At yesterday afternoon’s Apple Soho q & a, Social Network director David Fincher was asked about accusations that his film had altered or misrepresented certain aspects of Mark Zuckberg‘s life and personality. His response struck me as honest, reasonable, fair-minded.

The death of Eddie Fisher, whom no one cared very much about or paid attention to except as an object of derision for the last 47 years, was reported last night. He was 82.

Fisher had a ten-year run in the big-time, first as a popular crooner from the early to late ’50s and then as a tabloid/gossip-column joke from the late ’50s to early ’60s after he dumped wife Debbie Reynolds for Elizabeth Taylor, only to be himself dumped by Taylor for Richard Burton in 1962.

The man lived for nearly 50 years after that with the word “over” tattooed on his forehead. He was branded as a guy with no class or discipline who’d basically been led around by Mr. Happy. After the release of his 1999 autobiography, Been There, Done That, daughter Carrie Fisher reportedly declared, “That’s it — I’m having my DNA fumigated.”

Ten days old but well cut, well acted, amusing. Missed it until today,.

I left my Canon Powershot SD1400 at the apartment the day I was set to talk to Black Swan director Darren Aronofsky during the Toronto Film Festival. The video looks like faded grainstorm hell but there are some interesting portions. This is the personable, easy-going Aronofsky in amiable interview mode. The real guy, I suspect, is Genghis Khan, and that’s why he’s so good.

The Soho Apple store guys made a point of not allowing anyone sitting in the front “reserved for media” row to ask a question of Social Network director David Fincher and star Jesse Eisenberg. So all my questions went un-asked. The thing that surprised me was Eisenberg’s admission that he hasn’t seen the film yet, but will probably see it at tomorrow night’s New York Film Festival premiere screening. With a certain trepidation, I sensed.

Social Network director David Fincher( l.), star Jesse Eisenberg (r.) during this afternoon’s Soho Apple store appearance — Thursday, 9.23, 5:45 pm.

Fincher, Eisenberg, Rolling Stone critic and moderator Peter Travers.

Deadline‘s Tim Adler is reporting that three out of the four principal roles in Roman Polanski‘s God of Carnage have been cast, and that the chosen are Jodie Foster, Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz.

Having seen the original B’way version, I’m guessing that Foster has the Hope Davis vomiting role, Waltz has the Jeff Daniels role (lawyer, compulsive cell-phone calls, Davis’s wife), Winslet the Marcia Gay Harden role (book on Darfur) and James Gandolfini‘s role (hardware store owner, Harden’s husband) is the one yet to be cast.

Filming of Yasmina Reza‘s Tony-winning play will begin in Paris next February, Adler’s story says, and wil last for 12 weeks.

I spotted this on Awards Daily, copied the code, etc. I’d prefer a YouTube or Vimeo version, thanks.

The quietly growing underground cabal of Social Network dissers has, in Manohla Dargis‘s just-posted N.Y. Times review, another cartwheel-in-the-lobby piece to get riled about. Enough, dammit! Too many people are flipping for this thing and we’re sick of it. This is war! We need to get together this weekend and plan a counter-attack.

Who will be the anti-Social Network crusader to lead the troops? Who will be their King Harry? David Poland? Armond White? For those who haven’t yet reviewed it (particularly for a certain type of ego-driven critic), there is only way to not sound like a me-too kiss-ass.

“The Social Network takes place in the recognizable here and now,” Dargis says in her final paragraph, “although there are moments when it has the flavor of science fiction (it would make a nice double bill with The Matrix) even as it evokes 19th-century narratives of ambition. (‘To be young, to have a thirst for society, to be hungry for a woman,’ Balzac writes in Le Pere Goriot.)

“The movie opens with a couple in a crowded college bar and ends with a man alone in a room repeatedly hitting refresh on his laptop. In between, director David Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin offer up a creation story for the digital age and something of a morality tale, one driven by desire, marked by triumph, tainted by betrayal and inspired by the new gospel: the geek shall inherit the earth.”

What is the eerie alien vibe coming out of Matt Damon‘s right eye in the new poster for Clint Eastwood‘s Hereafter? Damon plays a guy with a problematic gift — the ability to speak to and hear the thoughts of people who’ve passed on — which is what the eye effect is trying to suggest. But it makes him look like (a) one of Nastassja Kinski‘s friends in a black-and-white version of Paul Schrader‘s Cat People, or (b) an adult version of one of the kids from the 1960 Village of the Damned.

Marshall Fine admires Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman‘s Howl (Oscilloscope, 9.24) , which “is about many more things than just a poem,” he writes. “But if you boil it down to its essence, it’s a movie about a poet and his creation – about the writing and transmission of a work of poetry. And unlike last year’s overrated Bright Star, this one is actually interesting.

“Howl was originally meant to be a documentary. But the writer-directors (who also did The Times of Harvey Milk and The Celluloid Closet) decided instead to create an impressionistic movie about a transcendent and transitional moment in popular culture: the writing and publication of Allen Ginsberg‘s ‘Howl,” a landmark 1956 epic poem that begins with ‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness…’

“While I admired and enjoyed this film, I will also honestly say that it’s not an audience movie. It is impressionistic and hallucinatory, dealing with obscure figures out of literary history – obscure, at least, to anyone who is not a fan of or acquainted with the Beat movement of the 1950s.”

May I interject a thought at this juncture? Howl is an audience movie — it’s very intriguing and friendly and enlightening every step of the way — as long as the audience is not composed of popcorn-muching morons with shaved heads who wear gold chains and cutoffs and basketball sneakers with thick white athletic socks.

Here’s what I said in a 1.21.10 piece filed during the Sundance Film Festival:

Howl is “an indie, artsy, half-animated dream-cream movie that’s basically an instructional primer for the uninitiated about what a wonderfully seminal and influential poem Allen Ginsberg’s Howl was and is.

“It’s brisk, condensed, in some ways florid, engaging, intellectually alert and stimulating. You know what this thing is? It’s a gay Richard Linklater movie, only deeper and more trippy. It’s an half-animated exploration thing that contains scenes of actors reading and ‘being,’ but in no way is this a movie that plays like a movie. It’s something else, and that’s a good thing for me.

“Howl is a ‘small’ film, but it’s rather wonderful and joyful in the particulars.

“Howl is not a narrative feature — it’s a near-documentary that says ‘stop what you’re doing and consider what a cool poem ‘Howl’ was…in fact, let us take you through the whole thing and show and tell you how cool and illuminating it is.” It uses Waltz With Bashir-like animation to illuminate what ‘Howl’ was in Ginsberg’s head when he wrote it, and what the poem’s more sensitive readers might have seen in their heads when they first read it.

“James Franco plays Ginsberg quite fully, particularly and well — he gets the slurring speech patterns and pours a mean cup of tea as he’s explaining a point to a journalist — but Franco, good as he is, is subordinate to (or should I say in harmony with?) the basic ambition of the film, which is to inform, instruct, awaken, turn on.

“For me, Ian McKellen‘s ‘Acting Shakespeare’ was a somewhat similar experience. An accomplished British actor explaining and double-defining the joy and transcendent pleasure of performing, feeling and really knowing deep down what Shakespeare’s poetry really means, and has meant to him all his life.”