For the record: As of 12.24.18, the easily-led-astray, slow-on-the-pickup Gurus of Gold are calling Spike Lee‘s BlacKkKlansman the fourth hottest Best Picture contender — ahead of Green Book and Black Panther and way ahead of Bohemian Rhapsody, the brilliant First Reformed and the widely praised Can You Ever Forgive Me? They may be right (what do I know?) but if you remove the brilliant slam-bang finale that links the KKK to Donald Trump, Spike’s film is a middle-range undercover caper film that no one has done cartwheels over. It’s a better-than-decent package with logic problems. I’m sorry but serious Best Picture contention is a stretch too far. And yet the myopic Gurus believe otherwise. Incidentally: A get-around guy I spoke to this morning isn’t predicting a Green Book Best Picture win, but his nose and his gut are telling him it could happen.

The roads of Wilton, Connecticut, where I endured my last two years of high school, were narrower and hillier and twistier back then. In the decades since many roads have been widened and re-graded to some extent, especially in the areas right off Route 7, which is the main drag between Norwalk and Danbury.

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Late Saturday afternoon I drove the beater from Wilton to Jett and Cait‘s home in Jersey City for a modest Christmas hang-out. Merritt Parkway to Cross County, the Hutchinson River Parkway and into the Bronx, over the George Washington Bridge and down the NJ Turnpike, and three infuriating three loop-dee-loops on the road to Jersey City because the GPS woman lost her mind.

I picked up ex-wife Maggie (i.e., Jett’s mom) at her Warren Street apartment. We landed at Jett and Cait’s around 7 pm. Dinner, dogs, gifts. Watched a movie (Can You Ever Forgive Me?, which I’d seen twice before). Maggie and I left around 10 pm. I went back through the Holland Tunnel ($15 access!) and up the West Side Highway. I was back in the Wilton abode in less than two hours.

Jett, all his life a highly considerate fellow, thinks I’m a fragile reed because I underwent basal-skin-cancer removal and skin graft surgery on 12.4. “Get back okay last night?”, he texted at 6:30 am. “Back in the crib before midnight”, I replied.

Two more days here (today and tomorrow) and then back to Los Angeles on Tuesday morning, and then on to HE’s first Existential Sundance Film Festival, and then down to Santa Barbara in late January.

Slowly but increasingly angry over James Mattis‘ strongly worded resignation letter, President Trump is removing the Secretary of Defense earlier than announced. Mattis will be out of the Pentagon on January 1st rather than February 28th, as the retired four-star general had stated in his letter.

Trump has tweeted that Mattis deputy Patrick M. Shanahan will take over as acting defense secretary.

A 12.23 N.Y. Times story by Helene Cooper essentially says that the accelerated departure was announced today because Trump was too stupid to fully understand the import of Mattis’ resignation letter right off the bat. Mattis personally delivered the letter to Trump on 12.20.

“When Mr. Trump first announced that Mr. Mattis was leaving [on] 2.28, he praised the defense secretary on Twitter, saying he was retiring ‘with distinction’,” Cooper reports. “One aide said that although Mr. Trump had already seen the resignation letter when he praised Mr. Mattis, the president did not understand just how forceful a rejection of his strategy Mr. Mattis had issued.”

But “the president has grown increasingly angry as the days have passed,” according to that aide. And today Trump finally said in effect “okay, I can be slow at times, I realize this, and this is why this is only just hitting me…all kinds of bad currents because of that letter so fuck Mattis…he’s out of here in eight days.”

Pawel Pawlilowski‘s Cold War “is one of those love-among-the-ruins romances that turn suffering into high style. Like its two sexy leads — who fall for each other and keep on falling — the movie has been built for maximum seduction. It has just enough politics to give it heft, striking black-and-white images and an in-the-mood-for-love ambiguity that suggests great mysteries are in store for those who watch and wait. You won’t wait long. The movie runs just 89 minutes, during which swaths of the 20th century flutter by like a flipbook.

“Pawlikowski has ideas he wants you to chew over, but at times his narrative brevity can make the story feel as if it’s stopping before it has really begun. If you want more, it’s because the worlds he opens up and his two impossible, irresistible lovers — Tomasz Kot and Joanna Kulig — are so beguiling that you would like to linger longer, learn more, see more. The movie is filled with ordinary and surprising beauty, with gleaming and richly textured surfaces, and the kind of velvety black chiaroscuro you can get lost in. Its greatest strengths, though, are its two knockout leads, who give the story its heat, its flesh and its heartbreak.” — from Manohla Dargis‘s N.Y. Times review, posted on 12.20.

Last night a friend considered yesterday’s “Progressive Poker Chips” piece, which passed along a feeling that Black Panther may be gathering the most Best Picture momentum because (a) it’s a major Hollywood history landmark, (b) it’s a leading virtue-signaling contender, and (c) that great final scene on the outdoor Oakland basketball court.

The friend said he hasn’t spoken to a single Academy member who’s given Black Panther the time of day or even MENTIONED it. He wonders if it can win without a level of noticeable enthusiasm. If Black Panther is going to take the Best Picture Oscar it has to build momentum with the Critics Choice and Golden Globes, and later the guilds. But he’s not seeing that either, he said. He allowed that he might be talking to the wrong folks.

HE REPLY: Okay, check. But are you talking to the New Academy Kidz along with the aging liberal virtue-signalling crowd (i.e., the bunch that actually wanted Get Out to win the Best Picture Oscar last year)? These people are genre-friendly and seemingly indifferent to the concept of “magical swoon cinema for its own sake”, and they’re a significant voting block.

What are you sensing serious love for?

I don’t think Vice has the horses. Christian Bale is brilliant, of course, but the film feels SNL-ish to some.

The Favourite is a good, sharply written, visually striking and well acted film for the first two-thirds but flattens out during final third — it doesn’t pivot or deepen or deliver richer cards. Or chords.

And please don’t insist upon A Star Is Born. Very winning during first half, but it loses the charm during the second half. (My affection ceased during the “URINE TROUBLE, MISTER!” Grammy awards scene.). Bradley back-pat for arguably delivering the best version of this old crusty Hollywood tale, but it’s still an old crusty Hollywood tale.

If Roma wins, fine. It’s a film to be completely proud of, and it’s a resonating Trump-pushback totem. All along I’ve been sensing admiration for Alfonso Cuaron and his exacting monochrome achievement, but something less than great cascading waves of passionate love. Smarthouse respect and some MEASURED love from people of education, taste and breeding, but not great waves of the stuff. Plus there’s the Netflix resentment from the old farts.

My personal top-tier favorite is Pawel Pawlikowski’s Cold War, but it’s strictly regarded as a foreign film contender.

My emotional fave is still Green Book, but the New Academy Kidz and p.c. purists have condemned it for not being woke enough — for being a “white savior” film. Which is COMPLETE BULLSHIT. It’s basically a parent-child road dramedy — Mahershala is the strict if constricted parent, Viggo is the casually brutish adolescent. It’s a spiritual growth and friendship film. I’m sorry but it’s the only contender that makes you actually feel good at the end.

My third favorite after Cold War and Green Book is Marielle Heller‘s Can You Ever Forgive Me? And Melissa McCarthy is FAR & AWAY the most deserving Best Actress contender who’s actually playing a lead role. The fact that right now I have Roma in fourth place on my personal fave list in no way indicates that I have any kind of beef with it. It’s a luscious and mesmerizing serving of elite smarthouse cinema, and a heartfelt tribute to a household saint.

I’m not a fan of Josie Rourke‘s two-week-old Mary, Queen of Scots (Universal, 12.7), but this, no shit, is one of best red-carpet photos mine eyes have ever beheld. Seriously. Great angle, perfect lens, whatever. Here’s my 11.16 review.

You’re a seasoned screenwriter on retainer with a prominent studio-based producer. He/she is excited by the Nuro-designed, driverless, grocery-delivering bot, and has told you to either (a) integrate the bot into an existing thriller screenplay that’s waiting green-light status or (b) create your own thriller in which the bot is part of action sequence of some kind. He/she wants some ideas written out before he/she leaves for a lunch appointment at 12:30 pm. You have 90 minutes to deliver. And…?

The moral and ethical tongue-lashings of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Neilsen, delivered on 12.20 by Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Illinois) and Rep. David Cicilline (D-Rhode Island), were, to my ears, musical. I didn’t really savor them until this morning, but whatever.

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This yuletide-and-jungle-bells Die Hard trailer isn’t a parody — it was created by 20th Century Fox marketing.

The best thing about this jerk-off trailer is the holiday-decorated title art that appears at the end.

Posted on 7.15.18: “The notion about Die Hard being a great Christmas film has always been lame, favored by mock-ironists. Over the weekend Bruce Willis declared that Die Hard “isn’t a Christmas movie — it’s a goddam Bruce Willis movie.” That puppy has been put to bed.”

During a 12.12 Ankler podcast, Richard Rushfield and I were coming to the same conclusion about the Best Picture race, which was that things seemed to be gradually tilting in Black Panther‘s favor. It may be the most compelling Marvel superhero film ever made, but it’s not the year’s best by any stretch. (I’ve said over and over that it has a great final hour.) And that’s not the main consideration.

What matters is that it seems to have the strongest (i.e., most progressive) Best Picture narrative. Voting for Black Panther will make a lot of Academy voters feel good about themselves, more so than if they vote for Roma or A Star Is Born or Green Book. And that’s the bottom line.

Earlier in the season I was telling myself that Ryan Coogler‘s film would certainly be Best Picture-nominated, if for no other reason than the fact that Black Panther is the only 2018 contender that historians will be readily discussing 50 years from now. As I wrote on 11.11, it’s “obviously an historical groundbreaker, the greatest African-American mythology film ever made, and” — I was mocked for this — “the most socially and emotionally resonant Marvel film ever released.”

But the more I meditate about the Best Picture race, the more it hits me that Black Panther is holding the best cards.

“The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices. For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless search for a scapegoat has a fall-out all its own. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone.”

Just as Republican dirty-trickster Lee Atwater offered death-bed apologies for his attack-dog zeal in ruthlessly torpedoing Democratic opponents (including Michael Dukakis and Gary Hart), the day will come when certain “woke”-sters will be experiencing similar guilt pangs and looking to explain their Salem-witch-trial attitudes, and specifically for having helped to eliminate or smother or otherwise push out of the way those who were fingered as imperfect or flawed or insufficiently woke.

“Weinstein, Moonves, Louis C.K. and the others…good riddance,” some former SJW will say from his or her hospital bed in 2053. “The 20-teens ignited a cultural sea-change that was necessary and cleansing, and I’m enormously proud of that. But I didn’t mean to be so zealous in going after those who didn’t live up to the woke paradigm outside the sexual harassment and assault realm.

“I wasn’t trying to hurt anyone, not really — I just felt that society needed to be more inclusive and Hollywood product to be more representational, and I felt at the time that ruining the lives of certain people who didn’t seem to be ‘on the team’…I felt that destroying a few careers was a reasonable price to pay for making the world into a better, fairer place. Like a lot of others at the time, I was using the age-old rationale that ‘you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.’ But I’m sorry now. I didn’t intend things to get out of hand.”