With Serenity due to open in ten days, I can feel the words taking shape in my head: “Get Joss Whedon.” (Yesterday’s misspelling was unfortunate, I agree.) Does this mean we should try and “get” Whedon in the sense of trashing his movie, fixing his game, beating him up in an alley, etc.? Not necessarily. Does it mean we should try to really get Whedon in the sense of arriving at a more profound understanding of who this ultra-crafty guy really is and what his wowser films are about deep down? I’m not certain. Thoughts?

Writing about Bubble, a certain columnist has said, “Steven Sodebergh’s most recent experiment has journalists with no actual depth of insight who were outraged by previous experiments flip-flopping and somehow embracing this one…and vice versa.” That’s a direct reference to, among I-don’t-know-how- many-others, myself…I’m one of those “with no actual depth of insight.” I don’t know how to say it in a limited space, but Bubble is (a) not as whack-cool as Soderbergh’s Schizopolis but (b) it’s way, way cooler than Full Frontal, which put Soderbergh into the critical doghouse. I could watch it another four or five times easily, but I don’t think I want to see Solaris ever again.

The Guardian‘s John Patterson hates Madonna and Guy Ritchie… whatever…but his 9.17 tear-down piece is wrong about two things: (1) Madonna’s palatial home near the Hollywood Reservoir was not in Silver Lake and didn’t even border on it — it was adjacent to Beachwood Canyon and is therefore smack dab in Hollywood; and (2) his observation that Madonna had to be “either terribly thick-skinned or terribly thick-headed” by continuing to make movies “after the quadruple-whammy of Shanghai Surprise, Body Of Evidence, Four Rooms and Evita” is 75% correct. Evita is a completely honorable and (for me) curiously touching film. I’ve seen it over and over on DVD, and it’s gotten a bit more rapturous each time. It’s one of Alan Parker’s finest films ever (certainly his most beautifully filmed), and say what you will about Madonna’s innate acting abilities but she’ll never be better than she was in this, largely because she wasn’t required to do anything but visually convey ruthless ambition while singing (and pretty well too, although she wasn’t up to delivering as well as Patti Lupone did in the Broadway stage show).

Good God…$50 bucks a year to henceforth access all sections of the N.Y. Times online.

Back to Los Angeles and the real world starting today…not a pleasant thought. In fact, I am filled with dread. The best film opening this coming Friday (9/23), hands down, is David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence. There’s also Flightplan, which I haven’t seen. Plus Polanksi’s Oliver Twist, The Prizewinner of Defiance, Ohio (Woody Harrelson’s character seems like such an asswipe in the trailer), and Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride.

The Thing About My Folks, that amusing and surprisingly touching little family film with Paul Reiser and Peter Falk?…the one I first wrote about after seeing it at the Santa Barbara Film Festival last February? It opened limited yesterday (9.16) and…well, do what you think is best. It’s not a Luchino Visconti film but it has a certain caringness about it…paternal love, compassion, recognizable family values. “With movies that are quality-level and playing well, there’s two kinds of buzz — good word-of-mouth and what we call compelling word-of-mouth,” Jeff Dowd said earlier this year. “The Thing About My Folks has compelling word-of-mouth, which you have when the movie is value-based….like The Passion of the Christ. That was a movie that culturally embraced the values of a certain audience. Fahrenheit 9/11 had a value-based appeal, and so did My Big Fat Greek Wedding. People want to see adult films that are positive and empowering and also entertaining, and this is a real family-values film. It’s what people really go through in holding families together…without being ideological or getting into any kind of red-state thing. It’s playing just as strongly in blue states. Throw a dart at a map of the country and it’ll play there.”

Whenever I think back upon the lightning-in-a-bottle period in Bob Dylan’s career, the time (’62 to mid ’66) when he wasn’t just the greatest ’60s generation poet-troubador of all time but someone (or something) who wasn’t just cable-connected to the heart of the early to mid ’60s tumult but in various ways was a kind of Zeus figure, sculpting and cutting through to the bone and voicing the whole evolving drama in head-turning verse…I just crumble inside. More often than not I think of the lyric Dylan wrote for a sad song from “Nashville Skyline” that went, “Once I had mountains in the palm of my hand.” Anyone with their ear to the rails back then could feel the rumble of that possession…the vibration was everywhere. And now, sitting at a dining-room table in a Toronto apartment in September 2005, my weariness amazes me. Martin Scorsese’s 201-minute documentary No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, which showed at the Toronto Film Festival last night, will be available on DVD this coming Tuesday (9.20) and will air on PBS in two segments on 9.26 and 9.27, is a truly magnificent American epic. It’s the best Scorsese film since My Voyage in Italy (’99), although I think it’s a much more emotionally powerful film than that 246-minute doc…or anything else Scorsese has created since Goodfellas. But is it the movie or just me and my investment in the Dylan saga? Scorsese is “in” this film, sure, but it all boils down to found footage and smart editing choices. In a way he lets the story tell itself, but he also frames Dylan’s saga in the same way David Lean configured the life of T.E. Lawrence in Lawrence of Arabia. This analogy originated with screenwriter Larry Gross in a Movie City News posting after he caught No Direction Home at the Telluride Film Festival, and it’s absolutely right-on. This movie is, in a sense, Scorsese’s Lawrence of Arabia, and without losing control of my faculties I have to say that here and there it’s more breathtaking and lump-in-the-throat terrific than Lean’s version. Part One, which lasts two hours, is about becoming…about Dylan’s absorbing all he could and summoning his many strengths, and it ends with his triumphant performance at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival…when Dylan had reached the summit of his powers as the penultimate poet and folk singer of his day. Part Two, which covers ’63 to ’66, is about the complications that came from Dylan’s shifting away from his acoustic roots and embracing his electrified destiny with “Bringing It All Back Home,” “Highway 61 Revisited” and “Blonde on Blonde”…complications and pressures that involved accusations of being a “traitor” to folk music and having to deal with repulsively stupid questions from middle-aged journalists. It all got thicker and gnarlier and finally led to a kind of downfall (his July 1966 motorycle accident, which…who knows?…might have occured for reasons other than mere chance) and a withdrawal from touring that lasted for eight or nine years. “I must have been mad, I never knew what I had”…I can’t nail this film in a Word item, but do not miss it. No Direction Home: Bob Dylan is easily one of the finest and most moving films of the year, and one of the most profound rock docs ever.

I saw Phillis Nagy’s Mrs. Harris, an HBO movie that will air sometime in early ’06, at Roy Thomson Hall last night with two women friends who are…well, agreeably seasoned. The film is a restrained (read: more than a bit dull) account of the downfall of Jean Harris (Annette Bening), the teacher who shot and killed Scarsdale Diet guru Herman Tarnower (Ben Kingsley). The film reminds us that powerful men who are used to getting what they want can be heartless dogs, and that women of taste and refinement sometimes throw caution to the wind in getting involved with guys of this sort, and that sometimes, if you’re really blue and feel pushed to the edge, you can just lose it and want to shoot somebody…yourself, for instance. It’s a huge bummer of a movie, so much so that one of the women I came with left without saying goodbye…she just walked out of the theatre talking on her cell phone, offering nary a word of farewell or even a wave from across the room. Things would have been different if she had come with us to the In Her Shoes screening at Roy Thomson a couple of nights ago, which I invited her to. That movie leaves you in a very nice place.

I’ve seen so many good films at the Toronto Film Festival, I’m feeling a little worn down. This one’s Oscar-worthy, that one’s stellar, this one stirred me to the depths of my soul…gimme a break already. It’s almost like I need to see a few stinkers now (or well-made worthy film that I simply don’t care for…whatever) just to restore my sense of equilibirium. Peter Jackson, I miss you.

Drive a mint-condition Mercedes sedan into the middle of any dirt-poor neighborhood and then park it and leave it there — the next morning it will be completely stripped. Leave a fresh and untouched edition of the Wall Street Journal and the Toronto Globe & Mail on a dining table at the Manulife Center early Friday morning during a visit to the local facilities, and when you return the two papers will either have been fully leafed through or flat-out stolen. Like Alaskan wolves or wild dogs roaming the plains of Africa, movie journalists cruise the Manulife Centre looking for fresh and free newspapers, and when they see a couple of free ones lying there…rowwrrl!

I gave up on doing columns on just Wednesday and Friday during the Toronto Film Festival…or at least, I put up a new lead story a lot more often, whenever something happened or the spirit moved, etc. I kind of liked doing this. Keep adding, keep rolling…keep it fluid and malleable. I’m thinking I should maybe keep on like this.

You didn’t hear it from me, but don’t be too surprised if you read about Miramax president Daniel Battsek acquiring distrib rights to Gavin Hood’s Tsotsi, a flat-out extraordinary South African drama based on a novel by Athol Fugard. I finally saw it yesterday afternoon after being badgered to death by Donna Daniels’ publicity team for the last two or three weeks to do just that. Set in a Johannesburg shantytown, Tsotsi (pronounced “Sawt-see”) is about a bloodless teenage thug (Presley Chweneyagae) who discovers a measure of humanity in himself when he starts to care for an infant who happened to be in the back seat of a car he stole. Unlike Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne’s Palme d’Or-winning L’enfant, which it vaguely resembles, Tsotsi has a potential to snag some decent coin as well as Oscar nominations (Best Foreign-Language Film, Best Actor, etc.), critics awards, Golden Globe awards, etc. How do I know it will sell tickets? Because my kind and compassionate Toronto friend Leora Conway saw Tsotsi at the Wednesday night premiere and went apeshit…she was beaming when she told me about it afterwards, and she said it made her cry at the end. It’s conceivable that a distributor other than Miramax might swoop in and grab Tsotsi, but somebody ought to and get it Oscar-qualified as soon as possible. This is one of those “it” films…I could feel the rooted energy from the get-go…from Hood’s hard-edged direction, the simple and elegant photography (which contrasts with City of God‘s jumpy hand-held visual style) and Chweneyagae’s searing performance as a stone psychopath who sometimes deolves into a terrified three-year-old…it all coagulates into something extra. Two or three weeks ago it won the Edinburgh Film Festival Audience Award and the Michael Powell award for Best British Film, so you have to figure it’s doing a couple of things right.