Nobody remembers or cares about John Avildsen’s Neighbors (’81), a John Belushi vs. Dan Aykroyd comedy which played fast and loose (to put it mildly) with Thomas Berger’s same-titled novel, described on the Wikipage as “a satire of manners and suburbia, and a comment on emotional alienation with echoes of the works of Franz Kafka.” Everyone called it lowbrow and not that funny. But compare the tone of the trailers for the Avildsen vs. the upcoming Nicholas Stoller film with Seth Rogen, Zac Effron and Rose Byrne. The former almost seems like an Ernst Lubitsch film compared to the newbie, which seems like a metaphor for the downmarket mongrelization of mainstream comedy.

Variety‘s Peter Debruge has gone apeshit for Ron Howard‘s Rush, which will have its big debut at the Toronto Film Festival. “Too often Howard has played it safe, but here his choices are anything but obvious. He embraces the power of music to heighten the experience, but goes the opposite direction that one might expect with it, using Hans Zimmer’s cello-driven score to steer things to a deeper place. The same goes for the story itself: Who else would have imagined Formula 1 as an appropriate conduit for existential self-examination? And yet, you’ve seldom felt more alive in a movie theater than you will experiencing Rush.”

Because I live in a right-brain flotation fog, I have an annual tradition of leaving my passport at home when I leave for Telluride. Who needs a passport for Colorado, right? I don’t consider that I’ll be flying directly to New York and then Toronto hours after returning from Telluride, etc. So I had a friend send my passport to my son’s place in Brooklyn for pickup today. But the Labor Day holiday allowed for only an 8:30 am drop-off on Wednesday, which doesn’t work since tomorrow’s Toronto flight leaves from Newark at 11:10 am. But I was saved when FedEx screwed up and forgot to send the passport, so they offered to put it on a commercial flight today and deliver it in Brooklyn by 10:30 or 11 pm tonight. So all’s well. I slept 90 minutes on the red-eye so I took a nap this afternoon, and now I have a date with…uhm, a film at 6 pm.

Taken from a fifth-floor Airbnb rental at 515 West 48th, just off Tenth Avenue.

Snapped last night from a backyard patio on Sandy Cape Drive, Pacific Palisades, where I had dinner during a seven-hour stopover in Los Angeles after flying back from Telluride.

This week Sony will begin liberally screening Paul Greengrass‘s Captain Phillips (10.13), and not just for elite NY and LA press, I’m told, but also regional critics. Five weeks out that means one thing: Sony is very confident they have a winner. It also means they want the word-of-mouth circulating and building during the Toronto Film Festival and particularly during the lead-up to the film’s 9.27 New York Film Festival debut. Captain Phillips has been produced by Scott Rudin, Dana Brunetti and Michael De Luca. Pic is rated PG-13 and runs 2 hours and 14 minutes, or the same length as 12 Years A Slave.

Hollywood Reporter award-season columnist Scott Feinberg is reporting that A24 will be campaigning James Franco for Best Supporting Actor in Harmony Korine‘s Spring Breakers. The campaign “will pay homage to Franco’s character Alien and his extended boastful rant in the film about his cool property by using the slogan ‘CONSIDER THIS SH*T’ as he holds an Oscar statuette in each hand,” Feinberg writes.

On 8.13 I riffed on a relatively new fall-festival phenomenon — “the Oscar-contending, Telluride-only, Toronto-blowoff movie.” This referred to three Telluride Film Festival headliners — J.C. Chandor‘s All Is Lost, Joel and Ethan Coen‘s Inside Llewyn Davis and Alexander Payne‘s Nebraska — having bailed on Toronto, possibly because their producers felt that the Toronto clusterfuck factor (i.e., so many films, so little time) meant that their films might get overlooked in the shuffle. I wondered if this indicated a significant shift in thinking among award-season strategists. Is Toronto losing some of its lustre to the Venice, Telluride and New York Film Festivals, which happen right before and after Toronto?

Today Variety reviewer and Motion Picture Blog editor/essayist Joe Leydon, a longtime Toronto Film Festival veteran, shared some thoughts along these lines:

“Considering how many Toronto-bound films are premiering this year at Venice and Telluride, I wonder how long it will be before someone suggests that TIFF go back to calling itself the ‘Festival of Festivals,'” Leydon wrote. “Not that there would be anything wrong with that, you understand.

For some reason I love these photos of Blue Is The Warmest Color costar Lea Seydoux and Adele Exarchopoulos speaking with director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (Biutiful, the forthcoming Birdman) following a Saturday screening of Abdellatif Kechiche‘s landmark film at Telluride’s Werner Herzog cinema. (Not taken by me — as soon as I remember who shot these I’ll give due credit.)

I sometimes dance a bit when I feel good. A subtle kind of slow-roll thing. Low-key, hip-shakey, bop-shoo-woppy. Never on a dance floor, of course, but at a party, in a parking lot, in a checkout line…anywhere but in a fucking club. Why am I mentioning this? Because this is what Michael Fassbender was doing Saturday night at the 12 Years A Slave party in Telluride.

Or he did, at least, during…oh, the first 20 or 30 minutes when he was talking to his friends and colleagues. He seemed to be saying to himself (and to any perceptive person who was watching), “This is good, this party. I feel nice…uhm-hmm. I’m just gonna cut loose a little bit.” He was talking and listening and being the debonair adult, of course, but he was doin’ it besides. Like he was dancing to “All Shook Up.” And I was saying to myself, “This guy is cool because he dances whenever and wherever. Like me, he’s a free man in Paris. He doesn’t need a fucking dance floor.”

I was so in awe that I devolved into a fan mentality when I spoke to Fassbender 10 or 15 minutes later. For some reason I asked him where his character’s plantation was located and…fucking Christ, did I just ask Fassbender a question I could answer in 10 or 12 seconds by going on the IMDB? Stunned by my faux pas, I quickly said, “I mean, I know…kind of a dipshit question, right? I could get this info by going online.” And then Fassbender, to his immense and lasting credit, looked me in the eye and said without a smirk or the slightest tone of condescension, “Then why don’t you go online to get it?”

And he was right! Honesty blast! When I’ve said something asinine I know it right away and MF was straight enough to say, “Yeah, I agree with you!” I laughed (well, chortled) and recovered by sharing my feelings about 12 Years A Slave when I caught it the previous night at the Palm. And then we talked about the feelings everyone seemed to be having after it ended. And that was all right.

And then my dp friend Svetlana Cvetko (Inequality For All, Inside Job) stepped in and started speaking with him, and then maybe ten minutes later I sauntered over and said, “Michael, could I get a photo for my column?” And Fassbender said, “You know what, man? I’d rather not.” But not in a snide or dismissive way. It was almost a pleading thing. His eyes seemed to say, “Do you get this? It’s not you…I just don’t feel like it.” And I said, “That’s cool, man…no worries.” And we gave each other a little upper-arm, top-of the-shoulder reassurance pat and that was that.

I have to leave (and I really wish it weren’t so) by 9:15 or thereabouts in order to make a 12:30 flight from Durango to LAX. I’m missing the 9 am Salinger screening. There’s a huge aesthetic gulf between your film-festival journo-distributor-buyer elites (endless merriment for Glenn Kenny) and regular Joes & Janes with mainstream sensibilities. People like Nebraska and Labor Day, which I’m not so high on. And they seem to be cool or mezzo mezzo toward the films I love/worship — Inside Llewyn Davis, All Is Lost, 12 Years A Slave, etc. Everyone likes Gravity. I never saw Tim’s Vermeer although not for lack of trying. I meant to share a brief chat I had with Michael Fassbender at the 12 Years A Slave party — I’ll do that this afternoon. I finally uploaded the mp3 of my chat with Alfonso Cuaron — here it is.