But the one thing prompted to me by this convergence was a long-ago conversation I had with a fellow film critic to whom I expressed my own misgivings about GWTW misgivings that had less to do with its pre-civil-rights-era racial attitudes that, as the Time Warner corporate qualifiers are now prepared to say “were wrong then and are wrong now” than for its relentless, overpowering surges of in-your-face magnolia-scented romance. Such a coincidence is where cheap ironies were born to congregate.
Da 5 Bloods, Spike Lee’s all-out, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink sortie into the legacy of the Vietnam War, dropped into Netflix’s rotation at roughly the same time that Gone With The Wind, (almost) everybody’s favorite antebellum epic, was pulled from HBO Max’s queue until a post-George Floyd America knows what to do with it.