Michael Moore spoke following last night’s Capitalism: A Love Story screening about why he’s still pretty much behind President Barack Obama…for now. And yet his last words on the subject were “maybe my next film will be about him.”

With all the running around Toronto I missed this over the weekend. “The Democrats just never learn [that] Americans don’t really care which side of an issue you’re on as long as you don’t act like pussies,” Bill Maher said last Friday night. Mild-mannered is as mild-mannered does. Maher called the White House “cowards” for letting the crazies push them around, and said President Obama needs to man up and “stand up for the 70 percent of Americans who aren’t crazy.”

Here‘s the transcript. Key quote: “Crazy evil morons make up things for Obama to do, and he does it.”

In my usual once-removed, insufficiently bookish way, I felt I came to know author/poet Jim Carroll not from his writings but through the 1995 film adaptation of The Basketball Dairies. I’m thinking particularly of that harrowing scene when Leonardo DiCaprio, who played the teenaged Carroll, wailed and screamed in the hallway outside his mother’s apartment, begging to be let in. That scene sank in deep. 14 years ago and I still play it in my head from time to time.

Author/poet Jim Carroll

Carroll died last Friday at age 59 of a heart attack. He was reportedly working at his desk working when he died. My condolences to family, friends and fans. Quality, not quantity.

A Guardian story reports that the annual dolphin slaughter is happening again in Taiji, Japan. I wonder what’s happened regarding Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s determination about heading up the Tokyo Film Festival jury in light of the fest’s reported decision not to screen The Cove despite its green theme.

The Indiewire guys have asked me and several others to grade the Toronto Film Festival selections we’ve seen thus far. I’m finding their list of 34 films, give or take, depressing because I’ve only seen 10 or 11 so far, and not counting today I’ve only got three and a half days to go before flying back to New York. Always like this, always frustrating, etc.

I haven’t time to write anything about Michael Moore‘s Capitalism: A Love Story, which I saw earlier this afternoon, but I think it’s brilliant and searing and the various nitpicking Moore critics can go to hell. He always does what he does with awesome skill, and every time I sit down with one of his films I melt down. Yes, I choked up.

I don’t care about what he hasn’t shown and what corners he’s cut because he always brings it home and makes his points not just understood but felt. I had a problem with one thing — he doesn’t hold Barack Obama‘s feet to the fire about chumming up and taking the word and counsel of Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geitner.

But Capitalism is a bold-as-brass slam at the basic evils unleashed by unregulated capitalism, and a clean and irrefutable explanation about how the U.S. system has taken the basic unfairness of life and magnified it tenfold, especially since the ascension of Ronald Reagan.

A couple of hours ago I did about 13 minutes with Joel and Ethan Coen, the director-writers of the irrefutably brilliant A Serious Man, at Toronto’s Park Hyatt.

A Serious Man‘s Ethan and Joel Coen.

The talk was loose, amiable, amusing. It always is when you speak to them. As long as you talk their language, I mean. Their personalities are so low-key and unaggressive that they could both die from this, and that’s cool. I hate the word “genius” because Hollywood phonies use it all the time, but that’s what these guys have. And I really love it when they laugh.

The mp3 speaks for itself but I started by repeating a remark from a producer friend that the film’s dark view of life being a non- stop gauntlet of misfortune and cruel fate is “dishonest” given that the Coens’ lives are so creative and productive and successful. They guys didn’t really answer this one but the semi-biographical A Serious Man is about their teenaged years and the staunchly Jewish Minnesota community they grew up with, and not their filmmaking lives.

I complimented them about the beautiful CG tornado that appears at the end, adding my general opinion that invisible CG is the best. They agreed. The visual effects maestros were Oliver Arnold, Andy Burmeister and Alexandre Cancado of Luma Pictures.

I asked them if they agreed with my belief that the philosophy of A Serious Man can be summed up by that kiki joke I mentioned in my review. They weren’t sure what I meant so I went into the shpiel and Joel went, “Oh, you mean roo-roo?” The joke has been told with many names over the years. Not only did they not disagree with the analogy but got a good laugh from it.

The movie is basically saying, I said, that your friends can’t help you, your family can’t helpo and your community can’t help you when it comes to God’s cruel humor. You’re alone, basically, and there’s no real comfort to be had, but the film delivers this in such a quietly hilarious way. And that’s the art of it. Ethan said he’s completely comfortable with that assessment.

What’s the point of describing the conversation? Just give it a listen. I expressed hope that they’ll make another out-and-out comedy before too long, and Ethan said that their next, an adaptation of True Grit with Jeff Bridges in the Rooster Cogburn/John Wayne role, is fairly funny. Not overtly but…well, you know.

Michael Bay has removed from his website that letter that trashed Megan Fox — i.e., the one that was written by three crew members. (And which was posted without his knowledge and assent?) Here’s his statement: “I don’t condone the crew letter to Megan. And I don’t condone Megan’s outlandish quotes. But her crazy quips are part of her crazy charm. The fact of the matter I still love working with her, and I know we still get along. I even expect more crazy quotes from her on Transformers 3.”

I was reeling for a minute or two last night about a vicious and dismissive thing that a fellow columnist (and a person I respect and half-like) said about HE. I’m not going to debate the particulars but after I read it I put the iPhone into my pocket and started shuffling down Cumberland Street in a kind of lethargic stupor. I don’t get the hate that some people spew. Awful, some of it.

This led to thinking, in any case, about how we all have two concurrent identities and personalities — one we inhabit and present in face-to-face dealings with fair-weather friends, business allies, acquaintances and whatnot, and one that comes out when we’re dealing with disshevelled family members in the kitchen at 12:30 am.

If you’re part of a family that is more frustrated and dysfunctional than not, the latter is almost always acidic and wounding and backbiting and accusatory in an August: Osage County-slash-Lion in WInter sense. The HE talk-back sword-stabbings and cat ‘o’ nine tail flailings that seem to happen here every other day are basically family squabbles. The difference, of course, is that it’s not happening privately in a kitchen but on a kind of world stage with kids in Kabul keeping up with the occasional mud-throwings along with the various industry, media and uber types who regularly visit.

I sometimes regard them as Edward Albee-ish or John Osborne-esque, but they often feel…well, let’s not be facile. But they do feel depleting and fatiguing and mystifying, even, from time to time. People keep saying I’ve made my own bed with the sharp and blunt tone in my writing, but I like to think that I at least take the time to sculpt and rephrase and mull things over and finally pull back a bit before hitting “save.” Ah, well. Ah, hell.

“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.