“An air of irresolution nonetheless lingers around In the Valley of Elah,” writes N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott, “a sorrowful, frustrated sense that the deepest mysteries cannot be contained within any narrative framework. Underneath its deceptively quiet surface is a raw, angry, earnest attempt to grasp the moral consequences of the war in Iraq, and to stare without blinking into the chasm that divides those who are fighting it from their families, their fellow citizens and one another.

“Not that the [film’s] message is ambiguous or unclear. The message is that the war in Iraq has damaged this country in ways we have only begun to grasp. For some people this will seem like old news. Others — in particular those who pretend that railing against movies they haven’t seen is a form of rational political discourse — may persuade themselves that it is provocative or controversial.

“Almost no violence takes place on screen, but there are times when Elah feels almost like a horror film. Its steady crescendo of suspense builds toward the revelation — and vanquishing — of some unspeakable, monstrous evil.

“But since the monster has no identifiable physical shape, it is not so easily defeated. While there are killers, liars and sadists to be found in this movie, there are not really any villains. And there is no reassuring conclusion. If it is anguished, even despairing, In the Valley of Elah is also compassionate. At heart it is a somber ballad about young men who remain lost in a dangerous, confusing place even after they come home.”

HE reader Tim Sherrick has written to ask what happened to my coverage of Michael Moore‘s Captain Mike doc, which I promised I’d get into. What happened was that I had the usual conflicts and deadlines and wound up missing the first screening, and then everyone I spoke to who’d seen it (and I mean everyone) called it a non-essential vanity project.

Does it reflect upon the current electoral situation vis a vis the upcoming Presidential election year? Somewhat but not really, Toronto press-passers all said. Does Moore deal with the fact that while 18-to-29s voted in greater numbers in ’04 than they did in ’00, the vast majority of them stayed away from the polls in droves and in so doing earned the label “generation of shame“? No, everyone said. That’s when I knew I’d wait for a screening back in LA, or perhaps even the DVD.

Many years before committing to play Salvador Dali in Andrew Niccol‘s Dali & I (as reported today on various sites), Al Pacino, who will play the famed surrealist, came somewhat close to making a Dali biopic with director-writer Roger Avary. The Niccol version, set during the waning years of Dali’s life, focuses on his mentor-protege relationship with a young art dealer, Stan Lauryssens (Cillian Murphy), whose book about their relationship is the basis of the film. Niccol directed S1m0ne, one of Pacino’s worst films ever, and Lord of War. Caveat emptor!

“After two features dramatizing the peripheral aspects of Manchester’s greatest rock band, Grant Gee and Jon Savage’s stylish doc Joy Division gets to the heart of the matter,” writes Variety‘s Robert Koehler.

“Pic takes full measure of the extraordinary unit’s music and its unlikely rise to instant-legend status, and has an eye for detail many similar docs simply lack. Theatrical interest in the wake of Anton Corbijn‘s Control will pull in buyers after a strong fest run, and a double DVD of Corbijn’s film and this one seems like a no-brainer.”

Allow me to two-cents this notion myself. Harvey Weinstein should acquire the doc so he can include both Control and Joy Division in a double-disc DVD. I happen to have a DVD screener of Joy Division sitting on my desk as we speak. I haven’t watched it because I haven’t had time to brush my teeth, but I will this weekend.

“If a more facile, stupid, condescending, predictable, smug, exploitive, corrosively despicable piece of wanna-be transgressive horseshit was ever made, then let’s have it, because I really am too old to take on a new profession just to get even with this asshole.” — The Reeler‘s S.T. Van Airsdale expressing rage over Nothing is Private and its director-writer, Alan Ball.

Aaron Eckhart in Alan Ball‘s Nothing Is Private.

I’ve heard more than a few people express similar sentiments over the last two or three days. They don’t dislike this film; they hate it. I feel very differently. I don’t just respect it (as well as the book, “Towelhead,” upon which it’s based); I admire it.

In last Monday’s review I called it “a sturdy, complex character drama that’s 100% deserving of respect…it’s obviously one of the most original, daring films about adolescent sexuality ever delivered by a quasi-mainstreamer…iIt’s also a sharp look at racism (and not just the American-bred kind) and a sobering portrait of the rifts and tensions between American and Middle-Eastern mindsets.”

For whatever reason, the Swedes have decided against calling Jodie Foster‘s Manhattan-vigilante pic The Brave One. Not that I’m a fan of The Stranger Inside, but I’ve never quite figured out what the American title actually means. It doesn’t really work as a literal notion (Foster’s character is “brave” because she works through her fiance’s death and personal trauma by drilling some bad guys?) or an ironic one.

Neil Jordan and Jodie Foster‘s The Brave One (Warner Bros., 9.14) will probably rule the roost this weekend. It’s tracking 74, 39 and 17, which indicates a good $20 million weekend, and maybe a nudge over. Dragon Wars (also opening tomorrow) is at 41, 30 and 9, which means it’ll do less than Jodie & Co..

Billy Bob Thornton‘s Mr. Woodcock (also debuting tomorrow) will do between $10 and $15 million with a 70, 36 and 12. David Cronenberg‘s Eastern Promises, which is platforming tomorrow and opening wide-ish next weekend, is at 29, 27 and 1.

Good Luck, Chuck (.21) is at 72, 37 and 8. Draw factors include Jessica Alba and that vanilla ice cream cone and Dane Cook, who has a following. The drawback is that Cook strikes some of us as an unrefined Stanley Kowalski type. Did you see him in Mr. Brooks? He’s an animal. His tail swings and you can see steam coming out of his nostrils in the pasture.

Peter Berg‘s The Kingdom opens two weeks from now, and is currently looking at 61, 37 and 6.. It’ll be sneaking this weekend. The Farrelly Brothers’ The Heartbreak Kid, opening 10.5, is looking at 60, 31 and 3, which indicates a good-but-not-spectacular opening. I expect it’ll start upticking before long. Most people don’t get wind of a hit until the very last minute.

Three days late and a dollar short, HE has joined the throng of sites running that on-set JFK look-alike photo from Zack Snyder‘s Watchmen (Warner Bros., 3.6.09), which began filming a few days ago but won’t open for another 18 months. An adaptation of Alan Moore‘s renowned graphic novel series, pic is set in an alternative, neo-Orwellian 1985 in which superhero-ism has been outlawed. Plot focuses on two of them — Billy Crudup‘s “Dr. Manhattan” and Jackie Earl Haley‘s”Rorschach” — uncovering an evil plot to inject lime sherbet into jars of Italian pesto sauce.

A Watchmen site snoop has reported that a flashback scene of Dr. Manhattan meeting President John F. Kennedy on the porch of the White House was filmed the other day….whatever.

Screen Daily‘s Len Klady says he came up with a headline for Patrick Z. McGavin‘s Screen Daily review of Asia Argento‘s Mother of Tears, although it was too long to fit on the page: “Don’t Cry For Me, Argentino.” [Update: apologies for allowing “Asia” to become “Daria” yesterday — TIFF fatigue manifests in strange & unruly forms.]

The Toronto Film Festival is over as of this morning. All that’s left to do is run sum-up pieces and catch the supposed so-so, straggler and left-over films because there’s nothing else to do. The coffee talk this morning is that TIFF programmers should ideally be re-screening the better films from the front-loaded first five days that people didn’t see because the schedule was so jammed. “They used to do that,” a veteran told me, “but things changed.”

I’m going to try and catch a noontime public screening of Noah Baumbach‘s Margot at the Wedding, which I obviously have to see despite it having been written off (“minor,” “frustrating,” “dislikable characters”) by virtually everyone I’ve spoken to here. (I would love it if the naysayers turn out to be wrong, in my view.) There’s also a public screening of the respected Lars and the Real Girl at 2:30, and a 7:30 public showing of Rebellion: The Litvinenko Case.

At last Monday night’s Atonement party a Manhattan-based columnist said in a somewhat alarming way (i.e., alarming for his tone of certainty) that the Democratic Presidential race is all but over, that Hilary Clinton is too far ahead of Barack Obama not to have it in the bag (the latest Rasmussen Reports poll of likely Democratic primary voters gives her 42% to Obama’s 22%), and that the essence of Obama’s problem, above and beyond his surreal lack of support from black voters, is subliminal Jim Crow racism, plain and simple.

The columnist didn’t say this, but the bottom line is that the Democratic primary race between Clinton and Obama is starting to look vaguely analagous to the Best Picture Oscar race between Crash and Brokeback Mountain.

Clinton, the lesser candidate, is fated, I fear, to beat Obama because of a subliminal factor that voters won’t admit to, much less talk about, just as Crash, the lesser film, beat Brokeback Mountain because of a more-or-less unmentionable prejudice among older Academy voters that I’ve previously called “geezer homophobia” (i.e., a primal revulsion at the idea of the ridin’ and ropin’ American cowboy — an iconic figure if there ever was one — being cast in an effeminate light by modernist p.c. liberalism).

Go outside the big cities, the columnist said, and America is a nation of rubes and crackers. As fair-minded and issue-driven as these voters like to portray themselves wth pollsters, the bottom line is that they’re constitutionally incapable of voting a black man into the White House. As far as these voters and Barack Obama are concerned, the columnist suggested, the ’08 race is a kind of a dry-run, getting-used-to-the-idea exercise that may allow for attitudes and conditions in 2012 or 2016 in which a black man (Obama or someone else) might stand a chance….maybe.

I’ve said this before, but Obama is too intelligent, too eloquent and attractive, too well-funded and too un-damaged by minor gaffes for him to be this far behind Clinton. It doesn’t figure — it doesn’t add up. I don’t like it and it gives me huge indigestion to admit it, but a voice is telling me that the Manhattan columnist is right.

What happened to Arianna Huffington‘s assessment of the situation a few months ago that Democratic voters “feel married to the Clintons but they love Barack Obama”? What happened to the emotional groundswell factor, that feeling that “it has to be” Obama, that Hilary Clinton is yesterday…a ’90s baggage lady who will arouse primal negativity among red-state voters in the general election? I don’t have a big problem with Clinton (she’s certainly preferable to the Republican hopefuls) but she doesn’t turn me on and she never will.

Postscript: A reader who asked for anonymity says my Obama-support analysis is “off,” in part because “just about every poll out there right now is limited to party affinity. Democrats are being polled about Democrat candidates and GOP for GOP. You overlook the point that in just about every poll that does put Obama head to head with Republicans, he wins…sometimes by six to eight points.

On top of which “Obama’s base of support is very different from Clinton’s or anyone else’s for that matter: They are younger and wireless. This means that a large pool of supporters simply aren’t participating in the traditional polling and data mining processes that the political establishment uses, because they aren’t reachable without a landline phone. Sensible political types assume that Obama’s support is broader than the polling indicates.”

Film Jerk‘s Edward Havens is running a list that’s been kicking around talent agencies for the last couple of weeks of 300 projects in active development — i.e., “[would-be movies] that have become pre-strike priorities for the major studios and a number of top production companies.” Films, in short, that stand a good chance of being made under the strike-threat circumstances. Havens points out that “certain directors have their names attached to two or more projects, while a number of them have no director attached.”