“For what it’s worth, I was at [last night’s 6 pm screening] of The Hurt Locker and liked it quite a bit,” writes Newark Star-Ledger critic Stephen J. Whitty. “I’ve always liked Kathryn Bigelow (and yet strangely, Point Break least of all) and thought this one not only hit all her old themes (male bonding, the rush of risk, loyalty vs duty) but also managed a take on this war I haven’t seen before.
“I agree it’s going to be a challenging sell down the road, but this really is one of those iraq war movies that’s not about the Iraq War. It’s about “what do you do when your boss is an adrenaline junkie?” The guys in it could just have easily been cops or firemen or John Ford cavalrymen.”

I had an opening this evening and decided to scoot down to Roy Thomson Hall to see Rod Lurie‘s Nothing But The Truth again. It’s still tight and true, still perfectly acted, still believable at every turn — easily among the best three or four films I’ve seen at TIFF so far. Sorry if this challenges the c.w., but it happens to be true. Washington Post writer Ann Hornaday told me last night that she’s also a fan.

Acute W Lounge hell…sheer torture listening to music from one of worst D.J.’s in the world.

But the after-party, held at the W Lounge on Davenport Street, was nothing but the pits. The music was that special kind of vomitous, head-splitting disco sometimes played at super-loud volume outside the homes of deposed Latin American dictators in order to persuade them to come out and surrender. The amazing and unstoppable Joe Leydon was there. I was in and out within ten minutes. Baah, humbug.

In a 9.7 N.Y. Times book review of Michael Kimmel‘s Guyland, Wesley Yang summarizes the hows, whys and wherefores of the perpetually adolescent, emotionally walled off, under-educated, doughy-bodied, vaguely slobbish Seth Rogen-Judd Apatow male of 2008
“Back in 1960, 77 percent of women and 65 percent of men under 30 had attained the five milestones that mark a transition to adulthood: leaving home, completing one’s education, starting work, getting married and becoming a parent. In 2000, those figures had declined to 46 percent of women and 31 percent of men. One-fifth of all 25-year-olds live with their parents.
“‘The passage between adolescence and adulthood,’ Kimmel concludes, ‘has √Ǭ≠morphed from a transitional moment to a separate life stage.’
“Young middle-class white men feel the relative decline in their status particularly acutely, Kimmel argues. Their privileges are under siege. Women compete with them in the work force. Formerly deferential minorities demand respect. The values of consumption have eclipsed those of masculine production. And all of this new competition occurs in a context of general downward mobility. The response of these young white guys to such confusing conditions, Kimmel asserts, is to withdraw into a place he calls ‘Guyland.'”

A smart exhibition guy (knows his stuff, doesn’t mince words) caught Kathryn Bigelow‘s The Hurt Locker at tonight’s 6 pm screening at the Ryerson, and says that “with the exception of the closing minutes, which I think are a little misjudged, I’m thinking it’s some kind of war classic. A tough and problematic film, marketing wise, but it transcends Iraq juju. For me anyway. Awesome.”
The second definition of “juju” in the American Heritage Dictionary says “the supernatural power ascribed to an object.”
I was kept out of today’s 3 pm Wrestler screening due to every seat being taken, and my only other chance to catch it will be at the 12 noon public screening tomorrow. This is precisely when the first and only press screening of The Hurt Locker happens. Now I have to decide between them. I should have been more focused and disciplined and gotten myself down to this evening’s showing.

The odd thing about Diane English‘s The Women (New Line/WB, 9.12) is that (a) it’s a better written, generally more watchable and down-to-earth film than Sex and the City and yet (b) it doesn’t feel as rooted in present-day mores as Sex does (or did). It feels, in short, like a film that should have been made and released a good ten or fifteen years ago. Twenty years ago would have been all the better. So it makes sense, as this English profile piece says, that she’s been trying to get it made since the early days of the Clinton administration.

I didn’t finish the Religulous piece until 2:55 pm, sitting here at my usual table at Starbucks under the Cineplex Odeo cinemas. I then flew upstairs to theatre #8, trying like hell to catch the 3 pm screening of Darren Aranofsky‘s The Wrestler, only to be told sorry, no room at the inn, all seats taken.

Obviously a Mickey Rourke sartorial advertisement pointing to his uniqueness as an actor and human being, but where did he buy that amazing tie? When did they ever make ties that short?

The winner of the Venice Film Festival Golden Lion prize was acquired very early this morning by Fox Searchlight. And here, according to In Contention‘s Kris Tapley, is a bootleg recording of the song that Bruce Springsteen composed and sang for the film.

Any half-intelligent person with a properly skeptical view of the idiotic belief systems required by all big-time religions will, I presume, feel satisfied if not comforted by Bill Maher and Larry Charles‘ Religulous (Lionsgate 10.3).
Christianity, until recently the most arrogant and blood-soaked of them all (until Islamic fundamentalists took the crown), receives the worst skewering, with particular attention paid to the hinterland right-wing nutbags and their endless capacity for vulgarity and simple-mindedness. Mormonism gets a couple of good tweaks as well. There can’t be too much of this sort of thing in my book, and hail to Maher (the star-writer-producer), Charles (the director) and all the people behind this pointed if mild-mannered doc for serving society’s best interests. Truly.
How funny is it? Somewhat. I was LQTM-ing for the most part. There were a few chuckles at the screening I attended, two or three haw-haws, but no horse laughs. But humor isn’t precisely the point. This is a very rational film about a rational point of view.
That said, there are two things that need to be understood about Religulous. They aren’t major stoppers, but they’ve been bothering me since I saw it a couple of weeks ago.
One, Charles hasn’t shot Religulous with an especially vivid sense of style or panache of any kind. He’s made it look and sound more or less like Morgan Spurlock‘s Where In The Hell is Osama Bin Laden? (Full dislosure: A friend said this after we saw it together, and I’m seconding the observation.) Two cameras, ground-level, tripod, hand-held, so-whatty. Somehow this doesn’t seem fitting for a doc that stirs thoughts about the Big Cosmic Altogether.
If I’d directed I would started things off with a moving-plane shot of big white clouds with Maher doing the voice-over. Square and sappy, sure, but a classic religious image that would pull viewers in and get things going. This is a Big Fundamental Subject, after all, and it needs some kind of visual correlative, even if the point is to make mince-meat of old-time beliefs. Religulous would have been a lot stronger, I swear, if it had somehow been directed by the ghost of Cecil B. DeMille, who, despite his ham-fisted Victorian hypocrisy, knew how to make you feel the presence of traditional “otherness.”
And two, Maher-the-rationalist doesn’t once acknowledge the general feeling known to all humans and animals since the beginning of intelligent life that there’s surely some kind of cosmic connectivity governing this and other worlds.
Point out the foolish and childish superstitions by all means, but Maher and Charles undercut their film by not once allowing that tens of millions of men, women, children, writers, theologians, mystics, painters, sculptors and simple men walking and starving in the desert over the past three or four thousand years have been stirred by a vague, hard-to-articulate sense that there’s a universal current and common design of some kind in every last aspect of creation. I don’t believe this myself — I know it.
Many if not most believers in this or that religion have come to this or that faith in order to hold onto some kind cohesive theory or dogma to explain the wonder of it all, even if what they’re finally given is nothing short of idiotic. Maher’s view is that we’re basically living in a world of random biological chance that has a way of dispensing meaningless pain and conflict on a daily basis. This is true in a sense, but there’s a uniformity to it anyway.
Maher and Charles should have sat down and thought a little bit harder about the ending of Stanley Kubrick‘s 2001: A Space Odyssey before making Religulous. It would have been that much better if they had.

I caught a 9 am screening this morning of Steve McQueen‘s strong and harrowing Hunger, which IFC is releasing sometime next year. McQueen won the Gucci Group Award at the Venice Film Festival a few days ago, and the Camera d’Or at Cannes last May. It was obvious within seconds that he’s a first-rate visual artist, and that the film itself is top-notch — a frank and unsparing chronicle of political torture of IRA combatants by the British, and particularly the plight of Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender), who died from a hunger strike in 1981 at age 27.

At the same time I wasn’t entirely taken with the slow pace of it, and I was more than a little unsettled by the disgusting particulars of the cell life of the Irish prisoners that McQueen shows during the first half-hour. The blunt, somewhat embarassing truth is that I have a problem with any movie that deals with prominent displays of fecal matter — particularly ones in which said matter is smeared upon prison-cell walls.
I had the same reaction when fecal matter was used for artistic expression in Quills. And I feel the same way about the artwork of Andres Serrano (his recent shit sculptures, the infamous “Piss Christ”). If this makes me a timid, shallow- minded sort then fine, okay…but I won’t absorb art that uses this particular brush, however honestly and honorably intended.
I realize with great chagrin that saying this makes me sound like the kind of person who prefers to watch something like Beverly Hills Chihuahua rather than a raw, blistering portrait of terrible political repression and the nobility of men with the steel to fight for their beliefs and take whatever punishment is meted out. The truth is that I’m a middle-class guy who lives somewhere in the middle sphere — no Chihuahua lover, but unable to stomach what I’ve just described.
May God protect the courageous freedom fighters of the world, and may God make life miserable for the forces of cruelty, torture and repression. And may the talented Steve McQueen move on to greater and hopefully less off-putting subjects in future films.

The N.Y. Times‘ Brian Stelter is reporting this morning that MSNBC has demoted passionate analyst-commentators and news-show hosts Chris Matthews (“Hardball”) and Keith Olbermann (“Countdown”) — the two reasons I watch MSNBC because they’re unabashed in stating what they know in their head and their gut and are among the few TV news guys who aren’t cautiously corporate milquetoast stooges. Matthews and Olbermann are now out of the catbird-anchor seat — slapped down, chastised and demoted by the fearful.

MSNBC host David Gregory, it’s been announced, will now anchor news coverage of the coming debates and election night. Olbermann and Matthews will remain as analysts during the coverage. The problem with this is that Gregory is, to the best of my knowledge, a corporate stooge who’s very much in the tank for the conservatives. How else are we to interpret his having danced on-stage during the infamous MC Rove routine? Would any fair-minded, self-respecting newsman have done such a thing?
The Olbermann-Matthew demotion “is a direct result of tensions associated with the channel’s perceived shift to the political left,” Stelter’s story says. And so now MSNBC has elevated a guy who danced on-stage with Karl Rove as their new top-dog political news anchor?
Fox News has its partisanship attitude/base, and for one brief shining moment, MSNBC wore its lefty stripes proudly and boldly. No longer, it would seem. The uglies have won over. Gregory is the epitome of everything I despise about news coverage that is rightish, compromised, kowtowing and corporate. Plus he has a rounded monkey nose. I hate the man — I hate thinking about him, listening to him, looking at him.
This is a black, black day for MSNBC freaks like myself. What has happened is nothing short of a right-wing coup by the corporate bad guys and old-school traditionalists in the Tom Brokaw mode.
10:15 am update: The opening graph of this piece that I posted earlier was sloppy and muddled — apologies offered.

I just want to leave Toronto and go home and lock the door and forget about everything except filing and playing with my cats. My beautiful black Canon camera ($400) was stolen by three young apes today at an internet cafe. I should have listened to my instincts. I could smell their anarchic stink. They looked like animals and I ignored this obvious fact. I went to the bathroom while they were sitting next to me and they made their play.
It was my fault entirely. I let it happen. When feral types congregate nearby, you grim up and protect your stuff. Can I join the conservative club now?
Plus they stole my iPhone. Total loss — $600 dollars and change. For whatever reason they didn’t steal the wide-angle lens that I used for the camera with certain shots. Could that be because they’re stupid, or that they lack nerve? If I had a large baseball bat and could be granted a magical encounter with these guys in some Toronto back alley….

Gallup has McCain-Palin up three points over Obama-Biden, 48 to 45, and Zogby has them ahead as well, 49.7% to Obama-Biden’s 45.9%. A standard convention bounce, of course, but still…my God. The writing on the wall couldn’t be clearer, especially as it reflects upon McCain’s rash judgment over the Palin pick, and a lot of the fence-sitting heartlanders are still favorably impressed.