You may have heard that spoof veteran David Zucker's newest project, An American Carol, is a takedown of Michael Moore. You can now have a look at the trailer, online at Yahoo!. And then you can riddle me this: Does An American Carol look like a clever parody of Moore's documentaries, or just a partisan attack on the filmmaker? Or, put another way, is the clip of Bill O'Reilly slapping around Kevin Farley's "Michael Malone" a commentary on the rivalry between the two, or right-wing wish fulfillment? One thing to note before answering is that O'Reilly appears in the film himself, while Moore does not.

Moore is obviously fair game; I've enjoyed his films, and sympathize with (some of) his politics, but I'd eagerly watch a skillful spoof of the pudgy, faux-working-class provocateur. I think parts of the trailer are pretty funny ("Here I am on the island paradise Cuba!"). But if the point is just to pile on the guy, with a rah-rah patriotic, stop-hating-America message at the end, then I'm significantly less interested.

The thing is, the trailer really doesn't make clear what's going on. On one hand, prominent conservatives like O'Reilly and James Woods appear to deliver literal and figurative blows. On the other, "Michael Malone" gets accused of being a slaveowner, which sounds more like a parody of conservative attacks on Moore than of Moore himself. And is Trace Adkins poking fun at his image here, or is he for real?

We know that Zucker is himself conservative, and that the movie is political -- which is fine. But is it political in an incisive, worthwhile way, or in the brainless beatdown mode of Ann Coulter et al? What do you think?

Things rarely go smoothly for costumed adventurers -- and the courtroom, it seems, is no exception. Nikke Finke reports that a federal judge has denied to dismiss 20th Century Fox's legal claim on Watchmen. You may remember that they filed a lawsuit back in February claiming that their rights to the DC property still held. They seek an injunction to prevent Warner Bros' adaptation of Watchmen from being released at all.
And at this point, that federal judge agrees with them.

Warner Bros, obviously, cries foul. They point out that several studios have tried to develop the property for years, with Fox saying nary a word, and passed up the chance to properly reacquire the rights some time back. Their view of the lawsuit is that it's just an opportunistic grab on a movie that has been gaining more and more buzz. You can read the whole legal chronology over on Deadline Hollywood (Finke's done a top-notch job of documenting the ins and outs) and see which side you come down on. It's exhausting -- isn't this what studios have lawyers for? To avoid this kind of last-minute litigation lunacy?

It's unlikely that the movie will really be delayed -- but it is possible that Warner Bros. will have to hand Fox a substantial chunk of change in order to release the film, as they had to do for Dukes of Hazzard some years back. As one of Finke's readers noted, suddenly the Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince schedule shift makes a lot more sense. The studio's 2009 budget could be pretty tight.

Watchmen opens (hopefully) March 6th, 2009.

Adam Sandler's most recent not-very-funny comedy, You Don't Mess with the Zohan, has earned about 100 million U.S. dollars since its release in June. It's not going to be pulling in any Egyptian gineih, Lebanese lira, or U.A.E. dirhams, though, because the censors in those countries have banned the film from local cinemas. I'm tempted to say that for the first time ever I'm jealous of Middle Eastern moviegoers, but that would be a shallow joke. Besides, no matter how lousy a movie is, it's nice to at least have the option of watching it.

Film censorship is common in Arab countries. What's noteworthy here is that the film in question is about Israeli/Palestinian relations, a subject that's probably of some considerable interest to many people in that region. Sandler's character, a former Israeli spy, moves to New York and gets a job at a hair salon run by a Lebanese-American woman -- but people in Lebanon won't be able to see the film. I guess the movie's final message of looking past our differences and learning to get along with each other was deemed too offensive.

Well, OK, as noted in Variety, anything with a lot of sexual content, political messages, or religion bashing is liable not to make it past the censors in the Arab world, and Zohan has plenty of all three. The film's Middle East distributor, Circuit-Empire, is still showing the film to the other Arab countries' censorship boards, but they don't expect it to fare any better than it did in Egypt, Lebanon, and the United Arab Emirates. Sorry, Middle East! You'll have to view images of Sandler's comically oversized package by some other means!

NOTE: This post discusses Twilight, the movie, and the Twilight book series (particularly the latest book, Breaking Dawn), and is SPOILER HEAVY. If you've not read the books and don't want to read spoilers, do NOT read this post until you've read them. It's also longer than my usual column, as I had a lot of ground to cover, so if you hate reading long pieces, skip it. Thanks.

You're probably aware, even if you're not into books about vampires and clumsy, average teenage girls falling in love with one, that there's a popular book series called the Twilight Saga, and the first book in the series, Twilight, is being adapted for the big screen by director Catherine Hardwicke. What you may not be aware of is the little undercurrent of female writers decrying the series as inherently anti-feminist.

The Twilight series grew in popularity, mostly off the radar of the feminist set, until it got so popular that the feminists started to take notice -- and offense. I first became aware of this anti-feminist backlash when Meg Cabot, author of The Princess Diaries (among other girly books) responded on her blog to readers writing her to ask what she thought of the series, thusly: " I didn't take my husband's last NAME when we got married. Do you honestly think I'd like a story about a girl considering changing SPECIES for a guy? No offense to any of you, but as a feminist, I just can't go there... "

I found Cabot's take interesting because I'm a feminist myself, who also didn't take my husband's last name when we got married, but I don't happen to find the series inherently anti-feminist. Nonetheless, since the release of the fourth book in the series, Breaking Dawn, on August 2, the feminist mutterings have started to escalate to a dull roar.

When Stephen Frears' The Queen came out in 2006, all the buzz emphasized Helen Mirren's icy performance as London's reclusive royal highness. The ubiquitous praise lead to her Oscar win, but it overwhelmed recognition of the movie's secret weapon: Michael Sheen as Tony Blair, quietly pressuring his Majesty to face the public in the wake of Princess Diana's untimely demise. There's a reason why Sheen conveyed the nuances of Blair's role in the event, which transpired a mere three months after the Prime Minister rose to power -- he had practice. The Deal, a fantastic made-for-TV movie Frears directed in 2003, tracked Blair's cunning (and morally questionable) instincts in the years leading up to his position at the top of the Labor Party.

Sheen played Blair in The Deal first, and it's both a superior performance and a superior film. Whereas The Queen had a tabloid hook and only tangentially explored the deeper political ramifications of a reclusive national leader, The Deal delves into precisely how Blair managed to emerge at the top of British politics with a series of calculated maneuvers. Political drama at its finest, The Deal hit DVD in the United States last month, where it has been touted as "the prequel to The Queen." That's not quite fair; The Queen is the sequel to The Deal, and the two movies ought to be seen as a single, wholly fascinating package depicting British politics in the 1990s.

Each day seems to bring us yet another piece of promotional marketing for Oliver Stone's Bush flick, W. Not long after Moviefone debuted the trailer, AICN now has a teaser poster and what you see above is one of two newly-released images from the film. They're definitely pimping it, trying to get folks interested in a movie about the life and times of George W. Bush even though many of us are tired of the man, the jokes, the legend -- all of it. We've spent 8 years with this dude ... can't we just shake his hand, thank him for a job done and move on?

Anyway, W (which feels like it was shot and edited in three weeks in order to make a pre-Election Day release date) arrives in theaters on October 17, and we were wondering how much you think it's gonna make? With one of the biggest presidential elections in years only a couple weeks away from that date, and with the entire world watching to see who we'll replace Dubya with, will all that chitter-chatter raise more or less interest in the Oliver Stone movie? Is this the kind of flick that will surprise everyone with a giant taking, or will it crash and burn? Sound off below ... and we'll revisit your answers in a couple months when W rolls out.

What with the firestorm over John McCain's ad calling Barack Obama a hollow celebrity akin to Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, you'd think someone would have pointed out that McCain actually has Obama beat in the "number of Hollywood movies appeared in" category. Here's a video -- unearthed by Movie Moron via SlashFilm -- of John McCain's amusing cameo in Wedding Crashers, shaking hands with Christopher Walken's remarkably well-connected Secretary Cleary at his daughter's wedding. And yes, that's James Carville next to him, but Carville shows up in everything.

Just a bit of harmless fun for McCain or despicable participation in a BOOB RAUNCH FEST? You be the judge.

Also: Number of cameos on 24: John McCain: 1; Barack Obama: 0. You can check that video out over here. What's that old saw about glass houses?

It must be a horrible, wonderful thing to be a movie star in this modern age -- rewarded and yet tightly caged by the public's perception of you. Stay within the expectations of the ticket-buying public, and you're likely (or, more accurately, more likely) to not fall off the public's radar; at the same time, that gilded cage must, at some point, feel more and more like a prison. I mention this in talking about Swing Vote because Kevin Costner manages a somewhat nifty trick in his performance as Bud Johnston, a New Mexico ne'er-do-well who, thanks to a close-fought election and a voting machine error, gets to pick the next president. Oh, sure, we all do that on voting day -- but, due to a electoral college tie and a tie in New Mexico, it turns out Bud's vote will be the deciding one. For, well, everyone. Before this is established by Jason Richman and Joshua Michael Stern's screenplay, though, we get a sense of Bud -- and, at first, Bud seems like another in a long line of Kevin Costner likable rascals from Bull Durham's Crash Davis to Tin Cup's Roy MacAvoy. But Bud is something more interesting -- a man whose charm can't quite cover up the holes in his soul. Bud's a drunkard. Bud's lazy. And if it weren't for his daughter Molly (Madeline Carroll), Bud would be even more adrift and frayed. Early, Bud tells his civic-minded daughter that " ... voting doesn't count for a goddamn thing." Bud's the kind of guy who's wrong a lot -- and he knows it -- but, thanks to the gentle contortions of Swing Vote's plot, never more so than now.

There's good news and bad news, Soderbergh fans: The bad news is that the director's two-part, Benicio Del Toro-starring Che Guevara biopic Che, as noted in a recent piece in The Hollywood Reporter, still doesn't have a U.S. distributor. Gregg Goldstein's piece (which also looks at the similar challenges faced by Cannes '08 films Synedoche, New York and Two Lovers) notes that there are four offers on the table from independent distributors, but no deal has yet been signed.

For many who saw Che at Cannes (including myself), this is vexing news. Goldstein also relates that one distributor's hopes to purchase Che as a single film with a three-hour running time has been roundly rebuffed. However, in case anyone would like to see what all the fuss is about -- albeit in blurry, bootleg fashion -- a grainy, blurry bootleg of the trailer (in all Spanish with no subtitles) for the first half of Che, The Argentine, has hit YouTube (see above) -- and while the bootlegged trailer may lack clarity and definition, it also gives a great sense of the look and the feel of the film.

Does The Argentine's trailer make you hunger for all of Soderbergh's Che? Or does it just make you appreciate how hard it's going to be to get a distributor to back a four-hour long historical drama in Spanish?

The basic scenario behind Swing Vote makes for an easy pitch: An average American (Kevin Costner) winds up in the position of casting the deciding vote in a presidential election. Both candidates (played by Kelsey Grammer and Dennis Hopper) fly into town and try to woo him. It's a simple premise clearly aimed at exploring the various quirks of the political process. However, although it is quite a fantastical situation, the filmmakers have put quite an effort into incorporating at least one element from the real world: News anchors. Countless movies have asked Jay Leno and his fellow late night brethren to make cameos on TV joking about this or that bit of plot to add a sense of realism, but Swing Vote brings a slightly different set of rules to the table: The presidential candidates are clearly fictional (and Grammer, the Republican candidate, doesn't have many Bush-like qualities), while the news anchors, for the most part, play themselves. If you ask me, something doesn't quite add up here.

Chris Matthews blares into the camera about the ramifications of the election snafu. Tucker Carlson follows suit. Larry King delivers his trademark monotone. And Arianna Huffington gets a full-blown monologue. How is it that all these people can play themselves in a world with a completely different president, one virtually devoid (as far as we can tell) of modern talking points like the Iraq War and the beleaguered economy? It's almost as if they've been imported from another dimension.