Yesterday I posted a podcast between myself, Jett Wells and Nathan Mattise on their weekly Whoa! magazine podcast. Mainly we discussed Telluride, Toronto, Drive, Andy Serkis and Warrior‘s Tom Hardy. And then it un-posted itself. Apparently there’s a gremlin in the system.

Amy Winehouse‘s toxicology tests show that no illegal drugs were present in her body at the time of her death, the AP reports. She had booze in her system, but that’s generally not a fatal condition. A Winehouse family spokesman released a statement today saying that “toxicology results returned by authorities have confirmed that there were no illegal substances in Amy’s system at the time of her death.”

So what happened then? What 27 year-old just up and dies? What 27 year-old body says, “You know something? I’m getting really weary. I think it might be time to shut down. I’ve been trudging along on the hard road of life for 27 years, and it’s a real slog, lemme tell ya.”

Just then two other bodies — one 44 years old, another 52 years old and a third that’s 71 years old — come along and shake the 27 year-old body by the shoulders. “You’ve been on this earth for 27 years old and you’re thinking about shutting down and dying?,” the 52 year-old body says. “What’s wrong with you? We’re all doing fine and we’re not thinking of quitting so what the hell, homie? Nobody dies at 27 unless they’ve been influenced by a foreign substance.”

The last time I looked the Civil Rights movement of the ’60s was about empowering the disenfranchised, particularly by ensuring that people of all ethnicities had the absolute right to vote. Today Gov. Rick Perry equated that struggle to the current efforts of right-wing, corporate-fellating serpents to lower taxes on business-owners and the corporate well-to-do. This, to him, is what American “freedom” is all about.

No doubt about it: there were iPad-like devices in Stanley Kubrick‘s 2001: A Space Odyssey. They sure do look like iPads — same size, similar illumination, etc. Which doesn’t bode well for Apple’s attempt to prevent Samsung from selling its Galaxy Tab.

“Apple and Samsung are currently engaged in a high-stakes intellectual property battle, with Apple [looking] to stop Samsung from selling its Galaxy Tab and other Android-based products,” MacRumors reported this morning. “Apple claims that Samsung has infringed upon Apple’s intellectual property rights by copying the designs of popular Apple devices such as the iPhone and iPad.

“According to court filings, Samsung has presented a scene from Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey as evidence of prior art that should invalidate Apple’s design claims on the iPad.

“From the filing: ‘Attached hereto as Exhibit D is a true and correct copy of a still image taken from 2001: A Space Odyssey. In a clip from that film lasting about one minute, two astronauts are eating and at the same time using personal tablet computers. As with the design claimed by the D-889 Patent, the tablet disclosed in the clip has an overall rectangular shape with a dominant display screen, narrow borders, a predominately flat front surface, a flat back surface (which is evident because the tablets are lying flat on the table’s surface), and a thin form factor.

“‘The patent in question is a design patent covering the ornamental design of the iPad, with Apple claiming that the Samsung Galaxy Tab is substantially identical to that design.

“‘By pointing to an example of a similar design made public in 1968, even if not an actual functioning tablet device, Samsung hopes to demonstrate that there is little variation possible when designing a tablet and show that the general concept used by Apple for the iPad has actually been circulating for decades.'”

Luc Besson‘s The Lady is a Toronto Film Festival-bound drama about the decade-long house arrest of the Burmese politician Aung San Suu Kyi (Michelle Yeoh), and also about her marriage to the late Dr. Michael Aris (David Thewlis). Honestly? The first three things that came to mind were as follows:

(a) A movie about a good woman being kept under house arrest for ten years?

(b) A movie about the not-exactly-Cary Grant-like Thewlis enjoying conjugal privleges with the beautiful Yeoh? Has Thewlis ever enjoyed nookie from any attractive woman in any movie, ever? Answer: Yes — Thandie Newton in Besieged.

(c) This, I’m betting, is a p.c. movie that’s about the audience feeling good about itself for watching a movie about a good, reform-minded woman being kept under house arrest for ten years.

“It is the fight of a woman without any weapons, just her kindness and her mentality. [Suu Kyi] is very Gandhi-like.” — Luc Besson.

The Lady script is by Rebecca Frayn “who began working on the project after she and her husband, producer Andy Harries, visited Burma in the early 1990s,” says the Wiki page. “Harries’ production company Left Bank Pictures began development of the script in 2008 under the working title Freedom from Fear. Harries wanted Michelle Yeoh as the lead and had the script sent to her.

“During the shooting of the film, news broke that Aung San Suu Kyi’s house arrest had been lifted and Yeoh was even allowed to visit her.

“Yeoh was deported from Burma on 6.22.11, reportedly over The Lady.”

A 5.9 magnitude earthquake has happened in northern Virginia, and was acutely felt in Washington, D.C. Obviously an unusual occurence in the northeast corridor, but nothing to hyperventilate about. People in Manhattan felt it also. I’ve just heard a report just heard that tremors were felt in Martha’s Vineyard. But seriously, folks — hardcore Southern Californians are used to this. Earthquakes can be devastating and deadly, but most of the time they’re a metaphor for the general unpredictability of life and the instability of things.

We need video of stuff falling off shelves and ceiling-hung fleurescent lamps swinging back and forth. And if no decent video results, we need to put it to bed in a couple of hours. 11:55 am Update: A pretty good video has emerged. This Brooklyn guy is on it. “Bowl of cereal at 12 noon…Jurassic Park 5…T-Rex…stock up on cans of sardines…the friggin’ world is about to end.”

Scott Feinberg‘s mom was watching a professional tennis tournament in New Haven, and “the entire stadium shook,” according to a tweet.

A female friend about 15 minutes ago: “Oh my God, I have to call my father and see if he’s okay!” Me: “Yeah, it sounds really serious! The earth trembled! You’d better make sure he’s okay!” Female friend: “That’s very cruel, Jeff. And it’s not funny.” Me: “No, but it is the huddling instinct. And you’ll be shutting down the nationwide cell phone network along with millions of others. But don’t let me stop you. Go for it.”

My son Dylan was catching a cigarette on the roof of my ex-wife’s apartment building. “What I felt was so subtle I didn’t immediately assume it was anything. I didn’t put a name to it. It was like ‘wait…what was that?” Then I went on Facebook and everyone was talking about an earthquake.”

I’ll bet $100 dollars that the woman who shot that Ryan Gosling video immediately called two or three of her friends on her cell and went, “Oh, my God! My God, my God! Oh, my God! OhmyGod! OhmyGod! This didn’t happen, this didn’t happen….ohhh, my God!”

I’ve got 45 films on my Toronto Film Festival list, 20 of which I probably won’t get to see, and a bunch more titles have just been added? Thanks, great…this festival is ridiculous. It’s a tsunami that washes over you and the riptides carry you along, and it’s all you can do to hang on to your Macbook Pro and keep your head above water. Too. Many. Films.

Aki Kaurismaki‘s Le Havre, Gus Van Sant‘s Restless, Alexander Sokurov‘s Faust, the Dardennes’ brothers‘ The Kid With a Bike, Bruno Dumont‘s Hors Satan, Bela Tarr‘s The Turin Horse; and Nuri Bilge Ceylan‘s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. Thankfully several of these will also show at the NY Film Festival.

Not to mention Davis Guggenheim‘s From the Sky Down, Jonathan Demme‘s Neil Young Life and Cameron Crowe‘s previous announced Pearl Jam Twenty, which will debut on Saturday, 9.10, at the Princess of Wales Theater.

Responses to Ryan Gosling‘s Manhattan street-fight intercession (which may have happened on Sunday, 8.21): (a) The way the two combatants are half-wrestling and half slapping-and-jabbing is how most fights happen in real life, (b) Hollywood guys take an oath at an early age to never portray this kind of fight in movies, (c) the narration by the woman who’s shooting the video (“The Notebook guy?…you’re lying, you’re lying, you’re lying, you’re lying…oh, it is!”) is breathtakingly lame, and (d) great camerawork with the hands and fingers in front of the lens (or is that some idiot security guy)?

Last Saturday morning Jett Wells and Nathan Mattise invited me to discuss Telluride, Toronto, Drive, Andy Serkis and Warrior‘s Tom Hardy on their weekly Whoa! magazine podcast. Jett and I squabbled a bit.

Red Dog, a possibly unsubtle but apparently likable Australian-made flick about a bright orphan dog who gets adopted by a community, has become a hit since opening in Australia on 8.4. By Australian standards, that is. It’s earned $8.5 million so far, which is apparently an excellent haul for that market and for a locally-made film. No U.S. distributor has snagged the rights so far, presumably for a reason. Too on-the-nose? Too “Australian” in some way?

The Red Dog trailer does a decent job of selilng what seems like an okay lovable-dog popcorn movie. There’s nothing wrong with a film about a smart dog and several blokey characters responding to him emotionally, etc.

For whatever reason the Essential Entertainment press release has made no mention of director Kriv Stenders. The dog, whose coat was dyed red for the film, is called Koko. (You’d think they’d let the gorilla have that name and come up with something else.) The costars are Josh Lucas, Rachael Taylor, Noah Taylor, Whale Rider‘s Keisha Castle-Hughes and Luke Ford.

“Trying to orient yourself in a work of chaos cinema is like trying to find your way out of a maze, only to discover that your map has been replaced by a reproduction of a Jackson Pollack painting,” says critic Matthias Stork in a video essay called Chaos Cinema. It’s must-viewing, this piece. It articulates and clarifies a lot of things that many of us have been feeling for a long while. “The only art here,” Stork declares, “is the art of confusion.”

Action films of the late 20th Century embraced classic cinema language, he explains. They were “coherent, understandable, riveting, economical, stabilizing — classical cutting. But in the past decade that’s gone right out the window. Commercial films have become faster, over-stuffed, hyperactive. Rapid editing, close framing, bipolar [something or other] and promiscuous camera movement now define commercial action films.

“Contemporary blockbusters, particularly action films, trade visual intelligibility for sensory overload…a film style marked by excess, exaggeration, over-indulgence, a never-ending crescendo with no spacial clarity…chaos cinema. The new action films are fast, forward, volatile, an audio-visual war zone.”

Stork approves of the cuting in The Hurt Locker. I’m sure he also admires the way Drive is thrown together.

All my life I’ve been asking myself, “What does it mean for somebody to be ‘crockin‘ all the time?,’ which is how Elvis Presley described some guy he doesn’t like or respect in the 1956 pop song “Hound Dog“. When I learned this morning that Jerry Leiber, the guy who co-wrote the song with Mike Stoller, had passed at 78, I checked the Hound Dog lyrics and read that the lyric is “cryin’ all the time” and not “crockin’.”

Jerry Leiber (l.) and Mike Stoller (r.)

You know something? The hell with that. It is “crockin'” that Presley is singing, and I don’t want to hear any differently.

Lieber co-wrote “There Goes My Baby” (I love Cat Stevens‘ version, which Wes Anderson used in Rushmore), “Kansas City,” “Yakety Yak”, “Poison Ivy”, “Stand By Me” (with Ben E. King), “Jailhouse Rock”, “Love Potion No. 9”, “Searchin'”, “Young Blood” (which Leon Russell covered well in The Concert for Bangla Desh), “Is That All There Is?” (wait…he co-wrote that Peggy Lee song?), “On Broadway” (with Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil) and “Spanish Harlem” (Leiber co-writing with Phil Spector).

In the annals of ’50s rock, late ’50s to early ’60s doo-wop and AM pre-Beatles ’60s rock, Leiber and Stoller are/were absolutely legendary, world-class songwriters on the level of Irving Berlin or Rogers and Hart or Rogers and Hammerstein or whomever….right up there, voices of a generation, lightning in a bottle.

It’s important to read their co-authored “Hound Dog: The Leiber & Stoller Autobiography.”