My heart fluttered when Grace Kelly appeared in this Dior J’adore spot. The appearances of Marlene Dietrich and Marilyn Monroe are pretty cool also. I first wrote about the reanimation of dead actors in a 1991 Empire piece. Back then people thought that the ability to reconstitute and re-use an actor so that he/she could actually “costar” in a feature was maybe 20 or 25 years off. I guess not, but I really want to see this happen someday.

Yesterday TheAtlantic.com’s Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg posted a short reel of “process plate” rear-projection footage of downtown Los Angeles, shot sometime around ’48 or ’49, I’m guessing. “If it was ever used, it was seen fuzzy and out of focus,” she wrote. “Today, however, it’s amazing documentation of a lost neighborhood.

“Watch the signs, the spectators and passersby, and the streetscapes, and marvel how historical images can carry evidentiary value that no one ever imagined they would.”

Being at the Telluride Film Festival caused me to miss a 9.3 Maureen Dowd N.Y. Times column that openly asked if President Obama is doomed, primarily due to the wimp factor. In ’09 and ’10 many worried that Obama was becoming Jimmy Carter. I think he’s now surpassed that feeling of late ’70s Carter enervation. There’s just a general sense that Obama can’t man up about anything, particularly regarding the Republicans.

“There’s nothing the Republicans say that [Obama] won’t eagerly meet halfway,” Dowd wrote.

“No. 2 on David Letterman‘s Top Ten List of the president’s plans for Labor Day: ‘Pretty much whatever the Republicans tell him he can do.’

“On MSNBC, the anchors were wistfully listening to old F.D.R. speeches, wishing that this president had some of that fight,” Dowd wrote. “But Obama can’t turn into F.D.R. for the campaign because he aspires to the class that F.D.R. was a traitor to; and he can’t turn into Harry Truman because he lacks the common touch. He has an acquired elitism.

“MSNBC’s Matt Miller offered ‘a public service’ to journalists talking about Obama — a list of synonyms for cave: ‘Buckle, fold, concede, bend, defer, submit, give in, knuckle under, kowtow, surrender, yield, comply, capitulate.’

“The days of spinning illusions in a Greek temple in a football stadium are done. The One is dancing on the edge of one term.”

So this means what? Middle-of-the-roaders are actually going to vote for that maniac Rick Perry? No…that can’t happen. Too much. Which is what might actually save Obama from being voted out of office. Weak and wimpy as he may seem, at least he’s not Perry. The Obama team should put that slogan on a bumper sticker.

When you’ve got the likes of Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham dismissing Sarah Palin‘s credibility as a presidential contender and calling her followers a small, hair-trigger fringe, what is there left for Nick Broomfield‘s You Betcha! doc to say?

Especially with Undefeated, that Palin hagiography doc, having commercially tanked and Palin herself having thoroughly discredited herself since she quit the Alaskan governorship and particularly since her “blood libel” speech in the aftermath of the Gabriele Giffords shooting. What else is there to say?

Sarah Palin: You Betcha!, which premieres this week at the Toronto Film Festival, has a domestic theatrical deal with Freestyle Releasing and a plan to open in New York and L.A. on 9.30.

Earlier today Movieline‘s Julie Miller riffed on the trailer for The Big Year (20th Century Fox, 10.14), a Ben Stiller-produced comedy that looks like a non-cancer-afflicted Bucket List meets “The Great Outdoors meets Planes, Trains & Automobiles meets Jack Black eating pretzels in his underwear,” as Miller noted. The costars are Steve Martin, Jack Black and Owen Wilson.

And yet Howard Franklin‘s script is based on Mark Obmascik‘s “The Big Year: A Tale of Man, Nature and Fowl Obsession” — a book of amusing reportage about three guys who spent all of 1998 watching several hundred species of birds. Okay? Guys spending thousands to watch birds.

The trailer underplays this angle, of course, making the film seem like a collection of the same old sardonic humor moments and comedic pratfalls and misfortunes that always occur when Hollywood stars encounter Mother Nature to any degree.

Declaration of Comedic Principle: it isn’t funny to watch anyone fall off a Joshua Tree-like rock hill. Falling and bruising your bones and muscles and ligaments hurts. Even if you don’t break anything the ache and stiffness stays with you for days.

The point of the tagline “from the director of The Devil Wears Prada and Marley and Me” (i.e., Daniel Frankel) is to make guys like me feel lethargic or depressed or want to drink hemlock, or possibly all three as a package deal.

The poster, however, spells out the bird-watching thing fairly explicity, I think, so Fox can’t be accused of ducking the beak-and-feather aspect entirely.

Keep in mind that Franklin wrote and directed those two culty-quirky Bill Murray comedies that hever quite caught on, Quick Change and Bigger Than Life, and that he adapted a third Murray dud, The Man Who KNew Too Little. Franklin also directed that Joe Pesci “Weegee” movie called The Public Eye. He also wrote Ridley Scott’s Someone to Watch Over Me and The Name of the Rose and Antitrust, which starred Tim Robbins as a Bill Gates-y software billionaire.

Interruptus Schmuptus Update: I’ve gotten new emergency passports in less than a day in Los Angeles and Paris, but New York’s passport bureaucracy is another story. A story you don’t want to hear about. Bottom line is that an L.A. friend is overnighting my passport to NYC and so I’ll be flying to Toronto tomorrow. Porter Air charged me $345 for a new one-way ticket. They would have charged $600-something but they’re offering a special 50% discount sale at the moment. Nice guys!

Newark Airport bulletin: I’ve brilliantly left my passport back in Los Angeles so no flying to Toronto and the Toronto Film Festival until I head back into town and over to the U.S. Consulate at Rockefeller Center and obtain temporary papers. Estimated cost of error (including round-trip NYC-to-Newark cab fare): $250, perhaps more.

Earlier: My Porter Airlines flight to Toronto leaves at noon, and then I’ll have to get situated and pick up the press pass and all that so filings will be few and far between. Attending the Telluride Film Festival definitely put a dent into my Toronto must-see list, and that’s good.

Late last night it was announced that Clint Eastwood‘s J. Edgar will premiere at the AFI Fest 2011 on 11.3. The Hollywod-based fest will run from 11.3 to 11.10. Hence the launch of a possible Best Picture campaign, and a likely Best Actor punch-through for Leonardo DiCaprio as Gay Edgar Hoover. Naomi Watts, Armie Hammer and Judy Dench costar.

Yesterday I was trying to think of a way to re-activate the Eddie Murphy-as-Oscar host conversation, but it would have just been a replay of the 9.4 kick-around so I dropped it. But let’s consider Tom O’Neil‘s assessment. One, Murphy is a humbled, partially unknown 50 year-old whose career “[has] been in decline in recent years.” Two, he’s nonetheless a player and a survivor whose career “may be back on the upswing soon” with the release of Tower Heist and A Thousand Words. And three, he’s funny.

My earlier point was that for Murphy to really be funny in his own skin (or at least the one I got to know with after twice watching him live in the early to mid ’80s), he has to go blue and scatalogical and liberally reference the realm of asses and trim and other primitive urges. And howz he gonna do that on the ABC network? We’d all love to see him go Buckwheat, of course, but that’s too far back in the canon, too yesteryear.

Between her scripts for this Jason Reitman-directed Paramount film and the yet-to-be-shot Lamb of God, Diablo Cody has, it seems to me, created a pair of headstrong, somewhat startling post-millennial female characters (i.e., 20- and 30somethings) whom you haven’t quite known or perhaps even met before. At least someone is coming up with new lassie permutations.

Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone and I recorded our post-Telluride Film festival sum-up yesterday afternoon as we drove south on 550 from Durango toward Albuquerque. The sound quality is relatively decent considering we were inside a barrel-assing SUV at 80 mph. Here’s a non-iTunes, stand-alone link.

Marcu Hu‘s Strand Releasing has acquired U.S. rights to Markus Schleinzer’s Michael. The Austrian-produced drama preemed at last May’s Cannes Film Festival and will have its North American debut next week at the Toronto Film Festival. All Toronto-covering journos are urged to catch it. Nothing is “shown,” trust me. And you won’t be sorry.

In my Cannes review I called Michael “a somewhat chiily, jewel-precise study of an Austrian child molester. It isn’t “pleasant” to watch, but it’s briliiant — emotionally suppressed in a correct way that blends with the protagonist, aesthetically disciplined and close to spellbinding.

“Because the titular character, a 30something office worker (Michael Fuith) is an absolute fiend and because the film acquaints the audience with the behavior and mentality of a child molester in ways that are up-close uncomfortable, a fair-sized portion of the crowd in the Lumiere theatre was booing when it ended. Those were the chumps in the cheap seats — the moralists.

“The people who know from film and especially a powerhouse flick when they see one were clapping, of course.

“Michael is easily the most gripping and cunning film I’ve seen here. It operates way above and beyond the raw brushstrokes and the imprecise, at times florid manner of Lynne Ramsay‘s over-praised We Need To Talk About Kevin. Don’t even talk about Ramsey’s film at this stage.”

Per official request I’m holding my reactions to Bennett Miller‘s Moneyball (Sony, 9.23) until the day after tomorrow (i.e., Thursday, 9.8). But I don’t see how I’d be breaking an agreement by linking to a 3.24.11 posting that included two responses to a Moneyball research screening in Los Angeles. Just to get the readership in the mood, so to speak.