I’m thinking about writing a Hollywood book about the deranged and hysterical media war against Peter Farrelly’s Green Book (‘18), but also about something bigger and broader — how the Green Book maelstrom launched the not-fully-concluded era of the woke baddie-waddies —- the censorious, ultra-sensitive identity fanatics who all but suffocated the film business during the woke terror era (2016 to 2024).

With the winds currently shifting and woke mentalism beating a retreat like Napoleon out of Russia, it’s now okay, I’m thinking, to write a book that recounts an honest history about how extreme progressive scolds tried like hell to murder one of the gentlest and most unassuming stories (and a fact-based one at that) about racial reckonings and journeys of self-discovery ever created within the Hollywood realm, and yet how the pissheads couldn’t quite deliver the death blow.

A book (which Sasha Stone was going to co-write with me…now she feels that we’re too far apart on the Trump factor) about how the uglies tried to bludgeon a good, modest little film…how they did everything they could to kill its chances in the Oscar race, and how they wound up failing…tough shit, assholes!

A book about a now-seven-year-old film that didn’t mine as much as gently explore a relatively dark and indecent era in American culture as far as the racial divide was concerned, and yet a film that played its cards just so…deftly, I mean…a film that fair-minded movie lovers fell for and which wound up snagging a Best Picture Oscar.

I’m talking about a film that made Manohla Dargis, Spike Lee, Inkoo Kang, Richard Brody, David Ehrlich and a whole army of progressive haters see red…a movie that led to a thousand cursings and spit-takes.

I’m thinking of a book would examine on a deep-dish, inside-the-beltway basis the blow-by-blow wokester campaign to disembowel Green Book, starting with the big ecstatic debut at the Toronto Film Festival in September 2018 and ending with Peter Farrelly’s film taking the Best Picture Oscar on 2.24.19, not to mention Mahershala Ali snagging Best Supporting Actor (traitor!).

Augmented, of course, by the usual backstory and perspective reporting — (a) a history of previous takedown campaigns, (b) the eruption of pernicious wokeism itself in ’16 or 17 or thereabouts, (c) a history of the actual 1962 Green Book road trip, (d) a history of the Green Book project. and the various participants, how it all came together, the initial marketing, how the woke resistance formulated, and so on…whizzing bullet by whizzing bullet, grenade by grenade,

I’ve already written a good portion of this saga in Hollywood Elsewhere…I must have tapped out 10 or 12 adversarial columns at the very least.

And yet the hysteria that swirled around Green Book during the last four months of 2018 and the first two months of ‘19 is not a story many people know. [Sasha wrote the next three or four paragraphs.] You’d have to be on the inside of the insular bubble that the Oscars and Hollywood have become….a political climate that began with the emergence of this warm-hearted, crowd-pleasing flick about friendship and tolerance, and yet ironically resulted in one of the screenwriters being banned from the ceremony, the film’s director persecuted on phony sexual assault charges, one of the actors called a racist and a general upending of the way the Academy votes on Best Picture.

The shock of the 2016 Donald Trump election sent Hollywood reeling, but the combination of rising activism and woke ideology collided with old-fashioned storytelling to create a firestorm that the film awards industry still hasn’t recovered from.

The trouble began to brew the year after Trump won the presidency, when La La Land was deemed “racist” and lost to Moonlight. It intensified the following year when Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri was knocked out of completion because it, too, was deemed “racist.”

Green Book was the film that ignited a guerilla movement of woke scolding, instruction, obstruction and correction. 

By 2020, as the streets exploded with protests and riots, the film industry and the Oscars would transform themselves away from a meritocracy into one rooted in DEI mandates. Some of the award-voting bodies, like the BAFTAS, would remove voting privileges entirely, inviting a committee to hand-pick their nominees. 

The Academy would introduce their first DEI mandate, implanted for the first time this year. As they watched the ratings tank and the box-office flatline, the industry began to realize, slowly, the damage done to their credibility.

And yet the Green Book brawl wasn’t entirely a social catastrophe. It was a first-rate period movie, it made people feel good, it made a fair amount of money, and it won the top Oscar prize.

The catastrophe was provoked when this gentle and likable film had its moment of Academy triumph — a tumult from which Hollywood all but killed its spirit and suffocated the human connection element through an adherence to hysterical woke dogma, identity politics, virtue signalling, etc.

I’m stuck on what to call it. “The Green Book Maelstrom,” “The Green Book Hurricane,” “The Green Book Wokestorm”? Nothing sounds quite right.

Subtitle:  “A Ferocious Battle for Hollywood’s Endangered  Soul and How a Best Picture Oscar Victory Led to A Multi-Year Chapter of Woke Totalitarianism.”

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Here are some of the columns I tapped out…a stream of random-ass impressions.

Fuhgedaboudit — “Green Book” Is A Huge Hit + Awards Contender / 9.11.18

The Elgin theatre audience exploded in cheers and whoo-whoo applause when a showing of Peter Farrelly’s Green Book (Universal, 11.21) ended late Tuesday night. I’m not talking about expressions of warmth and respect — I’m talking about instant kapow, instant “yes!” No other Toronto Film Festival screening I’ve attended has generated this kind of love, alpha vibes and excitement.

A racially stamped, early ’60s version of Planes, Trains & Automobiles blended with a little Driving Miss Daisy and fortified by a shrewd, plain-spoken, nicely-honed screenplay (by Farrelly, Brian Hayes Currie and Nick Vallelonga) that touches solid bottom in a few ways, Green Book is a huge hit waiting to happen and a definite Best Picture nominee…hands down, don’t even think about it, Tom O’Neil is going to have kittens.

A heartwarmer about the various shades and permutations of American racism coursing through the body politic back in the Kennedy era, Green Book is not the contradiction it sounds like but the most satisfying feel-good movie I’ve seen in a long, long time.

Is it anywhere close to daring or nervy? Nope — it’s a nice, safe, entertaining middle-class dramedy, tidy and affecting and right out of the big-studio handbook, but man, it really hits the spot. I’m talking about a moviegoing experience that goes down like a nice creamy milk shake.

You can call me a square or a sap for succumbing to a film of this sort, a liberal-minded social-issue dramedy that could’ve easily been made 20 or 30 years ago, but you should’ve heard that audience go nuts when the closing credits began. I mean, it was like thunderbolt and lightning.

Universal has a real problem on its hands with Mahershala Ali and Viggo Mortenson equally deserving Best Actor nominations; I really can’t decide who has a better shot. Okay, maybe Viggo because his character undergoes a greater amount of character growth and self-realization, but Mahershala delivers such a magnificent combination of dignity, buried pain, musical spirit and uptight rectitude.

At least there’ll be no hemming or hawing about Linda Cardellini, who’s a near shoo-in for a Best Supporting Actress nom as Viggo’s stay-at-home Italian wife. Plus you’d have to nominate the screenplay in the Best Original category, and Farrelly for Best Director along with Best Picture.

I’m not saying Green Book is a better film than Roma or First Man or Can You Ever Forgive Me? or Widows or First Reformed, but it makes you feel better than all of these films combined. I’m sorry but it does.

I’m going to bed but I’ll elaborate tomorrow morning sometime.

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September 11, 2018 10:16 pm

Fussies & Pissies Mulling “Green Book” Pushback / 9.12.18

Be mindful and take heed of the Guy Lodge brigade, already grousing and muttering about Green Book overpraise and loading their weapons as they ready a pushback movement as soon as possible. 

Have they actually pushed back yet? No, but they will — I can smell their thinking from thousands of miles away. For 12 hours the Green Book reception was a Toronto rainshower of love. Now it’s a coming war, skirmish, street fight, fisticuffs.

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Toronto Voters Tumble for “Green Book” / 9.16.18

Peter Farrelly‘s Green Book has won the Toronto Film Festival’s Grosch People’s Choice Award for most popular film! 

Alfonso Cuaron‘s Roma and Barry Jenkins‘ If Beale Street Could Talk were the second and first runners-up. A Star Is Born came in…what, fourth? Astonishing. (What happened to the suspected ballot-stuffing thing?) HE’s mind is officially blown. 

Downside for Green Book: It’s now in danger of being labelled the Best Picture front-runner.

Documentary Award: Free Solo. The Biggest Little Farm and This Changes Everything were the second and first runners-up.

Midnight Madness award winner: The Man Who Feels No Pain. Assassination Nation and Halloween are the second and first runners-up, respectively.

“Green Book” Is Taking Over / 11.1.18

On 10.4 I posted a Best Supporting Actor riff titled “Mahershala Ali Again. Really.,” which advanced the notion of a second Best Supporting Actor Oscar for the Green Book co-star. 

On 10.26 I posted another called “Mahershala Ali Kick-Ass Syndrome,” which noted that 15 out of 25 Gold Derby “experts” had put Ali at the top of their Best Supporting Actor spitball lists…a seeming lock to win.

Today Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil took a stab at explaining the Mahershala surge.

Gold Derby-wise, Ali has not only jumped in front of Beautiful Boy‘s Timothee Chalamet in the Best Supporting Actor race, but “seems to have established a firm lead,” O’Neil notes.

This is at least one category, it seems, in which “less” may be judged to be of greater value than “more”. Chalamet’s drug-addict performance is anguished and intense in a kind of Lee Strasberg acting-class way — a guns-blazing thing — while Ali’s Don Shirley, a brilliant pianist, is quiet and subtle. So why is Ali suddenly out-pointing Chalamet by such a significant margin?

Because the viewer senses a guarded sadness in Shirley, and a guy who’s a bit too rigid and controlled. Understandably, you come to realize, but he’s breathing only through his music. Ali acquaints you with Shirley bit by bit, layer by layer. Before long you’re hoping to see him kick back and breathe a little.

“Timing is part of the reason,” O’Neil writes. “Green Book is now screening widely to industry audiences across Hollywood, and enjoying fresh, happy buzz as word spreads that it might be the next Best Picture winner and also that — watch out, pay attention — Viggo Mortensen could win Best Actor too. Really! And Peter Farrelly for Best Director.”

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Bornsies vs. Bookies / 11.2.18

After a late September screening of Green Book (Universal, 11.16) I mentioned to a film-critic friend who loves Peter Farrelly’s film as much as I do that film snobs would be coming for it. 

“Film snobs?” he said derisively, contemptuously.

Last night HE commenter Bobby Peru mentioned a reaction to Green Book, overheard either during the screening or afterward. “And even though I wasn’t one of them, several journalists in the room giggled at the final scene’s embraces,” Peru wrote.

This, to me, is like the first shot fired at Fort Sumter. If I had been there with Peru and if I had suddenly morphed into Jack Nicholson‘s Badass Buddusky, I would have gone up to one of the gigglers and said, “I’m gonna kick your ass around the block for drill, man.” Okay, maybe I wouldn’t have been that belligerent, but Lordy, I hate the snooties.

One of the most reliable indications of a toxic film-snob mentality is a primal aversion to anything that delivers well-fused, well-finessed mainstream-ish elements in service of a familiar but hugely satisfying emotional payoff.

The snobs HATE this kind of thing. Some kind of genetic disorder took over their sensibilities when they hit their mid teens or perhaps when they began college, and they just aren’t susceptible to this kind of assured, emotionally rooted, feel-good thing, even one that unfolds within a disturbing social context. They recoil and flick their fingers and go “no, no…too emotionally effective…not for us.”

And so Peru, totally and irreversibly in the tank for A Star Is Born, mentions dismissals of the film’s final line and final embrace. But the crowd I saw it with at Toronto’s Elgin theatre LOVED that final line. They loved the film. They cheered it like drunken fans of a home-town hockey team. My older son Jett and his wife Cait “LOVED” Green Book whey saw it a week ago, he told me.

This is war, I’m telling you — the film snobs and the gay-culture-favoring Star Is Born-sies on one side, and the fraternal, warm-hearted Green Book worshippers on another.

Don’t overlook the gay culture subtext. Yes, that remark may initially sound curious as both films are pro-gay narratives and experiences. The difference is that while Green Book deals with an admirable gay character from the mid 20th Century who’s something of a stuffed shirt, A Star Is Born is gayer in a more modern and celebrative sense.

Farrelly’s film may be experiencing (or may experience later this month) a certain subliminal pushback from certain fellows who’d rather not immerse themselves or otherwise submit to the early ’60s experience of Don Shirley — a brilliant jazz pianist, as expert and gifted in his realm as James Baldwin was in his, living in a repressed era and relying on his considerable dignity to cope on a daily basis with the double yoke of being black and gay.

Boiled down to basics, the Born-sies will offer respect and curt salutations to Green Book, but they don’t want to “go there”, which is to say they don’t want to live in it. They want to keep it at a distance, and I guess you can’t blame them.

Peru asserted that Green Book “is not a contemporary parable and don’t try to make it one…it’s a simple, feel-goody story of friendship and that’s that.” 

I understand how gay guys might be uncomfortable returning to and re-contemplating the bad old homophobic days, even for a couple of hours and even if it’s a true story. They just don’t want to return to that ugliness, and to a story that happened seven years before before Stonewall. They prefer the 21st Century emotional comfort-blanket security of being Lady Gaga swooners.

But Peru is dead wrong and dead blind if he thinks Green Book isn’t a contemporary parable. Call it an emotional balm or a counter-legend or an oppositional myth, but I haven’t settled into such a wonderfully soothing, anti-racist, anti-Trumpian film in a long, long time.

In the same thread Variety‘s Kris Tapley called Green Book “a 25 year-old movie.” 

Yes, Green Book could have been made in the ’90s or even the ’80s, but Shirley’s gayness probably wouldn’t have been used in these older versions. 

I’m not saying Farrelly and his co-creators were doing anything but telling an early ’60s tale as best they could, but they’ve nonetheless made a parable that addresses the manifest Trumpian ugliness. For two hours it feels wonderful to slip into the fraternal cocoon of this film. I suspect that others, many others, will feel the same.

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“Green Book” Wins NBR Best Picture Trophy / 11.27.18

I’m told that New York and Los Angeles chapters of the National Alliance of Politically Correct Scolds and Admonishers (NAPCSA) will be meeting in emergency session later today to discuss how to respond to the National Board of Review having given its Best Film of 2018 prize to Peter Farrelly’s Green Book.

Worse in their view, the NBR has given its Best Actor trophy to Viggo Mortensen, whose chances of winning any acting awards had been dismissed by NAPSCA reps after he mistakenly used a verboten term in a post-screening discussion.

In a joint statement, NAPSCA co-chairs Brooke Obie and Inkoo Kang have said that “the NBR is obviously entitled to hand out its top awards to any film or filmmaker or performer it chooses…we wouldn’t want to inject ourselves into any private voting dynamic. 

“However, we would be derelict in our duties as moral and ethical arbiters if we didn’t express disappointment that they chose to honor Green Book, which, as we’ve patiently explained, fails to reflect the current politically correct values and conversations that we would prefer to see in commercial cinemas these days.

“Peter Farrelly‘s decision to tell a story set in 1962 obviously goes against the grain of current progressive thought, and we strongly disagree with this. We will be meeting later today to discuss measures that will hopefully nip this in the bud.”

The other NBR awards:

Best Director — Bradley Cooper, A Star Is Born
Best Actress — Lady Gaga, A Star Is Born
Best Supporting Actor — Sam Elliott, A Star Is Born
Best Supporting Actress — Regina King, If Beale Street Could Talk
Best Original Screenplay — Paul Schrader, First Reformed (yes!)
Best Adapted Screenplay — Barry Jenkins, If Beale Street Could Talk (really?)

Best Animated Feature: Incredibles 2 (give me a break!)
Breakthrough Performance: Thomasin McKenzie, Leave No Trace
Best Directorial Debut: Bo Burnham, Eighth Grade
Best Foreign Language Film: Cold War
Best Documentary: RBG

November 27, 2018 11:51 am

by Jeffrey Wells

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How Does it Feel, Green Book Haters?, 1.19.19

Peter Farrelly‘s Green Book has won the Producer’s Guild of America’s Daryl F. Zanuck award. 

Remember when I urged everyone to vote for Green Book as a royal fuck-you gesture to the p.c. haters? Well, that’s what happened tonight….yes! “Hate begats hate,” etc. 

Green Book and Roma are now neck-and-neck for the Best Picture Oscar. (Right?) I think it’s also very safe to say that A Star Is Born is now finished as a Best Picture contender — no wins from the PGA, Golden Globes or the BFCA, over and out. It’s been a good night for Hollywood Elsewhere.

January 19, 2019 11:21 pm

by Jeffrey Wells

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Green Schlongola / 1.9.19

The wokesters have found a new way to torpedo Green Book. Much better than “magic negro” or “white savior.” This afternoon The Cut‘s Anna Silman posted a hit piece about Green Book director Peter Farrelly having comically weenie-wagged in front of two prominent persons 20 years ago.

How Brett Kavanaugh was Farrelly’s behavior? Sometime in the mid to late ’90s Farrelly jokingly whipped out his johnson in front of then-20th Century Fox honcho Tom Rothman. (Weird but who cares?) He also flashed Cameron Diaz in the same impish spirit, before she was cast in There’s Something About Mary. (That’s it…off with Farrelly’s head!)

Silman and her hit-squad allies found descriptions of said behavior in two 1998 articles, one in Newsweek piece and another in an Observer article by Nicola 

Barker (no link — available only on Nexis). Diaz hasn’t complained about Farrelly’s flashing, although Rothman was quoted by Newsweek as saying “it wasn’t a pretty sight…in fact, I’m still recovering.”

HE to Cameron Diaz reps: Your client to hereby requested to come forward and not only confirm Farrelly’s behavior but provide explicit damning details. Not by me but, you know, the <em>Green Book haters. They’re looking to knock it out of contention once and for all, but they need your client to deliver the killshot quotes.

Silman: In these stories, it’s notable how Farrelly’s behavior is treated like a cute running prank instead of egregious sexual misconduct, illustrating just how much things have changed in the past two decades — indeed, much of it in the past year.”

Farrelly to Silman: “True. I was an idiot. I did this decades ago and I thought I was being funny and the truth is I’m embarrassed and it makes me cringe now. I’m deeply sorry.”

It really comes down to Diaz. If she waves or laughs it off, the story might peter out. But if she’s in any way traumatized or even irked by the memory, Green Book could be in trouble.

By the way: This afternoon “they” (Indiewire‘s Zack Sharf, among others) went after Nick Vallelonga with a deleted tweet about the Green Book co-screenwriter supporting Donald Trump’s tweet about mobs of New Jersey Muslims cheering the 9/11 disaster.

By The way: A friend sent me a Kate Erbland Indiewire piece about Green Book detractors and defenders. He interpreted the piece as more or less positive. Except it isn’t. The fact that Indiewire is basically Woke Central tells you the article had to contain a dig or two. Especially with Erbland, one of the woke-iest Indiewire staffers, on the keyboard.

Erbland quote: “The awards campaign for any biographical film benefits from the support of those who knew the subject, but for the increasingly embattled Green Book, it’s essential.”

Farrelly’s film was embattled when it first came out and the wokesters all jumped on it, but now that it’s won three Golden Globe awards and has acquired a positive good-vibe aura, Erbland is calling it “increasingly embattled.”

This is a code term aimed at Academy and guild members: It basically means “you don’t want to vote for anything controversial.”

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“Best Green Book Triumph Assessments” / posted on 1.20.19

Courtesy of CinnaJon, myself, Patrick Murtha, Spaceshiek, Jordan Ruimy and The Cinemaholic:

Cinnajon: “I had assumed Green Book was destined to be a Shawshank-like Best Picture also-ran, with middling box office, that takes on a second life when it hits cable. Now it sounds like the smear campaign may have provided an unexpected sympathy boost, which may buoy it to a much healthier first run than expected, if it remains in the driver’s seat. Wildly up-and-down trajectory to the finish line if this is how it actually plays out.

Jeffrey Wells: “Last night’s win was at least partly a sympathy vote after the vicious SJW attacks. I suggested a few weeks back that the industry should vote for Green Book in order to tell those odious lefty Stalinist bullies to go fuck themselves, and by golly that’s what partly happened! The p.c.-MOTIVATED haters started all the trouble, all the hate. Their post-GG takedown attempts amounted to pure viciousness and ugliness. Last night the PGA told them ‘nice try, assholes, but no sale.’ Thank you, Inkoo Kang! Thank you, David Ehrlich! Thank you, Indiewire p.c. comintern!”

Patrick Murtha: “Not only is this exactly right, Jeff, but I also suspect that 2019 is going to be a year of MAJOR backlash against the PC / SJW / woke crowd. Are you sensing this also? People are just getting fed up. It is perfectly possible to continue loathing Trump & Co. while also rejecting the wokesters.”

Spacesheik: “I loved Green Book — screw the haters. The audience I saw it with loved it as well (this was in November in an AMC theater at Tysons Mall, before all the hype). They enthusiastically clapped at the end. The film is highly entertaining, with some great performances all around. I’d watch it again. I was shocked when Peter Farrelly‘s name came onscreen, its the complete antithesis of everything he’s done before – and for that he deserves credit. You can dismiss whatever you want, but you can see the film was made with a lot of love and compassion towards that era and history.”

Wells response: “Check but Green Book wasn’t made with love and compassion ‘towards’ that era as much as with a frank attitude and acknowledgment that this was what the racial realm of 1962 was unfortunately like.”

Jordan Ruimy: “The fact of the matter is that Green Book is a crowd-pleaser like no other. All three times I saw it the audience applauded during the credits, which almost never happens. It has an 8.3 IMDB score, by far the highest of 2018 contenders and a much-coveted A CinemaScore. It has struck a chord with Joe and Jane Popcorn. The fact that it’ll spread into an additional 1000 theatres next week could make the case for it louder and clearer.”

The Cinemaholic: “I love Green Book but the PGA win is actually going to do more harm to film’s chances than good. The woke crowd is going to tear the film to pieces. I am waiting for Oscar nominations to see how it does there. If Farrelly and Vallelonga get nominated, you know that all the p.c. journalists will have a big meltdown again. Anyway, all this is so much fun. And yes, A Star Is Born is over. Roma will win Best Picture (as I have been maintaining since September).”

CinnaJon: “It seems like it’s already run the gauntlet of being torn to pieces, and is now emerging on the other side stronger and more embraceable than when it first entered the fray. The film could be the beneficiary of people reaching an exhaustion point with outrage culture. Voting GB is a pushback to all that.”

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Spike’s Frosty “Green Book” Stare / 2.2.19

Everyone knows that Spike Lee suffered a devastating career episode when arguably his best film, the racially charged Do The Right Thing (’89), which had won Best Picture awards from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and the Chicago Film Critics, was denied a Best Picture Oscar nomination.

The ’89 Best Picture nominees were Driving Miss Daisy, Born on the Fourth of July, Dead Poets Society, Field of Dreams and My Left Foot. It seemed like a horrendous oversight to many that Lee’s film, which delivered profound racial truths, was blown off. 

Adding insult to injury (at least in Lee’s mind) was the fact that Driving Miss Daisy, universally regarded as a white person’s comfort film about racism, won the Best Picture Oscar.

That win and that snub has seethed in Lee’s mind ever since. I listened to him talk about it just a few weeks ago in Manhattan. It’s like “it happened yesterday,” he said.

Many have said that Green Book is 2018’s Driving Miss Daisy. Many have argued that Peter Farrelly‘s film could have been made in the late ’80s. I happen to believe in my heart that Green Book is a somewhat nobler and more-highly-crafted film than Driving Miss Daisy, and that it exudes a classy and honorable current, and that it works as an anti-Trump metaphor.

But I understand why Lee and others believe it’s Driving Miss Daisy 2. And I understand why Lee has apparent feelings of animus toward this Universal release. Unfortunate, but that’s apparently the way it is.

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HE Oscar Pasta — Main & Final Course

8:07 pm: And Green Book wins the Best Picture Oscar. Producer Jim Burke: “We made this film with love, and with tenderness, and with respect.” I realize that Green Book isn’t quite made of the right cinematic stuff in some people’s eyes, and that it was/is, in some ways, a 1987 film. But words can’t describe how happy I feel that the p.c. haters were shut down but good by this. The rancid snobs and virtue-signalling reptiles were told to collect their overcoats and leave the room. The ugly crowd lost and a harmless, feel–good film won. Fuck you, assholes!

Congrats to the whole team — Peter Farrelly, Viggo Mortensen, John Sloss…the whole gang. Hollywood Elsewhere was a Green Book pom-pom girl from the get-go, all the way back to Toronto.

Sasha Stone vs. Brooks Barnes Over “Green Book” / 2.26.19

Yesterday N.Y. Times Hollywood correspondent Brooks Barnes posted a piece that echoed what Barnes claimed is the general morning-after industry view about Green Book having won the Best Picture Oscar, that it was nothing less a social-political tragedy — a mortifying act that angered, outraged and depressed not just Spike Lee but everyone in town, including the mail-room guys.

I knew this was a bullshit take from the get-go, but Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone put her objections into words faster than I. This morning Sasha forwarded a draft of a letter that she’d sent to the Times, and I suggested…I don’t know, three or four edits. Sasha gave me permission to post it here, but wants it understood that the use of certain explicit terms (“too white, vaguely racist”) was my idea, not hers. It’s a smart, well-reasoned response — please read:

“It’s disappointing that the Times did not offer more balanced coverage of Oscar night than what is contained in Brooks Barnes’ 2.25 article (“In Green Book, Oscar Critics See An Old Hollywood Tale“). It is misleading, on one hand, to point to a small but loud group of people protesting the film’s win but not, on the other, to report how popular Green Book was across the board.

“Two years ago, La La Land’s momentum was slowed because of politically correct protests online. (It was inauthentic, they claimed, for a white guy to be a jazz buff.) The Best Picture Oscar went to Moonlight. The following year, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri was met with protests over its rural insular whiteness. It, too, was derailed — The Shape of Water won. This year Green Book was repeatedly assaulted for being old-fashioned, too white and even vaguely racist.

 But this time the protests didn’t work. This may reflect an exhaustion with the hive mind continually pushing the red button of alarm.

“Green Book won the Toronto Audience Award in September, beating Roma, A Star is Born and every other film that played there. Green Book also defeated BlacKkKlansman, Black Panther, Roma, Bohemian Rhapsody and The Favourite at the Producers Guild of America Awards. It triumphed at the Golden Globes as well. If you ask me that show’s broad support counters your headline, and the narrative going forward.

“The fact is that for a film to win on a preferential ballot, as Green Book did at both the Producers Guild and the Oscars, it had to have broad support across all markers. That meant it could not have won with just ‘old white guys.’ Moreover, if ‘old white guys’ led that vote, how do you explain the unprecedented array of diversity and inclusion in the other categories?

“There were only three films in the running this year — Roma, Black Panther and Green Book, each of which won a major guild award. The likely truth is that Green Book prevailed on a preferential ballot partly due to the extreme protests against it, which most people outside the bubble of the internet thought were absurd.

“Green Book benefitted by not being a Netflix film. Roma was a foreign language film, and would have had to be the first in Academy history to win in both categories. That was the least likely scenario heading into the race.

“Green Book also benefitted from not being a Marvel film. Black Panther did not have any writing, directing or acting nominations. And BlacKkKlansman, remember, was not in competition for Best Picture, as it had not won a single major award heading into the race. It did not win the Writers Guild or the Screen Actors Guild or the Editors Guild or the Producers Guild.

“Some of those who cover the Oscar race seem to be misunderstanding the basics of how everything works. For Green Book to have won, it had to have gotten votes from every kind of voter — young, old, black, white, male, female. It simply could not have won otherwise. Please tell the truth about what really happened on Sunday night.”

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Here We Go Again — “Green Book”, White-Guy Attitudes, Wokeness / posted on 7.5.19

7.5 N.Y. Times opinion piece called “The Dominance of the White Male Critic” has been written by Elizabeth Mendez Berry and Chi-hui Yang. My first thought was that the article could have been co-authored by Sundance honcho Keri Putnam, who voiced a similar beef at the beginning of the 2019 Sundance Film Festival.

During a 1.24 Sundance presser Putnam said that organizers had noticed “a disturbing blind spot” in the press credential process. “Diversity isn’t about who is making the films,” Putnam said. “It’s about how they enter the world.” She said that the festival noticed that they were admitting “mostly white male critics,” adding that “this lack of inclusion has real-world implications.”

Excerpt from Berry-Yang piece: “For decades, those given the biggest platforms to interpret culture [have been] white men. This means that the spaces in media where national mythologies are articulated, debated and affirmed are still largely segregated. The conversation about our collective imagination has the same blind spots as our political discourse.

“Consider how this played out around the movie Green Book,” Berry and Yang observe, adding that “when it premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in September, most of the reviewers heralded it as a heartwarming triumph over racism.”

HE response: Yes, a number of reviewers who attended the Green Book premiere at the Elgin on the night of Tuesday, 9.11.18 (myself among them) passed along rave reactions, but mainly because the crowd had really flipped for it. Not because anyone saw it as any kind of “heartwarming triumph over racism” — that certainly wasn’t my impression — but as a well-mannered, nicely buffed capturing of the various shades and permutations of American racism coursing through the body politic back in the Kennedy era, and that’s all.

“Is Green Book anywhere close to daring or nervy?,” I wrote after the Elgin screening. “Nope — it’s a nice, safe, entertaining middle-class dramedy, tidy and affecting and right out of the big-studio handbook, but man, it really hits the spot. You can call me a square or a sap for succumbing to a film of this sort, a liberal-minded social-issue dramedy that could’ve easily been made 20 or 30 years ago, but you should’ve heard that audience go nuts when the closing credits began. I mean, it was like thunderbolt and lightning.”

But the Toronto afterglow didn’t last long. One day after the Elgin screening — one day! — I posted a piece called “Fussies & Pissies Mulling Green Book Pushback.” How did I know that the film snobs would be coming for it? Because of a tweet posted by Variety snootmeister Guy Lodge, a living, breathing barometer of elitist critical disdain in our day and age. Sure enough the grenades were soon lobbing in.

Berry and Yang: “But two months later, when [Green Book] started screening in movie theaters across America, black writers saw it as another trite example of the country’s insatiable appetite for white-savior narratives.”

HE response: Over and over last fall I explained that there’s nothing the least bit white savior-ish about Green Book, and that it’s basically a parent-child road dramedy — Mahershala Ali‘s Don Shirley is the strict if constricted father, and Viggo Mortensen‘s “Tony Lip” is the casually brutish adolescent. It’s a spiritual growth and friendship flick.

 If anyone does any saving it’s Mahershala who saves Viggo from his crude Italian-meathead-from-Queens attitudes. Peter Farrelly‘s film is simply about listening, kindness and compassion. But that’s me.

Did the white-savior thing get thrown at Green Book regardless? Yeah, of course, but those who took potshots in this vein were hardly confined to critics on the urban fringes. It was mostly attacked during award season (and in some cases savagely) by under-40 white wokesters along with know-it-all palefaces who’d been around for decades. Trevor Noah‘s much-discussed Daily Show billboard slogan (“Don’t Green Book This One, Guys!”) wasn’t aimed at critics of color, trust me.

The Green Book haters included Indiewire‘s David Ehrlich, the N.Y. Times‘ A.O. ScottVariety snootmeister Guy Lodge, London Times‘ Kevin Maher (who actually called it a “botch job”), Claudia Puig (“insensitive”), NPR’s Mark Jenkins, eFilm Critic’s Peter SobczynskiThe New Yorker‘s Richard Brody, Toronto Globe & Mail’s Barry Hertz (“not quite Racism for Dummies, but close”), The Wall Street Journal‘s Joe MorgensternScreen International‘s Tim Gierson, etc.

Berry and Yang” “The initial positive buzz [for Green Book] set such a strong tone that its best-picture win at the Academy Awards seemed a foregone conclusion. But that didn’t stop the white filmmakers from going after black reviewers like K. Austin Collins of Vanity Fair who found it problematic.

“’What the makers of this movie are missing is just that many black critics didn’t get to see this movie until it came out‘ during Oscar season, well after early screenings for critics, Mr. Collins said during a panel at the Sundance Film Festival. ‘When black critics do finally get to see this movie, it is seen as disrupting the Oscar campaign. I don’t think any of us really care about that. We care about representation.’”

Obviously critics of merit should be given a chance to see and review the big films at the same time as established hot-shot critics. No one’s arguing against this.

What has my attention are the last four words in the above quote, for they constitute the kind of admission that Tom Wolfe once wrote about in “The Painted Word” when he described the classic “obiter dicta” — words in passing the give the game away.

When people talk about Oscar-season distinctions they’re usually referring to qualities that have touched or impressed a wide swath of viewers by way of theme, metaphor, emotional poignancy or commanding applications of skill and craft — the kind of stuff that moviegoers and Academy members tend to associate with classic keepers.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but Collins seemed to be saying that he and like-minded fellows regard this kind of thing as less than vital or perhaps even peripheral when considered alongside the much important issue of representation, which basically means “rewriting codified racist narratives and in some cases evening the score by way of progressive approaches to casting and story-telling.”

Maybe, but if you ask me that sounds like a rather limited and politically-minded place from which to absorb and assess the wondrous and delicate art of filmmaking. Making great movies and using movies to alter social consciousness can be achieved in the same effort, sure, but can also be understood as separate challenges, no? At least in some instances.

There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

July 5, 2019 4:59 pm

by Jeffrey Wells

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“Green Book” Revenge Vote? / posted on 1.20.20

Remember that Jeff Sneider tweet from last July that predicted some kind of anti-Green Book vote would manifest in 2020 Oscar voting? Sneider was wrong about Queen & Slim and Just Mercy but he was also saying that an anti-older-white-guy pushback vote would emerge down the road.

I’m mentioning this because a friend said this morning that there’s a feeling among industry fence-sitters that the industry has to somehow make up for giving Green Book the Best Picture award last year. Somehow that “wrong” has to be balanced out with a counter-vote. Call it the Green Book guilt-pushback factor. Or, if you will, the “Bob Strauss will forgive you if you vote to somehow make up for that calamitous error.”

Is this real or just grapevine bullshit?

January 20, 2020 3:16 pm

by Jeffrey Wells

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Another “Green Book” Bitchslap / 10.7.20

In a Variety cover story penned by award-season handicapper Clayton Davis, the legendary Spike Lee is asked what message he has “for Oscar voters who don’t agree with the new set of [diversity-favoring] Academy rules?”

Lee’s response: “They probably voted for Driving Miss Daisy and Green Book.” 

Lee is alluding to a bloc of voters known for their white boomer mindsets, and otherwise regarded as change-resistant bugaboos with conservative perspectives and what he presumes is a grumbling resistance to p.c. quotas and checklists.

In a 10.7 Indiewire piece posted earlier today, Zack Sharf writes that Green Book and Driving Miss Daisy “tell stories about race from a white perspective.”

Yes, there’s a New York Italian-American perspective in Green Book, and yes, the script was co-written by Nick Vallelonga (son of Viggo Mortensen‘s Tony Lip character) along with Brian Hayes Currie and director Peter Farrelly.

Then again it’s based on the documented recollections of Don Shirley as well as Tony Vallelonga, and it’s not told so much from a “white” point of view as much as a 1962 social perspective, when things were a lot less liberal and fair-minded compared to today.

And it’s fundamentally a parent-child relationship film with Mahershala Ali‘s Shirley character, a masterful jazz pianist, maintaining the ethical and behavioral upper hand throughout most of the film.

Lee’s derision doesn’t seem to be based on how the story is told (what would he have done differently if he wanted to be truthful about Vallelonga and Shirley’s recollections?) but that Green Book was made at all.

In short, Green Book isn’t a “white perspective” movie but a blend of all the above. Sharf, a dutiful foot soldier in service of the woke Indiewire agenda, is deliberately misrepresenting, as Lee has all along.

No dispute about Bruce Beresford‘s Driving Miss Daisy reflecting a whitebread industry consciousness about racism. I’ve never been much of a fan of this 1989 film, but to be fair it is set in Atlanta of 1948, which was a whole different moral universe than the realm of Los Angeles some 41 years later, much less today.

From “Sasha Stone vs. Brooks Barnes Over Green Book“, posted on 2.26.19: “It is misleading…to point to a small but loud group of people protesting the film’s [Best Picture Oscar] win but not, on the other, to report how popular Green Book was across the board.

“Two years ago, La La Land’s momentum was slowed because of politically correct protests online. (It was inauthentic, they claimed, for a white guy to be a jazz buff.) The Best Picture Oscar went to Moonlight. The following year, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri was met with protests over its rural insular whiteness. It, too, was derailed — The Shape of Water won. This year Green Book was repeatedly assaulted for being old-fashioned, too white and even vaguely racist.

“But this time the protests didn’t work. This may reflect an exhaustion with the hive mind continually pushing the red button of alarm.

“Green Book won the Toronto Audience Award in September, beating Roma, A Star is Born and every other film that played there. Green Book also defeated BlacKkKlansman, Black Panther, Roma, Bohemian Rhapsody and The Favourite at the Producers Guild of America Awards. It triumphed at the Golden Globes as well. If you ask me that show’s broad support counters your headline, and the narrative going forward.

“The fact is that for a film to win on a preferential ballot, as Green Book did at both the Producers Guild and the Oscars, it had to have broad support across all markers. That meant it could not have won with just ‘old white guys.’ 

Moreover, if ‘old white guys’ led that vote, how do you explain the unprecedented array of diversity and inclusion in the other categories?

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Significant Sasha Excerpts: “Green Book” Agonistes / 3.23.21

This morning Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone posted a sum-up piece that addresses the militant oversteps of the totalitarian Twitter mob over the last three years, give or take.

The piece is called “Best Picture and the Green Book Effect.” I’ve highlighted a few portions, but before I post them never forget an essential HE legend, which is that Green Book‘s Best Picture triumph, which happened a little more than two years ago, was an absolutely glorious pushback against the p.c. Twitter jackals.

Yes, I’ve said this two or three times before but it feels so good to repeat it.

Sasha excerpt #1: “I have never believed Green Book deserved the [ugly] treatment it got [from the wokesters], certainly not how the filmmakers’ past was rifled through and exposed. To me, it was redirected anger at Trump that caused a lot of the anger. [And yet Academy] voters didn’t seem to care and still picked the film to win Best Picture. Although now most people in the film coverage industry believe Green Book got what it deserved and that the Academy, which had picked Moonlight just two years before, was racist for voting for Green Book.”

Sasha excerpt #2: “The balloon of hysteria that arose on Twitter in reaction to Green Book’s success [was tumultuous]. They mostly left the film alone until it started winning the top prizes. The critics had thrown their lot 100% behind Roma and fully expected the Academy would make history with the first ‘foreign language’ film to win Best Picture.

“The Academy finally did that the following year [with Parasite], probably because of what happened with Green Book and Roma.

“But Roma was never going to win. If you gave voters only those two choices there is very little chance they were going to pick Roma. It was a beautiful film but it was not a general audience crowd-pleaser like Green Book is.

“In almost every case, a Best Picture winner is that one movie you can sit anyone down in front of and they will at least get it if not love it. They have to get it. Many could not and did not get why Roma was receiving so much praise.”

HE side riff: Roma lost support because of two things: (a) the opening 15 minutes, in which Yalitza Aparicio‘s Cleo” is shown cleaning up a spacious two-story Mexico City home and making beds and whatnot for what feels like forever, and (b) there were too many dog loads in the driveway, a problem made worse by the fact that Cleo made no real attempt to regularly clean them up.

Sasha excerpt #3: “Film Twitter tends to dictate the narrative and the journalists pick up on that narrative. If they say a movie is racist, journalists sometimes go along with it. If they say sexism is why a person did not get a Best Director nomination, journalists go along with it.

“But even if people who cover the race objected to the treatment of Green Book, they weren’t going to say anything. It was way too risky.

“If they did say anything it would be in support of the attempts to bring the film down. That’s really the way you build clout online in the insular world of film criticism or bloggers or fans online. You go along or else face being ignored or being attacked.”

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“Green Book” Didn’t Subscribe to Presentism / 9.14.22

Now that we’re all up to speed on presentism, or the current industry-wide requirement that all historical films need to reflect present-tense diversity standards and enlightened present-tense attitudes, we can more readily understand why Green Book was so viciously attacked almost exactly four years ago.

Peter Farrelly‘s film was bludgeoned by wokesters because it adhered to the realm of 1962 rather than 2018. It told the story (i.e., a tour of the Deep South by African-American pianist Don Shirley and Italian-American bouncer Frank “Tony Lip” Vallelonga) according to the standards and mindsets of the Kennedy era.

In the eyes of Bob Straus and the Green Book condemnation squad, thus was the one unforgivable sin.

Casting presentism: “For the last four or five years Hollywood progressives have also insisted that all historical films have to adopt the practice of presentism in terms of casting. That means that all casts have to reflect social values as they should be in terms of inclusion and representation rather than how they actually may have been during the time of the story.”

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