A Guardian story reports that the annual dolphin slaughter is happening again in Taiji, Japan. I wonder what’s happened regarding Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s determination about heading up the Tokyo Film Festival jury in light of the fest’s reported decision not to screen The Cove despite its green theme.

The Indiewire guys have asked me and several others to grade the Toronto Film Festival selections we’ve seen thus far. I’m finding their list of 34 films, give or take, depressing because I’ve only seen 10 or 11 so far, and not counting today I’ve only got three and a half days to go before flying back to New York. Always like this, always frustrating, etc.

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.”