Siri is a highly intelligent, HAL-like talking software inside the iPhone 4S. It not only understands sentences and phrases and commands but assesses and reports back to you, like a personal assistant. Will it have different voices? I’m not sure I want my personal Siri to sound like some middle-aged lady at the DMV. I’d rather talk to some guy who sounds like Pee Wee Herman. I’m probably going to have to repeat things to Siri, and I may sometimes lose my temper with it. “Yes, asshole…I just said that!”

Harkness Screens will be previewing a new Digital Screen Checker, a low-cost hand-held digital cinema device for accurately measuring foot lamberts, at ShowEast (10.24 through 10.27 in Miami). There’s a similar device being sold in England. I’d love to have one of these things at the ready for those times when I’ve noticed low screen-light levels, as I did on 9.25.

I saw the first half of Martin Scorsese‘s 208-minute George Harrison doc during the Telluride Film Festival, and was only somewhat impressed. It covered the first 23 or 24 years of Harrison’s life, or ’43 to ’69…and I felt I knew all that going in. But the second half, which I finally saw at a New York Film Festival screening, is highly nourishing and affecting and well worth anyone’s time.

Yes, even for the guys like LexG who are sick to death of boomer-age filmmakers and film executives endlessly making movies about their youth. It’s not unfair for them to feel this way because boomers have been commercially fetishizing their ’60s and ’70s glory days for a long time. But George Harrison: Living In The Material World, which debuts tonight on HBO, is still a very good film. Particularly Part Two.

Because it’s about a journey that anyone who’s done any living at all can relate to, and about a guy who lived a genuinely vibrant spiritual life, and who never self-polluted or self-destructed in the usual rock-star ways.

Well, that’s not true, is it? Harrison died of lung cancer that he attributed to his having been a heavy smoker from the mid ’50s to late ’80s. And he wasn’t exactly the perfect boyfriend or husband. (There were a few infidelities during his marriage to Olivia Harrison.) And he wasn’t the perfect spiritual man either, despite all the songs and talk about chanting and clarity and oneness with Krishna. He had his bacchanalian periods. And he did so with the wonderful luxury of having many, many millions in the bank. It’s not like Harrison was struggling through awful moments of doubt and pain in the Garden of Gethsemane.

But this journey is something to take and share.

The film is entirely worth seeing for a single sequence, in fact. One that’ll make you laugh out loud and break your heart a little. It’s a story that Ringo Starr tells about a chat he had with Harrison in Switzerland two or three months before his death in November ’01. I won’t explain any more than this.

In today’s N.Y. Times review critic Mike Hale noted that Scorsese and Harrison “were two questing minds, raised in Roman Catholic families, who were drawn to Asian philosophies and art and driven to stump for them in the West; two reserved but powerfully controlling and perfectionist artists; two men conscious of their roles as standards keepers and cultural influencers.” So there’s your personal element that exists beyond mere nostalgia and/or reliving the surge of one’s youth.

Scorsese’s doc has no title cards, no narration, no through-line interview as Bob Dylan: No Direction Home had. It just kind of glides along and swirls around and comes together, although I have to say that I found Part One a little slipshod and patch-worky at times. The editor is David Tedeschi, who also cut No Direction Home as well as Scorsese’s Public Speaking, the Fran Lebowitz doc, and Shine a Light, the 2008 Rolling Stones’ concert doc.

Part Two, as you might presume, is about Harrison’s solo career. It starts with the Beatles breakup, the making of All Things Must Pass, the 1971 Concert for Bangla Desh, etc. And then settles into the mid to late ’70s and ’80s, “Crackerbox Palace,” Handmade Films, “Dark Horse,” the Travelling Willburys, the stabbing incident and so on.

From my “Harrison of Liverpool” piece which ran on 7.17:

“Beatle lore-wise, Harrison was regarded early on as the solemn one, the deep spiritual cat (i.e., the last one to leave Maharishi Mahesh Yogi‘s ashram in Indian in late ’67) and to some extent the political commentator and satirist (the lyrics of “Piggies” and “Savoy Truffle“, ‘the Pope owns 51% of General Motors,’ etc.).

“Read this account of George and Patti Boyd Harrison’s brief August 1967 visit to San Francisco’s Haight-Ashubry district, which by that time was the pits.

“I also remember a story in an anonymous groupie tell-all book about a girl giving Harrison a blowjob at a party while he played the ukelele, and after it was over his getting up and saying ‘thanks, luv!’ and leaving the room without asking her name. Funny.

“Harrison died of lung cancer at age 58 on November 29, 2001, in Los Angeles. His Wiki bio says “he was cremated at Hollywood Forever Cemetery and his ashes were scattered in the Ganges River by his close family in a private ceremony according to Hindu tradition. He left almost 100 million pounds in his will.”

Update: Here’s a slam piece by Slate‘s Bill Wyman.

Fox Searchlight acquiring Steve McQueen‘s Shame meant that it would be out sometime in November or December, so yesterday’s FS announcement that the film, which costars Michael Fassbender and Carey Mulligan, will open is on 12.2.11 was…well, it was fine but it didn’t exactly quicken my pulse because I knew it was coming.

“Even with a relatively small amount of debt, decent health insurance, and a decent paying job, my family lives month to month. Treading water is the best anyone I know can seem to hope for. I believed I was voting for a president who would rein in Wall St. and reverse Bush’s aggressive foreign policies. What I got was more of the same and worse. I am the 99%.”

If you want to feel fairly good about your job and quality-of-life situation, even if you’re not doing as well as you’d like, spend 10 or 15 minutes reading We Are The 99 Percent. Trust me, you’ll feel very lucky and perhaps even blessed after doing so. This Occupy Wall Street-linked site tells you over and over that there are many, many people out there living lives that are impossible, agonizing…horrific.

All the young people dealing with crushing college-loan debt…awful. And all the people with beyond-debilitating health issues and pulverizing medical costs. How did they get so sick? How do five-year-olds get cancer? Who gets pregnant at age 21 with only part-time work and facing $80K in outstanding student loans? There are young women doing prostitution on the weekends to make ends meet. Life can be terrible.

Yes, life has always been crushing or gruesome for the people who aren’t smart or tough or savvy enough, or who damage themselves with bad food and/or addictions. But this site passes along a sense that many more people out there are having to deal with much harder burdens since the ’08 crash than before.

The bottom line for many Republicans and conservatives is that once they used to say “the world is for the few,” and now they’re saying “the world is for the very few…the 1%, that is. Sorry, U.S. citizens, but that’s the way it is, and we’re fighting tooth-and-nail to protect our security and pleasures and comforts even if it hurts or marginalizes the other 99%. Sorry but that’s Darwinism — we are fitter and sharper and better survivors than you. Things have gotten much tougher out there than ever before for the people who aren’t smart or healthy or sufficiently disciplined or clever or connected enough. We realize that. Fewer resources for more people, and the world is cracking under the strain. It’s getting to be a mad scramble and it’s not pretty but that’s life in the 21st Century. What do you want us to do? Give up our hard-earned wealth so the losers can have it a little bit easier? Life has always been unfair, and we didn’t make it this way. Well, okay, maybe we have but fuck it…we don’t care.”

I write a daily/hourly column about Hollywood and worthwhile movies and Oscar season shenanigans and my life on this beat. I’m not loaded but I do fairly well and the business — wwww.hollywood-elsewhere.com — continues to grow each year. My future is assured as long as I keep doing what I’ve been doing well for the last 20-odd years, particularly since I started writing online and working 14 or 15 hours daily. I’ve worked very hard to get to this place, and it wasn’t easy along the way but it’s really great now. I go to free movies and watch beautiful Blurays and attend lavish parties, and I travel around and go to Europe every May, and I’ve earned the respect and allegiance of a lot of good people. I live in an attractive, fragrant, well-maintained West Hollywood neighborhood. I have two great cats, and I drive an attractive beater and a scooter and a bicycle. I have a great life, all things considered.

But my two brilliant and healthy sons, aged 23 and 21, are looking at a tough situation right now. Very tough. My oldest is working for a cool company but he earns less than minimum wage, and he has to fork over $700 per month to pay back his $160K student loan. Unemployment among the under-25s is something like 20%, if not higher. That’s not good. And the three of us are among the 99%.

War Horse is a Steven Spielberg film, all right. Sound and fury, emotion on its sleeve, very handsome photography, first-rate actors conveying sensitivity and compassion. But beware of any shot of any young actress with a tear running down her cheek. Beware of dolly-in shots of handsome young farm lads. Beware of title cards that say “touched by kindness” and “hope survives.” Beware of French horny orchestral music that tries to melt you down.

I’ve been meaning to post this since yesterday afternoon. I know a lot of the HE regulars are going to slap this Luc Besson film around. It’s obviously a film about enshrining portraying Aung San Suu Kyi, a tough, progressive Burmese politician, as a martyr. Which she certainly was during her ten years of house arrest. There’s a reason I didn’t make a big effort to see this in Toronto. I don’t respond well to stories about keeping the faith despite oppression and punishment.

Cohen Media Group will open The Lady on 11.30.11.

In my 9.5 Telluride Film Festival review of Steve McQueen‘s Shame (which will have its NY Film Festival screening on Thursday morning) I called it “a prolonged analysis piece that’s entirely about a malignancy — sex addiction — affecting the main character, and nothing about any chance at transcendence or way into light of any kind. The sex scenes are grim and draining and even punishing in a presumably intentional way. [And] this is what an art film does — it just stands its ground and refuses to do anything you might want it to do.”

I felt all alone for a while with many if not most of the other critics who’d written about Shame from Telluride or Venice offering a fair amount of praise. And then came a brief critique two days ago from N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis‘s in which she called Shame “another example of British miserablism, if one that’s been transposed to New York and registers as a reconsideration of the late 1970s American cinema of sexual desperation (Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Hardcore, Cruising, etc.).” After this I didn’t feel so bad.

I suppose it’s fair to call Paddy Considine‘s Tyrannosaur (Strand, 11.18) another serving of miserable Limey lifestyles, given the general grimness of the story, particuarly as it affects Olivia Colman‘s character. But when all is said and done, Tyrannosaur has heart and humanity. It’s a much warmer and chummier film than ice-cold Shame, at least in the third act. So there’s that at least.

As I’m flying back to Los Angeles on 10.8, I won’t be seeing Sunday’s NYFF showings of Simon Curtis‘s My Week With Marilyn. The tweets will of course address question #1: is Michelle Williams‘ performance as Marilyn Monroe a Best Actress Oscar contender? On 8.15 I ran a quote from a credible fellow who had seen this Weinstein Co. release. “There is absolutely, positively no doubt that Williams is right alongside Meryl Streep and Glenn Close at the very front of the Best Actress race,” he said.

My Week With Marilyn is opening domestically on 11.4.

Two days ago the Guardian published a pro-Occupy Wall Street piece by Mark Ruffalo, who recently spent two days with the protestors. “99% of us have paid a dear price so that 1% could become the wealthiest people in the world,” he wrote toward the end. “It’s time to check ourselves, to see if we still have that small part that believes in the values that America promises. Do we still have a shred of our decency intact in the face of debasement?

“If you do, then now is the time to give that forgotten part a voice. That is what this movement is ultimately about: giving voice to decency and fairness.

“I invite anyone and all to participate in this people’s movement to regain your dignity and what you have worked for in this capitalist society. Each of us is of great value to the whole. Do not forget your greatness. Even when the world around you is telling you you are nothing. You have a voice. You want a better life for your children and the people you love. You live in a democracy. You belong, and you deserve a world that is fair and equal. You have a right to take your place and be heard.

“Show up at an Occupy Wall Street gathering in any major city in the US. Hit your social media outlets. Tweet it. Facebook it. Talk it up. It’s easy to do nothing, but your heart breaks a little more every time you do.”

Lars von Trier‘s Melancholia (Magnolia, on-demand 107, theatrical 11.11) screened last night at the New York Film Festival, and then the stars of the cast — Kirtsen Dunst, Charlotte Ginsbourg, Alexander Skarsgard — attended an after-party at the Stone Rose Lounge inside the Time Warner Center. It boiled down to free wine and beer and Deleon Tequila, and a sadistic deejay playing house music that put me in a bad mood and kept me there.

Melancholia star Kirsten Dunst during last night’s after-party at the Stone Rose Lounge.

After catching Melancholia at the Cannes Film Festival i called it “a morose, meditative in-and-outer that begins stunningly if not ecstatically and concludes…well, as you might expect a film about the end of the world to wrap itself up.

“Von Trier’s ensemble piece ‘isn’t about the end of the world but a state of mind,’ he said during the Cannes press conference. My thinking exactly. But it’s also a more striking thing for where it starts and what it attempts than how it plays.

“And yet I believe it’s the best…make that the gloomiest, most ambitious and craziest film Kirsten Dunst has ever starred in. Way bolder than Spotless Mind. It’s kind of La Notte-esque, now that I think about it. Dunst pretty much scowls all through Melancholia and does three nude scenes. What I really mean, I suppose, is that she’s never operated in such a dark, fleshy and grandiose realm.

“It’s basically just a stylishly nutso, intriguing, semi-bombastic ensemble piece about despair in the face of eventual ruination. You know…the kind of thing that most HE readers have in their heads each and every day.

Charlotte Gainsbourg.

“I felt elation only in the very beginning, and somewhat at the very end. But otherwise it mostly felt like a meditative slog. It’s not without its intrigues but it lacks tension and a through-line and a story, really, of any kind.

“After the stunning, tableau-like, slow-motion opening, Melancholia gets down to basic business. Situation, circumstance, character, mood.

“Justine (Dunst) is getting married to Michael (Skarsgard) and her control-freak sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) has orchestrated the wedding with husband Keifer Sutherland‘s money, and not the funds of Dunst’s father (John Hurt). Charlotte Rampling has a couple of scenes as Dunst’s blunt, cynical mom.

“But right after the wedding Justine slips into gloom-head nihilism and suddenly stops being attentive to Skarsgaard and starts meandering and moping around and fucking some guy (Brady Corbet) she barely knows near a golf course sandtrap.

“Did I mention that the Earth is apparently on some kind of collision course with a planet called Melancholia, which has recently emerged from behind the sun? And that no one turns on a TV news station throughout the whole film, and that Gainsbourgh goes online only once?

Alexander Skarsgard

“The movie is never ‘boring’ but only rarely gripping. It’s Von Trier, after all, but when all is said and done it’s basically a downhill swamp-trudge with tiny little pop-throughs from time to time.

“There’s an overhead tracking shot of two horseback riders galloping down a trail during a foggy morning that’s heartstoppingly beautiful. That plus the beginning I will never, ever forget.

“Death dance, death art…when worlds collide. Von Trier had a mildly intriguing idea here but didn’t know what to do with it, or he perhaps didn’t care to try. All he does is riff about how tradition and togetherness are over and very few of us care. My sense is that Von Trier experimented and jazz-riffed his way through most of the filming.

“All I know is that I feel the way Dunst’s Justine feels during most of the film, and I’m not dealing with the end of the world. Vaguely scared, unsettled…something’s coming.”

As talk persists that Woody Allen‘s universally loved Midnight in Paris will probably land a Best Picture Oscar nomination, there’s also no denying that Corey Stoll‘s hugely enjoyable, spot-on performance as young Ernest Hemingway is a Best Supporting Actor contender. Okay, maybe not up there with Max Von Sydow and Christopher Plummer, but definitely duking it out with Albert Brooks and Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Andy Serkis.

Corel Stoll in front of Luce (B’way at 69th) — Tuesday, 10.3, 2:05 pm.

Stoll is on-screen for maybe ten or twelve minutes in Midnight in Paris, and it doesn’t matter. He’s definitely the guy you remember for the sly humor and the authority and the wit and what feels like an almost eerie capturing of a legendary man’s man who had a thing for elegant, run-on sentences about being “real” and a worshipper of beauty and being courageous and solemn and separating the wheat from the chaff. Across the river and into the trees and away from the cocktail phonies.

Stoll and I did a one-hour sitdown yesterday at Luce on the Upper West Side. Here’s what was said.

Why do people decide that this or that performance is Oscar-worthy? Usually because the actor/actress has generated some kind of extra punch and pizazz within the confines of a character, and exuded a certain je ne sais quoi confidence and charisma and an aura that’s a little bit like candy. You “like” the performance and want the actor to stick around and keep adding his/her flavor to the room.

Stoll’s Hemingway is definitely one of these pop-throughs. Bewigged and moustachioed in Allen’s partly period film, he sounds like most of us imagine Hemingway would have sounded. He puts out the appropriately boozy, blustery, brawny quality that we’ve all read or heard about, and is simultaneously playing Hemingway for real and riffing on the legend — a pretty neat trick.. While’s he’s on-screen you’re saying “yeah, good stuff…more of this, please.”

As Ernest Hemingway in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris.

Yes, I too would like to see Stoll play young Hemingway in an HBO miniseries that starts with his World War I experience as an ambulance-driver in Italy and ends with the 1926 publication of “The Sun Also Rises.”

Born and raised on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the 35 year-old Stoll is no Hemingway in person. Not stuck on himself, I mean. He’s considerate, mild-mannered, unassuming and even-toned in conversation, and yet a straight-shooter. Say something that doesn’t seem right quite accurate and he’ll respond in a way that politely corrects.

I find this disparity fascinating. Some actors are commanding personalities with a kind of natural swaggering energy and macho aplomb and what-have-you, and others are like ultra-devoted priests of the cloth. Their interior energy is considerable, but they live to be unleashed by great characters and a general aura of make-believe. Alec Guinness was said to be like this, I once read, and so apparently is Stoll.

Stoll was believably brawny also as Detective Tomas “TJ” Jaruszalski in Law and Order: LA.

And he recently wrapped a role as Jeremy Renner‘s adversary in Tony Gilroy‘s Bourne Legacy, which will open on 8.3.12. The costars include Rachel Weisz, Edward Norton, Joan Allen, Scott Glenn and Oscar Isaac.

We got into this and that and whatever during our lunch. Shooting Midnight in Paris, how the Upper West Side has changed, where things might be for him in a few years, etc. It’s all here.

Stoll said something near the end of our chat about how Hemingway came along and wrote what he wrote at exactly the right time (i.e., the early to late 1920s), and that if he’d come along as a new-to-the-scene novelist ten years before or after it wouldn’t have worked as well for him, or perhaps not at all. That’s really what being an artist is about at the end of the day, isn’t it? Not just talent and dedication, but timing.