This video would have worked a little bit better before Scott Pilgrim vs. The World had come out and bombed. Now with everyone on the planet understanding that Michael Cera has screwed the pooch and jumped the shark, it seems curious that any male actor would want to attend MCSA. What for? To double-down on chances of terminating his own career?

Presumably Ben Affleck‘s The Town (i.e., the weekend’s top film) has now been seen by a fair percentage of HE regulars. Did anyone find Rebecca Hall‘s character — a fetching, upstanding, kind-hearted bank officer — remotely believable? Particularly her immediate romantic embrace of Ben Affleck‘s amiable, blue-collar Charlestown shlub, particularly after he confesses that he’s a bank robber?

Ben Affleck, Rebecca Hall in The Town

The script is basically about Affleck’s felon seeking a kind of redemption from Hall, but I didn’t believe a woman like her — cautious, business-suity, emotionally balanced — would pick an Irish lunchbox townie as her main squeeze, much less stay with him after learning he’s a criminal sociopath.

I touched upon this in my initial 9.9 review from the Toronto Film Festival.

Single women in the banking industry are exposed to (and therefore have a decent shot at hooking up with) yuppie professional types with much higher potential incomes than most Charlestown chowderheads. And a woman like Hall would certainly run in the opposite direction once she realizes the guy is a hair-trigger adolescent who doesn’t get that armed robbery is going to destroy his life in record time, and who is blind to this realization because he believes that being tight and close with townie pallies is more important than any kind of rational evaluation of priorities. I mean, c’mon.

A woman who would be able to roll with Affleck and his manic, self-destructive lifestyle would have to be a little bit manic and self-destructive herself — it’s that simple. A woman like Hall would have never gotten a job as a bank officer if she had emotional makeup that would allow for falling in love with a sociopathic edge-junkie chowderhead — it’s also that simple. This is why The Town, which is fairly well made and obviously jolting from time to time, didn’t work for me. I’d love to hear how it could work for anyone.

The high-throttle dialogue in The Social Network is, for me, a key reason why it works as well as it does. As I wrote last Monday night, David Fincher‘s film is like “His Girl Friday on Adderall.” It’s also spoken with the same rapidity that Ken Russell chose for 1980’s Altered States (a decision, incidentally, that so angered screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky he removed his name from the credits).

(l.) Social Network star Jesse Eisenberg, (r.) Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg

The reason for the pacing of The Social Network, in any event, is explained in Mark Harris‘s New York article (“Inventing Facebook”) about the forthcoming Sony release.

“[Aaron] Sorkin‘s shooting script was 162 pages,” Harris writes. “Using normal one-page-equals-one-minute Hollywood calculus, [this] would have yielded a two-hour-and-42-minute film instead of the one Fincher made, which clocks in at a fleet two hours, not including closing credits.

“After Sony looked at the draft and told them they’d have to cut the script, [director David] Fincher says he and Sorkin went back to his office, ‘and I took out my iPhone and put the little stopwatch on and handed the script to Aaron and said, ‘Start reading.’ He was done in an hour and 59 minutes. I called the studio back and said, ‘No, we can do this. If we do it the way Aaron just spoke it, it’ll be two hours.’

“Sorkin’s and Fincher’s confidence was boosted when they watched Jesse Eisenberg’s audition. Eisenberg, 26, who has become, in The Squid and the Whale, Zombieland and Adventureland, something of a specialist in motor-mouthed, sharp-minded, neurotic young men, put himself on a QuickTime video reading a scene as Zuckerberg.

“Sorkin’s characters, says Fincher, ‘are people who need to work their way through the kelp beds of their own thought processes on their way to the exact idea they’ve been trying to find.’ And Eisenberg was ‘the first person who could do Sorkin better than Sorkin. He can just flat-out fly. You can see in his eyes that he’s searching for the best way to articulate something in the middle of articulating two other things.”

“Other actors, however, didn’t find those familiar rhythms until they were in the presence of the screenwriter. When Justin Timberlake, who plays an impish, diabolical version of Napster founder and early Facebook partner Sean Parker, auditioned, he read opposite Sorkin, who was playing the role of Zuckerberg.

“‘It was awesome,’ says Timberlake. ‘Aaron writes like he speaks, so when you say his words, you hear his voice in your head a little, dry and witty. And in the audition, when I heard him say his words, I thought, Oh, so that‘s how fast this screenplay of 100,000 pages is gonna go by!'”

“Nowadays, when you hear people talking about ‘the Facebook movie,’ chances are they mean The Social Network, David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin‘s soon-to-open inquiry into the rise of Mark Zuckerberg, one of the founders of Facebook. But the description might be even better suited to “Catfish,” a documentary by Henry Joost and Ariel Shulman.” — from A.O. Scott‘s 9.17 N.Y. Times review.

Same riff in lead graph of Catfish assessment piece in current Esquire (i.e., the one with Javier Bardem on cover).

I slept late this morning, piddled around, didn’t start work until noon. My flight leaves around 7 pm so I have to start packing and get rolling. No more filing until late this evening, if then. I’ll miss the cool Toronto weather. Back to the razmatazz.

I don’t have time to discuss my brief chat last night with Patricio Guzman, director of the elegant and poetic documentary Nostalgia for the Light, which I saw here last weekend. It’s basically a double-track exploration of two uses of Chile’s Atacama Desert — an ideal place for astronomers to watch the stars, and a location where the victims of Augusto Pinochet’s reign of terror in the ’70s were buried decades ago.

Nostalgia for the Light director Patricio Guzman and translator — Thursday, 9.16, 9:35 pm.

Guzman (who knows Guillermo del Toro from way back) struck me as an artist full of the right stuff. He’s thoughtful, perceptive, careful with words, a world-class gentleman, and has an aura of spiritual calm. We agreed at one point that people should always refrain from talking unless they can improve upon the silence. Good fellow.

I don’t know if the just-announced casting of Sacha Baron Cohen in a biopic about late flamboyant Queen frontman Freddie Mercury is an inspired idea, or a dreadful one. The producers presumably reached out to Cohen not just because he physically resembles Mercury but because image-wise he’s steeped in the realm of gay flamboyance. Mercury was fairly Bruno-ish himself — one of the first openly gay performers in mainstream rock, making no bones about being a Taxi Zum Klo-ish enthusiast.

GK Films’ Graham King is co-producing the Mercury biopic with Robert De Niro‘s Tribeca Productions and Queen Films. Screenwriter Peter Morgan (Hereafter, The Queen) is reportedly working on a script. The as-yet-untitled film will not end with Mercury’s death but “Queen’s barnstorming appearance at the 1985 Live Aid concert in London,” according to this HuffPost story.

I’ve always found “Don’t Stop Me Now” — written and sung by Mercury — one of the more touching Queen songs. It’s basically a celebration of a lifestyle fueled by a series of mad sexual adventures with a string of partners. Mercury is singing about what makes his life worth living and what turns him on and how he loves it, and it killed him. He essentially died as a result of promiscuity during the peak AIDS danger era (late 80s, early ’90s).

I just finished a 15-minute phoner with 127 Hours director Danny Boyle, who was calling from London. There’s always a feeling of vigor and relish in Boyle’s voice — a general mood of “can’t wait” (or “couldn’t wait”) excitement. We covered several topics. I was telling him that my general impression of the film, looking back a week or so, is one of sensual delight — it’s full of explosive color (sandy ambers, reds, blues, browns) and ripe with aromas, secretions, tastings. And is nothing if not emotionally intense each step of the way.

Hollywood Elsewhere will either (a) find a way to attend and cover Jon Stewart‘s Rally to Restore Sanity and Stephen Colbert‘s March To Keep Fear Alive (despite plans to attend the Tribeca Qatar Film Festival from 10.26 through 10.30) or (b) at least be there in spirit. The Stewart/Colbert event will happen on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, 10.30. Any mass-supported statement about how pathetic the hee-haw Teabag fatass fungus-on-their-toenails contingent is will be good for the soul, and a balm in the eye of history.

On top of which it’ll be cool to mix it up with tens of thousands of like-minded people. Plus I haven’t been down to Washington since the ’90s, and I know some journalists who live and work vthere, etc.

The only thing that gives pause is that a rally about “taking it down a notch for America” sounds an awful lot like an early 21st Century version of Richard Nixon‘s “Silent Majority” movement.

Early in his first administration (i.e., the late ’60s) President Nixon began enshrining the milquetoast middle-classers who, he said, were silent, modest, not demonstrating, and not shouting anti-Vietnam War slogans. The salt of the earth, the moderate backbone of the nation, etc. During last night’s Jon Stewart Show Stewart asked, “Why don’t we hear from the 70-80 percenters? [who don’t have extreme nutbag political views]?” He said that he wants his Sanity rally — “a million moderate march…a clarion call for rationality!” — to articulate a middle-class response to “the loud folks.”

So I don’t fancy myself as one of the new Silent Majority. I don’t like or want the linkage. I see myself as one who despises the pitchfork racist nutter selfish-idiotic-pig crowd…no offense. So I don’t want to take things down a notch. I want these people rounded up in trucks and incarcerated in green reeducation camps. I’m perfectly serious.

Apparently freaked or at least alarmed by recent negative reactions to I’m Still Here, his Joaquin Phoenix meltdown documentary, Casey Affleck has dropped the pose and confessed to N.Y. Times reporter Michael Cieply that “almost every bit of” I’m Still Here is pretend, put-on theatre.

To this I say bullshit. I believe that some or much of the doc may have been staged and performed, okay, but I’m convinced that it was inspired by genuine career despair on Phoenix’s part, and that a sizable portion of it came straight from his real heart, head and gut.

What happened, I strongly suspect, is that after I’m Still Here was shown at the Toronto Film Festival Affleck and Phoenix both realized they’d over-played their hand by persuading the media that Phoenix is an even bigger egoistic fool than anyone had suspected or realized, and that the only way to save Phoenix from a life of depression and skid-row dereliction is to claim it was entirely made up. Think about it — how could Cieply claim or prove otherwise? Once you start down the rabbit hole there are no guideposts, no rules…nothing but free-form improv.

I believe Affleck is doing what he can to save his brother-in-law from ruination. Because Phoenix has no future without a complete renunciation of the whole “act.” Everyone on the planet has been convinced there is no bigger asshole around. Right now Phoenix would have trouble getting hired as an assistant at Kinko’s.

“It’s a terrific performance, it’s the performance of his career,” Affleck tells Cieply in a story that went up this afternoon.

Affleck “was speaking of Mr. Phoenix’s two-year portrayal of himself — on screen and off — as a bearded, drug-addled aspiring rap star, who, as Affleck tells it, put his professional life on the line to star in a bit of ‘gonzo filmmaking’ modeled on the reality-bending journalism of Hunter S. Thompson.

“The reviews were so angry,” said Mr. Affleck, who attributed much of the hostility to his own long silence about a film that left more than a few viewers wondering what was real — The drugs? The hookers? The childhood home-movie sequences in the beginning? — and what was not.

“Virtually none of it was real,” Cieply writes. “Not even the opening shots, supposedly of Mr. Phoenix and his siblings swimming in a water hole in Panama. That, Mr. Affleck said, was actually shot in Hawaii with actors, then run back and forth on top of an old videocassette recording of Paris, Texas to degrade the images.

“I never intended to trick anybody,” said Mr. Affleck, an intense 35-year-old who spoke over a meat-free, cheese-free vegetable sandwich on Thursday. “The idea of a quote, hoax, unquote, never entered my mind.”

Wait….”a meat-free, cheese-free vegetable sandwich“? What has that got to do with anything? To me, this sentence suggests that Cieply’s story itself is a put-on. You know what? I’m getting sick of this. I say trust no human being entirely. You know who I trust? My cats. Otherwise believe none of what you read or hear and only half of what you see.

Phoenix turned himself into a bloated, pot-bellied pig wasn’t theatre — he clearly did that.

And I was so appalled and amazed by the scene in which Phoenix’s assistant poops on his boss’s face that I’m going to deliberately defy N.Y. Times-sanctioned “reality” and continue to believe it really “happened.”

Two nights ago Woody Allen spoke about the Ground Zero mosque issue with N.Y. Daily News “Gatecrasher” columnist Frank DiGiacomo at a Manhattan event for You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger. “Of course I think they should build the mosque,” he said, “[but] the only people who have a right to weigh in are the people that were personally involved in 9/11.

“The people who lost friends or relatives have every right to protest and say what they want to say. All of the other people weighing in” are doing so for “political and exploitation reasons. I feel those people should shut up and just let the people who were personally affected make their case.

“If I was speaking to the people who are protesting legitimately, I would try to convince them, if I could, that building the mosque takes a step toward eliminating this kind of thing from happening again. Preventing the mosque from being built is not a step in the right direction.”

DiGiacomo asked Allen asked Allen if he has a bucket list of things he’d like to do before he dies. “Yes, and one of them is [to] live longer,” the director responded. “That’s at the head of the list.”

TheWrap‘s Brent Lang is reporting that Lionsgate has acquired domestic distribution rights to John Cameron Mitchell‘s Rabbit Hole, an exceptional grief-recovery drama with Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart that I reviewed yesterday. The plan is to open the film later this year and mount campaigns for Best Picture and Best Actress.