As Democrats and fair-minded Constitutionalists agonize over the forthcoming confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett and the resulting 6-3 conservative majority, it’s worth recalling that Mayor Pete was addressing the fundamental misrepresentation of American voter opinion early on.
From the time he announced his presidential candidacy on 4.14.19, Buttigeg was talking about expanding the number of justices from nine to 15, with five affiliated with Democrats, five affiliated with Republicans, and five apolitical justices chosen by the first 10.
No other candidate “made a Supreme Court overhaul central to his or her rationale for running and proposed presidential agenda,” according to NBC’s Josh Lederman. “Buttigieg has said structural democratic reform would be his top priority, vowing to launch a commission on depoliticizing the Supreme Court on his first day as president.”
As part of a week-long tribute to the recently departed Michael Chapman, Trailers From Hell is highlighting three brief Chapman commentaries, including Rod Lurie‘s 2013 riff on Martin Scorsese‘s Taxi Driver (’76).
Chapman’s impressionistic lensing of this moody portrait of increasingly delusional loneliness, and how a certain Manhattan cab driver is gradually engulfed by a vaguely hellish and spooky city with all kinds of needles and provocations…we all know the drill. But I have two quibbles with Lurie’s patter.
One, Taxi Driver is not “as depressing as a dying nun.” It’s hauntingly alive and pulsing and tingling with dread. “Depressing” is when a film depicts a relatively flat and oppressively defined realm of regimentation and submission from which there’s no escape.** “Depressing” is when a stuck, not-very-smart character is without nerve or options. Robert De Niro‘s Travis Bickle, one senses early on, is definitely a guy with options. They just happen to be of a powder-keg variety.
Two, Lurie suggests that Bickle’s “are you talkin’ to me?” is a steal from Shane — a line that Alan Ladd said to Ben Johnson inside Grafton’s Saloon and General Store. The line was actually “are you speakin’ to me?“, a slightly more refined form of inquiry. Plus it was ad-libbed by De Niro, and I seriously doubt if George Stevens’ 1953 western…aahh, who knows?
The difference between “talking” and “speaking” was pointed out in a scene from David Mamet‘s Glengarry Glen Ross:
Aaronow: Yes. I mean, are you actually talking about this or are we just…? Moss: No, we’re just… Aaronow: We’re just “talking” about it. Moss: We’re just speaking about it. (Pause.) As an idea. Aaronow: As an idea. Moss: Yes. Aaronow: We’re not actually talking about it. Moss: No.
Nearly four months ago J.K. Rowling landed in hot water when she said the wrong thing about transgender folk. She stated that “if sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased…I know and love trans people, but erasing the concept of sex removes the ability of many to meaningfully discuss their lives.” The blowback was harsh; her remarks were derided as transphobic.
Now Transgender Twitter wants Eddie Redmaynepunished also. Because four days ago the costar of The Trial of the Chicago 7 and two Fantastic Beasts films told the Daily Mail‘s Baz Bamigboye that while he disagreed with Rowling’s comments, he was alarmed by the “vitriol” she received on social media, which he called “absolutely disgusting.”
Redmayne added that ugly remarks about trans people are “equally disgusting,” but the “vitriol” remark was all anyone heard.
A 9.8.20 538 piece by Perry Bacon, Jr. says that “polls suggest about 10% of black voters both nationally and in key swing states with large black electorates are supporting Trump.”
The authors claim to have “exclusively obtained a vast cache of data used by Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign on almost 200 million American voters, and that “it reveals that 3.5 million Black Americans were categorized by Trump’s campaign as ‘Deterrence’ – voters they wanted to stay home on election day.”
Excerpt #2: “Civil rights campaigners said the evidence amounted to a new form of voter ‘suppression’ and called on Facebook to disclose ads and targeting information that has never been made public.
“The ‘Deterrence’ project can be revealed after Channel 4 News obtained the database used by Trump’s digital campaign team — credited with helping deliver his shock victory to become president four years ago.
Excerpt #3: “Vast in scale, it contains details on almost 200 million Americans, among more than 5,000 files, which together amass almost 5 terabytes of data — making it one of the biggest leaks in history.
“It reveals not only the huge amounts of data held on every individual voter, but how that data was used and manipulated by models and algorithms.
Empire‘s Ben Travis: “Fincher requested ‘Gary au naturel’ for his tale about the making of a Golden Age masterpiece, which offered the actor a challenge.
“’I thought, ‘Oh, fucking hell!’,” Oldman tells Empire. ‘I can’t remember the last time I did that. I’ve always got something! I was thinking, ‘I don’t know about that.’ I don’t look anything like Mank. There’s a similarity with [Tom Burke as] Welles and Amanda Seyfried] kind of looks like [film star and Hearst’s lover] Marion Davies, and you’ve got this pale make-up on Charles Dance, so he resembles [William Randolph] Hearst. But I didn’t have anything I could anchor to.
“Then, once we started, I thought, ‘Yeah, Dave was right.’ No tricks. No nothing. Just: here it is. I’ve embraced it.”
Gary Oldman, Tom Pelphrey, nondescript mystery actor in David Fincher‘s Mank.
We all read a few weeks ago about Trump campaign consultant/advisor Brad Parscale, 44, being demoted from his previous position as Trump’s 2020 campaign manager after the Tulsa debacle. But what could be bothering the poor guy to the extent that his wife, Candice Blount, felt compelled to call Fort Lauderdale cops about his erratic behavior and threatened self-harm?
The video shows poor Parscale sauntering out of the house bare-chested and carrying a beer — trouble right there. And then getting tackled by one of the cops, immediately followed by him protesting “I didn’t do anything! I didn’t do anything!”
Wiki excerpt: “Parscale was hospitalized on 9.27.20 after his wife told Fort Lauderdale police that he had guns and he was threatening to harm himself. An officer reported that “Bradley’s speech was slurred as though he was under the influence of an alcoholic beverage and he seemed to be crying.”[ Officers seized 10 firearms from the home and reported that Parscale’s wife had cuts and bruises on her arms and face, which she said Parscale had inflicted earlier in the week. Parscale was detained under terms of the Baker Act.”
On Friday, 9.25, Tatiana polled the readership of a Facebook site called “Russians in Los Angeles”, which has over 19,000 followers. (Try not to be confused about the fact that there’s another Facebook site with the same handle.) Her question was aimed at Russians with U.S. citizenship who can therefore vote. Many respondents have been living in this country for more than 30 years, Tatiana says.
Question: “Who do you like more in the Presidential race, Donald Trump or Joe Biden?”
I suggested that Tatiana ask this because in a general sense many Americans regard Russians as one of two things — (a) pro-Trump social media agents or potential U.S. election saboteurs, or (b) people who are traditionally or temperamentally receptive to to the exertions of a strongman autocrat. I had an idea that her poll might indicate that a cliche or two isn’t valid.
It’s 10:30 pm on Sunday, and Tatiana has so far received a little more than 500 replies, most of them more argumentative than declarative.
But the Russian-born U.S. citizens who answered are, I regret to inform, strongly in favor of Orange Plague. Out of a total of 154 voters, 135 (87.6%) of her Russian-American voters are for Trump, and 19 voters (12.4%) are for Biden.
So my expectation was wrong. Russian American voters do seem to have a liking for authoritarians, or at least the one currently in the White House. In part because the respondents were rattled by last summer’s BLM protests and want someone to get tough with that. Or so it would seem.
Tatiana has passed along a few reasons and rationales from readers. HE contends that some of these are based on bad information, a blatant defiance of fact, an apparent ignorance of today’s N.Y. Times report about Trump’s taxes and business acumen, and possible low-brain-cell counts:
(1) “The riots and the closing of small merchant businesses are only happening in the cities in which the governors and mayors are Democrats”;
(2) “Vote for Biden if you want riots, if you want to drop to your knees and kiss the feet of BLM, or if you want bigger taxes, but not if you want to stop illegal immigrants and control crime”;
(3) “Biden will move many U.S. workplaces to China”;
(4) “Democrats haven’t controlled the chaos…they’re allowing too much to be destroyed”;
(5) “Los Angeles mayor Gil Garcetti has turned this city into a trash can”;
(6) “Trump can stop the further collapse of the country”.
HE’s own Larry Karaszewksi has tweeted that the Kino Lorber Bluray of Jerry Schatzberg‘s Puzzle of a Downfall Child will pop on 12.15. Including audio commentary by Daniel Kremer and Bill Ackerman, (b) an interview with Schatzberg, and (c) an alternate studio-edit opening.
A little voice is telling me that a fair-sized portion of the stories Gianni Russo is sharing here aren’t reliable, but I love hearing them anyway. I don’t know how old this interview is, but it was only posted about two weeks ago.
The Frank Sinatra story sounds believable, especially the part regarding Sinatra immediately hanging up the phone when Russo called him back and said, “We’re friends, right? Would you turn down the [Maggio] part in From Here to Eternity if I asked you to?” The Kennedy stuff sounds familiar and is probably true to some extent, especially the stories about Joe Kennedy‘s thoughts about women and sexual favors, and Bobby Kennedy‘s hard-ass attitude about mafia guys, etc.
But there’s no way JFK told anyone that his administration would invade Cuba so the mob could get their casinos back. He felt pressured into supporting the Bay of Pigs invasion, yes, but that was a far cry from a full-scale U.S. invasion.
Wiki excerpt: “In 1988, Russo killed a man inside the Las Vegas club and casino he owned. When he tried to intervene to stop a member of the Medellín drug cartel from harassing a female patron, the man stabbed him with a broken champagne bottle. Russo, a legal carry owner, pulled his gun and shot him twice in the head. Russo was not charged with the killing because it was ruled a justifiable homicide. However, when Pablo Escobar heard about the death, he ordered a contract on Russo’s life. The Colombian drug lord supposedly only canceled it when he found out Russo had starred in…The Godfather.”
I’ve never once eaten at a Sizzler, but another familiar American brand has fallen victim to Covid, and for purely sentimental and unfocused reasons I feel badly about this. A world that once had Sizzler, California Pizza Kitchen, Souplantation and all kinds of independent restaurants as regular, comforting cultural fixtures…that world has slipped beneath the waves.
Donald Trump is a lying, raging sociopath and the boss of a New York crime family who’s been using the Presidency to enrich himself and his corrupt buccaneer pallies. We all know this, no? So learning from the New York Times that Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes in 2016, and again in 2017 during his first year in the White House — $1500 total — is not what most of us would call a huge shocker. It fits a well-known pattern, is all. He’s a shyster and a grifter.
So when your average downmarket Trump loyalist reads that Trump paid a grand total of $1500 in taxes in 2016 and ’17, is he going to say “so Donald’s a big swaggering billionaire and he paid a lot less to the government than I did in those same years??…wow, amazing! I wish I could get away with paying $750 to the IRS!” Or will he say, “Okay, so he’s obviously a charlatan and a grifter, but at least he’s protecting us from Black Lives Matter and that’s all that matters.”
The 9.27 Times report, prepared by Russ Buettner, Susanne Craig and Mike McIntire, says Trump “paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years, largely because he reported losing much more money than he made.
Excerpt: “As the president wages a re-election campaign that polls say he is in danger of losing, his finances are under stress, beset by losses and hundreds of millions of dollars in debt coming due that he has personally guaranteed. Also hanging over him is a decade-long audit battle with the Internal Revenue Service over the legitimacy of a $72.9 million tax refund that he claimed, and received, after declaring huge losses. An adverse ruling could cost him more than $100 million.
“The tax returns that Mr. Trump has long fought to keep private tell a story fundamentally different from the one he has sold to the American public. His reports to the I.R.S. portray a businessman who takes in hundreds of millions of dollars a year yet racks up chronic losses that he aggressively employs to avoid paying taxes. Now, with his financial challenges mounting, the records show that he depends more and more on making money from businesses that put him in potential and often direct conflict of interest with his job as president.”
Trump has naturally called the Times report “fake news.” What’s he gonna say, that they have him dead to rights?
Key paragraphs: “The Apprentice, along with the licensing and endorsement deals that flowed from his expanding celebrity, brought Mr. Trump a total of $427.4 million, The Times’s analysis of the records found. He invested much of that in a collection of businesses, mostly golf courses, that in the years since have steadily devoured cash — much as the money he secretly received from his father financed a spree of quixotic overspending that led to his collapse in the early 1990s.
“Indeed, his financial condition when he announced his run for president in 2015 lends some credence to the notion that his long-shot campaign was at least in part a gambit to reanimate the marketability of his name.”
Wiki excerpt: “By making himself the embodiment of virtue and of total commitment, Robespierre took control of the Revolution in its most radical and bloody phase: the Jacobin republic. His goal in the Terror was to use the guillotine to create what he called a “republic of virtue”, wherein virtue would be combined with terror.”
