John McCain's Facebook page lists his favorite movies as Viva Zapata, Some Like It Hot and Letters from Iwo Jima. Obama's Facebook page lists his favorites as Casablanca, Godfather I & II, Lawrence of Arabia and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Tropic Thunder (trailer above in case you're one of the few people in America who haven't seen the movie yet) takes a lot of risks satirizing the film industry. Inevitably, it's catching heat from disability groups, among others.

But it's also inspired champions like Slate's Dana Stevens, who offers this defense of Robert Downey, Jr.'s use of blackface and the repetition of the word "retard" in a scene mocking the Oscars' shameless tendency to give stars awards for playing people with mental disabilities. Here's some of what she says:

Siskel & Ebert was such an iconic show, and Ebert & Roeper seemed to do a pretty good job with the legacy, even with guests hosts during Ebert's health leaves.

But not, apparently, good enough for Disney-ABC, which is letting both critics leave the show next month. Ebert, who had been on the air for 33 years, says Disney wants to take the show in "a new direction."

How weird that the show isn't going off the air, it's just totally changing its cast and presumably its name?

Sasha Baron Cohen is following up his Borat film with a film featuring "Bruno," an Austrian celebrity journalist, and it's liable to be just as outrageous.

The Jerusalem Post reports that one of Bruno's targets was a political analyst and former spy in Israel.

Director Sydney Pollack died today at the age of 73 of cancer. He directed The Way We Were, Out of Africa and the brilliant Tootsie, a scene of which is posted above. In it, he plays the agent of Dustin Hoffman's character and delivers a line that should be a mantra for actors over-thinking silly roles:: "A tomato doesn't have logic!" He will be missed.

As stoner comedies go, Harold and Kumar go to White Castle was pretty successful, but now for the sequel they're getting . . . egad . . . political. Specifically, in Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, they mock our age of terror, winding up in Gitmo after their bong is mistaken for a bomb.

Salon says it's "hilarious," and praises a scene in which the duo smokes up with a certain current president. There are a ton of enthusiastic spoilers in this Ain't It Cool News item. So apparently it's a totally legitimate, and maybe even good, parody.

But the whole idea of such a film is weird, right? Everyone seems to be acting like terrorism and torture are perfectly appropriate subjects for pothead comedies (everyone except the administration officials who argue that it's a perfectly lovely detention center).

Do you think it's good that silly comedies are tackling such intense subject matter? Will you go see it?

UPDATE: If you haven't seen my debates with Christopher Hitchens, Michael Shermer and Daniel Dennett, you can watch them here. I am waiting for Shermer to post our Cal Tech debate of December 9, which was recorded by his Skeptic Society.

I watched the movie "The Great Debaters" last night, and it helped me to understand why atheists are such bad debaters. The movie portrays four students from a little black college in Texas, and shows how, under the tutelage of their pugnacious coach, they went on to defeat Almighty Harvard. Denzel Washington, who plays the coach, says early in the movie that debate is a kind of bloodsport. It's great virtue is that it puts rival ideas up against each other, as argued by people who passionately espouse those ideas, and then it lets the truth emerge through a kind of gladiatorial elimination.

Excellent Mashup from the 2005 Sundance film festival that has made it's way onto youtube and thus onto videosift.

"Planet of the Arabs is a powerful 9 minute collage of racist stereotyping of Arabs in movies.Out of 1000 films that have Arab & Muslim characters (from the year 1896 to 2000) 12 were positive depictions, 52 were even handed and the rest of the 900 and so were negative. A montage of Hollywood's relentless dehumanization of Arabs and Muslims."

The inspiration to the Planet of the Arabs mashup was an MEF documentary titled Reel Bad Arabs, the trailer for that documentary can be viewed next.

This week, we went to an uptown Manhattan movie theater to see Sweeney Todd. But even though it was pretty great, we didn't get to enjoy it so much, because we spent two hours wondering if we'd left our babysitter back in Brooklyn enough contact numbers. Did we, for example, mention our relatives upstate? In the Midwest? In Norway?

Why were we wondering such a thing while we should have been enjoying Sasha Baron Cohen's tight pants? Because every trailer was for a movie in which New York City gets destroyed. And not in a friendly way. In a BLAMMO! kind of way. In a how-awesome-was-THAT kind of way.

Think Progress has an interesting post up about what torture-themed movie posters the MPAA deems appropriate and which ones they reject.

They've approved gross-out images for Saw, Hostel and others, but deemed this image of two soldiers leading away a hooded detainee "not suitable for all audiences."

The poster was designed to promote Alex Gibney's film Taxi to the Dark Side, about an innocent Afghan taxi driver tortured to death in a U.S. prison.

And it seems like this might be a trend for the MPAA: According to Variety, "the MPAA also rejected the one-sheet for Roadside Attractions' 2006 film The Road to Guantanamo, which featured a hooded prisoner hanging from his handcuffed wrists."