American #287 (Miami to Los Angeles) is finally preparing to leave after a 45-minute delay caused by a rain puddle.   (That’s what they said.). And I can’t tap out two or three stories during the five-hour flight because the plane — a nice, newish-feeling 767 — has no onboard wifi. Thanks very much, American! Landing around 5:30 pm Pacific.  Update:  It’s 5:55 pm. Arrived LAX around 15 minutes ago.  Torture.  Okay, not really as I spent most of the flight submerged in that “great public bath, that vat, that spa, that regional physiotherapy tank, that White Sulphur Springs, that Marienbad, that Ganges, that River Jordan for a million souls” that is the Sunday New York Times. (Passage stolen from the opening of Tom Wolfe‘s “The Painted Word.”)

“…won’t be back for many a day…my heart is down, my head is turnin’ round, I had to leave a little girl in Kingston town.” It’s raining cats and dogs in Miami now, and somehow this simple, refreshing meteorological event has caused a delay in the departure of my American flight back to Los Angeles. I hadn’t been to the Miami area since the late ’80s before my just-concluded visit to the Key West Film Festival. I’d forgotten how warm and moist and soothing the tropical air can feel, and how transporting some of the aromas are. I’m essentially saying that nature has a stronger presence down here.   I’m thinking I need to visit Cuba sometime soon. Perhaps the rapidly-approaching Havana Film Festival (12.3 to 12.15)?   Three days ago I met a documentarian who said he’s been to Cuba a few times and knows several people in the Havana film community…maybe.

A beach party was held under the palm trees prior to last night’s Key West Film Festival awards ceremony.

People need to treasure each and every time they get to walk on a tarmac before or after a flight. Because it’s one of those alive-on-the-planet experiences that rarely happen these days.

I just had one of the most relaxing naps of the whole Key West trip on the floor at Miami International Airport, next to gate D44. I prepared my bedding (black leather computer bag, canvas KWFF bag), laid down and caught a full hour’s worth of zees, and felt pretty great after waking. Sometimes the simplest things can turn your day around.

With a final day (i.e., today) remaining in its schedule, the fourth annual Key West Film Festival handed out awards last night to filmmakers and name-brand auteurs at the Casa Marina, the Waldorf Astoria hotel on the beach. Producer-director and former Miamian Brett Ratner, benefactor of the festival’s Florida Film Student Showcase, took a bow and handed out four or five trophies. (At a pre-event beach party Ratner sidestepped questions about Warren Beatty‘s Howard Hughes film, which he’s a producer of, except to say it would be out in 2016.) Honoree and current Washington Post exec editor Marty Baron, the quiet-spoken leader of the Boston Globe‘s predator-priest investigation who is well portrayed by Liev Schreiber in Spotlight, spoke about the value of vigilant shoe-leather journalism. Directors Paul Verhoeven and Amy Berg (whose Janis: Little Girl Blue played at the festival) took bows, as did festival founder & chairman Brooke Christian and KWFF director of programming Michael Tuckman. Hollywood Elsewhere once again thanks KWFF for a rich and nourishing visit, and looks forward to returning. This is a classy, very well-run festival run by good people who “get it.” (Apologies for the substandard photos — I should have left my seat and gotten closer.)

Janis: Little Girl Blue director Amy Berg onstage during last night’s KWFF award ceremony.

Producer-director Brett Ratner, benefactor of the festival’s Florida Film Student Showcase.

Hollywood filmmakers are learning not to mess with LGBT activists, particularly the transgender wing. Ben Stiller‘s Zoolander 2 is being media-slapped as we speak over what some LGBTs regard as a demeaning satire of a possibly transgender guy, played by Benedict Cumberbatch. The trouble started when Cumberbatch’s character, a model named All (as in “all in”), appeared in a recently-popped trailer for the 2.12.16 Paramount release. A petition against the film has reportedly gathered 5800 signatures. The petition, apparently penned by activist Sarah Rose, claims that Cumberbatch’s character “is clearly portrayed as an over-the-top, cartoonish mockery of androgyne/trans/non-binary individuals. This is the modern equivalent of using blackface to represent a minority. The last thing the transgender community needs at this moment is another harmful, cartoonish portrayal of our lives.” Question #1: apparently LGBT is a dated acronym as the newbie is LGBTQ — lesbian gay bisexual transgender queer. I don’t mean to sound like a clueless asshole but what’s the difference between gay and queer again? Question #2: To the best of my knowledge minstrel-show actors wore blackface not to demeaningly simulate the appearance of “a minority” but precisely and intentionally to demean African-Americans…right?

HE Best Picture Dream Picks (i.e., in this order & to hell with tea-leaf-reading predictions with The Revenant and Joy put aside for the time being): Spotlight, Mad Max: Fury Road, Brooklyn, Beasts of No Nation, Love & Mercy, Son of Saul, Carol, Everest, The Martian, Asghar Farhadi‘s About Elly, the last 25 minutes of The Walk.

HE Hardball Best Picture Predictions (obviously without having seen The Revenant and Joy): Spotlight, The Revenant (because I can feel it), Joy (ditto), The Martian (popcorn), Room, Brooklyn, Carol. Mystifying Add-Ons: Bridge of Spies, Steve Jobs.

Variety‘s Gordon Cox has reported about yesterday’s visit to the Paley Center for Media by Sony honcho Tom Rothman. It contains three sage observations:

Quote #1: “The myth that movies are redeemed in ancillary markets is really not true. If they ignore it in the theater, they’re going to ignore it later. You’re dead, and then you’re deader.”

Quote #2: Rothman noted that “back when he was running production at 20th Century Fox, the ultimate risk inherent in James Cameron’s Avatar wasn’t the 3D or the blue-skinned characters with tails or any of the other things people fretted over. ‘The risk in Avatar was it was original,’ Rothman said. ‘It wasn’t based on anything with a core fan base.'” In other words, it was execution-dependent — said to be easily the most horrific term in the vocabulary of a 21st Century production executive.

Quote #3: “We made a film this fall, one of the films I’m most proud of in my career, a film that Robert Zemeckis made called The Walk. Got incredible reviews, it was incredibly experiential, it opened the New York Film Festival. And nobody alive gave a fuck.” Correction: the easy-lay crowd gave it a mixed-positive pass, but discerning critics thought it mostly sucked…except for the final 25 minutes, which were pretty great.

Last night I re-watched a good portion of Paul Verhoeven‘s Showgirls at the Key West Theatre & Community Stage. Adam Nayman’s revisionist book about this reviled cult film (which was selling at the KWTCS and at Key West Island Books) tries to resurrect the rep a la F.X. Feeney going to bat for Heaven’s Gate, but Showgirls is just as ghastly and indigestible as it seemed 20 years ago. Almost every line offends in some way, and some of the performances (like Kyle MacLachlan‘s) are somewhere between comically and demonically awful. But I love Verhoeven — easily one of the most likable and charming directors I’ve ever spoken with or listened to. (My first chat with him happened at a party in Cannes in ’92.) Hayman and Verhoeven did a 30-minute q & a following the screening, and everyone went home in a good mood. Verhoeven’s favorite memory: the audience anticipating en masse Peter Weller‘s response at the end of Robocop when the corporate chief says “nice shootin’, son….what’s your name?”

Critic-author Adam Nayman, director Paul Verhoeven following last night’s KWFF screening of Showgirls.

Key West Marina — Saturday, 11.21, 8:20 am.

It was so peaceful this morning inside Harpoon Harry’s around 7:20 am, when I strolled in for an omelette du fromage and some fruit. And then right around 8 am, the short and sandal-wearing tourist mob came in…chatter-chatter-chatter-yakkety-yakkety-yakkety-yak.

I’ll be hitting Pepe’s tomorrow morning…maybe. Come to think of it, maybe not because it doesn’t open until 8 am and you know what that means.

In yesterday’s (11.20) address about responding to the Paris terror attacks, Hillary Clinton said the following: “Islam is not our adversary…Muslims are peaceful and tolerant and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.” I’m somewhere between appalled and horrified at the post-Paris attitudes of Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and Ben Carson about Muslims and Syrian refugees in particular, but Clinton was flat-out wrong. A small but significant percentage of Muslims have openly described themselves as not just intolerant but supporters of the psychopathic barbarism of ISIS

An 11.17 Pew poll states that a small but noteworthy percentage of Muslims in nations with significant Muslim populations support ISIS. 4% of the Arab population in Israel, or roughly 42,000 souls, have a favorable view of that fiendish organization. 5% and 8% of Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank are also pro-ISIS. Positive ISIS numbers among Nigerian Muslims is around 20%, and 12% of Malaysian Muslims feel the same way. And you know that a certain percentage of the “don’t know” crowd are also pro-ISIS — they just don’t want to lay their cards on the table.

The bottom line is that a small percentage of Muslims support ISIS, and that the possibility of a Muslim community harboring or shielding ISIS militants is not, at the very least, a crazy racist notion. This is the fear driving conservatives in this country. I don’t agree with pushing away moderate Muslims or fanning hateful attitudes (which will play right into the ISIS scheme) and I have nothing but compassion for Syrian refugees, but I doubt that the PEW statistics are wrong.

Today I attended a Key West Film Festival PorchChat panel (2:30 to 3:30 pm) titled “Critics on Critics.” Deadline.com’s Brian Brooks moderated; panelists included Washington Post critic Ann Hornaday, Indiewire critic/editor Eric Kohn, CinemaScope critic and Showgirls revisionist/apologist Adam Nayman, Key West Citizen critic Shirrel Rhodes, Wall Street Journal critic Steve Dollar, Newsday/N.Y. Times contributor John Anderson and a well-mannered guy from Miami who wasn’t Rene Rodriguez but was hanging with the Univ. of Miami’s Anna Morgenstern.

Anderson said two things I disagreed with — one, that Suffragette isn’t a good film (it very definitely is) and two, that Abigail Disney‘s The Armor of Light (which is playing at KWFF) is an “important” film that festivalgoers should see. It’s an honest, well-made film but important it’s not — the gist of my Middleburg Film Festival review is that it’s a good-hearted doc about a reprehensible culture (i.e., rightwing gunnies).

Almost two months ago (9.25) former N.Y. Daily News film critic Joe Neumaier interviewed Beasts of No Nation costars Idris Elba and Abraham Attah at the SVA theatre on West 23rd Street. I love the crack and timbre of Elba’s voice, but Attah’s African accent defeats me. (I wish I could say otherwise.) You’ll notice both are wearing suits that closely resemble the famous gray suit worn by Cary Grant in North by Northwest (’59). Technically Grant’s was a lightweight wool Kilgour suit, in a blue/grey fine glen plaid pattern while Elba and Attah’s suits are a lighter silver gray color.

Never has the legend of Cary Grant’s North by Northwest suit been so diminished as when Seth Rogen wore a facsimile for a Vanity Fair Hitchcock tribute piece that run in February ’08.

I was chatting with Sammy, a 20something blonde from Chicago, during last night’s KWFF party at the Ernest Hemingway home. After about a half-hour the guy she came with (a Key West resident whom Sammy befriended when she lived here three or four years ago) walked over. I didn’t get his name but he was tall, good-looking, friendly — let’s call him Tom. The conversation turned to the film festival and Papa, Bob Yari‘s film about Hemingway which had screened earlier in the evening and which none of us had seen. I asked Tom if he’s seen Spotlight, which I said would be opening tomorrow (i.e. today) at the Tropic. “Uhhm, we have something else going on tomorrow,” he said. It’s not a festival film, I said — it’s opening commercially at the Tropic. “Oh, okay,” Tom said. So you’ve never heard of it? “No.” So you’re not much of a movie guy? “I’m a production guy,” he said with a certain pride and joie de vivre — a below-the-liner who works in the area. I asked if he knows about Atlanta being a hot place to shoot due to Georgia tax breaks and Pinewood Studios Atlanta. “Atlanta? Uhm, no,” he said. Inner dialogue: So how does that work, Tom? You’re a South Floridian in the business of making movies and commercials, and yet (a) you don’t have clue #1 about Atlanta being the hottest domestic place for film and TV production jobs and (b) you haven’t even heard of a film with a 97% Rotten Tomatoes rating and which has a reasonably good chance of winning the Best Picture Oscar? Talking to subdued-brain-wave guys is somewhere between stifling and infuriating. How deep is the quicksand?

Ron Howard‘s In The Heart of the Sea (Warner Bros., 12.11) has been trailering for ten months now. I’m close to numb at this point. Is there any possibility that it’s all an elaborate ruse — that Sea is just a series of impressive trailers and not actually a film? All this time it’s been portrayed as a “Chris Hemsworth and his shipmates vs. Moby Dick” thing. But now, suddenly, the focus is on Tom Holland as cabin boy Thomas Nickerson, who will eventually grow into Brendan Gleeson‘s Nickerson who, decades later, tells the Moby Dick source tale to Ben Whishaw‘s Herman Melville. What kind of marketing campaign introduces a new major character after almost a year of trailering, and with less than a month before opening? Something’s off — I can feel it.