“Asked if Barack Obama would wait to get a concession call from Hillary Clinton before claiming the nomination, Obama campaign adviser Anita Dunn said the onus was on Clinton now that the Democratic Party has firmed up the number of delegates needed to claim the party’s nod.

“‘He’s not going to wait by the phone like a high-school girl waiting for a date,’ said Dunn. ‘That’s not Barack Obama.”
Obama’s campaign is 68 delegates away from clinching the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, according to an ABC News delegate...

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The five porn scenes excerpted in Daniel Murphy‘s “The Five Most Ridiculous Porn Scenes” (a 5.30 Esquire posting) aren’t funny. All porn is fundamentally dreary and depressing because the people involved on both sides of the camera are (a) obviously not very bright and (b) untalented (to put it mildly). But the idea of the piece — the promise of it — is…well, somewhat funny.

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(1) “We’re the most captive nation of slaves that ever came along…the moral timidity of the average American is quite noticeable“; (2) “Everything’s wrong on Wikipedia”; (3) “I’ve developed a total loathing for [John] McCain, conceited little asshole. And he thinks he’s wonderful. I mean, you can just tell, this little simper of self-love that he does all the time. You just want to kick him”; (4) “You hear all this whining going on, ‘Where are our great writers?’ The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?” — from Vidal’s “What I’ve Learned” page in th new Esquire.

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East Hampton marina — Saturday, 5.31, 10:55 am.

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Due respect to Variety‘s Anne Thompson and other industry analysts who are seeing yesterday’s Sex and the City numbers as proof that the film, as Thompson put it, is “a big-titted hit,” but SATC is so far only a one-weekend wowser. If it shows legs next weekend and the one after that, great. Well, not so great when you think about it.

Michael Patrick King‘s film is, after all, an insipid thing to sit through — one of the most spiritually appalling successful films of all time — and, as Manohla Dargis and

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At 6:15 pm last night Variety‘s Pamela McLintock projected a $20 million Friday for Sex and the City. But sometime after 11 pm Fantasy Moguls’ Steve Mason posted a “shocker” report that SATC earned $28.25 million yesterday and is looking at a $70 million gross by Sunday night.
A Friday figure in the neighborhood of $20 or $25 million easily ranks as the biggest opening-day tally for a romantic comedy. As McLintock pointed out, The Devil Wears Prada — the last sizable chick-flick hit — earned $9.4 million on its opening Friday and $27.5 million for that weekend.

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Scallop Avenue in East Hampton — Saturday, 5.31, 8:15 am. A land where high thread counts are never questioned, much less commented upon — a given.

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I need to be fair and and admit that the career-spanning video on Tom Cruise‘s website is nicely cut. (The Air France terminal I’m typing this on won’t let me load links, but it’s www.tomcruise.com.) Now and then some of it makes you grin in admiration for the guy…truly. The one scene in the entire reel that brought a genuine smile to my face? When Cruise’s Joel Goodson spots Rebecca DeMornay‘s prostitute character in the lobby of a plush Chicago hotel and does that little two-shakes-of-an-index-finger wag as I way of saying “I see you, you see me, we’re both here…tah-tah!”

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Harvey Korman has died; Hedley Lamarr lives.

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“There is something depressingly stunted about this movie; something desperate too. It isn’t that Carrie has grown older or overly familiar. It’s that awash in materialism and narcissism, a cloth flower pinned to her dress where cool chicks wear their Obama buttons, this It Girl has become totally Ick.” — from Manohla Dargis‘ SATC review in today’s N.Y. Times.

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By a standard set many years ago by Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face, “the women in Sex and the City are little better than also-rans,” writes the New Yorker‘s Anthony Lane, “and their gallops of conspicuous consumption seem oddly joyless, as displacement activities tend to be.

David Hughes’ illustration for Lane’s review; one of Fancis Bacon’s Popes.

√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√Ö‚Äú’When Samantha couldn’t get off, she got things,’ Carrie says. Look at the beam in your own eye, sister. Mr. Big not only buys her a penthouse apartment (‘I got it’), he offers to customize the space for her shoes and other fetishes. ‘I...

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The red-band trailer for the Coen Bros.’ Burn After Reading (Focus Features, 9.12) tells you it’ll almost certainly be — surprise! — a dry, deadpan thing mixed with broad slapstick, and probably hilarious. My favorite aspect, though, is the photography by Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezski, whose legendary work on Children on Men was passed over last year for the Best Cinematography Oscar. A larger version.

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Cafe Charbon, a beautifully preserved (late 19th Century) bar in the Menilmontant district, was an absolute madhouse an hour or so ago. Insane. My return flight leaves tomorrow morning around 10:15 am, putting me back on JFK terra firma around noon.

Thursday, 5.29, 11:35 pm.

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Thursday, 5.29, 4:25 pm.

5.29, 7:35 pm.

5.29, 2:35 pm.

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Huffington Post‘s Hillary Rosen has reported that at last night’s “All Things Digital” conference in Carlsbad, California, media bigwig and staunch conservative Rupert Murdoch said that Barack Obama “is a rock star…I love what he is saying about education [and] I think he will win and I am anxious to meet him.”
John McCain, he added, “is a friend of mine. But I think he’s got a lot of problems. He has been in Congress a long time, and you have to make a lot of compromises. So what’s he really stand for?… I think he has a lot of problems.”

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Early yesterday evening on the way to meet friends for dinner in the 17th.

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My idea is this: Eddie Murphy shouldn’t return as “Axel Foley” proper in the new, Brett Ratner-directed Beverly Hills Cop flick (the fourth), which will shoot sometime next year and come out in 2010. He should play Axel gone to seed, as a 375-pound prosthetic fat-ass. I know that Ratner and the team have to do something for the film not to seem like a creaky retread, and this would be that.

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Houston, we have a problem. They can’t just put it all into a bag, take a space walk, give it a toss and let it float away?

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A video “that purportedly shows a living, breathing space alien will be shown to the news media Friday in Denver,” according to a 3.28 story by Rocky Mountain News reporter Daniel J. Chacon.

Jeff Peckman, who, Chacon says, is “pushing a ballot initiative to create an Extraterrestrial Affairs Commission in Denver to prepare the city for close encounters of the alien kind” (in other words…a nutbag!) said “the video is authentic and convinced him that aliens exist.”
Peckman “said the general public will have to wait to see it because it’s being included in a documentary by Stan Romanek.” What? On top of which...

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From this Matt Gross “Frugal Traveller” piece in the 5.28 N.Y. Times about doing Paris on a budget, a term I haven’t used before — “bobo,” which means bourgeois bohemian, as in ostensibly funky, soulful and tourist-free but not really. I should have popped out by now, being in the Urban Dictionary and all. Some of us are slower than others.

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First there was Scarlett Johansson as The Other Boleyn Girl. Next up, apparently, she’ll play the lead in Phillip Noyce‘s Mary, Queen of Scots (which I presume is still on, despite the shoot having been delayed a couple of months ago over fears of a SAG strike, which now seem less ominous).
And now, if you believe Jarett Wieselman‘s 5.27 Popwrap item, there are plans to film another Boleyn drama based on a book by Boleyn Girl author Philippa Gregory, called “

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In honor of the not-quite-15th anniversary of True Romance (it opened on 9.10.93 in the States, and 10.15.93 in Great Britain), Maxim has spoken to the principals — director Tony Scott, screenwriter Quentin Tarantino, stars Christian,Slater, Patricia Arquette, Gary Oldman, James Gandolfini, Dennis Hopper, et. al. — and assembled some good material.

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Sarah Jessica Parker‘s Carrie Bradshaw “is the worst human being ever,” declares MCN columnist Noah Forrest in a longish piece about his mixed feelings towards HBO’s Sex and the City series, which carry over (trust me) into the film. “Hyperbole? Sure, but there’s a lot of truth to that statement and it has very little to do with how much Carrie has affected women all over New York City (I swear if I see one more dress with a bushy tail on it…) and everything to do with how she treats her friends on the show.

“My overarching feeling when I look back on all of the [HBO] episodes is that she is a selfish, self-centered opportunist with no regard...

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The myth of the liberal media retired, officially and forever.

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I’ve watched episodes of Sex and the City on HBO maybe five or six times, which obviously indicates I’m not a huge fan but also that I’ve found it agreeable enough from time to time. The movie version, which runs around two and a half hours, takes whatever it was that made the show half-palatable and just amplifies and gussies it up all to hell. I’ve been told that the movie is the show and that any perceived degradation is a judgment that begins and ends in my own head. Not so. The first hour of SATC is as garish and putrid and spiritually repulsive as can possibly be imagined without throwing up, and I was never so moved during those episodic HBO sojourns.

Wednesday, 5.28, 1:35 pm — taken during a short break from the film that I needed badly.

Each main character — Sarah Jessica Parker‘s Carrie...

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“Hollywood is not Republican country,” Ben Stein has told Politico‘s Jeffrey Ressner in a column about John McCain‘s fundraising efforts there. “There are some of us here, but not enough to make a difference. I don’t think Hollywood will be counted on to make a great deal of support for Senator McCain.”
Ressner reports that McCain’s contributors include producer Jerry Bruckheimer, Paramount Pictures chief Brad Grey, MGM chief Harry Sloan, Time Warner chairman Richard Parsons, Saturday Night Live creator-producer Lorne Michaels, General Electric chairman Jeffrey Immelt, former MGM owner Kirk Kerkorian, as well as Stein, Rip Torn and Dick Van Patten. (Immelt and Grey also donated to Democratic candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton, Ressner adds.)
Rip Torn?

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There’s an indie puzzlement called Bunraku now shooting in Bucharest, Romania. Josh Hartnett, Demi Moore, Ron Perlman and Woody Harrelson are costarring under director-writer Guy Moshe. Here’s the link to an IMDB plot synopsis. Romanian friend Laura Gutanu sent me this 5.19 story about the film that appeared in Ciao!, a Romanian publication. Odd that a straight news org chose this photo.

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