WARNING — IF YOU LIVE IN A CAVE AND READ BY CANDLELIGHT A PLOT SPOLER IS CONTAINED HEREIN: The Weinstein Co’s August: Osage County, which screened early this evening at Toronto’s Roy Thomson Hall, feels a tiny bit abbreviated and doesn’t deliver quite as much of a full-on emotional wallop as Tracy Letts‘ Tony Award-winning stage play, but it’s strong and direct and satisfying enough to give the play’s admirers what they’re looking for. I was intrigued and attuned from start to finish. And the film certainly delivers at least four…make that five top-notch performances — first and foremost Meryl Streep as the bitchy matriarch Violet Weston (an all-but-guaranteed Best Actress nominee), Julia Roberts as her angry daughter Barbara, Margo Martindale as Mattie Fae Aiken, Julianne Nicholson as Ivy Weston and Juliette Lewis as Karen Weston.

Stephen Frears‘ Philomena is basically a gentle, tender-hearted, intelligently written film about an elderly Irish mother named Philomena Lee (Judi Dench) looking for a son she was forced to surrender for a blind adoption back in the mid ’50s, and about the fiendish Irish nuns who, consumed by the belief that Philomena was an unfit mother due to becoming pregnant out of wedlock, arranged to sell the boy to American parents. On top of which they kept his origins a secret, even when he returned to Ireland as a grown AIDS-afflicted gay man, trying to find his biological mom. The nuns, based in a convent near Limerick, refused to tell him anything.

Philomena had likewise been unsuccessful in learning any facts about her son (whose adopted name was Michael Hess) and didn’t come to the truth until she hooked up with author and former government guy Martin Sixsmtih (Steve Coogan), whose book, “The Lost Child of Philomena Lee,” is the basis of Coogan and co-writer Jeff Pope‘s screenplay.

I sometimes think that Jimi Hendrix was put on the planet to be that guy and do that thing that he uncorked so phenomenally between 1966 (the launch days in England) and mid ’68, and that maybe on some level he allowed himself to slip out because he knew deep down that he’d hit such a peak during that period that he’d never be able to repeat or recharge it. In any event there’s an upcoming two-hour American Masters doc called “Jimi Hendrix — Hear My Train A Comin'” (11.5.13), and it might be a little something better or extra because those awful Jimi Hendrix Estate people (who’ve blocked every Hendrix biopic ever attempted or so I’ve read) have cooperated fully.

I saw this on my way over to last night’s Warner Bros./Gravity party on King Street. Anyone who would wear these shoes in a sincere, non-ironic way is seriously screwed up in an aesthetic fashion or style sense. I’ve been around and acquired a thousand distastes (which is the basis of taste) and I know what looks half-decent vs. not so hot vs. classic vs. something wild and these shoes are dead fucking atrocious. I mean, I’m tempted to call them a metaphor for the coming Apocalypse. And look at that dork wearing them…God! John Varvatos is…I don’t what he’s doing but I can guess.

If you don’t review a film right away someone will come along and post your thoughts. Sure enough the opening paragraph of Scott Foundas‘s Variety review of Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom expressed my exact feelings about this Weinstein Co. release. It’s a “classic” biopic in the sense that it feels like it was made 30 or 40 years ago. It’s basically the life of Nelson Mandela by way of the sensibility of Richard Attenborough‘s Gandhi (’82). That makes it a reverential but generally mediocre film about a great man and a great saga, but one that is saved or at the very least enobled by Idris Elba‘s stirring, highly charismatic performance as Mandela — the first breakthrough performance that the 41 year-old Elba has given on the big screen or anywhere else for that matters.

It’s been almost six years since Tracy Letts‘ August: Osage County opened big-time on Broadway and five and a half years since it won a bagful of Tony Awards. And it’s been a good three-plus years since the film version began to be developed. And now the climax — the 12.25.13 Weinstein Co. release will be shown today (late this afternoon at a p & i screening, early this evening at Roy Thomson Hall) and the verdicts will be flying fast and furious by…oh, a little after 7 pm eastern?

The buzz around town is guarded. Almost every press person I’ve spoken to about it has offered a variation of the following: “Hopefully, yeah, sure…looking forward. An obvious Oscar nomination possibility for Meryl Streep…okay, maybe Streep but Harvey can’t play the ‘she’s due’ card any more. But almost certainly one for Julia Roberts, right? Or maybe not. Who knows? But translating a successful stage play definitely isn’t easy, especially when you cut roughly an hour out of the play’s over-three-hour running time, and John Wells directing …I don’t know, man. Remember The Company Men?”

I’ve just come back from buying stuff at one of those all-purpose pharmacies and markets. I sauntered up to the counter and put my stuff down. The 20something checkout guy said “hey” and I muttered “how are ya?” and then…

Checkout guy: Would you like a bag?
Me: Yes. (Quizzical expression, slight smile.) I mean…well, have you ever met anyone buying two or more items who doesn’t want a bag?
Checkout guy: Well, some people bring their own.
Me: Uh-huh. You’re talking in code then. What you’re asking is “do I want to buy a bag?”
Checkout guy: Right.
Me: Okay. (Pause.) I’m guessing a dinky plastic bag is worth nothing, maybe a tenth of a penny but you guys charge…what, a dime?
Checkout guy: Five cents.
Me: Local governments are charging stores a tax for plastic bags for pollution reasons so the stores are passing the cost along. I get it. Back in West Hollywood I bought two large cloth bags for grocery shopping. But I almost never take them with me because I tend to drop into Gelson’s or Pavillions on impulse so I wind up paying for paper bags almost every time. Stores have been providing free bags for decades, over a century. No more.