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Before reading Marc Graser‘s Variety story about Walt Disney Studios chairman Dick Cook being suddenly job-less, I knew it wouldn’t contain the slightest hint or motive or industry rumble as to why. Then I clicked over to Nikki Finke and her report that a Disney insider has confided that “Cook himself is telling Hollywood tonight” that he was “fired.” And that’s the way it tends to work. Variety delivers the boilerplate; Finke provides the sizzle.

The Weinstein Co. has decided to bump Miguel Arteta‘s Youth in Revolt out of a previously slated 10.30 opening in favor of a winter doldrums counter-programming slot on 1.15.10. Presumably Bob and Harvey have figured that Michael Jackson’s This Is It, which opens wide on 10.28, along with the other 10.30 openers — Endgame, Gentlemen Broncos, The Boondock Saints: All Saints Day, etc. — comprise too much competition. And that the new 1.15 competitors — Book of Eli and the Weinsteins’ own Hoodwinked Too! — are less so.

Naah, that’s not it. It’s something else, I bet. It always is.

In his 9.17 story about the delay, Variety‘s Dave McNary called Youth in Revolt “a potential awards contender.” News to me. What categories was McNary thinking of?

I saw Youth in Revolt in Toronto. I was half-okay with it, but it’s significant, I feel, that I didn’t write or post anything. The truth is that it’s just another adventures of a young horny dude movie gussied up with a witty, sophisticated script by Gustin Nash. Yes, of course — it’s preferable to sit through one of these things when the characters say wise and pithy things, but it’s basically the same old ghoulash. And the exalted reputation of C.D.Payne‘s original 1993 epistolary novel and all the sequels and their popularity among under-35ers doesn’t change that.

Nearly every critic has tired of Michael Cera‘s repetitive zone-case personality, and has raved about his “Francois Dillinger” incarnation in Youth in Revolt because it allows Cera to play dark and semi-perverse. But let’s not get carried away. It’s just a bit in a witty but very familiar-seeming film. Just a moustache, really.

“But you know, I want [a public option]. I want that. I want, not for personally for me, but for working Americans, to have a option, that if they don’t like their health insurance, if it’s too expensive, they can’t afford it, if the government can cobble together a cheaper insurance policy that gives the same benefits, I see that as a plus for the folks.” — Bill O’Reilly during an interview two days ago with the Heritage Foundation’s Nina Owcharenko.

I paid an extra $50 to hop on a 12 noon plane out of Toronto. If I was extra hardcore I would hump myself and my three bags up to Lincoln Center and pick up my New York Film Festival credentials…but I’m not. I’m amazed that last night’s peep-peep car riff was taken seriously. I was Sacha Baron Cohen-ing about the sad machismo that guys infuse into their attitudes about cars. I’d drive a dinky rig like that. I’ve never owned a muscle car in my life.

This dinky little vehicle, parked earlier this evening next to Sassafraz on Cumberland Street in the heart of Yorkville, is only slightly larger than the little convertibles that toddlers sit in at amusement parks. How can a Jean Paul Belmondo guy be a real man and own something like this? How can he perform sexually with his Jean Seberg-like girlfriend? It’s humiliating. Bring back those effin’ gas-guzzling Cadillacs with fins!

Here’s some of what I learned from the films, the current and my personal experience at the Toronto Film Festival, which I’ll be taking leave of tomorrow:

(1) Jason Reitman‘s Up In The Air is now the lead contender to win the 2009 Best Picture Oscar, and it may continue to be that even after Clint Eastwood‘s Invictus comes along. That’s because the subject of Invictus is somewhat narrower — institutional racism, South Africa, Nelson Mandela, etc. — and the focus of Up In The Air is about what people of all tribes and denominations are feeling (i.e., afraid of) right now.

(2) Annette Bening is now a likely Best Actress contender for her performance in Rodrigo Garcia‘s Mother and Child.

(3) A film that plays exceptionally for three-quarters of its length will not necessarily play that way during its last half-hour. A seasoned distributor told me this happens quite a lot, but I was stunned to notice this in the case of Mother and Child. Not to any fatal degree, but the payoff I was expecting didn’t quite happen.

(4) When you stay up until 2:45 am, you’ll pay and pay and pay the next day. I actually knew this before I came to Toronto.

(5) Even at a high-calibre film festival like Toronto’s, a film showing with a weak focus will stay that way throughout its running time despite urgent requests that it be fixed. I tried to point this out at a Cumberland press screening of Mother and Child, and the projectionist just wouldn’t agree. I knew this also before coming here.

(6) Cats don’t hold back if they don’t like you. They give it to you straight.

(7) Grant Heslov‘s The Men Who Stare At Goats will play well for those who can roll with its deadpan, lightly absurdist tone.

(8) There’s absolutely no reason why anyone should feel good about Megan Fox being a big star these days.

(9) Michael Moore‘s Capitalism: A Love Story is not just his toughest film — it gives no quarter — but one of his two or three best. It will almost certainly take one of the five Best Documentary Feature Oscar noms and, I believe, stand the test of time. It’s going to ignite a right-wing fever, of course, when it starts showing in the States.

(10) The N.Y. Film Festival committee blundered badly when they turned down Joel and Ethan Coen‘s A Serious Man, which is indisputably one of their darkest and greatest works.

(11) Snoring loudly during a movie is a no-no under any circumstance, but it’s especially outrageous during a press screening. Falling asleep on a subway train is a bad idea also.

(12) You can run your tail off during this festival and still miss at least half of the films you wanted to see. There’s no beating it. You’re intended to leave saying, “Jeez, if I only could have seen (fill in the blank).”

(13) The Road isn’t good enough to overcome the dystopian subject matter. But Collapse is.

Beautiful photography, amusing finale…a first-rate piece.

A press release announcing Criterion’s December releases arrived today in the inbox, and the long-awaited DVD/Bluray of Steven Soderbergh‘s Che wasn’t included. This despite Variety‘s Peter Debruge having reported on 9.1 that “Criterion will put out Soderbergh’s two-part biopic Che on both DVD and Blu-ray in December.” Am I missing something?

Directed by Kirk Jones (Nanny McPhee, Waking Ned Devine), Everything’s Fine (Miramax , 12.4) is about a widower (Robert De Niro) who sets off on a road trip to reunite with each of his grown children. Costarring Kate Beckinsale, Drew Barrymore, Sam Rockwell, Katherine Moennig and Melissa Leo. The film may indeed be fine, but the narration is bothersome.

Tim Blake Nelson‘s Leaves of Grass, a rowdy pot-dealing dramedy about twin brothers (both played by Ed Norton) with radically different attitudes and lifestyles — wasn’t what I wanted to see this morning. Actually I’d never want to see a film like this. Most of it is set in some Oklahoma backwater, and I realize how this may sound but it has too much of a greasy, fast-food, good-old-boy attitude for someone like myself. Every so often Nelson’s screenplay avoids the broad-brush approach, but too often it stomps and grins and goes “yeehaw!”

I just don’t give a damn about mangy bearded pot dealers dressed in flannel shirts and parkas and work boots with all kinds of ugly facial hair, and all the crap in their lives to boot. In the same sense that I’m automatically down with the stylish and rarified vibe of Tom Ford‘s A Single Man, which is set in Los Angeles and concerned with people of taste. I understand that a certain aridity can be suggested by such milieus. I’m not suggesting that a film has to be about tasteful and toney people to be good or interesting. I’m merely saying that grotesque Middle American natives are a huge turn-off for me, and that I can’t seem to stifle this feeling. I’m just being honest.

Two scenes early on told me Leaves of Grass wasn’t working. The first involves Norton’s bright college-professor brother being propositioned in his office by an adoring female student. My heart sank as she pulled her top off and leapt up on Norton’s desk — stuff like that is straight out of the Bob Clark Porky’s handbook. I was further disengaged when the same brother, named Bill, is beaten up by enemies of his pot-dealing brother, named Brady, in a mistaken-identity situation. The violence feels way too excessive and sadistic and out-of-the-blue (especially for an Act One occurence), and the guys doing the beating have Deliverance accents and look like scurvy dogs.

I didn’t come to the Toronto Film Festival to watch crude, low-rent fisticuffs that feel as if they were thrown in for some haphazard punch-up effect. I hated this kind of material when it turned up in Burt Reynolds shitkicker movies of the ’70s, and I won’t sit for it now. Life is short, and I don’t care if this sounds like I’m giving Nelson a fair shake or not. It’s not the shitkicker milieu per se — I’ve always loved Lamont Johnson‘s Last American Hero. But I didn’t like the chops I was seeing and I was shifting around in my seat and starting to feel pissy about being there, and that was the way it was.

So how much will it cost to get Variety after the paywall goes up in early 2010? I’ll go for $20 bucks monthly and $150 annually — no more. And it seems strange that the Hollywood Reporter is apparently planning to dump its print version before the end of the year, which means, of course, it’ll lose out on a good amount of Oscar ad pages.

Nikki Finke reported earlier today that the online-only switch-over date date considered was 10.167.09, but now that’s been pushed back. I’m not all that sure I need or want to pay for the online Reporter, to be perfectly frank.