Flying back to Los Angeles today. Back up sometime tonight, or certainly by Sunday morning.

Condolences to Sony Home Video’s Ben Feingold on the occasion of his termination as head of Sony Home Video, but I always heard he was a real mass-market, go-for-the-big-numbers guy who wasn’t into classic titles or the aesthetic particulars. You know…a kind of antithesis of a serious movie lover or a DVD special-edition connoisseur. It was Feingold who approved the issuing of that pan-and-scan DVD of Sydney Pollack ‘s Castle Keep a year or so ago, which resulted in Steven Spielberg and George Lucas complaining to Sony Pictures oncho Michael Lynton, who led to Feingold finally issuing a new version in the correct 2.35 to 1 aspect ratio. If Lucas and Spielberg hadn’t spoken up Castle Keep would almost certainly still be viewable only in pan-and-scan. I’m basically saying that as my DVD-watching interests are concerned, I’m not feeling all that melancholy about Feingold’s departure.

A nicely written, cleanly structured profile of Little Children director and cowriter Todd Field, by THR columnist Anne Thompson.

Okay — I blew my Toronto Film Festival experience by not seeing Borat. If there’s a consensus among the various columnists, it’s that more people connected in a dynamic, jolting, oh-my-gosh way with Sacha Baron Cohen‘s deranged put-on comedy (20th Century Fox, 11.3) than with any other Toronto Film Festival attraction. Fine… whatever. It guess it’s something to look forward to seeing when I get back to L.A.
Toronto is the festival that presides over the death and downgrading of imperfect films. All The King’s Men died here. Bobby was all but pummelled to death. Stranger than Fiction pretty much died. For Your Consideration, Infamous and The Fountain (a film I really and truly liked) all died here. Breaking and Entering found respect and muted enthusiasm, but that’s all.
Babel and Volver solidifed their already commanding positions. Venus did fairly well, but Peter O’Toole did better. Catch a Fire tried for traction and found some, but I’m not sure if it was enough. Little Children did moderately well, although it became clear that some had recoiled due to the second-act “ick” factor. And Guillermo del Toro‘s Pan’s Labyrinth gained.
My biggest Toronto favorite (apart from the films I loved but had already seen in Cannes) was Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck‘s The Lives of Others. And I’m hugely pissed that I couldn’t manage to see Paul Verhoeven‘s Black Book his return to Dutch filmmaking by way of a World War II melodrama, as well as Patrice Leconte‘s My Best Friend, which Variety‘s Robert Koehler brought to my attention two or three days ago. I nodded and said thanks and wrote a note to myself…and didn’t see it.
The Last King of Scotland didn’t ignite, but Forrest Whittaker‘s performance as Idi Amin did…sort of. Penelope Cruz has played the role of her life in Volver, and to my mind she became an all-but-certain Best Actress nominee out of her TIFF exposure. Kate Winslet caught a Best Actress wave with her Little Children performance, and costars Patrick Wilson and Jackie Earl Haley popped through in more general terms.
I’l try and add to this piece later on, as well as get into the mezzo-mezzo’s that I didn’t feel very much about one way or the other.

“The Departed, which I have seen, will be the year’s best American film as of it’s October 6th release date,” reader David Erlich has proclaimed. “It is, without a doubt, the most riveting work that any of the players — Matt Damon, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jack Nicholson — have been involved with in ages. That being said, the film has no chance of Oscar recognition for Best Picture, if only because of the last act.”

James D. Stern and Adam Del Deo‘s …So Goes The Nation, which IFC will release in October, is easily the smartest, the most perceptive and the most fair-minded reading of the 2004 Presidential election I’ve ever seen or considered. I saw it at Toronto’s Paramount theatre last night around 8:45 pm, and came out fairly wowed. Anyone with an interest in this kind of riveting, down-to-it expose should catch it at the earliest opportunity.
The fact that Nation is a 90-minute doc and not a network TV news special is material but immaterial — the key thing is that it explains in the frankest terms imaginable how the John Kerry campaign blew it big-time with the middle American voting public, and how cagey and brilliant those evil and manipulative Bushies (hey, if the shoe fits…) were at almost every turn.
The fact that Kerry is a better, more thoughtful man than George Bush and, had he been elected, would have made for a wiser, less ideologically-driven U.S. President isn’t addressed. The doc is solely about the game of winning and losing as it was played two years ago. And the two things that come through are (a) many millions of Americans out there are living in states of appalling ignorance and religious superstition and are therefore ripe for shrewd exploitation, and (b) the Kerry people made so many mistakes it’s hard to keep track of them all, even in a doc as lucid and well-organized as this one.
A good-sized portion of the doc is about how and why the Bush forces managed a narrow victory in Ohio, which is the state that finally tipped the election in their favor. It’s been widely reported that Republican stooges (especially the ultra-partisan Republican Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell) suppressed Democratic votes, and I was surprised that the doc didn’t get into this a bit more than it did. Republicans, on the other hand, claimed that fake voters were being registered on the Democratic side.
Stern and Del Deo talked to many of the right top-level strategists on both sides, and everyone is in agreement by the end of the film that the Kerry forces couldn’t have played it worse. They fucked up just about everything. The top-level talking heads include Republican National Committee chairman Edward Gillespie, his Democratic counterpart Terry McAuliffe, Bush campaign manager Ken Mehlman , Kry campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill and senior Democratic adviser Paul Begala.
The film also focuses in one some local political activists on both sides of the aisle. I was especially taken with a young Democratic strategist type named Evan Hutchison who strikes me as a younger James Carville — a guy with a common, plain-spoken way about him, and yet smart as a whip.
Toward the end Hutchison says something very interesting about the differences between the Bush and Kerry campaigns. If a Bush worker had a good idea that looked like it might pan out, he/she was given a shot and wasn’t held back by organizational bickering or jealousy or a lack of high-level patronage, whereas the Kerry campaign, Hutchison felt, was too loaded down with older guys who’d done little more than lose campaigns and were looking to protect their power and their turf.
Listening to and acting upon good ideas is one of the essential qualities of any winning organization, and if what Hutchison says is true, I respect the Bushies a lot more now than I did before seeing this film.

Radar‘s Jeff Bercovici is reporting that Paramount Pictures president Brad Grey was accosted by a squad of Scientology goons during Grey’s negotiations with Tom Cruise over his M:I:3 gross revenue payment deal, which Grey was determined to reduce. “According to a high-ranking media executive, Grey was walking to his car on the Paramount lot at the end of a business day and suddenly found himself surrounded by more than a dozen Scientologists, who pressured him to ease up on [Cruise], according to the source. Following a terse exchange, the visitors allowed Grey to get into his car and leave, but the message was clear. Though he was unnerved by the incident, sources say, Grey stood his ground. After protracted negotiations, Cruise eventually agreed to a less generous deal.”

Esquire has finally put up that delicious making-of-Bobby piece on its website. The author is John Ridley‘s (a.k.a. “Nikki Go”), who worked on the screenplay. The intro copy calls it “a story of determination, career redemption, selflessness, and how not to make a movie.”

The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neill invited me to sit down for a Toronto Film Festival/Oscar prediction podcast discussion…here it is.

As Oscar contender piece by Pete Hammond turned up on Hollywood Wiretap yesterday. I heard a couple of days ago that Hammond has been talking to somebody about writiing a running Oscar blog thing, so maybe this is the berth.
Reading it led me to a familiar conclusion, which is that the four most likely Best Picture nominees at this stage are still Clint Eastwood‘s Flags of Our Fathers (pure mystique…nobody has seen anything), Pedro Almodovar‘s Volver (probably his finest flm ever, and one of the best chick flicks of all time with a serious chance of being included — maybe — among the mainsream Best Pic contenders), Bill Condon‘s Dreamgirls (so far only extended product reels have been seen), and Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu‘s Babel with the fifth slot up for grabs.
The intrepid Little Miss Sunshine could work its way in there; ditto World Trade Center, although I’m doubting this more and more. What indisputably strong and accomplished film especially deserves to take the fifth slot? Paul Greengrass‘s United 93.
If there wasn’t such an ingrained Best Picture prejudice against films in the cinefantastique realm, Guillermo del Toro‘s Pan’s Labyrinth would be at least be considered worthy of end-of-the-year distinctions. It is without question del Toro’s finest film to date — a dark political melodrama and a serenely tender child’s fable in a single package.
My gut says don’t hold your breath waiting for derby action on The History Boys. Something’s not quite happening with this film — I can just feel it with my insect antennae.
Gabrielle Muccino‘s The Pursuit Of Happyness won’t pop through for another couple of months, and the less said the better until it does. Ditto Christopher Nolan‘s The Prestige .
Some other HE conclusions based on portions of Pete’s piece: (a) All The King’s Men is dead (in my estimation this Steve Zallian period drama has been over for months — the disastrous Toronto Film Festival reception was just the official confirmation); (b) the Running With Scissors strategy of skipping the early festivals is indicative of…uhm, something; (c) Little Children is a fine film and a major creative surge by director-cowriter Todd Fields, but it has an ick-factor thing to contend with; (d) The Last King Of Scotland is a respectably crafted real-life drama (no more that that) but it also has a great Forrest Whitaker performance as General Idi Amin; (e) due respect to tjhe illustrious David Thomson, but Infamous is nowhere near as cultured or artful as Bennett Miller ‘s Capote and is basically dead in the derby; and (f) the lead performance by Derek Luke in Catch A Fire is tender and affecting, but I don’t know if the flm will launch him or not.
And what else? Breaking and Entering is mostly middling Minghella — soulful and smartly assembled in many ways, but curiously plotted in terms of the infidelity activity between Jude Law and Juliette Binoche; Peter O’Toole‘s performance as an aging actor with a wink in his eye is Venus‘s ace in the hole; Stephen Frears‘ The Queen is…I’m not going to share just yet, but Helen Mirren‘s performance as Queen Elizabeth II is a near-lock for Best Actress; and the derision that greeted Emilio Estevez‘s Bobby in Toronto (the “Love Boat” label is going to stick) has begun to turn the film into a Jay Leno joke.
I wrote last week that Stranger Than Fiction is dead in the derby, and take no notice of anyone who says it isn’t.
Films yet to be seen and handicapped are Martin Scorsese‘s recently rebounded The Departed, Steven Soderbergh’s The Good German and Ed Zwick‘s Blood Diamond. Clouds of doubt are hovering over Alfonso Cuaron‘s Children Of Men and Robert DeNiro‘s The Good Shepherd.
Ridley Scott‘s A Good Life is agreeably escapist and goes down easy, but the bottom-line distinction is that it’s formulaic (as in predictable). Agreeably so, but formulaic nonetheless.

The local Toronto word on Emilio Estevez‘s Bobby (Weinstein Co., 11.17) has been pretty bad for the last two or three days, and so I went into this morning’s screening pumped and ready to scoff. But the old reverse-negative effect kicked in and I wound up not hating it too much.

Bobby Anthony Hopkins, director-writer-costar Emilio Estevez .

Much of Bobby is treacly and mediocre and some of it might make you shudder, but it’s not altogether grotesque. It’s reasonaby well-shot and cut, it has a few smallish moments that work, and there are some saving grace moments near the very end.
Archival footage of the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy is basically what saves it, along with a recording of an eloquent and very moving speech that Kennedy gave about the persistent presence of violence in American life. Despite the best of intentions and the worst of consequences, Bobby fails to undermine the actual Kennedy mystique. There’s a lingering potency to the RFK legend — who he was, what he said, the metaphor of his life and how it ended.
Otherwise It’s true what people gave been saying about Bobby — it is Love Boat ’68 at the Ambassador Hotel, and that in itself makes it pretty gruesome to sit through, but if you can get past that…
Let’s try again: if you can sit back and go with the fact that Estvez is going to try and make you feel the allure of Kennedy’s Presidential primary campaign as well as the terrible shock of his murder on the night of June 4, 1968, by making you feel how it was to be an average person muddling through in ’68, and that Estevez will try for this immersion by showing you a series of Love Boat relationship stories — and I mean stories and situations that do nothing to illuminate or inform anyone about Kennedy or his ideals…if you can kick back and say, “Okay, I can roll with this…I’m ready to accept the banality of this approach,” then Bobby isn’t half bad.
I had been prepared, see, so I was ready for the worst. I first read the phrase “Love Boat ’68” in that John Ridley-authored Esquire piece that ran earlier this year. So when Bobby turned out to be tolerably pedestrian — not awful or atrocious, but mediocre in a familiar, TV-drama sort of way — it was like, “Whoa…!”
What’s especially funny in the Ridley piece is his description of the disputes over finance and script-trimming between Estevez and Bold Films owner Michel Litvak, who not only made sure that his wife, the Russian-born Svetlana Metkina, was given a part in the film but managed to arrange for her to appear in “more scenes” just as principal photography was about to begin.
Sure enough, Metkina is in the film and to be honest, she’s not half bad as a Czechoslovakian journalist looking to wangle an interview with RFK.
It isn’t the performances that are terrible — it’s the 1980s Aaron Spelling-level material. Anthony Hopkins exudes a certain courtly dignity as a longtime Ambassador Hotel employee coasting on memories. Christian Slater isn’t too bad as a racist kitchen-employee supervisor. Laurence Fishburne actually does pretty well with a couple of decently written scenes about racial politics. Elijah Wood is tolerable as a draft-dodger. Freddy Rodriguez does a decent job as the Latino bus boy who cradled Kennedy’s head as he lay on the kitchen hallway floor with a 22 calibre bullet in his brain.
Demi Moore is…well, not bad as a drunken lounge singer. William H. Macy plays a randy but fair-minded hotel manager with a certain sensitivity. Sharon Stone overacts as a hairdresser with false eyelashes and loads of mascara. Helen Hunt is a pampered wife of an older rich guy, played by Martin Sheen. Lindsay Lohan and Heather Graham give passable performances also.
Ashton Kutcher‘s hippy-dippy drug dealer gives the only really bad performance, although “silliest” or “most embarassing” is a more accurate way to put it.

Screen a film about a real-life character who endures some kind of prolonged, life-threatening hell only to emerge alive and healthy at the end of the trail, and you’re almost certainly going to move people. Show this very same film at a public screening at the Toronto Film Festival, and when the lights come up people are going to rise to their feet and cheer with lumps in their throats and eyes rimmed with tears.

(l. to r.) Catch a Fire star Derek Luke, Focus Features honcho James Schamus, costar Tim Robbins at Lobby four days ago.

This is what happened at last Sunday’s (good God…four days ago) screening of Phillip Noyce‘s Catch a Fire (Focus Features, 10.27). I heard about it at the after-party at Lobby, and it sounded right because I’d had a similar reaction myself when I saw a longer version of Noyce’s film a few months ago.
Fire is the real-deal tale of Patrick Chamusso (Derek Luke), a South African factory worker and family man who was essentially goaded into becoming an anti-apartheid radical after he was falsely accused of being a domestic terrorist, and thereafter bullied and terrorized, by a South African secret policeman (Tim Robbins) and his goon squad.
The story concludes with Chamusso blowing up an oil refinery and then getting popped and sent to prison, only to be set free after the white-run South African government is voted out of power.
The emotional payoff happens at the very end when Noyce stages a real-life, happy-ending greeting between Chamusso, Luke and himself — everyone relieved and hugging each other and looking forward to a fair and just future. And then Chamusso addresses the camera and tells what his life has been like (generally happy, running an orphanage) since he got out of prison.
I wasn’t at the Elgin to witness the lights coming up and a spotlight finding a certain gentleman in an upper balcony and a loud voice announcing, “Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Patrick Chamusso!”…but The Envelope columnist Tom O’Neill was, and he described it pretty well the other day so here it is.

Luke, Breaking and Entering director Anthony Minghella.

I tried to run photos of the Catch a Fire after-party the next morning, but it took two days to finally get them sent to me free and clear withut any password mucky-muck,and by that time my focus and momentum were elsewhere. Whenever I take my own photos the process is always cool and easy and fast — whenever I ask publicists or staff photographers to send me photos it’s always tedious and time-consuming…no offense.
I’ll get into Catch a Fire at greater length in two or three weeks. It’s a significant accomplishment to just get this much posted. Everything it taking three our four times longer to write than it usually does. I’m so whipped and fried that I’m starting to get angry about it.