The King’s Speech is one of the best of the year, but it’s not as hot now (in late October) as it was pre-Toronto, and as lame as this sounds a little voice is telling me that Harvey and his team need to re-invigorate the hype. I don’t know what that means exactly. I just have this tingly sense that the sand is leaking out, granule by granule, and the Weinstein Co. needs to jazz it up on some level. Not now but next month, I’m thinking.

HE commenters who dissed Tony Scott yesterday need to do some back-up and re-think moves. A tough and respected critic saw Unstoppable a day or so ago and says it’s not only “a pretty good film” but one of Scott’s best, in part because there’s “no super-malevolent villain” this time (i.e., no Travolta-in-Pelham) and so that oh-fuck-here-we-go-again feeling is absent.

Unstoppable, he more or less said, is just a good, rock-solid, technical-challenge-for-Denzel Washington-and-Chris Pine flick with a loudmouth corporate jerkoff screwing things up and Rosario Dawson assigned to handle most of the exposition. (“When Scott realizes he’s gotta have somebody handle the exposition because somebody has to do it, his thinking is ‘okay, at least let’s have a really hot chick do it”) It’s just a good old “how do we fix this really bad-ass crazy choo-choo situation?” thing.

All Scott haters bow, scatter, or run for the hills. Or apologize right now — your call. And next time think first before shooting your mouth off.

It’s 9:50 am, and I’m writing this on a Secaucus-to-Suffern train. That’s Suffern, New York, where the old-timey Lafayette theatre is kicking off its 2010 rep season this morning with an 11:30 am showing of the recently restored The Bridge on the River Kwai. I’m attending at the invitation of Glenn Kenny, who’s friendly with Nelson Page, the owner and runner of the place, and Peter Aprussezze, who wrangles the prints and handles the projection. Call it a little get-out-of-town Saturday adventure.

After two brutal pans yesterday from Variety‘s Peter Debruge and the Hollywood Reporter‘s Kirk Honeycutt, Tyler Perry‘s For Colored Girls needs a champion — someone to step bright into the breach and say “hold up, they’re wrong…and here’s why.”

I nominate Movieline‘s Stu VanAirsdale, a self-admitted Perry fanboy who wrote an impassioned profile/defense of the Atlanta-based filmmaker in the September 2009 issue of Esquire (“Why Tyler Perry is the New Obama”). Calling him a “Dark Knight in a floral-print cape,” VanAirsdale wrote that “arguably no filmmaker working today has a better grasp of the zeitgeist than Perry does — and not just the black zeitgeist. Perry is doing some profoundly next-level theorizing about race in the United States. The films are also funny, well-acted and entertaining; a little earnest, sure, and kind of cornball.”

VanAirsdale also said that The Family That Preys, which he called Perry’s “best film….succeeds not only as a wildly pulpy Southern melodrama, but also as an engaging exploration of race, power, and class.”

Is this the guy to turn back the negative Colored Girls tide or what? And I’m not being snide. If the trades went after a filmmaker I admire and support, I’d sure as shit post a counter-view right away. I know that if I was a Lionsgate marketer I’d be on pins and needles this weekend waiting for VanAirsdale’s opening Colored Girls defense piece. I’d be preparing a quote-ad based entirely on what VanAirsdale may write. I mean, I’d have it ready to go first thing Monday morning. Seriously.

Wait…will Van Airsdale take the weekend off and post his defense Monday, or will he jump right in today while the impact-grenade effect from the Debruge/Honeycutt reviews is still ringing in the ears?

Suffern’s Lafayette theatre is a heavenly haven for movie lovers. It’s a beautiful, single-screen, old-style theatre with delicious popcorn, first-rate projection and sound, a great-sounding Wurlitzer organ and all the 1920s ornamental trimmings lovingly restored.

And it’s run by a pair of knowledgable, super-friendly guys — owner-operator Nelson Page and projectionist and print-wrangler Peter Aprussezze.

And believe it or not there was actually a long line of movie mavens shelling out for today’s 11:30 am showing of of the recently restored The Bridge on the River Kwai (’57). I was expecting maybe 10 or 15 people would show up. The tally was closer to 100.

The truth? Honestly? The digital projection was fine but the film itself (i.e., the digital master supervised by Sony’s Grover Crisp) looked dark. If what I saw represents what the forthcoming Kwai Bluray looks like, there’s going to be grumbling upon the 11.2 release.

I know this film very, very well, and too damn much of it looked shadowy and underlit this morning. I can already hear the loyalists saying “you don’t understand, Wells — this is how the actual film looked in 1957 when it played at the RKO Palace…it’s supposed to be dark in certain scenes.”

I’ll tell you right now that explanation isn’t going to work. Certain values simply weren’t visible due to shadows, and that’s no good in my book. If the Bluray itself doesn’t look better — sharper, less contrasty, less noirish — than what I saw this morning, there’s going to be some dissent and pushback.

On top of which the Lafayette theatre wasn’t heated, and after a while I just couldn’t take it. Sorry, but it’s late October and the fall foliage is starting to show on all the trees, and on a day like this you have to heat places like theatres. I’m not trying to make trouble for anyone, but my leg muscles start to ache when the climate is too cool.

Glenn Kenny in front of Suffern’s Lafayette theatre — Saturday, 10.23, 11:05 am.

Owner-manager Nelson Page, projectionist Peter Aprussezze

Salon‘s Matt Zoller Seitz feels that The Hangover 2 cast is guilty of hypocrisy (or certainly inconsistency) for shunning Mel Gibson while giving a wink and a pass to Mike Tyson, who cameo’ed in the first Hangover film. And that Hollywood itself has pulled the same crap by looking the other way when it came to the transgressions of Alec Baldwin, Elia Kazan, Charlie Sheen, Kate Moss, Roman Polanski and Lindsay Lohan.

“I don’t care how horrendously a person behaves behind closed doors,” Seitz writes. “Knowing what swine they are informs but does not veto my appreciation of their work, if in fact I appreciate that work to begin with, and even if I don’t, the gossip, arrest reports and tortured personal history add flavor to what I know, or think I know, about what such people do and represent. But the private melodrama never becomes the whole story for me — partly because of that whole, pesky ‘judge not lest ye be judged’ thing, but also because when we feast on these headlines, we’re treating selective knowledge as the whole story.

“We have no idea whether Tyson, Gibson, Baldwin, Lohan, Moss or anyone else are truly among the worst-behaved creative types in the entertainment industry, or just the ones that happened to get caught.”

I just want to be a perfect web columnist, so on a certain level I can relate to Natalie Portman‘s Black Swan character. But if I’d designed the Nina website, I’d include a reference to her Aunt Carole, who did two decades of medical confinement in England after killing two men with a straight razor.

In a 9.15 Toronto Film Festival review, I wrote that John Cameron Mitchell‘s Rabbit Hole “isn’t half bad. A little better than that actually. It may, in fact, begin to penetrate as a Best Picture contender down the road. It contains Nicole Kidman‘s best acting in a long while, and Aaron Eckhart, as her emotionally subdued husband, has his best part since his amiable biker guy in Erin Brockovich.

Rabbit Hole “is a restrained/contained middle-class grief drama in the vein of Ordinary People (i.e., dead son), and yes, it does seem curious (although perfectly fine and allowable) that Mitchell has made such a quietly effective MOR drama without so much as an allusion to wang sandwiches or semen facials or that line of country.

“David Lindsay-Abaire‘s screenplay (based on his play) never lays it on too thick, but doesn’t hold back too much either. It’s a process drama about keeping the trauma buried or at least suppressed, and about how it comes out anyway — a little hostility here and there, odd alliances and connections, a little hash smoking (a la American Beauty), stabs at organized grief therapy, questions of whether to keep or get rid of the son’s toys.

“It finally explodes in a bracing argument scene between Kidman and Eckhart, and then it subsides again and comes back and loop-dee-loops and finally settles down into a kind of acceptance between them. Not a peace treaty as much as an understanding that overt hostilities will cease.

“A few people applauded at the end of this afternoon’s press screening. I haven’t heard any clapping at all at any TIFF press screenings so far, so this probably means something.

“There’s a wonderful scene in which a Kidman disses a group-therapy couple who’ve also lost a child. They’re sharing the notion that God has a plan and He needed their child so he could have an extra angel in heaven, blah blah, and Kidman just shoots that shit down like Sgt. York. Perfect

“The only jarring element in the whole enterprise is the casting of the chubby, big-boned, dark-haired Tammy Blanchard as Kidman’s sister. They don’t just look like they couldn’t be sisters or cousins — Blanchard doesn’t look like she’s from Kidman’s genetic family. She might as well be Aborigine for all the resemblance. The only explanation (and if it was offered I apologize for missing it) is that Blanchard was adopted or sired by a different dad than Kidman’s. Their mother is played by the always spot-on Dianne Weist.

“Is Rabbit Hole a Best Picture contender? With ten nominations, yeah. Any film that inspires critics to clap has a shot in this game. So I think it’s in there. It’s a very decently made film that, the Blanchard casting aside, never gets anything wrong, and gets a lot of things right. It’s not in the class of The Social Network or Black Swan or Let Me In or Biutiful, but it’s a well honed, entirely respectable, honestly affecting drama.

“Sandra Oh gives a fine performance (her best since Sideways) also as a divorcee whom Eckhardt develops a certain interest in.”

Who wants to see a revolt-of-the-robots movie called Robopocalypse? Show of hands? I personally don’t think the title has enough syllables. It’s not hard enough to pronounce. Why not call it Robopoppadiddypopalypse? (Nine being better than five, right?) Like it or not, this will be the next high-crank, super-wank popcorn movie from the billionaire hack known as Steven “Abe Who?” Spielberg.

The book it’ll be based upon, written by Daniel H. Wilson, won’t be out until next June, but it’s obviously a Transformers-type deal aimed at 13 year-olds with the once-great Spielberg, a guy who used to make films that at least sounded semi-original, picking up discarded Reese’s Pieces dropped in the forest by Michael Bay and James Cameron, whose “war against the machines” in T2 sounds fairly similar.

TheWrap‘s Jeff Sneider reports that shooting will commence after Spielberg finishes his War Horse movie and after The Adventure of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn has been released and after Spielberg has arranged for all his checks to be sent to the right bank accounts and signed off on all his merchandising deals.

Box-Office Mojo is reporting that The Tree of Life, that dysfunctional ’50s Texas family + dinosaurs movie from The Artist Known As Mr. Cuckoo Bird, and costarring slightly younger versions of Sean Penn and Brad Pitt than the ones that currently exist, will open stateside on 5.27.11. This will be just a few days after the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, which of course raises expectations that the film will debut there.

What are the chances that The Artist Known As Mr. Cuckoo Bird will attend said festival? It’s a given he won’t show up at the press conference, but will be stay at the Hotel du Cap and send out smoke signals from some remote location on the grounds? What are the chances that publicists for Fox Searchlight, distributor of The Tree of Life, will do what they can to actively prevent journalists from speaking to or even seeing Mr. Cuckoo Bird? Will Mr. Cuckoo Bird give interviews in the manner of Banksy in Exit From The Gift Shop, wearing a hoodie with his voice electronically altered?

Last night’s screening of Paranormal Activity 2 at the Regal Union Square went pretty well. I was riveted at all times, as was the woman who sat next to me who was going “uhmm-hmm” or “whoa-hoa” and so on throughout the film. I love the technique of using security cameras to catch the spooky stuff without embellishments.

But I must report that some guys were booing at the end. They felt it was too dry and cryptic/ They felt that it failed to tie things together and bring tit all home, so they rebelled. “Booooo! Booooo!”. Sorry, but that’s what happened.