If nothing else, Mimi Leder‘s On The Basis of Sex (Focus Features, 12.25) — the story of crusading Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg — fits right smack dab into the emotional rage that everyone is feeling now in the wake of the Brett Kavanaugh Judicial Committee hearings (and, God forbid, his possible confirmation by the Senate later this week), and particularly how President Trump belittled Christine Blasey Ford yesterday in Mississippi. Incidentally: The Wikipage says RBG appears in Leder’s film.
“The most revealing element of [last] Thursday’s hearing was not Judge Kavanaugh’s response to sexual assault allegations — his denial was already well known — but rather his manner of delivery.
“It is perhaps unfair to expect Judge Kavanaugh, facing serious allegations that he asserts have slandered and disgraced him, to slow-play his response. But there is no civil right to serve on the Supreme Court. The question is not what is fair to Judge Kavanaugh but rather what is constitutionally healthiest for the republic. Judicial confirmation hearings are auditions for serving as a judge. Judge Kavanaugh showed himself to be up to fighting when attacked, but less so to judging dispassionately.
“Judge Kavanaugh had a choice between accelerating the combat — clearly President Trump’s method — and declining to join while still defending his name. The latter course would have accomplished dual goals: refuting the accusations while acting like an occupant of the office to which he aspires.
“Perhaps the F.B.I. will uncover useful evidence about what happened 36 years ago. But to advise and consent to his nomination, the issue the Senate must resolve is not merely how Brett Kavanaugh behaved in 1982. It is how Judge Kavanaugh comported himself in 2018, on television. Whatever else we can say, he did not act like a justice of the highest court in the land.” –from “Judge Kavanaugh Is One Angry Man,” a 10.1 N.Y. Times opinion piece by Greg Weiner.
Brett Kavanaugh was allowed to be angry. Dr. Ford wasn’t. Women grow up hearing that being angry makes us unattractive. Well, today, I’m angry – and I own it. I plan to use that anger to take back the House, take back the Senate, & put Democrats in charge. Are you with me? pic.twitter.com/c9DebKTQEV
— Elizabeth Warren (@elizabethforma) September 30, 2018
Next Monday President Trump will most likely nominate Judge Brett Kavanaugh, 53, a flinty, pro-business conservative who reportedly helped draft the impeachment case against President Bill Clinton (i.e., a U.S. President who lies about getting a blowjob must be removed from office), to fill Judge Anthony Kennedy‘s seat on the Supreme Court. Something about Kavanaugh’s beady eyes, doughy face and vaguely rural accent instantly turned me off.
Less likely to be nominated is Judge Amy Coney Barrett, 46, who is strongly favored by devout social conservatives whereas the pro-business crowd is more supportive of Kavanaugh.
From N.Y. Times: “[Kavanaugh’s] work in the George W. Bush administration; the perception that his opposition in his judicial opinions to abortion and Obamacare was insufficiently adamant; and even a 1991 clerkship with Judge Alex Kozinski, a former federal Ninth Circuit judge who retired last year after accusations of sexual misconduct, have all come into question.
“At the other end of the spectrum is Judge Barrett, who has emerged as a favorite candidate of many conservative Christian leaders — both evangelicals and Catholics — who have championed her cause. During her confirmation hearing for the appeals court position, Senator Diane Feinstein questioned Judge Barrett about her public statements. “You have a long history of believing that your religious beliefs should prevail,” Feinstein told Barrett. “The dogma lives loudly within you.”
I miss Sen. Al Franken (third video down) so much that it hurts.
Late this afternoon the legendary Martin Scorsese sat for a mostly French-language q & a today following a Director’s Fortnight screening of Mean Streets. The questions were almost entirely about the genesis and making of this 1973 classic. Scorsese recalled his Little Italy upbringing in the ’50s and early ’60s, and the crackling atmosphere of the 1973 Cannes Film Festival, where Mean Streets premiered and actually got booed by some.
The healthy-looking 75 year-old (who again was wearing violet socks) mentioned that the troubled bond between Harvey Keitel‘s Charley and Robert De Niro‘s Johnny Boy is based on the relationship between Scorsese’s dad and his nee’er-do-well younger brother. Scorsese also recalled the real-life influence of a man of the cloth, a kind of “street priest” who counselled him during his early-to-mid-teen years.
But all this fell by the wayside when Scorsese mentioned that his forthcoming The Irishman, a $180 million gangster flick funded mostly by Netflix, contains about “300 scenes.”
Right away I leaned forward and wondered if I’d just heard that. Because 300 scenes could translate into a helluva running time, perhaps as long as 450 minutes or 7 hours and 30 minutes. I asked Scorsese’s rep for a confirmation or clarification, but heard zip. Then an Associated Press story run by The New York Times reported the “300 scenes” quote, and I knew I hadn’t been hearing things.
In other words (and I’m just spitballing here) The Irishman could wind up as an expanded Netlix miniseries in addition to being shown as a shorter theatrical feature. Who knows? I know that a film with 300 scenes will definitely be a bear, length-wise. Too much of a bear for theatres, in fact, if Scorsese intends to use all or most of that footage.
The average scene used to last two minutes, give or take. But scenes today are shorter, or roughly a page and a half or 90 seconds per scene. By this standard a typical two-hour movie might contain 75 to 90 scenes. If the scenes last 90 seconds a film with 75 scenes would run 112 minutes; if the scenes number 90 the running time would be 135 minutes without credits.
From a portion of Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury,” titled “Donald Trump Didn’t Want to Be President” and excerpted in the current issue of New York. The following comes from former White House deputy chief of staff Katie Walsh:
“As soon as the campaign team had stepped into the White House, Walsh saw, it had gone from managing Trump to the expectation of being managed by him. Yet the president, while proposing the most radical departure from governing and policy norms in several generations, had few specific ideas about how to turn his themes and vitriol into policy. And making suggestions to him was deeply complicated.
“Here, arguably, was the central issue of the Trump presidency, informing every aspect of Trumpian policy and leadership: He didn’t process information in any conventional sense. He didn’t read. He didn’t really even skim. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semi-literate. He trusted his own expertise — no matter how paltry or irrelevant — more than anyone else’s. He was often confident, but he was just as often paralyzed, less a savant than a figure of sputtering and dangerous insecurities, whose instinctive response was to lash out and behave as if his gut, however confused, was in fact in some clear and forceful way telling him what to do.
“It was, said Walsh, ‘like trying to figure out what a child wants.'”
From 1.17 N.Y. Times story about Betsy DeVos’s Education Secretary confirmation hearing, written by Kate Zernike and Yamiche Alcindor: “With time limited, Democrats confronted Ms. DeVos with rapid-fire questions, demanding that she explain her family’s contributions to groups that support so-called conversion therapy for gay people; her donations to Republicans and their causes, which she agreed totaled about $200 million over the years; her past statements that government ‘sucks’ and that public schools are a ‘dead end’; and the poor performance of charter schools in Detroit, where she resisted legislation that would have blocked chronically failing charter schools from expanding.
“Under questioning, Ms. DeVos said it would be ‘premature’ to say whether she would continue the Obama administration’s policy requiring uniform reporting standards for sexual assaults on college campuses. She told Connecitcut Senator Christopher S. Murphy, whose constituents include families whose children were killed in the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, that it should be ‘left to locales’ to decide whether guns are allowed in schools, and that she supported Mr. Trump’s call to ban gun-free zones around schools. She also denied that she had personally supported conversion therapy.”
All of a sudden and out of the blue, I found myself today respecting and agreeing with Senator Marco Rubio. I can’t believe it, but there it is. He manned up, stood tall, told it straight, no quarter.
From David E. Sanger and Matt Flegenheimer‘s N.Y. Times story about Rubio’s interrogation of former Exxon CEO and would-be Secretary of State Rex Tillerson: “One especially skeptical Republican was Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, whose vote on the Foreign Relations Committee might well decide the fate of Mr. Tillerson, the former chief executive of Exxon.
“In one contentious exchange with Mr. Rubio, who ran against President-elect Donald J. Trump last year for the Republican nomination, Mr. Tillerson rebuffed an effort to get him to describe Mr. Putin as a war criminal for ordering the bombing of civilians in Chechnya. ‘I would not use that term,’ he said.
In nominating Jeff Sessions as Attorney General, Donald Trump was saying “this is another expression, people, of where I’m coming from and what my election was all about — the resurgence of whiteness and white cultural dominance, and a modest but effective suppression of the multiculturals. We’ll try to put a happy face on it, but these folks are not going run the show as much, trust me. The Obama years are over, and we’re not gonna take any shit.”
Do I, Jeffrey Wells, have the courage and conviction to rant during a confirmation hearing and get myself tossed out and maybe arrested? If past behaviors are any indication (and they are), the answer is “uhhm…well, not really.” I’ve always run alongside the action, staying close but mainly as a cautious observer, like Robert Redford would have behaved in a ’70s movie about street protests. I’ve never been thrown out of anything, never been punched or billy-clubbed by a cop. I take potshots from the side.
A couple of hours ago Gold Derby‘s Chris Beachum reported that Paramount has committed to a December release date for Martin Scorsese‘s Silence, a religious persecution period drama set in 17th Century Japan. “While [a specific release] date is not set in stone, we’ve had enough of a confirmation that it will indeed be released in December,” Beachum wrote. I immediately wrote Paramount for specifics — true or not, what date if true, how many theatres? If Beachum is correct, I’m guessing Silence will have a NY-and-LA opening in early to mid December, and that it’ll screen for critics either just before or just after Thanksgiving.
HBO and Rick Famuyiwa‘s Confirmation (i.e., Anita vs. Clarence) pops tonight, and here’s a review by L.A. Times critic Mary McNamara: “If Anita Hill (Kerry Washington) has no political agenda, pretty much everyone else involves does, and Confirmation is admirably ruthless in its presentation of all of them.
“Clarence Thomas (Wendell Pierce) remains steadfast in his denials and, until the moment when he famously lashes out at what he calls a ‘high tech lynching,’ spends much of the film in signature silence, which Pierce deftly uses to suggest a panoply of emotions, from shock and rage to touching bewilderment, without ever quite committing to one reaction or another.
“His team, on the other hand, is quickly focused. Republican Sens. John Danforth (Bill Irwin), Arlen Specter (Malcolm Gets) and Alan Simpson (Peter McRobbie) are first dismissive, then argumentative and finally resort to outright smear tactics.
“The Democrats aren’t much better. Kennedy (Treat Williams) is hamstrung by his own record with women and Biden, who Kinnear portrays in contrasting tones of self-pity and sincere political anguish, is initially reluctant to sully himself or the proceedings with what he fears is personal, possibly vindictive, dirt.
This morning I rsvped to a last-minute Brigade invitation to see Gavin Hood‘s Eye in the Sky (Bleecker, 3.11). It happens tomorrow at noon. Right away the publicist replied as follows: “Thanks, Jeffrey — noted. Will keep you posted on confirmation ASAP!” Two minutes later I wrote back: “What does that mean? You’ll…what, let me know if I can attend? It’s a little nickle-and-dime lunch-hour screening.” Publicist: “Correct, we’ve made note of your RSVP and should have word on confirmations by EOD today.” Me: “Can’t wait to find out!”
Seriously, who says “hey, would you like to attend a last-minute screening at noon tomorrow?” and then when you rsvp they turn around and say “okay, cool…we’ll let you know later on if we have a seat for you!”
Update: I’ve been told I’ve made the cut and that they have a seat for me at tomorrow’s noon screening. How flattering!
It’s been nearly 25 years but remember the following: (1) Anita Hill (Kerry Washington in HBO’s Confirmation) didn’t come forward to try and torpedo Clarence Thomas during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings — she was summoned by the Judiciary Committee after a private FBI interview was leaked to the press, and therefore had no choice; (2) Four female witnesses were ready and willing to support Hill’s testimony, but they were not called due to what the Los Angeles Times described as a private, compromise deal between Republicans and the Senate Judiciary Committee chair Joe Biden (Gregg Kinnear in the film); (3) Hill took a polygraph test and passed with flying colors; Thomas declined the test. Remember that moment in Jerry Maguire when Tom Cruise joked that he was afraid of sounding like Clarence Thomas? Does anyone recall how Judiciary Committee member Ted Kennedy (Treat Williams in the film) more or less excused himself from asking Hill questions at the the hearings, given his own alleged indiscretions? Wendell Pierce portrays Thomas.
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