I didn’t even see Aaron Schneider‘s Get Low at Toronto, but it was clear early on that it had an impassioned critic fan base and that Robert Duvall‘s lead performance was being seen as award-worthy. But Sony Pictures Classics, which acquired it, will not be releasing Get Low this year and is planning a mid-2010 release.

So what’s happened to Michael Hoffman‘s The Last Station distribution-wise since it drew enthusiastic notices (particularly for Christopher Plummer‘s allegedly Best Actor-worthy performance as Leo Tolstoy) at the Telluride Film Festival nearly a month ago? I’ll tell you what’s happened — nothing. No deal, I mean, because the rights sellers are asking too much. Actually way too much, according to one source.

The other night I asked a hypothetical question of an acquisitions veteran who knew the score. If, in your estimation, the realistic market value of The Last Station is five dollars, what are sellers asking for? Fifteen, I was told. Included in the high price is an ironclad pledge to launch a Best Actor campaign for Plummer as well as Helen Mirren for Best Actress and somebody else (James McAvoy or Paul Giamatti for Best Supporting?).

An additional complication is that while The Last Station may sell tickets to the over-40 crowd, it’s a very linear and straightforward film, which is another way of saying it hasn’t been regarded by most critics who’ve seen it as being all that wise or hip. So there’s that as well.

The only slightly “off” element surrounding last night’s A Serious Man premiere was that it was happening under the auspices of the Friars Club Comedy Film Festival. This suggests that Man traffics in a form of rollicking Milton Berle schtick when in fact it’s one of the greatest and darkest “no-laugh funny” movies of all time. It’s undeniably brilliant and masterful but almost all the humor is of the LQTM (“laughing quietly to myself”) variety. Which is actually the kind of humor I prefer.

I spoke to Michael Stuhlbarg, who truly needs to be in a Best Actor running for his performance as the relentlessly earnest and reasonable Larry Gopnik, and to Amy Landecker, who stands out in the film as Gopnik’s next-door neighbor — a kind of Jewishy Marlene Dietrich with a thing for pot and nude sunbathing.

Jonathan Mostow‘s Surrogates is the likely weekend champ among the new wide releases, according to today’s tracking. Surrogates has a First Choice Open & Release rating of 18 vs. an 11 for Fame and a 7 for Pandorum. The best films, as is often or usually the case, are among the limited or regional releases — Scott Hicks‘ The Boys Are Back (with a 70% Rotten Tomatoes rating), The Other Man, I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, and Stanley Tucci‘s Blind Date. I won’t even see Brief Interviews With Hideous Men until this evening.

Please forgive the sluggish postings. I’m looking around for the right place to move to and most of you presumably know what an all-consuming, tangled-up process this can be.

Breakdown (’97), an above-average Kurt Russell thriller, convinced me that its director, Jonathan Mostow, was a skilled and disciplined helmer of high-end Bs. I was doubly persuaded three years later when his next, U-571 (’00), came along. And then my enthusiasm waned slightly with Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (’03). Now he’s back after a six-year lull with Surrogates, a cyber-replicant thriller with Bruce Willis that opens today.

The critical reaction is mixed (50% at Metacritic, and 46% among the RT hoi polloi) but the premise is terrific and Variety‘s Todd McCarthy is calling it “intense and eerily plausible.”

Mostow’s “smart speculative suspenser imagines a time when people can live through ideal versions of themselves while they sit wired up at home,” he notes. “Effective science fiction often reflects the preoccupations and anxieties of the moment when it is made, and Surrogates, based on a graphic novel by Robert Venditti and Brett Weldele, certainly speaks to the way people today increasingly live on their computers and other electronic devices and project themselves into the world through them.

“The idea that one day we may need to choose between living life directly or virtually provides the dramatic tension for the script by Mostow’s Terminator 3 collaborators John Brancato and Michael Ferris.

“Surrogates distinguishes itself from countless other thematically overlapping films by being not about robots run amok, but about humans seduced by the easy life; humanity here has ‘advanced’ so far that it has become subordinate to its substitute.

“As a cautionary sci-fier, it’s not all that far removed from such classics as The Day the Earth Stood Still and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and if eyebrows are raised over the issue that Surrogates runs only 88 minutes, it’s worth remembering that the those two ’50s originals ran just 92 and 80 minutes, respectively.

Wizard of Oz balloon being gassed up outside Manhattan’s Tavern on the Green — Thursday, 9.24, 6:10 pm. Here’s a still of same with a truer sense of light.

1. Werner Herzog’s Rogue Film School will be in the form of weekend seminars held by Herzog in person at varying locations and at infrequent intervals.

2. The number of participants will be limited.

3. Locations and dates will be announced on this website and Werner Herzog’s website: www.wernerherzog.com approximately 12 weeks in advance.

4. The Rogue Film School will not teach anything technical related to film-making. For this purpose, please enroll at your local film school.

5. The Rogue Film School is about a way of life. It is about a climate, the excitement that makes film possible. It will be about poetry, films, music, images, literature.

6. The focus of the seminars will be a dialogue with Werner Herzog, in which the participants will have their voice with their projects, their questions, their aspirations.

7. Excerpts of films will be discussed, which could include your submitted films; they may be shown and discussed as well. Depending on the materials, the attention will revolve around essential questions: how does music function in film? How do you narrate a story? (This will certainly depart from the brainless teachings of three-act-screenplays). How do you sensitize an audience? How is space created and understood by an audience? How do you produce and edit a film? How do you create illumination and an ecstasy of truth?

8. Related, but more practical subjects, will be the art of lockpicking. Traveling on foot. The exhilaration of being shot at unsuccessfully. The athletic side of filmmaking. The creation of your own shooting permits. The neutralization of bureaucracy. Guerrilla tactics. Self reliance.

9. Censorship will be enforced. There will be no talk of shamans, of yoga classes, nutritional values, herbal teas, discovering your boundaries, and Inner Growth.

10. Related, but more reflective, will be a reading list: if possible, read Virgil‘s “Georgics”, Ernest Hemingway‘s “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” “The Poetic Edda,” translated by Lee M. Hollander (in particular “The Prophecy of the Seeress”), Bernal Diaz del Castillo‘s “True History of the Conquest of New Spain.”

11. Follow your vision. Form secretive Rogue Cells everywhere. At the same time, be not afraid of solitude.

Earlier today I was told a perverse relationship story that allegedly happened near the start of filming of Steven Soderbergh‘s Kafka, which was shot in Prague in 1990. The original source was Soderbergh, I’ve been assured, but since I’m hearing this second-hand please take it with a grain.

La Femme Nikita star Anne Parillaud had been cast as Gabriela, the female lead/significant girlfriend of Franz Kafka (Jeremy Irons ). Filming had just begun and she and Irons went out to dinner together, as actors just starting to work together often do. And Parillaud went back to Irons’ hotel that night, and presumably didn’t sleep much.

The next morning on the set Soderbergh led her over to a corner and says he’s sorry but she’s not going to work out because a significant party has complained about her French accent — Gabriela is supposed to be a Prague girl, born and bred — and that she’s going to have to be replaced. (Theresa Russell was soon after hired.) “But who…who has complained?,” the shocked Parillaud asked Soderbergh. Jeremy Irons, he answered.

In other words, her dismissal had not only been called for by Irons but, she later found out, locked in a day or two before. Meaning that Irons knew that if he wanted to “say goodbye” to Parillaud he had to make his move before she was told the bad news, and he probably knew Soderbergh would be telling her the next day or certainly very soon. So it was basically a “move it or lose it” situation before Parillaud learned the facts.

Even if this isn’t true, it’s a great story. The more likely truth, I’m guessing, is that Irons and Parillaud had already gotten started before the decision was made and that Irons didn’t have the courage to tell her what he was feeling and saying as things went along. Either way I’ve heard some cold-hearted seduction stories before, but this is a classic.

I was a “permalancer” for People magazine for two years (’96 to ’98). At times the climate at People was the most miserable I’ve ever experienced. Except for my short tenure at Entertainment Tonight, that is, which Iasted two or three months during the summer of ’98. Absolute hell, in part because I had to be at work at 5 am and in part because of the acutely political competitive-female vibe under boss lady Linda Bell Blue.

Will they fire me next month, next week…tomorrow? Why are people always speaking in hushed tones behind closed doors? Is the work I’m doing of any value to anyone? Will I always have to wake up at 3:45 am? Is it too late to learn a new trade?

Ned Price, Warner Home Video’s vp of mastering for technical operations, delivering this morning’s opening remarks about the steps taken to render the new Wizard of Oz Blu-ray, which will street on 9.29.