UPDATED Thoughts, January 15, 2020: Just caught up with a second viewing of “One Night in Miami.” It is a powerful, well made film. It’s still talky, but I was less bothered by that. All the actors are exceptional. I’m torn among which one I liked best. Regina King has made an exceptional ensemble piece. She is really the star here because she’s taken what was essentially a play performed in one room with four men, and opened it better than I remembered. Eli Goree is just sensational as Muhammad Ali, and Leslie Odom, Jr. — well, it’s not just the singing. His speech about Bobby Womack and the Rolling Stones will land him an Oscar nomination. I was already a huge Aldis Hodge fan, and Kingsley Ben-Adir has got me now, too. Plus, I like any movie Lance Reddick is in. So second time around, I’m an even bigger fan of “One Night in Miami.” It’s certainly a contender for Best Picture.

September 10, 2020: My first TIFF film is Regina King’s “One Night in Miami.” I wanted to love it. Certainly, we all love Regina King and know how important this material is to her. But this is a movie that will play well on Amazon. In theaters, it would have been problematic.

Kemp Powers wrote this play in 2013, imagining conversations among four towering historic heroes who were all in Miami on the same night in February 1964: Malcolm X, Sam Cooke, football player turned movie star Jim Brown, and Cassius Clay. The latter came to fight Sonny Liston in a memorable knockout. In Powers’ telling, Malcolm X is there to convert him to Islam. The others are there for the big fight.

So what if they all hung out afterwards? What would happen?

The problem with the movie is all they do is talk, endlessly. The talk is important, I’m not saying it isn’t, but it’s pages and pages of exposition with no action. The four men cover a lot of ground and history but it’s not depicted. It’s reviewed.

Leslie Odom Jr is so good as Sam Cooke they should just spin him right off in a biopic and let him sing Cooke’s songs. As it is, even though this movie is co-produced by Jody Klein, whose father Allen Klein had the Cooke catalog, there are few moments of Odom showing off. Maybe they’re waiting for the sequel.

The rest of the main cast are spot on: Kingsley Ben-Adir as Malcolm X, Eli Goree as Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali, Aldis Hodge as Jim Brown. But they are all dressed up with no place to go. Goree has a nice way of capturing the rhymin’ Clay, Ben-Adir fleshes out a frustrated Malcolm X empathetically. Aldis Hodge, who should have been a movie star already, radiates charisma as Brown.

You can feel this was a stage production transferred to film. The one scene that has a gut punch is when Brown goes to visit a wealthy patron in the South played by Beau Bridges. The man is so excited to see him at his southern mansion and meets him on the porch, but won’t let Brown in his house because he’s back. It’s freakin’ 1964. Think about it: Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, Alabama bus in 1955. We’ve already had the march on Selma. It doesn’t matter.

If only there’d been more scenes dramatized like this, “One Night in Miami” wouldn’t have seemed like a year in any other place. But Regina King acquits herself with the material she has in her directorial debut, and I look forward to seeing more from her.

You’ve never heard of “Hard Kill.”

It’s the latest Bruce Willis movie that was made for straight to video and streaming. Rotten Tomatoes gave it a Zero from 21 negative reviews. Even the audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes was low, 64%, when it was “released” last September.

“Hard Kill” will nevertheless get a sequel, because, why not? Willis’s co-star, Jesse Metcalfe, announced it this morning on Fox5 NY’s “Good Day New York.” “We just got word,” said Metcalfe.

The director, Matt Eskandari, has made two other Bruce Willis D Movies in the last two years including “Survive the Night” and “Trauma Center.” You never heard of them either. Don’t worry.

These Bruce Willis movies are a far cry from the actor’s halcyon days in movies like “Die Hard” and “The Sixth Sense.” They’re so bad and low budget that even the Razzie Awards ignore them. Willis himself may be unaware of how awful they are. He usually plays a small part of the production, appearing in two or three scenes, taking second billing, and deferring to a younger actor as the lead.

“Hard Kill” was not a big hit in theaters. According to boxofficemojo.com, it made $111,523. Most of that came from the United Arab Emirates, some of it from Vietnam. Other income might have been realized from streaming services or DVD sales in other foreign territories. It’s ranked at #40,647 on amazon.com among Blu-Ray DVD’s and can be purchased for six dollars and eleven cents.

The Motion Picture Academy usually gives out Lifetime Achievement awards. Among them, in most years is the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian award. They were re-branded as the Governor’s Awards and got their own ceremony starting just a few years ago.

This year, for the first time, there will be two Jean Hersholt Awards. One will go to Tyler Perry, actor, director, producer and philanthropist. He really deserves it, too.

The other will go to the Motion Picture Fund, which runs the big retirement home/assisted living facility for showbiz people in Woodland Hills. Known as the MPTF, the Fund is a thing not a person. They have $90 million in assets according to their 2018 tax filing. The Fund is run by supremely overpaid people ($36 mil in salaries in 2018 including $800,ooo for the CEO) who’ve done a lot of bad things over the years. It was not that long ago that there were protests against the MPTF during awards weekends about the management of the home. But producer Jeffrey Katzenberg made it his admirable mission to raise millions for them. And now they’re getting an Oscar, which is totally ridiculous. They should just give it to Katzenberg. (Oh wait, he did get it, in 2012.)

In order to pull off this little coup, the Academy had to vote to change the wording of the Hersholt prize. “For this year only, the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award may be given not just to an individual, but also to a group of individuals or an organization in the motion picture arts and sciences whose humanitarian efforts have brought credit to the industry.  The Board may bestow up to two Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Awards.”

Oy vey.

The Academy can also give out the Irving Thalberg Award, and just a Lifetime Achievement Award. There’s been no announcement of those yet, but expect a total of two more along this line. The awards will be given out at the Oscars ceremony on April 25th, which will most certainly be virtual.