Screen Daily‘s Len Klady says he came up with a headline for Patrick Z. McGavin‘s Screen Daily review of Asia Argento‘s Mother of Tears, although it was too long to fit on the page: “Don’t Cry For Me, Argentino.” [Update: apologies for allowing “Asia” to become “Daria” yesterday — TIFF fatigue manifests in strange & unruly forms.]

The Toronto Film Festival is over as of this morning. All that’s left to do is run sum-up pieces and catch the supposed so-so, straggler and left-over films because there’s nothing else to do. The coffee talk this morning is that TIFF programmers should ideally be re-screening the better films from the front-loaded first five days that people didn’t see because the schedule was so jammed. “They used to do that,” a veteran told me, “but things changed.”

I’m going to try and catch a noontime public screening of Noah Baumbach‘s Margot at the Wedding, which I obviously have to see despite it having been written off (“minor,” “frustrating,” “dislikable characters”) by virtually everyone I’ve spoken to here. (I would love it if the naysayers turn out to be wrong, in my view.) There’s also a public screening of the respected Lars and the Real Girl at 2:30, and a 7:30 public showing of Rebellion: The Litvinenko Case.

At last Monday night’s Atonement party a Manhattan-based columnist said in a somewhat alarming way (i.e., alarming for his tone of certainty) that the Democratic Presidential race is all but over, that Hilary Clinton is too far ahead of Barack Obama not to have it in the bag (the latest Rasmussen Reports poll of likely Democratic primary voters gives her 42% to Obama’s 22%), and that the essence of Obama’s problem, above and beyond his surreal lack of support from black voters, is subliminal Jim Crow racism, plain and simple.

The columnist didn’t say this, but the bottom line is that the Democratic primary race between Clinton and Obama is starting to look vaguely analagous to the Best Picture Oscar race between Crash and Brokeback Mountain.

Clinton, the lesser candidate, is fated, I fear, to beat Obama because of a subliminal factor that voters won’t admit to, much less talk about, just as Crash, the lesser film, beat Brokeback Mountain because of a more-or-less unmentionable prejudice among older Academy voters that I’ve previously called “geezer homophobia” (i.e., a primal revulsion at the idea of the ridin’ and ropin’ American cowboy — an iconic figure if there ever was one — being cast in an effeminate light by modernist p.c. liberalism).

Go outside the big cities, the columnist said, and America is a nation of rubes and crackers. As fair-minded and issue-driven as these voters like to portray themselves wth pollsters, the bottom line is that they’re constitutionally incapable of voting a black man into the White House. As far as these voters and Barack Obama are concerned, the columnist suggested, the ’08 race is a kind of a dry-run, getting-used-to-the-idea exercise that may allow for attitudes and conditions in 2012 or 2016 in which a black man (Obama or someone else) might stand a chance….maybe.

I’ve said this before, but Obama is too intelligent, too eloquent and attractive, too well-funded and too un-damaged by minor gaffes for him to be this far behind Clinton. It doesn’t figure — it doesn’t add up. I don’t like it and it gives me huge indigestion to admit it, but a voice is telling me that the Manhattan columnist is right.

What happened to Arianna Huffington‘s assessment of the situation a few months ago that Democratic voters “feel married to the Clintons but they love Barack Obama”? What happened to the emotional groundswell factor, that feeling that “it has to be” Obama, that Hilary Clinton is yesterday…a ’90s baggage lady who will arouse primal negativity among red-state voters in the general election? I don’t have a big problem with Clinton (she’s certainly preferable to the Republican hopefuls) but she doesn’t turn me on and she never will.

Postscript: A reader who asked for anonymity says my Obama-support analysis is “off,” in part because “just about every poll out there right now is limited to party affinity. Democrats are being polled about Democrat candidates and GOP for GOP. You overlook the point that in just about every poll that does put Obama head to head with Republicans, he wins…sometimes by six to eight points.

On top of which “Obama’s base of support is very different from Clinton’s or anyone else’s for that matter: They are younger and wireless. This means that a large pool of supporters simply aren’t participating in the traditional polling and data mining processes that the political establishment uses, because they aren’t reachable without a landline phone. Sensible political types assume that Obama’s support is broader than the polling indicates.”

Film Jerk‘s Edward Havens is running a list that’s been kicking around talent agencies for the last couple of weeks of 300 projects in active development — i.e., “[would-be movies] that have become pre-strike priorities for the major studios and a number of top production companies.” Films, in short, that stand a good chance of being made under the strike-threat circumstances. Havens points out that “certain directors have their names attached to two or more projects, while a number of them have no director attached.”

Sidney Lumet‘s Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead (ThinkFilm, 10.26) is, for me, a major Toronto Film Festival revelation…a knockout. It’s a New York family crime drama like nothing Lumet (83 friggin’ years old and cooking with high-test like he was in the ’70s and ’80s) has ever attempted, much less achieved. And with a killer cast giving exceptional perfs — Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Albert Finney, Ethan Hawke, Marisa Tomei. It’s like something out of Shakespeare or Greek tragedy…it’s the House of Borgia. And a great suspense film to boot.

I don’t have time to get into this now (have to hit the I’m Not There party and then another film) but I’ll elaborate tomorrow. But I immediately knew this would be exceptional. How did I come to this conclusion? I figured any film that starts off with a naked Hoffman doing it doggy-style with a naked Tomei — a “whoa!” shot if I’ve ever seen one — has to be dealing from a fairly exceptional deck.

Here’s the opening of Lisa Nesselson‘s Variety review from last May…

“An intricate tragedy that plumbs messy emotional depths with cinematic precision, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead explores urban malaise via ingredients so timeless, an ancient Greek stumbling into the theater would recognize the building blocks of mortal folly. Filial impiety, sibling rivalry, marital distress and crippling debt bedevil protags who shop for all their decisions at Bad Choices ‘R Us.

“Satisfyingly draining narrative will probably skew toward older viewers, but the wrenching tale has something for anyone who likes their melodrama spiked with palpable tension and genuine suspense.”

El Cantante star Marc Anthony — a.k.a., “Mr. Lopez” — looks as “undead in person” as he did in the film,” reports New York magazine’s “Fug Girls” in the “Show & Talk” column. “Lopez slid in [to a Jennifer Lopez fashion show] about twenty minutes before the house lights went down. He looked faintly cranky, and his pallor was typically zombified. He wasn’t bothered by too many flashbulbs, although that might be because vampires don’t show up on film.” I worship people who write like this. If a guy looks like a Bronx Dracula, don’t pussyfoot around…say it!

I started things off with a 9 a.m. screening of Paul Crowder and Murray Lerner‘s Amazing Journey:The Story of The Who, and I left in an angry huff 25 minutes later. The limited footage I saw told me that Crowder and Lerner are hacks, propagandists and bald-faced liars. By all means see this foggy-minded doc when it turns up on DVD, but you’d do well to inject a heroin-cocaine speedball at the same time. The more drugged up you are, the better it will play.

It was bad enough that Amazing Journey began like a rote-worship piece in the regimented form of all rock-music documentaries. This groaningly familiar format — opening montage, talking-head sum-ups about the group’s legend, adolescent beginnings, struggling parents, first guitars, etc — has been adhered to so closely and so often that it’s become almost comical. Don’t documentarians have any pride when it comes to films like this? Do they think audiences are dumb sheep?

Then things took a bizarre turn about 15 minutes in when the band story was abandoned so that Crowder and Lerner could suddenly downshift into a tribute section about the late John Entwistle, the Who’s miraculous bass player who died on 6.27.02 at the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas. One minute, two minutes …”what the fuck are they doing?” I whispered to Meredith Brody, who was sitting two seats away. “The film just started and they’re suddenly doing this Entwistle whitewash thing because he died of drug use!”

Entwistle left the earth “due to a heart attack induced by an undetermined amount of cocaine,” according to most accounts (and one in particular), and it’s pretty well known that Entwistle battled cocaine addiction through much of his adult life. And yet Crowder and Lerner have the nerve to run a clip of Who guitarist-singer- songwriter Pete Townsend saying that Entwistle “had one addiction and it began with the letter H — Harrod’s in London. He was a fashion plate and loved shopping there, but that, really, was his only addiction!” [Note: not an exact transcript, but pretty close to what Townsend says.]

That was it. I looked at the unperturbed Brody, got up, grabbed my bag and bolted the hell out of there. It was all I could to restrain myself from walking up to the movie screen and spitting on it. [Note: A journalist friend says that Amazing Journey admits later on that Entwistle had drug issues, so Crowder and Lerner aren’t total liars — they just allow Townsend to float a lie in the beginning without challenging it. By my standards that’s the same damn thing, but let’s try and be liberal.]

Director Roman Polanski has bailed out of Pompeii, a Euro-funded epic that would have cost a mere $100 million (which is nothing in today’s big-dick movie economy). This means the project is probably dead for good. Producer Robert Benmussa told reporters that the historical drama collapsed over “fears that the looming actors strike could derail the project.” I’m sorry we won’t be seeing it. The CG recreations might have been wonderful. I wouldn’t have cared if Roland Emmerich was planning (or suddenly not planning) to direct, but Polanski is/was another story.

Pompeii ruins, snapped a little less than four months ago

One reason I visited the actual Pompeii ruins last May was that I wanted to write off my Italy sojourn with Jett as a research/business expense. I guess I can still claim this. I went there with a completely realistic expectation that the film would be shot, etc.

Wasn’t Jon Stewart‘s Oscar-hosting gig in ’06 widely seen as underwhelming? Did anyone stand up and say”encore!”? Didn’t a few people write articles that expressed the opposite view? Doesn’t matter because the New York Times is reporting that producer Gil Cates (obviously acting with the assent of other Academy fuddy-duds) is bringing Stewart back to host the 2.24.08 Oscar telecast. Cates’ move is somewhat analagous to Bush accepting Gen. David Petraeus‘ Iraq War progress assessment lock, stock and barrel. This on top of Cates’ recent re-rehiring as producer is the final straw. We need a South American-styled coup d’etat.