John Calley, one of the most sophisticated and filmmaker-friendly studio chiefs of all time whose golden years were at Warner Bros. from 1968 to 1981 (and then later at Sony from 1996 to 2003), has left the earth. He was 81 years old, or close to that. I love the fact that when Calley was handed the Academy’s Thalberg award in 2009, he voiced an uncommonly frank remark about the life of a studio executive: “You’re very unhappy for a long period of time. And you don’t experience joy. At the end you experience relief, if you’re lucky.”

My first screening yesterday was Marc Forster‘s Machine Gun Preacher. It’s a unexceptional boilerplate thing about a criminally-inclined druggie (Gerard Butler) who finds Jesus and then goes off to the Sudan to build houses and wipe out the evil warlords, etc. It’s not a dreadful film but one completely untouched by any kind of vision or inspiration. “What’s happened to Marc Forster?,” I asked a couple of friends yesterday. “He used to be the artful Monster’s Ball guy, and now he’s made a so-so film in the style of an anonymous hack.”

Then came William Friedkin‘s Killer Joe, which is based on a Tracy Letts play. It’s technically adept and Matthew McConaughey is okay as a chillly psychopath type, but it’s primarily about a demimonde of intellectually challenged low-lifes ( Emile Hirsch, Thomas Haden Church, Gina Gershon, Juno Temple). After 40 minutes or so I was asking myself, “Why am I watching a movie about low-rent trailer-trash scuzballs nosing around like pigs in the gutter?” A friend says that Letts’ stagey dialogue is part of the problem, and that so far his films (this and Friedkin’s Bug) haven’t been satisfactorily translated to film.

Then I caught a 2 pm showing of Juan Carlos Fresnadillo‘s Intruders, which is basically another spooky-monster-in-a-child’s-bedroom movie in the tradition of Guillermo del Toro‘s Pan’s Labrynth. I felt I was seeing nothing original wbatsover. I’ve been feeling more and more fatigued and irritated by CG monsters who make that same deep digital-gurgly sound. Please…stop it!

Ralph Fiennes‘ Coriolanus was the last film of the day, and the only one with intelligent, commendable high-end chops. And yes, Vanessa Redgrave is a Best Supporting Actress contender, no question. Fiennes is a fine performer and a first-rate director who can handle action scenes with the best of them. Cheers to costars Gerard Butler, Brian Cox, Jessica Chastain, James Nesbitt and Paul Jesson.

One problem: I was able to understand maybe 20% of the dialogue. Maybe it was the sound system or the echoes in the Elgin theatre but at most I was able to decipher an occasional phrase or word or what-have-you. I’ve absorbed and enjoyed Shakespeare all my life, on stage and in films, and we all know that Shakespeare takes a little while to get used to and “hear.” But I couldn’t find the groove last night. And I’m in the older and educated Shakespeare movie demographic.

Think about the millions of under-40s moviegoers who wouldn’t watch this film with a gun at their head. How will they react, if they somehow find themselves watching it in a theatre? Solution: American colloquial subtitles that would offer Tobacco Road rephrasings of Shakespeare’s dialogue. I know — a dreadful idea. A metaphor for the end of civilization, etc. But we’re living in a debased and under-educated culture, and we might as well deal with it as practically we can.

I still haven’t reviewed Gerardo Naranjo‘s Miss Bala, but I tweeted twice about it two or three days ago. Tweet #1: “If Michelangelo Antonioni had made a movie about a Mexican beauty queen grappling with drug gangsters, the result might have been Miss Bala.” Tweet #2: “Naranjo has totally ignored the chaotic action aesthetic of Michael Bay & his acolytes, and delivered an action thriller with a truly elegant visual style. Long shots and almost no cut-cut-cut-cuting.”

I met with Naranjo late yesterday morning. Mostly I just flattered him and the film. I also met Stephanie Sigman, the star of the film, and took a couple of side-by-side shots of the two of them.

Naranjo is a bright, good-humored fellow who knows how to handle action and danger in a much, much more involving fashion that 90% of the bullshit scattershot action directors out there. Those guys know nothing, and Naranjo, I feel, is a master. “Bala” is the Mexican term for bullet, by the way. Miss Bala will open limited in mid October through Fox International and the marketing efforts of David Dinerstein.

Miss Bala director Gerardo Naranjo, star Stephanie Sigman at Hotel Intercontinental on Front Street — Monday, 9.12, 11:05 am.

I arrived a bit late at yesterday’s GE/Cinelan press breakfast, but the gist of the announcement was that GE and Cinelan are partnering on a new series of three-minute nonfiction shorts about innovation in various fields. It’s called the Focus Forward documentary project, and there’s an exclusive deal for Vimeo to present the results. Participating filmmakers include Morgan Spurlock, Liz Garbus, Joe Berlinger, Alex Gibney, Steve James, Barbara Kopple and Jessica Yu.

“I saw Moneyball,” a friend said, “and it’s rather amazing, especially on a thematic and/or screenwriting level. But the last thing it is is a power Oscar play. I expect Brad Pitt could find some flow this season, and maybe it’ll figure in the adapted screenplay category (given the names), though it’s not the kind of script that resonates in the season. (I don’t make the rules.) But that’s it. I don’t see 300 people putting this in their #1 spot for Best Picture.”

No, I responded. No, no, no, no…wrong. It is a kind of Oscar play…a quiet, forceful one that’s something to be proud of. “Smart layered movies have to be given their due,” I replied. “The Academy can’t be allowed to dumb down the Best Picture race again…not after last year’s King’s Speech win. That embarassment has to be forgotten, erased, paved over. Please don’t wink at or tacitly approve the default preferences of the dumb-downers…don’t play along with them by predicting their dumb-down votes. Don’t go all War Horse on me, please.

“Moneyball is a kind of heaven. Don’t hang back with the brutes.”

I’m at the 50/50 post-premiere party for the Toronto Film Festival, and I’m fuming at all the full-of-themselves under-40s who, in the middle of a super-crowded, celebrity-studded madhouse party (Seth Rogen and Joseph Gordon Levitt are sitting 20 feet away), order tray after tray of complicated mixed drinks from the bartender, tying her up for minutes on end. Just order wine or beer or straight shots, you thoughtless jerks, and give other people a chance to order what they want so everyone can have a nice time.

Update: There was one other bartender besides the woman I’m speaking of, and some guy darting in and out and delivering drinks on a tray. The prty could have used at least one more bartender, and two more would have been all the better.

“I’m so sick of assholes using their phones in movies. I’m thinking of starting a terror campaign with a makeshift pea shooter — a straw from McDonald’s and a small bag of lentils from a grocery store. Wonder what kind of range or accuracy I could get? I’ve actually taken to kicking the seat of people in front of me who take their phones out in the middle of screenings.” — Formidable Toronto-covering critic, written earlier today.

“It’s a drama about a guy who thinks he is trying to win baseball games, [and] has come to believe that in order to be okay with who he is, this thing has to happen. And it ends up being a classic wisdom story, a King Arthur type of thing — get the grail and all will be restored to order. And of course, it’s an impossible task but it’s the journey of the thing that teaches the lesson that needs to be learned.

“And so you never quite get your hand right around it, but you realize, it’s not about the grail.” — Moneyball director Bennett Miller, as quoted in 9.12 piece by HuffPost’s Jordan Zakarin.

It is significant, I think, that Marshall Fine is a fan of Rod Lurie‘s Straw Dogs. Partly because Fine is an author of “Bloody Sam,” a well-written book about Sam Peckinpah, director of the original 1971 version. And secondly because Fine didn’t like Lurie’s excellent Nothing But The Truth…weird.

James Marsden, Kate Bosworth in Rod Lurie’s Straw Dogs.

Lurie’s Straw Dogs “is a solid, tense drama that packs a wallop and tells its story on Lurie’s own terms,” he writes. “It’s less a remake than a new version of the story, filtered through Lurie’s vision.

“Sam Peckinpah’s 1971 film was a violent hymn to the notion of the territorial imperative: that man is inherently violent and prone to expand his territory at the expense of others, whether he needs to or not. Peckinpah celebrated the animal within, using a mathematician (Dustin Hoffman) to further demonstrate that even the mildest sort harbors a killer within.

“Lurie follows Peckinpah’s story closely, though he’s transferred the setting from rural England to the small-town American South. Yet he has made a film which, while just as violent and tense as Peckinpah’s, seems less Darwinian, if only by degree.

“In Lurie’s version, the couple, David and Amy Sumner (James Marsden and Kate Bosworth), return to her family home on the Gulf Coast in Mississippi after the death of her father. She’s the small-town girl made good, the homecoming queen who ditched the football captain to escape the South and find stardom in Hollywood. David is an amused Ivy Leaguer, a preppie who has made it as a screenwriter, who views this move to the South as though he were a sociologist studying a previously undiscovered tribe.

“The old homestead needs some repairs, so he hires a group of locals, led by Charlie (Alexander Skarsgard), who turns out to be the football star that Amy left behind. When Charlie and his roughneck crew show up, there’s obviously a yawning cultural chasm between them and David, no matter what he tries to do to be accepted.

Except, of course, that he’s always looking down his nose at them, even when he’s trying to be one of the boys. They, in turn, are cagey to the point of being predators; their Southern politesse masks a vicious passive-aggressive quality that is constantly testing the boundaries that David will allow them to cross.

“David sees himself as the civilized man, the guy who is sure that there is a rational, if not intellectual, solution to any problem. When that problem is a dead cat left hanging in their closet, subtlety would seem to go out the window.

“Lurie beautifully sets up the tension between the rednecks’ casual cruelty, David’s determined high-mindedness and Amy’s increasing frustration with David’s passivity. But he also reveals David as a man who can only be pushed so far before he makes his stand.

“And what a stand it is. This is, after all, a movie based on a book called The Siege at Trencher’s Farm and the film’s finale is every bit of that: a bloody battle with improvised weapons and a kill-or be-killed ethos. Lurie lights the fuse that leads to this explosion early on — yet even having David’s current project be a screenplay about the siege of Stalingrad isn’t enough foreshadowing for the brutality of the final confrontation between David, Amy and Charlie’s crew.

“That sequence drew squeals of outrage from sensitive moviegoers when Peckinpah’s film came out. So did a rape scene that implied a certain pleasure on the part of the victim in the original, something Lurie eliminates in this film. There’s none of that macho ‘See? She really wanted it after all’ to the assault when it happens here.

“Lurie’s film is bound to be just as controversial as Sam Peckinpah’s original for its depiction of violence. But Straw Dogs is a smart, provocative — and exceptionally intense and exciting — movie.”

I’ve never wanted to be in the same room as Bucky Larson: Born To Be A Star. I knew that instantly when I saw the ads. I don’t want to smell it, think about it, acknowledge it…nothing. I don’t even want it in the dumpster in my garage. Since opening two days ago it’s become common knowledge that it has a 0% Rotten Tomatoes rating. So there’s been a kind of competition this weekend to top the most withering putdowns filed by critics. if anyone’s seen it, have at it.

I saw Rod Lurie‘s Straw Dogs three months ago, and wrote down some reactions within hours of seeing it. Now that it’s about to open, I can let them out. This new Dogs is flawed here and there, but it’s also the most visceral, straight-from-the-solar-plexus film that Lurie has ever made. And it’s spooky in a couple of ways that Sam Peckinpah, director of the original 1971 version, never divined.

At the very least Lurie’s version is a mature complement to Peckinpah’s. There’s no reason at all to trash it. It may be your cup or not, but it’s an entirely respectable work.

Warning: SPOILERS follow, but not really if you’ve seen the Peckinpah version because Lurie’s follows that film very closely.

Lurie’s is also coming from the head (i.e., reshuffling the cards from a liberal-minded position) and Gordon Williams’ book, and the rape scene has been overly fiddled with, but it’s a serious “growth film” for Rod so hats off.

Here’s exactly what I wrote on June 16th: “In some ways Rod Lurie‘s Straw Dogs is a more complex film that Sam Peckinpah‘s 1971 original, and I was generally pleased with it. But I just couldn’t get the Peckinpah version out of my head. It’s been finessed and finagled and modified in some ways, but it’s basically the same film that Peckinpah made only less…make that not misogynist at all.

“The truth? Rod’s film sometimes — not always but often — made me feel like I did when I was watching Gus Van Sant‘s Psycho.

“I’m sorry but I feel that Peckinpah’s siege is better handled than Rod’s (better cutting, more tension). And the key flashpoint in the siege scene is when the old blowhard drunk struggles with the local constable over a shotgun, which accidentally fires and kills the latter. Lurie decides to play this scene differently, and, in my opinion, not as well.

“Henry Niles, the village idiot, is a problem. I accepted the idea of this character in a small English hamlet in 1971, but not in the American South of 2009. And Lurie didn’t need to have him kill Janice. He just needed to put his hands under her blouse & Woods needed to see that…or see her hand-jobbing or fellating him. That’s all it would take to trigger a huge rage. And then you’d have a truly ironic situation, given the rape of Kate Bosworth by Alexander Skarsgard.

“Marsden is quite good, and is clearly more sympathetic than Hoffman’s David Summer.

“But Rod’s version isn’t as good in the matter of Amy. Sexist pig that he was, Peckinpah had Susan George‘s Amy figured out better than Rod has Kate’s worked out. Bosworth is less of a not-terribly-bright and manipulative tart but there’s something a bit vague & half-and-half about her.

“Who runs barefoot through the woods? That was ridiculous. She’s going to run barefoot over stones and sticks and pine cones and chipmunk shit?

“Amy’s striptease at the window somehow seems more blatant and teasing than Susan George pulling off her sweater. She does a slow unbuttoning thing…blatant. Not real. Too much.

“Skarsgard doesn’t hit her to make her submit during the rape? A rapist would probably do that. Lurie’s version of the rape scene feels like a p.c. intervention. It basically feels abbreviated. It’s been cut too much. And the ass-fucking aspect is completely wimped out on, I feel. This is not a nice story about nice people doing nice things. So why even make this film if your’e going to do it half-assed? Why water it down?

“All in all, Straw Dogs is somewhere between a pretty good film and a very good film, and an ADULT film…a very interesting and very intelligent re-do all in all, but it’s simply not better than Peckinpah’s version — that’s a fact. But on its own terms, it’s a full meal and intelligent and decently calibrated.”