A smart exhibition guy (knows his stuff, doesn’t mince words) caught Kathryn Bigelow‘s The Hurt Locker at tonight’s 6 pm screening at the Ryerson, and says that “with the exception of the closing minutes, which I think are a little misjudged, I’m thinking it’s some kind of war classic. A tough and problematic film, marketing wise, but it transcends Iraq juju. For me anyway. Awesome.”
The second definition of “juju” in the American Heritage Dictionary says “the supernatural power ascribed to an object.”
I was kept out of today’s 3 pm Wrestler screening due to every seat being taken, and my only other chance to catch it will be at the 12 noon public screening tomorrow. This is precisely when the first and only press screening of The Hurt Locker happens. Now I have to decide between them. I should have been more focused and disciplined and gotten myself down to this evening’s showing.

The odd thing about Diane English‘s The Women (New Line/WB, 9.12) is that (a) it’s a better written, generally more watchable and down-to-earth film than Sex and the City and yet (b) it doesn’t feel as rooted in present-day mores as Sex does (or did). It feels, in short, like a film that should have been made and released a good ten or fifteen years ago. Twenty years ago would have been all the better. So it makes sense, as this English profile piece says, that she’s been trying to get it made since the early days of the Clinton administration.

I didn’t finish the Religulous piece until 2:55 pm, sitting here at my usual table at Starbucks under the Cineplex Odeo cinemas. I then flew upstairs to theatre #8, trying like hell to catch the 3 pm screening of Darren Aranofsky‘s The Wrestler, only to be told sorry, no room at the inn, all seats taken.

Obviously a Mickey Rourke sartorial advertisement pointing to his uniqueness as an actor and human being, but where did he buy that amazing tie? When did they ever make ties that short?

The winner of the Venice Film Festival Golden Lion prize was acquired very early this morning by Fox Searchlight. And here, according to In Contention‘s Kris Tapley, is a bootleg recording of the song that Bruce Springsteen composed and sang for the film.

Any half-intelligent person with a properly skeptical view of the idiotic belief systems required by all big-time religions will, I presume, feel satisfied if not comforted by Bill Maher and Larry Charles‘ Religulous (Lionsgate 10.3).
Christianity, until recently the most arrogant and blood-soaked of them all (until Islamic fundamentalists took the crown), receives the worst skewering, with particular attention paid to the hinterland right-wing nutbags and their endless capacity for vulgarity and simple-mindedness. Mormonism gets a couple of good tweaks as well. There can’t be too much of this sort of thing in my book, and hail to Maher (the star-writer-producer), Charles (the director) and all the people behind this pointed if mild-mannered doc for serving society’s best interests. Truly.
How funny is it? Somewhat. I was LQTM-ing for the most part. There were a few chuckles at the screening I attended, two or three haw-haws, but no horse laughs. But humor isn’t precisely the point. This is a very rational film about a rational point of view.
That said, there are two things that need to be understood about Religulous. They aren’t major stoppers, but they’ve been bothering me since I saw it a couple of weeks ago.
One, Charles hasn’t shot Religulous with an especially vivid sense of style or panache of any kind. He’s made it look and sound more or less like Morgan Spurlock‘s Where In The Hell is Osama Bin Laden? (Full dislosure: A friend said this after we saw it together, and I’m seconding the observation.) Two cameras, ground-level, tripod, hand-held, so-whatty. Somehow this doesn’t seem fitting for a doc that stirs thoughts about the Big Cosmic Altogether.
If I’d directed I would started things off with a moving-plane shot of big white clouds with Maher doing the voice-over. Square and sappy, sure, but a classic religious image that would pull viewers in and get things going. This is a Big Fundamental Subject, after all, and it needs some kind of visual correlative, even if the point is to make mince-meat of old-time beliefs. Religulous would have been a lot stronger, I swear, if it had somehow been directed by the ghost of Cecil B. DeMille, who, despite his ham-fisted Victorian hypocrisy, knew how to make you feel the presence of traditional “otherness.”
And two, Maher-the-rationalist doesn’t once acknowledge the general feeling known to all humans and animals since the beginning of intelligent life that there’s surely some kind of cosmic connectivity governing this and other worlds.
Point out the foolish and childish superstitions by all means, but Maher and Charles undercut their film by not once allowing that tens of millions of men, women, children, writers, theologians, mystics, painters, sculptors and simple men walking and starving in the desert over the past three or four thousand years have been stirred by a vague, hard-to-articulate sense that there’s a universal current and common design of some kind in every last aspect of creation. I don’t believe this myself — I know it.
Many if not most believers in this or that religion have come to this or that faith in order to hold onto some kind cohesive theory or dogma to explain the wonder of it all, even if what they’re finally given is nothing short of idiotic. Maher’s view is that we’re basically living in a world of random biological chance that has a way of dispensing meaningless pain and conflict on a daily basis. This is true in a sense, but there’s a uniformity to it anyway.
Maher and Charles should have sat down and thought a little bit harder about the ending of Stanley Kubrick‘s 2001: A Space Odyssey before making Religulous. It would have been that much better if they had.

I caught a 9 am screening this morning of Steve McQueen‘s strong and harrowing Hunger, which IFC is releasing sometime next year. McQueen won the Gucci Group Award at the Venice Film Festival a few days ago, and the Camera d’Or at Cannes last May. It was obvious within seconds that he’s a first-rate visual artist, and that the film itself is top-notch — a frank and unsparing chronicle of political torture of IRA combatants by the British, and particularly the plight of Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender), who died from a hunger strike in 1981 at age 27.

At the same time I wasn’t entirely taken with the slow pace of it, and I was more than a little unsettled by the disgusting particulars of the cell life of the Irish prisoners that McQueen shows during the first half-hour. The blunt, somewhat embarassing truth is that I have a problem with any movie that deals with prominent displays of fecal matter — particularly ones in which said matter is smeared upon prison-cell walls.
I had the same reaction when fecal matter was used for artistic expression in Quills. And I feel the same way about the artwork of Andres Serrano (his recent shit sculptures, the infamous “Piss Christ”). If this makes me a timid, shallow- minded sort then fine, okay…but I won’t absorb art that uses this particular brush, however honestly and honorably intended.
I realize with great chagrin that saying this makes me sound like the kind of person who prefers to watch something like Beverly Hills Chihuahua rather than a raw, blistering portrait of terrible political repression and the nobility of men with the steel to fight for their beliefs and take whatever punishment is meted out. The truth is that I’m a middle-class guy who lives somewhere in the middle sphere — no Chihuahua lover, but unable to stomach what I’ve just described.
May God protect the courageous freedom fighters of the world, and may God make life miserable for the forces of cruelty, torture and repression. And may the talented Steve McQueen move on to greater and hopefully less off-putting subjects in future films.

The N.Y. Times‘ Brian Stelter is reporting this morning that MSNBC has demoted passionate analyst-commentators and news-show hosts Chris Matthews (“Hardball”) and Keith Olbermann (“Countdown”) — the two reasons I watch MSNBC because they’re unabashed in stating what they know in their head and their gut and are among the few TV news guys who aren’t cautiously corporate milquetoast stooges. Matthews and Olbermann are now out of the catbird-anchor seat — slapped down, chastised and demoted by the fearful.

MSNBC host David Gregory, it’s been announced, will now anchor news coverage of the coming debates and election night. Olbermann and Matthews will remain as analysts during the coverage. The problem with this is that Gregory is, to the best of my knowledge, a corporate stooge who’s very much in the tank for the conservatives. How else are we to interpret his having danced on-stage during the infamous MC Rove routine? Would any fair-minded, self-respecting newsman have done such a thing?
The Olbermann-Matthew demotion “is a direct result of tensions associated with the channel’s perceived shift to the political left,” Stelter’s story says. And so now MSNBC has elevated a guy who danced on-stage with Karl Rove as their new top-dog political news anchor?
Fox News has its partisanship attitude/base, and for one brief shining moment, MSNBC wore its lefty stripes proudly and boldly. No longer, it would seem. The uglies have won over. Gregory is the epitome of everything I despise about news coverage that is rightish, compromised, kowtowing and corporate. Plus he has a rounded monkey nose. I hate the man — I hate thinking about him, listening to him, looking at him.
This is a black, black day for MSNBC freaks like myself. What has happened is nothing short of a right-wing coup by the corporate bad guys and old-school traditionalists in the Tom Brokaw mode.
10:15 am update: The opening graph of this piece that I posted earlier was sloppy and muddled — apologies offered.

I just want to leave Toronto and go home and lock the door and forget about everything except filing and playing with my cats. My beautiful black Canon camera ($400) was stolen by three young apes today at an internet cafe. I should have listened to my instincts. I could smell their anarchic stink. They looked like animals and I ignored this obvious fact. I went to the bathroom while they were sitting next to me and they made their play.
It was my fault entirely. I let it happen. When feral types congregate nearby, you grim up and protect your stuff. Can I join the conservative club now?
Plus they stole my iPhone. Total loss — $600 dollars and change. For whatever reason they didn’t steal the wide-angle lens that I used for the camera with certain shots. Could that be because they’re stupid, or that they lack nerve? If I had a large baseball bat and could be granted a magical encounter with these guys in some Toronto back alley….

Gallup has McCain-Palin up three points over Obama-Biden, 48 to 45, and Zogby has them ahead as well, 49.7% to Obama-Biden’s 45.9%. A standard convention bounce, of course, but still…my God. The writing on the wall couldn’t be clearer, especially as it reflects upon McCain’s rash judgment over the Palin pick, and a lot of the fence-sitting heartlanders are still favorably impressed.

As far as it goes, Kevin Smith‘s Zack and Miri Make A Porno is smooth and winning, largely due to Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks‘ engaging, alive-in-the-moment performances as longtime pals and roommates who discover, to their surprise, that they’re in love with each other while making a low-grade, hand-to-mouth porn film.

Call this one definitely better (and certainly more smoothly shot and cut) than Clerks II, heads and shoulders above Jersey Girl, a bit funnier than Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, livelier and more entertaining that Dogma, almost as intimate and touching as Chasing Amy, much better than Mallrats and not as good as the original Clerks.
Within his familiar smart-but-easygoing-schlub persona, Rogen is on a roll these days, incapable of seeming rote or insincere, and he punches up the energy and aliveness in a way that’s obvious and ummistakable. And Banks matches him note for note with a game receptivity and good humor. As I was walking out, a journalist friend said, “Smith should thank God for Judd Apatow and Seth Rogen,” meaning that Smith is sorta kinda riding their coattails with this film, albeit in a way that bears his own ethos and sensibility.
Zack and Miri grooves right along in a good-natured, “let’s relax and be cool about being blunt and more than a little gross” sort of way.
It’s basically about the financially-strapped Zack (Rogen) and Miri (Banks), sharers of a ramshackle pad in funky Monroeville (a suburb of Pittsburgh where George Romero has shot two or three of his zombie movies), realizing that internet porn is a not-too-difficult way to raise quick cash, and giving it a try with no production money, a cheap video camera and a few friends as costars and assistants.

It struck me as a little bit weird that the sex scenes are shot with a static camera sitting on a tripod each and every time. Hand-held photography is obviously the way to go with films of this sort — get in there, get close, get it all, etc. But then none of Smith’s films have been shot with a loosey-goosey hand-held approach — visually he’s always been a very formal, almost rigid, director — so I guess it does sort of make sense.
It’s obvious that Zack’s scripting the sex scenes so that Miri won’t “do” anyone other than himsefl on-camera, and Miri being distinctly unsettled when Zack is offered an easy roll in the sack with one of the pic’s female costars, that they care deeply for each other.
Zack also experiences a creative awakening in shooting home-style porn, which gives a lift to his overall attitude and self-image. But the penultimate moment comes when he and Miri finally perform the deed on-camera, and their cohorts (and the audience, of course) realize it’s not much of an acrobatic, look-at-us! performance for all the right reasons.
It’s unrealistic, of course, that a hottie like Banks would be attracted to a schlubby guy like Rogen (unless we’re talking about the real-life Rogen, which is a whole different deal because then you’re talking a guy who’s bright, funny, famous and rich). But then Apatow has been pulling this fantasy crap in film after film, and now Smith (another rich, brilliant, super-successful geek with a weight issue) has picked up the torch.
In the real trenches of the real world, average overweight geeks do not schtup beautiful blondes with radiant ruby eyes, exquisite facial structure and perfect white teeth — end of story, end of proposition, total dreamworld. But the fact that this doesn’t get in the way of enjoying Smith’s film says something. To me anyway.
Mistake: At the end of Zack and Miri’s sex-on-camera scene Banks sits up and starts collecting herself — we’re talking seconds after Rogen has dismounted — and we see that she’s wearing jeans. Now how did that happen?

It’s 1:55 pm, I have about two hours left before my next event, and I haven’t posted any kind of reaction to at least eight films now. I’m starting to feel like an air-traffic controller dealing with more and more jets circling above and the caffeine anxiety starting to really build up. Not to mention the other eight to ten more flicks I’ll be seeing and responding to Monday through Thursday before heading home on Friday afternoon.
The un-assessed films are (a) Danny Boyle‘s initially bothersome but finally superb Slumdog Millionaire (which I took two hours to review yesterday but lost due to online access shutting off before I was able to save it); (b) Bill Maher and Larry Charles‘ Religulous, which I saw and mostly liked (with reservations) in Los Angeles; (c) Jonathan Demme‘s partly inspired, partly problematic Rachel Getting Married (also seen in L.A.); (d) Andreas Dresen‘s surprisingly touching Cloud 9 (which I saw here last Thursday), (e) Claire Denis‘ low-key but precise and absorbing 35 Rhums (ditto), (f) David Koepp‘s Ghost Town (ditto), a playful mainstream studio wanker that has no business being in Toronto, really, except to satisfy the ambitions of its distributor, Paramount Pictures; (g) Matteo Garone‘s savage, inescapably “real” Gamorrah, (h) Guillermo Arriaga‘s The Burning Plain, a layered and well-acted adult drama that doesn’t really hit the mark; or at least isn’t on the same plane as the Innaritu-directed films based on Arriaga scripts (h) Kevin Smith‘s Zack and Miri Make a Pormo, which I just saw this morning.
I’m not going to catch up. All my advance homework, hard work and dogged attempts to see everything I should see have come to naught. It’s all collapsing into a heap. I just decided to blow off the Kevin Smith Zack and Miri press conference — that will buy me an extra couple of hours.

It’s official — for some incomprehensible reason (and yet linked, I suspect, to yesterday’s computer mishegoss), I can’t access my server on my primary laptop. I can go online in any internet cafe in Kabul, Berlin or Mendocino and access it, but my 17-inch Gateway is blocked from doing so. So I’m forced today to make this i-klick cafe on Yonge and St. Joseph my office for the next few hours.

Yonge and St. Joseph, steady drizzle — Sunday, 9.7.08, 1:20 pm

Kings for a day, and then out the door.