Paul Greengrass‘s Captain Phillips will open the 2013 New York Film Festival on Friday, 9.27. Which means…what, the press screening is three or four days earlier? Greengrass can nail this kind of thing blindfolded with one hand tied. Playing the NYFF, as always, means savoring big media attention without tons of competition. Big frog, smallish pond.

For whatever reason an early request for a press ticket to this evening’s screening of Paul Schrader‘s The Canyons at the Walter Reade theatre was overlooked, and I’ve been struggling to gain admittance since yesterday. I’m told by a well-connected source that one reason for the difficulty is that Dina Lohan (Lindsay’s mom) suddenly announced yesterday that she wanted six tickets. If I don’t see it tonight then I don’t see it. I could run a link to Scott Foundas‘s respectful review or Eric Kohn‘s pan, but I’d rather absorb and consider on my own.

In Woody Allen‘s Blue Jasmine, Cate Blanchett‘s tragic character “has lost her public identity — indeed, has become something of a pariah. She has lost her money, and she has to find something to do. Allen, of course, also endured (in the early ’90s) the shattering of his public identity and a barrage of hostility; like her, he was rejected by one of his children in the wake of scandal. (And, like her, he’s known to the world under a pseudonym.) But Allen didn’t lose his money and he didn’t lose his ability to work; he didn’t struggle and strive to recover his former status, because he was able to simply keep going forward — and the artistic results have often been wondrous.”

I was all over The Player in early 1992 and pushing it like mad with my editors at Entertainment Weekly. It took at least a couple of weeks after I first caught an early-bird screening in…what was it, mid-February?…before EW‘s “News & Notes” section deigned to run a small descriptive paragraph with an enthusiastic quote or two. My opinion (i.e., that it was a hilariously dry and biting satire that had an uncut, beautifully choreographed extended opening sequence and that it would catch on big-time and that Altman had made perhaps the biggest commercial hit of his career) wasn’t notable or newsworthy, of course. I had to find some non-vested types whose reputation mattered, and whose opinion therefore had weight. I knew and could say, in short, but I couldn’t and wouldn’t be heard because I was a freelance reporter and not a hotshot critic. Even if I was a critic I couldn’t have said anything because it was way too early in the cycle.

The 2013 Locarno Film Festival program was announced today. 2 Guns. A whole lotta George Cukor. Chinatown and Faye Dunaway. It begins on Wednesday, 8.7, and runs until Saturday, 8.17. A smart, elegant, sophisticated gathering. Locarno is in Switzerland, of course, but it’s really northern Italy in almost every other sense — culturally, atmospherically, architecturally. Scores of gelato stands and foodie joints. Pizza, pasta, etc.

I attended ten years ago with Jett and Dylan, who were then 15 and 14. Europe was suffering at the time through one of the worst heat waves in meteorological history, and I remember how we were constantly damp and sweating. (I remember Roger Ebert‘s face being all pink and sweat-beady during an outdoor discussion panel.) The guys and I took an afternoon swim each and every day in Lake Maggiore.

Reza Azlan, author of “Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth,” apparently decided that the exposure from a Fox News interview was worth having to field a barrage of prejudicial, bone-dumb questions from “Spirited Debate” host Lauren Green. Azlan’s polite but appalled responses are hilarious. He knows there’s no getting through to idiotic Christians with fixed agendas. Watching him struggle to maintain a calm, even-toned composure is akin to an educator trying to explain the basics to an under-educated psychopathic teenager.