“By all that is right, fair and profound, a film that wins the Best Picture Oscar should pass the ‘wow!’ test. Agreed, many past winners haven’t lived up to this standard. Time and again Academy voters have rewarded films that comfort or affirm basic truths or remind us, movingly, how things are. Or how we’d like them to be. But Best Picture winners should do more. They should turn heads, open doors, make history, raise a few eyebrows and rock the rafters on some level or another. They should make you say ‘Wow, I just saw something!’ And they should at least make you want to watch them a second time, if not a third or fourth.” — from one of my 2014 Birdman essays.

I’ve experienced four serious head-turners so far this year — Kenneth Lonergan‘s Manchester by the Sea, Cristian Mungiu‘s Graduation, Asghar Farhadi‘s The Salesman and Olivier Assayas‘ Personal Shopper. I’ve been delighted by or have otherwise greatly admired David Mackenzie‘s Hell or High Water, Luca Guadagnino‘s A Bigger Splash, Robert Eggers‘ The Witch and Gavin Hood‘s Eye in the Sky. But there’s a difference between high and peak voltage levels.

What unseen fall or holiday films seem to be generating that special anticipatory aroma? Answer: Ang Lee‘s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, Barry Jenkins‘ Moonlight and Denzel Washington‘s Fences. Maybe. And that’s it.

Yesterday I was sent a 2006 draft of Jay Cocks‘ screenplay of Silence, which is based upon the novel of the same name by Shusaku Endo. The script is 111 pages, which indicates something close to a two-hour film. Director Martin Scorsese has been editing his movie of Silence, which is due for release sometime later this year via Paramount. And yet I heard the other day that a recent cut ran about three hours, and that Scorsese is trying to whittle it down. (Variety‘s Kris Tapley has tweeted it runs 195 minutes.)

A New York journalist confides that a guy he knows claims to have attended a recent Silence research screening. The guy felt disappointed that Liam Neeson, portraying Father Cristovao Ferreira, doesn’t have very much screen time (he probably wanted Neeson to draw a samurai sword and deliver a little whoop-ass), and that the whole thing is pretty much on Andrew Garfield‘s shoulders, and that Garfield, the guy said, is too wimpy and whiny. That’s not my idea of an intelligent observation. Garfield’s character, Father Sebastiao Rodrigues, isn’t supposed to be Dwayne Johnson in Fast 8. He’s supposed to be a wimpy, whiny Jesuit priest facing violent persecution at the hands of militants in 17th Century Japan.

I have no rational explanation why I never got around to installing a system-flushing program like CCleaner (there are many that offer the same basic service), but for whatever idiotic reason I never did. But recently all three units (2 Macbook Pros with solid-state drives, a Macbook Air) began acting all slow and gummy and covered in maple syrup, and I was getting really sick of this. So I complained to Stan’s Tech Garage, and they installed CCleaner on all three, and now things are much faster. I’ll be running the system check every two weeks — easy.

It took some doing but I’ve finally scored a draft of Taylor Allen and Andrew Logan‘s Chappaquiddick (dated 5.11.16, 131 pages), the Ted Kennedy implosion melodrama that will begin filming just after Labor Day. The script is blistering, damning. A nightmarish atmosphere prevails. I was shaking my head as I read it last night, going “Jesus” and “Jesus H. Christ” over and over.

In the somewhat similar manner of Oliver Stone‘s Nixon or W., the script doesn’t strictly adhere to 100% verified fact (certain behaviors may have been exaggerated or invented and surely some of the dialogue has been imagined to varying degrees) but it does seem to follow the generally understood history of this wretched affair.

Chappaquiddick pulls no punches and hits hard. Just about every page exudes the stench of an extremely odious situation being suppressed and re-narrated by professional fixers, some of whom are appalled at Ted’s behavior and character but who do what’s necessary all the same. Protect and maintain the family’s power and mythology at all costs, by any means.

Kennedy and Mary Jo Kopechne smooch (on-camera) and actually do the deed (off-camera). And I’m not exaggerating when I emphasize that the depiction of Kopechne’s slow, agonizing death from suffocation inside Kennedy’s submerged, upside-down 1967 Oldsmobile is agonizing to read. I don’t want to imagine what it’ll be like to watch.

The reputation of the late Massachusetts Senator (1932-2009) was sullied, to say the least, by this horrific 1969 episode, but he quickly recovered, of course, and the honor and the lustre were gradually restored. For nearly four decades after the tragedy Ted was a fully respected and renowned legislator, an ally of President Barack Obama and vice versa, a health care advocate, a godfather, a diplomat and an operator who knew how to play the game and get things done.

But after Chappaquiddick is seen a year from now (starting, I’m guessing, with the early fall festivals) his name will be sullied again, trust me.

Robert Redford was born 80 years ago in Santa Monica. Today is his birthday.

He graduated from Van Nuys high school in ’54. Alienated, unsettled. Booted out of the University of Colorado in Boulder after a year and a half. Travelled to Europe in ’56, drinking and painting and kicking around. Down and out and despairing at 20. But a year or two later Redford knew he wanted to act, and by ’59 he was out of the woods and into the groove. And he was getting a lot of TV-series work by ’60. So he’d found himself by age 23 and was a semi-success by age 24.

But he had at least tasted a bit of that lonely-guy, who-am-I?, “where the fuck am I going and how will I pay for it?” angst, and he drew upon that creepy feeling time and again, of course, when he became a big-name actor in the late ’60s.

Hitting 80 is not that big of a deal these days (80 being the new 70), but it still feels a bit strange to think of Redford — the smiling, well-built, good-looking towhead — being paired with that number.

Speaking of which, Redford bailed on the blonde-hair thing when…? The early to mid ’90s? I know that ever since I started going to Sundance in ’93 his hair was mostly copper-colored. Back in the early ’80s I interviewed an old high-school friend of his, some drawling dude, who said that Redford’s Van Nuys nickname was “Red.”

The Broadcast Film Awards guys have announced their intention to totally ace the influence of the Golden Globe Awards by holding the Critic Choice Awards on Sunday, December 11th. The Golden Globe Awards will be held roughly than a month later, on Sunday, January 8th. The GG date had been regarded (and still is regarded, albeit to a lesser degree now) as a serious Oscar-nomination influencer by award strategists. Oscar nømination balloting kicks off on Thursday, 1.5.17 and closing on Friday, 1.13.17. But the new Critics Choice Awards date all but blows that scheme out of the water.

Initial BFCA balloting (i.e., suggested you-tell-us nominations) will begin on the morning of 11.28.16 and end on 11.29.16, late in the day or early evening. The BFCA noms will be announced on 12.1.16. The final ballots will go out on 12.8.16 with return ballots required by 12.9.16, again late in the day or early evening.

The vast majority of the award-quality heavy hitters will have opened by late November. The new BFCA deal brings a certain pressure factor to the post-production skeds of five presumed award-calibre December releases — Denzel Washington‘s Fences, Martin Scorsese‘s Silence, Peter Berg‘s Patriot’s Day, David Frankel‘s Collateral Beauty and Morten Tyldum‘s Passengers. But nothing they won’t be able to handle, I would imagine. The BFCA guys have totally vetted the schedule with distributors and award strategists, I’m told, and the new plan is good to go. (Full disclosure: I am a voting member of the BFCA.)

As we all know, many people out there like to vote for people they think are likely to win. The dumbshits, I mean. They believe that voting for a winner will upgrade their stock or something. Forget principle, voting for someone they believe in…they just want to be “on” the winning side. This is why Trump is really dead now, because the “possible loser by a landslide” thing has totally spread its seed and begun to sink into public consciousness. Even the slowest, dumbest people out there are starting to sense this.

“I was visited by The Power and The Glory / I was visited by a majestic hymn / Great bolts of lightning lighting up the sky / Electricity flowing through my veins / I was captured by a larger moment / I was seized by divinity’s hot breath / Gorged like a lion on experience / Powerful from life.

“I wanted all of it, all of it / Not just some of it / But all of it.” — Lou Reed, “Power And Glory (The Situation)”

Same thing I posted two months ago: Andrea Arnold‘s American Honey is a kind of Millenial Oliver Twist road flick with Fagin played by both Shia Labeouf and Riley Keogh (Elvis’s granddaughter) and Oliver played by Sasha Lane…but with some good earthy sex thrown in. There’s no question that Honey stakes out its own turf and whips up a tribal lather that feels exuberant and feral and non-deodorized. It doesn’t have anything resembling a plot but it doesn’t let that deficiency get in the way. Honey throbs, sweats, shouts, jumps around and pushes the nervy. (Somebody wrote that it’s Arnold channelling Larry Clark.) It’s a wild-ass celebration of a gamey, hand-to-mouth mobile way of life. And every frame of Robbie Ryan‘s lensing (at 1.37:1, no less!) is urgent and vital.” — from my 5.14.16 mini-review. A24 will presumably open Honey sometime in the fall.

A Charlie Rose Show-type setting. A large, round, polished oak table. Bottles of Fiji water, the usual dark background. The host is myself, and the guests are the late William Wyler, Jack Hawkins and Gore Vidal, all of whom helped create the 1959 version of Ben-Hur, along with original Ben-Hur author General Lew Wallace, still bearded and uniformed.

jack Hawkins as Quintus Arrius in the 1959 version of Ben-Hur, directed by William Wyler.

Jeffrey Wells: First of all, thank you all for coming. None of you are living, of course, but we appreciate your time nonetheless. Today’s topic, somewhat painful or at least uncomfortable to discuss, I realize, is the decision by the remakers of Ben-Hur — director Timur Bekmambetov, screenwriters Keith Clarke and John Ridley — to jettison the character of Quintus Arrius, the Roman general and nobleman who rescues Judah Ben-Hur from living death as an oar slave.

Wyler: For the sake of running time.

Vidal: The Arrius portions added up to roughly 30, 35 minutes. Which is one reason why our version, Willy, ran 212 minutes. The 1925 version ran…what was it, two and a half hours?

Wells: 143 minutes.