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.

Michael Moore spoke following last night’s Capitalism: A Love Story screening about why he’s still pretty much behind President Barack Obama…for now. And yet his last words on the subject were “maybe my next film will be about him.”

With all the running around Toronto I missed this over the weekend. “The Democrats just never learn [that] Americans don’t really care which side of an issue you’re on as long as you don’t act like pussies,” Bill Maher said last Friday night. Mild-mannered is as mild-mannered does. Maher called the White House “cowards” for letting the crazies push them around, and said President Obama needs to man up and “stand up for the 70 percent of Americans who aren’t crazy.”

Here‘s the transcript. Key quote: “Crazy evil morons make up things for Obama to do, and he does it.”

In my usual once-removed, insufficiently bookish way, I felt I came to know author/poet Jim Carroll not from his writings but through the 1995 film adaptation of The Basketball Dairies. I’m thinking particularly of that harrowing scene when Leonardo DiCaprio, who played the teenaged Carroll, wailed and screamed in the hallway outside his mother’s apartment, begging to be let in. That scene sank in deep. 14 years ago and I still play it in my head from time to time.

Author/poet Jim Carroll

Carroll died last Friday at age 59 of a heart attack. He was reportedly working at his desk working when he died. My condolences to family, friends and fans. Quality, not quantity.

A Guardian story reports that the annual dolphin slaughter is happening again in Taiji, Japan. I wonder what’s happened regarding Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s determination about heading up the Tokyo Film Festival jury in light of the fest’s reported decision not to screen The Cove despite its green theme.

The Indiewire guys have asked me and several others to grade the Toronto Film Festival selections we’ve seen thus far. I’m finding their list of 34 films, give or take, depressing because I’ve only seen 10 or 11 so far, and not counting today I’ve only got three and a half days to go before flying back to New York. Always like this, always frustrating, etc.

I haven’t time to write anything about Michael Moore‘s Capitalism: A Love Story, which I saw earlier this afternoon, but I think it’s brilliant and searing and the various nitpicking Moore critics can go to hell. He always does what he does with awesome skill, and every time I sit down with one of his films I melt down. Yes, I choked up.

I don’t care about what he hasn’t shown and what corners he’s cut because he always brings it home and makes his points not just understood but felt. I had a problem with one thing — he doesn’t hold Barack Obama‘s feet to the fire about chumming up and taking the word and counsel of Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geitner.

But Capitalism is a bold-as-brass slam at the basic evils unleashed by unregulated capitalism, and a clean and irrefutable explanation about how the U.S. system has taken the basic unfairness of life and magnified it tenfold, especially since the ascension of Ronald Reagan.

A couple of hours ago I did about 13 minutes with Joel and Ethan Coen, the director-writers of the irrefutably brilliant A Serious Man, at Toronto’s Park Hyatt.

A Serious Man‘s Ethan and Joel Coen.

The talk was loose, amiable, amusing. It always is when you speak to them. As long as you talk their language, I mean. Their personalities are so low-key and unaggressive that they could both die from this, and that’s cool. I hate the word “genius” because Hollywood phonies use it all the time, but that’s what these guys have. And I really love it when they laugh.

The mp3 speaks for itself but I started by repeating a remark from a producer friend that the film’s dark view of life being a non- stop gauntlet of misfortune and cruel fate is “dishonest” given that the Coens’ lives are so creative and productive and successful. They guys didn’t really answer this one but the semi-biographical A Serious Man is about their teenaged years and the staunchly Jewish Minnesota community they grew up with, and not their filmmaking lives.

I complimented them about the beautiful CG tornado that appears at the end, adding my general opinion that invisible CG is the best. They agreed. The visual effects maestros were Oliver Arnold, Andy Burmeister and Alexandre Cancado of Luma Pictures.

I asked them if they agreed with my belief that the philosophy of A Serious Man can be summed up by that kiki joke I mentioned in my review. They weren’t sure what I meant so I went into the shpiel and Joel went, “Oh, you mean roo-roo?” The joke has been told with many names over the years. Not only did they not disagree with the analogy but got a good laugh from it.

The movie is basically saying, I said, that your friends can’t help you, your family can’t helpo and your community can’t help you when it comes to God’s cruel humor. You’re alone, basically, and there’s no real comfort to be had, but the film delivers this in such a quietly hilarious way. And that’s the art of it. Ethan said he’s completely comfortable with that assessment.

What’s the point of describing the conversation? Just give it a listen. I expressed hope that they’ll make another out-and-out comedy before too long, and Ethan said that their next, an adaptation of True Grit with Jeff Bridges in the Rooster Cogburn/John Wayne role, is fairly funny. Not overtly but…well, you know.

Michael Bay has removed from his website that letter that trashed Megan Fox — i.e., the one that was written by three crew members. (And which was posted without his knowledge and assent?) Here’s his statement: “I don’t condone the crew letter to Megan. And I don’t condone Megan’s outlandish quotes. But her crazy quips are part of her crazy charm. The fact of the matter I still love working with her, and I know we still get along. I even expect more crazy quotes from her on Transformers 3.”