Here’s the teaser for Cameron Crowe‘s Pearl Jam 20, presumably a hagiography kiss-ass doc about Pearl Jam‘s history and legacy. It’ll play at the 2011 Toronto Film Festival…I know that much. With an avalanche of award-calibre films playing TIFF, this is the kind of thing you see if you can fit it in…maybe. But preferably before or after the festival.

Pic will reportedly “open” on 9.20.11 “in select theaters for one night only in celebration of Pearl Jam’s 20th anniversary with full run beginning on 9.23 in key markets,” blah blah.

I realize that the idea of Geoffrey Rush playing Rupert Murdoch in the inevitable phone-hacking-scandal movie (however and whenever it gets made) has been kicked around on this and that site. How could there be any choice but Rush? The face, voice, scrappy Australian accent, the right age, etc. It could be Rush’s signature role a la George C. Scott-as-General Patton.

“Gentlemen, you have just seen me do a disgusting thing…but you’ll always remember what I just did. If no one remembers your brand, you’re not going to sell any soap.” I’ve seen The Hucksters exactly once, and honestly? I don’t remember a thing about the plot or any lines spoken by Clark Gable or Deborah Kerr or Ava Gardner…nothing. But I’ve never forgotten that glob of spit.

HE reader Matthew Morretini claims that “the last four paragraphs of this N.Y. Times obit for actor Tom Aldredge are priceless.” He’s right.

This Steve Carell “Funny or Die” bit isn’t that far off the mark. It’s well known in Hollywood circles (and I’ve said it more than once in this column) that movie stars frequently have disproportionately large heads.

“I’ve spoken to a fair number of big-name actors and can testify that this is frequently the case,” I wrote four years ago. “Mel Gibson has a big head; ditto Kirk Douglas and Kevin Costner. (I once wrote that Costner ‘has a head the size of a bison’s.’) Warren Beatty has a fairly sizable head. So do Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Clive Owen . I don’t recall Tom Cruise‘s head being all large, however.

“There’s obviously something about having a big head that gives a person presence, power…a sense of dominance. Full disclosure: I have a big head myself.

“Big movie-star heads are a very consistent visual factor in day-to-day Hollywood life, and yet people who don’t mix it up with talent would never, ever learn of this from mainstream interviewers and columnists. I’m just saying.”

I’m presuming that the new one-sheet for Our Idiot Brother (Weinstein Co., 8.26) has intentionally downsized Paul Rudd so he looks like a ten-year-old? I’m questioning the Photoshopping because Rudd doesn’t seem to be that much smaller — just somewhat. (Elizabeth Banks is Amazon-sized compared to him.) It’s a moderately clever idea but the Weinstein marketers should have made him the size of a five-year-old and removed all ambiguity.

The most conspicuous absences among the 2011 Toronto Film Festival’s just-announced gala and special presentation slate are Tomas Alfredson‘s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Roman Polanski‘s Carnage. Both are set to play at the partially overlapping Venice Film Festival. Deadline‘s Mike Fleming has heard Tinker may be the opening-night debut at the subsequent New York Film Festival, which would explain that particular situation. Hey, Scott and Todd…any truth to that?

More TIFF titles and programs are set to be announced so this is just the opening salvo. (I’m presuming that Martin Scorsese‘s 208-minute George Harrison doc will be announced down the path; ditto Ami Canaan Mann‘s Texas Killing Fields.) This is going to be a very high-throttle, heavy-star-wattage, Oscar-launchy festival. Here, alphabetically, are most of them:

Galas: Albert Nobbs (d: Rodrigo Garcia, w/ Glenn Close); Butter (d: Jim Field Smith, w/Jennifer Garner, Hugh Jackman, Ty Burrell); A Dangerous Method (d: David Cronenberg); The Ides of March (d: George Clooney); The Lady (d: Luc Besson); Moneyball (d: Bennett Miller); Peace, Love, & Misunderstanding (d: Bruce Beresford, w/ Jane Fonda, Catherine Keener, Chace Crawford, Elizabeth Olsen); Take this Waltz (d: Sarah Polley); W.E. (d: Madonna).

Special Presentations, Part 1: 50/50 (d: Jonathan Levine); 360 (d: Fernando Meirelles, w/ Jude Law, Anthony Hopkins, Rachel Weisz, Ben Foster); The Artist (d: Michel Hazanavicius); Americano (d: Mathieu Demy); Anonymous (d: Roland Emmerich); A Better Life (d: Cedric Khan); Burning Man (d: Jonathan Teplitzky); Chicken with Plums (d: Marjane Satrapi, Vincent Paronnaud); Coriolanus (d: Ralph Fiennes); Dark Horse (d: Todd Solondz….another dysfunctional weirdo piece?); The Deep Blue Sea (d: Terence Davies)

Special Presentations, Part 2: The Descendants (d: Alexander Payne); Drive (d: Nicolas Winding Refn); Elles (d: Malgoska Szumowska); The Eye of the Storm (d: Fred Schepisi w/ Geoffrey Rush, Charlotte Rampling); Friends With Kids (d: Jennifer Westfeldt, w/ Kristen Wiig, Megan Fox, Jon Hamm, Maya Rudolph, Edward Burns); Habemus Papam (d: Nanni Moretti); Hick (d: Derick Martini, w/ Blake Lively, Chloe Moretz, Alec Baldwin, Juliette Lewis); The Hunter (d: Daniel Nettheim); Jeff, Who Lives at Home (d: Jay & Mark Duplass); Killer Joe (d: William Friedkin); Like Crazy (d: Drake Doremus).

Special Presentations, Part 3: Machine Gun Preacher (d: Marc Forster); Melancholia (d: Lars von Trier); The Oranges (d: Julian Farino); Pearl Jam Twenty (d: Cameron Crowe); Rampart (d: Oren Moverman, w/ Woody Harrelson, Anne Heche, Cynthia Nixon, Sigourney Weaver, Ice Cube, etc.); Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (d: Lasse Hallstrom); Shame (d: Steve McQueen, w/ Michael Fassbender, Carey Mulligan); A Simple Life (d: Ann Hui); The Skin I Live In (d: Pedro Almodovar); Take Shelter (d: Jeff Nichols); Ten Year (d: Jamie Linden, w/ Channing Tatum, Rosario Dawson, Justin Long, Kate Mara, etc.); Trishna (d: Michael Winterbottom, w/ Freida Pinto and Riz Ahmed — an Indian Tess of the d?Urbervilles); Twixt (d: Francis Ford Coppola); Tyrannosaur (d: Paddy Considine); We Need to Talk About Kevin (d: Lynne Ramsay w/ Tilda Swinton); Woman in the Fifth (d: Pawel Pawlikowski w/ Ethan Hawke, Kristin Scott Thomas).

Comedies aren’t funny unless they contain at least some of the respect for genuine human experience that dramas do. Sorry to be a scold, but comedy writers need to represent the way it actually is out there. If they don’t do that and just make up exaggerated farcical crap, intelligent audiences can’t and won’t recognize anything they’ve written as life-like, and therefore won’t laugh.

A failure to do this on the part of top-dollar cyborg-screenwriter Dan Fogelman is the main reason why Glenn Ficarra and John Fuqua‘s Crazy, Stupid, Love (Warner Bros., 7.29) is one of the most revoltingly phony, profoundly sickening “romantic comedies” I’ve ever seen.

I hated Crazy with a passion because it has no respect for real-world human behavior. Nothing about it feels the least bit true or reflective of modern life as most of us (with the exception of certain filmmakers) know it. Wafer-thin characters, ludicrous sitcom plotting, outrageous fakery of all kinds, absurd over-emoting, ghastly dialogue, etc. What were Ficarra and Fuqua and Fogelman trying to do? Establish a new high-water mark in synthetic “humor”? I was okay with Ryan Gosling‘s performance as far as it went (he plays a super-slick, somewhat robotic pickup artist) but otherwise I didn’t believe a single word, bit, moment or emotion in this film. Nothing.

How can a flagrantly square, middle-class, big-studio comedy misrepresent straight life (middle-aged marriages, single women, teenagers, the mentality and patter of hounds, the behavior of attorneys) this badly? Crazy is so off-the-charts fakey-crazy that it’s breathtaking. It was so bad that I cried. Any episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm — Larry David‘s landmark-level, wonderfully acidic comedy series — is Eugene O’Neil compared to this.

I was initially intrigued when I read Peter Debruge‘s recent rave of Crazy, Stupid, Love in Variety. But right after I posted it I heard from a critic friend who called it “phony fucking bullshit of the highest order, an utter wad of falsehood shot through with behavior no human being would actually engage in.” How could two indisputably bright fellows disagree so strongly?

I figured it out pretty quickly once Crazy, Stupid, Love began playing earlier this evening. Debruge, I realized, has a very, very different sensibility than mine. That’s a polite way of putting it, I think. Ditto David Edelstein, Pete Hammond, Caryn James, Mary F. Pols, Emmanuel Levy and all the rest of the Rotten Tomatoes supporters.

Crazy, Stupid, Love is about a middle-aged couple (Steve Carell, Julianne Moore) breaking up due to Moore wanting a divorce, and then both of them trying things out as singles, and…you know the rest. Carrell pals up with Gosling-the-ladykiller at this one effing bar (which they keep returning to over and over and over and over). Gosling mentors the insecure, dipshitty, relentlessly dull Carell on the art of seducing women, etc. New wardrobe, new haircut, pickup lines, blah blah blah blah blah.

Ryan Gosling, Steve Carell.

Eventually Carrell gets pretty good at it, but of course, being one of those guys who needs his soul-mate (one of the most loathsome, hoodwinky terms in the English language), he can’t settle into singlehood and neither can Moore and yaddah-yaddah, etc.

I’m taking this opportunity right now to say screw the concept of soul-mates in movies. Good for you if you’ve found one in real life but movies about them are utterly dreadful to sit through.

Emma Stone plays Hannah, a young attorney whose connection to Carell-Moore seems nonexistent at first. She gets hit on by Gosling and turns him down, and then realizes that a law-firm hotshot she’s in love with doesn’t feel the same way about her, which prompts Stone to all-but-destroy her professional prospects at this firm (brilliant!), and then leads her to return Gosling’s advances, etc.

You don’t care. I didn’t care. Only Anne Thompson (whom I spoke to in the Arclight lobby after it was over) and people from her aesthetic corner of the woods care. “What romantic movies do you like?,” I was asked. “The Year of Living Dangerously,” I replied. “Notorious. The Visitor. Witness.”

There’s also Carell’s 13 year-old kid (Jonah Bobo) and the babysitter he’s in love with (Analeigh Tipton), and the acutely uncomfortable fact that Tipton has the hots for Carrell.

The way Moore tells Carell that she wants a divorce in scene #1 is forced and phony. A scene in which Carell’s pal (John Carroll Lynch) tells him they have to break up because his wife told him they have to choose between being friends with either Moore or Carell but not both is truly sickening. A scene in which Marisa Tomei, a schoolteacher who happens to have been Carell’s first post-marital conquest, totally risks her job and professional reputation during a parent-teacher meeting is completely ridiculous, unfunny and also sickening. A scene in which Bobo tells Tipton that he’ll resemble his father when he gets older is bullshit as he’s clearly no spawn of Carell or Moore — he looks like the son of a Lithuanian coal miner. I could go on and on and on.

Nearly every scene in this film blows in one way or another. A scene of intimacy between Gosling and Stone is one of the few that work. That’s the most supportive thing I can say.

By all means join the simpleton party this weekend and pay to see Crazy, Stupid, Love and have a good time chuckling. I’m presuming it’s going to make a fair amount of money. Let’s see what develops. But understand this above all: Crazy Stupid Love is a burn.

Some people have been making cheap cracks about my “air and ether” remark earlier today about being able to read delicate radio signals and atmospheric data about where actors and filmmakers are coming from and what they’re facing and thinking and sorting through with their partners and agents. “It’s in the air, in the ether,” I wrote. “You just have to know how to feel or read it.”

I meant that when you’ve gathered enough experience and learned how to fine-tune your insect antennae and olfactory glands and you can’t write a column like this while running around with a note pad like Clark Kent, then you just have to trust what you’ve learned and absorbed and divined. It would be better, agreed, to do the Clark Kent plus the air-and-ether thing, but the latter works on its own. All you have to do is turn on the dish and just start processing and translating.

I’m not taking about the same thing that Paul Newman spoke of when he delivered his big speech in The Hustler (1961), but there are similarities. Because I honestly believe that I’ve reached a certain Eddie Felson-like proficiency in this racket or realm or whatever-you-want-to-call-it.

“If a guy knows….if he knows what he’s doing and why [then] he can make it come off,” Newman/Felson said 50 years ago. “When I’m goin’, I mean, when I’m really goin’ I feel like a…like a jockey must feel. He’s sittin’ on his horse, he’s got all that speed and that power underneath him…he’s comin’ into the stretch, the pressure’s on him, and he knows…he just feels when to let it go and how much. Cause he’s got everything workin’ for him. Timing, touch. It’s a great feeling, boy, it’s a real great feeling when you’re right and you know you’re right. You don’t have to look, you just know.”

Or as Lawrence Tierney‘s Joe Cabot said after fingering Mr. Orange in Reservoir Dogs, “You don’t need proof when you’ve got instinct.”

New Yorker critic David Denby sharply disagrees with Peter Debruge‘s recent Variety rave of Crazy Stupid Love, which has its all-media screening tonight at the Arclight. I’m telling you right now tonight may be a defining moment for Debruge. If I decide he’s a little too far off the mark on this film, his trustworthiness will have to be reconsidered.

Illustration by The New Yorker‘s Robert Risko.

Denby’s main beef is that it doesn’t seem to matter that much if Steve Carrell‘s Cal and Julianne Moore‘s Emily decide to cancel their planned divorce or not. Denby then makes a good point about how couples who seem to well-matched tend to speak to each other.

“In the remarriage classics (The Awful Truth, The Philadelphia Story, His Girl Friday), the former partners have a way of talking and being with each other that they don’t have — and couldn’t possibly have — with anyone else. That sophisticated metaphor for sexual compatibility made for uniquely satisfying romantic comedy.” But Cal and Emily “met when they were in high school,” he notes, “and, apart from reminiscing about that time, they don’t have much to say to each other.

Crazy, Stupid, Love regrettably “holds to the boring modern convention that good people are inarticulate, and Cal and Emily mainly stumble around trying to fill the silence.

“Moore may be too earnest an actress for rigidly structured commercial comedy. She tries to find some hard truths in the role, and she makes Emily angry, vague, and even a little dim. The character is parched and not very likable.

Carrell “always conveys the sense that he’s a rational man trying to keep his integrity,” and he “seems more comfortable acting with Ryan Gosling than with Moore. Cal has his mishaps and his successes, but the filmmakers believe in soul mates forever, and that kind of thing, and the audience may not want to think about the aftermath of the movie, in which Cal and Emily discuss, again and again, that magical year they met in high school.”

Remember my 7.16 story about Ami Canaan Mann‘s Texas Killing Fields, an Anchor Bay crime drama that has no website or trailer and is looking “a little wobbly? Well, Variety‘s Nick Vivarelli is reporting that it’ll play in competition at the 2011 Venice Film Festival (8.31 through 9.10), which means it’ll also probably play Toronto.

From low-rent Anchor Bay limbo to Venice Lido lah-lah — that’s a pretty good rebound. Congrats to producer Michael Mann or whomever arranged this one.

The official Venice Film Festival lineup will be unveiled Thursday, but Vivarelli says

the following are apparently locked: William Friedkin‘s Killer Joe, Abel Ferrara‘s Last Day on Earth, Tomas Alfredson‘s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, Andrea Arnold‘s Wuthering Heights, Steve McQueen‘s Shame, Roman Polanski‘s Carnage, Philippe Garrel‘s A Burning Hot Summer (a remake of sorts of Jean-Luc Godard‘s Contempt), Chantal Akerman‘s La folie Almayer, Yorgos Lanthimos‘ Alps, Eran Kolirin‘s The Exchange, Jonathan Demme‘s I’m Carolyn Parker: The Good, the Mad and the Beautiful, James Franco‘s Sal (another one of Franco’s gay films), George Clooney‘s The Ides of March, David Cronenberg‘s A Dangerous Method, Todd Solondz‘s Dark Horse, Steven Soderbergh‘s Contagion, Mary Harron‘s The Moth Diaries and Madonna‘s W.E.

The gist of Scott Feinberg‘s 7.25 piece (“The Art of Dying Young‘) about the death of Amy Winehouse is that it’s not such a terrible thing to check out early if your legend is going downhill anyway. Biological shutdowns will always be traumatic to friends, fans and loved ones, but it’s arguably worse, Feinberg is saying, to hang on past your peak point.

But how do you know when you’ve peaked? Answer: Nobody ever does. Everyone goes through life saying, “I’ll find a way to turn things around…after all, tomorrow is another day.”

“Most [performing survivors] overstay their welcome,” says Feinberg, “and simply begin to evaporate from the public’s consciousness, either because they find themselves (a) unable to maintain the performance-level that first garnered them fame, (b) creatively limited by the public’s limited perception of them, (c) distracted and/or deterred by fame and its trappings, (d) no longer able or willing to compete with ‘fresher’ faces.”

Truman Capote certainly fell prey to (c). I remember to this day what Gore Vidal said when Capote committed suicide: “A very wise career move.”

If I could re-orchestrate my life from a free-for-all cosmic perspective, I’d like to live about 250 years but get no older than, say, 42 years. I’d arrange to be born in 1800 .with my 2011 consciousness intact, and then explore the unsullied American frontier and become an inventor and buy up all the patents for everything and become stinking rich. And then tour the world and become friends with everyone worth knowing — young Abe Lincoln, Leo Tolstoy, Chief Sitting Bull, Herman Melville, young Katherine Hepburn, Frederick C. Douglas, Karl Marx, Charles Dickens, Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., Isodora Duncan, D.W. Griffith, Theodore Roosevelt. Jack Reed, Jack London, young Cary Grant, young JFK, young John Lennon, etc. And then wind things down around 2050, give or take.