It’s taken me almost a full year to fully refine my 2015 Telluride Film Festival review of Danny Boyle‘s Steve Jobs to its essence. To really boil it down, I mean, and come to a clearer understanding of what I was getting at.

Here’s how I put on 9.6.15: “Am I a hotshot columnist from West Hollywood or a Riverside County housewife who goes to movies for emotional soothings? I’m better than that and so is the exceptional, high-throttle Steve Jobs.

“Jobs is a three-act ‘talk opera’ (Sasha Stone‘s term) or ‘verbal action film’ (a guy at Universal suggested that one) or aggressive cine-theatre (my own) but also a film that, for me, feels more impressively conceived and poundingly ambitious than affecting or, truth be told, likable.

“You have to take each film by its own scheme and determinations, and with a film as aggressively verbal and drill-bitty as Steve Jobs terms like “affecting” and “likable” are almost certainly beside the point. With a film like this you either you jump on the luge and submit to the speed and the brain-cell exhilaration…or you don’t. And what would be the damn point of not submitting to it?

“I jumped on, all right, and by the end of the two-hour ride I felt tingly and throbbing and, yes, a bit drained and also a teeny bit sorry that I wasn’t as delighted as I’d expected to be. Which I fully concede is at least partly my fault as I’d fallen head-over-heels in love with Sorkin’s script two or three months ago. Dazzled by it, glad-to-be-alive contact highs, ‘this is what brilliance feels like,’ etc.

“You see a certain movie in your head when you’re reading a highly charged, original-attitude script, and then you see the film’s version and it’s like, ‘Oh…well, okay, this is how they saw it.’ It never bored me, it kept me on my toes, it delivers a kind of hammerhead contact high…but I wasn’t feeling that levitational thing.

I’ve seen but haven’t yet reviewed (and am not about to review here and now) Daniel Noah‘s Max Rose (Paladin, 9.2), the Jerry Lewis drama about aging, legacy and unfinished marital business, and Oliver Stone‘s Snowden (Open Road, 9.16). But I caught them both within the last two days (8.25 and 8.26) and they’re both surprisingly good, which I wasn’t certain would be the case.

The Snowden embargo lift isn’t for a while yet, but I can at least say that in my view it’s Oliver’s best film since Any Given Sunday — a return to form. It’s lean, sober, intelligent and well controlled. Yes, we all know the Snowden saga due to Laura Poitras‘s Oscar-winning Citizen Four, but this is a bracing, well-acted, highly engaging companion piece. I especially loved a brilliantly designed digital sequence that shows how NSA surveillance works on a personal, always expanding, ultimately global basis.

I’ll tap out something about Max Rose tomorrow morning.

I also spoke this morning to a person who caught Clint Eastwood‘s Sully, which will premiere at next weekend’s Telluride Film Festival, and he, a tough, no-nonsense critic, says it’s quite good. Efficiently edited (only 96 minutes) by Blu Murray, and a nicely structured saga about the battle between the value of air industry technology vs. seasoned piloting by crusty, gray-haired pros.

I can’t imagine anyone being persuaded to vote for any Presidential candidate based on what Bruce Springsteen says or doesn’t say, but The Boss is apparently not going to be endorsing Hillary Clinton, to go from what he said at an 8.25 concert at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey. The quote is from an 8.25 post from Backstreets, a Springsteen-endorsed fansite: “But while Bruce was content to let his lyrics do the talking, tonight we get his first direct comments on this election season, which he calls ‘the ugliest I’ve ever seen.’ So many people, he reminds us, ‘have been hurt so hard by American de-industrialization, by globalism, by NAFTA — and that can get lost in all the noise.” Hillary is something of a pro-NAFTA globalist, right?

In the view of more than a few in the Hollywood community, Birth of a Nation director-writer Nate Parker has become Black Bart — a demonic figure whose lack of sensitivity during a Penn State episode 17 years ago resulted in a charge of rape (i.e., an unwanted menage a trois that the drunken victim properly regarded as a violation) and whose behavior may have contributed, certainly to some extent, to the suicide of the victim 13 years later. A rash verdict if you ask me, but the crowd wants what it wants.

The Birth of a Nation is almost certainly award-season toast — everyone seems to believe that. It even appears as if Parker himself might be persona non grata, industry-wise, for the next few months. But what he, Jean Celestin and the late victim got into during the 1999 incident in question was, however repulsive or appalling from her P.O.V., probably not hugely different from the bacchanalia that hundreds of thousands of inebriated college students got into in their dorm rooms going back to the mid ’60s, or the dawn of the libertine era.

Here, in an 8.27 interview with Ebony‘s Britni Danielle, is how Parker sees the differences between then and now:

Britni Danielle: “You started out tonight addressing the controversy, and you talked a lot about male culture and toxic masculinity. So I want to kind of compare. What, at 19, did you know about consent?”

Nate Parker: “To be honest, not very much. It wasn’t a conversation people were having. When I think about 1999, I think about being a 19-year-old kid, and I think about my attitude and behavior just toward women with respect [to] objectifying them. I never thought about consent as a definition, especially as I do now. I think the definitions of so many things have changed.

“Put it this way — when you’re 19, a threesome is normal. It’s fun. When you’re 19, getting a girl to say yes, or being a dog, or being a player, cheating. Consent is all about — for me, back then — if you can get a girl to say yes, you win.”

One way or another you have to witness some kind of natural, jaw-dropping vista every two or three years, if not more frequently. If you don’t or can’t, you’re missing something primal. All three videos were shot during a May 2012 visit to Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland with Jett and Dylan. #1, a pan of the Bernese Alps that tower over the village (Eiger, Monch and Jungfrau) was taken during a day-long hike. #2 is a pan of Lake Brienze (Brienzersee). #3 is of Staubbach Falls.

A capsule description of April Mullen‘s Below Her Mouth, a 2016 Toronto Film Festival attraction, from Toronto Star film critic Peter Howell: “Erika Linder and Natalie Krill play illicit lesbian lovers in a made-in-Toronto film that promises to push the boundaries for cinematic sex, as Blue Is the Warmest Color did before it. Shot by an all-female crew, the TIFF program calls it ‘one of the boldest and sexiest dramas of the year.'”

Wells thought: “If this scene was about (a) a guy attempting to make out with a cute girl in a bar, (b) the girl changing her mind and running outside and darting down an alley and (c) the guy chasing her down and more or less saying ‘wait, you can’t run away, I really want to fuck you’ and putting the moves on her again, a viewer might presume it’s about a predator engaged in a kind of aggressive date rape. But because it’s about lesbians, nobody raises an eyebrow.”

Reaction among execs running A24, the distributor of Andrea Arnold’s American Honey (opening on 9.30.16): “It’s so great when this kind of buzz gets around. This is why we love this business because when a movie has the right kind of chemistry and the right kind of chops, something magical happens and it just takes off with ticket buyers…it becomes this mystical, unstoppable act of art and nature that people feel they just have to see.”

Reaction among execs running IFC Films, the distributor of Olivier Assayas‘s Personal Shopper (no U.S. release date): “Why don’t guys like Lawson leave us alone? We’re letting the Toronto and New York film festivals show Personal Shopper, fine, but we’re not sure how we feel about it. Some people in Cannes weren’t fans and that gives us the willies. The concept of releasing Personal Shopper intimidates us financially, if you want to know the truth, and so we’re almost sorry we acquired it and we’re not sure we even want to release it any time soon. Okay, maybe sometime next spring. But please, just stop it. We hate tweets like this. They just make things worse.”

Audiences took one look at Montgomery Clift in A Place in the Sun and said, “He’s cool, an okay guy, decent, I trust him, reminds us of a friend from college or high school, obviously good looking.” If I were gay I would think “hmm, in my dreams.” I took one look at Joe Alwyn, the lead in Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, and said, “Ang Lee chose this guy to be the lead? He looks like he doesn’t get it, like he can’t get it for lack of brain cells. I’ve seen guys like this working at yogurt shops, and I certainly have no interest in hanging with him…at all.”

Roughly 15 years ago I was having a chat with a professional woman of some size, and I was about to allude to people of girth when I realized I might get myself in trouble. I needed to put on my tiptoe shoes. Before I knew it I was scrambling and a bit anxious. I obviously didn’t want to say “fat” or “obese” or “overweight” — all shaming terms. It would have also been wrong to say “person with a weight problem” because in p.c. circles excess weight isn’t a problem. I also knew that “rotund” was out because it sounded snide. This was all whirring through my brain within three or four seconds, mind. So I seized on the term “calorically challenged.” It seemed respectful, no attitude or judgment implied — the equivalent of calling a short person “height-challenged.” And you know what? The professional woman took offense. She didn’t say in so many words that I was being an insulting smart-ass, but that’s what she was thinking. It was then that I realized that there’s no winning in this atmosphere. You just have to live and think in denial. Overweight people don’t exist. All shapes and sizes are beautiful. You just can’t say anything else. You realize what I’m describing, don’t you? In a sense we’re all living in that 1961 Twilight Zone episode called “It’s a Good Life,” and all the p.c. militants are a version of Anthony.

Here are my initial stabs at award-season acting contenders, as posted on Gold Derby. I’ve been saying since catching Manchester By The Sea last January that Casey Affleck is a cast-iron lock for Best Actor, but I’m also presuming that one of the stand-out supporting performances — by 19- or 20-year-old Lucas Hedges or veteran Kyle Chandler — will generate awards chatter. Likewise, Manchester‘s Michelle Williams will almost certainly be a Best Supporting Actress contender; ditto Moonlight‘s Naomie Harris, who’s allegedly the standout in Barry Jenkins‘ film. Best Actress-wise, it still seems that the likely headliners are Loving‘s Ruth Negga (saw it/her in Cannes) vs. Fences‘ Viola Davis.

I don’t know for a fact that Clint Eastwood‘s Sully (Warner Bros., 9.9) will have its first public showing at the Telluride Film Festival, but signs are pointing in this direction. I was told a while back that a major American release about a true-life saga would debut there. Plus a certain East Coast critic has been hearing Sully-at-Telluride rumblings. As I understand it one of the factors is that Sully producer Frank Marshall has a home in Telluride and that feelings of regional loyalty and kinship kicked in. (Or something like that.) So that’s it, fellas — the other 20 (give or take) plus Sully. Sure, I could be wrong about this. But I doubt that I am. I sure wish I could attend tonight’s special Sully junket screening in Los Angeles, but that’s only for “interview” press.