Tail-end of Eric Kain‘s “People Are Upset Over Joker’s 11 Oscar Nominations — Here’s Why They’re Wrong,” posted yesterday (1.14) on Forbes:

“Sure, Joker isn’t a perfect film. But to say that it celebrates toxic masculinity is to misunderstand it not only completely, but willfully. And that’s not how it works, people. An honest critique assesses a film based on its merits, not on the biases you seek to fill in the blanks with.

“Oh, and if you doubt my bonafides on this, read my colleague Mark Hughes’s take from when this film first came out. Mark is about as liberal as they come, and he also insists that the movie is the furthest thing from ‘toxic’.

“I really do think it’s a shame that more women weren’t nominated this year and it’s honestly galling that Kathryn Bigelow is the only woman to ever win an Academy Award for Best Director. That’s a big red flag, frankly, and I won’t argue with anyone who says the Oscars are a joke. Clearly there are some deep-seeded issues with the Academy Awards and some serious soul-searching needs to happen.

“That being said, this is also a reflection of the industry, which has been playing catch-up when it comes to female directors for some time now.

“But the controversy over Joker’s nominations is misguided and frankly distracts from bigger, more important issues. If you don’t like the movie, fine. That’s completely fine — we all have our own tastes. Just don’t make it something that it’s not.

“P.S. I wonder what these same folk would say about American Psycho or Taxi Driver, two films that are cut from the same cloth and quite powerful examinations of similar issues.”

Four days into the Santa Barbara Film Festival (1.15 to 1.25), which kicks off tomorrow night, SBIFF honcho Roger Durling will host a special 20th anniversary screening of David O. Russell‘s Three Kings. (It actually opened 20 years and three months ago, or on 10.1.99.)

The screening will happen on Saturday, 1.18 at 2pm at the historic Lobero theatre, and it’s 100% FREE to all film-loving human beings who may be in the Santa Barbara area. Russell will sit for a post-screening q & a.

Are Americans as hated now by people in the Middle East as we were back then? Hard to say, but the main characters in Russell’s film (played by George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg and Ice Cube) aren’t average Americans. Well, they begin their journey as standard selfish fellows, but they grow out of that.

Note: Yes, I’m aware that “Anniversary” is misspelled in the SBIFF app art.

I could’ve posted the following yesterday: “In today’s Guardian (1.13) is a brilliant Jessa Crispin piece that said critics who think and write like Mark Harris have become so political-minded and have chugged so much virtue-signalling Kool-Aid that they’re not only opposed to telling the truth about films as a rule but are pretty much incapable of doing so.”

Journo pally #1: “The underlying wokester idea is basically ‘we are going to ferret out the monsters.’ It is Mark Harris’ job as high priest of Film Twitter to EXPOSE the evil that lurks beneath the Academy members. Expose their biases and old-fashioned views to shame them for their choices. Never coming into that conversation would ever be whether the performance or the film is good enough. We all just accept this reality because no one wants to be the next one to be called out, exiled, shamed.

“Ultimately the people who pay the price for this aren’t people like Mark Harris. He’ll be just fine. Eventually it will fall on the actors of color and women because sooner or later people are going to think “this has nothing to do with merit at all [for] there is something else at work, a kind of puritanical purge so that we can exist in a kind of utopian dream.” But that dream has been shattered by Trump. So what we’re doing is simply tinkering with a world that doesn’t really matter all that much anymore. Policing the Oscars? Really? It comes down to that.”

Journo pally #2: “Where the Oscar nominations revealed that white woke critics are living in a Twitter bubble, they reacted by burrowing deeper inside the bubble, doubling down on their ‘Joker is the Antichrist that must be stopped’ narrative. There’s no arguing with these people. They’ve become hectoring fanatics of art puritanism.”

CBS news report (slight rewritten): Senior White House officials tell CBS News they increasingly believe that at least four Republicans will vote to call witnesses. But what if Senate witnesses are approved and Republicans insist on calling Typewriter Joe to testify?

In addition to Senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, Mitt Romney of Utah and possibly Cory Gardner of Colorado, the White House also views Rand Paul of Kentucky as a ‘wild card’ and Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee as an “institutionalist” who might vote to call witnesses, as one official put it.

The question of whether to call new witnesses in the trial would be decided by the full Senate after the trial gets underway. A simple majority of 51 votes will be needed to approve motions to call witnesses, meaning Democrats would need to convince four out of the 53 Republicans in the Senate to vote with them to compel testimony.

White House officials [have] reiterated the president’s intention to claim executive privilege if necessary to block John Bolton from testifying. Mr. Trump told Fox News last week that he would likely do so to “protect the office.” While Bolton could testify about some events that would fall outside the scope of executive privilege, the White House would fight to prevent Bolton from discussing direct conversations with the president.

We already knew that Spike Lee‘s Da 5 Bloods was unlikely to premiere at the 2020 Cannes Film Festival due to the (presumably) lingering Netflix prohibition. Now that Spike has been named as the honcho of the 2020 Cannes Film Festival jury, Da Five Bloods really isn’t screening there. It’ll almost certainly debut at the fall festivals (Venice, Telluride, Toronto, NYC).

Posted on 11.26.19: I’ve heard from a guy who attended a recent NYC-area screening of Lee’s film, which he says had a running time between 160 and 165 minutes and is pretty much completed with the credits in place.

Tipster: “It’s a slick, fast-paced, 165-minute emotional-flashback-to-Vietnam film. It’s a present-day thing about four aging veterans (Delroy Lindo, Clarke Peters, Isiah Whitlock, Jr., Norm Lewis) returning to Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) to find the remains of the ‘fifth Blood’ (played in flashback by Chadwick Boseman) who was killed in action. They’re also looking to retrieve a pile of gold that they buried during their Vietnam service.

“And so they head off into the jungle and reconnect with one another in various ways. There’s a sort of Last Flag Flying sense of bonding between these men, all living different lives from when they knew each other, and all of them they sharing a similar sense of fear with age and time closing in, and all haunted by the wartime histories.

“Spike opens with a montage of the violence of the late 60s and early 70s, set to the music of Marvin Gaye — there’s a lot of Gaye in this, actually, and he uses it so well, all fitting in smoothly and providing momentum from the start.

“I saw Bloods with two other critics, and they both loved it. It will be a major success for both Spike and Netflix, and I could even see a directing and picture nomination depending on how they decide to release it.”

God, do I miss waiters with confident, take-it-or-leave-it airs! Hell, any sort of attitude, character, subtle swagger. Consider this paragraph from a N.Y. Times review of Carbone, a storied Italian eatery on Thompson Street in the West Village.