Oh, and by the way: John Horn‘s 8.30 story in the L.A. Times was incorrect, apparently, in announcing that Adrienne Shelly‘s Waitress, a drama with Kerri Russell as a pregnant, unhappily married waitress in the deep south who falls into an affair with a visitor, would be showing at Telluride. No sign of it so far, according to what I’ve been told. Same deal with Susanne Bier‘s After the Wedding, which I expect will be as precise and penetrating as Bier’s Brothers and Open Hearts. No Telluride sightings, I mean. Maybe it’ll turn up as a surprise sneak sometime today.

Peter O’Toole‘s performance in Roger Michell‘s Venus (Miramax, 12.15) is an absolute lock for a Best Actor nomination, says Oscar prognosticator Pete Hammond after catching the British-made comedy-drama yesterday afternoon at the Telluride Film Festival. This is also the view of several others who caught the film yesterday as well, he reports. I’ve been flagging this development for a while now, and trying to see Venus since I first heard about some research screenings last April. Michell admitted to being nervous about the reaction to yesterday’s showings, which were the very first for the final finished print. Venus will be screening at the Toronto Film Festival, and Michell, O’Toole and various other team members will show up also.

I was stuck on a really long (eight and a half hour), occasionally miserable Amtrak train trip earlier today from Toronto to Syracuse, N.Y. The purpose was to visit my son Jett , 18, who started freshman classes here a week ago. I’d forgotten about the intense squalor of freshman dorm life — the constant aroma of leftover pizza, the pizza take-out boxes and empty bags of chips scattered about, the leftover chicken-wing bones on the floor, the communal bathrooms, the stanky T-shirts and grubby socks and athletic shorts on the floor, the general pig-trough vibe.

Saturday, 9.2.06, 6:45 pm — notice the incongruent “S” letter in the the “S.I. Newhouse Communications Center” banner over the main doorway. The original “S” was lost and the school replaced it, but the replacement letter uses the wrong font. Tens of millions being spent at this university and they get somehting like this wrong. It’s like wearing a perfect $750 Italian suit with one of the buttons being the wrong color.

It was raining hard for three or four hours during the train trip, and the roof of the car I was sitting in was leaking water in six or seven different spots. Hang in there, Amtrak! The U.S. border police stopped the train to check passports, etc. (which is normal) but they kept everyone waiting for an hour and 45 minutes (which is bullshit). The food car sold bad coffee, cheese danishes, chips, shit sandwiches and the like. Bored-out-of-their-minds passengers were lined up all through the trip.
The trip kept me out of internet reach from 7:45 am until 6 pm and when I finally arrived I didn’t feel like jumping online because every now and then life is about something other than jumping online. (I was tempted to write a measured response to David Poland‘s rave review of Stephen Frears’ The Queen but I guess I can wait.) I just wanted to hang and talk and roam the campus and take pictures.
Last night Jett and I ate some truly foul pizza at one of the joints on Marshall Street, and I mean pizza so bad that that the Food and Drug Adminstration agents should be called in to make arrests.

The Toronto Star‘s Peter Howell polls some smarty-pants types about their most impassioned wanna-sees at the Toronto Film Festival…but only three choices each. Shoulda been four or five, and Howell should have also asked for their gut reactions about films they can’t wait to not see…the biggest Toronto Film Festival turn-offs, sight unseen.
I love it, incidentally, that Variety ‘s Robert Koehler said that two of his hottest can’t-waits are films directed by Abderrahmane Sissako (a film called Bamako) and Apichatpong Weerasethakul (one titled Syndromes and a Century). I’m not saying or hinting that Weerasethakul and Sissako aren’t formidable filmmakers, but Koehler is always paying attention to out-of-the-way filmmakers of their calibre, and a good thing, that…because if Koehler didn’t do this, who would?

A very Canadian, “hooray for our side” view of the must-sees at the Toronto Film Festival in the Toronto Globe & Mail. Strictly for local consumption, although I too am keenly interested in seeing Sarah Polley‘s Away from Her, her feature directing debut.) Peter Howell‘s annual what-journos-are-hot-to-see piece in the Toronto Star will probably offer a better sum-up.

“It’s difficult to pinpoint the precise moment when Neil LaBute‘s remake of The Wicker Man completely jumps the tracks. For some, it will be the scene where Nicolas Cage, in dire need of transportation, turns a gun on a passing bicyclist and melodramatically commands: “Step. Away. From. The Bike.” For others, it will be the fight scene that ends with Cage delivering a karate kick to a feisty Leelee Sobieski . (Take that, bi-yotch!) But for most, the point of no return will arrive during an extended climactic sequence that calls for Cage to pad about in a tacky bear costume. It’s so hilarious, it’s almost, well, unbearable.” — Joe Leydon on his Moving Picture blog, wriring in a much more down to it and funnier than his Variety review.

Okay, okay…Bush takes a bullet and croaks in Death of a President, a drama that will show at the Toronto Film Festival and also air on England TV in October. And it’s a big hah-hah. But is it? And if so, why? I’m not getting the undercurrent. I wish Bush had never been elected, but I don’t want to fantasize about him being dead. Maybe it’ll work as a piece of plain old imaginative story-telling, but there’s something vaguely distasteful at the bottom of it.

I read those Laurence Olivier and Danny Kaye stories years ago — common currency — and we’ve all thought about the undercurrent of the snails-and-oysters scene in Spartacus and so on, so I’m not getting why there’s a revisitation piece in the Daily Mail, written by Michael Thornton, about Oliver’s bisexuality.

Ich bin ein Toronto resident now, having arrived here around 9 pm this evening. Same old town, same leafy-shady trees, same friendly people, same old black squirrels.

Is there something incongruent between the MySpace aesthetic (advertising one’s self, celebrating one’s uniqueness, looking to meet people, etc.) and Martin Scorsese‘s The Departed, which is said to be pretty rough and bloody and ferocious? Somehow the two don’t seem like a spiritual match. Nonethess, here’s the Departed‘s MySpace page.

That brief kissing scene (it’s over in a flash) between Toby Young‘s Truman Capote and Daniel Craig‘s Perry Smith is one of many things in infamous (showing this weekend in Telluride and next week in Toronto) that feel askew. Craig’s rugged boxer-like English features couldn’t look more different than the real Smith’s face, which was soft, round and semi-mournful and half-defined by his mother’s Cherokee blood. Craig’s black hair dye and dyed black eyebrows don’t begin to make him look right physically, not to mention the fact that he’s at least a head taller than Young whereas the real Capote and Smith, both shrimps, were almost exactly the same height. And I’m not even mentioning the two rough-up scenes between them that probably didn’t happen, according to a guy I’ve spoken to who was close to Capote.

David Poland, who saw Todd Field‘s Little Children a week and a half or two weeks ago along with a handful of other critics, is calling it the “best American film” and “first American masterpiece” of 2006, as well as on Fields’ part “one of the great sophomore efforts of all time.”
Another guy who’s seen this New Line release admires it but feels it may be a little too cool and detached to rank as a big-time Oscar contender…we’ll see.
Poland says Children “is the film that Ang Lee and Alan Ball and Robert Redford and Paul Thomas Anderson and even Woody Allen have been trying to make for a long time. New Line’s terrific, but narrow, trailer for the movie, understandably, focuses on ‘the affair’ in the film. But man, I am here to tell you — it’s just the appetizer.
“The film is very, very funny, but audiences are afraid to laugh at a lot of the humor.” (How does Poland know that? Is he quoting data from test screening reactions? If so, who’s feeding him tthis?) “After all, how funny are cheating and perversion and mean-spiritedness and outright stupidity? Very funny. But it’s a Kubrickian humor…tough and more than a little shocking. There isn’t a shot in the movie that feels wrong. Whether it’s a table scene with four characters who are each in a completely different place emotionally or a scene underwater meant to force/allow us to see through the eyes of a sex offender or a satirical take on football,
“Field uses the whole toolbox with assurance and detail. And any time you get the feeling that maybe he got the wrong performance out of someone, the reason why it is perfection is right around the corner.”
Here’s another slightly-less-admiring review by Emanuel Levy.