Manhattan life is plagued by many irritations. I hate the fact that subway car doors frequently don’t open for several seconds after the train stops at a station. (In Paris you can manually open the doors yourself with that silver latch handle thing.) But the biggest drag these days (for me anyway) are the slowpokes on the street and especially in the subways. I’m not saying they have to race around like crazy rats, but what’s wrong with walking with a purposeful stride? Very few charge around like yours truly, it seems, and the ones that are really slow and obstructionist and are always blocking the sidewalks in groups of five or six or more…I was going to say it’s the tourists but I’m starting to think it’s almost everyone these days except for X-factor types. For me walking around Manhattan is exhilarating exercise, especially if you walk with a little bounce in your step; for the vast majority it’s apparently something to be endured by reducing energy expenditure as much as possible and shuffling around like 80somethings.

I saw an IMAX 3D version of Victor Fleming‘s The Wizard of Oz at 10 am this morning at Leows’ Kips Bay. The screen was fairly small so I wouldn’t call it a genuine IMAX presentation, but the 3D was real enough. I have to be honest and say that while it felt interesting to watch this 1939 classic in 3D, the experience didn’t floor me. The conversion was very nicely done, I felt — tasteful, subtle, unintrusive. So subtle, in fact, that after a while I kind of forgot that I was watching 3D. The same thing happened when I watched the 3D-converted Titanic. The 3D process just starts to take a back seat to the content of the film. You get used to it and then you start to forget about it.

I think we all knew this, but now it’s reflected in a chart — fine. Update: It was announced two or three hours ago that Steve McQueen‘s period film has won the Toronto Film Festival Audience Award. If Joe and Jane Popcorn liked it in Toronto, it suggests that Academy bluehairs might be open to it also. Three days ago Grantland‘s Mark Harris told the LA/NY award-season cognoscenti to calm down (“It’s September, for God’s sake”), but what’s he thinking now, I wonder?

Here’s that 1990 Peter Ustinov interview for the Criterion Spartacus laser disc. Ustinov’s recollections of Charles Laughton (from 9:00 to 15:00) are priceless, particularly his mimicking of Laughton’s blinking and twitching. Ustinov’s description of Laughton — “An extremely vulnerable and sensitive soul who went through life just waiting to be offended” — strikes a chord. When I wake up and start my day I know that something appalling or offensive is just waiting around the corner, and that the only way to keep this encounter from happening is to stay indoors and just write. But if I do that I’ll eventually run out of material.

During the Toronto Film Festival I was told to steer clear of Matthew Weiner‘s You Are Here, a kind of mixed-bag relationship dramedy with Owen Wilson, Zach Galifianakis, Amy Poehler and Laura Ramsey. Part of me didn’t want to see this anyway because I can’t stand Galifianakis so I passed. As it turned out most of the reviews were negative. But a complaint voiced by Hitfix‘s Gregory Ellwood in a recent TIFF sum-up piece rubs me the wrong way.

“Weiner’s passion project about two buddies getting their lives back on track couldn’t decide what it wanted to be,” Ellwood writes. “A drama? A comedy? A farce?” My immediate reaction was “why does a movie have to decide what it precisely is in terms of tone and approach? Why can’t it be a blend? Why can’t a film accomodate differing attitudes and moods simultaneously or at least shift between them? Isn’t that what life is like sometimes?