I believe his line about refusing to ever leave the Republican party, but not about his having not finally decided who to vote for in the Presidential election. If he’s a diehard Republican than else is there to do except vote for Romney? Why am I even talking about this? He won’t matter until he makes a good film again. Which is highly unlikely.

Michael Tolkin‘s The Rapture will have a one-night engagement at Hollywood’s American Cinematheque on Thursday. It’s a thinking-man’s horror flick, and one of the most chilling and profoundly creepy films ever — a perfect bitchslap directed at Godfreaks and the religious right.

“The Rapture weirded me out on a level that I didn’t fully comprehend at first,” I wrote a year and a half ago. “So much so that I’ve only watched it twice. It’s not what you’d call a ‘pleasant’ film, but it sinks in and spreads a strange malevolent vibe — a profound unease, disquiet — into your system.

“Mimi Rogers hit her absolute career peak playing a telemarketing swinger-turned-convert who (a) sends her daughter to God with a bullet in the head and then (b) tells God to shove it when He/She is levitating Rogers up to Heaven during the finale.

“David Duchovny and Will Patton costarred. I was so taken by Patrick Bauchau‘s performance as a libertine that I sought him out at a party sometime in the late ’90s and wound up interviewing him at his Hollywood home.”

Sasha Stone and I have decided to go our separate ways, and poor Phil Contrino has been left high and dry. I won’t go into details, but Sasha and I have different intrepretations of the classic Phoebe Ephron line (which was later used by her daughter Nora) “everything is copy.” A couple of hours ago I did a solo with Marshall Fine about Life of Pi, generation gaps between critics, Anna Karenina, Manohla Dargis and related topics.

Here’s a stand-alone mp3 link. I haven’t yet figured out how to upload to iTunes so forget that for now.

“When candidates debate each other, they should debate each other. In a real debate, the participants engage, they grapple, they get into each other’s hair (metaphorically, of course). Without that clash of ideas and personalities, there’s no point in getting the two sides together on one stage.

“But in the presidential debates over the years, the rules have bizarrely permitted the candidates to ‘debate’ without actually addressing each other. Some have spent the entire night studiously avoiding eye contact.

“Their escape mechanism is the moderator, the one person on stage whom both candidates must address, in a weirdly triangulated conversation, as they work through the questions the moderator poses. So it becomes those questions, and not the candidates’ ideas or personalities, driving the discussion.

“It feels hollow. It feels forced. There’s a simple fix for this: Make these candidates talk to each other.”

“Looper felt to me like a maddening near-miss: It posits an impossible but fascinating-to-imagine relationship — a face-to-face encounter between one’s present and future self, in which each self must account for its betrayal of the other — and then throws away nearly all the dramatic potential that relationship offers. If someone remakes Looper as the movie it could have been in, say, 30 years, will someone from the future please FedEx it back to me?” — from Dana Stevens‘ 9.28 Slate review.

“The biggest disappointment, for me, is that the great haunting concept of an older guy (Bruce Willis) being able to give counsel to his younger, stupider, less wise self (Joseph Gordon Levitt) has been almost completely ignored, and that’s really a shame.” — from my 9.6 review, titled “Looper Dooper.”

Notice I didn’t say this potential was completely ignored; I said it was “almost completely” ignored. It was toyed and fiddled with but not really developed.