I’m feeling a bit alienated from under-40 movie actors, mainly because I can understand maybe half of what they’re saying in movies these days. It’s my fault, not theirs. I grew up trying to speak clearly and concisely, and I guess I got used to others speaking the same way, especially actors in movies. I could actually understand those guys (i.e., actors who peaked from the 1930s to the early aughts) each and every time they spoke. But times have changed. I need to learn how to speak with a little uptalk mixed in with some vocal slur fry. That basically means I need to take it easy with the clear enunciation and speaking from the diaphragm at a moderate pace, and instead try speaking solely from the throat with an emphasis on fast and slurry and…well, basically sounding like I just woke up. Instead of saying “does this room have a mini-bar?”, I need to say “havaminibar?” It’s not hard. I can get into it. I know of a West Hollywood vocal coach who might be able to help. He charges $75 an hour.

This morning Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn urged me to catch The Keeping Room, an allegedly thrilling Civil War melodrama that could be described as female-centric Straw Dogs meets an expansion of that scene in Gone With The Wind when Scarlett O’Hara shoots that grizzled Union soldier in the face. It screens tonight at 7:45 pm. Kohn’s review calls it “an artful period drama and first-rate thriller” and “smarter than it looks.” But I’m concerned by two sentences. One, “The violent incursions in the concluding 45 minute stretch don’t always dodge cliches.” And two, “The two men hankering to rape and pillage the farm come across in more simplistic terms — as scowling villains with no motivation other than sheer lunacy.” Why do any villains have be ape-crazy and frothing at the mouth? I hate this kind of comic-book writing. People are people, and they have their reasons. Hunger, greed, lust…whatever. No motivation = a hack screenwriter who can’t cut the mustard. But let’s not pre-judge. I’ll catch it this evening and see what’s what. Here’s David Rooney’s review in The Hollywood Reporter.

(l. to r.) Muna Otaru, Hailee Steinfeld, Brit Marling in The Keeping Room. Heavy blood stains on garments tend to have a brownish tint, no?

A couple of thoughts in the wake of Michael Fleming’s Deadline report about Lionsgate/Roadside Attractions having acquired U.S. and Canadian rights to Bill Pohlad and Oren Moverman‘s Love & Mercy. One, it just hit me that “I Can Hear Music,” the Beach Boys track that I’ve always regarded as their most emotionally affecting, was just a cover and was written for the Ronettes by Jeff Barry, Ellie Greenwich and Phil Spector. (The Beach Boys recorded it on 1969’s “20/20.”) And two, while Brian Wilson has always been a good humanistic, earth-loving, blue-minded guy, the Beach Boys band members (Mike Love, Al Jardine, Bruce Johnston) have been philosophically and politically Republican since at least the Reagan era. Consider this 7.2.12 N.Y. Times op-ed- piece by Daniel Nester (“Be True To Your School”), and particularly this passage: “For many Republicans, the rags-to-riches story of [the Beach Boys] embodies an imaginary time of consensus politics and an American Dream at once white-bread and innocent. The band tapped into this sentiment well before the Reagan era, and it’s this strain of the Beach Boys’ peculiar cultural DNA that has supplied them with steady bookings as political mascots for Republicans and conservative causes.” Again, the “Music” mp3.

In the immediate wake of yesterday’s Apple announcement of the iPhone 6 and 6 plus, Slate‘s Lily Hay Newman wrote a piece titled “The New iPhones Will Probably Have Terrible Battery Life.” I have absolutely no trouble believing this as iPhone batteries have always been weak so why should anything change? The only answers for me have been (a) Mophie Juice Packs, which augment the iPhone battery and keep things going a lot longer, and (b) the Jackery portable iPhone charger. Everyone has known for months that the iPhone 6 phones would measure 4.7 and 5.5. inches diagonally so Mophie has had ample time to prepare. I checked this morning to see if their their new iPhone 6 juice packs are ready for sale, and of course they’re not. Can you imagine being the Mophie manufacturing guy now? “I’m trying…we’re running a little behind…it’s hard keeping up with all these sudden changes,” etc.

A couple of days ago Awards Daily‘s Ryan Adams posted the new international trailer for David Ayer‘s Fury and wrote that costar Logan Lerman “looks to have the same roller coaster arc as Barry Pepper was given in Saving Private Ryan…a plum supporting role.” Sorry but nope. Lerman is obviously playing a sensitive candy-ass who trembles in the heat of battle (at least initially), and that’s analogous with Jeremy Davies‘ Private Ryan role as the frail, pale-faced translator and not Pepper’s scripture-quoting sharpshooter. I don’t mind the company of delicate dweebs in a real-life setting but they’re a huge drag to deal with in a war film. The Germans are the enemy, delicate weenie boy. Spill their blood. Shoot them in the belly.

That review I ran yesterday of Bill Pohlad‘s Love and Mercy reminded me of a brief encounter I had with Brian Wilson in ’74.

I was living in an upstairs one-bedroom apartment at 648 14th Street in Santa Monica, doing nothing, working as a tree surgeon…my lost period. (I began my adventure in movie journalism the following year.) Right below me lived a guy named Eddie Roach and his wife Tricia. At the time he was working with the Beach Boys as a kind of staff or “touring” photographer. Dennis Wilson fell by two or three times and hung out a bit, and one time I was part of a small group that played touch football with him at a local high-school field. Dennis mocked me that day for being a bad hiker, which I was.

Anyway it was a cloudy Saturday or Sundayafternoon and I was lounging in my living room when I began to hear someone tooling around on Eddie’s piano. It sounded like the beginnings of a song. It began with a thumping, rolling boogie lead-in, complex and grabby, and then the spirited vocal: “Back home boogie, bong-dee-bong boogie…yay-ee-yay…back home boogie, bong-dee-bong”…and then he stopped. One of the chords wasn’t quite right so he played a couple of variations over and over, and then he began again: “”Back home boogie, bong-dee-bong boogie yay-ee-yay!” and so on. Then another mistake and another correction. Then he stopped again and started laughing like a ten year-old drunk on beer: “Hah-hah, heh-heh, heh-hay!” and then right back into the song without losing a beat. It was great stuff. Who is this guy?

In my 9.3 Telluride review I described The Imitation Game as being about (a) “the personal, bureaucratic and old-school morality issues that interfered with and ultimately shut down the beautiful mind of Enigma code-breaker Alan Turing” and (b) “a sad but fascinating tale about the lonely fate of an eccentric, exceptional genius-hero, and how 1940s and ’50s Britain gave him grief every step of the way.”

I didn’t say this at the time but The Imitation Game feels somewhat tedious in this respect. It’s almost entirely about how Turing’s superiors and co-workers didn’t care for his personality. In scene after scene we watch his Bletchley Park colleagues express irritation and disdain about his aloof, superior manner and general lack of social skills. It reminds us of a lesson that we all have to learn and swallow early on, which is that you must be pleasantly sociable with people you work with (or hang or go to school with) because they’ll make your life hell if you’re not.

The sentiments of Turing’s co-workers are basically as follows: “Most people come to realize by the age of 10 or thereabouts that extra-smart, extra-perceptive people lack a certain normality. They tend to be flaky and eccentric and inwardly directed and not very good with telling jokes and schmoozing and flirting and general shoptalk. We, however, are different. We at Bletchley Park do not recognize that brilliant types need to be cut a little slack, and we certainly don’t recognize this in Mr. Turing’s case.

For a fairly long time Muhammad Ali, 72, has been in declining health due to Parkinson’s disease and other ailments. A guy who was so physically dazzling with such a lithe and beautiful mind turned into a withered, slow-moving old man who has trouble speaking. Aging can be torture. I remember when he showed up at the Spirit Awards in ’98 or thereabouts and everyone cheered him with “Ali Boom Ba Yay!” I own a DVD of Ali’s greatest fights, and when I want to go to bed with a smile I always watch his 1974 Zaire championship bout with George Foreman. Works every time. I’m catching a screening of I Am Ali a few days after I return to Los Angeles.

This morning I saw the two Al Pacino films playing at the Toronto Film Festival — David Gordon Green‘s Manglehorn and Barry Levinson‘s The Humbling. And once again Jean-Luc Godard‘s remark about how “every fictional film is a documentary of its actors” came into play. I mainly wanted to see how Pacino, who was 73 when they were shot last year, is coming along. He seems alert and together as far as it goes, but I wish he could just return to being those guys that he was in Heat (i.e., Vincent Hanna) or The Insider (i.e., Lowell Bergman). The Humbling and Manglehorn are meditations about the perils of being an aging, fickle-ego type who’s long since given up on being a good family man or a go-alonger of any kind. Both are saying “if you’ve come this far without a loyal wife or girlfriend or a family to hang with over the holidays then fuck it…just play it like you always have. Enjoy and fulfill as best you can. Otherwise life is short and then you die.”

I liked The Humbling a bit more than Manglehorn because (a) Pacino’s famous-actor character is richer than his Texas Manglehorn locksmith, (b) if it’s a choice between a lonely, low-profile, barely-getting-by septugenarian and a well-known one who drives a nice car and still gets laid every so often, I’m with the latter, (c) HE’s own Greta Gerwig costars as a less-than-ardent lesbian, (d) the fact that Pacino lives in a nicer house in The Humbling (Levinson’s own home in Redding, Connecticut) means that any of the shit that happens is easier to tolerate or process and there’s nothing like nice digs to take the edge off, and (e) The Humbling has a whimsical “life can taste like a fucked bowl of soup but what can you do?” sense of humor. The film is based on a 2009 book by Phillip Roth, and to me that meant…I don’t want to go there.

But I manage to miss stuff regardless. Choices, priorities, stamina, etc. “You don’t beat this festival” — Burt Reynolds in Deliverance. One person, two computers, two cameras, one Red Bull brain, one pair of hands and legs, one pair of lungs…can’t do it all. I missed yesterday afternoon’s big showing of Jennifer Aniston‘s Cake; my next shot is a p & i screening this morning at 10:30 am. Update: Saw about three-quarters of Cake…very good Aniston but who cares about pain management? A bit meh. This morning, to repeat, also includes Manglehorn and The Humbling. A little writing time this afternoon and then we’ll see what develops.

Taken during last night’s rooftop party for Sony Pictures Classic’s Whiplash. I got there, savored the view, took shots. No Damien Chazelle (director) or Miles Teller so I ran over to the next event…sorry.

Mark Hartley, director of Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films, and producer Brett Ratner during last night’s dinner at Barberian’s Steak House. I saw Hartley’s hilarious, fast-paced film in Los Angeles but the embargo didn’t go up until yesterday.

Every year there’s a lead performance or two in an indie-level film that’s so drop-to-your-knees mesmerizing that people like myself throw back the shutters and shout “definitely award-worthy…make room!” (Last year’s contender in this regard was Adele Exarchopolous in Blue Is The Warmest Color.) And every time I blow the horn the cynical, know-it-all Gurus and Gold Derby-ers say “nope…no way, Jose…the distributor either can’t afford or won’t pay for a serious awards campaign, let alone for the services of a Lisa Taback-level campaign strategist…this is a Spirit Awards contender at best.” I spit on that attitude, that corroded way of thinking. Because I’m telling you straight and true that Paul Dano‘s performance as the youngish Brian Wilson in Bill Pohlad‘s Love and Mercy, which I saw this afternoon, is almost spookily great.

Perfectly fattened-up Paul Dano as Brian Wilson in Bill Pohlad’s Love and Mercy.

Wilson’s disturbed spirit hums and throbs in the 30 year-old Dano, who looks like he gained 35 or 40 pounds to play the genius Beach Boy maestro in his mid ’60s blimp period. You can really feel the vibrations and sense the genius-level ferment and the off-balance emotionality. Inwardly and outwardly it’s a stunning, drop-dead transformation and the finest performance of Dano’s career, hands down. It is also, trust me, just as commendable as the other highly-touted, year-end heavyweight performances (including Birdman‘s Michael Keaton, The Theory of Everything‘s Eddie Redmayne, The Imitation Game‘s Benedict Cumberbatch), if not more so. You might be thinking it but don’t you dare dismiss Dano’s performance with a wave of your hand. I know what you’re going to say so don’t even say it. Just shut up.

Not to mention John Cusack also as the 40ish Wilson in the same film, which shifts back and forth between the mid to late ’60s (i.e., the recording of Pet Sounds and Smile) and the mid to late ’80s (i.e., “the Landy years”). Cusack has been on a downturn for the last three or four years, playing ghouls and creeps and psycho killers…my heart aches for the guy. True, he’s had two good roles over the last couple of years — Richard Nixon in The Butler and the husband-masseuse in David Cronenberg‘s Maps to the Stars — but this is a revelation. Cusack plays a gentle but very solemn and intimidated Wilson during the period in which he was under the firm hand of the disreputable Eugene Landy, who died in 2006. (Landy got Wilson to lose weight and get healthier, but at a tremendous price.) Cusack is child-like and Gentle Ben-ish, and as convincing and fully submitted to his task as Dano is to his. For the first time in my moviegoing life I wasn’t bothered by two actors playing the same character — quite a landmark.

It’s a travesty that six years ago some guy mixed remnants of Alex North‘s rejected score for 2001: A Space Odyssey with the “discovery of animal bone as a weapon” sequence. It’s obviously not properly synched, but even so North’s score seems wildly off-pitch. It pulls Kubrick’s film down to earth at every stanza, every measure. It even sounds fucking Spartacus-y at times. Then again it’s probably impossible for any serious fan of this 1968 classic to contemplate the film with any music other than Ligeti‘s space music and Strauss’s “Blue Danube.”