As Ben Affleck‘s Live By Night began screening last night for elite press, Hollywood Elsewhere was hanging at The Porch with the Key West Film Festival guys — founder & chairman Brooke Christian, director of programming Michael Tuckman, p.r. honcho Julia Pacetti — and Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn.

It’s 12:55 pm now. Sunny and around 80 degrees, and more than a little humid. I’ve rented my bicycle. I’m sitting inside Coffee Plantation, a nice little cappucino-and-croissant bungalow on Caroline Street, as I tap this out. Key West is basically about peace, flora, shade, sea air, serenity and Bahamian architecture to die for. Not to mention evening fragrances that will transform your basic outlook on life. What better place to hang or have a film festival, for that matter?

Adjacent to Key West cemetery.

Remember when people use to sweep their sidewalks and patios with brooms? Before the invention of obnoxious leaf-blowers, I mean. Their relentless use has turned Los Angeles into a kind of coughing, motor-revving hell, and all because Latino groundskeepers swear by them.

Indiewire critic Eric Kohn hanging last night at Key West’s The Porch.

Most of us regard zoos as penitentiaries for animals. I riffed on this when I wrote about Cameron Crowe‘s We Bought A Zoo (i.e., We Bought A Jail). But Niki Caro‘s The Zookeeper’s Wife, a World War II drama set in Poland, isn’t about the glories of running a zoo but saving the lives of Jews who might have otherwise been exterminated by Nazis. Boilerplate: “A true story about the Warsaw Zoo keepers Jan and Antonina Żabiński (Johan Heldenbergh, Jessica Chastain) who saved many human and animal lives during World War II by hiding them in animal cages.” Written by Angela Workman, based on the non-fiction book of same name by Diane Ackerman, costarring Michael McElhatton and Daniel Bruhl.

The idea of Ben Affleck‘s Live By Night becoming a Best Picture contender may or may not penetrate among Academy and guild members, but it definitely impresses in a below-the-line sense — cinematography, editing, production design, etc. This, at least, is the view of Variety‘s Kris Tapley, who attended last night’s DGA screening for elite critics and blogaroos.

“It makes sense that Warner Bros. is leading the conversation on Live By Night with crafts,” Tapley wrote, “because all of those bits and pieces — as well as the sound design — are what could register in the upcoming awards race.”

Critic friend who attended last night’s screening: “I was thinking the whole time that I bet you would have liked it because it has that very specific, meticulous kind of directing that both of us really love.”

Affleck said during a pre-screening schmoozer and during a post-screening q & a that “the idea for him was ‘blending a throwback vibe with modern energy,'” Tapley writes. “And that’s fitting: In Lehane’s novel, Affleck has found a gangster yarn akin to the ’30s and ’40s genre pictures that inspired him, but one with a fresh face. It moves from the Depression-hit Boston metropolis to the melting pot of Tampa, Florida (filmed largely in Georgia), giving Affleck’s below-the-line team a rich opportunity.”

All year long Warner Bros. has been cagey or iffy or hazy-minded (choose one of the three) about positioning the film as an Oscar contender. Last June they abandoned the previously announced October 2017 release to January ’17, which everyone know meant some kind of platform release later this year. But WB declined to formally announce the film’s 12.25.16 platform release until relatively recently.

Jon Stewart, currently plugging a new Daily Show oral history book, needs to memorize a page or two from the Michael Shannon playbook. Say it again: when Stewart and Stephen Colbert organized their 2010 Rally to Restore Sanity And/Or Fear, he was essentially saying he was open to projecting and persuading on a mass national scale. This translated as “I might conceivably run for office some day…who knows?” Stewart could have launched a Presidential campaign after announcing in February 2015 that he was leaving The Daily Show, and — make no mistake — he definitely could have won. But he decided to spend time with his kids instead. We all have our paths to walk and destinies to fulfill, but as far as I’m concerned Stewart is almost a kind of villain for not rising to the challenge. Again: If Stewart had managed to beat Hillary Clinton in the primaries and become the Democratic nominee, Trump wouldn’t now be the president elect.

Hollywood Elsewhere will be attending the 2016 Key West Film Festival between now and Sunday. My flight from Miami touched down at Key West airport around 7 pm, give or take. The festival is putting me up at the Caribbean-styled Duval House (815 Duval Street). It’s very good to be here. The tropical air is warm and fragrant and soothing. I’m about to hit the opening-night party at the Audobon House.

Earlier this evening Jessica Chastain asked film crickets on Twitter what advice they might have for a woman looking to break into this devotional calling or difficult racket or however you want to describe it. She got the usual responses — knock on doors, start your own blog, submit pieces to established publications, network your ass off, live online, attend the best film festivals, get to know the community, knock on more doors, etc. Total boilerplate.

So I decided to insert three suggestions that no one else had mentioned. One, make double-sure that you’re a talented enough writer to even give it a shot because if you’re not innately talented to some degree, you’re wasting your time. Two, look at yourself in the mirror and ask if writing about movies matters more to you than anything else, including earning a half-decent salary or even eating regularly. And three, don’t even try to break in unless you’re willing to eat shit — i.e., to do whatever it takes without any thought to how well or poorly you’re being paid, or if you’re being paid at all. You need to be tenacious as fuck, and that might mean having to write for free or next to no money and enduring all kinds of deprivations for a year or two or even longer. Because that’s what I had to do.

And then I thought of something else, which was that it would help if you’re “fetching” along with being a good networker. And right away the p.c. brownshirts, in this instance led by anal-cavity-residing Indiewire critic David Ehrlich, jumped all over me for using the “f” word. I was an animal, they felt, for suggesting that presenting a nice, attractive image at parties and editorial meetings and film festival panels and whatnot will help you, as will being a good schmoozer and chit-chatter. Ehrlich was appalled that anyone would even suggest that an attractive appearance might have something to do with how you’re received in mixed company or by potential employers.

Well, appearances do matter along with all the other stuff. In any profession an attractive or at least a pleasant-looking person coupled with all the other necessary traits will tend to experience better career progress than that of a brilliant job applicant who looks like Charles Laughton‘s Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame or Shirley Stoller in Seven Beauties or The Honeymoon Killers.

Do you have to be moderately attractive or pleasant-looking to make it in the film critic realm? For the most part, no. Not that many critics are lookers. But it sure as shit doesn’t hurt, and that’s all I was saying.

I’m not saying Hollywood Elsewhere’s flight to Miami-Key West is hugely uncomfortable. I can take it.  Nobody sitting in coach expects any longish flight to be pleasurable — you just have to tolerate the experience like a man.  It’s just that (a) the wifi that I paid $17 to use is faint (the laptop won’t connect) and moody and basically a gyp, (b) my seat was made for a guy the size of Pee–Wee Herman, (c) the 70something gray-haired guy in front of me has reclined his seat so far back that I can’t use the MacBook Air, (d) the awful Ben–Hur remake is playing on two or three nearby mini-screens, and (e) we’re over Houston with around two hours to go, which is two hours too long as far as my inner impatient teenager is concerned.  

“This country’s filled with ignorant jackasses. The big red dildo running through the middle  of our country needs to be annexed to be its own country of moronic assholes.  You can call it the United States of Moronic Fucking Assholes.  I don’t know how people got so goddam stupid.  It’s the worst thing that’s ever happened.  The worst.  Donald Trump is going to destroy civilization as we know it, and the earth, and all because these [moronic fucking assholes] don’t have any idea why they’re alive.” — the great Michael Shannon on the Trump electoral tragedy, as quoted by Ebert.com’s Nick Allen on 11.15.  [No embed links due to shitty wifi on my American Airlines flight to Miami, resulting in my MacBook Air being unable to connect despite my having paid $17 to use AA’s service.  And yet the iPhone connects for some reason.]

40 years after the fact, Carrie Fisher has revealed that Han Solo was putting the high hard one to Princess Leia for three months during the 1976 filming of the original Star Wars in England. The salacious details will be alluded to but most likely not revealed in Fisher’s “The Princess Diarist,” which hits stores on 11.22. Fisher reportedly describes the affair as “intense”, a presumed allusion to her emotional state more than her costar’s. The 33 year-old Ford was married at the time (big deal) and was probably telling himself “life is short, love affairs are shorter…oh, sweet nectar of eros!” Fisher was a ripe 19. It just goes to show that the camera doesn’t necessarily absorb  chemistry between costars, as no one has ever sensed a drop of the stuff while watching what later became known as Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope. The sexual tension between Han and Leia breathes and heaves in The Empire Strikes Back, of course, but that was three years later. Fisher’s confession does seem to lend a certain decades-old poignancy to that legendary Empire scene when Princess Leia says “I love you!” as Han is descending into the carbon-freeze pit and Han says “we lived, baby…we went there.”

I spoke early Tuesday evening with the always glowing and effervescent Greta Gerwig, who’s in town for a week to discuss her four 2016 supporting performances — principally those in Pablo Larrain‘s Jackie and Mike Mills‘ 20th Century Women, which are award-season headliners, as well as Rebecca Miller‘s respected Maggie’s Plan and Todd Solondz‘s irksome Wiener-Dog.

Afterwards she’ll return to life in New York but more importantly to 20 weeks of editing on Lady Bird, a Sacramento-based dramedy (“Sorta sad, sorta funny, a lotta talking”) that she wrote and recently directed, and which costars Saoirse Ronan and costars Laurie Metcalf, Lucas Hedges and Tracy Letts. It’s about a 21 year-old woman’s final year of living with her parents, and will probably play the 2017 fall festival circuit.

Greta Gerwig at WeHo’s Le Pain Quotidien on Tuesday, 11.15, at roughly 6:10 pm.

I’ve felt an easy groove with Gerwig since 2010, or after catching her gentle sad-sack performance in Noah Baumbach‘s brilliant Greenberg, which I regard as her first knockout punch. We’ve interviewed two or three times since and run into each other here and there, including a random encounter at a Film Forum screening of L’Avventura in 2013.

We talked a bit about Lady Bird, and then Manchester By The Sea (she’s as big a fan as I) and Lucas Hedges and his principal Best Supporting Actor competition Mahershela Ali, and how gratified Greta feels that Moonlight director Barry Jenkins, whom she’s known for a long while, is coming into his own, and about Fences and Manchester costar Stephen Henderson, and about the Metrograph and hwo disheartewned she feels about more and more people watching movies on devices rather than in theatres, and about making Jackie in Paris last fall (shooting began just after the terrorist attacks) and how she wound up hiring a lot of the crew people she met during the making of 20th Century Women for Lady Bird. Plus 10 or 12 other fly-by topics.

My favorite Gerwig performances in this order: (1) spirited Brooke in Mistress America, (2) the indefatigable Frances in Frances Ha, (3) the endaring Florence Marr in Greenberg and (4) pink-haired Abbie in 20th Century Women. She’s fine in Jackie but is under-utilized and conservatively corseted in early ’60s hair and clothing.

Again, the mp3.

How repellent can a strange bedfellows engagement comedy be? How unfunny? James Franco isn’t an asshole (I’ve met him a few times — he’s a good egg) but he sure does play assholes a lot! Why Him? is basically a reversal of the Meet The Parents formula only this time the future son-in-law is the oppressive grotesque figure and the peevish milquetoast dad is the victim. I would rather endure a ten-day stomach virus than sit through this thing. Trailers always make films seem more lowest-common-denominator than they actually are, but director John Hamburg (Along Came Polly, I Love You, Man) is obviously a lowballer.

The big Academy premiere for Kenneth Lonergan‘s Manchester By The Sea happened last night. There was a big after-party, of course. (North Shore working-class food — clam chowdah, baked beans, crab cakes, potato salad, etc.) I was roaming around with a friend, and for a short while we chatted with costar Lucas Hedges, who is totally locked for a Best Supporting Actor nomination. Sharp dude, just turned 20, friendly, slick-looking suit, preparing to do a play (“Yen“) at the Lucille Lortel.

Manchester By The Sea costar and all-but-assured Best Supporting Actor nominee Lucas Hedges.

About a minute into our three-way it hit me that my pal wasn’t following rule #2 from Ms. Manners’ Manual of Normal Celebrity or Filmmaker Chit-Chat (2016 edition). Rule #1 is that your opening remarks must express one of the following: (a) a deeply personal emotional reaction to the film, (b) generic gushing praise, (c) an inside-baseball industry observation about box-office or awards prospects, or (d) admiration for some outfit or garment that the celebrity or filmmaker is wearing. My friend chose (a) but she broke rule #2 by not expressing her thought within 15 to 20 seconds, 30 at the outside. She took well over 90 seconds.

Why 30 seconds max and preferably 20, or better yet 15 or even 10? Because industry parties are not The Charlie Rose Show. They’re about sound bytes, banter, ping-pong. If you have something extra-heavy to say, fine, but do it within 20 or 30. But my friend went on for over 90, and the expression on Hedges’ face as she passed the 45-second mark was priceless. His face was basically saying “okay, we’re going deep and heavy here, and that’s cool but…wow, okay, she’s still developing her thought, throwing in a little back-story, not even close to the crescendo…but hang in there, hold your eye contact, show respect, let her run with it.”