Four months ago in Cannes, my highly enthusiastic response to Walter Salles On The Road was a minority opinion. Which I didn’t give a damn about. I saw what I saw and knew what I knew. But Salles himself obviously agreed that it needed to be tweaked and modified as the Road screening here is 15 minutes shorter — 124 minutes vs. the 139-minute version shown in Cannes. I’m told last night that the film also has a whole new beginning. It opens in England on 9.21, and 12.21 stateside.

President Barack Obama‘s speech last night “was disappointing until, with about ten minutes to go, [he] acknowledged disappointment, and so began its rise,” writes Esquire‘s Tom Junod. “The times have changed — and so have I,’ Obama said. ‘I’m no longer just a candidate. I’m the president.’

“Of course, he was reminding us of his power; the fact of his presidency has become an argument for his presidency. But he was also reminding us that as a candidate who rose to power on the politics of pure potential, he is, as president, a fallen man. ‘And while I’m proud of what we’ve achieved together, I’m far more mindful of my own failiings, knowing exactly what Lincoln meant when he said, ‘I have been driven to my knees many times by the overwhelming conviction that I had no place else to go.'”

“This was where the speech turned, and became, in its statement of humility, a statement of rousing power. ‘I ask you for your vote,’ he said, and his commonplace words had a beseeching quality that put them outside the realm of political performance. He had failed to transform his office, and failed to transform our politics, but he sounded fully aware that he had been himself transformed.'”

“I wrote a few days ago that if the Democrats could maintain the enthusiasm they showed on the first day of their convention for all three days, Mitt Romney would be in serious trouble,” Politico‘s Roger Simon wrote this morning. “They did, and he is.

“Democratic enthusiasm — real fire-in-the-belly enthusiasm — is a killer for Romney for one big reason: There is no sizable pro-Romney movement in this country. There has been a sizable anti-Obama movement.

“There are relatively few Republicans deeply in love with Romney. There never has been. Romney won his nomination by being the most electable general election candidate in a weak and whacky primary field. He won, in other words, not by devotion, but by default.

“His campaign is fueled by dislike for and disappointment with Barack Obama. That dislike and disappointment is real.

“In 1996, the last time a Democratic president ran for reelection, there was a significant anti-Bill Clinton movement in this country. This was before the Monica Lewinsky scandal. But a lot of right-wingers hated Bill Clinton and felt he was guilty of unspeakable crimes like murder and drug-trafficking. That didn’t mean there was a significant pro-Bob Dole movement, however. And Clinton won easily by 8.5 percentage points.

“This is not 1996, the economy is bad, the cast of characters has changed and nobody is going to win by 8.5 percentage points. But the dynamic is the same: It is harder to turn out a vote against someone than a vote for someone.

“Anger is not a movement. Disappointment is not a cause. And passionate support is an antidote to both.”

Joe Wright‘s Anna Karenina (Focus Features, 11.16.12) will have its detractors (in my screening today five or six people were actually chuckling at it during a high-emotion scene in the late second act) but for me it’s a serious, drop-your-socks knockout — the first truly breathtaking high-style film of the year, a non-musical successor to Moulin Rouge and a disciple of the great ’70s films of Ken Russell (and by that I mean pre-Mahler Russell, which means The Music Lovers and Women In Love) as well as Powell-Pressburger’s The Red Shoes.

You either go with the proscenium-arch grandiosity of a film like Anna Karenina or you don’t (and I was just talking in the Bell Lightbox lobby with a critic who didn’t care for it) but if you ask me it has all the essential ingredients of a bold-as-brass Best Picture contender — an excitingly original approach, cliff-leaping audacity, complex choreography, the balls to go classic and crazy at the same time, a wild mixture of theatricality and romantic realism, a superbly tight and expressive script by Tom Stoppard and wowser operatic acting with a special hat-tip to Keira Knightley as Anna — a Best Actress performance if I’ve ever seen one.

The brazen idea behind Wright’s film is that he’s presenting a completely theatrical environment, and therefore defined by and subject to the terms of live theatre. The film literally takes place in a 19th Century theatre with the orchestra seats removed, and yet it’s a special kind of theatre that dissolves and opens up from time to time — regularly, literally — and thus allowing Wright and his players to run out or zoom into a semi-naturalistic world. But one is mostly aware that we’re watching a play that is choreographed like a musical or a ballet with broad but delicious acting and some magnificent dance sequences and killer production design and break-open walls and actors sometimes freezing in their tracks and becoming tableau.

I can imagine some people saying “whoa…this is too much” but like I said, either you understand the concept and accept it…or you don’t. I loved every minute of it except for a portion in the third act when it seems to run out of gas. But it revs up again at the finale.

I’m being kicked out of the Bell Lightbox press lounge as we speak so I guess I’ll have to add to this later on this evening, but I couldn’t feel more excited and elevated.

Those snide bitches who chuckled during this afternoon’s screening needed to be hauled out by the collar and slapped around. If they had been watching Wright’s film as a literal theatrical presentation (and it could be presented that way with modifications), they wouldn’t have dared to laugh at any projection of tragic intensity. No one who understands and respects theatre would do that.

I didn’t mean to suggest that Anna Karenina is as good or almost as good as Moulin Rouge but without the music — it’s a much tonier and classier production than Baz Luhrman‘s film, in my view, although it’s coming from the same general ballpark. And of course it’s a much darker thing than Moulin Rouge, given the Leo Tolstoy source material.

I hate having to stop writing but I’m really being kicked out of here…eff me.

I saw Rian Johnson‘s Looper (Sony, 9.28) in Los Angeles a week or so ago, and as it screened this morning in Toronto it’s okay to post my thumbnail response, which I originally tapped out on an iPhone while sitting in traffic on Venice Boulevard:

Looper is a highly imaginative sci-fi action thriller in the Phillip K. Dick mode that’s a little too enamored of its originality and imagination, I feel — certainly more than it is enamored of being propulsive or thrilling. I realize that Johnson reads this column from time to time and that he’ll be pissed when he realizes I feel more in the way of muted respect than genuine admiration, but them’s the breaks.

The biggest disappointment, for me, is that the great haunting concept of an older guy (Bruce Willis) being able to give counsel to his younger, stupider, less wise self (Joseph Gordon Levitt) has been almost completely ignored, and that’s really a shame.

And Levitt’s made-up, CG-fortified Willis face is weirdly unformed and gets in the way of any potential investment. We all know what Willis looked like when he was costarring in Moonlighting and their faces, his and Levitt’s, just don’t match or seem even vaguely from the same family or country, even. The effect doesn’t work. Johnson should have cast Willis in both roles and CG’ed and de-aged him for his younger-self scenes.

Boil Looper down and it’s just another violent whammy-chart actioner, albeit with a novel time-travel premise. The whammy chart thing is oppressive. It really feels as if someone shoots something or someone every seven or eight minutes, and that this is happening because the software insists.

“Too many gunshots” is a malady…hell, a form of cancer afflicting modern action films. It’s also a bellwether. The more gunshots, the worse a movie tends to be. And fewer gunshots almost always tends to mean quality. Examples: The Limey, Shane.

The effing Wiki plot gives you a headache: “In a futuristic gangland in the year 2044, a 25-year-old killer named Joseph Simmons (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) works for a mafia company in Kansas City as a ‘looper.’ Loopers kill and dispose of agents sent by their employers from corporate headquarters in Shanghai from the year 2074″…what? “Loopers are foot soldiers, paid on the terms that all targets must never escape. When Simmons recognizes his target as a future version of himself (Bruce Willis), his older self escapes after incapacitating him. The resulting failure of his job causes his employers to come after him, forcing him to fight for his life as he hunts his younger self.

Tweeted by Johnson an hour ago: “I am the opposite of pissed. This is the perfect Jeff Wells reaction, and when I see you I am going to kiss you on the mouth.”

For me, the first day of the 2012 Toronto Film Festival isn’t much to write home about because I’ve seen so many films having their first press & industry screenings today. The only major pop-outs are Joe Wright‘s Anna Karenina at 3 pm and a 3D screening of the digitally restored and cleavered (i.e., whacked down to 1.85 to 1) Dial M for Murder, which shows this evening at 9:15 pm. And I’ve got a couple of parties starting around 10 or 11 pm, but those aren’t as much fun without the drinking.

The films I’d normally be seeing with great excitement I’ve already seen, and the ones playing today that I haven’t seen I don’t want to see. And if I don’t want to see something, you can’t stop me. (Yes, that’s a Samuel Goldwynism.)

I saw Jacques Audiard‘s Rust and Bone (8:45 this morning) in Cannes — here‘s what I wrote. I also saw Abbas Kiarostami‘s brilliant Like Someone in Love (12:34 pn today) there and posted this. (This film is so mesmerizing that I’m thinking of seeing it again for the sheer pleasure factor.) I’ve seen Amy Berg‘s West of Memphis twice (at last January’s Sundance Film Festival as well as the Santa Barbara Film Festival) and praised it up and down. I saw Michael Haneke’s Amour (3:45 pm today) in Cannes and posted this. And I saw and was quite elevated in Cannes by Walter Salles On The Road (1:45 pm).

Filing from the Venice Film Festival, Variety‘s Leslie Felperin isn’t exactly doing cartwheels for Robert Redford‘s The Company You Keep, but she’s in a respectful and approving frame of mind. Calling it an “unabashedly heartfelt but competent tribute to 1960s idealism [in which] nostalgia is generally the order of the day,” pic is “not entirely filtered through rose-colored granny glasses.”

“Screenwriter Lem Dobbs, adapting Neil Gordon’s novel, has something of track record with this sort of material, having written Steven Soderbergh‘s The Limey (1999), another tale about ’60s survivors haunted by its thesps’ own filmographies. Like that film, all plot roads lead to a young woman whose honor must be defended, in this case Brit Marling‘s smart love-interest law student, who upstages Shia LaBeouf.

The Company You Keep “is nowhere near as formally audacious as Soderbergh’s film, but in its stolid, old-fashioned way, it satisfies an appetite, especially among mature auds, for dialogue- and character-driven drama that gets into issues without getting too bogged down in verbiage.

“There is something undeniably compelling, perhaps even romantic, about America’s ’60s radicals and the compromises they did or didn’t make, a subject underexplored in Hollywood cinema apart from honorable exceptions like Sidney Lumet‘s Running on Empty (1988) and a few others. The French, meanwhile, have almost completely monopolized radical chic nostalgia, as seen in this pic’s Venice-fest competish rival, Olivier Assayas‘ Something in the Air.

Keep‘s “colorful, almost-wastefully impressive cast limns a sociologically convincing rogue’s gallery of reformed revolutionaries — some turned organic farmer, like the one played by Stephen Root (refreshingly cast against usual nerdy type); or university professor (Richard Jenkins) or Nick Nolte‘s small businessman, a cleaned-up acid casualty. The last, a brief but memorable turn, harks pleasingly back to Nolte’s blasted ‘Nam vet in Who’ll Stop the Rain.”

The star of Nick Cassavetes‘ Yellow is wife/co-writer Heather Wahlquist, playing “a pill-popping school teacher and mother of four who finds herself losing her mind while trying to depict her real life from her altered states of consciousness.” The TIFF attraction costars Sienna Miller, Melanie Griffith, Gena Rowlands, Lucy Punch, David Morse and Ray Liotta.

From HE reader Jakob Aljaz: “I’ve read Jeff’s ‘Too Damn Many‘ article on Hollywood Elsewhere (8.16.12), which listed around 40 films he’d like to catch in Toronto. But in the last few days there have been major raves (Variety, etc.) for two fims that Jeff didn’t include: Tobias Lindholm‘s Danish thriller A Hijacking and Peter Strickland‘s Berberian Sound Studio. Also of interest is the philosophical documentary The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (a must for any leftie).”

Every time Bill Clinton addresses the Democratic National Convention, I fall in love all over again. He hit a grand slam in ’04, in ’08 and again tonight in Charlotte. This was The Master — a man who talks straight and specific and with beautiful rhythm and emotion, and just lays it down like an oratorical God…wham! Playing the crowd like a violin, choice line after choice line…spirit-lifting, like great music.

To fully understand what a truly great speech Clinton gave, you might want to read Ryan Lizza’s New Yorker piece (“Let’s Be Friends”) about the relationship between Clinton and Barack Obama.

“People ask me all the time how we delivered four surplus budgets,” Clinton said. “What new ideas did we bring? I always give a one-word answer: arithmetic.

“If [the Republicans] stay with a 5 trillion dollar tax cut in a debt reduction plan – the arithmetic tells us that one of three things will happen: 1) they’ll have to eliminate so many deductions like the ones for home mortgages and charitable giving that middle-class families will see their tax bill go up two thousand dollars year while people making over 3 million dollars a year get will still get a 250,000 dollar tax cut; or 2) they’ll have to cut so much spending that they’ll obliterate the budget for our national parks, for ensuring clean air, clean water, safe food, safe air travel; or they’ll cut way back on Pell Grants, college loans, early childhood education and other programs that help middle-class families and poor children, not to mention cutting investments in roads, bridges, science, technology and medical research; or 3) they’ll do what they’ve been doing for thirty plus years now — cut taxes more than they cut spending, explode the debt, and weaken the economy.

“Remember, Republican economic policies quadrupled the debt before I took office and doubled it after I left. We simply can’t afford to double-down on trickle-down.”

This is nicely cut, but it’s just not right to watch Lawrence of Arabia footage on a smallish screen. I’ve said that I’m at ease with watching films on a iPad, but not this one. Nothing smaller than a 50-inch or 60-inch high-def screen, I’m thinking, although 70 or 80 inches would be better. And sitting no more than four or five feet away.

A friend asked me to riff about the various festival entries for a video interview piece, and I said fine. We were halfway through when a young festival rep came up and said sorry, no video inside the festival reception room unless a festival rep is observing. We all said cool, but I asked the rep why the rule exists. “No biggie but where’s the harm in shooting an occasional video interview?,” I said. She said she didn’t know. “So you haven’t asked your bosses to explain why?,” I said. No, she answered. “Okay,” I replied.

An excerpt from Aleksandar Hemon‘s “Beyond The Matrix,” a 9.10 New Yorker piece about Cloud Atlas: “It was on the day before they left Costa Rica that the Wachowski brothers and Tom Tykwer had a breakthrough” about how to write the script of David Mitchell‘s ‘Cloud Atlas‘. “They could convey the idea of eternal recurrence, which was so central to the novel, by having the same actors appear in multiple story lines — ‘playing souls, not characters,’ in Tykwer’s words.

“This would allow the narrative currents of the book to merge and to be separate at the same time. On the flight home, Lana and Andy carried the stack of rubber-banded cards they would soon convert into the first draft of the screenplay, which they then sent to Tykwer. The back-and-forth between the three filmmakers continued, the viability of their collaboration still not fully confirmed.

“By August, the trio had a completed draft to send to Mitchell. The Wachowskis had had a difficult experience adapting V for Vendetta, from a comic book whose author, Alan Moore, hated the very idea of Hollywood adaptation and berated the project publicly. ‘We decided in Costa Rica that — as hard and as long as it might take to write this script — if David didn’t like it, we were just going to kill the project,’ Lana said.

“Mitchell, who lives in the southwest of Ireland, agreed to meet the filmmakers in Cork. In ‘a seaside hotel right out of Fawlty Towers,’ as Lana described it, they recounted for the author the painstaking process of disassembling the novel and reassembling it into the script he’d read. ‘It’s become a bit of a joke that they know my book much more intimately than I do,’ Mitchell wrote to me. They explained their plan to unify the narratives by having actors play transmigrating souls.

“‘This could be one of those movies that are better than the book!” Mitchell exclaimed at the end of the pitch. The pact was sealed with pints of Murphy’s stout at a local pub.”