Day: November 18, 2017

The annual film panel at the Key West Film Festival happened yesterday afternoon (11.17, 3 pm) at The Porch. With Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn moderating, the panelists included L.A. Times critic Kenneth Turan, Josh Rothkopf of TimeOut New York, Buzzfeed‘s Alison Willmore, Rolling Stone‘s David Fear, Shirrel Rhodes of the Key West Citizen, Miami New Times, Hans Morgenstern of Miami New Times and freelance critics Steve Dollar and Juan Barguin. I was invited to attend but couldn’t make it — earnest apologies.

If I had been Kohn, I would’ve asked the panelists the following: (1) “What’s going to win Best Picture Oscar this year, and why?” (2) “When’s the last time you paid to see a film at a regular theatrical showing at a megaplex, and what were your impressions after doing so?” (3) “So why are there so few really exceptional films this year, and why are the less-than-complete-knockouts getting all the Best Picture attention?” (4) “Without regard to the Oscar race, what has been your personal favorite Best Picture fave, and why?”

(l.) Juan Bargin, (middle) L.A. Times critic Kenneth Turan; (r.) Rolling Stone critic David Fear.

(l. to r.) Dollar, Willmore, Rothkopf, Barguin, Turan, Fear, Kohn.

Steve Dollar, Alison Wilmore, Josh Rothkopf

I know very little about what it takes to be a good stand-up comedian, but I suspect it might be a little bit like writing or working out. You can’t avoid it for 25 years and expect to just jump back in the saddle and be able to perform as well as you did in ’92. It’s not like riding a bicycle. It takes a long while to get your muscles back in shape. If I were to stop writing for a week, I would probably have a hard time getting back into it. If I were to stop for a year, I would have a horrible time resuming. But 25 years? Forget it.

That said, I admire Judd Apatow‘s willingness to jump back in.

Yesterday’s Deadline statement from Get Out director Jordan Peele was apparently a backpedal of some kind. It was apparently released because of what Peele actually said to Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn on the fly when Peele and Kohn spoke earlier this week.

An educated guess would be that Peele got into trouble for what he said to Kohn, and so the statement given to Deadline reads like a mea culpa to the Golden Globes. Peele clearly didn’t realize that Get Out was submitted in the comedy category. It would appear that Universal did that without telling him.

From Kohn’s piece: “At a lunch event for [Get Out] at New York’s Lincoln Ristorante, Peele elaborated on his reservations. ‘The problem is, it’s not a movie that can really be put into a genre box,’ he said in an interview prior to the lunch. ‘Originally, I set out to make a horror movie. I ended up showing it to people and hearing, you know, it doesn’t even feel like horror. It’s in this thriller world. So it was a social thriller.’

“While Universal submitted Get Out as a comedy to the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, Peele clearly had no input into that decision. ‘I don’t think it worked like that,’ he said. ‘I think it was just submitted.’ In fact, submissions are made to individual categories, but the HFPA makes the final decision about which categories each film falls into.

“A rep for Peele did not respond to a request to clarify whether the movie had been submitted as a comedy without his input.”
…

Some guy tried to punk me last night by sending a PDF of what he claimed was the first 55 pages of Quentin Tarantino‘s 1969 “not Manson” script. “Couldn’t get the whole thing,” he wrote. “My source only had a brief moment with it, hoping to get the rest next week.” What he sent was the first episode of John McNamara‘s Aquarius, a two-year-old, semi-fictional NBC series, initially set in Los Angeles of late 1967, about a tough L.A. detective (David Duchovny) searching for the teenaged daughter of an ex-girlfriend, and which portrayed Charles Manson (Gethin Anthony) as the cause of her disappearance.

If I was a bigger watcher of network TV I might’ve spotted it right away, but instead I read it. I was initially intrigued by the big “9” on the cover page (the forthcoming project will be Tarantino’s ninth feature that he’s directed and written on his own) and an early scene in which a character orders “a slice of key lime to go” (Tarantino likes pie), but it was obvious early on that it wasn’t a Tarantino script. None of the characters had any of that swagger attitude. No gabbing, no soliloquies, no trademark loquaciousness. Plus the story’s too densely-packed with incident, and Tarantino isn’t big on punch-punch plotting. He’s basically a playwright who works in film.

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“I was very shaken. He did a bad thing. What he doesn’t deserve is to be lumped in with Roy Moore, Kevin Spacey or Harvey Weinstein. Or Donald Trump. I know the difference between a man who once acted like a dick and a man who is a dick. I know the difference between someone who behaved like a high-schooler and someone who targeted high-schoolers.”

And by the way…

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