Names and faces

• Former Secretary of State John Kerry drew applause from the audience of HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher after comparing President Donald Trump to a teenage girl. Kerry appeared on the show Friday to promote his new memoir, Every Day is Extra. Maher brought up a Trump tweet from the day before, in which the president had accused the former secretary of state of having "illegal meetings" with the Iranian government. "BAD!" Trump wrote at the end of the tweet. "What did you do, John F. Kerry, that was bad?" Maher asked Kerry. "I think I told the truth," Kerry replied. "He's the first president that I know of who spends more time reading his Twitter 'likes' than his briefing books or the Constitution of the United States." The crowd cheered, and Kerry continued to lament what he thought was the deleterious effect of Trump's lies on American democracy. "Unfortunately, we have a president, literally, for whom 'the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth' is three different things. And you don't even know what they are," Kerry said. "I don't want to get into a real riff on this, but I gotta tell you ... he really is the rare combination of an 8-year-old boy -- I mean, he's got the maturity of an 8-year-old boy with the insecurity of a teenage girl. It's just who he is."

Peter Farrelly's Deep South road-trip movie Green Book won the Toronto International Film Festival's audience award on Sunday, putting it on an envious path to the Oscars. The event's People's Choice Award is one of the most closely watched of the fall festival circuit because it often corresponds with awards-season success. In the past decade, every People's Choice winner from the Toronto festival has scored a best-picture nomination at the Academy Awards. Few pundits pegged Green Book as an awards favorite ahead of its world premiere in Toronto. It is, after all, directed by one-half of the sibling duo best known for comedies like There's Something About Mary and Dumb and Dumber. But the audience displayed a rapturous response to Green Book, which stars Mahershala Ali as a classical pianist on a concert tour of the Deep South in the 1960s. Viggo Mortensen plays the Italian-American bouncer hired to drive him while relying on The Green Book, the guide for black-friendly hotels and restaurants. The first runner-up for the film festival's top prize was Barry Jenkins' James Baldwin adaptation If Beale Street Could Talk. The second runner-up was Alfonso Cuaron's black-and-white neo-realistic drama Roma. Last year's audience award in Toronto went to Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.

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AP Pool

John Kerry

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Christopher Katsarov/The Canadian Press via AP

Director Peter Farrelly arrives ahead of the screening of "Green Book" during the Toronto International Film Festival in Toronto, on Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2018.

A Section on 09/17/2018

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