Today (Tuesday, 9.13) is the last high-pressure day of the Toronto Film Festival. Or maybe it’s the beginning of Phase 2, which is when it all settles down and the crowds thin and it all starts to feel more manageable. One of the two. All I know is that it always means “olly, olly, in come free” when Deadline‘s Pete Hammond leaves Toronto. It means that the boom-boom promotional hoo-hah is winding to a close. Now I can start to catch up on all those films I’ve been reading about but haven’t yet seen — Denial, Collossus, Into The Inferno, Their Finest, Barry, Brimstone, The Duelist, et. al. You don’t have to speed-walk as much when this phase kicks in. You can breathe again. You have to keep filing, of course, but the pace feels saner.

I was going to blow off Mick Jackson‘s Denial as the 16-year-old libel suit it’s based upon (i.e., David Irving having sued author/historian Deborah E. Lipstadt for calling him a Holocaust denier in her 1994 book “Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory”) seems absurd. But the following passage in Marshall Fine‘s 9.13 review changed my mind:

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With its acquisition of Pablo Larrain‘s Jackie and its intention to open it on 12.9.16, Fox Searchlight has revitalized its award-season game while filling the hole left by Nate Parker‘s all-but-discounted The Birth of a Nation, which FS had been presuming all year long would be its prime Oscar pony. The intimate, impressionistic Jackie may or may not acquire enough support to snag a Best Picture nomination but Natalie Portman will almost certainly snag a Best Actress nomination. (La La Land‘s Emma Stone, Loving‘s Ruth Negga and Fences‘ Viola Davis are seen as the other three hotties in this category.) Variety has reported that some distributors who caught Jackie the night before last were “worried that Larrain’s art-house touches may not connect with enough ticket buyers to offset the high asking price,” which will translate in award-season terms to problems with the Academy schlubby-dubbies. Jackie is nonetheless the only filmed Kennedy saga in history that qualifies as audaciously artful, and as such is an effort that will win respect and kudos left and right.

Pablo Larrain‘s Jackie is a major stand-out in a long line of docudramas about the tragedy and travails of the Kennedy family. It’s the only one that can be truly called an art film — intimate, half-dreamlike, cerebral, not entirely “realistic” but at the same time a persuasive and fascinating portrait of what Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy (Natalie Portman) went through between the lunch-hour murder of her husband in Dallas on 11.22.63 and his burial at Arlington National Cemetery on 11.25.63.

Some of Jackie is about grief and weeping (naturally) but mostly it’s about steel — holding it together, arranging the funeral, standing up, refusing to wilt. It’s almost all shot in close-ups, right in there, no blinking or downshifting.

And the music! Mica Levi‘s melancholy strings, not so much “melodic” as a kind of melodic wailing, filled the Winter Garden last night and it was like “whoa!” The strings and a couple of tracks from the original B’way cast album of Camelot comprise the entire musical scheme. Not even those haunting funeral drums are heard — a ballsy move when you think about it.

Larrain, the respected Chilean-born director of No, The Club and Neruda, makes Jackie his own, and particularly Portman’s. It’s the best thing NP has done since Black Swan, and it puts her right dead smack into the hallowed circle of Best Actress contenders now — Portman plus La La Land‘s Emma Stone plus (here’s hoping) Viola Davis in Fences along with Loving‘s Ruth Negga.

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I was told yesterday that the famously non-functioning Scotiaplex escalator is now working again. I haven’t personally witnessed this but the reports are apparently true. While this is obviously good news, Scotiaplex management retains its poor reputation now and forever. The people who waited until the Toronto Film Festival was half over to fix this situation are ignoble and derelict. If there’s a God these guys will be dogged by this failure for the rest of their lives. Every time they look in the bathroom mirror they’ll say to themselves, “I’m a nice guy with certain attributes but when it came to the Scotiaplex escalator catastrophe of 2016, I fucked up badly…and because of this I will always be a fuck-up in a certain residual sense. Beat me with birch branches. My hands will never be clean.”

According to Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson, TIFF-attending critics are building upon the ecstatic praise for Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight that began in Telluride. “Strong marketer A24 will keep pushing for this,” she writes, “[but] the likeliest outcome [is that] House of Cards costar Mahershala Ali will score a Best Supporting Actor nomination for his heart-tugging role as a tough drug dealer who mentors the vulnerable young ‘Little.'”

Good for Moonlight, A24 and Ali (whose performance is a grabber), but I’m telling you two things: (1) the Telluride foo-foos did this intimate, small-scale drama no favors by overpraising it, and (2) I’ve been hearing more balanced reactions since arriving in Toronto. Yesterday a certain hotshot columnist told me “there’s not enough there there” and “it’s not gay enough.” Prior to last night’s Jackie screening a New York-based film critic said he wasn’t all that taken with Jenkins’ film. It deserves an audience and whatever accolades it may receive, but Team Moonlight needs to face facts about the likely reception among Academy/guild members as well as Average Joes.

I saw Oliver Stone‘s Snowden (Open Road, 9.16) in late August, but the embargo has only just lifted. It’s Oliver’s finest and most satisfying film since Any Given Sunday, which is no small equivalency. Oliver has rebounded! Compelling and comprehensive, Snowden tells the tale of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden (Joseph Gordon Levitt), who in my eyes is a kind of Paul Revere of the digital invasion age.

Human nature being what it is, most people out there want security more than freedom. They want the government to waste Islamic bad guys, and, being of relatively clean conscience, are okay with their privacy being invaded as a trade-off. The longer view is that if some rash authoritarian is elected President one day, he/she could utilize the NSA’s vast surveillance network to create an Orwellian thought-police state. There’s also the matter of political resistance, an essential tenet of any democracy, being weakened by the lack of private agency.

Snowden is a well-measured complement to Laura Poitras‘s Oscar-winning Citizen Four, which of course means zip to the tens of millions of potential ticket buyers who’ve never even heard of Citizen Four, much less seen it, or who’ve otherwise bought into the MSM’s view that what Snowden did was dicey if not verging on treason.

Outside of your educated, progressive X-factor lefties, sensible centrists and smart righties the U.S. is mostly a nation of comfort-seeking, mall-meandering sheep. For every person interested in seeing Snowden, there are 20 or 25 who would much rather see Garth Jennings‘ Sing (Universal, 12.21).

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“40 Wall Street actually was the second-tallest building in downtown Manhattan, and it was actually, before the World Trade Center, was the tallest. And then, when they built the World Trade Center, it became known as the second-tallest. And now it’s the tallest.” — Donald Trump speaking to interviewer on 9.11.01. (Hat tip to Marlow Stern for his posting of same earlier today.)

Here's the disgusting audio of Trump on 9/11 bragging about how his building is now the tallest in Lower Manhattan: pic.twitter.com/4ufikWwOom

— Marlow Stern (@MarlowNYC) September 11, 2016

There will be five screenings of Pablo Larrain‘s Jackie at the Toronto Film Festival — tonight at 8:30 pm at the Winter Garden, a pair of Monday screenings — 2:30 pm at the Elgin along with a 3 pm p & i showing at the Scotiaplex — along with a Wednesday 2:45 pm Scotiaplex repeater and finally a Bell Lightbox screening on Sunday at 3:45 pm. But tonight’s showing is the hot ticket, and Hollywood Elsewhere has managed to score a seat. Ditto the after-party.

From Jonathan Romney‘s Screen Daily review, dated 9.7: “Not so much a biopic as an essay on history and what happens to people who become part of it, Pablo Larraín’s Jackie is an elegant, highly intelligent attempt to humanize a legend — while showing its subject’s acute awareness of what it means to become a legend.

“Natalie Portman excels in her most demanding and most complex performance to date as First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, shown living through the immediate aftermath of her husband’s assassination in 1963. Larraín’s highly varied visual invention and command of complex structure serve as a reminder of how vitally an imaginative director can skew what otherwise might have emerged in more mainstream colors.

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Hillary Clinton left a 9/11 memorial service early today, apparently due to feelings of weakness, and then she fainted as she was helped into her SUV, her knees buckling, her shoe falling onto the pavement. You know who almost certainly wouldn’t have fainted under these conditions? Bernie Sanders — that guy knows the meaning of “to live in this town, you must be tough tough tough tough tough tough tough.” Elizabeth Warren wouldn’t have fainted. No healthy person in his/her late 60s faints from warm weather. That’s for people in their late 70s or 80s, if at all.

It would be one thing if the temperature had been in the mid to upper 90s, but the temperature in Manhattan right now is roughly 80 degrees (27 celsius) give or take. The incident happened this morning around 9:30 am, according to a N.Y. Times report, which indicates that temps were somewhat cooler, probably somewhere in the upper 70s.

This is very, very bad — the alt-right is going crazy with this video.

It’s still likely that Hillary will beat Donald Trump on November 8th, but I’m honestly wondering now if she’ll run for a second term. It’s fair to feel concern about this. The Presidency is a tough job, and the image of a chief executive fainting and unable to stand up due to temps in the high 70s indicates that other signs of frailty will manifest down the road.

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“For me, [The Birth of a Nation] isn’t the Nate Parker story,” said Penelope Ann Miller, who plays a slave owner in the film, during a TIFF press conference held today. “This is the Nat Turner story. I would say from most of the interviews I’ve done [that] most people don’t know about the Nat Turner story. I think it’s an important story to learn about. I hope people would give us a chance.”

That has been my feeling all along. If at all possible (and I realize it may not be for some), the subject of The Birth of a Nation — Turner’s leading of an 1831 slave rebellion in Virginia — should be the focus. Nate Parker‘s Penn State history is a tough thing to get around, but Turner’s legend demands respect. He was the first African American in U.S. history to push back forcefully against slavery, some 30 years before the beginning of the Civil War.

Incidentally: A colleague who caught a screening of Parker’s film the other night said that my descriptions of the film have been “too kind.” Among his complaints was his belief that the film takes too long for the rebellion to happen — i.e., roughly 90 minutes.

In my 1.25.16 Sundance review I said that Birth “will almost certainly be nominated because it delivers a myth that many out there will want to see and cheer, but don’t kid yourself about how good and satisfying this film is. It’s mostly a mediocre exercise in deification and sanctimony. I loved the rebellion as much as the next guy but it takes way too long to arrive.”

Two days ago Politics Forum’s Todd VanDerWerff posted an interesting two-sided piece about Manchester By The Sea. On one hand he derided “sad white people” dramas with two observations — (1) the notion of white guys contemplating their sadness is a fundamentally privileged thing, and (2) sad white guy movies almost always rely on some sort of third-act redemption. On the other he notes that Manchester is an exception to this pattern by eschewing or subverting said tropes.

A few seconds after reading this a suspicion came to mind. By all appearances and indications David Frankel‘s Collateral Beauty (Warner Bros., 12.16) is one of VanDerWerff’s sad white guy movies, except the sad white dude is Will Smith.

The recently-popped trailer seems to fit VanDer Werff’s description to a T: “A white guy with enough of a financial cushion to contemplate his inner life realizes just how empty it is. (He probably lives somewhere in the Northeast.) He tries to fill the void with other things but continually fails. The thought keeps gnawing at him, until he returns to some sort of foundational trauma that made him who he is. With the help of others, he moves past the trauma and has a chance at something new — not necessarily better, but new.”

I don’t know if Smith’s Collateral Beauty character gets past his sadness and experiences some kind of third-act rebirth, but the trailer sure indicates this.

Basic compassion demands an acknowledgement of today’s 15-year anniversary of the 9/11 massacre. The memories are seared deep and we’ll never stop recalling them. In a strange way I’ve always regretted not being in Manhattan that day. I’ll never forget how it felt with the film fraternity up in Toronto, and everyone huddling together in a kind of daze. I recall standing on the corner of Bay and Bloor Street and telling myself over and over, “This is the new Pearl Harbor.” My strongest recollection is everyone (including Brian De Palma) staring at the video footage from the lobby of the Cineplex Odeon, and some of us (myself included) still going to TIFF films after the news broke.

Yesterday a friend sent me this TIME essay about Richard Drew’s capturing of that legendary photo of the upside-down guy.

I posted a similar shot of a guy in mid-fall on the one-year anniversary. Later that day a big-name critic wrote and said I’d crossed a line. I’ve always been of two minds regarding the 9/11 horrors. On one hand I understand the feelings of people who don’t want to remember things too vividly; on the other I think it’s fundamentally wrong to heavily edit or smother the reality of what happened, at least for those who might want to go there.

Posted on 9.9.11: “I’ll be appalled for the rest of my life that my Reel.com editor (whose name I’m not going to mention) chose to summarize the column that I wrote from the Toronto Film Festival on the evening of 9.11.01 as follows: “Jeffrey Wells reports on the toll that current events have had on the Toronto Film Festival, and tries to muster enthusiasm for films that have screened, including Lantana, Monsoon Wedding, and Last Orders.”

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