I've missed Guy Maddin's THE SADDEST MUSIC IN THE WORLD, which other credible journalists (the NEW YORK TIMES' Elvis Mitchell, for one) are hopped up about.

I saw a little more than half of Dan Ollman and Sarah Price's YES MEN, and instantly fell for the humorous attitude that pervades it. I hope to see the whole thing soon. Especially given what I've heard about the Australian McDonald's put-on and the idea of excrement burgers.

Last night (Thursday) I caught about 60% or 65% of Jorgen Leth and Lars von Trier's THE FIVE OBSTRUCTIONS, which turned out to be much funnier and more accessible than I expected for a film about an arch artistic exercise -- i.e., Leth remaking a 1967 short film,"The Perfect Human."

I was touched and pleased by Lone Scherfig's WILBUR WANTS TO KILL HIMSELF, which I also saw Thursday night at the Uptown. I especially moved by the performance of 36 year-old Scottish actress Shirley Henderson, who's also memorable in John Crowley's first-rate INTERMISSION. Crowley told me during a Thursday morning chat at the Intercontinental outdoor patio that the reason the Cannes Film Festival didn't screen it is because they turned the film down. What?

Jonathan Demme's THE AGRONOMIST -- a history of repression and terrorism in Haiti as seen through the eyes of the late (i.e., assassinated) Jean Domninque, the owner for decades of an independent Haitian radio station that told the truth and bucked the murderous ruling elite -- was touchingly well-composed, althought it also made me feel embittered. A beautiful courageous man struggles to make his country free for 40 years and is murdered for his trouble, and things are nearly as bad today as they ever were. Terrific.

Dominique's widow Michèle Montas, who took part in a Q & A at the Uptown following Wednesday night's public screening, was nearly assassinated herself in December '02. Demme was asked why shadowy U.S. interests have been supporting the bad guys in Haiti for all these decades. He said he isn't an authority, but that he's always understood that there are about 20 "enormously wealthy" Haitian families who've been funneling huge donations to Republicans for ages, and that the CIA has been in bed with the repressionist forces in that country for a long time also.

Mark Urman's Thinkfilm will be distributing the Demme film early next year, but it'll qualify for an Oscar for an '03 Oscar nomination for a Best Documentary Feature award.

I went to Mikael Håfström's EVIL (called ONDSKAN in Sweden, where the film was shot) because an agent friend told me before the festival this boarding-school film resembled Lindsay Anderson's IF (1969).

Hafstrom is an assured director, and the good-looking lead actor, Andreas Wilson, has considerable force and charisma, but the script Hafstrom co-wrote with Hans Gunnarsson, based on Jan Guillou's novel, is one physical confrontation scene after another. Beatings, kickings, buckets of excrement poured over the heads of guys sleeping in their bunks...yeesh. I had no idea Swedish males in boarding schools were subjected to such a violent code of conduct.

EVIL, in any event, is a solid piece, but to compare it to IF invites the negative, since it's nowhere near as rich or inventive. Tony Richardon's THE LONELINESS OF THE LONG DISTANCE RUNNER (1961), another superb British drama that's not exactly about a boarding school but something very much like one, is also a much better piece.

Nobody I spoke to was all that high about Ridley Scott's MATCHSTICK MEN or Carl Franklin's OUT OF TIME, which I saw in L.A. and thought was pretty much a waste. It's NO WAY OUT meets INSOMNIA, only directed as a South Florida throw-away genre piece. It's not even a Showtime movie.

I'll attempt a more thoughtful sum-up next week. I gotta try and make THE GOSPEL OF JOHN at 11:45 am. It's 11:07 right now,and I haven't even showered.

Scrappy Little Pisser

Scott Caan's DALLAS 362, which screens tonight (i.e, Friday the 12th) at Toronto's Isabel Bader Theatre, is a smartly written, nicely performed, genuinely promising first film. Why do I feel I've just damned it with faint praise? I don't mean to. A growing-up, coming-of-age movie that's partly a middle-American MEAN STREETS and partly a dark relationship comedy, it may not be a blinding, once-in-a-lifetime experience...shit, there I go again.

How about this? It's got spunk, personality and at times a wack sense of humor, which is nearly enough to take the film across the finish line in itself.

It's a low-budget male relationship movie, which yanks it out of the running right away as a date movie, I suppose. And except for a pair of older boomer-aged characters played by Kelly Lynch and Jeff Goldblum, it's mostly about some fringe-y, wild-ass GenX types with self-destructive behavior patterns. And we all know that demimondes of this sort tend to play better with esoteric DVD renters than mainstream ticket buyers.

But DALLAS 362 has a good supply of quirky, hang-it-all indie attitude, and more moxie and flavor in its left testical than LOVE ACTUALLY has in its entire preening, desperate-to-please, over-dressed body. Any bets about which film will earn tens of millions, and which will barely make a ripple before heading off to video?

Not surprisingly, and to some extent autobiographically for Caan, DALLAS 362 is a dear-dad movie. It contains echoes of the writer-director's relationship with his father, actor James Caan, although Scott casts himself in a second-lead role and gives the lead to Shawn Hatosy, a short, verging-on-pudgy young actor with Irish skin and small dark-brown eyes that made me think of that Michael Caine line in GET CARTER -- "piss-holes in the snow."

Hatosy was okay in THE COOLER (which, I realize, hasn't even opened yet), and he's better than adequate in Caan's film, but he doesn't have star chemistry. Caan, who does -- he's always had an effortlessly grounded macho prescence and a ready-to-pounce intensity -- should have played the lead, and Hatosy, good as he is in Rusty's shoes, should have played Dallas. They're both short (Caan is about 5'5") and are probably friends in real life, so you can see why it happened. What's done is done, in any case.

Rusty (Hatosy) and Dallas (Caan) are a couple of L.A. guys in their mid 20s who are always getting into bar fights. They keep telling themselves it's always the other guy's fault, but they're obviously into rage. Rusty, who's slightly more stable than Dallas, is pushed into therapy sessions by his mom, Mary (Kelly Lynch), with an amiable, pot-smoking psychologist named Bob (Jeff Goldbum), who also happens to be her new boyfriend.

For the first 30 to 45 minutes, the movie is mainly about kicking around, chasing girls, meeting this and that edgy character, and getting banged up in pool halls and juke joints at night.

Dallas's day job is collecting money for a bookie, but he's working on two plans to rip off rich guys in their homes -- one being the bookie he works for, and the other a guy he won't know anything about until the night of the job. Rusty, meanwhile, starts getting in touch with his feelings during his therapy sessions with Bob. One revelation is that he's pining heavily for his dead father, a rodeo rider who died after being gored by a steer, and wants to follow in his footsteps. Another is his deep kinship with Dallas, whose loyalty and fearlessness makes Rusty feel "safe," he says, even though Dallas is obviously pulling him in the direction of chaos.

The going-to-Texas dream has a roadblock in the form of Mary, who doesn't want to endure another rodeo tragedy and has told Rusty to forget it. What kind of 24 year-old doesn't follow his dream because him mom says no? Maybe the kind who hasn't quite realized what that dream exactly is...yet. But once Rusty achieves clarity on this, he starts edging away from Dallas, who is determined to pull off the two home invasion robberies despite his friend's disapproval. Rusty is appalled at his friend's recklessness, in fact, but he decides not to stand in his way either.

The real-life parallels or references? The younger Caan is obviously following in his father's footsteps, both as an actor and a director,. James Caan was on a very reckless personal streak in the '80s. He also had a liking when he was younger for outdoorsy macho stuff, including bronco riding, if I remember correctly.

There are some occasional misfiring bits in DALLAS 362, but nothing too bothersome. There's a scene in a diner between Hatosy and a beautiful blonde stranger who walks in with lust (or something very close to that) in her eyes. Rusty tells the blonde he'd like to "save " her by carrying her away, but can't right now. Then he leaves without asking for her phone number, or giving her his. What the....?

The opening credit sequence -- a series of black-and-white photos portraying Dallas and Rusty's raucous nighttime adventures -- is magnificent, but the closing sequence, meant to emphasize that Rusty is finally walking on his own path, is overbaked. And the final shot seems too literal.

Bottom line: DALLAS 362 is a highly assured debut of a new writer-director. Caan's dialogue is truly extraordinary at times, and he gets great performances out of everyone. He reportedly told a screening audience at the Las Vegas Film Festival last summer that he wrote the script in about a month. Good as it is, it makes you wonder how the script might have turned out if he'd taken six months to develop it further.

The filmed result, in any event, is far better than most of the mainstreamy stuff playing at your local plex. I don't know what the pickup situation is, but someone ought to give DALLAS 362 a theatrical shot before it turns up at Lazer Blazer on West Pico Blvd.

What...Already?

The Toronto Film Festival began to suddenly downshift on Wednesday, revealing a fact that is not widely known: this is a five-day festival that just happens to run for ten days. Believe me, the juice was all-but-gone as of midnight on Tuesday, 9.9. Nearly all of the hot-ticket attractions were press-screened the first five days, primarily to accomodate the film-buying community which prefers to get in and get out, fast. Press-screening-wise, we've got THE BROWN BUNNY and THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN on Friday morning, but things have been feeling pretty flat since Wednesday. I could actually use the word "dead." I said to a fellow journalist that day around lunchtime, "What's happening? There are no more major films to see and I'm not feeling a pulse. It feels like it's over already."

It doesn't have to be this way. I don't know any journalists who weren't forced to miss three or four high-interest titles because they had to choose between one film or another. I missed out on Robert Altman's THE COMPANY, Len Wiseman's UNDERWORLD, Mike Hodges' I'LL SLEEP WHEN I'M DEAD, Joel Schumacher's VERONICA GUERIN, Ulrich Seidl's JESUS, YOU KNOW, and Vikram Jayanti's GAME OVER: KASPAROV AND THE MACHINE, just for starters.

Why aren't the Toronto Film Festival programmers re-screening some of the big titles on Friday? Why didn't they do it on Thursday also, given the low-wattage levels of the films they were screening?

They just aren't. The last time I checked the big white board in the lobby of the Varsity, no repeat screenings had been scheduled. Mistake. The programmers knew they were front-loading the festival, and knew many of these films wouldn't be seen due to the either-or factor. Why not give press people a second chance with some missed titles as the festival winds to a close? Why not go the extra distance and make a very good festival even better?

Alejandro's Return

The first time I laid eyes on Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu was at a post-screening party in Hollywood for AMORES PERROS, which had just shown at the nearby American Cinematheque.

As soon as he walked in and somebody pointed him out, I said to myself, "That guy is cool." He was wearing a slight grin and a look that said, "Okay, the vibe is good here...let's enjoy it! What journalists are here? Where are the girls?" He wasn't into feigning disinterest or boredom, as famous types often do at parties, but he wasn't on the other end of the behavior-scale either. I liked his charismatic movie-star appearance. Most directors I know tend to look a little bit nerdy or nebbishy, like Curtis Hanson. Gonzalez Innaritu looked like Antonio Banderas's slicker, better-looking kid brother.

There's a little more to my admiration than this. The director of the Toronto Film Festival's one unqualified narrative hit, 21 GRAMS, is my favorite filmmaker working today (more so even than Lars von Trier, and that's saying something) because he's been, over the last two or three years, the most consistently satisfying and startling all around the track. This onetime TV commercial whiz from Mexico City is only 39 years old, and already he's working at a level that I'm sure is the envy of other world-class directors everywhere.

21 GRAMS is a mix of shattering middle-American tragedy and audaciously crafted art. AMORES PERROS, Gonzelez Innaritu's first feature, was painful, mind-blowing, astounding, classic. And I'm not just trotting out a cliche in saying he's made two short films that are nothing short of spellbinding.

With the 8-minute long "The Powder Keg," Gonzalez Innaritu delivered by far the best of the BMW.com short films in the "Hire" series. It was about a wounded photojournalist (Stellan Skarsgaard) looking to escape a revolution-torn Central American country.

And his "Mexico" segment in the 11.9.01 anthology piece about the World Trade Center catastrophe was, in my humble opinion, far and away the best of the 11 shorts that composed it. (Roger Ebert said so also.) It was mainly about sound -- choppers hovering, excerpts of frantic telephone calls, the thud-hit of jumpers slamming into the pavement -- heard over a black screen, with brief flashes of black-and-white footage of the lower Manhattan tragedy shown every 15 or 20 seconds.

I've been keeping in touch with the guy with an occasional e-mail since the early AMORES PERROS days in '00, and when I was offered a shot at saying hello and discussing 21 GRAMS during the festival was offered to me last week, I took it. We sat down at the Hotel Intercontinental around 1:30 pm last Tuesday, just before Dave Poland's time at bat.

21 GRAMS "is about how frightened we all are," he said, "but I don't think it's a dark story. It's about a chain of losses, and how we confront those losses and move on with our lives. In the end it's about hope." The important thing, he believes, is that anyone watching the film can relate and realize they could be any one of the the three main characters, played by Naomi Watts, Sean Penn and Benicio del Toro.

We went over the basic points -- that 80% of the film was shot in Memphis, and the rest in the town of Grant, New Mexico. That the script took three years to refine and that 25 drafts were written. That the value of actors like del Toro and Penn is that "audiences know right away that they have a strong and unique interior life...that's the source, you can see it plainly in their features."

There's no mistaking the skepticism in 21 GRAMS towards people who lean on Jesus worship in order to get through life's hardships. Benicio's character, Frank, bails on Jesus after causing the death of three people in a terrible car accident -- he can't forgive any celestial presence that would benignly permit such a thing.

Gonzalez Innaritu says he was subjected to the usual Catholic teachings and began to develop strong skepticism by age 12 or 13. He began, as I did at roughly the same age, to see the God and Jesus bullshit -- those immensely discomforting assurances that they know all, see all, care deeply, and takes an occasional hand in our fates -- in all of its splendor. Most of us get there sooner or later. Benicio's Frank sure as hell does, and it's difficult to imagine Penn's and Watts's character not sharing this view by the film's end.

"The real spiritual people you meet in life are serene and at peace," Innaritu says. But the holy rollers and born-again Jesus freaks "need emotion and the feeling of being spellbound and speaking in tongues and all that dramatic stuff. For them it's either Jesus or alcohol or drugs...they need radical feelings."

We started talking about the advance reactions to Mel Gibson's THE PASSION, and Alejandro said he's begun to read the book Gibson's film is said to be largely based upon -- "The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ," a lengthy "revelation" received and written by Sister Anne Catherine Emmerich on the details of Christ's crucifixion, with all the horrendous sufferings. I got the feeling he was slightly appalled, but maybe not.

He said he's learned an important lesson about his work habits in shooting 21 GRAMS and AMORES PERROS, which is that he worries and analyzes too much and that it's be better to trust in artistic instinct. "You're moving in the direction of Clint Eastwood's approach," I said. "He told me once he's always looking to avoid paralysis through over-analysis." "Exactly," said Gonzalez Innaritu. "I agree completely."

He said one of the inspirations behind the brilliant leaf-blower sequence, in which the film's fatal car accident is suggested rather than depicted, was a rule ascribed to Alfred Hitchcock: "Never kill a child on-screen." The shot of the gardener manning the leaf blower on a front lawn of a suburban home -- an excruciating shot because we know the fatal accident is about to happen off-screen -- last 23 seconds, he says. He was going to have it last a lot longer, but thought better of it.

The most interesting thing I heard in my Tuesday afternoon visit to the 21 GRAMS suite were the slightly different responses to the same questions by Innaritu and his screenwriter, Guillermo Arriaga. The development of the 21 GRAMS script involved "much more than 25 drafts," according to Arriaga. The decision to shoot the leaf-blower sequence as a static single shot with sound effects, says Innaritu, was largely (mostly?) his invention, although Ariaga says the whole thing was pretty much written down in the script.

Arriaga also explained that 21 GRAMS is the second in a trilogy of car-crash movies that he's written, AMORES PERROS being the first. The final installment, UPON OPEN SKY, will not be directed by Gonzalez Innaritu but by himself, he said. They were all inspired by a 1985 car crash during a hunting trip north of Mexico City in which he was badly injured. UPON OPEN SKY is "all about teenage kids" and will have no stars.

Arriaga said he is currently writing a script for Innaritu with a tentative title of BLACK DOG, WHITE DOG, which could just as easily be called BLACK CAT, WHITE CAT.

Gonzalez Innaritu and Arriaga both said they were going later in the day to see Jane Campion's IN THE CUT, and wanted to know what I thought. A different way to shoot a cop thriller, I said. A quasi-feminist tone, a more emotional atmosphere, good performances...but with a disappointing ending. "Aha," said Innaritu, his expression unchanged, his enthusiasm undiminished.

Separated at Birth?