I’ve heard from reputable sources that Alejandro G. Inarritu‘s The Revenant (20th Century Fox, 12.25) is definitely the shit, and if that turns out to be true I’m betting that Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays the lead role of 19th Century trapper Hugh Glass, may finally snag a Best Actor Oscar. He’s been Best Actor-nominated three times (The Aviator, Blood Diamond, The Wolf of Wall Street) so maybe this’ll finally be it, 22 years after he broke into features with This Boy’s Life. The guy’s paid his dues.

Leo has been a power-hitter and marquee headliner for nearly 18 years now, or since Titanic. Nobody can ever diminish or take away the killer performances he gave in The Departed, Inception, Revolutionary Road and The Wolf of Wall Street, but when I think of vintage DiCaprio I rewind back to that dynamic six-year period in the ’90s (’93 to ’98) when he was all about becoming and jumping off higher and higher cliffs — aflame, intense and panther-like in every performance he gave. I was reminded of this electric period this morning that I watched the above YouTube clip of DiCaprio in Woody Allen‘s Celebrity (’98).

I respected Leo’s performance in This Boy’s Life but I didn’t love it, and I felt the same kind of admiring distance with Arnie, his mentally handicpped younger brother role in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, partly because he was kind of a whiny, nasally-voiced kid in both and…you know, good work but later. Excellent actor, didn’t care for the feisty-kid vibes. But a few months before Gilbert Grape opened I met DiCaprio for a Movieline interview at The Grill in Beverly Hills, and by that time he was taller and rail-thin and just shy of 20 years old. I was sitting in that booth and listening to him free-associate while saying to myself, “This kid’s got it…I can feel the current.”

At first glance Tony McNamara‘s Ashby (Paramount, 9.25) seems like a loose rehash of Theodore Melfi‘s St. Vincent. Bill Murray played the suburban-residing, raggedy-ass social misfit in the latter while Mickey Rourke plays a slight variation (i.e., an ex-CIA guy) in Ashby. Women hover in both films. One difference is that the kid being uncle’d, watched over and mentored in Ashby is a high-schooler (Nat Wolff) rather than a 12 year-old.

Obviously Xavier Giannoli‘s Marguerite, a French-Belgian-Czech co-production based on the life of notoriously mediocre opera singer Florence Foster Jenkins, has beaten the Meryl Streep-Stephen Frears version of the same story to the punch. The Giannoli film will play at the Telluride Film Festival right after its big debut at the Venice Film Festival, having shot in the Czech Republic between September and November of last year. The Frears-Streep version only began shooting in London last May, and will most likely open in the fall of ’16.

Meryl Streep, Hugh Grant in Stephen Frears’ Florence Foster Jenkins.

Both versions have been described as comedy-dramas, which seems logical. The Wiki page for the Giannoli version is said to be “loosely” based on the life of notoriously mediocre opera singer Florence Foster Jenkins. The Frears-Streep version, which is being produced and distributed by Pathe, is directly based on the Jenkins saga. What’s the difference? The Streep factor, of course. Many more people (in this country and in England, at least) are going to sit up in their seats and pay close attention when Florence Foster Jenkins opens next year than the Giannoli version, I can tell you that.

But the Giannoli version is said to be pretty good (at least according to Europe-based critics who’ve recently seen it). And the Giannoli will benefit from a feeling of freshness (something the Frears-Streep can’t hope to deliver). And it will presumably enjoy a hearty reception in Venice and Telluride and probably open commercially before the Frears-Streep.

Despite Indiewire having reported that Sydney Pollack‘s Amazing Grace, a never-released 1972 doc about Aretha Franklin performing gospel tunes inside a Los Angeles church, will premiere at the Toronto Film Festival, I’m told it’ll play the Telluride Film Festival first. And thank your lucky stars if you’re catching it at Telluride or Toronto because a money dispute may prevent Amazing Grace from being seen commercially. Franklin, 73, has just told the Detroit Free Press‘s Brian McCollum that she and her attorney may file an injunction to prevent the doc’s release. Presumed translation: Aretha wants a bigger paycheck.

Franklin’s gospel concert, performed inside L.A.’s New Temple Missionary Baptist Church (So. Broadway near 87th Place), happened 43 and 2/3 years ago. Pollack shot over 20 hours of 16mm footage and had hoped to put the film out in concert with Franklin’s Amazing Grace album. But a release never happened due to music rights issues or some other monetary hangup. In January 2010 Variety‘s Jon Burlingame reported that producer Alan Elliott and editor William Steinkamp had begun to assemble a final definitive cut.

I honestly hadn’t paid the slightest attention to French actor Jean-Hugues Anglade since he had a brief walk-on role in John Adams, the 2008 Tom Hooper/HBO miniseries. I remember saying as I watched it, “Hey, that’s the guy who starred in Roger Avary‘s bank-robbery movie, Killing Zoe!” But now JHA is a real-life hero who jumped into a scary situation with an Islamic wacko during a train ride between Amsterdam and Paris earlier today. Anglade alerted the law by pulling an alarm, and in so doing cut himself with shattered glass.

But the primary hero, to go by all accounts, was an Air Force guy named Spencer Stone.

Gunfire happened between the wacko, a 26 year-old Moroccan guy who was “reportedly armed with a Kalashnikov and several knives,” and two Americans — Alek Skarlatos, an Oregon Army National Guard guy returning from Afghanistan, and Airman First Class Spencer Stone. One of them was harmed during the fracas, but not seriously. Crisp salutes for Stone, Skarlatos and Monsieur Anglade, and thank God no one was killed. Sidenote: Maybe some iPhone video will turn up later this evening? This only happened about nine hours ago. Somebody must have caught some portion of what happened. A news story without footage is fairly unusual these days.

Update from the N.Y. Times‘ Adam Nossiter: “The two American service members who tackled a gunman on a high-speed train traveling from Amsterdam to Paris rushed him even though he was fully armed, then grabbed him by the neck and beat him over the head with his own automatic rifle until he was unconscious, one of them said in television interviews here on Saturday.

Thanks to Forbes.com’s Natalie Robehmed and her 8.20 story about the highest-paid actresses over the last 12 months, I’m finally paying attention to Bingbing Fan, a hot Chinese actress who pulled down $21 million (pre-tax) from roles in X-Men: Days of Future Past and The White-Haired Witch of Lunar Kingdom plus commercial endorsement revenue from Chopard and L’Oreal. Fine. Hello, Bingbing!

And now that I’ve made Ms. Fan’s acquaintance, I’d…well, I think I’d like to go back to not contemplating her if that’s okay. It’s not just my aversion to Asian cinema (sorry) and particularly historical Asian cinema (especially if it involves swords) but…I’m not going to go there.  Let’s drop it.

The big news about the Forbes survey is not that all these women are doing so well but that guys are getting paid a lot more.

How many of the top earners made their dough by acting in really good films and how many brought in the dough with shitty mass-market projects and/or commercial endorsements?  Just about all of them.

How many noteworthy performances have been based upon an actor’s imitation of the director of the film in question? Or, to broaden it out, based upon imitations of anyone in particular? It’s common knowledge that the New Yawk accent used by Peter Sellers in Stanley Kubrick‘s Lolita was an imitation of Kubrick’s Bronx-cab-driver patois. I recall reading that Albert Finney‘s performance in Annie (’82) was basically an imitation of director John Huston? Are there any others on the list? I have a special liking for this Lolita scene because Sellers is actually blending Kubrick’s voice with the manner of a closeted gay guy of the period.

An old friend and his gentle, kindly wife are allowing me to crash at their condo during the 10-day Toronto Film Festival. This morning I sent them the following: “Thanks again to you both. I arrive in Toronto on Wednesday afternoon, 9.9, around 3:30. Flying in on Porter. I’ll go right to Bell Lightbox for my press pass & materials and whatnot. I’ll be at your place by 6 or 6:30 pm…something like that.

“Over the first five days I’ll be rising earlyish and attending screenings by 10 am or sometimes earlier, and then back around 11 or midnight. During the second five days everything slacks off. No promises but I’ll try to wangle some screening tickets. We’ll see how it goes. Maybe we can do a dinner on Wednesday night. On me, of course.

“Before it all starts we need to address the inevitable, which is referenced in that famous Chinese saying: ‘House guest like fish. After three days, stink.’

A friend who hadn’t seen Mad Max: Fury Road in theatres just watched the Bluray last night, and he noticed that portions had accelerated and slowed-down frame rates. Not the same thing as the herky-jerky motion in Saving Private Ran and Gladiator, but in the same vague ballpark. He’d just installed a Sony 4k projector and was running data up-rezzed from an Oppo, so he wasn’t sure if it was the film or the hardware. Then he came upon a quote from dp John Seale, which basically said the Mad Max frame rates were finely manipulated all through:

“Something like 50 or 60 percent of the film is not running at 24 frames a second, which is the traditional frame rate,” said Seale. “It’ll be running below 24 frames because [director] George Miller, if he couldn’t understand what was happening in the shot, slowed it down until you could. Or if it was too well understood, he’d shorten it or he’d speed it up back towards 24. His manipulation of every shot in that movie is intense.”

Director Rod Lurie is conducting another Hollywood-centric Facebook poll, this time about the greatest-ever lead performances in feature films. Which right away excludes James Gandolfini in The Sopranos so the HE version is allowing performances from longform cable. Lurie started me off with a taste of 20 performances, and right away I was saying to myself “these are too familiar, too boilerplate…where’s that special-passion choice that defies conventional thinking?”

What is a greatest-ever performance anyway? My theory is that picks in this realm have less to do with skill or technique or even, really, the actor, and a lot more to do with the viewer and what they choose to see. The choices that people make tend to reflect their intimate personal histories on some level. Because they’re choosing performances or more precisely characters who closely mirror and express their deepest longings, fondest hopes and saddest dreams.

My late younger brother was tremendously moved by Mark Ruffalo‘s portrayal of a loser in You Can Count On Me, in large part because my brother was that character. I know a pretty lady who’s always felt close to Vivien Leigh‘s Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With The Wind for the same reason. Bill Clinton once said on a High Noon DVD documentary that Gary Cooper‘s performance in High Noon is his all-time favorite because Will Kane‘s situation (everyone chickening out when things get tough and leaving him to stand alone) reminded him of what it’s often like for a sitting U.S. President.

When I began to assemble my pantheon the first nominees that came to mind were Gandolfini, Marlon Brando in On The Waterfront, Monica Vitti in L’Avventura, Amy Schumer in Trainwreck (I’m dead serious), George Clooney in Michael Clayton, Gary Cooper in High Noon, Mia Farrow in Broadway Danny Rose, Lee Marvin in Point Blank, Alan Ladd in Shane, Brad Pitt in Moneyball, Marilyn Monroe in Some like It Hot and Jean Arthur in Only Angels Have Wings. This is without thinking anything through or second-guessing myself.

I’ve been chuckling at the flip, iconoclastic, world-weary smirkings and pot-shots of P.J. O’Rourke since the mid ’70s — a long journey. I can’t think of another rightie libertarian whose stuff I’ve laughed at quite so often. Come to think of it I can’t think of another rightie libertarian whose stuff I’ve laughed at, period. One way or another I’ve always been a fan of his material. (For the most part.) Mainly, I suppose, because O’Rourke was editor-in-chief at the National Lampoon during that legendary publication’s last decently creative period, or ’78 through ’80, and because I truly worshipped that mag back in the day so there’s a carry-over effect.

O’Rourke is the author of 16 satirically smart-ass books (including last year’s “The Baby Boom: How It Got That Way (And It Wasn’t My Fault) (And I’ll Never Do It Again),” which I haven’t yet read) and is currently a monthly columnist for the Daily Beast.

Two of my favorite O’Rourke books are “Holidays in Hell” and “Modern Manners“. I’ve also always loved the title of “Republican Party Reptile“, or more precisely the illustration of Dwight D. Eisenhower wearing a mohawk (which was dumped when O’Rourke’s publisher explained that relatively few targeted readers knew or cared who Eisenhower was). Honestly? I’ve never read “Republican Party Reptile”. No offense but why would I? I’m a leftie, and in some respects I’m selfish enough as it is.

Two days ago movie-weekly.com‘s Richard de Carvalho posted an interview with legendary movie-poster artist Drew Struzan at Disney’s D23 Expo. A longtime George Lucas pally and a designer of Star Wars posters since the late ’70s, Stryzan was hired by J.J. Abrams to create the one-sheet for Stars Wars: The Force Awakens. Struzan told Carvalho that before starting he “got to read the script and subsequently I’ve seen half of [The Force Awakens] and I can tell you and the fans this, honest to God, is far and away probably going to be the best Star Wars you’ve ever seen…it’s beautifully made and it’s a wonderful story.”

So what’s Struzan gonna say? That having read the Force Awakens script and having seen half of the film that it’s not too bad?

Let’s allow that Struzan’s words may turn out to be a straight-dope assessment. I’d be delighted if everyone agrees down the road, but how can you trust Struzan for the time being? He’s been cashing Star Wars paychecks off and on for over 35 years and has never, to my knowledge, said anything of a critical nature about the prequels. Or any Star Wars film for that matter. How discerning is he? What are his values?