The basic thrust of Mark Harris‘s Grantland piece on Tom Cruise (posted as part of the site’s “Tom Cruise Week” tribute) is that his decision to become the dominant 50something energizer bunny of the action-franchise realm is unfortunate because he seems to have concurrently shut down his ambitious acting game. Harris says that Cruise’s peak acting years happened between 1988 and ’99, or the timespan in which Born on the Fourth of July, Jerry Maguire and Magnolia were released. That’s because Cruise’s performance in each landed a Best Actor nomination, but that’s not encompassing enough. Cruise also delivered riveting, touch-bottom performances as a selfish, resentful younger brother in Barry Levinson‘s Rain Man (’88) and as Vincent-the-compassionate-assassin in Michael Mann‘s Collateral, and he definitely pushed his limits in A Few Good Men (’92), The Firm (’93), Interview with the Vampire (’94) and Vanilla Sky (’01). And how can Harris write a here-and-now assessment of Cruise and not even mention Alex Gibney‘s Scientology doc and the portrayal of Cruise as an enabler/promoter of an unmistakably venal, predatory and vicious-minded organization? How can Harris ignore that and just say “ah, well, too bad Cruise isn’t interested in the big acting roles any more”?

If Michael Bay‘s 13 Hours: The Secret Solders of Benghazi (Paramount, 1.15.16) is anything like Mitchell Zuckoff’s book of (almost) the same name, Hillary Clinton will have nothing to fear. The book is a workmanlike tribute to the private militia guys who defended Benghazi’s U.S. Embassy and CIA station as best they could during the 9.11.12 attack in Libya. The film is obviously minor or it wouldn’t be opening in mid January, but it might be respectable. The attack killed U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, foreign service guy Sean Smith and U.S. citizens Glen Doherty and Tyrone S. Woods. A story of duty, bravery and manning up when the bad guys are at the gate.

If Thomas McCarthy‘s Spotlight (Open Road, 11.6) is only playing the Venice and Toronto film festivals, fine. But as I noted yesterday, the fact that it’s been categorized by TIFF organizers as a “Canadian premiere” indicates a Telluride showing directly after Venice. Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams, Liev Schrieber, Stanley Tucci, John Slattery, Brian D’Arcy James and — wait for it — Billy Crudup. The guy who used to play soulful heartthrobs, now he plays chilly creeps.

Wouldn’t it be great if Walter James Palmer, the dentist from Eden Prairie, Minnesota who paid $55K to track and kill Cecil the Lion, could be stripped naked, forced to drop a tab of ecstasy, set out on the plains of Kenya and be hunted down by animal conservationists? Not with bullets, mind, but with paintballs. Just so he could savor the experience. And then they could tie him to a tree and paint his dick blue. Something like that. This guy is disgusting. Boycott his ass. Warning: Anyone trying to steer the comment thread into any kind of comparison to abortion and dead fetuses will be instantly deep-sixed, and his/her comments will be deleted.

It’s been well telegraphed that Glenn Kenny, who edited and was on good bromancey terms with the late David Foster Wallace, is less than pleased with the latter’s portrayal in James Ponsoldt‘s The End of the Tour (A24, 1.31). He’s particularly unhappy with Jason Segel‘s hulking behemoth impersonation along with David Margulies‘ script, which is based on David Lipsky‘s “Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself.” Kenny has now vented his complaints in detail in a 7.29 Guardian piece.

What do they boil down to? Wallace was who he was and the guy presented by Ponsoldt, Segel and Margulies is a lot lumpier and gloomier and kind of suicide-obsessed with his clothing a half-size too small.

Kenny obviously knows what he knows but honestly? I found myself wondering if the ghost of Abraham Lincoln had similar reservations about Henry Fonda‘s performance in John Ford‘s Young Mr. Lincoln. How did the ghost of F. Scott Fitzgerald feel about Gregory Peck‘s portrayal of him in Beloved Infidel?

Kenny beef #1: “I found The End of the Tour risible. [This] very conventional independent film left me so angry I actually had trouble sleeping the night I saw it. I lay awake obsessing over the best phrase that could sum up Jason Segel’s performance as Wallace. I came up with ‘ghoulish self-aggrandisement‘. For me, it recalls a line from a Captain Beefheart song: ‘I think of those people that ride on my bones.'” (HE insert: I think it’s fair to say that for most people the phrase “riding my bones” refers to some hulking behemoth putting the high hard one to a presumably willing recipient.)

Yesterday EW‘s Mary Sollosi posted a clip of British supermodel and Paper Towns star Cara Delevingne enduring a hellish interview with three peppy but dismissive anchor-reporters from Good Day Sacramento — Marianne McClary, Ken Rudulph and Mark S. Allen (i.e., the show’s resident film maven and BFCA member who attends all the movie junkets). It was a scene from Invasion of the Body Snatchers — Delivingne was the human and the Sacramento threesome were the pod people.

Things started off awkwardly with McClary addressing Delevingne as “Carla.” Then McClary asked if Delevingne had read the John Green book that the film is based on. (Translation: “You don’t seem like the deep-actress type. Are you just whirling along and grabbing the money and saying to hell with the art?”) Then Rudulph asked if Delevingne’s super-busy schedule was a problem, indicating an underlying “slow down, girl!” opinion. Then Allen told her flat-out that she wasn’t acting peppy enough. “I saw you in London talking a couple of weeks ago on TV and you seemed a lot more excited about it than you do right now,” Allen remarked. “Are you just exhausted?”

My honest-to-God preference as to who should be the 2016 Democratic nominee for President? The person I’d be the most confident about and happiest with? Barack Obama. Seriously — a Rooseveltian third term would be an excellent thing. After Obama I’d like to see Jon Stewart run. Seriously. I wish he’d announce right now and go for it and see what happens. I realize that Bernie Sanders seems weak outside of his base. He doesn’t seem to connect with African Americans and Hispanics as much as he needs to. But I like him a lot more than Hillary. We’re unfortunately stuck with Hillary. I’m going to vote for her because even with her baggy eyes and pissy moods and secretive nature she’ll be a far better option, policy-wise, than Donald Trump or Jeb Bush.

In the wake of my Anomalisa riff, here’s my 5.25.08 Cannes Film Festival review of Charlie Kaufman‘s Synecdoche, New York: There’s no way around saying that Charlie Kaufman, the director-writer of Synecdoche, New York, is a gloom-head. A brilliant and, in his past screenplays, hilarious one (by the standards of dryly perverse humor), but a gloom-head all the same. Who, for now, has put aside his sense of humor. The problem with his film, which I loved in portions, understood the point of and was intrigued and somewhat amused by in the early rounds, is the damn moroseness of it.

And the title is impossible. I would actually say commercially suicidal. I finally learned how to pronounce the damn thing — Syn-ECK-duh-kee — but if the folks who wind up distributing believe that average moviegoers are going to do anything but run in the opposite direction when this puppy opens, they’d best think again. Titles should always convey something that your average dumbass can understand — this one doesn’t. And they sure as shit can’t be tongue-twisters on top of this.

I nonetheless said to myself during the first 50 minutes or so, “This is my kind of deal.” Okay, maybe into the first hour. Smart-guy material, wise and witty, at times almost elevating, at times surreal, performances that strike the chords just so.

But it began to wear me down. I could feel my interest ebbing. This had something (okay, a lot) to do with the archness and obsessiveness of the characters caught up in various fickle head trips and never saying “uncle.” I didn’t hate what was going on — it’s an imaginative Alice in Wonderland-type thing — but I found myself wishing nonetheless that all these dithering neurotics (Caden especially) would get over themselves and…I don’t know, go rob a bank or move to rural China or something. The story tension in Synecdoche, New York is zilch.

Charlie Kaufman‘s Anomalisa, a stop-motion animated drama about “a man crippled by the mundanity of his life,” is going to play the 2015 Toronto Film Festival and also (maybe, hard to say) Telluride. The voice actors are Jennifer Jason Leigh (Lisa), David Thewlis (Michael) and Tom Noonan. Duke Johnson is the co-director but Kaufman is the sole author of the screenplay and therefore, one presumes, the guy who thought up the title. Which reminds you of another unspellable, not-easy-to-pronounce, all-but-impossible-to-remember title, Synecdoche, which was a morose, somewhat arresting 2008 film that Kaufman directed and wrote. I honestly don’t remember much about Synecdoche except for the capturing of a certain feeling of middle-aged lethargy and not one, not two but three shots of a toilet bowl.

Ken doll contemplating existential gloom in Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson’s Anomalisa.

No one and I mean no one outside of Kaufman’s immediate circle (friends, family, attorney, agent, therapist) is going to remember Anomalisa. It’s barely pronounceable, all but impossible to remember and kinda difficult to spell. Go up to Tom Luddy or Todd McCarthy or Kris Tapley during the Telluride Film Festival and say “what’s the name of Kaufman’s film again?” and they’ll probably say “uhm, aroma…animal…Animal Crackers for Lisa?” And totally forget Joe Popcorn — he’s going to take one look at the lobby poster and go “anomawhassa?” It’s actually quite simple. It’s Anomaly + Lisa. But nobody’s going to give a shit, trust me.

In this morning’s Toronto announcement story (“TIFF vs. Telluride: Intrigue Intensifies, Plot Thickens“) I failed to highlight two films that appear to warrant special attention — Hany Abu-Assad‘s The Idol, which appears to be more of a lighthearted, less melodramatic film than Abu-Assad’s widely praised Omar, and Sebastian Schipper‘s Victoria, which premiered at last February Berlinale and which just popped a trailer.

Otherwise the just-announced Toronto galas and special presentations that nobody is particularly interested in (at least for the time being) are as follows:

GALAS: Beeba Boys (dir. Deepa Mehta, Canada, World Premiere), Forsaken (dir. Jon Cassar, Canada (World Premiere), Hyena Road (dir. Paul Gross, Canada, World Premiere), Lolo (dir. Julie Delpy, France, World Premiere), The Man Who Knew Infinity (dir. Matt Brown, United Kingdom, World Premiere), Remember (dir. Atom Egoyan, Canada, North American Premiere), Septembers of Shiraz (dir. Wayne Blair, USA, World Premiere), The Dressmaker (dir. Jocelyn Moorhouse, Australia, World Premiere).

With the exception of Michael Moore‘s Where To Invade Next, the films announced the morning as galas and special presentations at the 2015 Toronto Film Festival were expected. (Where did Moore’s doc come from? I hadn’t read squat about it until this morning.) It’s welcome news, of course, that Tom Hooper‘s The Danish Girl, Ridley Scott‘s The Martian, Brian Helgeland‘s Legend (the launch of Tom Hardy‘s Best Actor campaign), Moore’s doc, Jay Roach‘s Trumbo (the launch of Bryan Cranston‘s Best Actor campaign), Stephen Frears‘ The Program, Roland Emmerich‘s Stonewall, Carey Fukanaga‘s Beasts of No Nation (definitely not looking forward to this one!), Rebecca Miller‘s Maggie’s Plan and Peter Sollett‘s Freeheld are getting the red-carpet treatment as either world or North American premieres. Looking forward, champing at the bit.

But what has my attention are the Canadian premieres, which are indications that the films in question will play Telluride first.

I’ve been hearing for a few weeks that Thomas McCarthy‘s Spotlight would play Toronto but not Telluride, and then last week Spotlight costar Mark Ruffalo disclosed to Italian journalists that the film would debut at the Venice Film festival. But this morning TIFF announced that Spotlight, to be screened as a special presentation, is a Canadian premiere. TIFF wouldn’t describe it as such if it wasn’t being premiered somewhere else on the North American continent before TIFF begins on 9.10, so…right? Okay!

John Crowley‘s Brooklyn (Fox Searchlight, 11.6) has also been called a Canadian premiere, but it’s been forecast all along that this tenderly rendered period romance (which debuted at last January’s Sundance Film Festival) would play Telluride so no biggie. The launch of Saoirse Ronan‘s Best Actress campaign, you bet.