The Quantum of Solace teaser. Reactions?

The Hollywood Reporter's Ray Bennett has raved about Mamma Mia! from London, where it'll open next Friday (7.4). How does a dedicated sourpuss and Europop/ABBA hater cast doubts and aspersions without having seen the film? Obviously he can't and shouldn't. The watchword should always be "try to be fair." The sourpuss can, however, sniff the air for girly-girl fumes, for hints of vapidity or plasticity or anything that feels like excessive fizz.

The word "fun," for example, has been known to strike fear in the hearts of ardent film lovers. "Fun," as we all know, is a code word that usually...Read More

It was reported earlier today that Bill Clinton has told confidantes that in order to get his full support in the presidential campaign Barack Obama will have to apologize, beg and grovel like nobody's business. Clinton was quoted as saying, in fact, that Obama will have to "kiss my ass" in order to make things right.

Bill Clinton, George McGovern

Clinton apparently resents having been tarnished by the Obama campaign for having played the race card, which of course Clinton absolutely did when he compared Obama's win in the South Carolina primary to Jesse...Read More

What...another Dark Knight reviewer doing cartwheels over Heath Ledger's Joker? Is this getting tedious or just repetitive? We get it already. Brilliant demonic channeling. The guy's going to win a posthumous Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. Warner Bros. will almost certainly run a full-on Oscar campaign on his behalf. Now can we talk about something else, please? I feel like I'm getting beaten over the head here.

Ledger "presents himself as The Joker in a role that defines a career," writes Rope of Silicon's Brad Brevet. "It is unimaginable it would come to the point...Read More

"Curmudgeonly, cantankerous, cigar-chomping Hellboy is a cross between a '40s noir detective and a burning fireplace," writes Variety's John Anderson, "but he's also cool enough to make Hellboy II: The Golden Army the hipster's hit of the summer. It's certainly a more deliberately (and successfully) funny movie, thanks largely to Ron Perlman, who returns with the rest of the cast, and without whom an onscreen Hellboy would have been almost unthinkable.

"Yes, Catholic imagery has always run rampant through helmer Guillermo del Toro's movies, including Pan's Labyrinth, which he made in between the two Hellboy entries,...Read More

Eight or nine days ago the New York Observer's Sarah Vilkomerson wrote one of the funniest observation-and-reporting articles I've read in ages called "You've Got Mail (You Never Open)." And I only happened upon it last night over dinner. Funny because it's true, because it's my life -- because the urban under-45 onliners, one gathers, have become a nation of mail denialists.

"I don't have a fundamental fear or anxiety that makes me avoid the mail," Mark McMaster, a 29-year-old senior account manager at Google, tells Vilkomerson. "It just seems relatively uninteresting, and probably most...Read More

A convincing report of stepped-up secret covert actions against Iran by the Bushies, as written by New Yorker's Seymour Hersh in a piece called "Preparing the Battlefield." The neocons have only a few months left to try and hurt I'm-a-dinner-jacket. It's a kind of prelude or warm-up, some believe, to the big Israeli bombing of Iran that will happen (if it happens) sometime after the Democratic and Republican conventions. One imagines that $4.40 a gallon will seem like a fond memory if and when such hostilities commence.

The obvious movie analogy to the "my middle name is Hussein!" movement (good citizens symbolically showing support for Barack Obama and flipping off the righties who've tried to use the exotic Middle-Eastern sound of this name to stir fear among rural dumb-asses) is, of course, the "I'm Spartacus" scene in Spartacus (1960). Moving then, moving today.

To emphasize the analogy I tried to find a good-quality letterboxed clip of this third-act moment in Kirk Douglas and Stanley Kubrick's film. Then I was distracted by this beautiful Pepsi ad that ran on the Oscar show four...Read More

Websites started kicking "nuke the fridge" around roughly three weeks ago, and Newsweek's Periscope columnist Sarah Ball has just had a go at it. It refers to Harrison Ford hiding in that refrigerator in Indy 4 to escape the effects of a nuclear blast, etc. The main reason the term hasn't seemed all that vital to get into from this end is that it doesn't seem all that different or distinct from "jump the shark."

Sean Connery's fridge moment in Thunderball.

The latter, of course, refers to suddenly being old news -- having lost...Read More

It's been a long while -- two or three months, at least -- since I've seen Alex Gibney's Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S. Thompson (Magnolia/HDNet, 7.4), which I mostly enjoyed and fully respected. David Carr's story about it in the 6.29 N.Y. Times has jarred my memory somewhat. And yet mainly I'm reminded that my primary impression of Thompson's life can be summed up in four words: "Wow, what a waste."

Hunter S. Thompson sometime in the mid to late '60s, to judge by his hairline.

The "wow" part -- Thompson's productive years...Read More

I wish I could help it, but every time a woman (or a group of women) registers astonishment at something another woman has said by saying "oh...my...god!" I feel hugely repelled. In real life, in a TV series, in a film...anywhere. Chalk on a blackboard times ten. So I'm naturally concerned about a moment in the Mamma Mia trailer in which Amanda Seyfried tells her friends she has three possible dads coming to her wedding and she doesn't know which is the actual sire, and...you know the rest. Where there's smoke, there's fire. Fingers crossed. It opens on 7.18.