Movie Nation

So there’s a nice dust-up starting between the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and Jordan Peele, the sketch-show comic who wrote and directed “Get Out.”

The Golden Globes-givers say “Get Out” will be entered in the “best musical or comedy” category for consideration.

It should get in (weak year for comedies) and has a strong chance of winning.

And Peele is pissed. He takes issue with the category. He’s jokingly called the horror tale of an affluent community where black lives are taken to prolong rich which lives “a documentary.”

He wants it taken seriously, which is fine. But press him and he’d have to admit “Get Out” not only has laughs, that was its intent. It’s a darkly comic satire. “Dr. Strangelove” is the quintessential satire worth referencing here, a movie about accidental nuclear war, as serious as a heart-attack — and funny.

And sending up something in the culture.

The playwright George S. Kauffman famously joked that “Satire’s what closes Saturday night,” as in “nobody gets it and nobody will buy tickets.” That wasn’t the case with “Get Out,” a stunning smash of the spring, a real eye-opener.

As I am tired of explaining what “satire” means on Facebook, let me just link to the Wikipedia definition of it. 

And while there may be a disconnect between how black and white audiences take it, the Globes got this one right. It is satire. And Peele, while stirring up publicity, is sharp enough to know that straight out. He’s not one of these people I’ve had angry emails from over the years when I’ve characterized an African American satire (“Dear White People”) as “a dark comedy.” Nothing to do with pigeon-holing, not “dark” as in skin color. Dark in tone, touching and torching some deep, secret “how people REALLY feel” truth.

Does Peele really want his movie competing with the likes of “Dunkirk,” “The Post,” “Florida Project,” “Darkest Hour” and the other crowded list of late-year best picture possibilities?

No. If he’s lucky, he’ll have a trophy to take home, because the worst case scenario is that the equally dark and funny “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” will get shoved into “best musical or comedy,” and then it’s anybody’s race to call.

So let me say this for the first time in my life. The Golden Globes got it right.

“Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” is a film Jeremiad whose time has come.

A searing, dark comedy tearing into unaccountable racist, homophobic police, the impotent rage of the wronged, the small-mindedness of small towns and the redemption of the seemingly irredeemable and starring a “Justice League” of America’s greatest character actors, it’s one of the best pictures of the year.

It veers from explosive laughs and blasts of violence to the sullen silence of life-consuming grief. The dialogue tickles and scalds, the action surprises. And, no surprise here, it was written and directed by the brilliant, brittle Irishman Martin “In Bruges/Seven Psychopaths” McDonagh.

The Oscar-winning Frances McDormand is Mildred Hays, an Ebbing, Missouri divorcee utterly deflated by grief. Then she notices those three, long-abandoned billboards on the little-used road home.

She has a purpose. She has an outlet. And before The Most Out Gay in the Village Red Welby (Caleb Landry Jones, terrific), who owns them, can find a reason otherwise, she’s rented those three billboards — questioning why no progress has been made in the police case about her daughter’s rape and murder.

“How come Chief Willoughby?”

Officer Dixon (Sam Rockwell, brilliant) is furious. And Chief Willoughby (Woody Harrelson) is dismayed.

Profanely dismayed, because this is a McDonagh movie, after all. Almost everybody curses like a Show Me State sailor. Parents — the sheriff has two little girls with wife Anne (Abbie Cornish) — and kids (Lucas Hedges plays Mildred’s embittered surviving son) alike, no matter. Let the blue streak commence.

Mildred wants results. The town, subjected to embarrassing regional TV coverage, wants her to stop. And that’s when her chess game of publicity and public shaming turns into war.

Cops here, she complains, are too busy “eating Krispy Kremes” and “torturing black folks” to find a killer. And that brings back her brutish ex-husband (John Hawke), brings out the worst in her dentist, the condemnation of the local priest and prompts the pleas of her son to stop amidst a rising tide of threats and counter-moves by the police.

Every “I know how hard it’s been for you” earns an eye-roll. Because no, you don’t.

And every criticism and threat brings another odd ally to her side — ad agency Red, the “town midget” (Peter Dinklage), black co-workers and billboard posters.

It’s a less showy film than some of McDonagh’s other work, but there’s beauty in the Ozarks foothills, in the sideways glances Mildred aims at one and all, at the self-aware irritation reflected in her eyes in her station wagon’s rear view mirror.

And as topical and zeitgeisty as this picture purports to be, McDonagh makes sure he gets in his shots at the Catholic Church blended with story arcs laced with Biblical shots at redemption. Even the irredeemable have inner resources that might be tapped, souls worth saving.

And Mildred? McDormand (“Fargo”) stuns at every turn, never letting us feel a false moment as a vengeful harpy with a deep well of compassion, a guilt-ridden parent looking for closure.

There’s a Randy Newman song that perfectly describes Mildred’s actions. “I Just Want You to Hurt Like I Do.” That ethos is the anchor of a great character in a film filled with them, the beating heart of one of the best pictures of 2017.

MPAA Rating:R for violence, language throughout, and some sexual references

Cast: Frances McDormand, Sam Rockwell, Woody Harrelson, Peter Dinklage, John Hawke

Credits:Written and directed by Martin McDonagh . A Fox Searchlight release.

Running time: 1:55

There’s something about the “new girl” in school that makes us wary.

The hair may be dyed blonde with streaks of pink, the shorts cut-off in that timeless teen “bad girl” fashion.

But she’s utterly unquestioning when Beaver (Daniel Webber) angles to copy off her English quiz paper. Her confidence goes well beyond any “I’ve figured out I’m a dish and have power over my male peers” years.

“I don’t DATE high school guys.”

And that casual way she handles a cigarette, that voice — smoky, sexy and wise.

“Where you from?” she’s asked.

“Which time?” is her too-clever come-back.

We’ve already seen the unfashionable corner of California where she’s moved, and the drugs. And we’ve picked up on Beaver’s peripheral connection to that, young, dopey and unsophisticated younger brother to Troy (Grant Harvey), both of them easily bullied by Wyatt (Pablo Schreiber),  a muscle-bound billboard for tattoos, intimidation and “cooking.”

When Wyatt hisses “I ain’t goin’ to jail for your mistakes,” Troy, one of his street dealers, takes it to heart. Beaver is new enough to this to be terrified.

And then, voila, “Kat” (Eliza Taylor) pops up, in school, at their beer busts, in their parties and when they’re not looking, in their business.

“Thumper” is a standard-issue police procedural of the “21 Jump Street” variety — cop young enough to pass for high school goes undercover to break up an epidemic in the making, a town where overdose deaths are making the news.

But writer-director Jordan Ross, of the MTV series “True Life,” maintains tension and fills in the fascinating back stories on these characters, peeking beyond drug abuse and arrest statistics, humanizing the entire genre eco-system.

These kids aren’t just “bad,” they have problems at home and narrowly focused options for escape, financial and personal. The villain may be a brute, but Schreiber’s Wyatt is introduced as a doting dad, on “suicide watch” for the toddlers he’s ill-equipped to have in his life. He has a point of view and a chip on his shoulder about how life put him here.

And Taylor, an Aussie TV and film (“The November Man”) actress, lets us see the distractions, pressures and lying on the fly necessary to pull one over on people who may not be that bright, but have the adrenaline of paranoia supercharging their suspicions. We may know pretty much where this is going. But she holds our interest through every interruption along the way.

All of the traps set for our heroine are tropes of the genre, the suspicion that even half-stoned teens have when she doesn’t smoke meth or shoot up with them, for instance. The only one that rings false is her attraction to Beaver.

Yes, the connection and empathy we buy into. The temptation? Nope. The kid’s a kid, and not that sharp at that.

But Ross, his leading lady and her terrifying quarry make “Thumper” a familiar yarn that’s engrossing, unnerving and very well told.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, with violence, teen drug abuse, sexual situations and profanity

Cast: Eliza Taylor, Pablo Schreiber, Daniel Webber, Lean Headey, Grant Harvey, Jazzy De Lisseer

Credits: Written and directed by Jordan Ross. An Orchard release.

Running time: 1:30

Victoria Negri‘s “Gold Star” is a simple you’ve-got-to-come-home-again tale of a daughter forced to leave her life in the Big City to go back and take care of her infirm father.

It’s no shock that “Vicki,” the character Negri wrote for herself and plays in the picture, is the better for it.  But there are wrinkles to this sensitive story that add interest, elements of plot, romantic complications and the like.

And perhaps the best of those “wrinkles” is the late Robert Vaughn, as “Gold Star” was his final film.

As stroke victim Carmine, he doesn’t speak. He’s lost the use of his legs. But he’s still got that impressive Vaughn mane of hair, which helps explain why, at 90, his second wife (Catherine Curtin) grouses about the things you don’t think about “when you marry somebody twice your age.” He’s still dashing, still has that twinkle about him. And he beautifully underplays the unspoken life-lessons he’s teaching his youngest daughter, getting across what he means with just a tear, just a moment of need.

Vicki has a life in the city. Sure, she’s a music school drop-out who isn’t doing anything with her talent. But she’s got a live-in bartender/pothead/would-be-guitar-hero boyfriend, so that’s something.

Mom’s increasingly strident demands that “I NEED you here,” cannot be ignored. So Vicki tries her hand at popping back into New York (Mom and Dad live in Connecticut), clinging to the life she has there.

Even after she meets a “nice guy” at the hospital. Chris (Jacob Heimer) is a dutiful grandson (his grandfather is ill), a law student and a bit boring and anal retentive. Whatever possibilities exist there, she’s got to get over her innate stranger danger.

“I’m not going to kill you and wear your skin,” Chris re-assures her, puncturing her “Silence of the Lambs” fantasy.

Chris is kind, gets along with her father and seems intent on injecting himself into her life.

And Vicki is torn, upset at seeing how empty her New York life was, still resentful at the thought of a long-term provincial future, and seriously stressed about the nursing care she’s expected to provide (but untrained for). Diaper changes?

“I’m not supposed to DO that,” she shouts at the old man, as if his hearing is gone, along with his ability to speak.

There’s not a lot to this, aside from the good acting. “Gold Star” (What do we get on our report cards when we’ve been good?) has maybe one decent surprise.

But it’s the comfort zone Negri creates around this “We’re all going to deal with this, sooner or later” subject and the warmth Vaughn projects in a seriously circumscribed performance make it worthwhile.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with sexual situations, marijuana use

Cast: Victoria Negri, Catherine Curtin, Robert Vaughn, Jacob Heimer

Credits: Written and directed by Victoria Negri.  A Big Vision release.

Running time: 1:30

You know the bar’s been lowered by a genre, a franchise and a studio’s difficulties in a genre when “Justice League” gets a lot “Well, not BAD for Warner Brothers” reviews.

What promises to be a “Wonder Woman” sized blockbuster for a studio and comic book universe (DC) starved for a chunk of the Marvel Movie Money premiered to a lot of grade-on-the-curve shrug reviews. On Metacritic. 

A 51 is a passing grade, sort of. But that reflects a lot of folks saying, “Well, OK. Sure. Whatever.” Variety and the LA Times swoon, most everybody else? Shrug city.

The jokes are there, they just needed more of them. The effects are great. The story? Villain? Generic, been there, seen that. Silly, to boot.

Warners imposed a 2:50am Eastern embargo on reviews, promising one of those “Da Vinci Code” “everybody’s review posts at the same time” situations for a movie with a lot riding on it.

Of course, you can’t see the legions of reviews posted in the wee hours of the morning on Rotten Tomatoes, which is (perhaps understandably) trying to expand its business by no longer just aggregating critics’ reviews, but creating its own critics and putting them on video (more ad bucks) and sometime Thursday “unveiling” the RT number (always less subtle, less “accurate” than Metacritic). That’s not cricket, of course, punishing those of us who hustle and have a readership for the sake of their “anointing” two young and telegenic nobodies of color as America’s movie authorities.

This is what critics posting there see when wondering why they waited up into 3am to post a review.

“Dear Reviewer, the Tomatometer score for this movie/TV show will populate on RT on Thursday morning. Please submit your review as you would normally, but please note it will not immediately be displayed on the site. Thank you and please let us know if you have questions! RT Staff”

It’s not exactly ethical that they’re promoting their show by withholding others’ reviews on a site where those reviews are typically aggregated. That’s not the bargain readers, or reviewers, strike with aggregators.

A bit like Fox deciding to run its own car on the NASCAR circuit, and starting the race 10 minutes earlier with only their car running, and covering that as the actual event.

But they’ll  figure this out. The Internet can be a meritocracy, and plucking and promoting their own “critics” and forcing film fans to watch them on video may not go over the way they think.

And MRQE is a little slow jumping into RT’s intentional “You can only see our reviewers” handicap. Do the math, guys. Here’s your chance. Stay up late with the rest of us.

If nothing else had happened at the movies this year, 2017 would still go down as that moment when Warner Brothers finally achieved parity — at least in tone and quality — with the Marvel men and women in tights.

“Justice League,” the DC Comics version of “The Avengers” (or “X-Men”), a superhero (and heroine) all-star team — finds laughs, fun action beats and fan-friendly winks and cameos in a picture that’s on a par with the year’s biggest blockbuster, “Wonder Woman.”

It doesn’t hurt that Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) plays a pivotal role in this new aggregation of super-might, a team assembled to fight a planetary threat. More helpful still is the addition of charismatic new players Jason Momoa and Ezra Miller, as a badass, trash-talking Aquaman and a hyper-nebbish of a Flash.

“Buffy” vet Joss Whedon, who made “The Avengers” movies funny, co-wrote the script.

“Dressed like a bat,” the burly Atlantean with all the tattoos growls. “I DIG it!”

“I hear you can talk to fish,” a misinformed Batman (Ben Affleck) counters.

The fresh threat to Earth is cosmic silliness of the most generic variety. An alien named Steppenwolf (I kid you not), digitally inhuman, but with the voice of Ciaran Hinds, needs three  boxes to seize control of the planet and avenge himself against the humans, Amazons and Atlanteans who thwarted him eons ago.

Yeah, “Lord of the Rings” stuff. Yawn.

“You will KNOW the righteousness of power!” he roars in warning. Sure.

The trouble is, Amazon warrior Diana Prince (Gadot) can’t stop this threat by herself. Nor can Bruce Wayne. And Bruce (Affleck) had a hand in killing off Superman (Henry Cavill) a while back, you may recall. Bad move on Bruce’s part.

So they need to round up superheroes based on rumors of who this fellow might really be, where that one actually lives. They need to convince the loner Arthur Curry/Aquaman to join up, win the trust of the computer-assisted Victor Stone/Cyborg  (Ray Fisher) and figure out how to “Pet Sematary” a certain Kryptonian.

The locations, ranging from Iceland to British Columbia and New Zealand, impress, although most outdoor shots are cast in that Zack Snyder blue-grey gloom. The fights are what we’ve come to expect in such pictures (Whedon took over directing duties on re-shoots).

There’s no getting around this contorted, stupid as all get-out story. But the right tone helps put it over. The “team” has its grumpy founder (Batman), its powerhouse smart alec (Aquaman), its “kid” (Flash) and the technically improved computer/war machine (Cyborg).

Wonder Woman is the adult in the room, the Captain America of this franchise.

It’s as if Warners has been making course and casting adjustments, fixing this “universe” on the fly. Middling Superman movie? Give the Man of Steel a smaller role and watch Cavill shine. Batman fighting Superman gets panned?  Push the Bat into the background, too. Affleck’s no Christian Bale, but he’s got a lighter touch.

Make this series’ “Spider-Man,” the eager beaver kid (Flash) a bit leery of his first combat, a chatterbox who owns his junk-food mania (energy requirements) and Jewish go-for-the-gag humor.

Yes, Cyborg is a character as boring as his name. And there are several supporting players simply wasted in forgettable (and forgotten) roles. Joe Morton and Billy Crudup play fathers of two heroes, Amber Heard comes out of the water just long enough to insult her fellow Atlantean (meekly), Jeremy Irons is the first Alfred-the-Butler prone to profanity, and J.K. Simmons is just right, if ridiculously under-used as Police Commissioner Gordon.

But Amy Adams returns as Lois Lane, and Diane Lane comes back as Clark Kent’s mom, bringing heart to the picture. The brawls, as over-familiar in their Bruce-in-a-china shop mayhem, amuse. And you’d have to be pretty hard-hearted to not be a little touched by the mythos of the finale.

“Justice League” doesn’t have anyone with the witty way with a line Robert Downey Jr. brings to Ironman, or the swagger of Chris Hemsworth (Thor) to carry it. But Momoa’s bemused physicality has its own cockiness, Miller’s wide-eyed Flash innocence and Gadot’s commitment to earnest, brave and spoiling for a fight Diana put “The Avengers” on notice.

There’s a new team in town, and they don’t need government funding and a dude in an eye-patch to get a dirty job done.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for sequences of sci-fi violence and action

Cast: Ben Affleck, Gal Gadot, Jason Momoa, Henry Cavill, Ezra Miller, Amy Adams, Diane Lane, J.K. Simmons, the voice of Ciaran Hinds

Credits:Directed by) Zack Snyder (and Joss Whedon), script by Chris Terrio and Joss Whedon. A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 2:01

No, amigos. He doesn’t have the title role (all will be clear when you the see the movie, which is magical).

But Anthony Gonzalez is the vocal star, playing a child who just wants to make music like his legendary mariachi band-leading hero (Benjamin Bratt) in a family where music is forbidden — some long-held grudge about the musician who left great-great grandma.

On the Day of the Dead (Dia de los Muertos), the lad tumbles into the afterlife where he has to contend with annoyed dead relatives, desperate-to-be-remembered ghosts and the legend who inspired him.

Anthony  sings. He swaps lines with Bratt, Gael Garcia Bernal (at least in the movie). And “Coco” isn’t Anthony’s first movie, or his last animated one (voice cast in Pixar’s next one).  I;m interviewing him shortly.

Questions for Anthony? Comment away, and thanks, as always, for the help.

They moved there to pursue her dad’s dream, to be a rich cardiologist serving the wealthy of California.

“I always said we’d move to paradise,” he reassured the family. And look where they ended up — in seaside Palos Verdes, in a clifftop mansion overlooking the Pacific surf.

But there was trouble before they arrived in paradise, our teen narrator, Medina (Maika Monroe of “It Follows”) tells us. She was 16 and “already in trouble in school.” She’s entirely too attached to her more sociable twin brother  Jim (Cody Fern).

They need to find their place here. That title, “The Tribes of Palos Verdes,” suggests where that place is.

And Mom (Jennifer Garner)? She’s so thrown off-balance by this adjustment from heartland Michigan to a rich, rigid “ladies who lunch” world that we know that keeping her on an even keel should have been a family priority all along. Not that her flirtatious, follow-his-bliss husband (Justin Kirk of “Weeds”) cares about that.

This setting and set-up, based on a Karen Croner (“Admission,””One True Thing”) script, plays like “Big Little Lies Lite,” a more narrowly-focused coastal Cali melodrama about a family in crisis, a disaster waiting to happen.

In the Monterrey-set TV show “Lies,” there’s rivalry, social striving, painful personal history and eventually murder to sort out. Here, we wonder who will snap first and who will fall the furthest.

That could be literal, as music video directors turned feature filmmakers Brendan and Emmett Malloy treat us to ominous shots looking down those cliffs to the ever-pounding sea.

But in a metaphoric sense, it is the mother we fear for, and fear. Garner delivers one of her finest performances as a manic depressive with “black hole moods” on her bad days. She taps into something deep and dark in playing a broken, brittle woman whose paranoia about her roaming husband and the isolation he’s hurled her into is well-placed. Sandy veers between conciliatory and unhinged, and their epic fights — at home and in public — rattle their kids, and us.

Thank heavens those kids have discovered surfing, figured out how to keep the peace with the beach bullies The Bay Boys (Mel Gibson’s kid plays one of them). It’s the other things this world exposes them to that could be the bigger threats. Medina’s sexual awakening is not on the safest ground with this macho-infantile crowd. And Jim seems like just the sort of guy who’d enjoy more than just flirting with recreational drugs.

The Malloys keep the focus and the camera in close on Medina’s journey, and Monroe, a hardcore kite surfer, doesn’t just do her own surfing here. She commands our attention, and not just because the Malloys come oh-so-close to objectifying her. She’s paying attention, as teen narrators must do. And we pay attention to her paying attention.

The connection between the twins is discussed but never understood by the twins themselves. Part of this is the film’s myopic Medina point-of-view, but mostly it’s due to the melodramatic plot threads that pile up in the later acts.

With Dad’s new “love” (Alicia Silverstone) and that new love’s attractive son (Noah Silver), there’s more trouble in paradise in store.

All of which leaves the sibling connection under-explained and the picture’s pursuit of “tribes” incomplete. There’s a compactness to it all that I appreciate (“Big Little Lies” had more incidents, but like all limited-run cable series, the story slowly drips out like molasses in winter). But the story and story arc here are truncated and can leave the viewer still-interested if slightly dissatisfied when all is said and done.

MPAA Rating:

Cast: Maika Monroe, Cody Fern Jennifer Garner, Justin Kirk, Alicia Silversone

Credits:Directed by, script by . An IFC release.

Running time: 1:43

Robert Reich started warning about the ticking time bomb of American financial inequality shortly after quitting the Clinton Administration, where he’d been a fairly frustrated Secretary of Labor.

Twenty years ago he gave speeches fretting about the “rage” and “resentment” welling up within the electorate over a financial/taxation/”fixed” system that has been moving money “upward,” creating a nation of the increasingly well-off haves and a burgeoning, once middle-class majority of have-nots.

In the decades since, he’s repeated versions of this message, the “myth” of “the free market” and the selling of that myth by businesses and their Congressional lackies and media mouthpieces to an increasingly unheard, unlistened-to public. He’s written books, popped up on cable news and done commentaries on Public Radio fretting about the day that “somebody” figures out “how to bottle that rage,” dealing a potentially fatal blow to American democracy.

“Saving Capitalism” isn’t an “I told you so” book, or documentary. It’s “America, what went wrong” from a guy who should know.

Reich lays out the history of how this happened (It started under Reagan) and voices frustration at his role in it (he was heard-out but voted down by the de-regulation happy Goldman Sachs alumni working in the Clinton White House, and the GOP Congress that ended economic banking customer/economic protections like The Glass-Steagall Act).

And he tilts at the windmills of American division, the knee-jerk belief, schemed for by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, preached by Reagan, reinforced as GOP Gospel via politicians and decades of cynical right wing media tirades, that “government IS the enemy.”

The documentary started life as a tour in support of the book of history and urgent suggestions that the man who popularized the phrase “corporate welfare” sees as solutions. But Reich turned it into a listening tour, visiting Missouri farmers and harrumphing Kansas business leaders, irked that 30 years of getting all the breaks in the tax code and regulatory front has made them demonized “scapegoats.”

Reich is trying to alter the national mindset, trying to repeat the oft-stated alert that the billions that businesses and business organizations pour into influencing elections and politicians has warped a system that brought a higher living standard and rising expectations to generations after World War II. Businesses figured out in the ’70s that political power equaled market power, Reich says. And our elected representatives have let them so tilt the playing field that we’re doomed to a shrinking future of diminished expectations, financial insecurity and political instability.

Keep an eye out for life expectancy, crime and wage stagnation statistics in the coming years, and don’t bet on him being wrong.

The diminutive, soft-spoken Reich is a persuasive speaker, whether you hear him for a few soundbites on TV or in longer commentaries on radio or in books. And while “Saving Capitalism” the movie is light on contrary voices (Nobody was willing to go on camera saying “Everything’s fine. The system works great just as it is!”) and a bit murky in the “action” stage of its arguments, it still makes for an eye-opener, especially for those unfamiliar with Reich’s career.

“The system is always going to be regulated,” he argues.  But now, all the regulation is aimed to help businesses and hurt working people and consumers. Banks get fresh protections from consumers who want to sue them for misdeeds. Whole segments of government have their hands tied by a business-appeasing Congress.

What Reich is hoping for appears to be a “post-Democratic/Republican” discussion, by finding common ground with knee-jerk conservatives like Congressman Dave Brat, a vocal critic of “crony capitalism,” a waking up of farmers and rural voters who see their profit margins shrinking as a result of big business-coddling trade and farm policies and a general recognition that powerless people cannot keep voting out of misdirected rage.

And maybe he’s hoping to reach that core of politicians who recognize that however rich the current perversion of the American System might make them now, or when they become well-paid lobbyists after faithfully serving the needs of their wealthy, well-connected donors, that this warped “influence industrial complex” is unsustainable.

Good luck with that last one.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Robert Reich, Congressman Dave Brat

Credits:Directed by Sari Gilman, Jacob Kornbluth, based on the book by Robert Reich. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:12

So they’ve got a date in mind. And Daniel Craig is still under contract to do one more James Bond film. Even though the last film really looked as though he was done with Mr. Shaken-Not-Stirred. Craig will be 51 by the time Bond-the-Next hits theaters. And seven years will have passed since the “last” Bond picture.

In other words, with this deal set up, I would not be shocked if they didn’t try to cast this three movies out and come up with a new Bond. I know, I’ve been saying this after “Skyfall” Craig seemed so “OVER this character.”

Because now, according to Deadline.com, they may have a deal — co-producers/financiers/distributors. MGM will now ally itself with upstart Annapurna Pictures.

It’s an Ellison (Silicon Valley) money venture with Megan Ellison in charge, coming to life in 2012 with “The Master” and “Spring Breakers” and “Zero Dark Thirty” getting them off the ground with a bang.

They’re behind such recent daring fare as “Detroit” and “Professor Marston and the Wonder Women,” and the Daniel Day-Lewis, Paul Thomas Anderson Oscar-bait period piece “Phantom Thread” is under their banner, too.

We don’t have a title, having long ago exhausted the James Bond titles of Ian Fleming (A remake, since most of the movies adhere close to formula?). The director won’t be Sam Mendes (supposedly), and Denis Villeneuve, the French-Canadian Spielberg (Ridley Scott?), is a leading contender. He’s on the top of every short list these days, which explains “Blade Runner: 2049.” Sort of.