Yesterday afternoon Los Angeles attorney Eric Spiegelman posted a time-lapse video — 90 minutes compressed into 24 seconds — of the enormous smoke clouds over the 818 and 626 areas over the San Gabriel mountains and near the La Canada, Flintridge, La Cescenta and Altadena areas. Indiewire’s Anne Thompson and L.A. Observed posted it last night. I’m just tagging along — a day late and a dollar short.

A horrendous flame monster threatening to eat your home is one of the worst things that can happen to anyone, and I’m genuinely sorry for anyone out there who’s caught a bad break. Roughly 20,000 acres have been burned so far but apparently not that many homes. Yet. I’ve never experienced anything like this but I’m sure it’s horrific. I wouldn’t wish a fire trauma of any kind on anyone. Not even Glenn Beck .

Chris Gore‘s video doesn’t compare to Spiegelman’s, but he scored verbally by saying “the whole thing’s on fire…this is like a Godzilla movie.” I wonder if he shot this with an iPhone video camera? Probably, I’m guessing, because he didn’t zoom in.

Compare the jacket art for the forthcoming Criterion DVD of Downhill Racer to the art for the two theatrical posters used during the film’s original release. The middle poster is obviously the sexiest and most sophisticated. The electric-blue one on the right is…well, okay. But the Criterion DVD jacket looks like a robot-droid skiier — like Peter Weller‘s Robocop negotiating a slope on the ice planet of Hoth.

(l. to r.) Jacket of forthcoming Criterion Downhill Racer DVD; theatrical release poster #1; alternate theatrical poster.

What was Criterion thinking? The cover makes me almost not want to buy it, and I love this film.

A clean and handsome-looking Blu-ray of Phillip Noyce‘s nicely sculpted Dead Calm (’89) will be out on 9.8.09. Hard to believe it’s been 20 years since I’ve seen it. A very tight and well-ordered thriller, to say the least. It’s a little bit curious to consider the way Nicole Kidman used to look. Sam Neill looked so young back then! (Who didn’t?) It’ll be nice to get a copy before I leave for the Toronto Film Festival.

Noyce, currently in post on Salt, his Angelina Jolie Russian spy movie for Sony, told me yesterday he hasn’t yet seen the Dead Calm Blu-ray.

“I spent several months on the original transfer back in 1990,which I presume was used to guide this version,” he recalled. “The original theatrical film was not presented in Dolby Digital surround, just the analogue Dolby SR. Blu-ray consumers would definitely benefit from a remastered 5.1 digial audio track, which could be included alongside the original. I’ve remastered the DVD sound for all my early Australian films in 5.1,including the mono tracks for Newsfront (’78) and Backroads (’77).”

I’m watching the Ted Kennedy funeral procession make its way to Arlington National Cemetery, and particularly the area adjacent to JFK and Bobby Kennedy’s grave with the rough stones and the eternal flame with the biege-colored Custis-Lee Mansion atop the sloping green hill. I’m listening to MSNBC’s Chris Matthews talk about Jimmy Breslin writing that 11.25.63 interview/profile of Clifton Pollard, the guy who dug JFK’s grave. Here‘s that story.

The version of Alejandro Amenabar‘s Agora that’ll screen at the Toronto Film Festival will run 126 minutes, give or take, which is roughly 15 minutes shorter than the Cannes version, which I believe ran 141 minutes. My Cannes observation: “I was surprised, really, that it moved as fast as it did.”

The biggest tech headache of the year is about to take place in Toronto. There is no film festival anywhere in the world that makes people like myself suffer like the Toronto International Film Festival. Compared to Cannes and Sundance and given the generic expectation level of a major film festival, Toronto wifi is similar to the wifi in Oxford, Mississippi. Or nearly.

My iPhone was showing five bars this morning but the AT&T Communication Manager (i.e., the air card software) was saying no dice. It does this from time to time. Actually, more often. Technology lets you down all the time.

A festival without lots of plentiful free wifi all over the place is a drag — that’s all there is to it. Every journalist who attends needs to constantly file, and getting online in Toronto — or more particularly in the areas near theatres and screening rooms — has always been a pain in the neck. Wifi is obtainable, of course, but a lone-wolf journalist has to work and scheme and pay and sometimes walk blocks out of his way in order to get it.

Sundance is sometimes a tough wifi situation, but it’s workable. You can always find it here and there, and my AT&T air card works most of the time. And there’s always the option of Starbucks, wifi cafes and hotels. There’s no using the air card in Cannes because of the ridiculous expense, but there’s good wifi everywhere inside Cannes’ Grand Palais, which has two huge press salons, as well as inside the American Pavillion and in the various hotels on the Croisette. So it’s a pretty good deal in both places.

But good free air in Toronto is elusive and at a premium, and year after year festival chiefs have made no real effort to improve things. There’s only one lousy wifi room inside press headquarters at the Sutton Plaza hotel (a sea of flat screens that are always occupied with a line of people waiting to use them), except there’s no desk space for people with their own laptops to sit down and work upon, as you can do in Cannes. As far as I know the Sutton flat-screen room is pretty much it as far as festival-supplied “air” goes.

You can always go to a Starbucks (I pay them a monthly wifi fee), but Starbucks can be extremely crowded and you never know. Or you can go to a wifi cafe that sells air, but the cost of this adds up. As in France, AT&T air cards are unusable in Toronto due to absurd fees.

It would stand to reason that wifi galore would be available inside the press screening headquarters at the Bloor/Bay Manulife Center, which houses the multi-screen Cineplex Odeon Varsity plex. I’m always looking to file between screenings and there’s a cafe adjacent to the theatre concessions stand that would be perfect for this, but the Cineplex Odeon has never offered wifi, not even on a pay-as-you-go basis. They clearly don’t want people like me hanging around. It’s obviously a deliberate policy.

Festival staffers have use of private-password wifi at the Cineplex Odeon, of course, but journalists aren’t allowed to use it. Naturally! Year in and year out, and things never change. An American visitor can’t get online inside the Cineplex Odeon unless he/she has a Canadian wifi account and an air card, and who wants to spring for that?

The only way to file between Cineplex Odeon Varsity screenings is to walk down to the Starbucks on the level below, but the place is always full of non-working customers taking up tables and just lolling around, reading books and chit-chatting and whatnot. And there’s only one wall outlet if the computer battery is running low. And 80% of the time someone else is always using it for some non-journalistic purpose, or the tables around it are always filled with 20-something women who are always giggling and hanging around and sipping lattes for interminable periods.

The L.A. County coroner’s ruling about Michael Jackson‘s death being called a homicide isn’t specifically worded, to my understanding. The secondary definition of second-degree murder is “a killing caused by dangerous conduct and the offender’s obvious lack of concern for human life…a middle ground between first-degree murder and voluntary manslaughter.” Dr. Conrad Murray, Jackson’s personal physician, had been thought to be suspected of manslaughter. What’s the precise difference between manslaughter and the kind of second-degree murder described above, and what will be the penalties if Murray is charged with the latter?

“My relationship with Don Hewitt was never close,” writes former 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman (who was played by Al Pacino in The Insider). “It was marked not just by arguments, but a kind of dance where he would regularly ‘fire’ me during my first decade at the program.

“But it finally disintegrated during a critical period in 1995 when CBS management and lawyers changed the rules, citing a little-used legal concept (‘tortious interference’) to justify killing an investigation of the tobacco industry that I was working on. Hewitt’s acquiescence, and then public justification of management’s decision, was the last straw. That episode convinced me he was willing to abandon the basic trust that a real news organization has to maintain with its most important sources: people who are willing to risk retaliation for telling the truth.

“I never expected that Hewitt would protest publicly. I was dismayed that someone who had so little to lose was unwilling to at least talk back, even in private meetings, to the powers that be.

“I have to acknowledge that working for Don Hewitt taught me how to survive the consequences of my decision to talk openly and honestly about what really happens when powerful interests are threatened by the truth. Seeing him in action over the years prepared me for the consequences of my own decision to try to expose, and hopefully undo, CBS’s decision.

“After loudly protesting my critique of what he did, as portrayed in the 1999 movie, The Insider, Hewitt went on to try to blackball me in the industry. He finally relented — citing advice from his friend, Benjamin Bradlee, the former executive editor of The Washington Post, who told him, ‘go back to the dugout, sit down and shut up.'”

I wrote the following on 8.19, hours after news of Hewitt’s death broke: “Hewitt’s reputation isn’t 100% sterling due to the depiction of his actions during the Jeffrey Wigand/Brown & Williamson/tortious interference debacle in Michael Mann‘s The Insider. Fairly or unfairly, he was portrayed by by Phillip Baker Hall as a corporate-deferring go-alonger who allowed the reputation of 60 Minutes to be tarnished in what is now regarded as a classic case of corporate interests undermining journalistic integrity.

“Many heartfelt tributes will be heard over the next few days, but The Insider will live on for decades if not centuries. Tough deal, but there’s no erasing it.

These three are contending that Cannes journalists over-reacted to Lars von Trier‘s AntiChrist, and in so doing revealed their emotionally timid natures plus a lack of historical perspective. Poland/Morgan/Gross have seen AntiChrist but had many weeks, of course, to prepare themselves. What were they going to do — agree with the mob? Whatever their motives they’re clearly bending over backwards to be contrarian for the sake of contrarianism. And they’re flat-out ignoring how amateurishly awful Antichrist is. Forget shock value — I’m talking about basic chops.

The slow-mo “baby falling out of the window” monochrome sequence in the beginning is awful. Dragging out any tragic/violent event in slow-mo is one of the whoriest tricks in the book — second-rate directors have been avoiding it for years. The psycho-claptrap that we hear Willem Dafoe speaking to wife Charlotte Gainsbourgh in the aftermath of their loss is stunning. How could any director-screenwriter have okayed this stuff?

The film is brazen — the word is actually shameless — but there are no surprises or odd moves that startle in a knockout way. (Like, say, the church bells ringing at the end of Breaking The Waves.) All through the damn thing you’re muttering “come on…come on.” There’s no psychological uncovering in any of it. The movie is a blunt tool. Boilerplate notions of pacing and gradual building into the forest-cabin madness that leads to the third-act violence are required but absent. It’s a stunningly sloppy thing — ludicrous, appalling, lemme-outta-here.

You can’t review AntiChrist without acknowledging what Von Trier wrote in his “director’s confession” in the Cannes press book: “Two years ago I suffered from depression. Everything, no matter what, seems unimportant, trivial. I couldn’t work. Six months later, just as an exercise, I wrote a script. It was a kind of therapy, but also a search, a test to see if would ever make another film.

“The script was finished and filmed without much enthusiasm, made as it was using about half of my physical and intellectual capacity. Scenes were added for no reason. Images were composed free of logic or dramatic thinking. They often came from dreams I was having at the time, or dreams I’d had earlier in my life.”

I lost my original review of AntiChrist an hour or so after the Cannes press screening, but I haven’t backed off an inch from what I wrote later that night after wailing and punching walls with my fist: (a) “It’s an out-and-out disaster — one of the most absurdly on-the-nose, heavy-handed and unintentionally comedic calamities I’ve ever seen in my life” and (b) “easily one of the biggest debacles in Cannes Film Festival history and the complete meltdown of a major film artist in a way that invites comparison to the sinking of the Titanic.

“A man whom I’ve admired and respected for many years has lost his mind for the time being, or at least lost it while he was writing and shooting the film. I just can’t fathom how the director of Breaking The Waves and Dancer in the Dark and Dogville could have made something so amateurishly awful. The decent and compassionate thing would be to forget Antichrist and to forgive Von Trier. To put it aside and move on on all fronts.”

Still looking for distribution, Alejandro Amenabar‘s Agora will show at the Toronto Film Festival. In my Cannes reaction, posted on 5.18, I called it “a visually ravishing, intelligently scripted historical parable about the evils of religious extremism. And I don’t mean the kind that existed in 4th century Alexandria, which is when and where this $65 million dollar epic is set. I mean the evils of the present-day Taliban and the Neocon-aligned Christian right, and the way Agora metaphorically exposes these movements for what they are.

“As Adam Curtis‘s The Power of Nightmares wisely explained, these two extremist faiths are similar in their loathing for liberalism and militant yearning to turn back the clock and to above all hold high the flag of religious purity. The 9/11 attacks kicked off their holy war against each other — a war that fortified their positions in their respective cultures during the Bush years.

“And now comes Agora, dramatizing how purist zealotry among 4th Century Christians led to the persecuting of Jew and pagans, to the sacking and burning of the great library of Alexandria, and to the murder of Hypatia (Rachel Weisz), the first widely-noted female scholar who taught philosophy, astronomy and mathematics. (Note to whiners: Noting a well documented event that happened 1600 years ago can’t be called a spoiler.)

“Amenabar’s film, an English-language Spanish production that was shot in and around Malta, seems to me like the most thoughtful and intellectually-talky big-screen epic ever made, although there’s a fair amount of strife and sword-stabbing and mob violence all through it. The intense conflicts, exacting and cultured dialogue, dashing visual energy and top-notch performances from Weisz, Max Minghella, Oscar Isaac, Rupert Evans, Ashraf Barhom, Rupert Evans and Michael Lonsdale make Agora more than gripping for its entire 141 minutes. I was surprised, really, that it moved as fast as it did.

Some are calling it too talky or insufficiently emotional, which translates into the imprecise term known as “boring.” It isn’t that, trust me, although I admit it’s hard to imagine the U.S. fans of sludge entertainment being keen to see it. You need to be keyed into what it’s saying about our world and to be rooting against the bad guys (i.e., old-time Christians) to really get into it, I suppose, although the high-quality sheen is unmistakable in every department. It’s well worth it for the CG alone.

Is it an Eloi costume epic? Does it have a muscular macho figure like Brad Pitt in Troy or Russell Crowe in Gladiator driving ther narrative and kicking ass? Does it have an intense erotic relationship as an emotional centerpiece? No — it’s a stirringly shot epic that is essentially cerebral in nature. After looking at the above trailer internet trolls have been calling it boring, stillborn, a tank waiting to happen, etc.

On what planet could a 53% second-weekend drop be considered “solid”? This is how box-office analyst Steve Mason has described the projected Inglourious Basterds fall-off this weekend, based on yesterday’s figures.

In the old days a 25%-to-30% second-weekend fall-off was considered a decent hold, a 40% fall-off was thought to be worrisome and a 50% fall-off was a major “uh-oh.” But in today’s era in which some highly-touted films have fallen off 60% and even 70% on their second weekends, a 50% drop is now considered par for the course as in “not great but not catastrophic.” Perspective is all.

Warner Bros.’ 3D The Final Destination brought in $10.5 million yesterday, and is projected to top out Sunday night at $26.3 million. Rob Zombie and the Weinstein Co.’s Halloween 2 earned $6.9 million yesterday (#2 for the day), and is looking at $16.8 million for the weekend. Inglourious Basterds is in third place as we speak, but it’s projected to reach $17.7 million by Sunday night for a ten-day cume of $71.4 million.

I’m not at all pleased to report that Ang Lee‘s Taking Woodstock (Focus) is already dead. I’m not much of a fan, but I feel badly for Lee and producer-screenwriter James Schamus, whom I like and admire. It will pull in slightly less than $4 million by Sunday night, averaging $2800 in 1,393 situations.

The decent, obliging thing to do if you’ve seen Robert Siegel‘s Big Fan is to give it a pass. If you care about independent cinema and you’d like to see at least a trickle of blunt, feisty, low-budget character dramas turning up at Sundance and Toronto and Cannes for years to come, you’ll put away the things that bothered or half-bothered you and just say, “Okay, very cool! Love that pudgy Patton Oswalt angst and the whole lower-depths, lower-middle-class Staten Island loser thing…love the grayness, the bleakness and the spirit-deflating self-loathing…love the shitty story…love the whole package.”

But I can’t do that, man. Because Big Fan wound up frustrating me all to hell.

I love movies that have gotten hold of something genuine and uncomfortably realistic, as Siegel has done here with the life of a sad, pissed-off fat guy named Paul (Oswalt) who works in a parking garage and lives with his braying mom in Staten Island and who lives for New York Giants games (which he can’t afford to attend so he watches the games in the Meadowlands parking lot outside the stadium with a friend, Sal, played by Kevin Corrigan), and who especially lives for his radio time on a sports talk show in which he goes into a vigorous rap about how great the Giants are and how lowly and contemptible the competition is.

Paul and Sal are these wonderfully tasty hopeless-loser characters, and the film is all about this great downbeat, going-nowhere milieu that makes the not-far-away world of the Sopranos seem like the land of Gene Kelly and Brigadoon. Big Fan is basically a very believable thing in just about any respect you’d care to name except — I’m sorry, have I mentioned this? — the story starting in the second act. That’s when it goes off the rails.

It happens after Paul and Sal happen to spot Giants player Quantrell Bishop (Jonathan Hamm) coming out of some low-rent house in Staten Island where he was probably scoring drugs. They tail Bishop to Manhattan and then to a Scores-like club, and follow him inside. They eventually go over to his table to say hi and, like the clueless assholes they are, mention the Staten Island sighting. Which of course makes Bishop angry and defensive, which leads to his flying off the handle and pounding Paul and putting him in the hospital.

So far, so good. And the next turn — Paul so invested in Giants worship that he refuses to press charges against Bishop or sue him for damages, even though he has a solid case and could probably collect big-time, especially with Paul’s ambulance-chasing attorney brother offering to handle the case — is interesting also. But the failure of Bishop to get in touch after Paul lets him off the hook, or for anything of a vaguely positive nature to happen due to Paul’s refusal to hurt the Giants in any way, is immensely disappointing. I simply didn’t believe that Bishop wouldn’t do or say something, and I knew as the story froze and gave up the ghost that Siegel had just…I don’t know what he was doing but I knew he wasn’t doing it.

The story just runs out of gas at this point because there’s really nothing at stake and nowhere to go. It comes to an end with a bizarre incident in a Philadephia bar that felt to me like just another reiteration of loser-dom.

N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis has written that the point of Big Fan is that a life filled with so much generous love needs no pity. Oh, yeah? The vibe in the beginning is one of half-articulate nihilism and self-loathing plus stupdi footbal love. The second act vibe is about the same thing. The third and closing act is about half-articulate nihilsm and self-loathing mixed with depression and fanatical stubbornness. What is anyone supposed to do with this? What is the appropriate response if you’re not a film critic? Drive out to the middle of the Verrezano-Narrows bridge and jump off?