Jennifer Aniston is one of the producers of the Toronto-bound Cake, a somewhat dark-toned, lower-budgeted drama, shot last spring in Los Angeles, in which she, Anna Kendrick, Sam Worthington and Chris Messina costar. It has to do with tragedy, morose moods, a pain-support group, a sudden departure, a mildly unattractive mousey appearance for Aniston and (here’s hoping) acerbic dialogue. Aniston occasionally steps outside her comedic comfort zone to make films of this sort (Life of Crime, Friends With Money, etc.), the difference being that this time she helped with the financing. Please don’t get me wrong — I admire Aniston for trying to expand her repertoire, and I intend to give Cake a chance. As much as I’m able to, I mean.

Jennifer Aniston with prosthetic cheek scar during filming of Cake earlier this year.

The problem is that I have an Aniston blockage. I’d like to submit to the idea of Aniston playing a dumpy, brown-haired downhead, but I just can’t. And it’s not because she’s worth around $150 million or something in that vicinity. Nothing wrong with Aniston being loaded, but I can’t quite do that suspension-of-disbelief thing. Not with her super-toned bod and frosted blonde hair and her SmartWater and Aveeno endorsement deals, and her unrelenting presence in the supermarket tabloids for the last…what, 15 years? And always with the hot-bikini vacations on the Mexican coast.

In my mind Aniston is right next door to Blake Lively in the soul department. She’s a personality, a light comedienne, a world-famous metaphor for the 21st Century jilted woman, a marketing concept. And I just can’t see her as a mousey depressive dealing with pain and death and trips to Mexico. I’ll follow Amy Adams or Jessica Chastain or even Anne Hathaway into this realm, but Aniston presents an obstruction. Not that I wouldn’t like to. I just feel constrained.

It would appear that Jon Stewart‘s Rosewater (Open Road, 11.7) is basically another ordeal film, perhaps not precisely in the vein of Unbroken or All Is Lost or Life of Pi as it’s about jail rather than the open sea, although it’s close enough as Unbroken also deals with agonizing conditions in a Japanese P.O.W. camp. Directed and written by Stewart and produced by Scott Rudin, pic is based on a first-hand account of BBC journalist Maziar Bahari (played by Gael Garcia Bernal in the film) and the 118 days he spent in an Iranian prison in ’09 on trumped-up charges. Bahari’s book about the experience is called “Then They Came For Me: A Family’s Story Of Love, Captivity And Survival.” Bahari’s Revolutionary Guard interrogator, a man known as “Rosewater,” is played in the film by Kim Bodnia. As Rosewater will play the Toronto Film festival as a Canadian premiere, I’m presuming it’ll appear first in Telluride.

Thanks to Awards Daily‘s Ryan Adams for posting an Easy Lay, Non-Discretionary List of 2014 Best Actress Contenders…31 in all. Nice effort, a good start. But let’s cut out the chaff and get real. By current HE spitball standards there are seven female performances that may potentially shake out as highly likely or distinctly possible contenders within two or three months. Topping the list are Wild‘s Reese Witherspoon, Eleanor Rigby and Miss Julie‘s Jessica Chastain and Gone Girl‘s Rosamund Pike.

I obviously know next to nothing about who’s really hot-tub but (a) I do know which roles appear to be the most substantial and awards-baity on paper, (b) I would be floored if Witherspoon, Chastain and Pike are not part of the Best Actress conversation by mid-October, (c) I do know which actresses have built up good cred and are “owed,” so to speak, and (d) I do have a fairly acute intuition about which performances are almost certain to be ignored. Here’s how it seems right now:

Highly Likely: Reese Witherspoon, Wild; Jessica Chastain, Eleanor Rigby + Miss Julie; Rosamund Pike, Gone Girl.

Distinctly Possible but don’t bet the farm: Felicity Jones, The Theory of Everything; Emma Stone, Birdman (supporting); Michelle Williams, Suite Française; Amy Adams, Big Eyes; Julianne Moore, Maps to the Stars.

This international Birdman trailer is an uptick. Potent emotional currents, casual-natural acting, withering God’s-eye humor as opposed to “laughs”, an apparently noteworthy Emma Stone performance. But what’s with Michael Keaton‘s Tom Waits voice? And what’s with the non-stop running around with Fruit of the Loom underwear, at least as far as this trailer is concerned? Underwear, underwear, genital-revealing underwear under the glare of Times Square….I’ve got it, thank you. Yes, it’s a metaphor but in my eyes Fruit of the Loom is pretty close to gold-toe socks in terms of aesthetic offense. The world of men’s underwear is pretty cool these days. I personally lean toward slim boxer underwear with a button-snap fly. Nobody with a shred of taste or self-respect wears Fruit of the Loom briefs, least of all anyone allowing for the possibility that they might wear them in public.

Last week a staunch Democrat muttered that people shouldn’t even talk about Elizabeth Warren running against Hillary Clinton in 2016. Warren will just fuck things up by weakening support for Clinton and might thereby allow for a possible Republican presidential victory. I only know that a presidential campaign has to be about something more than just “I’ve been biding my time and am pretty much inevitable” and “it’s time for a woman to be in the Oval Office.” I agree with both notions but a presidential campaign has to be about real heart and extra-passionate beliefs, and Clinton seems to barely have either (her main conviction is that she wants very much to win) while Warren has both in spades. You know she does, and you know that Hillary, a corporate center-rightist with nominally “liberal” colors, has never had that fire.

Will Hillary be nominated and elected? Most likely, yes, and that’ll be a lot better than Rand Paul or whomever. And it’ll be good to have Bill Clinton back in the hot seat and co-running the show.

But Clinton can’t just be coronated. She has to lay it on the line and show what she’s philosophically made of and and duke it out on the mat. At the very least a Warren debate will force Clinton to take a more populist tack. It might make real common sense at the end of the day for Democrats to go with a Granny Ticket. Seriously.

Disney marketers are selling the mythical storybook sizzle — witches, spooky woods, maidens, spells, beanstalks, a handsome prince, “I wish…” — and sidestepping the incidental fact that Rob Marshall‘s Into The Woods (Disney, 12.25) is given to song, and more particularly to the unconventional, occasionally quite subtle and sophisticated super-songs of Stephen Sondheim. Hilarious! Disney marketers are essentially declaring that the idiots out there don’t know from Sondheim and are probably going to be turned off by any notion of melodic fancy but the spooky storybook stuff…yes! We’ll eventually let them know it’s a musical down the road, Disney is thinking. Gently, gradually, bit by little bit. Hit them with it too suddenly and they might freak or complain.

Meryl Streep, Anna Kendrick and James Corden can belt out a tune quite robustly and professionally, of course. I’m hoping/presuming/praying that Emily Blunt, Chris Pine, Tracey Ullman, Christine Baranski and Johnny Depp will somehow muddle through. We all know that in terms of his directing style Marshall is a brassy, straight-ahead square who would rather strangle himself than play to the sophistos — he makes movies for popcorn-eaters. Chicago was certainly proof enough of that. But if he just gets out of the way of the material and just captures the play and the music and leaves well enough alone, Into The Woods might work.

After a slow-if-not-difficult day with the column and all kinds of niggly-piggly chickenshit matters that I had to attend to above and beyond, I didn’t feel like submitting to Sharknado 2 last night. Just another cash-in — the original was the charm. I had to hop on the non-hog (i.e., Yamaha 400 cc Majesty) and buzz around town. You don’t go any one special place…that’s cornball style, you just go. Okay, I went to one special place (Amoeba) and then into the hills in order to not feel the glorious sensation of wind blowing through my hair because I’m required to wear a helmet that makes my head feel warm and somewhat damp. I’ll catch the encore showing on Saturday, 8.2. But in the meantime this extra-particular complaint by Vulture‘s John Sellers is 65% hilarious and 35% something else.