“There’s also no excuse for police using excessive force against peaceful protests, or to throw protestors in jail for lawfully exercising their First Amendment rights. And here in the United Sates of America, police should not be bullying or arresting journalists who are just trying to do their jobs and report to the American people what they see on the ground. Let’s remember that we’re all part of one American family” — bullshit. “We are united in common values” — really? “And that includes belief in equality under the law” — nope. “Now’s the time for an open and transparent process to see that justice is done” — clearly.

Leaving aside the present ugliness, no one should misunderstand a simple fact about cops, which is that they deal with the worst aspects of human nature 24/7 and that the only way to deal with them when they’re angry and barking some kind of order is to chill and obey. Don’t run or argue or flip the bird. Just give in and show submission and that’ll be the end of it. The key is to make them feel placated so they’ll move on. You will always make it worse if you give them any kind of shit. You can’t improve the situation by going “why don’t you leave me the fuck alone?” Some people can’t seem to understand this.

David Ayer‘s Fury will close the BFI London Film Festival on Sunday, October 19th, or two days after it opens stateside. Two weeks ago Sony declared they consider Fury an award-season contender, but if they wanted a real-deal conversation starter they would have arranged for a surprise screening during the forthcoming 52nd New York Film Festival. Alas, the film wasn’t ready to be screened for the NYFF committee in time (or so I’ve been told). The London Film Festival slot is a promotional bounce for the 10.24 British opening plus a nod to the fact that Fury shot in England for three months last year. HE to Fury producers: You’re going to have to do better than this if you want the Oscar-blogging mafia to really sit up and go, “Yes!…definitely hot shit…looking forward and then some!” I obviously know nothing about the quality of Fury. For all I know it’s Saving Private Ryan meets Full Metal Jacket. But you have to roll it out in the right way or people will mutter to themselves, “Well, if their energy levels are only at a level 7 or 7.5, why should we raise ours any higher?”

I’m not trying to be an asshole here. Sony started the awards-contender chatter, not me. If they just wanted to position Fury as a commercial actioner (i.e., a rugged war flick aimed at guys) with an expectation of strong reviews, fine. But that Cieply article started something. When you say “okay, award-conversation starters…pay attention to this” and “let us in, wee-yoo,” you’re jumping into a game that has certain rules and regulations.

I was going to say something like “I have too much respect for Robin Williams‘ talent and particularly what he achieved in his heyday to post an Entertainment Tonight quickie teaser for Merry Friggin’ Christmas (Phase 4, 11.7), which is obviously second-tier.” But another impulse won. Boilerplate: “Boyd Mitchler (Joel McHale) and his family must spend Christmas with his estranged family of misfits. Upon realizing that he left all his son’s gifts at home, he hits the road with his dad (Williams) in an attempt to make the eight-hour round trip before sunrise.” Costarring Lauren Graham, Wendi McLendon-Covey, Ryan Lee, Candice Bergen and Pierce Gagnon.

“Genius” and “magic” are two words that I really, really don’t like. Too many questionable, less-than-reputable people (i.e., peripheral showbiz assholes) have used them too many times. It’s generally understood that these words have been permanently contaminated by this usage, and it’s therefore understood by smart, more-or-less-together people — people who “get it” — to not use these words for the next, oh, 50 years or so. “Genius” is slightly worse than “magic” but only slightly. They’re both really quite awful. I’m saying this with a certain affection for Are You There? director-writer Matthew Weiner, who says the “m” word in the opening minutes of this interview with HuffPostLive‘s Ricky Camilleri. Just watch it — that’s all I’m saying.

Obviously I’m focused on which films might lead the Best Picture pack or are likely to win awards in other categories during the coming season. But it’s not the winning as much as the savoring and, yes, the arguing. 70% savoring, 30% arguing. The bottom line is that an amazing cavalcade of cool-sounding films are either opening or being shown at festivals between 8.29 and 12.31, an average of ten noteworthy-or-better films per month. We’re also going to see one small-arms skirmish after another. “Each movie is its own little war,” David Poland once said, except he really meant “battle.” The important thing is to fight clean and not gang up on a film with baseball bats and the throwing of political mudballs, which is what happened to poor Zero Dark Thirty.

The top 20 are Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s Birdman, James Marsh‘s The Theory of Everything, Christopher Nolan‘s Interstellar, J.C. Chandor‘s A Most Violent Year, Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Inherent Vice, Ava Duvernay‘s Selma, Vincent Melfi‘s St. Vincent, Ridley Scott‘s Exodus: Gods and Kings, David Fincher‘s Gone Girl, Angelina Jolie‘s Unbroken, Jean Marc Vallee‘s Wild, Andrey Zvyagintsev‘s Leviathan, Noah Baumbach‘s While We’re Young, Rob Marshall‘s Into The Woods, Clint Eastwood‘s American Sniper, Mike Binder‘s Black and White, Jon Stewart‘s Rosewater, David Ayer‘s Fury, Jason Reitman‘s Men, Women & Children and Stephen Daldry‘s Trash.

We’ll also be grappling with Morten Tyldum‘s The Imitation Game, Tim Burton‘s Big Eyes, Fatih Akin‘s The Cut, Liv Ullman‘s Miss Julie, Abel Ferrara‘s Pasolini, Saul Dibbs‘ Suite Francaise, Werner Herzog‘s Queen of the Desert, Christian Petzold‘s Phoenix, Michael Roskam‘s The Drop, Ramin Bahrani‘s 99 Homes, Damian Szifron‘s Wild Tales, Maya Forbes‘ Infinitely Polar Bear, Rupert Goold‘s True Story, Thomas McCarthy‘s The Cobbler, David Dobkin‘s The Judge, Dan Gilroy‘s Nightcrawler, Lone Scherfig‘s The Riot Club, David Gordon Green‘s Manglehorn, Barry Levinson‘s The Humbling…are you kidding? 40 films over the course and that’s not even counting the chaff. The journey and the communion…that’s what counts.

I’m obviously way late to this Proctor & Gamble video piece about female self-image and the use of the term “like a girl,” all in the service of selling Always, a line of absorbent hygiene pads for women. The ad broke sometime on 6.26 and here it is six weeks later. But it’s really something. Cheers to “Like a Girl” director Lauren Greenfield, who helmed The Queen of Versailles. Thanks to Awards Daily‘s Ryan Adams for providing a link.

I’m presuming that Grantland‘s Mark Harris, author of perhaps the most widely-referenced meta-utterance of last year’s award season and perhaps of all award seasons to come (i.e., “It’s September, for God’s sake”), is quite reasonably waiting to see a few of the presumed award-season heavies before writing about the shape of things. An entirely adult and prudent approach. But we’re living in fast times. Unstable, spitbally, lunging, a bit wild. If I had my druthers Harris would throw caution to the wind and tap out 1200 speculative words right effing now about the Best Picture conversation and which leading and supporting performances appear (based on trailers, scripts, loose chatter) to have the heat. He’s put his finger to the wind and probably knows as much as I do (or almost as much) and I’ve written tens of thousands of words about the season already and it’s only mid-August, for God’s sake. Why did I really write this? An HE reader created the illustration below and I wanted to post something with it.

We’d already been told about the 52nd NY Film Festival highlights — David Fincher‘s Gone Girl to open, Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Inherent Vice for the centerpiece and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s Birdman to close. I knew that many if not most of the remaining selections would be…what is the phrase?…”tastefully curated” given the ivory-tower likings of the selection committee. And yet a portion of the 52nd NYFF slate seems a little…what, livelier? A little raunchier and more rabbit-holey? In years past the mission had been to show aesthetically correct “spinach” movies apart from the headliners and the odd perversities (like this year’s decision to screen David Cronenberg‘s Maps to the Stars, which I saw and quite admired in Cannes).

The basic brand hasn’t changed, of course. People still buy NYFF tickets so they can partake in or at least listen to that rarified 65th Street conversation. They want their nourishment fix from the “right” kind of filmmakers, which in many instances means watching films that have recently played in Cannes…you know what I mean. There are only so many slices in a pie in any given film year. I’m a fool for the NYFF myself. I’ve been attending since ’77. I love hanging outside Alice Tully Hall at dusk before a hot-ticket screening and chatting with the know-it-alls.

Before this morning’s announcement the only “could it possibly happen?” questions were (a) would David Ayer‘s Fury, recently spun by N.Y. Times reporter Michael Cieply as a possible Best Picture contender and now opening in mid-October (or just after the NYFF concludes), snag a last-minute slot, and (b) would Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi‘s The 50-Year Argument, a 97-minute doc about the N.Y. Review of Books, get some kind of peek-out screening prior to the 9.29 HBO debut?

The answer to both, for now, is apparently nix. The NYFF guys wanted to see Fury, I’m told, but it wasn’t ready in time. (Apparently Cieply was only shown portions of Ayer’s film.) Given the close relationship between Scorsese and NYFF director Kent Jones (they made the brilliant Letter to Elia together) I’d be surprised if it isn’t given some kind of surprise slot but…well, maybe not.

Warner Bros. will give Clint Eastwood‘s American Sniper, an adaptation of the same-titled book by real-life Iraq War sniper Chris Kyle, a 12.25.14 limited release. Kyle is played by Bradley Cooper — a now-likely contender for Best Actor unless, of course, the film turns out to be lame. Which I’m not expecting to see happen. The costars are Sienna Miller, Luke Grimes, Kyle Gallner…I don’t know the rest of the guys in the cast. Sniper was almost directed by Steven Spielberg but then he bailed….close one. American Sniper will open wide on 1.16.15.

Bradley Cooper, Clint Eastwood during the shooting of American Sniper.

I’ve passed along this Lauren Bacall story previously, but it came from Howard Hawks. Hawks was interested in her for a film in the mid ’40s (probably To Have or Have Not) but told her she had to lower her voice, that she’d be more interesting if she sounded sultry and smoky. So Bacall went away and came back and her voice was just what Hawks was talking about. Then he told her to stop smiling all the time and to maybe insult a man every now and then. She later told him that she ran into Clark Gable at a party and said to him in that cool, low-down way of hers, “Where’d you get that tie?” Gable said “Oh, some haberdashery in Beverly Hills…what do you wanna know for?” And Bacall said, “So I can tell my friends not to go there.”

Yesterday HE reader and L.A. Daily News guy Bob Strauss wrote that “any critic who can’t distinguish between the performance and the character doesn’t just have lousy perception, they’re unfit for the job.”

That’s almost total bullshit — all actors blend themselves into the characters they play, and when the process is finished nobody really knows where the actor ends and the character begins, least of all the critics. It’s all an improvised mashed-potato process. With the exception of those rare world-class actors who can truly be called chameleons (Meryl Streep, the late Laurence Olivier, Daniel Day Lewis and maybe, what, 10 or 12 others?) very few actors are really playing “somebody else”. A performance is simply a process by which an actor tries on a coat or a pair of shoes or a mood or a history lived by some character on a page, and then they cross-blend themselves into this person and…tah-dah! How’s this sound? Should I do it differently? I love this job, man…I love making movies.

Those who can do this well or at least smoothly and who’ve been agile enough to scale the hurdles and who have sufficiently big heads…they’re all good to go. Almost no successful actors will admit this because revelations of this sort seem to devalue their craft. They want you to think it’s tricky magic or rocket science, but it’s not. I’m not saying it’s easy or that anyone can do it, but a lot of people can.

Every actor in Hollywood history has lied through their teeth about this process. They’ve all used the same line about simply and purely playing a made-up character, and that what they perform has nothing to do with who they really are and so on. That is undoubtedly true to some extent but it’s NEVER, EVER 100% true. Even though Cary Grant always claimed he would like to be “Cary Grant” as much as the next day, he was still always Cary Grant. Vince Vaughn has always been (and always will be ) Vince fucking Vaughn. Humphrey Bogart was always that guy with the dangling unfiltered cigarette and the tough Manhattan attitude. Owen Wilson has always been Owen Wilson in every performance he’s ever given.

Very few actors are serious chameleons. Most of them are just making it up as they go along. All good actors take their looks and personalities and attitudes and toss them around in a salad bowl, and then they tailor or modify a character to fit their own personality or psyche and swirl the salad around some more and then they GO THERE. They do that thing, they let it rip and that‘s what makes certain performance “pop” and others not so much. No film is entirely pretend. In a sense all performances are documentary-“real” if you allow the deep-down to come forward in your perceptions.

“Whatever the on-screen persona or character, whatever the makeup, it is nigh on impossible to obfuscate the person. Not only that, but it records them doing what inspired them the most — acting. A film is the plate on which a butterfly is preserved.” — Checking On My Sausages, 7.30.10.