BEFORE: Wow, April went FAST - I think. I was so busy in April that it's a wonder I got all my movies watched, in between all my shifts at the movie theater. Between that and my other job, I was always coming or going, staying up late or waking up early, and I feel like I don't just sleep in as much as I used to, even on my days off. I'm not sure what that means - just that I'm very stressed-out, maybe, and I can't relax enough because of all the stress dreams. Steps are being taken to alleviate this situation, like I'm setting up job interviews, but I just don't know if they're going to pay off. If they don't I'll still be stressed, but also depressed, so we'll see.
George Clooney carries over again from "Idina Menzel: Which Way to the Stage?" and since May is here, I'll list my links for May as they stand right now, through Memorial Day and a few days after. But things could always change, I still have to figure out a path to Father's Day, and that could affect the line-up at the end of May. So after tonight, it's: George H.W. Bush, Joe Pesci, George Hamilton, Michael Caine, Will Patton, Pierce Brosnan, Trevor Laird, Brenda Blethyn, Clark Gregg, Hadley Robinson, Fred Hechinger, Bill Camp, Adam Driver, Matt Damon, William Nadylam, Jude Law, Blake Lively, Bashir Salahuddin, Glen Powell, Zachary Levi, Chris Parnell. That should give you SOME small ideas about where I'm headed.
I know, I know, that's only 21 people and the month of May has 31 days. Some actors will stick around for three movies at a time, but also, the chain is two movies short right now - so I'll either take 2 days off or find some more films to fit in-between, either way I'm not that worried about it.
THE PLOT: The sensational true story of the National Enquirer, the infamous tabloid with a prescient grasp of its readers' darkest curiosities.
AFTER: OK, so they interviewed a bunch of people who worked at the National Enquirer over the years, during different decades I think because there's a BIG age range among the former reporters. These, of course, are just the people who are willing to ADMIT that they were reporters for the Enquirer. The publication, famous for being sold in grocery stores at the check-out line, was known for salacious and attention-grabbing headlines - the theory being that if you were in a long check-out line with nothing to do, you might pick up the nearest reading material, and you might get one or two stories in before you had to put your groceries up on the belt, and maybe you'd get so caught up in a story that you just HAD to buy the magazine (I can't bring myself to call it a "newspaper"...) or, more likely, you'd still be holding the magazine while you were taking your food items out of the cart, and ideally the publication would be stuck to some melting ice cream and thus become inseparable from the groceries. Or maybe your hand would swing REALLY wide when you were putting the Enquirer back in the rack, and you'd accidentally scan the bar code on it, and then you HAVE to buy it, it's the law. I bet at least 15% of their sales were made that way.
But this is also the story of ALL the American celebrity scandals of the last few decades - the Gary Hart scandal, John Belushi's overdose, President Clinton getting a hummer from a White House intern, Donald Trump's affair/divorce/marriage/affair/divorce/marrage/affair cycle, Bill Cosby's affairs (consensual and non-), the O.J. Simpson murder trial, and then there's Whitney Houston's death, Princess Diana's affairs and death, and so much more. But note that those EVENTS aren't profiled here, rather it's the COVERAGE of those events that's described here - so essentially it's the reporting about the reporting on those topics. Yeah.
Thankfully, there's a cut-off and they don't go past 2010 or so - if I were to pick up the Enquirer today (it's still being published, right?) all the stories would probably be about Vanessa Hudgens and Bebe Rexha and all the Kardashians (so many Kardashians...), not to mention Doja Cat and Dua Lipa and other famous people I know nothing about, except their names. I'll watch "TMZ" sometimes at 4 am just to make an attempt to stay current, but I just don't care enough for anything to really stick.
But I'm here to learn stuff, so what did I learn about American scandals from this movie about the Enquirer? Let's start with one good thing and one bad thing. Remember Gary Hart? He was the front-runner Democrat in the months leading up to the Presidential election of 1988, and when reporters asked him about adultery, whether he'd ever been unfaithful to his wife, he seemed to hem and haw just a bit. (The correct answer was "No" and he blew it.). To recover, he practically dared reporters to follow him around and present proof of his adultery - so, they did, and they found it. (Whoopsie.). Photos came out of him after a day of sailing with Ms. Donna "Not his wife" Rice, and so we'll never really know why a guy who was cheating on his wife dared reporters to follow him around and catch him in the act, it was all very stupid. But that's not the BAD thing the Enquirer did - their reveal of Gary Hart's adultery forced him to drop out of the race, and so the Democrats nominated Michael Dukakis, governor of Massachusetts who had all the personality of a cold gyro sandwich. Dukakis lost the election to George Bush Sr, while Gary Hart might have had a better chance of beating him. So we had 4 more years of Republican rule, and then when George W. Bush came along (after Clinton, of course) he was somehow able to become President on his father's coattails, he had no experience or marketable skills whatsoever - I know he was Governor of Texas, but come on, total nepo baby.
So, in an alternate universe where the Enquirer never blew the whistle on Gary Hart's affair, he might have been elected President and then George W. Bush and evil overlord Cheney wouldn't have run the country from 2000-2008, and maybe there wouldn't have been 9/11 or a war with Afghanistan that dragged on for 20 years. Just saying.
The one GOOD thing that the Enquirer did was to get involved with the O.J. Simpson case, I mean every single little detail, they followed up on. When it became known that there was a bloody shoe print at the scene from a pair of Bruno Magli shoes, O.J. swore in court that he would never wear that brand, even called them "ugly-ass" shoes. He said he'd never be seen in a pair of shoes like that - and the Enquirer once again took up the challenge. They contacted sports photographers who had been taking photos of O.J. for YEARS, and paid them to go through their collections of photos, until one of them found a photo of O.J., coming in to football practice with the Buffalo Bills, and BOOM, wearing Bruno Magli shoes. Or I think maybe the photo was of him at an airport, getting those shoes shined. Either way, BUSTED.
Think about the alternate universe again, the one where the Enquirer didn't get involved in this little bit of the O.J. story - he might have gotten acquitted, because for some reason, they allowed him to put on that pair of black gloves by himself, so he could pretend that they didn't fit. Jesus, what a mistake, he's an ACTOR, for Chrissakes, don't you think he could just ACT like the gloves were too small? Why wasn't a third party contracted to measure his hands and measure the gloves, and confirm that they were the proper size? What a bunch of morons.
Anyway, the story of the National Enquirer is extremely relevant right now because of the magazine's connections to Donald Trump. Back in the old days, the paper got rich running stories about Trump's affair with Marla Maples (on the ski slopes, right in front of the wife - bold, if nothing else...) and then his divorce from Ivana. Trump always believed that there's no such thing as bad publicity, so he would call the Enquirer HIMSELF and pretend to be his own press agent, "John Miller" and leak gossip about HIMSELF to the paper - just spell the name right, know what I mean? The relationship between Trump and the Enquirer's current publisher, David Pecker, progressed to the point where they were such good friends that the newspaper was buying "exclusive rights" to negative stories about Trump, just so they could kill them and not run them. Why anybody would spend money on news stories that they never run is also very stupid, but that's the arrangement Trump had with his Pecker.
The Enquirer also did this for Arnold Schwarzenegger, pay money for damaging news stories and then never run them. Mega-star and "Governator" Arnold probably had more affairs than Trump and Muhammad Ali combined, but we've never heard about most of them because the Enquirer had his back. And hmm, who sits on the board of American Media, which publishes the National Enquirer? Hint: it rhymes with Schwarzenegger. This practice is called "catch and kill", and it's relevant right now to all the allegations against Trump - and it probably affected the 2016 election, the way the Enquirer killed all the negative stories about Trump's sexual misconduct and instead chose to run negative stories about Ted Cruz and Hunter Biden.
Look, I'm not sticking up for tabloid journalism here, I know they're bottom feeders and jackals, but plenty of people appear to buy into this kind of reporting, and most people just can't get enough of it. We want to read about celebrities being just as screwed-up as everybody else, and so we're like the hungry animals in the zoo, but in the zoo where none of the zookeepers seem to understand anything about proper nutrition. So we're just a bunch of fat zoo animals that can't improve our situation, because we can't find a way to properly communicate to our handlers that we need to start eating better. Know what I mean?
On the other hand, I can't approve any movie (or comic book, for that matter) with the word "Untold" in it. It's not an "untold" story because you're TELLING IT RIGHT NOW, boneheads.
Also starring Ken Auletta (last seen in "Where's My Roy Cohn?"), Malcolm Balfour, Carl Bernstein (last seen in "Everything Is Copy"), Tony Brenna, Iain Calder, Steve Coz, Jerry George, Gigi Goyette, Maggie Haberman, Larry Haley, Keith Kelly, Jose Lambiet, Judith Regan, Shelley Ross, Pat Shipp, Barbara Sternig, Val Virga, David Wright,
with archive footage of Dan Aykroyd (last seen in "Julia"), John Belushi (last seen in "Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road"), Barbara Bush, George H.W. Bush (last seen in "Becoming Cousteau"), George W. Bush (last seen in "Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You"), Phil Donahue (ditto), Bob Hope (ditto), Richard Nixon (ditto), Mike Wallace (ditto), Tucker Carlson (last seen in "All In: The Fight for Democracy"), Cher (last seen in "Val"), Bill Clinton (last seen in "Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time"), O.J. Simpson (ditto), Hillary Clinton (last seen in "Sheryl"), Michael Jackson (ditto), Jay Leno (ditto), Michael Cohen, Anderson Cooper (last seen in "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever"), Bill Cosby (last seen in "What's My Name: Muhammad Ali"), Ted Cruz (last seen in "Running WIth Beto"), Stormy Daniels, Phyllis Diller (last seen in "The One and Only Dick Gregory"), Michael Dukakis (last seen in "Irresistible"), Steve Dunleavy, Ronan Farrow, Farrah Fawcett, Fred Friendly, Gary Hart, Mary Hart (last seen in "I Am Divine"), Patricia Hearst, Don Hewitt, Whitney Houston (last seen in "Dionne Warwick: Don't Make Me Over"), Jesse Jackson (ditto), Stevie Wonder (ditto), Kate Jackson (last seen in "The Kid Stays in the Picture"), John F. Kennedy Jr., Larry King (also last seen in "Where's My Roy Cohn?"), Ted Koppel (last seen in "The Eyes of Tammy Faye"), Maria Shriver (ditto), Robin Leach (last seen in "Wolfgang"), Monica Lewinsky (last seen in "Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump"), Mike Pence (ditto), Chuck Todd (ditto), Nelson Mandela (last seen in "Citizen Ashe"), Marla Maples, Roger Moore, Gregory Peck (last seen in "The Boys from Brazil"), David Pecker, Gene Pope, Elvis Presley (last seen in "Sammy Davis Jr.: I've Gotta Be Me"), Prince Charles (last seen in "Pavarotti"), Princess Diana (ditto), Prince Harry, Prince Phillip, Prince William, Donna Rice, Geraldo Rivera (last seen in "All About Steve"), Charlie Rose (last seen in "Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool"), Arnold Schwarzenegger (last seen in "The Queen of Versailles"), Donald Trump (ditto), Jane Seymour (last seen in "Lassiter"), Jaclyn Smith (last seen in "Charlie's Angels" (2019)), Charles Spencer, Howard Stern (last seen in "Can We Take a Joke?"), John Tesh (last seen in "Whitney"), Ivana Trump (last seen in "Class Action Park"), Melania Trump (last seen in "We Feed People"), Oprah Winfrey (last seen in "Val")
RATING: 6 out of 10 press passes
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