Day: July 17, 2016

From Sasha Stone’s letter to Viggo Mortensen over his continuing, never-say-die support for Bernie Sanders: “It’s 2016 and we know the election could be close once again. We know that if Jill Stein earns 7% of the vote that could easily tip the election in Trump’s favor. We know that when that happens, Paul Ryan will essentially be President as Trump will become an hysterical puppet. We know, beyond any doubt, that they will put an extreme conservative back on the Supreme Court to replace Scalia. We know that they will try to overturn Obamacare, the rights of gay couples to get married in every state, a woman’s right to do with her body what she chooses. We know Trump’s first order of business will be to ‘declare war’ with ISIS and that will mean terrible terrible things for our country — and it will not stop ISIS anyway because no war can stop every madman in every truck. We know all of these things.

“How can you, in good conscience, believe that being true to your own whim is more important than protecting so many others will be put in such grave danger? How can the Viggo I thought I knew and admired be that selfish?”

When I saw this photo on Facebook this morning, my second thought was “good…a cartoon character about to be shot through the head by Jason Bourne.” Then I thought of all the wonderful, starry-eyed kids out there who love the Ice Age characters and would be upset by this image, and certainly by this notion. I’m sorry for sharing this thought just now. I want only to think gentle, positive things about everyone and everything. Thank God for family-friendly animated features and all the money they make for the corporations who fund them.

Taken last night at the corner of Hollywood Blvd. and Highland Ave.

Wives are always giving their husbands shit about something. You’re insensitive, you always wait too long to take out the garbage, you’re too randy, you’re too work-obsessed, you’re not randy enough, you could be a better provider, you don’t spend enough time with the kids, you lack sensitivity, you’re flabby. But wait until you hear the complaints in The Infiltrator, an ’80s cocaine-trade thriller about a real-life customs agent Robert Mazur (Bryan Cranston) who infiltrated the ranks of Pablo Escobar associates by pretending to be a flashy money launderer. They’re lulus.

They can be summed up as (a) “You put too much gusto into your impersonations when drug dealers are around” and (b) “The agent who’s pretending to be your wife in the field is too hot, and that’s entirely your fault.”

The already famous waiter-brutalizing scene in The Infiltrator — (l. to r.) Pablo Escobar associate, waiter getting head pushed into birthday cake, Robert Mazur (Bryan Cranston), Mazur’s rock-stupid wife Evelyn (Juliet Aubrey).

The gripes are on the idiotic side, but that’s…I was about to say irrational complaints are to be expected in any marriage but let’s be fair and balanced. And yet the fact is that Cranston absorbs some highly negative criticism from Juliet Aubrey (as Mazur’s wife Evelyn) — late in the second act, early in the third — that is forehead-slapping dumb.

93% of the film is about Cranston’s Mazur pretending to be slippery financier Bob Musella. If Mazur’s performance isn’t note-perfect the drug barons will smell a rat and kill him. Surely he’s told his wife this basic fact, and surely she understands that if he runs into one of these guys unexpectedly, he has to instantly and convincingly become “Bob Musella.” Obviously.

And yet when Mazur and his wife are out celebrating their anniversary at a nice restaurant, one of the Escobar guys strolls over and says “hey!”, and so Mazur, naturally, goes right into his act. And soon after he angrily chews out a waiter for serving a wedding anniversary cake (which in fact he had ordered) and not a birthday cake. Then he grabs the waiter and shoves his head into the cake. If the Escobar guy had suspected Mazur/Musella had, in fact, ordered an anniversary cake, the jig would be totally up.

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“As [Donald] Trump prepares to claim the Republican nomination for president this week, he and his supporters are sure to laud his main calling card — his long, operatic record as a swaggering business tycoon. And without question, there will be successes aplenty to highlight, from his gleaming golden high-rises to his well-regarded golf resorts, hit TV shows and best-selling books.

“But a survey of Mr. Trump’s four decades of wheeling and dealing also reveals an equally operatic record of dissembling and deception, some of it unabashedly confirmed by Mr. Trump himself, who nearly 30 years ago first extolled the business advantages of ‘truthful hyperbole.’ Indeed, based on the mountain of court records churned out over the span of Mr. Trump’s career, it is hard to find a project he touched that did not produce allegations of broken promises, blatant lies or outright fraud.” — paragraphs #3 and #4 from David Barstow’s 7.16 N.Y. Times piece, “Donald Trump’s Deals Rely on Being Creative With the Truth.”

Today’s Baton Rouge cop killings (three policemen dead, one shooter killed) looks to everyone like a Dallas copycat thing. It feels to me like yet another indication that we’re back in the spring and summer of 1968. Obviously awful in human/social/political terms, but now we’re faced with the possibility (God forbid) of still more sniper cop-killings in the future, subsequent mayhem inspired by the Dallas shootings and now today’s.

In short, is this an indication of a malevolent hate-trend (if that’s not too insipid or shallow of a usage) or flash-fire, a version of an arguably similar self-destructive martyrdom that we’ve seen in the Middle East time and again. Or is it just bad luck for everyone that two guys (one in Dallas, another in Baton Rouge) had the same idea? God help us all if this keeps happening.

1:38 pm Pacific: CBS News is reporting that the shooter has been identified as a black male named Gavin Eugene Long of Kansas City, Missouri. He was born on July 17, 1987.

I have a peripheral thought (and I’m mentioning this with the usual presumption that the Twitter dogs are going to bark and howl): how might these cop killings affect the reception to Nate Parker‘s The Birth of a Nation (Fox Searchlight, 10.7)?

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