An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power

Year 11, Day 180 - 6/29/19 - Movie #3,277

BEFORE: Hot town, summer in the city - the icecaps are melting, and it's not pretty.  Hey, I'm back with another hot summer film today, and I mean that, sincerely.  It's hot out there in New York, heck, it's hot everywhere, and summer just started a week ago!  By the end of July we'll probably all spontaneoustly combust or something.  What better time to stay indoors with the A.C. on and watch a movie about how doomed we all are, in part because people won't stop using their A.C.s.  No, the irony is not lost on me, but what can I do?  Use a FAN like a commoner?

Bill Clinton carries over again from "RBG" - and did you notice that since the Walter Cronkite part of the chain, I've only used politicians to make my links?  Ed Koch, Arnold Schwarzenegger, then Ronald Reagan, then Clinton.  Who will be next?  For that matter, now that I'm about 1/3 of the way through the documentary chain, which politician is leading in the polls for most appearances this year?  Right now, before counting today's appearances, Barack Obama is in the lead with 9 appearances in 2019 films, followed closely by a three-way tie between Clinton, George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, each with 8.  Then comes Nixon with 7, and JFK is way back with 5.  It's still a close race, and any of these contenders could easily beat James Franco's appearances and take the year - I think Obama's got the inside track because I'm watching so many docs that were made during his presidency, but don't count out Nixon, he's a sneaky one.

THE PLOT: A decade after "An Inconvenient Truth" brought climate change to the heart of popular culture, the follow-up shows just how close we are to a real energy solution.

AFTER: I didn't watch the Democratic debates, but I started to watch my talk shows and comedy news shows for the week, so I'm starting to see clips from the debates.  Here's the problem with all of the Democratic contenders, to me - they all want the job.  This may sound silly, but I don't really trust anybody who WANTS to be President.  It's a terrible job, only an idiot would want it, and I'd make a Trump joke here, but it's too easy, plus I think we've collectively establish that even HE didn't want it, he was only running because he didn't think he'd win.  So of course, he won and he's stuck for four or even eight years doing stuff he's no good at and doesn't even like doing, because to get out of it, he'd have to admit that he only ran to get his name in print to sell more bad steaks and terrible vodka.  (It was a long hustle, and it failed miserably...)

So I mentioned at lunch yesterday (at one of my jobs, the staff all eats lunch together) that I would be more likely to vote for someone who DIDN'T want to be President, that could be somebody with a good head on their shoulders.  See, I definitely didn't want Trump to be President, but I was also a little iffy on Hillary Clinton, she just wanted it a bit too much, with a little bit of "I deserve this" thrown in for bad measure.  I didn't support Bernie Sanders, but he seems a bit like a guy who doesn't want the job, but he'll do it if he has to, because nobody else is as qualified.  But at lunch, the interns were confused - how can you vote for someone who doesn't WANT the job, and it's a fair question, because our system is broken and is not merit-based, it's become just a massive popularity contest, and it's therefore too easy to elect someone liked by many (for whatever reason) but clearly incompetent.  However, I couldn't think of a good example of someone who was qualified, eligible but DIDN'T want the job.

Now, two days later, I've got one - Al Gore.  He could have been President in 2000, perhaps he SHOULD have been President, we'll never know (thanks, Florida) but maybe he's President in an alternate reality.  And he says several times in this sequel to "An Inconvenient Truth" that he's made his peace with what happened in 2000, and the fact that sometimes you have a plan and things don't go your way (and that's a fact that some people never learn but should) and that he's a "recovering politician" who no longer wants to be President.  Well, he's got my vote, then.  I don't know how I'm going to convince 200 million other Americans to write his name in, but I'd better get started.

If you saw the Democratic debate (again, I only watched some clips on the Colbert show) it seems like there were so many other issues to talk about, and so many people talking over each other, that I'm not surprised to learn that global warming doesn't seem to be at the top of any candidate's to-do list. Joe Biden wants to cure cancer, but that was the job Obama gave him, does he have any ideas of his own?  Elizabeth Warren, former economics professor, probably wants to balance the budget, which is noble.  But put Al Gore in the Oval Office, and we'll all be on solar power and wind power before you know it, and that's not a bad thing.  There's enough energy coming from the sun in ONE HOUR to give us humans the same energy we get from fossil fuels in a YEAR.  Why the hell are we wasting most of it?  There's so much space out in Nevada or Montana or Arizona that they could put up a solar array the size of a small city, and boom, suddenly we've all got energy to spare.  What. Is. The. Hold-Up. Here?

Plus it's CLEAN - no emissions, no fumes, no carbon.  We're supposed to be weaning ourselves off of fossil fuels, anyway - you know they're going to run out, right?  If they do then there's going to be an agonizing waiting period while they put up windmills and solar panels, and that means a few months with no internet, no phones, no lights, no motor cars.  (Aha, have I got your attention now, millennials?)  But no, go ahead and listen to Commander Cheeto when he tells you that "windmills cause brain cancer".  Umm, how, exactly?  Does he think they make noise, and that noise goes through your ear and into your brain and then cancer?  WTF?

Anyway, this film shows Al Gore taking a break from his never-ending PowerPoint presentation around-the-world tour and using a DIFFERENT PowerPoint presentation to train a new batch of his eco-warriors.  And he addresses the concerns of the naysayers who ask, "Well, what about global COOLING?" and "How come it was so COLD last winter, then?"  Because it's a statistical trend, just like the trend among climate deniers to have statistically lower I.Q.s than the people who know how to read a chart or a graph properly.  Part of the climate change equation is the tendency toward more extreme weather, which means the hot days get hotter, the rain and snowstorms dump more volume on us, and the superstorms pick up speed over warmer water, making them deadlier than ever.  But if you want to believe that hurricanes are God's vengeance for being sinful, please, go right ahead.  Me, I can live just fine with Florida being under water, as long as Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris go down with the ship.  (I may forget, but I don't forgive.)

Then it's off to the 2016 Conference for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC, pronounced "unfuck", appropriately enough) where Gore casually bumps into super-hunk Canada PM Justin Trudeau (sorry, Al, he's married...) and ends up negotiating a deal for India to move toward solar power and get off of the fossil fuels.  The politicians from India are very upset that America and other Western countries got to pollute for 150 years, and they're just getting started, so they want the same rights to pollute as we had.  Umm, yeah, that seems fair on paper, but it's just not a workable plan, we REALLY polluted for a long time, but we learned from the experience, can't they just trust us on this one?  Like, we left garbage in SPACE and on the MOON, and now we're working on the oceans, so you're just not going to beat us.

Al gets one of the solar companies he's got a relationship with to share their technology with India, which is probably like a loss leader for them - sure, they've got to sell a ton of solar panels to India at little or no profit, but if that ends up working, they get to approach other countries and say, "Look what we did for India, we got them off the fossil fuels, and we can do it for you, too."  It gets their brand name out there, theoretically they should be able to write their own ticket after that.  Provided some idiot doesn't decide arbitrarily to pull our country out of the Paris Accords....

Gore made a comment in this film that while working to fight climate change, he's seen his share of setbacks.  Essentially, he's gone back and forth between hope and despair.  And that sort of sums up my documentary chain, so far at least.  For every film that gives me hope, there's one that brings me down.  NASA sent men to the moon in "Apollo 11", but nobody could stop a man on a Texas tower from shooting a bunch of people.  The laws in the South after the 13th Amendment, along with the war on drugs, have sent a generation of black men to prison, but then again, Ruth Bader Ginsburg fought for equal rights for women.  Fred Rogers talked and listened to children, and taught them lessons in the Land of Make-Believe, while Michael Jackson did terrible things to children in Neverland.  Ed Koch saved New York City from bankruptcy, but then Enron and the sub-prime mortgage scandal caused a financial collapse.  So, hope and despair, strikes and gutters, it's all part of this crazy mixed-up American landscape.  11 down, 18 to go.

NITPICK POINT: Even though the Paris Accords were very important, I kind of have to wonder about the futility of flying SO MANY world leaders, and all of their entourages, to Paris just to talk about ways to conserve energy.  How much jet fuel was used in getting all of those people there?  The world leaders don't exactly fly on commercial planes, but private jets instead.  That's even worse - how could the organizers of this event be so unaware of the message they were sending?  Why couldn't some of those world leaders carpool there, or, umm, planepool?  Shouldn't they be doing all this via teleconferencing by now?  Same goes for Al Gore, who's traveled all around the world just to give a PowerPoint talk that could just as easily have been delivered over the internet.  Just saying.

I'm still also riding the fine line between hope and despair - can you blame me?  One day there's a story in the newspaper about how we'll all be dead in 40 years, tops, and then a week later Robert Downey Jr. is holding a TED talk to say that we CAN clean up the oceans, we CAN stop global warming, if we use robots.  Umm, OK, but aren't those robots going to need some energy to power them?  Maybe we should get all the solar panels up first, then power the robots to clean up the planet. Otherwise you just know they're going to have like a thousand robots ready to clean the ocean, the day before we finally run out of fossil fuels...

Also starring Al Gore (last seen in "Won't You Be My Neighbor?"), Cory Booker (last seen in "13th"), Al Franken (last seen in "Long Strange Trip"), Francois Hollande, John Kerry (last seen in "Molly's Game"), Angela Merkel, Narendra Modi, Vladimir Putin (last seen in "12 Strong"), Justin Trudeau, Jinping Xi, Laurent Fabius, Karenna Gore, Chris Hayes, Eric Schneiderman, with archive footage of George W. Bush (also carrying over from "RBG"), Hillary Clinton (ditto), Barack Obama (ditto), Donald Trump (ditto), Barbara Boxer (last seen in "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room"), Laura Bush (ditto), Jeb Bush, Ben Carson, Dick Cheney (last seen in "Capitalism: A Love Story"), Ted Cruz, Andrew Cuomo (last seen in "Koch"), Lester Holt (last seen in "Leaving Neverland"), James Imhofe, Joe Lieberman, Mitch McConnell, Scott Pruitt.

RATING: 5 out of 10 carbon offset credits

RBG

Year 11, Day 179 - 6/28/19 - Movie #3,276

BEFORE: I went looking for another coincidence today, like maybe it's Ruth Bader Ginsburg's birthday, or maybe the anniversary of some famous court case that she won, but no such luck - and that put me in a quandary, like how am I going to feel if I check the news today and find out she died?  I just can't have that on my conscience.  Fortunately, there's a news story today about how she's donating money to some bilingual Hebrew and Arabic schools in Israel.  Whew, that was a close one.

Bill Clinton carries over again from "Won't You Be My Neighbor?" - as long as documentaries keep using footage of Presidents, my linking should be OK...

THE PLOT: The exceptional life and career of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who has developed a breathtaking legal legacy while becoming an unexpected pop culture icon.

AFTER: The first thing I naturally think of when I see the initials "RBG" is that it stands for "red, blue, green", the three colors that come together to constitute video and TV pictures - although I think more commonly that's abbreviated as "RGB".  Still, the notion persists in my brain.  Really, it's just a set of three letters, most people have three initials, but thanks to the connection to a certain Notorious rapper, people have drawn an unlikely connection between that rapper and history's second female Supreme Court Justice, and she's become quite cool lately thanks to the association.

One weird connection between yesterday's doc on Mr. Rogers and today's is that both central subjects are seen watching or commenting on the many parodies done about them on shows like "SNL" or "SCTV".  Naturally, Mr. Rogers didn't hold any grudges against Eddie Murphy for his "Mr. Robinson's Neighborhood" sketches, but I wonder how he felt about the "Battle of the PBS Stars" sketch on SCTV, where Mr. Rogers (played by Martin Short) was seen in a boxing match with Julia Child (played by John Candy).  Today I got to see Justice Ginsburg watching Kate McKinnon play her on SNL's "Weekend Update", complete with wild dancing, a rap-like breakdown and a couple of "Gins-Burns" insults.  She was surprisingly OK with all of that.  For the record, she doesn't mind the connections to Biggie Smalls, either, since they're both famous people born in Brooklyn, and currently she probably has more street cred than he does, what with being dead and all.

They made a biopic film about RBG too, back when she was just RB, or perhaps just Ruth Ginsburg, called "On the Basis of Sex", with Felicity Jones playing her.  (Now, even though RBG was very attractive back in the day they still might have over-emphasized that in the Hollywood version.)  The important thing about RBG is that she became the champion of sex-discrimination suits, because she believed, first and foremost, that the Constitution promised equal protection for all U.S. citizens, regardless of gender, and that didn't seem to match with what was going on in the real world.  So there were test cases, where this female person in the Army wasn't receiving the same benefits as a man, or a male home-worker raising his son who wasn't receiving the same Social Security benefits as a woman would after his spouse died.  And each case argued before the Supreme Court, each victory (she went 5-1 on this, not bad at all) got us one step closer to some kind of egalitarianism.  (I'm willing to believe that there's still a long way to go, but every journey has to start somewhere.)

Now, of course, after outlasting a number of Presidents, like Bush the younger, the eyes of the nation turn once again to this Clinton appointee, to see if she can also outlast Trump.  Apparently there was pressure on her to retire during the Obama years, to free up a seat for another liberal judge, but let's face it, that was never going to happen.  She's gonna run till she drops, and also there's the chance that Mitch McConnell would have turned down any Obama appointee when he was a lame duck, because he stated, "We simply can't appoint a new Supreme Court justice in an election year."  Which really meant, "We simply can't appoint a new Supreme Court justice in an election year unless there's a sitting Republican President."  Suck my ass, Mitch McConnell, now that we know what a piece of partisan garbage you really are.  Enjoy your retirement.

There's footage here of her testifying (great, like I haven't seen enough testifying this week...) at her own confirmation hearings, really just charming the hell out of Joe Biden and Teddy Kennedy.  She got confirmed by a vote of 96 to 3, which is just ridiculous, and that may be the last time that our Senate ever agreed on anything, if you think about it.  Ginsburg's granddaughter went to Harvard Law School, and was part of a class that was 50% female - contrast that with Ginsburg's class, which had only 9 women out of over 500.  Yeah, I'd say she made a difference. She may not be allowed to cook at home, but damn can she adjudicate.

She's in her 80's and survived two bouts with cancer, but she works out with a trainer and says she feels healthy.  She's got an "odd couple" friendship with Antonin Scalia, even though they differ in court they bond over a shared love of opera, and though a male friend probably can't take the place of her late husband, it's probably great to have a friend who can joke around in a similar way.  Totes adorbs.

Also starring Ruth Bader Ginsburg (last seen in "Capitalism: A Love Story"), Arthur R. Miller, Orrin Hatch, Gloria Steinem, Brenda Feigen, Nina Totenberg, Ann Kittner, Harryette Helsel, James Ginsburg, Jane Ginsburg, Lisa Beattie Frelinghuysen, Mary Hartnett, Wendy Williams, Sharron Frontiero, Kathleen Peratis, Stephen Wiesenfeld, Harry T. Edwards, Ted Olson, Eugene Scalia, Lilly Ledbetter, and archive footage of  Samuel Alito, Joe Biden (last seen in "Capitalism: A Love Story"), Stephen Breyer (ditto), Tom Brokaw (ditto), George W. Bush (ditto), Jimmy Carter (ditto), Katie Couric (ditto), Anthony Kennedy (ditto), Sandra Day O'Connor (ditto), Barack Obama (ditto), William Rehnquist (ditto), Antonin Scalia (ditto), David Souter (ditto), John Paul Stevens (ditto), Clarence Thomas (ditto), Harry Blackmun, Hillary Clinton (also last seen in "Won't You Be My Neighbor?", Peter Jennings (last seen in "13th") Rachel Maddow (ditto), Colin Jost (last seen in "How to Be Single"), Ted Kennedy (last seen in "History of the Eagles"), Rush Limbaugh (last seen in "Vice"), Thurgood Marshall, Joseph McCarthy, Kate McKinnon (last seen in "Rough Night"), The Notorious B.I.G. (last seen in "Quincy"), John G. Roberts, Lesley Stahl, George Stephanopoulos, Donald Trump (last seen in "Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold").

RATING: 6 out of 10 dissenting opinions

Won't You Be My Neighbor?

Year 11, Day 178 - 6/27/19 - Movie #3,275

BEFORE: So it turns out that once you make it through the four-hour documentary about Michael Jackson being a pedophile, the rest of the documentary chain seems like a breeze by comparison - it's all downhill from there.  But still, it's been a very taxing eight days so far, what with a school shooting, political scandals, racism, race riots, financial scandals, bank bail-outs, etc.  I deserve a break - wouldn't it be nice if I could return, just for a short while, to a time where I didn't have to worry about the stresses of modern life and being an adult, and all I had to do was to make it through the school day so I could come home and turn on the TV and be greeted and comforted by a nice man who would put on a puppet show for me and maybe sing a song or two?  Here's hoping...

Bill Clinton carries over from "Capitalism: A Love Story".

FOLLOW-UP TO: "I Am Big Bird: The Carroll Spinney Story" (Movie #3,231), "Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey" (Movie #3,232)

THE PLOT: An exploration of the life, lessons and legacy of iconic children's television host Fred Rogers.

AFTER: Jesus, I can't even catch a break with a documentary about Mr. Rogers, because it turns out that he was trying to educate me the whole time.  Never mind that, he was PREACHING to me with his show - it turns out Fred Rogers was an ordained Presbyterian minister, and he saw a special need to get on TV and impart little life lessons that were Christian-oriented.  Next you'll probably tell me that "Davey and Goliath" wasn't just a show about an animated boy and his claymation dog.  I KNEW this guy was up to all good, I just knew it.  But it turns out he wasn't your average preacher, not like that dirty snake Joel Osteen or some POS like Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell, all of whom wanted to get on TV for the sole purpose of soliciting donations, because of COURSE Jesus wants him to have a private jet so he can travel around the U.S. collecting more donations more efficiently.

But jeez, if that's the worst thing that I can say about Fred Rogers, then the guy was probably on the up and up, and that's what nearly everybody has to say about him, that what you saw on the TV was the way he was in real life, he wasn't putting on an act or hiding anything, he just had a unique ability to talk to children and make them feel special (only not in a Michael Jackson sort of way) and loved (again, not like that) by taking them each day to the Land of Make-Believe (which was not the name of a secret closet in his bedroom, like with Jacko).  And he didn't really sugar-coat too much, he was there for kids during the tough times - after the assassination of RFK, after the Challenger disaster, and after 9/11 - because learning to read and write is great, but the mental health of kids is important, too, and he GOT that.

There's been a lot of testifying in this space recently - Enron executives testifying before Congress, bank CEO's testifying about subprime mortgages and young kids testifying about their time spent at Neverland.  Well, that continues tonight as this doc features footage of Fred Rogers testifying before Congress (at least twice) about the absolute need for public television, which was first funded by President Johnson, and then Nixon of course tried to take the funding away, because the war in Vietnam needed money.  Mr. Rogers to the rescue, instead of just reading from the paperwork he brought with him, he made an emotional appeal to one of those hard-as-nails senators about a song he wrote for his TV show, about how when you feel like what you're doing is wrong, then you have the ability and the will to just stop.  Well, you can visibly see that Senator's resistance just melt away, and therefore PBS got additional funding to continue, and the psyches of a generation of kids got spared from a lifetime of watching hosts talking down to kids and showing them insipid cartoons.  Best moment of the week.

Perhaps that song was really a metaphor for Vietnam - it's like when Mr. Rogers saw that there was still segregation in the South, and black people weren't allowed to use the same swimming pools as whites, he did a bit on his show where it was a hot day, and he was cooling his feet in a kiddie pool with a garden hose, and then he invited the police officer character on his show to share the pool with him.  Simple, brilliant, and effective - and kids then see a black man's feet and a white man's feet in the same pool, and they learn that it's no big deal.  That doesn't exactly fix racism, but it's a step in the right direction.

Later, when it was revealed that the actor who played that black police officer was gay, Fred tried at first to help conceal this fact, but eventually he came to accept him as such, as we all should.  And then there were protests over Mr. Rogers being tolerant of the gay lifestyle.  Are you kidding me?  Do you know how people sound when they're against tolerant people?  By doing so, they only highlight their own intolerance, by a factor of ten.  (Unfortunately, I don't think the gay community has learned this, they're still quite intolerant toward intolerant people, and you have to break the cycle somewhere - just as minority groups tend to act intolerantly toward racists, perhaps understandably, but it just doesn't help).

In the first WEEK of his second show, he had his puppets doing a thinly-veiled take on Vietnam.  Yep, this is a guy who looked around the TV landscape at the time and said, "Wow, I could do SO much better than these clowns."  (Literally, there were clowns on TV back then, as if that wouldn't scare the crap out of reasonable kids...)  Then try to measure the positive effect this guy had on a generation, while producing 895 episodes of "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood" (and another 337 episodes of an earlier kids show, from 1961-1967).  Who the heck DOES that, that's a ton of positive affirmations, and by all accounts, he believed every word that he said.

Now, I know the criticism, and that's the mistaken belief that by making every kid feel special, he diluted the very concept of special-ness.  Because if everyone is special, then no one is really special, and then before long we're giving out trophies for participation and you've got an entire generation of vapidly entitled millennials - which we do have, but I believe it's a coincidence.  Under other circumstances I'd be inclined to agree with that, but later in his life, during commencement speeches, Mr. Rogers would explain what he meant by "special", in that he believed each person is unique, there's only one of you, and every person deserves to love and be loved.  And if you find fault with that, while defending your "hero" Michael Jackson, then your head's just not screwed on right.

He also kept the format of his show amazingly consistent - why change it, after all, if kids are going to always be aging out of the program, and the format will work just as well on the next batch of kids that's just discovering him on PBS?  This also prepared kids for the real adult world, because they're all going to grow up and get jobs (OK, most of them), and then every day of their lives is going to be (pretty much) the same - come home, take off your jacket, take off your shoes, feed the fish (or the cat, dog, whatever) and then spend some time in the land of make-believe (however you define that) before you have to get up the next day and do it all over again.

When I look at the Land of Make-Believe as an adult, it's amazing how much I didn't notice when I was a kid.  I have false memories, it seems, of Mr. Rogers talking to his puppets, but that's impossible, because he provided the voice of every puppet on the show.  Now, of course, every puppet voice sounds very similar, they all just sound like Fred Rogers doing a bit - but in the context of the show, he himself never went to the Land of Make-Believe (he was always there, but behind the scenes) and each puppet represents a different aspect of his personality.  Daniel Tiger is the nervous, insecure part, riddled with anxiety - Rogers himself was bullied as a child, so he knew the value of getting out the message to children that somewhere there was someone who liked them, just the way they were, and there was no need to compromise themselves to fit in.  King Friday XIII is the bossy but benevolent despot (the kind of person needed to be the producer of a show, the top banana who still cared about all of his cast and crew) and Lady Elaine represented his older sister, or so the theory goes, and so on.  I'm still working out X the Owl and Henrietta Pussycat, but something tells me I don't even want to go there.  Seems like kind of a "we're all masculine, we're all feminine" thing.

Did you know that VCRs are legal, partially because of Fred Rogers?  The big broadcasters didn't approve of people taping TV shows at first, because it constituted copyright infringement or messed with their ad rates or something - then Fred Rogers testified in court that he didn't mind people taping his show, especially if the family was busy when his show aired, and they wanted to watch it together at a more convenient time.  We now call this "time-shifting", but it was a radical concept back in the day.  Before that, if a show aired at 8 pm, you HAD to be there at 8 pm to watch it, there was no way to get it on Demand or on Netflix or Hulu or Slingbox or BlabBlab or Zinger or NubNub or on your phone or during one of the other 100 times that channel would air the show over the next week.

It turns out that Mr. Rogers never killed people in combat (urban legend), wasn't hiding tattoos under his cardigan sleeves (another urban legend) and the name "McFeely" isn't salacious at all, it's his mother's maiden name, and his father was president of the McFeely Brick Company.  He's the second best thing to come from Latrobe, PA (after Rolling Rock beer, of course).  He played piano well and composed most of the songs on his show (not the opening theme, though...).  Once he overcame his shyness in high school, he was president of the student council, editor of the yearbook and a member of the National Honor Society.  You look up "straight arrow" in the dictionary and you'll see his picture.  Then he spent a lifetime in public television and talking to children - except for a few years after 1975, when PBS ran reruns, as he had set his sights on making television for adults.  But this sounds a lot like when the rock group KISS finally took off their make-up, and two years later people were begging for them to put it back on - five years later he was back on PBS, making new issue-oriented TV for kids, because that's where he was needed the most.

There's supposed to be a biopic about Mr. Rogers coming out later this year, with Tom Hanks in it - oddly, in the early footage of Fred Rogers I noticed a resemblance to Colin Hanks, and at other times, Jim Parsons.  Michael Keaton is supposedly in this film somewhere, because he worked as a stagehand on Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood early in his career, but I couldn't spot him.  What else can I say about a man who weighed a consistent 143 pounds, and took special delight in that, because numerically 143 represents "I love you" if you count the letters?  Yeah, I'm a large 50-year old man, and I'll admit I was tearing up near the end of this film...

Also starring Fred Rogers, Joanne Rogers, John Rogers, Jim Rogers, Bill Isler, Hedda Sharapan, Junlei Li, Max King, Margaret Whitmer, Tom Junod, Elizabeth Seamans, Joe Negri, David Newell, Elaine Crozier, George Wirth, David Bianculli, Francois Scarborough Clemmons, Susan Stamberg, Nick Tallo, Yo-Yo Ma

with archive footage of Betty Aberlin, John Candy (last seen in "She's Having a Baby"), Jim Carrey (last seen in "I Love You Phillip Morris"), Johnny Carson (last seen in "Apollo 11"), Hillary Clinton (last seen in "13th"), Lyndon Johnson (ditto), Ralph Ellison, Jamie Foxx (last seen in "I'm Still Here"), Al Gore, Robert Kennedy (last seen in "History of the Eagles"), Brian Kilmeade, David Letterman (last seen in "I Am Big Bird: The Carroll Spinney Story), Christa McAuliffe, Margaret McFarland, Eddie Murphy (last seen in "Koch"), Richard Nixon (last seen in "Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold"), Sen. John Pastore, Paul Reubens (last seen in "Matilda"), Martin Short (last heard in "The Spiderwick Chronicles"), Tom Snyder (last seen in "Super Duper Alice Cooper").

RATING: 7 out of 10 long-haired hippie stagehands (Mr. Rogers didn't partake, but I'll bet he often had a contact high...)

Capitalism: A Love Story

Year 11, Day 177 - 6/26/19 - Movie #3,274

BEFORE: Another day, another documentary - and another long submission made on the IMDB about all the famous people appearing in a doc's archive footage that somebody forgot to mention.  Now I've been bouncing back and forth between politics and celebrity profiles, and that's all being done to maintain the chain.  If each doc had properly listed its cast, then more connections would be possible, and I could have arranged the films in a better order.  But then again, it is what it is, and maybe this causes more of those little random coincidences that way.  Now I'm specifically looking for them, like are there any "great moments in capitalism" that happened on this day in history?

Let's see, on this date in 1948, William Shockley filed the first patent for the grown-junction transistor - that's not nothing, especially if you're into electronics and stuff.  Also on June 26, 1974, a UPC code was scanned for the first time, to sell a package of Wrigley's gum in Troy, Ohio.  Not too bad.

Ronald Reagan carries over again from "Leaving Neverland" - seems appropriate, right?

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Where to Invade Next" (Movie #2,645), "Sicko" (Movie #2,646)

THE PLOT: An examination of the social costs of corporate interests pursuing profits at the expense of the public good.

AFTER: Also, on June 26 in 1934, president Franklin Roosevelt signed the Federal Credit Union Act, to establish the first credit unions.  I bring this up because footage of Roosevelt appears late in this film from Michael Moore, where he proposed a "Second Bill of Rights" that would protect the workers of America, and (if you believe the hype) would have effectively served as a precursor to both the civil rights movement and the Equal Rights Amendment.  But that damn slacker FDR then went and died a year later, before he could implement his lofty goals - and apparently that's why we were in such a pickle in 2009, or so Michael Moore would have us believe.

I was on the Michael Moore bandwagon for some time, like I saw his film "The Big One" at a film festival, maybe in Toronto in 1999 (?) and then a few years after that he had a TV show and was spending more of his time in NYC, and he came to a couple parties at my boss's apartment.  You know, all the indie filmmakers hang out together, right?  I think maybe he fell out of favor with me when I finally went back and watched "Bowling for Columbine", since I'd missed it when it first came out, and then of course two years ago I caught up with his films again, and basically he's still beating the same tired old drum, he hasn't changed or evolved much in the last two decades, but come on, really, shouldn't he have?

This film about capitalism is already 10 years old, but it kind of proves my point - he was still showing up at this corporate headquarters or that one, pretending to think that he could somehow get an audience with the CEO just by showing up, when he knows full well that every building has security guards (especially in Manhattan after 9/11) and their sole purpose is to prevent anyone from being there who isn't scheduled to be there, like him.  Come on, dude, you've been pulling this crap since "Roger & Me", and every security guard in the world probably has a picture of Michael Moore next to his station with a note that says, "Do NOT allow this person to enter the building, under any circumstances."  So he knows that he's never going to get into the CEO's office to interview that guy, not on his best day, not being who he is and looking like he does.  But he does it anyway, and he pretends like he doesn't know that you're supposed to call first and arrange an interview, just to provoke a confrontation and kill 30 more seconds of movie time.

Meanwhile, every other documentary filmmaker knows what you're supposed to do - pick up the god-damned phone.  Even if you can't schedule an interview with that crooked CEO, you can at least air the footage of you making the call, or you say, "We called Mr. Tom Shady of ShadyCorp. but he refused to be interviewed for this film."  Then you know what, he looks totally guilty that way.  But when you show up with a film crew in the building lobby with no notice, and pretend that you don't know the proper procedure to set up an interview, now YOU look like the bad guy.  So if cholesterol doesn't get him first, I guarantee Michael Moore's cause of death will be "beaten by security guard" when he refuses to leave a building lobby some day.  In the meantime, I can't really take the guy seriously as a filmmaker if he's still pulling this B.S.

It's too bad, because there was a germ of a good idea here, to get some sympathy for the regular people who were losing their houses to the banks, back at the end of the early 2000's (seriously, we STILL don't have a name for the first decade of the New Millennium?) while the big banks were being bailed out by the U.S. government for not being prepared for the housing crash, which came about because THEY THEMSELVES were speculating on a bunch of bad mortgages that THEY THEMSELVES had offered to people with bad credit.  Umm, or something like that.

The film opens with an average family somewhere in middle America that's being foreclosed on, and had the foresight to video-tape the sheriff coming to the door to ask them to clear out.  Later we learn that not only was this a common sight in 2009's America, but that the bank wanted to flip the house as soon as possible, so they hired the family to clear out THEIR OWN HOUSE by taking everything to storage or the dump, for which they would receive a check for $1,000 to start over somewhere else, but if they left the house dirty or with any furniture, they'd get a big fat goose egg.  Much like the evidence presented in "Leaving Neverland", right or wrong, we're only getting one side of the story here, the P.O.V. of the family.  So the bank, the sheriff, the judge are all terrible people (yet notably absent) and this family obviously, apparently, did nothing wrong and is unjustly losing their house.  How do I know this is the case?  How many payments did they miss?  How long was the husband out of a job?  OK, times are tough, but isn't it possible that they did something wrong?  Couldn't they have raised some money some other way, like maybe sell off a portion of the husband's massive gun collection?  Just putting that out there...

Then the film loses sight of the personal and tries to look at the big picture - like, what is "capitalism" and is it good or bad?  (Umm, why can't it be neither?)  All the religious people interviewed in this film (and there are quite a few) say that it's obviously bad, because Jesus caused a scene at a temple one time when he got mad at the money-lenders.  Right, except a few things - we've got a separation of church and state in this country, or at least we're supposed to, so it doesn't make sense to apply "moral" rules from religion to the system we have of making laws and enforcing them.  Is it morally right to evict someone from their home?  I say the question doesn't apply - it's morally neither right nor wrong.  It can be a shitty thing to do, but religion shouldn't be entering into the picture at that point.  It's funny how the same people who say that religion has no place in government when you're talking about abortion or same-sex marriage suddenly want to look at the moral nature of the banking industry or which crimes need to be prosecuted.

Is it morally right that there used to be a 90% tax rate for the richest people in America, then it got lowered to 50% and now it's probably lower than that?  Again, I think it's a bogus question.  It's not fair, it stinks for most people that there's such income disparity and that 1% of the people own 95% of the money, or whatever, but it's neither moral or immoral, it just is.  God does not have an opinion on how much money is too much or not enough, and even if he did, the people in the clergy are supposed to have taken a vow of poverty, so why are churches tax-exempt, and why is the Catholic Church still one of the biggest landowners around?

Now, that being said, it turns out that Wal-Mart taking out insurance policies on their own workers - sorry, associates - was also a shitty thing to do.  Especially when none of that money went toward funeral costs if an associate died, but the company could still make a few thousand bucks, especially if a younger female associate bucked the odds and died young.  We also learn that Michael Moore loved capitalism when he was a kid - but that was probably because when you're a kid, you don't have to pay for anything, Mommy and Daddy handle everything, and you just get to have fun and learn how to make home movies.  Suddenly, when he's an adult, and people stopped buying his DVDs, that's when Michael Moore thinks we need a new system (also known as "why can't I get any grant money to make more rambling political films?").

Then there's an examination of some prison-for-cash scandal in Wilkes-Barre, PA, where a bunch of high-school kids needed to be "scared straight", and that should have taken like a week, but the kids were locked up for nine months because somebody was profiting from this, somewhere. Umm, Mr. Moore, have you seen "13th"?  Because another filmmaker just totally put you to shame, and it turns out that for-profit prisons are all over the country, and they've locked up an entire generation of black men and are using them for free labor.  But no, please go on and tell us about how a dozen white kids were inconvenienced for a while.  Then there are some (white) airline pilots who aren't making as much as they'd like, and some (white, again) people who won't be able to pay off their student loans for a few years.  Geez, Michael, maybe you should stop making films about white people, you're really missing the boat here.

Then it's back to the sub-prime mortgage crisis, and the bailout that a lot of members in Congress didn't want to vote for.  But since every other person in Washington worked for Goldman-Sachs, and that firm contributed a lot of money to George W. Bush, guess what, on the second vote the bailout of America's banks passed.  I'm not saying that was right or wrong, but at least on the upside, didn't we kind of avoid another Great Depression?

It's notable to point out that this film got released soon after Obama got elected, so thankfully that all worked out, and America never needed to worry about anything ever again.  Seriously, though, the movie that I eliminated from my documentary chain this year (I had one too many, after adding "Billy Elliot" last month...) was "Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden", and now I'm seriously wondering if I accidentally kept the film that was more out of date between the two.

Michael Moore then meets a young (?) up-and-coming Senator from Vermont named Bernie Sanders, and realizes that he's got some pretty cool ideas about Socialism. (and he's complaining about the top 1%, so naturally Moore got all starry-eyed over him...). And the kids sure seem to be taking to his ideas, but why wouldn't they?  Free college education?  Free socialized medicine, I mean, free healthcare?  That probably sounds fantastic to someone staring down at a stack of unpaid college loans.  But isn't the next generation entitled enough already?  Here's exactly why we shouldn't give them all free college education: because they WANT IT.  Then they'll be even MORE entitled if they get it.  Did you ever see a kid crying because he wants ice cream?  The absolute LAST thing you should do is give that kid ice cream, just to make him stop crying, you'll set his emotional growth meter back to zero.  Then the next time he wants ice cream, or something else, he'll know exactly what to do to get it.  Everyone has to figure out, at some point, that they need to work to get the things they want, and it's better to start them young - explain to that kid that Daddy doesn't have any money on him right now, and maybe tomorrow after Daddy gets his paycheck, and the kid behaves very well between now and then, MAYBE you can stop for ice cream on the way home.  Otherwise he (and all the millennials) are just never going to learn.

Moore comes to a conclusion about capitalism (Spoiler alert, it's bad.) and says that we can fight back with its polar opposite, democracy.  Hmmm, I'm not sure those words are opposites, who's to say the two forces can't work together?  It's been done in the past.  And technically he's right, it's very possible that the lower 95% can come together and realize that collectively, they've got 95% of the voting power in the country, but come on, look around, when's the last time that 95% of the people agreed on anything?  (I think it was an "American Idol" finale...) Look, if your income is the national average, you probably believe that only the 50% of people above you should pay more taxes, and the 50% below you (including you, of course) should get a break.  If your income is in the top 75%, you'd probably argue that only the top 24% of people should be taxed more, and so on.  Everyone only wants what's best for the country by their definition, which is what's best for themselves.  So it's never going to happen.

I'm going to check back in with Michael Moore in a few days, to see if he's grown up at all since 2009.  Probably not.  (And Jesus Christ, Michael, stop tying everything back to Flint, Michigan, I think we've proven conclusively that nobody cares, or they'd have clean water to drink.)

EDIT: Once again, I missed the best possible tie-in.  Today was the first of several/many debates among Democratic Presidential contenders, and they've divided the 20 (?) or so candidates into 2 sets that will debate during successive nights, I think.  And in the first pack was Elizabeth Warren, who appears in "Capitalism: A Love Story", even though that was filmed before she was a U.S. Senator.  Back in 2009 she was a Harvard professor, and she weighed in on the malfeasance in the Senate that took place because so many government officials had ties to Goldman-Sachs.  Also appearing on night 1 were NYC Mayor Bill DeBlasio, Cory Booker, Beto O'Rourke and...um, the rest.  (Stay tuned for Night 2 with Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Kirsten Gillibrand et al.)  But now I want to know how Elizabeth Warren did - Harvard professor of economics, Senator from Massachusetts, seems to be very smart - I think I might have to do a little more research on her, since I don't want to vote for a Socialist and Joe Biden seems likely to continue being creepy and shoot himself in the foot.  He's still talking about curing cancer?  Wasn't that the job that Obama gave him?  Does he have any original ideas of his own, or is he just falling back on what seemed to excite people before?

Also starring Michael Moore (last seen in "Rush: Time Stand Still"), William Black, Elijah Cummings, Baron Hill, Marcy Kaptur, Marcus Haupt, Stephen Moore, Bernie Sanders (last seen in "13th"), Wallace Shawn (last seen in "The Haunted Mansion"), Elizabeth Warren, Peter Zalewski, and archive footage of Glenn Beck, Joe Biden (last seen in "Seal Team Six: The Raid on Osama Bin Laden"), John McCain (ditto), Michael Bloomberg (last seen in "Koch"), John Boehner (last seen in "Vice"), Nancy Pelosi (ditto), Brian Williams (ditto), Tom Brokaw (also carrying over from "Leaving Neverland"), Katie Couric (ditto), Janet Jackson (ditto), Justin Timberlake (ditto), George W. Bush (last seen in "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room"), Dick Cheney (ditto), Bill Clinton (ditto), Arnold Schwarzenegger (ditto), Jack Cafferty, Jimmy Carter (last seen in "13th"), Martin Luther King (ditto), Nancy Reagan (ditto), Chris Dodd, Dick Durbin, Jerry Falwell, Barney Frank, Timothy Geithner, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Phil Gramm, Alan Greenspan, Charles Keating, Helmut Kohl, Steve Kroft, Dennis Kucinich, Zedong Mao, Sandra Day O'Connor, Barack Obama (last seen in "Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold"), Michelle Obama (ditto), Sarah Palin, Henry Paulson, Don Regan, William Rehnquist, Pat Robertson, Franklin Roosevelt, Robert Rubin, Paul Ryan, Antonin Scalia, Chuck Schumer, Ryan Seacrest (last seen in "Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of Our Lives"), Donna Shalala, Joseph Stalin, Chesley Sullenberger, Clarence Thomas.

RATING: 4 out of 10 food stamps

Leaving Neverland

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Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room

Year 11, Day 175 - 6/24/19 - Movie #3,272

BEFORE: More fun with archive footage tonight - several politicians carry over from "Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold", but let's highlight the most outrageous one - Arnold Schwarzenegger.

THE PLOT: A documentary about the Enron corporation, its faulty and corrupt business practices, and how they led to its fall.

AFTER: The summer/Southern theme continues since the focus tonight is back on Houston, where Enron was based.  There's also part of the film that takes place in California, once Enron gets a financial foothold in that state's energy market, so there's summer brown-outs and wildfires that all factor in to the success and eventual failure of Enron's corporate strategy.  Last night the Didions were holding beach parties in Malibu, and today I'm watching Gov. Gray Davis get recalled in part because of those brown-outs, and Arnold Schwarzenegger taking over as governor.  I had no idea that whole mess could be traced back to Enron's shady business model.

It's a bit hard for someone who's not a forensic accountant to follow it all - basically Enron was in the energy trading game, getting energy from the places where there was too much and somehow delivering it to the places that needed it.  Umm, I think?  And then charging a premium when they did that.  Any deregulation of the energy industry by a President who happened to be a friend of Kenneth Lay, or a recipient of his campaign contributions, that's just a coincidence, right?  Sure....

From there, the company embarked on a "fake it till you make it" strategy, issuing and leveraging stock, basically betting that the price of energy would rise while also being the ones setting the price of that energy.  Umm, I think?  And then convincing everyone, even their own employees, to buy more stock in the company because it was clearly undervalued, while also knowing that if they could convince people to buy more stock, that would in fact drive the value up.  Come on, who needs a 401K or a pension fund, Enron stock is a sure thing, right?  Because the stock market always goes up over time, if you don't count those little market corrections that happen from time to time and also caused Black Friday and the Great Depression.

I'm sure the company did well legitimately for a while, it did have a modest rate of growth slightly better than the national average.  That I can believe, but then came the push to do better, charge more, tout the profits and hide the losses via various shell companies - phony businesses that were owned by Enron's CFO that did fake transactions, ones which shuttled the losses over to other entities so only profits would show up on Enron's books.  The use of "mark-to-market" accounting meant that everything was based on what the market value of the company was, which coincidentally the executives also arbitrarily determined.  Profits were "whatever we say they are" or "whatever we need them to be" in order to get more people to invest in stock.

What's crazy is that once they started accelerating profits, the executives found that they had to keep doing that, because every time they claimed more income, that raised expectations even more for the next quarter, and the next, and so on.  So there was more impetus to go into new fake markets and expand into new fake ventures just to make more fake money, or something.  Here's the crazy part, Enron wanted to go into business with Blockbuster Video in 2001 to provide streaming movies to people across the country via the internet!  Which is crazy, because who the hell wanted to stream movies back before they could stream movies?  Somebody had a vision of the future that ended up being accurate, only they couldn't quite make it happen, and they were only interested in making it a thing because it was potentially profitable, not because they loved provided people access to movies.  But I guess a streaming movie is a form of energy, somehow?

Then they had some crazy idea to trade weather, because weather is also a form of energy (?) but I can't for the life of me see how they were going to do this or profit by it - were they going to take the rainclouds from Seattle and somehow bring them to Las Vegas or buy up the snow in Minnesota and truck it down to Florida?  I think by this time the writing was probably on the wall and they were just saying crazy things that weren't possible, then even crazier things because deep down they wanted to get caught for making insane amounts of money for the executives and getting ready to lay off all their employees without severance pay.  But I'd have to check the timeline on that.

As for the executives, they did whatever they could to increase short-term profits within particular time frames so they'd get performance bonuses, meanwhile they were taking all of their stock options and cashing them out whenever the stock price reached high levels, so they'd essentially get rich while advising all the lesser employees and investors to keep holding on to the stock and ride out the lows in the market, because these things always go up again, right?

The company survived as long as it did because of California, whatever losses in other markets there were that couldn't be hidden by transferring them to shell companies could be made up for by profits in California.  Deregulation of the energy markets meant that Enron could charge more in California, especially when demand went up.  And they made demand go up by causing these brownouts, and the brownouts came from shutting down several power plants at the same time for phony maintenance, repairs, or bogus emergencies.  Wildfires near the plants helped, too, so that leads to questions about whether those fires were intentionally set, I suppose.

The terrorist attack on September 11, 2001 was something of a blessing for Enron, it took speculation about their corporate practices out of the headlines - yet CEO Ken Lay still had the nerve to compare the WTC attack in New York with the SEC "attacking" Enron to investigate their shady accounting. So, yeah, there's probably a special place in hell for Ken Lay, here's hoping.  By this time the company had watched both its stock price and its credit rating fall, at that point the only option was to file for bankruptcy and wait for the congressional hearings to start.  Enron also took down Arthur Andersen, the noted accounting firm that happily got paid each week to not notice all the terrible things on Enron's balance sheet.

Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling went on trial in 2006 for a host of charges including securities fraud, money laundering, insider trading and conspiracy.  Skilling was sentenced to 24 years in prison, but got 10 knocked off.  Lay was on the hook for up to 45 years, but then conveniently died before sentencing.  Even in death, the consummate asshole, he wouldn't even let anyone get the satisfaction of seeing him suffer, no, he was too good for that.  The only good news, that followed later, is that there were successful class-action suits that returned at least some money to the investors and the people who lost their pension funds.

The approach here is fairly matter-of-fact, "talking heads" style. But then they dropped in footage of strippers, like the ones that Lou Pai used to hire for private dances.   It almost seems like this is the sort of documentary they were making fun of when they made "The Big Short".

Also starring John Beard, James Chanos, Carol Coale, Gray Davis, Joseph Dunn, Max Eberts, Peter Elkind, David Freeman, Philip Hilder, Bill Lerach, Joe Lingold, Loretta Lynch, Amanda Martin-Brock, Bethany McLean, Mike Muckleroy, James Nutter, John Olson, Kevin Phillips, Nancy Rapoport, Harvey Rosenfield, Mimi Swartz, Sherron Watkins, Andrew Weissman, Colin Whitehead, Charles Wickman, with narration from Peter Coyote (last seen in "Hemingway & Gellhorn")
and archive footage of Kenneth Lay, Jeff Skilling, Andrew Fastow, Lou Pai, Tim Belden, Sen. Barbara Boxer, George H.W. Bush (also carrying over from "Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold"), Barbara Bush (ditto), Dick Cheney (ditto), Ronald Reagan (ditto), George W. Bush (last seen in "Koch"), Laura Bush (last seen in "Quincy"),  Bill Clinton (last seen in "13th"), Sen. Peter Fitzgerald, Rep. Jim Greenwood, Sen. Fritz Hollings, Linda Lay, Jay Leno (last seen in "I Am Big Bird: The Carroll Spinney Story"), Sen. Carl Levin, Maria Shriver (last seen in "The Front Runner"), Rep. Cliff Stearns, Rep. Ted Strickland, Sen. Henry Waxman, Sen. Ron Wyden, James Stewart (last seen in "You Can't Take It With You"), Donna Reed (last seen in "Shadow of the Thin Man").

RATING: 6 out of 10 paper shredders

Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold

Year 11, Day 174 - 6/23/19 - Movie #3,271

BEFORE: This is another documentary I spotted on Netflix last year, and thankfully it's still available there.  Funny how the "Netflix originals" seem to hang around longer than the films they source from other companies. Hmmm.....

I've got another disaster to report today, it seems my DVR crashed, and it needed to reboot several times late last week.  Today I noticed there was suddenly about 10% more space available, so the system somehow deleted a bunch of movies.  Which would only be a problem if I was working on a perfect year, and needed to watch certain documentaries to maintain my chain.  I had to scramble last night, first to figure out what was now missing, then to make sure that I could still access the missing films, either by re-recording them or accessing them on demand when needed.  I think that the documentary chain will be un-affected - it's possible I might have lost some films I had already seen but couldn't burn to DVD and was saving for some reason, but I'll have to deal with that later.  The main focus right now is getting to the end of this year's docs chain without an interruption.

At the end of it all, there was one film on my list that vanished (again, this is not supposed to HAPPEN with the DVR...) that I hadn't seen yet, but it wasn't scheduled for viewing in 2018, so I'm going to try not to worry about it.  I've learned to at least TRY to take these things in stride, like maybe they're some kind of karmic message from the organization lords of the universe.  I recorded this boxing (?) movie "Warrior" at one point, and the DVR decided to record only HALF of it without telling me - that was going to be part of my chain in March, but then I worked the chain around it and moved on, and look at me now - I'm more than halfway to a perfect year.  "Warrior" goes back on the "someday" list, and I soldier on as best I can, keeping my eyes on the prize. (There is a prize for this, right?). Same thing happened last year with "Call Me By Your Name", the Academy screener wouldn't play for me at home, so I scrapped my plan and moved on.  Then the film later aired on premium cable, but it was also one of the films that just vanished.  I've set it to re-record, but maybe just something in the universe does not want me to watch that film - now I have to decide if I'm going to listen to that karmic force, or rise up and rebel against it.

Ed Koch carries over again from "Koch" for another appearance in archive footage.

THE PLOT: Literary icon Joan Didion reflects on her remarkable career and personal struggles in this intimate documentary directed by her nephew, Griffin Dunne.

AFTER: As America ramps up for Election Year 2020, I've got my own Presidential race going on - which current or former U.S. President will appear in the most documentaries this year?  I've got more political material coming up this week and next, it's really anybody's game at this point.  It's hard to predict the outcome because of that IMDB problem I mentioned, when films don't report all of the people who appear in archive footage.  But I can tell you that right now Barack Obama is in the lead, after appearing in 7 films so far.  Hot on his heels is Richard Nixon with 6 appearances, covering topics like the moon landing and Watergate really helped him out.  Next is a three-way tie between JFK, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush with 5, Bill Clinton with 4, Trump with 3, another 3-way tie between Lyndon Johnson, Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush with 2.  You see how easy it for the documentary appearances to take over - just a few more and Obama or Nixon could surpass James Franco and win the year, and I watched NINE films with James Franco.

Among First Ladies, there's a tie right now between Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama with 3 appearances, then Pat Nixon and Nancy Reagan with 2, and Jackie Kennedy and Barbara Bush with 1.  Hillary also leads the contenders who ran for President and lost, followed by Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani with 2 each, and then a big pack of also-rans: John McCain, John Kerry, Bob Dole, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Dick Gephardt, Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, Al Sharpton and Bernie Sanders with 1 each.  Joe Biden's got 1, but he doesn't really fit into any category yet - but I'm pulling for you, Joe. Umm, I guess if you can poll better than Trump, I'm pulling for you.  Just stop talking to women all creepy-like.

Other than that, I didn't really find much that held my attention with this film.  It's probably on me, I'm not that familiar with the work of Joan Didion, either her books or her magazine articles, and I think that might be a prerequisite, given the way this film is set up.  In addition to telling stories about her life and career, she reads particular passages from her books, and sometimes I couldn't tell the difference.  I kind of made the same mistake I did with "The End of the Tour" about a month ago - since I never read "Infinite Jest" or any other work from David Foster Wallace, I was missing out.  I mean, I could take the events of the film as they were, but there was no context.  I could assume that this book of his was brilliant and well-loved, and sort of extrapolate from there, but that has a limited effect.

So, in a way a documentary can be educational, but there's a limiting effect and not bringing some background to the table myself can then seem counter-productive.  Like when I watched "Apollo 11", of course I'm bringing in the background information that these three guys MADE IT to the moon and back, it's just sort of a given and then we're all tuning in for the specific details.  I already knew that Ed Koch was a three-term mayor, but not a four-term one, now I'm just tuning in to see exactly how it all went down.  When I'm starting from scratch, and I don't have any background reference going in, that's a very different situation - I have to hope that the film's going to fill in all the details, and this just isn't that kind of film today.

I mean, there are details about her life, her marriage to John Dunne, the fact that they adopted a daughter, they held parties in their Malibu home attended by the filmmaking elite, Harrison Ford spent months working on their home as a carpenter, and so on.  But I'm just missing the details about why her writing was important, and I'm not sure if that's because the director (her nephew) didn't provide them, or focused too much on personal anecdotes, or what.  He also appeared in that "Bright Lights" documentary about Carrie Fisher, and that doc had more impact for me because I knew more about Carrie Fisher, I met Carrie Fisher and I was personally invested in learning more about her.  So again, I'm willing to take the blame today and say that maybe I'm the problem here, in that I didn't know enough about Joan Didion going in.

What's universal about her story, though, is that she suffered great losses, and then went on to write about them in a way that took her personal story and made it universal.  Her daughter got very sick and then her husband died, and she wrote about it.  Later her daughter's health seemed to improve, but then she fell and hurt her head while getting off of a plane, causing a hematoma that required brain surgery - and after that she died from pancreatitis.  Joan was in the middle of a book tour, promoting her book "The Year of Magical Thinking" (about her husband's death) when her daughter died, and then wrote about the next wave of personal tragedy in another book, "Blue Nights".  She's also survived MS and a nervous breakdown in 1968, and who knows what else.

But this too, points out not only the fragile nature of life but the double-edged nature of our own existence.  We all say we want to stay healthy and live for a very long time, but really, what are the odds?  And what happens when you do live for a very long time, that probably means you're going to watch a lot of family members and friends pass away, and that's going to take its toll on you, too.  Unless you live like a hermit and avoid all human contact, then tragedy's going to find you, one way or the other.  It's a little fascinating that Didion had close ties to news events like the Manson murders and the Patty Hearst kidnapping, but many people have written about those stories over the years, so I'm not really seeing why her accounts should be lauded over others.

There's just not much more for me here, so I'm going to move on.  I can't always tell that a film's not going to speak to me much until I watch it - it's a bit like biting in to your sandwich and then noticing that there's a bite-mark in the paper, and you realize you were so anxious to get the food in your mouth that you've swallowed a small amount of the wrapping, but there's nothing really you can do about it now.

Also starring Joan Didion, Griffin Dunne (last seen in "Ocean's Eight"), Vanessa Redgrave (last seen in "Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool"), Harrison Ford (last seen in "Blade Runner 2049"), Hilton Als, Tom Brokaw (last seen in "Vice"), Jim Didion, David Hare, Susanna Moore, Lynn Nesbit, Phyllis Rifield, Amy Robinson, Robert Silvers, Susan Traylor, Calvin Trillin, Shelley Wanger, with archive footage of John Gregory Dunne, Dominick Dunne (last seen in "Addicted to Love"), Quintana Roo Dunne, Tony Dunne, Dick Cheney (last seen in "Fair Game"), Patricia Hearst, Charles Manson, Richard Nixon (last seen in "13th"), Donald Trump (ditto), George H.W. Bush (ditto), Barack Obama (also carrying over from "Koch"), Ronald Reagan (ditto), Anna Wintour (also last seen in "Ocean's Eight"), Barbara Bush (last seen in "Gaga: Five Foot Two"), Lynne Cheney, Michael Dukakis, Janis Joplin (last seen in "Super Duper Alice Cooper"), Jim Morrison (ditto), John F. Kennedy (last seen in "Apollo 11"), Jacqueline Kennedy (last seen in "How the Beatles Change the World"), Pat Nixon (last seen in "Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House"), Oliver North, Michelle Obama (last seen in "Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey"), Arnold Schwarzenegger (last seen in "Around the World in 80 Days"), Roman Polanski, Linda Kasabian, Steven Spielberg (last seen in "Quincy"), Martin Scorsese (last heard in "The Grifters"), Brian De Palma, Warren Beatty (last seen in "McCabe & Mrs. Miller"), Lillian Gish, Tuesday Weld, Natalie Wood (last seen in "The Great Race"), John Wayne (last seen in "Keith Richards: Under the Influence").

RATING: 4 out of 10 co-written screenplays