Vocal fry murmur among 25-and-under actresses has become so pronounced and consistent and increasingly hard to understand that I brace myself whenever a younger actress pops up in a film or TV drama. Will I be able to understand her at least partly or will I be leaning forward and cupping my ears and wondering what I missed? And don’t say it’s me — VFM is a completely recognized and routinely-analyzed epidemic. It’s been implanted in younger women along with uptalk, and it’s the responsibility of the director to recognize that they become all but indecipherable if they sink too deeply into their vocal murmur, and that they have to be told, “I realize that you’re being natural and real, but you have to figure some way to do that and be understood by people who’re accustomed to greater degrees of vocal clarity.”

It’s not just actresses. Vocal fry is everywhere, and it’s alienating or pissing people off in all walks of life. Here’s an 8.12.14 Business Insider piece that says vocal-fry women are hurting their chances of getting hired and/or advancing. Second graph: “Vocal fry involves dropping one’s voice to the lowest register, causing the vocal chords to flutter, which creates a creaking sound.”

Shailene Woodley was bugging the shit out of me last night as I watched Gregg Araki‘s White Bird in a Blizzard (Magnolia, 10.24). Sometimes I was able to hear her words and other times she would say “uhm…duhcantuhfaylee” or “muhrduhraffah” or “defayzmoreuhmnet.” It depends on how intimate and low-down the setting is. If she’s angry or agitated Woodley is fine (“Why are you doing this? Thank you for, like, totally embarassing me in front of my friends!”). But if she’s laid-back and serene and speaking quietly to a boyfriend on a couch or in a car, forget it. I’d say that her VFM obscures between 25% to 33% of her dialogue in this film.

Woodley has probably decided that enunciating is anathema to expressing her core emotions, and she’s probably told herself, “Marlon Brando was given shit for mumbling and slurring when he was young but it never hurt him any.” That’s actually bullshit. There’s not a single line that’s hard to decipher in any early Brando film. By any case Brando’s mumbling (in what, A Streetcar Named Desire?) pales next to vocal fry.

HE’s last Toronto Film Festival priority slate (posted on 8.12) had 26 hard picks, 30 if you want to be liberal about it and 33 if you really want to bend over backwards. Today the last few titles were announced, and one of them is a keeper — Vincent Melfi‘s St. Vincent with Bill Murray portraying a stonier, less-well-off version of himself, and costarring Melissa McCarthy, Naomi Watts, Chris O’Dowd, Jaeden Lieberher.

The Compson family in James Franco’s The Sound and the Fury, one of the just-announced additions to the 2014 Toronto Film Festival.

I very much want to see Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi‘s The 50 Year Argument, which HBO will debut on 9.29…but how necessary-to-see alongside everything else? Should I put the New York Review of Books on hold until the HBO airing? Or possibly catch it at the NYFF? Krzysztof Zanussi‘s Foreign Body and Raoul Peck‘s Murder in Pacot sound like near-essentials. Okay, priorities. Okay, films I’d like to see if the schedule allows.

Forget Nuri Bilge Ceylan‘s extra-long, time-hogging, schedule-killing Winter Sleep, which I resent anyway because the Cannes jury gave it the Palme d’Or while nickle-and-diming Leviathan with a Best Screenplay award. I’ll see Sleep in Los Angeles when I have the time to spare and not before. If it was screening here before Toronto I’d see it in a heartbeat. Ceylan is a master of his realm and a world-class auteur, but no way am I surrendering 196 minutes to any one film during the Toronto Film Festival.

This is where it is now, what we’ve come to. Our hearts, minds and souls thrive in text messaging or not at all. Whatever you might offer verbally these days is strictly follow-up, explanation and elaboration. If it all works out it leads to touch and warmth, of course, but that’s across the river and into the trees. Otherwise the screen rules. Say it with feeling and conviction, open up and let it in…but we live on and more essentially within our screens. I sure do, I can tell you. And happily, for the most part. But what would Ernest Hemingway or Jack London say?

Which reminds me that I’m pissed that the bigger of the forthcoming Apple 6 phones (what is it, the 5.5 inch?) may be delayed until early ’15. I’m not springing for the 4.7 inch version. No half measures.

What follows is a rash, imprecise, certainly unfair impression. I’ve developed this vague idea that Chaz Ebert‘s rogerebert.com has a general inclination to go easy, and that the critics who bang out reviews and essays for the site are…well, not necessarily inclined to err on the side of friendliness but they certainly have this in the back of their minds. I think the site reflects Chaz’s nature to some extent, and her understandable interest in keeping things on an even keel. I especially expect kindness from Matt Zoller Seitz, whom I used to think of as this cool New York guy but whom I now regard as this gentle, kindly papa bear figure. I’ve admired and respected MZS for a long time but since he’s been with the Ebert site I see him as Mr. Greenjeans — a first-rate writer and top-notch critic who will always radiate a certain alpha vibe.

I’m not saying that the entire Rogerebert.com crew (Christy Lemire, Glenn Kenny, Simon Abrams, Godfrey Cheshire, Susan Wloszczyna, etc.) is committed to butter not melting in their mouths, but it seems this way (emphasis on the “s” word). Like I said, what I’m saying lacks precision and exactitude. Of course the site is not all about turning the other cheek. Of course it’s staffed by first-raters. But when I think of rogerebert.com, I think of a bunch of people who are not just smart and gifted but nice. Does the site have one asshole, one snarly snapdragon who doesn’t give a shit? They could use one, let me tell you. Am I the only one sensing this ?

Paramount will pop Jason Reitman‘s Men, Women & Children limited on 10.3 or about…what, three weeks after it plays at the Toronto Film Festival? Wide break on 10.17. The news was broken by In Contention‘s Kris Tapley. Teens, oddball parents, infidelity, online porn, icky impulses, maybe a stray predator or two. Directed, produced by Reitman. Based on a darkish book by the somewhat libidinal-minded Chad Kultgen. Cowritten by Reitman and Erin Cressida Wilson. Adam Sandler, Rosemarie DeWitt, Ansel Elgort, Jennifer Garner, Judy Greer, J.K. Simmons, Dennis Haysbert. I’ll be watching for comparisons to Henry Alex Rubin‘s Disconnect, which dealt with similar material.

The trailer pops tomorrow but where’s the poster? Where are the stills?

IMDB plant review: “I recently attended a screening for Men, Women & Children and I was impressed at how well put together the film is. The performances were all fantastic, and the music and atmosphere blended in nicely. The movie itself is very ‘true to life’ and I’m sure many folks would relate to the situations that take place. Sandler gave one of his greatest performances. Reitman was in attendance at the screening. Great acting, great story, nicely directed.”

I just happened to re-read my initial Lincoln review, which I posted on 11.8.12. I have a reputation of being a knee-jerk Spielberg hater, yes, but what I said here was fairly perceptive and on-point, I think. Measured, contained, judicious. I didn’t just crap all over it. Yes, I am very, very proud of having been part of the team that prevented…okay, that hit this film with enough bee-bee pellets so that enough Academy members felt discouraged from giving it the Best Picture Oscar. But I wrote about it with an even hand, I think. I said what I felt I had to say in just the right way. Final sentence: “The bottom line? Lincoln is a good film, deserving of respect and worth seeing, but it happens at an emotional distance and feels like an educational slog.”

In late ’09 I posted a tally of the 42 Best Films of the First Decade of the 21st Century. A little more than four months from now we’ll be at the halfway mark of the second decade — 2010 through 2014 or five years. Obviously I should wait until late December but here’s a temporary list of the best so far, and then I’ll update between Christmas and New Year’s Eve….fair enough? Doing a decade or half-decade sum-up requires harshness. You throw out everything except the real dead-to-rights bell-ringers. Every year people put certain films on their Ten-best lists because they feel they should (peer pressure, ad pressure, political correctness). Two or three years later those “should” choices go right out the window.

So far the 2010 to 2014 list includes 35 films. Some of these will have to get chopped by year’s end. The five best of the last four years and eight months (in this order & including not-yet–opened festival viewings): Tie between The Wolf of Wall Street and The Social Network, followed by Leviathan, Zero Dark Thirty, A Separation.

Best of 2010 (in this order): The Social Network, The Fighter, Black Swan, Inside Job, Let Me In, A Prophet, Animal Kingdom, Rabbit Hole, The Tillman Story, Winter’s Bone (10). Best of 2011 (ditto): A Separation, Moneyball, Drive, Contagion, X-Men: First Class, Attack the Block (6). Best of 2012: Zero Dark Thirty, Amour, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Barbara, The Grey, Moonrise Kingdom (6). Best of 2013: The Wolf of Wall Street, 12 Years A Slave, Inside Llewyn Davis, Her, Dallas Buyers Club, Before Midnight, The Past, Frances Ha (8). Best of 2014: Leviathan, Locke, Wild Tales, Ida, The Grand Budapest Hotel (5).

42 Best of the First Decade (’00 to ’09): Zodiac, Memento, Traffic, Amores perros, United 93, Children of Men, Adaptation, City of God, The Pianist, The Lives of Others, Sexy Beast, Avatar, There Will Be Blood, Michael Clayton, Almost Famous (the “Untitled” DVD director’s cut), 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Collateral, Dancer in the Dark, A Serious Man, Girlfight, The Departed, Babel, Ghost World, In the Bedroom, Talk to Her, Bloody Sunday, No Country For Old Men, The Quiet American, Whale Rider, Road to Perdition, Open Range, Touching the Void, Maria Full of Grace, Up In The Air, The Hurt Locker, Million Dollar Baby, The Motorcycle Diaries, An Education, Man on Wire, Revolutionary Road, Che and Volver.

The Film Before The Film, created by Nora Thoes and Damian Perez, Berlin-based students at the BTK University of Applied Sciences, and running 9 minutes plus 2 and 1/2 minutes of end credits, covers the evolution of main-title sequences. Nothing stunning but a solid comprehensive job. No mention of Saul Bass‘s Ocean’s 11 titles sequence? I’ve always hated those laser blue titles used for the Salkind’s ’78 Superman…too slow, repetitive and show-offy. (Posted this morning by Slashfilm‘s Peter Sciretta.)

I never liked school or submitting to any kind of group dynamic. So I avoided Alcoholics Anonymous when I gave up the hard stuff (particularly my nightly doses of vodka and pink lemonade) in ’96, and I never did AA after I gave up wine (i.e. my beloved Pinot Grigio) and the occasional beer in March 2012. If I had a Bible it was Pete Hamill‘s “A Drinking Life” — lone wolf, cold turkey, do it yourself, my action and not “God’s,” etc. Sobriety has been pretty wonderful for the last 30 months and has ushered in unexpected clarity and stability in many areas of my life, but attending a few Al-Anon meetings in Santa Monica back in ’07 and ’08 (at the behest of a girlfriend) reminded me that I wasn’t born to follow.

But last Friday I was talking to a sober filmmaker about sobriety, and I was reminded that opening up and talking about the welcome changes always ushers in good feelings. So before I knew it I was asking him about attending a meeting somewhere. He thought I might enjoy it because of the beautiful, eccentric women that attend a particular meeting at Cedars Sinai on Sunday evenings. (“If you’re looking for a love at an AA meeting, the odds are good but the goods are odd,” is how he put it.) He turned me on to a sober friend who attends the Cedars Sinai gathering. So I talked to the friend and he gave me the particulars and said he’d save me a seat. I showed up just in time at 6:59 pm. I stood in the back for the most part and sat on a garbage can for about 20 minutes. I never found the sober guy.

A friend talked me into attending the U.S. premiere of Neil Norman‘s Pushin’ Too Hard, a doc about the mid ’60s SoCal rockers The Seeds, at the Egyptian last Saturday night. Yeah, I know…who? The Seeds formed in ’65, put out only one serious Top-40 hit (“Pushin’ Too Hard“) in ’66, and released three medium-selling L.A.-area singles (“Can’t Seem To Make You Mine”, “Mr. Farmer” and “A Thousand Shadows”) before breaking up in ’68. This happened largely due to the eccentric wanderings of lead singer Sky Saxon (a.k.a., Richard Marsh). Like many under-equipped psychedelic adventurers of the ’60s, Saxon eventually dropped too many tabs and wound up living, mentally-speaking, in his own private fruit-loop Neverland. He died at age 71 in ’09.

The film feels a little too long — it could stand a trim of a good 20 minutes if not more. It doesn’t feel like a pro-level job — a bit on the ragged, sloppy-ass side — but that fits in with the low-rent, garage-bandy Seeds sound and the rep they had. It’s an okay film — a good-enough, second-rate doc about a band that went a little beyond flash-in-the-pan status, but not by much. The tone of the narration by legendary ex-groupie Pamela des Barres (who was sitting right behind me) feels too spunky and self-consciously “spirited”, like she’s narrating the history of Shindig, the ABC rock-music series.