BEFORE: Another month is over after today, and I'm getting very close to another century mark, which would be the 2/3 completion point for this Movie Year. Just a few more docs and I'll be there. But here's the format breakdown for July:
17 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD):
Sigourney Weaver, the Most Iconic Action Heroine,
Earth, Wind & Fire (To Be Celestial vs. That's the Weight of the World),
Sergio Leone: The Italian Who Invented America,
Roberta,
Diana Ross: Supreme Sensation,
ABBA: Super Troupe,
Paul Anka: His Way,
Adam Sandler: Funny Guy,
Madonna: Goddess of Pop,
Bang My Box: The Robin Byrd Story,
Cheech & Chong's Last Movie,
Mister Rogers: It's You I Like,
Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man!,
Roy Orbison Forever,
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: Live from Gatorville,
Stevie Nicks: Wild at Heart,
John McCain: For Whom the Bell Tolls
1 Movie watched on cable (not saved): Fleetwood Mac: Live in Boston
4 watched on Netflix:
Chris & Martina: The Final Set,
Devo,
Being Eddie,
Pamela: A Love Story
2 watched on Amazon Prime: Flipside, When We Went MAD!
2 watched on Hulu: Gloria Gaynor: I Will Survive, Child Star
2 watched on Hulu: Gloria Gaynor: I Will Survive, Child Star
1 watched on Disney+: Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story
1 watched on Peacock: Lorne
1 watched on HBO MAX: David Lynch: The Art Life
29 TOTAL
It's very tricky to go from Stevie Nicks to John McCain, but I'm very sneaky - Bill Clinton carries over from "Stevie Nicks: Wild at Heart" because he used "Don't Stop" as a campaign song, and he's here tonight to talk about John McCain. Everything's connected, I just have to figure out how. Today's "Get to Know a State" profile is similarly sneaky - there's no doubt footage here of McCain campaigning for President with Sarah Palin as his running mate, and she was from ALASKA (OK, Idaho first and then ALASKA!). I'm not likely to get another tie-in with Alaska, so here we go:
Date admitted to the U.S.: January 3, 1959 (49th state)
Claim to fame: It's freaking huge and close to Russia and I think there was oil there at one point.
Nickname: The Last Frontier
State Motto: "North to the Future"
State Flower: No flowers there.
State Bird: Willow ptarmigan
State Fish: King salmon
State Mammal: Moose
State Gemstone: Jade
State Mineral: Gold
State Dog: Alaskan malamute
Notable Sports Teams: None I can find - the state sport is dog sledding, after all.
Fun Facts: It's just so freakishly big - like over 663,000 square miles big. If it were a country it would be the 18th largest country in the world. 34,000 miles of shoreline, there are mountains, volcanoes, tundra, you name it. After oil the next biggest industry there is tourism, a lot of people from the Lower 48 go up there because they can't believe how big it is, also how far away. The westernmost point is about as far away from the Easternmost point as San Francisco is from Miami. 290 million acres of it is overseen by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, while the state owns another 101 million acres under the Statehood Act. That still leaves 44 million acres that are owned by 12 Native American corporations. But it's the least densely populated state, and only two other states have fewer people, Vermont and Wyoming. Meaning if you get lost in Alaska, it could be a long time before you see another person.
Nope, never been there. I'm still at 21 states visited out of 29.
THE PLOT: In-depth look at the life of John McCain, from his time as a POW in Vietnam to his three decades of service in the U.S. Senate and two presidential campaigns.
AFTER: The first part of this film is set in a very different time in U.S. history - there was a corrupt President who got the country involved in a war in Asia for very sketchy reasons, and kept telling America it was going well, but the truth was that there was no workable plan for winning that war. Well, I'm just glad to know that we all learned something and that couldn't possibly happen all over again.
The John McCain that served as a long-term Senator from Arizona was a navy pilot during the Vietnam conflict, and he was like third or fourth generation Navy, the son of an Admiral who figured the best place for him was in the air shooting down the enemy, while his father commanded a fleet of ships. Well, life had other plans for him after his plane got shot down, and he was forced to eject over Hanoi, fractured both arms and a leg during that ejection, landed in a lake and was pulled to safety by Vietnamese citizens who beat him severely. Maybe they didn't like the fact that he had been flying over their city and shooting stuff, who can say?
Anyway, the five years that he spent in captivity in the "Hanoi Hilton" are detailed here, though his captors found out that his father was of high rank in the military, at first they thought they could use him to gain leverage to win (or stop) the war, but when they realized that wasn't going to happen, he was treated worse and even tortured. His father never pulled any favors to try and get him rescued or traded back in a prisoner exchange, that just wouldn't have been right, but I don't know, I think maybe they could have tried? I mean, sure, you have your principles but wouldn't you also prefer to get your son back, if possible?
It did happen, the war eventually ended and the return of prisoners was negotiated, but the effects were more long-term. Like many veterans he suffered from PTSD in addition to his physical injuries, and also there was an effect on his marriage, he had to get to know his children all over again, and apparently he had a few affairs along the way. But he got a job serving as the Navy's liaison to the U.S. Senate, and that was his entry into politics. Later on when he got divorced and married again, and was living in Phoenix, Arizona, he set his sights on becoming a member of the House of Representatives, well, I guess that beats working for your father-in-laws beer distributorship. As a Rep (during the Reagan years) he was assigned to the House Committee on Interior Affairs. Later he was on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, but many of his decisions were colored by his Vietnam experiences, like he criticized Reagan for taking too long to pull U.S. troops out of Lebanon.
He ran for the Senate in 1987, as Barry Goldwater retired after 30 years as Arizona's senator, and there he joined the Armed Services Committee, as well as the Commerce Committee and the Indian Affairs Committee. Well, sure, he knew a lot about Armed Services and even more about affairs...but then there was a scandal over political contributions from financial companies, and McCain was named as one of the "Keating Five", five senators who appeared to have tried to influence federal regulators who were investigating a company called Lincoln Savings and Loan. All he did was meet with those regulators, and he was cleared of acting improperly, but still, it wasn't a good look if somebody who got contributions from a company also met with the government regulators who were investigating that company.
But he kind of got his reputation back when he championed campaign finance reform, and also served on the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA affairs, obviously a cause that meant something to him. He worked with frenemy John Kerry to keep investigating whether there were still active POW's in Vietnam, which honestly nobody was really sure about, even in the early 1990's. And he voted to confirm President Clinton's Supreme Court nominees, like Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, because back then not all decisions were made along party lines.
Then came the 2000 Presidential elections, and McCain threw his hat in the ring - but it was a tough battle against George W. Bush, who was seen as the presumptive heir to his father's job. McCain had a bus called the Straight Talk Express, and held town meetings all over and kept promising the American people he would never lie to them. Yeah, here's the thing, though, that's not a political strategy that tends to work, because voters don't always want to hear the truth, sometimes they like being lied to, whether they know it or not, because it helps them to dream just a little bit, if they think that things are likely to get better. The South Carolina campaign was particularly nasty, both the McCain campaign and the Bush campaign ran negative ads while both were claiming to run positive campaigns. And then somebody asked the "gotcha" question about whether it's OK to keep flying the Confederate flag, and Bush lied about just a bit better than McCain did. I mean, there's no good way to answer that questions, any solid answer is going to anger either liberals or conservatives, McCain did say it should be OK, but then regretted later that he didn't take a strong enough stand against it.
McCain waited out the Bush years and tried again, ran for President in 2008 and got Bush's endorsement (well, Cheney sure wasn't going to run...) and this time McCain only had to go up against Mitt Romney on the Republican side, and then Barack Obama in the November election. This is where McCain most likely bungled things by choosing Sarah Palin as his VP candidate, sure she was a woman and he kind of got points for that, but she was also extremely divisive, and people considered her unqualified too. She said a lot of crazy shit and maybe that's just part of being from Alaska, I don't know, but for a while it was all about hockey moms and bear cubs and reality TV. But the other thing that killed McCain's chances of being President was the 2008 financial crisis, which came at a bad time for Republicans. He also refused to go negative against Obama, and if people in his audience were wary of voting for someone with a Muslim name, and mistook him for Arab, McCain was right there to correct them and point out that Obama was a decent man. Sure, it was the right move as a human, but the wrong one for a politician who wanted to get elected.
Well, we know what went down, McCain lost the 2008 election and went back to the Senate, he played more partisan politics after that, though, and was less likely to compromise or support the Supreme Court picks of a Democrat President. Maybe he was finally learning to play the game and serve his constituency with his Republican flag waving high, I don't know, but he was very criticial of Obama's policies during those years, perhaps he was just trying to get up another run for President in 2016. But even teaming up with Mitt Romney to express concerns about Trump running for office didn't do much - by that point the Trump train was rolling forward and probably couldn't have been stopped. McCain called a bunch of Trump supporters "crazies" and Trump responded by making fun of McCain's capture in Vietnam. I think we all got a glimpse of what Trump was capable then, and it only got worse and worse from there.
In 2017, McCain was treated for a blood clot above his left eye, and his absence caused Mitch McConnell to delay a vote on the American Health Care Act. But a few days later McCain was diagnosed with an aggressive brain tumor, and even though he had brain surgery, and then returned to the Senate in July to cast a deciding vote to NOT allow the Senate to consider bills to replace the Affordable Care Act, he still criticized the party-line voting. Then he remained in Arizona for months to undergo cancer treatment, and only lived a few more months, dying in August of 2018. He requested that George W. Bush and Barack Obama deliver eulogies at his funeral, and also that Trump and Palin were not to be invited. Yeah, that tracks.
Directed by George Kunhardt, Peter Kunhardt, Teddy Kunhardt.
Also starring John McCain (last seen in "Mike Wallace Is Here"), Joe Biden (last seen in "Elton John: Never Too Late"), David Brooks, George W. Bush (last seen in "When We Went MAD!"), Hillary Clinton (last seen in "Martha"), Rick Davis, John Fer, Lindsey Graham (last seen in "Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump"), Victoria Kennedy, John Kerry (last seen in "Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story"), Henry Kissinger (last seen in "Golda"), Joe Lieberman (last seen in "Shock and Awe"), Andy McCain, Bridget McCain, Carol McCain, Cindy McCain, Doug McCain, Joe McCain, Meghan McCain, Sidney McCain, Barack Obama (last seen in "Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man!"), Donald Rumsfeld (last seen in "The Super Bob Einstein Movie"), Mark Salter, Grant Woods
with archive footage of George H.W. Bush (last seen in "Rather"), Steve Carell (also last seen in "When We Went MAD!"), Gary Cooper (ditto), Russ Feingold, Barry Goldwater, Henry B. Gonzalez, Edwin Gray, Charles Keating, Ted Kennedy (last seen in "Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything"), John S. McCain Jr., Richard Nixon (last seen in "Devo"), Michelle Obama (last seen in "Earth, Wind & Fire"), Sarah Palin (last seen in "Big Miracle"), Ronald Reagan (last seen in "Bang My Box: The Robin Byrd Story"), John Vessey and the voice of David Brinkley (last seen in "Being Eddie")
RATING: 5 out of 10 military decorations and medals
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