Deadline‘s Pete Hammond has run three responses from possibly vested viewers about Mel Gibson‘s performance in Jodie Foster‘s The Beaver. They all said Gibson is “extraordinary,” he reports. One person said that Gibson “gives an incredible performance…if you can forget what happened, and I didn’t have tabloid images racing through my mind watching him, it’s really something…I still don’t want to be his friend but he’s great in this.” Another says, “I don’t bullshit about these things…he’s amazing.”

GQ has an excellent recollection piece about the making of Martin Scorsese‘s Goodfellas, which opened 20 years and three days ago (on 9.19.90).

Martin Scorsese (director; co-writer): “I’d seen Ray Liotta in Something Wild, Jonathan Demme‘s film; I really liked him. And then I met him. I was walking across the lobby of the hotel on the Lido that houses the Venice Film Festival, and I was there with The Last Temptation of Christ. I had a lot of bodyguards around me. Ray approached me in the lobby and the bodyguards moved toward him, and he had an interesting way of reacting, which was he held his ground, but made them understand he was no threat. I liked his behavior at that moment, and I saw, Oh, he understands that kind of situation. That’s something you wouldn’t have to explain to him.”

Liotta: “I think I was the first person that Marty met, but it took maybe a year. It was a very, very long process, not knowing anything and really wanting to do this. I was new. I’d only done three movies at the time. All I heard was that the studio wanted somebody else — ‘What about this?’ ‘What about Eddie Murphy?’

Winkler: “Marty wanted Ray very badly. Frankly I thought we could do a lot better, and I kept putting him off saying, ‘Let’s keep looking.’ And then me and my wife were having dinner one night in a restaurant down in Venice, California, and lo and behold, Ray Liotta came over to me. He was in the same restaurant, quite by coincidence, and he asked if he could come talk to me.”

Liotta: “I just went up and said that I really, really wanted to do the movie.”

Winkler: “We went outside, he said, ‘Look, I know you don’t want me for it but I…,’ and he really sold me on the role right that evening. I called Marty the next morning and I said, ‘I see what you mean.'”

The piece was reported by Sarah Goldstein, Alex Pappademas, Nathaniel Penn and Christopher Swetala, and compiled by Penn.

Two New York Film Festival press screenings (and one press conference) ate up the morning. First came Michael Epstein‘s LennonNYC (set to air 11.22 on PBS’s American Masters), a celebration of the commerciality of the late John Lennon under the guise of a recollection of his last nine years of life, most of which were spent in Manhattan. And then Martin Scorsese and Kent Jones‘ Letter to Elia, a tender and intimate personal recollection doc about what Eliza Kazan‘s films meant to young Scorsese, particularly from the mid ’50s to early ’60s.

LennonNYC director Michael Epstein, Film Society of Lincoln Center co-honcho Scott Feinberg following this morning’s screening at Walter Reade Theatre — Wednesday, 9.22, 11:15 am.

LennonNYC hits every exuberant worshipful note you could expect or imagine from a doc meant to inspire love of a rock legend (and to generate interest in buying CDs of John Lennon’s music). It says that Lennon was an amazingly spirited and indefatigable live-wire. He never had any moments of boredom or banality — the man was incandescent 24/7. Everyone he knew and worked with loved him or got off on him, or both. The talking heads all say the same thing — “John was so great, I loved John, his creative process was astonishing, he loved Yoko, he loved Sean, what a guy,” etc.

I’m sorry but sitting through two hours of this wears you down. I’m good for an hour of this but two hours feels like oppression, punishment. Hagiography always has this effect. I loved Lennon’s music as much as the next guy, but nobody’s life has ever been this vivid and wonderful and awesome to contemplate.

On top of which Epstein doesn’t even mention Mark David Chapman‘s name. Chapman was the dark side of Lennon/Beatles fandom, the kind of fan who felt he “owned” his idols and they “owed” him a certain kind of output. And it is utter dereliction, in my view, for Epstein to have ignored the saddest and darkest irony of Lennon’s life, which is that he was killed because he gave up being an angry and envelope-pushing rock crusader and retreated to a life of luxurious seclusion and house-husbandry. He was killed because he gave up the creative struggle for four-plus years, which led Chapman, deluded fuck that he was, to feel betrayed, and to take Lennon down as a form of revenge or punishment.

Make a face and dismiss Chapman as a loon, but that’s what happened. And any filmmaker who says “I didn’t find the Chapman aspect very interesting…it had nothing to do with who John was” (which is approximately what Epstein said during this morning’s press conference) isn’t dealing from a straight deck.

Approaching Walter Reade theatre on 65th Street.

Letter to Elia, on the other hand, is a delicate and beautiful little poem. It’s a personal tribute to a director who made four films — On The Waterfront, East of Eden, Wild River and America America — that went right into Scorsese’s young bloodstream and swirled around inside for decades after. Scorcese came to regard Kazan as a father figure, he says in the doc. And you understand why. Letter to Elia is a deeply touching film because it’s so close to the emotional bone. The sections that take you through the extra-affecting portions of Waterfront and Eden got me and held me like a great sermon. It’s like a church service, this film. It’s pure religion.

More than a few Kazan-haters (i.e., those who couldn’t forgive the director for confirming names to HUAC in 1952) were scratching their heads when Scorsese decided to present Kazan’s special lifetime achievement Oscar in 1999. Letter to Elia full explains why, and what Scorsese has felt about the legendary Kazan for the 55, going-on-60 years.

I didn’t try to get the attention of Film Society of Lincoln Center co-chief Richard Pena (l.) or that of Letter to Elia co-director Kent Jones (r.) — I just snapped and ran.

Cafe area just in front of Alice Tully Hall at Broadway and 65th — Wednesday, 9.22, 1:25 pm.

Blue-chip restorationist Robert Harris is driving — driving! — all the way from Chappaqua to Ottawa this weekend for The Lost Dominion Screening Collective’s 70mm Film Festival at the Canadian Museum of Civilization (9.24 through 9.26). As the years slip by the opportunities to see mint-condition 70mm prints of classic mid 20th Century films are diminishing, particularly in first-class venues with optimum projection standards. I’d be up there in a heartbeat if my schedule permitted.

In the view of N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott, Woody Allen has slipped into a mode (or mood) that is beyond autopilot. For him making films has become a kind of rote errand — a calling he needs to pursue because without that calling there is only the void. But doesn’t this express what all movie lovers feel? That they need to see and absorb and consider the next film — proverbially, repeatedly, eternally — because the absence of these encounters would constitute an intolerable nothingness?

“The metaphysical pessimism that constitutes Woody Allen‘s annual greeting-card message to the human race — just in case we needed reminding that our existence is meaningless — is served up in You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger with a wry shrug and an amusing flurry of coincidences, reversals and semi-surprises.

“There are hints of farce, droplets of melodrama, a few dangling loose ends and an overall mood of sloppy, tolerant cynicism.

“At this point in his career — 40 features in about as many years — Mr. Allen has both mastered his craft and grown indifferent to it. Does he take any pleasure in making these movies? Does he expect the audience to take any?

“It’s hard to say, since he seems to make films, and we seem to watch them (at least those of us who still do), more through force of habit than because of any great inspiration or conviction. Given the nonexistence of any controlling moral order in the universe, what else can we do? And what else would we want him to do?”

I’m hearing an idea that the departure of White House economic adviser Lawrence Summers, announced a couple of hours ago, had something to do with a recent Washington, D.C. screening of Charles Ferguson‘s Inside Job (Sony Classic, 10.8). I don’t even know for sure if there was a recent D.C. screening. The Sony Classics guys aren’t picking up.

Inside Job charts all the Wall Street gambling and thievery that went on for years starting with the Reagan administration and particularly during the eight years of Dubya, and then makes a persuasive case that Summers, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and other Obama administration bigwigs who strongly supported and heavily profited from the Wild West derivative speculations that primarily caused the 2008 crash can hardly be trusted to accurately diagnose, much less correct, the nation’s financial troubles.

It sounds like a bit of a reach, but I love the idea that Inside Job might have been at least a partial factor in Summer’s departure, which of course is a very good thing. I’m supposing that there might have been a concern that anti-Obama candidates would latch onto the film’s assertions as a way to beat up Summers and thereby underline the claim that Wall Street bad guys are shaping and organizing the Obama administration’s financial policy. In any event: Ding Dong, the Warlock Is Dead.

Is there a more admirable personal trait than to show you’re not a fair-weather friend? So here’s to you, Beaver director Jodie Foster, regarding your statement to MORE’s Sheila Weller about Mel Gibson: “When you love a friend, you don’t abandon them when they are struggling. Of course, Mel is an undeniably gifted actor and director, and The Beaver is one of his most powerful and moving performances. But more importantly, he is and has been a true and loyal friend. I hope I can help him get through this dark moment.”

HE to Summit’s Rob Friedman: There’s no sensible reason on earth to keep The Beaver out of theatres. A CBS/Vanity Fair poll reported last month that Joe Popcorn has no significant issues with the guy. It’s just the Hollywood culture (or certain elements with it) telling you to indefinitely postpone this film. Please — grow some cojones to match Ms. Foster’s and release The Beaver already. A platform release in December, and then open it wide in early February. Or forget a 2010 release and debut it at Sundance 2011.

Despite what Deadline‘s Pete Hammond has reported, Ben Affleck‘s The Town has a snowball’s chance in hell of becoming a Best Picture candidate. No. Effin’. Way.

The best liberal neck-rub of the day is Peter Beinart‘s Daily Beast article predicting that Sarah Palin, Christine O’Donnell, Rand Paul and the purist Teabag contingent are going to push the conservative agenda to such a rightist extreme that the 2012 election will be a disaster for Republicans in the same way the candidacy of the ultra-liberal George McGovern (beautiful man! should have been elected!) destroyed mainstream Democratic hopes in 1972.

“It may seem odd to talk of a blowout Republican defeat in 2012, when the GOP is headed for a blowout victory in 2010. But it is precisely the over-interpretation of the latter that could produce the former. When the dust from this massive recession settles, it will be clear that America is not moving right; it is moving left because America’s fastest-growing demographic groups reside on the center-left. Hold on, Republican moderates — you may be poised for a big comeback in 2016.”

Here comes another immensely shallow but entirely honest statement from yours truly. The instant I clapped eyes on those mid-1800s women’s bonnets in those stills from Kelly Reichardt‘s Meek’s Cutoff, I said to myself, “I’m going to figure some way of avoiding this film for as long as I can.” I suspected it would be a quality-level thing because Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy proved she’s a talented, dead-serious director. Attracted to downer-type women-facing-tough-odds stories, okay, and not exactly into narrative propulsion, but Reichardt’s films require respect and attention.

Meek’s Cutoff costars Shirley Henderson, Zoe Kazan, Michelle Willliams.

And I didn’t care. I was going to avoid Meek’s Cutoff any way I could for as long as I could because I don’t like the gloomy symbolism of floppy bonnets on pioneer women’s heads. To me bonnets spell sexual repression and constipation and tight facial muscles. They suggest the existence of a strict social code (i.e, the film takes place in 1845) that I don’t want to sample or get close to because I know it’s all about men with awful face-whiskers and the wearing of starched collars and keeping everything buried and smothered and buttoned-up among the wimmin folk.

So congratulations to Meek’s Cutoff for having been voted Best Narrative Film in Indiewire’s Toronto International Film Festival poll. It’s important for films like this to get the smarty-pants seal of approval from indie-friendly elites. God, am I not looking forward to this film! I have to get past this — I realize that. I will get past this. I may, in fact, be getting past it as I write this.

Here’s a little background on the Meek’s Cutoff.

I know all these Social Network posts are getting tiresome and that they may inspire a backlash of some kind (though I can’t imagine this happening), but Miami Herald critic Rene Rodriguez has written the following “little blog post” called “The Best Movie of the Year? Probably”:

“I know it’s only September and a lot of Oscar-hopeful films are yet to unspool, but I doubt I’ll see a better movie this year…screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, who can start making room on his mantle for an Oscar right now, has taken the story of Mark Zuckerberg, who created the Facebook website while a sophomore at Harvard University, and turned it into a resonant snapshot of our time — the way social class and structure have mutated in the Internet era, the me-first attitude of contemporary business ethics and entrepreneurship.

“The Social Network, which is all dialogue but is paced as rapidly as Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, is also the first detailed screen portrait of Generation Y — people born between 1982 and 1995 — and their views on career, money, relationships and their responsibility, if any, to society.

“The movie is recognizably Fincher (Harvard is lit like a dungeon) but the director’s editing rhythm is much faster and more dynamic than usual, and he gets compelling performances out of Jesse Eisenberg, who captures Mark Zuckerberg’s profound emotional dislocation, Andrew Garfield as Zuckerberg’s college roommate and business partner Eduardo Severin, and Justin Timberlake as Sean Parker, the Napster founder who wormed his way into the Facebook enterprise as the website was beginning to take off.”