News: Baldwin Style, Spidey, Christie's Flip, 'NYDN'

Nope, Mitt Romney won't be teaming up with Spider-Man if he wins the White House.

Republican House Speaker John Boehner, who hails from Ohio, thinks that President Obama will win the Buckeye State. "The auto bailout may help the president in Ohio a little," he said.

Rosario Crocetta, the new gay governor of conservative Sicily, promised voters not to have sex while in office.

LGBT groups plan on protesting anti-gay singer Beenie Man's upcoming concert at Ocean Grove Lodge in Trinidad, California.

After endorsing President Obama in 2008, the New York Daily News today backed Mitt Romney. "Offering a rosy vision of a country already on the rise, Obama argues that he would lead a resurgence by staying the course," the editors write. "He posits that spending in areas such as education and clean energy would be beneficial, and he sees raising taxes on high-income earners as key to 'balanced' deficit reduction. Each on its own is attractive, but the whole comes up short."

Openly gay Rep. Tammy Baldwin's popular Senate campaign is profiled in the New York Times Style section today. Why style and not National? Who knows, but here's a taste: "Though a victory by Ms. Baldwin on Tuesday would represent the election of the first openly gay or lesbian person to the Senate, gay groups have been surprisingly low-key about their public support. Fund-raisers have largely been intimate affairs at people’s homes; no giant fund-raising galas in gay enclaves like West Hollywood or the Castro in San Francisco."

New York magazine takes post-Sandy Manhattan.

A judge tossed gay man Stephen Hank's defamation lawsuit against Bristol Palin and ordered him to pay all legal fees connected to a nightclub altercation in which Hank called Palin's mother, Sarah Palin, a "whore" and Bristol responded by calling him gay.

Wreck-It Ralph topped the weekend box office with $49.1 million.

PeTA says being a vegan makes your penis bigger. I doubt the veracity of that statement, because, c'mon, we men-folk would have figured that out ages ago!

10 random quotes from Ellen DeGeneres.

Joe Simpson still says he's not gay.

Rhode Island House Speaker Gordon Fox says that his state will vote on marriage equality next month.

The economy tops equality as the most important issue for Grindr users: "Forty-six percent of gay men who responded to the nationwide survey, conducted by hookup app Grindr, voted for the economy and job creation as the No. 1 priority in the race between the Democratic incumbent, President Obama, and Republican challenger Mitt Romney. The second-highest-ranked issue was equality (29 percent). In third place was health care (11 percent.)"

After loving up on President Obama during the post-Sandy media storm, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie reaffirmed his allegiance to Mitt Romney. "The fact of the matter is what New Jerseyans expect from their governor is to work for them, not to work for any particular political party. I'm a Republican and I have endorsed Mitt Romney, I support him and I intend to vote for him on Tuesday," he told an Israeli television station.

Maine GOP State Rep. David Johnson uses dead gay brother to rail against marriage equality: "I miss my brother and stay in contact with his partner because I love them both and know many other gay couples and love them dearly as well. The fact remains that God intended marriage to be between one man and one woman, and we have no right to redefine marriage. It has taken me a while, but I have finally figured out that God’s plan is better than man’s plan in all aspects of life. He constructed marriage this way for a reason."

Movies: Denzel is High as a Kite in 'Flight'

Denzel loses control in FLIGHT

BY NATHANIEL ROGERS

YOUR FEATURE PRESENTATION

No one can fly a plane like Captain Whip (Denzel Washington). Unfortunately no one can drink like him either. Within the first fifteen or so minutes of Flight, the new drama from Robert Zemeckis (of Forrest Gump fame), Whip has already downed multiple vodkas, beers, and at least one line of coke. He's high before lift-off; this bender is all on the morning he's piloting 104 souls on a commercial aircraft to Atlanta.  

Whip gives drunk driving a whole new vertical meaning. 

Captain Whip's flight is, unfortunately, doomed. In the aftermath of the unusual crash (very well shot and edited -- a real armrest grabber and apparently it is possible to fly a plane inverted) Whip, his co-workers, multiple lawyers and moneyed executives are engaged in the very tense and very high-stakes legal battle as to the why the plane went down. 

"Why?" is an open ended question so let's ask a more specific one. Will Denzel win his sixth Oscar nomination?  

MORE AFTER THE JUMP...

YES. (That was easy… even though the Best Actor race is hotly competitive) 

The flight that arguably gives the film its title is over well before the movie is but the showy physical disaster is only the layover. The flight's final destination/disaster is emotional. The title might well refer to this instead, booze and drugs being a popular method of escape. Whip is trouble and not just for himself. He manipulates, challenges and confuses everyone in his circle, a recovering addict named Nicole (Kelly Reilly), his lawyer (Don Cheadle), his union rep (Bruce Greenwood), his co-pilot (Brian Geraghty), and his friend and dealer (John Goodman in a crowd-pleasing turn that might have Oscar dreams of its own). All of these relationships and confrontations give Denzel plenty of room to fill in a superb characterization of an arrogant man and the maddening selfishness of addiction. Alcoholism is a tough subject to convey without stepping in piles of cliché -- it's hardly unfamiliar terrain for the movies. But even when Flight underlines a moment too boldly or presents it too simplistically, as in the epilogue, it will still ring true to those who've spent any time with alcoholic loved-ones. 

Director Robert Zemeckis has been away from live action cinema for over a decade now after pulling double duty in 2000 (Castaway, What Lies Beneath). He spent the last decade obsessing over motion capture animated features and Flight sometimes has a self-conscious naughtiness to it as if Zemeckis is overcompensating for his family friendly filmography. The  very first scene earns Flight its R rating for nudity and drug use and he doesn't stop there giving more time to Kelly's backstory ('ooh, look a porn set!') or grabby moments ('ha-ha, 'Jesus freaks!,' 'omg, it's Denzel's ass') than seem remotely necessary for the story Flight is telling.  

Thankfully Zemeckis's decade away from live action filmmaking has not dulled his instincts with movie stars. His filmography is chalk full of magnetic star turns from Kathleen Turner in Romancing the Stone (1984) all the way through to Tom Hanks in Castaway (2000). Flight is no exception. No one can fly a plane like Captain Whip and only a precious few movie stars can lift-off and keep a movie soaring as well as Denzel Washington.

Nathaniel Rogers would live in the movie theater but for the poor internet reception. He blogs daily at the Film Experience. Follow him on Twitter @nathanielr.

Chris Kluwe Drops 'Pioneer Press' Over Anti-Gay Op-Ed

Chris Kluwe, the uber-gay friendly Minnesota Vikings punter, this weekend left his freelance post at the St. Paul Pioneer Press over that paper's editorial board's op-ed supporting an amendment to the state constitution that would define marriage as one man, one woman.

From that op-ed:

Love may be love, but even now there are any number of prohibitions around marriage between consenting (heterosexual) adults. These prohibitions are intended to be in the interest of promoting the general welfare. It all comes back to the initial question of the definition of marriage as a means of promoting the general welfare.

Obviously Kluwe cannot support such a publication, so he took to Twitter to explain his resignation and to tell the paper exactly how he feels about it. Read the stream of Twitter consciousness AFTER THE JUMP.

Julie Brown Does Victoria Jackson Doing Homophobia: VIDEO

From 1986 until 1992, Victoria Jackson was a funny person on Saturday Night Live. These days she's a not-so-funny, homophobic, racist and all-around terrible Tea Partier.

Julie Brown is another funny person who was on MTV in the late-80s and early-90s, the same time Jackson was on SNL.

Unlike Jackson, Brown is still funny today, as seen in this video in which she spoofs Jackson's conservative, anti-gay politics. 

According to Brown-as-Jackson, people shouldn't vote for Obama because he's socialist, likes the gays and is black, but you're not supposed to say that.

Watch Brown's video and her parodical anti-gay tune AFTER THE JUMP.

President Obama's Ads Slightly More Negative Than Mitt Romney's

Politico reports that negative narratives are all the rage this presidential election season, and that President Obama's ads are more on trend than Mitt Romney's, but only by a little:

A full 86 percent of Obama’s television advertising and 79 percent of Romney’s has been negative, according to the Wesleyan Media Project, which tracks political advertising. By comparison, Obama and John McCain had spent an average of 69 percent of their TV budgets on negative ads by this point in 2008, and George W. Bush and John Kerry had spent 58 percent in 2004.

No wonder little Abby Evans had that breakdown.

Ohio Voters Praise The Romney They Think They Know: VIDEO

Chase Whiteside braved the swing state hell of Ohio to talk with Mitt Romney supporters about why they're supporting the Republican presidential candidate.

"He's a family man. He's a Christian. He doesn't believe in abortion; he doesn't believe in homosexuality and let me tell you, I believe in God and God is going to make sure Mr. Romney wins," says the woman pictured above.

Watch the rest AFTER THE JUMP.