The Last Jedi loving cup runneth over. Which is precisely why the only tweets I half-trust are from Scott Mantz and Kyle Buchanan. Believers are too vested, too eager to celebrate. I only want to read reactions from scoffers, smartasses, doubters, dissenters, dickheads, grizzled veterans, cynics, skeptics, people who carry wounds, all-seeing mystics, non-believers, agnostics, atheists, frowners. If only Paul Schrader had attended! HE’s big Jedi moment happens on Monday evening. Until then…

Initially posted on 12.9.16: Issur Danielovitch, otherwise known as Kirk Douglas, turns 101 today. Cheers, salutes and celebrations for a legendary fellow — an ego-driven, headstrong, no-nonsense hardhead, thinker and studly swaggerer during his day. A pusher, doer, striver. Douglas was one of the first male superstars to adopt a persona that was about more than just gleaming white teeth and manly heroism, although he played that kind of thing about half the time. But Douglas also dipped into the dark side, portraying guys who were earnest and open but hungry, and who sometimes grappled with setbacks and self-doubt and hard-fought battles of the spirit.

Douglas’s peak years as a reigning superstar and a producer-actor known for quality-level films ended 53 years ago with his last steady-as-she-goes lead in a fully respected film — John Frankenheimer‘s Seven Days In May (’64).

Douglas has been working and writing and flooring the gas ever since, but out of his 101 years only 15 of them were spent at the very top. He broke through at age 33 as a selfish go-getter in Champion (’49) and then fed the engine with 19 or 20 high-calibre films — Young Man with a Horn (’50), The Glass Menagerie (’50), Ace in the Hole (’51), Detective Story (’51), The Big Sky (’52), The Bad and the Beautiful (’52), 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (’54), The Indian Fighter (’55), Lust for Life (’56), Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (’57), the masterful Paths of Glory (’57), The Vikings (’58), The Devil’s Disciple (’59), Strangers When We Meet (’60), Spartacus (’60), Town Without Pity (’61), Lonely Are the Brave (’62), Two Weeks in Another Town (’62) and finally the Frankenheimer film.

Big stars will flirt with journalists from time to time. They’ll turn on the charm for a week or two and then “bye.” I was one of Douglas’s flirtations back in ’82, for roughly a month-long period between an Elaine’s luncheon thrown by Bobby Zarem on behalf of the yet-to-shoot Eddie Macon’s Run, and then the filing of my New York Post piece about visiting the set of that Jeff Kanew-directed film in Laredo, Texas.

Lady Bird‘s Laurie Metcalf has the top slot because (a) her performance as Greta Gerwig‘s high-strung, suffer-no-fools mom probably reminds women of contentious relationships with their own mothers, and because it feels as if Metcalf has managed a kind of big-screen comeback. She’s been working on stage and in various TV series all along, I realize, but to me she’s been absent from the big leagues since she played Andy Garcia‘s lesbian partner in Mike Figgis‘s Internal Affairs (’90).

Melissa Leo‘s brittle, neurotic nun in Novitiate is second because, I’m guessing, it took a lot of brass to make that performance come off. Mary J. Blige gave the finest performance in Mudbound, a notch ahead of Jason Mitchell‘s. In I, Tonya, Allison Janney plays the absolute worst movie mom in 36 years, or since Faye Dunaway‘s Joan Crawford terrified her daughter in Frank Perry‘s Mommie Dearest (’81). Phantom Thread‘s Lesley Manville has the fifth slot because the movie just arrived, but her performance is quietly compelling in an icy sort of way.

2018 will launch in 24 days, and it’s likely to be even more volatile than ’17. Certainly in terms of the Mueller investigation of Trump-Russia collusion and quid pro quo corruption, which will be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Boiled down to basics, Trump and his hooligans plotted to favor Russia on various financial and diplomatic fronts in return for Russian financial assistance for Trump’s failing empire plus providing major assistance in the cyber-takedown of the Clinton campaign. This will naturally lead to impassioned, across-the-board calls for Trump’s impeachment, but that won’t happen unless the November midterms result in significant Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, which, given the alt-right racial animus in Bumblefuck regions, is less likely than you might think.

Trump is facing three possible scenarios. One, he’ll decide not to run in 2020, a practical decision based on his pathetically low approval ratings plus his own lack of interest in wanting to endure a second four-year term. Two, he’ll be impeached in early ’19 and then decide to resign before a final Congressional vote, depending upon assurances from the feds that he won’t be prosecuted for treason. Or three, he’ll be impeached but not convicted a la Bill Clinton, and then will run out of dumb pride but suffer defeat due to a strong Democratic candidate.

In all three scenarios Trump is out as of 1.20.21, if not before.

The problem is that right now there’s no strong Democratic candidate, no heir apparent, no rock star. By the end of this year somebody with the chops and the nerve has to start testing the waters and coming into focus.

I would vote for Bernie Sanders in a New York minute, but I think his moment came and went in 2016. He would appeal to big-city multiculturals and progressives as well as a certain percentage of hinterland dumbshits, but low-information Southern blacks blew him off last year. I also suspect that people might feel a bit squeamish about electing a 79 year-old. (Same deal with Joe Biden, who’s a year younger than Bernie.)

I would also vote for the brilliant and ballsy Kamala Harris, currently the junior senator from California, but she needs to start conveying her intentions and making noise. Being a 50ish woman of mixed ethnicity, Harris would of course scare the wilies out of white working-class rurals and their girlfriends and wives, but these people are trash — the dregs of society. They’ll always, always vote for the wrong people for the wrong reasons.

Harris might become a bolder, more exciting figure when and if she steps up to the plate. I nonetheless have a sense that swing voters may turn out to less than fully aroused by her candidacy; ditto Bernie and Joe. I have a feeling that someone else needs to emerge, and I mean no later than a year from now.

Dwayne Johnson would probably be better than Trump, but only somewhat. We could do better.