I missed Aaron Schneider‘s Get Low in Toronto but finally saw it this morning. It’s a first-rate backwoods American drama with a touch of whimsy. Superbly acted by Robert Duvall , Bill Murray, Lucas Black, Sissy Spacek and Bill Cobbs. An eloquent, plain-spoken, true-heart thing about values, friendships, backstories and buried business. My next film, Gaspar Noe‘s Enter The Void, starts in two minutes. Later….

IFC.com’s Stephen Saito recently reported on last Saturday’s Martin Scorsese/LACMA event. Somone asked where Scorsese stood on film grain, and he might as well have said, “Uhm, I kind of get where Jeffrey Wells is coming from on this issue and he’s not altogether wrong. The grain monks have staked out a position that is perhaps a little too purist, too extreme,”

Saito recorded most of the conversation and has sent the full quote from Scorsese on film grain. Read it and weep, residents of the Abbey of St. Martin! If Scorsese isn’t with you, you’re finished.

“I think it’s an interesting point,” Scorsese began. “Some of the grain, in certain cases, I think it’s been…like Jack Cardiff, who when he was still alive was able to comment of course on all the restorations of Black Narcissus and all the other films begin made and I think in certain films in certain sections, they would’ve liked it better if the grain was less. They would’ve liked it better if the dissolves…the internegatives didn’t look like dupes. And we just have to settle. They had to settle.

”And I think to a certain extent, they would’ve liked it cleaner. Don’t forget too that the instance of three-strip Technicolor, look at that…they did a few years ago, they had a color film at the Academy and they showed a few seconds of Robin Hood digitally restored and I do know…I really believe that the cinematographer would’ve preferred to have it cleaner at the time. There’s no doubt.

“I happen to like grain because I’m used to seeing it, but when I see it cleaned up, it’s a whole other experience. I talked about the grain, for example, we were talking about lusting after those Red Shoes 16mm prints — even with the grain, it didn’t matter. But to see it in a new form, I think that’s what the filmmakers really would’ve preferred in most cases, unless it was a stylistic choice to go with grain.”

Variety‘s Todd MCarthy has described Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman‘s Howl as “an admirable if fundamentally academic exploration of the origins, impact, meaning and legacy of Allen Ginsberg‘s titular landmark poem, it is also an intriguing hybrid of documentary, narrative and animated filmmaking, one that needed to burst through the constraints of its conceptual origins as a docu to express everything on its mind.

“That said, how many remotely commercial films have ever had the nerve to build themselves around core sequences consisting of long swaths of poetry being read to eager listeners, whose rapturous reactions are recorded in enthusiastic detail? Even if the shock that Ginsberg’s bluntly sexual and provocative words carried then can’t possibly be felt the same way 55 years later, anyone who revels in the pure pleasure of the spoken word will receive rare gratification here.”

And Marshall Fine has called it “an imaginative and thoughtful work, one that illuminates a fascinating moment of cultural history and one of America’s great writers. Whether it will appeal to a mass audience — or even an arthouse crowd — is another question altogether. After all, before the screening last night, the directors thanked their producers for allowing them to make ‘a movie about a poem.’ Which is what they’ve done.”

I spoke to director Bryan Singer at last night’s cool but over-crowded Howl party, and he told me about a chance meeting and a very long talk he had with ex-president George W. Bush on a jet back from South Korea last October. They talked for roughly six hours (with a nap break in-between), and literally about “everything.” Singer says he’s posted an account of it on his Facebook page along with a photo or two, but I haven’t been verified.

Singer was on his way back from a visit to the Pusan International Film Festival. Bush, who’d apparently given some kind of speech-for-hire in Seoul or wherever, began the conversation by asking Bryan what he did and so on. I couldn’t hear every word due to the incredible noise factor at the party, but I think I heard that Bush told Singer he was an X-Men fan, and that he and Bush ’41 had watched one of the films together.

In a 1.20 Huffington Post-ing, psychologist, neuroscientist and Emory University professor Drew Western has explained the Barack Obama problem — his stunning failure to show a semblance of balls in his dealings with Republicans — clearly and concisely,

“It is a truly remarkable feat, in just one year’s time, to turn the fear and anger voters felt in 2006 and 2008 at a Republican Party that had destroyed the economy, redistributed massive amounts of wealth from the middle class to the richest of the rich and the biggest of big businesses, and waged a trillion-dollar war in the wrong country, into populist rage at whatever Democrat voters can cast their ballot against.

“All of this was completely predictable. And it was predicted. I wrote about it for the first time here on the sixth day of Obama’s presidency, and many of us have written about it in the intervening year.

“The President’s steadfast refusal to acknowledge that we have a two-party system, his insistence on making destructive concessions to the same party voters he had sent packing twice in a row in the name of ‘bipartisanship,’ and his refusal ever to utter the words ‘I am a Democrat’ and to articulate what that means, are not among his virtues. We have competing ideas in a democracy — and hence competing parties — for a reason. To paper them over and pretend they do not exist, particularly when the ideology of one of the parties has proven so devastating to the lives of everyday Americans, is not a virtue. It is an abdication of responsibility.

“What happens if you refuse to lay the blame for the destruction of our economy on anyone — particularly the party, leaders, and ideology that were in power for the last 8 years and were responsible for it? What happens if you fail to ‘brand’ what has happened as the Bush Depression or the Republican Depression or the natural result of the ideology of unregulated greed, the way FDR branded the Great Depression as Hoover’s Depression and created a Democratic majority for 50 years and a new vision of what effective government can do? What happens when you fail to offer and continually reinforce a narrative about what has happened, who caused it, and how you’re going to fix it that Americans understand, that makes them angry, that makes them hopeful, and that makes them committed to you and your policies during the tough times that will inevitably lie ahead?

“The answer was obvious a year ago, and it is even more obvious today: Voters will come to blame you for not having solved a problem you didn’t create, and you will allow the other side to create an alternative narrative for what’s happened (government spending, deficits, big government, socialism) that will stick. And it will particularly stick if you make no efforts to prevent it from starting or sticking.”

A presentation of a non-contentious, live-and-let-live relationship between Up In The Air director-cowriter Jason Reitman and screenwriter Sheldon Turner will be given at the WGA theatre on Sunday, 1.24, following a 2 pm screening of the film. It would be great if someone attending could send either video- or audio-recorded portions, or at least send along a selective stenographic record of their statements.

I noticed last night that some people don’t have the elocution skills to say Howl properly. You have to really use your mouth and your tongue and get that “owl” sound going. You have to say “ow!” as in “damn, that hurts!” and then throw in a strong rolling “l.” Two or three people I spoke to prior to last night’s Eccles screening were calling it “Hal,” as in HAL 9000 computer. One of them was a publicist. I leaned forward and went “come again?” and he said, “You know…Hal? The movie you’re about to go see?”

Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Freidman‘s Howl, which premiered tonight at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, isn’t half bad. Why did I just say that? It’s better than that — it’s 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.

I’ve read Howl one a half times, but only now do I feel I really know it.

I did nothing this afternoon except grab a free lunch at Frontier, the daring-indie-cinema space on Main Street. And then walk across the street to the Egyptian for the annual festival-launch press conference, this time (and for the first time) with John Cooper paired with festival founder Robert Redford. And then I walked down to Java Cow to write and upload. There I met a fetching blonde who smiled and started the conversation and bought me a coffee — delightful. The Java Cow wifi wasn’t fast enough to handle my YouTube uploads, but I took it like a man.

Sundance Film Festival director John Cooper, founder Robert Redford — Thursday, 1.21, 2:15 pm.

Bilal’s Stand director-writer Sultan Sharrief, who gave me a short lift today from the Yarrow to downtown. Sundance programmer Shari Frillot says his film, filled with heart and authenticity, hails a new voice American independent cinema.” in

Veteran indie publicist Linda Brown (center); colleagues/employees Elizabeth Glenn (l.), Nicole Menconi (r.) during today’s press luncheon at Frontier on Main Street.

Pepperminta director Pipilotti Rist during Frontier press luncheon.

Lobby of Park City Marriott, taken from new “press lounge” balcony, which is basically a narrow space with some tables and chairs and eats without much of an opportunity to “lounge.” That’s Variety critic Todd McCarthy with the baseball cap; standing to McCarthy’s right is critic Harlan Jacobson.

Howl co-directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman have announced their next feature — a drama about the late oral-sex queen and subsequent feminist and antiporn activist Linda Lovelace, based on a script by W. Merritt Johnson.

Lovelace is “a story with great dramatic and psychological dimensions,” said Friedman. “It’s also set against a backdrop of shifting sexual mores, which should be a lot of fun to dig into.”

Producers Laura Rister at Untitled Entertainment, Jim Young at Animus Films and Heidi Jo Markel at Eclectic Pictures are in “active negotiations” with Nu Image to finance the project. Johnson will executive produce.