Senator Corey Booker‘s tongue-lashing of U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen earlier today was a humdinger. Nielsen worked for John F. Kelly during his term as Secretary of Homeland Security (January to July 2017), and then as Principal Deputy White House Chief of Staff to President Donald Trump (September to December 2017). It’s not sexist to note that Nielsen fits that Nordic ice-blonde quality that Republicans and Trump administration appointees often seem to cultivate or favor in terms of hires. Fox News management also seems to favor women who fit this profile.

If I were going to be in Los Angeles tomorrow evening I’d be attending “Focus on Female Directors 2018” at the American Cinematheque Egyptian. The shorts will include Robin Wright’s The Dark of Night, Svetlana Cvetko’s Yours Sincerely, Lois Weber, Autumn de Wilde’s I Love L.A.”, Marie Dvorakova’s Who’s Who in Mycology, etc. There in spirit.

I have to stop filing for a while, mainly because I have to pack and prepare for tomorrow morning’s very early departure for Salt Lake City and the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. I should be in Park City by 12:30 or 1 pm. A day of checking in, preparing, thinking things through, etc. I might post a rundown of the films that I feel are completely necessary to see (Wild Life, Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot, Marina Zenovich‘s Robin Williams doc, etc.), but it’s all a big crazy salad. All catch-as-catch-can. You see everything you can and find your way through it film by film, and you stay the hell away from 90% of the parties.

Three weeks ago I was half-agreeing with Tucker Carlson about the outraged reactions to Matt Damon’s mansplaining remarks (“spectrum of behavior”, “shouldn’t conflate”) in a televised chat with Peter Travers.

“There’s not a single sentiment in [what Damon said to Travers] that’s not defensible or that 90 percent of the American population would find over the top or outrageous,” Carlson said. “It’s all within bounds or it would have been last year.”

But the blowback was pretty bad, and Damon is only human.

During an interview this morning on the Today show with Kathie Lee Gifford, Damon apologized and pleaded for forgiveness for having the temerity to share what he thought. The gist of Damon’s earlier comments were that (a) there are some really bad guys out there (i.e., Harvey Weinstein) as well as (b) some mildly shitty guys, (c) some flawed but not-so-bad guys (Sen. Al Franken) as well as (d) regular guys who’ve never pawed or assaulted anyone and are okay to have around. But that category (a) shouldn’t be conflated with categories (c) and (d).

“I really wish I’d listened a lot more before I weighed in on this,” Damon told Gifford. “Ultimately, what it is for me is that I don’t want to further anybody’s pain with anything that I do or say. And so for that I’m really sorry. A lot of those women are my dear friends and I love them and respect them and support what they’re doing and want to be a part of that change. But I should get in the back seat and close my mouth for a while.”

Morgan Neville‘s Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, a doc about the life and legacy of Fred Rogers, will premiere at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. An ordained Presbyterian minister before becoming a children’s TV star, Rogers was everyone’s idea of a gentle, kindly, compassionate fellow. Rogers passed in ’03, but he was the personification of everything Donald Trump never was, isn’t today and never will be. I love guys like Fred Rogers, and he was also something of a progressive, forward-thinking lefty, which makes me admire his memory all the more. And I’m a longtime admirer of Neville (20 Feet from Stardom, Best of Enemies: Buckley vs. Vidal, Keith Richards: Under the Influence). But I can’t honestly say that Won’t You Be My Neighbor? is at the top of my Sundance gotta-see list. I’m just being honest.

I don’t always catch trending YouTube clips, but this is the most persuasive argument for Gary Oldman winning the Best Actor Oscar that I’ve seen since award season began. I admired his performance as Winston Churchill as far as it went, but except for the London Underground scene + the House of Lords finale I didn’t really “like” it. But I like James Brown. Has Oldman said anything about the Woody Allen situation, or is he steering clear?

What is Alec Baldwin‘s problem? Doesn’t he understand which way the winds are blowing? The Time’s Up kangaroo court (Greta Gerwig, Mira Sorvino, Rebecca Hall, Natalie Portman, Reese Witherspoon) has thrown Allen over the side and Baldwin tosses him a life preserver? Does Baldwin want to work in this industry or not?

Seriously, Baldwin is almost Edward R. Murrow talking back to Sen. Joseph McCarthy right now. Almost.

Did the blood drain from Timothee Chalamet‘s face the instant he read Baldwin’s tweet? Did the Call Me By Your Name star and likely Best Actor nominee run out of the room and into the traffic-congested street like Kevin McCarthy at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers? Has he been telling friends “I didn’t know what to say or do! My agent told me to do it! I just want to be nominated and have a great career, and I didn’t want the Time’s Up gang to be mad at me…can you blame me?”

Let there be no doubt that John Lennon‘s “Isolation,” recorded 48 years ago, is one of the gentlest and most scalding pieces of confessional, self-lacerating poetry of the immediate post-Beatles era, bar none and hands down. Just as John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band is one of the greatest rock albums ever — so lean and stripped down and revealing on a raw, exposed-nerve level.

Now “Isolation” is back and part of the bustling, pulsing realm of 2018. The teaser-trailer for Gus Van Sant‘s Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot (debuting in Park City this weekend) has made it relevant and fresh again. Plus the subject matter of the film and the story (i.e., about crippled alcoholic cartoonist John Callahan) and the hippy-dippy period blend so well that you can’t help but think “wow, this looks really good!” Probably. You can’t read too much into a trailer. But this one is brilliantly assembled.

All hail Joaquin Phoenix‘s temporary abandonment of his beardo gloomhead persona, and all hail Jonah Hill, as always.

“I have been asked in a few recent interviews about my decision to work on a film with Woody Allen last summer,” Timothy Chalamet said on Instagram Monday evening. “What I can say is this: I don’t want to profit from my work on the film, and to that end, I am going to donate my entire salary to three charities: TIME’S UP, the LGBT Center in New York and RAINN.”

In other words, Chalamet considers his fee for acting in Allen’s A Rainy Day in New York to be dirty money, which is tantamount to calling Allen a dirty filmmaker, or more precisely a guilty filmmaker.

Along with other actors, Chalamet has presumably arrived at this belief by way of faith and solidarity with Dylan Farrow and her longstanding charge that Allen sexually abused her as a child. It’s well known that facts, evidence, two investigative agencies and Farrow’s own brother, Moses Farrow, strongly dispute Dylan’s recollection, but that’s not Chalamet’s concern at this point.

The 22 year-old actor is playing it smart for the sake of his career and the maintaining of a progressive, forward-looking, Time’s Up-embracing industry profile among his contemporaries. It is far easier and safer to throw in with the anti-Woody gang (Greta Gerwig, Mira Sorvino, Rebecca Hall, Natalie Portman, Reese Witherspoon). Throw the 82 year-old filmmaker under the bus, terminate his career, wash your hands.

Chalamet had no choice, right? His career would have definitely been hurt if he’d taken Allen’s side or adopted a neutral posture. He had to join the throng.

Hollywood Elsewhere has been saying all along that Chalamet’s Call Me By Your Name performance is far richer and miles above Gary Oldman‘s broad performance as Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour. But I can’t honestly say that I admire Chalamet at this point in time, or that tonight’s statement has shown him to be a man of balls and character.

For the 17th time, the facts are right here in Robert Weide’s 12.13.17 piece, “Q & A With Dylan Farrow.” I realize that facts are secondary in this matter, but they should matter to some degree…no?

McMafia, the eight-part BBC1 minseries that will begin airing on AMC on 2.26, is based on a same-titled book by Misha Glenny and directed by James Watkins.

Glenny chose the name McMafia “because of how professional, organized and homogenous international gangsters have become,” it says here.

As Semiyon Kleiman (David Strathairn) tells banker Alex Godman (James Norton), “These people dress like bankers, they speak a dozen languages, they eat in the best restaurants, stay in the best hotels. But underneath all that sophistication, there’s an open grave in the Mexican desert with 50 headless corpses inside.”

McMafia “has been criticized for its stately pace and complex plotting,” a review stated. “It can feel a little po-faced, lacking the wit of a Hugh Laurie or a Tom Hollander, who both brought light and shade to The Night Manager.

Welcome, much-needed changes to the movie industry have already been brought about by #Time’s Up and #MeToo, but it was suggested during a dinner last night that some kind of new Hays Code agreement might eventually be adopted by the motion picture, TV and streaming community. I wasn’t told, mind, that this idea is actually being kicked around, but a friend believes that the current climate might lead to such a measure, and who knows?

The new Hays Code agreement could partly seek to eliminate gender discrimination and pay disparity between men and women. I for one think that’s a pretty good notion if fairly implemented.

The friend also suggested, however, that another goal might be to institute sexual morality advisories that would discourage depictions of sexual misconduct and assault against women and minors without appropriate consequence. The sexual morality portion would be a matter of tremendous concern to filmmakers, he said. I don’t think I need to explain why this concern would be manifest among directors and screenwriters of all stripes and stations.

Again, I’m not saying that such an agreement is actually being discussed by anyone, but where there’s conversational smoke there’s sometimes fire. Maybe. I’m mentioning this because before last night I’d never heard such an idea, even in the loosest of conversations. We are witnessing, after all, the gradual emergence of a new form of liberal Calvinism these days, so it wouldn’t be totally crazy if a #Time’s Up production code was eventually agreed upon and instituted.

When we say Hays Code (named for Will Hays) we really mean the Breen code (named for Joseph Breen). It was adopted in response to what some regarded as a climate of tawdry morality in movies of the early 1930s. The code was a set of moral guidelines that was applied by major studios from 1934 to roughly 1968.

The code began to slowly erode in the late ’50s and early ’60s, but it ended with a bang when Elizabeth Taylor said “goddam you” to Richard Burton in Mike Nichols‘ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolff (’66).

Last night I spoke to a knowledgable industry friend who agrees with Mark Harris about Woody Allen’s career being toast. While he’s appalled and horrified by the current terror and believes that the only sane response is to duck and wait it out, he also thinks A Rainy Day in New York will be over, done and finito for the Woodman.

He also suspects that Amazon will jettison A Rainy Day in New York, although they’ll look like gutless political cowards if they do this. On the other hand Call Me By Your Name star Timothee Chalamet, who costars in Rainy Day, will have to answer very carefully when a questioner brings up the Allen hoo-hah on the next red carpet.

He said that Woody needs $25 million to make his films, all in, and that he’s not going to be able to raise this without significant name-brand U.S. actors along with general support from the U.S. film industry. My friend didn’t say that Allen’s films are obviously winding down anyway in terms of quality, but others have noted this.

What about the European market? I said. Allen is worshipped in France, etc. Allen’s producers won’t be able to raise $25 million from European financiers alone, he said, because the European market for his films isn’t large enough.

He’ll have to scale his fee and production costs way down to make a European-centric feature — $10 million or even $9 or $8 million. He’ll have to shoot guerilla-style, hip pocket, on the fly, available light, etc.