And I must be completely honest. Obama is coasting right now. He isn't doing anything all that exciting. But he isn’t going to get in his own way either.

What snapped things? I think the combination of being unable to pretend that they weren’t inciting some horrible behavior and being called out by Obama and Biden. Once they were called out, the only way to respond was to push harder or to pull back. And pushing harder was a clear trip into Colonel Kurtz Land. And pulling back is, in reality, a surrender.

Democrats will remain paranoid until McCain makes his concession speech and Sarah Palin does Saturday Night Live just before Thanksgiving. But at this point, Osama could put a dirty bomb in McCain’s Chicago HQ, leave bread crumbs leading to Obama’s door, and the public would still be looking to the response of the candidates to determine if the needed to shift to McCain, who is one brutal commercial showing all of his shifting of positions in the last two weeks alone from being wiped out in this effort.

And don’t be surprised if we see a lot more of The Clintons next week and through the rest of the campaign. They have to know that 2012 is no longer a real issue and that it’s time to refocus on 2016, when Biden will be 74 (and Hillary just 69) and vulnerable to age attacks.

$500 million in their pocket with no financial exposure on Indy IV.

If they are in the mood, Indy V will happen. Paramount will pay for it and take nothing but distribution again, though this time they may not get as much as 12.5%.

Of course, the really unfortunate part about this is that the slam by Stone & Parker was one of their weakest efforts. How many times can you say, "They raped Indiana Jones" before the joke is done? Where was the next, funnier, idea, whether "ET vs Yoda" or "Transformer Jaws" or Lucas & Speilberg being controled by aliens or Scientologists... I don't know. They are often brilliant and unexpected. This things was a fart joke trading on the word 'rape." Yawn.

Quarantine is about right for a Screen Gems movie. The openings - and thus, the final numbers, are not quite what they were in recent years past, so the question is whether there is some dip in what and how they are delivering or whether the market has simply softened for those kinds of genre pictures. (My guess is the latter.)

You know, it's interesting that Sony and Disney are now the only two companies with strong niche plays... and I don't mean specialty Dependents. I mean that Sony's SPC is the only specialty arm that really focuses on foreign, doc, and lower expectation indies. And Screen Gems, with the narrowing of Rogue and the living death of Fox Atomic, is really the only studio arm so focused on raw genre, with Paramount claiming Vantage is going there and, of course, true indie Lionsgate still sawing.

Anyway...

Beverly Hills Chihuahua's drop is surprisingly small, Opening Fiday-to- Second Friday. INevnitably, the weekend drop will be smaller than the 45% estimated for yesterday.

Body of Lies will be Ridley Scott's second worst opening of this millenium (the worst is A Good Year, which Fox couldn't figure out how to sell), thought it will be in the top third of the opening histories of both Crowe and Dicaprio. The film, which Warners is telling people cost $70 million (ha ha), is headed to under $50 million total domestic. But with these actors, the internation will almost inevitably be north of $80 million and could well be over $100 million... which is why they were hired at these prices.

Universal's shot at the uplifting feel-good sports drama, The Express, just never found any momentum. To be honest, I had no idea it was even coming until a couple of weeks ago. No screening that I was even invited to. Minimal advertising. Has Rob Brown done a single show? Oh well, I guess it's better than The Babe, whihc was sold to within an inch of its life and found a similarly uninterested audience.

It's hard to know what Pramount Vantage is trying to accomplish with The Duchess. They have taken the same release tack as Pride & Prejudice, but that release happened in November and went to 1299 screens over Thanksgiving weekend. The result looks like it was about triple what The Duchess will do on this Columbus Day weekend "holiday." And with all the awards buzz around that film, it was still the best weekend they ever had.

City of Ember on 2022 screens... an unmitigated distribution car wreck. The film is heading to one of the very worst opening weekend per-screeens of this year (around #115 of 125 wide releases). The crew at Fox Walden seemed to be working without an ad budget and with a lot of energy... that didn't take. The choice to launch the film at Fantastic Fest instead of prioritizing the national media ended up defining the experience.

And, one must say, that Jeffrey Godsick's return to Fox just days ago tells us that "they" knew exactly what was about to happen, that Jeffrey was taken back onto the mother ship as the studio surely agreed to do if things didn't work out, and that the end of Fox Walden as a production entity is unannounced but inevitable.

Still... even if it is a tactic... good for him. It's the right thing to do, even if he and his people created the rage he is now trying to calm.

It might be a tactic. It might be a close friend warning him that he could be responsible for Obama being assassinated. There is even a report that the RNC is pulling its money from presidential advertising and putting it all into trying to save some Senate seats... which is the kind of cold water that would make most men consider how they will be remembered and stop worrying about winning quite as much.

I think this and Troopergate signal an end to whatever slim chance of coming back that McCain had. But one always worries that something might happen... that "The Bradley Effect" might be real, etc.

Here comes the weekend...

The McCain of Last Week

Now the typing monkeys are reporting what they've been sold/told this week.

I don't know why Scott Rudin finally took his name off The Reader. It will eventually come out. A guess? Harvey didn't come through with everything that was promised two weeks ago. Or Harvey put a gun to someone's head to handle HFPA in a way that Rudin saw as a betrayal and this was the only move left. Or Rudin realized that the only way to free 42 West of being forced to work with Harvey was to drop his association with film. Or all of the above.

But you know... this movie being release was never something Rudin wanted... there was no win, only a face-saving compromise... Rudin got in his shots, but the movie is being released, even if it has to be cut by off-duty parking lit attendants.

Daldry will have a big day in the some when Billy Elliot opens on Broadway... Winslet will not do any press for The Reader... Revolution Road will pay a price, which can be recovered if the movie is great... The Reader will be what it is, but you will see a re-run of a couple of years ago when TWC just didn't have the juice to push their awards movies hard enough to get traction, except at HFPA.

Let's all hope for the one thing that really does matter... that the movie is good.

And here is a link to The Scumbag Express, Former Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating, a McCain campaign co-chairman, on the Dennis Miller Show, calling Obama is anti-cop, "a guy of the street" and talking about his early 1980s drug use, and any other scummy tactic that he can think of while not talking about any real issues facing America today.

Kim Voynar is already changing MCN...

But there is this bizarre insistence of taking what I would call minor facts and turning them into misleading headlines.

Patrick Goldstein is previewing John Horn’s “bold prediction — it's possible that "Body of Lies" may lose the opening weekend box-office race to a week-old movie about a talking dog.”

And I’m already pissed.

Why?

Because Patrick, in his best G-O-O-M-L style, starts by writing off Beverly Hills Chihuahua in a box office story like it isn’t a major surprise success. Sure, you can laugh at it from a critical perspective. But for starters, it had the best opening of ANY MOVIE since July. That’s not nothing. The only movie that out-opened it in Sept/Oct last year was the franchise film, Saw IV. In 2006, only Saw III. You get the idea.

What really is an issue for those who funded Body of Lies is Eagle Eye, which opened to a little less than Beverly Hills Chihuahua and cost tens of millions less than BOL. But Patrick is too busy selling another line of crap to bother mentioning Eagle Eye’s $29.2 million domestic opening… movie fatigue!!!

Oh, that movie fatigue!

How I love it when people who think they know something prove they not only don’t know much, but that they aren’t interested in learning anything that doesn’t fit the prerecorded message in their head.

Movie fatigue takes place when movies people don’t care that much about seeing are released or are poorly marketed. It’s not that complicated. Who was tired when Eagle Eye opened? And what adults were hopping to the theater last year or the year before or the year before?

It’s a horrible habit amongst hack journalists to write actors off as “over” or to overpraise this week’s success story. Remember when Will Smith was going to be destroyed by Hancock… which turned out to be the second highest grossing film of his career, behind only Independence Day? Is Tom Hanks the $77 million opening man of The Da Vinci Code or the under $10 million start of Charlie Wilson’s War? At just over $19 million, Burn After Reading is the biggest Coen Bros opening ever… but why? Was it Pitt and Clooney? The explain Leatherheads and Jesse James.

It’s the studio mindset and the marketing, stupid.

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that Body of Lies opens to $18 million, a couple of million behind weekend two of BHC. Do you know how many movies that Crowe or DiCaprio have been in that opened to more? Three apiece. Catch Me If You Can, Titanic, and The Departed and for Crowe, American Gangster, Gladiator, and Master & Commander.

Do you see some similarities? Three Best Picture winners, one BP nominee, and two serious contenders with a variety of nods. These are movies that the studios were pushing and pushing hard. This is not the case with Body of Lies. This is a movie that WB has never felt good about. They backed away from Oscar buzz early and often.

I would normally not call out WB’s indifference to a very expensive film with some very important filmmakers and actors who have a history with the studio… but as always, how a studio handles a film is much more important than any other element.

American Gangster was Crowe’s biggest opening… and Denzel Washington’s too. But how many $20 million openings are there in Crowe’s entire career? Three. And Denzel? Eight. So who opened that movie? But let’s look at the bigger picture… how did the film do worldwide? There, Crowe propped up Washington – by Universal’s design – where the film did $135 million… third best for Crowe, but #1 for Denzel (and #2? Philadelphia, with Hanks).

In the movie business, "one" is never a trend that you can follow.

Patrick’s third old saw is that movie star salaries will plummet based on this one failure. “If "Body of Lies" doesn't cut the mustard this weekend, you can bet that a lot of movie star fees will start going down almost as fast as the stock market,” he barks.

Bull.

WB knew what level these guys could open at when they funded the film. If Jeff Robinov wants to blame movie star impotence for his choice to overspend on a movie, he is welcome to sell that line… but it’s ridiculous.

It is absolutely fair to point out that many of the highest grossing films are driven by their concepts – including the f-ing Chihuahuas – and not by movie stars. But it is equally fair to point out that four of the year’s top ten domestic openings so far could not have done as well without their stars – Harrison Ford, Will Smith, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Angelina Jolie.

I guess that when Patrick writes, “Outside of 2007's ‘American Gangster’ and 2006's ‘The Departed,’ which both had two mega stars and an A-list director at the helm, it's hard to think of many recent films that justified the cost of all that high-priced talent,” he is engaging in some backdoor criticism and not engaging the box office on its face.

Tobey Maguire will be 40 when he puts on the tights to play teenaged Peter Parker for Spider-Man 4… but he’s getting paid and paid massively to do it because, in many cases, stars still count… a lot. That doesn’t mean that you can’t have a re-launch, like Nolan’s Batman, that does even better. But don’t expect them to change up Christian Bale as long as Nolan is making Bat-films.

There is plenty of screaming to do about what IS wrong with Hollywood. The gambling nature of huge up-and-coming star paydays is insane. And stars (and more importantly, their agents) suffering a drop in value do not give up their quote easily. The price tag for production is waaaaay out of control. Etc, etc, etc. But the problem I keep having with much of the creaky Traditional Media is that they set their minds and then try to prove that their ideas are right by pulling facts apart like taffy and rarely (RARELY!!!) doing the simple research to come closer to real arguments.

And it sucks.

But today, listening to a couple of right wing radio talkers (Prager & Medved, and some guy late last night), I started to be convinced that this really is over. The level of pain in their shrieks was at a high for the year, perhaps because Sarah Palin made them think the Republicans were back in the race. The Ayers stuff is still out there, but it was more of the line of, "all of his policies are lies," as they make false claims about what his policies mean... and I mean claims that are not, "it won't work," so much as "he doesn't really intend to do anything he is saying."

I am actually comfortable entertaining arguments that Obama's policies will not work. Arguments can be legitimately made. But Dennis Prager practically crying out, "Obama is against clean power," and then arguing that new jobs from a "green economy" effort "will just go overseas like all the other jobs." I mean, this is a smart man caught drooling in public.

Then there is the return of “Hussein” being used in introductions of the candidates at events, which continued today. There’s Cindy McCain trying to invoke the “my son’s in harm’s way” card regarding a political vote meant to keep more American children from being killed in Iraq (which, by the way, doesn’t acknowledge that John McCain has voted against troop funding in Iraq as well, not to mention being against a GI Bill for Iraq troops who are not as wealthy as the McCain). And now we are hearing the Hillary Clinton "it's not over... they are just trying to get you to think that" argument, which is a very strong signal that, well, it's over.

If they are this desperate, they must know, in thier guts, that it is almost compeltely over. Of course, that is one step happier than David Brooks calling Sarah Palin a cancer on the right wing.

Fortunately, McCain seems to be getting a bit more clear-headed about describing himself, his campaign, and his followers at this point…

Hallett calls this attack on Obama's association with Ayers and the Annenberg Challenge by further association, "a smear campaign. It's a political diatribe that has no basis in fact. The Chicago Annenberg Challenge was an extremely positive initiative. It was well-vetted, thorough, and the fact that it is now is being used for political purposes is, in my opinion, outrageous."

The full NPR story