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Swing Vote star Kevin Costner’s moment of pleasure quickly turned into regret as Costner began to wonder where the ice cream would end up. After the ice cream cone failed to answer his question, Costner assumed that the ice cream would go to his thighs. Costner paused for a moment and continued to plow through his cone. Using his regular guy charm, Costner said, “I guess I’ll just have to swim extra lap at the pool in the morning.”

[Photo Credit: X17]

*A Call To The Bullpen is a work of fiction. Although the pictures we use are most certainly real, Defamer does not purport that any of the incidents or quotations you see in this piece actually happened. Lighten up, people ... it's a joke.

WHAT'S NEW: Barring some Joker-emulating fanboy's cackling sabotage of a few thousand projectors nationwide, this will likely be the week The Dark Knight slips out of first place behind The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. Make that "first place at the box office," that is — not necessarily in our hearts, where the roundly loathing critical reaction to Mummy doesn't have us too confident in its overall superiority. But that's August for you, and despite the Batmobile at its tattered heels, The Mummy's awfulness shouldn't keep about $52 million worth of American ticketbuyers away. Sorry about that. Or, if you're up for a counterprogramming schlep to Norwalk, Lionsgate's buried Clive Barker adaptation Midnight Meat Train finally opens in one theater. Again, welcome to August. It can only get better. Really.

THE BIG LOSER: In fairness, we're checking out Swing Vote this weekend, so we don't know for ourselves yet whether or not it's a joy to behold. But let's recap for second: Kevin Costner's latest is the story of an alcoholic single dad whose vote is discovered to hold the key to a presidential election. Its plot is essentially lifted from a 1939 John Barrymore film. It's over two hours long. Costner financed it himself, and best promoted it Wednesday night as Conan O'Brian's Chinese-restroom-tour sidekick. Kevin, we really are puling for you, but why are we not encouraged?

THE UNDERDOG: Speaking of counterprogramming, the small drama Frozen River is about as antisummer as its gets: A broke single mother (Melissa Leo) in frigid upstate New York, whose American dream consists of a new double-wide and a Christmas with actual presents under the tree, falls into an immigrant-smuggling ring with a young Native American woman (Misty Upham). That's it — that simple, that stark, and quite strong. And don't hold its Sundance Grand Jury Prize against it; for every brooding indie convention into which it trips, Leo and Upham dig out with help from writer/director Courtney Hunt's elegant eye and gut-punch plot twists. It's not an August miracle or anything, but it's easily the best thing opening in town this weekend.

FOR SHUT-INS: New DVD releases include Martin Scorsese's Rolling Stones concert doc Shine a Light, the 25th anniversary rerelease of WarGames, and a three-way tie for Must-Have-Right-Now Box Set: The Hills: The Complete Third Season; Beverly Hills 90210: The Fifth Season; and Girlfriends: The Fourth Season. Don't rush off to buy them all at once — we have a feeling they'll be there for a while.

So are we worrying too much? Is The Mummy 3 ready for misunderstood masterpiece status? Or is that Swing Vote? Or will Heath Ledger surge back to make fools of us all? We're up for anything at this point in the season — fire away below, and help us count down the days until Pineapple Express.

KEVIN COSTNER'S “Swing Vote” tells the story of an apathetic man floating through life, happy to play whatever cards life deals him. Costner's approach to making the film couldn't have been more different: Rather than watch the Capra-esque fable about a deadlocked election drift away, the actor stepped up to invest more than $21 million of his own money to finance it.

...Costner decided to star in the film and looked for a backer for "Swing Vote's" tentative $20-million budget. But the model some financiers wanted to use — by raising capital through foreign pre-sales — didn't strike him as equitable.

"They want to raise it on your name, but you're not actually benefiting from that," Costner says. "So I looked to my wife and said, 'Why don't we just do this?'"

We can think of three separate reasons why not, but who are we to judge? Oh, right, we're Defamer. In that case, Kevin, kudos for your financial risk-taking, but in this weekend's Mummy/Swing Vote matchup, we're casting a third party vote for another viewing of The Dark Knight.

• Kevin Costner bets on himself again in 'Swing Vote' [LAT]

Both movies are about drunken single parents (Costner, Barrymore) who through a quirk are in the position to decide an election with their single vote. Both become celebrities and are courted by politicians to the point of bribery; and both finally see the light thanks to their children. ...

There are differences, too — running time, for starters (Swing Vote's 127 minutes to Great Man's 72 minutes) and what Lumenick characterizes as the "egregious product placement [of Costner being] named 'Sexiest Man Alive' by People Magazine." (We're sure Life Magazine had an analogue worth offering to RKO 70 years ago.) But the critic later uncovers arguably the most devastating — if throughly wonky — smoking gun with Costner's fingerprints all over it:

But I believe there may be very oblique nod in the movie itself that only an extremely hard-core movie buff like myself would pick up. It occurs in a scene where the Democratic president candidate, uncomfortably played by Dennis Hopper, is pretending to be knowledgable about trout fishing in a conversation with Costner's character, a fishing buff whose vote he is trying to reel in. Hopper's campaign manager, played by Nathan Lane, at one point slips Hopper some handwritten notes that he secretly reads from.

In real-life Barrymore was a drunk who, by the time he made The Great Man Votes — released two years before his death — was in such bad shape he couldn't memorize lines (but could still act the pants off Costner). Garson Kanin, who directed Great Man, wrote in his memoirs that Barrymore read his lines from small blackboards that were strategically placed around the set.

Le scandal! All right, fine — If Drew Barrymore isn't defending the family honor at a press conference by tomorrow afternoon, then we probably can't summon enough energy to care either.

• Goodnight, Sweet Prince: Kevin Costner Channels John Barrymore [NYP]