My first Toronto film won’t be a festival selection. Two nights hence I’ll be catching a work print of Casino Jack, George Hickenlooper‘s recently wrapped and currently-being-edited drama about the adventures of Republican businessman, lobbyist and scumbag Jack Abramoff (Kevin Spacey). I’ve been pestering the temporarily-Toronto-based Hickenlooper about seeing it, and the night before the festival begins seemed like the only time so that’s the plan.

(l.) Kevin Sopacey (r.) Jack Abramoff.

Critic F.X. Feeney (full disclosure: a friend of Hickenlooper’s) caught a version of Casino Jack a while back and has passed along the following: “It manages to make lucid, funny, revealing sense of all that Republican Bush-era madness. Although it never lets Jack A off the hook in matters of right versus wrong, it locates him humanly in a context that was already savage when he arrived. He’s guilty of being the best shark in the tank, and the others are remorseless with him when they smell blood.

“Key to this is Kevin Spacey’s performance, which is so nuanced and reliant on what he does best (that perpetual soul-searching as he thinks out loud — Hamlet on uppers) that it should perp-walk him to glory. The picture, I think, is a home run.”

Spacey’s costars are Kelly Preston, Rachelle Lefevre, Barry Pepper and Jon Lovitz

Abramoff was a central figure in a series of high-profile Bush-era political scandals. He was convicted of fraud, conspiracy and tax evasion, and is currently doing time in a federal slammer in Cumberland, Maryland. Abramoff will be sprung sometime in December 2011.

Abramoff’s Wikipedia bio reads as follows: “Abramoff pleaded guilty on January 3, 2006, to three criminal felony counts in a Washington, D.C., federal court related to the defrauding of American Indian tribes and corruption of public officials. The four tribes Abramoff and his associates persuaded include: Michigan’s Saginaw Chippewas, California’s Agua Caliente, the Mississippi Choctaws, and the Louisiana Coushattas. Abramoff is accused of defrauding the tribes of tens of millions of dollars on issues associated with Indian gaming.

“The following day he pleaded guilty to two criminal felony counts in a separate federal court, in Miami, related to his fraudulent dealings with SunCruz Casinos. On September 4, 2008, a Washington court found Abramoff guilty of trading expensive gifts, meals and sports trips in exchange for political favors and he was sentenced to a four-year term in prison which will be served concurrently with his previous sentences.

“The Abramoff corruption investigation has led to the conviction of White House officials J. Steven Griles and David Safavian, U.S. Representative Bob Ney, and nine other lobbyists and Congressional aides.”

I’m trying to figure/imagine why Oliver Stone‘s South of the Border, a friendly doc about Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, isn’t playing at the Toronto Film Festival. I’m calling/writing the TIFF guys as we speak but…

South of the Border director Oliver Stone, Venezuelan president Cesar Chavez a few hours ago at the Venice Film Festival.

What has Telluride 2009 taught us over the last three and a half days? One, that Up In The Air is a lock for a Best Picture nomination and probably the front-runner until Invictus comes along. Two, The Last Station isn’t necessarily a Best Picture contender, but it will surely be acquired forthwith (probably by Sony Classics, I’m guessing). Three, Red Riding is destined for major-cult-film status. And four, Werner Herzog‘s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans will probably sell more tickets than My Son, My Son because it’s weirder and dopey-loopier by the grace of Nicolas Cage.

A currently in-progress seminar called “The Edge of Humor: When Does the Laughter Stop?,” which began in the Telluride town park at noon today. (l. to r.) Anne Thompson (moderator), Nicolas Cage, George Gittoes, Nicolas Cage, Jason Reitman and Paul Schneider. (Alexander Payne was scheduled but didn’t show.)

Nic Cage following today’s “Edge of Humor” panel.

(l.) An Education‘s Carey Muligan and Fish Tank‘s Katie Jarvis. (Photo taken by Indiewire‘s Eugene Hernandez.)

Minnesota Sen. Al Franken recently drew a map of all 50 states at the Minnesota State Fair. And totally freehand. Definitely impressive but an old bit. He did the same thing on David Letterman‘s NBC show back in ’84. In one minute and 55 seconds.

Michael Hoffman‘s The Last Station “should be an interesting film to watch from the acquisition marketing angle,” says the Telluride-based “buckzollo.” “This waning-days-of-Leo Tolstoy biopic has not been acquired as far as I know. It could be more tightly edited and frankly needs a sound edit (i.e., too loud with the chirping crickets). But I believe it is very marketable, mostly because it is about a major literary brand.

“The film claims that Tolstoy is the most celebrated author of all time. As Ken Burns alluded to in a discussion, the film is a 1900s version of the Michael Jackson death or OJ craziness. There is a lot of archival footage and it was very interesting to me to discover how much the Tolstoy’s were celebrities and had cameras rolling all the time back in the day.

“The movie could run afoul of critics (or so I’m sensing), but the fact that it is very easy to absorb without haing a Master’s Degree in Russian Literaure should be a marketing boon, no? One guy told me it needs a good $25 million to make the Oscar run, which is ‘exactly what Harvey and Bob do well although they probably don’t have the wad.’ I’m wondering if Apparition (who I am told will see it Tuesday) might want some guaranteed Oscar bait to get off on a good foot?

“The themes in The Last Station are contemporary and everything is very “eat up-able.” You learn something and there’s no way that Christopher Plummer, channeling Ernest Hemingway or something, can’t elbow his way onto the Best Actor contender list. And Helen Mirren, James McAvoy and Paul Giamatti are great. And it’s beautifully shot. The question is will someone belly up tp the bar and if yes, will there be time to mount the right kind of campaign?

Todd McCarthy‘s description of The Informant! — “amusingly eccentric rather that outright funny” — reminded me that I almost prefer the kind of comedy that is clearly coming from a place of modest merriment (perverse or otherwise) but which you don’t really laugh at. Call them smirkers or half-chortlers or simply no-laugh comedies. Films that seem to float along on a charged-attitude high — a frame of mind that’s clearly dispensing amusement but not quite to the point of inspiring audible reactions. (Except from those awful people in theatres who laugh too loudly and too often.)

And I’m not talking about flagantly and painfully unfunny films like The Year One, any of the Rush Hour movies, any of the “comedies” by the Wayans brothers, anything starring Anna Faris or Will Ferrell or anything like Duplex or Rumor Has It or Gigli or what-have-you. I’m talking about movies that know what they’re doing and have a fine sense of dry humor but aren’t actually “funny.”

I’ve probably enjoyed at least a thousand high IQ/high-pedigree no-laughers in my time, but…now that I think of it it’s almost a book idea. Seriously. Anyway, off the top of my head…

Fargo. Lolita. Wonder Boys. Bottle Rocket. The Candidate. (Every single scene in this film has a comedic/satirical edge of some kind.) The Long Goodbye. Beat The Devil. Borat. Dr. Strangelove. (A brilliant satirical classic but you don’t really laugh at it — at best it makes you smile and smirk) The Hit. Burn After Reading. The Birds. Rushmore. Slap Shot. The Last Detail. Clerks. True Romance. Prizzi’s Honor. North To Alaska. The bowling alley scene in There Will Be Blood (after you’ve seen it three or four times). After Hours. Local Hero. Strangers on a Train.

All name anagrams must contain a suggestion of character in the person whose name is being futzed with. This came to mind as I remembered a great anagram that Dick Cavett once created for Oscar Wilde: O I SCREW LAD. Just for fun I tried a couple myself. I was thinking about The Informant! and thought of Steven Soderbergh, and the best I could do was “B STRONG HEED SERVE.” I wasn’t as successful with George Lucas: EAGLE OR CUSS. Then I found a couple of classics on an anagram site. Clint Eastwood = OLD WEST ACTION. Alec Guiness = GENUINE CLASS. They’re hard to get right.

In Contention‘s Guy Lodge, filing from the Venice Film festival, is calling Steven Soderbergh‘s The Informant! (Warner Bros., 9.18) “a flip, frisky entertainment that may well represent the year’s most audacious feat of adaptation.”

Matt Damon in Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant!

Yeah, but does it work? I’ve heard that it does and also that it doesn’t quite. But either way Marvin Hamlisch‘s score is an arch and fuddy-duddy character in itself.

Imagine standing in a 7-11 parking lot with a couple of homies at 10:45 pm, and one of them asks what’s good and you say The Informant!, and the guy says, “Oh, yeah…what’s good about it?” And you go, “Well, it’s, uhm…because it may be the year’s most audacious feat of adaptation! And it’s, like, frisky!” You can’t say stuff like this in a parking lot. You need to look the bro’ in the face and give him the lowdown.

Okay, back to Lodge…

“Screenwriter Scott Z. Burns (The Bourne Ultimatum) has reimagined Kurt Eichenwald‘s dense non-fiction thriller about a mid-1990s agribusiness price-fixing scandal as a rapid-fire corporate comedy of errors, like The Insider as filtered through the dry whimsy of Preston Sturges.

“It’s a double or nothing strategy that merrily pays off, offering rich comic defends as the true-life nature of the material elevates its absurdity, but — far more surprisingly — not sacrificing the sense of consequence and complexity in the events at hand.

“Critically touching on both the antisocial nature of corporate American greed and the inefficiency of the government in curbing it, the film actually makes an elegant companion piece to its its festival compatriot, Michael Moore‘s Capitalism: A Love Story.

“The perspective Soderbergh presents here, however, is a lot less judgmental or clear-cut than Moore’s, thanks in no small part to the guiding presence of Matt Damon, whose subtle, malleable characterization here keeps framing and reframing the film’s own ethical stance.

“Damon plays Mark Whitacre, a folksy, seemingly guileless Cornell grad and up-and-comer at agricultural behemoth ADM, with whose illegal price-fixing of food additive lysine he is complicit, until his aggrieved wife (an affecting Melanie Lynskey) urges him to turn whistleblower for the FBI.

“And so begins several years of eager — if not particularly adept — duplicity on Whitacre’s part, but just as the FBI close in the company, Whitacre’s personal web of business indiscretions begins to unravel.

“The brilliance of Damon’s performance — and, consequently, the pleasure of the film — lies in the fact that Whitacre is by turn a lot smarter and a lot dumber than people take him for.

“We never quite gauge the reliability of his narration until the final reel; not unlike his otherwise wholly different turn in The Talented Mr. Ripley, he reveals the psychological cracks in the makeup of the American everyman so incrementally that you hardly notice until it’s too late. Aided by a deadpan comic fluidity the actor has never controlled so comfortably, it’s the finest work of his career.

“Soderbergh, meanwhile, matches Damon’s playfulness by channelling the knockabout tone of socially aware 1970s comedies like The Candidate, right down to details like the lurid opening credits and a cheerfully antiquated score (his first for a feature in 13 years) from Marvin Hamlisch.

“The hyper-self-reflexive trappings can grow a claustrophobic over the course of an entire feature, and the storytelling lags a little at both ends — this is a film that could have benefitted from clocking in at a crisp 90 minutes. But Burns’ busy, persistently witty flow of dialogue (most amusing of all in the non-sequitur-laden stream-of-consciousness voiceover of Damon’s inner thoughts) generally distracts us from such structural quibbles.”

The short verdict, I suppose, is “wait for Toronto.”

Thanks again to the good folks at Warner Bros. publicity who blocked me from seeing The Informant! at New York press screenings despite persistent pleadings. I was just trying to lighten my Toronto load and would have held all reactions until the first Toronto showings. Deeply appreciated, anything I can do in return, etc.

UPDATE: Todd McCarthy‘s just-up Variety review opens as follows: “The wacky little brother of Erin Brockovich, The Informant! goofs around lightheartedly while still doing some justice to the true-life story of a zealous but wildly delusional corporate whistle-blower.

“A larky outing for director Steven Soderbergh after the somber rigors of Che and The Girlfriend Experience, the pic showcases an excellent performance by a chubbed-out Matt Damon as a Midwestern executive who’s so smart he’s dumb.

“Amusingly eccentric rather than outright funny, this Warner Bros. release will have to rely mostly on Damon for its B.O., which looks to be modest.”

Up In The Air director-writer Jason Reitman “is the first to acknowledge the frequent changes of tone in the film,” writes Chris Willman in a recent Huffington Post-ing. “He says he thinks of the first act as being like Thank You for Smoking‘s corporate satire, the second act as like Juno‘s more intimate comedy, and the third act as something much more personal for him.

“At various points the movie feels very Cameron Crowe-esque, with its exec-finding-his-soul overtones harking back to Jerry Maguire or Elizabethtown. At other times it feels like it’s leading in the direction of being a romantic comedy, but what it offers in the end is something far less conventional than that. It’s not actually a ‘feel-good’ movie, finally, though Telluride attendees left feeling awfully good about it.

“‘I’m trying to take the audience in a certain direction so that when the ending happens, you really feel the impact of it,’ Reitman said — and to be any less cryptic than that would be offering spoilers.

“The main character definitely involves Clooney playing to suave, commitment-phobe type, up to a point. ‘I feel that this is a movie very much in his voice,’ Reitman said. ‘And I thought — I presumed, and I found myself to be correct — that this movie, this storyline and its characters, really speak to him, and that you can feel that in the authenticity and vulnerability of his performance.’

“If people see parallels between Clooney’s intelligent playboy image and the movie’s alternately glib and soulful terminator, so does Reitman. ‘It’s interesting, the connections between him and this character…I think [Clooney] saw this as a chance to stare that straight in the eye.’

“The director says the film is ‘truly about connecting with other human beings…for the first time ever, [the Clooney character] realizes he’s alone in the universe, and I wanted to leave you with that feeling.’ But he sees that as upbeat, mind you: ‘When you realize how alone this character is, you want to reach out and love other people.’

The initial Up In The Air focus “will surely be on the incredible timing of the unemployment angle,” says Willman. “Most of the ‘actors’ Clooney lays off in the film — who respond by swearing, threatening suicide, weeping, or with real resignation — are people who really were recently fired. The filmmakers placed an ad, saying they were making a documentary about job loss. They narrowed the field down to 100, filmed 60 people, and 25 of those made it into the movie as firees.

“The closing end-credits song is also written and sung by a regular guy in his mid-50s who handed Reitman a cassette of a sad tune he’d written about his own job loss and the subsequent search for purpose.

“Jason Reitman — Hollywood’s one-man stimulus plan.”

“Nicolas Cage was here to support Werner Herzog‘s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans,” writes a Telluride friend. “It’s his loosest and wackiest performance in a while, but also one he’s very much in control of. The material suits him. It’s a fun ride. Trippy, silly, dark and a rush. I haven’t laughed so hard in a long while.”

I pretty much concluded on 8.31 that Sam Taylor-Wood‘s Nowhere Boy is going to miss the mark due to hair-color, nose-prosthetic and casting issues. But if I had any doubts the indications and undercurrents running beneath this obviously skanky 5.29 Daily Mail story about Wood’s personal intrigues have removed most of them.

(l. to r.) Nowhere Boy director Sam Taylor-Wood; Ed Wood, Jr.; the young Stanley Kubrick; Sally Potter.

I’m not talking about the allegations in this vulgar tabloid story. I’m talking about what is plainly missing beneath or within Wood’s features.

One glance at those sad photos and it’s obvious she lacks that hard-to-define je ne sais quoi that heavy-cat film directors always seem to exude. I’ve eyeballed and spoken to hundreds of film directors over the years and I swear to God you can always tell if they’ve got any kind of focus or precision or steam-engine power in their films simply by looking at their faces and particularly from the presence or absence of a certain thousand-yard-stare that all visionaries (even the not-so-good ones) have.

Wood’s eyes tell you right away that she doesn’t have much going on inside. Certainly not to the extent that Jane Campion, Sally Potter, the Lina Wertmuller of the ’70s or Sofia Coppla have interior force, I mean.

If you took one look at the late Stanley Kubrick at any point in his life (including his early childhood) you knew right away he had a certain brooding heavy-osity and that he’d always be up to something grounded and solid. (Those harshly examining dark eyes told you he was a killer.) If you looked at the schmudgy and smirky features of Ed Wood you could also tell what he was about — i.e., not that much. Say what you will about Leni Reifenstahl but one look at her features and it was obvious she had mad currents running within. You can tell by looking at Wood that she’s into gliding along as best she can.

The only thing that bothers me about this whole interior-perception thing is, as I’ve noted before, that Matt Greenhalgh‘s Nowhere Boy‘s script reads quite well. But I’ve been around long enough to know that if a director is bad or mediocre enough he/she can ruin the best scripts without half trying.

On top of which Taylor-Wood, 42, and Johnson, 19, have been reportedly been romantic for several months. I’ve long been persuaded that films in which a director and a star are doing each other during shooting tend to be problematic or at least conflicted on this or that level. (Unless, of course, the director is a major world-class artist — i.e., Michelangelo Antonioni — and the star is Monica Vitti, and it’s the early to mid ’60s.) Creative focus during the directing of a motion picture and D.H. Lawrentian passion are two very different games. Sex almost always clouds vision.

Nowhere Boy is about the adolescent Liverpool days of John Lennon, who’s being played by the raven-haired, thick-nosed Aaron Johnson. A party was reportedly thrown by the Nowhere Boy producers in Cannes last May, and, according to a Daily Mail story, Julian Lennon, the late singer’s son, attended.

Lennon was asked by a reporter about his impressions of the Sam Taylor-Wood Wood/Aaron Johnson take on his dad’s early life. “I know what I know, I like what I know, and I don’t like some of what I know and I don’t particularly want to see someone else’s variation on that,” he said.

“Impeccably groomed and with a ready answer to almost any remark anyone can throw at him, George Clooney owns his role of Ryan Bingham in the way first-rate film stars can, so infusing the character with his own persona that everything he does seems natural and right. The timing in his scenes with Vera Farmiga is like splendid tennis, with each player surprising the other with shots but keeping the rally going to breathtaking duration.” — from Todd McCarthy‘s Variety review of Up In The Air, posted just after 6 pm eastern.

Here also is a stone-skimming reaction by THR “Risky Business” columnist Jay A. Fernandez.