I’ve never been much of an Olympics watcher. Never. I’m strictly a watch-the-highlights type, if that. But I’m even less into the Rio de Janeiro games, if that’s possible, due to those images of raw sewage that won’t leave my head. I know — shut ’em out, focus on the stadium images. But all those stories about untreated crap flowing into Rio’s Guanabara Bay (“the shittiest Olympics ever“) have infected my attitude. If nothing else the sewage coverage has persuaded me to never fly down there. I don’t know why I’d go anyway, but now Rio is really at the bottom of my list. I’m more of a Caribbean island and Central America type of guy anyway when we’re talking exotic western hemisphere travels. I visited Argentina, once, when I covered the Mar del Plata Film Festival. South America has never held a fascination.

For those who didn’t attend the 2016 Sundance and Cannes festivals and who don’t plan on hitting Telluride or Toronto, the just-announced slate for the 54th New York Film Festival (9.30 to 10.16) will be full of the usual excitement and nutrition shots. The NYFF is always a great thing to settle into. To attend this annual gathering is to sense that you’re alive and attuned and a reveller in a very rich Manhattan scene, a celebration and meditation about movies that matter most, just as those who attended this festival in 1963 or ’78 or ’99 were also plugged into the films and currents that were essential back then. For two weeks in early October it’s the ultimate well, the place to be.

But for festival veterans like myself it’ll mostly be a “greatest festival hits of 2016” recap. Not entirely but mostly.

If I were attending I’d be focusing on a combination of unseen curiosities and special faves: Barry Jenkins‘ buzzed-about Moonlight, Paul Verhoeven‘s Elle (which I missed at Cannes, partly due to my schedule but also because Sony Classics refused to screen it before the official debut), Kenneth Lonergan‘s Manchester by the Sea, Olivier Assayas‘ Personal Shopper (one of a handful of 2016 films that I consider to be truly riveting and extra-level), Ava Duvernay‘s The 13th (not a study of the 13th amendment but “an in-depth look at the prison system in the United States and how it reveals the nation’s history of racial inequality”), Mike Mills‘ 20th Century Women (I’ve heard good things but also a meh comment), Pablo Larrain‘s Neruda and James Gray‘s The Lost City of Z (the Charlie Hunnam factor gives me concern).

There may also be a special sneak preview (a highlight that NYFF director Kent Jones hasn’t included for the past couple of years) and perhaps an extra sidebar attraction or two.

Earlier today I listened to some piquant buzz from a “vested party” about Barry Jenkins‘ Moonlight (A24, 10.21), which will play at the Toronto Film Festival and perhaps another gathering I can’t speak of. We all know the drill — produced by A24, Plan B and Upload for under $5 million, based on Tarell McCraney‘s play “In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue,” a coming-of-age film set in ’80s Miami, about a black dude named Chiron (played by Alex Hibbert, Ashton Sanders and Trevante Rhodes) amid the temptations of the drug trade. “I’ve seen it and it’s spectacular,” the v.p. says. “It’s Boyz in the Hood meets Boyhood meets Brokeback Mountain. Or…you know, it’s Boyz in the Hood but nobody gets shot.”  It’s all supporting parts but a major stand-out performance is from Mahershala Ali, the good-looking bald dude in House of Cards who had the hot affair with whatsername. Why can’t I find one decent Moonlight still featuring Rhodes and Ali?

Three Criterion Blurays arrived today — a remastered, 4K-harvesting of Tony Richardson‘s A Taste of Honey (’61) rendered at 1.66:1, a 1.33:1, high-def recapturing of Hiroshi Teshigahara‘s Woman in the Dunes (’64) and Stig Borkman‘s Ingrid Bergman: In Her Own Words, rendered within a 1.78:1 a.r. The Bergman doc pops on 8.16; the other two on 8.23. I still don’t understand why some boxy films are rendered at 1.33 and others at 1.37. I’ve been told for years that in the boxy realm 1.37:1 is the a.r. preferred by cinematographers. I don’t understand why they’re given equal weight.

This political cartoon, drawn for Newsweek by Pulitzer Prize-winner Jack Ohman, has been pasted to the inside of a office-supplies closet door for the last…oh, close to 24 years. From a Dan Quayle biographical profile: “He seemed tongue-tied and flustered, wearing a stunned expression that Bush’s media adviser Roger Ailes described as ‘that deer-in-the-headlights look.'”

Halfway through last January’s Sundance Film Festival (i.e., seven and a half months ago) I was talking to Guardian critic Jordan Hoffman about Jim Hosking‘s The Greasy Strangler (FilmRise, 10.7). Hoffman and his Sundance “boner buddies” (i.e., nerdy film festival elites who get off championing icky cult films that will probably have trouble attracting Average Joes in the commercial arena) were giggling about it, and although I was sensing difficult if not grotesque subject matter I was nonetheless wondering if I should see it. “Don’t,” said Hoffman, shaking his head and suppressing a grin. “You’ll hate it.” So I ducked it at Sundance, but Hoffman’s words would’t leave me alone. Last week I watched it on my computer. Started to watch it, I mean. AarrghhHH! Long-haired, saggy-bod fat guys in their underwear. Not to mention a fat girlfriend. Either you embrace this kind of thing or you don’t. Or can’t. I lasted about 25 minutes. Hoffman’s review called it “a welcome oasis of filth, depravity and shock in a culture that too often thinks merely being a little weird passes muster.”

I was thinking this morning about Chris Nolan‘s Interstellar, which I gradually came to dislike more and more as the weeks and months rolled on. I hated, hated, hated the bassy, muddy sound mix. Now, 21 months after it opened wide on 11.5.14, I can say unequivocally that it’s one of my all-time shit list films, and that watching it twice in November 2014 delivered such a terrible injection of lead mercury poisoning that to this day I feel very reluctant to let Nolan into my system again.

I’ve started to think about Inception also, and I think…well, that hasn’t aged well either. I’m not sure I ever want to see it again. I don’t own the Bluray, have never streamed it, don’t miss it in the slightest. I’m completely at peace with the notion of erasing it from my memory except for the Paris cityscape folding up and over…but that’s a cliche now so who cares?

When I hear Nolan’s name or think about Dunkirk, I think “ugh, no, please…not again with the stately, overblown pretension.” And I felt the exact opposite about the guy after Memento, Insomnia, Batman Begins and even The Dark Knight.

What tore it for me was that 11.14 interview with The Hollywood Reporter‘s Carolyn Giardina, the one in which Nolan basically said that Interstellar‘s soupy, bass-heavy sound mix was intentional, and that viewers aren’t intended to hear all the dialogue, and that they should try and roll with that instead of complain. In short, Nolan said “too bad but that’s the way it is.”

When I read that interview I said to myself, “All right, that’s it…Nolan has played his last holier-than-thou, Moses-down-from-the-mountain cinematic contempt card…with me at least…eff him and the horse he rode in on.”

So Variety‘s Kris Tapley recently told Meryl Streep that her Bridges of Madison County costar Clint Eastwood said he’d vote for Donald Trump. “I didn’t know that,” a “visibly surprised” Streep said. “I’ll have to speak to him. I’ll have to correct that! I’m shocked. I really am. Because he’s more…I would have thought he would be more sensitive than that.”

Clint “down with the pussy generation” Eastwood, director of Sully (Warner Bros., 9.9).

Actually, Clint didn’t endorse Trump in that Michael Hainey Esquire interview. When Hainey asked him point blank if he’s endorsing Trump, Clint responded in the negative. “I haven’t endorsed anybody,” he said. “I haven’t talked to Trump. I haven’t talked to anybody.”

6:02 pm update: When Hainey pushed Eastwood later in the chat to choose between Trump and Hillary Clinton, Eastwood said he’d have to “go for” Trump. But he was being goaded. Hainey was testing Eastwood’s mettle. He was saying to him, “Are you a man or a mouse? Are you going to stand by your crusty, old-guy, Walt Kowalski-ish conservative principles or fold like a wuss and vote for Clinton?” Eastwood had to man up and say “Trump” but he didn’t mean it. And I didn’t really believe it.

Back to original piece: If Clint endorsed anyone he endorsed Sully, the real-life airline pilot played by Tom Hanks in Clint’s forthcoming film (Warner Bros., 9.9). Esquire quote: “It’s a madhouse out there. You wonder, what the hell? I mean, Sully should be running for president, not these people.”

I’m not saying this was Donald Sutherland‘s best scene ever, but when I think of his 50-year career it’s the strongest recollection I have. Mr. X in JFK (’91) was certainly his best performance since his exceptional bad guy in Eye of the Needle (’81) and his big-hearted dad in Ordinary People (’80). His greatest period was that ’70 to ’73 four-year streak — M.A.S.H. (’70), Alex in Wonderland (’70), Little Murders (’71), Johnny Got His Gun (71), Klute (’71), Steelyard Blues (’72) and Don’t Look Now (’73). And to think of him lowered by a paycheck role in The Hunger Games! For actors in particular, old age is not for sissies.

Yesterday’s Best Picture assessment riff vaguely depressed me. After I re-scanned the films, I mean, and realized that an apparent majority of them seem to belong (emphasis on the word “seem”) to the pretty-good-but-no-cigar category. Which indicates, at least for now, that the forthcoming six-month award season (Labor Day to 2.28.17) may turn out to be weak or pallid, at least compared to other years. Then I asked myself, “What if this becomes a pattern? What if weak-tea fall/holiday films become the norm?”

With more and more U.S.-based directors and producers talking about how increasingly difficult it is to get funding for quality-level theatrical films because of the usual depressing reasons (i.e., the complete absence of John Calley-level thinking among studio execs, an overwhelming preference for sequels and fantasy films among the big studios, specialty distributors leaning more and more on acquisitions) and with more and more filmmakers (especially screenwriters) moving over to cable…Jesus, I don’t want to go there. Okay, I guess I have to.

All I can say is, thank God for Amazon and Netflix and Megan Ellison because at least they care about the over-30 audience, and because they’re pumping money and feeling into the form, and I don’t mean longform cable. Longform has gone to some stellar places over the last 17 years (i.e., the birth of The Sopranos) but it takes a special gift or discipline to tell your story and “say it all” in the space of 100 or 110 or 120 minutes. People who can do that are still operating on the highest level, I believe.

But with megaplex fare getting critically out-performed and out-pointed by small-screen dramas with increasing frequency, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has to grim up and ask itself a tough question, to wit: “Where, really, is the art of cinema thriving today? Because many of the truly talented people in this town aren’t working on projects that will necessarily end up in theatres, and the day is coming when it won’t be “many” but “most.”

Screenwriter Josh Olson (A History of Violence, Jack Reacher) offers an interesting comment in this 11.15.13 Trailers From Hell riff about Peter Yates‘ The Hot Rock (’72). Noting that Yates film is “not strictly a comedy but more of a caper film with a light touch,” Olson says that these days “Hollywood seems to have a problem with anything that combines tonality.” More than a few critics have the same aversion. Over and over I’ve read the line that “this movie doesn’t know if it wants to be a comedy or a thriller” blah blah. Another thing that’s enjoyable about The Hot Rock is that everyone — Yates, Robert Redford, George Segal, Zero Mostel, Moses Gunn — is working beneath their station. They’re doing paycheck work but giving it their full spirit. Assignment #1: Name a good 21st Century film in which everyone is slumming but fully respecting the job and bringing their A-game, and the movie succeeding because of this. Assignment #2: Name a good 21st Century film that straddles tones or genres, mixing this and that but never quite being one thing.