I ran into a Bobby disser yesterday afternoon at the “indie” publicist hotel, the Intercontinental. To be specific, he shrugged his shoulders, shook his head and kind of grimaced after mentioning that he’d seen it. The best thing about it, he said with some enthusiasm, is the archival footage of Robert F. Kennedy. The worst thing, he claimed, is Ashton Kutcher‘s performance as a late ’60s hippy-dippy type.

Instead of going to that disastrous Borat midnight screening at the Ryerson last night…oh, that’s right, I haven’t mentioned this yet. Only 20 minutes worth of the film was shown before the friggin’ projector broke down. Sacha Baron Cohen, Michael Moore and director Larry Charles entertained the rowdy (as in hugely pissed off) crowd and promises were mde about the show starting any minute now, etc., but they finally had to cancel the whole show and re-schedule for midnight makeup tonight at the Elgin.
Variety‘s Stephen Zeitchik, David Poland and Justine Elias have provided colorful reportings on the particulars.
There’s a Borat press screening in a couple of hours (12:45 pm) inside a puny little 82-seat theatre at the Varsity plex…brilliant. If the festival had its act together, they’d arrange for a bigger last-minute daytime venue. (Thre’s also a 1:15 pm Saturday screening at the Paramount.)
I started this item by saying instead of going to the damn Borat screening (which I knew wouldn’t get out until 2:15 or 2:30 ayem, and then I’d get to bed at 3:30 ayem), I went to an after-party at Lobby, a narrow, darkly lit club on Bloor Street, for Ken Loach’s The Wind That Shakes the Barley. It was awful, noisy, repulsive. Wall-to-wall 20- and 30-something nocturnal party types with much-too-loud music and steely-eyed goons at the doorway keeping invited guests from coming in…a festival pigfuck extraordinaire.
I went to a little joint two or three doors down and ran into MPRM’s Jennifer Lopez and Wendy Martino. We shared stories and traded news and generally had a nice wind-down for an hour or so.

IFC Films has picked up …So Goes the Nation, a doc by James Stern and Adam Del Deo about the key battleground state of Ohio during the ’04 Presidential campaign. Any examination of Ohio ’04, of course, means an examination of the long-standing charge that George Bush‘s stooges stole the election by suppressing liberal democratic voters through various underhanded means. This story has been reported and explored quite a lot over the last couple of years, and the response from the right has consistently been “get over it.” …So Goes The Nation is being touted as an even-handed look at what happened, but “even handed” is a code term that sometimes means “bending over backwards to accomodate the bad guys’ point of view.” (Sorry to be judgmental and all, but if you conspire to steal an election, that kinda makes you a “bad guy.” ) A release says that tthe doc “looks at the election and the voting public through lenses large and small, and in doing so, examines both the U.S. voting process and the American national psyche.” The public Toronto Film Festival screenings aren’t until Thursday, 9.14, and Friday, 9.15.