Zac Efron is astute, capable and alert as the young-lad protagonist in Richard Linklater‘s Me and Orson Welles, a light-hearted period drama set against the creation of Welles’ Ceasar, a modern-dress adaptation of Shakespeare’s classic, at Manhattan’s Mercury Theatre in 1937.

But Christian McKay‘s performance as Welles is the thing to see and hear. He’s got the deep timbre, the stentorian voice, the attitude, the swagger, the size — much better than Vincent D’onofrio‘s Welles in Ed Wood (which someone voiced for him anyway…right?), and a truly thrilling act of bringing a legend back to life. And it’s not the first time he’s played Welles, either.

I decided against running this Funny Or Die video of Gina Gershon inhabiting Sarah Palin, but I thought it over while I was watching Richard Linklater‘s Me and Orson Welles (which I just came out of) and decided okay, it can’t hurt. But it’s really not that good. The video, I mean.

“John McCain has demonstrated in the last two months that he does not have the character to be president of the United States. And that is why it is more important than ever to ensure that Barack Obama is the next president. The alternative is now unthinkable. And McCain — no one else — has proved it.” — the concluding graph of Andrew Sullivan‘s latest (9.11.08) column, called “McCain’s Integrity.”

I went to see Phillipe Claudel‘s I’ve Loved You So Long last night at the Elgin with an even-handed attitude. I was expecting a good film (but not necessarily great because it’s French-made, and you never know with those guys) with a presumably moving, Oscar-calibre Kristin Scott Thomas performance, which I’d been told about from just about everyone.

It turns out that Scott is that and more — she’ll definitely land a Best Actress nomination, and she just might win, considering that she achieves so much in ILYSL with very little “acting” plus the fact that she’s been around for a couple of decades — but the film itself is a landmark-level achievement. It’s remarkably tight, absorbing and affectng every step of the way — a genuinely profound growth journey taken with quiet and gentle steps.
Whatever happens on the Oscar nomination front, this film has immediately shot to the top of my list of the year’s best films.
You wouldn’t think that a quiet little domestic drama about a female ex-con finding her way back into the swing of things, or one about two sisters who haven’t been in contact for 15 years (and who were even close to begin with) slowly coming to know and care for each other would be all that gripping, but is this ever! And the reason it holds you ever step of the way is because you’re hungry for any and all details that may explain why Thomas committed the crime that put her away.
When the answer finally comes at the end of the third act, it makes for a very sad and yet satisfying resolution. The ending actually borders on being comfortable. I didn’t think anything smacking of completeness or contentment could come from this film, given the particulars, and yet Claudel has come up with an ending that really and truly works.
I have to get down to the festival but I’ll try and add stuff to this review when I’m back at it tomorrow morning. I’m on a plane and back to Los Angeles tomorrow afternoon, thank God.

N.Y. Post Lou Lumenick reportedly whacked Roger Ebert with a film-festival program binder during last Saturday morning’s Slumdog Millionaire press screening (which began at 9 am — I was there) and the story doesn’t come out until five days later? What was Rush & Molloy’s source waiting for?

“Soon after the lights went down,” Rush & Molloy have written, “a man in the audience started yelling, ‘Don’t touch me!’ People looked around and shrugged. Ten minutes later, the voice yells again, ‘I said don’t touch me!'”
“Again, people shrugged off the disturbance. But a few minutes later, says our source, ‘the guy stands up in the darkness and thwacks the guy behind him with a big festival binder. He hit him so hard everybody could hear it. Everyone freaked out and turned around.'”
Ebert couldn’t see all that well, apparently. And he couldn’t ask Lumenick to…whatever, slump down or move to the side because he can’t talk due to cancer surgery. And so Lou-Lou stood up and let him have it. I have to be honest — this doesn’t play all that favorably for the N.Y. Post critic and movie blogger, but then stuff happens in the throes of movie-watching passion. You know how it is. You get all cranked up and in no mood for distractions of any kind.
Lou is a mild-mannered gentlemen by my experience. He reportedly didn’t apologize to Ebert, but unless scratches or bruises were incurred it’s probably best to let it go.
This is in fact what Ebert said today when he wrote a piece about the incident.

I saw the final 65% of Steven Soderbergh‘s Che, Part 2 last night at the Elgin. And I was struck once again how well it plays the second time (i.e., just as well the first), and how it’s a flat-out brilliant recreation and neck-deep immersion into a fascinating life and time. Each and every shot and cut is dead-on perfection, thrilling in its verisimiltude, refined just so. And the Elgin’s projection (which seemed to be digital) was eye-pop sharp. The film looked and sounded better last night than it did in Cannes, and that’s saying something.

These troubled and fearful thoughts from the Guardian‘s Jonathan Freedland about how things seem to be turning in the polling are on my mind also, although I was somewhat placated by Gail Collins‘ analysis in yesterday’s N.Y. Times. Make that slightly.
“More troubling was the ABC News-Washington Post survey which found McCain ahead among white women by 53% to 41%,” Freedland notes. “Two weeks ago, Obama had a 15% lead among women. There is only one explanation for that turnaround, and it was not McCain’s tranquillizer of a convention speech: Obama’s lead has been crushed by the Palin bounce.”
I have one thoughtful but foolish hope in my head right now. If the pro-Obama youth vote comes out in huge numbers, the current dire expectations created by likely voter polls (i.e., a reading of mostly-older voters who voted in ’04 or ’00) will be forgotten. The pollsters always say that you can’t call much less measure the under-25s because many if not most of them don’t have land lines. There could be this whole uncharted opinion-base out there that pollsters aren’t even calibrating.
Except the realist in my chest knows deep down that the under-25 Generation of Shame is probably going to stay home in sufficient numbers so that their greatest potential impact may not be felt. It would be glorious, of course, if this turned out not to be true, but those two American Teen costars — Colin Clemens and Jake Tusing, both about 20 — bummed me out to no end when they said they wouldn’t be voting this November and that they couldn’t care less.
The only antidote I can think of is that last night I asked Lovely Still director Nik Fakler, who lives in Omaha, if he and his friends are voting, and he said “of course!” I told him what Clemens and Tusing had said and he smiled, threw his head back and went, “Oh, God!”
Another Encouraging Note: MSNBC’s First Read guys wrote this morning that “in the past 12 hours, we now have new polls for seven battleground states. CNN/Time has Obama up in the blue states of Michigan (49%-45%) and New Hampshire (51%-45%), while McCain is up in the red states of Missouri (50%-45%) and Virginia (50%-46%). And Quinnipiac finds Obama ahead in Ohio (49%-44%) and Pennsylvania (48%-45%), and McCain in front in Florida (50%-43%). Indeed, with the exception of Ohio — and that is BIG exception — these polls suggest that the current map looks a lot like it did in ’04.”

John McCain using the “lipstick on a pig” line, except referring (directly or obliquely) to Hillary Clinton, or perhaps her campaign. (Thanks to the 23/6 guys for this.)

It took a few hours, but I finally uploaded yesterday morning’s interview with Slumdog Millionaire director Danny Boyle. Or rather the computer did it while I slept. It’ll probably take a while to load. I’ll have to remember next time to break the video down into five- or ten-minute segments. I haven’t timed the Boyle chat but it’s something like 25 or 30 minutes.

I still can’t figure what code to use so a visual screen will show up on the column that you just click on to activate, like all the other video-running sites do.
Boyle said a couple of times during our discussion that he believes in “extreme” and “vivacious” cinema. Slumdog Millionaire is certainly that. It’s also very much a rags-to-riches Dickensian fable in which all manner of ugliness, cruelty and avarice are heaped upon the young hero, and things are set right only within the last half-hour.
This means, naturally, that Slumdog, though beautifully filmed and sharply written by Simon Beaufoy (having adapted an Indian book called Q and A), is not exactly surging with alpha vibes during its first two-thirds. But it’s certainly propelled by Boyle’s remarkable filmmaking fever, and it does start to pay off like a slot machine starting around the 100-minute mark. And then it concludes with a dance sequence in a Mumbai train station that just blows you away.
It’s a epic-sized, live-wire story of an Indian youth named Jamal (the grown-up version is played by Dev Patel) whose streak of correct answers on a Hindi version of Who Wants to be A Millionaire? creates suspicion that he’s somehow cheating. The powers-that-be interrogate him, and his life story — which, in a sense, is also the story of India’s social evolution over the past 15 to 20 years — is told to them and to us.
Slumdog looks like Best Picture material to me because of its freshness (all the more interesting by its reliance on a story-telling strategy made famous by Charles Dickens), the themes of justice and redemption and satisfied love, the almost luridly colorful vistas, and the relentless and impassioned character of Jamal, who is every kid who ever had to run and hustle and struggle to survive.

“With her bravura turn in Rod Lurie‘s engrossing political drama Nothing But The Truth, Kate Beckinsale has staked a strong claim for her first Academy Award nomination,” wrote Tom Teodorczuk in a 9.9 posting on the Evening Standard site.
“The native Londoner, who now lives in Los Angeles, excels as Washington, DC journalist Rachel Armstrong who spends two years behind bars for refusing to cave in to government pressure to reveal her source.
“Lurie, himself a former journalist and high school contemporary of Barack Obama, has loosely based his film on the imprisonment of New York Times writer Judith Miller in 2005 for contempt of court after she refused to testify to a Grand Jury investigating the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame. (Joe Wilson, Plame’s husband and former acting ambassador to Iraq, had been openly critical of the Iraqi invasion.)
“Substitute Venezuela for Iraq, Armstrong for Miller and Erica Van Doren (Vera Farmiga) for Plame.
“Having been initially hopeful that her scoop blowing Van Doren’s cover as a CIA operative would ‘bring down the White House’, Armstrong refuses to buckle to the attempts of prosecutor Patton Dubois (Matt Dillon) to persuade her to divulge the source and is imprisoned.
“Lurie’s fictional variations on the complex Miller-Plame case blur the boundaries of his characters’ personal and professional lives and allows Nothing But The Truth to escape from its source material.
“Lurie clearly supports the notion that journalists should not be imprisoned for refusing to disclose their sources.
“But his primary focus is on delivering an absorbing political yarn and not a half-baked civics class in the vein of Robert Redford‘s dire Lions For Lambs.”

“I think I might be able to explain some of Sarah Palin‘s appeal,” Roger Ebert wrote last weekend in the Chicago Sun Times. “She’s the American Idol candidate. Consider. What defines an American Idol finalist? They’re good-looking, work well on television, have a sunny personality, are fierce competitors, and so talented. Why, they’re darned near the real thing.

“There’s a reason American Idol gets such high ratings. People identify with the contestants. They think, ‘Hey, that could be me up there on that show!’
“My problem is, I don’t want a vice president who is darned near good enough. I want a vice president who is better, wiser, well-traveled, has met world leaders, [and] who three months ago had an opinion on Iraq. Someone who doesn’t repeat bald-faced lies about earmarks and the Bridge to Nowhere. Someone who doesn’t appoint Alaskan politicians to ‘study’ global warming, because — hello! — it has been studied. The returns are convincing enough that John McCain and Barack Obama are darned near in agreement.
“I would also want someone who didn’t make a teeny little sneer when referring to ‘people who go to the Ivy League.’ Although Palin gets laughs when she mentions the ‘elite’ Ivy League, she sure did attend the heck out of college. Five different schools in six years. What was that about?
“And how can a politician her age have never have gone to Europe?
“But [then] some people like that. She’s never traveled to Europe, Asia, Africa, South America or Down Under? That makes her like them. She didn’t go to Harvard? Good for her! There a lot of hockey moms who haven’t seen London, but most of them would probably love to, if they had the dough. And they’d be proud if one of their kids won a scholarship to Harvard.
“I trust the American people will see through Palin, and save the Republic in November. The most damning indictment against her is that she considered herself a good choice to be a heartbeat away. That shows bad judgment.”
Wait…shouldn’t the sentence read “the most damning indictment against John McCain is that he considered Palin a good choice to be a heartbeat away”?

I’ve been doing the Toronto Film Festival for seven days straight now (counting the travel day a week ago Wednesday, which was moderately stressful and certainly long), and I’m figuring it’s time for a little chill-down and a chance to summarize some films I haven’t yet gotten around to. I’m planning on seeing Cyrus Nowrasteh‘s The Stoning of Soraya M. at 4:30, Vincent Amorim‘s Good at 6 pm, Dan Stone‘s At The Edge of the World at 7:15 and finally a public screening of Barbet Schroder‘s Inju at 9 pm.
Only during a film festival of this magnitude would writing for six hours and then seeing four films be considered a chill-down day.