Okay, it's minutes away -- too late to affect the betting line, but just in time to embarrass me! You've seen my Best Picture nominee reviews. And now the proto-envelopes, please:
Best Picture: Green Book. My big sucker bet! I know everyone says Roma, and I loved it, but like I said, it looks and moves too much like a museum installation -- Green Book is old Hollywood stuff and pEoPlE LiKeD iT. (Also: Driving Miss Daisy didn't get a Best Director nomination that year, either.)
Best Actor: Rami Malek, Bohemian Rhapsody
Best Actress: Glenn Close, The Wife
Best Supporting Actor: Mahershala Ali, Green Book
Best Supporting Actress: Rachel Weisz, The Favourite
I'm sticking with conventional wisdom all the way, except for Weisz, whom I think will lap the field out of sheer magnificence.
Best Director: Spike Lee, BlacKkKlansman
Best Original Screenplay: Green Book
Best Adapted Screenplay: A Star is Born
My other sucker bet! I think a split ticket on Best Picture and Screenplay is the sort of comity gesture Academy members might like.
Best Original Score: Terence Blanchard, BlacKkKlansman
Best Cinematography: Alfonso Cuaron, Roma
Best Production Design: Black Panther
Best Costume Design: The Favorite
Best Film Editing: Vice
Best Song: "Shallow," A Star Is Born
Best Make-Up and Hairstyling: Vice
Best Sound Mixing: Bohemian Rhapsody
Best Sound Editing: A Quiet Place
Best Foreign Language Film: Roma
Blanchard is always great and his style and Lee's dovetailed so well here it's giving me a serious hunch. Roma was too good for Cuarón not to win a craft award. The other craft award predix are based on previously observed Oscar wealth-sharing.
Best Animated Feature: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
Best Documentary Feature: Hale County This Morning, This Evening
Best Special Effects: First Man
Best Animated Short: Bar
Best Life Action Short: Skin
Best Documentary Short: A Night at the Garden
I am totally guessing. I'm guessing on all of these, really -- who knows the heart of the Academy voter anymore? But this is part of the fun for me, and maybe you. Now, on to the Pantages!
(Oh, I'll try to be responsive in comments should you be so inclined.)
UPDATE. Well, I'm losing already.
UPDATE 2. Okay, got the make-up thing, I'm a star, yay.
UPDATE 3. Why did I bother.
UPDATE 4. I won at something! I feel good now!
UPDATE 5. FIRST MAN FOR VISUAL EFFECTS I'M A G E N I U S
UPDATE 6. LOL all the woke people are mad about Green Book. Guys, this is Hollywood. What did you expect? It’s like being pissed they didn’t nominate The Love Witch. Anyway, I shoulda put money on it!
Sunday, February 24, 2019
ON TO OSCAR 2019, PART 7.
(Other Best Picture Nominees considered so far: Black Panther, A Star is Born, Roma, BlackKkKlansman, The Favourite, Bohemian Rhapsody, and Green Book.)
Vice. Lively, politically astute, but a bit of a mess. In The Big Short, reformed funny-movie maker Adam McKay dramatized the fucking-over of the American economy, and amplified it with explanatory montages. Vice, about the fucking-over of America, is similar but with even more weight on the montages -- in fact, most of the historical characters are introduced mainly as pieces of the Brechtian educational filmstrip; for example, Frank Luntz has lines but no character; his main usefulness is as a living demonstration of how Republican propagandists used focus groups to not just sell policies but also poison the public discourse. Long passages are just tableaux or archival footage, cutting political events with clips of The Rifleman, Survivor, and Jane Fonda's Workout, seasoning history with zeitgeist.
You can see why Cheney looked like a great focal point for the story: He not only has a fat hand in every Republican outrage from Nixon through W, he also exemplifies the Republican success story: Be a total fuckup, get religion either figuratively or literally, latch onto some scumbags who respect your scumbaggery and scam your way to the top. The film suggests a similarity between the trajectories of youthful drunkards Cheney and George W., but also acknowledges the big difference: Unlike Bush Cheney is not even passably good with voters; he only shines among his fellow power jocks; as one of the film's many joke sequences underlines, his gift is to look serious and knowledgeable even when pitching total nonsense. In other words, he can bullshit the bullshitters, and he's not above hauling in an expert or two -- trained legal analysts, for example, with no excess of scruples -- to back his bullshit up.
The main problem with this approach is, Dick Cheney is not a tragic or a comic or even an anti-heroic figure -- he's just a piece of shit. Christian Bale dives to the center of the character and comes up with a believably not-too-bright guy who loves his family and finds a way to raise their standard of living by joining Today's GOP. This is a sensible explanation of the real Cheney's career, and Bale does it well -- but it has very little to do with the political lesson McKay's giving, other than to unnecessarily explain that amoral men make amoral movements. What would it mean if Cheney were a different person? What's the functional difference between Cheney and, say, fellow country-wrecker Donald Trump? After a while the Dick Cheney story diverges from the political story and, despite a half-hearted attempt to link some family drama to Republican hypocrisy (which could be yet another movie!), loses focus.
As Lynn Cheney, Amy Adams manages to spell out the personal frustrations that she displaces by feeding Dick's ambition without turning into a Lady Macbeth bitch-caricature (with a script that does her no favors), and Sam Rockwell does a good job of catching both W's weakness and charm. And I enjoyed all the cameos and special guest appearances, including Madea as Colin Powell. But the real doubles act, to me, is Bale's Cheney and Steven Carell's Donald Rumsfeld. There's a lot of student-exceeds-the-master in the relationship, and while Carell never makes the old bastard genuinely likable, there's some poignance in his profession of admiration from an abandoned office to the old friend who's just cut his throat. If we could strip away the superfluities, that's the part I'd keep.
That's it! In an hour or two, my predictions; then, showtime!
Vice. Lively, politically astute, but a bit of a mess. In The Big Short, reformed funny-movie maker Adam McKay dramatized the fucking-over of the American economy, and amplified it with explanatory montages. Vice, about the fucking-over of America, is similar but with even more weight on the montages -- in fact, most of the historical characters are introduced mainly as pieces of the Brechtian educational filmstrip; for example, Frank Luntz has lines but no character; his main usefulness is as a living demonstration of how Republican propagandists used focus groups to not just sell policies but also poison the public discourse. Long passages are just tableaux or archival footage, cutting political events with clips of The Rifleman, Survivor, and Jane Fonda's Workout, seasoning history with zeitgeist.
You can see why Cheney looked like a great focal point for the story: He not only has a fat hand in every Republican outrage from Nixon through W, he also exemplifies the Republican success story: Be a total fuckup, get religion either figuratively or literally, latch onto some scumbags who respect your scumbaggery and scam your way to the top. The film suggests a similarity between the trajectories of youthful drunkards Cheney and George W., but also acknowledges the big difference: Unlike Bush Cheney is not even passably good with voters; he only shines among his fellow power jocks; as one of the film's many joke sequences underlines, his gift is to look serious and knowledgeable even when pitching total nonsense. In other words, he can bullshit the bullshitters, and he's not above hauling in an expert or two -- trained legal analysts, for example, with no excess of scruples -- to back his bullshit up.
The main problem with this approach is, Dick Cheney is not a tragic or a comic or even an anti-heroic figure -- he's just a piece of shit. Christian Bale dives to the center of the character and comes up with a believably not-too-bright guy who loves his family and finds a way to raise their standard of living by joining Today's GOP. This is a sensible explanation of the real Cheney's career, and Bale does it well -- but it has very little to do with the political lesson McKay's giving, other than to unnecessarily explain that amoral men make amoral movements. What would it mean if Cheney were a different person? What's the functional difference between Cheney and, say, fellow country-wrecker Donald Trump? After a while the Dick Cheney story diverges from the political story and, despite a half-hearted attempt to link some family drama to Republican hypocrisy (which could be yet another movie!), loses focus.
As Lynn Cheney, Amy Adams manages to spell out the personal frustrations that she displaces by feeding Dick's ambition without turning into a Lady Macbeth bitch-caricature (with a script that does her no favors), and Sam Rockwell does a good job of catching both W's weakness and charm. And I enjoyed all the cameos and special guest appearances, including Madea as Colin Powell. But the real doubles act, to me, is Bale's Cheney and Steven Carell's Donald Rumsfeld. There's a lot of student-exceeds-the-master in the relationship, and while Carell never makes the old bastard genuinely likable, there's some poignance in his profession of admiration from an abandoned office to the old friend who's just cut his throat. If we could strip away the superfluities, that's the part I'd keep.
That's it! In an hour or two, my predictions; then, showtime!
ON TO OSCAR 2019, PART 6.
(Other Best Picture Nominees considered so far: Black Panther, A Star is Born, Roma, BlackKkKlansman, The Favourite, and Bohemian Rhapsody.)
Green Book. I don't get the alleged problem with this movie. I don't see it as "The White Savior" -- I see it as The Odd Couple.
Dr. Don Shirley is black, brittle, and insistent on his rights -- for which who could blame him, as he's an educated, talented classical musician forced to play pop to get over, and it's 1962. He can't take comfort in his blackness, either; backstory and behavior suggest his education and ascent from poverty has left him cut off from his roots. (He professes not to know who Aretha Franklin is, surrounds himself with African artifacts, and never talks to his family.) Despite his bitter experience of the world, he's surprisingly unworldly -- putting himself in obvious mortal peril throughout his tour of the Deep South -- and you get the impression he hangs onto that unworldliness, as he hangs onto his nightly bottle of Cutty Sark, because if he were constantly seeping in the undiluted ugliness of the world it would kill him.
For his Southern tour Shirley enlists as a driver/guardian Tony Lip (so-called, he says proudly, because he's "a bullshit artist... I'm good at talking people into doing things they don't wanna do"), a streetwise, unbright Bronx goomba with an extremely que-sera-sera attitude -- which isn't easy to maintain, as he's uneducated and marginally employed with a family to feed. When the Copa, where he works as a bouncer, shuts down for a few months, he's mainly qualified to win short money on hot-dog eating contests and he won't work for the Mob, so when someone gets him the Shirley gig he takes it, even though -- we have clumsily telegraphed to us early on -- he's prejudiced against black people.
Can two diverse men share a Cadillac Seville without driving each other crazy? [Cue theme music]
Yes, Green Book has the kind of Lessons-In-Life-and-Love howlers you would expect. The weirdest is when Tony gets the fastidious Shirley to play some R&B at a local black juke joint. (Shirley delicately removes a glass of whiskey from the upright first.) And Lord help us, those clips on TV aren't a joke, Shirley does help Tony write love letters. To his wife!
But the movie has a trick up its sleeve, and the trick is dramaturgy. Because of the way the characters are built, not only are those scenes less obnoxious than they could have been, the whole Driving Dr. Shirley thing works pretty well, too. First, when Tony really does play White Savior (and, blessedly, we get the first instance of this out of the way early), Shirley is ungrateful and mainly outraged at the unfairness of a system that makes it necessary that he be saved. So it's not really the whitesaving that turns the relationship around. But Tony's enough of a go-along type -- and, let's face it, used to servile gigs -- that he doesn't get too indignant about that. That gives him room to pay attention. And he's also, as a bullshit artist, a good enough student of human nature to actually pick up on what's eating Shirley, and a good enough human being to care. (Key line: "I been working nightclubs in New York City my whole life. I know it's a complicated world.") Shirley may be alienated, but not so alienated he can't pick up that Tony is actually listening, and in response he begins to unburden himself more to him -- even when it's in anger. Time then does its work.
So what if it's corny? I think I would have preferred it if [spoiler!] on Christmas Eve Shirley just stayed home and called his estranged brother instead of going all the way from West 57th Street to the freaking Bronx IN A SNOWSTORM to hang out with the Italians who, a minute ago, were calling black people eggplants. It ain't Frantz Fanon, it's a Hollywood movie. I was held.
Also it's Mahershala Ali and Viggo Mortensen, so if nothing else you can soak in their craft. Ali's Shirley is a real old-fashioned fusspot -- you can imagine Shirley learning and adopting a Clifton Webb facade, and shifting to the shit-eating smile when there are white folks to be pleased -- but even from the beginning you can perceive the years of hurt behind it, and when it's exacerbated -- as when a couple of black horseshoe players at a motel call him "fancy pants" -- you can feel the wounds reopen. And his pride is real and he can't be moved off it. (And he's funny! He really nails "I knew you had a gun.") Mortensen's technically ridiculous -- I mean, 'ey, gabagool, 'ats-a some accent, chief. But he's believably a creature of instinct who has operated so effectively on it, and has had so little need (or maybe capacity) for higher orders of thought that you can believe he'd unthinkingly accept Arthur Avenue bigotries, and unthinkingly say the ridiculous shit he says to Shirley (including that Shirley isn't as black as he is!) but, when his instinct tells him he had it all wrong, he would heed that, too. These guys have some great scenes together -- the one in the rain after they get sprung from jail, ending Ali climbing the ladder on "so if I'm not black enough, and if I'm not white enough, and if I'm not man enough, then tell me, Tony, what am I?" (Imagine being given that line on a piece of paper and getting what Ali gets out of it!); but I almost prefer watching them do the dumb scenes like the love letter ones, because as much as my eyes roll to describe it, they don't roll when I watch it.
Green Book. I don't get the alleged problem with this movie. I don't see it as "The White Savior" -- I see it as The Odd Couple.
Dr. Don Shirley is black, brittle, and insistent on his rights -- for which who could blame him, as he's an educated, talented classical musician forced to play pop to get over, and it's 1962. He can't take comfort in his blackness, either; backstory and behavior suggest his education and ascent from poverty has left him cut off from his roots. (He professes not to know who Aretha Franklin is, surrounds himself with African artifacts, and never talks to his family.) Despite his bitter experience of the world, he's surprisingly unworldly -- putting himself in obvious mortal peril throughout his tour of the Deep South -- and you get the impression he hangs onto that unworldliness, as he hangs onto his nightly bottle of Cutty Sark, because if he were constantly seeping in the undiluted ugliness of the world it would kill him.
For his Southern tour Shirley enlists as a driver/guardian Tony Lip (so-called, he says proudly, because he's "a bullshit artist... I'm good at talking people into doing things they don't wanna do"), a streetwise, unbright Bronx goomba with an extremely que-sera-sera attitude -- which isn't easy to maintain, as he's uneducated and marginally employed with a family to feed. When the Copa, where he works as a bouncer, shuts down for a few months, he's mainly qualified to win short money on hot-dog eating contests and he won't work for the Mob, so when someone gets him the Shirley gig he takes it, even though -- we have clumsily telegraphed to us early on -- he's prejudiced against black people.
Can two diverse men share a Cadillac Seville without driving each other crazy? [Cue theme music]
Yes, Green Book has the kind of Lessons-In-Life-and-Love howlers you would expect. The weirdest is when Tony gets the fastidious Shirley to play some R&B at a local black juke joint. (Shirley delicately removes a glass of whiskey from the upright first.) And Lord help us, those clips on TV aren't a joke, Shirley does help Tony write love letters. To his wife!
But the movie has a trick up its sleeve, and the trick is dramaturgy. Because of the way the characters are built, not only are those scenes less obnoxious than they could have been, the whole Driving Dr. Shirley thing works pretty well, too. First, when Tony really does play White Savior (and, blessedly, we get the first instance of this out of the way early), Shirley is ungrateful and mainly outraged at the unfairness of a system that makes it necessary that he be saved. So it's not really the whitesaving that turns the relationship around. But Tony's enough of a go-along type -- and, let's face it, used to servile gigs -- that he doesn't get too indignant about that. That gives him room to pay attention. And he's also, as a bullshit artist, a good enough student of human nature to actually pick up on what's eating Shirley, and a good enough human being to care. (Key line: "I been working nightclubs in New York City my whole life. I know it's a complicated world.") Shirley may be alienated, but not so alienated he can't pick up that Tony is actually listening, and in response he begins to unburden himself more to him -- even when it's in anger. Time then does its work.
So what if it's corny? I think I would have preferred it if [spoiler!] on Christmas Eve Shirley just stayed home and called his estranged brother instead of going all the way from West 57th Street to the freaking Bronx IN A SNOWSTORM to hang out with the Italians who, a minute ago, were calling black people eggplants. It ain't Frantz Fanon, it's a Hollywood movie. I was held.
Also it's Mahershala Ali and Viggo Mortensen, so if nothing else you can soak in their craft. Ali's Shirley is a real old-fashioned fusspot -- you can imagine Shirley learning and adopting a Clifton Webb facade, and shifting to the shit-eating smile when there are white folks to be pleased -- but even from the beginning you can perceive the years of hurt behind it, and when it's exacerbated -- as when a couple of black horseshoe players at a motel call him "fancy pants" -- you can feel the wounds reopen. And his pride is real and he can't be moved off it. (And he's funny! He really nails "I knew you had a gun.") Mortensen's technically ridiculous -- I mean, 'ey, gabagool, 'ats-a some accent, chief. But he's believably a creature of instinct who has operated so effectively on it, and has had so little need (or maybe capacity) for higher orders of thought that you can believe he'd unthinkingly accept Arthur Avenue bigotries, and unthinkingly say the ridiculous shit he says to Shirley (including that Shirley isn't as black as he is!) but, when his instinct tells him he had it all wrong, he would heed that, too. These guys have some great scenes together -- the one in the rain after they get sprung from jail, ending Ali climbing the ladder on "so if I'm not black enough, and if I'm not white enough, and if I'm not man enough, then tell me, Tony, what am I?" (Imagine being given that line on a piece of paper and getting what Ali gets out of it!); but I almost prefer watching them do the dumb scenes like the love letter ones, because as much as my eyes roll to describe it, they don't roll when I watch it.
Friday, February 22, 2019
ON TO OSCAR, PART 5.
(Other Best Picture Nominees considered so far: Black Panther, A Star is Born, Roma, BlackKkKlansman, and The Favourite.)
Bohemian Rhapsody. I've often said that the biopic is an intrinsically minor artform, and that only extremely rare exceptions bend the curve. Bohemian Rhapsody looks good and moves with some of the strut and glide of Queen's music, but it has all the traditional biopic problems -- for example, outside the star, there are no real characters. Credit Tom Hollander for sneaking a hint of dry humor into his lawyer/manager Jim "Miami" Beach (and Mike Myers -- had me fooled!), but everyone else is a cipher. Maybe it's because they're all still alive and could make trouble but the movie bandmates don't give us anything besides the most pro-forma behind-the-music moments: The lightbulb that's-a-great-riff! moments, the Freddie-you've-gone-too-far moments, etc. Even Mercury's female "love of my life" Mary never shows any feelings but Freddy-related feelings, and out of a regrettable soap opera at that. What if they'd been a little playful about it? When Freddie says "I think I'm bisexual" and Mary says, "you're gay," didn't anyone on the set realize how funny that is? I was laughing, anyway.
In fact all the stuff about Freddie's sexuality is weirdly fraught -- I haven't seen a leather scene like that since Cruising. (Wait'll they make the Rob Halford biopic!) Well, the closet can do strange things to a man and, given his background, Mercury was particularly [cue the music!] under pressure from both directions -- pushed not to go too far for obvious social reasons, but compelled to reveal what was going on inside himself for artistic reasons. That's a lot to take on and I can hardly blame Bryan Singer, the superhero-movie director of a big-budget can't-miss biopic (who has some issues himself), for deciding that the answer is the true love of a decent bloke you can bring home to your stereotypically uptight immigrant dad. But sweet as that is, judging by his music I bet that wasn't all Freddie Mercury was going for.
But if the script doesn't show us, at least Rami Malek's performance is able to suggest it. There have been a lot of jokes about Rami Malek's dental prosthesis doing the acting for him, but like any good actor Malek makes the thing work for the character -- sometimes the teeth are a totems of his fears and sorrows, something to hide and brood over, and sometimes they're the prow of a proud ego-ship steaming late into rehearsal. And despite being 90% of the movie, Malek's Freddie is still able to remain a little mysterious -- even in the cliche good-love and bad-love scenes, you can feel that he's protecting something inside himself -- his heart, maybe, or his ego, or his talent; something, in any case, that can't stand too much handling. Whether at the top of his game or the height of his madness, that makes Mercury vulnerable and lovable and fascinating, and not just someone we're staring at because he's famous. For a biopic that's an achievement.
Bohemian Rhapsody. I've often said that the biopic is an intrinsically minor artform, and that only extremely rare exceptions bend the curve. Bohemian Rhapsody looks good and moves with some of the strut and glide of Queen's music, but it has all the traditional biopic problems -- for example, outside the star, there are no real characters. Credit Tom Hollander for sneaking a hint of dry humor into his lawyer/manager Jim "Miami" Beach (and Mike Myers -- had me fooled!), but everyone else is a cipher. Maybe it's because they're all still alive and could make trouble but the movie bandmates don't give us anything besides the most pro-forma behind-the-music moments: The lightbulb that's-a-great-riff! moments, the Freddie-you've-gone-too-far moments, etc. Even Mercury's female "love of my life" Mary never shows any feelings but Freddy-related feelings, and out of a regrettable soap opera at that. What if they'd been a little playful about it? When Freddie says "I think I'm bisexual" and Mary says, "you're gay," didn't anyone on the set realize how funny that is? I was laughing, anyway.
In fact all the stuff about Freddie's sexuality is weirdly fraught -- I haven't seen a leather scene like that since Cruising. (Wait'll they make the Rob Halford biopic!) Well, the closet can do strange things to a man and, given his background, Mercury was particularly [cue the music!] under pressure from both directions -- pushed not to go too far for obvious social reasons, but compelled to reveal what was going on inside himself for artistic reasons. That's a lot to take on and I can hardly blame Bryan Singer, the superhero-movie director of a big-budget can't-miss biopic (who has some issues himself), for deciding that the answer is the true love of a decent bloke you can bring home to your stereotypically uptight immigrant dad. But sweet as that is, judging by his music I bet that wasn't all Freddie Mercury was going for.
But if the script doesn't show us, at least Rami Malek's performance is able to suggest it. There have been a lot of jokes about Rami Malek's dental prosthesis doing the acting for him, but like any good actor Malek makes the thing work for the character -- sometimes the teeth are a totems of his fears and sorrows, something to hide and brood over, and sometimes they're the prow of a proud ego-ship steaming late into rehearsal. And despite being 90% of the movie, Malek's Freddie is still able to remain a little mysterious -- even in the cliche good-love and bad-love scenes, you can feel that he's protecting something inside himself -- his heart, maybe, or his ego, or his talent; something, in any case, that can't stand too much handling. Whether at the top of his game or the height of his madness, that makes Mercury vulnerable and lovable and fascinating, and not just someone we're staring at because he's famous. For a biopic that's an achievement.
Wednesday, February 20, 2019
ON TO OSCAR 2019, PART 4.
(Other Best Picture Nominees considered so far: Black Panther, A Star is Born, Roma, BlackKkKlansman.)
The Favourite. [Mild spoilers.] This struck me at first as an exceedingly cold-blooded comedy of manners, like a Joe Orton adaptation of Wycherley -- or a Peter Greenaway movie with much better dialogue (Servant, whose room is invaded by a courtier: "Have you come to seduce me or to rape me?" Courtier: "I am a gentleman." Servant: "So, rape then.") The photography, which while gorgeous leans at lot on the fish-eye, also seemed designed to distance us, literally and figuratively, from the characters. But flashy as it is, the film reveals a very poignant strain.
The early-18th-Century rivalry between Churchill forebear Sarah Duchess of Marlborough and her reduced distant relation Abigail Hill for the affections of Britain's Queen Anne is such a sure-fire subject I was surprised not to have seen it done before -- though apparently it has been, including in a 2014 Helen Edmundson play. As the principals are introduced, we are brought quickly up to speed on Sarah's sway over the addled and capricious queen and on impoverished Abigail's desire to rise; the conflict seems inevitable and the ensuing machinations, beautifully written, give the traditional thrill of seeing a couple of live ones go at it. (As their shooting-range repartee reveals, Sarah has age and guile but Abby has youth and quickness.)
But while Abigail's drive to get up the ladder occasions astonished laughter, we also get some very cold glimpses of what she has had to pull herself up out of ("when I end up on the street selling my asshole to syphilitic soldiers, steadfast morality will be a fucking nonsense that will mock me daily"). By the time she offers a truce to Sarah after having nearly killed her, even as the audacity of it amuses we realize she's serious; she's inviting Sarah to sympathize sufficiently with her situation to forgive and, though we obviously can't expect her to accept, we may also feel that Sarah, having been protected by her class all her life, is being a bit ingracious in responding with blows ("Obviously, you still have some anger to expiate").
But Sarah has her own vulnerability as an (it has to be said) aging lover whose good sense sets her above the herd but also apart from sympathy; when she discovers Abigail in Anne's bed, her heartsickness could not be more genuine. As for the Queen, her capriciousness and cruelty are funny and sometimes shocking, but over time we come to understand it's based on severe emotional distress, caused by an understandable lack of trust in nearly everyone (and a feverish over-valuation of the few she does trust), and exacerbated by her royal isolation. I was especially struck by her bright, almost demented happiness at the wedding she hastily arranges for Abby and the poor dope Masham -- maybe because it's a rare occasion for her power to create joy.
The acting couldn't be better. Even at Abigail's shittiest, Emma Stone's face can show an almost childlike openness (I don't recall noticing how big and blue her eyes were before); Rachel Weisz employs the full force of her natural magnificence to o'erween without losing our rooting interest. Olivia Colman does that too, but in the manner of a baffled, spoiled child who can find no comfort and yet must still do her sums and read her speeches.
The Favourite. [Mild spoilers.] This struck me at first as an exceedingly cold-blooded comedy of manners, like a Joe Orton adaptation of Wycherley -- or a Peter Greenaway movie with much better dialogue (Servant, whose room is invaded by a courtier: "Have you come to seduce me or to rape me?" Courtier: "I am a gentleman." Servant: "So, rape then.") The photography, which while gorgeous leans at lot on the fish-eye, also seemed designed to distance us, literally and figuratively, from the characters. But flashy as it is, the film reveals a very poignant strain.
The early-18th-Century rivalry between Churchill forebear Sarah Duchess of Marlborough and her reduced distant relation Abigail Hill for the affections of Britain's Queen Anne is such a sure-fire subject I was surprised not to have seen it done before -- though apparently it has been, including in a 2014 Helen Edmundson play. As the principals are introduced, we are brought quickly up to speed on Sarah's sway over the addled and capricious queen and on impoverished Abigail's desire to rise; the conflict seems inevitable and the ensuing machinations, beautifully written, give the traditional thrill of seeing a couple of live ones go at it. (As their shooting-range repartee reveals, Sarah has age and guile but Abby has youth and quickness.)
But while Abigail's drive to get up the ladder occasions astonished laughter, we also get some very cold glimpses of what she has had to pull herself up out of ("when I end up on the street selling my asshole to syphilitic soldiers, steadfast morality will be a fucking nonsense that will mock me daily"). By the time she offers a truce to Sarah after having nearly killed her, even as the audacity of it amuses we realize she's serious; she's inviting Sarah to sympathize sufficiently with her situation to forgive and, though we obviously can't expect her to accept, we may also feel that Sarah, having been protected by her class all her life, is being a bit ingracious in responding with blows ("Obviously, you still have some anger to expiate").
But Sarah has her own vulnerability as an (it has to be said) aging lover whose good sense sets her above the herd but also apart from sympathy; when she discovers Abigail in Anne's bed, her heartsickness could not be more genuine. As for the Queen, her capriciousness and cruelty are funny and sometimes shocking, but over time we come to understand it's based on severe emotional distress, caused by an understandable lack of trust in nearly everyone (and a feverish over-valuation of the few she does trust), and exacerbated by her royal isolation. I was especially struck by her bright, almost demented happiness at the wedding she hastily arranges for Abby and the poor dope Masham -- maybe because it's a rare occasion for her power to create joy.
The acting couldn't be better. Even at Abigail's shittiest, Emma Stone's face can show an almost childlike openness (I don't recall noticing how big and blue her eyes were before); Rachel Weisz employs the full force of her natural magnificence to o'erween without losing our rooting interest. Olivia Colman does that too, but in the manner of a baffled, spoiled child who can find no comfort and yet must still do her sums and read her speeches.
Monday, February 18, 2019
ON TO OSCAR 2019, PART 3.
BlacKkKlansman. From the title to coda, this is just way too much -- which is what Spike Lee does and it's alright with me. There are times when his Sesame-Street schematic style just made me laugh out loud; like when he was setting up the black-cop-plus-white-cop-make-one-klansman plot, I thought, come on -- this is even a true story and I don't quite believe it. (The chief might buy the idea from black rookie cop Ron Stallworth if it were allowed to grow on him -- but a snap decision on a sit-down and "with the right white man we can do anything"?)
I got over it, though. I'm a sucker for this stuff. To me Lee and Oliver Stone are the heirs to Sam Fuller -- vulgarians who muscle and hustle you along. And though the KKKreeps in the movie are cartoons, how far from cartoon characters can the actual fuckers be, with their racist monomania and basement-den boys' Valhalla? But though they're cartoon characters, they're still characters, and Lee gives them enough operating room so you can see how they might be a real danger, especially under the guidance of "national director" David Duke -- whom Topher Grace plays sort of like Eric from That 70's Show grown up racist, which makes him more horrifying than any po-faced Evil Dwells Among Us portrait. (I think Grace's comic understatement has a lot in common with my favorite Marlon Brando performance: George Lincoln Rockwell in Roots II.) And if the white cops in the station are just variations on Officer Hoppy from Sanford and Son, at least they learn to roll with Ron's jam and get a kinder laugh in the end.
But the good-n-evil games are the least of it -- though Lee builds numerous tense scenes with an expertise that comes with constant work (TV shows, documentaries, movies -- he doesn't just hustle audiences). It's Ron's identity crisis that's the most interesting feature. He's mysterious coming in, dressed and coiffed out of an Afro-American fashion catalogue but seeming to play the line-walking good father's son -- which we take for a dodge until we realize it's only partly a dodge, he is that good son taught from birth to walk the line, and his "that's heavy" and "my sister" at the Kwame Ture event seem stiff because he's stiff. (Much is made at the station of his alternating "straight" and "jive" manners, but there's really not much functional difference.) Ture's long speech is there not only to give Lee a chance to raise our consciousness, but to raise Ron's.
As Ron's running his undercover act with the Klan, he's also running one on his Black Power girlfriend -- and in both cases he can't keep the double game up forever. (John David Washington is excellent at walking that line.) It's a dramatically pleasing solution that Ron sorts out his identity crisis by partnering on the Klan scam with the white Jewish cop Flip (a moody Adam Driver). It's weird to consider that for all Lee's alleged radicalism, and for his and the black characters' contempt for white savior shtick, this plot device isn't too far from 60s Sidney Poitier territory; the two men keep needling and proving themselves to each other, and when Flip acknowledges that, by putting the white face on Ron's fake Klansman, as a Jew he's "passing" too, the comraderie finally seems to break the lifelong tension that's made it hard for Ron to relax into himself -- and also seems to help solve (spoiler here, folks) the conflict with his girlfriend. Though she can't accept a brother working from the inside, she comes to accept Ron, and I think it's because he's come to accept himself.
That's heavy, my brother! Lee also gives us a lot of cinema sweets and sours -- Ron standing face to face with the human target that is, basically, him; the cross-cutting from Harry Belafonte in the student union to the Klan meeting; Ivan the drunken Klansman just making that weird sound of incomprehension into the camera. And I've been singing "It's Too Late To Turn Back Now," not just because the song is irresistible but also because Lee's delirious black love & soul dance scene is too.
As for that coda: I disapprove on Farberesque principle with this sort of gimp-string manipulation. I didn't like it, for example, when Gus Van Sant did it at the top of Milk to make a veil of sorrow that the film hadn't earned. I did think , though, it was fair play for Lee to use Rodney King at the beginning of Malcolm X to rack-focus us between the past and the present. And as for the flash-forward to Charlottesville and the tiki-torch boys at the end of this Klan story, what I have to say is this: fuck the Klan, fuck David Duke, and fuck Donald Trump.
I got over it, though. I'm a sucker for this stuff. To me Lee and Oliver Stone are the heirs to Sam Fuller -- vulgarians who muscle and hustle you along. And though the KKKreeps in the movie are cartoons, how far from cartoon characters can the actual fuckers be, with their racist monomania and basement-den boys' Valhalla? But though they're cartoon characters, they're still characters, and Lee gives them enough operating room so you can see how they might be a real danger, especially under the guidance of "national director" David Duke -- whom Topher Grace plays sort of like Eric from That 70's Show grown up racist, which makes him more horrifying than any po-faced Evil Dwells Among Us portrait. (I think Grace's comic understatement has a lot in common with my favorite Marlon Brando performance: George Lincoln Rockwell in Roots II.) And if the white cops in the station are just variations on Officer Hoppy from Sanford and Son, at least they learn to roll with Ron's jam and get a kinder laugh in the end.
But the good-n-evil games are the least of it -- though Lee builds numerous tense scenes with an expertise that comes with constant work (TV shows, documentaries, movies -- he doesn't just hustle audiences). It's Ron's identity crisis that's the most interesting feature. He's mysterious coming in, dressed and coiffed out of an Afro-American fashion catalogue but seeming to play the line-walking good father's son -- which we take for a dodge until we realize it's only partly a dodge, he is that good son taught from birth to walk the line, and his "that's heavy" and "my sister" at the Kwame Ture event seem stiff because he's stiff. (Much is made at the station of his alternating "straight" and "jive" manners, but there's really not much functional difference.) Ture's long speech is there not only to give Lee a chance to raise our consciousness, but to raise Ron's.
As Ron's running his undercover act with the Klan, he's also running one on his Black Power girlfriend -- and in both cases he can't keep the double game up forever. (John David Washington is excellent at walking that line.) It's a dramatically pleasing solution that Ron sorts out his identity crisis by partnering on the Klan scam with the white Jewish cop Flip (a moody Adam Driver). It's weird to consider that for all Lee's alleged radicalism, and for his and the black characters' contempt for white savior shtick, this plot device isn't too far from 60s Sidney Poitier territory; the two men keep needling and proving themselves to each other, and when Flip acknowledges that, by putting the white face on Ron's fake Klansman, as a Jew he's "passing" too, the comraderie finally seems to break the lifelong tension that's made it hard for Ron to relax into himself -- and also seems to help solve (spoiler here, folks) the conflict with his girlfriend. Though she can't accept a brother working from the inside, she comes to accept Ron, and I think it's because he's come to accept himself.
That's heavy, my brother! Lee also gives us a lot of cinema sweets and sours -- Ron standing face to face with the human target that is, basically, him; the cross-cutting from Harry Belafonte in the student union to the Klan meeting; Ivan the drunken Klansman just making that weird sound of incomprehension into the camera. And I've been singing "It's Too Late To Turn Back Now," not just because the song is irresistible but also because Lee's delirious black love & soul dance scene is too.
As for that coda: I disapprove on Farberesque principle with this sort of gimp-string manipulation. I didn't like it, for example, when Gus Van Sant did it at the top of Milk to make a veil of sorrow that the film hadn't earned. I did think , though, it was fair play for Lee to use Rodney King at the beginning of Malcolm X to rack-focus us between the past and the present. And as for the flash-forward to Charlottesville and the tiki-torch boys at the end of this Klan story, what I have to say is this: fuck the Klan, fuck David Duke, and fuck Donald Trump.
BEZOS OFF.
I'm unlocking a newsletter issue today (Subscribe! Cheap!™) showing a possible outcome in Amazon's search for a new HQ2 location, involving a longtime alicublog mainstay, Fritters, Alabama.
It's a response in large part to all the dummies acting as if the oversight New York would have put on Amazon in exchange for billions of dollars in tax breaks, which caused the tycoon Bezos to decamp in a huff, were unspeakable insolence in the face of corporate beneficence -- and the even crazier idea that New York, the economic titan of the nation, would suffer greatly from the loss of this single project.
About the worst of the bunch is, natch, at The Hill, written by Stephen Moore of the Heritage Foundation -- it's basically a concatenation of ancient rightwing slurs. "The Empire State has to be the most business hostile place in all of North America," Moore snarls, which is why New Yorkers walk around barefoot in patched overalls, as opposed to the wealthy citizens of business-friendly Bumfuck, Mississippi. Like the lower-profile idiots, Moore also cartoonishly portrays the objections to the Amazon deal thus: "They do not want Amazon jobs because Bezos has made so much money. The Ocasio-Cortez followers hate Amazon almost as much as Walmart." (Rendering this even more of a non sequitur, Walmart just opened a Jet.com warehouse in The Bronx.) Also, he claims, the foolish Gothamites demanded "every job be unionized" -- not sure where he's getting that from: Maybe he refers, albeit bullshittily, to the union push at Amazon's existing facility in Staten Island.
Moore declares it a "catastrophic loss for New York," which he no doubt expects his readers out in the sticks to believe, and which inspires my fantasia; go look.
It's a response in large part to all the dummies acting as if the oversight New York would have put on Amazon in exchange for billions of dollars in tax breaks, which caused the tycoon Bezos to decamp in a huff, were unspeakable insolence in the face of corporate beneficence -- and the even crazier idea that New York, the economic titan of the nation, would suffer greatly from the loss of this single project.
About the worst of the bunch is, natch, at The Hill, written by Stephen Moore of the Heritage Foundation -- it's basically a concatenation of ancient rightwing slurs. "The Empire State has to be the most business hostile place in all of North America," Moore snarls, which is why New Yorkers walk around barefoot in patched overalls, as opposed to the wealthy citizens of business-friendly Bumfuck, Mississippi. Like the lower-profile idiots, Moore also cartoonishly portrays the objections to the Amazon deal thus: "They do not want Amazon jobs because Bezos has made so much money. The Ocasio-Cortez followers hate Amazon almost as much as Walmart." (Rendering this even more of a non sequitur, Walmart just opened a Jet.com warehouse in The Bronx.) Also, he claims, the foolish Gothamites demanded "every job be unionized" -- not sure where he's getting that from: Maybe he refers, albeit bullshittily, to the union push at Amazon's existing facility in Staten Island.
Moore declares it a "catastrophic loss for New York," which he no doubt expects his readers out in the sticks to believe, and which inspires my fantasia; go look.
Friday, February 15, 2019
BEZOS AND FDR FINALLY UNITED IN RIGHTWING HISTORY.
I keep forgetting how dumb Jonah Goldberg is, merely because I don't read him as much as I used to (yes, I am still capable of growth and learning). But Jesus:
Goldberg thinks it was just a racket, though, the secret purpose of which was... I don't know, to make America Communist by consolidating the power of Big Movie Theater Chains, or to pay off FDR's donors.
The howler is that when Republicans do big-government big-money interventions -- even the one Republican president Goldberg allegedly disapproves of -- he's willing to accept their allegedly patriotic and utilitarian logic: e.g. "My hunch: The tax bill will help the economy," tweeted Goldberg about the amazingly transparent donor payoff Trump and Congressional Republicans pulled in 2017. But if Democrats propose a jobs program, it's a utopian fantasy. Even if it were a fantasy, I'd still take it over the dystopian reality Goldberg seems to think we deserve.
Amazon is taking its ball and going home, and New York Democrats are actually celebrating.
I wasn’t a huge fan of the deal New York and Amazon worked out. I don’t like corporate welfare, and the race among municipalities to bribe businesses to set up shop in their backyards has a lot of problems.Followers of the Goldberg style will recognize the all-bases cover he uses when he knows taking a firm position will leave him exposed. (Around here we call it the pee-dance.) He can't just say, as have many wingnut morons doing If I Was Mayor of a City I Obviously Hate cosplay on the internet, that it was bad to reject Amazon's deal because conservatives are supposed to be against "Crony Capitalism" these days (It's one of the THIMK-style signs in his office, the others include Liberal Fascism, You're the Real Racist, and My Mom Can Get You Fired). But he still has to bitch about it -- the big picture over his column of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, with whom the dummies are associating the deal, shows he's pretty much expected to -- so he has to fudge (without thinking about fudge, which would delay his filing by 30 minutes and 700 calories). Now let's look at the horrible mutant baby of logic in which this results:
...But what’s just astounding to me is how Democrats can (almost in one breath, figuratively speaking) champion a Green New Deal that would use the powers of the state — taxes, subsidies, regulatory bullying, etc. — to herd whole industries into alignment with their vision of a just and green society, and at the same time denounce these very tactics when actually put into practice.Did you know large national projects such as the Space Race and crony capitalism are the same thing? Let's hear Goldberg explain:
...The most prominent architect of the GND is New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Under her proposal, cows might suffer, but humans will thrive thanks to all the wonderful new jobs and free health care her utopian scheme would provide.LOL at the idea you can ever make anything better for non-billionaires!
...When Inskeep pointed out to her that deficit spending is “borrowing money that has to be paid back eventually through taxes,” AOC reversed herself with an impressive lack of embarrassment, saying that’s okay because this isn’t spending, it’s investing. Borrowing tens of trillions for her “investments” will pay for itself, “Because we’re creating jobs.”
The Amazon deal would have created some 25,000 jobs with an average annual salary of $150,000...Quit laughing -- just because it would cost New York $3 billion in tax breaks, plus which these big corporate promises seldom pan out, doesn't mean it's impossible.
...but AOC was against it because the agreement amounted to “creeping overreach of one of the world’s biggest corporations.”
Maybe it did. But I have news for AOC and others trying to use the precedent of the original New Deal as an excuse to get the band back together: This is how New Deals work.Yes, Goldberg thinks the profit motive of a rich oligarch is pretty much the same as FDR's reason for launching the Works Progress Administration. His hook, or rather his rusty hatpin, is that the New Deal was a "bonanza for big business":
In their effort to mobilize the U.S. economy to fight the Depression, the New Dealers favored big businesses and “associations” — cartels, guilds, syndicates, etc. — at every turn. The largest corporations individually or in association wrote the “codes” — i.e., regulations — of the National Recovery Administration and other agencies for their own benefit. It was all done in the name of efficiency and progress.
For instance, the big chain movie houses of the 1930s — the Netflixes and Hulus of the time — wrote the codes in such a way that independents were nearly run out of business, even though 13,571 of the 18,321 movie theaters in America were independently owned.The New Deal also, indeed primarily, fed, housed, and gave employment to a whole lot of starving, homeless, jobless citizens. Even if Amazon's promised jobs panned out they were not going to the needy, and might not even have gone to locals.
Goldberg thinks it was just a racket, though, the secret purpose of which was... I don't know, to make America Communist by consolidating the power of Big Movie Theater Chains, or to pay off FDR's donors.
The howler is that when Republicans do big-government big-money interventions -- even the one Republican president Goldberg allegedly disapproves of -- he's willing to accept their allegedly patriotic and utilitarian logic: e.g. "My hunch: The tax bill will help the economy," tweeted Goldberg about the amazingly transparent donor payoff Trump and Congressional Republicans pulled in 2017. But if Democrats propose a jobs program, it's a utopian fantasy. Even if it were a fantasy, I'd still take it over the dystopian reality Goldberg seems to think we deserve.
Thursday, February 14, 2019
ON TO OSCAR 2019, PART 2.
Roma. [Mild spoilers.] When I was a young man I went with this girlfriend to visit her parents in Miami. As she, like most of my girlfriends, came from considerably more money than I did, the parents had a swell place, and a maid greeted the girlfriend at the door -- very effusively and even emotionally, I thought, considering she was after all a maid, though also with some reserve (like the hugs, though there were a lot of them and they were obviously heartfelt, never lasted very long) that made it seem even weirder. After the woman went back to her work, the girlfriend said, "That's [name of maid] -- she sort of raised me."
That played on my mind when I saw Roma, which as you may know is about a live-in servant to a middle-class family in the eponymous district in Mexico City in the early 70s. The servant, Cleo, young and modest and indígena, seems to be more or less the housekeeper; there's another girl who seems to be the cook, but they help each other in their jobs. In addition to housework, Cleo spends a lot of time with the children, one of whom, fair-haired and sensitive and given to tales of his past lives, I at first took to be her son, she seemed to understand him and love him so well, though she seemed too young to have had him. When I realized he was instead one of the family, and that he was probably the avatar of the filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón, I cried, and not for the last time. In fact I haven't cried for a movie as much since Moonlight, so there's a lachrymal vote in the Oscar sweepstakes.
Even before I made that connection, I could see it was a memory movie even if I hadn't heard in advance that it was -- so often details are jacked up in the way a child would perceive and then remember them in adulthood: The overdriven sound of 60s cars, the multilayered din of city streets, the chaos and clatter of hawkers flashing and bouncing their wares outside the movie palace, the paneling and fluorescent lights of the mueblería. Even in scenes the child Cuarón could not have witnessed, the look and feel asserts itself, as if to insist on its importance, even over the story -- which I confess sometimes made me impatient, because it reminded me more of the sort of film installations one sees in museums than a movie.
But things do happen. Cleo takes up with Fermin, a friend of a cousin who turns out to be no good, a hitter in the Los Halcones paramilitary, who gets her pregnant and abandons her. (His abandonment and later renunciation of her are among the more protracted scenes, and thinking about it now I guess maybe I felt impatient with them because they're so painful.) The family meanwhile is disrupted; the father fucks off with a mistress, and his wife and her mother can at first think of nothing better than to deceive the kids and pretend he's just away on business. The twin sorrows of Cleo and her employer run on tracks that are sometimes parallel and even come very close, but there's always, as there was with my girlfriend's parents' maid, a line that no one is going to cross. But the maid and the family get through -- one would say together, but not quite, except in the blessed memory of a boy who grew up to make a movie where she was, at last, the center of attention, and at the close ascends into the endless memory of art.
There is so much that's virtuosic in this movie, and it's mostly Cuarón, who directed, wrote, shot and edited it (and I bet he had a lot to say about the sets); I especially love the long dolly shots, from the servants' giddy race down a Mexico City street to the genuinely how-the-hell amazing ocean rescue, but every scene is a jewel of rhythm, blocking, and dramatic emphasis, including the revelation scene at the seaside restaurant where the mother is the focus but there's a little boy who can't stop crying. All the acting is choice but Yalitza Aparicio's Cleo is the sort of thing that might have made Bresson think, maybe it's okay if the actors try a little. Her performance is more perfectly on the cusp of acting and not-acting than any other I've seen, and I've seen Joseph Chaikin. If you don't like the movie, you'll at least like a lot of the things that you see and hear in it.
(Kind of hate to disturb the reverie, but if you want to know everything that's wrong with "conservative" "arts criticism," you might check out Ross Douthat's studiously inept review of the film. The crux of it is, liberals r hypocrites because they like a movie where the maid is exploited, what if it was Berkeley huh libs. And wait till you hear his more specific criticisms; get this -- "The choice to film in black and white feels a wee bit pretentious, depriving the viewer of the rich colors that many of the street scenes imply" -- similarly, why were In Cold Blood, Psycho, and Dr. Strangelove in black and white, they had color then, I don't get it -- aaaargh fuck this guy; how perfect that this alleged follower of Christ should be such a perfect philistine.)
That played on my mind when I saw Roma, which as you may know is about a live-in servant to a middle-class family in the eponymous district in Mexico City in the early 70s. The servant, Cleo, young and modest and indígena, seems to be more or less the housekeeper; there's another girl who seems to be the cook, but they help each other in their jobs. In addition to housework, Cleo spends a lot of time with the children, one of whom, fair-haired and sensitive and given to tales of his past lives, I at first took to be her son, she seemed to understand him and love him so well, though she seemed too young to have had him. When I realized he was instead one of the family, and that he was probably the avatar of the filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón, I cried, and not for the last time. In fact I haven't cried for a movie as much since Moonlight, so there's a lachrymal vote in the Oscar sweepstakes.
Even before I made that connection, I could see it was a memory movie even if I hadn't heard in advance that it was -- so often details are jacked up in the way a child would perceive and then remember them in adulthood: The overdriven sound of 60s cars, the multilayered din of city streets, the chaos and clatter of hawkers flashing and bouncing their wares outside the movie palace, the paneling and fluorescent lights of the mueblería. Even in scenes the child Cuarón could not have witnessed, the look and feel asserts itself, as if to insist on its importance, even over the story -- which I confess sometimes made me impatient, because it reminded me more of the sort of film installations one sees in museums than a movie.
But things do happen. Cleo takes up with Fermin, a friend of a cousin who turns out to be no good, a hitter in the Los Halcones paramilitary, who gets her pregnant and abandons her. (His abandonment and later renunciation of her are among the more protracted scenes, and thinking about it now I guess maybe I felt impatient with them because they're so painful.) The family meanwhile is disrupted; the father fucks off with a mistress, and his wife and her mother can at first think of nothing better than to deceive the kids and pretend he's just away on business. The twin sorrows of Cleo and her employer run on tracks that are sometimes parallel and even come very close, but there's always, as there was with my girlfriend's parents' maid, a line that no one is going to cross. But the maid and the family get through -- one would say together, but not quite, except in the blessed memory of a boy who grew up to make a movie where she was, at last, the center of attention, and at the close ascends into the endless memory of art.
There is so much that's virtuosic in this movie, and it's mostly Cuarón, who directed, wrote, shot and edited it (and I bet he had a lot to say about the sets); I especially love the long dolly shots, from the servants' giddy race down a Mexico City street to the genuinely how-the-hell amazing ocean rescue, but every scene is a jewel of rhythm, blocking, and dramatic emphasis, including the revelation scene at the seaside restaurant where the mother is the focus but there's a little boy who can't stop crying. All the acting is choice but Yalitza Aparicio's Cleo is the sort of thing that might have made Bresson think, maybe it's okay if the actors try a little. Her performance is more perfectly on the cusp of acting and not-acting than any other I've seen, and I've seen Joseph Chaikin. If you don't like the movie, you'll at least like a lot of the things that you see and hear in it.
(Kind of hate to disturb the reverie, but if you want to know everything that's wrong with "conservative" "arts criticism," you might check out Ross Douthat's studiously inept review of the film. The crux of it is, liberals r hypocrites because they like a movie where the maid is exploited, what if it was Berkeley huh libs. And wait till you hear his more specific criticisms; get this -- "The choice to film in black and white feels a wee bit pretentious, depriving the viewer of the rich colors that many of the street scenes imply" -- similarly, why were In Cold Blood, Psycho, and Dr. Strangelove in black and white, they had color then, I don't get it -- aaaargh fuck this guy; how perfect that this alleged follower of Christ should be such a perfect philistine.)
Sunday, February 10, 2019
ON TO OSCAR 2019, PART 1.
[As I do from year to year, I'm going to try and get down as many Oscar-nominated films as I can before the big show on March 4.]
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. [Up for best adapted screenplay, 2 others] [Mild spoilers that get hotter as we go.] I have frequently said the Coens must be stoners, and I mean that neither as a dis nor as a backhand compliment so much as a description of what their work suggests. They have the stoner's voluptuary taste and feeling of randomness -- they seem to keenly feel things and notice details other people wouldn't. Sometimes this gives them a fresh, unexpected perspective that lights up a scene -- as we all saw recently when a lot of people were playing the Danny Boy clip from Miller's Crossing in honor of Albert Finney. (And of course it's apparent in all of The Big Lebowski, the first of their films that I really got.) But they also let their enthusiasms lead them down side roads and alleys and sometimes far, far from the point.
For 18 minutes their omnibus film The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is brilliantly on point. The old-time kid's western storybook framing device launches, and we get the gunslinging balladeer himself hilariously tall-taling and Mike Finking his way through some spectacular showdowns -- brilliantly funny and violent -- without mussing a hair or missing a beat; even when his number finally comes up, his eloquence does not fail, but rather ascends (along with Buster himself) in song. It's as if the Coens had taken the childish notion of The Old West -- the kind kids of the storybook era knew, with bloodless gun-battles and happy-ending cliffhangers -- and run it through 50 years of New Westerns, leaving the old storybook innocence spattered with Peckinpah blood, wised-up and absurd, but still mythic.
That's the high point, though. Not that the other stories aren't good, they're just not as inspired, and exhibit a mean streak that saps the pleasure from even the Coens' abundant inventiveness. The story of the bank robber who escapes justice only to be captured by fate is clever -- but it's also right out of O. Henry and Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. The celebrated "Meal Ticket" episode is a dark and compelling conceit, but finally just depressing. "The Gal Who Got Rattled" cooks up a wonderful Oregon Trail sorta-romance between a marooned Midwestern maiden and a comically noble cowboy -- only to cut it brutally short because, well, I guess because that's life, pardner. "The All-Gold Valley" ends more happily but no more cheerfully. By the time we get to the big, dumb death-metaphor of "The Mortal Remains," I felt like this is what O Brother Where Art Thou would be like if they hadn't known enough to let go of Homer.
It all looks great -- Bruno Delbonnel, who did the Simon & Garfunkel cover look for Inside Llewyn Davis, makes a series of gorgeous, living tipped-in four-color plates here, and Carter Burwell's majestic music would make Jerome Moross proud or maybe jealous. All the actors are wonderful, but I give the palm to Tom Waits as the greatest successor to Gabby Hayes, Tyne Daly who knows how a lady should be treated, and Bill Heck and Zoe Kazan for the sweetness they bring to the hard trail.
A Star is Born. This old war horse always pleases me one way or another -- whether with old-Hollywood glammah or with the outrageous 70s excess of Barbra and Kris. I was surprised how straightforward and muted this Bradley Cooper version is -- it really looks like an actor made it, with the scenes played for maximum honesty and the dialogue super-naturalistic to the point of being frequently hard to make out (which makes sense as Jackson Maine, the latest incarnation of the drunken, doomed star, is losing his hearing). I was going to say that he even cut the big confrontations and set pieces from the earlier versions but looking back I see they're all still in there -- they just evolve so naturally, without announcing themselves (like Ally's manager telling Maine what's what), that you don't feel the build-up. It's almost John Cassavettes' A Star is Born. Cooper's insight seems to be that the story's so strong you don't have to force it. And he's right.
Maybe they let Cooper make this movie in such a minor key because Lady Gaga as Ally supplies more than enough major-chord glammah to pull the crowds with her big splashy song numbers; they're not my thing, but they by God convince you she's the star you're watching get born. The best thing I can say about her acting is that she doesn't get blown out of the water by the big boys she's running with here. Sam Elliott, in particular, is not only great in the customary Sam Elliot way of just being Sam Elliot, but his scenes of brotherly blood and iron with Cooper are tough and true. And Cooper, who was amazing in American Sniper, is amazing here playing a different kind of damaged case. The one drawback in his performance is mainly a wound to the film: his Maine is so buried in his pain -- squint-faced, greasy-haired and grin-armored; you can smell the booze on him -- that you wonder what Ally sees in him -- she acts the enabler with him at first, sure, but her behavior with her dad (Andrew Dice Clay! Who's very good!) shows that she's not a sucker. But I bought that he was able to get this far and not much farther without cracking, and that finding Ally was like getting a glimpse of his own soul after it being long away, and it helped him go a few more miles than he might have. I wouldn't give up Lowell Sherman and Constance Bennett for this, but it's a worthy entrant.
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. [Up for best adapted screenplay, 2 others] [Mild spoilers that get hotter as we go.] I have frequently said the Coens must be stoners, and I mean that neither as a dis nor as a backhand compliment so much as a description of what their work suggests. They have the stoner's voluptuary taste and feeling of randomness -- they seem to keenly feel things and notice details other people wouldn't. Sometimes this gives them a fresh, unexpected perspective that lights up a scene -- as we all saw recently when a lot of people were playing the Danny Boy clip from Miller's Crossing in honor of Albert Finney. (And of course it's apparent in all of The Big Lebowski, the first of their films that I really got.) But they also let their enthusiasms lead them down side roads and alleys and sometimes far, far from the point.
For 18 minutes their omnibus film The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is brilliantly on point. The old-time kid's western storybook framing device launches, and we get the gunslinging balladeer himself hilariously tall-taling and Mike Finking his way through some spectacular showdowns -- brilliantly funny and violent -- without mussing a hair or missing a beat; even when his number finally comes up, his eloquence does not fail, but rather ascends (along with Buster himself) in song. It's as if the Coens had taken the childish notion of The Old West -- the kind kids of the storybook era knew, with bloodless gun-battles and happy-ending cliffhangers -- and run it through 50 years of New Westerns, leaving the old storybook innocence spattered with Peckinpah blood, wised-up and absurd, but still mythic.
That's the high point, though. Not that the other stories aren't good, they're just not as inspired, and exhibit a mean streak that saps the pleasure from even the Coens' abundant inventiveness. The story of the bank robber who escapes justice only to be captured by fate is clever -- but it's also right out of O. Henry and Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. The celebrated "Meal Ticket" episode is a dark and compelling conceit, but finally just depressing. "The Gal Who Got Rattled" cooks up a wonderful Oregon Trail sorta-romance between a marooned Midwestern maiden and a comically noble cowboy -- only to cut it brutally short because, well, I guess because that's life, pardner. "The All-Gold Valley" ends more happily but no more cheerfully. By the time we get to the big, dumb death-metaphor of "The Mortal Remains," I felt like this is what O Brother Where Art Thou would be like if they hadn't known enough to let go of Homer.
It all looks great -- Bruno Delbonnel, who did the Simon & Garfunkel cover look for Inside Llewyn Davis, makes a series of gorgeous, living tipped-in four-color plates here, and Carter Burwell's majestic music would make Jerome Moross proud or maybe jealous. All the actors are wonderful, but I give the palm to Tom Waits as the greatest successor to Gabby Hayes, Tyne Daly who knows how a lady should be treated, and Bill Heck and Zoe Kazan for the sweetness they bring to the hard trail.
A Star is Born. This old war horse always pleases me one way or another -- whether with old-Hollywood glammah or with the outrageous 70s excess of Barbra and Kris. I was surprised how straightforward and muted this Bradley Cooper version is -- it really looks like an actor made it, with the scenes played for maximum honesty and the dialogue super-naturalistic to the point of being frequently hard to make out (which makes sense as Jackson Maine, the latest incarnation of the drunken, doomed star, is losing his hearing). I was going to say that he even cut the big confrontations and set pieces from the earlier versions but looking back I see they're all still in there -- they just evolve so naturally, without announcing themselves (like Ally's manager telling Maine what's what), that you don't feel the build-up. It's almost John Cassavettes' A Star is Born. Cooper's insight seems to be that the story's so strong you don't have to force it. And he's right.
Maybe they let Cooper make this movie in such a minor key because Lady Gaga as Ally supplies more than enough major-chord glammah to pull the crowds with her big splashy song numbers; they're not my thing, but they by God convince you she's the star you're watching get born. The best thing I can say about her acting is that she doesn't get blown out of the water by the big boys she's running with here. Sam Elliott, in particular, is not only great in the customary Sam Elliot way of just being Sam Elliot, but his scenes of brotherly blood and iron with Cooper are tough and true. And Cooper, who was amazing in American Sniper, is amazing here playing a different kind of damaged case. The one drawback in his performance is mainly a wound to the film: his Maine is so buried in his pain -- squint-faced, greasy-haired and grin-armored; you can smell the booze on him -- that you wonder what Ally sees in him -- she acts the enabler with him at first, sure, but her behavior with her dad (Andrew Dice Clay! Who's very good!) shows that she's not a sucker. But I bought that he was able to get this far and not much farther without cracking, and that finding Ally was like getting a glimpse of his own soul after it being long away, and it helped him go a few more miles than he might have. I wouldn't give up Lowell Sherman and Constance Bennett for this, but it's a worthy entrant.
Friday, February 08, 2019
FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.
Pop's not dead!
• I have opened another issue of the Roy Edroso Breaks It Down newsletter to the public at large (that's you) (subscribe, why don't you? It's cheap), this one announcing a new conservative-but-not-that-kind of conservative magazine, The Bulshit. Plz enjoy.
• RIP, Albert Finney. As a youth he was wonderfully handsome and charming, which he used to fine effect in his early films -- his Tom Jones is hilariously callow and on-the-make, but so pure in his pleasure that we always side with him. That fine animal energy never left his acting, and as he outgrew romantic leads he used it to illumine from within his classic character roles. His performances in Annie, Murder on the Orient Express, The Dresser, et alia are almost ridiculous -- bigger than we're used to anymore, played to the balcony in an age of tiny multiplexes and home theaters, but fascinating because they have a strong internal logic, are built with a craftsman's purpose, and have that light inside, showing all the affect and prosthetics are just the armament of the man. My own favorite Finney performance is from a mostly-forgotten 90s film, A Man of No Importance, in which he plays Alfie Byrne, a thoroughly closeted small-town Irish bus conductor and off-hours theater director who endeavors to put up a production of Wilde's Salome (which he pronounces voluptuously like "baloney") and falls hopelessly for a young actor. I'm allergic to phrases like "struggles to embrace his sexuality," but the scenes in which he does just that -- never has a middle-aged man been so terrified to enter a gay bar -- are by turn humorous and heartbreaking. The light inside was very strong indeed.
Wednesday, February 06, 2019
THE STATE OF THE UNION IS BULLSHIT.
But we knew that. From coverage at my newsletter (to which you really should subscribe):
I will only add:
Trump keeps going on women-empowerment, and then onto the trade deficit, and then NAFTA, and then... But there’s nothing left. He keeps talking, about infrastructure, about bipartisanship, about “cutting-edge industries”; but the air doesn’t vibrate to him; he calls for coverage of “pre-existing conditions,” and there isn’t even the Trumpian frisson from a Big Lie well-told, not even the sinful shiver that used to come for many of us from [his] flouting of standards of decency, the giddy feeling of going too far. Even the Republicans’ applause turns pro-forma, a few hard smacks and siddown. When Trump talks about stopping AIDS, a noble and doable goal, his habit of lying boldly works against him — a large gesture that’s supposed to stir the soul instead of sneers and smirks can’t stir shit. Even the great joke of Trump pretending to care about abortion and “the holy image of God” falls flat, and the North Korea thing is so dumb the Republican applause falters with embarrassment, which is what they have instead of shame.The N. Korea line, for the record, was "If I had not been elected president of the United States, we would right now, in my opinion, be in a major war with North Korea." Of course the whole thing was a dense burrito of lies, and the abortion one was unspeakably gross, but his claim that El Paso went from one of the most dangerous cities in America to one of the safest because of a border wall particularly bothered me -- partly because the lie was so easy to check, but mostly because it's such a perfect example of his lying style: Creating a phony crisis, then claiming to have solved it with one of his hobby-horses.
I will only add:
- I don't know why a panel of pharmacologists hasn't been convened to discuss what Trump's Adderal was cut with last night to soften and slow him down (in, I assume, an attempt to convey gravitas). Ativan? Horse tranks?
- Whatever they drugged him with, why didn't they add something to keep his mouth from going all gummy?
- Ole Perfesser Instapundit called the speech "Reaganesque," a wicked burn decades in the making (oh, come on, he can't possibly mean it as a compliment -- he's evil, not stupid!)
Friday, February 01, 2019
FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.
Love this. It's like Cheap Trick reborn as post-punks.
• Watching the big game this weekend? With no Iggles to make me proud by stomping Tom Brady I doubt I will. I'm not even juiced by the commercials -- that I should live to say such a thing! -- especially the ones with celebs in them; the Sarah Jessica Parker/Jeff Bridges one is so corny I was mortified for both of them, though I think it may move some Stella, on the Evan Llewellyn Evans principle. Anyway, if you're not yet a subscriber to my newsletter (Why not? It's cheap!™), good news, I have unlocked a Super Bowl-related episode of my Oval Office plays. Feast yer eyes!
• Another Trump interview? The Daily Caller EXCLUSIVE from the other day wasn't enough for him? Maybe he owed Maggie Haberman a favor (har, I know, folks), but here it is in the Times, and you can read a nice précis by Evan Hurst at Wonkette because Hurst brings laughs and really, otherwise who needs it anymore? Even on the Kremlinological level, there is absolutely no reason to read Trump interviews because he's so full of shit you can't tell anything about what he's going to do by anything he says. As for literary content, please. The only reason I bother is to catch vagaries of his self-presentation for character touches in my little Oval Office plays in the newsletter (Cheap!™). Why anyone else would bother I can't guess.
• It's getting to the point where whenever a prominent rightwinger complains about the "Twitter mob" you can safely assume he richly deserves whatever brief spurt of disapprobation he's comparing to physical assault. The latest: neocon nudnik Max Boot. He starts by defending the Covington Catholic Kids, and claims people who still say they saw what they saw -- the kids giving Nathan Phillips a hard time -- were merely "getting caught up in a rush to judgment online... because that is the nature of social media," according to "experts."
On Wednesday afternoon, I was the target for a few hours after I published a Post column arguing that, while we can’t win the wars in Afghanistan or Syria, we can lose them by pulling out prematurely.As part of his January 30 defense of Forever Wars with The Dusky Hordes, it seems Boot had written this:
These kinds of deployments are invariably lengthy and frustrating. Think of our Indian Wars, which lasted roughly 300 years (circa 1600-1890), or the British deployment on the North West Frontier (today’s Pakistan-Afghanistan border), which lasted 100 years (1840s-1940s). U.S. troops are not undertaking a conventional combat assignment.One wonders how "unconventional" these long campaigns are if his examples go back over 400 years. Anyway, Boot weeps, people started yelling at him online -- which, as we know from conservative history, is persecution such as the Holy Martyrs suffered. He tweeted to clarify but alas:
Clarifying what I was saying and apologizing for any misunderstanding mollified some of the attackers. But other critics kept popping up who reacted to the original tweet and did not see my follow-up. So about three hours after I posted my first tweet, I decided to delete it, explaining my decision by noting that it was distracting attention from the point of the article — which was to defend the U.S. deployments in Afghanistan and Syria, not the Indian Wars.Max doesn't approve (necessarily!) of our homegrown genocide, he just wanted to use it as an example to... who knows, to defend our occupation of nations we more recently destroyed without building our own empire on their ruins (yet), is my best guess. Boot, a notorious neocon, has for years defended the worst excesses of Western imperialism -- see his 2006 defense of the Moro Massacre -- and deserves no benefit of the doubt; he would probably have been more belligerent about this current example were he not working the woke-warpig angle for career purposes. All it needs is a stirring defense by Andrew Sullivan -- another horrible wingnut who briefly affected sanity before returning to his roots -- to make it an official load of bollocks.
Wednesday, January 30, 2019
DONALD TRUMP -- OF JAMAICA ESTATES? I CANNOT CALL HIM TO MIND.
Sorry, just ducking in here (subscribe to my newsletter BTW!) to remind you that, though other National Review writers are crazier and stupider, Jim Geraghty really is the most full of shit:
Oh yeah, Paul Ryan was there too. New York Times:
Oh Look, Another Case of Corporate Welfare Not Paying Off
A lot of conservatives and Republicans who like former Wisconsin governor Scott Walker were less than thrilled with his support for a massive deal with technology company FoxConn, offering a massive $3 billion incentive package so the company would build a $10 billion facility that could employ up to 13,000.Gosh, looks like conservatives didn't like Scott Walker's Foxconn deal (now revealed as a total scam) at all, though they loved him. Actually, you know who approved of this "corporate welfare" deal enough to take part in the fucking GROUNDBREAKING?
Oh yeah, Paul Ryan was there too. New York Times:
The president described the plans for the $10 billion high-tech campus being built by Foxconn, an electronics supplier for Apple and other tech giants, as the “eighth wonder of the world” and an illustration of his effort to create jobs by renewing manufacturing, attracting foreign investment and adapting a tougher trade policy.I tell you, in a couple of years none of these guys will have ever even heard of Donald Trump.
Friday, January 25, 2019
FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.
Some other good versions out there,
But you can't go wrong with Muddy.
• Speaking of nuts, at National Review Kevin D. Williamson portrays the Democratic economic message thus:
The Kulaks Must Be Liquidated as a ClassThat'll reinvigorate conservatism, alright right alright! Or at least keep the donors happy. Williamson tells us how all the tyrannies of the past few centuries are attributable to Marxists (though he skips, among other tyrants, the Nazis, since associating them with Marxists and thus with liberals is Legacy Pledge Jonah's side of the street). Then in a shock cut worthy of "the foundation of the city of... Imperial Rome" (though in fairness Buñuel was a surrealist, not a psychopath) Williamson speeds to his primary target:
Elizabeth Warren is going to look terrific in those mirrored aviator sunglasses and peaked captain’s hat. She’s spent half her life playing dress-up, morally — pretending to be an Indian — so she may as well dress the part of her aspirations. “Who are you wearing to the state dinner? Oscar de la Renta? Prada? Pinochet?”Oh, yeah, Williamson skipped Pinochet, too, until it was time to compare the senior senator for Massachusetts to a fancy dictator he hadn't used yet. Williamson says Warren is in a panic because "her entire party lurches in a chávista direction" -- presumably meaning some members of it want to return the top marginal tax rate to where it was under the notorious Bolshevik John F. Kennedy (who was a reformer among his kind, however, as he reduced it from the 90-plus it was in the heyday of America's Stalin, Dwight Eisenhower).
Since Warren is a female as well as a liberal, Williamson has to drag her a while ("Senator Warren has pretended to be a lot of things. A Cherokee, for one" -- Fox and Friends, make room for one more!) before he gets to her alleged "asset-forfeiture scheme," a 2% wealth tax. You may see some purpose in such a tax in an era of rampaging inequality, flat wages, and nominally middle class families living in terror of sudden impoverishment, but Williamson thinks it exists because Democommies find it "simply morally obligatory to hurt wealthy people."
After more ravings in this line, Williamson gets to his wow finish:
You may not feel like a kulak. You may take comfort in hearing that only the “tippy-top” wealthiest people are to be expropriated in the name of social justice. Those children at Covington Catholic probably didn’t think they were Nazis a week ago, either.
History is short, if you look at it with the right kind of eyes. Some of you might want to consider looking from Zurich or Singapore.Ah, so Williamson is thinking of absconding with his thousands and fucking off to some faraway economic safe zone? The Ocasio-Cortez and Warren plans sound better every day!
Thursday, January 24, 2019
INTO YOUR LIFE IT WILL CREEP.
For me the whole Covington thing boils down to this: These Catholic schoolboys acted like assholes, which is totally typical of Catholic schoolboys, as I can attest because I was a Catholic schoolboy myself and frequently behaved like an asshole. I still cringe when I think of my teenage behaviors, and am glad to have (to some extent, anyway) grown out of them. I hope these kids will, too, but there's less chance of that now that they've been celebrated as holy martyrs by rightwing crackpots. The smirk kid has had his PR-firm-crafted defense published in hundreds of outlets including CNN and been interviewed on national TV, yet conservatives act like he's the Dauphin during the French Revolution.
No doubt you've seen plenty of shit takes without trying or wanting to -- including this brain-melting Twitter spiel by Megan McArdle, which includes a lecture on physiognomonic studies ("most facial expressions are to some extent culturally constructed, even though we learn them so early we think they're innate reflections of our inner emotional state") and ends with "please do read [my column]. Also, hug someone." About the looniest is by Kevin D. Williamson, who seems, well, disturbed:
I wonder if any of these guys know that they're just talking to themselves and normal Americans are wondering how the fuck they can get them and their psycho leader out of government.
No doubt you've seen plenty of shit takes without trying or wanting to -- including this brain-melting Twitter spiel by Megan McArdle, which includes a lecture on physiognomonic studies ("most facial expressions are to some extent culturally constructed, even though we learn them so early we think they're innate reflections of our inner emotional state") and ends with "please do read [my column]. Also, hug someone." About the looniest is by Kevin D. Williamson, who seems, well, disturbed:
You people are a bunch of hysterical ninnies, and it is time for you to grow the hell up.
You know who you are...
Joy Behar, as profoundly dim and tedious a person as American public life has to offer...That's in the first three paragraphs. Later:
...narrowly partisan, selfish, deeply stupid, entirely unpatriotic, childish, foot-stamping, fingers-in-the-ears, weeping, cooties-loathing, teary-eyed, tremulous, quavering, pansified, gormless, deceitful, dishonorable...
I’m talking about you, Ruth Graham of Slate, still trying to justify by whatever pathetic means are available what everybody with any sense knows to have been an exercise in pure horses***. I’m talking about you, editors of the New York Times. You sorry specimens are poor excuses for journalists, which, of course, we already knew. What’s more relevant here is that you are bad citizens. Trafficking in lies and distortions...This is what passes as sweet reason in wingnut world. I recommend you read Laura Wagner's essay at The Concourse, and to watch how this incident feeds the acceleration of conservative paranoia. David French at National Review:
Hostility to traditional, orthodox Christianity is no longer confined to the white progressive elite. It’s now popular in the white Left. Liberal elites who attack traditional Christian beliefs and express contempt for traditional Christians aren’t demonstrating their disconnect from America, they’re giving their constituents exactly what they want.White Democrats want to kill Christers -- thank God for the black Democrats, I guess; maybe French will support Kamala Harris in 2020! And at the meth labs of The Federalist, Nathanael Blake declares "a culture that considers sexual desire the essence of a person will not tolerate a rival Christian viewpoint, but stigmatize and punish it," and that liberals' "ultimate goal is a legal regime that will treat us very much like the English treated the Irish Catholics" -- prepare for Cromwellian massacre and starvation, Joel Osteen! Our sexy heresies demand it!
I wonder if any of these guys know that they're just talking to themselves and normal Americans are wondering how the fuck they can get them and their psycho leader out of government.
Monday, January 21, 2019
THE ANNUAL CONSERVATIVES DO MLK DAY OBSERVANCE.
Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, guys. As I did in 2004, 2007, 2008, 2011, 2012, 2014, 2015, and 2017, I have taken a tour of the conservative sites celebrating this year's edition.
At National Review, Congressional Liberty Caucus troll Mike Lee:
Toward the end of his life, Martin Luther King Jr. turned his attention from an exclusive focus on racial justice to unequal opportunity more generally. The United States was “a nation gorged on money,” he wrote, “while millions of its citizens are denied a good education, adequate health services, decent housing, meaningful employment, and even respect, and are then told to be responsible.” He specifically blamed federal policymakers for “subsidies of the rich and unemployment and underemployment of the poor.”This may put you and I in mind of King's proposed guaranteed income plan, but Lee is all about the Constitutional right to starve (in both the transitive and the intransitive sense), and so celebrates Martin Luther King by comparing him to one of his Fox News heroes:
King’s indictment against the status quo of his time, and against the political and economic elite responsible for it, could be leveled almost word for word today. Indeed, some people — and not just liberals — are still making that indictment today.
In the wake of Tucker Carlson’s viral populist manifesto earlier this month, populist- and libertarian-leaning conservatives have been debating the same point King raised over 50 years ago. Does economic inequality depend on individuals’ good and bad choices, or on the social circumstances in which individuals make those decisions?In case you missed it, Carlson's speech -- widely heralded in the rightwing intellectual Kingdom of the Blind -- mainly complained that capitalism wasn't doing enough for poor white people. Lee is also worried about whitey, but spares a thought for black folk, who suffer from the bitter legacy of slavery -- not because of continued racism by whites, but because slavery discouraged marriage ("Husbands and fathers were prohibited from exercising the authority that men at the time were supposed to wield") and, as we all know, marriage makes you rich, so we can show our solidarity with our black brothers and sisters by nagging them into wedlock and cutting food stamps.
Elsewhere, the Daily Signal talks with King's anti-abortion crackpot daughter Alveda ("the baby’s not her body. Where’s the lawyer for the baby?"). At Liberty Unyielding Mark Angelides does the traditional wingnut yak about how while King's "clarion call to look past race, color, and creed... has been distorted by the left and become nothing more than a hierarchical structure based on characteristics rather than character." Shorter: You're the real racist! Angelides -- who, "hailing from the UK... specializes in EU politics and provides a conservative/libertarian voice on all things from across the pond" -- then goes further, blaming the media for "its overvaluing of content based on protected characteristics" of the sort found in civil rights legislation, which is presumably the real racism. The argument of a British Brexit operative should count just as much as that of your local blackamoors!
And God help us, Jeff Jacoby:
As MLK Foresaw, Racism in America Has Been Largely Overcome
“I have no despair about the future,” wrote the Rev. Martin Luther King in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” in April 1963. “I have no fear about the outcome of our struggle in Birmingham…. We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom.”
He was right.Thus Jacoby reduces King from a civil rights leader to a crystal-ball gazer, like Criswell. He was the real Negrodamus! Racism is "only a minor problem now," says Jacoby, "one that has grown steadily less toxic and less entrenched." The polls all say so! If you're still complaining, you're just a Gloomy Gus, because like V-E Day and V-J Day, MLK Day is about celebrating the end of something bad.
And John Hinderaker at Power Line pretends to be puzzled that a basketball team from a predominantly black high school refused to play a rural white team whose fans displayed a Trump banner at their game on MLK Day. To anyone with half a brain the situation is obvious, but Hinderaker plays dumb -- "I don’t think it is particularly appropriate, but why does Walker think the fact that his team is predominantly black is somehow relevant? President Trump has done a great deal more for black Americans than Barack Obama ever did" -- and then throws up his hands: "Oh, please. 'People of color in the U.S.' are among the most privileged people on the planet." By the way, in case you were wondering why people think the Covington students' defense by other prominent conservatives is bullshit, this is why.
Friday, January 18, 2019
FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.
I have to say I'm pleased by the synchronicity of it all. I was just talking about the Washington Examiner's attempt to fuck up Muslim-Jewish relations with sensational, groundless charges against Congresswomen Ohar Ilhan and Rashida Tlaib. The rightwing rag is also mentioned in a similar context in my latest newsletter issue, which I am releasing to the general population for free (think about subscribing!), for its execrable Tiana Lowe story, "Democrats don’t want to hear Rashida Tlaib’s anti-Semitic dog whistle." And now they're getting attention because Trump has tweeted the gist of their bullshit border-menace story, which includes allegations that "prayer rugs" (hint Mooslim hint) -- a routine the paper apparently ran in 2014 as well. You may recall the Examiner is where rightwing investors re-sluiced the funds that were keeping the Weekly Standard alive, and it was generally felt that they did so because they wanted less anti-Trump talk and more pro-Trump rock. It appears the Examiner editorial staff got the message. Don't get me wrong, they've always sucked -- as my archives indicate -- but lately they seem to be really stepping up. Inept strongman leader, regular explosions of racism, an increasingly forced-into-line propaganda press -- all signs of a healthy political movement!
+ + +
Oh, and don't sleep on the Washington Times, either -- dig this "news alert" I got on Suborn Perjury Day:
Soon every one of their rags, from the New York Post on down to the pennysavers, will just be Adams, James Woods, Kevin Sorbo et alia interpreting current events. And Benghazi!
Wednesday, January 16, 2019
A NEW LOW, PART 1,254,090.
Charles Two Middle Initials Cooke at the conservative flagship magazine National Review:
It seems like for the past week every conservative bigwig in the country has weighed in on what is essentially standard-issue You Snobs Care About Foreigners Well What About The Poor Hillbillies on Opioids gush as restated by the heir to the Swanson TV Dinners fortune. I knew Trump had gutted their movement, but this is like an Evelyn Waugh parody, like a sub-basement of a nadir of intellectual decay -- it's as if Cooke had an even lower opinion of his own karass than I do, and set out to make conservatism look stupid. It's too bad we can't have a reliable accounting of who finances this crap, because I really suspect it's mostly supported by rich wastrels as a joke to see how many among the dummies who still support this movement will catch on.
I’ve greatly enjoyed reading the many responses to Tucker Carlson’s now-famous monologue. We’ve had contributions from David French, Kyle Smith, Kevin Williamson, Yuval Levin, David Bahnsen, Michael Brendan Dougherty, Mike Lee, Ben Shapiro, Mona Charen, Jonah Goldberg, David French again, Kevin Williamson again, David Bahnsen again, Jonah Goldberg again, and more. And that’s just on the website. The question has also been discussed at length on many of NR’s podcasts, and, of course, on Twitter....Forget the rest of Cooke's post; forget anything else written about Carlson's allegedly inspirational speech -- except what I wrote about it in my newsletter (Subscribe! Cheap!) and quoted in a previous alicublog post. Instead contemplate that Cooke has cited the deep thoughts of no fewer than 11 major conservative thinkers on a dumb TV speech by a racist Fox News bowtie buffoon.
It seems like for the past week every conservative bigwig in the country has weighed in on what is essentially standard-issue You Snobs Care About Foreigners Well What About The Poor Hillbillies on Opioids gush as restated by the heir to the Swanson TV Dinners fortune. I knew Trump had gutted their movement, but this is like an Evelyn Waugh parody, like a sub-basement of a nadir of intellectual decay -- it's as if Cooke had an even lower opinion of his own karass than I do, and set out to make conservatism look stupid. It's too bad we can't have a reliable accounting of who finances this crap, because I really suspect it's mostly supported by rich wastrels as a joke to see how many among the dummies who still support this movement will catch on.
Friday, January 11, 2019
FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.
I should like to extend my remarks on a subject I treated briefly in the newsletter, the sudden elevation of Tucker Carlson from rightwing TV rageclown to serious conservative intellectual. (Before I go on, PLUG FOR MY NEWSLETTER: It's called Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, it comes out five days a week, it's absurdly cheap and the money goes to support a good cause i.e. the continued shabby-genteel survival of me and the missus.) The Carlson speech over which many wingnut dummies have swooned is, to quote from myself,
...the usual Tucker Carlson bullshit, but with Big Ideas substituted for the usual dogwhistles.
For example, Carlson wants to know, after people like him are gone, “What kind of country will be it be then? How do we want our grandchildren to live? These are the only questions that matter." Normally this is where he starts foaming about the dusky hordes, but on this occasion he lashes out instead at... materialism. “Does anyone still believe that cheaper iPhones, or more Amazon deliveries of plastic garbage from China are going to make us happy?” he cries.
As longtime followers of conservative intelligentsia will have figured out, here Carlson is doing a Values thing; the bad conservatives only care about the market, but noble Tucker cares about the poor — now that authors like J.D. Vance have hipped him that a lot of those poor are white and living in red states...
Carlson’s yak is not any kind of an argument, it’s just shtick — leaning toward one group of rightwing intellectuals (the Values Klan) against another (the Free-Market Country Club). It may be very important to pencil-necks who imagine their debates and flame wars are deeply meaningful — like the “Reformicons” who pretended they had a hand in Republican policy just before Trump came in and blew them away with one of his farts — but to the conservative hoi polloi it means less than nothing...If you're wondering why one of the leading conservative racists is trying to class up his act (and, say this for him, he sure knew how to get the suckers to bite), I suggest it's because he sees that, while white supremacy sells pretty good now, November's blue wave suggests limited growth opportunities for his franchise -- he's not going to break out of the Fox News ghetto into which Jon Stewart more or less shoved him by going on and on about dirty Messicans. Hence, the grand manner: He adopts an anti-crony-capitalist angle, and suddenly he's not just another shitbird, he's a Big Thinker, and when Trump implodes he'll be well-positioned to climb as a Voice of the Respectable Right.
Others among the brethren are sensing that a shift is necessary -- that's why they're all of a sudden running away from their old buddy Steve King, whose recent comments made his white nationalism too obvious to ignore. But they're not as smart about it as Carlson. At The Daily Beast, Matt Lewis tries to get "The Left" with a bank shot and winds up sending the cueball crashing through the poolroom window:
How Steve King’s Idiotic and Odious Words Help the Left Destroy Western Civilization
In his comments to the Times, King equated Western civilization, which belongs to all of us, with white people only. And that’s just what the hard left wants people to think.Oh, you say authors don't write their own heds and subheds? Okay, from the body copy:
Men like Steve King see whiteness as a fundamental ingredient of Western civilization and, ultimately, of the United States of America. This is, by definition, a “racist” view. Moreover, it puts King is on the same level with radical leftists who agree that “Western civ” is a dog whistle for racism.The racists and the people who notice they're racists -- both part of the same pathology!
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