Late this morning I finally saw Neil Labute‘s Sexting, an eight-minute short that premiered at Sundance 2011. A typically sharp and blunt LaBute piece. It’s basically Julia Stiles as the proverbial girlfriend talking straight into the lens but actually or anxiously to the wife of the married guy she’s been having an affair with. The nature of their exchange is hinted at around the 25-second mark.

I took two Olympus digital recorders to yesterday’s Barry Lyndon discussion with Alec Baldwin and James Toback. I pushed the record button on the newer one and placed it on the stage just before the session began, and somehow it recorded nothing. I successfully recorded their discussion with an older device from my seat, but after a while I wondered what the point was of having two recordings so I turned it off.

Director-writer James Toback (l.), actor Alec Baldin during yesterday afternoon’s hour-long chat at Savannah’s Lucas theatre.

Baldwin was funny and brilliant and so was Toback, and there I was in the fourth row, technically blowing it all to hell. Here‘s the short miserable clip that I recorded with the older device. Oh, and I accidentally deleted my photos so I had to borrow these shots from another site.

Toback told a funny story that happened during the cutting of Spartacus, which Kubrick directed and Kirk Douglas produced and starred in. The story came from editor Robert Lawrence, who later edited Toback’s Fingers and Exposed.

Kubrick and Lawrence were editing the finale when Jean Simmons, escaping from Rome with the help of Peter Ustinov , is saying goodbye to Douglas, who’s dying on a cross. Kubrick told Lawrence he didn’t want to use what he felt was a grotesque close-up of Douglas. Lawrence said the shot wasn’t so bad and in any case Douglas will surely complain when he notices that his closeup is missing. “I don’t care what he says,” Kubrick said. “I’m the director…take it out.” They later showed the scene to Douglas, and his immediate comment was exactly what Lawrence had predicted — “Where’s my closeup?” Kubrick shrugged and said, “I don’t know, Kirk.” He then turned to Lawrence and said, “Where’s his close-up?”

Five Savannah Film Festival-visiting entertainment journalists — myself, Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone, Hollywood Reporter‘s Tim Appelo, critic Todd Gilchrist and CHUD’s Renn Brown — took part in a confession session this morning with about 25 Savannah film students. It happened in the plush lobby of the Marshall House, and it began, believe it or not, at 8:15 am. Here’s an mp3 file containing some of what was said.

I almost had words with a driver of a dark sedan during this morning’s bike ride through Savannah’s historic district. “Almost” is actually overstating it. I could have had words with this guy if I had a little less self-control.

I was stopping to take a picture on a small cobblestoned street, and a friend pulled her bike over to the opposite side. Along comes asshole in his dark sedan, and he doesn’t like that she’s taking up 18 to 24 inches of space in the right lane. He stops and waits for her to walk the bike entirely out his way before he proceeds. Except she doesn’t, meaning he’ll have to veer ever so lightly into the left lane to pass her. There was plenty of room, trust me.

So he starts in with the expressions. He scrunches his face up to express his contempt for her bike-riding skills. Then he does one of those head-wagging, “tsk-tsk” loud-exhale expressions that says “my God, this woman is beyond pathetic…the people I have to put up with…Jesus!,” etc.

The next “almost” happened in a touristy area near Congress Street. I raised my camera to take a picture of a couple of Clydesdale horses. A woman who was about to walk in front of my viewing path went “oh” and stopped and waited. She was being polite, of course, but I’ve said before that waiting for someone to snap a photo is a mark of middle-class cluelessness about photography. A good photographer has to roll with what happens, and sometimes you can get a better shot if somebody or something is half-obscuring what you’re shooting. You never know, and you’re better off not knowing. I never stop and wait for a picture to be taken…ever.

In any case, I said “thanks…it’s okay…it’s cool” to the woman. But I didn’t say it the right way. She took umbrage and asked if I had an attitude problem. I was just trying to get out of there but just to mess with her head I said “uh, yeah, I guess I do.” She stopped in her tracks. “What’s your problem?” People like you, I wanted to say. People who don’t understand that one of the tenets of mediocre photography is refusing to accept the natural unruliness of life and to just go with what happens when you’re shooting and stop trying to control everything. But instead I said “it’s cool, doesn’t matter” and turned away.

At 5 pm (95 minutes from now) Alec Baldwin and James Toback will be leading a post-screening discussion of Barry Lyndon (’75) at Savannah’s Lucas Theatre. The Stanley Kubrick film began showing around 2 pm. I waited in the green room before it began to do a chat with Toback (which I’d been told I was scheduled to do), but he wound up doing a longish TV interview and I was shunted aside. I didn’t care that much. I took a nap in an easy chair instead.

I went upstairs to see how Barry Lyndon looked, and was amazed and very pleased to see it projected at an aspect ratio that almost looked like 1.37 to 1 but was definitely boxier than 1.66 to 1. If any 16 x 9 or 1.85 crop fascists had been there they would have been furious. “Chop those tops and bottoms off!,” their mantra would go. “What’s with all the headroom? This is an outrage! Who’s the projectionist?”

The foot-lambert levels were insufficient, of course — it looked like 8 or 9 foot lamberts, definitely on the dark side — and the focus was hazy. This is what your typical theatrical projection of classic films is mostly like these days, for the most part. What you see is nowhere near as sharp and well-lighted and good-looking as the Bluray. Cheers all the same to the projectionist for staging a mini-rebellion and showing this classic film even a tad boxier than Kubrick himself intended.

I have to be honest and report that I felt under-nourished and bored during my second viewing of Michel Hazanavicius‘ The Artist, which opened the Savannah Film Festival last night. I felt mostly pleased and charmed when I saw it in Cannes five and a half months ago, but it’s too cloying and simplistic — too much of a peanut- gallery pleaser — to stand up to a second viewing.

Last May I called The Artist “a winning ‘success’ and at the same time a half-and-halfer — a film that delivers beautifully but also leaves you wanting in certain ways. It’s basically a very well-done curio — an experiment in reviving a bygone era and mood by way of silent-film expression.

“Is it a full-bodied motion picture with its own voice and voltage — a film that stands on its own? Not quite. But it’s a highly diverting, sometimes stirring thing to sit through, and the overall HE verdict is a thumbs-up.

“If you’re any kind of film buff it’ll work for you and then some, but I’m not so sure about the under-45 set. Monochrome plus no dialogue are obviously stoppers for the majority of filmgoers out there. Let’s face it — The Artist would have seemed like a quaint exercise if it had been made 35 or 40 years ago by Peter Bogdanovich.

“My basic impression is that The Artist is a very well-done curio — an experiment in reviving a bygone era and mood by way of silent-film expression.

“Is it a full-bodied motion picture with its own voice and voltage — a film that stands on its own? Not quite. But it’s a highly diverting, sometimes stirring thing to sit through, and the overall HE verdict is a thumbs-up.

“The Artist has been very carefully assembled, but chops-wise it’s not strictly a revisiting of silent-film era language. It visually plays like a kind of ersatz silent film — technically correct in some respects but with a 2011 sensibility in other ways. It has a jaunty, sometimes jokey tone in the beginning, and then it gradually shifts into drama and then melodrama. But it tries hard and does enough things right that the overall residue is one of satisfaction and ‘a job well done.’

“Shot in Los Angeles, the story of this French-financed production recalls the plots of Singin’ In The Rain and A Star Is Born with a little Sunset Boulevard thrown in.

“It takes place in Hollywood between 1927 and 1931 and focuses on George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) a Douglas Fairbanks-y silent film star who stubbornly refuses to adapt to the advent of motion-picture sound, and Peppy Miller (Berenice Bejo), a Janet Gaynor-like or young Joan Crawford-y actress whose career takes off with sound.

“Hazanavicius uses an entire passage of Bernard Herrmann‘s Vertigo score in the final act, when Valentin is at his lowest ebb.

“It’s interesting that Dujardin strongly resembles Fredric March, star of King Vidor‘s A Star Is Born (1937).

“John Goodman plays a studio chief, James Cromwell plays Valentin’s chauffeur, and Penelope Ann Miller plays Valentin’s unsatisfied wife.”

Incidentally: The Artist showed at the SCAD Trustees’ theatre (216 E. Broughton Street, a block away from the Marshall House). It’s been ten years since I last attended the Savannah Film Festival, and I’d forgotten that the screen is way too small for the size and length of this fairly sizable theatre. We’ve all become accustomed to a certain largeness in proportion to a viewing space, especially with the advent of super-sized flat screens. If you’re sitting in the rear of the SCAD theatre the screen looks like your father’s 27″ television. It’s not good enough. The festival fathers need to upgrade.

Low-key offbeat mood movies like The Rum Diary have always been tough sells, even if they’re relatively assured and “well made” as far as that goes. The odds are that half the critics are going to take a dump on them because they aren’t dramatic or wacko or plotty enough. But dry, rambling, mild-mannered half-comedies are okay in my book, and I was surprised to discover earlier this week that this long-delayed Bruce Robinson-Johnny Depp film is far from a burn.

Either you let it in or you don’t. It is what it is, and it ain’t half bad.

“No, wait…that’s not what we want!,” says the public. “We want madness, cojones or some kind of extremity. We want deep-river emotion or major nutso insanity or…whatever, something weird or new or jaw-dropping or pants-dropping.” Well, Rum Diary isn’t that. Which is why it’ll be gone from theatres fairly quickly.

If you’ve followed the tortured history of this film, shot in early ’09 and then found wanting by distributors and set out on a path of unloved loneliness, you would naturally expect it to play like some kind of calamity. That’s what I was mostly expecting. And when it turned out to be what it is, I felt mildly pleased. It’s an in-and-outer, mostly an inner, and reasonably adult and thoughtful and measured. It works according to its own modest design.

I for one am sick of the rules of doper or absurdist or extreme-misfortune-happening-to-idiots formulas, and I felt mildly amused and half-charmed by this dry, no-big-deal thing. I loved that it kept its laid-back cool and didn’t force a comedic agenda into the folds of its slight narrative. And the fact that the story, set in 1960 Puerto Rico, feels like it’s actually happening in 1960 and not a 2011 version of same.

Everyone knows the gist of the Hunter S. Thompson book by now. Depp’s Paul Kemp is Thompson as soft clay, uncertain of mission, a pre-60s guy in the sense that the ’60s began with the Kennedy assassination, pre-Hells Angels book, pre-Fear and Loathing, pre-Woody Creek, pre-almost everything.

Rum Diary is basically a Hunter S. Thompson origin saga — i.e., how the late gonzo writer came to find his soul and his voice at the beginning of his career.

Kemp arrives in San Juan to work for a failing daily newspaper, and becomes chummy with the paper’s boozy, slightly fungusy photographer (Michael Rispoli) and some kind of slimy, greasy newsroom oddball (Giovanni Ribisi) who hangs around and drinks. He meets Puerto Rico’s greedy capitalist cabal (led by Aaron Eckhart‘s “Sanderson’) and stupidly falls then falls in love with Chenault, Sanderson’s hottie-blondie girlfriend (Amber Heard).

What happens? Sanderson hires Kemp to write some kind of real-estate brochure that will presumably generate investor interest, but Kemp barely types a word before falling in love with Chenault, which naturally leads to eventual conflict with his employer. This and that happens (a lot of beautiful Puerto Rican scenery) including too much drinking, the watching of one of the Kennedy-Nixon debate on a TV belonging to a neighbor, and the taking of some kind of hallucinogen via eyedrops. But the basic offshoot is that Kemp realizes he despises slick opportunistic hustlers like Sanderson and will henceforth devote his life to giving them as little comfort and as much anguish as possible.

It goes without saying that it’s a pleasure to see Depp not wearing mascara or a pirate hat and being somewhat naturalistic, and at the same time inhabiting the same Hunter Thompson he played in Terry Gillliam‘s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (an unfulfilling film that was nowhere near as good as the book) only this time with hair.

I should have written this two or three or four days ago (I saw Rum Diary last Tuesday night) but it wouldn’t come.

Gas lighting “refers to creating of artificial light from combustion of a gaseous fuel, including hydrogen, methane, carbon monoxide, propane, butane, acetylene, ethylene or natural gas. Before electricity became sufficiently widespread and economical to allow for general public use, gas was the most popular means of lighting in cities and suburbs. Early gas lights had to be lit manually, but later gas lights were self-lighting.” — from Wikipage.

I’ve been saying for years that it’s cool with me if the Motion Picture Academy wants to give Doris Day a Lifetime Achievement Oscar. She was fairly big during the ’40s and huge in the ’50s and early ’60s, and what she stood for — prim, old-fashoned, pure-of-heart virtue in a perky persona — was unmissable in its time and essential for any film scholar or historian to acknowledge today.

But to me Day’s aversion to any suggestion of real sexuality always seemed a bit curious and even weird. I always thought of her as a kind of Singing Nun or Virginal Funny Girl. The hard truth is that in any kind of real-world context, Day played willful, persistent and exceedingly strange women, especially from the early ’50s on. Try watching her labored performance in Alfred Hitchcock‘s 1955 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much without wincing. She was so into the Doris Day persona that she reportedly turned down the Mrs. Robinson role in The Graduate

In any event, despite pleas and exhortations by Douglas McGrath and Nellie McKay and Rex Reed and Liz Smith and other Day fans, the Academy never went for the idea. But the Los Angeles Film Critics Association announced today that it has. And that’s fine. Day is 87 and I presume in good health. But why has the Academy never stepped up to the plate and paid appropriate respect?

Day was very, very good in Pillow Talk and Lover Come Back, opposite Rock Hudson. She was also commendable in Young Man With A Horn and Love Me or Leave Me, and I remember something true and steady about her performance in Young At Heart, in which she played the love interest of a dark-hearted Frank Sinatra.

And yet it’s hard to think of another living veteran of ’50s and ’60s cinema who is more of an icon for uptight middle-class Truman-and-Eisenhower-era values and zero sexuality. I know I suddenly liked Day a lot more when I heard that rumor about her having had an affair with Sly Stone, but that turned out to be bogus. Day did apparently have a fling with L.A. Dodgers base-stealer Maury Wills.

My problem with Day mainly boils down to her performance in The Man Who Knew Too Much. Here’s how I put it last year: “I love aspects of this 1956 thriller (the murder in the Marrakech marketplace, the assassination attempt in Albert Hall) but Day’s grating emotionalism makes it a very hard film to watch. She cries, shrieks, trembles, weeps. And when she isn’t losing it, she’s acting pretentiously coy and smug in that patented manner of a 1950s Stepford housewife. Or she’s singing ‘Que Sera Sera’ over and over again.”

Michael Cieply 10.28 piece about War Horse director Steven Spielberg, called “What Makes Spielberg Jump?”, will appear in Sunday’s print edition. The invisible subtitle is “Spielberg really wouldn’t mind winning an Oscar for War Horse (Best Picture or Best Director or both), and this is the opening salvo in an attempt to make that happen.”

Here’s the portion that got my attention: “For those who wonder what drives him, money is no object: The Los Angeles Business Journal recently listed Spielberg as this city’s eighth richest person, with a net worth estimated at $3.2 billion.”

Meaning that his liquid worth is…what? With those kind of holdings Spielberg could easily self-finance a $100 million movie and pay for the worldwide marketing without breaking a sweat…no?

“He’s often choosing [which films to do] for emotional reasons,” Spielberg’s longtime producing partner Kathy Kennedy tells Cieply. “I do think that plays a role in what he chooses to do.” As opposed to making a film because he needs the scratch?

Spielberg has always been a bottom-line commercial guy, and like most shrewd players he’s never sunk a nickel of his own money into a film he’s produced or directed. (Or at least not to my knowledge.) But he could play it like Francis Coppola if he wanted to. If he wanted to self-finance he has the absolute freedom to do any film he wants, any way he wants, starring anyone, and costing whatever. Any emotional subject that appeals to him, Spielberg can make a flick about it and get it released. No strings, no impediments.

So why is he directing Robopocalypse after Lincoln?