For some reason this photo of the River Bend Lodge in Chama, New Mexico, makes me feel soothed and peaceful-like. Maybe it’s the green lawn or the log-cabin vibe or the buffalo statue or all of it. I’m staying here on the night on Wednesday, 8.31, as part of the first leg of a five-hour drive up to the Telluride Film Festival from Albuquerque, New Mexico. They have cabins with loft beds, and a river outside with the smell of pine trees in the air. I love mom-and-pop places and I hate corporate-type hotels.

The well-connected Patricia Bosworth has always been a succinct, carefully phrased writer and a perceptive and trustworthy biographer. (I’ve read her 1978 book about Montgomery Clift twice.) I was reminded of her skills when I began reading a Vanity Fair excerpt from her latest biography, Jane Fonda: The Private Life of a Public Woman earlier today. It also hit me again that the story of Fonda’s life from the early ’60s to early ’70s is a stirring one, particularly in the arc of her relationship with French director Roger Vadim.

The bottom line is that Vadim was a much more interesting man than he was a director — his films were never very much more than shallow exploitation fare with provocative sex scenes. But he did guide Fonda’s life and soul into realms she’d never known or savored before they met and got going as a couple sometime in ’64. And Fonda did came of age and bloomed in all sorts of ways — sexually, politically, culturally — due to his influence. He orchestrated her metamorphosis from plucky young lass to seasoned European woman.

And then the string ran out in the early ’70s, both having travelled as far as they were able to within their particular realm, having married each other in late ’65. Fonda moved on to feminism and political militancy and Klute and “Hanoi Jane” and Tom Hayden and all that, and Vadim, among other things, went on to make the execrable Pretty Maids All In A Row. He was a flat, terrible filmmaker. (Barbarella is glossy dreck.) Vadim’s great gift was his ability to seduce, marry and exploit beautiful actresses. And to make his life into a great sensual symphony of sorts, I suppose.

It’s a fascinating growth-of-a-woman story (the excerpt, I mean) with a fair amount of frank reporting about the impulsive, swan-divey sexual intrigues of that era. What a time to be randy and alive and hungry! Although the sexual anecdote that I’ve most enjoyed about the young Fonda (however accurate or inaccurate it may be) is contained in Peter Biskind‘s Warren Beatty biography.

Jane Fonda, Roger Vadim on the set of Barbarella.

This won’t qualify as a substantial observation, but I’ve noticed over the past couple of days that Gov. Rick Perry has only half a neck. He’s got a fairly large head that seems to mostly just sit on his shoulders, and what little he has in the way of a neck is hidden by those high-and-wide elephant collars he loves to wear. I’m not saying he has no neck at all, which is how it was with Mickey Spillane. And it may be an optical illusion as much as anything else.

In the ’80s, ’90s and early aughts Liam Neeson starring or playing a supporting role in a film was a better-than-half-likely assurance of quality. No longer. Now Neeson’s participation means there’s a better-than-50-50 chance that the film is a piece of action shit. Because his name, sorry to say, has nearly become a synonym for the bend-over paycheck theology. Neeson hasn’t quite attained the status of Jason Statham, whose action films are almost always garbage (i.e., 90% or 95% of the time), the last exception being ’07’s The Bank Job. But he’s getting there.

Not that it matters because action stars seem to endure no matter how many pieces of shit they make. Because action fans (i.e., guys who line up to see every Statham film no matter what) don’t seem to care whether an action film really delivers or not. They don’t seem to discriminate between CG robo-dogshit actioners like Fast Five and elite Tiffany entries like Drive. If anything a significant percentage seems to prefer the former.

I myself believe it’s important for action stars to at least offer a slight ray of hope for the discriminating action fan (i.e., someone like myself) by making a tolerable, half-acceptable film every four or five or six years. It’s understood that they make crap for a living, no problem with that, but every fifth or sixth film has to be half-decent, I feel, so you can say to yourself, “Okay, there’s a one-in-six chance this latest film won’t be torture to sit through.” They can’t all be bad, I’m saying. You can’t appear in nothing but crap for ten years straight and hold onto people like me,

Except by this standard Neeson is already failing. His last good film in which he starred was Kinsey (’04), and he’s scheduled to make Taken II in 2013. Maybe he’s the new Statham, only older.

In addition to my previously posted list of 35 Toronto Film Festival must-sees (26 features, 9 documentaries) I’m today adding nine more films, selected from a new batch that TIFF announced this morning, which brings the total to 44. At best I’ll get to see maybe 25 of these. (My usual festival tally is between 20 and 25.) At least there’s the comfort of knowing that many if not most of the 2011 Telluride selections will overlap and therefore dent.

Rachel Weisz in Terrence Davies’ The Deep Blue Sea.

This morning’s add-ons:

Guy Lodge‘s…I meant to say Terrence Davies‘ The Deep Blue Sea. (Lodge urged me to catch it on 8.7.) A 1950s-era tale about an affair between a married socialite (Rachel Weisz) and an ex-RAF pilot (Tom Hiddleston). Eventually and quite naturally Weisz’s older husband (Simon Russell Beale), a judge, finds out and the shit hits the fan. Based on the play of the same name by Terence Rattigan. “A career-best performance from Weisz, according to trusted sources who have seen it,” says Lodge.

Contemporary World Cinema (2):

Always Brando, d: Ridha Behi. About a young Tunisian actor named Anis Raache “who bears a stunning resemblance to young Marlon Brando,” and Behi having gone to the real Brando eight or nine years ago to pitch a young-old movie focusing on Raache and the real McCoy, or something like that. Brando died in before shooting began.

Miss Bala, d: Gerardo Naranjo. A Mexican beauty queen and a drug gang. This was a mid-level sensation at last May’s Cannes Film Festival. I missed it then, but not this time.

Galas (6):

Page Eight, d: David Hare. Contemporary espionage & moral dilemmas. Bill Nighy, Rachel Weisz, Michael Gambon, Ralph Fiennes and Judy Davis.

The Awakening, d: Nick Murphy. Allegedly “a sophisticated psychological/supernatural thriller in the tradition of The Others and The Orphanage.” W/ Rebecca Hall, Dominic West and Imelda Staunton.

Killer Elite, d: Gary McKendry. Scenic global thriller about special ops & assassins, blah blah. Jason Statham, Robert De Niro, Clive Owen, blah, blah.

That Summer, d: Philippe Garrel. “A couple living together in Paris – he’s a painter, she’s a film actress – befriend a couple of film extras who fall in love with each other. All four go to Rome where their relationships undergo profound changes as emotions shift and change.” Perfect!

Violet & Daisy, d: Geoffrey Fletcher. W/ Saoirse Ronan, Alexis Bledel and James Gandolfini.

Wuthering Heights, d: Andrea Arnold. W/ James Howson, Kaya Scodelario. Do I have to see this? Is it really necessary? What will it actually add?

At the 31-second mark N.Y. Times columnist Paul Krugman suggests that if there was a huge government-spending program brought about by an emergency, like the spending prompted by the Great Depression and World War II, it would bolster our economy and make it robust, even, in less than two years. And then at 1:04 he theorizes that such a program could be brought about by the threat of invading space aliens.

Almost exactly the same point was made in a slightly different context by President Ronald Reagan in December 1985.

Speaking about sharp nuclear-policy differences between himself and Russian president Mikhael Gorbachev, Reagan said, “I couldn’t help but…when you stop to think that we’re all God’s children, wherever we live in the world, I couldn’t help but say to [Gorbachev] just how easy his task and mine might be if suddenly there was a threat to this world from some other species from another planet outside in the universe. We’d forget all the little local differences that we have between our countries and we would find out once and for all that we really are all human beings here on this Earth together.”

While Movieline and Awards Daily readers enjoy a recently-posted “greatest improvised or unscripted lines” video, they should understand that Dustin Hoffman‘s Midnight Cowboy encounter with a cab (which is included in the video) was definitely planned, scripted, choreographed and rehearsed. Producer Jerome Hellman explains in this commentary clip:

Yesterday’s Oscar Poker chat was enjoyable enough. The usual Phil Contrino box-office commentary, and then Sasha and I discussing The Help and Telluride and The Lone Ranger, etc. Here’s a non-iTunes, stand-alone link.

The drift is basically Guillermo del Toro telling Josh Horowitz about Alfonso Cuaron & Co. having achieved the next Big Thing (which he declines to describe) in the 3D Gravity (Warner Bros, 11.20.12). Sidenote: The video embed codes provided by mtv.com are infuriating, second only to the N.Y. Times in terms of making me want to mail a plastic sandwich baggie filled with dogshit to their offices.

My Week With Marilyn Observation #1: “Good lord, when are people going to figure out that this show belongs to Michelle Williams and she alone? That is all anyone will be talking about once people actually see the movie. 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.”

My Week With Marilyn Observation #2: “It’s totally Michelle Williams’ film. She’s the only justification for making it and for watching it. She really captures Marilyn’s whispery allure, drifting attention span, lack of self-confidence and, most importantly, movie star charisma. I don’t go in for the all the Oscar speculation stuff, but she’s (a) the whole story, (b) a definite Oscar contender, and (c) a [provider of] a performance that older Hollywood people will respond to in a big way.”

For me the weekend’s best stand-out tweet came from Joseph Kahn.