With last night’s report about the CIA having conclusively determined that Russian hackers fed info to Wikileaks last summer in order to damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign and help Donald Trump win the election, a Trump transition spokesperson said the following: “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction” — what? “The election ended a long time ago in one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history” — indisputable bullshit. “It’s now time to move on and ‘Make America Great Again'” — sociopathic denial cloaked in a nationalist campaign mantra, and fully in keeping with the mindset of innumerable despots and tyrants of the past.

The Washington Post reported Friday evening that the CIA told U.S. Senators earlier this week says Russia hacked DNC emails and funnelled them to Wikileaks in order to help Trump win the election. During the meeting, CIA officials told the senators it was now “quite clear” that electing Trump was Russia’s goal. Quote from official to Post reporter: “It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia’s goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected. That’s the consensus view.”

I’m sorry but Paramount and Participant’s sequel to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth doc, which will premiere at next month’s Sundance Film Festival, is going to feel like a hugely depressing “so what?” to nearly everyone. Not over the content of Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk‘s film, which will presumably be as well-researched as the original 2006 film was, but because of Donald Trump’s nomination of Scott Pruitt, a climate-change-denying animal, to head the Environmental Protection Agency. The Trump horror has made this untitled doc seem like a study of early 14th Century England (the capture and execution of Scottish resistance fighter William Wallace, the usurpation of the English throne by Edward III and the start of the Hundred Years War) that ignores the black plague, which began infecting English citizens in 1348. Who cares about Edward III when a pandemic is poised to kill 1/3 of England’s population? The U.S. is about to enter a period of outrageous governmental corruption and lunacy that one way or the other will almost certainly accelerate the fossil-fueled poisoning of the planet. What the hell can a documentary about the ongoing fight against climate change possibly mean when King Kong is about to take over?

No more Spider-Man movies…ever. No more watching them, reviewing them, acknowledging them…none of that. A spandexed, Deadpool-aspiring superhero tossing out a few mock-sarcastic lines on criminals before dispatching them…never seen that before!

Two weeks ago I asked for reader assistance in assembling a speculative roster of 2017 releases that might wind up on the top-ten lists a year from now. It goes without saying that some of these may rank as 2017-18 award-season hotties by the blogaroos. Now we have at least the beginnings of a rundown — roughly 59 films.

Of these there are 35 that could be described as either highly promising or pick-of-the-litter, and nearly all from name-brand directors. At least five of these have the traditional earmarks of Best Picture contenders — Kathryn Bigelow‘s Untitled Detroit Riots Drama, Chris Nolan‘s Dunkirk, Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Charles James ’50s period drama, Alexander Payne‘s Downsizing and Joe Wright‘s Darkest Hour, a Winston Churchill vs. Nazi war machine drama.

Likeliest Best Picture Contenders (5):

Kathryn Bigelow‘s Untitled 1967 Detroit Riots Docudrama, written by Mark Boal, with John Boyega, Jack Reynor, Will Poulter, Ben O’Toole, Hannah Murray, Brandon Scales, Anthony Mackie, Jacob Latimore, Kaitlyn Dever, Jason Mitchell, Algee Smith, Joseph David-Jones and John Krasinski.

Alexander Payne‘s Downsizing (Paramount, 12.22), a sci-fi comedy about “a couple that has agreed to have themselves shrunk down, except the wife changes her mind after the husband submits to the process.” Matt Damon, Kristen Wiig, Christoph Waltz, Alec Baldwin, Neil Patrick Harris, Jason Sudeikis.

Paul Thomas Anderson Anderson’s ‘s semi-fictionalized biopic about legendary egomaniacal fashion designer Charles James (1906-1978) with Daniel Day Lewis in the lead role. Deadline‘s Mike Fleming reported on 9.8.16 that the film will be set in the fashion world in London in the 1950s (even though James operated out of New York City during that decade). Fleming also said that Focus Features plans to release it in late 2017.

Chris Nolan‘s Dunkirk (Warner Bros., 7.19), a partially IMAX-shot, World War II-era epic. Step back — it’s the new Nolan! Aneurin Barnard, Kenneth Branagh, James D’Arcy, Tom Hardy, Jack Lowden, Cillian Murphy, Mark Rylance.

Issur Danielovitch, otherwise known as Kirk Douglas, turns 100 today. Cheers, salutes and celebrations for a truly legendary fellow — an ego-driven, headstrong, no-nonsense hardhead, thinker and studly swaggerer during his day. A real 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 52 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 100 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 sometimes 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.

The gifted, ginger-haired French mouse otherwise known as Isabelle Huppert has agreed to receive the Santa Barbara Film Festival’s Montecito Award on Wednesday, 2.8. The Elle star, a recent winner of three Best Actress trophies from the New York Film Critics Circle, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and the Gotham Awards, was invited to participate by festival honcho Roger Durling, whose savvy endorsements of certain award-season contenders for the last dozen or so years has led to his status as a kind of swami-like oddsmaker, an Oscar whisperer, Santa Barbara’s “Nick the Greek.” Before this morning Huppert was a fairly certain Best Actress contender, but now with Durling’s tribute she’s locked down. Does anyone remember Huppert in Bertrand Blier‘s Going Places? That was when I first sat up and took notice, 42 fucking years ago.

When reps for Fences‘ Viola Davis announced that she’d be running as a Best Supporting Actress contender, there were two basic reactions: (1) If SAG and Academy members accept that she’s playing a supporting role, she’s got the Oscar in the bag but (2) will they accept this or call it category fraud, given that she’s playing the strongest female role with loads of screen time, and that she stands right up to Denzel Washington line for line, and that she won a Best Actress Tony award in 2010 for playing the exact same role? If there’s any mucky-muck about this, Manchester By The Sea‘s Michelle Williams (who totally kills within less than ten minutes of screen time) could be the surprise winner. Hidden Figures/Moonlight‘s Janelle Monae and Moonlight‘s Naomie Harris are evenly matched in third and fourth place. 20th Century Women‘s Greta Gerwig has earned a nom, for sure, but she was ten times more electric/magnetic in Frances Ha (’13) and/or Mistress America (’15).

John Glenn, the first American to orbit the earth, has died at age 95. He was just over 40 when the Friendship 7 capsule orbited the globe three times on 2.20.62. Glenn was elected U.S Senator from Ohio in ’74; he served in that capacity until ’99. He was portrayed by Ed Harris in Phil Kaufman‘s The Right Stuff (’83), and self-described in one scene as “Harry Hairshirt.” On 10.29.98, at age 77, Glenn flew as a payload specialist on a space shuttle mission (Discovery mission STS-95), and in so doing became the oldest person to orbit the earth. A full life, a good run. He’s looking down at the earth now like Keir Dullea‘s starchild at the end of 2001.