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Dry wit and deft allusion are the chief signatures of New Yorker critic Anthony Lane, whom I’ve been reading for a quarter-century. No fastballs or croquet mallets, but curves, knuckleballs, sliders. His pans suggest that disdain, anger and even disgust reside within, but Lane is hardly an emotionally open book. He always holds himself in check.

It’s therefore interesting and significant that you can detect serious, unmitigated loathing in his 9.27 review of Joker (“Todd Phillips’ Joker Is No Laughing Matter“). Not just about the film but the hype. Joker, in short, has gotten under his skin. He’s fuming and ready to take a swing. This means something.

“Here’s the deal,” Lane explains. “Joker is not a great leap forward, or a deep dive into our collective unconscious, let alone a work of art. It’s a product. All the pre-launch rumblings, the rants and the raves, testify to a cunning provocation, and, if we yield to it, we’re not joining a debate; we’re offering our services, unpaid, to the marketing department at Warner Bros.

New Yorker illustration by Zohar Lazar.

“When Dalí and Buñuel made L’Âge d’Or (1930), they wanted to start a riot, and they succeeded, but Joker yearns for little more than a hundred op-ed pieces and a firestorm of tweets. With ticket sales, naturally, to match.

“The evidence for this daring scheme is everywhere you look, in Phillips’s film, and everywhere you listen. Nicholson’s Joker may have danced and pranced to the sound of Prince’s ‘Partyman’, but Phoenix gyrates, on a steep flight of steps, to ‘Rock ’n’ Roll Part 2’, a 1972 hit by Gary Glitter. It used to be popular with sports teams, rousing the crowds at N.F.L. and N.H.L. games, before Glitter was convicted, in 1999, of possessing child pornography, and, seven years later, of sexually abusing minors, in Vietnam. Since then, understandably, the song has tumbled out of favor.

“Do you believe that the decision to revive it, for Joker, is anything but a studied choice, nicely crafted to offend? Please. I happen to dislike the film as heartily as anything I’ve seen in the past decade, but I realize, equally, that to vent any inordinate wrath toward it is to fall straight into its trap, for outrage merely proves that our attention has been snagged. Just ask the President of the United States.”

One dispute: In today’s realm, “a firestorm of tweets” is a riot.

HE-posted on 9.29.19:

I don’t eat candy in movie theatres as a rule. I’m strictly a warm-buttered-popcorn-and-coke kind of guy. But if I was forced to eat some kind of candy or else, I would choose Jujyfruits, which is the hottest candy in Pennsylvania right now. Followed by Hot Tamales, Good & Plenty, orange slices and thick red licorice. But I really try and stay away from that shit. Anyone who likes Tootsie Rolls in this day and age has something wrong with them. Ditto Necco Wafers. And to hell with Slurpies — they give me a headache.

There’s no question that Roman Polanski‘s An Officer and a Spy, a drama about the infamous Dreyfus case, is a strong, worthwhile film. It won the Silver Lion at last month’s Venice Film Festival. But of course it can’t be theatrically distributed or streamed in the U.S because of Polanski has been cancelled over his late ’70s statutory rape case, as well as a couple of other unsavory allegations left over from the ’70s and ’80s.

HE to distribution pally: How might I some day see An Officer and a Spy (aka J’Accuse) in this country? I realize that the odds are against theatrical distribution because of the wokester #MeToo political climate, but surely someone has the bravery to distribute this film, at the very least on a streaming basis.

A distributor pally suggested that I reach out to the worldwide sales agent, Playtime, and in particular Francois Yon, a Playtime Group partner who presides over Sales & Business Development.

I did so right away, and an hour or two later Francois responded as follows: “Thank you Jeffrey. Maybe you should write about this situation and how the American audiences are being culturally cut out from the rest of the world. It did happen a few times in past American history, so I remain hopeful that [things] will change once the Trump years are behind us.”

HE to Francois: “You’re saying I might have to wait until Trump is out of office before seeing An Officer and a Spy? Seriously? Will there be some way for me to at least stream it from a European company? Can you offer me a private link? I’d really like to see this as I went to Telluride instead of Venice.”

Dear Boys and Girls: Woke Twitter is apparently committed to smearing, belittling and otherwise taking down Todd Phillips‘ Joker (Warner Bros., 10.4). The reaction to Phillips’ quotes in a new Vanity Fair interview, in which he said that SJW Twitter jackals are killing (or have killed) irreverent humor, made that clear. It is axiomatic that if Woke Twitter is trying to denigrate something or someone, the victim of this attack almost certainly has something worth pondering and considering. So this is one more reason to flock to Joker this weekend.

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From “Shoot Them in the Legs, Trump Suggested: Inside His Border War,” a 10.1 N.Y. Times story by Michael D. Shear and Julie Hirschfeld Davis:

Wiki boilerplate: “Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) is 2.7.20 Warner Bros. release, based on the DC Comics team Birds of Prey. The film is intended to be the eighth film in the DC Extended Universe (DCEU) and is directed by Cathy Yan from a screenplay by Christina Hodson. The ensemble cast includes Margot Robbie, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Jurnee Smollett-Bell, Rosie Perez, Chris Messina, Ella Jay Basco, Ali Wong and Ewan McGregor.

“Birds of Prey follows Harley Quinn as she joins forces with Black Canary, the Huntress, and Renee Montoya to save Cassandra Cain from Gotham City crime lord Black Mask.”

“Six billionaires fake their own deaths and form an elite vigilante squad in order to take down notorious criminals”…bullshit. The Michael Bay stamp is just as toxic as ever — the high-velocity action aesthetic taken to absurd, over-funded, over-amplified heights. Ryan Reynolds needs to keep rolling and knocking, of course, but how does starring in a film like this not lower his basic stock rating? Shot in Italy (Rome, Florence, Siena, Taranto), the UAE (Abu Dhabi, Al Ain) and Hong Kong. I haven’t seen it, but the trailer suggests pure wankery.

Nick Clement (aka “Action Man”): “They’re putting this out DECEMBER 13th!! The insanity of a mega-budget Scorsese and mega-budget Bay coming from the same studio and separated by one month is unprecedented. It looks completely insane/stupid/retarded/amazing. PHOTO-REAL ACTION THAT ACTUALLY LOOKS NEW AND INSPIRED. And the full-deal F-bomb route, like the old days. Because it’s Netflix. And they don’t give a fuck. They gave Bay unlimited freedom to be Bay — can’t wait!!!!”

I’ve watched this day-old video 15 or 20 times now. Why hasn’t the fast-acting hero’s name been reported? This is the kind of thing that John McLane would’ve done if he’d been an airport service guy instead of a flinty renegade cop.

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When I awoke yesterday morning the iPhone 8 Plus battery was just about drained, and it wouldn’t activate. It was plugged into a smallish Jackery battery, but the charging cord was one of those shitty ones they sell at gas stations. The battery icon showed that the phone was all but drained with just a little bit of red of the left side, and it wouldn’t power up.

So I tried to fix things with the assistance of a friendly but none-too-bright Apple tech assistance person. I knew she wasn’t that brilliant when she said she’d never heard of Jackery external batteries, and then was asking me over and over when was the last time I’d charged the phone straight from a wall socket, blah blah. “Never”, I said.

Then I talked to a smarter Apple person, and his advice was to submit the phone to a Genius Bar session at the Grove Apple store. He got me a 4:30 pm appointment. Thanks.

Four or five hours later I was at the store and showing the phone (still plugged into the Jackery battery with that shitty white cord) to a Genius Bar guy. He was gay and 40ish (am I allowed to describe a person this way?) and something about his speech and manner told me “be careful…he’s not Albert Einstein.” (The best Genius Bar techs are always mercurial types in their 20s and 30s.)

Gay Genius Guy tried this and that in the back room, and came back with an unusual diagnosis. The phone wasn’t turning on because a badly loaded app was keeping the mechanism from going through the necessary steps.

“A bad app? An app that hasn’t loaded correctly?” I said, giving him the side-eye. “I’ve been grappling with iPhones for 12 years now, and I’ve never once heard of problematic software preventing a phone for tuning on.” GGG said there’s always a first time for anything.

“But it’s clearly seems to be a battery issue,” I argued. “How do you know that an app is causing this?”

We went back and forth. The only safe and comprehensive solution, he maintained, was to wipe the phone of all data and reload it through iTunes, which would have been a huge pain in the ass and eaten up a lot of time. I guess I was frowning and pouting a bit, but I really didn’t like this guy or his diagnosis.

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The initial idea for this morning’s Oscar Poker chat with Jordan Ruimy was to focus only on The Irishman. But I insisted on first discussing the Joker situation. There’s a shot near the very end of Todd Phillips‘ film, a street-riot sequence, an atmosphere of complete social breakdown and chaos and rage…if the film had ended with this shot Joker wouldn’t that much more startling. It’s nonetheless a totally nutso thing, and all but completely unmitigated. The nihilist energy is so pure, so raw. I’m honestly wondering how the Academy fuddy-duds will process this film. When last weekend’s screening ended there were a couple of people saying, “This is not going to sit well with some people.” Again, the mp3

Two weeks ago I ran a recollection from a producer friend about a young Australian guy who met a few Los Angeles agents on the strength of his having allegedly shot the plastic bag sequence in American Beauty. The contention or belief was that director Sam Mendes hadn’t shot the plastic-bag sequence — this young guy had.

Producer friend clarifies: “I just saw [an] interview with Mendes about the plastic bag film, and it seems pretty clear Mendes directed it. So what was that other guy doing meeting people and saying he directed it? I recall that the Australian guy sent his short film to the production looking for a job. All I can imagine is that he sent a primitive student film and Mendes saw it (or was told about it) and decided to do his own inspired professional version.

“A pretty prominent Australian agent set up the student director’s meeting, and it was a senior manager from Anonymous Content that called me about his own scheduled meeting. The student director obviously had some credibility behind him. But it’s clear the footage in the feature is Mendes, very clear, even if the concept was the student’s. I also heard that the student director signed with an agent!”