I’d like to buy a nice, smallish, bouncy pillow with a battery inside it that keeps the pillow somewhere between cool and room-temperature normal. I don’t like resting my head on overly heated, faintly damp pillows, which they all eventually turn into due to body-warmth (or head-warmth) transference. We’re always flopping the pillow over so we can sleep on the cool side, and this is the solution. I’ve been surfing around for cool pillows but haven’t found any so far.

Bobcat Goldthwait‘s God Bless America “may turn out to be my favorite viewing experience of the Toronto Film Festival,” Marshall Fine has written. “Outrageous, bitter and wildly, inappropriately funny, God Bless America had me roaring at the story of a newly-minted spree killer who decides to eliminate what he sees as the worst of American popular culture, beginning with a spoiled rich brat who’s the star of a reality show and ending up on the stage of an American Idol doppelganger with an AK-47.

Tara Lynne Barr, Joel Murray in Bobcat Goldwait’s God Bless America

“Frank (Joel Murray) is an average guy from Syracuse who tells his cubicle-mate at work that he doesn’t find morning radio amusing because ‘I’m not afraid of foreign people or people with vaginas.’ Goldthwait summarizes his film in a line of Frank’s early on: ‘Why have a civilization if we’re no longer interested in being civil?’

“Goldthwait’s previous two films also specialized in the viciously funny: the horrifyingly squirmy comedy Sleeping Dogs Lie and equally unholy and painfully laugh-provoking World’s Greatest Dad. Hopefully, God Bless America will find a wider audience than the previous two, which barely got released.

“Goldthwait’s films have teeth and aren’t for everyone, but there’s definitely an audience that shares his sense of outrage about just how low our lowest common denominator has fallen. God Bless America is Goldthwait’s most snarlingly subversive comedy yet.”

In a 9.18 N.Y. Times piece about standout character performances, Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott have praised Judy Greer‘s third-act turn in The Descendants. “Best known for kooky-friend roles in romantic comedies, Greer makes a strong, poignant impression in three scenes opposite George Clooney. [She’s] playing a fairly tangential character: the wife of the man Mr. Clooney’s wife had an affair with. But whether clueless, bewildered or tearful, Greer shifts the film’s center of gravity and alters its emotional chemistry.

Judy Greer in The Descendants

“A star imports outsized individuality into every role, playing variations on a person we believe we know. A character actor, by contrast, transforms a well-known type into an individual.” And in The Descendants, “Ms. Greer reminds Mr. Clooney’s character and the audience mesmerized by his star power that it is not all about him.”

Last night friend-of-HE Nick Clement — a.k.a. “Action Man” — saw the eight- or nine-minute Girl With the Dragon Tattoo sizzle reel that Toronto critics were also shown at the Straw Dogs screening. Clement also saw Moneyball as the main attraction. He emailed his responses to both last night.

Tattoo quickie: “As the lights went down for Moneyball and light flooded the screen, the footage began with…wait…Christopher Plummer in closeup, talking about some dark family stuff? And then wham…massive excitement levels. It was like watching a mini-version of David Fincher‘s upcoming film, but not in a bad way. Now I’m even more anxious to see what Fincher has cooked up based upon what I saw tonight.

“This movie isn’t going to stretch Fincher as a filmmaker, and yeah, the material is completely within his comfort zone, but if this particular story had to be re-imagined by Hollywood, I can’t think of another director for the job. In short, from what I saw tonight, the film looks INCREDIBLE, with an icy visual style that harkens back to Seven and The Game (a film I adore).

“Rooney Mara looks extremely intense and Craig looks appropriately weathered and intrigued by all the things going on around him. The score that was used was very TSN-esque, very low-level, almost a constant electronic humming, that then progessed and crescendoed into an explosive finale. Combined with all the dark and nasty and exciting imagery on display (snippets of lesbian sex, the infamous assault sequence, violence, car chases, general deviancy) the reel got a huge charge out of the audience, with lots of chatter and buzzing after it was over.

“I think some people were perplexed as to what they were watching as it clearly wasn’t a trailer, and at these free screenings, they typically don’t show trailers (maybe one). And, now having seen some real footage from the film with dialogue and characters and plot points established, I guess you can’t rule out the film from getting a possible genre-category Best Picture nomination (think District 9) from the Academy.

“One thing’s for sure — it’s gonna make a shit-ton of money at the box office, despite the hard R they’ve obviously gone for.

“And I loved how after the on-screen ‘A Film by David Fincher’ credit came up, there was a ‘Screenplay by Steven Zaillian‘ credit; not since the first trailer for Bad Boys II do I remember a trailer that gave an in-name shout-out to the writers (Shelton, Stahl and Hancock got credited).”

Moneyball Elation: “No huge need for me to re-review as you’ve covered all the bases in your previous posts. But Moneyball is right up there among the finest sports films ever made. It’s wonderfully written, sharply directed, and features the best movie-star performance from Brad Pitt in a long time, and possibly ever.

“Jonah Hill is perfectly cast as the stats man, bringing lots of laughs to the surprisingly funny script (you can clearly see both Aaron Sorkin and Steve Zaillian‘s hands all over the script), and Hill and Pitt have dynamite chemistry (the trade-deadline scene was my favorite). The terrific, almost ambient score (loved the frequent “Explosions in the Sky”-esque guitar riff) is balanced beautifully by the numerous (and startling) moments of silence, which really help bring you into Billy Beane‘s psyche.

“In many ways Moneyball is definitely this year’s The Social Network , except here you’re not watching a group of prissy assholes bickering over money and fame, but the story of a deeply charismatic GM with a serious love for baseball who is starved for something new in the sport that he’s been involved with all his life.

“It’s worth noting the audience response to Moneyball, which was extremely favorable. Mixed demographics, almost every seat taken, people of all ages. A huge round of applause greeted the film at the end, people laughed in all the right places, and Pitt and Hill cast a spell on the entire crowd with their back-and-forth. For a movie that’s all about words and people talking, people were amazingly courteous and respectful, which is shocking because these free screenings tend to always bring out the texters and morons. But not tonight.

“It might’ve had something to do with the fact that there were four security guards pulling people out of the theater for using phones. But I’d like to think that when a good story is being told that people are enjoying, they’ll all shut the fuck up and do what they’re there in the theater to do — watch the movie. Not text their friends or chit-chat or browse Google every 20 minutes.

“Moneyball is a very quiet movie at times, so it can easily be ruined by unappreciative audiences. But based on what I saw and felt tonight, this movie will be a big hit and have terrific word-of-mouth. And for a sports movie that avoids almost every sports movie cliche in the book, that’s saying something. I loved it.

“All in all, another splendid night at the movies. This fall has been sensational so far: 50/50, Contagion, Warrior, Moneyball and now Drive (!) this weekend, and we’re not even done with September! It’s gonna be a great few months coming up.”

I’ve just come out of a TIFF screening of Oren Moverman‘s Rampart, a corrupt cop L.A. noir starring the great Woody Harrelson. The ending is a problem (a woman behind me went “what?” when the credits came up) but it’s way, way better than Moverman’s first film, The Messenger (’09) — visually, stylistically and definitely performance-wise.

Harrelson is Dave “date rape” Brown — a half-terrified, half-arrogant beat cop in a black-and-white who beats up various perps and suspects, and who killed a suspected rapist back in ’87 and is basically a loose cannon and a madman, but a smart guy all the same. WH carries the film start to finish, but the mostly female supporting cast is aces as well — Robin Wright, Sigourney Weaver, Cynthia Nixon, Anne Heche, Brie Larson plus Ned Beatty, Ice Cube, Ben Foster and Steve Buscemi.

Moverman rewrote an original script by James Ellroy, which was mainly inspired by the late ’90s Rampart scandal. All the crap and clutter of that scandal, which involved dozens of dirty cops on the take, is pushed to the side in order to focus on Brown, who’s brazenly dirty to start and who keeps digging himself into a deeper and deeper hole.

So Dave is on a downward swirl starting about 20 minutes in and the swirl never quits. It’s slow but inexorable and engulfing. A typical cop drama would use a big windup smash finish to settle Brown’s various problems and set the moral record straight, but Moverman sidesteps this and…well, there’s no big whopping or sadly bittersweet finale. Certainly nothing along, say, the lines of the finale of Touch of Evil, another dark drama about a deeply corrupt lawman.

I would say that Harrelson is now on the map for some possible Best Actor action. This may not fly all the way due to the generally grim tone and the lack of what your average Academy member would call a “satisfying conclusion.” Wright is excellent as a defense attorney who has it off with Dave a few times, and who lets it all out each and every time she’s on-screen.

If you’ve ever been stuck in some hippy-dippy atmosphere or environment that you couldn’t escape from…if you’ve ever been more or less forced to spend time with graying, balding, pot-bellied, granola-slurping doobie-tokers…a prisoner of smiling people dressed in Mexican peasant shirts and sandals and beads and easy-fit jeans who won’t stop speaking in ’60s psycho-babble platitudes…if you’ve ever had to suffer this way, as I have once or twice over within the past 15 or 20 years, then Bruce Beresford‘s Love, Peace and Misunderstanding will bring it all back home.

It’s pretty close to excruciating. How could the director of Breaker Morant and Tender Mercies make something like this? How could Jane Fonda, so bright and brilliant and transporting in B’way’s 33 Variations, give such an oppressively banal, cliche-spouting performance as an aging hippie grandma? (The script is by Christina Mengert and Joseph Muszynski, and if I was an actor those names alone would scare me off.) The only actor who comes through unscathed is Jeffrey Dean Morgan, who plays a local carpenter-musician who falls for Fonda’s uptight daughter, played by Catherine Keener. Morgan brings his own alpha force field to the game. It’s not that Elizabeth Olsen and Chace Crawford, who play Keener’s children, are painful to watch but they give off a vibe of feeling vaguely trapped, which is how I more or less felt as I watched it.

I talked to the son of a critic friend as I left, and he said “that might be the worst film I’ve ever seen.”

No, I haven’t seen Salmon Fishing in the Yemen or You’re Next, which is “basically another Shaun of the Dead,” a guy told me last night. Why would I, the king of “writing five or six hours in the morning and seeing two or three films in the afternoon and maybe also in the early evening and then going to a party after that” get around to seeing two films that nobody knew anything about until they saw them here?

I don’t take chances. I don’t walk into pitch-black rooms. I walk into semi-lighted rooms that I’ve checked out in advance. Like Ricky Roma in Glengarry Glen Ross, I follow leads.

My teeth are clenched. I’m pulling my hair out. I can’t stand this. It’s 1:22 pm and I have Faust or Peace, Love and Misunderstanding at 2 pm and then Oren Moverman‘s Rampart at 5:15 pm and I didn’t even get around to reviewing yesterday’s highlights, Michael Winterbottom‘s Trishna and David Hare‘s Page Eight. Both are highly intriguing adult dramas, particularly the Winterbottom, which is quite handsomely shot and framed and cut and richly performed (most notably by Freida Pinto, who has seemed challenged in her previous performances). Maybe sometime this evening.

“What do we know about the Best Actor race right now?,” Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone wrote this morning. “We know that George Clooney is, to my mind, in the frontrunner’s spot for The Descendants. Right behind him, I figure, is Michael Fassbender in Shame.”

Due respect but I have to say no on Fassbender. His performance is too malignant and frosty, and you don’t get a Best Actor nomination for a performance that includes walking around your New York apartment with your elephant-sized appendage hanging out and bouncing against your upper thigh. Portraying a sexual pervo in a clinically accurate way is not what stirs hearts and minds. Fassbender is an iceman in this thing.

Stone doesn’t mention in her piece that she hasn’t seen Moneyball yet, so take her assessments with a grain.

“And in the major upset category,” adds Stone, “is Christopher Plummer for Barrymore, already called for the win by Jeff Wells of Hollywood-Elsewhere and mentioned in this story by Tom O’Neil. But if we’re talking frontrunners, the snake in the grass in the Best Actor race is The Artist‘s Jean Dujardin, who will charm the pants off of anyone who sees the film.”

In a GQ interview with Mark Harris, Clint Eastwood and Leonardo DiCaprio have issued non-denial denials that J. Edgar is focused in any significant way on a gayish subcurrent inside the decades-long relationship between J. Edgar Hoover (DiCaprio) and partner/ally/confidante Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer).

On one hand, Eastwood says “it’s not a movie about two gay guys [but] a movie about how this guy manipulated everybody around him and managed to stay on through nine presidents. I mean, I don’t give a crap if he was gay or not.”

But he also says that Hoover and Tolson “were inseparable pals. Now, whether he was gay or not is gonna be for the audience to interpret. It could have been just a great love story between two guys. Or it could have been a great love story that was also a sexual story.”

DiCaprio elaborates: “What we’re saying is that [Hoover] definitely had a relationship with Tolson that lasted for nearly fifty years. Neither of them married. They lived close to one another. They worked together every day. They vacationed together. And there was rumored to be more. There are definite insinuations of…well, I’m not going to get into where it goes, but…”

I wrote the following about six weeks ago: “Knowing Clint as I do, the Gay Edgar Hoover angle will be ‘there,’ but in a vaguely suppressed, played-down way, which of course would be appropriate for the rigidly homophobic era during which the saga of J. Edgar and Clyde took place.

In April 2010 I reported about Dustin Lance Black‘s script, to wit:

“The scenes between Hoover and FBI ally/colleague/friendo Clyde Tolson (whose last name Black spells as ‘Toulson’) are fairly pronounced in terms of sexual intrigue and emotional ties between the two. Theirs is absolutely and without any qualification a gay relationship, Tolson being the loyalty-demanding, bullshit-deflating ‘woman’ and Hoover being the gruff, vaguely asexual ‘man’ whose interest in Tolson is obviously there and yet at the same time suppressed.

“The script flips back and forth in time from decade to decade, from the 1920s (dealing with the commie-radical threat posed by people like Emma Goldman) to the early ’30s (the focus being on the Charles Lindbergh baby kidnapping case) to Hoover’s young childhood to the early ’60s (dealing with the Kennedy brothers), the mid to late ’60s (Martin Luther King‘s randy time-outs) and early ’70s (dealing with Nixon‘s henchmen). Old Hoover, young Hoover, etc. Major pounds of makeup for Leo, I’m guessing.”