That’s Jessica Biel as Vera Miles in Hitchcock, Sacha Gervasi‘s making-of-Psycho film that will open 2012 AFI Fest. I think it’s fair to say that Biel’s mouth is a lot bigger and opens a lot wider than Miles’ mouth. Biel’s mouth might even be bigger than Joe E. Brown‘s. I know, I know — “who’s Joe E. Brown?” He played Osgood Fielding, the old coot who had thing for Jack Lemmon‘s “Daphne” in Some Like It Hot.

Kino Lorber’s forthcoming Fear and Desire Bluray looks great — natural, clean, straight from the lab. Until this release the only way to see Stanley Kubrick‘s first film was to get hold of one of those dupey, cruddy-looking VHS tapes or DVDs, or watch via online stream. So this is great news from a purist, restorationist perspective.

The problem, of course, is that the movie itself is an embarassment. Kubrick called it crap in interviews, and it’s easy to see why. Soldiers caught behind enemy lines in some kind of existential. low-budget conflict in what looks to be a park in upstate New York or New Jersey with the picnic tables removed. Blah, blah, blah. Fear and Desire should be shown to all first-time filmmakers. It will greatly encourage them to know that Kubrick made Paths of Glory only four years later.

The first thing you hear is some pretentious narration, written by Howard Sackler, that goes as follows: “There is war in this forest. Not a war that has been fought, or one that will be, but any war. And the enemies who struggle here do not exist, unless we call them into being. This forest, then, and all that happens now is outside history. Only the unchanging shapes of fear — and doubt and death — are from our world. These soldiers that you see keep our language and our time, but have no other country but the mind.” I wanted to turn it off right then and there.

The only thing that sustained my interest was the fact that Fear and Desire has been mastered at 1.33. Any film that brings even a little discomfort into the heads of guys like Bob Furmanek is, in my book, a good thing. Don’t believe it when these guys say they just want the correct aspect ratio to be rendered. That’s just what they say for attribution.

I watched last night’s Presidential debate from the bar at Finn McCool’s, a pub on Santa Monica’s Main Street. About two-thirds of the way through these two 20something jock types came in, and right away one of them looked around the room, noticed that 12 or 15 people were watching the screen and said to his pally, “Oh, okay…everybody’s watching this thing.” In other words, they came in to watch a game and were unhappy about the bar’s two or three screens being otherwise engaged.

I was sitting right next to them and silently saying to myself, “Yeah, it’s tough, chief…I know. Once every four years around October and November people in bars like this actually watch something other than football or baseball games. Not an easy one to swallow, I realize. Especially for guys like yourself, right? Life sucks every so often.”

According to Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil, The Sessions director-writer Ben Lewin is surprised that Fox Searchlight has submitted his film for Golden Globe consideration as a drama. Because midway through filming he realized that The Sessions is “actually a comedy,” and this realization led costar Helen Hunt to “recalibrate” her character.

Lewin would be wise to shut that one down right away. Golden Globe submissions and decisions about which films are “comedies” are often a stretch and sometmes absurd, but there’s no way in the world any semi-awake human being on the Planet Earth would call The Sessions a comedy. It uses a humorous line here and there, chiefly during William Macy‘s church-pew counselling scenes with John Hawkes. But it’s obviously just a straight healing story with sexual-emotional flavorings and a kind of tragic undercurrent.

I would say overall that you really have to have a bent mind to even half-smirkingly call it a comedy…c’mon. It’s about a guy with almost no life who experiences a few shafts of emotional and spiritual light before all the lights go out. Where is the ha-hah in that?

It took me most of the morning to recover from last night’s Barack Obama tragedy, and the Black Hole of Calcutta depression that resulted. Thank you, Barry, for yanking out my butt-cork and making me feel as if my soul was draining out and falling to the carpet like sand. Wait…is this happening? Oh God, It is happening. The man has an arsenal of damning facts at his disposal and he’s not using any of them, and he’s losing this debate to that Amiable, Good-Natured, Lying Republican Country-Club Slimeball.

I wrote last night that “I know what it’s like to half-prepare for something and then go out there and just blow it.” You can prepare a lot of or not so much, but you have to want to go into the arena and smile like a Cheshire cat and rip the other guy’s throat out, and one thing that mild-mannered Barry has always had difficulty with is being adversarial and confrontational in a one-on-one situation. All I can say is that he’d better wake the hell up, man up, toughen up, call in Chris Matthews for some debate coaching and get out there and turn this thing around in the next debate. I haven’t been this angry with him since the budget standoff and his reported willingness to compromise with Boehner and the other fiends. I hate wimpitude.

Obama has the wind behind him, he has the edge and he’s likely to win, the numbers are looking good and he all but forfeits the debate because he has to be Mr. Smiley and because he problems with aggression?

Next Monday night’s New York Film Festival debut of Steven Spielberg‘s Lincoln is unexpected, for sure, and the bravest thing that Disney marketing has done on behalf of this Tony Kushner-scripted film. Before this moment Disney has been presenting a cautious if not timid face to the world, particularly in its decision to take the AFI Fest’s closing-night slot, which is only hours before the 11.9 opening.

So good on Team Disney — for the first time they are standing by their film with noticable pride and resolve. Because you know the New York blogosphere will not cut Lincoln any breaks, and that a lot of the wise guys are looking to get Spielberg-Williams any way they honestly can. (I’m not the only one.) And you know that N.Y. Post critic Lou Lumenick and his Lincoln tipster, “Guido Bazin”, will be on pins and needles to see if the crowd agrees or not with Guido’s 9.22 impressions of the film.

It burns me that Glenn Kenny and Kris Tapley will be seeing Daniel Day Lewis‘s Honest Abe by way of Walter Brennan and Matthew Modine before me, but them’s the breaks. I’ve asked to see the film, naturally, but they may have their own plans. It’ll begin to screen in LA next week

I despise the wussy timbre of Daniel Day Lewis‘s Abraham Lincoln voice. Even more than I did before. It’s chalk on blackboard. The only time I was able to stand it was at the end of the trailer, when he gets angry. But it wasn’t enough for a save.

I began to be bored by tonight’s Presidential debate very early on. I was sitting in a bar and half listening, but mostly talking to a girl. All I know is that I listened out of the corner of my ear and I was soon bored and depressed. I don’t know if Romney won or not, but he looked and sounded okay, and Obama definitely underperformed. He clearly hadn’t prepared. I know what it’s like to half-prepare for something and then go out there and just blow it. That’s what Barack did tonight. Way to go, guy.

In a 9.19 post called “Mild To A Fault,” I wrote the following: “My concern is that Barack Obama, convinced as everyone else is by now that Mitt Romney is going to lose, is going to do his usual courtly, combat-averse, close-to-genuflecting routine when he debates Romney on 10.3, 10.16 and 10.22. He’s figuring Romney has already dug his own grave to why box a dead horse? Obama doesn’t like to scrap, much less take off the gloves. I’ve always seen that as a failing.”

Sasha Stone and Glenn Kenny called me dead wrong and clueless, but I was right, wasn’t I?

It was almost as if Obama sat down with his team this afternoon and said, “I don’t want to commit hari-kiri opposite Romney…I want to hold my own as best I can and maintain my dignity…but I think I kinda might want to lose, strange as that sounds.”

Adviser #1: “You want to lose?”

Obama: “Yeah, I do a little. Because, for me, anything is better than manning up and scoring points against Romney because, as you guys know, I’m deathly afraid of looking or sounding too aggressive. Now, can I lose by just being mild and unruffled or…?”

Adviser #1: “Well, I think you might want to try to pretend that you’re not the President and that you’re just some history professor at Andover. Try to seem as wonky as possible. Lots of stats and policy jargon. That’ll bore the piss out of everyone and people will stop listening. That’ll get the ball rolling.”

Obama: “Okay. Then what?”

Adviser #2: “No matter where the debate goes, don’t bring up Romney’s 47% gaffe. Pretend like it didn’t happen. Don’t bring up Bain, don’t mention offshore tax shelters, don’t mention his history as a company killer and a job outsourcer, don’t mention his disastrous European trip. Everything that makes him look bad or clumsy or mercenary, don’t mention. And if he lies about your record, let him get away with it.”

Obama: “Got it. Anything else?”

Adviser #1: “That’s enough for now, I think. You’ll be seen as a loser by the liberal pundits if you do what we’ve just suggested, and then we can talk later on how to lose the second debate.”

Obama: “Fine. Thanks, guys.”

Oh, and Jim Lehrer is finished. He’s too old, not sharp enough, his voice is too high-pitched, he’s over. He’ll never moderate a Presidential debate again.

You can forget trailer #1 and trailer #2. This is the film — the first good taste of Silver Linings Playbook since the Toronto Film Festival. And I agree, by the way, with Jennifer Lawrence‘s response to Julia Stiles and John Ortiz‘s disapproving glumness. Do I respond this way in real life? No. I sit there and suck it in and smile.

One day after the appearance of the new Killing Them Softly one-sheet, which looks to me like the most excitingly designed poster of 2012, another goodie has arrived. The only problem is that the guy doesn’t look like Sessions star John Hawkes. He looks like a cross between Michael Shannon and Roger Rees when he starred in Nicholas Nickelby or Hapgood on Broadway.

On 8.17, or 45 days ago, I posted an open letter to Academy president Hawk Koch, asking him to arrange a special Academy screening of Keanu Reeves and Chris Kenneally‘s Side by Side. (I also sent Koch a direct letter and gave Kenneally a heads-up.) I don’t know if this effort had anything to do with the Academy deciding to screen the doc on Sunday, 10.7, at 2:30 pm (which will be followed by a q & a with Reeves). But I suspect they’re related. Wouldn’t you?

The Academy listing says that Side by Side is about “filmmakers discussing the pros and cons of digital ‘film.'” Not really. The film very simply but intelligently explains how and why the industry has changed over from film to digital over the last 14 years or so. The disappearance of celluloid and the dominance of digital is the most earth-shaking and to some extent traumatic change that Hollywood has undergone since the advent of sound, , and it would benefit everybody to sink into this history and understand it as fully as possible.

Side by Side tells an important tale. This plus the fact that it’s very intelligently assembled means it ought to be a Best Feature Documentary nominee.

I can feel a mousey indie attitude, a lowballness, a lack of thunder and swagger coming out of Indomina‘s pre-release campaign for Leos Carax‘s Holy Motors (10.17 in NYC). This is one of 2012’s great films, the L’Age d’Or of our time, a landmark madhouse flick. It can’t just be another indie sparkler that opens and closes and goes straight to VOD and Netflix…please. Attention must be paid. Trumpets must be sounded.

Holy Motors is so much bolder and more inventive than Argo or Silver Linings Playbook or Life of Pi it makes me sick to think of the likely disparity in terms of reception and box-office. Les Miserables may wind up as the most popular broad-consensus Best Picture winner of 2012, but Holy Motors is an unhinged free-for-all for the ages.

You should have been in the Grand Lumiere when I saw it during Cannes Film Festival, and to be among a crowd clapping and cheering on their feet when it ended. This. trust me, is what Holy Motors deserved. It doesn’t deserve to just open in a small theatre or two like a church mouse and then just dribble away and end up on VOD, and Netflix.

From my 5.23.12 review:

“I got out of the noon showing of Leos Carax’s Holy Motors about 100 minutes ago…holy moley! Holy Paris, holy Trip City, holy nocturne, holy inferno, holy freedom, holy holy, roly poly, put on the wackazoid. Holy white stretch limo. Holy wigs and fake beards and long nails and spirit gum. And holy Denis Lavant, Eva Mendez, Kylie Minogue and Michel Piccoli! Dali/Bunuel/Lynch/Carax live large. Welcome to Holy Nuttervile in the best, most spirit-releasing sense of that term.

“It’s basically a dreamscape movie about a possibly wealthy guy named Oscar (Lavant) whose job it is to tool around Paris in a big white limo and pretend to be other people, complete with first-rate makeup and latex and wigs and you-name-it. It’s the inner life of a mad director (i.e., Carax) who’s letting his imagination run wild.

“Who pays Oscar or why he would be rich doing this kind of thing, or why he goes home to a small white condo and has two chimpanzees for children instead of the two or three human kids he waves goodbye to in the beginning…forget all that. This movie is about playtime. Anything can, will and does happen, and reality has nothing to do with it. And yet it feels grounded in the stuff. It’s ‘loony’ but believable. And very handsomely shot.

“If only an American filmmaker was this mad, this imaginative, this unchained, this willing to leap. I wonder if any American has it in him or her to create something like this. If he or she did, Americans would probably say ‘what the fuck?’ and stay away in droves. It’s in the realm but well beyond anything David Lynch has ever done.”