I’ve forgotten to ask HE rank-and-filers about their reactions to Mark Romanek‘s Never Let Me Go, which opened last Friday. I never tapped out a full review, but my basic reaction was that it’s really sensitive, delicate, anguished and very carefully made. But it’s morose, and this plus the passivity and resignation doesn’t work. It very gently suffocates.

As Kazuo Ishiguro‘s book makes clear, once the layers have been peeled back and the situation is laid bare, Never Let Me Go becomes a piece, essentially, about resignation and doom.

“If the film is difficult for some people, it’s not because of the movie’s quality, but simply because it deals with issues that most people are uncomfortable with,” a friend wrote earlier this month. “The performances are all fine. And the direction is subtle. It has a modesty. It’s all handled with humanity. The point isn’t to wallow in their tragedy, but to relate their experiences to our own. If you understand that, the film slowly builds its power as it progresses.”

Barack Obama isn’t exactly Jimmy Carter, but he comes awfully close. This time, however, there’s no Ronald Reagan waiting in the wings to defeat him in the next Presidential election. It’s not enough for a sitting President to have inspired anger and frustration and suffer low approval ratings. There also has to be a much better liked and tougher-talking alternative running against him/her.

What right-leaning candidate would be killer enough to unseat Obama? Nutbag Newt Gingrich? Mitt Romney? Sarah Palin? Florida’s Charlie Crist? Jeb Bush? Bobby Jindal of Louisiana? Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota? I don’t see anyone out there who’s commanding and charismatic enough. I think Obama will limp through and barely be re-elected. That’s how it seems right now.

While promoting Pan’s Labrynth Guillermo del Toro spoke of his earliest childhood horror — a standing horned goat hiding behind a bedroom armoire in the dark. My imaginary childhood horror — one that thrives to this day — is a six-foot-tall standing black panther. Whenever I’m alone and hear an unexpected noise there’s a part of my mind that expects to see this guy. Not attacking or growling but just standing there in a slightly crouched position, legs apart with half-cat and half-human arms. Mouth open, tongue exposed, and staring right at me with those big yellow cat eyes.

How would the world be a lesser place if Kim Kardashian was to fall headfirst down a well and drown? She’s redefined the words “nothingness” and “worthlessness” in ways that would give even F. Scott Fitzgerald, the creator of Daisy Buchanan and husband of Zelda Fitzgerald, pause. The fact that she’s famous and desired for her hot bod, for being rich, for her Ray J sex tape, and for Keeping Up with the Kardashians amounts to a societal indictment of the first order. Put her on Charlie Rose and she’d say…what? I’m asking.

The key to this photo is the look of smug delight on the Ben & Jerry guy’s face. He’s just sold an ice cream cone to the smokin’ Kim Kardashian, and his day is totally made.

Tom Hooper‘s The King’s Speech winning the Toronto Film Festival’s People’s Choice Award tells you that festivalgoers, like the older Academy contingent, will go for the accessible emotion every time.

Speech is a tidy, traditional portrait of British royalty and a profound friendship between a king and a commoner. It’s a very fine film for what it is, appropriately framed in a conservative light and true to the era in which it unfolds. But it isn’t nearly as exciting or audacious as Darren Aronofsky‘s Black Swan — sorry.

The People’s Choice Award For Documentary winner was Sturla Gunnarsson‘s Force of Nature: The David Suzuki Movie, which I never even heard about during the festival. The runner-up in this category was Patricio Guzman‘s Nostalgia For The Light — correct.

I’m having trouble remembering Due Date (Warner Bros., 11.5), the Todd Phillips road comedy with Robert Downey, Jr and Zach Galifianakis. The title, I mean, because it alludes to pregnancy and…you know, doesn’t seem to indicate guy humor or Son of Planes, Trains and Automobiles or anything in that realm.

On top of which I’ve had a problem with Galifianakis since The Hangover. He’s not funny, I hate Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis, and I don’t want to see another Galifianakis man-diaper performance.

The only actor I’d like to see less in the Galifianakis Due Date role is the cherubic Dan Fogler, the only under-35 comedian who turns me off more. Fogler is currently portraying Alfred Hitchcock in Chase Palmer‘s Number 13 , which is going to be ghastly, I fear. Think about it — the unruly, lethally unfunny, squiggly-haired clown from Balls of Fury playing the droll and sophisticated Hitchcock as a struggling young filmmaker. (It’s about an unfinished 1922 thriller called Number 13 that Hitchcock directed at age 23, but which was shut down due to lack of funds.)

Who would I like to see pared with Downey in Due Date? Kevin Smith sideman Jason Mewes. I’ve always found his stoner shtick fairly hilarious. Plus he’s a more grounded actor than Galifianakis. He says his lines with method-y conviction, never seems to be “goofing off” or coming from a place of ambivalence.

I saw Randall Wallace‘s Secretariat (Disney, 10.8) about a month ago, but it feels a bit longer than that. And it won’t open for another 18 days as we speak. I knew I’d be sitting on my reactions for quite a spell, so I tapped them out the night I saw Secretariat and sent them to a guy who’d also seen it. Otherwise it might have been difficult. You have to tap it out fresh.

Two days ago the Hollywood Reporter‘s Lindsay Powers reported that David Letterman was in on the Joaquin Phoenix meltdown joke all along.

She quotes Late Night staff writer Bill Scheft as follows: “Dave knew about it and Dave loved it because he could play along. It was great television. I’ve told people that [everyone was in on the joke], and not only don’t people believe me, they tell me that I’m wrong and that [Phoenix] is a schizophrenic and he needs help and he’s going to end up like his brother [River, who died of a drug overdose in 1993]. I said no. I saw the segment notes. It’s an act. I saw Ben Affleck’s brother taping the whole thing from offstage.”

Legendary Hollywood columnist and chronicler James Bacon died yesterday (or the night before) at age 96. Last night I searched for documentary or talk-show clips of Bacon passing along stories, anecdotes…anything. All I found was this video report of Bacon attending a 4.6.07 ceremony in honor of his getting a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (somewhere near 1637 Vine Street).

Bacon, whose career rested upon trusted relationships with scores of A-list stars during his peak years, began as a general assignment AP reporter in the 1940s. His Hollywood era spanned from the late ’40s to the mid ’80s, when he was cut loose by the L.A. Herald Examiner. He knew everyone and was liked by all. He operated during an era in which certain columnists and reporters were trusted and “let in.” Those days are completely and totally over.

If Bacon hadn’t aged and had kept his strength up and decided to cash in his relationship chips, he would have been an excellent online columnist. I said “hey, hombre” to Bacon at a couple of Hollywood parties in the early ’80s (when I was working at the Hollywood Reporter), but I never broke bread with the guy. I wish I had.

A roundish portly fellow for much of his professional life, Bacon reportedly enjoyed his libations. Happy imbibers aren’t supposed to last 96 years, so I guess it just came down to good genes. It takes one to know one, I suppose. Good genes are my one ace in the hole. I’ll last until my mid ’90s also, and I won’t quit on this column until I slump over the keyboard. Like Alec Guinness falling on the plunger in The Bridge on the River Kwai, my last act will be to hit “save and publish.”

Two days ago (i.e., Friday, 9.17) Vanity Fair‘s “Little Gold Men” columnist John Lopez posted a glowing review of Guillame Canet‘s Little White Lies, which he saw at the Toronto Film Festival. I saw it there also — my last TIFF screening — and couldn’t have felt more differently.

Little White Lies begins with a 30something party animal (Jean Dujardin) leaving a night club at dawn and getting slammed by a truck as he’s heading home on his scooter. Hands down, this is the most absorbing sequence in the film; no subsequent portion put the hook in like it.

But before long Canet’s ensemble cast leaves Paris for a vacation home in southwestern coastal France (the shooting location was Lege-Cap-Ferret, near Bourdeaux), and the film devolves into a kind of French Big Chill. But not really because there isn’t any generational looking-back and summing-up thing going on. It’s mainly a piece about middle-class drift and nothingness among 30- and 40-something Paris urbans. It meanders and meanders and then meanders a bit more. It lasts for 160 minutes, give or take — way too long.

This is a stock beef, but there’s so much smoking going on in Little White Lies that I began to feel a vague aching sensation in my lungs. It began to seriously anger me. I began asking myself if anyone in this film outside of the small children was capable of getting through a scene without lighting up. Yes, one or two characters didn’t smoke but otherwise it was a cancer marathon.

I was a bit confused by the allegiances of Marion Cotillard‘s character, who is apparently commitment-phobic. She appears at first to be the significant other of the banged-up scooter-crash guy, but then she announces at the end that she’s pregnant, but not necessarily, I gathered, by Dujardin. Could the father be the other 30-something, not-very-tall member of the group, a guy with a 14-day beard growth (Gilles Lellouche) with whom Cotillard is shown hanging with in a bedroom during the vacation portion? I lost the thread. Maybe because I dozed off for a bit.

I know that the cloying fellow (Laurent Lafitte) who wouldn’t stop discussing an ex-girlfriend named Juliette possibly being interested in getting back together was hugely annoying. I wanted him to drown in a boating accident. And I certainly found it tedious that an older-guy character played by Francois Cluzet (the Dustin Hoffman-resembling actor who starred in Canet’s Tell No One) was constantly angered about minor stuff all the time. Resolve it or lose it.

Lopez, on the other hand, calls Little White Lies “a Gallic gem, and not just because you get to watch the immaculate Marion pout with a full glass of burgundy. [The film] could make for a boringly bourgeois exercise in self-congratulation if the opening scenes didn’t set the tone for just exactly what type of people these ‘friends’ are. It’s a complexly textured mix of farce and drama that generates from the care and delight Canet takes in measuring his characters’ massive imperfections.

“There are laughs, there is wine — believe us, there is wine — and there is an endless French summer of sexual confusion, narcissistic tomfoolery, and the sentimental celebration of friendships which flicker between noble motives and base needs, like an old light bulb in a dusty laundry room that somehow lasts for decades.

“Granted, the film can linger a little too long on certain scenes and beats, but when the summer is as lazy as it is in France, that is to be expected. The emotions and laughs are there, and at the end you feel as if you’ve escaped to a desert island with real friends–annoying, entertaining, self-absorbed, and sweet-when-they-can-swing-it friends. And isn’t that why we usually go to the movies?”

Yesterday’s lament about the reported refusal of Warner Home Video technicians to do anything about diminishing excessive grain in the new Bluray of Merian C. Cooper and Willis O’Brien‘s King Kong reminded me of an observation I shared about five years ago, about how deliciously unreal the old Kong looked due to his white eyeballs.

“Cooper’s Kong didn’t look like any gorilla, chimp or orangutan that had ever walked the earth. He was something between a prehistoric hybrid and an imaginary monster of the id…a raging nightmare beast designed to scare the bejeesus out of 1933 moviegoers.

“O’Brien, the legendary stop-motion photography pioneer, used three slightly different-looking Kong models during filming, but for me the master stroke was deciding to give his Kong a set of gleaming white teeth and a pair of very bright white eyes.

“In some of the darker shots of Kong in the 1933 film those teeth and those eyes just pop right out, and the effect is still primal as hell. Those white eyes and black pupils look so fierce and almost demonic…contrasting as they do with that black bear fur that Kong was covered in…that they almost give you the willies, even now.

“There’s no such aura with Peter Jackson‘s National Geographic Kong [in his ’05 remake]. The realism element is awesome but the guy doesn’t look all that spooky. Not even a little bit. Ferocious and all, but he makes me think of Michael Apted and Sigourney Weaver.

“There’s nothing wrong with this approach. It is what it is, and Jackson is going for his own thing. But in trying for anthropological realism Jackson has thrown out that creepy, better-than-reality, only-in-the-movies element that gives the 1933 film a little-boy’s-nightmare quality.”

Another enjoyable discussion between In Contention‘s Kris Tapley and Indiewire columnist Anne Thompson, this time focusing on the Toronto Film Festival highlights. They also get into the strange (some would say reality-defying) winning of the Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion by Sofia Coppola‘s Somewhere.