I’ve been attending Toronto Film Festival parties for years, and I’ve learned never to come on time because the door goons always say “we’re not ready to let anyone in yet.” The rule of thumb is that you have to stand around for 10 or 15 minutes. And it’s quite rude. If I were to throw an event like this I wouldn’t dream of asking journalist guests, all of whom are on a fairly tight clock, to stand around like chumps trying to get into Studio 54. But the people who throw these events do this damn near every time.
The invitation for last night’s Burn After Reading party said 11 pm. Fool that I am, I timed my arrival so I was there precisely on time, as was MTV’s Josh Horowitz. After bitching and whining for five minutes we were asked (along with several others) to clear the sidewalk area, and then to please stand off to the side, and then to please stand further to the side so as to not block the adjacent driveway, and then to please stand next to the metal cattle fence to the other side of the entrance.
And then one of the goons said, “No cameras will be allowed inside.” For a second or two I considered saying something smart-assy, but wisdom prevailed. But at that point I was also berating myself for not acting like a man of true character and gravitas and walking away proud.
Once inside, however, the party was very nice. Cool climate, not too crowded, delectable Asian finger food, fetching waitresses, delicious junior-sized Cosmopolitans. Horowitz and I spoke for a short while to the great Richard Jenkins (a serious Oscar hopeful for his performance in The Visitor), and also to Ethan Coen. But for the most part journalists talked to journalists and talent — Joel Coen, John Malkovich., Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton — talked to talent (and to producers, managers and agents).
I’ve taken photos at these events before and it was no big deal, but a little voice told me not to. I think it was mainly because of the white-haired, tuxedo-wearing Malkovich, whom I’m afraid of because of his intensity or something. I noticed that McDormand (who looked great) had her hand touching her cheek and chin a lot — a sign of boredom and/or slight discomfort.

At last night’s the Coen Bros./Burn After Reading party I asked a journo pal who’s seen Spike Lee‘s Miracle at St. Anna if it really needed to be 166 minutes. (Some movies, like Steven Soderbergh‘s 260-minute Che or Sidney Lumet‘s 168-minute Prince of the City, really need long running times to achieve the goals they’ve set out to achieve.) And the guy said no, it doesn’t. Spike’s tendency to over-underline is in full force here, he said.
Then I spoke this morning to another journo who’s seen it also, and he said the same thing: “It should have been two hours at most, and it’s not that good to begin with.” I’m still looking forward to this World War II/Tuscany/little kid movie — all Spike Lee joints command my attention — but these two comments were why I passed on today’s showing and went off to write instead. You have to make calls like this all the time during a festival of this size and scope. The question isn’t “is it any good or not?” but “does it absolutely have to be seen here?”

It’s been an awful tech day and basically a black bummer all around, leaving me in the foulest of moods. I wrote my review of Slumdog Millionaire in the lobby of the Four Seasons hotel between noon and 2 pm, but the temporary online provider (Wayport, $15 bucks per day, bad news) killed the connection twice, and the second time my review, an 80% positive thing that was very tight and well-phrased, was lost when I tried to save it. (I have this unwise habit of composing on Movable Type.)
Then I saw Gomorrah, an Italian crime film which was as solid and raw and convincing as I’d been told. So that was satisfying, although I was still smarting from the loss of that Slumdog piece. Damn Wayport to hell.
Then I went over to the Starbucks at the Manulife Center (my office, more or less, with only one available wall plug) and was unable to log onto my MT 4.0 composing software via HE’s new Canadian server, LFC Hosting, due to some kind of blockage or viral whatsis that came, I suspect, from Wayport. I restarted three or four times, dumped cache and cookies…nothing. I have a backup computer with me, but the day has been a near-total wash in terms of filing.
I’ve been invited to re-examine the new Blindness and then come to the after-party at 11 pm, but I feel so dispirited all I feel like doing is grabbing some hot food in Chinatown and then heading back to the pad for some CNN or TCM. Zone out and forget everything.

The Venice Film Festival has handed the Golden Lion award to Darren Aronofsky‘s The Wrestler. It would obviously have been a nice double-whammy if they’d given the Best Actor prize to comeback kid Mickey Rourke, whose lead performance in Aronofsky’s film was strongly praised here and there. (The Wrestler will screen for TIFF press on Monday.) The only other English-speaking winner was Jennifer Lawrence, who won the Marcello Mastroianni Award for Best Young Actor or Actress for her performance in Guillermo Arriaga‘s The Burning Plain.

AICN’s Dr. Hfuhruhurr, a card-carrying Reagan conservative, has posted a positive review of David Zucker‘s An American Carol, a reportedly broad anti-left satire about the transformation of a Michael Moore-like documentarian in the manner of Ebenezer Scrooge’s awakening in A Christmas Carol.
In the review Hfuhruhurr briefly calls yours truly a paragon of intolerance because I’ve posted some snarky but accurate items about the film and because I vented a brief flash of anger at Jon Voight when he wrote a stunningly ignorant anti-Obama editorial in the Washington Times a few weeks back.
Hfuhruhurr can bloviate all he wants (he’s a good snappy writer), but in this instance he sounds very much like a propagandist — a right-wing advocate who’s carrying water for a fired-up, hypocrisy-poisoned community that worships the Glenn Becks and Sarah Palins of the world — and somewhat less of a serious movie guy.
Today’s rabid righties are not guided by the principles of loyal opposition and all that — they’re hammerhead dogma-spewers of the lowest order. Contrarians, dogs, takedown artists. As Jon Stewart said (and I’m paraphrasing), “If Barack Obama was to discover the cure for cancer, they’d find a way to spin it negatively.” They’re not on the “wrong side” as much as the fact that they’re animals. Seriously. No offense.
I’ve been told by people I know and trust (to the extent that if Zucker’s film had anything going for it, they would acknowledge that rather than dismiss it on an ideological basis) that An American Carol is fall-on-the-floor, Burn Hollywood Burn bad..

The Burning Plan director-writer Guillermo Arriaga following last night’s screening of his film at Toronto’s Winter Garden theatre. I was supposed to chat with him after the screening, but a last-minute addition of a q & a with the audience delayed everything, and I had to be at the Coen brothers/Burn After Reading party at 11 pm, so I decided to record a portion of the q & a and take some shots, three of which came out nicely.

Ruthie Stein of the San Francisco Chronicle was telling me yesterday about watching The Brothers Bloom the other day and getting more and more irritated at this guy sitting a seat or two away who wouldn’t stop laughing at the damn thing. He was having a great time. Every line that was intended to be wryly amusing or half-funny, he howled at.
After a while Stein started giving him death-ray looks. Her thoughts (which she didn’t express in words at the time) were in the general ballpark of “what the fuck are you laughing at? Will you stop it please? What’s wrong with you?”
I park my car in Stein’s garage. I’ve been there. I hate people who laugh uproariously at marginally funny movies. A couple of weeks ago a guy sitting behind me at a screening of Mike Leigh‘s Happy-Go-Lucky wouldn’t stop with the fucking giggles, and I had to restrain myself from turning around and saying, “I’m sorry but could you give it a rest? Please?”

I rolled with Steven Soderbergh‘s 260-minute Che without ever getting bored or sleepy or taking a bathroom break. But for some reason a little voice in my chest went “uh-oh” when I noticed the running time for Spike Lee‘s Miracle at St. Anna, which screens tomorrow morning at 11.

Ed Harris‘s Appaloosa is just okay. No, that sounds dimissive. It’s a decent…too negative again. It’s a solid piece of work — how’s that? But dammit, the words “not half bad” keep creeping into my head, which sounds, I realize, like damnation with faint praise. I don’t mean to put it down; I was never in serious pain. But ten minutes in I knew this was no Open Range, which in my book (and the books of many others) is the finest, best-written and most believably recreated western since Unforgiven.
I would put Appaloosa on the level of 3:10 to Yuma, more or less. In fact, I would call it a tiny bit better than that James Mangold western. There are no gay gunslingers (i.e., psychos wearing high-style leather waistcoats with buttons in the back) with makeup dirt caked onto their face. And there are no excessive fetishistic shootouts in which 89 guys get killed. It’s got a nice modest feel to it. And it’s nicely shot, very well acted (particularly by Harris, Viggo Mortensen and bad-guy Jeremy Irons) and “engaging” as far as it goes.
But it’s basically a low-key buddy movie, and as such goes in for charm and humor too much for my taste. No offense but I don’t want to be “entertained” when I’m watching a western — I want to feel it, believe it, smell the horseshit, feel the saddle ache in my ass and sense the wind on my face. Plus it doesn’t have a resounding theme (or not one that I could identify). The theme, such as it is, is basically “women come and go, and even when they come you can’t trust them. Your buddy watching your back is all that really matters in the end.”
It’s fine, it moves along, etc. I can imagine some people going to this thing and loving it. The crowd I saw it with in the Cumberland was laughing a good deal. Well, from time to time. But should you laugh at the jokes in a western? This isn’t Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It doesn’t have that dynamic or the visual stylishens or the movie-star panache. It’s Harris and Mortensen, after all. I wish Irons could have played a good guy. He speaks with his English accent, thank God.
I have to quit again for a 5:30 pm screening upstairs. O’Horten, I’m thinking. And then I’ll head downtown for the public showing of The Burning Plain, and then a chat with director-writer Guillermo Arriaga (who’s leaving town tomorrow for some reason) and then the Burn After Reading party.

Paying attention to things in a way that I’m not, HE correspondent Moises Chiulan has noted Nikki Finke‘s breaking news that Sony has signed Sam Raimi and Tobey Maguire for a 4th and apparently 5th Spider-Man film. Zero excitement on this end…sorry.

Either you get, agree with and derive enormous delight from dry misanthropic humor…or you don’t. Either way, you certainly can’t argue with the fact that while Joel and Ethan Coen have a lot more up their sleeves than just this, when they’re in the mood to dispense their extremely low opinion of human behavior, they are masters of the form. Nobody knows from dry, diseased and delectably deadpan like these guys. It’s in their bones and their blood.

And it’s the genius of Burn After Reading, their latest, to offer another serving in a way that may seem slight or irksome to some, but it is in fact — I mean this — a major satirical meditation about everything that is empty, wanting, sad and hilariously absurd in these united and delusional states of America.
I didn’t laugh all that much, but I loved every minute of this thing. Relished it. I sat there with a bemused smile on my face, chortling every now and then but with all kinds of “yeah, right, exactly, perfect, hah!” stuff happening in my head.

The plot shenanigans are for the popcorn eaters to chew on and the disgruntled critics to bitch about; the meat and marrow of Burn After Reading is contained in the ample and delicious margins. The atmosphere, the asshole-ish line deliveries, the mocking tone, the wacked particulars, and those looks of fear, loneliness, concrete stupidity and desperation.

If you look at it this way, the movie is a feast.

If you’re on the misanthrope boat, this half-espionage, half-comedy of modern fools and manners is about as good as this sort of thing gets. But you have to forget about “laughing.” (Which is overrated anyway, despite what Joel McCrea‘s John L. Sullivan might have thought.) Because this movie is about much more than that.

You can sit there and eat your popcorn and take it as a sardonic goofball spy movie crossed with a comedy of errors that doesn’t add up to much, and that’s fine. But the meanest and cruelest jokes aren’t just the funniest, as Mort Sahl once said — they’re also the most thoughtful.

Burn After Reading is not a movie for the ages, but a modest and dead-perfect geiger-counter reading of what ails those desperate, constantly itchy and perturbed Americans in the comfortable urban areas who can’t help but shoot themselves, attack others, make mad lunges at quick money and temporal erotic satisfaction. Prisoners of their swollen egos and limited intelligence. Strivers who must (they feel) have more, who can’t be satisfied or serene, who eat the right foods, belong to health clubs, drink too much, scheme and claw too much and are natural-born comedians in the eyes of God.

Which is how Burn After Reading starts and ends, by the way — from the point of view of a sad, bemused and occasionally chuckling cosmic super-being who exists somewhere above the earth.

I haven’t even mentioned the cast — George Clooney, John Malkovich, Brad Pitt, Frances McDomand, Richard Jenkins, J.K. Simmons, David Rasche — or the beautiful note-perfect ending. But them’s the breaks when you’re doing four movies a day plus filing and parties and random chit-chats on the street.