A pre-screening conversation at the Tribeca Screening Room last night, two or three minutes before The King’s Speech began, was about a review that called Mark Romanek‘s Never Let Me Go (Fox Searchlight, 9.15) a “masterpiece.” He’s wrong, one guy said. It’s one of those films for which the phrase “very well done for what it is” was invented, said another. It very gently suffocates. “Really sensitive, delicate, anguished and very carefully made,” I replied. “But it’s morose, and that plus the passivity and resignation doesn’t work.”

Update: Arrived in Toronto at 1:15 pm. Welcomely cooler here than Manhattan. Before: I saw Never Let Me Go and The King’s Speech back-to-back last night. Now there’s no Friday morning press-screening conflict and I’m free and clear to see Black Swan. I ‘m leaving now for Newark and my Toronto flight. (I’m actually past my departure hour.) No more filings until the late afternoon.

Forget the silliness and consider all that beautiful headroom above R. Lee Ermey and Matthew Modine‘s heads. This is the 1.37:1 Full Metal Jacket I know and love and wish I owned on Bluray.

Obama has screwed himself with caution and timidity (he didn’t go far enough with stimulus funding) and allowing the uglies to lead the conversation, but boil the current catastrophes down to basics and it all tracks back to Bush-era excesses and abuses.

So how are Average Joes going to vote in the mid-terms? Simple — they’re going to vote for a Republican majority in Congress, and thereby block any chance of Obama pushing anything through legislatively. They’re going to give more power to those who caused all the problems in the first place (i.e., righties committed to exploiting stupidity and serving the corporations + Tea Party nutters). That’ll fix things, right?