So where's the footage or at least a still of Hitler's decapitated head? Or at least one of his headless body, slumped over the desk at Madame Tussaud's of Berlin? A good moralistic story like this happens and there's no money shot?

This trailer for the currently-playing Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson (HDNet/Magnolia) is so well-cut, smartly condensed and plugged into the Thompson essence that -- I need to say this carefully -- it's almost a better thing than the 120-minute doc it's selling. Almost, I say.

As I wrote last month, Alex Gibney's doc tells the full lopsided tale about a brilliant journalist who produced great stuff for maybe 11 or 12 years (mid '60s to mid '70s) and then wallowed around in drug-fueled lassitude for almost the next 30. Gonzo is a good film -- thorough, inventive, humorous -- but it drives you mad with a sadistic '60s soundtrack made up of songs that classic-rock stations have been torturing their listeners with for the last 30 or 35 years.

The trailer hits every basic point delivered in the film but without the music. Which makes it, in a way, better. At the very least, it gave me an idea of what Gibney's film might've been without having to be swamped with the sounds of Janis Joplin, Jesse Colin Young, et. al.

Gas station at San Vicente and 26th Street -- Saturday, 7.5.08, 4:55 pm. We'll be at $5 bucks a gallon by Labor Day.

"What I find really hard to take is the way the media behave. They seem to pick on Barack much more readily than they do on McCain. They suddenly say he's this kind of politician, he's not what we thought, dah-dah-dah-dah. They say, 'We're not supposed to take a side, we're supposed to just give the news,' but they don't just give the news, and they don't tell the truth...excuse me? I only listen to Keith Olbermann. To hell with the rest of them. I'm an MSNBC type now." -- Lauren Bacall speaking to the S.F. Chronicle's Walter Addiego. Somehow the idea of that "put your lips together and blow" lady from To Have and Have Not being a BHO fan feels delightful.

David Gilmour's "The Film Club" is nominally about his decision to permit his 15-year-old son, Jesse, to drop out of school as long as he agreed to watch three movies a week of Gilmour's choosing. That's it? No requirement to write about them afterwards? No digesting and reprocessing them in some creative way (like shooting a short-film tribute)? Just watching three films a week doesn't seem like enough to engage a 15 year-old. I would insist on at least four or five.

Douglas McGrath's 7.6 N.Y. Times article about the book reminded me, in any case, of that i-Village article I co-authored with my son Jett about three years ago that covered...well, vaguely similar ground. The title was "Kazan for Recess? Kubrick for Snack? How to create a passion for film in your kids."

The underlying point, now that I'm thinking about it, was that unless a movie-fanatic father saturates his kids with first-rate films early on (and I mean starting at the toddler stage), any effort to implant or encourage a sense of taste in movies will be an uphill one, and may well prove fruitless.

Kids are off into the wild blue yonder by the time they hit 15. Friends, school, burgeoning sexual urges, media distractions...forget it. The spiritual divorcement process actually begins sometime in their late tweens. You have to reach them early on, when they're still soft clay, or you're spinning your wheels. Even if you've gotten to them early they still go away in their mid teens. But if you've done your work they'll come back after three or four years.

I love two Gilmour lines that are excerpted in McGrath's article. The first is a statement that Peter Yates' Bullitt "has the authority of stainless steel." The other, as McGrath writes, "captures the reality-altering magic that movies cast." After seeing Bullitt as a kid, Gilmour recalls "emerging from the Nortown theater that summer afternoon and thinking that there was something wrong with the sunlight."

In response to a somewhat dithering, self-regarding Emily Gould piece called "How Your Emily Gould Sausage Gets Made" (posted 7.3.08 on her Emily Magazine blog), Some Came Running's Glenn Kenny wrote the following: "Um, not to put too fine a point on it -- and believe me, I know this is going to sound 'mean,' but there's just no way around it -- but could you do the rest of humanity the favor of, like, throwing yourself in front of a bus or something? Thanks."

Glenn Kenny; Emily Gould

I had read elsewhere that Kenny had suggested Gould should off herself, but this is not that. By the use of the term "bus," which is universally preceded these days by the words "throw under the," Kenny is telling Gould to dispense with a certain late June/early July attitude or psychology that she's currently working from, or which (if you want to be forgiving or magnanimous) has enveloped her.

As we all know, those who get thrown under a bus are being punished for something they've recently said or done -- discipline, not execution. What Kenny is actually suggesting, I think, is that Gould should change or refine or alter or somehow upgrade her...whatever, Brooklyn blogger shpiel. (Not that I have any such issues with Gould myself. I've always liked her prose and considered her a pretty cute kitty.)

The proof is in the pudding of Kenny's actual sentence. The word "like" and the words "or something" are obviously softeners (as in fabric) which emphasize a meaning that is 90% metaphorical.

Last night I was watching clips of a couple of Jezebel writers, Tracie Egan (brunette, teetering towards a certain fullness of face) and Moe Tkacik (redhead, thinner), on Lizz Winstead's Shoot the Messenger, a weekly talk show. Their appearance was taped on 6.30.08. If you haven't spoken to any sharp, urban twentysomething femme fatales lately, you may want to watch this.

Mostly I was going, "Okay..." Sassy but not classy, and certainly not very curious about anything outside their realm. Is there anything more attractive than the exhibiting of genuine curiosity? Is there a bigger turn-off than people who don't seem to know the meaning of the word? Although I admire their sexual fearlessness, or the pose of same.

Egan and Tkacik are obviously tickled to be passing along intentionally nervy and contrarian attitudes about sex, date rape and sloppy contraception (i.e., having the guy pull out). Clearly they're being themselves, but that also means deriving a certain delight in pissing off older women who are veterans of feminist battles over the last 30 to 40 years by talking about how...well, listen to them.

Definitely fascinating, although a voice is telling me there's something degraded going on as well. Something in their "you know, whatever" way of talking -- blase urban Valspeak -- tells me that certain aspects of the universe are being overlooked by these two. I'd be willing to bet they've never read anything by Alan Watts.

Lauren Lipton's 5.4.08 N.Y. Times profile of the Jezebel crew reads as follows:

"The Jezebel blog was founded last spring by Gawker Media as a smart, feisty antidote to traditional women's magazines (or 'glossy insecurity factories,' as Jezebel describes them). It quickly developed a loyal following and has seen an influx of new visitors, after being name-checked on the official blog for Gossip Girl, the prime-time soap opera.

Jezebel.com staffers as of two months ago (l. to r.): Tracie Egan, Maria-Mercedes Lara, Moe Tkacik, Jennifer Gerson, Anna Holmes, Dodai Stewart and Jessica Grose.

"But as Jezebel's first anniversary approaches on May 21, its readers and editors are learning a lesson right out of high school: popularity has its pitfalls, and mean-girl behavior is hard to quash.

"Some readers, in comments on the site, have accused editors of political bias and misogyny. Readers have called one another, by turns, immature, boring and cliquish. This spring the editors responded by banishing certain commenters and putting others 'on notice' for being nasty or, worse, not funny."

I know the name of that tune. Nothing gives me a feeling of greater pleasure than the banning of brutish big-mouths who spew personal venom on the HE threads. I slap those bitches down like dogs, and then boot their ass into the snow.

How do you pronounce Moe Tkacik's last name? Obviously you drop the "t." What is it...Kassik?

I shrugged at this Harvey Weinstein-Joe Roth "please fire me" tape, which made its way around earlier this week. This is how colorful swagger types whose success partly depends on their ability to convince people every day that they fear nothing and no one....this is how guys like that talk. The bluster and the clubby attitude and vague air of entitlement. Most of them swear like sailors, and it's kinda funny when they do.

I don't live in these realms on a daily basis but time and again I've been in the room when such conversations have taken place. Twas ever thus.

It pains me to report this, but Hancock did a lot better yesterday than anyone was expecting -- $18.8 million -- and is now looking at $67 million for the weekend and $109 million cume for the five-and-a-half day July 4th holiday. It's still not a major wowser -- if Hancock was an earthquake-level hit it would be looking at a five-day haul of at least $120 or $130 million -- but the $109 million cume means, as my numbers guy said this morning, "they got out alive."

Dammit. I wanted to see Will Smith, Akiva Goldsman and Peter Berg punished (i.e., by seeing Hancock come up short in terms of expectations) for creating one of the all-time worst third acts in motion picture history.

Yesterday's reporting about Thursday's figures being flat encouraged me to think, "Okay, people are actually saying no to a bad film...the ticket-buying public is showing a little judgment here!" Not true, it turns out. Smith is such a big star that people will pay to see anything he's starring in, including a film that sends you out staggering and gagging. They're going for those first two acts, I suppose.

Who am I to talk, right? I paid to see it last Tuesday night.

I don't know what Barack Obama is doing now except making clear that he's not a movement leader or a left-wing ideologue, but a crafty politician trying to appeal to the shmoes as well as the faithful who've been with him since '07. He's basically a liberal-minded centrist. He doesn't seem to believe he knows everything or is absolutely right all the time. He seems to respect the idea of looking at things anew once in a while, to see how things may have changed or shifted around. That said, he'd better not overdo this move-to-the-center thing or he'll piss off the lefties and then the press will start beating him up.

In his review of Guillame Canet's Tell No One, a superb French thriller that I finally saw this afternoon, New Yorker critic David Denby writes that he "realized I was very happy that everyone was speaking French. The reason is simple: an American version of this material would have had too many explosions and far too much violence in general, and it would have been similar to 30 other thrillers made here during the past ten years."

Tell No One director Guillame Canet (left, holding steadi...excuse me, a mojocam) shooting chase chase sequence with Francois Cluzet (right).

Truer words have rarely been spoken. It's not that Tell No One, which involves murder, thugs, cops, gangstas, shootings, chases and the like, lacks thrills and intrigue. But it doesn't brandish the cloddish brute machismo that you have to accept with if you're going to watch a thriller made in this country.

American crime pics are about their stories and characters, sure, but they're also about topping the last successful thriller in terms of visceral impact or stylistic panache. Their producers don't want 15 year-old kids telling each other, "The shoot-out scene in that movie last month was a lot cooler."

Tell No One is aimed at viewers who've had a year or two of college, read a book occasionally and have made it past the grand old age of 25. It plays its own game and sets its own standards. A little quieter, a lot smarter and much more riveting than...now I'm trying to think of a recent American murder-mystery I've really liked. It's been a while.

Tell No One is based on an American mystery novel by Harlan Coben, but director Guillaume Canet, working with the screenwriter Philippe Lefebvre, "has set Coben's material in a realistic social and working world where good-looking, intelligent, and articulate people find one another interesting," as Denby notes. "La belle France! This emphasis on sociability is not unusual in French commercial filmmaking, but it's virtually unknown in genre movies made here these days. There is violence -- some of it startling, all of it significant -- but that's not what the movie is about."

It's also interesting as hell because the lead actor, Francois Cluzet, is almost a dead ringer for Dustin Hoffman, or rather Hoffman as he looked around the time of Rain Man, Family Business and Dick Tracy. It's like watching Hoffman's twin brother since he has a similar acting style, keeping the tension tucked inside but always radiating intelligence and paying close attention, etc.

It's doubly fascinating that Canet puts Cluzet through a terrific foot-chase sequence in Paris, since it recalls the nocturnal running-through-Manhattan scene that a bare-chested Hoffman performed in Marathon Man.

Five years ago Paramount Home Video put out a DVD of the "authorized restored version" of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, and everyone was happy. Here, finally, was the version film buffs could buy and take to bed. "At last we have the movie every would-be cinematic visionary has been trying to make since 1927," said N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott.

No longer. A near complete version of the film has been found in Argentina after a quarter of the film was believed lost for 80 years, a German film foundation announced two days ago. The extra footage runs an extra 25 minutes, and the 2003 DVD runs 124 minutes, so this new and presumably final version of Metropolis will presumably run 149 minutes, or just shy of two and a half hours. This is excellent new, of course, but I've seen Metropolis twice and I've never felt the absence of any vital narrative thread. I'm not a Lang scholar so what do I know?

In this National Post piece about movie-theatre manners, author Michael Reid fails to mention one of the worst offenses out there -- i.e, people claiming that nearby seats are saved without territorial jungle markings. Under-20s are the primary culprits. They'll point to three, four or five seats and say, "Sorry, these are saved." Not without markings they're not!

As I explained last summer, everyone needs to adhere to "a basic Animal Planet view that you can't 'save' seats without marking them like dogs and wolves and coyotes mark territory by urinating on the ground, or the way Alaskan gold miners stake claims with little piles of rocks in Henry Hathaway films.

"All you have to do is put something on the seat -- a jacket, a magazine or an L.A. Weekly page, even a folded paper napkin. But you can't just point to three or four seats (or six or ten seats...there has to be a limit) and say, 'These are saved.' Certainly not when the lights are going down. You can try this with one or two seats, maybe, but not with three."

The next 17 year-old kid who says "sorry, these are saved" without markings is gonna have to lay it out with me.

HE reader Alejandro Aldrete of Monterrey, Mexico, is angry that Disney/Pixar has sent only dubbed prints of WALL*E to local theatres, in contradiction of the usual-usual. I'm guessing that the Mexican distribution exec has probably decided that subtitles aren't necessary for a kid's film, and would certainly hurt business -- brilliant.

"WALL*E arrived today in Mexican cinemas all over the country, and I believe in most of Latin America," Aldrete writes. "I don't know about the other countries, but apparently, even though today in my city of Monterrey, with nearly 5 million people and counting, and with WALL*E in hundreds and hundreds of theatres playing every hour from 10 am to midnight, I can't find one single print of this film that isn't dubbed into Spanish.

"Dubbing is common on Latin American television, but for the theatre run most films are subtitled. Only kiddie films get here dubbed to cinemas, and usually with one or two prints with subtitles. Yet in the last few years, animated films have stopped coming here with subtitles. Last year it was the same situation with Ratatouille, and even common people around here know it's a crime against any film of that caliber to not be able to get seen as it is intended in it's original version.

"My problem with Disney/Pixar on this is that they damn well know Pixar films have a special appeal to adults and film buffs. In the past with The Incredibles and Finding Nemo, I would go to a subtitled showing of those films and have a great time because I knew I was watching something ten times better than any dubbing they could come up with, and also because subtitled showings tend to have less kids fucking around and making noises. So it was a nice deal.

"I personally feel insulted and not taken into account as a loyal costumer of Pixar that they have decided to not bring here one single copy of WALL*E in it's original form with original audio. Is it too much to ask that they send a bunch of subtitled prints to Latin America for the film buffs? The ones that will keep buying their films in 30 years? I mean really, how greedy can you be to think that you're losing money by giving us one print in a hundred?"

Meryl Streep is not going to be Oscar nominated for her performance in Mamma Mia!. Okay, possibly a Golden Globe nomination or win...maybe. But forget the Academy. However good or wonderful Streep may be in this upcoming ABBA musical, AMPAS members will stick to the straight and narrow and nominate for her Doubt, if they nominate her at all.

My perception is that Mamma Mia!'s reputation went south with the hip crowd once the Hollywood Reporter's Ray Bennett flipped for it. That was it -- the death knell. Those actresses playing the girlfriends of Amanda Seyfried going "oh...my...God!" were just icing on the cake.

In his 7.2 piece about William Holden and the ongoing Holden retrospective at Lincoln Center (which goes until 7.15), Michael Atkinson hits the nail on the head in discussing the brusque anxiety and rattled melancholia that always simmered in the characters Holden played -- there, obviously, because they defined Holden himself.

"Truth be told, Holden's character-role capacities ranged only from narcissistic American jerk to self-loathing American lug," he writes, "but his best movies are implicit inquisitions into that personality -- like Sunset Blvd., Sabrina [and] Mark Robson's The Bridges at Toko-Ri.

"By the time of David Lean's The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), a big-budget production looking for a disillusioned American Everyman sickened by his own lack of heroism needed only go to Holden.

"As Holden aged, his richest vein was the bitter personification of the costs of progress and the loss of frontier -- he became, almost inevitably, the angry Old Guard facing melancholy supersession by the young, by modernity, and by the press of time."

And yet Atkinson doesn't mention Holden's performance as Frank Harmon, a cynical L.A. real-estate agent in Clint Eastwood's Breezy ('73), which is part of the retrospective. Atkinson obviously thinks little of the film but his "angry Old Guard" comments about Holden fit Harmon to a T. Breezy is just pretty good -- mature, straight, measured -- but Holden's acting lends a solid gravity force in every one of his scenes.

Except that this 1940 title card has...I don't know, a vibe. The starkness, the shadows, the monochrome sheen, the deco moderne lettering, the odd sideways markings on the road, the fake authenticity of it.

Fantasy Moguls' Steve Mason is reporting that even though Will Smith, Akiva Goldsman and Peter Berg's Hancock was "flat" from Wednesday-to-Thursday with an estimated $17.1 million and a 2 1/2 day cume of just over $41 million, it's nonetheless on target for $100 million over the 5 and 1/2 day holiday weekend. But I say no to that.

The truth is that Hancock's ticket sales yesterday should have been more than its Wednesday business, which was estimated at $17.3 million. Instead it did $17.1 million -- flat-ass. A movie that's really happening with the public would have jumped to $19 or $20 million yesterday. This tells you the word on the street (i.e., that the third act is an out-and-out disaster) is probably catching up with it.

July 4th is always a dead day, so Saturday's business will tell the tale. But I'm figuring Hancock will do $80 to $90 million by Sunday night. And if this happens, anyone who reports that figure as an absolute box-office triumph will be less than honest in their assessment. Not that $80 to $90 million is anything to sniff at. It's just that you can't expect sales to be rocket-ship historic if the dogs don't like the dog food. If you make a movie that goes completely insane and blows itself up in the third act, sooner or later people will realize this and respond accordingly.

Kit Kittredge, sad to say for Picturehouse/NewLine, is a flat-out disaster. It did about $1.1 million on Wednesday in 1700 theatres, averaging $600 a theatre. And it $900,000 on Thursday for a $500 per theatre average. Complete wipe-out. Mason pussyfoots by saying it's "unlikely to top $10 million" by Sunday night. Gee, do ya think so?

Seeing Hellboy II the other night reminded me that the films of Guillermo del Toro are as good as it gets in the fantastical horror realm. They've got first-class effects, wit, invention, soul, visual economy, emotional gravitas. The monsters are beautifully particular, the performances have warmth and authority, and the camerawork and the cutting are grabby and fast but this side of hyper.

The problem is this, and it's not so much Guillermo's fault as the action-fantasy genre: I'm sick to death of watching stuff getting wrecked and smashed and shattered and blown into a million pieces. I hate the rigid big-studio FX formula that insists upon confrontation and chaos and ruination happening ever 20 or 30 minutes, like some stupid whammy chart. Windows exploded, buildings decimated, cars doing aerial triple-flips, fire hydrants spewing tons of city water, industrial clutter everywhere....what the fuck is this? It's the same shit in every movie, and it vacuums your soul.

What kind of cretin do you have to be to find this stuff interesting after it's been repeated 25 or 30 times? How many times can the dumbest moviegoer out there go "whoa!" after seeing a super-hero wallop a slime-covered monster and send it flying several hundred yards into a building or a wall of glass or a concrete bunker, or vice versa? How many times can the hero take a severe beating to the extent that it looks like he's finished? How many times can a slithering disgusting alien creature try to eat or invade or flatten the heroes? How many times can a moron with a extra-large tub of popcorn in his lap be impressed with loud aural thumpings on the soundtrack?

Guillermo does everything he can to add feeling and humor and humanity to Hellboy II, and he succeeds nicely from time to time, but he's working within a genre that insists upon showing the same shit over and over, no matter what and no end in sight.

I never thought I'd say this, but in this context I'm a Barry Manilow type of guy. I mean that I loved (okay, liked) the sequence in which Ron Perlman's Red and Doug Jones' Abe Sapien drunkenly sing along to Manilow's "Can't Smile Without You." And I'm a pretty big fan of Tecate beer. And I liked the bit with Perlman protecting the baby from the madness and other stuff along these lines.

I'd much rather see a televised dramedy series starring Red, Abe, Selma Blair's Liz Sherman, Jeffrey Tambor's Tom Manning and all the rest of the Del Toro freaks and eccentrics, and made into a kind of Everybody Loves Raymond type deal with monsters showing up maybe once every five or six episodes. If that. Because I really can't stand watching shit being blown up any more. How can people can sit through the same demolition derby in film after film, over and over, year after year? It's insane.

Guillermo knows that I'm much more of a Chronos/Devil's Backbone/Pan's Labyrinth/The Orphanage type of guy and that I just can't roll over for the big-studio stuff. It's always been a big problem for me.

One technical beef: when the giant land-squid monster picks up a Mercedes Benz and squeezes it to death, we should see gallons of gasoline gushing out. Are we supposed to think that the car had no gas in it? I didn't believe it. Maybe Guillermo can fix this effect for the DVD version.

I can't remember the last time I've taken such an instant dislike to an actor as I have to Josh Peck, star of The Wackness (Sony Classics, 7.4 in N.Y. and L.A.) It's lazy to do this, but I can't express it any better than I did last April: "Peck obviously does well at playing young urban white guys who talk in a street argot that is part imitation 'black' and part whatevuh," I wrote last April, "but in any case suggests a total inability to convey an air of refinement and higher education.

"Is there any circumstance in which any casting director, no matter how whacked, would use this guy to play a small-town cop in Oregon, an assistant to a U.S. Senator, a young suburban dad, a used-car salesmen from Cranford, New Jersey, or anything other than a what-up homie who sells tabs of ecstasy and dilaudid in Tompkins Square Park?

"In other words, Josh Peck is basically Leo Gorcey. Nothing wrong with that, exactly, except that he has one trick and one rap and thassall."

I can't embed this Channel 4 promotional ad for a series of Stanley Kubrick films they'll be showing, but it's ingenious -- a carefully choreographed, superbly designed and exquisitely cast tribute to The Shining. The sets, the haircuts, the mood of it...perfect! Except I can't find the actor playing Kubrick or Jack Nicholson. I guess I need to watch it a few more times. (If it's embedded somewhere, please send along the code.)

"Channel 4 has painstakingly recreated the set of Stanley Kubrick horror film The Shining," the story reads, "complete with look-a-likes of the crew and cast members including Shelley Duvall, for a TV ad to promote a More 4 season of the director's films.

"The 65-second promotional spot has been filmed as a one-take tracking shot through the recreation of The Shining.

"Viewers get Kubrick's point of view as he walks through the set, ending up in his director's chair as the crew prepare to shoot the famous scene of Danny Torrance, the son of Duvall and Jack Nicholson's characters, riding round and round the deserted corridors of the Overlook Hotel.

"The promo, filmed as a single tracking shot with a cast of 55 actors, was meticulously researched to 'remain as faithful as possible to the period in which it was shot and the culture of the British studio in the late 1970s".

I'm sorry, but Meryl Streep's use of the word "miasma" in the previous story reminded me of the character named "Miasmo" in Peter Yates' The Hot Rock ('71), and that led to finding this scene on You Tube. Hands down, it's the best acted and most convincing dumb hypnotism scene in the history of American cinema.

In an interview with The Guardian's Stuart Jeffries, Mamma Mia! star Meryl Streep has more or less said that the reason she's starring in this new movie musical is because of the roundabout influence of Osama bin Laden and the 9/11 attacks. More particularly because of the effect that a matinee performance of Mamma Mia! on the Broadway stage had upon a group of 10 year-olds, including her daughter Louisa, not long after the attacks.

Mama Mia! star Meryl Streep; Osama bin Laden.

I knew there was unusual left-field reason why Streep would star in a movie version of an ABBA stage musical! I knew it and now it makes sense.

It was seven years ago and Streep "was in a bit of a pickle," Jeffries writes. "She had to dream up an excursion for some friends of Louisa, the youngest of her four children by husband Don Gummer, the sculptor to whom she has been married for the past 30 years. Only one problem: it was October 2001 in Manhattan.

"'Everybody was really dimmed spiritually after 9/11,' Streep relates. 'I thought, 'What am I going to do with the kids?' So I took all these 10-year-olds to see a matinee of Mamma Mia!. They walked in and they sat there with their heads in their hands. Dimmed is the word. They were sad all the time, you know?

"'The first part was really wordy, and then 'Dancing Queen' started up. And for the rest of the show they were dancing on their chairs and they were so, so happy. We all went out of the theatre floating on the air. I thought, 'What a gift to New York right now!' She sent a thank you letter to the cast."

And that opened Streep's emotional receptivity door and down the road she was offered the part. In other words, Streep became a Mamma Mia! fan for the same reason that some journalists fell big-time in love with Amelie at the 2001 Toronto Film Festival -- i.e., because it was shown right after the attacks and put them in a much better mood. Another way to put it is that Streep joined the Mamma Mia! team for the same reason that Ron Silver became a Republican. Oh...my....God!

"Isn't this role beneath you?" Jeffries asks. "I'm not strategizing my career moves at all," Streep replies. "I haven't got a career that I'm building. When I swim my 55 laps, I try to remember the movies I've been in order, and I can't...the past is just a miasma. There's no career path.

"I just want to do things that are valuable to introduce into the culture,. This film [Mamma Mia!] is a valuable thing. I knew it when I saw it."

God grant me (a) the serenity to accept the bad movies I cannot stop from being made that I will probably wind up seeing anyway because I have to try and stay current because I write a daily column, (b) the courage to refuse to see the really bad films that come along that are truly bad for your soul, like Wanted, and (c) the wisdom to know the difference.

Some Came Running's Glenn Kenny feels that a certain James McAvoy line in Wanted -- "Six weeks ago, I was ordinary and pathetic, just like you" -- indicates that screenwriters have contempt for their audience. "What is this bullshit?," Kenny asks. ""Have screenwriters become so defensive /resentful on account of churning out quasi-nihilistic, faux-convoluted, graphic-novel-mytho-Babel tripe like this that they feel compelled to lash out at the audience that laps their nonsense up?" Uh, yeah...kinda.

A gaffe, as Michael Kinsley famously wrote, is when you blurt something out that everyone knows to be true (like Samantha Power calling Hillary Clinton a "monster") but which you're not allowed to publicly acknowledge. And in a way, Kenny seems to be saying, that Wanted line is a kind of screenwriter's gaffe -- a confession of loathing for the unwashed masses that kind of "slipped out" and wound up in the Wanted screenplay. (Which is attributed to Michael Brandt, Derek Haas and Chris Morgan.)

The Hollywood elite, trust me, think very little of ticket-buyers in general. Once you've made it to a certain level in the film industry and have begun to run with the truly cool and connected and earn serious dough, you don't relate to average stiffs. Big Talent tends to look upon regular moviegoers as prisoners of a sort, living in a comfortable penal colony that allows them to indulge in all kinds of perks but keeps them prisoners all the same. (You know...like the way things are in The Matrix.) I'm sorry if this sounds cruel.

Talk to talent on E.T. or Extra about the fans and they'll go "we love 'em all!" -- but that's public relations. Remember John Lennon's lyric about how "you're still fucking peasants as far as I can see"? That was another "uh-oh...a celebrity just said what he should have kept quiet about." The real truth about things only comes out when someone is tired or arrogant or involved in primal-scream therapy and the obiter dicta -- the words in passing -- just tumble out.

I was doing an interview in 1982 with actor Paul Land, who played the "Tommy Dee" character in Taylor Hackford's The Idolmaker. Land, whose people skills weren't that great, was talking about his life before he became a successful actor, and he said at one point, "I was like you back then!" Me, he meant -- a low-rent schlub, struggling to survive. I understood what Land was basically saying and I didn't take offense, but the publicist in the room noticably stiffened and went "aaahh."

I now have good reason to doubt Glenn Erickson's review of the Blu-ray Dirty Harry disc that I linked to and commented about yesterday. Erickson was cool with Fox Home Video's controversial Patton Blu-ray disc, but has claimed that the Dirty Harry disc shows "heavy tweaking to minimize grain, sharpen contrast and brighten colors" and that "heavy processing has given most night shots an almost unnatural look."

The reason is that transfer guru and unrequited grain-worshipper Robert Harris doesn't agree, and neither, according to a well-placed source, does Clint Eastwood himself. Harris says that the Harry disc looks like beautifully restored film and not digital data (unlike, in his opinion, the case with the Patton disc). And an on-the-lot source has told me that Eastwood approved the Blu-ray transfer during a test screening late last year.

Eastwood "came in to watch the first ten minutes, said it was fine, and then got up, went to the back of the room, sat down and watched the whole thing," the source says. "The only grain reduction was done to even out the grain structure. We also toned down a blood scene so it wouldn't look so day-glo red."

The trailer for The Day the Earth Stood Still (20th Century Fox, 12.12) with Keanu Reeves (as Klaatu), Jennifer Connelly, Kathy Bates and John Cleese. Directed by Scott Derrickson, written by David Scarpa. I copied the code from some Russian site called Ru Tube. YouTube had it up for a bit before it was pulled. It probably won't last very long here also. It's also watchable on this fan site.

Scarpa's script may, I'm reading, be based more closely on Harry Bates' 1940 short story called "Farewell to the Master" than the classic 1951 Robert Wise film with Michael Rennie, Patricia Neal, Billy Gray and Sam Jaffe. Don't read the Wikipedia synopsis of the short story if you don't want to know.

During a q & a session following a Los Angeles Film Festival showing of Boogieman, the superb Lee Atwater doc, I asked a question about the differences in the political climate of 20 years ago (i.e., during the Bush-Dukakis presidential race) and today, and said that I don't think that racial attitudes are quite as fearful and retrograde as they seemed to be in '88. I was obviously referring to the Obama ascendancy, but some in the audience flat-out laughed at me for saying this.

The night before last I happened to watch 48 HRS. ('82), the seminal action buddy movie with Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy as a cop and a con kicking around San Francisco and looking to stop some bad guys. I was surprised how...yesteryear it felt.

And I'm telling the snooties who laughed at my political naivete a couple of weeks ago that the racial attitudes and undercurrents in this Walter Hill movie, which came out 26 years ago, have all pretty much disappeared in Blue America. They give you a taste of a racially-biased and separatist culture that no longer exists in this country, or is at least severely diminished, and would never be represented in an action film made today.

Nolte is a flat-out racist brute who calls Murphy "nigger" and "spear-chucker." They go into a redneck bar that's supposed to be some kind of haven for good ole boy white separatism (in San Francisco?), and when Murphy walks in the vibe in the room is like, "Holy shit, a black guy!" When Murphy order a drink the bartender goes, "How about a Black Russian?" Can anyone imagine material of this sort turning up in any movie made today? Even one set in Bumblefuck, Idaho?

48 HRS. is about Nolte and Murphy seeing beyond their personal petty crap and coming to like and respect each other for who they are inside, but the fact that Hill and his writers toss in the racial jibes tell you something about the culture back then.

Attitudes were still fairly ugly in some quarters. The hosing of the civil rights demonstrators in Selma, Alabama, had happened only 17 years before, or what 1991 is to us today. Ours was a reasonably progressive society in elite media circles (Bryant Gumbel began his Today stint in January 1982, and Bernard Shaw had begun as a CNN anchor two years earlier) but Nelson Mandela wouldn't be released from Robben Island prison until 1990.

I was around and I don't remember anything in the early '80s like the comme ci comme ca homogenous whatever vibe that you feel today. In the blue cities and upscale suburbs, I mean. Maybe my memory is faulty, but I don't think so. The flannel-shirt dumb-asses are obviously still out there in force (they obviously kept Hillary's campaign going in the final stretches of the Democratic primary race), but things have definitely evolved and progressed since the early Reagan era.

"For those who are quick to call Hancock 'a mess' or the third act 'a huge left turn' or Variety's hypetastic Last Action Hero-like or whatever euphemism they are using this time, I offer this very serious suggestion -- see the movie again. If they still don't see how well the tapestry is woven, I will leave them to their myopia." -- Opening graph of David Poland's spoiler review of Hancock, which went up (I think) the night before last. See it again? I have a different suggestion. Erase this movie from your mind by any means necessary.

"The new Blu-ray of Dirty Harry prompts mention of the heated web debate about whether or not studios are over-enhancing older films for hi-def," writes film.com's Glenn Erickson. "Irate bulletin board posters have singled out Patton, as Fox's Blu-ray has been enhanced to minimize natural grain, presumably because Blu-ray proponents think that the format means 'no grain.' Patton was so bright and clear in its 70mm theatrical presentation that ordinary viewers are unlikely to complain. This reviewer wasn't offended either.

"Dirty Harry on Blu-ray is more complicated. The Blu-ray disc shows heavy tweaking to minimize grain, sharpen contrast and brighten colors. Sunny exteriors haven't changed much but heavy processing has given most night shots an almost unnatural look -- detail and bright color in what were once dimly lit areas, with everything else falling into inky blackness."

Hold on...Erickson is complaining about a so-so-looking film looking better than it did upon original release? Whatever for? I don't see the beef as long as it looks like "film" and bears a strong resemblance to the intended color and lighting scheme. Is Erickson saying it looks unnatural? Like data rather than celluloid? Look at that Clint Eastwood still up above, which was taken from the Blu-ray by the DVD Beaver guys. He looks terrific. And what's wrong with that?

"To this reviewer, Patton looks more or less like its theatrical presentation, while Dirty Harry is substantially altered," Ericksonj continues. "The 1971 release, after all, was never a visual beauty. The quest for 'docu realism' seems to have meant indifferent exposure and an over-reliance on zoom shots. Many dialogue scenes have a very shallow focus, and a number of shots are just plain out of focus. On original release prints, 'pushed' nighttime scenes offered milky blacks, golf ball-sized grain and weak hues."

Too many actresses are treated like race horses. They're allowed to race for a certain period, and then they "age out" and are put out to pasture. Is this what's happened to Rene Russo? She was looking good during the Clinton years, gliding along there in the early to late '90s (In the Line of Fire, Get Shorty, Tin Cup, The Thomas Crown Affair). And then...?

The last beam-ups were costarring roles in two movies released three years ago -- Two for the Money with Al Pacino and Yours, Mine and Ours with Dennis Quaid -- and then she went poof. And now off the radar for three years and counting. Not fair, not right -- women of Russo's age (born in '54) are in their prime and very watchable.

Hey, what about Madeleine Stowe? I saw her at the Aero Theatre a few months ago with her husband and child, but she's been MIA for a good while also. Several years. I heard she wrote a good script a few years ago (a western?) that people liked and wanted to make, but they said no when she said "I have to star in it." She wouldn't budge, the interest faded and it went away. That's the story I was told.

John McCain "was down at the end of the table and we were talking to the head of the [Nicaraguan] guerilla group here at this end of the table and I don't know what attracted my attention," Republican Sen. Thad Cochran recounted earlier this year, according to the Sun Herald's Michael Newsom. "But I saw some kind of quick movement...and I looked down there and John had reached over and grabbed this guy by the shirt collar and had snatched him up like he was throwing him up out of the chair to tell him what he thought about him or whatever.

"I don't know what he was telling him but I thought, good grief, everybody around here has got guns and we were there on a diplomatic mission. I don't know what had happened to provoke John but he obviously got mad at the guy and he just reached over there and snatched him."

The Western Writers of America have come out with a list of the 100 top westerns of all time. Variety's Anne Thompson, in an uncharacteristic burst of passion, has written that "they should be ashamed of themselves for these woeful rankings." I don't have the same likes and dislikes but I certainly don't feel...you know, disdain.

The WWA's Top Ten: Shane, High Noon, The Searchers, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Dances with Wolves, The Wild Bunch, Red River, Tombstone, The Magnificent Seven and Open Range.

HE's Top Twelve: Shane, Unforgiven, Red River, The Wild Bunch, High Noon, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Open Range, The Ox-Bow Incident, Hud, Lonely Are The Brave, Tombstone and The Professionals.

I have a slight soft spot for Ride the High Country and Johnny Concho, the Frank Sinatra western. I've never really liked Johnny Guitar. I respect but have never really gotten off on those Anthony Mann/Jimmy Stewart westerns. Sergio Leone's westerns have too many portentous close-ups. I don't like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance as much as I should because of the TV sound stage vibe, the hamminess of the acting, the fact that John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart are at least 15 years too old for their parts, etc. But I love the music and the opening credits.

I should have thought longer and harder before writing that Akiva Goldsman most likely wasn't to blame for Hancock's horrendous third act. HE reader "Richardson" did a good job earlier today of persuading me to reconsider. As he put it, "I can't see how you can blame Will Smith for major script problems when Goldsman is the credited re-writer who defanged the script. Same as [he did on] I Am Legend. You can blame Smith for approving Goldsman as the writer, though, since he surely did that."

Only in the film industry have I seen people laugh so uproariously and so obsequiously as Akiva Goldsman seems to be doing here. When you get to this town you soon learn that the vast majority of funny things that movie stars say and do are often hugely funny, causing those in their presence to shriek and bust a gut.

I guess my judgment was clouded by the fact that I'm an admirer of Goldsman's scripts of A Beautiful Mind and Cinderella Man, but I sorta kinda woke up when I re-read Richardson's post late this afternoon and also after a veteran Los Angeles critic reminded me in an e-mail, "When in doubt, blame Akiva Goldsman!"

This same guy sent along me a copy of Vy Vincent Ngo's Tonight He Comes -- the original script that eventually morphed into Hancock. "I haven't had time to read this completely yet," he said, "but from what I can tell it looks interesting and might serve as some sort of object lesson about what happens to scripts when they get tailored for a big-star tentpole. It's worth checking out if you have a little time. I don't know who sent this to me, but it's obvious he doesn't care who sees it at this point."

The problem is that Ngo's 126-page script isn't dated, and it's missing page 125. In any case, if anyone wants to read it I'll send it along.

Here's the letter that accompanied the script: "It's always frustrating to read movie reviews in which the writing is slammed. Screenwriters are easy targets, but they're often innocent bystanders in the development process. If you want to know what Hancock looked like before all the cooks in the kitchen got their grubby paws on it, here's an earlier draft that shows the writer's true vision.

"If you take the time to read it you'll discover that it was once a very promising story before the bigwigs crapped it up. You can't blame the writer for that."

Anyway, here it is. It would be better, of course, if I could find a version that contains page 125. If anyone has a PDF with all the pages, please send along.

Off to that screening (which I'm late for) -- back around 3 pm. In the meantime, please review this astounding summary of right-wing talkshow and blogger reactions to WALL*E. Consider this Glenn Beck quote in particular: "I can't wait to teach my kids how we've destroyed the Earth. I can't wait. You know if your kid has ever come home and said, 'Dad, how come we use so much styrofoam,' oh, this is the movie for you."

The denial levels in this guy are menacing. There are guys like Beck out there right now -- millions of them -- waving away the reality and chuckling to themselves and passing their bullshit along to their kids and keeping the ignorance levels high. This is the way the world is going to end.

A reader remarked in response to yesterday's Hitchcock/Truffaut item that Alfred Hitchcock looked like one of those recumbent tubbos from WALL*E, and I had to respond immediately to that. I'm re-posting here to give it the proper attention because it's a fairly major point:

"No -- he was Alfred Hitchcock, and therefore brought things to the table that were so creatively ripe, rich, eternal, fascinating and delectable that his physical proportions are anecdotal, at best. Same deal with Orson Welles (starting in the mid 1950s), Guillermo del Toro, Diego Rivera, Charles Laughton, etc. Their inside action so completely overwhelms the outside appearance that the matter of corpulence barely comes to mind.

"Now, it may well be that this or that morbidly obese Jabba waddling around the local galleria is a secret Orson Welles or Guillermo del Toro and that their inner light is simply not apparent to the passerby (i.e., I was a secret guy myself for years before coming into my own), but possessing an awareness of this or that lardbucket's wondrous creativity, imagination and richness of spirit is not my responsibility. I need some sort of readily apparent indications of this.

"Besides, we can all tell things by just looking at someone. We can see past a person's massive body-fat situation to look at how they're dressed, what they seem to be income or lifestyle-wise, what they're up to activity-wise, how fat their kids are and how their eyes look -- how sparkling or interested they seem to be in the life around them, or how deadened by junk food and a WALL*E teletubby lifestyle, which creates eyes that are next door to a shark's.

"On top of which Mr. Hitchcock was a super-Jabba only from the early to mid 1930s to the early '40s. He embarked on a diet during the making of Lifeboat with the aid of a product called Reduco (you can see the before and after shots of Hitchcock on a newspaper that William Bendix is reading during the film), and henceforth was never that massive -- just pleasingly plump or perhaps modestly fat. He suddenly became heavier, yes, towards the end of his life when he wasn't working and was eating far too many rich desserts or high-calorie gourmet dishes, but....I digress. (I'm kidding about Reduco, of course -- that was a made-up product Hitchcock threw in for the sake of visual economy.)"

HE reader Mark Edward Heuck has passed along the art below with the following message: "Alcoholic drifter with superhuman powers and antisocial feelings -- check. Saves good-looking stranger who dedicates themselves to superhero's career rehabilitation -- check. Starring Academy-Award nominated actor in the lead - check. Showstopping musical numbers written by Rocky Horror Picture Show creators -- uhhh, hold on." Has anyone ever seen this Alan Arkin film? I don't even remember it.

Don't let anyone tell you that the tide is turning on Hancock, and that David Denby's rave in the New Yorker was some kind of indication that the initial bad buzz is not to be trusted and that it's just a matter of the cool people sending out the cool word.

Forget all that. Hancock is a cloddy but decent-enough thing at first but then -- wait for it -- it shoots itself right in the face with a .44 Magnum. It does this at the two-thirds mark with (a) an astoundingly ridiculous plot turn, (b) a totally absurd abandonment of logical behavior concerning a certain character, (c) an introduction of a tediously loathsome fat-faced villain who does nothing but bring everyone down and spoil the vibe, and (d) a ludicrous (and suddenly introduced) back-story dependency that is ridiculous in its complexity and certainly makes no rudimentary sense.

How does a movie directed by Peter Berg (never a Stanley Kubrick-type guy but a fairly able guy and a shrewd operator) and produced by three very savvy hombres -- Akiva Goldsman, James Lassiter and Michael Mann -- along with star Will Smith turn out this badly? How could they have gone with such a drop-dead awful third act?

The villain has to be Smith; he must have pushed it through. Goldsman knows what makes a good story -- he's no dummy. And Mann clearly knows his way around a solid three-act structure and what good stories have to do. Did these guys actually produce this film or just sit back and glad-hand Smith and pocket the paycheck? What the hell happened?

Hancock, which I paid to see at the Arclight last night (after catching Hellboy II at the Chinese), is a crudely destructive but tolerably entertaining cartoon for the first act. A runamack alcoholic superhero creating titanic havoc and earning everyone's enmity -- fine. The second act, which is about Hancock's prison time, quiet meditation, rehab and p.r. restoration, is less engaging but not too bad. But the third act, trust me, sends the Hancock train completely off the rails and crashing into the stockyards. It is not just bad -- it is confounding, mind-boggling, nuts.

I could feel the energy hissing out of the audience last night once the third-act meltdown settled in. Some laughed it off; some were scratching their heads as they smiled at their dates; some were walking out with very pissed-off expressions. I have to get dressed and make a private screening of a friend's movie in less than an hour, but this movie is one of the weirdest big-budgeters I've ever seen because it's acts as it wants to destroy itself. It has no interest in doing that dance of skill and spirit and occasional movie magic that lifts you out of the third-act quagmire and sends you out satisfied.

Hancock dives into a third-act sinkhole and goes, "Whuhhh...we're diving into a pit of insanity now and we're not leaving! Get used to the stink pit! You thought this movie had a reasonable attitude and would avoid this kind of thing....surprise, assholes! We were a 'pit' movie all along and you just didn't realize it until the third act, so fake-out and fuck you! Because we're getting paid anyway.

"You don't want to know the realm we live in. You'll never get there anyway. We are the gods and you are the peons. We lose our bearings because we feel like going there because we're arrogant, which means pulling the rug out in the third act and you, the audience, pay to see it regardless. A pretty good deal from our end!"

As someone noted yesterday, Tony Ortega's "Trash Talking with Harvey Weinstein" piece, which was posted yesterday on the Village Voice site, recalls the sifting-through-garbage tactics of famed Dylanologist A.J. Weberman. Ortega happened upon a large bin of Harvey's trash in some Tribeca back alley that had all kinds of good stuff, and so he made a piece out of it and even got Harvey to get on the phone.

Harvey Weinstein; Nicole Kidman

The most heartening or encouraging thing for me were the various unsigned Nicole Kidman contracts regarding The Reader, which is currently filming without her. As Ortega notes, "She dropped out when she got pregnant for the first time with her new husband, Keith Urban, and was replaced by Kate Winslet. The documents contain details that are probably pretty standard for highly-paid stars like Kidman: the size of her name in advertising, a guarantee of first-class travel, a right not to have her hair 'permanently' colored, restrictions against nudity not already spelled out in the screenplay, the right to keep one of each item of her wardrobe," etc.

The agreeable surprise is that Kidman agreed to make the flm for a lousy $100 grand, plus another $450,000 if the movie breaks even. (Given the lore about Harvey's bookkeeping practices, the $450 thousand sounds like a dream.) As Ortega points out, "That's a pittance for a star in her bracket, but not unusual when an actor really wants to take part in an 'art' movie."

Kidman's price surely has been dropping since the double box-office calamities of The Invasion and The Golden Compass (which followed a commercially lackluster run of films starting with Cold Mountain and the refrain I've heard said over and over, to wit: "She doesn't sell tickets") but $100,000 seems really low for a star of her magnitude. Cheers nonethless for her willingness to take less for the right role. I don't know how many others have this attitude, but everyone should embrace the concept of risk in this business, at least occasionally. It would be a far healthier business if they did.

It's not nostalgia, and it's not a refrain of the "old films are better than the new" crap that the sentimentalists run up the pole from time to time. The fact is that this King Kong vs. T-Rex fight sequence (found about halfway through this clip) is better choreographed, more thrilling and generally more kick-ass than any mano e mano, big monster vs. big monster sequence made since the 1950s -- including, I would add, the battle between the Ed Norton and Tim Roth bulkazoids in The Incredible Hulk.

As part of a discussion of John Horn's recent L.A. Times piece about a visit to the set of Oliver Stone's W, Patrick Goldstein posted a page from Stanley Weiser's script. Noting Horn's observation that the film "is heavily focused on the current president's relationship with his father," i.e., ex-President George H.W. Bush, Goldstein chose a scene in which Bush, Jr. tries to comfort Poppy on the night of his electoral loss to Bill Clinton in 1992.

So what the hell -- here's my favorite scene. (I can play this game too...no?) It's basically George Bush, Jr. vs. his mother, Barbara Bush -- Page 92, Page 93 and Page 94.

The gist of Eric Lundegaard's 7.1 Slate piece (""Why We Need Movie Reviewers") is that critics are more in synch with moviegoer tastes than you might think. The key is to look at how critical favorites have done on a per-screen basis. If you look at things this way, the fog lifts and the blinders come off!

Going by Rotten Tomato ratings, Lundegaard notes that "while there were fewer 'fresh' films (i.e., pics that critics liked) that showed on fewer screens and took in less overall box office, they tended to make almost $1,000 more per screen than 'rotten' movies (i.e., pics critics didn't like). So, on a per-screen-basis, more people are following critics into theaters than not."

The Hollywood Reporter's Thomas K. Arnold has rewritten a Paramount Home Video press release about the forthcoming Godfather trilogy Blu-ray four-disc package that's coming out on 9.23, and again -- as noted in my riff on Peter Bart's 6.23 Variety blog piece about the package -- no mention of the fact that the restoration guru Robert Harris (Vertigo, Spartacus, etc.) supervised the frame-by-frame digital restoration of all three films. The last time I looked the Harris brand meant blue chip, top-of-the-line, etc. The PHV press release mentions Harris and his credits right up front (i.e., in the second paragraph).

In this stammering Tony Kaye video about his regard for the films of Stanley Kubrick, he talks (at the very end) about an encounter with a friendly payroll consultant. As a way of stirring empathy between kindred souls, the guy told Kaye "he played the ape in 2001...the one who picked up the bone and threw it into the air." As Kaye puts it, "The friendliest person I ever met when I was going bust was the ape in 2001."

I knew in a flash upon watching this morning that Kaye had spoken to Dan Richter, whom I interviewed 15 years ago for an L.A. Times Calendar piece. Here are three scans of the original -- #1, #2 and #3.

My second favorite Kaye line in this video is his repeating what New Line Cinema's Bob Shaye said in an argument over American History X, to wit: "'Look..who do you think you are, Stanley Kubrick or something? You don't have a track record, you haven't done anything, you can't tell me what you want." In response to this, Kaye says, " I was stood up, very reactive, and stormed out and proceeded on a direct road to hell. "

Taken on the balcony of suite #1418 at the Four Seasons Hotel prior to my Guillermo del Toro sit-down two days ago -- Sunday, 6.29.08, 5:40 pm

Three reactions to Eddie Murphy telling Extra's Tanika Ray that he's considering retirement from film acting with comments like (a) "I have close to fifty movies and it's like, why am I in the movies?," (b) "I'll go back to the stage and do standup" and (c) that he "doesn't want to be a part of" Brett Ratner's Beverly Hills Cop 4 because "the movie [isn't] ready to be done."

Eddie Murphy; Frank Sinatra.

One, Murphy may be feeling deflated about the tracking on Meet Dave (7.11), which has been fairly abysmal for the last couple of weeks. The first-choice numbers have recently improved (they're up to 2 or 3) but the signs are unmistakable that the bloom is off the rose and that people have finally understood that the odds of a Murphy comedy being gross or sloppy or not funny enough are pretty good so why bother in the first place? Murphy has since quashed the retirement talk, but that's only because he's moody fuck who feels what he feels when he's feeling it. The bottom line is that he's in a lousy place.

Two, he's talking about a "Frank Sinatra retirement" which really means an extended "fuck all this" adventure that's about shedding the old skin and finding new sources of vitality or what-have-you. A soul-seeking, soul-recharging exercise that every high-stress creative person goes through once or twice, usually in their 40s or 50s. In short, a bout of the middle-aged-crazies.

Three, it's obviously a healthy thing or Murphy to be thinking about getting out of the rut and get back to his stand-up roots. I used to love the guy in the old days (late '70s to '83). I saw him perform live twice back then -- once at a comedy club in Manhattan, once at the Universal amphitheatre. But the hip industry people haven't been with him for 20 years. His loss of the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Dreamgirls confirmed that, and then people really didn't like his graceless ass when he bolted out of the Kodak theatre 90 seconds after Alan Arkin, the winner, took the stage.

All I know is, the guy used to be really funny, and that he needs to get back to that place again if he wants to matter again. Or feel anything again. Right now he's a dead man.

A 30-minute iPhone 3G video tour starring that same dweeby-looking Apple guy in his 40s with the conservative haircut and the glasses -- the same guy who's been hosting the how-to video on the Apple site since the iPhone first appeared last summer. Except it's not a quick tutorial for experienced users showing what's new and different. It's a basic tutorial about everything. Oh.

There are two PUMA PACs -- one run by founder and Massachusetts mom Darragh Murphy that stands for People United Means Action, and one run by Will Bowers that stands for Party Unity My Ass. But they're both are about rallying Hillary Clinton supporters believe she lost due to media sexism and who won't support Barack Obama (who, PUMAS believe, were the principal agents of said sexism) are perhaps inclined to vote for John McCain.

Here's a New England Cable News report on Darragh that ran yesterday, and here's a report by Pandagon's Amanda Marcotte contending that "PUMAS are Swiftboats" and particularly that Darragh was a McCain contributor in 2000 (based on a donation record found on Open Secrets.com) and that there's reason, therefore, to wonder about her true motives. Apart from being dead set against Obama, that is.

"I would like to argue that this PAC was not formed to support Clinton," Marcotte writes, "but to support the media narrative about hysterical feminists, and to help the McCain campaign with (a) creating the illusion that McCain is moderate enough to attract the votes of feminist Clinton supporters and (b) reinforcing the narrative about how feminists are just hysterical bitches with no common sense who subsist on outrage, can’t act in their own self-interest because of their feminine-addled brains, and can safely be ignored."

An HE reader named Lucas sent me an embedded code for that Travelocity ad I spoke of the other day. The actor is Stephen Full -- here's his reel. The actress is Diane Ruby Lane.