A little over a month ago the selections for the forthcoming New York Film Festival (9.25 through 10.11) were revealed. Many noted that the slate seemed to reflect the tastes of a rather hermetic, esoteric, film-dweeby selection panel with an aversion to anything that smacked of accessibility and across-the-board engagement. But I didn’t know how dweeby until just a little while ago when I was told by an excellent source that the NYFF committee turned down the Coen Bros.’ A Serious Man, Lone Scherfig‘s An Education and Jacques Audiard‘s A Prophet. To which I said, “What?”

On 8.11 Film Society of Lincoln Center programmer Richard Pena tried to explain the dweeb slate to the Hollywood Reporter‘s Stephen Zeitchik as follows: “Two years ago, we had the Coen brothers and Wes Anderson and Julian Schnabel and Noah Baumbach and Sidney Lumet. Last year, there was less, and this year there is much less.”

Except the NYFF selection committee did have the Coens this year in the form of A Serious Man, which, in the view of many who’ve seen this film in Toronto, is arguably one of the best they’ve ever made. And yet the NYFF selection committee — Pena and critics Dennis Lim, Scott Foundas, J. Hoberman and Melissa Anderson — for the most part disliked it and declined to show it.

I don’t know who specifically voted against it except for a vague understanding that Foundas is not a fan. (Apparently Foundas and Hoberman gave A Serious Man a “bomb” rating in the Critic’s Choice chart in the new issue of Film Comment.) But having seen A Serious Man myself and given the large Upper West Side Jewish audience that attends this festival, I can say with absolute authority that the NYFF committee is imbedded way too deeply inside its own posterior cavity. I mean, they’re really nuts not to show this film. As they are in having also turned down An Education and A Prophet.

These are three movies with serious critical cred that also play to an audience. Each would be a huge hit, trust me, with the NYFF crowd that attends each and every year. The NYFF selection committee has become a gathering of Trappist monks who’ve been slurping too much goat’s milk with their granola. I’m not the only one who thinks this, trust me.

Last night’s chat with Mother and Child director-writer Rodrigo Garcia went smoothly enough, but it was partly a technical disaster on my end. I forgot to take a photo of him for some reason, and the video footage I shot was accidentally erased during a file transfer I attempted an hour after we parted. But at least I have the mp3. I’d summarize what we discussed but my first film of the day — Love and Other Impossible Pursuits — starts in 17 minutes.

Mother and Child director-writer Rodrigo Garcia in a N.Y. Times photo taken four years ago.

Film festivals always start to wear me down by the fifth or sixth day. Even people who work fewer hours than I tend to feel exhausted at this point. I’ve been doing the usual 6:30 wakeup and hitting the sack no earlier than 1 am each night, and today marks the beginning of the seventh day of that pace. I’m holding up reasonably well and keeping as focused as can be expected under these circumstances.

One of the tables at Bymark, the elegant restaurant on Wellington Street where Miramax held its after-party Tuesday evening for Scott Hicks’ The Boys Are Back. Costars Clive Owen and Sam Neill attended.

I did, however, fall asleep in a sitting position on the westbound Bloor Street subway the night before last, and awoke only at the very end of the line.

“Kipling! Kipling!” I opened my eyes and looked up at a woman standing over me and trying to wake me up. “This is Kipling, sir…last stop!” I stumbled out of Kipling station and looked around at the break nocturnal landscape — acres of unlit nothingness and endless stretches of parking lot depression — and realized I was in Toronto’s equivalent of western Siberia. I suppose I should be thankful to that woman. If she hadn’t woken me some kid might’ve come along and stolen my bag.

I spoke early yesterday evening with Mother and Child director-writer Rodrigo Garcia, and then dropped by a delightful after-party for Scott Hicks‘ The Boys Are Back (Miramax, 9.25). And that was it.

Today’s activities: Don Roos‘ Love and Other Impossible Pursuits (9 am), Tom Ford‘s A Single Man (11 am), Fatih Akin‘s Soul Kitchen at 1 pm, Steven Soderbergh‘s The Informant! at 3:15 pm and a chat with Werner Herzog around 5;15 pm. Where’s the writing time in that schedule? Beats me.

Toronto-based artist Richard Kruger gave me a lift yesterday in this contraption, taking me from the Elgin theatre to the Soho Metropolitan hotel on Wellington Street.

The month-old trailer for Oliver Parker‘s Dorian Gray (which played twice last weekend at TIFF, is currently running in the UK, but has no US distributor or release date) makes it quite clear that the film does everything it can to coarsen and vulgarize and make sticky with blood Oscar Wilde‘s original 1891 novel. Which is why I didn’t even flirt with the idea of seeing it here.

It should therefore come as no surprise that the 9.15 review by Variety‘s Todd McCarthy says that Parker “takes a meat cleaver to Wilde’s work [with] a film as coarse and crude as its source material is refined and sublime.

“To paraphrase the great Irish scribe himself, the picture is a monstrous corruption [that’s] more at home stylistically in the bloody vicinity of Elm Street or Hammer Studios than in the loftier realms of distinguished literary adaptations, film festivals or the earlier incarnation of Ealing Studios.

“There are three good things in this latest version of Wilde’s only novel: Colin Firth, who tosses off the vast majority of the script’s appropriated witticisms with seasoned aplomb; Rebecca Hall, who singlehandedly revives the moribund enterprise with a jolt of vitality in the final reels; and the painting itself, which is stunningly rendered.

“Otherwise, Parker goes for the jugular, literally, splashing blood all around the famous story of an exquisite young man whose devil’s bargain allows him to retain his beauty and lead a life of depraved debauchery while his portrait ages hideously in an attic. It’s as if the director envisioned a companion piece to Sweeney Todd, but with a porno-worthy synth score rather than Stephen Sondheim.”

I’m sitting in a Starbucks on Yonge and College, and the great Eddie Marsan (here to promote The Disappearance of Alice Creed) just walked in with his wife. I was either too cool or too much of a coward to waltz over and snap his photo. Marsan has a great English face — brute but somehow sensitive. And I’m with everyone else in having loved his performance in Happy Go Lucky.

I was half-fine and half-meh over Neil Jordan‘s Ondine except for the great Colin Farrell‘s performance. It’s not fair or right to dismiss a film in this fashion so I’ll just pledge to come back to it tomorrow.

It’s now 5:30 pm, and I have to make it down to the Elgin for a 6 pm screening of Scott Hicks‘ The Boys Are Back. I’ll have to cut out for a quick 6:45 pm discussion with Mother and Child director Rodrigo Garcia, and then attend a Boys Are Back dinner party at 8 pm, and then another event for The Private Lives of Pippa Lee.

I wrote last night’s riff about Rodrigo Garcia‘s Mother and Child without having seen the final 30 minutes. So I went to see it again today at a 12:30 pm Cumberland press screening and was rather surprised to discover that the last 30 minutes are the weakest part of the film. The plot lurches a couple of times and tone becomes a little too emphatic. The first 95 or so minutes use gradual and subtle shadings; the last 30 minutes use more and more primary colors. I’m not saying it falls apart, but the last act does diminish Mother and Child somewhat.

I was suffering from the very beginning of Todd Solondz‘s Life During Wartime, which screened this morning at 9 am, and there was very little respite until I bolted, which was about 65 minutes in. I’d been seething, scowling, muttering, looking at my watch and asking myself, “Should I do the full suffer and stick it out until the end, or can I escape after an hour or so?”

I left because I’ve never related to Solondz’s more-or-less constant theme — the inner monster in us all will always crawl out and can probably never be restrained — and I find it incredibly boring to sit through another icky-pervy exploration of same.

I left because I’m just about burned out on the plight of a suffering male child molester as a topic of dramatic interest or intrigue. I think male child molesters should have their sexual organs chopped off with a dull axe. Other scenarios hold little interest.

I left because I didn’t believe anything I was hearing — to my ear Solondz’s dialogue is always unnatural and rhetorical — and I didn’t believe any of the actors. To me they were just speaking the dialogue and trying like hell to make it all play realistically, but the odds were too great against them. Solondzworld is a place of constant guilt and venom and nightmares. Do the merciful thing — get out your father’s AK-47 and shoot yourself in the mouth. It’s easier and less complicated that way,.

I left because bitter middle-aged women who wear bad wigs (like Charlotte Rampling‘s character) don’t come over to a man’s table (i.e., one occupied by costar Ciarin Hinds) and start conversing with an unmistakable implication that some sort of erotic coupling is on her mind. It doesn’t happen that way, and it never will happen that way.

And it doesn’t matter if Solondz agrees and wanted this scene to be seen as some kind of arch exercise. The point is that no one can relax and listen and settle in when a scene is bullshit.

I left because the tall and large-boned Allison Janey could never be a sister to the tiny pipsqueak British actress Shirley Henderson — not in a million fucking years.

I left becasue mothers never discuss erotic awakenings with their tweener-aged sons, and because it’s not funny when Solondz tries to make such scene into a form of dry “what if?” comedy. Heh-heh, not really, fuck off.

I left because…all right, I can’t write any more because Neil Jordan‘s Ondine is going to start in 17 minutes.

I’ve just come from the first TIFF screening of Rodrigo Garcia‘s Mother and Child, and if someone picks it up and puts it into NY and LA theatres before 12.31, it’s a Best Picture contender. Because sophisticated filmgoers of a certain age are going to cream over this. All right, don’t trust me…I don’t care. I know what I know and I go to sleep with that every night.

This is a great woman’s film except it isn’t, not really, because it got to me big-time and I generally don’t fall for films aimed at the opposite genre market so go figure. It’s so good and so exactingly and humanistically right that a fair-sized portion of the Julie and Julia audience may reject it because it’s not coarse or common enough.

On top of this Annette Bening, who gives what I feel is possibly the best performance of her life in this film, will be a Best Actress contender.

I know what Mother and Child is and I’m not going all breathless and gah-gah because that’s what some critics do when they see a new film at a film festival. For what it is — a super-sensitive, perfectly acted and exquisitely written adult drama about (the title kind of indicates this) mothers and daughters and parenting and re-establishing connections, Mother and Child is really and truly as good as this sort of thing gets. It’s got Fox Searchlight or Focus Features written all over it.

That’s all I have time to say right now. I’m at an IFC dinner party and I’m tapping this out on a bar and I don’t want be rude to my hosts.

I escaped from this morning’s screening of Derrick Borte‘s The Joneses after twelve minutes and quickly hightailed it over to the Cumberland for Werner Herzog‘s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, which I missed only a bit of. I’m not much of a laugh-out-loud type of guy but I laughed my head off at portions of this deranged psycho-dramedy, although if it was my call I would have titled it Bad Lieutenant: The Silence of the Reptiles.

Nicolas Cage, Eva Mendes in Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.

It’s hilariously bent and livewire and even surreal at times, but it’s still not entirely the ultimate cuckoo Nic Cage film I was hoping for. I loved that Herzog constantly subverts the suspension-of-disbelief element that one is naturally inclined to submit to as the proverbial campfire tale is told. And yet time and again Herzog reminds the viewer that Bad Lieutenant doesn’t know from campfires and is essentially a goof — a deliciously eccentric druggy-crazy cop movie about a deliciously eccentric druggy-crazy cop movie.

And with such a consistent emphasis on extreme acting, deliriously dopey iguana and crocodile shots, and other outrageously skewed bits the occasional stabs at emotional sincerity just seem to get in the way. So it’s not really pure and unified thing. It lurches around, which is cool in a sense but also a little disorienting

But most of Herzog’s Lieutenant is a boldly feisty mescaline crime movie, and when Cage is channeling that wackjob current that he knows and channels so well, it’s well worth the ticket price.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans would be a great midnight movie if the midnight movie business amounted to anything these days. It’s definitely something to watch stoned. I began to sense a kind of contact pot high; at times a bit more than this. With all the iguanas and crocks slithering around I sometimes felt like I was Hunter Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas after putting a little extract of pineal gland on my tongue.

A fellow was snoring in the seat next to me during the last 20 minutes of this morning’s Bad Lieutenant screening. Everybody dozes off during festival showings, but this guy was sleeping with his mouth open and making sounds like a hog having its throat cut. At first a woman volunteer came over and whispered that he can’t do this, etc. No effect. So I elbowed him a couple of times and murmured the same thing — “C’mon, man, no snoring.” Indifference. More hog sounds.

I must have poked him six or seven times but he wouldn’t quit. Or rather he’d quit for a minute or two and then start up again. So I got up and took his picture. I’m posting this as a service to TIFF journalists who may run into this dude during the remainder of the festival. Just desserts. You can’t mess with your fellow viewers’ absorption in a film and not expect some sort of consequence.