BEFORE: Yes! Joseph Gordon-Levitt carries over from "The Brothers Bloom", and I'm right where I said I would be in mid-April, watching two Oscar contenders in a row, and these will probably be the last ones I'll be able to watch before the Academy Awards telecast in just 9 days. Tomorrow's film just would NOT link to anything but political documentaries, at least it didn't when I came up with the schedule. (It's possible that now other links have opened up, like to that Tom Hanks film "News of the World", but it's too late, the die is cast...). Anyway, the good news is that I'm here, where I wanted to be, and I've got a clear plan through Mother's Day all the way to Memorial Day.
What I'm looking at now is an Oscar telecast where in each category I've only seen one of the nominees, occasionally two (like with Best Animated Feature) but usually just one. I'm OK with that, it's better than most years, and it gives me something to root for in each race, but by no means can I be considered an expert in any single category. I'm trying to not read any of the handicappers' predictions, so I can be surprised, but if an Oscar-themed issue of Entertainment Weekly shows up in my mailbox, well, then I can hardly be held responsible.
Tomorrow is Saturday, April 17, and here's the TCM "31 Days of Oscar" line-up for Day 17:
6:30 am "Meet Me in Las Vegas" (1956)
8:30 am "Meet Me in St. Louis" (1944) - SEEN IT
10:30 am "The Merry Widow" (1934)
12:15 pm "Midnight Lace" (1960)
2:15 pm "Mighty Joe Young" (1949)
4:00 pm "Mildred Pierce" (1945) - SEEN IT
6:00 pm "Million Dollar Mermaid" (1952)
8:00 pm "The Miracle Worker" (1962)
10:00 pm "Mister Roberts" (1955) - SEEN IT
12:15 am "Mogambo" (1953)
2:30 am "Mona Lisa" (1986)
4:30 am "Monsieur Hulot's Holiday" (1953)
Only another 3 out of 12 added to my tally tomorrow, with just 79 seen out of 195, I sink to 40.5% seen. But I think Sunday's really going to be my day. From Saturday's line-up, I'd consider recording "Mona Lisa", I've heard good things about it, but I just can't right now, my DVR is too full and I have no slots open, because I've been hitting Netflix really hard, and that's not going to change until the end of the month. Maybe I'll put it on the "someday" list, down at the bottom.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Steal This Movie" (Movie #3,789)
THE PLOT: The story of 7 people on trial, stemming from various charges surrounding the uprising at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
AFTER: OK, I've kind of got the inside track here, because I already watched one movie about Abbie Hoffman, just three weeks ago, and this trial was a key part of his story. But today we're doing a deep dive into basically JUST the trial, or the riots and the trial, really. There's a great prologue of archive footage that starts the film and basically sets the scene, which is great for those of us who were too busy in 1968 getting ready to be born. Or, you know, for the kids out there who didn't get to be alive at all during the 1960's like us cool people. But then just as all the key figures are in place in Chicago for their demonstration, the film skips ahead 5 months, and suddenly its AFTER the election, and a new administration has to prosecute the rioters. (IF that seems a bit familiar, hang on, many more connections to current events are coming...)
Wait, did I miss it? I only looked away for a moment, what happened at the riots? Ah, but the film is about the TRIAL, not the riots. This is first and foremost a legal drama. But we're still going to get there, the film's going to flashback to the riots quite frequently, and normally I hate these split-timeline overly flashback-y deals, but here it makes SENSE, because think about it, if the director showed you the riots and then the trial, you'd already HAVE all the information presented at the trial, so the trial would be a duplication in storytelling at that point, plus you would have already formed an opinion, most likely. This way, it's like you're one of the jurors or something, you get to learn what happened at the riots, plus directly after, only when it's pertinent or presented in court, so now it's like YOU ARE THERE, in all ways possible, you're hanging on all the testimony as it's presented, and you have to piece it together, like anybody else would, from the evidence before you. That's pretty cool. I'll endure a little bending of the timestream if it can create an effect like that.
Here's where me having the inside track, and some advance knowledge, hurt just a bit. Like, I knew that Bobby Seale would eventually be given a separate trial from the others (they weren't called "The Chicago 8", after all...) but I didn't know WHEN, exactly, this was going to happen. And I didn't know the extremes that the judge would go to when asking him to be silent in court. There's a legal Catch-22 presented here, because Bobby Seale's lawyer was in an accident, so he couldn't represent him in court, and whenever Seale would complain to the judge about him being tried without his lawyer present, the judge simply wouldn't listen, because it wasn't "proper" for Seale to address the judge directly, instead of through his lawyer. Who, umm, wasn't there. But try telling that to the judge, who was apparently incapable of seeing the conflict in the logic.
There are many more examples that portrayed this judge (Hoffman, no relation to Abbie) as very strict, and obsessive about the rules, to the point of being close to incompetent. He couldn't get some of the defendants' names correct, he dispensed contempt of court rulings out like candy, and seemed very unclear on how to handle certain evidence from testimony. Still, since so many of his rulings were against the Chicago 7, there was much dispute over whether the whole trial was a sham meant to railroad them, or maybe he just didn't like hippies, any of them, and that completely colored his judgment. As my driver's ed teacher liked to say, "Justice is whatever the judge had for breakfast."
Why is this film particularly relevant right now? Two reasons, the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 and the Capitol Hill riots of 2021. For the BLM protests, it's very easy to see the connections, time and again last year we saw what began as (relatively) peaceful protests that turned ugly, and you have to ask yourself whether the police really are handling protests in the best way when they turn up in riot gear, with plastic shields, and start lobbing tear gas into the crowds to disperse them. Is that really the best solution? Maybe there wouldn't have been so many calls to defund the police if those police hadn't spent so much of their budgets on tear gas, pepper spray and billy clubs. In the case of the 1968 riots, the final determination is that the violence was instigated by the police, under orders from the mayor of Chicago, and not by the hippies. Or if there was violence from the hippies, it came from the undercover cops disguised as hippies, and that's essentially the same thing.
Now, connecting the 1968 riots to the January 6, 2021 assault on Capitol Hill is a bit murkier, perhaps I shouldn't even go there. But I can't say that one set of demonstrations is "right" and the other is "wrong" just because in one case the demonstrators were Democrats and in the other, they were Republicans. But Abbie Hoffman here made a key argument in his testimony - the prosecutor asked him if he believed it was OK to overthrow the U.S. government, and Hoffman replied, "We do it every four years." It's a valid point, there's an engine in place in our country for radical change at the end of each term, and it's (part of) what makes our country great. The problem with the Capital Hill riots was that we'd already gone through the process, the election already happened, and one side, naturally, was unhappy with the results. That's bound to happen, but very rarely will the people unite, take up arms, and attempt to interfere with the electoral process. They were going to overthrow the overthrow, and that's NOT allowed. One overthrow good, two is no bueno. For 200 years the losing party has always complained, acted like babies and then bowed out, to lick their wounds and try to figure out a way to get back in power in the next election. 2020 was different, thanks to the internet, social media, and a President who refused to concede the election and instead magnify the lie about election fraud, and then had the audacity to use impressionable (dumb) Americans to do his dirty work by storming the Capitol, while he watched from the safety of the White House.
What hit me on January 6, while many people were shocked by the violence, and people who seemed to have no respect for the American electoral process, I wasn't shocked at all. That mess at the Capitol, that misguided throng of humanity, that ragtag bunch of screwed-up rednecks, ever-Trumpers and Q-Anons, THAT's America, and we have to deal with those people in some way, going forward, or it's going to happen again. These are the same people, essentially, who dumped tea into Boston Harbor, who rose up during the Whiskey Rebellion, Shay's Rebellion, who seceded from the Union and formed the Confederacy. They saw the country going in the wrong direction, as defined by their terms or ones handed to them, and they rose up to do something about it. For good or bad, that's the same kind of spirit that led to the American Revolution, that got England off our backs following the Stamp Act, the Intolerable Acts, and several other Acts I can't recall. What's that I said back in my review of "Havana", the only thing different between a revolution and an attempted coup is that one is successful, and the other less so.
I maintain that we're all very, very lucky that none of the Capitol Hill rioters had any interest in, or aptitude for, running a country, otherwise we could have seen a man in a big furry horned hat swearing in Trump for the second time. Instead, once they all got inside the Capitol, they just committed acts of vandalism, and when they realized that, you know, running a country might involve some hard work, they left - and now we can all spend our summer watching "The Trial of the Capitol Hill 47" or however many it turns out to be. I'm down for that.
Anyway, back to 1968. Eventually we learn the details behind the riots, how Tom Hayden got arrested for letting the air out of the tires of a police car - but he was allowed to turn himself in the next day, since there were police cameras on site at the time of his infraction. Later Hoffman, Rubin and others were leading a protest to the police station where Hayden was being held, and the police surrounded them on three sides outside a hotel window, which ended up being shattered, of course. (But where, oh where, was Pigasus? Wikipedia confirms this animal candidate existed, but I guess he's too low-brow for an Aaron Sorkin film...)
There seem to be some other discrepancies here, as this film shows the protestors being met with armed guards on the streets, and forced back into the park, where the big battle takes place. But Wikipedia is telling me that the big confrontation became known as "The Battle of Michigan Avenue", which seems to imply that it took place in the streets, outside the Conrad Hilton. So, which is it? There were definitely some skirmished in Grant Park, but since the film chose to play a little fast and loose with the timeline, it's hard after just one viewing to piece the whole timeline together.
The most interesting part to me, from the trial part anyway, was seeing Abbie Hoffman and Tom Hayden mentally challenging each other behind the scenes. Two people with very different outlooks, different approaches to getting the message out, and yet somehow they needed each other in the end, and two people can disagree vastly, yet still be on the same side of the political spectrum. This stuff was fascinating, showing disrespect for the judge and the legal process was less so. Even if you don't like the fact that the judge is ruling against you, I think you still have to respect the legal institution as a whole, because some countries don't have this. In some countries you can get killed just for disagreeing with the government, and a protest, even a peaceful one, would be right out of the question.
So, who wore it better, Sacha Baron Cohen as Abbie Hoffman, or Vincent D'Onofrio? Hmm, it's kind of a toss-up, I think maybe I'll Google some real photos or footage of Abbie to see who got closer with that weird accent. (I just did, Cohen's the clear winner, except he's much too tall.) But it's worth noting that Sacha Baron Cohen looks a LOT like the caricature of Abbie Hoffman seen in the poster for "Steal This Movie", which doesn't resemble D'Onofrio at all. Weird. Also, "Steal This Movie" sort of cheated when they cast an actor to play Tom Hayden, they used Hayden's son, Troy Garity.
But can it win an Oscar? Again, I have no idea, because I've only seen one out of the eight films nominated - now it's the one I'll be rooting for. This is up for 6 Oscars, so it might win something, I guess we'll find out in 9 days. Sorkin was trying to get Spielberg to direct this film back in 2006, and then it took another 15 years for Sorkin to direct it himself and get it released. If it wins, that means it will have peaked at the right time.
Also starring Eddie Redmayne (last seen in "The Aeronauts"), Sacha Baron Cohen (last seen in "Alice Through the Looking Glass"), Alex Sharp (last seen in "The Hustle"), Jeremy Strong (last seen in "The Gentlemen"), John Carroll Lynch (last seen in "Lay the Favorite"), Noah Robbins (last seen in "Set It Up"), Daniel Flaherty (last seen in "The Meyerowitz Stories"), Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (last seen in "Baywatch"), Mark Rylance (last seen in "Dunkirk"), Ben Shenkman (last seen in "Just Like Heaven"), J.C. MacKenzie (last seen in "The Irishman"), Frank Langella (last heard in "This Must Be the Place"), Kelvin Harrison Jr. (last seen in "The Birth of a Nation"), Michael Keaton (last seen in "Dumbo"), John Doman (last seen in "The Company Men"), Wayne Duvall (last seen in "Richard Jewell"), Caitlin Fitzgerald (last seen in "Adult Beginners"), Max Adler (last seen in "Sully"), C.J. Wilson (last seen in "Manchester by the Sea"), Damian Young (last seen in "Wonderstruck"), Alice Kremelberg, Alan Metoskie, Meghan Rafferty, Brady Jenness, Brendan Burke (last seen in "The Kitchen"), Tiffany Denise Hobbs, Steve Routman (last seen in "Bad Education"), John F. Carpenter, Larry Mitchell, Mike Geraghty, Michael Brunlieb, Michelle Hurst (last seen in "Frances Ha"), Kathleen Garrett, Michael A. Dean, with archive footage of Walter Cronkite (last seen in "The U.S. vs. John Lennon"), Richard J. Daley (last seen in "Steal This Movie"), Robert F. Kennedy (ditto), Lyndon Johnson (last seen in "Da 5 Bloods") and Martin Luther King (ditto).
RATING: 7 out of 10 Molotov cocktails
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