Darren Aronofsky‘s Black Swan (Fox Searchlight, 12.1) is immediately admitted into the Best of 2010 club. It stands head and shoulders over every previous Aronofsky film — it’s way in front of The Wrestler and don’t even mention Requiem for a Dream. It’s also cinched a Best Picture nomination (obviously) and totally locks in Natalie Portman as a Best Actress nominee. Done, settled, no arguments.

This is Portman’s Bette Davis performance in All About Eve mixed with a little Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? twitchy goony-bird grand guignol, only younger, hotter and (bonus point) bisexual. The movie is also these things but with a little dab of Herbert Ross‘s The Turning Point (did I just say that?) and slight sprinklings of Rosemary’s Baby, Psycho and Ken Russell‘s Mahler.

I was thinking this morning (and I realize I’m being way premature) that Portman might snatch the Best Actress Oscar away from poor Annette Bening, whose Kids Are All Right performance has been looking like the front-runner. The Academy loves and wants to finally take care of Bening after all her frustrating losses (she’s holding this year’s Jeff Bridges industry-goodwill hand) but whaddaya gonna do when a performance like Portman’s comes along? You can’t vote industry-buddy purely for the sake of industry-buddy. You have to man up and give it to the actress with the best chops.

“FUCKING BRILLIANT MOVIE!,” I just wrote Aronofsky. “But Jesus…why did you use the term ‘horror movie’ with me last summer? This is manic psychological realism. All about going mad from a desperate need for creative perfection and mastery of craft, and fear of losing your edge or a competitor stepping in front of you. Each and every anxiety attack plaguing Portman’s ballet-dancer character is self-inflicted, and there’s never a moment when you say, “Okay, now we’re entering the realm of pure wackjob fuck-all horror” — you keep it real from start to finish.

“Blair Witch and The Last Exorcism and that little paranormal thing aside, the horror genre has become so cheap and chewed up, so sullied with a gore-and-blood-bath mentality, so given over to excess and grotesque wallows for the sake of grotesque wallows…whereas your movie is absolutely reality-based — pure psychological metaphor, and always thoroughly tethered to Portman’s mental state. It’s a movie about the inside of an ambitious woman’s head all the way, and yet operatic and schizo and just a gradual tumble of anxiety and panic and finally madness. And yet fascinating all the way through with all the subtle CG and rashes and bleeding cuticles and cracked toenails.

“And wonderful CG! Which is to say the kind of CG that doesn’t call attention to itself 90% of the time. I lost count after a while. 40-something?” No, I was told — Black Swan has just over 300 vfx shots. “Almost every mirror is slightly manipulated,” he said. “Lots of subtle, hopefully unconscious weirdness.” Of course, the unconscious or not-blatantly-noticable weirdness is what’s beautiful about it, I replied. One of the things, I mean. And there are so many.

Cheers also to Portman’s costars — Mila Kunis, Winona Ryder (a grotesque role, but the best thing she’s done in eons), the great Vincent Cassel and Barbara Hershey. And hats off to Matthew Libatique‘s cinematography (which is grainy like The Wrestler‘s), Andrew Weisblum‘s editing and Clint Mansell‘s original score.

I’ve been trying to write my Black Swan review for the last 90 minutes, but my favorite Mac image-manipulation software — picnik.com — is acting wacked, forcing me to use the irritating and altogether tedious iPhoto. I need to find something that’s as easy as Picnik — easy for dumb guys, I mean — but doesn’t twitch out on me. On top of which I need a lover who won’t drive me crazy, but we’ll let that go for now.

King Street — Thursday, 9.9, 8:40 pm.

The Inside Job team prior to last night’s Ryerson screening. I’m afraid I don’t know everyone’s name, but the laid-back bearded guy on the left is Sony co-chief Michael Barker, director Charles Ferguson is standing dead center, the woman in the black dress is either exec producer Christina Weiss Lurie or associate producer Kalyanee Mam, and Sony co-chief Tom Bernard is the big friendly-looking guy to her right.

Prior to last night’s 9 pm screening of Charles Ferguson‘s Inside Job at the Ryerson:

Ben Affleck‘s The Town (Warner Bros., 9.17), which I saw early this afternoon, never made me miserable. It’s “professionally done” for the most part, but I did lose faith in it early on. It’s not what I’d call a mediocre thing, but it’s certainly not what anyone would call a believable crime flick — certainly not in terms of how a decent, open-hearted bank-employee girlfriend (as played by Rebecca Hall) could be expected to respond to a nice, open-hearted felon (Affleck) with serious mother issues who’s looking to escape the criminal fastlane.

Ben Affleck, Jeremy Renner in The Town.

It’s reasonably handled in most respects, but The Town doesn’t begin to compete in the realm of other distinctive Boston crime flicks. It’s nowhere near the level of The Departed. It’s not as good as Affleck’s own Gone Baby Gone. It’s certainly no Mystic River. And it sure as double-shit is no Friends of Eddie Coyle. (Don’t even fucking mention that 1973 Peter Yates film in the same breath.)

The problem is that Affleck cuts his character way too much of a break. He’s basically a dirty guy who doesn’t deserve to escape. But the dictates of a big-studio crime film say otherwise.

But I don’t want to put it down too severely. The Town has its moments. There are three (four?) thrilling heist sequences, and one high-throttle car chase. The performances are generally better than passable. Jon Hamm plays an unusually nervy cop; Jeremy Renner does an above-average job as a self-destructive psychopathic dog. Robert Elswit has done a very good with the photography as far as this sort of thing goes. It ain’t art but it’s high-end functionalism. It’s basically a whaddaya whaddaya okay fine whatever.

Re-experience Robert De Niro‘s jailhouse wailing and wall-punching scene in Raging Bull. And then imagine a followup moment in which Joe Pesci’s Joey sneaks into Jake La Motta’s hotel room as he’s sleeping, and then climbs onto the bed, drops his pants and takes a dump on his brother’s face. And then Jake leaps up and beats the crap out of Joey and runs into the bathroom to clean his face off, going “Eeoohhwww! I can’t take this! Eeooohhww!”

I’ve just described the essence of Casey Affleck‘s I’m Not Here (Magnolia, 9.10), the Joaquin Phoenix meltdown doc which screened this afternoon at the Toronto Film Festival.

The face-shitting scene actually happens (Pheonix really seems to take it in the face — his fired assistant Anton is the squatter), and De Niro’s Miami Dade jailhouse scene is matched when Pheonix jumps out of a cab after taping his infamous Late Night with David Letterman visit, and then scales a small Central Park hillside and begins crying about how he’s become a joke, how his life is over, how he’s fucked things up beyond recognition.

Right now you’re asking yourself “Gee, why didn’t Martin Scorsese think of this 30 years ago?”…right?

I can’t recount the history of the Phoenix meltdown and deliberate career collapse of ’08 and ’09. I can’t do it! I’m sorry but my fingers are refusing to type the words. Look it up or whatever.

The bearded bellowing pig that we see in I’m Still Here is what guys really look and sound like when they’ve decided to slowly end their lives in installments or chapters or whatever. They vent anger, wallow in melodrama, pollute themselves, rage about how brutal and lacerating their insights are, etc.

It doesn’t matter if parts of I’m Still Here were staged for “entertainment’s sake.” I don’t think very much of it was. I think that that Phoenix’s endlessly discussed psychological celebrity breakdown (via ego, drugs and hubris) is mostly real. But again — it doesn’t matter because the man is toast. His self-loathing is so acute it’s difficult to accept even as he acts it out with obviously intense conviction. He makes himself fat, grows a beard, does coke, falls off stages, drinks, smokes cigarettes in each and every scene — he’s a revolting bloated clown. And now he’s the first award-nominated, formerly respected actor to be shown literally being shat upon.

I’m Still Here is brave but appalling. It’s never “boring”, but is probably one of the most loathsome things I’ve ever sat through, and yet I’m perversely glad that I’ve finally seen it. I can now walk around and make faces as I tell people what I thought of it.

Somewhere around the three-quarter mark I started to laugh and couldn’t stop. It was when Phoenix leaned over a toilet and began vomiting some kind greenish-brown slop, three or four spews in a row. “Wheee!!….I’m sitting here in a Toronto theatre watching Joaquin Phoenix puke!!” I was telling myself. “Here I am! And there he is!”

It’s not an “act” — it’s a serious tragedy, and I feel dirty for having watched it. The poor guy. The misery he’s put himself through, and for what? So he can prove to the world what an inconsequential rapper-poet he is? I myself need to run into a bathroom and splash hot water on my face and go “Eew! I can’t take this! Eeooohhww!”

Joaquin Phoenix has shot his wad with this film. No one will ever be able to accept him as an everyman in a movie ever again. No one will want to watch him in anything. He’s a dead man. The only way he can redeem himself is to take flying lessons, steal a jet and fly it over to Iran and crash it into the home of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Clint Eastwood‘s Hereafter, which screens at the Toronto Film Festival on Sunday (with an alleged press screening on Saturday), “has a big, harrowing special-effects scene early on and reserves its third act for something far less bombastic,” reports the L.A. Times‘ Geoff Boucher.

Clint Eastwood during filming of Hereafter.

Screenwriter Peter Morgan says “he wrote a different ending that would have a grander scale,” Bouncher writes. “Everyone agreed, though, that in the final analysis, Hereafter was going to keep its unconventional contours.

“‘The classic thinking is you can’t peter out in your third act, you have to go bigger, and the other classic Hollywood thinking is that all the questions have to be answered,’ says Hereafter star Matt Damon. ‘Is it clear enough? I don’t want an 8-year-old to come see this and not know what’s going on. With Clint, his process is free of all that grist mill. He can do something that has a different shape. It wouldn’t occur to him to have a giant set piece in the third act because, well, this story doesn’t require it.'”

That’s it — I’m in love with this film. Seriously. When’s the last time a mainstream feature didn’t end with the usual required grand crescendo?

“At the age I am now, I just don’t have any interest in going back and doing the same sort of thing over and over, that’s one of the reasons I moved away from westerns,” Eastwood tells Boucher. “The question about what happens after we die is something that we all ask and when I read [Morgan’s] script it was so intelligent and I knew right away that I wanted to do it.”

Hereafter (Warner Bros., 10.22) “is a cinematic triptych with the separate stories of battered souls searching for answers about the afterlife — there’s a reluctant Bay Area psychic (Damon), a London youngster (Frankie McLaren) grieving the death of his twin brother and a French journalist (Belgium-born actress Cecile de France) who was caught up in a tsunami, killed by the raging water and then revived after a strange, spectral experience.

“‘It’s a spiritual story but there are no real religious connotations to it,’ Eastwood said. ‘The [major religions] are kind of unsatisfying to the kid in our story because he’s looking for something that can answer his questions. He wants a straight answer and he can’t seem to find anything from people who turn out to be either psychics looking for a fast buck or people just talking…you don’t really see movies like this these days that have a spiritual aspect or a romantic aspect. And it is romantic. These days you have a lot of movies about people jumping on each other in the sack but we don’t have that. This is more about attraction.”

Hereafter is “also a movie that, because of Eastwood’s age, will be read by many as an artistic statement about his turning toward his own mortality. He pondered that notion for a moment but found any insight elusive. ‘I’d like to think I would have made this movie when I was 30 or 40 too, because it’s a good story. I don’t know. I was more of an actor who directed back then and now I’m more of a director who acts. Or occasionally acts. Or maybe never acts.'”

Why has Fox Searchlight decided to release Terrence Malick‘s The Tree of Life, which they’ve just acquired from Bill Pohlad, in 2011 instead of later this year? Theoretical Answer #1: They don’t want to complicate or compromise their already-underway campaigns for Black Swan, 127 Hours, Never Let Me Go and Conviction. Theoretical Answer #2: Even if they’ve decided that Black Swan and 127 Hours are their only serious contenders, they’re figuring they can’t ramp up a new Tree campaign fast enough. I think they’re wrong but what do I know? I guess the Malick will finally peep through in Cannes 2011 after all.

With Robert Redford‘s The Conspirator only two days away from its first Toronto Film Festival showing (the first public screening being on Saturday at Roy Thomson Hall), I’m reposting what I wrote last April about the film’s potential, and about James Solomon‘s script in particular:

“The calibre of Robin Wright Penn‘s performance as Mary Surratt, the rooming-house operator who was wrongly executed for allegedly conspiring with John Wilkes Booth and others to assassinate Abraham Lincoln, is unknown. But last night I read a shooting draft of James Solomon’s The Conspirator, the Robert Redford-directed drama about Surratt’s trial, and it’s obviously a sturdily-written, well-burnished thing. And there’s no missing the grace and gravitas woven into Surratt’s character.

“Half the work has been done, I’m saying, for Penn. All she has to do is play Surratt in a straight and solid manner, and she’s got a Best Actress nomination all but sewn up. If, that is, The Conspirator lands a distributor (which it almost certainly will) and comes out in the late fall or early winter, and gets a good campaign going, etc.

“Redford may or may not have have peaked as a director (his last seriously strong film was ’94’s Quiz Show), but he’s always been good with actors. I’m basically saying that Solomon’s script is so fundamentally solid that all Redford has to do is get the period details right, shoot it handsomely and let his quality-level cast do what it does best, and he’s pretty much home free.”

Drafthouse Films, a new Austin-based distribution company headed by Tim League, has announced the acquisition of Chris Morris‘s Four Lions, an Islamic terrorist comedy which has been wandering in the woods and looking for a home since playing Sundance eight months ago. It’ll open in mid October in New York, Los Angeles and Austin, and take it from there.

Here’s my brief review, initially posted on 1.24.10:

“Early last evening I saw Chris Morris’s Four Lions — an unsettling, at times off-putting, at other times genuinely amazing black political comedy about London-based Jihadists — Islamic radicalism meets the Four Stooges/Keystone Cops. It’s sometimes shocking and sometimes heh-heh funny, and occasionally hilarious.

“Morris uses a verbal helter-skelter quality reminiscent of In The Loop, and yet the subject is appalling — a team of doofuses who dream of bombing and slaughtering in order to enter heaven and taste the fruit of virgins. It’s amazing and kind of pleasing that a comedy of this sort has been made, but I don’t want to think about the reactions in Manhattan once it opens.

“At times it felt flat and frustrating (I couldn’t understand half of it due to the scruffy British accents) and at other times I felt I was watching something akin to Dr. Strangelove — ghastly subject matter leavened with wicked humor. An agent I spoke to after the screening said, ‘I don’t know if the American public is ready for this film.’ He’s probably right, but Four Lions is an absolute original — I’ve never seen anything like it, nor have I have ever felt so torn in my reactions.

“I’d love to see it again, but with subtitles.”

The cost of a monthly New York subway pass is…what, about $90? And is good for a solid month from the day you buy it. Toronto sells weekly passes for $36, and they’re only good on a specific date-to-date basis. The one I bought yesterday afternoon (Wednesday) is good until Sunday night. Two rides per day x four and a half days = nine rides at $4 a ride. And then I have to buy another $36 weekly pass to cover next week. Is this reasonable? Not a fan.