Stu VanAirsdale (a.k.a. “the Reeler’) submits a snippy-rippy review of movie fall-preview pieces by six or seven Manhattan publications.

Reuters guy Arthur Spiegelman went to last night’s Toronto Film Festival premiere of Death of a President and has reported that it received a “short burst” of “mild applause from an audience that seemed more interested in how it was made than why.” He also writes that “moviegers left with mixed feelings, with one American tourist calling it overhyped but interesting.”

Producer-director Gabriel Range “complained there had been a rush to judgment about his film, spurred by both its subject matter and by a still photo from the movie that superimposed President George Bush‘s head on an actor being shot,” Spiegelman writes. “Many of the questions for Range concerned how he managed to make the film so realistic and whether authorities in Chicago, where it was filmed, knew what he was doing.”
That’s the part that has me interested — the purported realism of the footage. That’s why I’m making Tueday’s press screening come hell or high water.
DOAP “opens with demonstrations against Bush as he visits Chicago in 2007. As he leaves a hotel after delivering a speech, he is shot by a sniper in a nearby building. A police hunt leads to the arrest of a Palestinian man on flimsy evidence. Later the man is convicted of the assassination and kept in prison even as evidence points to another man as having committed the crime.
“Despite the sensationalism of its subject matter,” Spiegelman observes, “the film tries to be a low-key and sober look at the effects of Bush’s post 9/11 policies on U.S. society, especially on civil liberties.”
“I hope we portrayed the horror of assassination,” Range said. “There have been plenty of fictional films about assassination and I don’t think anyone would get the idea of assassinating Bush from this film.”

Anne Thompson is running video links on her Risky Biz blog to a post-Rescue Dawn q & a with director Werner Herzog and star Christian Bale, and also a post-Borat q & a with Sacha Baron Cohen.

DVD jacket art for two titles from Warner Home Video’s forthcoming (11.7) Marlon Brando Collection, which I wrote about in mid August.

Miami Herald critic Rene Rodriguez has seen Martin Scorsese‘s The Departed here in Toronto, and he’s calling it “class-A pulp…grave, resonant, psychologically complex and acted to the skies.”
And that’s not all: “Anyone who’s been waiting for Scorsese to return to form after the Oscar-baiting turgidness of The Aviator and Gangs of New York won’t be disappointed,” he’s written. “This is Scorsese’s best and most invigorating work since the underrated Casino, if not GoodFellas, as well as his most sheerly entertaining.”
If Rodriguez is on the money, then what is Warner Bros. publicity’s problem? They’ve got something that allegedly works on a feisty-pulpy crime-movie level and yet they send out signals left and right that it’s got issues, that they’re concerned about reactions (as indicated by a clear reluctance to show it), that “it’s not a festival movie,” etc.?
Rodriguez’s view is just the first word and he may end up 180 degrees apart from the eventual general consensus (or not), but if he’s right WB publicity has created a totally unnecessary neg-head smokescreen about this film.
If on the other hand what Rodriguez is saying appears in hindsight to have been a bit too breathless, then what WB has been doing makes sense…I guess….but this is becoming more and more fascinating by the minute.

Last night Little Miss Sunshine was handed the Deauville Film Festival’s Grand Prix award — hooray for that. The smart, sometimes darkly-shaded comedy, directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris and written by Michael Arndt, “was met with loud applause and raucous laughter when it was shown at the festival ,” blah, blah. Deauville’s Jury Prize went to Ryan Fleck ‘s “Half Nelson”, and the award for Best Screenplay and the International Critics’ Prize went to Laurie Collyer‘s Sherrybaby.

In a Leonardo DiCaprio profile that went up on 9.10, L.A. Times writer Mary McNamara conveyed that unlike the vast majority of entertainment journalists thus far, she’s actually seen Martin Scorsese‘s The Departed (Warner Bros., 10.6), in which DiCaprio costars with Matt Damon and Jack Nicholson.
The film “burrows into the Boston underworld [and] is vintage Scorsese, rife with grit and gore and more expletives than Snakes on a Plane,” McNamara writes. “As a cop who infiltrates a mob run by Jack Nicholson, DiCaprio stands fully baptized into the Scorsese canon, smashing gangsters in the head with beer mugs, holding fellow officers at gunpoint and going mano a mano with Nicholson in all his maniacal glory while trying to decipher the code of true loyalty.”
The Departed‘s press junket will happen in Manhattan later this week. I’ve been asking for the last two or three days about attending a local press screening of The Departed in Toronto, but the responses have been vague. Last night a visiting publicist told me that a journalist told him that a local screening had been slated for either yesterday or today. These developments on top of the weeks-old decision not to show The Departed at the Toronto Film Festival obviously sends out a certain type of smoke signal that I don’t have to decipher for anyone.

I think Marc Forster‘s Stranger Than Fiction (Columbia, 11.10), which preemed at the Toronto Film Festival over the weekend, is maddening in its lack of clarity — its inability to make simple unified sense of all the strands.
But there’s no one correct way of seeing it. Emmanuel Levy is calling it “a moral fable, a wake-up call for all [who] would like to change our story. The movie touches on a universal fantasy , the notion that we have inner voices in our heads that tell us what to do and how to be.”
What Will Ferrell‘s Harold Crick character “discovers in the midst of the film’s incredible events is how to escape all that and really begin to enjoy his existence. All of the characters, including Harold’s wristwatch, end up doing little but significant things to help save one another, underlying the theme that the people and things we take most for granted are often the ones that make life worth living and actually keep us alive.”

9.11.01 happened five years ago today…take a moment. It seems like a soft day at the Toronto Film Festival, which means there’s a bit more time to stay with www.cnn.com and watch CNN’s streaming replay of its 9.11.01 coverage — precisely as it unfolded, minute-by-minute — from 8:30 am to midnight.

The first words that came out my mouth this afternoon as I watched the closing credits of Todd Field‘s Little Children were “very interesting.” It’s a wee bit cold and a little bit strange, but it’s also a very poised (i.e., stylized but not overly so), carefully composed art film — and as such it has my complete respect.
That sounds like I’m holding back, doesn’t it? I’m not trying to. I just don’t know how else to put it.
It’s less naturalistically moving than Fields’ In The Bedroom, but then it’s a step up from that film — Fields isn’t trying for similar moods and tones. It’s certainly one of the most impressive suburban malaise films I’ve ever seen, in part because the feelings of dread are constant and unnerving. Every step of the way you’re thinking, “Something really bad might happen here.”
This is not a film looking to warm anyone’s heart — that’s for sure. And yet it brings compassion and insight and exquisite humor to its story, which is based on a novel by Tom Perrotta (who also wrote Election), who co-scripted with Fields. It’s a story about characters and situations that I partly recognize and certainly believe in, with almost every one seriously handicapped in one way or another.
Little Children may be better than I’m able to give it credit for right now, three hours after seeing it at the Varsity. I know I haven’t seen anything like it in a long, long while. It’s immensely satisfying and pleasurable to watch a film as ambitious and precise and high-strung as this, and yet it’s not a soother. This said, I’m not sure if it’s an Oscar derby movie or not. I can see how some might find it too queer for their tastes, and I can see some being excited — turned on — by its apart-ness.
This is a film about emotionally arrested adults — 30- and 40-somethings who desperately need to live in their own private dreamspaces, and hang the consequences.
I really loved the perfectly phrased narration (read by Will Lyman), which reminds me somewhat of the dry, sardonic narration in Stanley Kubrick‘s Barry Lyndon. The turn-off element, I suspect, will be the sex-offender character (played by Jackie Earle Haley). He’s a sad, self-torturing, pathetic, very real person — a character I’m not likely to forget. Kudos to Earle for bringing something (don’t know what exactly) really fascinating to it.
Kate Winslet‘s performance, it seems to me, is a near-lock for a Best Actress nom, and I was totally knocked out by how good Patrick Wilson is — it’s the best thing he’s ever done so far, and I’m including his superb acting in in Mike Nichols‘ Angels Over America. Jennifer Connelly also, I feel, outdoes herself here.
If nothing else, this is a fascinating things-are-fucked-up-in-surburbia movie. Everyone needs to see it and chew it over. I plan on seeing it at least another couple of times.

Will Mel Gibson‘s Apocalypto really arrive on Dec. 8?” asks N.Y. Times columnist Caryn James. “As recently as last week Touchstone, the Disney division releasing it, insisted it would. That√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s about all the studio will say about a movie that must have become an albatross, because the crucial question is: How can this film be marketed? Mr. Gibson√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s name and ability to chat up Apocalypto was its only real selling point. Now he trails apologies and questions about bigotry wherever he goes, which will make it pretty hard to stay on message about old Jaguar Paw. ”