Marshall Fine admires Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman‘s Howl (Oscilloscope, 9.24) , which “is about many more things than just a poem,” he writes. “But if you boil it down to its essence, it’s a movie about a poet and his creation – about the writing and transmission of a work of poetry. And unlike last year’s overrated Bright Star, this one is actually interesting.

“Howl was originally meant to be a documentary. But the writer-directors (who also did The Times of Harvey Milk and The Celluloid Closet) decided instead to create an impressionistic movie about a transcendent and transitional moment in popular culture: the writing and publication of Allen Ginsberg‘s ‘Howl,” a landmark 1956 epic poem that begins with ‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness…’

“While I admired and enjoyed this film, I will also honestly say that it’s not an audience movie. It is impressionistic and hallucinatory, dealing with obscure figures out of literary history – obscure, at least, to anyone who is not a fan of or acquainted with the Beat movement of the 1950s.”

May I interject a thought at this juncture? Howl is an audience movie — it’s very intriguing and friendly and enlightening every step of the way — as long as the audience is not composed of popcorn-muching morons with shaved heads who wear gold chains and cutoffs and basketball sneakers with thick white athletic socks.

Here’s what I said in a 1.21.10 piece filed during the Sundance Film Festival:

Howl is “an indie, artsy, half-animated dream-cream movie that’s basically an instructional primer for the uninitiated about what a wonderfully seminal and influential poem Allen Ginsberg’s Howl was and is.

“It’s brisk, condensed, in some ways florid, engaging, intellectually alert and stimulating. You know what this thing is? It’s a gay Richard Linklater movie, only deeper and more trippy. It’s an half-animated exploration thing that contains scenes of actors reading and ‘being,’ but in no way is this a movie that plays like a movie. It’s something else, and that’s a good thing for me.

“Howl is a ‘small’ film, but it’s rather wonderful and joyful in the particulars.

“Howl is not a narrative feature — it’s a near-documentary that says ‘stop what you’re doing and consider what a cool poem ‘Howl’ was…in fact, let us take you through the whole thing and show and tell you how cool and illuminating it is.” It uses Waltz With Bashir-like animation to illuminate what ‘Howl’ was in Ginsberg’s head when he wrote it, and what the poem’s more sensitive readers might have seen in their heads when they first read it.

“James Franco plays Ginsberg quite fully, particularly and well — he gets the slurring speech patterns and pours a mean cup of tea as he’s explaining a point to a journalist — but Franco, good as he is, is subordinate to (or should I say in harmony with?) the basic ambition of the film, which is to inform, instruct, awaken, turn on.

“For me, Ian McKellen‘s ‘Acting Shakespeare’ was a somewhat similar experience. An accomplished British actor explaining and double-defining the joy and transcendent pleasure of performing, feeling and really knowing deep down what Shakespeare’s poetry really means, and has meant to him all his life.”

The Envelope/Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil, TheWrap‘s Steve Pond and Rope of Silicon‘s Brad Brevet have all written that as of right now (i.e., without anyone having seen True Grit and The Fighter, and not enough people having seen Made in Dagenham and The Way Back), the Best Picture race has boiled down to a choice between The Social Network and The King’s Speech.

May I say that Brevet gets it exactly wrong when (a) he calls The Social Network “a good film but not the masterpiece [or the] front runner [that] so many others are painting it as” while (b) describing Tom Hooper‘s The King’s Speech as “the one film that’s right up the Academy’s alley” (okay, he’s not wrong when it comes to the over-50 set) and “a great film.” I’m sorry, but no, no, respectfully no.

The King’s Speech is a very good, extremely well-made film (regal, Britishy, traditional minded, emotionally satisfying) but not a great one, and The Social Network (with Black Swan nipping at its heels) is as hugely satisfying and masterpiece-level as anything of its type (a blending of the best rat-a-tat instincts of Howard Hawks and Paddy Chayefsky for the telling of a seminal generation tale) could possibly get.

O’Neil writes that “at this point, it sure looks like we have solid Oscar front-runners for Best Picture (The Social Network), Best Actor (Colin Firth, The King’s Speech) and Best actress (Natalie Portman, Black Swan). It’s very possible that all three could trot across the derby finish line without tripping en route.”

Pond says “there’s still room for lots of movement, for favorites to fade and dark horses to come out of nowhere,” but basically acknowledges that The Social Network and The King’s Speech are the main combatants, and that Black Swan and 127 Hours have “stirred up passions” — i.e., Oscar season journo-speak for “close behind but not quite the leaders of the pack.”

I like the way Pond sizes up the chances of Network vs. Speech:

King strengths: “Plays exceptionally well for a mainstream audience, as witnessed by its People’s Choice Award at Toronto. It’s set in the days before World War II, a conflict long beloved by [older] Oscar voters. It’ll get support from the actors branch, since it’s a film that soars on the strength of performances from Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush and Helena Bonham Carter. And it’s daring enough, in a quiet way, to not turn off the younger members.

King weaknesses: “Subject matter may be a bit dry to get a major boxoffice boost. If the voters are looking for something adventurous (No Country for Old Men, Slumdog Millionaire), this might seem a bit old-fashioned. It could fall into the ‘it’s a performance movie’ ghetto. But most of all, nobody wants to be the frontrunner this far out – least of all Harvey Weinstein, who perfected the art of slipping into the race late in the game.

Social Network strengths: ” Smart and sharp and solid. A mainstream move from a director, David Fincher, who is well-admired but has usually been a bit too risky for the Academy’s tastes. It captures the tenor of its time, and goes beyond its ostensible subject – the creation of Facebook, and the lawsuits that ensued – to be about something more universal: the quest for connection, whether that’s in person or online.

Social Network weaknesses: “Does it make enough of an emotional connection? Perhaps not. The movie ends in a nicely understated manner, with a tinge of regret rather than any big Lessons Learned – but sublety and understatement is hardly the way to win votes of the people who named Crash Best Picture.”

70% of me hates this damn photo. The photographer’s timing was immaculate in that he caught me licking my lips at just the right moment, making it look like I’m scowling at the entire world and all of its peoples and faiths and creeds. But the capturing of the inside of the Grand Theatre Lumiere, the biggest inside the Cannes Palais, is better than anything I’ve ever gotten myself.

Taken last May by Indiewire’s Todd McCarthy inside Grand Theatre Lumiere inside the Cannes Palais, prior to one of the big screenings.

Indiewire‘s Eugene Hernandez has flown the coop for a gig as director of digital strategy with the Film Society of Lincoln Center — a marketing job that will presumably pay him a higher salary than he made at Indiewire, and which will open the door to all kinds of blue-chip jobs in the future. Hernandez, a man of the pavement whose basic attitude is that of an apartment-dweller (and I mean that in the best sense), has been invited to hang with the folks on the hill — the swells.

2:26 pm Update: Hernandez has told Deadline‘s Michael Fleming “that he’ll keep the blog he writes for Indiewire and will help them find a new editor.” He’ll begin the Film Society of Lincoln Center job on 11.1.

A reaction piece by Indiewire columnist Anne Thompson conveys mixed feelings — she feels as if she’s been left high and dry by Hernandez, but that things are still cool and full-speed-ahead with SnagFilms CEO Rick Allen (who purchased Indiewire operation two or three years ago) and the rest of the Indiewire team and…whatever, we be cool.

Hernandez has written a piece called “This Is Not Goodbye.” Actually, it is, Eugene — it is goodbye and good luck and “see ya ’round the campus.” Hanging around “over the next few weeks during the transition” and then “cheering loudly from the sidelines” is analagous to someone saying to a business acquaintance while standing at the corners of Houston and Broadway, “Jesus, we haven’t talked in so long…we should really do lunch!”

David Robb writes a 9.22 Hollywood Reporter piece about how Stanley Kramer‘s Inherit the Wind, a film about rural fundamentalism vs. educated and open-minded urbanism, is still relevant today and doesn’t once mention the words “Teabagger” or “Palinism”? And makes a statement that this 1960 film “is to my mind the quintessential parable about McCarthyism”?

All Robb manages to say about today’s political theatre is that “the arguments that creationists make in [Inherit the Wind] haven’t gone away — they’ve only gotten dumber and shriller.” Better to heed Spencer Tracy‘s words in the film: “Fanaticism and ignorance is forever busy and needs feeding, and soon with banners flying and drums beating we’ll be marching backwards.”

The just-announced decision by Facebook honcho Mark Zuckerberg to donate up to $100 million to the Newark, New Jersey school system has nothing to do with countering the “asshole” image of Zuckerberg that The Social Network advances…right? The bequeathment will arrive in the form of “Facebook’s closely held stock,” accordign to a 9.23 Wall Street Journal story by Barbara Martinez and Geoffrey A. Fowler.

There’s a mild irony in the fact that awareness is growing in journalistic circles and elsewhere that Zuckerberg’s assholery (as depicted in the film) is nowhere near as acute as Aaron Sorkin‘s script suggests. Zuckerberg is withdrawn and socially awkward, but he reportedly has a longtime girlfriend. Eduardo Severin ‘s financial moves on behalf of nascent Facebook in the early stages were questionable and he did need to be cut loose.

A putrid right-wing stink filled my den this morning when this ad played on MSNBC. It’s so infected with the Big Lie virus (i.e., indifferent to the fact that Bush-era deregulation and the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan created catastrophic conditions before Obama took over) that it creates a kind of instant soul-cancer effect.

It’s obviously aimed at stoking ignorant Teabaggers, but is really about Republican slime wanting to play more golf and kick back with screwdrivers inside their McMansions and cruise like they used to during the Dubya years. Not to mention their bedrock concurrent fears that the reign of the exclusive white-male political club is no longer a locked-down arrangement.

No organization claims responsibility for creating this ad and no contact information is supplied at the end. The Fair Campaign Practices Act prohibits this kind of thing, no? FCPA rules state that if an ad is political, “a disclosure statement must include (1) the words ‘political advertising’ or a recognizable abbreviation such as ‘pol. adv.’; and (2) the full name of one of the following: (a) the person who paid for the political advertising; (b) the political committee authorizing the political advertising; or (c) the candidate or specific-purpose committee supporting the candidate, if the political advertising is authorized by the candidate.”

A 9.23 Washington Post op-ed piece by White House adviser David Axelrod warns about the right-wing corporate shadow forces that are paying for these ads and financing the anti-Obama campaign.

MSNBC should be ashamed of itself.

The unanswered question about the secret Wachowski Bros. project known as Cobalt Neural 9 is whether or not there will be any girl-on-girl action. To me a Wachowski Bros. movie isn’t a Wachowski Bros. movie without this element. The Iraqi woman whom Butch-the-marine falls in love with a hot Iraqi pre-op shemale…wait, pre-op or post-op? And he/she has a girlfriend. That’s one way to approach it.

Deadline‘s Pete Hammond has run three responses from possibly vested viewers about Mel Gibson‘s performance in Jodie Foster‘s The Beaver. They all said Gibson is “extraordinary,” he reports. One person said that Gibson “gives an incredible performance…if you can forget what happened, and I didn’t have tabloid images racing through my mind watching him, it’s really something…I still don’t want to be his friend but he’s great in this.” Another says, “I don’t bullshit about these things…he’s amazing.”

GQ has an excellent recollection piece about the making of Martin Scorsese‘s Goodfellas, which opened 20 years and three days ago (on 9.19.90).

Martin Scorsese (director; co-writer): “I’d seen Ray Liotta in Something Wild, Jonathan Demme‘s film; I really liked him. And then I met him. I was walking across the lobby of the hotel on the Lido that houses the Venice Film Festival, and I was there with The Last Temptation of Christ. I had a lot of bodyguards around me. Ray approached me in the lobby and the bodyguards moved toward him, and he had an interesting way of reacting, which was he held his ground, but made them understand he was no threat. I liked his behavior at that moment, and I saw, Oh, he understands that kind of situation. That’s something you wouldn’t have to explain to him.”

Liotta: “I think I was the first person that Marty met, but it took maybe a year. It was a very, very long process, not knowing anything and really wanting to do this. I was new. I’d only done three movies at the time. All I heard was that the studio wanted somebody else — ‘What about this?’ ‘What about Eddie Murphy?’

Winkler: “Marty wanted Ray very badly. Frankly I thought we could do a lot better, and I kept putting him off saying, ‘Let’s keep looking.’ And then me and my wife were having dinner one night in a restaurant down in Venice, California, and lo and behold, Ray Liotta came over to me. He was in the same restaurant, quite by coincidence, and he asked if he could come talk to me.”

Liotta: “I just went up and said that I really, really wanted to do the movie.”

Winkler: “We went outside, he said, ‘Look, I know you don’t want me for it but I…,’ and he really sold me on the role right that evening. I called Marty the next morning and I said, ‘I see what you mean.'”

The piece was reported by Sarah Goldstein, Alex Pappademas, Nathaniel Penn and Christopher Swetala, and compiled by Penn.