Richard Kiel, otherwise known as “Jaws” in The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker, ascended today. He was four days shy of his 75th birthday. Kiel may have peaked with his 007 films, but he was a steadily employed actor for a half-century, starting in 1960 when he was 20 or 21. You can tell from his voice and manner on this 1985 David Letterman clip that he was quite the settled sophisto. Let no one forget that Kiel played the titular role in Eegah (’62), one of the absolute worst films ever made. That same year he played the lead Kanamit in “To Serve Man,” a legendary Twilight Zone episode. I don’t hold the fact that he was a born-again Christian against him.

Both the Toronto Film Festival and yours truly are limping along, hanging in there. I almost like it more after “the crowd” goes home, or after the fourth or fifth day. I’ve been here seven days now; two more full days to go after tonight. Tomorrow is the big Douglas Trumbull demonstration of MAGI plus Pasolini, The Good Lie, This Is Where I Leave You (Shawn Levy crap) and Still Alice. Friday offers Christian Petzold‘s Phoenix plus The New Girlfriend, Eden, The Riot Club, Bang Bang Baby. Definitely more high-pedigree titles over the last few days, which wasn’t the case before. I feel fine but I’m running on fumes, apples, grapes, energy bars and an occasional Toronto spicy dog with hot sauce.

Lobby of Scotiaplex on Tuesday, 9.9 — 2:50 pm. All but dead.

(l. to r.) Sony Pictures Classics Michael Barker, Janet Jones, Red Army producer/director Gabe Polsky, Wayne Gretzky, PSC’s Tom Bernard at last night’s Red Army premiere at the Ryerson Theatre.

“When I reach out for a handshake, there’s a little part of me that dreads the possibility of clasping a damp clammy hand. I’m thinking about this because I shook a really sweaty one last night. Outwardly I didn’t react in the slightest but inwardly I shuddered like a candy-ass. It’s like shaking hands with an eel with a fever or some kind of jellyfish or something. It’s worse when the clammy hand is cool but warm and slithery runs a close second. Please, God…let the next hand be dry and crisp like mine. Aahh, that was great. Okay, here comes another one…terrific, nice and dry. Another one…aagghh, an eel!

Some people just have this condition. A glandular thing. If I was a clammy-hand type I’d avoid handshakes. I’d clasp people by their wrists and quickly pat the tops of their hands or give them a comradely poke in the shoulder. Confession: I had slightly sweaty hands when I was a kid but I grew past it. I love that my hands are currently dry at all times, and I mean like sandpaper. Okay, the inner palms contain a hint of dampness but only that.

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.