Two months ago I caught Bombshell at a packed guild screening in Westwood. The crowd loved it. Gleeful whoo-whoo ovations when Charlize Theron, Nicole Kidman, Margot Robbie and John Lithgow took a bow. Ever since I’ve been presuming it would do pretty well commercially.

A couple of HE commenters recently predicted otherwise, I realize, but I couldn’t forget that ecstatic early reaction. I recommended it to everyone who asked. “Not a great film”, I would say, “but a pretty good one…sharp, fast moving, well layered and aggressively cut.” 9:10 update: I just saw Bombshell for the second time, and it totally holds up. It’s a satisfying, fully believable corporate thriller.

But when the reviews appeared yesterday, I suddenly realized it might not go over as expected. Aggregate averages in the mid ’60s usually means trouble.

Until yesterday I hadn’t heard this story from Milton Berle himself, but it’s a good one. “Pan letters.” Berle knew how things worked.

What makes us feel happy or at least comfortable or semi-content about things? Apart from discovering satori or enlightenment, I mean. (I happened to find this realm at age 19 by way of LSD and the Bhagavad Gita.) So what makes us feel reasonably good and assured about things?

In five words, a belief in the future. And if you want to add nine more, the likelihood of a fair amount of sunny days.

Not a belief that a safe and semi-bountiful tomorrow is guaranteed (for that is promised to no one) but knowledge that I’ll have a reasonably fair shot at making good and necessary things happen…an ability to feed the fire and keep the wheels turning and in so doing sample the modest comforts of life (Italian shoes, scrambled eggs and a buttered English muffin, Criterion Blurays, an occasional trip to Rome or Hanoi or Key West) being more or less within reach.

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Let it never be said that Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone doesn’t have a pair of cast-iron cojones. If you doubt this, read her Golden Globe reaction piece that went up late last night — “The Clickbait Outrage Machine Goes into Overdrive Post Globes.”

It’s one of the bravest and frankest essays ever written about the real-deal terms of female filmmaker empowerment in Hollywood. It’s a piece that only a tough woman columnist could have written. If I’d posted this on HE I would have been torn limb from limb by twitter jackals, and the buzzards would be feasting on the leftovers ten minutes later. But Sasha has the authority.

Yesterday I deftly debated the “gender parity watchdogs” who had howled in protest over four top-ranked female directors — Little Women‘s Greta Gerwig, The Farewell‘s Lulu Wang, Hustler‘s Lorene Scafaria and It’s A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood‘s Marielle Heller — not being nominated for a Golden Globe Best Director award, and their films not being nominated for Best Motion Picture, Drama.

I stated that The Farewell is a highly superior film, but also argued that a reasonably convincing case couldn’t be made for Little Women, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood or Hustlers “being more transporting or historic or eye-opening” than Martin Scorsese‘s The Irishman, Sam Mendes‘ 1917 or Todd Phillips‘ Joker. I also said it would be a push to convince people that Little Women, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood or Hustlers “are fuller meals or more humanist or more grounded in human vulnerability.”

That was as far as I felt I could go. But then Sasha’s piece appeared last night and made me look…well, like a guy who needs to be careful.

Because Sasha just said it. She basically argued that feminist industry progressives and their Film Twitter component are doing women no favors by insisting that a gender parity quota system should be observed when it comes to award nominations.

Film Twitter is basically declaring that (a) there must be some female award-show representation “so those involved can sleep at night, knowing that yes, Virginia, there is gender parity in Hollywood,” (b) not nominating women for awards is unacceptable, and (c) that those who defy this revolutionary mandate will have to pay a price.

“’Pick a woman, any woman‘ seems to be the message,” Sasha wrote. “Because if that happens [award-giving orgs] are shielded from attacks.

“I have no doubt that the clickbait cycle so prevalent today will seek to put Oscar voters on notice in the 11th hour, urging them to choose one of these [female-directed] movies for good optics, to shield them from the kind of heat the Globes got burned with [on Monday].

A Stone paragraph that will live forever: “If I were a woman I wouldn’t want anyone to do me any favors. I would want to make a movie SO GOOD that its value was undeniable. Like Kathryn Bigelow’s Hurt Locker, like Jane Campion’s The Piano, like Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, like Ava DuVernay’s Selma.**

“Voters should focus on choosing the best films or the best directors or the best scripts. But none of that matters to Film Twitter, which then is the feeder trough for clickbait all over the web.

Another historic Stone statement: “It seems like in our overriding desire to level the playing field we’ve decided that there is no absolute measure of what’s good and what isn’t, and that’s been replaced by a sliding scale that adjusts to factor in equality, parity, and inclusion.”

Earlier today Netflix content honcho Ted Sarandos shared some Irishman numbers. Over the first seven days (11.27 to 12.3), he said, the 209-minute gangster flick was streamed by 26.4 million account holders.

He added that Netflix expects that household number to hit or closely approach 40 million after 28 days, or as of 12.25.

Sarandos said that the 26.4 million viewers over the first seven days watched “at least 70%” of The Irishman. Good dogs! Give ’em a biscuit! So as far as Sarandos knows, an undetermined number of Netflix viewers have yet to see the other 30%, or roughly the last 60 or 70 minutes. Or, you know, they watched some of it, turned it off, watched a little more, turned it off, and then watched the last hour or whatever.

Sincere question: What kind of droopy-lidded slug stops watching The Irishman at the 130-minute mark, which is just after the point when things begin to get more and more entertaining (“People aren’t freezin’ to death in New York…it’s summer”) and just when the suspense element is kicking in (when and how will Hoffa be hit?) and which delivers the legendary jaws-of-death finale (getting older and older, “Peggy won’t talk to me”, “leave the door a little bit open”).

The reason that 40 million are expected to watch The Irishman by Christmas, obviously, is because it’s easy. Just turn it on and flop on the couch.

But what if Netflix had decided to delay streaming until 12.13 or thereby kept it in theatres all through November and half of December, or roughly 42 days? Or if it had delayed the theatrical release until Christmas day? What percentage of that 40 million might have trekked down to a theatre and bought a ticket?

Knowing that most people are as lazy as overweight cats, my guess is that 10% might have shown up. 4 million tickets x $9 average ticket price = $36 million. Maybe I’m being too conservative. Maybe 15% or 20%. You tell me.

Ivan Reitman‘s original Ghostbusters came out 35 years ago. I can still feel the hate. Some of Bill Murray‘s quips were amusing, but I despised the third act with a passion — that idiotic demon dog, Sigourney Weaver‘s possession by “Gozer” and especially that huge marshmallow monster clomping around Manhattan’s Upper West Side. GTFO.

A woman I was seeing at the time, a marketing exec, found it delightful. I think on some level this may have contributed to our eventual breakup. I remember taking a walk one afternoon and realizing that her Ghostbusters worship was a bridge too far.

Jason Reitman‘s Ghostbusters: Afterlife (Sony, 7.10 20) is obviously not an urban thing, and looks heartland picturesque a la Andrew Wyeth.

Boilerplate: “After being evicted from their home, two teens (Mckenna Grace, Finn Wolfhard) and their single mom (Carrie Coon) move to Summerville, Oklahoma after inheriting property from their late grandfather. Paul Rudd is a local egghead professor who gradually hooks up with Coon. When the town experiences a series of unexplained earthquakes, the kids discover their family’s link to the original Ghostbusters”, blah blah.

Quickie cameos from original cast members Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Ernie Hudson and Annie Potts.

Reitman co-wrote the screenplay with Gil Kenan (Monster House, City of Ember).

There’s one interesting thing about Jay Roach‘s Bombshell (Lionsgate, 12.13) that I haven’t mentioned, and it’s a pretty good trick when you think about it.

There’s no disputing that Fox News has been a malevolent cultural force in this country, generating rancid rightwing spin for over 20 years now, and that the late Roger Ailes did everything possible to trash President Barack Obama during his two terms and block every initiative of his center-moderate agenda. Worst of all, Fox News did more than any other entity to inflame rural bumblefucks and pump them up for the candidacy of Donald Trump.

Look where we are now, thanks to the Foxies — the country convulsing over the criminal reign of the most destructive sociopath president in U.S. history.

Megyn Kelly, Gretchen Carlson.

What Bombshell manages to do, then, is present lead protagonists Megyn Kelly (Charlize Theron) and Gretchen Carlson (Nicole Kidman) — a pair of charismatic on-camera professionals who contributed to the anti-Obama poisoning of the political waters and blew toxic rightwing smoke on a daily, dedicated basis…what Bombshell manages to do is make you forget that these women are no one’s idea of noble or heroic or even fair-minded as far as disseminating the news was concerned.

Any viewer would and should feel empathy for Kelly and Carlson’s situation with the sexually predatory Ailes, but it’s hard not to feel conflicted at the same time. Because Kelly and Carlson served an agenda that pushed racist, highly questionable, xenophobic propaganda.

Slate‘s Dana Stevens: “I can think of more important whistleblower stories than Megyn Kelly’s. A person with a platform that size who uses her on-air time to argue vehemently that Santa Claus is white just isn’t that exciting to root for. No one deserves to be harassed at work, and the fact these women banded together to bring down an enormously powerful and malignant man is admirable. That doesn’t mean I want to spend two hours gazing at Megyn’s seemingly poreless face as she wrestles with whether and how to tell her truth, while continuing to play a highly public part in a media ecosystem based on lies.”

Progressive Hollywood and “gender equity watchdogs” are raging over four top-ranked female directors — Little Women‘s Greta Gerwig, The Farewell‘s Lulu Wang, Hustler‘s Lorene Scafaria and It’s A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood‘s Marielle Heller — not being nominated for any significant Golden Globe awards. Not for Best Director, I mean, and not for Best Picture in either dramatic or comedy/drama categories.

If you leave aside notions of quotas and gender equity, the truth is that three of these films — Gerwig’s, Heller’s and Scafaria’s — could be fairly described (and are generally regarded) as somewhere between agreeable, good and better-than-pretty-good.

Neighborhood has a fine supporting performance (Tom Hanks as Fred Rogers) and a great third act scene (Rogers visits Lloyd’s dying dad) but the rest is just…well, good enough. Gerwig’s Little Women is very well liked in certain quarters, I realize, but it has struck more than a few as somewhat flawed and occasionally irksome. Scarfaria’s Hustlers is a fine, feisty, fact-based thing about Scores dancer scamming Wall Street wolves, but it’s an A-minus at best and realistically more of a B-plus. Be honest.

I believe that Wang’s The Farewell is a fresher, stronger, more emotionally gripping film than The Two Popes, so if you’re talking about switching out one of the five nominees for Best Motion Picture, Drama, there’s your trade — The Farewell goes in and The Two Popes drops out.

But as God is my witness, there’s no way in hell that one could make a reasonable argument for Little Women, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood or Hustlers being more transporting or historic or eye-opening than Martin Scorsese‘s The Irishman, Sam Mendes‘ 1917 or Todd Phillips‘ Joker.

You could make an argument that Noah Baumbach‘s Marriage Story is a candidate for possible substitution, but tell me how the arguments would go that Little Women, It’s A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood or Hustlers are fuller meals or more humanist or more grounded in human vulnerability. I’d really like to hear those arguments.

HFPA president Lorenzo Soria to Variety: “What happened is that we don’t vote by gender. We vote by film and accomplishment.”

Globes exec producer Barry Adelman: “Every year, somebody gets left out. There’s so much talent going on, maybe we need to expand the categories so more people can be part of it. I also think that if you look at some of the other things…a lot of the big television shows are created by women, so I think across the board there is a good representation. Maybe in a couple of those categories, we wish it could be a little different. Who knows what will happen next year?”

These deepfakes struck me as better than decent. Imagine where this can go as the inevitable refinements become common. The creator is iFake, a person (presumably a youngish male) looking for Patreon support. Excerpt: “Deepfaking takes a lot of time and resources to pull off and so I’ve created this page for fellow DeepFake enthusiasts who might be interested in supporting me and my work.”

Atlanta Journal Constitution editor Kevin Riley is concerned about the paper’s reputation having been “severely tarnished” ** by Clint Eastwood‘s Richard Jewell (Warner Bros., 1.13). Hence the AJC has hired Los Angeles pitbull attorney Marty Singer to convey objections to Warner Bros., Eastwood and others involved in the film’s production.

The AJC and Singer are “asking” that the producers “issue a statement acknowledging that some events were imagined for dramatic purposes, and that artistic license and dramatization were used in the film’s portrayal of events and characters,” as Riley has explained in a 12.9 email. “In addition, we’re requesting a disclaimer to that effect be added to the film’s credits.”

The AJC beef is basically about an implication in the film that AJC reporter Kathy Scruggs, portrayed in Richard Jewell by Olivia Wilde, used sexual favors to obtain information from law enforcement sources.

Riley’s email includes an attached a copy of Singer’s letter to WB, Eastwood, screenwriter Billy Ray, etc.

Riley: “We welcome the accurate telling of Richard Jewell’s story. In fact, the AJC worked closely with the Atlanta History Center on a recent program that focused on a definitive new book on the subject by a former Wall Street Journal reporter and the former U.S. Attorney who handled the case. We recognize that the AJC, and the news media in general, are not above criticism.

“We can’t be silent when a film that purports to take the media to task engages in the very behavior that it criticizes. I feel compelled to stand up for the dedicated journalists who work for the AJC — otherwise a deceased reporter will be maligned in movie theaters across the country and around the world. This is especially concerning at a time when the nation’s leading news organizations are being attacked.”

If this morning’s Golden Globes nominations said any one thing, it’s the fact that Netflix has kicked everyone’s ass with 17 nominations (more than double the second-place finisher). Another thing is that we’re all living in a streaming, streaming, streaming world these days, and that images projected out of a theatre booth and onto a big screen in front of popcorn eaters is no longer the primary thing…no longer the dominant way in which the art and transportation of cinema is dispensed and contemplated.

It breaks my heart to say it (although we’ve all felt this building over the last decade or so), but theatres are no longer the churches of our culture, the places where it all shoots out and caresses and coagulates and massages and comes together — living rooms are. For megaplexes are essentially zoos, gladiator arenas, amusement parks, video arcades, comic-book mythology salons. The communal experience survives to some extent, yes, but screening rooms and film festivals are the only decent way to go, certainly for anyone seeking a pure and unsullied experience.

Living rooms diminish the current between filmmakers and audiences, mainly by diluting the concentration levels. Which fits right in with the generally fragmented ADD thing — food breaks, bathroom breaks, walk-the-dog breaks, take-out-the-garbage breaks and deciding to watch the 209-minute Irishman in two or three installments rather than the whole thing in one setting. Not to mention texting and surfing while watching Robert DeNiro pop some guy.

Three Netflix features landed Golden Globes nominations in the Best Motion Picture, Drama category — Martin Scorsese‘s The Irishman, Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story, Fernando Meirelles‘ The Two Popes — and Craig Brewer, Eddie Murphy, Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski‘s Dolemite is My Name was nominated in the comedy or musical category.

Many of us were presuming that Netflix would probably do better than anyone else with the GG noms, but I didn’t think Marriage Story would snag more noms than The Irishman. But it did, six to five.

And yet MS‘s Noah Baumbach didn’t land a Best Director nomination, and neither did partner Greta Gerwig for Little Women.

I think it’s vaguely shitty (or vaguely clueless) of the Globe guys to blank Uncut Gems‘ Adam Sandler and The Irishman’s Robert De Niro in the Best Actor, Drama category, but that’s what they did.

The Irishman‘s Al Pacino and Joe Pesci are eyeball to eyeball in the Best Supporting Actor category (and also threatening to cancel each other out), but as Pesci isn’t a campaigner and Al is a brilliant one, we probably know where this is heading.

Ricky Gervais will host the Golden Globes ceremony from the usual Beverly Hilton location on 1.5.20.

The Philadelphia Film Critics Circle today handed Rian Johnson‘s Knives Out their Best Film award. I’m presuming that when Johnson heard the news he called the PFCC president and demanded a recount. All I can figure is that the Philly crix couldn’t decide on a Best Pic winner and so somebody finally said “fuck it, let’s give it to Johnson’s unpretentious, expertly written Agatha Christie throwaway flick,” and a majority shrugged and said “okay, whatever.”

Don’t misunderstand — I really like Knives Out (I’ve seen it twice), but it’s not a Best Picture-type deal. It’s a well-acted, super-witty popcorn diversion.

The other Philly eyebrow-raiser was giving their Best Supporting Actress award to Little Women‘s Florence Pugh. Nobody is thinking along these lines out here, I can tell you. For most of the film her Amy character behaves like a resentful, arch-backed little beeyotch. All she seems to do is taunt Saoirse Ronan‘s Jo. She even burns Jo’s manuscript at one point.

Best Director: Martin Scorsese, The Irishman
Best Actor: Adam Driver, Marriage Story
Best Actress: Lupita Nyong’o, Us (again?)
Best Supporting Actor: a tie between Brad Pitt in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Joe Pesci in The Irishman.
Best Foreign Film: Parasite (South Korea)…can’t give it to Ladj Ly’s Les Miserables!
Best Animated Film: Toy Story
Best Documentary: Apollo 11 (agreed)
Best Cinematography: The Lighthouse (agreed)
Best Script: Knives Out