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First came yesterday’s announcement that Pablo Larrain and Darren Aronofsky‘s Jackie will be debuting at the Venice Film Festival. And then some speculation on my part that wasn’t altogether wise.

(l. to. r.) Carrot-top Peter Sarsgaard, Natalie Portman, and an actor who resembles Animal Kingdom‘s James Frecheville (but who may not be).

Yesterday I wrote that “with Larrain already slated to attend the Telluride Film Festival with Neruda, it would be strange — a head-scratcher — if Jackie doesn’t wind up screening at Telluride also.” Convinced as I am that Telluride is the end-all and be-all of the domestic, ultra-refined, beginning-of-awards-season film festival experience, I asked “what possible strategy on the part of Jackie‘s producers could result in their film not playing Telluride?”

Answer: Jackie is looking to land a U.S. distributor, and Toronto, where it’ll screen after Venice, is much more of an acquisitions environment than Telluride. Plus a choice promotional berth at Toronto can be mighty tempting to a film in Jackie‘s position. So the decision to bypass Telluride has been made for the most practical of reasons. Fine.

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If Hillary Clinton doesn’t get a decent bump out of the convention and particularly from last night’s speech, she’s in serious trouble. Hopefully she isn’t. Hopefully her poll numbers will uptick and that she’ll put Donald Trump away in the debates and we’ll be spared an Armageddon scenario, not by a comfortable margin, alas, but by the skin of our teeth. Maybe. I watched her speech last night (replay, not live) and she obviously handled it well. A commendable job. But I was almost fearful of what I wouldn’t see or feel from her delivery and presence, and I had to almost make myself watch it.

Nobody wants this headline to be true more than myself.

The speech was well crafted, and her delivery was good enough and that plus the cheers and those thousands upon thousands of balloons made for a stirring, well organized pageant moment. Hillary has brains, heart, steel and cojones. I’m a Bernie bro, but many — most — of her convictions are my own. But she has no music or poetry in her, and she’ll never strike a magical chord or hit a rhetorical home run with the bumblefucks.

God help us, she’s not what “they” want, and “they” are seemingly convinced that Hillary is indifferent to their economic pain and more particularly is against their cultural interests, and that she’s foursquare on the side of the big social-political changeover we’ve all been witnessing and sharing in over the last eight or ten or fifteen years (weakening of the rural, blue-collar economy plus, as Michael Moore noted a week ago, the growing power of the multiculturals, militant femme-Nazis and LGBTs) and for them it’s curtains for White Guy Rule, and so it’s the Last Stand at the Alamo.

I’m getting a really bad feeling here. I fear Hillary may be John Kerry. I’m sensing those same ’04 cultural vibes, the same “oh, yeah? we’ll show them” resentments.

For the first time in this election season I am really, genuinely scared.

HE’s own Sasha Stone posted the following on Facebook this morning: “This election will be a pure test of whether white males (on the left and right) can get over themselves and vote for the best candidate [regardless of] whether they like her speeches or not, whether they like her body or not, whether they want to sleep with her or not, whether they respect her or not and yes, whether they like her or not.

“The way I figure it is: likability is probably not the best reason to elect someone. TV charisma is an even worse reason. I think back to some of the best presidents this country has had — FDR included — and I think they would never get elected today. So it’s a test. We’ll see just how smart the people who are supposed to have the most power in this country do on this test.”

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Jason Bourne isn’t too bad, but it feels like an aggressive effort to make money. More to the point, it doesn’t feel like it’s really about now. Except in one respect — cyber-tracking technology has become so immaculate and absolute that there are no chases any more. You can no longer lose the bad guys by ducking into an alley or an apartment building or some dark corner — the CIA and web technology know where you’re heading before you get there. So there’s now a kind of built-in futility to this kind of thing. The baddies are always breathing down your neck. Hell, they’re waiting for you.

Director Paul Greengrass, helmer of The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum (i.e., the best of the bunch), delivers serious excitement in the early Athens bike-riding sequence, but the brutally insane Las Vegas car-chase finale is like something out of James Wan‘s Fast 7 — grotesque, nonsensical destructo-porn.

The Bourne franchise was hatched in the post-9/11 Bush era, and to some extent I think many of us sensed that the first three films (’02, ’04, ’07) were absorbing and reflecting the psychic atmosphere back then — the after-smell of smoke and dust and jet fuel, the venal Dick Cheney vibe, the blowback stench from the Iraq invasion, bad guys in charge, whiffs of coming economic chaos. But things feel different now after nearly seven and a half years of Obama, and the vibe just ain’t the same.

Question: Early on it’s clear that Matt Damon‘s Bourne character is living hand to mouth. He’s making ends meet by decking opponents in bare-knuckle boxing matches in northern Greece.  Which would bring in what? A few hundred bucks per match, if that?  And yet once the action kicks in he does the usual globe-hopping that he’s done in previous installments. He’s got plenty of different passports but you need serious dough to fly or take trains from city to city, not to mention food, hotels, temporary cell phones, etc. So where’d he get the scratch?

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If Hillary Clinton is smart, she won’t bray her acceptance speech tonight. This is what an older industry friend shared last night. She needs to be cool, calm, precise, confident. Allow her experience to speak for itself. “Spirited” and “exuberant” are fine, but no braying. Braying is bothersome — pretty much everyone agrees on that. The transportational Democratic National Convention highs peaked last night with Barack Obama (pretty close to magnificent), Joe Biden (a free man in Paris), Michael Bloomberg (brilliant). Now we have to listen to Hillary. Just don’t bray — that’s all I’m saying.

The Venice Film Festival (8.31 thru 9.10) announced its slate this morning. For me the unexpected stand-out is the competition debut of Pablo Larrain‘s Jackie, a realization of Neal Oppenheim‘s restrained, West Wing-like script about Jackie Kennedy‘s four-day ordeal following her husband’s murder on 11.22.63.

Peter Sarsgaard as RFK, veiled Natalie Portman re-enacting JFK funeral procession in Pablo Larrain’s Jackie. In this shot Portman looks too short — in actuality the former First Lady was roughly the same height as RFK, give or take. And what’s with Sarsgaard’s flaming red hair? RFK’s thatch was drab brownish with a tinge of salty auburn.

Produced by Darren Aronofsky‘s Protozoa (in league with Fabula and Bliss Media), Jackie is apparently seeking a U.S. distributor. The Venice bow will most likely ignite a Best Actress campaign on behalf of Natalie Portman‘s lead performance unless, of course, the film turns out to be wanting. I’ve no clue about that, but Oppenheim’s script (which I read six years ago) is entirely decent, and the combination of Aronofsky and Larrain (who’s been in a prolific groove) suggests that Jackie may, at the very least, be an interesting mood-trip piece.

With Larrain already slated to attend the Telluride Film Festival with Neruda, which premiered at last May’s Cannes Film Festival, it would be strange — a head-scratcher — if Jackie doesn’t wind up screening at Telluride also. Larrain, Portman and presumably Aronfosky (who’s currently shooting Day 6) will, of course, attend the Venice Film Festival debut. What possible strategy on the part of Jackie‘s producers could result in their film not playing Telluride?

If Team Jackie doesn’t fly to Colorado following the Venice debut people will be asking Larrain “is there a problem?”

Tom Ford‘s Nocturnal Animals will play Venice and Toronto but not, as previously noted, Telluride. Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival will play Venice before hitting Telluride and Toronto, and it’s been known for weeks that Damien Chazelle’s La-La Land will open the Lido fest. Nobody cares about Terrence Malick‘s Voyage of Time playing Venice…nobody.

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In his portrayal of Virginia-born pacifist Desmond Doss, Andrew Garfield speaks with a yokel accent straight out of Dogpatch. Grim up and take it. This Hacksaw Ridge trailer once again reminds that director Mel Gibson, while never one for subtlety, has a vigorous visual eye. The basic training scenes feel like Full Metal Jacket meets The Young Lions, and the Okinawa battle footage may be (the trailer suggests) in the inferno-like realm of Saving Private Ryan. The Venice Film Festival will screen this 11.4 Lionsgate/Summit release out of competition in early September. Garfield plus costars Vince Vaughn, Sam Worthington, Luke Bracey, Hugo Weaving, Ryan Corr, Teresa Palmer, Richard Pyros and Rachel Griffiths. Opening on 11.4.16.

I ran into director Gavin O’Connor during a Captain Fantastic screening three or four weeks ago, and I asked if The Accountant, his latest, would be screening at the Toronto Film Festival. He didn’t exactly say “definitely, no question” but I got the impression it would. Affleck looks a little bulky but the film looks good. A cut above, a little extra.  Overheard: “Very violent…a Charles Bronson film with autism.” Screen it in August, before the Telluride/Toronto rumble begins.

“We need to unite around a candidate who can defeat a dangerous demagogue…a risky, reckless, and radical choice. Donald Trump has left behind a well-documented record of bankruptcies and thousands of lawsuits and angry shareholders and contractors who feel cheated and disillusioned customers who feel ripped off. Trump says he wants to run the nation like he’s running his business? God help us! I’m a New Yorker, and I know a con when I see one. Truth be told, the richest thing about Donald Trump is his hypocrisy. This is not reality television — this is reality.” — Former NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg during tonight’s takedown speech in Philadelphia.

I can accept any actor in any role, especially if they’re Meryl Streep or Tilda Swinton or Daniel Day Lewis, but with others it’s a bit easier if their personal vibes or political associations don’t contrast too strongly with whomever or whatever they’re playing. I’m not talking about an actor not being able to sell a character against type, but certain actors in certain roles can lead to feelings of initial resistance. Which can dissolve in a matter of minutes or even seconds — don’t get me wrong — but that doesn’t mean hurdles aren’t there to begin with.

Audiences of the ’40s would have had difficulty with, let’s say, Lou Costello as Jack the Ripper or Ulysses S. Grant. Which isn’t to say Costello wouldn’t have theoretically killed in either role. But people have to believe in advance that you can bring a certain type to life before they’re willing to sit down and watch you do it.

Let’s say for the sake of hypothesis that HE’s own Jon Voight, by anyone’s yardstick a militant, Obama-loathing rightwinger, is cast as a bleeding-heart liberal in some kind of political drama. Would that mean I couldn’t accept him as such a character? No, but I’d be facing a slight roadblock going in. Most of us would. Just as I would have an easier time accepting the conservative-minded Gary Sinise as, say, a CIA contractor or an Army lieutenant rather than a Socialist mayor or an anti-war priest.

By the same token it would require a little adjustment to accept Susan Sarandon as a corporate spokesperson for a notorious polluter or a rural woman who sells AR-15s at gun shows. Not that she couldn’t pull it off but I would snicker at the thought. Ditto if flaming lefties Rob Reiner or Martin Sheen tried to play, say, a gun-rights advocate or an anti-abortionist or a rightwing Congressman.

Obviously Sheen played one of the worst righties of all time in David Cronenberg‘s The Dead Zone, but that was before his name became strong associated with liberal causes. And yes, the ardently liberal Richard Dreyfuss played Dubya vp Dick Cheney in Oliver Stone‘s W., but commandingly. Jane Fonda was fine as a chilly corporate bossy type in Aaron Sorkin‘s The Newsroom, but she’s been around forever and can play anyone or anything.

I basically don’t believe in painting actors with simplistic brushes or casting the same actor to play the same type of character over and over, but it obviously happens. Throwing this up for discussion, which actors do you feel are bulletproof in this regard (i.e., can play anyone or anything and nobody says a word) and which actors would you have trouble believing in this or that specific role?