I was all jazzed about this until I realized it was posted 10 months ago. And then my heart sank and the devaluation kicked in. Except I never saw it or ran it so…why not?

With the five-screen TIFF Bell Lightbox finally completed, the entire Toronto Film Festival is moving downtown this year. I don’t know to what extent the old Bay-Bloor haunts and hotels will be included, if at all, but I know that press and industry screenings at the Varsity 8 are total history. They’ll now be held at the Scotiabank theatre on John and Richmond Streets, just south of Queen.

A handful of P & I screenings will also take place at the NFB Mediatheque, I’m told, and perhaps a few will be held at the Bell Lightbox, which is four blocks south of the Scotiabank at the corner of King and John. So that’ll be it — Scotiabank and Lightbox, Scotiabank and Lightbox, Scotiabank and Lightbox. Plus the Elgin and the other venues around town (AMC Yonge-Dundas plex, Ryerson, Roy Thomson Hall, Cumberland Cinemas, etc.) But mainly Scotia-Lightbox, Scotia-Lightbox, Scotia-Lightbox.

Just forget the whole Yorkville scene, for the most part. (Right?) Those Starbucks I used to visit and file from — out. All those snazzy hotels and nice bars and beautiful Yorkville women and swell Yorkville restaurants — deep-sixed for the most part. Fewer trees and shade. Will the festival still be using the Cumberland Cinemas, or is that too far out of the downtown loop? Same black squirrels, of course.

And I’m going to have to find a place to stay downtown instead of focusing on something in the Yorkville area. I haven’t even begun to poke around.

The Bell Lightbox occupies “an entire city block in the heart of Toronto’s media and entertainment district,” according to the site, but all it has are five lousy screens with the biggest one (theatre #1) containing about 550 seats? A friend tells me the TIFF fathers “want the Lightbox to be like the Palais in Cannes.” I don’t know how that would work. The Grand Lumiere and the Salle Debussy are much, much bigger than the biggest Lightbox theatre, which will be about the same size at the Varsity 8.

I haven’t heard anything about any press centers with deskspace, wifi and flatscreens for filing reviews. The great thing about Cannes is being able to run right out of the Grand Lumiere and into the Orange press cafe (or into the other press room with all the flatscreens). Will there be a similar-type wifi facility adjacent to or within the Scotiabank or Bell Lightbox? I’ve asked the TIFF press reps — we’ll see what they say.

It sorta kinda sounds to me as if the Bell Lightbox isn’t really the festival’s new home or ground zero as much as a swanky new venue being added to the ones already being used, and that calling it TIFF’s new “home” certainly doesn’t make it the Grand Palais by any stretch. Unless, of course, the Bell Lightbox is offering a roomy wifi center for the press with lots of deskspace and chairs and free cappucino and water — that’s a different story. If they do that, all is well.

This Eat Pray Love trailer is slightly different than the last one (which surfaced in mid June). More dialogue. No patronizing mom. Billy Crudup gone. Two shots of perfect pasta dishes. Wise-man dialogue from Richard Jenkins, playing some kind of bearded Zen master. Same basic emphasis on relationships vs. spirituality. Same hip travelogue vibe.

We see James Franco calling Julia Roberts‘ “my queen” as he hands over folded “delicates” in a laundromat. There’s a bit more dialogue from Javier Bardem doing his charming Latin hound routine. There’s an excellent exchange in which an existentially depleted Roberts asks Viola Davis what she’s having for lunch and Davis goes “I don’t know, a salad” and Roberts goes “exactly!”

The copy line says “risk everything.” If you’ve got the money to travel for a year (and having travelled around and knowing what stuff costs over there, that’s a lot of fucking money — trust me), how much of a risk game can you be playing? She isn’t risking shit. She’s enjoying what maybe one-half of 1% of American women can afford to even think about, much less do.

Rolling Stone‘s website has posted two clips from Vikram Jayanti‘s The Agony & The Ecstasy of Phil Spector. Clip #2 — an explanation by Spector of how his crazy-ass Jewfro came about — is especially entertaining. I’d watched it smiling a couple of times on disc at my home, appreciative but silent, but when I saw this portion at a Film Forum showing last Thursday, people were laughing uproariously.

After posting the embed codes I discovered that the videos automatically launch. The hell with that. I posted one of them on the jump page.

From Daniel Kreps‘ Jayanti interview piece:

“Spector is known as a notorious recluse who avoids the press, but Jayanti tells RS plans to interview Spector in his mansion — the scene of the murder — came together in mere days. ‘The few things he’s done in public with a camera on, he was doing a schtick. I didn’t want that, I wanted to have real people and get very direct and close,’ Jayanti says.

“Ultimately, Jayanti and BBC Arena simply FedEx-ed a one-page letter to Spector’s mansion, asking for permission to speak to him. ‘It said, ‘Dear Mr. Spector, I make films about larger-than-life characters, often geniuses, at a moment of tremendous stress in their lives.’ And he wrote back two days later with an e-mail, and he said, ‘You sound like an interesting person, I know you’re a good filmmaker, come to the castle.’

“Jayanti and his crew planned to spend five days interviewing Spector on camera. Their first session lasted three-and-a-half hours, covering topics like the birth of the Wall of Sound, Spector’s tough childhood, and anecdotes of his time with John Lennon. But that would be the last time the crew got Phil on camera.

“In the days that followed, Spector’s legal team stormed the mansion in preparation of the first trial, which ended in a hung jury, and Spector kept delaying the remaining interviews. Finally, a judge’s gag order prevented Spector from speaking to Jayanti until the conclusion of the trial.

“Jayanti says he hopes his doc is a ‘Wall of Film’ that mirrors Spector’s own layered and revolutionary ‘Wall of Sound’ technique: At its most intense moments, the movie creates a gripping harmony of sound and images by overlapping Spector’s rare interview footage and scenes from the first murder trial with the complete recordings of 21 of Spector’s most beloved songs and critical text on each track by biographer Mick Brown, who wrote Tearing Down the Wall.

“‘I felt it was crucial to get the audience to listen really hard to the music, with new ears…as if they hadn’t heard it before. And also with Phil describing how he produces them, I wanted them to be able to experience the entire production as Phil intended it, which meant from beginning to end. There’s so much darkness underlying those happy, boppy, teenage-yearning songs,’ Jayanti says.

“In addition to providing interviews, Spector also allowed Jayanti to use his music free of charge in the film, and although no written contract on that point was ever produced, the laws of fair use ensured The Agony and Ecstasy could use Spector’s music legally and liberally.

“Spector vividly recalls his lifetime in music, but many of his memories are exaggerated reinterpretations of his past. The producer is infamous for overstating his role in some of his greatest works, from his contributions to Let It Be to allegations he added co-writing credits to songs he had no hand in crafting.

“He says in the film ‘my father blew his head off’ and he was five or six at the time. In fact, his father gassed himself with a hose in the garage, and Phil was nine or 10 at the time,’ Jayanti says. ‘People say to me, ‘Why didn’t you correct him at all these misstatements?’ I keep saying, that’s not my interest. I wanted to see what happens if I let Phil be Phil, and I think the result was I got a very accurate psychological profile, a very intimate one.’

“In the end, The Agony & the Ecstasy of Phil Spector is a rise-and-fall tale fitting of one of the greatest and [most] innovative producers of all time.

“The film amply demonstrates the megalomania, and grandiosity and ego but at the same time, inside each of those things there’s a kernel of quite insightful truth,’ Jayanti says. ‘He did do an extraordinary thing — he was [there at] the birth of the revolution and he was a big, big part of it. Although he overstates it a great deal, that’s because of the quirks of his personality.

“‘I want the film to be part of the discourse of in the future how Phil is viewed. Not just a footnote of a producer who went to jail for murder, but also as a person who gave a soundtrack to a generation.'”

Over the last three days (on 7.2 and 7.4), Michelle Blaine, former personal assistant to Phil Spector and webmaster of wallofguilt.com, has put up two videos of Spector talking about the Lana Clarkson murder case. They were recorded by Blaine in ’05, and portions were shown on Inside Edition in May of ’07.

The video clips are fascinating — anyone who’s seen Vikram Jayanti’s The Agony & the Ecstasy of Phil Spector is obliged to watch — but the site itself is a trip also.

Blaine captured a slightly different Spector than the one who appears in Jayanti’s film. He discusses several particulars about the case, for one thing, which Jayanti wasn’t interested in pursuing. And with a tiny bit more swagger and sacrcasm in his voice.

Michelle, whose IMDB bio doesn’t mention her having worked for Spector, is obviously of the firm opinion that he’s guilty of having shot Clarkson. Her relationship with Spector ended contentiously and acrimoniously, and she’s quite obviously resentful of Rachelle Spector, Spector’s much younger blonde wife, having moved in on Michelle’s turf and engineered her dismissal.

Consider, incidentally, Spector’s loop-dee-loop signature on the check for $100,000 that he shows to the camera.

It’s very nice to be a friend of Warner Bros. again after being placed on their shit list in late ’07. But I’m not really “in” with them in an In Like Flint sense. In their eyes I’m sort of in a halfway house — on a kind of probationary status — in which I get to see their films but fairly late in the game. Which is basically what’s now happening with Chris Nolan‘s Inception (Warner Bros., 7.16).

Most of your civilized upscale journalists (i.e., the people in the know & in the glow) have already seen Inception. The junket crowd caught it prior to last weekend. And then the night before last (i.e., Friday, 7.3) the L.A. Cool Kidz attended a special L.A. Cool Kidz screening with a notification that they could review Inception as of Monday at 3 pm, Pacific. So that’s when the first wave of reviews will hit the beach. Read, highlight, copy, paste.

When does the New York contingent get to weigh in? Well, a bit later. Some New York junket participants saw it here before the late June junket, but the first New York Cool Kidz screening won’t happen until 7.6 at 2 pm, or a full day after the first reviews from the Los Angeles Cool Kidz will break. So the early-bird New Yorkers are behind the eight ball going in.

As things now stand, Hollywood Elsewhere will have to wait for a full week after that. The Big Reveal will be at an all-media screening on Tuesday, July 13th, or three days before Inception opens. That will be a full day after the regional screenings happen on 7.12. So basically I’m at the tail end of the line. I’m not kvetching — I’m just saying how it is.

What’s the word? Inception is a very well done film that you’ll have to stay focused on like a laser beam and keep up with like an A student in advanced Algebra class on Ritalin, or you’re dead. 150 minutes, edge of your seat…focus, focus, focus. No bathroom or popcorn breaks. If you’re a Nolan head or a non-Nolan head, this is a movie you’ll need to figure out like a whiz kid messing with a Rubik’s Cube. The basic drill is you’ll need to see it twice. The first time to get wet and figure out some of the card play, and the second time to go in with an advanced knowledge base and then really get into it.

Speaking of Mike Nichols‘ Silkwood, I recently read a story about Cher going to see the film’s trailer at a theatre in Westwood (which would have been sometime in the fall of ’83) and feeling crushed when the audience laughed upon realizing that she was a costar. She called up Nichols in tears and he said “don’t sweat it, hang in there…it’ll all change when they see the film.” And it did. Two years later she did Mask, and then she won her Oscar for Moonstruck in ’87.

I’m trying to think of another professional slumper or go-alonger who was looking to boot things up, and who got lucky by landing a role in an above-average film, and then turned in an acclaimed performance. Right now I can only think of only two — Frank Sinatra and Greg Kinnear.

Sinatra’s turn as Pvt. Maggio in From Here to Eternity saved his life. His singing career had been dwindling since the late ’40s, and by the time he made Eternity in ’52 he was regarded as being all but over. Kinnear was been a lightweight actor who was mainly known for hosting E’s Talk Soup (’91 to ’95) and NBC’s Later (’95 to ’96). He finally broke into the serious-actor ranks by playing “Simon the fag” (i.e., in the parlance of Jack Nicholson ‘s character) in James L. Brooks‘ As Good As It Gets (’97).

I guess Steve Carell‘s hailed performance as a morose gay uncle in Little Miss Sunshine qualifies. His comedy career had been going great guns since he broke through in Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (’04) but Sunshine gave him serious-actor cred and the option to go the Adam Sandler route — i.e., make one smalish quality-level film every three or four years while mostly cranking out audience-friendly crap. But since Sunshine Carell has done only one other smallish good film — Dan in Real Life.

Who else?

When an actor sitting down is almost eye-level with an actress who’s standing up, and the actress isn’t playing his six year-old daughter and the actor is slumping a tiny bit in order to compensate, you’re talking about a fairly unusual physical dynamic in a movie. You do have to admit that. Perhaps this isn’t even a frame-capture from the film, and therefore a moot point. Directing 101 says to never compose a shot that emphasizes radical physical disparities, and Chris Nolan is no dummy.

Thankfully, Leonardo DiCaprio and Ellen Page play colleagues in Inception and not lovers. (If they had it would have meant a repeat of the bizarre body disparity between Page and Michael Cera, who looked almost Richard Kiel-sized when he stood next to her.) I realize that 6’8″ guys sometimes go out with women who are 5’2″ and who weigh a good deal less (120 or 130 pounds), but it’s still weird to visually consider the idea of two adults being this different in size and yet conjoined in some way, even professionally.

I discussed Page’s size issue ten and 1/2 months ago.

Now that the word is out about a certain upcoming film possibly being too smart for the room, I’m trying to recall which other films have earned this distinction.

Obviously it’s an honorable thing for a mainstream film to be accused of dealing cards that only the A students are going to fully appreciate. Lord knows that most films cater to C and D students on the theory that they cast a wider net.

Critics as a rule don’t like to even acknowledge the existence of “too smart” movies because to do so implies that perhaps they themselves didn’t get it, and that may lead to their editors getting ideas and maybe canning their ass down the road. I’m one of the few critics or columnists to have actually admitted to feeling intellectually challenged by a film. On 3.7.09 I openly stated that I wasn’t smart enough to fully understand Tony Gilroy‘s Duplicity.

All I can say is that the public sure as hell recognizes “too smart for its own good” when it happens, and woebetide the movie that gets painted with this brush.

There are some films, I imagine, that shoot themselves in both feet by being too smart and too hip for the room at the same time, although I can’t think of a good example at the moment. David Fincher‘s Zodiac, one of the greatest films of the last decade, possibly qualifies in this regard. It’s much more common to be described as simply “too hip or the room,” although hearing this about a film makes me want to see it immediately.

Grindhouse was obviously no intellectual puzzle movie, but it was definitely too hip for the room. Michelangelo Antonioni‘s wonderful early-to-mid ’60s hot streak was rooted in the chic allure of being too hip for the room — he was a genius at this. By refusing to tell the audience what happened to the missing girls, Peter Weir ‘s Picnic at Hanging Rock became this sort of film in a very admirable and dazzling way. Michael Haneke is a brilliant fellow, but he’s always out-smarting himself, I feel. Pretty much every Coen Bros. film ever made has been too hip for the room — that’s their badge of honor — but their movies are never confounding. Greenberg was too hip for the room.

But what others besides Zodiac were too intellectually complex and too off on their own aesthetic-attitudinal beam to attract at least a fair-sized audience?

Fred Ward tells a joke — familiar now, not so much then — in this scene from Mike Nichols‘ Silkwood (’83). It starts at the 6:18 mark. I’ve told this joke myself for the last 26 or 27 years, but I can never quite tell it with just the right timing and emphasis. The singer, not the song. I made this same point last December.

I love the way David Lynch says “When you don’t have final cut, you stand to die the death….die the death.” I don’t like that look of solemn de-emotionalized conviction on Catherine Breillat ‘s face. I’m irritated by the gray-white streaks in Agnes Varda‘s dyed red hair (either embrace au natural or do regular salon visits). And it’s great hearing John Sayles say that “New York-area Hispanics do talk loudly but we don’t like to talk about this.” And I love blonde hair.

Which is a way of saying that I watched Great Directors again last night and really enjoyed the leisurely vibe of it. It’s like going to a party on a Sunday afternoon with several fascinating film directors and everyone not being seized with being funny all the time. If there’s one thing more loathsome than various people sitting around a table and feeling the urge to make each other howl with laughter (and obliging in kind when a table-mate makes the effort), I’d like to know what it is.

Yes, I’m kidding about the Sayles quote but I couldn’t resist.