HE to Parasite-Dissing Trump: “You’ve made me look bad by speaking ill of Parasite‘s Best Picture win…thanks. I don’t want to be on your side of any issue. It’s a terrible look. Besides you haven’t even seen it, for God’s sake — you just resent the idea of a South Korean film winning the top prize because it strikes you as un-American. But I guess I should be grateful you were speaking from ignorance. If you had seen it and complained that it was nonsensical for the drunken family of con artists to let the fired maid into the home during that rainstorm…if you’d said that I’d be in real trouble right now.”

HE to Trump About Gone With The Wind: “I’d also be in trouble if you said you really like Green Book. Thank you for not saying that and praising Gone With The Wind instead. Is it possible you never read Lou Lumenick’s seminal 6.24.15 piece that more or less equated Gone With The Wind with D.W. Griffith‘s Birth of a Nation? Or are you praising Gone With The Wind with the cynical knowledge that its romanticized view of the Old South is regarded as a hurtful relic of a dark era for African Americans? And that your followers…well, are more or less okay with that old-school, misty-eyed David O. Selznick memory?”

From “In The Matter of Gone With The Wind,” posted on 6.26.15:

“Lumenick is not wrong, but I feel misgivings. I don’t believe it’s right to throw Gone With The Wind under the bus just like that. Yes, it’s an icky and offensive film at times (Vivien Leigh‘s Scarlett O’Hara slapping Butterly McQueen‘s Prissy for being irresponsible in the handling of Melanie giving birth, the depiction of Everett Brown‘s Big Sam as a gentle, loyal and eternal defender of Scarlett when the chips are down) but every time I’ve watched GWTW I’ve always put that stuff in a box in order to focus on the real order of business.

“For Gone With The Wind is not a film about slavery or the antebellum South or even, really, the Civil War. It’s a movie about (a) a struggle to survive under ghastly conditions and (b) about how those with brass and gumption often get through the rough patches better than those who embrace goodness and generosity and playing by the rules. This is a fundamental human truth, and if you ask me the reason Gone With The Wind has resonated for so long is that generation after generation has recognized it as such. If you want to survive you have to be tough and scrappy and sometimes worry about the proprieties later on. Anyone who’s ever faced serious adversity understands the eloquence of that classic Scarlett O’Hara line, “I’ll never be hungry again.”

“I think GWTW particularly connected with 1939 audiences because they saw it as a parable of the deprivations that people had gone through during the Great Depression.

“On top of which the second half of part one of Gone With The Wind (the shelling of Atlanta to Scarlett shaking her first at those red skies) is undeniably great cinema. Max Steiner‘s music, the struggle, the crowd scenes, the panic, the burning of Atlanta, Ernest Haller‘s cinematography, the anguish, the soldiers groaning and moaning, Scarlett’s drooling horse collapsing from exhaustion, the moonlight breaking through as she approaches Tara…you just can’t throw all that out.

“Yes, the film’s unfortunate racial attitudes, which were lamentably par for the course 75 years ago, are now socially obsolete. And I wouldn’t argue with anyone who feels that portions of it are too distasteful to celebrate, but it just doesn’t seem right to lock all of that richness inside some ignoble closet and say ‘no more, forget about it, put it out of your minds.’ Legendary filmmaking is legendary filmmaking.

“On the other hand I distinctly remember Hillary Clinton saying seven or eight years ago in some softball interview that Gone With The Wind was her all-time favorite film. You can bet she’ll never say that again.”