These troubled and fearful thoughts from the Guardian‘s Jonathan Freedland about how things seem to be turning in the polling are on my mind also, although I was somewhat placated by Gail Collins‘ analysis in yesterday’s N.Y. Times. Make that slightly.
“More troubling was the ABC News-Washington Post survey which found McCain ahead among white women by 53% to 41%,” Freedland notes. “Two weeks ago, Obama had a 15% lead among women. There is only one explanation for that turnaround, and it was not McCain’s tranquillizer of a convention speech: Obama’s lead has been crushed by the Palin bounce.”
I have one thoughtful but foolish hope in my head right now. If the pro-Obama youth vote comes out in huge numbers, the current dire expectations created by likely voter polls (i.e., a reading of mostly-older voters who voted in ’04 or ’00) will be forgotten. The pollsters always say that you can’t call much less measure the under-25s because many if not most of them don’t have land lines. There could be this whole uncharted opinion-base out there that pollsters aren’t even calibrating.
Except the realist in my chest knows deep down that the under-25 Generation of Shame is probably going to stay home in sufficient numbers so that their greatest potential impact may not be felt. It would be glorious, of course, if this turned out not to be true, but those two American Teen costars — Colin Clemens and Jake Tusing, both about 20 — bummed me out to no end when they said they wouldn’t be voting this November and that they couldn’t care less.
The only antidote I can think of is that last night I asked Lovely Still director Nik Fakler, who lives in Omaha, if he and his friends are voting, and he said “of course!” I told him what Clemens and Tusing had said and he smiled, threw his head back and went, “Oh, God!”
Another Encouraging Note: MSNBC’s First Read guys wrote this morning that “in the past 12 hours, we now have new polls for seven battleground states. CNN/Time has Obama up in the blue states of Michigan (49%-45%) and New Hampshire (51%-45%), while McCain is up in the red states of Missouri (50%-45%) and Virginia (50%-46%). And Quinnipiac finds Obama ahead in Ohio (49%-44%) and Pennsylvania (48%-45%), and McCain in front in Florida (50%-43%). Indeed, with the exception of Ohio — and that is BIG exception — these polls suggest that the current map looks a lot like it did in ’04.”

John McCain using the “lipstick on a pig” line, except referring (directly or obliquely) to Hillary Clinton, or perhaps her campaign. (Thanks to the 23/6 guys for this.)

It took a few hours, but I finally uploaded yesterday morning’s interview with Slumdog Millionaire director Danny Boyle. Or rather the computer did it while I slept. It’ll probably take a while to load. I’ll have to remember next time to break the video down into five- or ten-minute segments. I haven’t timed the Boyle chat but it’s something like 25 or 30 minutes.

I still can’t figure what code to use so a visual screen will show up on the column that you just click on to activate, like all the other video-running sites do.
Boyle said a couple of times during our discussion that he believes in “extreme” and “vivacious” cinema. Slumdog Millionaire is certainly that. It’s also very much a rags-to-riches Dickensian fable in which all manner of ugliness, cruelty and avarice are heaped upon the young hero, and things are set right only within the last half-hour.
This means, naturally, that Slumdog, though beautifully filmed and sharply written by Simon Beaufoy (having adapted an Indian book called Q and A), is not exactly surging with alpha vibes during its first two-thirds. But it’s certainly propelled by Boyle’s remarkable filmmaking fever, and it does start to pay off like a slot machine starting around the 100-minute mark. And then it concludes with a dance sequence in a Mumbai train station that just blows you away.
It’s a epic-sized, live-wire story of an Indian youth named Jamal (the grown-up version is played by Dev Patel) whose streak of correct answers on a Hindi version of Who Wants to be A Millionaire? creates suspicion that he’s somehow cheating. The powers-that-be interrogate him, and his life story — which, in a sense, is also the story of India’s social evolution over the past 15 to 20 years — is told to them and to us.
Slumdog looks like Best Picture material to me because of its freshness (all the more interesting by its reliance on a story-telling strategy made famous by Charles Dickens), the themes of justice and redemption and satisfied love, the almost luridly colorful vistas, and the relentless and impassioned character of Jamal, who is every kid who ever had to run and hustle and struggle to survive.

“With her bravura turn in Rod Lurie‘s engrossing political drama Nothing But The Truth, Kate Beckinsale has staked a strong claim for her first Academy Award nomination,” wrote Tom Teodorczuk in a 9.9 posting on the Evening Standard site.
“The native Londoner, who now lives in Los Angeles, excels as Washington, DC journalist Rachel Armstrong who spends two years behind bars for refusing to cave in to government pressure to reveal her source.
“Lurie, himself a former journalist and high school contemporary of Barack Obama, has loosely based his film on the imprisonment of New York Times writer Judith Miller in 2005 for contempt of court after she refused to testify to a Grand Jury investigating the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame. (Joe Wilson, Plame’s husband and former acting ambassador to Iraq, had been openly critical of the Iraqi invasion.)
“Substitute Venezuela for Iraq, Armstrong for Miller and Erica Van Doren (Vera Farmiga) for Plame.
“Having been initially hopeful that her scoop blowing Van Doren’s cover as a CIA operative would ‘bring down the White House’, Armstrong refuses to buckle to the attempts of prosecutor Patton Dubois (Matt Dillon) to persuade her to divulge the source and is imprisoned.
“Lurie’s fictional variations on the complex Miller-Plame case blur the boundaries of his characters’ personal and professional lives and allows Nothing But The Truth to escape from its source material.
“Lurie clearly supports the notion that journalists should not be imprisoned for refusing to disclose their sources.
“But his primary focus is on delivering an absorbing political yarn and not a half-baked civics class in the vein of Robert Redford‘s dire Lions For Lambs.”

“I think I might be able to explain some of Sarah Palin‘s appeal,” Roger Ebert wrote last weekend in the Chicago Sun Times. “She’s the American Idol candidate. Consider. What defines an American Idol finalist? They’re good-looking, work well on television, have a sunny personality, are fierce competitors, and so talented. Why, they’re darned near the real thing.

“There’s a reason American Idol gets such high ratings. People identify with the contestants. They think, ‘Hey, that could be me up there on that show!’
“My problem is, I don’t want a vice president who is darned near good enough. I want a vice president who is better, wiser, well-traveled, has met world leaders, [and] who three months ago had an opinion on Iraq. Someone who doesn’t repeat bald-faced lies about earmarks and the Bridge to Nowhere. Someone who doesn’t appoint Alaskan politicians to ‘study’ global warming, because — hello! — it has been studied. The returns are convincing enough that John McCain and Barack Obama are darned near in agreement.
“I would also want someone who didn’t make a teeny little sneer when referring to ‘people who go to the Ivy League.’ Although Palin gets laughs when she mentions the ‘elite’ Ivy League, she sure did attend the heck out of college. Five different schools in six years. What was that about?
“And how can a politician her age have never have gone to Europe?
“But [then] some people like that. She’s never traveled to Europe, Asia, Africa, South America or Down Under? That makes her like them. She didn’t go to Harvard? Good for her! There a lot of hockey moms who haven’t seen London, but most of them would probably love to, if they had the dough. And they’d be proud if one of their kids won a scholarship to Harvard.
“I trust the American people will see through Palin, and save the Republic in November. The most damning indictment against her is that she considered herself a good choice to be a heartbeat away. That shows bad judgment.”
Wait…shouldn’t the sentence read “the most damning indictment against John McCain is that he considered Palin a good choice to be a heartbeat away”?

I’ve been doing the Toronto Film Festival for seven days straight now (counting the travel day a week ago Wednesday, which was moderately stressful and certainly long), and I’m figuring it’s time for a little chill-down and a chance to summarize some films I haven’t yet gotten around to. I’m planning on seeing Cyrus Nowrasteh‘s The Stoning of Soraya M. at 4:30, Vincent Amorim‘s Good at 6 pm, Dan Stone‘s At The Edge of the World at 7:15 and finally a public screening of Barbet Schroder‘s Inju at 9 pm.
Only during a film festival of this magnitude would writing for six hours and then seeing four films be considered a chill-down day.

I’ll never forget the thoughts and feelings that were coursing through my system seven years ago today, starting a little after 9:30 am as I stood inside Bay Bloor Radio, located in the basement of Toronto’s Manulife Center, and watched the unfolding horror on big-screen projection.

I’ll also never forget my astonished reaction on Wednesday, 9.12, to the decision of Rod Armstrong, my Reel.com editor at the time (and now a San Francisco Film Festival programmer), to downplay what had happened in his summary of my column’s content that day. The most Rod was able to squeeze out was that “recent events” had impacted the Toronto Film Festival.
Rod was one of those “keep the column exclusively focused on movies” type of guys, no matter what. A lot of online editors subscribed to this approach in the old days. But something snapped when I read Armstrong’s words, which seemed to me one of the most titanically chickenshit sidesteps in the history of editorial intros, however discreet and sensitive his intention. All I know is that from that point on my column-writing creed began to be “movies now and always, but how can you ignore the other stuff if it pushes its way into your head as much as this or that great, worthwhile, so-so or godawful film?”
“I seriously doubt if anyone will be interested in reading this morning about the latest hip movies at the Toronto Film Festival,” I wrote on the evening of 9.11.01 while sitting in the apartment of Leora Conway, an old friend and Toronto resident who had graciously put me up that year.
“The wind has been knocked out of [this festival], I can tell you that. Not that anyone cares. Festival director Piers Handling announced the cancellation of some 28 public screenings and 13 press screenings yesterday afternoon. The festival resumes today, but people will mostly be going through the motions. It’s now the Festival of the Walking Numb. Spiritually, it’s all but over.
“Those hundreds (more likely thousands) of bodies lying under the rubble in New York and Washington, D.C., have pulverized everyone’s consciousness, and there just isn’t room to let anyone’s particular cinematic vision of life into our heads. Reality has taken over completely. Reality is all. What happened yesterday was beyond horrific, beyond sadistic, beyond the most spectacular Jerry Bruckheimer CGI fireball.

“Commentators and editorialists are saying everywhere that America will never be the same in the wake of those jets smashing into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon, and are describing what happened as Pearl Harbor times 10. That’s true in more ways than one.
“Those camcorder shots of the buildings crashing down were terrible but awesome. I watched them over and over yesterday and into the night. We all did, I’m sure. It sounds insensitive to even think this, but one result of that footage is that special-effects companies are going to have to get a lot better very quickly. Because any huge, computer-created explosion in any new movie is suddenly going to look a lot faker. Reality has raised the bar.
“Life is processed with one type of software, and movies with another. We cut movies slack for their occasional lack of verisimilitude while we watch them in the dark, but reality cuts us very little of the same in the cold light of day.
“I was thinking yesterday afternoon of that scene in Apocalypse Now in which Marlon Brando‘s Colonel Kurtz talks about the ‘brilliance … the sheer brilliance’ of the Vietcong having hacked off the arms of several children who’d gotten inoculation shots from American medics. Kurtz obviously respected the psychopaths behind this act, calling them ‘trained cadres … men with families, men filled with love’ who simply ‘had the will to do this.’
“As you listen to Brando go on, you can at least half get what he’s saying. Kurtz is telling us that maybe, just maybe, there can be vestiges of love and noble purpose in the most horrific acts of war. What is the difference between hacking off children’s arms with machetes and slaughtering thousands of innocent office workers in downtown Manhattan and at the Pentagon? Mostly scale, I’d say.”
That last graph was close to what Bill Maher said a few days later on Politically Incorrect (i.e., that the Al Qeada team behind the 9.11 attacks were “not cowards”), which soon after led to his show’s cancellation. But I finished the piece with the following graph, and perhaps saved myself from any possible Reel.com recriminations:
“But who today is even considering for a second that the people behind yesterday’s barbarism are (or were, in the case of those who killed themselves) anything but fiends, and that their motives were anything but twisted and deranged?”

I flew to New York in late September 2001 to attend the New York Film Festival, but the first thing I did when I arrived…well, here’s the piece I wrote:
“I got my first look coming in on the Newark Airport bus at 5:45 A.M., right before we hit the Lincoln Tunnel when you can see most of Manhattan. In the darkness of the downtown area where the World Trade Center used to be, I could see a small (from my perspective) glowing cloud of white smoke, illuminated by the powerful lamps the night crews are using to work by. I decided right then to visit the site that day.
“A few hours later, after dropping off my stuff and grabbing some breakfast, I took the IRT down to Chambers Street. The stop closest to the devastation is Fulton Street, but I wanted to walk around and see it from every angle. The New York cops and the military have the northern end fenced off about four blocks north of the site. But standing at Chambers and looking south, you can see the rubble of the north tower.

“It’s the color of brownish desert sand, mostly. Standing maybe five or six stories tall, with rubble trailing down from the top. It’s chilling when you first see it. It’s chilling when you’ve been staring at it for a couple of hours.
“I walked to the east and down Broadway, past City Hall and down to Fulton, across the street from a small 18th- or 19th-century church (I’d know the name if I lived here) that’s being used as a gathering and refreshment station for volunteers. I saw a hand-painted banner with the word ‘Courage’ painted on the side. The tourist traffic was a lot heavier here. Cops were telling everyone not to take pictures, so as to keep everything moving. I guy next to me told his friend with a camera about the no-photo rule, and the guy said, ‘This is still America.’
“I walked down to Cedar Street, below Fulton, and turned right toward the barriers, which are about two blocks from the site. You can see the outer shell of the south tower, the highest part of which stands about four stories. Guys were watering the rubble down with huge fire hoses, and constant trails of smoke were wafting out in different places. It looked like the steam you see leaking out in Hot Springs, Arkansas. There were six or seven steam shovels scraping at the ground. It seemed that the more the shovels scraped the surface, the more the residual heat from the September 11 fires seemed to escape.
“A news guy who works for a TV station met me. Our idea was to get inside a certain building (I can’t say too much or I’ll get him into trouble) and then get up to the 30th floor, where we’d get a pretty good view. My friend wasn’t carrying a police pass (they take about nine hours to get, he said) but he had some good press ID, and he managed to bluff us past the cops and the Army guys who were checking credentials.
“We got into the building and after talking our way past some more uniformed security suits in the lobby, made our way up to the 30th floor and looked out. My eyes popped open. Startling, staggering…but I felt strangely glad to be there.
“Some people I’d talked to had told me about the smell. Like burning tires, one publicist said. It smelled vaguely to me like a rock quarry I’d once been to in Connecticut, with that powdery aroma of crushed stones. It also brought back a line in a recent New York Times story about the ‘scent of unquieted souls.'”

I should have linked to this 9.10 Sarah Palin–Westbrook Pegler observation by the Wall Street Journal‘s Thomas Frank, which was quickly linked to by Politico‘s Ben Smith.