I couldn’t find an embed code for Sarah Palin’s rave review of Phillip Noyce‘s The Giver, but at least I watched and recorded it — here’s the mp3. Will all the right-wing pundit love for The Giver (“A Glimpse of Progressivism Gone Wrong”) deliver a box-office boost? So far it’s at $16 million and change, but it’ll face stiff competition for the Christian dollar this weekend from When The Game Stands Tall, a Christian football movie from Sony Affirm. Boxoffice.com‘s Phil Contrino doesn’t see much happening. “The Giver didn’t come out of the gate strongly so there’s not a lot of momentum,” he says. “It might get a tiny bump from Palin and the others but When The Game Stands Tall has the edge right now.” On top of which, he claims, “There’s a YA dystopian fatigue factor out there.”

Still, The Giver is at least the recipient of some fresh rightwing oxygen, and this might at least translate into added coin from the home video, VOD and Bluray realm…no? I wonder how the ardently liberal Noyce and Harvey Weinstein feel about this? They may not relate to rightwing theology but at least the conservative wackos are true believers and they’re really pushing their flock to see it. Check out these rightwing praise pieces — article #1, article #2, article #3 and article #4.

I’ve been wondering if James Marsh‘s The Theory of Everything (Focus, 11.7) intends to sugar-coat the actual story of the relationship between theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking (Eddie Redmayne) and former wife Jane (Felicity Jones), in the same way that A Beautiful Mind overlooked some of the less appealing aspects of John Nash‘s life? Perhaps not. Jane, bless her, stuck by Hawking and got him through his trials with ALS and depression, but in 1977 she met “organist Jonathan Hellyer Jones when singing in a church choir…and by the mid-1980s, he and Jane had developed romantic feelings for each other,” acccording to Hawking’s Wiki bio. “According to Jane, her husband was accepting of the situation, stating ‘he would not object so long as I continued to love him.'” Precisely how the film will deal with this chapter is yet to be known but I know the IMDB lists Jones as a character and that he’s played by Charlie Cox.

The anti-police rhetoric and street fervor in Ferguson has reached such a pitch over the last several days (and not without dozens of belligerent provocations from the authorities) that it doesn’t seem possible that the “Michael Brown got shot by a racist cop because he was black” crowd can ever consider much less accept a different scenario. But recent reports from St. Louis Post Dispatch crime reporter Christine Byers and Foxnews.com’s Hollie McKay seem to be puncturing the anti-cop, Brown-basically-died-from-brutal-attitudes narrative. I’ve assumed all along that Darren Wilson, the Ferguson beat cop with a reportedly blemish-free record who shot Brown six times and wasted him with a shot to the head, almost certainly fired in a state of fear and possibly panic. Does it make any sense at all that he’d fire six times while Brown passively stood or kneeled with his hands up?

No one is a bigger fan of Charlie McDowell‘s The One I Love (TWC/Radius, 8.22), the Twilight Zone-y relationship film with Mark Duplass and Elizabeth Moss, than myself. And the swelling in my right hand is completely healed after that 8.7 refrigerator-punching. But Duplass and Ted Danson as a gay couple? Nope. I’ll accept a 10 or 15-year relationship age gap, maybe 20 in a pinch. But not 29.

Ira Sachs‘ Love Is Strange (Sony Classics, 8.22) is a bittersweet, sluggish, mild-mannered tale about an older gay couple, Ben (John Lithgow) and George (Alfred Molina), facing financial hardship and having to give up their condo and temporarily move in with friends. It’s all because they’ve recently married and George, a Catholic school music teacher, has been canned by the Archdiocese for the usual homophobic reasons. Right away I asked myself, “They didn’t see this coming? They didn’t even suspect that the Catholic elders might react this way?” Not very bright if you ask me. It’s great to get openly married and wave your flag but what idiot would do this knowing that it might lead to getting whacked? My second thought was, “They can’t they fight this in court? Doesn’t George have an extremely strong discrimination case against the Archdiocese? What are they gonna do, take this lying down?”

They take it lying down, all right. Sachs doesn’t want any blame-gaming or court battles. His film is mostly about coping and weary resignation. Sachs is interested in the humiliating process of leaning on friends and family and having to make do with less, and in basically going down the drain with dignity. The film’s slogan, if you want to give it one, is “life sure gets hard when you lose your home but at least we love each other and our extended families are helping but whoa, what a way to wrap things up.” Love Is Strange is nothing if not kindly, perceptive and compassionate, and there’s no faulting Lithgow and Molina’s performances. They know exactly what they’re doing and how to make many (okay, more than a few) of their scenes turn the key and flip the lock. But let no one doubt that Sachs has made a very low-key, occasionally quite trying film. I didn’t hate it but I checked my watch at least six or seven times.

From Justin Chang‘s 8.20 Variety piece about the Telluride vs. Toronto War: “It probably didn’t bother Toronto too much that its new honesty policy allowed it to deal Telluride an unusual slap in the face. In unveiling its typically massive film slate, the Toronto press office opted for the first time to disclose the true premiere status of each entry, effectively spilling the beans (or some of them, anyway) on Telluride’s lineup, which is usually kept under wraps until just before its Labor Day weekend kickoff.

“Based on reasonable deductions from Toronto’s announcement, the Telluride program almost certainly will include Jean-Marc Vallee‘s Wild, Morten Tyldum’s The Imitation Game, Jon Stewart’s Rosewater, Ramin Bahrani’s 99 Homes and Ethan Hawke’s documentary Seymour: An Introduction. As usual, Telluride will host the North American premieres of Sony Classics’ Cannes entries, which this year include Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher and Mike Leigh’s Mr. Turner, Andrei Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan and Damian Szifron’s Wild Tales.”

HE Insert #1: I heard Foxcatcher wasn’t going to Telluride…hmmm. HE Insert #2: Sony Pictures Classics has recently screened Leviathan, Whiplash and Wild Tales for regional critics. One of them told me he’s just seen Leviathan and Wild Tales. I wish SPC would extend the same courtesy to big-city critics. I’d love to re-see all three just for the pleasure, without being pressed for time.

I lasted about 45 minutes with Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller‘s Sin City: A Dame to Kill For (Dimension, 8.22). Not to sound pervy but I waited for Eva Green‘s nude scenes. Honestly? They were pretty damn good. That’s what this film is selling, right? Hard-boiled hard-ons. The first Sin City (’05) was a simple-dick noir cartoon crammed with gruff machismo and brazenly sexual temptresses. Sin City: A Dame to Kill For is a parody of a parody of a simple-dick noir cartoon, etc. Rodriguez always gets his actresses to parade around in skimpy lingerie and Miller…well, his comic book series started it all. I was dead bored five minutes in, but I was determined to wait for Green. I’m sorry but that’s what happened.

Eva Green in Sin City: A Dame to Kill For.

In the view of Variety‘s Justin Chang, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For “clocks in 23 minutes shorter than its predecessor yet [it] feels far more enervating. This is a movie that, in attempting to update the tawdry pleasures of classic American crime fiction, doesn’t hesitate to indulge its characters’ peeping-tom fantasies as well as ours. In scene after scene, voyeurism is less a subtext than a narrative constant, whether it’s a kinky tryst being secretly photographed from above, a woman diving naked into a moonlit swimming pool, or a squad of vigilante vixens roaming the streets with crossbows while modeling the latest in designer dominatrix wear.

Why did Dan Gilroy‘s Nightcrawler (Open Road, 10.31), a noirish thriller about an enterprising freelance crime journalist (played by a gaunt Jake Gyllenhaal), change its opening date from 10.17 to 10.31? I ask because for most instinct-driven, under-educated types, a movie called Nightcrawler (which of course was the name of Alan Cumming‘s shape-shifting character in Bryan Singer‘s X2) opening on Halloween weekend (10.31 to 11.2) indicates something spooky or slithery. Remember what happened to William Friedkin‘s Sorcerer, which 90% of the audience assumed was about something supernatural? So why risk the confusion?

I’ll tell you why. David Ayer‘s Fury is why. Or…well, I suppose it’s really due to The Interview abandoning its 11.17 release for Christmas Day, which led to Fury filling that date and so on. You know what? It’s simpler just to blame Brad Pitt.

Nightcrawler was all set to open on 11.17 on 2000-plus screens and then Fury, a violent, visually striking, sure-to-be-heavily-promoted WWII film, pounced on Nightcrawler like a panther and said, “Look, sorry, man but you might be a cooler, more layered Gilroy film but you know that Pitt can kick Jake Gyllenhaal‘s ass with one hand tied behind his back, especially with Jake’s weight-loss appearance. Plus we have a big-dick budget and we’re bigger and more badass than you guys, at least as far as the young male adult audience is concerned and….well, obviously it’s a free country so you do what you want but we’re opening on 11.17. Life in the big city, man. Adapt or die.”

97 year-old Kirk Douglas sat down and tapped out a short tribute piece for The Hollywood Reporter about the recently-passed Lauren Bacall, whom Douglas first met in 1940 when they were attending the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Douglas was 24, Bacall was 16…I won’t ask. In ’46 Douglas’s lead performance in The Wind Is Ninety, a Broadway play, won good reviews. At an L.A. party Bacall told producer Hal Wallis to see it for Douglas’s sake and “he actually listened to her,” Douglas writes. “Did I mention she was persuasive? Soon after I was on my way to Hollywood with a meaty role as Barbara Stanwyck‘s husband in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers.” Which, by the way, is a fairly dreadful film. But it led to Out of the Past and, in ’49, Champion.

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne‘s Two Days, One Night has either opened or is due to open around Europe over the next month or two, and it will screen at both TIFF and the NYFF on 10.5. But U.S. distributor Sundance Selects is still thinking things over. I would be too if I was distributing. After seeing it in Cannes last May I called Two Days, One Night “another line-drive single…a low-key, no-frills, ploddingly earnest drama about factory workers being asked to make a choice between humanity and expediency after a co-worker (Marion Cotillard) has been told she’s being laid off…it’s a decently made but far-from-inspired film, roughly on the level of the Dardennes’ The Kid With The Bike.”

The Toronto International Film Festival has decided to partner with the Weinstein Co. to launch what appears to be an imminent “Bill Murray in St. Vincent for Best Actor” campaign. A celebration of “Bill Murray Day” on Friday, 9.5, will include free screenings of three Murray classics — Stripes, Ghostbusters and Groundhog Day — at the Bell Lightbox. The world premiere of St Vincent, Murray’s latest and a possible (though unproven) basis for a Best Actor campaign, will cap things off. Above and beyond the merits of Murray’s performance (i.e., a semi-alcoholic, loose-shoe babysitter), the campaign theme will almost certainly be “Murray is owed.” He was shafted, of course, when the Academy didn’t even nominate his note-perfect performance in Wes Anderson‘s Rushmore (’98) and his Best Actor-nominated performance for Lost in Translation lost to Mystic River‘s Sean Penn.

You know what would have been great, seriously? If Barack Obama had dumped the ice on his head. Why not? Everyone’s been getting to the act, it’s for a good cause, and it would feel like justice all around. Inside Obama’s head as he dumps the ice water: “I’ve been meaning to pass along a personal thanks for that huge financial catastrophe you left me to deal with when I took office in January 2009, so thanks…felt good!”