For a while it looked as if a plane reservation I made on Sunday to evacuate the wifi dungeon of Marrakech on Tuesday morning and arrive at JFK around 3:45 pm that afternoon might be kaput. A Royal Maroq Air rep told me on Sunday that my reservation was totally safe and locked down, but I was told early this morning this might not be so. Nothing of a bureaucratic nature is dependable in this country. Dealing with the powers-that-be (security guards, wifi guys in swanky hotels, etc.) is often a game of pure whimsical mindfuck torture. For a while it seemed as if I was being held hostage here. You can only leave when we deem it convenient for us! But late this afternoon I was told I’m good to go tomorrow morning. Sigh…thank you!

If I never return to the Marrakech Film Festival it’ll be too soon, but not everything has been bad. Yes, the wifi problems have been unrelenting but everyone you run into is is polite and calm and gentle to a fault. There’s apparently no such thing as an impolite Marrakech resident. (Okay, I did run into a couple of ruffians on a bike on Saturday night who tried to assault me and steal my wallet — I later named them Dick and Perry — but I pushed one of them in the chest and told them both to fuck off and then ran in the opposite direction and they were good enough not to follow, so even the thieves and the roughnecks are polite.) And there’s no indoor smoking ban. And there are no helmet laws so you can scooter down the street with the wind blowing through your hair. And the food is wonderful. And the energy in the main old-town square is so exciting and heavenly. And there are horse carts all over the city, and sometimes as you’re driving down the street you can smell horseshit, and that is a very good thing. The older you get and the more plastic and corporate the world becomes, the better horseshit smells.”

I think I’ve earned a certain authority in detecting whether an Oscar-worthy actor or actress is playing the pain-in-the-ass Mo’Nique game, and I don’t think Christian Bale is doing that at all. He’s not saying “what kind of money can I make out of this?” He’s not saying “I ain’t doin’ this or that unless I see some cash on the table.” And he’s not walking down red carpets with yak hair on his exposed thighs.

N.Y. Times photo of Christian Bale by Kevin Scanlon.

Bale simply can’t stand probing questions about who or what he is. He’s basically saying he wants his privacy and his dignity, and all that makes him is George C. Scott with a little Greta Garbo thrown in. Which is totally cool in my book.

On top of which Bale has told N.Y. Times guy Dennis Lim that “I love it when people say you did good work…it makes me all happy and shiny…I’m human.” And then he adds, “I’ll campaign for the movie, but I won’t campaign for myself.” What’s wrong with that?

“Mr. Bale’s views on artistic privacy are related to his faith, perhaps a naive one, that an anonymous actor is a more credible shape shifter,” Lim writes, “‘I like the idea of movies having a magic element,’ he said. ‘How many times have you seen an actor in a movie who you know only as the character? It’s wonderful, isn’t it?’

“To the extent that Mr. Bale can approximate a blank slate in his films, he said, it is because he is an actor, not a movie star. He guards his personal life — he and his wife of 10 years, Sibi Blazic, have a 5-year-old daughter — and save for the Terminator blow-up and allegations of verbal assault on his mother and sister in 2008 (the charges were dropped), he has not gotten much tabloid attention.

“A movie star is someone people look at and go, ‘I want to be like that person,’ ” Bale tells Lim. “There’s the responsibility of desire. It’s not something I’m interested in trying. I would fail miserably at it, so why even bother?”

Richard J. Lewis‘s Barney’s Version, which is based on a 1997 autobiographical novel by Mordechai Richler, is so steeped in the lives and culture of Montreal Jewry that I was having trouble breathing. I wanted to be let out in the world beyond, one that wasn’t so oppressively one-note, but the film steadfastly refused. “No,” it said. “You’re stuck with the Canadian Jews and especially Paul Giamatti‘s relentlessly vulgar, cigar-smoking, acutely dislikable Barney…deal with it.”

Barney’s Version isn’t just about boomer-aged Canadian Jews who grew up and lived in Montreal, but it will probably only play with boomer-aged Canadian Jews who grew up and lived in Montreal.

All I could think of were thoughts of escaping back to the U.S., if necessary by subterfuge in the back of a truck. Let me out of this fucking world, I don’t want to know this slovenly turd, etc. Stop with the lighting of cigars, the cigars, the Monte Cristo cigars…stop it! The movie is a feast of primitive appetites and lying and animal cunning and endless gloom and depression…yeesh!

My son Jett, 22, walked out less than an hour in.

I loved Giamatti the actor for many years, and I’ll give him props for creating a sly, brilliant and spirited Barney, but he’s also created a repulsive Uriah Heep, and is saddled with some not-terribly-clever Richler dialogue to boot. The affection and identification I felt for Giamatti’s Miles in Sideways has been totally reversed by this film. I now have a negative association with the man.

Yes, Barney’s love for Rosamund Pike‘s character is pure and unfettered, and he loves his children, especially his daughter. But that’s not enough to exonerate him in my eyes. I wanted only to not have to deal with this asshole. But deal I did. I stayed with Barney’s Version right to the end.

Barney’s Version won’t stop hitting you over the head with Richler’s cynical, openly vulgar, world-weary “this is who and what I am and pardon me while I light another expensive cigar” schtick over and over again. Welcome to the Canadian Club for Older Gray-Haired Guys with Pot Bellies, it says over and over and over. Every Canadian director of note plays a part (Denys Arcand as a waiter, etc.), and we’re also stuck with Leonard Cohen tunes. This movie is relentlessly Canadian, Canadian, Canadian and fucking Canadian from start to finish.

I think I dropped out of the film when whatsername in Rome said Barney wasn’t much of a lover because he orgasmed in less than 30 seconds and had a three-inch member. All I could think was, “I’m stuck with a guy who has a three-inch dick for the next 110 minutes?”

Oh, no — here comes Dustin Hoffman, who’s looking like he’s 85 or 86 years old. (Was he wearing age makeup? I just spoke with him in LA a couple of years ago and he looked significantly younger.) Please don’t let Hoffman grin and say “Mazel Tov!” at the wedding scene. Please, please don’t let him say it, no, no, I’m begging you….aaah! He said it!

Pike is quite good with the focus and the class, but the movie isn’t good enough (and is in fact way too repulsive on too many levels) to propel her into awards consideration. On top of which her love for Barney is Richler’s wet fantasy dream There’s no way in the universe a woman as classy as Pike would marry a low sloppy beast like Barney. She could’ve done much, much better, and certainly knew that going in (as do we) so it makes no sense at all. A wise, ethical, beautiful and super-classy woman like Pike’s character is going to be receptive to sex and marriage with a bearded, balding, smelly, small-minded, bulging-eyed gnome who drinks like a fish and cheats on his wife on their wedding night?

Listen to these three guys — Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil, Deadline‘s Pete Hammond, Hollywood Reporter‘s Tim Appelo — debate the relative Best Picture strengths of The Social Network vs. The King’s Speech vs. whatever. How much of this is animated debate and how much is about what’s really happening out there?

Hammond makes the point that the National Board of Review voting was influenced by a newly inducted group of younger voters, who naturally went with The Social Network because it’s youth-friendly. Okay, but how does Hammond explain The Social Network winning a major-category trifecta (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay) with the Washington, D.C.-area film critics? Did that org changes the rules to allow their kids to vote?

Sidenote to O’Neil: Please up the sound levels — I had to listen with earphones to hear clearly.

Last night Hollywood Reporter guy David Ciminelli pointed to a KTLA news report saying that ballistics test of a gun that belonged to Harold Smith, the ex-con loser who shot himself last week when Beverly Hills detectives approached him as a “person of interest” in the murder of Ronnie Chasen, “reportedly show that the bullet used by Smith in his suicide is not the same type of bullet used to kill Chasen.”

Smith may have just been a wacko, but the ballistic test means nothing, of course. Anyone involved in a hit knows that you either leave the weapon at the scene with no prints or you throw the weapon into the ocean or a lake or bury it out in the desert, and that you sure as hell don’t carry it around so you can use it to shoot yourself if the cops pay a visit.

Meanwhile Chasen’s brother, director-screenwriter Larry Cohen, has told N.Y. Times reporters Michael Cieply and Brooks Barnes that Smith “was a ‘deranged person’ who lied about any involvement in the high-profile case, and suggested that his sister may have been a victim of road rage.”

And on another, entirely unrelated front, longtime indie publicist Reid Rosefelt has penned a lament about the tabloid feeding frenzy sparked by Chasen’s killing. I agree with Rosefelt about the ick, but then no one should be surprised or shocked by this.

“Oh, come on, Reid…this is tailor-made for the stinkies,” I replied after reading his piece. “You know what the media world is like these days. It would be bizarre if they weren’t pouncing all over this thing is as many ways as they are. You couldn’t create a more lurid tabloid-type story if you dreamt it up. Five in the chest on Sunset Boulevard? A questionable fringe type shoots himself when the cops come calling?

“The only thing missing is sex, or some kind of love-gone-wrong angle involving an angry ex-boyfriend or something along those lines. If this had happened in the early to mid ’50s Confidential would have been all over it for week and months on end.

“When a sudden and violent death happens to a person of prominent social standing, people feel threatened and in the absence of leads or solid facts, they naturally speculate. It’s somehow comforting to do this, and very human, when you think of it.”

Two days ago the Winnipeg Free Press‘s Randall King reported that Guy Maddin, the indie-minded, David Lynch-ian Canadian filmmaker known for his quirky oeuvre, will marry film writer and Sunset Gun columnist Kim Morgan. This seems to me like a symmetrical mating of the souls — they’re both visionary eccentrics — and it’s a nice May-December thing besides. Maddin is 54, and Morgan is an early thirtysomething (I think.)

When’s the last time a film blogger even went out with a respected filmmaker, much less got engaged to one? What does this engagement say about the standing of film bloggers in the overall social-professional sphere, if anything? What would people say if, for example, Kris Tapley elbowed Mark Boal out of the way and got engaged to Kathryn Bigelow after playing a small role in The Hurt Locker? Or Isabella Rossellini, say? They’d say, “A little weird, a little curious…but at the same time kinda cool.”

Morgan is a very bright critic, a deeply emotional writer and also an iconic “personality” known for her smoldering-hot-blonde photos on her website and Facebook page. She became a “brand” and did an episode of At The Movies with Richard Roeper, and was treated patronizingly by him, and — according to quotes in King’s article — attracted Maddin’s sympathetic attention.

“Winnipeg filmmaker Guy Maddin has always been a movie critic’s darling,” King’s story begins. “Now he’s making it official.

“Maddin, 54, confirmed he will be marrying L.A. film critic Kim Morgan in Winnipeg in the near future after news of the betrothal was revealed in a tweet by film critic Roger Ebert.

“‘Ebert got a bit ahead of us,’ Maddin said. ‘But we’re engaged and we’re going to get married soon, and the rest, I’ve got to keep some of it a secret. Because that’s the spirit of it. It will be absolutely private.’

“‘It would have been nice if it had been tweeted just after it happened.’

“Maddin and Morgan fell in love when he flew her to Winnipeg this summer to star in his film Keyhole (in which she plays Udo Kier‘s gun moll) and in the short films Hauntings.

“The director has been married once before, but has been divorced, he says, for 32 years.”

A critic friend with slightly dweeby, ComicCon-ish taste in films saw James L. Brooks‘ How Do You Know (Sony, 12.17) two days ago (i.e., Saturday, 12.4) and is calling it “one of the most grueling experiences I’ve had this year…I seriously almost walked out but only stayed through the end because I knew that it was bad enough to make my year’s worst list…it’s this year’s It’s Complicated, only worse.”

Another critic friend slightly disagrees. How Do You Know “isn’t nearly as bad” as all that, she says, “but it’s also not something you need to worry about putting into a Top Ten list. It ain’t Broadcast News, but I don’t think anyone is actually expecting it to be. Go in with an open mind, think of what your middle-aged cousins and aunts and uncles would want to see, and revel in Paul Rudd‘s charming Rudd-ness.”

A third critic strongly disagrees with the “most grueling experience” guy. “It’s not News but it’s way better than Spanglish,” he says. “It’s a little unfocused as it shuffles along, but everyone’s game, the script has humorous cynicism…it’s mainstream entertainment, but Brooks manages to steer it away from Nancy Meyers and Nora Ephron territories.”

This still feels a little sad. How does a guy as good as Brooks used to be — Terms of Endearment, Broadcast News, As Good As It Gets — devolve to the level of Spanglish and now this? How do you un-learn how to make really good films that are connected to issues and currents that most recognize and accept as heartfelt and truthful?

What’s the deal with the True Grit fellatio handed out by Vulture‘s Lane Brown in the latest (12.3) Oscar Futures chart? Really…where is this coming from? Brown hadn’t seen Grit when he typed this up but thoughtful reactions have been mixed from the get-go. I understand the reflexive instinct to cream over any new Coen Bros. film (and I say this as one who’s done so many times), but Brown and others need to come down to earth about this thing.

Brown Fallacy #1: “Matt Damon steals the movie.” Retort: Sorry, but he doesn’t. At all. He just acts in it. The one who steals the film is Dakin Matthews.

Brown Fallacy #2: Jeff Bridges is “allegedly better than he was in Crazy Heart, or better than John Wayne was in 1969’s original Grit.” Retort: Nope. Bridges just frowns and barks and growls his way through it, and there’s really nothing all that great about this, trust me.

Brown Fallacy #3: The Coen brothers are “‘at the top of their game’ or working outside of their usual idiom with nice results.” Retort: Nope. They chose a story that says nothing other than the fact that life was tough and brutal in the Old West, and which has nothing whatsoever to bequeath thematically about our own world. The Coens have made a holding pattern artistic-exercise film that ranks near the bottom of their list along with The Man Who Wasn’t There and The Ladykillers.

Brown Fallacy #4: True Grit reviews “seem to indicate it’s good enough to snag one of the ten slots that everyone already assumed it would.” Retort: Blatantly untrue due to the HitFix Drew McWeeny orgasm factor. The fact that McWeeny called True Grit “one of the most crowd-pleasing films I think the Coens have ever made, accessible and simple and mythic and beautiful” tells you without question that it’s probably an artistically curious thing that’s doomed to fail with Joe Popcorn. McWeeny is a brilliant fellow, but experience has taught me to never trust his love spasms. “Crowd-pleasing”? Maybe in spurts, but this film is going to die very quickly when it opens.

In Contention‘s “The Circuit” has revealed the winners of the Washington, D.C.-area film critics’ association, and for the second time in a row (following last week’s NBR awards) The Social Network has swept the table in the top categories, winning for Best Picture, Best Director (David Fincher) and Best Adapted Screenplay.

The D.C guys gave their Best Actor award to The King’s Speech headliner Colin Firth instead of TSN‘s Jessie Eisenberg, who was the NBR’s choice. They also handed their Best Actress trophy to Winter’s Bone‘s Jennifer Lawrence and bestowed two wins upon David O. Russell‘s The Fighter — Christan Bale for Best Supporting Actor and Melissa Leo for Best Supporting Actress.

In Contention‘s Kris Tapley has claimed that Christopher Nolan‘s Inception “was the big winner over all [due to] taking four awards including Best Original Screenplay.” That’s actually bullshit — an original screenplay award plus three tech awards (Best Cinematography, Best Art Direction and Best Score) amounts to four wins, but it’s the big-gun categories that matter. If anything, Inception‘s D.C.-area honors point to a likelihood that people are generally viewing it as an original, technically dazzling film that didn’t quite deliver where it really counts. If you want to be really blunt about, these awards are actually an indication that Inception is pretty much finished as a Best Picture contender. If you admire but don’t really love a film, shower it with below-the-line awards.

A majority of the D.C.-area critics choosing Jennifer Lawrence‘s performance over Natalie Portman‘s in Black Swan may be a bellwether in itself. As Lawrence’s character is steady and steely, Portman’s is frenzied and anguished. There’s no question that Portman delivers more of a knockout perf, and yet Lawrence’s brave determination won the day.

[The above Social Network promo is a new 60-second TV spot that Sony ran last night during Leslie Stahl‘s 60 Minutes interview with Mark Zuckerberg.)

Scott Feinberg reported earlier today that an 11.28 “Vulture” article by Claude Brodesser-Akner has ignited the beginnings of what feels like a suspiciously-timed smear campaign against The King’s Speech. It basically has to do with an eight-year-old Guardian article about Hitler-kowtowing on the part of Colin Firth‘s King George character.

It suggests not so much an anti-Semitic attitude on George’s part as an indifference to the plight of European Jewry at the start of World War II. Maybe so, but things weren’t as cut and dried as they seem from today’s perspective.

Two days ago Feinberg received a letter from “an Academy member” who claimed “there are a LOT of us who won’t vote for King’s Speech” due to the following Brodesser-Akner passage:

“Seeing as Speech is Oscar bait in extremis, this blogger feels morally compelled to note that while the film largely glosses over the Nazi-sympathizing past of the tongue-tied monarch (Colin Firth) and deals with his relationship to an Aussie-born speech therapist (Geoffrey Rush), when it came to actively working to stymie Jews fleeing Hitler’s Germany, George actually communicated quite eloquently.”

Brodesser-Akner was referring to an April ’02 Guardian piece by Ben Summerskill called “MPs Want Quick Release of Queen Mother’s Papers.” It includes the following reference to a public domain document:

“In the spring of 1939 George VI instructed his private secretary to write to Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax. Having learnt that ‘a number of Jewish refugees from different countries were surreptitiously getting into [British] Palestine’, the King was ‘glad to think that steps are being taken to prevent these people leaving their country of origin.’ Halifax’s office telegraphed Britain’s ambassador in Berlin asking him to encourage the German government ‘to check the unauthorized emigration’ of Jews.”

How commonly known in 1939 was the Third Reich’s plans to exterminate European Jews? My understanding is that some of pertinent facts were conveyed to President Franklin D. Roosevelt (and presumably other heads of state) in the early ’40s, but who knew for sure in 1939?

Here’s another wrinkle, which is also contained in Summerskill’s article:

“Support for appeasement of Hitler was common among the British establishment during the 1930s,” he wqrites. “Conservative MPs who publicly opposed the policy, such as Winston Churchill, were threatened with de-selection.

“The historian Andrew Roberts believes that Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain‘s appeasement policy ‘commended itself to the royal family on a number of levels. It was, correctly, considered axiomatic that another war would spell doom for the British Empire.'”

In other words, support for Hitler among the British establishment in the late ’30s was the reigning herd instinct among the tepid and the cautious. Now, what other herd instincts that led to massive disasters can we think of? How about U.S. Congressional support for the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which led to the Vietnam War and was based on total bullshit? Or support by the vast majority of U.S. Senators and Congressmen for invading Iraq in ’03 based on the belief that Saddam Hussein was harboring weapons of mass destruction?

That said, this alleged-Nazi-sympathizer thing could — let’s face it — hurt The King’s Speech among older Hollywood Jews if it’s not quickly turned around. I always thought it was the former King Edward (played by Guy Pearce in the film) who was the alleged Nazi sympathizer, not Bertie.

Myself and a group of six or seven sat down with Marrekech Film Festival jury chief John Malkovich late this afternoon at La Mamounia Hotel, which has to be the swankiest and most super-deluxe hotel in all of Marrakech. Malkovich seems so cool, so Zen, so quietly thoughtful. There’s no sense of urgency in the man — everything about him is measured and settled. Is he pretending, hiding? Not so you’d notice.

John Malkovich in one of the Riyahd bungalows at La Moumania Hotel — Saturday, 12.4, 6:15 pm.

He pulled out a Marlboro Light, tore off the filter, delayed as he talked a bit, and then lit it. (Marrakech has no indoor smoking bans.) And Malkovich, let me tell you, knows how to smoke with elegance and style, like Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past.

He mentioned his fashion line, technobohemian, which is available in a few stores in Europe and a few in the States. The New York outlet is Blue Tree (1283 Madison Ave), and the Los Angeles outlet is Church (7277 Santa Monica Blvd.).

I asked if the deflated indie-film economy has led to actors such as himself doing more paycheck roles vs. roles in quality fare, and Malkovich just shrugged out an answer that seemed honest and matter-of-fact and…whatever, that’s how I play baseball. Listen to the

WMA file to hear it. (I tried converting to mp3 but something wasn’t working.)

It was gently sprinkling as I waited for the interview to start. Hundreds of tiny droplets on the perfect blue pool water. The rosey terra cotta walls and dark gray clouds went well together. And then the rain stopped.

Satuday, 12.4, 5:25 pm.