The Writers Guild's members-only "Candidates Night" was packed on Wednesday night as all 17 candidates for the WGA board  vacancies pitched themselves.

Guarded with a velvet rope presence that wouldn't have been out of place at a Hollywood hot spot on a Saturday night minus the eye candy but not the inevitable drama, the event was just the latest round in the ongoing bout the union has seemingly been having with itself since the strike during the winter of 2007/2008.

The fanboys will weep, but it looks like "The Watchmen" was and is going to remain one of those movies that just couldn't live up to its hype -- on screen or on the new DVD.

Released on March 6, the adaptation of the acclaimed distopian graphic novel, which Time magazine once called one of the 20th century's "100 Best English-language novels," hit thousands of theaters harder than a caped crusading body blow. Unfortunately there wasn't much of a follow-up punch.

My grandmother once told me that when she heard on the BBC that America had dropped an atomic weapon on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, she suddenly thought how, with man now possessing the true might of Gods, the world had fundamentally changed. She would say that there was a pre-Hiroshima world and a post-Hiroshima world and they had very little in common.

It’s one of those nights when Reese Witherspoon and Jake Gyllenhaal cruise on by and you find yourself thinking “what a cute couple” instead of “don’t stare at the movie stars.”

There was no denying that, with the flagellation of the Michael Jackson Memorial and mourning, it had been a week where it sometimes felt that all the light had been beaten out of the glitter and the grime of the City of Angels.

To paraphrase Jon Landau’s famous quote about Bruce Springsteen, I have seen the future of rock’n’roll and its name is Air Guitar.

The thing is, unlike Landau’s praise of New Jersey’s finest, it sort of snuck up on me. I’d seen the odd news item and heard a story or two, but I’d never given it much thought beyond the kitsch value.

Nonetheless, the revelation became clear at a packed Troubadour on Friday night at the Los Angeles Regional heat of the 2009 US Air Guitar Championship.

Call it a tale of two types of towns.

Barack Obama’s appearance in Las Vegas Tuesday night at a Caesar’s Palace fundraiser that brought in $2 million for incumbent Harry Reid saw the President share billing with Bette Midler and Sheryl Crow.

“Don’t call it a comeback/I’ve been here for years.”

The lyric is from LL Cool J’s 1990 hit “Mama Said Knock You Out,” but you could just as easily apply it to Eminem today.

Towards the very end of “The Big Lebowski,” the Stranger -- an old-fashioned cowboy played by Sam Elliot who narrates the movie -- tells the audience that he'll "catch ya later on down the trail."

At the time, it seemed like a quant finale to, as Roger Ebert put it in his 1998 Chicago Su- Times review, "a genial, shambling comedy."

If the Presidency of Richard Nixon taught us anything it is that the most powerful man in the world should be very careful what he says into a microphone.

With the growing fallout from his crack on “The Tonight Show” about the Special Olympics, Barack Obama, like Nixon, like Ronald Reagan, like Bill Clinton, and like Dick Cheney before him, needs to remember the difference between inside thoughts and outside thoughts.