How have I visited the Palm Springs area…what, ten or twelve times this century and not, until this afternoon, visited Indian Canyons, which is bursting right now with the most luscious greens and rocky sandy browns mine eyes hath seen the glory of since…I was going to say Morocco or southern Spain but this is better.

As it was unseasonably warm in Los Angeles yesterday, I presumed the desert would follow suit. So without investing a great deal of thought and feeling the jazz in my veins (i.e., that smooth hepcat samurai vibe), the SRO and I drove out to Palm Springs last night and discovered temps in the high 40s. Fantastic! A two and a half hour drive for nothing.

The idea was to hunker down in one of my favorite ’50s-style hotels, but the place I reserved (the Skylark, which I thought I knew) turned me off when I pulled up, and all the other joints I like (i.e., have stayed at before) were booked. And in bone-chilling jacket weather to boot.

The Ace Hotel (for under-40 hipsters) turned out to be an offense against God and man, charging $270 for a shitty shoebox that smelled like stale booze and cigarettes. The Motel 6 next door was even worse — the leftover aroma of farting, sandal-wearing, cigarette-smoking asshats who’ve stayed there for years on end. 

We finally settled on the Caliente Tropics, which tried to charge me $210 before I pointed out that their iPhone price was $149 — dicks. And then the shower didn’t work. Plus I love staying right on Palm Canyon Drive, which is like staying next to the Santa Monica Freeway in terms of howling-demon traffic noise and the banshee screech of truck brakes.

I’m very, very sorry we did this. I feel like such a doofus. I guess I’ll catch Logan somewhere and then do some hiking. The Palm Springs area blows without the heat.

This is several days old and yesterday’s news, but a 2.28 Hollywood Reporter piece by Stephen Galloway that derided the echo chamber of Oscar punditry and the failure of the know-it-alls to foresee Moonlight‘s Best Picture win (“Why the Pundits Were Wrong With the La La Land Prediction“) was wrong in two respects.

One, whoda thunk it? Even now I find it perplexing that Moonlight won. A finely rendered, movingly captured story of small-scale hurt and healing, it’s just not drillbitty or spellbinding enough. I wasn’t the least bit jarred, much less lifted out of my seat, when I first saw it at Telluride. It’s simply a tale of emotional isolation, bruising and outreach and a world-shattering handjob on the beach…Jesus, calm down.

As I was shuffling out of the Chuck Jones I kept saying to myself “That‘s a masterpiece?” (Peter Sellars, sitting in front of me, had insisted it was before the screening started.) If there was ever a Best Picture contender that screamed “affection and accolades but no cigar,” it was Moonlight. And the Oscar pundits knew that. Everyone did. So I don’t know what happened — I really don’t get it. I’ve already made my point about Moonlight in the Ozarks. It’s just a head-scratcher.

And two, Galloway’s contention that only pipsqueaks with zero followings were predicting or calling for a Moonlight win is wrong. As I noted just after the Oscars, esteemed Toronto Star critic Pete Howell and Rotten Tomatoes‘ Matt Atchity were predicting a Moonlight win on the Gurus of Gold and Gold Derby charts. As I also noted, Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone hopped aboard the Moonlight train at the very last millisecond, although she stuck to La La Land for her Gurus of Gold ballot. These are facts, and Galloway’s dismissing Howell and Atchity was an unfair oversight.

During the 2015 Spirit Awards ceremony I asked director Ira Sachs, whose Love Is Strange (’14) had been nominated for Best Feature and Best Screenplay, about his plans for a Montgomery Clift HBO biopic that he had begun to write with Mauricio Zacharias. He said it was a bit too early to discuss but I saw something in his eyes as we chatted — Clift’s saga was somehow too big for him.

(l.) Matt Bomer; (r.) the late Montgomery Clift.

Sachs has alway struck me as a somber internalist, a low-key indie guy, a dweeby explorer of quiet intimate material. He could never be mistaken for a director who feeds off the glare of the marquee, and Clift was and is “big” — a tragic brooding hunk (at least before the car accident), a famously closeted icon after his death and easily the charismatic equal of Marlon Brando and James Dean in the ’50s. Call me crazy but I heard a voice that said “Clift might be beyond Sachs’ grasp…they just don’t seem like a match.”

Well, here it is two years later and I haven’t heard zip about the Clift project, which was going to be a big score for Normal Heart costar and Clift look-alike Matt Bomer, and not a word about Sachs and Zacharias’ screenplay. But maybe I’m out of the loop so I’m openly asking the producers — Anonymous Content’s Tony Lipp and Alix Madigan, Pier 3 Pictures’ Michael Din and Larry Moss — what’s up. It just seems a shame that they might — I say “might” — have dropped the ball on this.

The verb “tap”, as in (a) tap dancing, (b) tapping a person on their shoulder or (c) tapping their Trump Tower phone lines, isn’t spelled with two pees. Remember Hollywood Wiretap? It was founded by former Variety guy Tom Tapp. Maybe he has something to do with this.

Without trashing PwC’s Brian Cullinan and Martha Ruiz (who have been banished to Hollywood hell for the rest of their lives) and without stating again what a twisted kerfuffle it was or announcing measures that will prevent last Sunday’s debacle from ever happening again or anything along those lines, let’s try to appreciate what a truly great TV moment this was — a live, nutty calamity that allowed everyone concerned to behave like persons of honor and dignity (except for Cullinan and Ruiz, of course) and show what they were made of, especially La La Land producer Jordan Horowitz — he will probably never experience a prouder public moment in his life. Only 36 years old and the man is a living legend.

“I’ve just gotten back from a Sunday evening screening of King Kong, and the second and third acts of this monkey movie are pretty damned exciting in an emotional, giddily absurd, logic-free adrenalized way, and so I have a limited apology to offer to Peter Jackson.

“You aren’t that bad, bro. You got a few things right this time. The movie is going to lift audiences out of their seats. And I need to say ‘I’m sorry’ for bashing you so much because you’ve almost whacked the ball out of the park this time.

“King Kong is too lumpy and oddball during the first hour to be called exquisite or masterful, but there’s no denying it pretty much wails from the 70-minute mark until the grand bittersweet finale at the three-hour mark.”

I apologize for not trashing this bloated, over-cranked mess of a film. I should have manned up and called it what it was, but I caved to some extent. I could apologize for the rest of my life for this, and who would care? I fucked up and I’ll never be forgiven, and I shouldn’t be.

Similar-type hat, same blue coat and spinster shoes, same kit bag…safe and sound. The question is “did Saving Mr. Banks screw the mystique?” Julie Andrews was 27 or 28 when she performed the title role in Disney’s Mary Poppins 53 or 54 years ago. Emily Blunt, the star of Rob Marshall‘s currently-shooting sequel Mary Poppins Returns, is a bit older (34) but no matter. The ’64 film was set in 1910, but the sequel takes place 25 years later as the now grown-up Jane and Michael Banks (Emily Mortimer, Ben Whishaw) are visited by their former nanny and spiritual guide following a family tragedy of some kind. The script is by David Magee (Life of Pi, Finding Neverland); the costars are Lin-Manuel Miranda, Julie Walters, Meryl Streep and Colin Firth. Dick Van Dyke and Angela Lansbury are in for cameos.

Every so often a marginal, not-bad genre film released in the early part of the year becomes the recipient of wild over-praise by the foo-foos.

Last year it was Dan Trachtenberg‘s 10 Cloverfield Place, which prompted some to suggest that John Goodman or even the highly actorish Mary Elizabeth Winstead had delivered an award-worthy performance. I called bullshit on this early on — needless to add no one said boo about Cloverfield down the road.

This year’s recipient is Jordan Peele‘s Get Out. The fact that New Yorker foo-foo king Richard Brody is calling it not only “great” but “a recapturing of the spirit of the films of Luis Bunuel” underlines this phenomenon.

Opening graph: “In Get Out, one of the great films by a first-time director in recent years, Jordan Peele borrows tones and archetypes from horror movies and thrillers, using them as a framework for the most personal of experiences and ideas: what it’s like to be a young black man in the United States today.”

This is actually a valid point. A critic in 1956 could have similarly said that Don Siegel‘s Invasion of the Body Snatchers borrows tones and archetypes from horror movies and thrillers to dramatize what it’s like to be a middle-class, numbed-out conformist in the Eisenhower era. The difference, I believe, is that Siegel’s film is significantly smarter — better written, more intelligently plotted — than Peele’s. Siegel played it straight while Peele is going for (but doesn’t quite find) John Carpenter-like genre chuckles.

You want some serious Carpenter-style humor? Consider some of the jokes in Assault on Precinct 13 (’76), especially the moment when Darwin Joston‘s Napoleon Wilson and Tony Burton‘s Wells play potatoes to decide who will risk his life first — that one gag is fifteen times funnier than anything in Get Out.

In the just-released trailer for Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales (Disney, 5.26), it takes a full minute for Johnny Depp‘s Captain Fatass to make an appearance. Before that it mostly explains why Javier Bardem‘s Captain Armando Salazar has it in for the fellow once known as Captain Jack; it also shows clips of costars Brenton Thwaites, Geoffrey Rush and Kaya Scodelario. Depp, presumably augmented by the slimfast software that helped Ben Affleck to look leaner in Live By Night, finally shows up at 1:01 and is seen in three or four clips. You can’t blame Disney marketers for wanting to (a) keep Depp hidden for as long as possible and (b) refining the CG until it looked right.

I saw the story yesterday about Tom Hanks having presented the White House press corps with yet another espresso maker. (He gifted them with an expresso machine in 2004 and again in ’10 when he learned that the first unit had broken down.) Hanks included a note with the just-delivered gift that read “To the White House Press Corps — Keep up the good fight for truth, justice, and the American way…especially for the truth part.” But I ignored the story because I couldn’t figure out what a cartoon depicting raggedy-ass World War II dogfaces (an image pasted on Hanks’ note) had to do with calling Donald Trump on his bullshit. I still don’t get the connection.

Wells to Hanks: Can you help me out, brah? You’re into the lore of the noble fighting men of World War II — I get that — but what does that have to do with White House journalism? I’m not trying to be an asshole — I really and truly don’t get it.

Whatever Kong: Skull Island turns out to be, it definitely has a disciplined running time: 115 minutes (118 minutes with closing credits). That’s only 11 minutes longer than the 1933 King Kong (104 minutes with overture) and 72 minutes shorter than Peter Jackson‘s elephantine 2005 remake, which ran 187 minutes.

“I wanted to keep it short,” director Jordan Vogt-Roberts has told Miami Herald interviewer-critic Rene Rodriguez. “I’m fascinated by how bloated movies have gotten these days. Fargo was 95 minutes. I miss the days of brevity in films. You’ve got Transformers movies that are three hours. I wanted this movie to be fun.”

“Although the film is a tentpole picture designed to prop up a huge franchise,” Rodriguez notes, “the movie is filled with artistic touches that make it feel personal and unique. There’s a genuine artistic vision here, from the plentiful improvisations (most of them by John C. Reilly) to throwaway but lovely shots, such as a dragonfly flying in front of a fleet of military helicopters, looking like it’s one of the choppers.

JVR: “My mantra while making the movie was ‘elevate beyond expectation.’ I wanted to avoid anything that felt derivative, because otherwise why would anyone go see this movie?”