Mark Graham at Vulture reports that Fox Searchlight has canceled its rollout of Jared Hess's Gentlemen Broncos because of savage reviews. To hell with those reviews. And to hell with Fox Searchlight for losing heart. This is among the wildest and bravest comedies I've seen in years. Sure, some of Hess’s gross-out gags are heavy-handed, and the grotesquery is laid on too thick. But even at its campiest, there's a serious theme. Vastly disparate sexual issues are being worked out through outlandish fantasies — freaky, psychedelic enactments of the hero's novels that are so visionary and intense that they hurtle past Freud into a Jung-like mythical dimension. Gentlemen Broncos is a leap over Napoleon Dynamite and Nacho Libre. Now, Hess doesn’t just gaze on paralyzed nerds from the outside; he takes you into their heads and gives form to their alienation from the physical world. It used to be that movies this ambitiously bizarre could find a home in midnight screenings and develop fanatical cults. Now they go straight to DVD — which deprives us of the fun of experiencing them with a responsive audience. See the movie before it goes away. And Fox Searchlight: Reconsider. There must be a way to help this picture find an audience.

Some readers (and a posse led by Latoya Peterson at Jezebel) are angered by my review of Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire. They believe my language reflects deep and both conscious and unconscious prejudices toward African-Americans, obesity, and the so-called “underclass.” Defending myself against those charges (as well as outright abuse) is bound to be a losing battle, but I respect the feelings of Peterson and many of her commenters (the least abusive, anyway) and am sick at the thought that my attempts to evoke this movie have been viewed so harshly — and, I believe, unfairly.

Tonight at BAM at 6:50 I’m going to introduce the rarely screened (and unavailable on DVD) 1962 drama The Chapman Report, directed by George Cukor. It’s part of a 1962 series hatched by New York Film Critics Circle president chairman Armond White and the nice folks at BAMCinématek to celebrate the circle’s 75th anniversary. Why 1962? That was the year that — because of a newspaper strike — the NYFCC gave out no awards. Beyond that, it was a year when the culture was teetering between two violently disparate eras and the cinema was beginning to reflect the tension. No film is more quintessentially 1962 — in its strengths and weaknesses — than The Chapman Report.

I'd intended to blog on the New York Film Festival today but took the wrong cold medicine last night and spent the next eight hours on the couch in front of the TV. I'd like to say I plucked one of my fabulous Kino box sets from the pile and filled in the gaps in my Murnau, but it was mostly a semi-stoned voyage through the late-night bowels of cable movie channels. I recall something with the kid from American Beauty following around with a video camera a serial killer who'd kidnapped his mom (!), some bikers killing supposed high-school students in the desert, nutberg Mark Wahlberg pawing a nubile young Reese Witherspoon and getting chucked out the window by William Peterson, a cut-rate alien in a sub menacing Robocop and Amanda Pays, a scientist who kept killing and reanimating his assistant for no clear reason, a Most Dangerous Game update with a serial killer hunting a naked woman in the Rockies, Jack Bauer's uninteresting daughter getting tortured by serial killers, Jack Bauer himself as a telepath hunting a serial killer ... I did rewatch, for the tenth time, the last 45 minutes of Carl Franklin's classic thriller One False Move, with its increasingly canted angles and nearly unbearable suspense (even if you know what's coming), Michael Beach and Billy Bob Thornton (who co-wrote the film) as among the coldest and scariest killers in film, and Bill Paxton — maybe the most sheerly likable of modern leading men, back then and now, as a harried Mormon. The bloody final confrontation takes less than half a minute, yet you'd be pressed to find its like for pure catharsis. I hate to admit I hadn't seen all of Showgirls, but I finally, finally got through it after stopping every fifteen minutes when Elizabeth Berkeley's big teeth got too much and coming back after watching part of another serial-killer movie. Gina Gershon hissing in Berkeley's face reminded me of the giant Komodo spitting at the giant cobra in another movie I caught in stroboscopic flashes ... Truly a dark night of the soul ...

But then I read something that renewed my faith ...

Roman Polanski has been arrested in Switzerland and will reportedly be flown to Los Angeles to stand trial after 35 years. This is as it should be — alas. But it didn’t have to go down this way. The excellent documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired did not minimize the horrific nature of the crime, but also made a good case against the late judge who held up a plea agreement between Polanski and the prosecutor. Now, there will be a lot of grandstanding by idiots, who will say that Polanski is worse than the likes of Peter Braunstein and should be thrown in prison for the remainder of his life.

On Tuesday night, I got to moderate a spirited Q&A at the Pelham Picture House with Laura Gabbert, co-director of the documentary No Impact Man (opening 9/11 at the Angelika), and Michele Conlin, wife of the film’s main subject, Colin Beavan. (She looms large in the movie as well.) I’m now reading Beavan’s book, which carries the chewy subtitle: “The Adventures of a Guilty Liberal Who Attempts to Save the Planet and the Discoveries He Makes About Himself and His Way of Life in the Process.” It’s an entertaining, amusing, provocative film (I’ll be reviewing it in next week’s mag), but one of its most fascinating aspects was, for me, upsettingly evocative. Beavan’s project — to live with his wife and young daughter in Manhattan and yet, for a year, never take an elevator or drive or watch TV or buy clothes or eat anything grown non-locally, etc. — makes him a figure of fun in the media and among his friends and acquaintances. Almost from the start he needs to defend his project — and himself.

Snapshot of a 12:05 a.m., August 28, 2009, Halloween II show at the Pavilion Theater, Park Slope/Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn: More people going into the 3-D Final Destination movie, also screening a little after midnight. Whole families. Young kids. I guess there were no midnight 3-D Pixar movies tonight. There’s a little girl at Halloween II as well, maybe 8 years old. I saw a 4-year-old at Sin City, so nothing surprises me anymore. But I feel sick about what kids — who don’t need to know how deeply sick the world is — have to process nowadays. I know they’re no angels; I’ve read Lord of the Flies. I know babysitters are expensive. But sometimes I dream of a little less capitalist laissez-faire and a little more nanny-state finger-wagging. I look at those parents and think how fun it would be to see a scene in a hack-‘em-up in which a mom and dad take a little kid to an R-rated slasher movie and get sliced and diced while their tot laughs and eats another Milk Dud ...

There are so many good movies around this weekend that I'm burbling like Julia Child. If you're in NYC, don't miss Azur & Asma, at the ungodly hour of 10 a.m. at the IFC Center as part of the NY Int'l Children's Film Festival. You might recall that this film was added retroactively to my 10 (now 12) Best List of 2008. As a sucker for time-travel romances, I found The Time Traveler's Wife the best now-you-see-him-now-he's-years-away the best sci-fi weeper since Somewhere in Time. And dig those tall shrimp-from-outer-space in the splendidly splattery South African apartheid allegory District 9. As Julia so memorably put it, Bon appetit!