While offering introductions at the start of this afternoon’s Cloud Atlas press conference, the moderator mentioned that today — September 9th — is costar Hugh Grant‘s birthday. Without skipping a beat Tom Hanks went right into the birthday song and the whole room joined in.

Everyone, it seems, except for one off-in-the-corner sourpuss agrees with me about The Silver Lining’s Playbook being a knockout and a likely awards contender. It’s an awfully nice feeling when everyone jumps in and says, “Yup, what you wrote last night was right on the money.” And it’s a terrible feeling when the reverse happens. Do you know how you can tell when a movie is really working during a showing? During the quiet, intimate scenes you can sense the concentration — the entire theatre is dead quiet except for the dialogue. You could hear a pin drop.

I don’t want to be crabby but Deadline‘s Pete Hammond tapped out the day’s oddest comment when he wrote in the middle of a whoop-dee-doo, here-comes-another-Oscar-contender piece that “the film has a certain charm.” That’s like saying a rainshower delivers a certain amount of moisture.

Eric Kohn‘s Indiewire review is an impassioned a-minus. This Oscar potential piece by L.A. Times columnist Steven Zeitchik is cautious but accurate. My favorite rave so far was written by Indiewire‘s Kevin Jagernauth — here are excerpts:

“While the film’s tone will find many making comparisons to Russell’s Flirting With Disaster — and indeed, it has that film’s energy, though it’s not quite as zany — the helmer imbues it with an even bigger heart thanThe Fighter, creating a picture that while frequently laugh out loud hilarious, has very real emotional stakes. Russell wisely never overplays that latter card, tending to side with comedy over drama more often than not, but when those notes do come to the fore, the character work has been so well done, that they’re honest without being sentimentalized.

“But none of this works without some carefully developed, and perfectly pitched performances from the leads, and Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence both arguably give career best, awards-worthy performances. We’ve frankly never seen Cooper in a role like this, one that requires him to not only to carry the film, but to play a nuanced character who is in big in personality, but also tremendously vulnerable. He’s also outrageously funny.

“Lawrence may be an even bigger surprise to many as Tiffany, a young woman who is sexy, tough and also easily bruised, who not only has to manage Pat’s unpredictable nature, but also keep herself on an even keel to stop from sliding into self destructive tendencies. And the actress simply nails it, and one particular showdown with De Niro is awards-reel ready, and earned deserved applause as well from the TIFF press audience.

“Silver Linings isn’t a movie about mental illness so much as it about the struggle many can identify with, in trying to find someone who can accept us for all of our quirks and flaws, big and small. [It] isn’t the deepest movie you’ll see this year, and ultimately doesn’t say anything new about how men and women relate. But Russell’s film says it in a manner that is a true joy to watch…[it] retains a looseness while never losing track of where the characters and story need to go.

“Yes, the marketing presents it as a big broad comedy — and it certainly is — but it’s also a unique and involving tale of two outsiders who together find a way to get on with life after it has dealt them some bad hands. And the silver lining is a film that is worth every satisfying minute you spend with it.”

I made a choice last night to see Silver Linings Playbook rather than the 172-minute Cloud Atlas, as they were more or less screening against each other, and to judge from reviews so far it seems that I went with the more satisfying film. But I love the Cloud Atlas review by Variety‘s Peter Debruge, and this portion in particular:

“An intense three-hour mental workout rewarded with a big emotional payoff, “Cloud Atlas” suggests that all human experience is connected in the pursuit of freedom, art and love. As inventive narratives go, there’s outside the box, and then there’s pioneering another dimension entirely, and this massive, independently financed collaboration among Tom Tykwer and Wachowski siblings Lana and Andy courageously attempts the latter, interlacing six seemingly unrelated stories in such a way that parallels erupt like cherry bombs.”

And this: “No less exciting is the way Cloud Atlas challenges its actors to portray characters outside their race or gender. [Costar] Hugo Weaving plays villains in nearly every age, ranging from a heartless Korean consumerist to a Nurse Ratched-like ward master. Indeed, the filmmakers put the lie to the notion that casting — an inherently discriminatory art — cannot be adapted to a more enlightened standard of performance over mere appearance, reminding us why the craft is rightfully called ‘acting.'”

Roughly six hours ago I went into David O. Russell‘s The Silver Linings Playbook (Weinstein Co., 11.21) thinking “I love Russell but the trailer made it look a little schizzy and grating…here’s hoping but I don’t know.” I came out two hours later going “holy shit, this is one of the fastest, smartest and most satisfying love stories I’ve ever seen. Wow!…didn’t see it coming.” But what a kick when it happens.

Belle of the ball, surrounded by well-wishers, etc.: Jennifer Lawrence at Soho House after-party for The Silver Linings Playbook — Saturday, 9.8, 10:55 pm.

Serious romcom fans allegedly like stupid and sappy, so maybe the girly-girls who like Kate Hudson movies will hold back just a bit because Silver Linings Playbook is too smart and probing and raggedy-jaggedy, but I’ll be astonished if it doesn’t make at least $100 million.

Nobody knows who’s going to win anything at this stage, but you can count on the following for sure. One, it’s a lock for a Best Picture nomination (and is way more promising in this regard than Argo, Sasha Stone!), Russell is a likely nominee for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay, Jennifer Lawrence is a cast-iron lock for Best Actress, Bradley Cooper delivers the richest and most naturalistic performance of his career and may be in line for a Best Actor nom, Robert DeNiro gives his most touchingly emotional performance since you-tell-me and is almost certain to be nominated for Best Supporting Actor, and….I’ve said this already, right?…the film is going to make money hand over fist.

Should I take two or three steps back and calm down? Maybe I should. Maybe I should take a Xanax. But I know what I saw and what I felt, and I felt the room, man.

And I’m telling you the energy pouring out of Roy Thomson Hall was ecstatic. Everyone knew they’d just seen some kind of romantic home run — something touching and original and kind of aggressively amazing. Santa Barbara Film Festival chief Roger Durling and I were walking toward the Soho House after-party and we couldn’t stop talking about what a surprise it was all around. I must have said “wow!” five or six times.

“Jennifer Lawrence, man…she’s so amazing! She’s like Shirley MacLaine in The Apartment or…who else, Cher in Moonstruck, right? Only better. She owns the second half of this film. I think she’s gonna win, right? Who’s gonna beat her?”

Silver Linings Playbook director-writer David O. Russell.

Set in a Philadelphia suburb and based on Matthew Quick’s novel, it’s about two manic nutcases who’ve taken huge emotional hits and ingested their share of meds (Cooper, Lawrence) who gradually fall for each other, and embark on a path fraught with mistrust and anger, but leading ultimately to healing and happiness. And it’s also about their families and football and gambling and dancing and all kinds of ins and outs.

It’s fast and snappy like His Girl Friday and a mad whirl, all right, but one that wraps it all up at the end with humor and wholeness and happiness and even a kiss. And it works. It’s a surprise that it all comes together as well as it does, but it does. Really.

Calling The Silver Linings Playbook a romantic mental-health dramedy doesn’t do it justice, but that’s at least part of the deal. It’s not a stretch to say that it delivers on the level of Moonstruck, When Harry Met Sally and The Apartment. I know, I know — I’m harming it by over-praising it, but it’s one of those very rare romantic films that hits the fastball hard and strong….thwack!…out of the park. But it doesn’t really start paying off until the second half, and really the last third. And the trailer barely hints at what’s in store.

I liked Silver Linings so much that I’m going back to see it again tomorrow morning at 8:45 am.

Silver Linings Playbook star Bradley Cooper, Harvey Weinstein at after-party.

(l. to r.) Santa Barbara Film Festival director Roger Durling, Weinstein Co.’s Dani Weinstein, L.A. Times film guy Glenn Whipp.

Russell chatting with L.A.Times columnist Steven Zeitchik.

The people behind Pieta, the South Korean film that has won the Venice Foim Festival’s Golden Lion, must feel dispirited in view of reports that the jury, led by Michael Mann, intended to give the prize to The Master but changed their minds in order to hand out a critics award plus acting awards to Joaquin Phoenix and Phillip Seymour Hoffman.

As I tweeted last night, The Master is “a bear,” adding that “we are ALL bears!” And a lion too, at least for a while.

I flinched this morning when I read a riff by Deadline‘s Pete Hammond that called Joe Wright‘s Anna Karenina “risky” and “a roll of the dice.” Those are code terms that mean “beware, 62 year-old Academy members…you may not like this exciting new adaptation of Leo Tolstoy‘s classic tragedy because it doesn’t traffic in typical historical realism and therefore you and your friends might have a difficult time with it.”

Keira Knightley in Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina.

I despise that way of absorbing and processing films.

Wright’s decision to present Anna Karenina as a “ballet with words” is the kind of outside-the-box manuever that true cinema lovers live for. God, please let me live in a world in which a brilliant director will at least occasionally be daring or different or nervy enough to try something like Wright’s Karenina, and God protect me from a movie-watching realm in which films like Karenina and guys like Wright are never seen or heard from.

The innovation and spirit that pumped life and blood and greatness into Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger‘s The Red Shoes and into the better films of Ken Russell is the same that animates and energizes Anna Karenina, and I despise the fuddy-duddy mindset that would look at this film and go, “Uh-oh…might be dicey! Feels like a risk!”

Derek Cianfrance‘s The Place Beyond The Pines is basically an upstate New York crime story about fathers and sons. It’s also about cigarettes and bank hold-ups and motorcycles and travelling carnivals and nobody having enough money and anger and bullheadedness and the general malaise that comes from living in the pure hell and suffocation of Schenectady and those Siberian environs…I’ve been up there and it’s awful so don’t tell me.

It’s also about men and their lame cock-of-the-walk issues in Cianfranceville, or the Land of the Constant Macho Strut and the Eternally Burning Cigarette, and if you can swallow or suck this in, fine…but I couldn’t.

Guys like Movieline‘s Frank DiGiacomo and Variety‘s Jeff Sneider were having kittens over this movie last night on Twitter, and I was like “what?”

Boiled down, Pines is about the conflicted, problematic, sociopathic or otherwise questionable tendencies of two fathers (Ryan Gosling, Bradley Cooper) and how their sons (Dane DeHaan and Emory Cohen, respectively) are all but doomed to inherit and melodramatically carry on that legacy and that burden, so finally and irrevocably that their mothers (respectively played by Eva Mendes and Rose Byrne) might as well be living-room furniture, and the influence of schools, community values and/or stepfathers matter not.

If you can roll with this world-of-Cianfrance view — i.e., wives and mothers are good for sex and breeding and cleaning and making meals and running errands and occasional guilt-tripping but when it comes to the issue of a son’s character and destiny, it’s all about dad — you might be able to roll with The Place Beyond The Pines. But I wasn’t able to. I respect Cianfrance’s ambition in telling an epic, three-act, multi-generational tale that spans 15-plus years, but I don’t respect or believe what he’s selling.

Except for the bank-robbing and road-chase sequences I didn’t believe a single moment in this film. I couldn’t buy any of it. Okay, I bought some of it but only in fits and starts.

You can’t have Gosling play a simple-dick man of few words who entertains audiences with his talent as a motorcycle rider and then turns to bank-robbing on the side — that’s way too close to his stunt-driving, getaway-car character in Drive.

(l. to r.) De Haan, Cooper, Mendes, Gosling and Cianfrance before last night’s screening.

Plus I don’t respond well to movies with female-voiced choral music (i.e., a caring, all-seeing God is watching over us) on the soundtrack plus other musical implications of doom and heavyosity.

Plus I hate movies about blue-collar knockabouts and greasy low-lifes and teenage louts who constantly smoke cigarettes. The more a character smokes cigarettes the dumber and more doomed and less engaging he or she is — that’s the rule. If you’re writing or directing a film and you want the audience to believe that a character is an all-but-completely worthless scoundrel or sociopath whom they should not care shit about, have that character smoke cigarettes in every damn scene.

The principal theme of The Place Beyond The Pines is the following: “Dads Are Everything and Mothers Don’t Matter, but Cigarettes Sure Run A Close Second!”

In short, I thought the movie was unreal, oppressive, dramatically forced bullshit, although it receives a shot in the arm from Dane DeHaan (In Treatment), who looks like a mixed reincarnation of Leonardo DiCaprio and Benicio del Toro as they were in the mid ’90s, although he’s a lot shorter (5’7″).

I also felt that Mendes and Byrne are too hot to live in Schenectady. Beauty almost always migrates to the big cities where the 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. There’s a certain genetic look to the men and women of Upper New York State, and they aren’t the kind of people who pose for magazine covers or star in reality shows.

Read this classic paragraph from Indiewire‘s Kevin Jagernauth: “With The Place Beyond The Pines Derek Cianfrance has now placed himself in the canon of great, contemporary American filmmakers like James Gray, Paul Thomas Anderson and the Coen brothers. This is a film that desires to say something about how we relate to each other, and how the often overlooked consequences of our actions can refract down avenues we could never expect. [It’s a] brilliant, towering picture [and] a cinematic accomplishment of extraordinary grace and insight.” Amazing! Planet Neptune!

It’s going on 9 am and I should have awoken two hours ago. I had three alarms set on two devices, and in my dissolute slumber I blew them all off. That means the body was in dire need and insisted, and you just have to accept this when it happens. And I didn’t even bang out a reaction to Derek Cianfrance‘s The Place Beyond The Pines, which I saw last night at 6 pm.

9:50 am update: For the sin of missing the early morning screenings (there were three worth catching) and because there’s nothing reallly showing at noon or thereabouts I’m either wide open or flatlining (depending on how you look at it) until the 3:30 pm public screening of Martin McDonagh ‘s Seven Psychopaths, and then comes an hour’s worth of filing until the 6:30 pm Roy Thomson Hall screening of David O. Russell‘s The Silver Linings Playbook (and I hate the RTH acoustics — way too echo-y). And that’s all — two films for Saturday. Slacker.

Tonight’s public screening of The Master began almost an entire friggin’ hour later than scheduled — just about 10 pm. Here are the tweets I managed to punch out as I walked back to the place. It damn well ought to be a lock for a Best Picture nomination but you never know about those 62 year-old Academy fuddy-duddies. Joaquin Phoenix is a guaranteed lock for Best Actor; ditto “Philly” Seymour Hoffman for Best Supporting Actor.

What a movie, what a meal, what a sumo wrestling match…it’s like being run over by a truck going 15 miles an hour! Favorite external tweet from Ben Kenigsberg: “Uh, yeah. Those rules about how movies are supposed to work? I think someone threw those out, did something new.”

Tweet #1: There can be NO ultimate, clean & final understanding of The Master…ever. But it is absolutely vivid, penetrating, world-class filmmaking.

Tweet #2: The Master is about wanting to break through, needing to break through, longing to break through…and finally saying “fuck it, I gotta be me.”

Tweet #3: The Master is about the proverbial search, yes, but you’d also better believe it’s based upon the early days of Scientology, Scientology and…uhm, oh, yes, FUCKING SCIENTOLOGY.

Tweet #4: Paul Thomas Anderson told Joaquin Phoenix, “I need you to be a serpent, an alien, a hee-hee-hee-hee creep, a wormy masturbator, intense, volatile, a primal reptile, odd, beastly. In short, never entirely or simply human. I need you to be “interesting” in the Stanley Kubrick sense of that term.

Tweet #5: The Master ensnares and penetrates… It gets you off if you can be gotten off by the magic of sheer, howling, balls-to-the-wall filmmaking. But NO ONE will ever be soothed or placated by it, and NO ONE will ever “understand” it or parse it or break it down into rhyming prose.

Tweet #6: The Master rips its shirt open and shouts at the audience, “I am a bear! We are ALL bears! And you will not tame me! Accept me as I am or go away and hide in your little hole.”

Tweet #7: The Master is not, repeat NOT, definitely fucking NOT a “date movie”…unless, you know, you’re going out with someone like Maya Rudolph.

My “agonizing reappraisal” led to a decision to see Derek Cianfrance‘s The Place Beyond The Pines at…well, not 6 pm as it’s now 6:09 pm, but soon. And then grim up, brush my teeth, splash water in my face and see The Master at 9 pm — both inside the storied Princess of Wales theatre, in which I’m now sitting.

An hour ago I spoke to the seriously hardcore Joe Wright, director of the form-breaking Anna Karenina, at Toronto’s Park Hyatt. I haven’t time to tap out a piece, but rather than describe Karenina as “a musical without songs,” as I put it, Wright called it something closer to “a ballet with words.” He also felt that the influence of Powell-Pressberger (particularly The Red Shoes) was stronger than that of Ken Russell, an association I thought of immediately when I saw the film yesterday afternoon.

Anna Karenina director Joe Wright — Park Hyatt, 14th floor, 9.7, 1:50 pm.