As of 8:30 am Pacific the New York Film Critics Circle had given its Best Documentary prize to The Central Park Five, a fine, sturdy, New York-centric doc that nonetheless bothered me for reasons I’ve explained. (No need to dredge it all up again.) And the Best First Film award went to David France‘s How To Survive a Plague. I’m off to a 9 am appointment and won’t be free until 11 am.

On 9.5.12 I sat down with Stephen Holt inside the press lounge of the Toronto Hyatt and spoke of the about-to-begin Toronto Film Festival and the just-concluded Telluride Film Festival. Central Park Five, Amour, Argo, Anna Karenina, The Master. We did about 14 minutes before a TIFF staffer told Holt and camera guy Cody Michaels that no recordings were permitted. (Editing by Kevin Teller.)

For whatever reason this nine-week-old video wasn’t posted until this morning (11.8).

A single eight-day film festival (11.1 through 11.8) showing 16 choice films (among many others) is offering one hell of a feast: A Royal Affair, Beyond The Hills, Central Park Five, Holy Motors, Hitchcock, The Hunt, The Impossible, Kon Tiki, Life of Pi, Post Tenebras Lux, Rise of the Guardians, Reality, Room 237, Rust and Bone, Silver Linings Playbook and West of Memphis. These are the ones I know are worth seeing.

On one level this poster for Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon‘s Central Park Five conveys in a rather clunky way that the doc deals with race. On another it implies that the subject — the 1989 Central Park Jogger rape case and the five Harlem youths who were wrongly found guilty of the crimes and imprisoned for years — will be treated in a stark and simplistic fashion. In a way that’s true. Here’s my Telluride Film Festival review.

MSN critic and HE gadfly Glenn Kenny will be tomorrow’s Oscar Poker guest. We’ll be chatting around 1:30 pm Eastern, by which point he’ll have seen Robert Zemeckis‘s Flight so we’ll get into that along with the awards-season razmatazz. I’d also like to set aside at least part of our discussion for an airing of classic Wells-Kenny grievances. One of them will be the Central Park Five dispute (link #1 and link #2). Please submit any suggestions for other topics of debate.

Yesterday and today I was shoved around and name-called by a team of leftwing p.c. mullahs and fascist feminist thugs. It was caused by their simple-minded inability to understand what I said in yesterday’s post about Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon‘s The Central Park Five, a PBS-funded doc about the 1989 Central Park Jogger rape case that I saw two days ago at the Telluride Film Festival. They were alarmed that I seemed to be making a blanket statement about the victim, a 29 year-old Salamon Brothers employee, having “all but asked” to be attacked. I wrote this because I feel she nearly did by exposing herself to serious danger in a really dicey area at a much-too-late hour.

Let’s try it again because we have some seriously thick people out there who hear only what they want to hear and who truly live to take offense and point fingers. Anyone, man or woman, child or oldster, who jogs solo through the north end of Manhattan’s Central Park at 10:30 pm, which is when and where Trisha Meili, the victim in the above-named case, was assaulted and raped, is flirting with danger. Especially if you don’t look like Muhammud Ali of the ’60s and ’70s or like present-day Jason Statham, and double especially if you’re a young woman who’s not Katniss Everdeen and carrying a hunting knife.

Central Park is a dark unlighted haven for all sorts of goings on after it gets dark, especially after 9 pm. I’m an ex-New Yorker so don’t tell me. There’s an “element” out there, Central Park is not exactly flooded with cops, and bad guys can obviously hide in the dark between bushes and trees and wait to pounce. Anyone with half a brain knows this. Trust me — tourists from Missouri and Alabama and Virginia know this. If you must run through the park after dark you need to stay within shouting distance of well-lighted areas. You definitely don’t run above 96th Street when the clock goes into double digits. And if you ignore these rules and do what Trisha Meili did that night in April 1989, you’re not “asking for it” but you might as well be for all the caution and common sense you’d be showing.

The reason I brought his up in the first place wasn’t to beat up on poor Trisha Meili, but because I found it irksome that the Burns-McMahon doc never even addressed the fact that it was clearly irresponsible to expose herself to attack, particularly given the fact that New York City in 1989 was something of a racially incendiary culture. That was all it was…until the mullahs and the fascist goons jumped in and tried to turn it into something else.

Earlier today I asked one of them if they felt that late-night solo jogging in Central Park seemed even somewhat safe to them, and if they themselves would do this if they were into jogging. They didn’t answer but the answers are obviously “no” and “no.” Boneheads.

I felt moved but irritated and occasionally infuriated by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon‘s The Central Park Five, a PBS-funded doc about the 1989 Central Park Jogger rape case and the five Harlem youths who were wrongly found guilty of the crimes and imprisoned for years — a travesty. I saw the two-hour film yesterday afternoon at the Telluride Film Festival and subsequently discussed it during yesterday’s Oscar Poker podcast.

I could write thousands of words about this but let’s just deal with the basics and my problems with the doc.

The Central Park Jogger case was about (a) an assault and rape of Trisha Meili, at the time a 29 year-old Wall Street worker, on 4.19.89, and (b) five coerced and nonsensical video-taped confessions by four innocent black males in their mid teens — Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana and Kharey Wise. (A fifth suspect, Yusef Salaam, “made verbal admissions but refused to sign a confession or make one on videotape,” the Wiki page says.)

There was no proof that the youths were guilty, certainly not from any DNA. The guilty party, a convicted rapist and murderer named Matias Reyes, confessed to the rape in ’02. But the kids having idiotically confessed (even though they recanted a few weeks later) sealed their fate, and they all did serious prison time and had their lives half-ruined. If anyone deserves to be financially compensated for a perversion of justice, it’s these guys. Their lawsuit is currently unresolved. But I was still bothered by the following:

Question #1: It was one thing when one mentally challenged defendant in the West Memphis Three case confessed to having killed three boys, but the mind reels at the idea of four guys who weren’t mentally challenged confessing to the Central Park rape, and with their parents or guardians in the room! Four kids plus four guardian/parents — that’s eight instances of massive stupidity. The kids had been grilled and pressured by NYPD detectives because they’d been involved in a “wilding” incident that same night in which a gang of about 30 kids from their general neighborhood had randomly attacked and beaten up a couple of victims inside the park. But the absurdity of four kids confessing en masse to something they didn’t do because they were tired and wanted to go home is mind-boggling. And the filmmakers barely touch this. It is simply explained that the confessions were coerced. Madness.

Question #2: Why the hell was the victim, Trisha Meili, jogging in the vicinity of 102nd street on a dark road inside the park around 10:30 pm? I know New York City and that is flat-out insane. A sensible single woman shouldn’t jog in Central Park after dusk, period, much less above 96th street, much less above friggin’ 100th street. The only thing she didn’t do was drape a sign over her jogging outfit that said “attack me.” Everybody knows you don’t tempt fate like that. And no one in the film, not a single soul, even mentions this.

Question #3: The five unjustly convicted youths were not blameless angels, although the film tries to indicate this. They were part of a roving gang that was harassing and beating the crap out of anyone they happened to encounter. The five say in the film that they were just watching this activity and going “wow,” but I don’t believe in my gut they were just onlookers. It was the metaphor of a sizable gang of black kids hurting victims at random and the inflaming of this by the media and politicians that got the five convicted as much as anything else, and I resented the film trying to sidestep the likelihood that they were bad-ass teenagers at the time who were up to no good.

Question #4: Not only does Trishna Meili not speak to the filmmakers, but a photo of her isn’t even used, despite her having written a book, “I Am The Central Park Jogger.” Her injuries were so severe and traumatizing that she’s never been able to remember the incident, but to not even explain the whys and wherefores of her absence from the film seems strange. She may not have wanted to be in the film, okay, but why not at least explain that? And why wouldn’t she want to be in the film if she’d written a book about the attack and her recovery? The film doesn’t even run a pertinent quote or two from her book. Incomplete and irksome.

Tomorrow morning I’ll again try to riff through the last three days of Telluride Film Festival viewing (10 films since Friday morning) without getting all bogged down. Frances Ha, The Central Park Five, The Attack, the wifi dead zone that is Mountaintop Village, etc. I got a decent video of Bill Murray tossing off remarks before this evening’s screening of Hyde Park on Hudson , a settled but slight film made with obvious craft and modest ambition, but YouTube uploads take forever where I’m staying so I’ll post it tomorrow morning.

Today Sasha Stone and I recorded a special Telluride-centric Oscar Poker with four guests — Hollywood Reporter columnist Scott Feinberg, Jett Wells, renowed cinematographer Svetlana Cvetko (Inside Job) and editor-screenwriter David Scott Smith. We discussed Ken Burns, David McMahon and Sarah Burns‘ Central Park Five (major criticism), Noah Baumbach‘s Francis Ha, Dror Moreh‘s The Gatekeepers, Pablo Larrain‘s No, Ben Affleck‘s Largo, etc. Here’s a stand-alone mp3 link.

As with all film festivals, Telluride chatter is constantly about what everyone’s seen and felt and heard. After two days of this I’ve heard too many people say that a given film is “really good” or that he/she has “heard really good things” about it. Your brain turns to chewing gum after hearing this 30, 40 times. Last night I began asking chatters to try and express their reactions with a bit more specificity. I don’t think that’s asking too much. I try to gently draw them out.

Best buzz so far: Ben Affleck‘s Argo, Pablo Larrain‘s No, Dror Moreh‘s The Gatekeepers, Wayne Blair‘s The Sapphires, Ken Burns‘ The Central Park Five. Good buzz: Noah Baumbach‘s Frances Ha, Christian Petzold‘s Barbara. Flat or downish buzz: Roger Michell‘s Hyde Park on Hudson, Sally Potter‘s Ginger and Rosa, Ramin Bahrani‘s At Any Price.

Update: I’ve just hit Telluride and I’ve learned that Ben Affleck‘s Argo is indeed playing here, albeit as a sneak preview.

Earlier: I got out the iPhone the instant my Phoenix-to-Durango plane landed (about 50 minutes ago) to review the final Telluride 2012 lineup…and I was soon feeling faint. The blood had drained from my cheeks. This?

Why isn’t David O. Russell‘s Silver Linings Playbook showing here? There’s a reason, of course, but I wanted that kind of film here and it’s not. What happened to the rumor about Trouble With The Curve and a possible Clint drop-by? People were tweeting “wait, wait…this is it?”

No Master, no Malick, no Clint, not even DePalma…no established power-hitters.

In recent years Telluride has become known as an elite, pre-Toronto, first-out-of-the-gate place to sample at least a smattering of award-season contenders. Well, not this year, pally! This year it’s Tom and Gary’s Cool Little Indie-Foreign Festival plus a sampling of Cannes Hand-Me-Downs and Sony Classics servings (Amour, No) and one or two fringies. Roger Michell‘s Hyde Park on Hudson will play here, but who knows what that is besides performances? I guess award season will start in Toronto this year, and Telluride will just be a nice cool place to hang and schmooze with maybe two or three pop-throughs…maybe.

2012 Telluride selections: The Act Of Killing, (d: Joshua Oppenheimer); Amour (d: Michael Haneke); At Any Price (d: Ramin Bahrani); The Attack (d: Ziad Doueiri); Barbara (d: Christian Petzold); The Central Park Five (d: Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, David McMahon); Everyday (d: Michael Winterbottom); Frances Ha (d: Noah Baumbach); The Gatekeepers (d: Dror Moreh); Ginger And Rosa (d: Sally Potter); The Hunt (d: Thomas Vinterberg); Hyde Park On Hudson (d: Roger Michell); The Iceman (d: Ariel Vromen); Love, Marilyn (d: Liz Garbus); Midnight’s Children (d: Deepa Mehta); No (d: Pablo Larraín); Paradise: Love, Austria, (d: Ulrich Seidl); Piazza Fontana (d: Marco Tullio Giordana); A Royal Affair (d: Nikolaj Arcel); Rust & Bone (d: Jacques Audiard); The Sapphires (d: Wayne Blair); Stories We Tell (d: Sarah Polley); Superstar (d: Xavier Giannoli); Wadjda (d: Haifaa Al-Mansour); What Is This Film Called Love? (d: Mark Cousins).

Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon‘s The Central Park Five will play Toronto and may — I say “may” — turn up in Telluride. Obviously another miscarriage-of-justice doc, etc. The trailer shows nothing but almost complete blackness for the first minute or so — ballsy or boring? There’s a pre-Toronto screening happening in Manhattan later this week but not, apparently, in Los Angeles.

“In 1989, five black and Latino teenagers from Harlem were arrested and later convicted of brutally beating and raping a white woman in New York City’s Central Park. New York Mayor Ed Koch called it the ‘crime of the century’ and it remains to date one of the biggest media stories of our time. The five each spent between 6 and 13 years in prison before a shocking confession from a serial rapist and DNA evidence proved their innocence.”