Just observationally, an interesting thing about The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 is all the ethnic cross-pollination on display in its romantic relationships, which would surely irritate Samuel L. Jackson’s character from the forthcoming Lakeview Terrace, as well as bigots… or, I’m sorry, “those of a certain generation” everywhere.

Summoning up fleeting memories of Mandingo, Alexis Bledel’s character falls for an African-American nude model (Jesse Williams) from her figure-sketching class, complicating a potential reconciliation with her Greek national crush (Michael Rady) from the first movie. Amber Tamblyn’s character does the deed with her Asian boyfriend (Leonardo Nam, returning from the first film) while, in a racial inversion of the previous couplings, America Ferrera’s character goes to a summer theater program and develops feelings for a British actor (Tom Wisdom). (Blake Lively’s character is conspicuously out of commission on the crushes in this flick, after having pursued a disastrous, self-destructive relationship in the first film.)

I don’t profess to know what this all really means, as these castings, if different in a few specific details, are still true to the source material — four hit books. So it’s not part of a secret Hollywood agenda. It would seem to highlight, however, the increasing indifference toward race among young people that has helped power and lift the candidacy of Barack Obama. We like what we see and know, and as more and more kids grow up and pursue educations in integrated environments, it’s not a big deal to date outside of one’s ethnic group, and/or have friends that do the same.

Gail Sheehy’s lengthy post-mortem on the Hillary Clinton campaign, for Vanity Fair, is at once a fascinating and — for anyone who followed the particulars of the Democratic primary race the past six months — familiar read. Screw Primary Colors, this may be the real political psychodrama of our time, ripe for its own roman a clef treatment. It’s all there — the perpetual bafflement at Obama’s non-­belligerence; the serial campaign mismanagement and bickering between Clinton’s “Big Five” (Patti Solis Doyle, Harold Ickes, Mark Penn, Howard Wolfson and Mandy Grunwald); the ravings of pollster Penn, convinced that Hillary needed to throw around more weight than any
man in order to meet the commander in chief threshold test, and how this approach was normalized by the experience of the Clintons’ White House years; and yes, even the “dark clot of wishful thinking” that broke loose with Hillary’s invocation of Robert Kennedy’s assassination in June of 1968.

A lot of this piece is re-tilled Earth in the macro sense, but it’s got great detail. Among the notable revelations is news that, long before the Bosnia sniper-fire issue, another one of Clinton’s signature stories — about a young woman who worked for minimum wage,
was uninsured, and who got pregnant — was apocryphal at best, riddled with inaccuracies that seem to indicate a willful neglecting of facts. And then there’s this quote from Leon Panetta, Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff: “There are moments when [the Clintons] want to hear from the
dark side because that may be the only way to win. …Losing is not part
of their vocabulary. They know no limits when it comes to the energy
and tactics they will use — no matter how distasteful.” For the full read, click here.

I wasn’t really around for Richard Nixon’s Watergate flameout, but was there as much enmity toward the man as there now is toward President Bush, or was he generally regarded as more of a sad, pathetic bastard who’d merely written his own political obituary, and in the process inadvertently exposed the country to his own darkly paranoid worldview?

Largely because of the war in Iraq, of course, there’s no such oh-it’s-just-politics pass for Bush, whose current 25-30 percent approval ratings still seem kind of high to me, and have for most of his second term. After all, Bush’s impending exit has already been touted in celebratory T-shirts that have gained popularity as much more than just some whimsical Blue State item. He’s  routinely booed and heckled in public on the few occasions he’s not trotted out before a scrubbed audience. Anti-smear email campaigns are used, and regularly falsely attributed to celebrities, to try to prop up his administration as something other than the flaming trainwreck of a disaster that it is. And now graffiti — like the above item, and an entire series of professionally stenciled put-downs here in Los Angeles and in other big cities — openly scorns the guy. January 20, 2009, indeed…

John Cusack got his political ya-yas out recently with the limited release of War, Inc., coming soon to DVD. Now he’s taking more specific aim at John McCain in this 30-second spot, funded by MoveOn.org. A couple apolitical thoughts on the piece: First, what’s with the four quick flashes early in the ad? You gotta build to that stuff, kids. Secondly, all those cigarettes are finally starting to take a toll on Cusack’s vocal timbre.

For those looking to cast their eyes past the horizon of the Democratic primary battle, Todd Purdum has penned, for Vanity Fair, a fascinating piece on former President Bill Clinton which examines his successes and excesses, particularly since leaving office. “It is beyond dispute that Clinton’s foundation has done worthy work
around the world,” Purdum writes, “funneling low-cost anti-retroviral drugs to more than
a million AIDS patients, shining the singular
power of a presidential spotlight on the good work of others, and
raising millions of dollars for practical programs in places much of
the world’s power establishment never bothers with.
But it is also beyond dispute that Clinton has blended the
altruistic efforts of his philanthropy with the private business
interests of some of his biggest donors in ways that are surpassingly
sloppy, if not unseemly, for any former president.”

That means a shined light on rubbed elbows with billionaire raconteur Ron Burkle, occasional movie producer/Elizabeth Hurley impregnator Steve Bing and InfoUSA CEO Vinod Gupta, as well as smoke-if-not-fire intimations of other rubbed body parts with Gina Gershon, Barbara Streisand, Eleanor Mondale and a handful of other nameless women in positions of power, wealth and nominal fame. Purdum also ruminates in much less sexy fashion about possible mood changes and
loss of stamina in Clinton following his 2004 quadruple-bypass heart surgery. It’s not so much a firmly conclusory piece as it is an exploration of the great, inimitable shade of grey that dominantly makes up both Clinton the man and politician, but it is well written, reasonably speculative, and does provide a glimpse behind the curtain as it relates to some of the proxy campaign shortcomings of Hillary Clinton, particularly the simultaneous disbelief and disdain for Obama’s meteoric national rise.

Incidentally, it’s a no-brainer that there’s a great big screen biopic waiting to be done about Clinton. It’d be a case full of dynamite if they wanted to do it right, but Tom Hanks or maybe even John Travolta — who has the proper glad-handing charm and same gift of sartorial weight control, and previously channeled Clinton in the roman a clef Primary Colors — could do a smash-up job. Maybe Tom Wilkinson, too. Of course, you’d need to be about 20 more years removed, I guess, so who does that leave? Ed Norton and Christian Bale have shown a chameleonic ability to disappear into character. Hugh Jackman also has the right rakish charisma, if he could put on some pounds. Hopefully not Zac Efron, though, that’s all I’m saying.