Last night’s gotta-see-this tipoff was from a distributor-buyer I’ve known for years. He told me to be sure to catch Francois Ozon‘s Refuge, which I’m half-inclined to do despite my having gone a little bit cold on Ozon since the days of Swimming Pool. Indiewire’s Eric Kohn has written that while “the movie’s cumulative impact is resolutely minor,” it also “contains an admirable amount of psychological depth.”

These girls have been chosen by TIFF marketers to dramatically symbolize, in posters plastered all over Toronto, how really powerful movies makes us all feel. (They’re the standouts, I should say — others also appear.) Obviously a familiar pitch, but one look at these two you they’re not film festival types. They look like fans of Megan Fox, Twilight, Transformers, Matthew McConaughey, etc. They’re probably lining up this weekend to see Jennifer”s Body.

And you know they’d run screaming from the prospect of watching A Serious Man. They wouldn’t sit for The Cove with a knife jabbed into their ribs. They might see Up In The Air, but only if there’s nothing glossy and shallow playing alongside it. So why have TIFF staffers chosen these two? What are they trying to tell us?

After seeing this morning’s 9 am screening of The Road (which I didn’t have time to grapple with to any degree), I made it over to the Cumberland for the 11:30 am showing of Luca Guagadnino’s I Am Love, which I’d been persuaded to see by Jay Weissberg‘s 9.7 Variety review.

Kristin Scott Thomas, Serge Lopez in Catherine Corsini’s Partir.

I found my seat, the lights went down, the film began, and 10 minutes later I was having second thoughts. An allegedly Visconti-like portrait of a wealthy Milanese family and a gradual manifestation of threats to the order of things, it began quietly and reservedly. Preparations for a family dinner, cityscapes of a snow-covered Milan, and the gradual introduction of family members. I’m ashamed to admit that I began to feel antsy. I felt a lack of edge and subversion. Deep down, I suppose, I didn’t really want to wade into a new Visconti; I wanted a Marxist Pasolini.

And I began to think more and more about Catherine Corsini‘s Partir (i.e., Leaving), the Kristin Scott Thomas-Serge Lopez drama about a mad extra-marital affair, that was just starting in another Cumberland theatre two floors below. I have a thing for KST and a fascination for dramas about cheating. Did I feel guilty about blowing off I Am Love? Of course, but with so many films playing at TIFF and not enough time to fit even a fraction of them in, you have to trust your snap judgments. So I bailed.

Set in Nimes, Partir is about an upper middle-class wife of a doctor and a physical therapy specialist (Thomas) who gradually and somewhat accidentally falls for an ex-con laborer (Lopez) who’s working on a rear-cottage conversion in her back yard. It sounds like a stretch — women of means never sleep with the help — but it happens in a step-by-step, emotionally plausible way that didn’t throw me out of the film. The affair consumes, and within a day or two KST decides to tell her doctor husband (Yvan Attal) what’s going on. She tells him it’s over but of course it isn’t.

So she moves out, leaving not just her spouse but two teenaged kids. And then Attal, bent silly with rage, uses his political contacts to make life financially unbearable for KST and Lopez, cutting off work opportunities and such. And when their money really starts to evaporate, she gets desperate and turns to theft. The cops are tipped, Lopez gets arrested, and KST moves back with her family when Attal promises to let him her lover skate. But she can’t handle the deal and submitting to what feels like punishment sex in the marital bed, and she goes nuts. I won’t spill what happens, but the audience began to murmur and chortle when the final act occured.

It doesn’t quite work. We all understand getting carried away with passion, but women always take a hard look at the monetary underpinnings of any relationship, and I’m sorry but I didn’t believe that KST would lose it to this degree. I know for sure that the story wouldn’t fly if were re-shot for an American audience. Certainly not in this recession. But the first half of the film does work and rather nicely at that, and I was more or less content with this. I didn’t leave angrily. I just told myself, “Okay, you took a chance and it didn’t quite pan out.”

And to hear it from Robert Koehler, who’s not the type to bail on a film after 15 minutes, I Am Love does pan out. So okay, I half blew it. But that’s a film festival for you. You have to think on your feet and take your chances. I’ll catch I Am Love later in the week. Sorry.

Just to get things straight, the three TIFF Man movies are as follows: (a) A Single Man, directed and adapted by Tom Ford and costarring Colin Firth, Julianne Moore, Matthew Goode and Ginnifer Goodwin, about a Los Angeles-based English professor dealing with the sudden death of his partner; (b) Brian Koppelman and David Levien‘s Solitary Man, basically about an older middle-aged guy catting around with Michael Douglas and costars Jesse Eisenberg, Mary-Louise Parker, Susan Sarandon, Jenna Fischer and Danny DeVito; and (c) Joel and Ethan Coen‘s A Serious Man, which of course I saw and reviewed yesterday.

“Ms. Sourpants…a cringe-able actress…dumb as a rock…a classless, graceless, ungracious bitch.” This is what three guys claiming to be part of the “loyal Transformers crew” have written about Megan Fox on Michael Bay‘s website, obviously with Bay’s okay. It comes in response to Fox having complained about working for Bay on both Transformers films and comparing him to Hitler, etc.

Jennifer ‘s Body star Megan Fox on front page of today’s (Saturday, 9.12) Globe and Mail.

“We’ve had the tedious experience of working with the dumb-as-a-rock Megan Fox on both Transformers movies,” the letter says early on. [Note: the grammar ansd phraseology are weak so I’ve cleaned up certain portions.] “We [work] in different departments, and can’t give our names because sadly doing so in Hollywood could lead to being banished from future Paramount work. One of us touches Megan’s panties, another has the often shitty job of pulling Ms. Sourpants out of her trailer, and the last of us is near the Panaflex camera that helps to memorialize the valley girl on film

“Megan has the press fooled. When we read those magazines we wish we worked with that woman. Megan knows how to work her smile for the press. Those writers should try being on set for two movies [because] sadly, she never smiles. The cast, crew and director make Transformers a really fun and energetic set. We’ve traveled around the world together, so we have never understood why Megan was always so much the grump of the set.

“When facing the press, Megan is the queen of talking trailer trash and posing like a porn star. And yes we’ve had the unbearable time of watching her try to act on set, and yes, it’s very cringe-able. So maybe, being a porn star in the future might be a good career option. But make-up beware, she has a paragraph tattooed to her backside (probably due to her rotten childhood) which means easily another 45 minutes in the chair!

“So when the three of us read Ms Fox…blabbing her trash mouth about a director whom we three have grown to really like. She compared working with Michael to “working with Hitler.” We actually don’t think she knows who Hitler is by the way. But we wondered how she doesn’t realize what a disgusting, fully uneducated comment this was? Well, let’s get some facts straight.

“Say what you want about Michael. Yes, at times he can be hard, but he’s also fun, and he challenges everyone for a reason – he simply wants people to bring their ‘A’ game. He comes very prepared, knows exactly what he wants, involves the crew and expects everyone to follow through with his or her best, and that includes the actors. He’s one of the hardest working directors out there. He gets the best from his crews, many of whom have worked with him for 15 years. And yes, he’s loyal, one of the few directors we’ve encountered who lowered his fee by millions to keep Transformers in the United States and California, so he could work with his own crew.

“Megan says that Transformers was an unsafe set? Come on Megan, we know it is a bit more strenuous then the playground at the trailer park, but you don’t insult one of the very best stunt and physical effects teams in the business! Not one person got hurt!

“And who is the real Megan Fox? About as ungracious a person as you can ever fathom. She shows little interest in the crew members around her. We work to make her look good in every way, but she’s absolutely never appreciative of anyone’s hard work. Never a thank you. All the crew members have stopped saying hi to Ms. Princess because she never says hello back. It gets tiring. Many think she just really hates the process of being an actress.

“Megan has been late to the set many times. She goes through the motions that make her exude this sense of misery. We’ve heard the A.D’s piped over the radio that Megan won’t walk from her trailer until John Turturro walks on set first! John’s done seventy-five movies and she’s made two!

“Never expect Megan to attend any of the 15 or so crew parties like all the other actors have. And then there’s the classless night she blew off the Royal Prince of Jordan, who prepared a special dinner for all the actors. She doesn’t know that the grip’s [two] daughters wanted to visit her daddy during work in order to meet Megan, but that he wouldn’t let them come because he told them ‘she’s not nice.’

“The press certainly doesn’t know her most famous line. On our first day in Egypt, the Egyptian government wouldn’t let us shoot because of a permit problem as the actors got ready in make up at the Four Seasons Hotel. Michael tried to make the best of it, and so decided to take the cast and crew on a private tour of the famous Giza pyramids. God hold us witness when we say that Megan’s response was, “I can’t believe Michael is fucking forcing us to go to the fucking pyramids!” (I guess this is the ‘Hitler guy’ she’s referring to.)

“So this is the Megan Fox you don’t get to see. Maybe she will learn, but we figure if she can sling insults then she can take them too. Megan really is a thankless, classless, graceless, and shall we say unfriendly bitch. It’s sad how fame can twist people, and even sadder that young girls look up to her. If only they knew who they’re really looking up to.

“But fame is fleeting. We behind-the-scenes guys have seen em’ come and go. Hopefully Michael will have Megatron squish Megan’s character in the first ten minutes of Transformers 3.”

I just got out of a 9 am screening of John Hillcoat‘s The Road. It’s now 11:05 with another movie — I Am Love — about to begin at 11:30 so I have ten minutes to review The Road. And I’m not going to make it. Ugly-beautiful photography and highly admirable production design — two hours of rotted, ash-covered, end-of-the-world remnants captured in ravishing desaturated color — and who needs it? Okay, Viggo Mortensen and the kid are very good…yes, fine. But what they bring isn’t nearly enough.

I read Cormac McCarthy‘s novel for the beautiful prose, but the movie is quite unnecessary. It really and truly goes nowhere, enhances nothing, offers no poetry of any lasting value and adds nothing to the conversation. Plus it has a lousy story. You can have it. I’ll never watch The Road again. You can give me the Blu-ray and I’ll never pop it in.

A connected friend assures that this “I will not read your effing script” rant has made Josh Olson “the hottest screenwriter in town at the moment…he struck a nerve and set off a mother lode around the web.”

Here’s a portion I fully understand and believe in, which is that you can spot mediocrity or a lack of talent in any form of artistic endeavor almost right away. Within ten pages in a script, and within ten minutes if you’re watching a film. Actually, you can can usualy tell if a film doesn’t make it within two or three minutes after the credits but I think it’s fair to stick around for at least ten minutes.

“Now, I normally have a standard response to people who ask me to read their scripts,” Olson writes, “and it’s the simple truth: I have two piles next to my bed. One is scripts from good friends, and the other is manuscripts and books and scripts my agents have sent to me that I have to read for work. Every time I pick up a friend’s script, I feel guilty that I’m ignoring work. Every time I pick something up from the other pile, I feel guilty that I’m ignoring my friends. If I read yours before any of that, I’d be an awful person.

“Most people get that. But sometimes you find yourself in a situation where the guilt factor is really high, or someone plays on a relationship or a perceived obligation, and it’s hard to escape without seeming rude. Then, I tell them I’ll read it, but if I can put it down after ten pages, I will. They always go for that, because nobody ever believes you can put their script down once you start.

“But hell, this was a two page synopsis, and there was no time to go into either song or dance, and it was just easier to take it. How long can two pages take?

“Weeks, is the answer.

“And this is why I will not read your fucking script.

“It rarely takes more than a page to recognize that you’re in the presence of someone who can write, but it only takes a sentence to know you’re dealing with someone who can’t.”

My Toronto Film Festival structure is already starting to fall apart. I plan and organize and copy and paste like an obsessive accountant before I come here each year, and then it all goes to hell in a kind of tornado-like gale before the second day is through. I know which screenings I want to get to, but the interviews and parties and press conferences just seem to whirl around like debris. There’s just not enough time in the day to see and do everything you want to do and write about it.

I saw four films yesterday (including Grant Heslov‘s The Men Who Stare at Goats) and haven’t tapped out a word about any of them. (Well, I did write about them this morning but the Bell internet re-booted after I’d written about ten graphs and I lost the whole friggin’ thing.) All I’m planning to do now is stop by the Sony Classics dinner at Mirabelle, which starts at 7 pm. I’ll post some fresh photos later this evening, and tomorrow is a new day.

Incidentally…I kind of hate it when I’m sitting alone at a cafe and a couple approaches and right away I start to discreetly eyeball the lady because she’s exceptional looking, and right away the guy starts eyeballing me with an expression that says, “Whaddaya think you’re doing?…she’s with me, we’re in love…look at somebody else!” Whenever that happens I look away for a second or two, not wanting to be rude or provoke anything, but then I resent myself for wussing out. It’s okay to look as long as you’re not obnoxious about it, I think. What’s the guy gonna do?

Joel and Ethan Coen‘s A Serious Man is a brilliant LQTM black comedy that out-misanthropes Woody Allen by a country mile and positively seethes with contempt for complacent religious culture (in this case ’60s era Minnesota Judaism). I was knocked flat in the best way imaginable and have put it right at the top of my Coen-best list. God, it’s such a pleasure to take in something this acidic and well-scalpeled. The Coens are fearless at this kind of artful diamond-cutting.

A Serious Man star Michael Stuhlbarg on phone; Adam Arkin is the out-of-focus guy (i.e., an attorney) behind him.

The wickedly acidic and funereal tone and lack of stars means it isn’t going to make a dime, but it’s a high-calibre achievement by the most gifted filmmaking brothers of our time, and it absolutely must rank as one of the year’s ten Best Picture nominees when all is said and done. The Academy fudgies will not be permitted to brush this one aside, and if they do there will be torches and pitchforks such as James Whale never imagined at the corner of Wilshire and La Peer.

The worldview of this maliciously wicked film (which isn’t “no-laugh funny” as much as wicked-bitter-toxic funny, which I personally prize above all other kinds) is black as night, black as a damp and sealed-off cellar. Scene after scene tells us that life is drip-drip torture, betrayal and muted hostility are constants, all manner of bad things (including tornadoes) are just around the corner, your family and neighbors will cluck-cluck as you sink into quicksand, etc.

This is the stuff that true laughter is made of, and this is a genuinely wonderful film to sit through because of it. It’s so refined and compressed and jewel-cut, so precisely calibrated and cold as nitrogen, and yet hilarious as Hades. Literally. I can’t wait to catch it a second time.

Only a couple of tough Jewish filmmakers could make a film this despising and contemptuous of their own. And what a way to spur the sales of Jefferson Airplane CDs!

Joel and Ethan Coen

Set in 1969 or ’71 (to judge by the music), A Serious Man is about a decent but fatally passive and acquiescent college (High school?) physics teacher named Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) and his family, along with his extended family of neighbors, synagogue members, rabbis, attorneys and whatnot who live in St. Louis Park, Minnesota — a suburb of Minneapolis.

The story is about Gopnik grappling with one horrific threat and misfortune after another. His wife Judith (Sari Wagner Lennick, who looks like Mrs. Shrek minus the green skin) is planning to leave him for a 50ish grotesque named Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed). The father of a South Korean student looking for a better grade tries to bribe Gopnik and then sue him for defamation when he won’t accept it. His application for tenure appears threatened. His no-account brother Arthur is living on the couch, and is being investigated by police for indecent behavior. There’s a slim and foxy next-door neighbor who sunbathes nude in hetr back yard.

Every character in this film except for the teenage kids and the next-door nudist is an appalling Jewish grotesque. The grotesques in Mike Leigh’s films have nothing on this bunch. The thought of actually being inside the head and the skin of one of these characters …eewww! In a certain light A Serious Man is almost a kind of companion piece to Todd Browning‘s Freaks, except that Browning’s film is greatly compassionate and caring and A Serious Man is anything but.

You know what this film philosophically is in a nutshell? That kiki joke I passed along a couple of years ago. The one about two anthropologists captured by cannibals in New Guinea, etc.? Chief to anthropologhists: “Death or kiki?” Anthropologist #1 chooses kiki and is beaten, tortured, whipped, flayed and eaten by crocodiles. The chief asks Anthropologist #2 the same question, and he says, “I’m not a brave man so I’ll choose death.” And the chief goes, “Very well, death…but first, kiki!”

I’ve just seen the most eloquent, affecting and altogether best film of 2009…so far. Yes, better than my beloved The Hurt Locker. If it doesn’t win the Best Picture Oscar next February…well, okay…I’ll live. Jason Reitman will live, George Clooney will live, Paramount publicity will live, Brad Grey will live, your family and friends will live, and the sun will come up the next day.

(l. to r.) Vera Farmiga, George Clooney, Anna Kendrick in Jason Reitman’s Up In The Air.

But Up In The Air really has it all — recognizable human-scale truth, clarity, smart comfort, the right degree of restraint (i.e., knowing how not to push it), and — this got me more than anything else — a penetrating, almost unnerving sense of quiet.

This is one of the calmest and most unforced this-is-who-we-are, what-we-need and what-we’re-all-afraid-of-in-the-workplace movies that I’ve ever seen. From an American, I should say. (The Europeans have almost made job-anxiety films into a genre — i.e., Laurent Cantet‘s Time Out, etc.) But I would guess that Up In The Air will play very, very well in Paris. It’s a film that walks and talks it and knows it every step of the way. Work, adulthood, asking the questions that matter, compassion, family, stick-your-neck-out, etc. The whole package. With an almost profound lack of Hollywood bullshit and jerk-offery. And a kind of Brokeback Mountain-y theme at the finale — i.e., “move it or lose it.”

Up In The Air doesn’t tell you what to feel — it lets you feel what it is. All the best movies do that. They don’t sell or pitch — they just lay it down on the Oriental carpet and say to the viewer, “We’ve got a good thing here, and if you agree, fine. And if you don’t, go with God.”

You know what? The hell with that attitude. If you really watch and let this movie in and then say, as a friend of a good friend said after watching it in Telluride a few days ago, “I don’t know…it’s nice but it’s more like an okay ground-rule double than a homer,” then due respect but you’re the kind of person who likes candied popcorn and Strawberry Twizzlers and feel-good pills. No offense.

Variety‘s Todd McCarthy called it “a slickly engaging piece of lightweight existentialism.” That’s an unfair and inappropriate characterization. There’s a difference between lightweight and having the goods and taking it easy and laying it on gradually.

The thing that puts Up In The Air over is that it’s about right effin’ now, which is to say the uncertain and fearful Great Recession current of 2009. Reitman has been working on it for six years, and if it had come out last September — just as the bad news about what those greedy selfish banking bastards had done was being announced and everyone started to mutter “uh-oh” to themselves — it wouldn’t be reflecting the cultural what-have-you as much as it is now. And yet it never alludes to anything that specific. It doesn’t have to.

We all know about the story by now. Ryan Bingham (Clooney) is a kind of lightweight Zen smoothie who specializes in gently firing people when their bosses are too chicken to do it themselves. He doesn’t just like travelling around in business class seats and staying in nice hotels — he relishes the sense of belonging and security that he gets from being constantly in motion and never digging into a life of his own. And it’s easy to spot the arc — i.e., will Ryan find some way to let go of skimming along and maybe go for a little soul infusion?

The basic story propellant comes from two women who represent a certain kind of change/growth/threat element — Alex (Vera Farmiga), a fellow traveller who’s an exact replica of Bingham save for her sexuality, and with whom he strikes up a nice groove-on relationship in the film’s beginning, and Natalie (Anna Kendrick), a hamster-sized junor exec type who ‘s sold Ryan’s boss (Jason Bateman) on whacking people through a video conferencing system rather than face-to-face.

But I don’t want to get into the story more than that. What happens, happens for the right reasons. The main thing is that none of the developments feel the least bit ungenuine. And I will square off with anyone who says the ending isn’t sufficiently “happy.” Anyone who doesn’t realize that Clooney is quite another man and open to the next good thing at the finale simply hasn’t been paying attention.

There are many witnesses in this film a la Reds — real-life people who’ve been laid off and are facing the abyss in more ways than one — and I’ve already read complaints that Reitman overplays this card. I respectfully disagree. The clips appear symmetrically (i.e., at the beginning and end), and have an added weight at the finale. “Repetition” doesn’t necessarily mean “repetitiously.”

I’m really glad I caught Up In The Air at the beginning of the second wave — i.e., immediately post-Telluride. By the time it comes out on 11.13.09 it’ll be something else, and by that I mean the movie that snarkers will be looking to shoot down just to do that. Snarkers are so reprehensible. They pummel and flatten things down and rob them of their fresh-soil beauty.