I wrote last night’s riff about Rodrigo Garcia‘s Mother and Child without having seen the final 30 minutes. So I went to see it again today at a 12:30 pm Cumberland press screening and was rather surprised to discover that the last 30 minutes are the weakest part of the film. The plot lurches a couple of times and tone becomes a little too emphatic. The first 95 or so minutes use gradual and subtle shadings; the last 30 minutes use more and more primary colors. I’m not saying it falls apart, but the last act does diminish Mother and Child somewhat.

I was suffering from the very beginning of Todd Solondz‘s Life During Wartime, which screened this morning at 9 am, and there was very little respite until I bolted, which was about 65 minutes in. I’d been seething, scowling, muttering, looking at my watch and asking myself, “Should I do the full suffer and stick it out until the end, or can I escape after an hour or so?”

I left because I’ve never related to Solondz’s more-or-less constant theme — the inner monster in us all will always crawl out and can probably never be restrained — and I find it incredibly boring to sit through another icky-pervy exploration of same.

I left because I’m just about burned out on the plight of a suffering male child molester as a topic of dramatic interest or intrigue. I think male child molesters should have their sexual organs chopped off with a dull axe. Other scenarios hold little interest.

I left because I didn’t believe anything I was hearing — to my ear Solondz’s dialogue is always unnatural and rhetorical — and I didn’t believe any of the actors. To me they were just speaking the dialogue and trying like hell to make it all play realistically, but the odds were too great against them. Solondzworld is a place of constant guilt and venom and nightmares. Do the merciful thing — get out your father’s AK-47 and shoot yourself in the mouth. It’s easier and less complicated that way,.

I left because bitter middle-aged women who wear bad wigs (like Charlotte Rampling‘s character) don’t come over to a man’s table (i.e., one occupied by costar Ciarin Hinds) and start conversing with an unmistakable implication that some sort of erotic coupling is on her mind. It doesn’t happen that way, and it never will happen that way.

And it doesn’t matter if Solondz agrees and wanted this scene to be seen as some kind of arch exercise. The point is that no one can relax and listen and settle in when a scene is bullshit.

I left because the tall and large-boned Allison Janey could never be a sister to the tiny pipsqueak British actress Shirley Henderson — not in a million fucking years.

I left becasue mothers never discuss erotic awakenings with their tweener-aged sons, and because it’s not funny when Solondz tries to make such scene into a form of dry “what if?” comedy. Heh-heh, not really, fuck off.

I left because…all right, I can’t write any more because Neil Jordan‘s Ondine is going to start in 17 minutes.

I’ve just come from the first TIFF screening of Rodrigo Garcia‘s Mother and Child, and if someone picks it up and puts it into NY and LA theatres before 12.31, it’s a Best Picture contender. Because sophisticated filmgoers of a certain age are going to cream over this. All right, don’t trust me…I don’t care. I know what I know and I go to sleep with that every night.

This is a great woman’s film except it isn’t, not really, because it got to me big-time and I generally don’t fall for films aimed at the opposite genre market so go figure. It’s so good and so exactingly and humanistically right that a fair-sized portion of the Julie and Julia audience may reject it because it’s not coarse or common enough.

On top of this Annette Bening, who gives what I feel is possibly the best performance of her life in this film, will be a Best Actress contender.

I know what Mother and Child is and I’m not going all breathless and gah-gah because that’s what some critics do when they see a new film at a film festival. For what it is — a super-sensitive, perfectly acted and exquisitely written adult drama about (the title kind of indicates this) mothers and daughters and parenting and re-establishing connections, Mother and Child is really and truly as good as this sort of thing gets. It’s got Fox Searchlight or Focus Features written all over it.

That’s all I have time to say right now. I’m at an IFC dinner party and I’m tapping this out on a bar and I don’t want be rude to my hosts.

I escaped from this morning’s screening of Derrick Borte‘s The Joneses after twelve minutes and quickly hightailed it over to the Cumberland for Werner Herzog‘s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, which I missed only a bit of. I’m not much of a laugh-out-loud type of guy but I laughed my head off at portions of this deranged psycho-dramedy, although if it was my call I would have titled it Bad Lieutenant: The Silence of the Reptiles.

Nicolas Cage, Eva Mendes in Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.

It’s hilariously bent and livewire and even surreal at times, but it’s still not entirely the ultimate cuckoo Nic Cage film I was hoping for. I loved that Herzog constantly subverts the suspension-of-disbelief element that one is naturally inclined to submit to as the proverbial campfire tale is told. And yet time and again Herzog reminds the viewer that Bad Lieutenant doesn’t know from campfires and is essentially a goof — a deliciously eccentric druggy-crazy cop movie about a deliciously eccentric druggy-crazy cop movie.

And with such a consistent emphasis on extreme acting, deliriously dopey iguana and crocodile shots, and other outrageously skewed bits the occasional stabs at emotional sincerity just seem to get in the way. So it’s not really pure and unified thing. It lurches around, which is cool in a sense but also a little disorienting

But most of Herzog’s Lieutenant is a boldly feisty mescaline crime movie, and when Cage is channeling that wackjob current that he knows and channels so well, it’s well worth the ticket price.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans would be a great midnight movie if the midnight movie business amounted to anything these days. It’s definitely something to watch stoned. I began to sense a kind of contact pot high; at times a bit more than this. With all the iguanas and crocks slithering around I sometimes felt like I was Hunter Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas after putting a little extract of pineal gland on my tongue.

A fellow was snoring in the seat next to me during the last 20 minutes of this morning’s Bad Lieutenant screening. Everybody dozes off during festival showings, but this guy was sleeping with his mouth open and making sounds like a hog having its throat cut. At first a woman volunteer came over and whispered that he can’t do this, etc. No effect. So I elbowed him a couple of times and murmured the same thing — “C’mon, man, no snoring.” Indifference. More hog sounds.

I must have poked him six or seven times but he wouldn’t quit. Or rather he’d quit for a minute or two and then start up again. So I got up and took his picture. I’m posting this as a service to TIFF journalists who may run into this dude during the remainder of the festival. Just desserts. You can’t mess with your fellow viewers’ absorption in a film and not expect some sort of consequence.

Michael Moore spoke following last night’s Capitalism: A Love Story screening about why he’s still pretty much behind President Barack Obama…for now. And yet his last words on the subject were “maybe my next film will be about him.”

With all the running around Toronto I missed this over the weekend. “The Democrats just never learn [that] Americans don’t really care which side of an issue you’re on as long as you don’t act like pussies,” Bill Maher said last Friday night. Mild-mannered is as mild-mannered does. Maher called the White House “cowards” for letting the crazies push them around, and said President Obama needs to man up and “stand up for the 70 percent of Americans who aren’t crazy.”

Here‘s the transcript. Key quote: “Crazy evil morons make up things for Obama to do, and he does it.”

In my usual once-removed, insufficiently bookish way, I felt I came to know author/poet Jim Carroll not from his writings but through the 1995 film adaptation of The Basketball Dairies. I’m thinking particularly of that harrowing scene when Leonardo DiCaprio, who played the teenaged Carroll, wailed and screamed in the hallway outside his mother’s apartment, begging to be let in. That scene sank in deep. 14 years ago and I still play it in my head from time to time.

Author/poet Jim Carroll

Carroll died last Friday at age 59 of a heart attack. He was reportedly working at his desk working when he died. My condolences to family, friends and fans. Quality, not quantity.

A Guardian story reports that the annual dolphin slaughter is happening again in Taiji, Japan. I wonder what’s happened regarding Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s determination about heading up the Tokyo Film Festival jury in light of the fest’s reported decision not to screen The Cove despite its green theme.

The Indiewire guys have asked me and several others to grade the Toronto Film Festival selections we’ve seen thus far. I’m finding their list of 34 films, give or take, depressing because I’ve only seen 10 or 11 so far, and not counting today I’ve only got three and a half days to go before flying back to New York. Always like this, always frustrating, etc.