Talking Movies

March 1, 2025

The Inanity of Evil

Filed under: Talking Politics — Fergal Casey @ 10:22 pm
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…There is an idea of America, some kind of abstraction, but though you may sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: it is simply not there.

This is the first day of a world without America. It’s just gone. It no longer exists. There is no NATO. There is no nuclear shield over Europe, or anywhere else that yesterday thought it was allied with a force for good in the world. Nothing remains of George Bush Sr’s New World Order. We are on our own.

There is something deeply wrong with Donald Trump. Beyond being a semi-literate moronic twelve-year old bully. JD Vance of course is a glib debating champ seventeen-year old bully; he has already told us he will say anything to get ahead. So ignore the words of these fools.

Yesterday in the Oval Office was Eomer telling the truth to a possessed Theoden King parroting the words of a malevolent force, while Grima Wormtongue whispered poison. We will never know why Trump cowers before Putin: agent, asset, useful idiot? And who cares? What matters are deeds – Trump, Vance, and Gabbard act like they are Russian assets.

World War III has already begun, and we are losing.

Russia is sabotaging European elections. Russia is sabotaging European infrastructure. Russia is sabotaging European reality.

Europe needs to be on a war footing. The factories need to run all night in Germany. Poland needs a massive fortified Maginot line the length of its border with Belarus quick as quick can be. And after that the line should march onwards, to make impossible the advance of the Russian meat grinder.

Slava Ukraini. Viva Europa Unida.

December 1, 2024

Notes towards a unified theory of gaslighting

Filed under: Talking Art,Talking Books,Talking Nonsense,Talking Philosophy,Talking Politics — Fergal Casey @ 6:23 pm
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It has been quite a while since I last did one of the whimsically titled ‘The Week in Gaslighting’ pieces. And not for lack of material. But the sheer abundance of material has given me pause, and the notion to try and figure out what ties all this gaslighting together.

“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command” – George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Sometimes gaslighting involves telling someone you didn’t see or hear what you did see and hear. Other times it involves telling someone you did see or hear what you didn’t see or hear. Joe Biden exemplifies both. Joe Biden is as sharp as a tack, we were told, by God, he keeps up a schedule that exhausts his young staffers. And then after the debate, that was, like poor Bunbury, quite exploded. Instead we saw a confused, oftentimes vacant, and habitually querulous old man. He seemed to take offence at people noticing his advanced age. And if Trump was really an American Hitler wouldn’t he feel rather ashamed if his obvious infirmity led him to defeat? Not so long as I did my bestest! By God, that’s the spirit of FDR right there. And so to the second act of gaslighting in this particular American life: Joe Biden did the patriotic thing and stood down with dignity. No, he bloody did not. We all saw that he was dragged off the stage, kicking and screaming, by a shepherd’s crook whittled and deployed by George Clooney and Nancy Pelosi. He kept behaving like a Rodney Dangerfield tribute act: I don’t get no respect for this booming economy! To say that this was tone deaf given that people blamed him for booming inflation doesn’t seem adequate. Biden’s every appearance, as Helen Lewis memorably put it, was an agony akin to watching an old man carry a heavy vase over a just polished floor. His ‘big boy’ press conference began with a verbal gaffe, after a previous verbal gaffe at the NATO presser, and was also around 40 minutes later than scheduled. None of this inspired any confidence that this man could get thru the next four months nevermind another four years. And this is why Kamala Harris was so stumped by Fox News asking her when she became aware of Joe Biden’s cognitive decline. If he’s as sharp as he’s ever been – which was essentially her answer – then the obvious rejoinder is, so why are you here running for President instead? And the answer appears to be, because that was the last kick of a dying horse. Joe Biden was so devoted to his country that he knowingly saddled his party with a candidate who hadn’t even made it to the Iowa caucus. Sheer spite. Or George Washington’s spirit, according to some.

Two things can be true. A tableau can be one thing, and then morph into another entirely different thing. A tableau can be The Last Supper by Da Vinci, and then morph into a tableau of a painting nobody outside France has really heard of called The Feast of the Gods. But, when we can plainly see that The Last Supper has been referenced don’t tell us it hasn’t. We could see it. It’s only one of the most famous images in the world. When the person in the centre tweets about it being a gay new testament, and a drag queen who was part of it says of course it was referencing The Last Supper, don’t tell us The Last Supper hasn’t been referenced. Battlestar Galactica didn’t tell people they hadn’t referenced The Last Supper for a memorable promotional photo they released. And if they had attempted to do so they would have been laughed out of the room. Talking of being laughed out of the room, Raygun. And so the calls to expertise. It’s not The Last Supper, it’s a really obscure painting you haven’t heard of it. It’s not laughably bad breakdancing, you just haven’t done the necessary research to appreciate it. And apparently neither had the judges. The idea here is that you can’t be allowed to say in plain terms what you saw with your own eyes. A painting being referenced in a deliberate poke at the only world faith that (cough) progressives don’t mind being poked in the eye. An athlete (one uses the term loosely) performing on the world stage at a level which had people unfamiliar with the sport wondering what was she was doing there, much like previous musings over the OIympians Eddie the Eagle and Eric the Eel. It’s Art.

All attempts at defending Raygun fall down on the plain fact that people with no breakdancing experience could easily replicate her moves and post them to TikTok. Which made me think of the quote from Travesties where Tom Stoppard has a character rant at another for redefining what constitutes art to excuse his own shortcomings at it. In short – an artist is someone who does well or exceptionally what most people cannot do well or at all. Raygun does not perform to a level that bored teenagers couldn’t instantly and mockingly equal. But the redefining of art has been going on for quite some time. Hence Sean Moncrieff bringing on an art history professor to defend modern art after the latest accident where a janitor, who doesn’t have a degree and so therefore sees what is actually in front of them, swept up as rubbish a piece of modern art. Essentially modern art since conceptual art really got going has been bedevilled by artists becoming aphorists. Aphorists like Wilde or Nietzsche would have been stumped if you asked them to paint something. And aphorists like the people who tape a banana to a wall or manufacture some beer cans to strew on the gallery floor would be equally stumped by a request to whip out the easels and oils and dash off a quick impression. Because they cannot do it. What was once the requirement for calling yourself an artist, and what most people who don’t have a degree in art history still think of as the quintessence of art. What to do if your portraits resemble monkey Jesus? What you can do is come up with quippy or enigmatic titles for artworks and then put something totally indifferent underneath the title to become art by the power of aphorism.

October 29, 2024

Notes from Grim Exile

Filed under: Talking Nonsense,Talking Politics — Fergal Casey @ 12:40 pm
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B. Bradley Bradlee, roving ambassador and newspaperman, had come out of semi-retirement in Cádiz to cover the 2024 Presidential Campaign in the USA. He has now, in a puzzling move, fled the country with just seven days until polling day, and files this report from somewhere in the Iberian Peninsula.

Donald Trump is going to be re-elected. This is not a prediction, this is a certainty. Ignore the bookies, ignore the polls, look at the stock price of DJT on the tickertapes. Wall Street is pushing all their chips onto Red. And that is why I have got a jump on the likes of Jeffrey Goldberg by fleeing the country before the election results transform 45 into 47. If I learnt anything as a cub reporter on the city beat at the Daily Sentinel it was to listen to Mike Axford. His dictum? If they can remember your name when they’re out rabble-rousing then you’re in bad shape if they win. And so I have returned to Europe, but not to where I’m known, I’m in hiding. If the Company runs me down the next plan involves beards and Morocco.

I had considered the possibility of interior exile in Wyoming, because no three letter agency would think to look for me there because they know the truth – that Wyoming isn’t real. But the lure of the sunshine has drawn me back to the shores of … well, that would be telling. [Editor’s Note: Wyoming is definitely real. I’ve met people from Wyoming.] Two things convinced me of Trump’s imminent imitation of Grover Cleveland. [Editor’s Note: Yes, technically, I’ve only met people who said they were from Wyoming, but, per Sean Connery in The Untouchables, why would anybody who’s not from Wyoming claim to be? Sorry, Wyoming.] The first was the ‘Man Enough’ advert supporting Harris, which is not a parody by Republicans. [Editor’s Note: I mean for heaven’s sake, there were six seasons of Longmire! Wyoming is a real place.]

When the truth dawned that this was true Blue I could only think – with friends like these, who needs enemies? [Editor’s Note: Yes, Longmire wasn’t shot in Wyoming, but Rocky IV was. Therefore it’s a real place.] Then came Barack Obama’s anti-pep talk to black men in Pittsburgh. [Editor’s Note: Okay, so they shot Rocky IV in Wyoming to double for Russia because they knew nobody would recognise it because nobody’s ever been there. But just because there’s nobody there doesn’t mean the place they’re not isn’t there.] As motivational tools go, the anti-pep talk is one of the most effective I’ve seen deployed over the years. At utterly destroying morale. [Editor’s Note: Apologies again, Wyoming.] The men who showed up to work feel totally unvalued and check out, and the men who were already checked out feel totally justified.

If Kamala Harris wants to throw a Hail Mary pass at this point she needs to do the JRE podcast. I personally shall remain hunkered down in safety, following in the footsteps of Byron. (Good luck figuring out my location from that specific but maddeningly expansive clue, you federal bozos!)

B. Bradley Bradlee is the fictional editor emeritus of The New York Times. He is a contributing writer for the German weekly Die Emmerich-Zeitung.

May 29, 2024

The Third Man: 75

Filed under: Talking Movies — Fergal Casey @ 8:39 pm
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It has been 75 years since an inimitable theme was first picked out on a zither and a glorious cameo and a piece of ad lib escaped from a film and took on a life of their own.

In the bombed out Vienna of 1949 Carol Reed’s masterpiece, The Third Man, unfolds. It’s a film noir drenched in moral ambiguity. The unconventional score by Anton Karas, a jaunty melody played on a zither, but capable of infinite variations ranging from violence to romance, sets the tone perfectly. Its melancholic strains weave through the narrative, a constant reminder of the city’s, and the characters’, shattered state.

Reed, a master of suspense, utilizes camera angles to heighten the film’s sense of unease. Dutched shots distort perspectives, reflecting the warped realities presented to Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten), a writer who arrives in Vienna only to find his old friend, Harry Lime (Orson Welles), is being buried. As Holly delves deeper into the mystery surrounding Harry’s demise, the camera placement, often on extreme close-ups, reflects his bewilderment an outsider, a naive American thrust into a world of moral decay, surrounded by people speaking German, and three other official languages beside; all part of the fractured state of post-war Vienna.

The bombed-out buildings of Vienna are more than just a disorienting backdrop; where characters go out a window and somehow run up rubble to get to a higher street. They are a physical manifestation of the moral ruin that permeates the film. Harry Lime, initially sketched in memoriam by Holly as a charming rogue, is revealed to be a ruthless black marketeer profiting from the suffering of others. Trevor Howard’s officer, first introduced with a villain’s sinister shiny leather overcoat, is not a villain; but his willingness to use pressure points on innocent people to get what he wants certainly puts him right on the dangerous edge. That is of course screenwriter Graham Greene’s self-described home turf. The city’s crumbling infrastructure becomes a symbol of the collapse of traditional values, when even the Soviet officer shrugs his shoulders to the British officer at doing the wrong thing because what else can one do in a place like this.

As Holly unravels the truth, he is forced to confront the story he told himself to make his world make sense. Initially blinded by loyalty, he eventually recognizes the depth of Harry’s depravity. This journey is beautifully portrayed by Cotten, who captures Holly’s transformation from a wide-eyed innocent to a disillusioned man in a sense performing moral outrage to one who is then forced to choose between friendship and morality when it turns out moral outrage isn’t something you shout from the rooftops it’s something that weighs you down; even to the depths.

The spectre of Orson Welles hangs heavy over this film, even though his screen time is startingly limited. His inimitable voice imbues Harry Lime with an unforgettable charisma; which led to a strange afterlife for the character in a radio drama where he was reinvented as a sort of antihero – and whose scripts even gave rise to Welles’ somewhat addled film Mr Arkadin. Harry makes no bones about his activities; leading to the much quoted ‘Cuckoo clock’ speech. And even when he has crossed the line in cinema, killing someone sympathetic onscreen, a flicker of charm remains, a testament to Welles’ captivating performance and Graham Greene’s masterfully written script which gives us Reed’s indelible image of Welles’ fingers reaching thru a sewer grating into the street, tasting freedom but unable to grasp it, before a moment of acquiescence and strange mercy.

June 30, 2021

Miscellaneous Movie Musings: Part XL

Filed under: Talking Movies — Fergal Casey @ 9:30 pm
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As the title suggests, so forth.

Tom Cruise is America, or something

I’d been thinking about this for a while, but was finally spurred into action by Megan Garber’s recent Atlantic piece on Top Gun as infomercial for nothing less than the US of A itself. She’s absolutely right. Top Gun exudes Reagan’s America even more purely than Stallone asking in Rambo: First Blood – Part II whether America gets to win Vietnam this time. (Yes, Rambo, of course.) But whither Reagan’s America now? And so to the once boyish now aged Cruiser… It occurred to me when recently watching it on TV that Cruise in Mission: Impossible – Fallout is almost a stand-in for America, maybe even Joe Biden, now. He knows that he is not physically on top of this, but his instincts remain true, and his resolve undimmed though tinged with desperation. The repeated insistence by Cruise that he will find a way, make it work, figure it out – I won’t let you down! almost seems to reflect the figure America currently cuts on the world stage. Hapless, diminished, but bloody determined to live up to its own heroic self-image.

Movie musicals are too long

I was thinking about why I haven’t loved so many of the great filmed Broadway musicals as much as I ‘should’, given that I love musicals onscreen and onstage, and then it hit me. They are too long. It could really be that simple. En masse. And they are too long because… they are too long. To be less simple. Finally watching South Pacific last year I got more out of it than most filmed Broadway musicals hitherto because I gave myself an interval. I paused the movie, made some tea, mooched about the place, reflected on what had happened so far and wondered where things might go next. As one does at an interval in a Broadway musical. I haven’t really tried this out to the extent that I can pronounce a definitive verdict on this theory, but I do think it explains why the likes of West Side Story and My Fair Lady never really seemed to connect with me the way shorter musicals like Kiss Me Kate and The Rocky Horror Picture Show did.

August 26, 2020

Miscellaneous Movie Musings: Part XXXV

Filed under: Talking Books,Talking Movies,Talking Television — Fergal Casey @ 4:11 pm
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As the title suggests, so forth.

I tell you R-Patz, I just can’t stop washing my hands lately. You’d think I’d been reading Heidegger or something.

The End of Cinema, or at least American-led cinema

And so Tenet is here. Eventually. The most anticipated summer blockbuster of 2020 might also be the only summer (or autumn or winter) blockbuster of 2020 that actually gets released in cinemas. But not in America. I am still tentative about venturing to a cinema for the first time since the coronavirus arrived, but it’s a dilemma. There is no such dilemma Stateside, because Tenet is not being released in America. In some senses this merely makes painfully obvious what was already to be gleaned from statistical analysis of say Transformers or Fast and Furious: major American movies make more money overseas than in America. But the risk, to simply cut off the American market and throw it away as unnecessary, is still breathtaking on the part of Christopher Nolan and Warner Bros. And it seems, in this week of make-believe by Donald Trump that everything is rosy in the Rose Garden, that the pandemic has been defeated by his amazing leadership, that the roaring economy is now roaring again in a V shaped recovery, to take on an almost mythic cultural and political heft. The free world has given up on America providing any sort of leadership, and now even America’s own dream factory has given up on America. Americana still sells overseas, but the country itself is no longer a viable market.

There is an idea of a United States of America, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real country, only an entity, something illusory, and though it can hide its cold heart and you can see its flag-waving and hear its anthem deafening your ears and maybe you can even sense its values are probably comparable: it simply is not there.

Tarantino misreads 1960s television

When I returned home last August from watching Quentin Tarantino make shameful pigswill of reality with his nonsense version of the Manson Family Murders I watched the end of Kill Bill: Volume 2 randomly playing on TV and then turned on True Movies for their late night re-runs of The Man from UNCLE, and this only increased my annoyance with QT for also shamefully calumning late 1960s TV. Cinematographer Robert Richardson has noted that Tarantino deliberately included camera moves in the Western pilot that our hero Rick Dalton appears in that would have been utterly impractical for the era. Taken beside how he presents Rick’s appearance in the real show The FBI as a bad joke, you’d be hard put not to think that Tarantino is implying 1960s television was a waste of time. Which is odd given how he’s been perpetually circling a movie based on a 1960s TV show – Star Trek. The truth is that 1960s television was actually pretty good: The Prisoner, The Avengers, The Fugitive, The Man from UNCLE, Star Trek, The Twilight Zone, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Thunderbirds, Mission: Impossible, Hawaii Five-O, The Monkees, Batman, The Invaders, Lost in Space, The Time Tunnel, Doctor Who, I Dream of Jeannie, Bewitched, Hogan’s Heroes, Rawhide, The Champions,  Land of the Giants, Gilligan’s Island, Get Smart, The Munsters, My Favourite Martian, The Addams Family, Flipper, The Flinstones, Joe 90, Stingray, Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons, Dad’s Army, Steptoe and Son. Ask yourself why pop culture would still be in thrall to so many of these shows if they were all a bad joke…

May 29, 2020

Miscellaneous Movie Musings: Part XXXIII

Filed under: Talking Movies — Fergal Casey @ 8:36 pm
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As the title suggests, so forth.

If not Lazenby, then who?

Almost anyone. But seriously, folks. There were any number of actors in England in 1968 who could have done a better job of picking up the keys to Sean Connery’s Aston Martin. A typically three-cornered hat discussion with Friedrich Bagel and The Engineer to the music of de Falla produced this shortlist of contenders:

Rod Taylor, Alan Bates, Albert Finney, Oliver Reed, Michael Caine, Roger Moore, Terence Stamp, Anthony Hopkins

Patrick McGoohan, Malcolm McDowell, Christopher Lee, Nicol Williamson, David Warner, Edward Fox

Now, not all of these people would have been asked, and some of them would likely have refused had they been asked, (Alan Bates and Nicol Williamson spring to mind), and some of them would likely have refused contemptuously (*Dear EON, Patrick McGoohan has had quite enough of playing spies at this point, thank you very much). The EON producers would never have seriously asked a bona fide film leading man like Caine, in order to keep the budget down. They would have asked a TV star like Roger Moore, sadly tied up with The Saint, or Timothy Dalton, a supporting player in a major film. As indeed they did. But the actual shortlist of undistinguished Bond contenders from whom Lazenby won based on a screen test is the stuff of madness when you consider that all these alternatives were available. The roguishness of Oliver Reed’s 007, the undercurrent of menace of Malcolm McDowell’s Bond, the unpredictability of David Warner’s agent: these are the roads not taken. There seems to be some sort of retrospective attempt to insist they needed to cast an unknown actor, like they had with Sean Connery. But Sean Connery was not unknown when he was cast. Far from it, he had already appeared in Darby O’Gill and the Little People and his supporting role in The Longest Day would have been appreciated by British TV audiences who, between 1959 and 1961, had seen him as Count Vronsky, Hotspur, Macbeth and Alexander the Great. He was not an unknown, he was quite well known to British audiences as a leading man playing historic roles. Lazenby by contrast was quite well known to British audiences for advertising Fry’s chocolate bars.

The critical rehabilitation narrative

I’ve been thinking recently about what we might dub the critical rehabilitation narrative. Nothing seems to please some critics more than to discover neglected masterpieces, to rescue from the discard bin gems that were unappreciated at the time. The only problem is sometimes the critics are very pleased with themselves, their wider critical narrative powers along, and it’s only a minor detail that the film in question is still rubbish. That’s not to say that it is wrong to revisit films and see if they were misjudged; after all Fight Club suffered hugely from being released so soon after Columbine. But sometimes there is much to be said for reading the original reviews and getting a bracing perspective, like disinterring The Cabinet of Dr Caligari from the reverence of generations of film students and discovering in Peter Gay’s Weimar Culture that its own writers disowned the finished film for changes made to its finale which they regarded as dangerously reversing its political message, and doing so at a time that imperilled the nascent republic. Or realising that Matthew Modine saying recently that Full Metal Jacket has aged better than other Vietnam films because it’s finale of urban insurgency could be in Iraq only proves the point of the objections made by critics on release. Because of the WB indulging Kubrick’s power-tripping laziness he had departed from the novel’s jungle war conclusion to instead depict the (easily manufactured in England) ruined city of Hue, because he couldn’t be bothered leaving England. And it would be hard to easily manufacture in England a jungle war. Just as well Vietnam wasn’t noted for being a JUNGLE WAR. Revolution was reviled on release and exiled Pacino to Broadway. But Revolution is an unfocused film of baffling decisions, like shooting it entirely in England and not having Annie Lennox sing, rather than an outright atrocity. Watching its depiction of the start of the American Revolution, the mob bullying, the expropriation, the self-interested and abrasive self-righteousness is oddly reminiscent of Doctor Zhivago’s portrayal of the Bolsheviks. It’s hard not to think that this enraged American critics at the time, who sublimated that rage into attacks from other angles. And yet the final minutes of Revolution feature a truly astonishing tracking shot, a technical marvel and a triumph of production design, that I have never ever heard anyone praise or even mention. If you can’t do the hard work of salvaging the good from amidst the bad then what is the point of critical rehabilitation?

April 7, 2020

Any Other Business: Part XLIX

Filed under: Talking Movies,Talking Politics,Talking Television — Fergal Casey @ 3:39 pm
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As the title suggests, so forth.

RIP Honor Blackman

Honor Blackman has died aged 94; she was the oldest surviving Avenger. I wrote last summer about what a disconcerting experience it was watching True Movies’ scrambled late night re-runs of The Avengers. I had only previously seen a handful of Cathy Gale episodes late at night on RTE 1 over 20 years earlier. As True Movies jumped between episodes and seasons of the first three years of the show it became evident that it was something of a miracle that it ever became the classic show it did. It was only when Blackman debuted in the first episode of the second season, ‘Mr Teddy Bear’, that things really started to click. The chemistry between Steed and Gale, and her judo prowess, defined the show as The Avengers. In retrospect she fared much better than Diana Rigg in transferring from The Avengers to Bond. I remember watching On Her Majesty’s Secret Service for the first time after devouring Channel 4’s re-runs of The Avengers in the mid-90s, and being immensely frustrated that Rigg’s Bond girl was so damn passive. By contrast Blackman as Pussy Galore in Goldfinger walked from a TV role into a movie role and traded away none of her antagonistic strength, flirtatious charm, and judo prowess. And that is not something that can be said, even now, for many actresses making that transition; just look at Jessica Alba’s failure to ever find a film role to remotely equal her star-making lead in Dark Angel.

Donnie Dumbo

Trump Delenda Est

I think at this point we can say that Trump has not grown into the job; he has actually got far worse. What can be said about a man whose ego is so monstrous that he has transformed press briefings on a pandemic into virtual campaign rallies, who is so incredibly incapable of not making a pandemic all about him that it drives hardened journalists to profanity in their disbelief? This is his shooting people on 5th Avenue moment. People have died, are dying, and will continue to die because of Donald J Trump’s ego. The bragging, the bluster, the bullsh-t, the strong impression of functional illiteracy; a ten year old is trying to run one of the world’s biggest countries, and not a smart ten year old, but the type of bully who when called upon to read aloud in class painfully plods along not reading so much as sounding out the letters he sees as he sees them as if he’s never seen them before in his life. It explains much when you actually allow yourself to admit that Trump probably cannot read. He can pick out certain words, and improvise around them, with his simplified vocabulary. But he cannot read. If you forced him to deliver a well-known Bible passage at a Mass, he would endure agonies, because it would be made obvious thru cutting off his favourite tactic of paraphrase and riffing. His decision to weigh in on the firing of Captain Crozier, who was actually trying to do his job, makes a lot of sense from that perspective: the peculiar gripe that this was not English Lit, don’t write a letter, just call someone, makes perfect sense coming from a man who cannot read. Mike Pence probably wouldn’t do a stellar job of steering America thru this pandemic, but, freed of Trump and the need to continually massage Trump’s ego, he might not make things worse by actively promoting snake-oil remedies from the White House. Invoke the 25th Amendment now.

April 1, 2020

President Trump announces plan to 25 himself

Filed under: Talking Nonsense — Fergal Casey @ 3:20 pm
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President Donald J Trump will shortly be removed from office, writes B. Bradley Bradlee who talked to Trump exclusively; after he was mysteriously teleported from quarantine in Hubei province to the Presidential suite in Mar-a-Lago when Bill Nye’s attempts to prove Chopped do not slice salads to subatomic level backfired.

Trump said the idea came to him while watching Donald Sutherland as the Architect in The Matrix Reloaded

President Trump explained that he had decided to sign a letter invoking Section 3 of the 25th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America; removing himself from office until such time as he shall write another pursuant letter reinstating himself in office; after catching the end of The Matrix Reloaded on Fox the other night. “I was watching that, with the Architect. You know the scene. Everyone knows it. Tremendous actor, Donald Sutherland. Great guy. Great American. Really loved him as the wise leader in the Hunger Games movies. You know the Hunger Games movies? Everybody does.”

Trump then came to the point – “And he says, this is what he says, in the movie, I couldn’t solve the problem, because I’m too perfect. Isn’t that something? I couldn’t solve the problem, because I’m too perfect. It wasn’t that he couldn’t solve the problem, it was that the problem, it could only be solved, by somebody who wasn’t as perfect. And I thought, My God, that’s me! You know?” When pressed Trump confirmed he was talking about the Wuhan Flu Coronavirus. “What the country needs now, Bradley, is for me to step away, because I’m just too perfect.”

Trump continued, at length –“Did you know it says it, right there in the Constitution, that the Constitution is there to form a more perfect Union? Did you know that? Most people don’t know this. But it’s right there. I know it. Nobody knows more about the Constitution than I do. And I thought about that and it makes sense, of course it makes sense. If I’m perfect, that’s what I should be focusing on – not just Keeping America Great Again, but making America as perfect as I am. So that’s where my focus should be for the next while.”

When pressed on when he would resume office Trump speculated “the 4th of July has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? I think that would be a good time. Mike Pence can handle this Wuhan Flu Coronavirus. I mean don’t get me wrong, he’s a great guy, very appreciative of what I’ve done for him, but he’s not perfect. If it wasn’t for me he’d probably have lost the election in Indiana to that kid Mayor. He’s exactly the kind of lesser mind you need to stop everyone from getting the common cold.” Trump then asked whether I was with Fox. He was puzzled as to why a German weekly had been granted access, and how I didn’t sound German. I explained I was American, writing for a German weekly, but had worked for — at which point the President instructed the Secret Service to “kick this bum to the kerb”. As I was being manhandled out of the suite Trump asked how I had got in. I protested that with quantum physics it’s hard to assign blame, but the bag should probably stop with Bill Nye, and he roared “The SCIENCE Guy?! You liberal elite ARE all working together!”

B. Bradley Bradlee is the fictional editor emeritus of The New York Times. He is currently a roving reporter breaking quarantine by strange physics for the German weekly Die Emmerich-Zeitung.

*Bill Nye wishes to clarify that his experiment slicing salad did not ‘backfire’, it simply disproved his hypothesis, and that is why science is science; failure always teaches you something – in this case that overly sliced salads can open wormholes.

February 21, 2020

Any Other Business: Part XLIV

Filed under: Talking Politics,Talking Television — Fergal Casey @ 2:40 pm
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As the title suggests, so forth.

“What a shocking cheap hat!”

Deja vu, all over again. Two years on from ‘Beast from the East’, as we suffer thru a month of storms every weekend, once again if you walk into Dundrum Town Centre and mooch through Penneys or M&S you will find woolly hats and rugged scarves and thermal gloves being shovelled out at the door at knockdown prices. You will find shorts, bikinis, polo shirts, and sun-hats as the new in thing to wear. The clothes on sale in our shops have, somehow, as always, changed seasons well in advance of the actual weather. We have just had the coldest days of the winter and are expecting more of the foulest and yet the clothes offered as just in at this moment will be unwearable until June. I need an economist to explain to me how this makes sense – do people really buy their wardrobes that far in advance? – doesn’t anybody suddenly need a new scarf or a heavier hat in February or March when it snows after the shops have shifted seasons? – do the shops not take a commercial beating selling clothes that won’t be needed for another five months? What’s going on, in short, and why does this happen season after season? In the meantime I shall be pulling on a trapper hat much like the one pictured above, bought at an outrageous discount last week at H&M.

The Gibraltar Gambit

Previously I’ve suspected there was a recurring Google Calendar alert somewhere in the Spanish civil service. This reminded them to enrage Michael Howard into threatening to cable out the entire Mediterranean fleet by periodically asking for Gibraltar back. Now it seems the Greeks are getting in on the act, if the return of the Elgin marbles really has been tacked onto proposals for trade talk tactics between Britain and the remaining members of the EU. Where might this all end? Yield Rockall? There are so many grievances that so many countries have with the lonely island that the list could get truly absurd. Mind you would it really be any more absurd than the American list topped by “– and agree to have all your chickens dumped in chlorine like they’ve been to a low-rent swimming pool”?

A bold artistic decision to ensure the future of the show … that cancels the future of the show

I feel like this is a corollary to the previous series of entries on attempts to make mucho money by terrible artistic decisions that ended up making predictably terrible art and then hysterically nada money. It appears Hulu have absolutely no plans whatsoever to continue their revival of Veronica Mars. Critics lauded the bold artistic decision creator Rob Thomas considered necessary to ensure the future of the show, but die-hard fans excoriated that bold artistic decision, which they saw as simply dynamiting Veronica Mars. And as the die-hard fans were the only reason a cancelled Zeros network show had such a curious afterlife in the first place this was a move that backfired spectacularly; quelle surprise but the brickbats of the fans matters more to Hulu than the garlands of the critics. I will probably never bother with the Hulu season because I don’t want to see the final five minutes. (And I had been intrigued to see JK Simmons, who was so good in Thomas’ unseen show Party Down, enter the world of Neptune.) I don’t check out of this universe lightly; I have both of the Veronica Mars novels and all three seasons on DVD. When I had to introduce Elliot Harris to Veronica Mars from scratch, before catching the Veronica Mars movie in the one cinema in Dublin showing it, I sent him six clips I thought would give him a flavour of the show and act as a ‘Previously on Veronica Mars…’  I told him if he only watched one that Logan’s ‘Epic Love’ speech to Veronica was by far the most important one. Rob Thomas’ justification for throwing that speech, that dynamic in the morgue bin was that for the show to continue as a noir mystery Veronica had to be a lone wolf. Well… offhand the existence of The Thin Man and Moonlighting suggests otherwise. Maybe simply have Logan appear from time to time, as the service permits, as in the novels. Anything but blow him to blazes so that the show can continue in limited runs whenever Thomas and Kristen Bell can fit it in their schedules. If nobody is left who wants to see the show then your damn schedules could be free enough to accommodate a network season but it doesn’t matter.

Starbucks doubles down in Dundrum

To return to Dundrum Town Centre and the laws of economics puzzling me, how the devil is Starbucks returning to its previous haunt by the Mill Pond? This was the smaller of their two Dundrum Town Centre establishments, and shared its space with Mao. After some mysterious happening an eternal refurbishment unsurprisingly led to the departure of both Starbucks and Mao and a dizzying array of temporary tenants (bean bags, arcade games, net cafe, Italian furniture) before now Starbucks has returned, to take just not its old slot, but Mao’s slot too!

iZombie, oDear

After two years or so of a break since finishing season 2 of iZombie I found myself utterly lost when attempting to start season 3 and so went back to the pilot and re-watched the show, enjoying it greatly. And then, as I finally made my way into new episodes, a sinking feeling started to take hold. Season 3 of iZombie is not all that great… There are several threads one could point to that unravelled the fabric of the show: the utter idiocy of the Peyton/Blaine/Ravi storyline, the utter idiocy of Major’s hooking up with a clearly unhinged Chaos Killer groupie, the utter idiocy of Ravi spilling the entire secret history of the zombie plague to a reporter unawares. All revolved around characters behaving like complete morons at odds with their previous actions on the show. The wider conspiracies surrounding the activities of Fillmore Graves and Zombie Truthers never quite exerted the magnetic pull of the Max Rager machinations of the previous season, and this less satisfying arc tended to swamp the case of the week mysteries which themselves became more hit and miss.

Mitt Romney: Profile in Courage

How unexpected. A year and a half ago I was remembering the 2012 election duel between Obama and Romney because of College Humour’s ‘Gangnam Style’ parody video ‘Mitt Romney Style’. At the time I referred to the robotic Romney, who surprised Obama in the first debate by having had a Reagan upgrade to the operating software;  beginning with a perfectly executed joke that left Obama so stunned that he staggered thru that entire debate punch-drunk. I had seen Romney’s sons appear on Conan O’Brien’s TBS show and had mused that George Romney’s charisma had skipped a generation. Of late, however, the interviews Romney has been giving to the Atlantic‘s McKay Coppins suggests a looser more devil-may-care character has emerged in the last job he will ever have. Eighteen months ago I mused that everyone had been glad that the RNC intimated to Romney that he should stop seeking to run again in 2016, but what people wouldn’t give now to have had Romney rather than Trump as the GOP candidate in 2016. And now it seems Romney, at eight years distance from his run when it was obligatory to demonise him, is revealing what he might have been like as a President in a crisis – voting his conscience though the heavens fall.

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