From 3.7.16 TPM piece, “Lust for Destruction,” by Josh Marshall: “A large segment of the American right is animated by a belief that ‘their’ world, their America is being taken away from them — this includes everything from declining white racial dominance, having to choose whether you want to hear the phone tree message in English or Spanish, changing cultural mores. The whole package. This is the essence of Donald Trump‘s campaign, the most visible and literal part of his appeal — beating back the external threat, the harsh anti-immigrant policies, Muslim bans, flirting with white supremacists, etc.

“Trump is the master of GOP dominance politics — the intrinsic appeal of power and the ability to dominate others. All of this has an intrinsic appeal to America’s authoritarian right, especially in a climate of perceived threat, which has been growing over the last two decades — something political scientists are now catching on to.

“The phenomenon of the imperiled, resentment right is something you’re well familiar with if you’re a close observer of American politics. Back in December we saw this show up in the demographic data in the unprecedented rising mortality rates of middle-aged whites from chronic substance abuse, overdose and suicide. And as the Washington Post‘s Jeff Guo noted last week, the states where middle-aged whites are dying fastest heavily correlate with the states where Trump has had his highest margins.

“Think about that for a second. Trump’s message and policy agenda hits every dimension of threat and change.

Read more

If given a choice between drone-killing a house full of hellbent terrorists and not drone-killing them because a young girl with a hula hoop is frolicking nearby, what would you do? Not a toughie by real-life standards, but a truly agonizing decision by the standards of a Gavin Hood suspense thriller costarring Helen Mirren, Aaron Paul and the late Alan Rickman. But what if you were Dwight D. Eisenhower in early June 1944 and you had two D-Day choices — (a) give the “go” order to invade and eventually defeat the Nazis or (b) not invade and thereby save the lives of God knows how many thousands of innocent French citizens (many of them children) who would inevitably be killed in the crossfire between Allied and Nazi forces. Would you decide against invading? Exactly. The answer to question #1 is a no-brainer.

Eye in The Sky (Bleecker Street, 3.11 NY & LA, 4.1 wide) was well reviewed at last September’s Toronto film Festival — 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, 69% on Metacritic.

Former First Lady and legendary tough cookie Nancy Reagan died today at age 94. She was the toughest, closest and most trusted adviser of her husband, Ronald Reagan, during his California governorship and U.S. Presidency. I never had any strong opinions about her one way or the other. I didn’t dislike her as much as I didn’t care. Except, of course, when she launched her infamous “Just Say No” anti-drug campaign in 1986, which everyone regarded as an embarassment.

But my heart went out to Mrs. Reagan one day about three years ago, give or take. It happened inside Alex Roldan hair salon, which is on the first floor of the London hotel in West Hollywood. She was driven from her Bel Air home to the salon every two or three weeks, my hair guy told me, but she was obviously frail and her legs were apparently gone. I recognized the syndrome as my mother, who passed last June, was going through similar woes at the time. 

Two people — a personal assistant and a hair salon employee — were trying to help Mrs. Reagan move from a shampoo chair into her wheelchair, and it was taking forever.  I was about ten feet away and was on the verge of offering to help. It wasn’t my place, of course, so I just stood there and watched. The poor woman. Old age offers very little dignity, and no mercy at all. Now she’s off the coil.

From a 12.20.89 Washington Post article about Peggy Noonan‘s “What I Saw at the Revolution: A Political Life in the Reagan Era“: 

“The most devastating commentary on Reagan comes from this exchange between Noonan and her boss, Bentley T. Elliott…Noonan: ‘The president is clearly an intelligent man, but I get the impression sometimes his top aides don’t think he’s very bright.’   Elliott: ‘There are people who say that’s why the First Lady is so protective of him…because she thinks he’s not smart…because she really thinks he’d do anything, he’s so innocent and dumb.” 

“Noonan gives the First Lady a modicum of sympathy. After all, it’s tough to be confined to a job with no job description. But then, Noonan brings out the long knives:  ‘They called her Evita, they called her Mommy, they called her the Missus and the Hairdo with Anxiety. Her power was everywhere…She was everywhere.'”

Nina Simone will always be a legend. She was obviously a gifted jazz/blues singer. And she was certainly an activist from the mid ’60s to mid ’70s. But “survivor”? She lived until she was 70, but her life became more and more of a disaster zone from 1970 on. Survivors are people who soldier on through great adversity that has rained down upon them. But Liz Garbus‘ What Happened, Miss Simone? makes a convincing case that Simone was her own worst enemy. Pretty much all of her adversity was self-created. A more honest poster for Nina (RLJ, 4.22) would read “Singer. Activist. Legend. Piece of Work.”

Read more

The muffled dialogue and whispery, muttered voice-overs in Terrence Malick‘s Knight of Cups were barely intelligible when I saw it a month ago. The film is mixed that way. But the subtitles on the German Bluray definitely altered things. I still don’t like this film but I no longer despise it. Because now, at least, I know what some of the characters are on about. Words and sentences are very significant components in our lives; it helps when they’re understood.

At the beginning of the Knight of Cups Bluray a title card suggests that the disc should be played loud. I would have done that but the shitty Sony sound bar I bought the other day can’t go any louder than it already is, which is medium to pronounced.

This spot has obviously been made by a first-rate team. Excellent production values. I wonder how many days it took the Saturday Night Live guys to scout and shoot? Probably two — a day of location scouting (northern New Jersey?), a day of shooting. TV commercials tend to take a couple and sometimes three or four days to shoot, and they always cost a shitload. I’ve watched a couple so don’t tell me. It takes them forever to dress and light shots, and the director is always playing the role of the heavy-cat artist, sitting in his canvas chair like Michelangelo Antonioni…shades, furrowed brow, impassioned discussions with his dp and top crew people.

Read more

Louis C.K. to Conservatives about Donald Trump: “Please stop it with voting for [Donald] Trump. It was funny for a little while, but the guy is Hitler. And by that I mean that we are being Germany in the ’30s. Do you think they saw that shit coming? Hitler was just some hilarious and refreshing dude with a weird comb over who would say anything at all. If you do vote for Trump, at least look at him very carefully first. You owe that to the rest of us. Know and understand who he is. Spend one hour on Google and just read it all. I don’t mean listen to me or listen to liberals who put him down. Listen to your own people. Listen to John McCain.”

At long last, Kino’s Bluray of Richard Fleischer‘s The Vikings (which I pre-ordered some weeks ago) arrives on Tuesday, 3.8. Odin! Shot in Technirama, the same large-format process used to shoot Spartacus, this eye-filling cheeseball epic is sure to look exceptional in high-def.   Not a restoration but certainly an improvement over the old DVD. Brian Orndorf’s Bluray.com review: “Bringing breathtaking vistas to HD, The Vikings Bluray preserves the bigness of the effort. The image (2.35:1 aspect ratio) presentation is generally detailed to satisfaction…a crisp viewing experience that pushes to the natural limits of the original cinematography. Delineation isn’t a problem, handling evening sequences with care. Scenes with mist and fog hit a few pockets of noise. The source remains free of major damage, offering only mild patches of speckling.”

Posted just after Richard Fleischer died in March ’06:

“For me, Fleischer’s peak was The Vikings — the 1958 historical action epic that was mostly dominated by producer-star Kirk Douglas, but was notable for two dramatic elements that still work today.

“One is what seems to happen inside the brawny Viking characters (particularly Kirk Douglas and Ernest Borgnine‘s) whenever Odin, the Nordic God, is mentioned. We hear a haunting, siren-like theme on the soundtrack, and these rough blustery types suddenly stop their loutish behavior and retreat into a childlike emotional place…a place that’s all about awe and fear. This happens maybe three times in this big, unsophisticated popcorn movie (which nonetheless feels far sturdier and more classically composed than a typical big-budget popcorn actioner made today), and each time it does The Vikings has a spirit.

Read more

Read more

This slightly vandalized American Friend poster has been hanging on my living room wall for a while now. Cost about $275 or $300. I sent this pic to an old friend a few days ago. “Looks nice,” he replied. “Everyone needs a good vanity project now and then.” Vanity? Okay, to some extent but mainly it’s a kind of capturing of the way I used to feel about myself in the late ’70s…the gloom, the despair…the old Hollywood Weltschmerz thing. If I hadn’t manned up and gotten it together in that do-or-die period (’77 to ’81) I might have slid down the muddy banks and into the river. The 40th anniversary of the showing of this film at the 1977 New York Film Festival is fast approaching. Gulp.

Yesterday Terrence Malick‘s Knight of Cups opened in at least four locations. A portion of the readership caught it yesterday, I assume. Please share reactions. I posted a half-mystified, half-apoplectic response during the Santa Barbara Film Festival. And then the German Bluray arrived and I watched part of it again. But I made the mistake of waiting until 11 pm so I’m afraid it put me to sleep. I’ll give it another go tomorrow. Emmanuel Lubezki‘s cinematography delivers the usual but God, the nothingness, the floundering around, the atmospheric plotzing.

The last line of my 2.8.16 review stated that Knight of Cups “is a kind of ISIS recruitment film.” This was a cousin of an idea I posted posted eight years ago about the first Sex and the City film being a Taliban recruitment thing.

If you were looking to persuade angry, disenfranchised youths that America is the cradle of Satan, you would only have to show them Knight of Cups. It makes the case. Christian Bale wanders around from one affluent Los Angeles location to another…doing nothing, feeling nothing, gazing at people and places, apparently wanting nothing. Nothing whatsoever percolating in his soul. This is a man who has discovered the beautiful and repulsive meaningless of things when you have a fair amount of money in your bank account and Chivo is following you around and Terrence Malick is whispering in your ear, “This is good, Christian…let’s do it again but this time with less feeling.”

Hell, Knight of Cups made me think about joining ISIS…kidding. But it did make me think about…whatever, popping a Percocet or something. It’s a brilliant zone-out film. You sit there and sit there and eventually your eyelids begin to droop a bit, and then a bit more. As I sat in my seat I really did wonder what effect this tidepool of ennui and eternal drifting might have upon an angry someone who’s leaning toward a philosophy of moral decisiveness or absolutism. I swear to God this movie is fuel for that kind of thing.

Read more

The Trump-Hitler echoes are fitting together. Any psychologist will tell you that Trump’s insistence the other night that there’s “no problem” with the size of his gross animal member is a schoolyard bluff tactic — that only those with concerns boast about such matters. (The same psychology prevails with people in a work environment who constantly throw around sexual double entendres– the more you joke about it, the less you’re getting.) Couple this with a 2.22.16 Telegraph piece that referenced a claim, made in a 2015 book called “Hitler’s Last Days, Minute by Minute“, that Adolf Hitler’s anger and aggression was compensation for having had a micro-penis (“a rare condition called penile hypospadias“). He also had only a single testicle. Last night Bill Maher referenced a 1990 Vanity Fair piece (by way of the Weekly Standard) that claimed “Trump kept a volume of Hitler’s speeches by his bedside.”

Read more