In an interview with Gray Television Washington Bureau Chief Jacqueline Policastro given earlier today, Orange Plague said “he’s ready to step in to provide another stimulus to Americans struggling during the coronavirus pandemic.” Trump quote: “The plague came in, and it’s not the people’s fault. So we want to take care of them.” He said, according to Gray TV, that he wants to extend the $600 weekly benefit to unemployed Americans.
In my heart of hearts I’d like to impose a Mississippi Burning payback fantasy upon Orange Plague, Mitch McConnell, Stephen Mnuchin and Senate Republicans who won’t budge on restoring the $600-per-week pandemic benefits. An angry crowd breaking through locked doors and beating these loathsome pricks…not killing them**, but delivering severe pain, boot-kicks, gashes, bruises, swellings, black eyes, blood trickling, etc.
Just a fantasy but if it actually happened? I wouldn’t condemn it. No one would. Some of us would cheer.
From Paul Krugman‘s “The Unemployed Stare Into the Abyss — Republicans Look Away,” an 8.3 N.Y. Times column about how “the cruelty and ignorance of Trump and his allies are creating another gratuitous disaster“:
“Around 1000 Americans are dying from COVID-19 each day…ten times the rate in the European Union. Thanks to our failure to control the pandemic, we’re still suffering from Great Depression levels of unemployment. [And] yet enhanced unemployment benefits, a crucial lifeline for tens of millions of Americans, have expired. And negotiations over how — or even whether — to restore aid appear to be stalled.”
“House Democrats passed a bill specifically designed to deal with this mess two and a half months ago. The Trump Administration and Senate Republicans had plenty of time to propose an alternative. Instead, they didn’t even focus on the issue until days before the benefits ended. And even now, they’re refusing to offer anything that might significantly alleviate workers’ plight. This is an astonishing failure of governance — right up there with the mishandling of the pandemic itself.”
“The policy proposals being floated by White House aides and advisers are almost surreal in their disconnect from reality. Cutting payroll taxes on workers who can’t work? Letting businesspeople deduct the full cost of three-martini lunches they can’t eat? Above all, Republicans seem obsessed with the idea that unemployment benefits are making workers lazy and unwilling to accept jobs.”
** “After all we’re not murderers, despite what this undertaker thinks.” — Vito Corleone, The Godfather.
All my moviegoing life I’ve been more or less avoiding Frank Capra‘s Mr. Smith Goes To Washington (’39). A highly respected political dramedy about idealism vs. corruption, of course. One of Capra’s finest films, they all say. And one of the standouts of 1939, which has long been celebrated as old-time Hollywood’s greatest year.
But we all know that Capra lays it on too thick. And so my thinking was, “Okay, I’ll see it eventually but I’m in no hurry.” I began telling myself this back in the ’70s, and I somehow managed to sidestep Mr. Smith all through the Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations, and over the last three and a half years of Trump. But a 4K Bluray version was part of a Sony package I bought a while back, and last night I decided to pop it in.
HE verdict: Mr. Smith is a “good” film in that it says the right populist things about governmental corruption (i.e., established stinky politicians need to consider the views of a true-blue idealist every so often), and it does so with crackerjack dialogue (written by Sidney Buchman and Myles Connolly) and lots of snappy attitude and sweaty passion, and you can see how and why it made Jimmy Stewart (between 30 and 31 when it was shot) a major star.
But my God, it wears you down! I felt exhausted after 45 minutes, and I had another 80 minutes to go. By the time it ended I felt all but poisoned by the sugar and the Capracorn syrup. And it felt so fake and cranked up…a big bowl of patriotic whipped cream with sentimental sauce and a cherry on top.
Has anyone in the history of the planet earth every been as naive and idealistic as Stewart’s Jefferson Smith? How could the son of a man who was friendly with Claude Rains‘ Senator Joseph Paine for so many years possibly be this clueless about the ways of the grown-up world?
Why in heaven’s name would Jean Arthur, who’s obviously class-A material and who seems destined to end up as Smith’s girlfriend or wife…why would she even flirt with the idea of marrying Thomas Mitchell‘s cynical Capitol Hill reporter? She and Mitchell were drunk when the idea arose, yes, but it makes no sense — nobody ever marries Thomas Mitchell, and flirting with this degraded Arthur’s value.
And after Stewart collapses on the Senate floor, the guilt-wracked Rains/Paine runs out and tries to shoot himself? Where did the gun come from? And Harry Carey, the president of the Senate (which makes him FDR’s vp), is the only person in the Senate chamber who sympathizes with Stewart’s plight?
I’m glad I finally saw Mr. Smith Goes To Washington. I’m not calling it a bad film but it’s certainly an exhausting one. I will never, ever see it again. And I’m saying this as a fan of It’s A Wonderful Life, which I’ve seen at least six or seven times.
Originally posted on 4.2.08: 25 years ago Oliver Stone did me a great favor, and I’ve thanked him at least two if not three times since. In ’95 he and publicist Stephen Rivers arranged for me to pay a brief visit to the Nixon West Wing — Oval Office, cabinet room, hallways, various offices, etc.
Production designer Victor Kempster had built the amazingly detailed set (including an outdoor portion with grass and bushes) on a massive Sony sound stage.
I was allowed in just after Stone and his cast (including Anthony Hopkins) and crew had finished filming. It was sometime around February or March of ’95. I wrote up my impressions for an L.A. Times Syndicate piece. Nixon opened on 12.20.95.
The Nixon unit publicist (or somebody who worked for Rivers) escorted me onto the stage and left. Nobody was around; I had the place all to myself. I had a video camera with me and shot all the rooms, and took my time about it. I was seriously excited and grateful as hell for the opportunity because it was, in a sense, better than visiting the real Oval Office in the real White House, which I would have never been allowed to do even if I’d been best friends with someone in the Clinton administration.
Nixon’s oval office.
JFK’s subdued variation.
Every detail was Eric von Stroheim genuine. Wooden floors, real plaster, ceilings, rugs, moldings, early 1970s phones, bright gold French aristocracy drapes, china on the shelves and mantlepiece, etc.
Five years later I was granted a visit to a replica of Jack Kennedy‘s West Wing that had been used for the shooting of Roger Donaldson‘s Thirteen Days. It was around the same time of year — February or March of 2000, roughly nine or ten months before the movie’s release in December. The set had been built by production designer Dennis Washington inside a warehouse-type sound stage somewhere in southern Glendale or Eagle Rock.
The difference between the Nixon Oval Office decor — creamy beiges and bright golds, a bright blue rug, gilded bric a bracs on the shelves (which contributed to a kind of effete, faux-aristocratic atmosphere) — and the subdued greens, browns and navy blues of JFK’s office (which even had a replica of the coconut shell that Lt. Kennedy used to carve out a message during his PT 109 adventure) will always stay in my mind.
You can tell a lot about people from the decor in their homes and workplaces. Only an arrogant know-nothing would have chosen the nouveau-riche wooden floor that Bush had installed in ’05. The White House is a place of great history, echoes and ghosts, and it should look and feel like it’s been hanging in there for at least a century or so — stressed floors, old timber and dark varnish, like the early 20th Century and 19th Century homes that are found in the northeast.
These visits were as close as I’m ever going to get to the real Oval Office — they gave me a real organic window into recent history. Even if I’d been invited to the real White House I wouldn’t have had the chance to poke around and study everything at my leisure.
My favorite moment in Platoon is when Taylor (Charlie Sheen) and King (Keith David) are talking about their U.S. backgrounds and core identities. I don’t remember it verbatim but King asks Taylor if he comes from a wealthy family and Taylor sidesteps a response. Soon after Taylor offers some kind of poetic or idealistic reason for having volunteered for Vietnam duty (“I wanted to see the injustice and conflict first-hand”), and King says, “Well, you gotta be rich in the first place to think like that.”
I fell for King at that very moment.
I naturally loved Willem Dafoe‘s Elias (and so did Martin Scorsese — soon after he offered Dafoe the lead role in The Last Temptation of Christ because of it) and identified with the potheads. And I hated the rugged whiskey-drinkers (Tom Berenger‘s Staff Sergeant Barnes, Kevin Dillon‘s Bunny, John C. McGinley‘s Sergeant O’Neill).
I’ve seen Platoon six or seven times, but I never once spotted Johnny Depp (and he’s definitely in it, according to credits).
The Hill‘s Mike Lillis, posted at 8:45 am: In a brief but heated exchange, Rep. Ted Yoho (FLA) told Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NYC) that she was “disgusting” for recently suggesting that poverty and unemployment are driving a spike in crime in New York City during the coronavirus pandemic.
“You are out of your freaking mind,” Yoho told her. Ocasio-Cortez shot back, telling Yoho he was being “rude.” The two then parted ways. Ocasio-Cortez headed into the building, while Yoho, joined by Rep. Roger Williams (R-Texas), began descending toward the House office buildings. A few steps down, Yoho offered a parting thought to no one in particular. “Fucking bitch,” he said.
Rep. Ted Yoho apologizes for remarks made during an exchange on the Capitol steps with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. pic.twitter.com/IrDjJZ7JIE
— Alex Salvi (@alexsalvinews) July 22, 2020
Tom Hanks‘ Greyhound is a tight, tense, no-bathroom-breaks battleship flick, and altogether a better-than-reasonably-good action film. It’s obvious catnip for war-film aficionados, and certainly for WWII buffs.
Aaron Schneider directed, but Hanks — the star, sole screenwriter and producer with Playtone partner Gary Goetzman — is the ranking auteur here, and you can’t help but admire the meticulous honing that went into upping the suspense-and-danger factor. Once on board and underway, the narrative offers no breathers.
For this is a riveting procedural — a taut logistical drama set on gray, heaving seas, about rookie naval Commander Ernest Krause (Hanks) and the crew of a destroyer escorting a convoy of 37 ships across the North Atlantic in early ’42, and dealing with all kinds of hair-raising hell.
It’s Krause’s maiden voyage, by the way, and he frankly looks a little old to be a greenhorn but we’ll let that slide.
The emotional engagement comes from Hanks trying like hell to play the role of the wise, confident daddy and to not screw up by failing to focus for even a second or two. The pressure is on every waking second.
Along with the cargo-laden convoy, Krause and crew obviously need to dodge German torpedos while inflicting as much damage upon the wolf pack as possible. This is the whole agenda, the whole film. Greyhound is therefore dealing a forced deck — every moment has to be pounding, every piece of information has to impart alarm.
The critical action in this 91-minute suspense thriller actually occupies 80 minutes if you discount the opening and closing credits, and is shorter still if you eliminate a stateside dinner scene between Krause and wife Evelyn (Elizabeth Shue) that adds zip to the overall. And let’s also cut out that praying at bedside stuff. And who cares if Hanks has bleeding feet?
Most of the tension comes from Hanks and key subordinates eyeballing sonar screens and gauging possible threat levels. There’s so much focus on those screens (along with other ominous visual indicators) that I was reminded of the missile-track sequence from Dr. Strangelove. A good portion of Greyhound is, in fact, that Strangelove sequence — “submarine five miles away and getting closer…four miles off…three!”
Last March I complained about the Greyhound trailer looking like “a video-game fantasy” and “a damn CG cartoon”. I even claimed that the film lacked a certain feeling of “tactile reality” that one got from older sound-stage war films like Mark Robson‘s The Bridges at Toko-Ri, Humphrey Bogart‘s Action on the North Atlantic or Cary Grant‘s Destination Tokyo. And yet, despite my loathing of computer effects, I somehow became accustomed to them once the film began, although the waves, explosions and tracer bullets always feel synthetic. I’m sorry but they do.
In summation, Greyhound isn’t half bad and plays better than I expected. A crisp salute to costars Stephen Graham, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Karl Glusman and Tom Brittney.
Does Greyhound fall short in failing to pay proper respect to African Americans who fought and died bravely during that historic conflict? Lamentably, yes. If I had been in Hanks or Goetzman’s shoes I would done a Hamilton and inserted a scene or two of an African American admiral keeping tabs on the situation, just to play it safe. Will Hanks and Geotzman be threatened with cancellation for casting Rob Morgan as a white-coat chef who’s constantly preparing eggs, bacon and pancakes for Hanks? Hard to say, but don’t be surprised if wokesters make a thing out of this.
Hollywood Elsewhere is hoping and praying that Telluride ’20 will happen, and that a facsimile of an actual, real-deal award season will begin to take shape sometime around late October or certainly by early November, and that all will eventually end well.
2020’s Best Picture nominees will be judged and supported according to five determining factors: (a) how woke or welcome they are, or to what extent they focus on non-white or female characters, (b) how un-woke and potentially unwelcome they might be due to focusing on white-male characters, which are a generic no-no among Khmer Rouge cadres, (c) how good they are in terms of basic craft (directing, acting, editing, cinematography…I know, old-fashioned concept!), (d) how “desperate” Academy voters might feel in a COVID-damaged, take-what-you-can-get realm, and (e) whether or not they seem to defy the categories by way of occupying their own realm and passing alone some aspect of fundamental human truth.
I know nothing, of course. I’m just spitballing (yes, again), and I’m probably going to have to correct this post 15 or 16 times before 9 pm this evening.
I’m presuming that the top 12 contenders right now are (1) David Fincher‘s Mank (Netflix), (2) Paul Greengrass‘s News of the World (Sony), (3) Tom McCarthy‘s Stillwater, (4) Thomas Kail and Lin Manuel Miranda‘s Hamilton (Disney), (5) Ron Howard’s Hillbilly Elegy (Netflix), (6) Steven Spielberg‘s West Side Story, (7) Aaron Sorkin‘s The Trial of the Chicago 7, (8) Chloe Zhao‘s Nomadland (Searchlight), (9) Spike Lee‘s Da 5 Bloods (Netflix), (10) George C. Wolfe‘s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (Netflix), (11) Rod Lurie‘s The Outpost (Screen Media) and (12) Lee Isaac Chung‘s Minari (A24).
Jeremy Strong (Jerry Rubin) and Sacha Baron Cohen (Abbie Hoffman) between takes during filming of Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7.
Five of the 12 (Fincher, Sorkin, Howard, Lee, Wolfe) are Netflix releases, and three of these are paleface movies.
Contenders that focus on characters of color or women are Hamilton (non-European-descended actors portraying the Founding Fathers), Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Da Five Bloods, Minari (Korean-American family struggling to hang on and stay afloat in ’80s Arkansas) and Nomadland (Frances McDormand as a roaming 60something woman of the highway).
Three of the Netflix movies — Mank, Chicago 7, Hillbilly Elegy — are about white characters and set decades in the past.
Is West Side Story going to be processed as a partly Puerto Rican tale, or will viewers and voters default to a shorthand notion that it’s a 63 year-old adaptation of a classic white-guy creation (Steven Spielberg, Stephen Sondheim, Leonard Bernstein, William Shakespeare)?
I don’t think Hamilton has a chance as it’s not really a film and was shot four years ago to boot. So in terms of the African American experience Lee and Wolfe are the only players, and the presumption is that the only stand-out Bloods contender is Delroy Lindo for Best Supporting Actor. Am I wrong?
A gut feeling is telling me that the five finalists are likely to be Mank, Chicago 7, Hillbilly Elegy, Nomadland and Stillwater. What do I know, right? Obviously the old school never-Netflix crowd isn’t going to be comfortable with this but what can they do about it?
Year in and year out my thinking is that high-calibre craft and emotional involvement are the most important factors, and that the old Tom Stoppard/Real Thing riff about “cricket bats” still applies.
Stoppard: “I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you’re dead.
“This [cricket bat] here, which looks like a wooden club, is actually several pieces of particular wood cunningly put together in a certain way so that the whole thing is sprung, like a dance floor. It’s for hitting cricket balls with. If you get it right, the cricket ball will travel two hundred yards in four seconds, and all you’ve done is give it a knock like knocking the top off a bottle of stout, and it makes a noise like a trout taking a fly
“What we’re trying to do is write cricket bats, so that when we throw up an idea and give it a little knock it might…travel.”
In short, my hunch is that the cricket-bat factor is likely to be strongest with Stillwater, Hillbilly Elegy, Nomadland, Mank and The Trial of the Chicago 7. Just spitballing.
From Bret Stephens‘ “Reading Orwell for the Fourth of July,” posted on 7.3.20: “Right now all the Twitter furors, the angry rows over publication decisions, the canceled speeches and books, the semantic battles about which words take an uppercase and which don’t…[all of this] may seem remote to those who care about more tangible issues: depression, disease, police abuse, urban decline.
“Yet the issue that counts the most is whether the institutions that are supposed to champion liberal ideals will muster the moral confidence to survive. On this July 4, it’s very much in doubt.
“As in so much else, George Orwell was here before us. In connection to the recent vandalism of monuments and destruction of statues, a line from “1984” has been making the rounds — ‘every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered.’
“[This] problem today comes from the left: from liberal elites who, when tested, lack the courage of their liberal convictions; from so-called progressives whose core convictions were never liberal to begin with; from administrative types at nonprofits and corporations who, with only vague convictions of their own, don’t want to be on the wrong side of a P.R. headache.
“This has been the great cultural story of the last few years. It is typified by incidents such as The New Yorker’s David Remnick thinking it would be a good idea to interview Steve Bannon for the magazine’s annual festival — until a Twitter mob and some members of his own staff decided otherwise. Or by The Washington Post devoting 3,000 words to destroying the life of a private person of no particular note because in 2018 she wore blackface, with ironic intent, at a Halloween party. Or by big corporations pulling ads from Facebook while demanding the company do more to censor forms of speech they deem impermissible.
“These stories matter because an idea is at risk. That’s the idea that…no society can long flourish when contrarians are treated as heretics.
“That idea, old as Socrates, formerly had powerful institutional defenders, especially in the form of universities, news media, book publishers, free-speech groups and major philanthropies.
“But those defenders are, on account of one excuse or another, capitulating to people who claim free speech for themselves (but not for others), who believe all the old patriarchal hierarchies must go (so that new “intersectional” hierarchies may arise), who are in a perpetual fervor to rewrite the past (all the better to control the future), and who demand cringing public apologies from those who have sinned against an ever-more radical ideological standard (while those apologies won’t save them from being fired).”
Seriously, what is wrong with these people? I understand paying tribute to two Russian spies who died here in the summer of 1959 — one from a fall after wrestling with a New York advertising man, another shot by U.S. marshalls as he attempted to cause the ad man’s death by stepping on his fingers. But where’s the sense in not wearing masks?
The other day I was driving and listening to “Not So Sweet Martha Lorraine” and marvelling at Country Joe McDonald‘s smooth twangy croon and Barry Melton‘s super-clean, sharp-as-a-blade guitar and that wonderful boppin’ organ, etc. “And finally blow out my brains…”
Bad relationship songs have cut both ways for a long time in the pop realm. Irritating or bad-vibe girlfriend songs by male blues singers and macho rock groups surged in the ’50s, ’60s and early ’70s, but have pretty much disappeared this century. (Or am I not paying attention?)
Toxic-male-relationship songs by prominent female singers happened from time to time in the ’60s (Linda Ronstadt‘s “You’re No Good”, Lesley Gore‘s “You Don’t Own Me”) but seem to be pretty much the only game in town today (Rhianna‘s “Love on the Brain“, JoJo‘s “Mad Love“, Lauryn Hill‘s “Ex-Factor“).
Are bad-girlfriend songs even allowed these days? I can’t think of any but what do I know?
Classic-era bad girlfriend (or irksome women) songs: “You Talk Too Much” (Joe Jones, ’60), “Black Hearted Woman”, “Every Hungry Woman (The Allman Brothers, ’70), “I Hear You Knockin’” (Smiley Lewis, ’55), “Stupid Girl,” “Under My Thumb” (Rolling Stones, ’65), “I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better” (The Byrds, ’65), “96 Tears” (Question Mark & The Mysterians), “I Can See For Miles” (The Who, ’67), etc.
I don’t have the time or energy to explain what I’m on about. I’m not even sure if I know myself. This is basically a Chris Willman piece that I accidentally stepped into out of enthusiasm for Country Joe and “Martha Lorraine.”
- All Hail Tom White, Taciturn Hero of “Killers of the Flower Moon”
Roughly two months ago a very early draft of Eric Roth‘s screenplay for Killers of the Flower Moon (dated 2.20.17,...
More » - Dead-End Insanity of “Nomadland”
Frances McDormand‘s Fern was strong but mule-stubborn and at the end of the day self-destructive, and this stunted psychology led...
More » - Mia Farrow’s Best Performances?
Can’t decide which performance is better, although I’ve always leaned toward Tina Vitale, her cynical New Jersey moll behind the...
More »
- Hedren’s 94th
Two days ago (1.19) a Facebook tribute congratulated Tippi Hedren for having reached her 94th year (blow out the candles!)...
More » - Criminal Protagonists
A friend suggested a list of the Ten Best American Crime Flicks of the ‘70s. By which he meant films...
More » - “‘Moby-Dick’ on Horseback”
I’ve never been able to give myself over to Sam Peckinpah’s Major Dundee, a 1965 Civil War–era western, and I’ve...
More »