All three of the rumored Star Wars, Episode VIII titles blow chunks. (1) Star Wars VIII: Forces of Destiny…what the hell does that mean? Every particle of matter in the universe has some kind of destiny caused by something. The idea that certain forces guide the destiny of this or that is about as interesting as the notion that sunlight is good for flowers; (2) Star Wars VIII: Tales of the Jedi Temple….who wants to hang out in a temple? Stars Wars fans want to hang out on Endor, Tatooine, the latest Death Star and the ice planet of Hoth…places like that; (3) Stars Wars VIII: The Order of the Dark Side…another loser title. Who or what is thinking up these things? A software program?

Imagine that this guy, who’s about 30, has been seen in a couple of highly regarded indie films and has just been cast as the second lead in a new HBO longform. Does he have that X factor thing? Could he make it in our realm? Or was he the kind of actor who could’ve only broken into Hollywood back in the mid ’40s?

I kind of hate peanut butter. I tend to eat it guiltily. I usually hate myself, in fact, after eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I hate the after-odor. But I really despise the gloopy, syrupy kind of peanut butter that they sell for double the price at high-end health food stores. You can almost drink the stuff. The only peanut butter I can half-stand is Skippy chunky.

Holiday trimmings on the Paramount lot — taken after my second viewing of Fences three or four nights ago.

With the conclusion of the Venice-Telluride-Toronto cycle I began to be convinced that La La Land‘s Emma Stone was the Best Actress contender to beat. I believed that she had easily delivered the strongest, most achey-breaky female performance of the year. Due respect to Stone’s competitors, but I settled into this belief more and more as the season progressed. And I still think that now. But so far, no one except for the relatively small fraternity represented by the Gold Derby-ites and Gurus of Goldies seems to be agreeing with me. On the journalistic side, I mean. Obviously the industry has yet to be heard from.

I’ve been told over and over that critics awards and Academy/guild awards don’t overlap, but I couldn’t help but feel at least a little surprised when Elle‘s Isabelle Huppert (who is wholly riveting in Paul Verhoeven‘s film) kept winning in the early cycle, and with no wins for Stone. So far Huppert has won with the New York Film Critics Circle, the Gotham Awards, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the Boston Society of Film Critics, the Chicago Film Critics Association, the San Francisco Film Critics Circle and two or three other groups.

And then tonight, something big happened — Jackie‘s Natalie Portman (who has also given an excellent performance) won a Best Actress award from the Broadcast Film Critics Association.

Portman’s BFCA win is significant because for the last several years overlaps in voting patterns between the Academy and the BFCA have happened more often than overlaps between the Academy and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (i.e., the Golden Globe awards). At the very least tonight’s Portman win suggests that she may have more heat than Stone…maybe. This doesn’t mean Stone isn’t going to pull off a late-cycle surge or that Huppert isn’t going to start winning again. A liberal interpretation of the Best Actress race at this point says it’s a three-way between Stone, Portman and Huppert, but the question has to be asked — when is Stone going to win something? Anything?

Mark Pellington‘s The Last Word is obviously a mainstream commercial thing, but the writing sounds half-decent. Shirley MacLaine playing yet another variation of her patented headstrong woman that goes all the way back to Terms of Endearment. Amanda Seyfried, Thomas Sadoski, AnnJewel Lee Dixon, Philip Baker Hall, Tom Everett Scott, Alanna Ubach and Gedde Watanabe. Debuting at Park City’s Eccles at next month’s Sundance Film Festival. Opening on 3.10.17.

Lily Gladstone, the somewhat surprising winner of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association’s Best Supporting Actress award for her lovestruck Certain Women performance, has triumphed again. The Boston Society of Film Critics, which just finished voting, has given her the same trophy.

Best Picture: La La Land
Best Director: Damien Chazelle, La La Land
Best Actor: Casey Affleck, Manchester by the Sea
Best Actress: Isabelle Huppert, Elle and Things to Come
Best Supporting Actor: Mahershala Ali, Moonlight
Best Supporting Actress, Lily Gladstone, Certain Women
Best Screenplay: Kenneth Lonergan, Manchester by the Sea
Best Documentary: O. J.: Made in America

If you really value movie craft in all its guises, you can celebrate George Roy Hill‘s The Sting as much as Martin Scorsese‘s Silence, Samuel Fuller‘s Forty Guns, Robert Bresson‘s Au Hasard Balthazar, Barry Jenkins‘ Moonlight or Asghar Farhadi‘s The Salesman. A great film is a great film.

The snobs will never admit this in certain cases, of course. That’s the cave they live in. They hate movies that feel good. Today’s assignment: Name some really good films that the snooties have always spat upon, or at least that were critically loathed when they first opened only to be given their critical due years later. But no comic-book CG superhero films.

A little over four years ago I ran a piece about The Sting. It was basically an answer to a question that Pauline Kael posed 43 years ago: “What is this movie about anyway?” Answer: Emotional comfort in the form of assured professional craft. It’s about conning people into caring about a shallow story with no themes or subcurrents whatsoever. It’s about keeping them intrigued even though the good-guy con artists have the upper hand all the way.

I once called the Chicago Limited poker-game scene “the most satisfyingly shot and performed scene of its type in Hollywood history because it’s not about poker, but about two cheats trying to out-fuck each other. Paul Newman‘s smug and rascally confidence is key, but the whole thing really depends upon Robert Shaw‘s seething rage — the scene wouldn’t play without it. It’s all about boiling blood.

Yesterday a Crown Heights guy in his late 20s wrote me about Pablo Larrain‘s Jackie, which he’d just seen at the Alamo Drafthouse and “really liked…it’s a very skilled art film that does a good job sticking a story.” He believes that Natalie Portman is “on another level” vs. La La Land‘s Emma Stone, whose performance he respects and appreciates but doesn’t love.

“Portman’s interpretation seems absolutely spot-on,” he wrote. “She captured Jackie’s measured personality [along with] her raw human self.

“I’m just surprised Stone has the lead in the Best Actress race now,” he went on. “To me, it’s not really that close, and with the political winds and all, this film makes you feel more sadness about where we are now. Makes you mad thinking about what Melania Trump will do to the White House interior…the theme about ‘there will never be another Camelot’ resonates especially.”

Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil said the other day that Academy and guild members generally don’t vote for the best but for “the most.” In a Best Actress realm that means the saddest, the hardest struggle, the most tearful, pronounced, pulled from the heart, etc. In that sense I’d say Stone and Portman are a 50-50 tossup at this stage.

I love Tom Wolfe‘s description of Jackie Kennedy in “The Right Stuff“:

“She had a certain Southern smile, which she had perhaps picked up at Foxcroft School, in Virginia, and her quiet voice, which came through her teeth, as revealed by the smile. She barely moved her lower jaw when she talked. The words seemed to slip between her teeth like exceedingly small slippery pearls.”

In mid-October the Nobel Committee revealed that Bob Dylan had declined to respond after it was announced he’d won the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature. On 10.28 The Guardian‘s Edna Gundersen wrote that when she’d asked if he’d be attending, Dylan replied, “Absolutely, if it’s at all possible.” On Saturday night (12.10) the Nobel ceremony happened in Stockholm, and Dylan wasn’t there. It wasn’t because of his concert schedule, which is finished for the year. At least he sent Patti Smith to represent him. (She did a great job singing “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall.”) And he wrote a speech.

Surely some HE regulars saw Damien Chazelle’s musical last night or today, particularly those back east. You’ve been hearing for months about La La Land being the leading Best Picture contender, and now it’s finally here. What’s the uber-ticket-buyer verdict? Which reminds me that earlier today some were saying they wanted to write about Manchester By The Sea. Presumably some have seen both — which has more Oscar heat? And if these aren’t as bull’s-eye as the blogaroos have been saying, what film is a more likely Best Picture contender? The forum is open.

After John Glenn died on 12.8 someone in the comment thread mentioned how great Phillip Kaufman‘s The Right Stuff (’83) was, and I disagreed as follows: “I’m sorry but The Right Stuff is not great. It’s a diverting film with some above-average passages, agreed, but too much of it feels like commoner soup. I expected some kind of semblance of the Tom Wolfe book, which was eloquent and savvy and well-researched and often funny, at least in a snickering sense.

“Almost every amusing element that landed in the Wolfe book fails to land in the film. Every scene in the Kaufman film feels broad and over-acted in order to appeal to the folks in the cheap seats. Urination jokes (i.e.. Alan Shepard letting go in his space suit), masturbation jokes, seasick-vomiting jokes, rubber-tube-up-the-ass jokes  — everything primitive is used. Very little in the way of low-key, the-way-it-really-was pilot stuff. Almost every scene feels performed by actors.

“Wolfe wrote about Glenn (Ed Harris) telling Alan Shepard (Scott Glenn) that he needs to stop catting around at the local cocktail lounges because it’ll be bad for the Mercury astronaut’s image if it gets out, and how Shepard told Glenn that girls are none of his damn business and to bugger off — great in the book, doesn’t work in the film.

“Wolfe wrote about Gus Grissom‘s ‘death dimes’ — two rolls of dimes that he took with him on his Mercury flight in order to pass them out to friends later on, but which made it difficult for him to tread water in the Atlantic after his capsule sank, because of their weight. (“And now this big junkheap of travel sentiment stuffed in his knee pocket was taking him under… dimes!…silver deadweight!”). Great in the book, ignored by Kaufman.

“I hate those awful, over-emphatic San Francisco mimes, cast as journalists, with their stubby little moustaches and narrow-brimmed hats running around like the Keystone Cops. And the absurdly crude portrayal of Lyndon Johnson as an intemperate oaf. And how Kaufman makes a big deal about Aborigine natives lighting bonfires as Glenn’s soars over Australia. I remember watching this back in ’83 and saying to myself ‘Who gives a fuck if Aborigines are lighting bonfires or not? What have Aborigines got to do with the space program?’

“The book was an absorbing, insightful take on a governmental program that promoted personalities and heroism to sell itself to the public. It passed along the technical intrigues of the early flights and especially the seminal Chuck Yeager lore and how that cockpit attitude influenced every pilot who ever lived. The film was a popcorn denigration — an attempt to make populist puree out of almost everything fascinating in Wolfe’s book.”

Martin Scorsese‘s Silence (Paramount, 12.23) is a long, sluggish, big-canvas spiritual epic that has obviously been sculpted with precision and passion. Set in 17th Century Japan and beautifully shot by Rodrigo Prieto, it’s clearly the work of a top-tier filmmaker who’s unloading in a very rooted way, and with great delicacy. But it’s a vast, sprawling thing, and some of it, to be honest, is boring and slow, and some of the violence is difficult to watch.

And yet it does pay off at the end, and I didn’t expect it to, given my feelings about religion and Catholics in particular, and so I was surprised by this. I wasn’t head over heels with what I’d seen and I was deciding around the midway point that it probably should be shorter, but the film (which runs 159 minutes) does sneak up and turn the key during the last 20 or 25 minutes.

But those first 130 minutes…whoa daddy. Quite the eyeful, eloquent writing, handsome design but glum and arduous and snail-paced like a sonuvabitch. But it’s still a fine film for what it is. You just have to say to yourself “this is not a film about my enjoyment…it’s a journey, a meditation, a lesson. Just man up and sit through it.”

Based upon the 1966 novel by Shusaku Endō, Silence is about the 17th Century persecution of Catholics in Japan, and particularly the Jesuits who introduced Catholicism to that country and did what they could to scatter the seeds.

Start to finish Silence is about matters of the spirit, but the visual depictions are about almost nothing other than unpleasant acts and conditions. Cruelty, torture, deprivation, starvation. I’m talking about crucified victims being drowned and burned to death, starved and beheaded and hung upside down with blood seeping out of an arterial neck wound. But the victims take it and eventually die (all but one, I should say) because they believe in the salvation of Jesus Christ.

Who gets into fights with cab drivers? I’ve had some mild disagreements with drivers from time to time, but the only time I’ve really argued with one was in Toronto two or three years ago, and that was because I had my GPS bearings and he was driving without a clue — no sense of instinct or direction or anything. He was an idiot. But nobody argues with a cab driver if they can help it, and getting into a physical fight with one sounds fairly ridiculous. And yet I feel a measure of empathy for Silicon Valley and Office Christmas Party star T.J. Miller, who was arrested last night after taking a poke at a Los Angeles cabbie. A Hollywood Reporter story says that Miller got physical “over a political argument involving Donald Trump.” I get it, man. You’ve persuaded a portion of the entertainment community that you’re an immature, hair-trigger type, but I understand. I would dearly love to bitch-slap a Trump supporter, and I haven’t clobbered anyone since I was 13.