The Sony buffet for junket whores journalists (myself included) doing Moneyball and The Ides of March interviews, taken yesterday morning inside the Ritz Carlton 2nd-floor lobby.

Posted/tweeted today around 6:30 pm Eastern by Moneyball costar Jonah Hill. These guys have real chemistry in Bennett Miller’s film. it’s not bromance chemistry but a kind of yin-yang thing — Pitt gets into Hill’s face, asks him a blunt question, Hill hesitates and gives him the answer Pitt wants to hear. They do this over and over. It’s great.

Moneyball costars Jonah Hill, Brad Pitt — shot either today or yesterday inside Toronto’s Ritz Carlton.

If my Bennett Miller interview comes off on schedule (i.e., five minutes from now), I’ll be able to catch a 12:15 pm screening of Gareth Huw Evans and Iko Uwais‘ The Raid, which had its Toronto Film festival debut on Thursday night. A Twitchfilm post called it “a bad-ass fusion of Die Hard and Assault On Precinct 13 with a body count that would make John Woo blush as the bullets, blades, sticks, elbows and feet get flying early and never let up.”

A tip of the hat to Fox Searchlight for acquiring Steve McQueen‘s NC-17 Shame. As I more or less said in my Telluride review, it’s hard to like Shame as you’re watching it (because it’s so friggin’ bleak) but it’s all but impossible to not think about it, a lot, after it’s over. It might become a modest commercial hit (maybe0, but the Academy blue-hairs are going to blow this movie off so fast your head will spin. Nonetheless, any distributor that puts cash on the barrelhead for a bona fide art film has my admiration.

Another quote from my Telluride Shame review: “This is what an art film does — it just stands its ground and refuses to do anything you might want it to do.”

At last night’s Ides of March party Phillip Seymour Hoffman — a.k.a. “Philly” — insisted that Paul Thomas Anderson‘s The Master, which he just finished filming, is “not a Scientology film.” But I’ve read an early draft and it seems to be about a Scientology-like cult, i said to him. And I’ve read about the parallels. “I don’t know what you’ve heard and what script you’ve read,” Hoffman replied. “Trust me, it’s not about Scientology.”

Maybe not specifically or literally, but there are just too many proofs and indications that The Master (or whatever it’s eventually going to be called) is at least about a cult with a charismatic L. Ron Hubbard-type leader that could be seen as a metaphor for Scientology. At least that. Read this February 2010 Playlist analysis and tell me it’s not that. And that Hoffman’s denial isn’t perhaps a little too definitive.

I’m on my way to an Ides of March party that starts at 7 pm and then another one for the Weinstein Co.’s The Artist, but I have to at least paste a couple of tweets about Gerado Naranjo‘s Miss Bala, which I missed in Cannes but finally saw today. Tweet #1: “If Michelangelo Antonioni had made a movie about a Mexican beauty queen grappling with drug gangsters, the result might have been Miss Bala.” Tweet #2: “Naranjo has totally ignored the chaotic action aesthetic of Michael Bay & acolytes, and delivered an action thriller with a truly elegant visual style. Long shots and almost no cut-cut-cut-cuting.”

I’ll be appalled for the rest of my life that my Reel.com editor (whose name I’m not going to mention) chose to summarize the column that I wrote from the Toronto Film Festival on the evening of 9.11.01, and which appeared the following day, as follows: “Jeffrey Wells reports on the toll that current events have had on the Toronto Film Festival, and tries to muster enthusiasm for films that have screened, including Lantana, Monsoon Wedding, and Last Orders.”

This was back in the day when entertainment websites wrote about and/or acknowledged only entertainment subjects…even if the horrible death of nearly 3000 people from jumping or flames or being crushed had led to a major film festival deciding to halt its various programs to show respect and take a breather. Even then, Reel.com felt that it was better to not be too specific (don’t want to encourage people to not think about movies!) and to refer to this slaughter as “current events.” Thank God that mentality has been entirely rubbed out on the web.

Koch Entertainment’s One-Eyed Jacks Bluray (out 11.8) will, of course, be some kind of high-def enhancement of a public-domain version, and all One-Eyed Jacks public domain versions are shit. There was a laser disc version that I owned in the early to mid ’90s that wasn’t too bad, so maybe Koch’s Bluray will be the equal of that. If it is I’m buying it…fool that I am.

This near-great 1961 psychological western has to be freed from public-doman jail and remastered and made into a eye-popping Bluray by its owner, Paramount Pictures. But of course Paramount Home Video has so far refused to even create a mint-condition Bluray of Shane, one of Hollywood’s all-time great westerns, so what are the odds of them doing the right thing by Marlon Brando‘s film?

It’s called bad (i.e., thoughtless, sociopathic) parenting. Shame on this and all the other corporate video divisions who care nothing…okay, very little for Hollywood history and heritage and want nothing more than to make money.

One-Eyed Jacks was the last Paramount film shot in VistaVision, a 35mm large-format system, and that’s why it’ll look close to breathtaking when and if it ever gets properly Blurayed.

Here’s the main title track from Hugo Friedhofer‘s score for One-Eyed Jacks. And here’s a guy selling CDs of the entire score.

With In Contention‘s Guy Lodge having posted a Venice Film Festival pan of Ami Canaan Mann ‘s Texas Killing Fields (Anchor Bay, 10.7), it seems fair to post my own reaction, which is a bit more favorable but only a bit.

Texas Killing Fields costars Sam Worthington, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Chloe Moretz, Stephen Graham, Jessica Chastain and Annabeth Gish. I reported in mid-August that it’s about the Texas I-45 Murders, a series of unsolved killings of prostitutes and lonely girls in the ’80s, probably by more than one assailant, in a blighted area south of Houston near Interstate I-45, which runs from Dallas down to Galveston Bay.

Mann, director of an earlier feature called Morning, is the daughter of Michael Mann, who produced this faintly-Zodiac-resembling crime drama.

I think it’s basically a highly intriguing, at times genuinely creepy, misshapen mess. There’s not enough of a story, the coverage is odd and haphazard, and it’s not long or complex enough to be a Zodiac-styled cold case movie. The tone lacks a commanding vision, a consistent aesthetic. It feels spotty and raggedy, but not un-intriguing for that.

Texas Killing Fields was obviously made by talented people looking do something extra. All the performances have something or other. All the leads are watchable and interesting, no phone-in performances. It’s atmospheric and creepy but…hello? It doesn’t go anywhere. It just ends with someone who seemed to be dead turning up not dead. And there’s a blonde bad guy who seems to be a prime suspect but then just suddenly shoots a minor character and disappears. I still don’t know what that was about.

Yesterday In Contention‘s Kris Tapley excerpted my Moneyball rave (thanks) but at the same time said “Jeff flies off the Oscar handle on dubious players too frequently to trust this just yet.” I don’t deserve that. I admit I’ve gotten it wrong from time to time, but hardly “frequently.” Generally my instincts are on-target, and I sure as hell know formulaic garbage when I see it. And I know when a film is up to something extra-special and worthwhile.

At the end of the day I’d rather be the guy who occasionally jumps on the wrong pogo stick than one who sneers at everyone and everything. If you can’t find true love in this racket you need to find another game.

Besides, what’s so off-the-handle about calling Moneyball “a smart, true-to-life, business-of-baseball movie with a touch of the mystical and the sublime, and propelled along by a highly pleasurable lead performance by Brad Pitt…a film made great not just [by] the emotional and spiritual currents, but the subtlety of them”? And declaring that Pitt is a Best Actor contender? He fucking is that.

Variety‘s Peter Debruge got on the Moneyball wagon last night, calling it an “uncannily sharp, penetrating look at how Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane helped reinvent baseball based on statistics rather than near-superstitious thinking.

“Another approach might have treated the source material as exposition for a more conventional baseball story, but Moneyball is content to draw back the curtain and find drama in the dealings. Director Bennett Miller‘s low-key style suits that strategy nicely, breaking up shop-talk scenes with artful, quiet moments in which Beane steps away from the action, nicely captured by d.p. Wally Pfister.

“Pitt gives a genuinely soul-searching performance. He reaches for junk food when nervous and questions himself in solitary, but his best scenes are those featuring his daughter Casey (Kerris Dorsey). During family moments, including those featuring his ex-wife (Robin Wright) and her new beau (an uncredited Spike Jonze), Pitt reveals that Beane’s swagger is mostly for show, and his true nature is far more sensitive than anyone who’s seen him cut a player would guess.”

Debruge is wrong when he says that Pitt “sheds any trace of movie-star vanity by allowing himself to be seen as a has-been with a bad haircut.” Pitt’s hair is okay — not everyone is obliged to wear an unevenly cut gaybar spikey mousse cut. You have to have a mullet or something equally extreme to be called a “bad haircut” guy. And Pitt’s Billy Beane is only a has-been player in Moneyball — as a general manager of the Oakland A’s he’s alive and kicking and very much in the present.

MSN’s James Rocchi has written that Pitt’s Beane-inhabiting “forgoes shallow charm in the name of deeper, stranger currents of performance and persona.”

In a just-posted Best Actor predictions piece, Rope of Silicon‘s Brad Brevet has written that “I also saw Moneyball yesterday and think Brad Pitt‘s performance is also likely to secure a nomination at this point.” He adds that he’s not as entirely confident about this as he is about George Clooney being nominated for his performance in The Descendants.

I’m not wrong here.