This looks and sounds half-decent. TIFF logline: “A powerhouse cast — Christopher Walken, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener and Mark Ivanir — brings vivid life to Yaron Zilberman‘s engrossing drama about an illustrious string quartet, whose 25th anniversary precipitates a tempestuous release of repressed feelings, long-held resentments and painful betrayals.” It screened today at 6 pm; the next TIFF showing is Wednesday, 9.12, at 5 pm.

Is this supposed to be Daniel Day Lewis Abraham Lincoln voice? Please, God…no! After the rich booming voices of Daniel Plainview and Bill the Butcher this is nothing — it sounds like a twangy Matthew Modine. No snap, no intrigue, not at all like Raymond Massey‘s (which Lincoln’s son Robert Todd Lincoln allegedly said was very much like his father’s). None of that piping high-pitched quality, no log-cabin Illinois flavor.

If this is how Lewis is going to sound, I’m appalled. I’m almost ready to say “forget it.” Update: It’s been asserted that the voice belong to some black actor named David Oyelowo. If so, relief!

I never wrote in my Place Beyond The Pines review that people who live in Schenedtady are flat-out “unattractive,” as the Times Union‘s Kristi Barlette wrote this morning. I said costars Eva Mendes and Rose Byrne are “too hot to live in Schenectady” — a key difference..

Boiled down, I said what any cab driver or club owner in any city will tell you — i.e., pick-of-the-litter types of either gender rarely choose to live in towns like Schenectady.

“Beauty almost always migrates to the big cities where power and the security lie, and in my experience the women who reside in blue-collar hell holes like Schenectady are far less attractive as a rule,” I wrote. Not unattractive per se, but not double grade-A either. “There’s a certain genetic look to the men and women of Upper New York State,” I wrote, “and they aren’t the kind of people who pose for magazine covers or star in reality shows.” And this is pretty much true — face it, rurals.

I brought two Macbook Pros with me to Toronto, and one of them has recently developed a charming habit of completely freezing at random — no keystrokes, no remedies, no saving your work…nothing. You have to power off with the button and then start all over again. Wonderful…I love it when this happens! What an emotion, what a feeling!

About a half hour ago I was in the middle of writing a riff on The Impossible (I always compose on Movable Type, which only auto-saves when it’s in the mood) and then… KLONNNG! YOU’RE DEAD! I couldn’t save anything so I did a visual capture with my iPhone camera — here it is. I have to start the day so this is the best I can do…eff it. I’ll transcribe and/or rewrite and format it properly later. What a grind, what stress, what frenzy!

Note: At the end of the first paragraoh I meant to say “…not only unmoving but uninvolving.”

I’ve always kind of vaguely hated the way Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan refuse to hit the same notes or at least try to adhere to a common melody in their Nashville Skyline duet of “Girl From The North Country.” The arrogance of these guys thinking, “Aaah, we’re good…whatever notes we hit and however we wind up phrasin’ is fine…it’s all good because we’re feelin’ it and sittin’ here together, all cool and settled and strummin’ on our guitars all humble-like.”

And they couldn’t occasionally hit the same note or share the same phrasing?

Despite all this I bought this song today because it’s become the new ear bug and I need to get rid of it. David O. Russell uses it in a quiet one-on-one scene in The Silver Linings Playbook, and I haven’t been able to shake this tune since the night before last.

Today is about Stuart Blumberg‘s Thanks For Sharing at 11 am, Billy Bob Thornton‘s Jayne Mansfield’s Car at 2 pm or thereabouts, and then, may the saints protect & God help us all, Terrence Malick‘s To The Wonder at 7 pm at the Princess of Wales.

I could see The Iceman at an 11:15 press & industry screening but I don’t wanna see it, see? Or as Humphrey Bogart used to say during his 1930s bad-guy phase, “See, mug?”

I’ve been trying to write stuff since 7:30 this morning but I had to walk four blocks this morning to a 24-hour market to buy garbage bags, and before the first screening I have to hit a nearby print and copy shop and print, sign and fax an insert order that can’t effing wait.

I feel like that Claude Rains line in Lawrence of Arabia: “On the whole I wish I’d stayed in Tunbridge Wells.” The reason I feel this way is mainly because of the Malick. The Malick plus having to file all the damn time on top of the movies I want to see always being scheduled in conflict with each other. Eff me. On top of which the place I’m staying in is starting to feel like a real pig sty, which is why I needed to to buy the garbage bags.

Life is a vale of troubles, and then you die.

Instinctively and intuitively, this photo of Florida pizza parlor owner and blood donator Scott Van Duzer lifting the First Dude off the floor convicned me that President Obama‘s reelection is in the bag. I saw the photo and grinned a bit and I kind of knew…okay? I shouldn’t say stuff like this. Fewer Obama supporters will vote.

Juan Antonio Bayona‘s The Impossible “delivers a visceral treatment of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, hampered only by the overwrought sentimentalism of the survival tale at its center. Until it slows down [the film] contains some of the most unsettling sequences in the history of the disaster movie genre…it never ceases to be a visual marvel. But] it suffers from the…problem of emphasizing a feel-good plot within the context of mass destruction.” — from Eric Kohn‘s 9.9 IIndiewire review. (I’ll post my own reactions tomorrow.)

Onstage at the Princess of Wales theatre on Sunday, 9.9 (l to r.): Impossible costars Tom Holland, Naomi Watts, Ewan McGregor, director Juan Antonio Bayona.

Bayona at Soho House after-party — Sunday, 9.9, 10:05 pm.

I have to leave for the big public premiere of Juan Antonio Bayona‘s The Impossible in a few minutes so I’m just madly posting photos and videos of the Silver Linings Playbook and Cloud Atlas press conferences, which happened late this morning and early this afternoon respectively. I’ve missed Cloud Atlas so far (I made a choice) and won’t catch up with it until Tuesday.

As someone who knew marketer Geoffrey Ammer somewhat (he took me to lunch a couple of times in the ’90s) and who liked his style, courtesy and professionalism, I’m very sorry to learn that he passed this morning from a heart attack at age 62. A Wrap story mentions that his dad also went early. If you’re living a reasonably healthy lifestyle longevity is always about genes. You’re either lucky or unlucky, and there’s not much you can do if you’re dealt a short hand. My condolences to Geoff’s family, friends, colleagues.