“He’s a perfect stranger / Like a cross of himself and a fox / He’s a feeling arranger / And a changer of the ways he talks…”

I don’t like it when someone asks “are you okay?” They’re showing concern and compassion, of course, but I don’t like the invasiveness of those words. What they mean, of course, is that they’re noticing or sensing that I’m not okay and that they’d like to lend a hand in some way. I don’t mind if people say “are you okay?” if I’ve fallen onto the pavement or been hit by a fastball or shot by a gang-banger, but I don’t like people to ask if I’m emotionally okay. Thank you but that’s my business, my concern. If I want to share I will but until that happens, please hang back. A friendly hug or pat on the back is cool, but don’t say those words. I never do. If I’m sensing someone is upset, I’ll show respect by giving them a back-pat and hanging close and talking to them as if nothing’s wrong. I’m not their doctor or counselor — I’m their friend. When I’m about to bid farewell I might say “you’re good?” but that’s as far as I’ll go.

Yesterday an anonymous guy from Definition magazine, a high-tech camera site, tweeted an observation about Ang Lee‘s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, a high-frame-rate groundbreaker that will have its big hoo-hah premiere at the New York Film Festival on Friday, 10.14.

Definition: “Just watched 12 minutes of Ang Lee’s new 120 fps movie. It’s the new reality, like live theatre, you are there, like stepping into the scene.”

This prompted a tweeter named Henrik Cednert to ask, “Is that a good thing or a bad thing? For sure different, but good or bad…? Gives me a bad flashback from The Hobbit.” Definition dude replied that 120 frames per second “gets rid of judder and strobing. Film has no makeup, actors had to bring A game. Intense experience. Much better than Hobbit.”

Some guy named Tweets of Rage, reflecting the concerns of untold millions, rejected Definition’s enthusiasm out of hand. “Doesn’t it still feel hyper real?,” he asked. “Like watching a play uncomfortably close up?” Definition: “I think less so than Hobbit‘s 48fps. [This] might be a case of using 120 as an effect to start with. Ang will only shoot 120.”

Ben Schwartz then mocked Definition by re-tweeting something Schwartz alleges he said in 2015: “All 3D films gave to us was a headache and an increased determination that we didn’t want to see another one.” Definition: “Correct. Now they’ve got an answer. Do the math.”

I can only repeat an observation I heard during a demonstration of high-frame-rate cinematography at a tech conference in Los Angeles three or four years ago, which is that to most viewers the differences between 48, 60 and 120 fps photography are barely noticable. I myself was having trouble detecting a big difference between the three formats, and I know my shit.

I’m presuming that the conservatives will be less dismissive of Billy Lynn than they were of Jackson’s The Hobbit as it operates in real-world milieus, which on some level will, I suspect, seem less jarring or challenging.

I myself am a total whore for HFR photography. Bring it on, please. And make 30 fps (i.e., the frame rate of Todd AO back in the mid ’50s) the industry norm. The more fluid the movement, the better the film seems. I’ve been saying for years that HFR has the potential of making banal FX-driven films feel at least diverting. If Antoine Fuqua‘s dreadful The Magnificent Seven had been shot at 48 or 60 of 120 fps, I would have said “shitty film but very cool to watch.”

Today (Tuesday, 9.13) is the last high-pressure day of the Toronto Film Festival. Or maybe it’s the beginning of Phase 2, which is when it all settles down and the crowds thin and it all starts to feel more manageable. One of the two. All I know is that it always means “olly, olly, in come free” when Deadline‘s Pete Hammond leaves Toronto. It means that the boom-boom promotional hoo-hah is winding to a close. Now I can start to catch up on all those films I’ve been reading about but haven’t yet seen — Denial, Collossus, Into The Inferno, Their Finest, Barry, Brimstone, The Duelist, et. al. You don’t have to speed-walk as much when this phase kicks in. You can breathe again. You have to keep filing, of course, but the pace feels saner.

I was going to blow off Mick Jackson‘s Denial as the 16-year-old libel suit it’s based upon (i.e., David Irving having sued author/historian Deborah E. Lipstadt for calling him a Holocaust denier in her 1994 book “Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory”) seems absurd. But the following passage in Marshall Fine‘s 9.13 review changed my mind:

With its acquisition of Pablo Larrain‘s Jackie and its intention to open it on 12.9.16, Fox Searchlight has revitalized its award-season game while filling the hole left by Nate Parker‘s all-but-discounted The Birth of a Nation, which FS had been presuming all year long would be its prime Oscar pony. The intimate, impressionistic Jackie may or may not acquire enough support to snag a Best Picture nomination but Natalie Portman will almost certainly snag a Best Actress nomination. (La La Land‘s Emma Stone, Loving‘s Ruth Negga and Fences‘ Viola Davis are seen as the other three hotties in this category.) Variety has reported that some distributors who caught Jackie the night before last were “worried that Larrain’s art-house touches may not connect with enough ticket buyers to offset the high asking price,” which will translate in award-season terms to problems with the Academy schlubby-dubbies. Jackie is nonetheless the only filmed Kennedy saga in history that qualifies as audaciously artful, and as such is an effort that will win respect and kudos left and right.

Pablo Larrain‘s Jackie is a major stand-out in a long line of docudramas about the tragedy and travails of the Kennedy family. It’s the only one that can be truly called an art film — intimate, half-dreamlike, cerebral, not entirely “realistic” but at the same time a persuasive and fascinating portrait of what Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy (Natalie Portman) went through between the lunch-hour murder of her husband in Dallas on 11.22.63 and his burial at Arlington National Cemetery on 11.25.63.

Some of Jackie is about grief and weeping (naturally) but mostly it’s about steel — holding it together, arranging the funeral, standing up, refusing to wilt. It’s almost all shot in close-ups, right in there, no blinking or downshifting.

And the music! Mica Levi‘s melancholy strings, not so much “melodic” as a kind of melodic wailing, filled the Winter Garden last night and it was like “whoa!” The strings and a couple of tracks from the original B’way cast album of Camelot comprise the entire musical scheme. Not even those haunting funeral drums are heard — a ballsy move when you think about it.

Larrain, the respected Chilean-born director of No, The Club and Neruda, makes Jackie his own, and particularly Portman’s. It’s the best thing NP has done since Black Swan, and it puts her right dead smack into the hallowed circle of Best Actress contenders now — Portman plus La La Land‘s Emma Stone plus (here’s hoping) Viola Davis in Fences along with Loving‘s Ruth Negga.

I was told yesterday that the famously non-functioning Scotiaplex escalator is now working again. I haven’t personally witnessed this but the reports are apparently true. While this is obviously good news, Scotiaplex management retains its poor reputation now and forever. The people who waited until the Toronto Film Festival was half over to fix this situation are ignoble and derelict. If there’s a God these guys will be dogged by this failure for the rest of their lives. Every time they look in the bathroom mirror they’ll say to themselves, “I’m a nice guy with certain attributes but when it came to the Scotiaplex escalator catastrophe of 2016, I fucked up badly…and because of this I will always be a fuck-up in a certain residual sense. Beat me with birch branches. My hands will never be clean.”

According to Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson, TIFF-attending critics are building upon the ecstatic praise for Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight that began in Telluride. “Strong marketer A24 will keep pushing for this,” she writes, “[but] the likeliest outcome [is that] House of Cards costar Mahershala Ali will score a Best Supporting Actor nomination for his heart-tugging role as a tough drug dealer who mentors the vulnerable young ‘Little.'”

Good for Moonlight, A24 and Ali (whose performance is a grabber), but I’m telling you two things: (1) the Telluride foo-foos did this intimate, small-scale drama no favors by overpraising it, and (2) I’ve been hearing more balanced reactions since arriving in Toronto. Yesterday a certain hotshot columnist told me “there’s not enough there there” and “it’s not gay enough.” Prior to last night’s Jackie screening a New York-based film critic said he wasn’t all that taken with Jenkins’ film. It deserves an audience and whatever accolades it may receive, but Team Moonlight needs to face facts about the likely reception among Academy/guild members as well as Average Joes.

I saw Oliver Stone‘s Snowden (Open Road, 9.16) in late August, but the embargo has only just lifted. It’s Oliver’s finest and most satisfying film since Any Given Sunday, which is no small equivalency. Oliver has rebounded! Compelling and comprehensive, Snowden tells the tale of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden (Joseph Gordon Levitt), who in my eyes is a kind of Paul Revere of the digital invasion age.

Human nature being what it is, most people out there want security more than freedom. They want the government to waste Islamic bad guys, and, being of relatively clean conscience, are okay with their privacy being invaded as a trade-off. The longer view is that if some rash authoritarian is elected President one day, he/she could utilize the NSA’s vast surveillance network to create an Orwellian thought-police state. There’s also the matter of political resistance, an essential tenet of any democracy, being weakened by the lack of private agency.

Snowden is a well-measured complement to Laura Poitras‘s Oscar-winning Citizen Four, which of course means zip to the tens of millions of potential ticket buyers who’ve never even heard of Citizen Four, much less seen it, or who’ve otherwise bought into the MSM’s view that what Snowden did was dicey if not verging on treason.

Outside of your educated, progressive X-factor lefties, sensible centrists and smart righties the U.S. is mostly a nation of comfort-seeking, mall-meandering sheep. For every person interested in seeing Snowden, there are 20 or 25 who would much rather see Garth Jennings‘ Sing (Universal, 12.21).

“40 Wall Street actually was the second-tallest building in downtown Manhattan, and it was actually, before the World Trade Center, was the tallest. And then, when they built the World Trade Center, it became known as the second-tallest. And now it’s the tallest.” — Donald Trump speaking to interviewer on 9.11.01. (Hat tip to Marlow Stern for his posting of same earlier today.)

Here's the disgusting audio of Trump on 9/11 bragging about how his building is now the tallest in Lower Manhattan: pic.twitter.com/4ufikWwOom

— Marlow Stern (@MarlowNYC) September 11, 2016

There will be five screenings of Pablo Larrain‘s Jackie at the Toronto Film Festival — tonight at 8:30 pm at the Winter Garden, a pair of Monday screenings — 2:30 pm at the Elgin along with a 3 pm p & i showing at the Scotiaplex — along with a Wednesday 2:45 pm Scotiaplex repeater and finally a Bell Lightbox screening on Sunday at 3:45 pm. But tonight’s showing is the hot ticket, and Hollywood Elsewhere has managed to score a seat. Ditto the after-party.

From Jonathan Romney‘s Screen Daily review, dated 9.7: “Not so much a biopic as an essay on history and what happens to people who become part of it, Pablo Larraín’s Jackie is an elegant, highly intelligent attempt to humanize a legend — while showing its subject’s acute awareness of what it means to become a legend.

“Natalie Portman excels in her most demanding and most complex performance to date as First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, shown living through the immediate aftermath of her husband’s assassination in 1963. Larraín’s highly varied visual invention and command of complex structure serve as a reminder of how vitally an imaginative director can skew what otherwise might have emerged in more mainstream colors.

Hillary Clinton left a 9/11 memorial service early today, apparently due to feelings of weakness, and then she fainted as she was helped into her SUV, her knees buckling, her shoe falling onto the pavement. You know who almost certainly wouldn’t have fainted under these conditions? Bernie Sanders — that guy knows the meaning of “to live in this town, you must be tough tough tough tough tough tough tough.” Elizabeth Warren wouldn’t have fainted. No healthy person in his/her late 60s faints from warm weather. That’s for people in their late 70s or 80s, if at all.

It would be one thing if the temperature had been in the mid to upper 90s, but the temperature in Manhattan right now is roughly 80 degrees (27 celsius) give or take. The incident happened this morning around 9:30 am, according to a N.Y. Times report, which indicates that temps were somewhat cooler, probably somewhere in the upper 70s.

This is very, very bad — the alt-right is going crazy with this video.

It’s still likely that Hillary will beat Donald Trump on November 8th, but I’m honestly wondering now if she’ll run for a second term. It’s fair to feel concern about this. The Presidency is a tough job, and the image of a chief executive fainting and unable to stand up due to temps in the high 70s indicates that other signs of frailty will manifest down the road.