BEFORE: Donald Trump carries over from "The Accidental President" and this is my last documentary on politics, I promise. For now, anyway, I'm sure there are tons of docs in production on the Capitol Hill riots, the 2020 election, and the mishandling of the pandemic - those will have to wait for another time.
The Oscars are tomorrow, so it's time to get last licks in, but I managed to avoid all the nominated documentaries, because the chain sort of demanded that I focus on politics for a bit. Oh, well, time to transition back to fiction films, and it's going to take a few days. But here's tomorrow's line-up for TCM's "31 Days of Oscar", which still has a week to go:
6:00 am "Shall We Dance" (1937) - SEEN IT
8:00 am "She Done Him Wrong" (1933)
9:15 am "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon" (1949)
11:00 am "Ship of Fools" (1965)
1:30 pm "Show Boat" (1951) - SEEN IT
3:30 pm "Silverado" (1985) - SEEN IT
6:00 pm "Singin' in the Rain" (1952) - SEEN IT
8:00 pm "The Smiling Lieutenant" (1931)
9:45 pm "Somebody Up There Likes Me" (1956) - SEEN IT
12:00 am "Sounder" (1972)
2:00 am "The Spanish Main" (1945)
4:00 am "Speedy" (1928)
5:30 am "The Spirit of St. Louis" (1957) - SEEN IT
Finally, another 6 films seen out of 13 is a big day for me. This puts me back up over the 40% mark, with 117 seen out of 291. Decisions made long ago to watch all the films I could with Fred Astaire and Howard Keel are now paying off.
THE PLOT: An eye-opening and shattering analysis of the behavior, psyche, condition and stability of Donald J. Trump.
AFTER: It should come as no surprise to learn that Donald Trump cheats at golf. You can learn a lot about a man by how he plays golf, which is an honorable sport played by some very dishonorable people. You might be surprised to learn HOW he cheats at golf, and how many different WAYS he cheats at golf, though. First, he keeps his own score, a lot of golfers do that, so probably fudging of scores runs rampant. Secondly, he usually plays alone, so there's nobody to call him on fudging his score, or witnessing whether the number he puts on the scorecard is even close to reality. When he does play in a group situation, it's usually on a course that he owns, so even if anyone DID notice his errant score-keeping, they'd be afraid to call him out on it. Then there's the golf carts - at each of his courses he's got a tricked-out cart that goes faster than every other cart, so he can get to the ball first, move it to where he wants to play it from, and nobody is the wiser. Then, since he runs so many tournaments at so many courses, he's been known to call in to a tournament, report the score he (supposedly) got that same day at a DIFFERENT course, and claim victory in the tournament by default, even though he was never there, didn't play in that tournament, and maybe didn't even play golf that day. So, has he ever played a true, honest game of golf, ever? Probably not.
This is very symbolic of how Trump runs his life, and business - everything's a scam, designed to benefit him. Trump Air, Trump Steaks, Trump University, Trump Vodka. All scams. Remember that show he made a year or so into his presidency where he had this big pile of documents on display at a press conference, which was supposed to be all the contracts he'd signed, turning his businesses over to his sons while he was President? As many have surmised, that was just prop comedy, most likely those folders were all empty, and the paper was all blank. It's like a bad magic trick that had no point and mystified nobody in the audience.
Decades of tax returns with (probably) falsified numbers. Gross over-estimations of his own wealth, used to secure more loans and more credit. Two casinos that somehow lost money, basically the only casinos in history to ever do that. That giant portrait of himself that turned out to be purchased with donations to the Trump Foundation, and most recently, campaign donations web-sites that started billing one-time donors monthly, then weekly, because they didn't "opt-out" of agreeing to more donations that they never officially agreed to. The first, VERY FIRST, press conference of his administration was about the high attendance at his inauguration, which was all a bunch of B.S. Photos clearly showed how sparse the attendance was, compared with Obama's inauguration crowd, but that didn't fit the Trump narrative, so "alternative facts" and "fake news" were created to dispel any reality that he didn't like.
All those photos of him "working" in the Oval Office, with no paperwork on or near his desk, no office supplies, either, just engaged in some kind of phone conversation - but probably just listening to a dial tone, trying to look busy. There's no THERE there, there's never BEEN any there there, just a big, sad empty man who told one lie after another, then five more to support those lies, and maybe even started believing in his own lies at some point. He never really did anything but watch TV and tweet, I'll bet, he just put Mike Pence or Jared Kushner in charge of any project that he was expected to handle, so they could avoid handing it. How's that Middle East situation coming, Jared? Oh, right, it's not your problem to solve any more, because the clock finally ran out.
In this film, a bunch of psychologists, historians, authors and ethics attorneys diagnose Trump from afar, which doesn't sound particularly kosher. According to them, he's a sociopath, a racist, a sexist and a malignant narcissist. To be fair, are we supposed to believe Trump's doctors and medical "experts" who claimed he weighed just 239 pounds? Maybe his left butt cheek weighs 239 pounds, come on? Louie Anderson's in better physical shape than this guy, how much did he bribe his doctors to maintain the lie about his weight? Remember, everything's a scam, including the President's official weight - you can't eat just Big Macs and KFC buckets and weigh in at 239, it's impossible. He was 350 at least, that's like Raymond Burr status, or two Paul Rudds.
This film is propaganda, sure, but in a way it was necessary propaganda - it's no coincidence that this was released at a time when certain factions were seriously considering having Trump removed from office, either by impeachment or via the 25th Amendment, over physical disability or mental instability. Pointing out that these psychiatrists had some kind of moral obligation to speak up to protect the populace, that's just not going to fly, and overall it doesn't counter-balance the kind of remote diagnoses being handed down here, which itself is some kind of violation. Just because I happen to agree with the verdict shouldn't excuse the methods used to arrive there. If you want to prove this man is mentally unstable or unfit, we're going to need some hard evidence, because nobody removes a president lightly. Sure, we GOT our hard evidence on 1/6/21, but this film came out in August 2020, clearly trying to influence the upcoming election.
NITPICK POINT: You can't have it both ways, because Bill Clinton did have affairs, too - as did JFK, FDR, and many other Presidents. One might draw the logical conclusion that this is WHY men want to rise to positions of power, so they can do whatever they want, at least sexually. Therefore you can't diagnose one a serial abuser and another a slight egomaniac from a distance, perhaps just because of your political leanings. Let's just admit that most Presidents can't seem to keep it in their pants, except maybe Obama and Biden. Right?
In the end, I think the best description of Trump comes from Anthony (The MOOCH!) Scaramucci who's no psychological expert, and doesn't claim to be, and still finds himself in the position of having to defend his old boss of what, 11 whole days? Scaramucci says (I'm paraphrasing here) look, Trump's not evil, he's not a sociopath, he's not a megalomaniac, he's not even a racist because he's terrible to EVERYONE, regardless of color, so he's just an ASShole. Well, of course, but stop confusing me with all the technical jargon. Worse than being an asshole, he's OUR asshole, we elected him, so we created him, even though he's always been an asshole, and will always be an asshole. We made that asshole President, all of us, we all played a part, and as we learned yesterday, it's partly Hillary's fault, partly the DNC's fault, partly the voters' fault, partly the RNC's fault, partly Twitter's fault, and partly the fault of previous administrations that created the socioeconomic conditions that allowed him to rise to power. So let's FIX those leaky-roof problems, so this doesn't happen again, mmmKay? The bigger question then becomes, how many people already knew about Trump's faults as a human, and voted for him anyway?
I had a choice of Trump films, it was either this film or "You've Been Trumped", which is about some dispute he had in Scotland over a golf course. Now I'm kind of wishing I'd watched that one, because maybe it would have been more fun, but I think this film is probably more important in the larger scheme of things. "You've Been Trumped" had a sequel, though, and I just couldn't fit two films in here in place of one - plus that film would have cost me $1.99 on YouTube, but this one was free on AmazonPrime, so it won out. The good news is, I learned about what a smart, reasonable and sensitive man George Conway is, I had him pegged all wrong, just because he was married to Kellyanne Conway. But maybe these two are just a dysfunctional functioning couple that disagrees politically, like James Carville and Mary Matalin were, once upon a time. (Back in the day, they worked as strategist for opposing parties, Carville for Democrats like Bill Clinton and Matalin for Republicans like George H.W. Bush. Somehow, they made that work, I guess by not bringing political work home.)
Also starring Anthony Scaramucci (also carrying over from "The Accidental President"), Ruth Ben-Ghiat, George Conway, Lance Dodes, Ramani Durvasula, Justin Frank, John Gartner, Cheryl Koos, William Kristol, Suzanne Lachmann, Malcolm Nance, Richard Painter, Rick Reilly, Sheldon Solomon,
with archive footage of Steve Bannon, Wolf Blitzer, Mika Brzezinski, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Kellyanne Conway, Ted Cruz, Steve Doocy, Lindsey Graham, Brian Kilmeade, Chris Matthews, Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, Mike Pence, Charlie Rose, Joe Scarborough, George Stephanopoulos, Howard Stern, Jake Tapper, Chuck Todd, Melania Trump (ALL carrying over from "The Accidental President"), William Barr, Daniel Day-Lewis (last seen in "Phantom Thread"), Alan Dershowitz, Rodrigo Duterte, Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, Yecep Erdogan, Anthony Fauci, Erich Fromm, Barry Goldwater, Jane Goodall, Mikhail Gorbachev, Chris Hayes, Adolf Hitler (last seen in "Angela's Ashes"), Samuel L. Jackson (last seen in "Coming 2 America"), Brett Kavanaugh, David Letterman (last seen in "Whitney"), Monica Lewinsky, Mitch McConnell (last seen in "John Lewis: Good Trouble"), Ilhan Omar (ditto), Ayanna Pressley (ditto), Ronald Reagan (ditto), Rashida Tlaib (ditto), Steven Mnuchin, Benito Mussolini (last seen in "The House that Jack Built"), Joseph Stalin (ditto), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (last seen in "Knock Down the House"), Vladimir Putin (last seen in "Borat Subsequent Moviefilm"), John G. Roberts (last seen in "All In: The Fight for Democracy"), Paul Ryan, Sean Spicer, Tony Schwartz, John Spencer, Fred Trump, Ivana Trump, Tiger Woods
RATING: 4 out of 10 mulligans
No comments:
Post a Comment