My concern is that Barack Obama, convinced as everyone else is by now that Mitt Romney is going to lose, is going to do his usual courtly, combat-averse, close-to-genuflecting routine when he debates Romney on 10.3, 10.16 and 10.22. He’s figuring Romney has already dug his own grave to why box a dead horse? Obama doesn’t like to scrap, much less take off the gloves. I’ve always seen that as a failing.

I also strongly disagree with Rope of Silicon‘s Brad Brevet in his view of Anna Karenina. Joe Wright‘s film is a breath of fresh air in the historical-drama genre, and a knockout in terms of design, choreography, performances (especially Keira Knightley and Jude Law‘s) and general audacity. It’s a contact high. But in trashing one of the year’s finest Brevet at least uses moderate language, unlike N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis did the other day.

The best movies define their own realm. Most reflect or recreate “reality” as most of us know it, but not with absolute slavish adherence to every last detail. Like the speaking voices of the famous. Accuracy is welcome but sounding “right” is what counts. Listen to the real voice of George S. Patton. Imagine If Patton collaborators George C. Scott and director Franklin J. Schaffner had taken leave of their senses and decided to go the tonally correct route. No legendary reputation, no Best Actor Oscar, no home video sales…an anecdote.

The best way to see The Master in 70mm is on a fairly large and flat (or only slightly curved) screen. I saw it in 70mm at Toronto’s Bell Lightbox — perfect. The best way for New Yorkers was that 70mm special screening at the Zeigfeld eight days ago. I wouldn’t know how good it looks or sounds at the AMC Leows Lincoln Square, but I’ve had some bad experiences at that place.

In Los Angeles The Master playing in 70 mm in two theatres in the Arclight, and on a single screen in West L.A.’s Landmark. (A 35mm and digital version is also showing there.) The L.A. Weekly‘s Michael Nordine recently advised readers to “see it in the Dome.” No — don’t. The super-curved Dome screen distorts. The only way this venue would work would be if the Dome’s screen has been taken down (which happened when Alan Parker‘s Evita played there in ’96).

I intend to see it again on Friday or Saturday. My money is on the other Arclight screen or the Landmark.

Ted Kotcheff‘s Wake In Fright, which opens theatrically in New York’s Film Forum on 10.5 and then 10.19 at L.A.’s Nuart, actually opened in October 1971, so it’s now enjoying its 41st anniversary. Just saying.

Steven Spielberg‘s Lincoln (Disney, 11.9) won’t screen for critics until next week, but already there is a certain pushback in the form of concern about Daniel Day Lewis‘s Lincoln voice. It ain’t right. In the 1920s Robert Todd Lincoln visited Raymond Massey backstage and told him how much his voice reminded him of his father’s. And if Massey’s Lincoln doesn’t work for you, try Sam Waterston’s.

A director-writer who knows people and gets around says he’s heard that “DDL’s Lincoln voice tries to be consistent with what the actual man’s sounded like, but aside from an impassioned, impressive performance the film is another Amistad with good intentions outweighing a good film.”

I can’t over-emphasize how enraged I am about N.Y Times critic Manohla Dargis having called Joe Wright‘s Anna Karenina “a travesty with a miscast Keira Knightley” that is “tragic only in its conception and execution”…God! This is an outrageously stingy and dismissive and short-sighted thing to say, and to call Knightley miscast when she in fact has given one of her most flat-on exhilarating performances (and I’m saying this having been bothered by her acting in years past) is…is…I feel like slamming my fist into a refrigerator.

(l. to r.) Manohla Dargis, Joe Wright, Keira Knightley

Dargis is basically saying that Wright’s decision to present Leo Tolstoy‘s 19th Century tragedy as a “play”, initially set inside a theatre but opening up into sound-stage sets and outdoor backdrops, was a huge mistake. In fact Wright’s decision to pull the plug on historical realism was an act of major artistic courage, especially since he didn’t choose this mad-Stravinski approach until Karenina was a couple of weeks into pre-production. Wright could have done the usual-usual and that Karenina would have gotten the usual-usual reactions, but he manned up and decided to go all Powell-Pressburger and Ken Russell and then Dargis comes along and calls his film an effing “travesty”?

That really and truly stinks. I’ve admired Manohla for many years, and I just feel appalled.

Sasha Stone is fond of saying that online columnists and critics aren’t the real deal, and that the real brahmins and gurus are the critics working for major established print orgs. To hell with that. Manohla Dargis is a heavyweight, agreed, but she doesn’t “know” any more than I do. She doesn’t have some kind of elite N.Y. Times enzyme in her bloodstream that gives her special eyes. She’s just a critic who knows what she knows, and who writes like a champ. I’ve been around as long as she has and then some, and I’m saying here and now that her opinion doesn’t count any more than mine or Sasha’s or Kris Tapley‘s or Eric Kohn‘s or anyone else with any hard-won, day-to-day cred.

And in the case of Anna Karenina, she’s hit a “wrong” gusher that compares to the one that James Dean lucked into in Giant. What she wrote is needlessly cruel and brash and lacking the compassion and respect that any fair-minded critic should bring to any act of creative daring. There is no such thing as a film critic being “right” or “wrong”, of course, but Manohla’s Karenina comments come awfully damn close.

Yesterday morning Sasha Stone and I recorded a special post-Toronto, where-is-the-Oscar-race-now? Oscar Poker with Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil. Apologies to Tom for our dominating the conversation in the early stages, but we got into everything and particularly The Silver Linings Playbook, what do “real” critics like Manohla Dargis know that we don’t? and beware-of-Lincoln. Here’s a stand-alone mp3 link.

Here’s O’Neil talking to Pete Hammond about the same. Key Hammond quote: “I wouldn’t bet the farm” on Beasts of the Southern Wild getting a Best Picture nomination.

Universal has bumped the opening of Tom Hooper‘s Les Miserables — one of the five presumed Best Picture contenders that haven’t been seen — from 12.14 to 12.25. The other Four Big Unseens are Robert Zemeckis‘s Flight (11.2), Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal‘s Zero Dark Thirty (12.14), Ang Lee‘s Life of Pi (11.21) and Steven Spielberg‘s Lincoln…but I wouldn’t bank on Lincoln if I were you.

These guys are basically putting on a show together. Jack Kennedy is the star-director and Chet Huntley and David Brinkley are essentially the obedient knaves. Different era, different values. If footage emerged of Anderson Cooper, say, letting Barack Obama have a do-over, his journalistic credibility would be severely damaged.

The candidacy of Mittens Romney died yesterday. He was on the ropes anyway, down three points with likely voters, but the “47% of Americans are deadbeat freeloaders” video has put an end to it — not because he says anything shocking on it, but because he says what everyone has always suspected are his core beliefs about the people who are basically deadweight. He’ll totally be on the defensive during the presidential debates and he just can’t recover.

Oh, and incidentally? Most people are basically deadweight. They’re sheep. The life of any culture or economy or revolution or what-have-you is always the dynamic 10% or 15%. So I agree with what he said, but I’m still a hardcore Obama man because Romney is a clumsy, clueless doofus and an absolute animal because he believes that the deadweighters have made their own fates. Which of course they haven’t. We’re all trying to keeps our head above water in heaving seas. To live by Romney’s vision is to embrace a form of inhumanity. Corporations are not people — they’re sociopaths.

I saw David Ayer‘s End of Watch (Open Road, 9.21) in Los Angeles just under three weeks ago, but never wrote a review. Apologies for that. This isn’t Training Day as it has no charismatic, self-destructive madman at the forefront. The leads (Jake Gyllenhaal, Michael Pena) are just likable young hot-dog cops. But it’s good resourceful Ayers stuff — a gripping, adrenalized ride in an LAPD black-and-white through South Central, and God help them both.

Gyllenhaal and Pena are basically doing that uniformed Cops thing — a young white guy and a young Latino guy all trained up and following a tradition established decades ago by The Blue Knight and New Centurions…the old mean streets, shit-happens, never-a-dull-moment routine.

The difference here is the Mexican cartels, man. The cartels play by a whole different set of rules. They cut off heads…whoa. They bring in wetbacks and store them in shitty bungalows. Their guns and AKs are blinged up the wazoo. And about halfway through they decide to take out our young heroes. But Gyllenhaal and Pena are just doing their jobs and banging around. Just a coupla go-go guys in a black and white. If Gyllenhaal or Pena had, let’s say, had inappropriate sex with a 16 year-old kid sister of some cartel guy then you’d have a personal revenge element, but they’re just aggressive cops who discover a house full of wetbacks…what?

It’s the crazy Latinos, dawg. Big Evil (“My evil is big”) and his homies and bitches who shout “fuck!” and “fuckin’!” every four seconds and who walk around like wolverines, like serpents with flicking tongues who haven’t a thoughtful or fair-minded molecule in their entire bodies. There’s a scene with a brother saying to another brother, “Ten years ago the guy on the corner was selling fried chicken…now he’s got a taco stand.” Or words to that effect. Crazy, cranked-up macho essays.

I had heard initially that End of Watch would be all POV video footage — front seat cop-car videos, chest-cam, hand-held videos, etc. Not so. The coverage is all over the place. Master shots, helicopter overhead shots, inserts, POV shots that nobody involved could possibly deliver. And that’s a good thing. What Ayers does is plant the idea that it’s all being shot by individual videocams, and then he ignores that rule. And that’s cool.

I have a problem with the ending. It looks like somebody’s dead and then, to our surprise, they’re not. I’m not going to spoil anything, but if you’re going to shoot somebody in the chest and give them a sucking chest wound and have blood coming out their mouths, we all know what this means. And then they’re lying on the ground and several dozen more rounds are fired in their general direction (actually at somebody else but same difference) and they’re not going to catch another two or three stray bullets in the chest or the head or the gut? I didn’t buy it, man.

And if gang-bangers have just blown a couple of guys away (no hints, no allusions) in an area sure to be swarming with cops in a matter of minutes, why the hell would they take their time as they leave the scene, sauntering down an alley and patting each other on the back? They’re not stupid. If you want to hit somebody, you do it out of the blue and then scram. You don’t do it in a cops vs. bad guys war zone.

I didn’t know what “watch your six” meant at first. I assumed right off it was a variation on “watch your back,” but it refers to a clock face. 12 o’clock is straight ahead, 3 o’clock is to your right, 9 o’clock is to your left, and 6 o’clock is behind you.

The opening bit is pure cop-car POV footage of a high-speed pursuit, cut for efficiency but otherwise raw and narrated by Gyllenhaal, explaining the ethos and the commitment of a street cop…who we are and what we do. The rest of the film is between good, very good and excellent, but this opener is perfect. Open Road should be using this as a teaser.