“This could very easily be the best-directed, best-acted, most beautifully photographed film of the year. That it will not likely merit so much as cursory Academy consideration is merely reason #3,807 the Oscars are a illegitimate, specious bunch of horseshit. And yet they transfix me. What am I to do?” — from Stu VanAirsdale‘s 9.10 Movieline review of Lars von Trier‘s Antichrist.

This morning’s snap decision has been to shine the 9:45 am screening of Niki Caro‘s The Vintner’s Luck and just stick with the column until Michael Moore‘s Capitalism: A Love Story screens at 12:15 pm. I felt guilty about this, of course, but then a Manhattan critic friend stopped by at my Starbucks office to tell me that the response to Caro’s film, which had a public screening yesterday at the Winter Garden, has been…well, let’s just say the jury’s out.

So it’ll be Capitalism followed by a Coen brothers chat at 2:45, a 6 pm screening of Jacques Audiard‘s The Prophet, and then a dinner thing for Chris Rock‘s Good Hair, which I won’t see until Tuesday.

Publicist Mickey Cottrell and Neil Young Trunk Show director Jonathan Demme got waffle-ironed when they were informed just after midnight that the Toronto Film Festival “has double booked screenings at 2 pm tomorrow, when ours had been set.” Two replacement slots have been offered, and I’m sure it’ll all work out after the dust settles. But this plus the oddly clueless Toronto no-show by Neil Young, as reported last Friday by the Toronto Star‘s Peter Howell, makes this concert film’s TIFF experience seem like one of the all-time debacles.

“They say rock ‘n’ roll never forgets,” Howell wrote, “but someone in charge of Neil Young’s itinerary evidently did.

“Young tells the Star he never intended to visit hometown Toronto to promote his new concert movie, The Neil Young Trunk Show, in a free public event Monday at Yonge-Dundas Square.

“The official TIFF schedule has Young as a confirmed attendee, along with director Jonathan Demme.

“‘This is the first time I ever heard I was supposed to be there,’ Young says from his California ranch home near San Rafael. ‘I didn’t know I was a scheduled event.'”

The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that A Serious Man is a timeless classic — a darkly hilarious piece that speaks to anyone who’s come to appreciate how life, for some people, is a grossly stacked deck. “But how can the Coens push this world view?,” a producer friend asked on the street yesterday, “given what they’ve done and achieved? It’s dishonest.” The irony, of course, is that people of brains and accomplishment and insight are the ones who will value it the most highly.

(l. to r.) A Serious Man costars Sari Lennick and Richard Kind, Focus Features chief James Schamus, costar Michael Stuhlbarg at last night’s Focus Features/Serious Man party at Opus.

Michael Douglas prior to last night’s public screening of Brian Koppelman and David Levien’s Solitary Man. Apologies for the rotten photo — I just wasn’t aggressive or precise enough with my positioning and flash attachment adjustment. This one‘s even worse.

As I’ve said before, the picket-sign sentiments of the yahoo teabaggers — who had a big protest rally yesterday in Washington, D.C. — aren’t just despicable. They also allow you to at least comprehend (i.e., obviously without sympathizing) why the Russian, Chinese and Cuban Communists made a point of imprisoning and wiping out the teabaggers in their cultures after they took over in 1917, 1949 and 1959. “We’re losing our country,” an elderly teabagger told a reporter yesterday. “We think the Muslims are moving in and taking over.”

ABC News reported that the rally drew somewhere between 60 and 70 thousand protestors.

“I’ve been loath to admit that the shrieking lunacy of the summer — the frantic efforts to paint our first black president as the Other, a foreigner, socialist, fascist, Marxist, racist, Commie, Nazi; a cad who would snuff old people; a snake who would indoctrinate kids — had much to do with race,” N.Y. Times columnist Maureen Dowd says this morning.

“I tended to agree with some Obama advisers that Democratic presidents typically have provoked a frothing response from paranoids — from Father Coughlin against F.D.R. to Joe McCarthy against Truman to the John Birchers against J.F.K. and the vast right-wing conspiracy against Bill Clinton.

“But Rep. Joe Wilson‘s shocking disrespect for the office of the president — no Democrat ever shouted ‘liar’ at W. when he was hawking a fake case for war in Iraq — convinced me: Some people just can’t believe a black man is president and will never accept it.”

Tom Ford‘s A Single Man will screen for the public tomorrow night at the Isabel Bader theatre and for Toronto press on Tuesday. Leslie Felperin‘s 9.11 Venice Film Festival review — “luminous and treasurable, despite its imperfections” — underlined its status as a Toronto must-see. I’ve seen the other two TIFF Man flicks — A Serious Man, of course, and Solitary Man last night — so this’l be the capper.

Felperin calls it “an impressive helming debut for fashion designer Tom Ford, who co-wrote the script with David Scearce. Pic freely adapts Christopher Isherwood‘s seminal novel set in Los Angeles, circa 1962, in which a college prof (Colin Firth), grieving for his dead lover, contemplates death. Sterling perfs from a tony cast rep a selling point, but the film’s ripely homoerotic flavor will make finding lovers in the sticks more difficult.

“Described by novelist Edmund White as “one of the first and best novels of the modern gay liberation movement,” Isherwood’s A Single Man presents a stream-of-consciousness portrait of a middle-aged gay man, known only as George, going about his daily routine in early ’60s LA.

“Ford’s script, which, per the press notes, departs significantly from Scearce’s earlier draft, remains fairly close in spirit to the original but departs from it in one major direction: Here, Brit expat George Falconer (Firth) is so bereft over the recent death of his longtime companion, Jim (Matthew Goode), in a car accident, that he’s planning to commit suicide — a plot point that injects tension into what might have been too quotidian a story had Isherwood’s template been followed to the letter.

“Action is confined to a single day, during which George puts his affairs in order. Telling no one of his plans, he follows what’s clearly a routine schedule — bantering with his housekeeper (Paulette Lamori), exchanging polite pleasantries with the all-American family next door and teaching his English class at a small college.

“Already detaching himself from the now, George can barely muster the energy to argue with a colleague (Lee Pace) about the ongoing Cuban Missile Crisis unfolding on the news. However, one of his students, the beautifully chiseled Kenny (Nicholas Hoult, the kid from About a Boy, now all grown up) insists on approaching George to discuss literature, drugs and life in general; the glint in Kenny’s eye hints at something more than purely educational interest.

“After a chaste afternoon encounter with a yet another gorgeous man (Jon Kortajarena), clearly a hustler looking for trade, George makes his way to the house of his friend Charley (Julianne Moore) for dinner that evening. An old friend from Blightly whom George once slept with, as flashbacks reveal, now-dipsomaniac divorcee Charley still can’t accept that George, whom she knows is gay, will never want a “normal” married life with her, despite their rich friendship.

“Ford’s largely delicate touch reps a pleasant surprise, especially given his only filmmaking experience hitherto has been overseeing advertising campaigns for Gucci and his own current, self-named line of fashion products. Clearly this is material close to his heart, and the empathy shines through. What’s more impressive is the skill he shows at evoking quietly sensual details, conjuring how, for instance, sniffing a stranger’s dog brings back memories of George’s beloved pet.

Less surprising, given Ford’s background, is the just-so exquisiteness of the overall look, not just in the men’s clothes (Ford designed Firth’s and Hoult’s figure-hugging suits and casual outfits himself), but in the interiors and femme costumes, too, for which production designer Dan Bishop and costume designer Arianne Phillips respectively deserve co-credit. The way Charley’s pink-and-gold parlor harmonizes not just with her sweeping monochrome dress but also her pink Sobranie cigarettes will evoke swoons of delight in auds for whom magazines like Wallpaper and Architectural Digest are holy writ.

Indeed, the period detailing is almost too perfectly done, to the point where one can’t help sensing the adman in Ford, nursing every detail to look not just accurate but impeccable and fashion-forward. Avid fans of “Mad Men” will notice not only that those pink Sobranies featured in an episode a few weeks before “A Single Man” premiered in Venice, but also that Mad Men gets the occasional ugliness of the period’s design better. An uncredited, voice-only appearance here by Mad Men‘s Jon Hamm further evokes the series.

“It might be argued that Ford is so keen to show immaculate taste, he’ll make sacrifices at the expense of verisimilitude, except that one key element in the filmmaking really does show an almost vulgar streak: Ford and lenser Eduard Grau’s decision to play with the color saturation, so that the initially dun-and-dreary color scheme will suddenly morph in a single shot to a warmer palette, as if the lovely things George sees — a handsome face, a pretty blue dress — have literally brightened his day.

“The effect might have come off better if it had been more subtly deployed, but then again, that little quantum of kitsch might turn out to be what will make auds love this film all the more in years to come.”

Last night’s gotta-see-this tipoff was from a distributor-buyer I’ve known for years. He told me to be sure to catch Francois Ozon‘s Refuge, which I’m half-inclined to do despite my having gone a little bit cold on Ozon since the days of Swimming Pool. Indiewire’s Eric Kohn has written that while “the movie’s cumulative impact is resolutely minor,” it also “contains an admirable amount of psychological depth.”

These girls have been chosen by TIFF marketers to dramatically symbolize, in posters plastered all over Toronto, how really powerful movies makes us all feel. (They’re the standouts, I should say — others also appear.) Obviously a familiar pitch, but one look at these two you they’re not film festival types. They look like fans of Megan Fox, Twilight, Transformers, Matthew McConaughey, etc. They’re probably lining up this weekend to see Jennifer”s Body.

And you know they’d run screaming from the prospect of watching A Serious Man. They wouldn’t sit for The Cove with a knife jabbed into their ribs. They might see Up In The Air, but only if there’s nothing glossy and shallow playing alongside it. So why have TIFF staffers chosen these two? What are they trying to tell us?

After seeing this morning’s 9 am screening of The Road (which I didn’t have time to grapple with to any degree), I made it over to the Cumberland for the 11:30 am showing of Luca Guagadnino’s I Am Love, which I’d been persuaded to see by Jay Weissberg‘s 9.7 Variety review.

Kristin Scott Thomas, Serge Lopez in Catherine Corsini’s Partir.

I found my seat, the lights went down, the film began, and 10 minutes later I was having second thoughts. An allegedly Visconti-like portrait of a wealthy Milanese family and a gradual manifestation of threats to the order of things, it began quietly and reservedly. Preparations for a family dinner, cityscapes of a snow-covered Milan, and the gradual introduction of family members. I’m ashamed to admit that I began to feel antsy. I felt a lack of edge and subversion. Deep down, I suppose, I didn’t really want to wade into a new Visconti; I wanted a Marxist Pasolini.

And I began to think more and more about Catherine Corsini‘s Partir (i.e., Leaving), the Kristin Scott Thomas-Serge Lopez drama about a mad extra-marital affair, that was just starting in another Cumberland theatre two floors below. I have a thing for KST and a fascination for dramas about cheating. Did I feel guilty about blowing off I Am Love? Of course, but with so many films playing at TIFF and not enough time to fit even a fraction of them in, you have to trust your snap judgments. So I bailed.

Set in Nimes, Partir is about an upper middle-class wife of a doctor and a physical therapy specialist (Thomas) who gradually and somewhat accidentally falls for an ex-con laborer (Lopez) who’s working on a rear-cottage conversion in her back yard. It sounds like a stretch — women of means never sleep with the help — but it happens in a step-by-step, emotionally plausible way that didn’t throw me out of the film. The affair consumes, and within a day or two KST decides to tell her doctor husband (Yvan Attal) what’s going on. She tells him it’s over but of course it isn’t.

So she moves out, leaving not just her spouse but two teenaged kids. And then Attal, bent silly with rage, uses his political contacts to make life financially unbearable for KST and Lopez, cutting off work opportunities and such. And when their money really starts to evaporate, she gets desperate and turns to theft. The cops are tipped, Lopez gets arrested, and KST moves back with her family when Attal promises to let him her lover skate. But she can’t handle the deal and submitting to what feels like punishment sex in the marital bed, and she goes nuts. I won’t spill what happens, but the audience began to murmur and chortle when the final act occured.

It doesn’t quite work. We all understand getting carried away with passion, but women always take a hard look at the monetary underpinnings of any relationship, and I’m sorry but I didn’t believe that KST would lose it to this degree. I know for sure that the story wouldn’t fly if were re-shot for an American audience. Certainly not in this recession. But the first half of the film does work and rather nicely at that, and I was more or less content with this. I didn’t leave angrily. I just told myself, “Okay, you took a chance and it didn’t quite pan out.”

And to hear it from Robert Koehler, who’s not the type to bail on a film after 15 minutes, I Am Love does pan out. So okay, I half blew it. But that’s a film festival for you. You have to think on your feet and take your chances. I’ll catch I Am Love later in the week. Sorry.

Just to get things straight, the three TIFF Man movies are as follows: (a) A Single Man, directed and adapted by Tom Ford and costarring Colin Firth, Julianne Moore, Matthew Goode and Ginnifer Goodwin, about a Los Angeles-based English professor dealing with the sudden death of his partner; (b) Brian Koppelman and David Levien‘s Solitary Man, basically about an older middle-aged guy catting around with Michael Douglas and costars Jesse Eisenberg, Mary-Louise Parker, Susan Sarandon, Jenna Fischer and Danny DeVito; and (c) Joel and Ethan Coen‘s A Serious Man, which of course I saw and reviewed yesterday.

“Ms. Sourpants…a cringe-able actress…dumb as a rock…a classless, graceless, ungracious bitch.” This is what three guys claiming to be part of the “loyal Transformers crew” have written about Megan Fox on Michael Bay‘s website, obviously with Bay’s okay. It comes in response to Fox having complained about working for Bay on both Transformers films and comparing him to Hitler, etc.

Jennifer ‘s Body star Megan Fox on front page of today’s (Saturday, 9.12) Globe and Mail.

“We’ve had the tedious experience of working with the dumb-as-a-rock Megan Fox on both Transformers movies,” the letter says early on. [Note: the grammar ansd phraseology are weak so I’ve cleaned up certain portions.] “We [work] in different departments, and can’t give our names because sadly doing so in Hollywood could lead to being banished from future Paramount work. One of us touches Megan’s panties, another has the often shitty job of pulling Ms. Sourpants out of her trailer, and the last of us is near the Panaflex camera that helps to memorialize the valley girl on film

“Megan has the press fooled. When we read those magazines we wish we worked with that woman. Megan knows how to work her smile for the press. Those writers should try being on set for two movies [because] sadly, she never smiles. The cast, crew and director make Transformers a really fun and energetic set. We’ve traveled around the world together, so we have never understood why Megan was always so much the grump of the set.

“When facing the press, Megan is the queen of talking trailer trash and posing like a porn star. And yes we’ve had the unbearable time of watching her try to act on set, and yes, it’s very cringe-able. So maybe, being a porn star in the future might be a good career option. But make-up beware, she has a paragraph tattooed to her backside (probably due to her rotten childhood) which means easily another 45 minutes in the chair!

“So when the three of us read Ms Fox…blabbing her trash mouth about a director whom we three have grown to really like. She compared working with Michael to “working with Hitler.” We actually don’t think she knows who Hitler is by the way. But we wondered how she doesn’t realize what a disgusting, fully uneducated comment this was? Well, let’s get some facts straight.

“Say what you want about Michael. Yes, at times he can be hard, but he’s also fun, and he challenges everyone for a reason – he simply wants people to bring their ‘A’ game. He comes very prepared, knows exactly what he wants, involves the crew and expects everyone to follow through with his or her best, and that includes the actors. He’s one of the hardest working directors out there. He gets the best from his crews, many of whom have worked with him for 15 years. And yes, he’s loyal, one of the few directors we’ve encountered who lowered his fee by millions to keep Transformers in the United States and California, so he could work with his own crew.

“Megan says that Transformers was an unsafe set? Come on Megan, we know it is a bit more strenuous then the playground at the trailer park, but you don’t insult one of the very best stunt and physical effects teams in the business! Not one person got hurt!

“And who is the real Megan Fox? About as ungracious a person as you can ever fathom. She shows little interest in the crew members around her. We work to make her look good in every way, but she’s absolutely never appreciative of anyone’s hard work. Never a thank you. All the crew members have stopped saying hi to Ms. Princess because she never says hello back. It gets tiring. Many think she just really hates the process of being an actress.

“Megan has been late to the set many times. She goes through the motions that make her exude this sense of misery. We’ve heard the A.D’s piped over the radio that Megan won’t walk from her trailer until John Turturro walks on set first! John’s done seventy-five movies and she’s made two!

“Never expect Megan to attend any of the 15 or so crew parties like all the other actors have. And then there’s the classless night she blew off the Royal Prince of Jordan, who prepared a special dinner for all the actors. She doesn’t know that the grip’s [two] daughters wanted to visit her daddy during work in order to meet Megan, but that he wouldn’t let them come because he told them ‘she’s not nice.’

“The press certainly doesn’t know her most famous line. On our first day in Egypt, the Egyptian government wouldn’t let us shoot because of a permit problem as the actors got ready in make up at the Four Seasons Hotel. Michael tried to make the best of it, and so decided to take the cast and crew on a private tour of the famous Giza pyramids. God hold us witness when we say that Megan’s response was, “I can’t believe Michael is fucking forcing us to go to the fucking pyramids!” (I guess this is the ‘Hitler guy’ she’s referring to.)

“So this is the Megan Fox you don’t get to see. Maybe she will learn, but we figure if she can sling insults then she can take them too. Megan really is a thankless, classless, graceless, and shall we say unfriendly bitch. It’s sad how fame can twist people, and even sadder that young girls look up to her. If only they knew who they’re really looking up to.

“But fame is fleeting. We behind-the-scenes guys have seen em’ come and go. Hopefully Michael will have Megatron squish Megan’s character in the first ten minutes of Transformers 3.”

I just got out of a 9 am screening of John Hillcoat‘s The Road. It’s now 11:05 with another movie — I Am Love — about to begin at 11:30 so I have ten minutes to review The Road. And I’m not going to make it. Ugly-beautiful photography and highly admirable production design — two hours of rotted, ash-covered, end-of-the-world remnants captured in ravishing desaturated color — and who needs it? Okay, Viggo Mortensen and the kid are very good…yes, fine. But what they bring isn’t nearly enough.

I read Cormac McCarthy‘s novel for the beautiful prose, but the movie is quite unnecessary. It really and truly goes nowhere, enhances nothing, offers no poetry of any lasting value and adds nothing to the conversation. Plus it has a lousy story. You can have it. I’ll never watch The Road again. You can give me the Blu-ray and I’ll never pop it in.