Derek Cianfrance‘s The Place Beyond The Pines is basically an upstate New York crime story about fathers and sons. It’s also about cigarettes and bank hold-ups and motorcycles and travelling carnivals and nobody having enough money and anger and bullheadedness and the general malaise that comes from living in the pure hell and suffocation of Schenectady and those Siberian environs…I’ve been up there and it’s awful so don’t tell me.

It’s also about men and their lame cock-of-the-walk issues in Cianfranceville, or the Land of the Constant Macho Strut and the Eternally Burning Cigarette, and if you can swallow or suck this in, fine…but I couldn’t.

Guys like Movieline‘s Frank DiGiacomo and Variety‘s Jeff Sneider were having kittens over this movie last night on Twitter, and I was like “what?”

Boiled down, Pines is about the conflicted, problematic, sociopathic or otherwise questionable tendencies of two fathers (Ryan Gosling, Bradley Cooper) and how their sons (Dane DeHaan and Emory Cohen, respectively) are all but doomed to inherit and melodramatically carry on that legacy and that burden, so finally and irrevocably that their mothers (respectively played by Eva Mendes and Rose Byrne) might as well be living-room furniture, and the influence of schools, community values and/or stepfathers matter not.

If you can roll with this world-of-Cianfrance view — i.e., wives and mothers are good for sex and breeding and cleaning and making meals and running errands and occasional guilt-tripping but when it comes to the issue of a son’s character and destiny, it’s all about dad — you might be able to roll with The Place Beyond The Pines. But I wasn’t able to. I respect Cianfrance’s ambition in telling an epic, three-act, multi-generational tale that spans 15-plus years, but I don’t respect or believe what he’s selling.

Except for the bank-robbing and road-chase sequences I didn’t believe a single moment in this film. I couldn’t buy any of it. Okay, I bought some of it but only in fits and starts.

You can’t have Gosling play a simple-dick man of few words who entertains audiences with his talent as a motorcycle rider and then turns to bank-robbing on the side — that’s way too close to his stunt-driving, getaway-car character in Drive.

(l. to r.) De Haan, Cooper, Mendes, Gosling and Cianfrance before last night’s screening.

Plus I don’t respond well to movies with female-voiced choral music (i.e., a caring, all-seeing God is watching over us) on the soundtrack plus other musical implications of doom and heavyosity.

Plus I hate movies about blue-collar knockabouts and greasy low-lifes and teenage louts who constantly smoke cigarettes. The more a character smokes cigarettes the dumber and more doomed and less engaging he or she is — that’s the rule. If you’re writing or directing a film and you want the audience to believe that a character is an all-but-completely worthless scoundrel or sociopath whom they should not care shit about, have that character smoke cigarettes in every damn scene.

The principal theme of The Place Beyond The Pines is the following: “Dads Are Everything and Mothers Don’t Matter, but Cigarettes Sure Run A Close Second!”

In short, I thought the movie was unreal, oppressive, dramatically forced bullshit, although it receives a shot in the arm from Dane DeHaan (In Treatment), who looks like a mixed reincarnation of Leonardo DiCaprio and Benicio del Toro as they were in the mid ’90s, although he’s a lot shorter (5’7″).

I also felt that Mendes and Byrne are too hot to live in Schenectady. Beauty almost always migrates to the big cities where the power and the security lie, and in my experience the women who reside in blue-collar hell holes like Schenectady are far less attractive as a rule. There’s a certain genetic look to the men and women of Upper New York State, and they aren’t the kind of people who pose for magazine covers or star in reality shows.

Read this classic paragraph from Indiewire‘s Kevin Jagernauth: “With The Place Beyond The Pines Derek Cianfrance has now placed himself in the canon of great, contemporary American filmmakers like James Gray, Paul Thomas Anderson and the Coen brothers. This is a film that desires to say something about how we relate to each other, and how the often overlooked consequences of our actions can refract down avenues we could never expect. [It’s a] brilliant, towering picture [and] a cinematic accomplishment of extraordinary grace and insight.” Amazing! Planet Neptune!

It’s going on 9 am and I should have awoken two hours ago. I had three alarms set on two devices, and in my dissolute slumber I blew them all off. That means the body was in dire need and insisted, and you just have to accept this when it happens. And I didn’t even bang out a reaction to Derek Cianfrance‘s The Place Beyond The Pines, which I saw last night at 6 pm.

9:50 am update: For the sin of missing the early morning screenings (there were three worth catching) and because there’s nothing reallly showing at noon or thereabouts I’m either wide open or flatlining (depending on how you look at it) until the 3:30 pm public screening of Martin McDonagh ‘s Seven Psychopaths, and then comes an hour’s worth of filing until the 6:30 pm Roy Thomson Hall screening of David O. Russell‘s The Silver Linings Playbook (and I hate the RTH acoustics — way too echo-y). And that’s all — two films for Saturday. Slacker.

Tonight’s public screening of The Master began almost an entire friggin’ hour later than scheduled — just about 10 pm. Here are the tweets I managed to punch out as I walked back to the place. It damn well ought to be a lock for a Best Picture nomination but you never know about those 62 year-old Academy fuddy-duddies. Joaquin Phoenix is a guaranteed lock for Best Actor; ditto “Philly” Seymour Hoffman for Best Supporting Actor.

What a movie, what a meal, what a sumo wrestling match…it’s like being run over by a truck going 15 miles an hour! Favorite external tweet from Ben Kenigsberg: “Uh, yeah. Those rules about how movies are supposed to work? I think someone threw those out, did something new.”

Tweet #1: There can be NO ultimate, clean & final understanding of The Master…ever. But it is absolutely vivid, penetrating, world-class filmmaking.

Tweet #2: The Master is about wanting to break through, needing to break through, longing to break through…and finally saying “fuck it, I gotta be me.”

Tweet #3: The Master is about the proverbial search, yes, but you’d also better believe it’s based upon the early days of Scientology, Scientology and…uhm, oh, yes, FUCKING SCIENTOLOGY.

Tweet #4: Paul Thomas Anderson told Joaquin Phoenix, “I need you to be a serpent, an alien, a hee-hee-hee-hee creep, a wormy masturbator, intense, volatile, a primal reptile, odd, beastly. In short, never entirely or simply human. I need you to be “interesting” in the Stanley Kubrick sense of that term.

Tweet #5: The Master ensnares and penetrates… It gets you off if you can be gotten off by the magic of sheer, howling, balls-to-the-wall filmmaking. But NO ONE will ever be soothed or placated by it, and NO ONE will ever “understand” it or parse it or break it down into rhyming prose.

Tweet #6: The Master rips its shirt open and shouts at the audience, “I am a bear! We are ALL bears! And you will not tame me! Accept me as I am or go away and hide in your little hole.”

Tweet #7: The Master is not, repeat NOT, definitely fucking NOT a “date movie”…unless, you know, you’re going out with someone like Maya Rudolph.

My “agonizing reappraisal” led to a decision to see Derek Cianfrance‘s The Place Beyond The Pines at…well, not 6 pm as it’s now 6:09 pm, but soon. And then grim up, brush my teeth, splash water in my face and see The Master at 9 pm — both inside the storied Princess of Wales theatre, in which I’m now sitting.

An hour ago I spoke to the seriously hardcore Joe Wright, director of the form-breaking Anna Karenina, at Toronto’s Park Hyatt. I haven’t time to tap out a piece, but rather than describe Karenina as “a musical without songs,” as I put it, Wright called it something closer to “a ballet with words.” He also felt that the influence of Powell-Pressberger (particularly The Red Shoes) was stronger than that of Ken Russell, an association I thought of immediately when I saw the film yesterday afternoon.

Anna Karenina director Joe Wright — Park Hyatt, 14th floor, 9.7, 1:50 pm.

Sarah Polley‘s Stories We Tell, a doc about memory, family and lineage, is nearly as good as what everyone has been teling me since Telluride. It goes on a little too long, but thoughtfully and probingly — certainly not in a criminal way.

There was criminality, however, in the tech crew at the Scotiabank plex allowIng the lower 40% screen to be tinted with an amber-red exit light, which was coming from behind the screen.

This red-amber effect diluted the purity of the image, partly tarnished the color and, in my view, diminished the pleasure of the film by roughly 20% to 25%. If Polley had dropped by she would have hit the roof. I told a couple of senior volunteers about this and requested that the red-light effect not reoccur with any more films during the festival. Something like this is strictly bush-league — the kind of thing you might see in a rural plex in Dingleberry, New York. Is this a first-class festival or not?

This David O. Russell film has been well-situated in that expectations are flat — not low, not high — except for Robert De Niro‘s alleged standout performance. It’s screening here tomorrow night in conflict with Cloud Atlas. Wachwoski/Tykwer or Russell? Russell or Wachwoski/Tykwer? Wachwoski/Tykwer or Russell?

Bill and Ben Productions’ A Liar’s Autobiography, an animated 3D flick based on the memoir of Monty Python veteran Graham Chapman, plays today at the Toronto Film festival. Pic uses Chapman’s narration of his autobiography, recorded shortly before his 1989 death from cancer. Produced and directed by Bill Jones, Ben Timlett and Jeff Simpson, pic used several animation companies working on different chapters in different styles.

Here’s how I phrased my reaction after seeing it in Los Angeles a couple of weeks ago:

“Not bad, pretty good, nice animation, mezzo-meh but I was’t blown away. I’m not sure the 3D was even necessary. It’s intriguing to see adult themes and subjects like alcoholism, gay identity in the ’60s and ’70s and bacchanalian excess addressed and explored in an animated feature, but It was never more than mildly interesting.

“I would have preferred a straight taking-head doc about Chapman because that way, at least, it wouldn’t have been so much of a gay-agenda thing. That’s what I sensed, at least. We all know about gay guys in the ’60s and ’70s who decided to come out and openly be themselves and, fortified with this new boldness and openness, fucked everyone and everything that moved, but we also know where that eventually led, and not a word about AIDS and HIV in the whole thing?

“I just don’t see why it’s of any particular interest to follow the life of a talented. quite witty Monty Python guy who was into gin, gin, gin, gin, gin and more gin (another self-destructive tale of a guy who nearly drank himself to death….yawn), and also fucking and sucking, fucking and sucking, fucking and sucking, fucking and sucking and….did I mention fucking and sucking?

“Oh, yes — he was also into Hollywood lifestyles and Hollywood name-dropping in the late ’70s and early ’80s. It doesn’t even mention he was on Hollywood Squares? Or did I miss that?

“The poor guy died of pipe smoking (i.e., throat cancer or tonsil cancer) and the film doesn’t even MENTION THIS? Not even in passing, not even as a wry joke?

“No matter — the important thing is to present animated Monty Python-esque images of men fucking and sucking, fucking and sucking, fucking and sucking, fucking and sucking, etc. This is basically an animated gay-guy fucking-and-sucking movie. It’s cool that Chapman embraced his own Chapman-ness and that he was openly gay as of the early ’70s and he really fucked and sucked his way around London and LA…fine. I was a slut myself in the ’70s and early ’80s but it’s just not a very interesting subject.

“Life HAS to be about more than which gender you prefer sexually and whether you like fucking women in the Biblical way or getting blown by women or by men and fucking guys in the ass. There really, REALLY has to be more to our time on this planet than just this. …please.

“Questioner: “‘So Graham, how’s your life been going so far?’ Chapman: ‘Well, I love the gay life and, uhm, I, uhhm…well that’s it! Is there something else about life on this planet that I should be noticing or caring about? No? Didn’t think so.’

“I was sitting there going, ‘Why did they make this movie again? What’s in it for me exactly? Because I’m not getting it.

“Lessons to be learned from A Liar’s Autobiography: (a) It’s good to accept who you are and fly your own freak flag and be proud of that; (b) It’s not good to be a drunk; (c) You also might want to cut back on the pipe-smoking; (d) It’s better to delve into matters of some weight or depth or soul and to nurture the eternals rather than always flitting around Hollywood and partying with the other party people and going on Hollywood Squares; and (e) if you’re into guys, it sure was great having mad monkey sex with them before AIDS came along!

“What did I miss?”

Last night I began an agonizing reappraisal of today’s Toronto Film Festival options. And I still haven’t figured how to play it. The morning and afternoon schedule is brutal in itself (Sarah Polley‘s widely praised Stories We Tell is the 9:45 am kickoff), but with so much going on this evening, including public screenings of Derek Cianfrance‘s The Place Beyond The Pines and Marina Zenovich‘s Roman Polanski: Odd Man Out plus an Anna Karenina soiree plus a midnight screening of Psychopaths (and I hate how midnight screenings always start at 12:15 or 12:20 am, which always sleep-deprives and screws up up the following day), I’m thinking it might be more sensible to see The Master fresh and clean at tomorrow’s 9 am press screening rather than at tonight’s 9 pm public screening at the Prince of Wales theatre. Maybe. Mulling it over.

Four months ago in Cannes, my highly enthusiastic response to Walter Salles On The Road was a minority opinion. Which I didn’t give a damn about. I saw what I saw and knew what I knew. But Salles himself obviously agreed that it needed to be tweaked and modified as the Road screening here is 15 minutes shorter — 124 minutes vs. the 139-minute version shown in Cannes. I’m told last night that the film also has a whole new beginning. It opens in England on 9.21, and 12.21 stateside.

President Barack Obama‘s speech last night “was disappointing until, with about ten minutes to go, [he] acknowledged disappointment, and so began its rise,” writes Esquire‘s Tom Junod. “The times have changed — and so have I,’ Obama said. ‘I’m no longer just a candidate. I’m the president.’

“Of course, he was reminding us of his power; the fact of his presidency has become an argument for his presidency. But he was also reminding us that as a candidate who rose to power on the politics of pure potential, he is, as president, a fallen man. ‘And while I’m proud of what we’ve achieved together, I’m far more mindful of my own failiings, knowing exactly what Lincoln meant when he said, ‘I have been driven to my knees many times by the overwhelming conviction that I had no place else to go.'”

“This was where the speech turned, and became, in its statement of humility, a statement of rousing power. ‘I ask you for your vote,’ he said, and his commonplace words had a beseeching quality that put them outside the realm of political performance. He had failed to transform his office, and failed to transform our politics, but he sounded fully aware that he had been himself transformed.'”

“I wrote a few days ago that if the Democrats could maintain the enthusiasm they showed on the first day of their convention for all three days, Mitt Romney would be in serious trouble,” Politico‘s Roger Simon wrote this morning. “They did, and he is.

“Democratic enthusiasm — real fire-in-the-belly enthusiasm — is a killer for Romney for one big reason: There is no sizable pro-Romney movement in this country. There has been a sizable anti-Obama movement.

“There are relatively few Republicans deeply in love with Romney. There never has been. Romney won his nomination by being the most electable general election candidate in a weak and whacky primary field. He won, in other words, not by devotion, but by default.

“His campaign is fueled by dislike for and disappointment with Barack Obama. That dislike and disappointment is real.

“In 1996, the last time a Democratic president ran for reelection, there was a significant anti-Bill Clinton movement in this country. This was before the Monica Lewinsky scandal. But a lot of right-wingers hated Bill Clinton and felt he was guilty of unspeakable crimes like murder and drug-trafficking. That didn’t mean there was a significant pro-Bob Dole movement, however. And Clinton won easily by 8.5 percentage points.

“This is not 1996, the economy is bad, the cast of characters has changed and nobody is going to win by 8.5 percentage points. But the dynamic is the same: It is harder to turn out a vote against someone than a vote for someone.

“Anger is not a movement. Disappointment is not a cause. And passionate support is an antidote to both.”

Joe Wright‘s Anna Karenina (Focus Features, 11.16.12) will have its detractors (in my screening today five or six people were actually chuckling at it during a high-emotion scene in the late second act) but for me it’s a serious, drop-your-socks knockout — the first truly breathtaking high-style film of the year, a non-musical successor to Moulin Rouge and a disciple of the great ’70s films of Ken Russell (and by that I mean pre-Mahler Russell, which means The Music Lovers and Women In Love) as well as Powell-Pressburger’s The Red Shoes.

You either go with the proscenium-arch grandiosity of a film like Anna Karenina or you don’t (and I was just talking in the Bell Lightbox lobby with a critic who didn’t care for it) but if you ask me it has all the essential ingredients of a bold-as-brass Best Picture contender — an excitingly original approach, cliff-leaping audacity, complex choreography, the balls to go classic and crazy at the same time, a wild mixture of theatricality and romantic realism, a superbly tight and expressive script by Tom Stoppard and wowser operatic acting with a special hat-tip to Keira Knightley as Anna — a Best Actress performance if I’ve ever seen one.

The brazen idea behind Wright’s film is that he’s presenting a completely theatrical environment, and therefore defined by and subject to the terms of live theatre. The film literally takes place in a 19th Century theatre with the orchestra seats removed, and yet it’s a special kind of theatre that dissolves and opens up from time to time — regularly, literally — and thus allowing Wright and his players to run out or zoom into a semi-naturalistic world. But one is mostly aware that we’re watching a play that is choreographed like a musical or a ballet with broad but delicious acting and some magnificent dance sequences and killer production design and break-open walls and actors sometimes freezing in their tracks and becoming tableau.

I can imagine some people saying “whoa…this is too much” but like I said, either you understand the concept and accept it…or you don’t. I loved every minute of it except for a portion in the third act when it seems to run out of gas. But it revs up again at the finale.

I’m being kicked out of the Bell Lightbox press lounge as we speak so I guess I’ll have to add to this later on this evening, but I couldn’t feel more excited and elevated.

Those snide bitches who chuckled during this afternoon’s screening needed to be hauled out by the collar and slapped around. If they had been watching Wright’s film as a literal theatrical presentation (and it could be presented that way with modifications), they wouldn’t have dared to laugh at any projection of tragic intensity. No one who understands and respects theatre would do that.

I didn’t mean to suggest that Anna Karenina is as good or almost as good as Moulin Rouge but without the music — it’s a much tonier and classier production than Baz Luhrman‘s film, in my view, although it’s coming from the same general ballpark. And of course it’s a much darker thing than Moulin Rouge, given the Leo Tolstoy source material.

I hate having to stop writing but I’m really being kicked out of here…eff me.