Variety critics Owen Gleiberman and Peter Debruge haven’t engaged in a genteel, hail-fellow-well-met, Marquis-of-Queensbury dispute about Joker — they’ve gotten into an actual argument. It’s like a mid ’60s slapdown between Pauline Kael and Bosley Crowther about Bonnie and Clyde. Gleiberman loves Joker‘s mad disturbing provocations while Debruge finds them rash and exploitive and even dangerous (i.e., “Phillips has given incel types a poster boy for the kind of toxic ‘it’s everybody’s fault but mine’ mentality“).

Favorite OG excerpt: “If you say you have trouble with films that create ‘sympathetic portraits of sociopathic characters,’ I guess that’s an argument. But it’s a terribly conservative one. The same argument, and outrage, was once used as a weapon against movies like The Public Enemy and Scarface, and you could easily wield it against a work of art like Bonnie and Clyde — as, indeed, the New York Times critic Bosley Crowther famously did at the time.”

“But when you call Joaquin Phoenix‘s Arthur Fleck a ‘poster boy’ for angry self-pitying incel types, I do think you’re onto something — not about whether he’s going to become a hero to the basement-dweller brigade, but about the true, underlying reason why there’s been so much hostility to Joker on the part of film critics who routinely greet utterly processed comic-book films with a wan shrug of approval.

“The movie is being treated by those critics as if it were a two-hour advertisement for the toxic white male. It almost doesn’t matter whether the film is glorifying or condemning Arthur’s violence. Everyone knows that Joker is going to be a huge hit — and, more than that, a phenomenon — and the fact that it places a toxic white male at the center of the conversation is somehow being slammed as a violation of the New Woke Rules.

“The critics are saying: We’re done with characters like this! But they’re trying to wish away something that can’t be wished away. In doing so, they’re treating the rare piece of popular art with a genuine emotional danger to it, as if it were the enemy.

Plus he’s looking older and is, if you ask me, too old to cut the 007 mustard. He can pretend and all, but I don’t believe that a 51 year old guy can handle all that rugged stuff like he did in his 30s and 40s. Yes, I know — Sean Connery was 52 when he made Never Say Never Again (’83), but I didn’t believe that one either. Connery’s prime Bond period was in the ’60s, when he was in his early to mid 30s. When Roger Moore shot his last Bond, A View to a Kill, he was 57 or 58…way too long-of-tooth. Pierce Brosnan finished his 007 service at age 52 or thereabouts.

Posted on 5.23.19: “If Craig was required to just stroll around and say dialogue, fine, but 007 has evolved past the guy he used to be — an elegant smoothie who would occasionally punch or plug a bad guy with aplomb — to an X-treme pugilist martial-arts superman. Craig is 51 years old — five years past the normal prime period for a typically fit male.”

Set in a Scottish highland regiment sometime after World War II, Tunes of Glory (’60) is about a brutal battle of esteem between the retiring commander, Major Jock Sinclair (Alec Guinness). and his replacement, one Lieutenant Colonel Basil Barrow (John Mills). Right away the macho Sinclair, whom everyone in the regiment likes and respects, mounts a steady campaign of disdain and belittling against Barrow, whom everyone comes to regard as prissy, stiff and constipated. The war ends with a bullet and blood on the floor, and a ton of residual guilt.

Guinness and Mills were at their absolute peak. James Kennaway‘s screenplay, sharp and well-honed, was Oscar-nominated.

Wiki excerpt: “Guinness wanted to play Barrow, and John Mills wanted to play Sinclair. It took a meeting between Guinness, Mills and director Ronald Neame to straighten out why each was best suited for the role they had been offered. However, in his autobiography, Mills claimed that he brought the script to Guinness, and between them they decided who should play which role. At the end of the dat Guinness believed this performance to be among his best.”

There are some who are still saying Trump will most likely win in ’20, mainly because they’re convinced that the pragmatic humanity of schoolmarm Elizabeth Warren is no match for this grotesque alpha-male sociopath on a debate stage. I’ve been scared all along of how well she’d do if Typewriter Joe were to fall by the wayside. (Bernie‘s heart attack has pretty much ended his candidacy — face it.) Warren is a smart, tough, determined, hard-charging change agent…anti-corporate, good with specifics, not corrupted, an actual human being. How could your pot-bellied, gun-owning hinterland slowboat prefer the Manhattan crime family boss who has no scruples, no temperance, no decency?

From Michael Moore’s Facebook rant about Joker, which posted early this morning: “The fear and outcry over Joker is a ruse. It’s a distraction so that we don’t look at the real violence tearing up our fellow human beings. 30 million Americans who don’t have health insurance is an act of violence. Millions of abused women and children living in fear is an act of violence. Cramming 59 students like worthless sardines into classrooms in Detroit is an act of violence.

“As the news media stands by for the next mass shooting, you and your neighbors and co-workers have already been shot numerous times, shot straight through all of your hearts and hopes and dreams. Your pension is long gone. You’re in debt for the next 30 years because you committed the crime of wanting an education. You have actually thought about not having children because you don’t have the heart to bring them onto a dying planet where they are given a 20-year death-by-climate-change sentence at birth.

“The violence in Joker? Stop! Most of the violence in the movie is perpetrated on the Joker himself, a person in need of help, someone trying to survive on the margins of a greedy society. His crime is that he can’t get help. His crime is that he is the butt of a joke played on HIM by the rich and famous. When the Joker decides he can no longer take it, you will feel awful. Not because of the (minimal) blood on the screen, but because deep down, you [will be] cheering him on.

“And if you’re honest when that happens, you will thank this movie for connecting you to a new desire — not to run to the nearest exit to save your own ass but rather to stand and fight and focus your attention on the nonviolent power you hold in your hands every single day.

“Thank you Joaquin Phoenix, Todd Phillips, Warner Bros. and all who made this important movie for this important time. I loved this film’s multiple homages to Taxi Driver, Network, The French Connection, Dog Day Afternoon. How long has it been since we’ve seen a movie aspire to the level of Stanley Kubrick? Go see this film. Take your teens. Take your resolve.”

Reported today by AP’s Jay Reeves: “A young man who was loudly cheering and applauding on-screen murders sent some people heading toward exits in a crowded theater near Manhattan’s Times Square on Friday night. Other patrons yelled at the man, who spit on them as they left early, said Nathanael Hood, who was in the AMC Empire 25.

“’I was scared. I’m sure a lot of other people were,’ Hood said in an interview conducted by private messages.

“’About halfway through when Joker started killing people and monologuing about how society is evil, [this ayehole] started clapping really loudly and incessantly for a good minute. People started yelling for him to shut up, but he kept clapping and cheering like mad,’ Hood said.

“The man started clapping and cheering again ‘really loudly’ during a climatic gunfight, he said, and got ‘belligerent’ when people told him to quit. Finally security came and got him. He was still being interrogated outside the theater when we came out. Plenty of police were around the theater, ‘ said Hood.

I intended to review or at least riff on Noah Hawley‘s Lucy in the Sky (Fox Searchlight, 10.4) after seeing it earlier this week. But I couldn’t get it up. I began to check my watch around the 40-minute mark, and after a while I faced the fact that I was shrouded in boredom. Which was partly due to the fact that half the time I couldn’t understand what Natalie Portman, as the high-strung, love-struck astronaut Lucy Cola, was saying.

Cola is based upon notorious ex-astronaut Lisa Nowak, who flipped out when her fellow astronaut lover William Oefelein, whom the married-with-children Nowak had been seeing for a couple of years, took up with the younger Colleen Shipman. The screenplay (by Hawley, Brian C. Brown and Elliott DiGuiseppi) is an attempt to enoble Nowak’s bizarre saga as something more than the result of jealousy and a manic personality — it tries to explain her apartness and disorientation as a spiritual result of having been on a prolonged space mission.

“I just feel a little off,” Portman/Cola says at one point. “You go up there, you see the whole universe. And everything here looks so small.”

I’m sorry but there’s just no caring for what she’s going through. I wanted to leave before the one-hour mark. “What does this have to do with me,” I was asking myself. “She’d rather be floating hundreds of miles above earth…okay. But why do I have to deal with her issues? I got enough aggravation. And is it really that hard to speak clearly so that hearing-impaired idiots like myself can understand what she’s saying?

But I love Portman’s current hair styling, or at least as she appeared the other night on Jimmy Fallon. And I was thinking to myself that if Lucy Cola’s hair looked this good (as opposed to her awful Dorothy Hamill soupbowl) I would have felt more sympathy for Lucy Cola’s plight. I’m sorry but these things matter.

Your flight finally lands in Los Angeles, and you’re feeling the usual relief mixed with lethargy as you wait for your luggage. But at least a taxi or an Uber ride won’t be hard to snag, you tell yourself, and the pick-up location is only a short walk. Except starting later this month, the pickup location (an outdoor lot called LAX-it) will be a long walk, and the only way to get there if you’re not in a long-walk mood will be to hop on a shuttle bus.

In other words, the process of escaping LAX congestion after you land will soon take an extra 20 or 30 minutes, minimum. Thank you very much, genius bureaucrats, for making that tedious airport even more of a traffic prison than it already is.

Last month I mentioned something I’d heard about award-season calculations inside the Netflix compound. It crossed my radar screen just before Telluride, and it came from a trusted colleague who gets around. The rumble was that Netflix was placing most of its award-season hopes upon Noah Baumbach‘s Marriage Story, which has an emotionally relatable story, a well-honed screenplay and dynamic, heartfelt performances from Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson.

“Not that Netflix doesn’t respect or believe in Martin Scorsese‘s The Irishman,” I wrote, “but that they’re unsure how well a sprawling Lawrence of Arabia-sized gangster film will play with Academy and guild members.”

I didn’t immediately recall this observation after being floored by The Irishman last Friday. It actually didn’t hit me until today, to be honest, but I was fairly taken aback once I started thinking about it. How could anyone who’d seen Scorsese’s masterwork believe that Marriage Story, which I totally fell for during Telluride and regard as one of the best of the year so far…how could anyone conclude that Noah Baumbach‘s film had a slightly better shot at Best Picture than the Scorsese?

The thinking, I was told in late August, was that Marriage Story delivers a stronger emotional current than The Irishman, and that emotion always wins the day at the Oscars. That’s true, but the last half-hour of The Irishman delivers a current that feels like melancholy, hand-of-fate heroin, and which sinks right into your bloodstream and stirs you deep down. There’s nothing in Marriage Story, due respect, that comes close to this . It’s a very fine film, but it’s coming from a different place, and generating a different kind of vibe.

On top of which Marriage Story ain’t Kramer vs. Kramer. It’ll be respected and saluted all around, but I’m sensing that the emotional reception…well, we’ll see. Right now Driver and Johansson are in the best shape of all the senior Marriage Story contributors.

I somehow can’t accept that the great Ang Lee, a serious filmmaker and two-time Oscar-winner, has made a problematic action film. Despite, I realize, ample evidence that says I’m in denial — namely a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 41% plus an even-worse Metacritic tally of 33%. I swear to God you can feel the resignation wafting out of Paramount publicity right now, and yet Hollywood Elsewhere wants to like it…really! My soft spot for Gemini Man is a serious admiration for high-frame-rate cinematography. I didn’t attend the 10.2 Grove screening, and I can’t be at Monday’s all-media because of a conflict. My only shot is the Sunday evening premiere. I understand that Gemini Man has issues, but maybe on some level they aren’t so bad.

Hollywood Elsewhere last attended the Middleburg Film Festival in 2015 — i.e, the Spotlight year. I’m happy to announce that I’ll be returning for this year’s festival between Thursday, 10.17 and Sunday, 10.20, and that Tatyana will join.

An LAX-to-Dulles red eye on Wednesday night (no sleep to speak of), and then a three-and-a-half-day stay at the five-star Salamander Inn. We expect to catch nine or ten films, minimum. And then a two-and-a-half day roam-around in the nation’s capital, and then a flight back to Los Angeles on Tuesday evening, 10.22.

The Middleburg slate is lively, necessary, and all-encompassing. The Irishman, Ford v, Ferrari, The Cave, The Capote Tapes, Clemency, Terrence Malick‘s A Hidden Life, Honey Boy, JoJo Rabbit, Just Mercy, Knives Out, Marriage Story, Motherless Brooklyn, Parasite, The Traitor, The Truth, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, The Report, Varda by Agnes, Waves plus panel discussions plus leisurely nature strolls and some roam-around time in historic Middleburg.

Tatyana and I would be delighted to pay $135 each for a clop-clop horse ride along a nice woodsy trail. Whether we’ll actually do that is another matter.