New York Film Festival press screenings began today. I missed this morning’s showing of The Art of the Deal, but I’m definitely planning to catch all or most of the Red Riding trilogy at Magno, which begins at 4 pm. There’s also a Michael Moore-Tina Brown q & a about Capitalism: A Love Story that I’m going to try and attend at Alice Tully Hall staring around 8:30 or thereabouts. So that’s it for the column until much later tonight.

More than 20 months after playing the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, Stanley Tucci‘s Blind Date will suffer a cruel and humiliating exhibition fate — an opening this weekend at Manhattan’s Cinema Village on 12th Street. (Variance Films has booked it there on the way to DVD.) And now its delayed appearance has taken a toll in another minor way.

Patricia Clarkson, Stanley Tucci in Blind Date.

Marshall Fine‘s positive review reminded me that Blind Date is about a husband and wife (Tucci and Patricia Clarkson) role-playing a series of blind dates. This, it turns out, is pretty much the same premise of one of the short films in New York, I Love You (Vivendi, 10.16), the forthcoming (and very nicely rendered) omnibus film from the producers of Paris Je’taime. Directed by Yvan Attal, it’s about a married couple (Chris Cooper, Robin Wright Penn) pretending to meet and flirt in front of a Manhattan restaurant. Not exactly the same thing, but close enough.

We can’t expect Hollywood’s Eloi-catering commercial forces to pay official tribute to an almost 70-year-old classic film, but it seems fundamentally wrong that there isn’t some kind of official memorial somewhere to Orson Welles‘ Citizen Kane. And what better place to have this memorial than the Palace theatre on Broadway and 47th, where Kane had its grand debut in on or about May 1, 1941?

You can find memorial statues and stones and museum exhibits at every major historical site in this country, from the remnants of the Alamo in San Antonio to the huge sloping field where the 1969 Woodstock festival took place to the location of 1863 Gettysburg battle to the JFK assassination museum in Dealey Plaza in Dallas. Hollywood history is also remembered here and there. The site of the original Jesse Lasky players can be found on L.A.’s Cahuenga Blvd., and there are brass plaques mounted on the Warner Bros. sound stages that list the films that were long ago shot within (Casablanca, Yankee Doodle Dandy, etc.).

But there’s nothing that pays tribute to the debut of Citizen Kane — obviously a seminal event in American motion picture history — at the Palace. It was the site of the film’s greatest hour in terms of contemporary audience reception, and it shouldn’t be forgotten that it was a small miracle that the film opened at all, given the pressures upon exhibitors and newspapers from the Hearst Corporation to bury the film, or at least have it officially ignored. It was quite a film and quite an event, and it just seems wrong — disrespectful, at the very least — that there’s not a plaque or some modest glass-enclosed display within the Palace (which is now showing West Side Story to the rubes) that acknowledges this seminal event.

Sony Pictures Classics has picked up Samuel Maoz‘s Lebanon, a Hurt Locker-ish view of war from inside an Israeli tank during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. The film will play at the forthcoming NY Film Festival and screen for press two days hence — can’t wait.

The idea would be to position Lebanon as a contender for the 2009 Best Foreign Language Feature Oscar, assuming that Israel submits it as an official entry. (And this isn’t a done deal.) SPC has recently shown a special allegiance for Israeli-made dramas, picking up Ari Folman‘s Waltz With Bashir (also about Israel’s Lebanon invasion) and Eran Kolirin‘s The Band’s Visit.

I can’t imagine anyone disputing, as I wrote last May in Cannes, that Lee Daniels‘ Precious is an “immensely sad, fully felt and deeply compassionate film.” And I wouldn’t vigorously dispute Roger Ebert‘s 9.19 prediction that Precious became an even likelier Best Picture nominee last weekend after winning the Toronto Film Festival Cadillac audience award (after having won with the same award in Sundance last January).

Mo’Nique in Lee Daniels’ Precious.

But I need to admit what I’ve been saying to myself since Cannes, which is that I have no interest in seeing Precious a second time.

(Note: Most of the Precious plot particulars have been revealed in various reviews, but spoiler whiners need to stop reading now because I’m doing to mention some of them.)

I don’t want to go into that awful apartment building again and watch that grotesque and pathetic monster-mom (Mo’Nique) abuse and torture that immensely unhappy, morbidly obese young girl (Gabby Sidibe), or think again about Mo’Nique allowing her animal boyfriend to have his way with Sidibe, partly out of her resentment toward her daughter and partly due to some revolting quid pro quo imagining that if the boyfriend got what he wanted he’d stay with Mo’Nique.

I’ve watched all kinds of violent and horrific behavior in films, but I’ve never run into anything quite as sadistically cold-blooded as I have in Precious. So I’m done…sorry.

It’s a real-life, lower-depths horror film, is what it is.

During the Toronto Film Festival a reporter from either the Globe & Mail or the Star quoted Good Hair‘s Chris Rock as saying “I can’t watch Precious again.” Maybe he’d already seen it two and three times and felt that was enough, but reading this (can’t find the link) reminded me of my core feelings. Precious is something you watch and go “wow, deeply moving!” and then stay away from for the rest of your life.

I suspect that most of the Precious support is about people wanting to cast (for their own reasons as much as their liking of the film) a symbolic vote for caring and compassion. It’s about people wanting to say to their community and to themselves, “Good God…we have to help someone with an affliction like this and do what we can to symbolically refute the sort of familial abuse that created her pain in the first place.”

This same feeling could possibly carry Sidibe to a Best Supporting Actress nomination…maybe. I’ve also wondered from the start if Mo’Nique is perhaps portraying too much of a monster for people to vote for her. (I’m not saying she doesn’t give the part hell — that confession scene at the end is phenomenal — but I am nursing doubts.) By my sights the most impressive acting in the film is from Mariah Carey because her human-services psychologist or counselor seems so quietly focused and restrained, and of course so un-Carey-like. She’s barely recognizable. And of course she’s an agent of healing, which is another vague plus.

I heard the somewhat raspy, high-pitched voice of H.G. Wells for the very first time this morning, when the link to this early 1941 radio chat with Orson Welles landed in my inbox. All my life I’ve been saying “H.G., not Orson” when anyone’s asked about spelling my family name. Nothing more than that. (Thanks to Michael Bergeron.)

Too many stars, Gary Marshall directing, Love Actually without Brits, out the window.

With almost any other screenwriter or screenwriters, this scene — this line, I mean — would just a good, vulgar, funny throwaway. But with the Coen brothers, it’s an integrated plot thread. Because Tara Reid‘s Bunny Lebowski really does need money, and to such a degree (we’ll eventually learn) that she’ll soon be a willing pawn in a fake kidnapping plot. This is what good screenwriting does. It decides that even a seemingly innocuous sex gag will feed into the whole.

“Movies that rise above, like A Single Man or Bright Star, will have a theatrical life for quite a while,” Apparition‘s Bob Berney tells Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson. “For financial reasons, not enough good films were for sale for buyers. A lot of films were misses. If a film is not really special, there is no in-between. It will not get a theatrical release. If it’s a halfway movie, audiences will skip it and watch it at home.”

You know what isn’t a halfway or an in-betweener? Chris Smith‘s Collapse. Where’s the disribution announcement on this one?

Producer Jonathan Dana provides the money quote in Thompson’s piece. “It’s a massacre…the end of funny money,” he says. He means funds “for anything above a micro-budget level that is too risky or daring or global,” Thompson explains, adding that “small-scale local productions will prevail, without counting on a North American theatrical release.”

I love the last part of the Dana paragraph in which Thompson summarizes his belief that “by dint of Darwinian forces of survival, movies will get better and stronger.” Oh, I see, I get it — filmmakers were holding back on their best efforts before? They were being…what, creatively whimsical as they psychologically cruised along on funny money, but now that it’s sink-or-swim, do-or-die season they’ll get real and try harder?

Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone dislikes Indiewire‘s decision to refer to certain columnists (such as myself and Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson) as “critics” in their Toronto Critics Poll. “I’m not dissing these guys,” Stone writes, “[but] not just anyone can write about movies and be called a ‘critic.'”

I wouldn’t call myself a “critic” either. Certainly not in the Marshall Fine/Dana Stevens/Scott Foundas/Stephen J. Whitty sense of the term. Which can be otherwise defined as seeing every last film that comes along and sitting down like a rank-and-file machinist in Detroit and reviewing every last one (including and especially the awful-awfuls) and always with a five-or-six-paragraph plot synopsis. Which can otherwise be defined as being a good soldier who does the hard and once-necessary task of grappling with all of it, good or bad, rain or shine, sick or healthy. Critics do the job like those pilots in Howard Hawks‘ Only Angels Have Wings flew mail over the Andes.

But critics aren’t truly and finally critics unless they’re stone Catholics about movies, and I have always been that. I’ve been swimming in these waters for 30 years now and I don’t just skim across the surface of the pond when I see and write about a film. True Catholics put on the wetsuit and dive in each and every time. They swim to the bottom and search around and can identify and quantify the various fish and algae down there, not to mention the geological assessments of silt and sand and bedrock.

I do all that and then some. All my life I have felt and communed and wrestled with films as seriously and arduously as Martin Luther did with Catholicism before striking out with the Protestant Reformation. Okay, not every last flick made and distributed on the planet earth but most of the ones worth seeing. Yes, I’ve deliberately chosen not to suffer through each and every film that opens because 60% to 70% of them are soul-sucking torture to sit through, and some of the worst suffering I’ve endured in my life (which has included getting punched and spat upon, being in car and motorcycle accidents, getting arrested and put behind bars, being fired just before Christmas several times, getting divorced and seeing friends and family members die) has been due to bad films.

So I’m selective, yes, and my judgment is far perfect. But even in the murkiest waters I can spot and smell trouble from hundred of yards off, like a shark can pick up distress signals.

Stone is implying that blogger-columnists like myself just kind of bop-bop-bop along like red robins and throw out little zingers — i.e., less than fully considered reactions — after seeing this or that film. Sometimes I do toss out facile-seeming reactions but that’s because I’ve decided that a zinger is quite appropriate and sufficient. We all know what proper film criticism is and no, I don’t follow the form. But a fully considered response to a film doesn’t always have to be expressed in ten to twelve graphs with five or six devoted to some droning boilerplate synopsis.

What matters is whether or not you’re a life-long hairshirt Catholic and whether or not movies get to you in the same way that spiritual satori or lung cancer does. In this respect very few critics out there have anything on yours truly.

Who’s Joe?

Did David Poland tip off Informant! director Steven Soderbergh about his shooting angle idea for this interview, and did Soderbergh drive over to nearest shoeshine stand to spiff up before Poland arrived? Imagine how the piece would’ve played if Soderbergh was wearing beat-up Converses. Or, for that matter, canary yellow sneakers. Key quote: “I think we got the money for the Liberace film…so it’s gonna be next summer.”

I was asking a few days ago why Oliver Stone‘s South of the Border, a reportedly flattering portrayal of Venezuela president Hugo Chavez that recently screened at the Venice Film Festival, wasn’t showing at Toronto. And then lo and behold I received an invite this morning to catch it on Wednesday evening (9.23) at the Walter Reade Theater. Stone will attend and do a q & a with Lincoln Center Film Society chief Richard Pena following the screening.

Bolivian president Evo Morales (interviewed in the doc) will also be there. It’s only a guess but it wouldn’t surprise if the Wall Street 2 team (including cast members Michael Douglas, Shia Lebeouf, Frank Langella, Carey Mulligan, etc.) would also attend in a show of support and solidarity for the boss.