BEFORE: Sebastian Stan carries over again from "A Different Man".
I've got just over three weeks until I can start the Doc Block - until then, I'm putting an emphasis on fathers as a subject - June is for Dads and Grads, but I think I only have one high school-themed movie scheduled, so mostly Dads. This one might fill the bill because I think it may explore the relationship between Donald Trump and his father, Fred, which was alluded to in a film called "Armageddon Time", which I watched last year.
Here are the actor links that should get me through Fathers Day and into the first week of my 44 planned documentaries: Martin Donovan, Teresa Palmer, Oliver Platt, Christopher Walken, Mary Stuart Masterson, Josh Hutcherson, Luis Guzman, Eddie Murphy, Rachael Harris, Bobby Cannavale, Thomas Barbusca, Jennifer Beals, Campbell Scott, Talia Shire, Gene Hackman, Bob Fosse, Ben Vereen, Conan O'Brien, Kevin Bacon. These should get me to June 31, unless something changes along the way.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Armageddon Time" (Movie #4,804), 'Where's My Roy Cohn?" (Movie #4,417)
THE PLOT: Donald Trump took over his father's real-estate business in 1970's New York, and got a helping hand from a closeted gay lawyer who helped turn him into a notorious legend.
AFTER: Well, it's the start of Pride Month and we're kicking it off with an appearance from Roy Cohn, famous for getting the Rosenbergs executed and also assisting Joe McCarthy in his communist witch hunts. We learned from the documentary about him that he was a lawyer who hated lawyers, a Jewish man who hated Jews, and a gay man who hated gay men. Umm, sure. Roger Stone once explained him in print by saying "Roy was not gay. He was a man who liked having sex with men." Right, exactly. If you consider "gay" as something of an epithet then that quote does makes sense, he just was who he was and he wasn't effeminate, you know? A real manly man's man, which might have been a new type of gay man at the time.
With regards to Fred Trump, I always say there are two types of fathers - the type that take their kids swimming and listen to their fears, encourage them, show them what to do and then stand by patiently while they try, and the second type just throw their kids in the deep water and say, "Well, that's how I learned. If he drowns, he drowns." Fred was definitely the second kind, although he stuck around after to tell the kid that he didn't learn to swim right. Donald Trump was an entirely different kind of father, I think he wanted to be the first kind of father, but he also probably would have gotten bored after five minutes and then said, "You know what, this kid is just NEVER going to learn how to swim. He's probably the worst swimmer in the history of swimming, and he's a total LOSER. Everybody's saying that about him." So in a world where sons aspire to be better fathers than their fathers were, Donald ended up being so, so much worse.
But he wasn't born that way, what the hell happened to him? Well, it's a bit complicated, and sure it STARTS with Fred Trump being a cold S.O.B. but then you have to look at Roy Cohn, who became a sort of father figure to Donald, but in a "zaddy" kind of way, the person who taught him the REAL rules of business, since his real father was too hung up on following these stupid things called laws and doing things the hard way, like getting building permits and actually paying his employees, what a sap. Roy Cohn lived by simple rules, not (as you might think) "live fast, die young, and leave a good looking corpse." No, his rules were: 1. Attack, attack, attack. 2. Admit nothing, deny everything and 3. Claim victory, never admit defeat. You can stll chart Trump using these rules whenever he's facing off against another country's leader, or another candidate, or Rosie O'Donnell. He still claims he won the election in 2020 and it was stolen from him - claim victory, never admit defeat.
Who cares if this wasn't EXACTLY how Trump met Roy Cohn, or how he met Ivana, or if the ghost-writer of "The Art of the Deal" was the first one to say he should run for office? This is all still 100% true, even if parts of it were made up. Hey, if Roy Cohn can say he had liver cancer, right up until the moment he died from AIDS, then I can believe that everything in this film happened exactly like this. It's all tru-ish and that's good enough for me. Here are some of the great things we learned about Trump from "The Apprentice" -
He made his first wife Ivana, get breast implants, then complained about how fake they felt.
He counter-sued the government when he was accused of not renting properties to black people, even though he knew that was true - the rejected applications were all marked with a letter "C". And "C" was for "colored", a term which had fallen out of favor even then in the 1970's.
He opened up three casinos in Atlantic City, but grew that empire too quickly, and before long, two of them were out of business and the third was losing money. Who the hell runs a losing casino, isn't the house supposed to win more often than not? I remember visiting the Trump Taj Mahal in A.C. back in 2012 or so, we didn't gamble there because workers were picketing the joint for not get paid properly, and so I didn't want to reward that anti-union behavior. Soon after that, the Taj Mahal closed too, and I think it's now the Hard Rock. Then they finally blew up the Trump Plaza in 2021, but Trump had already divested himself of ownership long before that.
Trump hired Roy Cohn to help him sue New York City when he couldn't get tax abatements for his hotel developments on 42nd St., despite knowing that Cohn's other clients included a couple of mobsters, the owner of Studio 54, George Steinbrenner, and, worst of all, the Catholic Archdiocese of New York. Well, as they say, if you lie down with dogs, you're going to wake up with fleas. Cohn allegedly got the discrimination case against the Trump organization dropped because he had photos of the lead prosecutor with a cabana boy at a resort.
OK, so Trump developed the old Commodore Hotel and turned it into the Grand Hyatt Hotel, at a time when most people didn't want to build anything in NYC or invest in the city's future in general. But that's ONE positive thing floating in an ocean of lies, blackmail, tax evasion and political dirty tricks. It's like saying Godzilla managed to burn up some garbage while he was razing the Tokyo skyline to the ground.
Trump allowed Roy Cohn's boyfriend to stay at the Hyatt, after he got sick and was kicked out of his apartment building, but when Trump found out the guy had AIDS, he got him ejected from the Hyatt, too, soon after that. After the boyfriend died, Trump brought Roy to Mar-a-Lago, which even back then was being called the "Winter White House". The property had been owned by cereal magnate Marjorie Post, who bequeathed it to the U.S. government when she died, so Presidents could have a place to stay when they visited Florida - only not many of the Presidents wanted to do that, so Trump bought it on the cheap, and wouldn't you know it, eventually it became the "Winter White House" for real.
(There's not even time in this film to get into how Trump managed to buy the Mar-A-Lago resort for $7 million after the owners rejected his initial bid of $15 million. HINT: he used Roy Cohn's three rules, especially the first one.)
How is it possible that this was filmed in Toronto? It sure LOOKS like NYC - but I guess it's not, that's very appropriate, considering how Donald Trump is really a fake billionaire who has just inflated his assets over time. And his birth city of New York doesn't even want him to come visit any more, so yeah, that feels about right that this was made in our future 51st state, Canada. They sure did a great job of integrating those scenes with stock footage of NYC. Oh, another fake thing about Trump, The real family name is "Drumpf", not "Trump". Trump's mother was also German, that explains a lot to me.
Look, I'm not going to lie and tell you that Sebastian Stan looked exactly like a young Donald Trump, he didn't. If anything he looked like a cross between an overweight Mark Hamill and Biff Tannen from "Back to the Future Part 2". But people say that character predicted Trump's presidency, so again, it feels appropriate somehow.
Also, I have to say it, and this comes from the heart, "FUCK YOU, Roy Cohn." and "FUCK YOU, Donald Trump". Just so we're all clear.
Directed by Ali Abbasi
Also starring Jeremy Strong (last seen in "Armageddon Time"), Martin Donovan (last seen in "When Trumpets Fade"), Maria Bakalova (last seen in "Unfrosted"), Catherine McNally, Charlie Carrick (last seen in "Alice, Darling"), Ben Sullivan, Mark Rendall (last seen in "Stockholm"), Joe Pingue (last seen in "Devil"), Ron Lea (last seen in "The Sentinel"), Edie Inksetter (last seen in "Godsend"), Matt Baram (last seen in "Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium"), Moni Ogunsuyi, Brad Austin, Stuart Hughes (last seen in "It"), Jim Monaco (last seen in "Malcolm X"), Clare Coulter, Hume Baugh, Tammy Boundy, Jaclyn Vogl, James Downing, Jai Jai Jones, Bruce Beaton (last seen in "Chicago"), Frank Moore (last seen in "Jesus Henry Christ"), James Madge, Ian D. Clark, Mishka Thebaud, Taylor Brunatti, Addyson Douglas, Emma Elle Paterson, Valerie O'Connor, Chris Owens (last seen in "A Simple Favor"), Jason Blicker (last seen in "Life" (2015)), Sam Rosenthal, Eoin Duffy, Craig Warnock, Tom Barnett (last seen in "The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day"), Ben Ball, Iona Rose MacKay, Samantha Espie, Aidan Gouveia, Charlie Seminerio, Russell Yeun (last seen in "Bulletproof Monk"), Michael Gordin Shore (last seen in "The Man from Toronto"), Kerry Ann Doherty, Michael Hough, Benny Shilling, Patch Darragh, Dina Roudman, Marvin Karon, Niamh Carolan, Peter McGann, Kyle James Butler, Emily Mitchell, with archive footage of Richard Nixon (last seen in "Fly Me to the Moon"), Gerald Ford (last seen in "Belushi"), Ronald Reagan (last seen in "Lou").
RATING: 6 out of 10 "diet pills", which were really amphetamines - but remember, Trump says he never took drugs, yet another lie.
No comments:
Post a Comment