To Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman, the reason Clint Eastwood made Richard Jewell “couldn’t be more obvious: to demonize the same forces Donald Trump is now in the business of demonizing.

“Richard Jewell is a drama that piggybacks on Trump’s demagoguery. The movie says that the mainstream media can’t be trusted, and that even the government’s top law enforcement agency will railroad you. And Jewell himself is the pudgy-soul-of-the-heartland, ordinary American white-guy yokel who gets used and abused by these corrupt institutions, with no one to look out for him.

“The movie treats him as a symbolic Trump supporter. Yet Eastwood, pretending to be a crusader for justice, would never come close to applying the same standard of truth and honor to the institutions that defend Donald Trump.

“The chief lesson of the Jewell saga should be that rumor, innuendo, and accusation without evidence are egregious — and that what matters, more than anything, is the truth.

Gleiberman wonders “how does [Eastwood] feel about Trump’s daily distortions of the truth? Trump’s lies about his own misbehavior? The baseless accusations he hurls at others? Should the Atlanta Journal-Constitution be vilified for its honest mistakes in judgment during the Jewell case, and Trump — or his chief propaganda organ, Fox News — be given a free ride? Why isn’t noble, straight-as-an-oak-tree Clint Eastwood making a movie about that?”

Hollywood Elsewhere returned to Mexico today, specifically to the Baja Oral Center in Tijuana. My first-rate dentist, Dr. Luis Garcia, gave me a great-looking crown. (BTW he likes The Irishman and Parasite, hasn’t seen Dolor y Gloria, and was a tiny bit meh on Once Upon A Time in Hollywood.) West Hollywood to TJ took a bit more than three hours; Mexican authorities just wave you through sans passport. Although my appointment was at 12 noon, I arrived at 11:20 am. I then faced a grueling four-hour drive back (1 to 5 pm). If I’d caught the southbound Amtrak Surfliner at Union Station I could’ve gotten some work done.

The Boston Online Films Critics Association (BOFCA) has awarded its Best Actor trophy to Uncut Gems‘ Adam Sandler…brave, brazen, approved. They’ve also handed their Best Actress prize to Us‘s Lupita Nyong’o…this is just a cool kidz pile-on now.

What happened to Diane‘s Mary Kay Place, fellas? A film shot in your own backyard and you forgot?

Little Women‘s Florence Pugh is 2019’s Best Supporting Actress? In what galaxy?

They’ve also declared in their ten best of 2019 list that Uncut Gems is a better or at least more noteworthy film than The Irishman…ludicrous. The BOFCA gang is just looking for attention.

HE to BOFCA: Show some Parasite restraint, fellas. Did you happen to see Les Miserables, by any chance? A more resonant, more sanely plotted foreign-language film than Parasite, in case you’re wondering. But of course you’re not.

The beast-destroyer who will protect all bumblefucks and erase all libtards. Team Trump’s message isn’t unambiguously perverse as much as…surreal? They’ve taken the message well beyond the realm of that legendary wolf-and-sheep New Yorker cartoon.

Criterion has apparently devised a new pricing and access strategy. Until recently there were only two ways to watch Criterion titles — buy the Bluray or DVD versions or stream the films on the Criterion Channel. Or so I’ve gathered.

Criterion physical media tends to be priced higher than average, of course. Their recently released Tunes of Glory Bluray, for example, costs $31.96 and the DVD sticker is $23.96.

But today I happened to notice that the same HD Criterion-stamped Tunes of Glory is available for purchase or rental on Amazon. You can buy permanent access for $14.99, or rent a limited viewing window for 3.99.

To my knowledge new Criterion titles being buyable or rentable on Amazon only days after the street date is a new thing. I tried double-checking this with Criterion p.r. rep Courtney Ott — zip.

A new Criterion gold-standard Bluray comes out, and you’re keen to see it. Do you shell out $32 (except during Barnes and Noble sale weekends) or pay $3.99 for an HD streaming version that probably won’t look substantially different than the physical media version? Or, if you want to watch it three or four times over the next few years, do you pay $14.99?

On 2.4.20 Kino Lorber will issue a 4K restoration Bluray of Russell Rouse‘s The Oscar (’66). I tried watching it once, but A couldn’t get past the first hour. It’s basically a Joseph E. Levine horror flick about a ruthless actor (Stephen Boyd‘s Frankie Fane) who claws his way to the top, etc. The dialogue and especially the performances are drop-dead awful. Some enjoy watching bottom-of-the-barrel films, but not me. A director friend says the commentary track by Josh Olson and Patton Oswalt “promises to be one for the ages.” Howard S. Berger, Steve Mitchell and Nathaniel Thompson provide another commentary track.

Ladj Ly‘s Les Miserables (Amazon, 1.10.20) is the official French nominee for the 2020 Best International Feature Oscar, having nudged aside Celine Sciamma‘s much-admired Portrait of a Lady on Fire. It was my favorite film at last May’s Cannes Film Festival, and the film I’d most like to see win the foreign Oscar on 2.9.20.

I know Parasite has it in the bag but Ladj Ly‘s film is just as socially incisive as Bong Joon-ho‘s, and it has no insane story-logic issues. And a much better ending. It would be a major miscarriage of artistic justice if Les Miserables doesn’t at least emerge as one of the Best International Feature Oscar nominees.

The other day I stopped by West Hollywood’s Sunset Marquis for a brief sit-down with Ladj Ly. Or rather with the non-English-speaking Ladj and his interpreter. Two on the couch, one (me) on a nearby chair.

Ladj struck me as a sea of calm. Settled, unhurried, matter of fact, good eye contact. Reluctant to smile too quickly or easily, but when he smiles it counts. His English sucks as badly as my French, which naturally put me at ease.

So we had a nice, easygoing chat but I never got a quote as good as the one Ladj gave the N.Y. Times the other day, so here it is: “I was inspired by my own history. Everything in the film comes from my life, from beginning to end. It’s a sort of autobiography, and a witnessing. I tried to make a film that resembles [the community that I live in]. To live in these towers — it’s violent, it’s degrading.”

Set in the Parisian suburb of Montfermeil, a poor but tightly-knit African Muslim community (where Ladj grew up and still lives), it offers a jolting contemporary echo of the cruelty, harassment and oppression that ignited Victor Hugo’s classic 1862 novel, this time rooted in police brutality and racial animus.

Written by Giordano Gederlini and Alexis Manenti and brilliantly shot by Julien Poupard, Les Miserables feels like a rough-and-tumble Antoine Fuqua film, using the basic dynamic of Training Day (but with three cops instead of two) plus a Little Do The Right Thing plus a constant stream of anxious urban energy. And with an open-ended existential ending that resembles the finale of Danis Tanovic‘s No Man’s Land. Or, if you will, the last two or three minutes of Asghar Farhadi‘s A Separation.

4K, 60 frames per second…watch this full screen or better yet mirrored on your 4K big-screen. I’ve been to this region of Switzerland twice and have driven this exact same road (Grundelwald to Lauterbrunnen and beyond) and have gotten misty-eyed both times. If you’re at all receptive to God’s architecture this video will put you into state of a meditative awe. I love that no one has narrated with the usual rambling blah-blah.

Would it have killed Sal, the pizzeria owner in Do The Right Thing, to mount a few photos of African-American cultural heroes (Muhammud Ali, Malcolm X, etc.) alongside the usual portraits of Frank Sinatra, Enrico Caruso, Fiorello LaGuardia and Vito Corleone? It was Sal’s restaurant, sure, but his customers were mostly African-American and Fort Greene, at the time, was a mostly African-American neighborhood. Almost anyone would have realized that sharing the wall was a smart move.

But not Sal. Because he was a proud, mouthy, pugnacious, under-educated cannoli prole who tended to argue first and think about it later.

Which is why Spike Lee hired the late Danny Aiello to play him. Because Aiello exuded white, working-class Italian-American culture without saying a word. No matter who he played, Aiello always seemed earthy, a bit anxious, wary, unsettled and on the bulky side. His characters always had something to prove. He could have never played an effete university professor or a wealthy architect. Well, perhaps he could have but he never did.

The 86-year-old Aiello died today (or last night) at a hospital in northern New Jersey. He had a home in pricey Saddle River, but he came from a New York City background that was all pizza and meatballs and subway rides and snowcones. Born in Manhattan to a large family, raised in the Bronx…a New Yorker and a New Jerseyan through and through.

My favorite Aiello performance? One of the especially fucked-up guys in a 1984 (or ’85) N.Y. Broadway production of David Rabe‘s Hurlyburly.

HE’s favorite Aiello screen perfs: Moonstruck, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Ruby, Harlem Nights, Léon: The Professional, 2 Days in the Valley. I never ever saw his performance as Don Domenico Clericuzio in the miniseries The Last Don (’97).

I never understood why Aiello’s assassin said “Michael Corleone says hello!” just before he attempted to strangle Michael Gazzo‘s Frankie Pantangeli in The Godfather, Part II. The hit was ordered by the Rosato brothers, of course. Aiello’s assassin had every expectation that Pantangeli wouldn’t survive so what difference does it make if he believes during his final seconds of life that Corleone was behind it or not?

The merde hit the fan three days ago when the Golden Globe award nominations were announced minus any prominent women (Little Women‘s Greta Gerwig, The Farewell‘s Lulu Wang, Queen & Slim‘s Melina Matsoukas) nominated for Best Director, or their films nominated for the Best Motion Picture prizes.

The same “holy moley” reaction happened on Tuesday when the SAG noms failed to include Little Women, etc.

Many angry reactions have been heard (including a claim by Matsoukas that a majority of the Golden Globe nominating committee blew off screenings of her film), but today the N.Y. Times weighed in with another complaint piece, passing along the same stuff that others have been tweeting since Monday.

Reported by Nicole Sperling and Brooks Barnes, the article embraces the progressive party line — i.e., lamenting an apparent “man tsunami” and asking “where are the women?”

Little Women producer Amy Pascal and producer Elizabeth Cantillon are heard from, as is USC gender bias authority Dr. Stacy L. Smith. An excerpt from an 11.23 Peter Bart Deadline riff discussing “male panic” and “the need to protect one’s turf” is included.

The Times article has only one dissenting quote, taken from a great, independent minded piece about this topic on 12.10 by Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone; “‘Pick a woman, any woman’ seems to be the message,” Stone is quoted as saying. “Many prominent voices refuse to accept the possibility that the five best movies of the year might be directed by men.”

Excerpt: “Women have come a long way in Hollywood since 2017, when the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements swept the culture — maybe so far that the film establishment, still overwhelmingly male, is reflexively trying to throw on the brakes, said Cantillon, who has been a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences since 2017. ‘I think there was all this support for the resistance,’ she said, ‘and then they were like ‘Whoa, not so fast.’”