David Ayer’s Harsh Times, a violent Los Angeles-based drama starring Christian Bale and Freddy Rodriguez, has been acquired for distribution by Bauer Martinez Distribution, the new theatrical distribution arm of Bauer Martinez Studios. (Apologies for the earlier error naming Lions Gate as the distributor.) It will have one final Toronto Film festival screening on Saturday evening, which I plan to attend. Movie City News is calling it “Crash for one” while another observer has described it as “a lot like Training Day, but with more of a gritty approach, and with actors who seem actually believable…which makes sense since it’s based on the real-life experiences of the director/writer and people he knows.” Okay…I’m there.

I can see why Fox Searchlight and Paramount Classics were fighting over the U.S. distribution rights to Jason Reitman’s Thank You For Smoking. (Fox Searchlight won.) The script is very witty and sharp. The dialogue, if nothing else (and there’s plenty else, starting with Aaron Eckhardt’s performance as Washington, D.C.’s all-time smoothest pro-tobacco lobbyist)…if nothing else describing the rationale “I have a mortgage to pay” as a “yuppie Nuremberg defense” will give it a kind of instant fame in chat rooms and cocktail parrties. Okay, somebody is now going to tell me that some comic coined the “yuppie Nuremberg defense” term ten or fifteen years in his/her stage act…right?

I saw Curtis Hanson’s In Her Shoes (20th Century Fox, 10.7) this morning and it got me. It’s “commercial,” yes, but not in the pat sense of that term — this is the best classy chick flick since Terms of Endearment, and they both have award-level Shirley MacLaine performances. Once you get past the first half-hour, which has a rote, almost sitcommy flavor and is all about showing us what an infantile self-destructive screw-up Cameron Diaz’s character is (and why her older sister, played by Toni Collete, is perfectly justified in wanting her out of her life), In Her Shoes starts to touch bottom when Diaz visits her long-lost grandmother (MacLaine) at a Florida old-folks home, and then it takes off and starts getting better and sadder and wiser and more touching. This is not an Armond White movie, but it’s exceptional nonetheless. It’s going to get every woman in the country and a lot of guys, it may wind up as as a Best Picture nominee, and this is MacLaine’s year, I think, to win another one. Collette and Diaz will probably also be nominated in their respective categories (which may be different), and Hanson also as Best Director. This sounds gushy, I realize, but trust me — Shoes works the way a big-studio, high-pedigree, lay-the-groundwork-and-then-make- them-feel-it emotional drama should. Hanson knew exactly what he was doing.

Niki Caro’s North Country is an honestly acted, decently assembled 1989 period drama about a landmark class-action sexual harassment case, but it feels way familiar and is nowhere near surprising or “whoa” enough to make you tell your friends to stop what they’re doing and go see it…although it is a sturdy, close-to-first-rate effort. It’s a little slow at times. For a movie that’s about a real-life courtroom case, it feels a bit curious that the idea of single-mom-and-coal-miner Charlize Theron suing the mining company she’s been woriking for doesn’t come up until the movie has been running for a good hour and 20 minutes. And then the courtroom stuff happens during the last 15 or 20 minutes. It’s fine and moving here and there, but we’ve all seen this kind of thing before and I can’t imagine anyone getting that cranked about it. Sexual harassment is a detestable thing, but it’s been a hot-button issue in our culture for…what?…25 or 30 years now? Yes, Theron could wind up as a Best Actress Oscar contender for her performance, but the film’s been-there, done-that quality will not work in her favor. Frances McDormand gets to play a victim of Lou Gehrig’s Disease….whoo-hoo! Lou Gehrig’s Disease! Emotional-impact-opportunity! Her character is dying but she still has the moxie to say “fuck you” to a corporate lawyer through a voice-box speaker and musters the courage to stand up for her friend, etc. But with all my complaining out of the way, it would be inaccurate and unfair not to say that the final courtroom scene does work…it put a modest lump in my throat. North Country may do fairly well with ticket-buyers, but it’s not a major-event film like Caro’s Whale Rider and that’s the truth.

Suddenly, starting yesterday (i.e., Monday) morning, all those vaguely bothersome humanoids with industry passes started cramming into the press and industry screenings, and within hours journos were heard bitching to one another about getting shut out of showings of essential-to-see films. I couldn’t get into Mary Harron’s The Notorious Bettie Page and then I was shut out of Michael Winterbottom’s Tristram Shandy. And yet this morning I got into the 10 a.m. Walk the Line press screening without any difficulty. Peter Howell told me that local Fox publicists had a well-attended press screening a couple of weeks ago, so maybe that was why. Variety‘s Joe Leydon says the Bettie Page jam-up happened simply because everyone wanted to see Gretchen Mol looking stylishly naked in that really dirty 1950s way.

It’s not that I haven’t been seeing films the last couple of days, or thought through my various reactions. I’ve seen Niki Caro’s North Country, Michael Haneke’s Cache (finally, after missing it in Cannes last May), Liev Schrieber’s Everything is Illluminated, Andrucha Waddington’s The House of Sand, Laurent Cantet’s Heading South, et. al. There have been two or three others, but none have so moved me to my core that it has felt mandatory that I file an immediate review. That’s been my policy for the last couple of days…fuck it. But I guess I’d better put something down about something sometime today, even if I’m not turned on about it.

Apparently enough people who saw James Mangold’s Walk the Line a couple of months ago told Fox publicists that portions of it were too much like Taylor Hackford’s Ray (early stuff showing a very young Johnny Cash growing up impoverished with his family in the rural south, and particularly the death of his brother). So a few trims were allegedly made in this section, etc. But the version I saw this morning (i.e., the 10 am screening on Tuesday, 9.13) doesn’t seem any different than the one I saw in Manhattan in mid-July, so I don’t know what’s up here. More later…

Guess what’s surprisingly good? And is easily one of the best edited films I’ve seen at the Toronto Film festival so far, not to mention one of the most unsettling and a dead-serious spiritual seeker? Abel Ferrara’s Mary, which I saw Sunday night at the Isabel Bader theatre. I didn’t have many hopes for this thing because — frankly? — I’ve been wondering about Ferrara lately. How long has it been since he’s really hit the mark, which I guess was Bad Lieutenant in ’92? Half improvised and half “written” by Ferrara and Simone Lageoles and one or two others, and excitingly captured by dp Stefano Falivene and very strongly acted by Forest Whitaker, Juliet Binoche, Matthew Modine and Heather Graham, Mary gets into all kinds of religious issues (particularly religious hatred and bigotry) but it’s partly about how a film about the passion of Jesus Christ called This Is My Blood stirs up the wacko right and puts its producer and star (played by Modine) into the media spotlight. It’s also about how the spiritual current of this film somehow gets under the skin of the actress who plays Mary Magdelene (Binoche) and prompts her to abandon acting and wander around the Middle East, looking to connect with Christ’s spirit on some level. It’s also about how the film touches the life of a Charlie Rose-type smoothie who hosts a vaguely exploitative TV show called “Jesus — The Real Story,” and how a health crisis threatening his wife (Graham) and newborn son shakes him up big-time and leads to a feverish talkin’-straight-to-God prayer scene that amounts to one hell of an acting moment for Whitaker. This movie is nothing if not a handful, and I was surprised at how “good” (challenging, intense, impassioned) it plays.

Congratulations to Sony Pictures Classics for acquiring Tommy Lee Jones’ The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada…and I’m sure everyone concerned is breathing a huge sigh of relief. A film as good as this one (which everyone saw in Cannes last May) deserves to be released during Oscar season, but the clock was ticking all summer long and no distribution deal. In her story about the pickup, the Hollywood Reporter‘s Anne Thompson said that Europa Corp., the film’s producer, had been asking $6 million for the film but that Sony did not meet that price. However, SPC did agree that Jones would not have to make any changes to his cut. Directed by Jones and written by the great Guillermo Arriaga (21 Grams), Burials has been called “the best Sam Peckinpah film since Peckinpah died,” or words to that effect. It stars Jones as a Texas cowboy who forces a border-patrol cop (Barry Pepper) who has not-quite-intentionally killed his good Mexican buddy to dig up the body and carry it across the Rio Grande and down to a final resting place in Mexico, as a gesture of respect.

Cheers to the Brokeback Mountain team — director Ang Lee, producer James Schamus and Focus Features — for having taken the Golden Lion (i.e., the best feature prize) at the just-wrapped Venice Film Festival. A BBC report claims that George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck “had been the hot favourite among film critics to take the Golden Lion,” but at least David Straitharn — Good Night‘s Edward R. Murrow — took the Best Actor prize, and Good Night‘s screenplay, by Clooney and Grant Heslov, was named best also. And…wow, this is a head-turner…director Abel Ferrara won the Jury Grand Prix for Mary, which stars Juliette Binoche as an actress haunted by the figure of Mary Magdalene after playing her in a film. (If the Best Actor prize had been my call, I would have said that as good and precise as Straitharn is, Heath Ledger’s performance in Brokeback Mountain is deeper and more fully realized.)

There’s apparently some concern at Sony/Columbia about Rob Marshall’s Memoirs of a Geisha (Columbia, 12.9), a pricey period drama and a presumed Oscar contender (in the costume and production design categories, at least). The story is about how a young girl (Zhang Ziyi) “transcends” her fishing-village roots and becomes one of Japan’s most celebrated geishas. Research has apparently indicated that the exotic story elements (the film is set in Japan in the 1930s and ’40s) aren’t being understood and/or absorbed as clearly as Sony would like, so Cold Mountain director Anthony Minghella has been brought in to write some voice-over narration. Adding narration to a film isn’t an absolute guarantee that the movie isn’t telling its story well enough on its own terms, but let’s face it — it usually means trouble. Then again, it could mean that the test audiences who’ve seen it are perhaps a tad too provincial and could use a bit more schoolin’ about other cultures. I have to be honest and say I’ve never been very hot about seeing this film. I could go on and on, but tracking the intrigues of a Japanese hottie who makes her way up the ladder by providing sexual excitement for rich guys…I don’t know.

Some buyers told me yesterday about a couple of recently-arisen festival favorites. First and foremost is Ward Serrill’s The Heart of the Game, a doc about the development of a naturally talented female basketball player from Seattle over a six-year period. The festival program calls it a film about “girls, basketball and the evolving relationship of race and sports in the United States,” blah, blah. (It screens at 11:15 this morning at the Cumberland. Will Hollywood Elsewhere manage to attend or will the slow-motion rigors of posting a fresh column interfere once again, for the 349th time?) The other one to see is a film I ignored yesterday morning — Jason Reitman’s Thank You for Smoking, a satire about the tobacco industry. Providing a reportedly worthy follow-up to his heartless Chad in Neil Labute’s In The Company of Men, Aaron Eckhardt plays a smoothly manipulative spokesperson for the fictional Academy of Tobacco Studies. The program calls his character, whose name is Nick, “the most stunningly proficient poster boy America’s Big Tobacco industry could hope for: charming, virile, remorseless.” There’s a public screening happening in about 15 minutes (9:15 am), which….naah, no way. The next screening is on Saturday evening, 9.17, at 9:15 pm at the Riverson.