Friday morning email from journalist friend: “Didn’t I predict you’d hate The Magnificent Seven? I totally called it.” Me: “The movie is empty stinking bullshit from beginning to end, head to toe. Fuqua has a good eye for framing and a Sergio Leone-ish penchant for close-ups, but otherwise forget it.”

From “Heroism Isn’t Machismo“, posted on 4.10.16: “No offense but I don’t trust Antoine fucking Fuqua — he lacks discipline, he’s popcorn, he’s cheeseball and he damn sure is no Akira Kurosawa or John Sturges.”

Denzel Washington (l.) and Magnificent Seven costars (Chris Pratt, Ethan Hawke, Vincent D’Onofrio, Lee Byung-hun) on Princess of Wales stage — Thursday, 9.8, 6:45 pm.

I don’t want to overreact but this trailer for Ben Affleck‘s Live By Night is giving me Miller’s Crossing vibes. Extra care went into it. An artified gangster film. And the plot of Dennis Lehane’s 2012 novel has several twists and turns. The story, dialogue and pacing are yet to be sampled but the champs, right now, are dp Robert Richardson and editor William Goldenberg. Costarring Affleck, Chris Messina, Sienna Miller, Brendan Gleeson, Zoe Saldana, Chris Cooper and Elle Fanning. A big-city platform release in December followed by 1.13.17 wide release.

The Scotiaplex (i.e., Scotiabank Cineplex) is the site for all the Toronto Film Festival press & industry screenings. Let me tell you, things were really, really bad over there today. Bad thing #1: A climate of near suffocation if you happened to catch the 12:30 screening of Paul Verhoeven‘s Elle, which was shown in a theatre (#2) with zero air conditioning. Bad thing #2: The Scotiaplex’s three-story-tall escalator wasn’t working and under repair. Management waits until hundreds upon hundreds of journalists descend on this place for TIFF and then the escalator needs urgent repair? Not two weeks or two months earlier but on opening day? Bad thing #3: Last year TIFF provided temporary wifi for journalists and industry types in the upstairs lounge area, which is right off the main lobby, but no TIFF wifi this year. A Scotiaplex employee told me TIFF just isn’t on the case. I asked the TIFF press office about this a couple of hours ago, but no reply thus far.

Engineers doing what they can to re-activate the Scotiaplex escalator earlier today.

Paul Verhoeven’s Elle is one wickedly perverse, end-of-the-world, ice-cold erotic whodunit. It’s not really a thriller as much as a fascinating character study of Isabelle Huppert‘s Michele, a 50something owner of a Parisian videogame company that creates violent rape fantasies, and how a series of assaults and shocks that befall her character are reflective of Michele’s pathology and that of the general drift of social mores these days.

So Elle is partly social criticism and partly a kind of sex comedy. Except you can’t really call it comedic or farcical. Well, you can but the humor is flavored with a chilly, amoral undertow that smothers the hah-hah. But it’s constantly amusing. And the film is sharp, direct and fat-free — the best or least problematic Verhoeven film since Basic Instinct or even Robocop. It runs 130 minutes but feels like 100, if that.

Elle is partly a kinky sex fantasia (i.e., get to know your rapist), partly a twisted tale of perverse karma stretching back decades, partly a portrait of social dysfunction and moral indifference, partly a Verhoeven-styled wicked game movie (he’s always been into kinky abandon of one kind of another), and partly a woman’s empowerment saga. I found it completely pleasurable despite the fact that the air conditioning wasn’t working in Scotiabank #2. It was awful in there.

David Birke‘s screenplay is adapted from Philippe Djian’s novel, but it really feels like Satan wrote it. Satan in a dry, whimsical, fuck-all mood.

It starts with Michele, a resident of a tony Paris suburb, being brutally raped by some guy whose face is covered by a black head mask. This being a Verhoeven film, Michelle is shocked and traumatized and perhaps a little bit turned on by the attack.

I caused a ghastly mess this morning in my friend’s condo. All in an attempt to heat water for coffee. I’ve never been very practical or handy-minded, and sometimes I do incredibly boneheaded things. But that’s me. I’m the kind of guy who calls AAA to have a tire changed. Partly because I don’t trust my abilities (I so hate changing tires that I instantly reject the idea) and partly because I don’t want to get my hands greasy. My hands must be clean at all times. Kind of a Howard Hughes-type deal.

In any event I woke up in the usual unfocused state but relatively clear of mind. I wanted some coffee. I saw a silver heating pot sitting on a pad of some kind, but I didn’t think to notice (because I’m an alien from Tralfamadore) that the pot had a plastic connector heating device on the bottom. I have an electric water-heating pot at home so I know about filling it up and then pushing a button to start the process, but in the fog of the moment I just figured “okay, no button on the pot so I’ll just fill it and heat the water on the stove.” So like a donkey I put the pot on the stove for coffee, turned the heat up halfway and took a shower.

Four minutes later (my showers never last longer than that) the place was filled with smoke, and then the fire alarm went off. The plastic on the bottom of the pot had melted onto the stove. A torrent of smoke. Melted plastic on the stove and linoleum counter, on two green bath towels, on the kitchen rug and the wooden floor — the kind of thing only a flake whose thoughts are elsewhere much of the time could manage.

Hollywood Elsewhere arrived in Toronto yesterday afternoon around 2:30 pm. The weather felt like Panama in July. I was wearing a heavy leather jacket that was perfect for those cool nighttime strolls in Telluride, but inappropriate here. Sticky and sweating and lugging three heavy bags, I picked up my press badge and other materials at the Bell Lightbox.

Armed with a new iPhone 6,Plus, I was then forced to spend two hours with the AT&T guys because my unlimited data international plan …forget it, too tedious to recount.

I’m staying at an old friend’s place at TwentyGothic, a condo complex in High Park. He met me there around 5:30 pm, and then we did dinner. And then he left for the country.

I would have been up and watching my first TIFF film — Thomas Vinterberg‘s The Commune — at 9:45 am. Alas, a small tragedy occured at 7:30 this morning. [See above.]