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.

I took an LA-to-NY Delta redeye last night, landing this morning around 8 am. I slept for a couple of hours at my son’s Brooklyn apartment, and then G- and M-trained over to Sony’s Madison Avenue headquarters to catch a pre-Toronto screening of Bennett Miller ‘s Moneyball (Sony, 9.23). I then stumbled around midtown in the rain, finally settling into a Starbucks on 57th near Lexington.

There’s nothing quite like Manhattan during a windswept, slightly chilly rainstorm. Tens of thousands of bodies, voices and spirits (plus that many umbrellas) all trooping down streets and boulevards, all with the same (or similar) urgency, and all of them damp and alive and alert to the symphony of things. I bought a huge umbrella for only $10 bills from a guy on a streetcorner. I visited the Apple store on Fifth Ave. and 59th — packed to the gills — to get my iPhone diagnosed and my SIM card correctly re-inserted.

The last interview I did at the Telluride Film Festival was with Chapin Cutler, honcho and co-founder of Boston Light and Sound, and one of the few people on the planet who really know how to project films to their absolute technical utmost. Cutler oversees the projection of all films during Telluride as well as Sundance, Hollywod’s TCM Classics Film Festival, and the Doha and Dubai Tribeca film festivals.

Cutler is like a NASA rocket scientist when it comes to theatrical projection. He adheres to standards that most commercial exhibitors avoid due to their cheapskate, nickle-and-dime attitudes about putting on a show with celluloid and digital.

Earlier that day I was floored by the almost highdef-video-level clarity of the projection of David Cronenberg‘s A Dangerous Method, and I wanted to know what kind of projector was used ands what light levels and whatnot.

The video below is something I took at the corner of Oak and Galela in Telluride. The spot is two houses down from a three-storied Victorian owned by Jack Zoller, where Sasha Stone and I stayed during the festival. Producer-writer Glenn Zoller invited us both. They were the greatest and most gracious hosts anyone could have asked for or dreamt of. Thanks very much, guys — you made us feel right at home.

Steve McQueen‘s Shame is a prolonged analysis piece that’s entirely about a malignancy — sex addiction — affecting the main character, and nothing about any chance at transcendence or way into the light. It’s a bucket of bleak. Michael Fassbender plays a successful Manhattaan guy with a sex-addiction issue. He’s into slamming ham like a vampire is into blood-drinking, minus any emotional intimacy whatsoever. And at the end of the day, all the film does is show you how damaged and deranged he is. The guy is lost, tangled, doomed.

Act One: Fassbender is one smooth, obsessive, fucked-up dude. Act Two: Fassbender really is a twisted piece of work, you bet. Act Three: Boy, is this guy a mess!

This is what an art film does — it just stands its ground and refuses to do anything you might want it to do. But Shame has a point, delivered with a methodical intensity, that sinks into your bones. And part of the point is that suppressed memories of incest…nope, I can’t do this. I have to leave for Albuquerque in less than 45 minutes, and it’ll take too many graphs.

But Shame has integrity, and is one of those films, like A Dangerous Method, that you might not like as you watch it but you think about a lot in the hours and days and weeks afterwards.

The sex scenes are grim and draining and even punishing in a presumably intentional way. Fassbender walks around with his dick hanging out and flopping against his upper thigh, and I suppose it ought to be acknowledged that he’s fairly well hung. Carey Mulligan, who plays his effed-up sister, has (a) a longish nude scene in a shower and (b) a song-singing moment that goes on for three or four minutes. I’m obviously not assessing the inner aspects. Another time…sorry.

David Cronenberg‘s A Dangerous Method (Sony Classics, 11.23) is one of those brilliant, highly refined dramas with stirring elevated dialogue that are good for you, like spinach. It’s difficult to truly enjoy films of this sort as you watch them, but they’re hard to forget or dismiss after you’ve left the theatre. In the long or short run all good cinema gains upon reflection.

Keira Knightley in David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method

But at the same time A Dangerous Method, which I caught late yesterday morning at the Telluride Film Festival, is a vaguely oppressive thing to sit through. Well-acted but extremely cool, aloof, studied and intellectually driven to a fare-thee-well. I’m not saying it’s going to underperform commercially, but I know what the current in the room was. People were respecting it for the most part, but not having all that great a time.

Written by Christopher Hampton and set mostly in Zurich between the early 1900s and the outbreak of World War I, Method is basically about how the mutually respectful and nurturing relationship between young psychiatrist Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) and infallible father figure Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortenson) came apart, largely over Jung’s ill-judged affair with Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), a brilliant but unstable young woman who eventually becomes a psychoanalyst herself.

Knightley’s highly agitated, face-twitching performance is fascinating but hard to roll with at times, particularly during the first 20 minutes to half-hour. Cronenberg told her to go for it in terms of facial tics and flaring nostrils and body spasms, etc. She does a jaw-jutting thing that hasn’t been seen since John Barrymore played Dr. Jekyll in the 1920 version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. At the same time Knightley brings a thrilling sexual intensity to the all-too-brief fucking and belt-whipping scenes with Fassbender.

All in all Knightley’s performance is quite a handful — it throws you and pulls you in at the same time. It’s a high-wire, risk-taking thing, and Method really needs to be seen for this alone.

The film is also essential viewing for a magnificent CGI shot of the lower Manhattan skyline as it appeared sometime around 1910 or thereabouts. The instant I saw I gasped and said to myself, “This is what great CG is all about…the kind that doesn’t look like CG at all but knocks your socks off for the realism.”