I haven’t time to write anything about Michael Moore‘s Capitalism: A Love Story, which I saw earlier this afternoon, but I think it’s brilliant and searing and the various nitpicking Moore critics can go to hell. He always does what he does with awesome skill, and every time I sit down with one of his films I melt down. Yes, I choked up.

I don’t care about what he hasn’t shown and what corners he’s cut because he always brings it home and makes his points not just understood but felt. I had a problem with one thing — he doesn’t hold Barack Obama‘s feet to the fire about chumming up and taking the word and counsel of Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geitner.

But Capitalism is a bold-as-brass slam at the basic evils unleashed by unregulated capitalism, and a clean and irrefutable explanation about how the U.S. system has taken the basic unfairness of life and magnified it tenfold, especially since the ascension of Ronald Reagan.

A couple of hours ago I did about 13 minutes with Joel and Ethan Coen, the director-writers of the irrefutably brilliant A Serious Man, at Toronto’s Park Hyatt.

A Serious Man‘s Ethan and Joel Coen.

The talk was loose, amiable, amusing. It always is when you speak to them. As long as you talk their language, I mean. Their personalities are so low-key and unaggressive that they could both die from this, and that’s cool. I hate the word “genius” because Hollywood phonies use it all the time, but that’s what these guys have. And I really love it when they laugh.

The mp3 speaks for itself but I started by repeating a remark from a producer friend that the film’s dark view of life being a non- stop gauntlet of misfortune and cruel fate is “dishonest” given that the Coens’ lives are so creative and productive and successful. They guys didn’t really answer this one but the semi-biographical A Serious Man is about their teenaged years and the staunchly Jewish Minnesota community they grew up with, and not their filmmaking lives.

I complimented them about the beautiful CG tornado that appears at the end, adding my general opinion that invisible CG is the best. They agreed. The visual effects maestros were Oliver Arnold, Andy Burmeister and Alexandre Cancado of Luma Pictures.

I asked them if they agreed with my belief that the philosophy of A Serious Man can be summed up by that kiki joke I mentioned in my review. They weren’t sure what I meant so I went into the shpiel and Joel went, “Oh, you mean roo-roo?” The joke has been told with many names over the years. Not only did they not disagree with the analogy but got a good laugh from it.

The movie is basically saying, I said, that your friends can’t help you, your family can’t helpo and your community can’t help you when it comes to God’s cruel humor. You’re alone, basically, and there’s no real comfort to be had, but the film delivers this in such a quietly hilarious way. And that’s the art of it. Ethan said he’s completely comfortable with that assessment.

What’s the point of describing the conversation? Just give it a listen. I expressed hope that they’ll make another out-and-out comedy before too long, and Ethan said that their next, an adaptation of True Grit with Jeff Bridges in the Rooster Cogburn/John Wayne role, is fairly funny. Not overtly but…well, you know.

Michael Bay has removed from his website that letter that trashed Megan Fox — i.e., the one that was written by three crew members. (And which was posted without his knowledge and assent?) Here’s his statement: “I don’t condone the crew letter to Megan. And I don’t condone Megan’s outlandish quotes. But her crazy quips are part of her crazy charm. The fact of the matter I still love working with her, and I know we still get along. I even expect more crazy quotes from her on Transformers 3.”

I was reeling for a minute or two last night about a vicious and dismissive thing that a fellow columnist (and a person I respect and half-like) said about HE. I’m not going to debate the particulars but after I read it I put the iPhone into my pocket and started shuffling down Cumberland Street in a kind of lethargic stupor. I don’t get the hate that some people spew. Awful, some of it.

This led to thinking, in any case, about how we all have two concurrent identities and personalities — one we inhabit and present in face-to-face dealings with fair-weather friends, business allies, acquaintances and whatnot, and one that comes out when we’re dealing with disshevelled family members in the kitchen at 12:30 am.

If you’re part of a family that is more frustrated and dysfunctional than not, the latter is almost always acidic and wounding and backbiting and accusatory in an August: Osage County-slash-Lion in WInter sense. The HE talk-back sword-stabbings and cat ‘o’ nine tail flailings that seem to happen here every other day are basically family squabbles. The difference, of course, is that it’s not happening privately in a kitchen but on a kind of world stage with kids in Kabul keeping up with the occasional mud-throwings along with the various industry, media and uber types who regularly visit.

I sometimes regard them as Edward Albee-ish or John Osborne-esque, but they often feel…well, let’s not be facile. But they do feel depleting and fatiguing and mystifying, even, from time to time. People keep saying I’ve made my own bed with the sharp and blunt tone in my writing, but I like to think that I at least take the time to sculpt and rephrase and mull things over and finally pull back a bit before hitting “save.” Ah, well. Ah, hell.

“This could very easily be the best-directed, best-acted, most beautifully photographed film of the year. That it will not likely merit so much as cursory Academy consideration is merely reason #3,807 the Oscars are a illegitimate, specious bunch of horseshit. And yet they transfix me. What am I to do?” — from Stu VanAirsdale‘s 9.10 Movieline review of Lars von Trier‘s Antichrist.

This morning’s snap decision has been to shine the 9:45 am screening of Niki Caro‘s The Vintner’s Luck and just stick with the column until Michael Moore‘s Capitalism: A Love Story screens at 12:15 pm. I felt guilty about this, of course, but then a Manhattan critic friend stopped by at my Starbucks office to tell me that the response to Caro’s film, which had a public screening yesterday at the Winter Garden, has been…well, let’s just say the jury’s out.

So it’ll be Capitalism followed by a Coen brothers chat at 2:45, a 6 pm screening of Jacques Audiard‘s The Prophet, and then a dinner thing for Chris Rock‘s Good Hair, which I won’t see until Tuesday.

Publicist Mickey Cottrell and Neil Young Trunk Show director Jonathan Demme got waffle-ironed when they were informed just after midnight that the Toronto Film Festival “has double booked screenings at 2 pm tomorrow, when ours had been set.” Two replacement slots have been offered, and I’m sure it’ll all work out after the dust settles. But this plus the oddly clueless Toronto no-show by Neil Young, as reported last Friday by the Toronto Star‘s Peter Howell, makes this concert film’s TIFF experience seem like one of the all-time debacles.

“They say rock ‘n’ roll never forgets,” Howell wrote, “but someone in charge of Neil Young’s itinerary evidently did.

“Young tells the Star he never intended to visit hometown Toronto to promote his new concert movie, The Neil Young Trunk Show, in a free public event Monday at Yonge-Dundas Square.

“The official TIFF schedule has Young as a confirmed attendee, along with director Jonathan Demme.

“‘This is the first time I ever heard I was supposed to be there,’ Young says from his California ranch home near San Rafael. ‘I didn’t know I was a scheduled event.'”

The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that A Serious Man is a timeless classic — a darkly hilarious piece that speaks to anyone who’s come to appreciate how life, for some people, is a grossly stacked deck. “But how can the Coens push this world view?,” a producer friend asked on the street yesterday, “given what they’ve done and achieved? It’s dishonest.” The irony, of course, is that people of brains and accomplishment and insight are the ones who will value it the most highly.

(l. to r.) A Serious Man costars Sari Lennick and Richard Kind, Focus Features chief James Schamus, costar Michael Stuhlbarg at last night’s Focus Features/Serious Man party at Opus.

Michael Douglas prior to last night’s public screening of Brian Koppelman and David Levien’s Solitary Man. Apologies for the rotten photo — I just wasn’t aggressive or precise enough with my positioning and flash attachment adjustment. This one‘s even worse.

As I’ve said before, the picket-sign sentiments of the yahoo teabaggers — who had a big protest rally yesterday in Washington, D.C. — aren’t just despicable. They also allow you to at least comprehend (i.e., obviously without sympathizing) why the Russian, Chinese and Cuban Communists made a point of imprisoning and wiping out the teabaggers in their cultures after they took over in 1917, 1949 and 1959. “We’re losing our country,” an elderly teabagger told a reporter yesterday. “We think the Muslims are moving in and taking over.”

ABC News reported that the rally drew somewhere between 60 and 70 thousand protestors.

“I’ve been loath to admit that the shrieking lunacy of the summer — the frantic efforts to paint our first black president as the Other, a foreigner, socialist, fascist, Marxist, racist, Commie, Nazi; a cad who would snuff old people; a snake who would indoctrinate kids — had much to do with race,” N.Y. Times columnist Maureen Dowd says this morning.

“I tended to agree with some Obama advisers that Democratic presidents typically have provoked a frothing response from paranoids — from Father Coughlin against F.D.R. to Joe McCarthy against Truman to the John Birchers against J.F.K. and the vast right-wing conspiracy against Bill Clinton.

“But Rep. Joe Wilson‘s shocking disrespect for the office of the president — no Democrat ever shouted ‘liar’ at W. when he was hawking a fake case for war in Iraq — convinced me: Some people just can’t believe a black man is president and will never accept it.”

Tom Ford‘s A Single Man will screen for the public tomorrow night at the Isabel Bader theatre and for Toronto press on Tuesday. Leslie Felperin‘s 9.11 Venice Film Festival review — “luminous and treasurable, despite its imperfections” — underlined its status as a Toronto must-see. I’ve seen the other two TIFF Man flicks — A Serious Man, of course, and Solitary Man last night — so this’l be the capper.

Felperin calls it “an impressive helming debut for fashion designer Tom Ford, who co-wrote the script with David Scearce. Pic freely adapts Christopher Isherwood‘s seminal novel set in Los Angeles, circa 1962, in which a college prof (Colin Firth), grieving for his dead lover, contemplates death. Sterling perfs from a tony cast rep a selling point, but the film’s ripely homoerotic flavor will make finding lovers in the sticks more difficult.

“Described by novelist Edmund White as “one of the first and best novels of the modern gay liberation movement,” Isherwood’s A Single Man presents a stream-of-consciousness portrait of a middle-aged gay man, known only as George, going about his daily routine in early ’60s LA.

“Ford’s script, which, per the press notes, departs significantly from Scearce’s earlier draft, remains fairly close in spirit to the original but departs from it in one major direction: Here, Brit expat George Falconer (Firth) is so bereft over the recent death of his longtime companion, Jim (Matthew Goode), in a car accident, that he’s planning to commit suicide — a plot point that injects tension into what might have been too quotidian a story had Isherwood’s template been followed to the letter.

“Action is confined to a single day, during which George puts his affairs in order. Telling no one of his plans, he follows what’s clearly a routine schedule — bantering with his housekeeper (Paulette Lamori), exchanging polite pleasantries with the all-American family next door and teaching his English class at a small college.

“Already detaching himself from the now, George can barely muster the energy to argue with a colleague (Lee Pace) about the ongoing Cuban Missile Crisis unfolding on the news. However, one of his students, the beautifully chiseled Kenny (Nicholas Hoult, the kid from About a Boy, now all grown up) insists on approaching George to discuss literature, drugs and life in general; the glint in Kenny’s eye hints at something more than purely educational interest.

“After a chaste afternoon encounter with a yet another gorgeous man (Jon Kortajarena), clearly a hustler looking for trade, George makes his way to the house of his friend Charley (Julianne Moore) for dinner that evening. An old friend from Blightly whom George once slept with, as flashbacks reveal, now-dipsomaniac divorcee Charley still can’t accept that George, whom she knows is gay, will never want a “normal” married life with her, despite their rich friendship.

“Ford’s largely delicate touch reps a pleasant surprise, especially given his only filmmaking experience hitherto has been overseeing advertising campaigns for Gucci and his own current, self-named line of fashion products. Clearly this is material close to his heart, and the empathy shines through. What’s more impressive is the skill he shows at evoking quietly sensual details, conjuring how, for instance, sniffing a stranger’s dog brings back memories of George’s beloved pet.

Less surprising, given Ford’s background, is the just-so exquisiteness of the overall look, not just in the men’s clothes (Ford designed Firth’s and Hoult’s figure-hugging suits and casual outfits himself), but in the interiors and femme costumes, too, for which production designer Dan Bishop and costume designer Arianne Phillips respectively deserve co-credit. The way Charley’s pink-and-gold parlor harmonizes not just with her sweeping monochrome dress but also her pink Sobranie cigarettes will evoke swoons of delight in auds for whom magazines like Wallpaper and Architectural Digest are holy writ.

Indeed, the period detailing is almost too perfectly done, to the point where one can’t help sensing the adman in Ford, nursing every detail to look not just accurate but impeccable and fashion-forward. Avid fans of “Mad Men” will notice not only that those pink Sobranies featured in an episode a few weeks before “A Single Man” premiered in Venice, but also that Mad Men gets the occasional ugliness of the period’s design better. An uncredited, voice-only appearance here by Mad Men‘s Jon Hamm further evokes the series.

“It might be argued that Ford is so keen to show immaculate taste, he’ll make sacrifices at the expense of verisimilitude, except that one key element in the filmmaking really does show an almost vulgar streak: Ford and lenser Eduard Grau’s decision to play with the color saturation, so that the initially dun-and-dreary color scheme will suddenly morph in a single shot to a warmer palette, as if the lovely things George sees — a handsome face, a pretty blue dress — have literally brightened his day.

“The effect might have come off better if it had been more subtly deployed, but then again, that little quantum of kitsch might turn out to be what will make auds love this film all the more in years to come.”

Last night’s gotta-see-this tipoff was from a distributor-buyer I’ve known for years. He told me to be sure to catch Francois Ozon‘s Refuge, which I’m half-inclined to do despite my having gone a little bit cold on Ozon since the days of Swimming Pool. Indiewire’s Eric Kohn has written that while “the movie’s cumulative impact is resolutely minor,” it also “contains an admirable amount of psychological depth.”