Samuel Moaz‘s heavily-hyped Lebanon screened for the New York Film Festival press early this afternoon, and my sense of the reaction in the room was…well, a little subdued. A bit of sneering going on. A “disappointment,” one guy declared. “Didn’t love it, didn’t hate it…it’s okay.” Who was it who wrote the seminal rave review of this?, I asked another fellow. He wasn’t sure, he said, but he’d “like to find him and beat him up.”

The problem, I suspect, is that people had it in their heads that Lebanon was going to be some kind of Israeli Hurt Locker. But as Cinemascopian‘s Yair Raveh explained in an HE reader response post a few days ago, it ain’t that. He called it a “visually striking think-piece” and “a haunting memory poem that’s more Bela Tarr then Katherine Bigelow.”

The Lebanon hook is that it’s an allegedly riveting experiment since no one, to my knowledge, has ever shot a war film completely from inside a tank. The result, based on Moaz’s personal experience during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, is a grim, occasionally poignant and extremely claustrophobic rendering of an Israel tank crew’s 24 hour ordeal during this conflict. The idea is to make you feel stuck and trapped and very afraid, and to feel the grease and the oil against your skin and the smoke in your lungs and smell the rank urine. And you do feel and sense these things.

But I think Lebanon is finally limited by the claustrophobic scheme. After an hour or so you start saying to yourself, “How long is this again? It’s 92 minutes but it feels like 110 or more. You’re supposed to feel the discomfort — I get that — but the conceit eventually begins to overwhelm and diminish the human element. In the same way, now that I think of it, that Alfred Hitchcock‘s Rope (’48) began to feel constrained by Hitchcock’s decision to shoot and compose without edits in a series of unbroken takes.

But before the “lemme outta here” feeling kicks in, Lebanon disturbs and provokes in a fairly striking way. There’s something undeniably arresting about watching various victims of the Israeli and Christian Phalangist carnage, including a dying donkey and a mother who’s just lost her five year-old daughter in a shelling, entirely through a tank lens without sound. And the disputes between the tank crew members — Yoav Donat, Itay Tiran, Oshri Cohen, Michael Moshonov, Zohar Strauss — certainly increases the tension and desperation..

The heat, in any event, has now been turned down on Moaz’s film, which was recently acquired by Sony Classics after winning the Golden Lion at the 66th Venice Film Festival. It’s also a possible Best Foreign Language Film Oscar nominee, assuming that Israrel submits it (although this is far from assured).

After wining the Golden Lion Maoz reportedly dedicated the award “to the thousands of people all over the world who, like me, come back from war safe and sound.Apparently they are fine, they work, get married, have children. But inside, the memory will remain stabbed in their soul.”

A fresh thought hit me as I watched this E.T. spot on Rob Marshall‘s Nine. One look at the Italian-suited, stylishly unshaven Daniel Day Lewis brooding and strolling around all these women and wearing that look of “oh, my…it just hasn’t come together yet, has it?” and I said to myself, “I don’t know if I care if DDL’s character has his vision together or not. I don’t know that a guy like this cracking the code and finding creative fulfillment is all that important to me.”:

I mean, I love Rome and the look of cavernous sound stages and the beautiful Amalfi coastline, but I don’t know that I relate to this world. Life is harder than usual right now. We’re dealing with a recession and all. The HPE has managed to get me evicted. And DDL is wearing great looking threads and tooling around in a cool sports car and fielding the attentions of several tantalizing women. What’s in this for me?

I’m also not sure if I cared all that much if Marcello Mastroianni‘s character had his creative ducks in order in Federico Fellini‘s 8 1/2 (i.e., the 1963 film that Nine is based upon). It was Fellni’s special surrealist atmosphere that kept you interested and aroused. I’m basically saying I don’t feel all that engaged in the ennui and emotional atmosphere of Nine. I know I’ll be seeing it soon but I’m not hungry to see it. Not like I’m hungry to see Invictus or Tree of Life or Zombieland or (sorry) Couples Retreat.

“I need to post this,” Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone wrote a few minutes ago, “because Jeff Wells just posted an absurd run-down of why the [Awards Daily Oscar Poll] is wrong. He gives various reasons why [although] most do not hold water. A Single Man has ‘gay-o-vision,’ Amelia has been dissed by an ‘insider’ and therefore has no shot, Food, Inc. is a ‘doc’ and therefore has no chance to make the Best Pic cut. Um. Lebanon is a foreign language and therefore won’t make the cut. Um. Sherlock Holmes is a ‘joke suggestion’ — I could go on. But do I really need to?”

Yeah, you do because (1) of all the things I’ve written about Sasha and Awards Daily, I’ve always managed to keep viciousness (i.e., describing something she’s written as “absurd”) out of the mix; (b) I said that A Single Man is “a sublime film in certain respects” and that it “could qualify” but that “the Gay-O-Vision factor could inhibit”; (c) Amelia, I’ve been told by a trusted source, hasn’t been precisely dissed by an insider as much as respectfully categorized (whatever its assets may or may not be) as not appearing to be an awards contender; (d) the last time I looked docs and foreign-language features don’t qualify for Best Picture consideration; and (e) all indications are that Sherlock Holmes, especially with a weakened, eager-to-please Guy Ritchie at the helm, is a product of whorishly imitative follow-the-formula satanic CG corporate-think, and it goes without saying that such an enterprise wouldn’t even begin to be considered in Best Picture terms…c’mon!

“Anyone who claims to have expert authority on the Oscars is usually one who will end up with egg on his or her face,” Stone writes. “The good predictors fly under the radar and do not brag about how good they are. if you have to put your faith in someone, there are a few who play the predicting game pretty well — Anne Thompson, David Karger, Damien Bona, Kris Tapley, David Poland and a few others whose names escape me — none of them brag about being good at predicting the Oscars. They are good at it because they keep their hearts entirely out of their decision-making. If your heart gets involved, you may get it wrong on occasion.”

Thompson, Karger and Tapley, sure, but Bona is strictly a stats man — he’s written reams of Oscar copy over the years and he’s never struck me as very reliant or trusting when to comes to listening to the Movie Gods or gut intuition. And don’t even mention Poland’s accuracy record over the past few years….please.

Note to Sasha and all the experts: If your heart gets involved, you may get it wrong on occasion — true. But if your heart doesn’t get involved ((along with your inner wizard-cap seance divining rod) then you have no soul. And you’ll wind up putting some of the readership to sleep.

This E.T. “exclusive footage of Nine” spot was posted on 9.18, and I don’t see what the big deal is. It’s just another whirling smorgasbord of glamour cuts and black-and-white rehearsal footage. (I would be earnestly salivating right now if the entire film had been shot in monochrome.) Since I never watch E.T. the standout element is the Stepford Showbiz News delivery style of co-host Mark Steines. His plastic-complacent manner is a self-directed parody. Don’t copy-reading styles ever evolve?

Listen sometime to the way TV announcers sounded in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. It seems astonishing that copy-reading delivery this phony and artificial was actually the norm at one time. But all cultures gradually evolve, and with this the manner and verbal comnmunication techniques of TV performers. Except Mark Steines sounds exactly the way E.T. robot-announcers sounded in the late ’70s. Everything has changed — Jimmy Carter was president 30 years ago — but E.T. is frozen in amber.

Ryan Adams‘ Best Picture poll on Awards Daily asks readers to choose 10 likely finalists among some 55 or 56 suggestions. The ten I’ve chosen (listed alphabetically) are Bright Star, An Education, The Hurt Locker, Invictus, Nine, Precious, A Serious Man, The Tree of Life, Up In The Air and Where The Wild Things Are. (I obviously haven’t seen Malick’s Tree but…well, you know. And haven’t I read two men-weeping stories about Wild Things? Or just one?)

Here’s why Adams’ other suggestions don’t rate, with due respect: Amelia (unseen but said by an insider to simply not quite cut it in terms of award-season chops), Antichrist (be serious!), Avatar (Delgo/Ferngully, furry ballerina, space Marines), Away We Go (too nice, modest, low-key), The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (joke suggestion), Broken Embraces (very fine Almodovar, but obviously in the foreign language category), City of Life and Death (foreign language), Coco Before Chanel (allegedly too middlebrow boilerplate), Coraline (animated), The Cove (documentary), Creation (forget it), District 9 (too dusty sci-fi, too cultish, too many empty cat-food cans), Everybody’s Fine (unseen but beware of this),

(500) Days of Summer (intriguing film but won’t make the cut), Food, Inc. (doc), Funny People (a very strong contender & a totally honorable film, but perceived as an under-performer), Get Low (haven’t seen it), Goodbye Solo (forget it), Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (be serious), The Informant! (jaunty and quite good in some respects, but lacks that thematic award-season dimensionality), The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (not in the game), Inglourious Basterds (baseball bat beating! fresh cow’s milk! foot-fetish shots!), In the Loop (superb satire but but lacks thematic depth and scope), Julie & Julia (nice movie, not in the game), The Last Station (allegedly very straghtforward & middlebrow…but where’s the distributor?), Lebanon (foreign language), The Lovely Bones (haven’t seen it but always be fearful of Jackson), The Men Who Stare at Goats (clever, amusing, not award quality), Moon (overpraised), 9 (nope), Ondine (not by my yardstck), Ponyo (who?), The Princess and the Frog (be serious), The Prophet (superb but foreign language), Public Enemies (admirable wth killre finale, but not as popular as it needs to be), The Road (good but not good enough), Seraphine (nope), Sherlock Holmes (another joke suggestion), A Single Man (sublime film in certain respects, could qualify but Gay-O-Vision factor may inhibit), Sin Nombre (masterful, certainly among the best of the year, but isn’t it Spanish speaking?), Star Trek (not that kind of film), Summer Hours (don’t know it), Tetro (best cinematography?), Up (animated), The White Ribbon (foreign language), Within the Whirlwind (Siberian gulag love story..what?).

To hear it from loyal HE reader “Lipranzer,” a Manhattan screening tonight of Capitalism: A Love Story was projected slightly out of focus because the projector was using special night vision lenses to prevent people in the theater from recording the movie and then selling pirate copies. Unless, you know, the security guy who allegedly said this was full of shit. Here’s the story:

“Tonight I attended a screening of Capitalism: A Love Story at the AMC Loews Lincoln Square at West 68th Street and Broadway,” he begins. “Right away the trouble started. After the initial credits over a black screen, we saw out-of-focus images. I headed to the exit to complain. In the lobby I saw two men who’d been guarding the entrance and asked them to get somebody to fix the focus. I was happy to see another moviegoer who was also complaining. I went back to my seat expecting the problem to be fixed.

“A minute or two went by and the projection was still out of focus. I went back to the exit, and this time discovered one of the guards there, and he assured me someone had gone up to fix the problem. As I started back to my seat, I noticed the other guard standing near the back of the theater, as if to check when the film would be coming back on. There was no other theater worker with a walkie-talkie, which is usually what happens when there’s a projector problem.

“And when I got back to my seat, despite all the yelling from the audience, and despite my yelling a general obscenity (I don’t remember exactly what it was, but it was something along the lines of ‘fix the motherfucking projector!’), the film was STILL out of focus. Finally, after maybe 3 or 4 minutes, the film finally snapped into focus, to the cheers of the crowd. But near the end the film went slightly out of focus again — not completely, but enough so that people on screen were slightly hazy looking.

“After it was over I saw another moviegoer, a middle-aged man, complaining to those same two guards. He wasn’t raising his voice or anything, so I was surprised when I heard the one of the guards say that he was tired of this discussion and was ending it. The man turned to go in disgust, and I caught up to him and asked if they’d explained what the problem was. According to him, the guards had explained the projector was using special night vision lenses to prevent people in the theater from recording the movie and then selling pirate copies.

“I’m sorry, but this is one of the biggest pieces of bullshit I’ve ever heard. There seems to be two options here. If you’re a conspiracy theorist, the guard was telling a lie — on his own or on orders from his boss or bosses — so that people would leave the movie disgruntled and spread bad word-of-mouth about the film. If that was the aim, it probably won’t work — the audience seemed to be laughing at all the right places and quiet at all the right places, emotional when the moment called for it, and they clapped at the end. And as I was heading to the bathroom, I heard some of the other moviegoers talking and basically agreeing with Moore’s message.

The other option, of course, is the guard was telling the truth, and this was an attempt to curtail piracy.

“Whatever their intentions were, the people who ordered this and carried it out have committed a colossal act of stupidity. Do studios and movie theater owners really believe the way to get people to come see their movies, whether by spending their hard-earned money on it or going to screenings like this that are designed to build positive word-of-mouth, is to completely alienate their customers by purposely making the movie hard to watch?”

“I say no. I’m currently sending an abbreviated form of this message to Michael Moore himself, asking him, or his representatives, to contact other theaters showing his film to make sure this doesn’t happen again. And it might not be a good idea to stop going to movies at the AMC Loews Lincoln Square until they agree never to pull a stunt like this again. I agree in the total scheme of things, this bit of corporate malfeasance ranks pretty low, and this type of action I’m proposing ranks pretty low as well, but it’s a start. Don’t we as moviegoers deserve better?”

Variety‘s Michael Fleming reported today that three key roles in David Fincher‘s The Social Network — a.k.a., the “Facebook movie” by way of Treasure of Sierra Madre — have been cast. Jesse Eisenberg will play Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (rumored, expected); Justin Timberlake will play Sean Parker, the Napster co-founder who became Facebook’s founding president; and Andrew Garfield (Red Riding) will play Eduardo Saverin, the Facebook co-founder who fell out with Zuckerberg over money. The Scott Rudin-produced, Aaron Sorkin-scripted drama will shoot next month in Boston and then move to Los Angeles. Sony will distribute.

As Tip O’Neill said decades ago, all politics is local. The Hispanic Party Elephant who resides upstairs became seriously angered over last weekend’s party-noise dispute (i.e., the one in which I was the bad guy for wanting to get some sleep at 1:45 am) and spoke to his pal the building owner, who then spoke to the lease-holder of this apartment. The long and the short is that the HPE has won and I’m moving out as of November 1st. And now I have to decide fairly quickly whether to hump it back to my affordable West Hollywood apartment or try and find a new place at probably double the rent (if not more) in the Manhattan-Brooklyn-Hoboken area. I’d pretty much decided to be a New Yorker the rest of my life, but the recession economy demands spartan austerity.

Magnolia Pictures has acquired North American rights to Luca Guadagnino‘s I Am Love, the Milan-based, Luchino Visconti-ish melodrama about a wealthy family with Tilda Swinton starring.

Last night Some Came Running‘s Glenn Kenny didn’t really get into last weekend’s Wizard of Oz original-grain-structure discussion, but he summarized my postings and has gotten hold of a copy and run some screen shots, etc. To be continued.

This columnist will be Straw Dog-ging it down in Shreveport, Louisiana, at the end of next week. Roughly two days, in and out. Director-writer Rod Lurie, costars James Marsden, Kate Bosworth, Alexander Skarsgard, James Woods and Dominic Purcell. I’m going to definitely visit the Stray Cat on Travis Street — i.e., the place where Josh Brolin and Jeffrey Wright got into a situation with the local fuzz during the shooting of W.. The wifi had better be good or else.

Joel and Ethan Coen‘s A Serious Man was named the best narrative film of the Toronto Film Festival in a just-posted Indiewire poll of attending critics and bloggers. And Erik Gandini‘s Videocracy was named best documentary.

Narrative runners-up were (in this order) Chuan Lu‘s City of Life and Death, Jason Reitman‘s Up In The Air, Jacques Audiard‘s A Prophet, Giorgos Lanthimos‘ Dogtooth (respectful disagreement!), Lee Daniels‘ Precious, Luca Guadagnino‘s I Am Love, Bruno Dumont’s Hadewijch, Tom Ford‘s A Single Man and Samuel Maoz‘s Lebanon.

The doc runners-up were Chris Smith‘s Collapse, Don Argott‘s The Art of the Steal, Leanne Pooley‘s The Topp Twins, and Micheal Tucker and Petra Eppperlein‘s How To Hold A Flag.