I slept late this morning, piddled around, didn’t start work until noon. My flight leaves around 7 pm so I have to start packing and get rolling. No more filing until late this evening, if then. I’ll miss the cool Toronto weather. Back to the razmatazz.

I don’t have time to discuss my brief chat last night with Patricio Guzman, director of the elegant and poetic documentary Nostalgia for the Light, which I saw here last weekend. It’s basically a double-track exploration of two uses of Chile’s Atacama Desert — an ideal place for astronomers to watch the stars, and a location where the victims of Augusto Pinochet’s reign of terror in the ’70s were buried decades ago.

Nostalgia for the Light director Patricio Guzman and translator — Thursday, 9.16, 9:35 pm.

Guzman (who knows Guillermo del Toro from way back) struck me as an artist full of the right stuff. He’s thoughtful, perceptive, careful with words, a world-class gentleman, and has an aura of spiritual calm. We agreed at one point that people should always refrain from talking unless they can improve upon the silence. Good fellow.

I don’t know if the just-announced casting of Sacha Baron Cohen in a biopic about late flamboyant Queen frontman Freddie Mercury is an inspired idea, or a dreadful one. The producers presumably reached out to Cohen not just because he physically resembles Mercury but because image-wise he’s steeped in the realm of gay flamboyance. Mercury was fairly Bruno-ish himself — one of the first openly gay performers in mainstream rock, making no bones about being a Taxi Zum Klo-ish enthusiast.

GK Films’ Graham King is co-producing the Mercury biopic with Robert De Niro‘s Tribeca Productions and Queen Films. Screenwriter Peter Morgan (Hereafter, The Queen) is reportedly working on a script. The as-yet-untitled film will not end with Mercury’s death but “Queen’s barnstorming appearance at the 1985 Live Aid concert in London,” according to this HuffPost story.

I’ve always found “Don’t Stop Me Now” — written and sung by Mercury — one of the more touching Queen songs. It’s basically a celebration of a lifestyle fueled by a series of mad sexual adventures with a string of partners. Mercury is singing about what makes his life worth living and what turns him on and how he loves it, and it killed him. He essentially died as a result of promiscuity during the peak AIDS danger era (late 80s, early ’90s).

I just finished a 15-minute phoner with 127 Hours director Danny Boyle, who was calling from London. There’s always a feeling of vigor and relish in Boyle’s voice — a general mood of “can’t wait” (or “couldn’t wait”) excitement. We covered several topics. I was telling him that my general impression of the film, looking back a week or so, is one of sensual delight — it’s full of explosive color (sandy ambers, reds, blues, browns) and ripe with aromas, secretions, tastings. And is nothing if not emotionally intense each step of the way.

Hollywood Elsewhere will either (a) find a way to attend and cover Jon Stewart‘s Rally to Restore Sanity and Stephen Colbert‘s March To Keep Fear Alive (despite plans to attend the Tribeca Qatar Film Festival from 10.26 through 10.30) or (b) at least be there in spirit. The Stewart/Colbert event will happen on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, 10.30. Any mass-supported statement about how pathetic the hee-haw Teabag fatass fungus-on-their-toenails contingent is will be good for the soul, and a balm in the eye of history.

On top of which it’ll be cool to mix it up with tens of thousands of like-minded people. Plus I haven’t been down to Washington since the ’90s, and I know some journalists who live and work vthere, etc.

The only thing that gives pause is that a rally about “taking it down a notch for America” sounds an awful lot like an early 21st Century version of Richard Nixon‘s “Silent Majority” movement.

Early in his first administration (i.e., the late ’60s) President Nixon began enshrining the milquetoast middle-classers who, he said, were silent, modest, not demonstrating, and not shouting anti-Vietnam War slogans. The salt of the earth, the moderate backbone of the nation, etc. During last night’s Jon Stewart Show Stewart asked, “Why don’t we hear from the 70-80 percenters? [who don’t have extreme nutbag political views]?” He said that he wants his Sanity rally — “a million moderate march…a clarion call for rationality!” — to articulate a middle-class response to “the loud folks.”

So I don’t fancy myself as one of the new Silent Majority. I don’t like or want the linkage. I see myself as one who despises the pitchfork racist nutter selfish-idiotic-pig crowd…no offense. So I don’t want to take things down a notch. I want these people rounded up in trucks and incarcerated in green reeducation camps. I’m perfectly serious.

Apparently freaked or at least alarmed by recent negative reactions to I’m Still Here, his Joaquin Phoenix meltdown documentary, Casey Affleck has dropped the pose and confessed to N.Y. Times reporter Michael Cieply that “almost every bit of” I’m Still Here is pretend, put-on theatre.

To this I say bullshit. I believe that some or much of the doc may have been staged and performed, okay, but I’m convinced that it was inspired by genuine career despair on Phoenix’s part, and that a sizable portion of it came straight from his real heart, head and gut.

What happened, I strongly suspect, is that after I’m Still Here was shown at the Toronto Film Festival Affleck and Phoenix both realized they’d over-played their hand by persuading the media that Phoenix is an even bigger egoistic fool than anyone had suspected or realized, and that the only way to save Phoenix from a life of depression and skid-row dereliction is to claim it was entirely made up. Think about it — how could Cieply claim or prove otherwise? Once you start down the rabbit hole there are no guideposts, no rules…nothing but free-form improv.

I believe Affleck is doing what he can to save his brother-in-law from ruination. Because Phoenix has no future without a complete renunciation of the whole “act.” Everyone on the planet has been convinced there is no bigger asshole around. Right now Phoenix would have trouble getting hired as an assistant at Kinko’s.

“It’s a terrific performance, it’s the performance of his career,” Affleck tells Cieply in a story that went up this afternoon.

Affleck “was speaking of Mr. Phoenix’s two-year portrayal of himself — on screen and off — as a bearded, drug-addled aspiring rap star, who, as Affleck tells it, put his professional life on the line to star in a bit of ‘gonzo filmmaking’ modeled on the reality-bending journalism of Hunter S. Thompson.

“The reviews were so angry,” said Mr. Affleck, who attributed much of the hostility to his own long silence about a film that left more than a few viewers wondering what was real — The drugs? The hookers? The childhood home-movie sequences in the beginning? — and what was not.

“Virtually none of it was real,” Cieply writes. “Not even the opening shots, supposedly of Mr. Phoenix and his siblings swimming in a water hole in Panama. That, Mr. Affleck said, was actually shot in Hawaii with actors, then run back and forth on top of an old videocassette recording of Paris, Texas to degrade the images.

“I never intended to trick anybody,” said Mr. Affleck, an intense 35-year-old who spoke over a meat-free, cheese-free vegetable sandwich on Thursday. “The idea of a quote, hoax, unquote, never entered my mind.”

Wait….”a meat-free, cheese-free vegetable sandwich“? What has that got to do with anything? To me, this sentence suggests that Cieply’s story itself is a put-on. You know what? I’m getting sick of this. I say trust no human being entirely. You know who I trust? My cats. Otherwise believe none of what you read or hear and only half of what you see.

Phoenix turned himself into a bloated, pot-bellied pig wasn’t theatre — he clearly did that.

And I was so appalled and amazed by the scene in which Phoenix’s assistant poops on his boss’s face that I’m going to deliberately defy N.Y. Times-sanctioned “reality” and continue to believe it really “happened.”

Two nights ago Woody Allen spoke about the Ground Zero mosque issue with N.Y. Daily News “Gatecrasher” columnist Frank DiGiacomo at a Manhattan event for You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger. “Of course I think they should build the mosque,” he said, “[but] the only people who have a right to weigh in are the people that were personally involved in 9/11.

“The people who lost friends or relatives have every right to protest and say what they want to say. All of the other people weighing in” are doing so for “political and exploitation reasons. I feel those people should shut up and just let the people who were personally affected make their case.

“If I was speaking to the people who are protesting legitimately, I would try to convince them, if I could, that building the mosque takes a step toward eliminating this kind of thing from happening again. Preventing the mosque from being built is not a step in the right direction.”

DiGiacomo asked Allen asked Allen if he has a bucket list of things he’d like to do before he dies. “Yes, and one of them is [to] live longer,” the director responded. “That’s at the head of the list.”

TheWrap‘s Brent Lang is reporting that Lionsgate has acquired domestic distribution rights to John Cameron Mitchell‘s Rabbit Hole, an exceptional grief-recovery drama with Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart that I reviewed yesterday. The plan is to open the film later this year and mount campaigns for Best Picture and Best Actress.

It’s rainy and coldish and misty in Toronto today. I’ve been pushing it for eight days now (today is the ninth) so I’m in no hurry to get out there. But I should push myself to achieve one final productive day before flying home tomorrow. Options include I Saw The Devil, Mother of Rock, Cirkus Columbia, Little White Lies, Bad Faith, Sensation, etc. Possible re-viewing of Casino Jack, a dinner with Nostalgia for the Light‘s Patricio Guzman, etc.

I don’t mean to sound cavalier about the curious career arc of an excellent actor, and I always flinch when I read “whatever happened to…?” articles because they sound blithe and dismissive. But fuck it — whatever happened to Michael Pitt? An Esquire article about fashion styles seen in HBO’s Boardwalk Empire (which premieres this Sunday) alerted me to Pitt’s steady recurring role as Jimmy Darmody, and my immediate reaction was “whoa…he fell off the radar and I hadn’t even noticed.”

Michael Pitt in HBO’s Boardwalk Empire.

Pitt was all the rage from ’02 to ’05 or thereabouts, starting with his breakout performances in Barbet Schroeder‘s Murder by Numbers (’02) and a year later in Bernardo Bertolucci‘s The Dreamers (probably his most emotionally accessible role). For me he peaked with his Kurt Cobain performance in Gus Van Sant‘s Last Days. My geiger counter says Pitt’s last stand-out performance was in Michael Haneke‘s English-language remake of Funny Games (’07).

Pitt has always projected a kind of studied weirdness — a slightly cold and aloof manner mixed with innocence. It’s the kind of thing that probably worked from him better when he he had that doe-faced thing going in his early 20s, but it may not travel quite as well with age. Pitt will be 30 in April 2011.

Perhaps directors (and casting directors got tired of his alien-from-another-planet schtick. I don’t know. But I do know he always felt to me like the real thing — an actor who really and truly meant it in a James Dean sort of way, right down to the core of his soul. I also know that the train he was on seemed to slow and come to a stop two or three years ago. Tell me why.

If nothing else this recently-released one-sheet for Ed Zwick‘s Love and Other Drugs (20th Century Fox, 11.24) conveys comfort, ease, self-satisfaction. It certainly doesn’t indicate heavy-osity. It seems to be saying, “All that ‘this movie is really exceptional’ and ‘Hathaway kills as a Parkinson’s sufferer’ stuff you were reading about earlier this year? Maybe or maybe not but we’re okay either way, and you should be too.”

Jamie Stuart‘s Filmmaker video interview piece with Never Let Me Go director Mark Romanek is, no offense, more intriguing than Never Let Me Go itself. Sorry, but it got and held me right away, which is pretty much the opposite of what happened when I sat down with Romanek’s feature.