Movie News: Tiger King Cold Case; Safdies Radio; Film Fests Go Online

In today’s Movie News Roundup: Film festivals move online; the Safdie brothers have a new show; a Tiger King call for clues; and the director of How to Survive a Plague isn’t optimistic.

Film Fests Go Online: We wrote about how the San Luis Obispo International Film Festival quickly pivoted to an online festival this year, and how other festivals are doing the same. The online film festivals provide comfort, a sense of normalcy and financial help during a trying time.

Listen to Safdie Radio: Elara, run by filmmakers Josh and Benjamin Safdie, has launched Quar Radio, “the show from the quarantine,” on Elara.fm. The first episode features Wayne Diamond, “the handsome older gentleman from our film Uncut Gems.” It’s great.

Tiger King Cold Case: Chad Chronister, the sheriff of Florida’s Hillsborough County, has tweeted out a request for new leads in the case of millionaire Jack Donald “Don” Lewis, the ex-husband of Tiger King heroine (?) Carole Baskin. Lewis went missing in 1997, and Tiger King villain (?) Joe Maldonado-Passage, who we call by his God-given name, Joe Exotic, accuses her of feeding Lewis to tigers, which she denies.  Anyway, it’s super encouraging that a sheriff solves mysteries by tweeting about them, just like we do.

Adam Schlesinger Hospitalized With COVID-19: There are many stories and tweets today that the wonderful songwriter Adam Schlesinger, who wrote the flawless title song in That Thing You Do, is in a coma. These stories were sourced to a tweet by a fan account, which is (all together now:) not a reliable source for a news story.  Kudos to the actual journalists at Variety who called a reliable source, Schlesinger’s attorney of 25 years, to get an update on his condition. That attorney, Josh Grier, says Schlesinger is on a ventilator and is heavily sedated but is not in a coma.

With so much misinformation out there right now, remember to ignore anything that is poorly cited, poorly sourced, or said by Diamond and Silk.

How to Survive a Plague: Variety spoke to David France, the director of the HIV/AIDS documentary How to Survive a Plague, about the U.S.’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. “We are suffering from a 40-year Republican campaign against the idea of government,” he said. France adds that while he thinks New York City will survive, “I don’t know if America is going to survive this.”

Jordan Doc: ESPN is releasing its Michael Jordan/Chicago Bulls documentary Last Dance early: It will premiere April 19 and then each Sunday until May 17. It was previously expected in June, the New York Post reports.

Zack Snyder’s Cutting Remarks: The director of Batman v. Superman shared some inside secrets about the making of the movie, and what he left out of it. The Hollywood Reporter has the details. Look, we know there’s a lot of online demand to release the Snyder cut of Justice League, but isn’t it kind of more fun to imagine it? Also, more people on Google find us the more we type “Snyder cut,” and we’d feel bad about wasting their time, except they clearly have a lot of it.

Speaking of Batman: We just finally watched Gavin O’Connor’s The Way Back, starring Ben Affleck as an alcoholic construction worker who gets a shot at redemption coaching his high school’s basketball team. O’Connor is a master at taking that kind of simple setup and making it sing. It’s a sincere, unfussy movie we highly recommend, filmed in our character-packed, often beautiful hometown of San Pedro, California. Why are we writing “we” instead of I? Our English teacher at San Pedro High told us that kind of thing was super pretentious.

Here’s a link to a little something we like to call “yesterday’s news.”