If there’s a line of at least five or six people waiting to use the one available bathroom, and if the person currently in the bathroom is either dying or giving birth or typing out the last chapter of a novel on his/her iPhone, then you know you’re at a Starbucks.

Say what you want about Michael Mann‘s Public Enemies, but the finale — the one-on-one between Marion Cotillard‘s Billie Frechette and Stephen Lang‘s Charles Winstead, a brief jailhouse conversation that ended with the words “Bye-bye, Blackbird” — was the most penetrating of 2009. The best, the most memorable, the most oddly affecting.

Stephen Lang as Charles Winstead in Michael Mann‘s Public Enemies.

Marion Cotillard’s final moment as Billie Frechette

It was a kind of neat bulls-eye Hollywood moment, and I can’t think of any other ’09 finish that felt quite so “right” and fulfilling. Great endings are half the game in my book, and this one played a big part in the my Public Enemies rave.

“Bye-bye blackbird” were the final words spoken by Johnny Depp‘s John Dillinger as he lay dying on the sidewalk outside Chicago’s Biograph theatre. Winstead is the one who leans close enough to hear them. But when Christian Bale‘s Melvin Purvis asks what he heard, Winstead says “nothin'” or “couldn’t hear” or words to this effect. He lies to his superior.

But in the final scene he leans forward and tells Frechette, and when she hears them she melts and melts some more as the music swells up and over, and we start to feel it too. The irony is that I hadn’t really accepted or invested in the Dillinger-Frechette love story current until that moment, but I suddenly did when this moment happened. An amazing thing, now that I think back.

And I couldn’t even find a still from this scene, much less a YouTube capture. I guess it’ll start turning up when the Public Enemies Blu-ray comes out on 12.8.

I went apeshit for this film but not very many joined me, and I eventually lost the spirit and the will to fight.

I called it “the most captivating, beautifully composed and freshly conceived gangster movie since Bonnie and Clyde. It’s an art film first, a Mann head-and-heart trip second, a classic machine-gun action pulverizer third, and a conventional popcorn movie fourth. [But] the schmucks will go ‘meh.'” And they did do that.

And a lot of HE commenters fell under the impression that I had said it was the best gangster film since Bonnie and Clyde, and that I should have stayed the course and fought it out like Dillinger. But I didn’t say that — I said it was the “most freshly conceived.” Little bit of a difference there.

I don’t see why there’s friction between documentarian Alex Gibney and director George Hickenlooper over the use of the term “Casino Jack” in the titles of their respective Jack Abramoff films. HIckenlooper’s film, a feature starring Kevin Spacey as Abramoff, is called Casino Jack, and Gibney’s is called Casino Jack: The United States of Money. I can tell the two apart easily. Both could play Sundance 2010…maybe.

A Hurt Locker q & a was moderated last night by director-screenwriter Tony Gilroy following a 6 pm screening at Manhattan’s DGA theatre. (l. to r.) Gilroy, Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow, screenwriter Mark Boal, costar Anthony Mackie, and…I’m sorry but I didn’t write down the name of the bearded guy on the right. It could have been producer Nicolas Chartier or associate producer Jack Schuster or producer Greg Shapiro. No disrespect intended.

It’s been 14 months since I first saw The Hurt Locker at the ’08 Toronto Film Festival. And it’ll be a topic of interest for the next three and a half months, presuming it gets nominated for Best Picture, Bigelow gets nominated for Best Director, and Boal snags a Best Original Screenplay nomination. (Which will probably happen.)

“Set in Baghdad and the full maelstrom of that godforsaken conflict, this is a full-power throttle, nail-biting, bomb-defusal suspense film that gradually becomes a kind of existential nerve ride about the risk and uncertainty of everything and anything,” I wrote on 9.8.08. “The Hurt Locker is absolutely a classic war film in the tradition of Platoon, The Thin Red Line, Pork Chop Hill, Paths of Glory and the last 25% of Full Metal Jacket.”

(l. to r.) Bigelow, Boal, Mackie — Thursday, 11.12, 8:50 pm.

“Defense Lawyer: Fort Hood Shooter Could Be Paralyzed” (11.13 AP story). HE reaction: That’s a start. This is straight out of the Glenn Beck playbook and I’m sorry, but Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan must swing for this. If he doesn’t, the crowd in the Place de Concorde will make their feelings known.

Dead Time Warner wifi in the apartment with the repair guy not able to visit until next Tuesday. ATT air-card wifi on the laptop spotty at best and randomly disconnnecting whenever it feels like it. An urgent visit to the local post office required due to curious refusal of postman to leave letters addressed to me here, and a screening of Crazy Heart at 11 am in Manhattan. I have all this good stuff to post but I know when I’m temporarily beaten. All she wrote until mid-afternoon.

Detective #1: “I think God hates me.” Detective #2: “Hate him right back. Works for me.” What film? Easy one.

It’s not that I’ve discounted Nicolas Cage’s loop-dee-loop jazzman performance in Werner Herzog‘s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. For an actor whose stock in trade is to convey varying degrees of derangement whatever the role, Cage hits a 21st Century high as Lt. Terence McDonagh — a wackazoid refrain of Cage’s legendary Peter Loew in Vampire’s Kiss.

To truly commune with an inspired Cage performance is to drop a tab of mescaline, jump off a 700-foot cliff in Yosemite National Park and howl like a coyote all the way down.

I’ve presumed all along that Academy voters would most likely undervalue (or even dismiss) Cage’s Lieutenant performance because it’s too Miles Davis, too much in the realm of instinct and mad brushstrokes. But maybe I’m wrong. It would be nice — hell, glorious! — if I am.

I had a nice, friendly, off-the-record lunch today with Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow at Extra Virgin on West 4th. She’s in Manhattan for a day or two, and is sitting for a q & a with director-writer Tony Gilroy this evening at the DGA theatre on West 57th. On 11.30 Bigelow will be handed a tribute award at the 19th annual Gotham Independent Film Awards. The org has also nominated Hurt Locker for Best Feature, Best Ensemble Performance and Best Breakthrough Actor (i.e., Jeremy Renner).

The DVD/Bluray comes out January 12th. If Summit is smart they’ll put the film back into NY and LA theatres starting next month.

Anyway after Bigelow left and I was putting my coat on I asked the Extra Virgin waitress if she’d seen The Hurt Locker. “The what?,” she said. “The Hurt Locker. An Iraq movie, bomb-squad defusing.” Her face was a blank. “Is it a documentary?,” she asked. “Nope, feature…a thriller,” I said. “Who’s in it?” she said. “Jeremy Renner, Ralph Fiennes, Anthony Mackie….that’s okay, just wondering,” I said.

Intrigued, I walked into the main room and asked the hostess and (I think) another lady employee who was sitting at the bar if they’d seen it. Same reaction — neither woman had even heard the title.

And we’re not talking about waitresses in some greasy spoon in Pensacola, Florida. New Yorkers are supposed to be moderately hip and aware. It’s one thing for these women not to have seen an Iraq War film, but to draw a total blank at a mention of the title? This obviously says nothing about the quality of the film, and almost everything about the lackluster marketing effort by Summit.

Gamechangers.com’s Mike Bonifer has written a nicely thought-through HE tribute, calling yours truly the October 2009 game-changer of the month. Except his piece was just posted today, 11.12. Why wait 12 days after the end of October to announce this honor? I should either be the November game-changer guy or Bonifer should have run this 30 days ago. Or…whatever, he should have waited until next April.

The site is a promotion for Bonifer’s book, “Gamechangers: Improvisation for Business in the Networked World.”

If you’ve ever played in any kind of half-assed blues band, which I did for a year or so (as a barely competent drummer), you know that the band has to have a half-assed blues band name. The one I played in was called the Sludge Brothers. The thinking was that “sludge” sounded authentic on some level; it also sounded like Flatt and Scruggs. A variation of this same band adopted a different name — Dog Breath — for a special one-night gig. It was stolen from Frank Zappa, of course.

But the band never adopted the greatest blues-band name I ever heard — Blind Pig Sweat. I heard it spoken exactly once in my life by someone other than myself, but I never forgot it. Whatever this quality is, it’s something you want in any name, title, etc.

Today’s (11.12) tracking has Roland Emmerich‘s 2012 with an 87 total awareness, a 49 definite interest and 30 first choice-and-release. That means pretty damn big. Maybe tsunami level. Variety says that box-office observers are forecasting over $40 million and perhaps higher. I say high 40s at least and perhaps a nudge over $50 million.

Vanity Fair.com‘s Jason Zinoman recently went the distance with Robert McKee‘s screenwriting course. He was”genuinely hoping to learn about screenwriting,” he writes, “but also, as a critic — and a specialist of horror movies — with a professional interest in McKee’s theories about genre and narrative.”

Legendary screenwriting guru Robert McKee

“By the end of the day, I had learned some valuable lessons about show business, the art of persuasion, and the tricky relationship between truth and fiction. I’d also learned that Robert McKee often has no idea what he’s talking about.

“Some people believe that no course can teach you how to write a screenplay, that it just comes out of you, but in my opinion that’s not true. A good teacher can really help writers, and McKee surely has had some success. He’s been criticized for turning the creative process into a series of rules, but this misses the real problem with his course, namely that the rules themselves are often banal and arbitrary. The emperor here is not naked, but he is showing some skin through his loosely tied robe, and when the subject turns to horror, the silky-smooth garment collapses around his ankles.”