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dweemeister · 3 years

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2020 Movie Odyssey Awards

Because the 2020 Movie Odyssey Award for Best Original Song final was extended, the 2020 Movie Odyssey Awards themselves are late once more - and all because of me this time out (oops). As you may know, this is the annual awards ceremony to recognize a year of films that I saw for the first time in their entirety in the calendar year. All films featured - with the exception of those in the Worst Picture category - are worth seeing.

The full list of every single film I saw as part of the 2020 Movie Odyssey can be seen in this link.

Best Pictures (I name ten winners, none of which are distinguished above the other nine)

The African Queen (1951)

The Haunting (1963)

The Irishman (2019)

A Letter to Three Wives (1949)

Mädchen in Uniform (1931, Germany)

Once Upon a Time in America (1984)

Ordet (1955, Denmark)

Parasite (2019, South Korea)

The Shop on Main Street (1965, Czechoslovakia)

The Trial (1962)

Seven of these films received 10/10 ratings. The others received 9.5/10 ratings. This Best Picture lineup were the ten best films I saw in all of 2020. The African Queen is a rollicking adventure film with Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn that took me by surprise (I was long put off from the film because of its reputation). It displays some of the most charming moments that only Golden Age Hollywood can offer. Golden Age Hollywood horror may not be scary to viewers; but what it lacks in elicited screams, it makes up in goosebumps. The Haunting is one of the great haunted house movies of all time with its thick atmosphere, fantastic production design, and spectral ambiguity. Watch it in the dark, if you dare.

Two gangster epics with a mournful disposition are also here in Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman and Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America. The former sees Robert De Niro seeking absolution despite personally not being fully regretful; the latter sees a regretful Robert De Niro seeking not absolution, but peace.

Made in Weimar Germany in the years just before the Nazi takeover is a classic of queer cinema, Mädchen in Uniform. Beyond its LGBTQ themes, it is a tale of young women finding friendship amongst each other. On the other side of Europe after its Nazi takeover is The Shop on Main Street - which switches gears between drama to lighthearted comedy to tragedy so nimbly. Another film exemplifying mastery in tonal shifts was the headline-grabber Parasite - an explosive, justly historic movie.

Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s A Letter to Three Wives is a suburban feminist ensemble piece, reflecting on the martial anxieties of women questioning their spousal bliss. The ending there, though not quite storybook, is poignant. Questions of faith, too, are asked in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Ordet - not in others, but in God. The film, one of the greatest films ever made about religious faith, ends impossibly, provocatively.

Best Comedy

The Battle of the Century (1927 short)

Best in Show (2000)

Elmer, the Great (1933)

It Happened on Fifth Avenue (1947)

Klaus (2019)

One Hour with You (1932)

The Princess and the Pirate (1944)

Road to Utopia (1945)

Soul (2020)

Three Little Girls in Blue (1946)

Now I typically give this category to the film that elicits the most belly laughs from me. None of these comedies did that for me this year. So I went with Ernst Lubitsch’s One Hour with You - starring Lubitsch regular Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald. It is what some folks might call a sophisticated comedy. But if you read between the lines, this pre-Code romantic comedy was probably one of the raunchiest things I saw all year.

For example:

POLICE OFFICER: Come on, come on. Where do you think you are? What are you doing? What’s going on here? ANDRE BERTIER: The French Revolution! [resumes kissing Colette] POLICE OFFICER: Hey, you can’t make love in public. ANDRE BERTIER: I can make love anywhere! POLICE OFFICER: No, you can’t! COLETTE BERTIER: Oh, but officer, he can! ANDRE BERTIER (joyously): Darling!

Otherwise, runners-up included It Happened on Fifth Avenue and Best in Show.

Best Musical

Blue Hawaii (1961)

Flower Drum Song (1961)

Hamilton (2020)

The Magic Flute (1975, Sweden)

My Dream Is Yours (1949)

New Orleans (1947)

New York, New York (1977)

One Hour with You

The Shocking Miss Pilgrim (1947)

Three Little Girls in Blue (1946)

You know, if Hamilton was an original musical and not a filmed version of the original Broadway run, it would certainly threaten in this category. Instead, it rounds things out. Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York - as a deconstruction of the mid-century MGM musical - wins out not only its strong soundtrack, but glossy aesthetic that one would not associate with Scorsese. Runners-up are Flower Drum Song (the last movie with at least a majority Asian-American cast until The Joy Luck Club thirty years later and Crazy Rich Asians after that) and Bergman’s adaptation of Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute.

Best Animated Feature

I Lost My Body (2019, France)

Klaus (2019)

The Last Unicorn (1982)

Mad Monster Party? (1967)

Marona’s Fantastic Tale (2019, France)

Melody Time (1948)

Saludos Amigos (1942)

Soul

Weathering with You (2019, Japan)

Wolfwalkers (2020)

Perhaps the least known animated feature of these nominees takes the prize. Anca Damian’s Marona’s Fantastic Tale is gorgeously animated, attempting to tell its story through the point of view of its small canine protagonist. The film appears as a dog might understand the confusing mess that is humanity. Close behind is Cartoon Saloon’s Wolfwalkers and Pixar’s Soul.

Best Documentary

Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment (1963)

Diego Maradona (2019, United Kingdom)

Elvis: That’s the Way It Is (1970)

The Eyes of Orson Welles (2018)

The Great Buster: A Celebration (2018)

I Am Not Your Negro (2016)

I Am Somebody (1970 short)

The River (1938 short)

The T.A.M.I. Show (1964)

Tokyo Olympiad (1965, Japan)

This was the best year for documentaries in a year’s Movie Odyssey for a long, long while. As a part of the tradition of Olympic films, Kon Ichikawa’s Tokyo Olympiad is a chronicle of the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo. The film resembled nothing like the Olympic documentaries before it - choosing not to concentrate on just gold medalists and reportage, but a story of Japan’s reintroduction to the Western world and the pains of the many also-rans in any Olympics. I also considered Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment (a JFK/RFK real-time documentary on the racial integration of the University of Alabama system), Elvis: That’s the Way It Is, The River (a New Deal-funded documentary short about the importance of the Mississippi River - narrated in free verse!), and The T.A.M.I. Show as potential winners, but nothing could eclipse Ichikawa’s monumental effort.

Best Non-English Language Film

The Cave of the Yellow Dog (2005), Mongolia

Emitaï (1971), Senegal

Kaagaz Ke Phool (1959), India

Olivia (1951), France

Ordet, Denmark

Parasite, South Korea

Persona, Sweden

The Shop on Main Street, Czechoslovakia

Sleepwalking Land (2008), Mozambique

Tokyo Olympiad, Japan

My god, this is always a stacked category. So why do I even bother? Because non-English language films - though they shouldn’t be ghettoized and considered a specialty - are nevertheless ghettoized and considered a specialty in America. This sort of category also gives some attention to a few films that don’t make much of an impression in other categories (namely the wondrous Sleepwalking Land and stunning The Cave of the Yellow Dog). But it is Ordet the reigns supreme here, edging out The Shop on Main Street, Parasite, and Kaagaz Ke Phool for this prize.

Best Silent Film

The Battle of the Century

Body and Soul (1925)

Bumping into Broadway (1919 short)

The Dragon Painter (1919)

I Do (1921 short)

Next Aisle Over (1919 short)

Ramona (1928)

The Scar of Shame (1927)

Shoes (1916)

Young Mr. Jazz (1919 short)

Lois Weber was as instrumental to shaping early American cinema as D.W. Griffith or Cecil B. DeMille. And in Shoes, she brings her sense of social righteousness and cinematic innovation to the fore. It is one of her best feature films, and its release came at the height of America’s Progressive Era - a time of greater awareness of industrialization and unregulated capitalism’s ill effects. Distant runners-up are new National Film Registry inductee The Battle of the Century (a Laurel and Hardy film with one of the best pie fights you will see) and Body and Soul (Paul Robeson’s theatrical debut).

Personal Favorite Film

The African Queen

The Cave of the Yellow Dog

The Haunting

A Letter to Three Wives

Marona’s Fantastic Tale

McFarland, USA (2015)

Murder Most Foul (1964)

Stars in My Crown (1950)

Three Little Girls in Blue

The Trial

An understated but nevertheless eloquent screenplay, light humor, and careful attention to all three of its lead actresses roles define A Letter to Three Wives. It is one of the best exercises of empathy I saw all year, amid its tremulous and anxious narrative backdrop. We like to deride post-WWII American film as depicting an idyllic suburbia that never existed... but not here. Byambasuren Davaa’s The Cave of the Yellow Dog captured my heart, too. The film, from Mongolia, was one of the gentlest movies I’ve had the pleasure to see in the longest time. McFarland, USA revived memories in me of high school cross country days; Murder Most Foul was a Ms. Marple whodunit that cements Margaret Rutherford as one of my favorite actresses; the homespun Stars in My Crown is Americana at its finest.

Best Director

Ingmar Bergman, Persona (1961, Sweden)

Carl Theodor Dreyer, Ordet

Guru Dutt, Kaagaz Ke Phool

John Huston, The African Queen

Kon Ichikawa, Tokyo Oympiad

Sergio Leone, Once Upon a Time in America

Joseph L. Mankiewicz, A Letter to Three Wives

Leontine Sagan, Mädchen in Uniform

Ousmane Sembène, Emitaï

Orson Welles, The Trial

Dreyer is in command of the film’s mise en scene from the beginning - culminating in breathtaking scene set-ups for conversations spoken in hushed tones. The style is never oppressive, never showy, and just right for a deeply introspective movie of tried and troubled faith.

Best Acting Ensemble

Edge of the City (1957)

Gosford Park (2001)

The Irishman

A Letter to Three Wives

Little Women (2019)

Marriage Story (2019)

Once Upon a Time in America

Ordet

Parasite

Stars in My Crown

Subtract any one actor from Parasite and the film cannot work as well as it does. Perhaps Song Kang-ho has the best performance in the movie, but that isn’t possible without his fellow cast members putting out the incredible turns that they offer. Ordet is a close second. Behind by a country mile are Gosford Park, A Letter to Three WIves, and Little Women.

Best Actor

Humphrey Bogart, The African Queen

Maurice Chevalier, One Hour with You

Guru Dutt, Kaagaz Ke Phool

Jozef Kroner, The Shop on Main Street

Alan Ladd, This Gun for Hire (1942)

Joel McCrea, Stars in My Crown

Paul Robeson, Body and Soul

Howard Vernon, Le Silence de la mer (1949, France)

Jon Voight, Deliverance (1972)

Denzel Washington, Malcolm X (1992)

Arguably Denzel’s finest. He inhabits Malcolm X - the bravura, the attitude, the pastor-like (and occasionally incendiary) rhetorical devices, the early rage, the standoffishness. It is a magnificent performance. Just behind is Bogart and the irresistible Chevalier.

Best Actress

Bibi Andersson, Persona

Edwige Feuillère, Olivia

Helen Hayes, The Sin of Madelon Claudet (1931)

Katharine Hepburn, The African Queen

Scarlett Johansson, Marriage Story

Ida Kamińska, The Shop on Main Street

Liza Minnelli, New York, New York

Lucia Lynn Moses, The Scar of Shame

Madhabi Mukherjee, The Big City (1963, India)

Waheeda Rehman, Kaagaz Ke Phool

As Ms. Lautmannová, Kamińska - in the autumn of her career - gives us a portrait of devout religiosity, elderly naivete, and otherworldly trust. She and co-star Jozef Kroner play off the other’s performance, one benefitting from the other. It is a delicate, heartbreaking performance. Some ways away are our two Indian actresses, Madhabi Mukherjee and Waheeda Rehman, as well as Bibi Andersson in the dizzying Persona.

Best Supporting Actor

Stephen Boyd, The Man Who Never Was (1956)

Haren Chatterjee, The Big City

James Edwards, The Steel Helmet (1951)

Moses Gunn, Aaron Loves Angela (1975)

Victor McLaglen, The Princess and the Pirate (1944)

Victor Moore, It Happened on Fifth Avenue

Sidney Poitier, Edge of the City

Song Kang-ho, Parasite

Richard Widmark, Kiss of Death (1947)

James Woods, Once Upon a Time in America

For the sixth straight year, Best Supporting Actor - a category almost always filled to the brim with villains - goes to an actor playing a menacing villain. That smirk, that creepy laugh. Holy crap. Widmark knocks it out of the park as the psychopathic Tommy Udo in his debut role. The role, taken by some the wrong way, inspired Tommy Udo frats in American colleges and universities (their central premise: male chauvinism and anti-feminist beliefs). Who else did I consider for a win here? Victor Moore, Sidney Poitier, Song Kang-ho, and James Woods (before he became a twitter conspiracy theorist).

Best Supporting Actress

Tsuru Aoki, The Dragon Painter

Ethel Barrymore, Pinky (1949)

Ruby Dee, Edge of the City

Laura Dern, Marriage Story

Nancy Kwan, Flower Drum Song

Maggie Smith, Gosford Park

Genevieve Tobin, One Hour with You

Emilia Unda, Mädchen in Uniform

Ethel Waters, Pinky

Dorothea Wieck, Mädchen in Uniform

Emilia Unda beats out fellow co-star Dorothea Wieck as the headmistress of the boarding school featured in Mädchen in Uniform. As the strict, uptight disciplinarian, one can see hints behind the facade she displays in front of the girls at the school. Nevertheless, yet another antagonist takes home this award. Also contending are Nancy Kwan and Ethel Waters.

Best Adapted Screenplay

John Huston, James Agee, Peter Viertel, and John Collier, The African Queen

Ladislav Grosman, Ján Kadár, and Elmar Klos, The Shop on Main Street

Steven Zaillian, The Irishman

Joseph L. Mankiewicz and Vera Caspary, A Letter to Three Wives

Christa Winsloe and Friedrich Dammann, Mädchen in Uniform

Leonardo Benvenuti, Piero De Bernardi, Enrico Medioli, Franco Arcalli, Franco Ferrini, and Sergio Leone, Once Upon a Time in America

Samson Raphaelson, One Hour with You

Carl Theodor Dreyer, Ordet

Teresa Prata, Sleepwalking Land

Orson Welles, The Trial

And unlike the mistake the Academy made in just giving the Oscar to Mankiewicz back in the day, the award also goes to his co-screenwriter, Vera Caspary.

Best Original Screenplay

Juan Antonio Bardem, Death of a Cyclist (1955, Spain)

Ousmane Sembène, Emitaï

Julian Fellowes, Gosford Park

Jérémy Clapin and Guillaume Laurant, I Lost My Body

Everett Freeman, Vick Knight, and Ben Markson, It Happened on Fifth Avenue

Bong Joon-ho and Han Jin-won, Parasite

Ingmar Bergman, Persona

Melvin Frank and Norman Panama, Road to Utopia

David Starkman, The Scar of Shame

Delphine Girard, A Sister (2018 short, Belgium)

This is Sembène’s first Movie Odyssey Award, and I think he was probably one of the most overdue. As one of the fathers of African cinema, Sembène’s movies are colored by politics, specifically anti-colonialism, racism, tribal relations, and the destruction of traditional Senegalese life. His biting work to Emitaï is an excoriating piece, and essential to anyone seriously wanting to learn more about movies. No real challengers, in my mind, but the next ones up would have been Bergman and Bong Joon-ho and Han Jin-won.

Best Cinematography

David Schoenauer, The Cave of the Yellow Dog

Michel Remaudeau, Emitaï

Davis Boulton, The Haunting

Rodrigo Prieto, The Irishman

V.K. Murthy, Kaagaz Ke Phool

Norbert Brodine, Kiss of Death

László Kovács, New York, New York

Tonino Delli Colli, Once Upon a Time in America

Kazuo Miyagawa, Shigeo Murata, Shigeichi Nagano, Kenji Nakamura, and Tadashi Tanaka, Tokyo Olympiad

Edmond Richard, The Trial

The Trial unfolds and is shot as if it was a nightmare, albeit a nightmare without any dreamlike elements. With Dutch angles and unconventional use of focus, it is a remarkable film to look at. Having the soon-to-be Orsay Museum as an interior certainly helps. The Cave of the Yellow Dog, The Haunting, Kaagaz Ke Phool, Once Upon a Time in America, and even Tokyo Olympiad would have been worthy winners too.

Best Film Editing

Don Deacon, Born Free (1966)

De Nosworthy and Nicholas T. Proferes, Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment

Tom Priestly, Deliverance

Ernest Waller, The Haunting

Barry Alexander Brown, Malcolm X

Nino Baragli, Once Upon a Time in America

Yang Jin-mo, Parasite

Ulla Ryghe, Persona

Tatsuji Nakashizu, Tokyo Olympiad

Yvonne Martin and Frederic Muller, The Trial

Best Adaptation or Musical Score

S.D. Burman, Kaagaz Ke Phool

José Feliciano and Janna Merlyn Feliciano, Aaron Loves Angela

Nat W. Finston, Woody Herman, Louis Alter, and Edgar De Lange, New Orleans

W. Franke Harling, Oscar Straus, Rudolph G. Kopp, and John Leipold, One Hour with You

Maury Laws and Jules Bass, Mad Monster Party?

Joseph J. Lilley, Don Robertson, Hal Blair, George David Weiss, Hugo Peretti, Luigi Creatore, Sid Tepper, and Roy C. Bennett, Blue Hawaii

Alfred Newman, Flower Drum Song

Edward H. Plumb, Paul J. Smith, and Charles Wolcott, Saludos Amigos

David Raksin, George Gershwin, and Ira Gershwin, The Shocking Miss Pilgrim

Harry Warren, Ralph Blane, and Howard Jackson, My Dream Is Yours

Oh geez what a line-up. But this category favors original musicals above all. And though some might hesitate to call it a musical, Kaagaz Ke Phool’s soundtrack - in its melding of dramatics and music - is as cinematic as they come. As opposed to the let’s-just-put-a-song-here-to-kill-free time attitude of some of these musicals, Kaagaz Ke Phool uses its songs purposefully. In other words, with feeling. Alfred Newman’s adaptation of Flower Drum Song was probably up next.

Best Original Score

John Barry, Born Free

Elmer Bernstein, The Comancheros (1961)

Akira Ifukube, Destroy All Monsters (1968, Japan)

Zdeněk Liška, The Shop on Main Street

Toshiro Mayuzumi, Tokyo Olympiad

Ennio Morricone, Once Upon a Time in America

Alfred Newman, The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965)

Leonard Rosenman, Edge of the City

Virgil Thomson, The River

John Williams, Empire of the Sun (1987)

This is not a sympathy prize for the recently-departed Italian composer. The key cue is the second one featured, "Deborah's Theme" and, when you listen to it, I think it tells you all you need to know about this movie. It's deeply expressive. And in the movie, it's allowed to be prominent. I've seen people say the late Morricone considered this his best score, but I can't find any official word of that anywhere. It is tremendous work, with Bernstein, Newman, and Thomson just behind.

Best Original Song

“Angela”, music and lyrics by José Feliciano and Janna Merlyn Feliciano, Aaron Loves Angela

“Can’t Help Falling in Love”, music and lyrics by Hugo Peretti, Luigi Creatore, and George David Weiss, Blue Hawaii (1961)

“Dekhi Zamaane Ki Yaari / Bichhde Sabhi Baari Baari”, music by S.D. Burman, lyrics by Kaifi Azmi, Kaagaz Ke Phool

“(Do You Know What It Means to Miss) New Orleans”, music by Louis Alter, lyrics by Edgar De Lange, New Orleans

“Farewell to Storyville", music by Louis Alter, lyrics by Edgar De Lange, New Orleans

“Happy Endings", music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb, New York, New York

“Here They Come (From All Over the World)", music and lyrics by P.F. Sloan and Steve Barri, The T.A.M.I. Show

“Is There Still Anything That Love Can Do?", music and lyrics by Yôjirô Noda, Weathering with You

“Theme from New York, New York”, music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb, New York, New York

“Waqt Ne Kiya Kya Haseen Sitam”, music and lyrics by S.D. Burman, Kaagaz Ke Phool

Thank you to all of those who participated in the 2020 Movie Odyssey Award for Best Original Song!

Best Costume Design

Uncredited, The Duke Is Tops (1938)

Irene Sharaff, Flower Drum Song

Jenny Beavan, Gosford Park

Jacqueline Durran, Little Women

Henry Noremark and Karin Erskine, The Magic Flute

Ruth E. Carter, Malcolm X

Marcelles Desvignes and Mireille Leydet, Olivia

Gabriella Pescucci, Once Upon a Time in America

Travis Banton, One Hour with You

Bonnie Cashin, Three Little Girls in Blue

Best Makeup and Hairstyling

Daniel C. Striepeke, John Chambers, Verne Langdon, Jack Barron, Mary Babcock, and Jan Van Uchelen, Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971)

Sallie Jaye and Jan Archibald, Gosford Park

Judy Chin and Fríða Aradóttir. Little Women

Uncredited, Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance (1972)

Uncredited, The Magic Flute

Marietta Carter-Narcisse and John James, Malcolm X

Michael Westmore, Christina Smith, Mary Keats, June Miggins, and Sydney Guilaroff, New York, New York

Carmen Brel, Simone Knapp, Jean Lalaurette, and Maguy Vernadet, Olivia

Ben Nye, The Shocking Miss Pilgrim

Ben Nye, Three Little Girls in Blue

Best Production Design

Norman Reynolds and Harry Cordwell, Empire of the Sun

Alexander Golitzen, Joseph C. Wright, and Howard Bristol, Flower Drum Song

Stephen Altman and Anna Pinnock, Gosford Park

Elliot Scott and John Jarvis, The Haunting

Bob Shaw and Regina Graves, The Irishman

M.R. Achrekar, Kaagaz Ke Phool

Henny Noremark, Anna-Lena Hansen, and Emilio Moliner, The Magic Flute

Harry Kemm, Robert De Vestel, and Ruby R. Levitt, New York, New York

Dennis Gassner and Lee Sandales, 1917 (2019)

Carlo Simi, Once Upon a Time in America

The production design, or the haunted house, was a character. Nothing else in this category could compare.

Achievement in Visual Effects (all are winners because it would be unfair to compare the visuals of 1917 against When Worlds Collide)

Babe: Pig in the City (1998)

Destroy All Monsters

The Irishman

1917

Red Dawn (1984)

Plymouth Adventure (1952)

War of the Worlds (2005)

When Worlds Collide (1951)

Worst Picture

Age 13 (1955 short)

Fireman, Save My Child! (1932)

Frankie and Johnny (1966)

The Greatest Story Ever Told

Red Dawn

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018)

Fuck Fallen Kingdom.

Honorary Awards:

Colored Players Film Corporation, for its thematically courageous race films, tackling issues neglected by Hollywood

Harold Michelson, for his contributions as an illustrator and storyboard artist (posthumous)

Lillian Michelson, for her dedication as a film researcher and archivist

Tadahito Mochinaga, for achievements in stop-motion animation with Rankin/Bass

Floyd Norman, for his pioneering career in cinematic animation

FILMS WITH MULTIPLE NOMINATIONS (excluding Worst Picture... 57)

Ten: Once Upon a Time in America Nine: Kaagaz Ke Phool Seven: New York, New York; One Hour with You Six: The African Queen; Gosford Park; The Irishman; Parasite; The Shop on Main Street; The Trial Five: Flower Drum Song; The Haunting; A Letter to Three Wives; Mädchen in Uniform; Ordet; Persona; Three Little Girls in Blue; Tokyo Olympiad Four: Edge of the City; Emitaï; The Magic Flute; Malcolm X; New Orleans; Olivia Three: Aaron Loves Angela; Blue Hawaii; The Cave of the Yellow Dog; It Happened on Fifth Avenue; Marriage Story; The Scar of Shame; The Shocking Miss Pilgrim; Stars in My Crown Two: The Battle of the Century; The Big City; Body and Soul; Born Free; Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment; Deliverance; Destroy All Monsters; The Dragon Painter; The Greatest Story Ever Told; I Lost My Body; Kiss of Death; Klaus; Mad Monster Party?; Marona’s Fantastic Tale; My Dream is Yours; 1917; Pinky; The Princess and the Pirate; The River; Road to Utopia; Saludos Amigos; Sleepwalking Land; Soul; The T.A.M.I. Show; Weathering with You

WINNERS (excluding honorary awards and Worst Picture; 28) 3 wins: A Letter to Three Wives; Ordet 2 wins: The Haunting; Mädchen in Uniform; Once Upon a Time in America; Parasite; The Shop on Main Street; The Trial 1 win: The African Queen; Babe: Pig in the City; Blue Hawaii; Destroy All Monsters; Emitaï; Gosford Park; The Irishman; Kaagaz Ke Phool; Kiss of Death; Malcolm X; Marona’s Fantastic Tale; New York, New York; 1917; One Hour with You; Red Dawn; Persona; Plymouth Adventure; The Shocking Miss Pilgrim; Shoes; Tokyo Olympiad; War of the Worlds; When Worlds Collide

92 films were nominated in 26 categories.

#2020 Movie Odyssey Awards #My Movie Odyssey

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cinema-tv-etc · 5 years

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Franco Zeffirelli: Film and opera director who revelled in the lavish and theatrical

The last of Italy’s post-war cinema giants, Zeffirelli worked with many of the greatest stars of the 20th century

Tom Vallance - Saturday 15 June 2019

Franco Zeffirelli, who described his style as “lavish in scale and unashamedly theatrical”, was one of the most influential, flamboyant and controversial designer-directors of the 20th century. His Florentine background and love of the Renaissance permeated his diverse work, which encompassed theatre, cinema and his greatest love, opera.

Initially an actor, then designer of sets and costumes, Zeffirelli – who has died aged 96 – confounded his mentor and lover Luchino Visconti by successfully becoming a prolific director who triumphed at La Scala, Milan, with his first operatic production, then stunned Covent Garden with his vivid staging of Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci. His Shakespearean productions at the Old Vic included a legendary version of Romeo and Juliet with Judi Dench, and a rapturously received Much Ado About Nothing with Maggie Smith, Albert Finney and Robert Stephens.

His best films were either Shakespearean or operatic ones, and included The Taming of the Shrew with Taylor and Burton, a Romeo and Juliet with two teenage unknowns, and Hamlet with Mel Gibson – plus a sumptuous film of La Traviata and a sweepingly dramatic, though drastically reshaped and cut, version of Verdi’s Otello with Placido Domingo. The treasured Covent Garden productions of Lucia di Lammermoor with Joan Sutherland and Tosca with Maria Callas were his work, and he created one of the most lavish opera productions ever seen with his Turandot at the Metropolitan.

On television his epic production Jesus of Nazareth has become a worldwide staple. He worked with both Olivier and Gielgud, and he gathered together an all-star cast for his film Tea With Mussolini, loosely based on his own childhood memories of the expatriate British ladies in Italy who helped raise him just before the Second World War. He also fought with the Italian resistance during the conflict, found God when he was nearly killed in a car accident with Gina Lollobrigida, and since 1960 had been heavily involved in right-wing politics, eventually becoming a member of the Italian senate, representing the Forza Italia party in 1996.

Born out of wedlock in Florence, Italy in 1923, his surname was the result of an accident. Since his father would not acknowledge him, and his mother was married, he had to be given an invented name and his mother chose Zeffiretti, after the “little breezes” of an aria in Cosi Fan Tutte, but it was misspelt in the register as Zeffirelli. He was raised by a peasant woman for two years, then after his mother was widowed she took him into her family, but her death when Zeffirelli was six years old resulted in his being passed to his father’s cousin, Aunt Lide.

His initial ambition was to be an architect, but Lide’s lover Gustavo was an amateur baritone, and he introduced the boy to opera and the cinema, both of which were to be life-long passions. He later described his reaction to his first opera, Die Walkure, as “hardly a refined appreciation, more like a child of today gawping at Star Wars”.

He had his first real taste of theatre when, while fighting with the partisans in the Second World War, he met the music and ballet expert Richard Buckle and helped him stage a troop show. Seeing Olivier’s film of Henry V chrystallised Zeffirelli’s ambition. He recalled: “I knew then what I was going to do. Architecture was not for me; it had to be the stage. I wanted to do something like the production I was witnessing.”

After the war, he was working as an assistant scenic painter when he met the man he described as “probably the single most important person I have ever known”, the director Luchino Visconti. On their first meeting backstage he told Visconti that he was an actor, to which Visconti replied: “So you should be, with your looks.”

Visconti gave the youth small parts in his stage productions of Crime and Punishment (1946) and Eurydice (1947), and he made his screen debut in Luigi Zampa’s L’Onorevole Angelina (1947) starring Anna Magnani, after which Visconti used Zeffirelli and Francesco Rosi as his assistants on his film La Terra Trema (1948), filmed on location with a cast of Sicilian fishermen, and distinguished by its superb photography. Said Zeffirelli: “This is my main debt to Luchino in filmmaking: his passionate attention to detail. Everything was always researched to a point far beyond the needs of the actual scene. You immersed yourself in the period, the place, its culture, so that even though the audience might not take in every detail they would be absolutely convinced of its essential ‘rightness’.”

For a production of As You Like It (1948) Visconti hired Salvador Dali as designer but, when the surrealist’s plans proved impractical, Visconti asked Zeffirelli to help out. He then gave Zeffirelli the first work for which he was independently credited, as designer of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire (1949).

Visconti and Zeffirelli were now living together in Rome, but worked separately for a spell before reuniting for the film Bellissima (1951) starring Anna Magnani, on which Zeffirelli again served as an assistant. After working briefly with Rossellini and Antonioni, he designed one of Visconti’s greatest theatrical triumphs, a production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters (1952), and worked as his assistant on the film Senso (1954), but the often stormy relationship of the two men was coming to an end.

When Zeffirelli was asked to design a production of Rossini’s L’Italiana in Algeri at La Scala, he saw it as an opportunity to break with the world of Roman theatre. With its cast clad mainly in light blues and whites, the sunny production of 1953 was rapturously received and the manager of La Scala, Antonio Ghiringhelli, decided to follow it with La Cenerentola (1954) with the same creative team.

But director Corrado Pavolini had fallen ill, and Zeffirelli, with the backing of Simionato, asked if he could be both director and designer. The result was another great success, and the director’s first experience of handling a large chorus.

Zeffirelli was immediately asked to direct two productions the following season, Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’amore and Rossini’s Il Turco in Italia (both 1955). He was also told that Maria Callas wanted to sing Donna Fiorilla in the Rossini and had specifically asked that he should direct it.

Zeffirelli had first met Callas when As You Like It had been running in Rome at the same time as Parsifal, in which Callas sang the role of Kundry. Tullio Serafin, who was a major influence on Zeffirelli, introduced both him and Visconti to “this very plump Greek-American girl with a terrible New York whine allied to a rather prim, matronly manner. She sounded awful and looked worse.” Then she had sung, and Zefirelli had been entranced. “I followed her to Florence to see her Traviata and hung around her dressing room like a lovesick boy,” he recalled.

Zeffirelli would shortly realise his longstanding ambition to direct a film. Camping (1957) was a modest, sentimental story of two young lovers on a motorcycle, but the public liked it. He was then called back to Dallas, Texas, to stage La Traviata for Callas, and succeeded in eclipsing Visconti’s previous staging with an audaciously cinematic production, using multiple sets and dispensing entirely with the interval between the second and third acts.

At the end of 1959 Zeffirelli was invited back to Covent Garden to create new productions of Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci, which were to prompt the Old Vic to ask him to direct Romeo and Juliet, with the particular request that he reproduce the Mediterranean feeling of his opera productions. For this Zeffirelli was determined to use a truly youthful leading pair and cast two young players starting out, Judi Dench and John Stride. “Judi was small and doll-like and looked even younger than her age, just the way I’d always imagined Juliet should be,” he said. The production, so different from all previous accounts of Shakespeare’s tragedy – the director even replaced the balcony with battlements – was loathed by London’s theatre critics next day, who condemned the acting, the sets and the direction. But the following Sunday London’s most respected critic, Kenneth Tynan, called it “a revelation, even perhaps a revolution ... The Vic has done nothing better for a decade.” Romeo and Juliet immediately became a sell-out and extended the length of its season.

The following year, 1961, Zeffirelli directed Fastaff at Covent Garden, then made his debut at Glyndebourne with L’Elisir d’amore. In Dallas, he staged a controversial Don Giovanni with Joan Sutherland and Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, setting the opera in the burnt-out aftermath of a catastrophe, then returned to England to create an Othello for the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford. It turned out disastrously. Wanting an elegant, cultured Othello, he cast John Gielgud, with young Ian Bannen as Iago. “Whatever chemistry makes a director and his actors work was missing with us three ... Gielgud and Bannen were like oil and water and somehow Gielgud and I never seemed to react together.” A few months later the Old Vic Romeo and Juliet opened in New York and was a critical and commercial triumph, with Zeffirelli receiving a special Tony Award for design and direction.

In 1967 he directed his first major film, The Taming of the Shrew (1967), starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, and described by one critic as “a mixture of classical Shakespeare, the Marx brothers and a Renaissance painting”. It was a great success, and Zeffirelli followed it with Romeo and Juliet (1968), starring newcomers Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey. Writer Bruce Robinson, who played Benvolio in the film, later claimed that Zeffirelli tried to seduce him, and that he was the model for the lecherous Uncle Monty in Robinson’s 1987 film Withnail and I.

Given a small budget by Paramount, Romeo and Juliet made $50m – the highest ratio of investment to earnings in the history of the studio. “The effect on me was stunning,” he said. “It made me a lot of money, transforming me from someone who’d always lived at the limits of his income to someone who could be described as rich, and it elevated me from being a European celebrity to someone who was famous internationally.”

A few months later Zefferelli was critically injured when the car he was in, driven by Gina Lollobrigida, skidded and smashed into a barrier, sending him through the windscreen. Months of facial surgery preceded his return to work with a triumphant staging of Pagliacci and Cavalleria Rusticana at the Metropolitan. His accident had delayed his plans to film the life of Francis of Assissi, which he thought relevant to the “peace and love” movement of the Sixties. Titled Brother Sun, Sister Moon, the film appeared in 1972 and was criticised as simplistic and naive.

In 1975 Zeffirelli embarked on a project that would take two years to complete – an ambitious television miniseries based on the life of Christ, titled Jesus of Nazareth. Featuring a starry cast supporting Robert Powell as Jesus and Olivia Hussey as Mary, the series was screened worldwide over Easter and was given the exceptional accolade of a mention by the Pope in his Psalm Sunday message.

Zeffirelli next staged Alfred de Musset’s Lorenzaccio for the Comedie Francaise, and a triumphant Otello at La Scala (both 1976). Starring Placido Domingo, Mirella Freni and Piero Cappuccilli, with Carlos Kleiber conducting, Otello was the first La Scala premiere to be televised live.

A second de Filippo play, Filumena, was another hit for the National, after which Zeffirelli went to Hollywood. Though his films The Champ (1979) and Endless Love (1981) attracted audiences, they were decried by critics.

Returning to La Scala in 1981 to stage Cavelleria Rusticana and Pagliacci, both starring Domingo, Zeffirelli filmed both productions, partly in the opera house and partly on location in Sicily. When shown on television in the US, Pagliaci won both a Grammy and Emmy. Teresa Stratas, the film’s soprano, then starred in La Boheme for Zeffirelli at the Metropolitan, and he realised he had the perfect star for a filmed version of La Traviata. When Jose Carreras declined to play Alfredo, Domingo accepted the role.

Visually entrancing, and extremely moving, La Traviata is one of the finest opera films. The film version of Otello is comparable in its power and spectacle, though marred for purists by some drastic cutting.

In 1985 Zeffirelli designed his first ballet, Swan Lake, for La Scala, his revolutionary approach – particularly his replacement of tutus with calf-length dresses for the ballerinas – causing Mikhail Baryshnikov to withdraw from the production. He then made a film his detractors seized on – a ludicrous account of Toscanini’s early years, Young Toscanini (1988). The director was happier with an impressive Hamlet (1990) starring Mel Gibson, and a television film of Don Carlos (1992). But a version of Jane Eyre (1996) suffered from the mismatching of its leads, Charlotte Gainsbourg and William Hurt.

The cast of Tea With Mussolini (1999) was high-powered, including Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, Joan Plowright, Lily Tomlin and Cher, and made Zeffirelli’s labour of love watchable if unsatisfying.

His last films were Callas Forever (2002), a dramatisation of the singer’s last years, and Tre Fratelli (2005). In 2003 he was nominated for a Laurence Olivier Award for his set designs for Absolutely! (Perhaps), and in November 2004 he was given an honorary knighthood.

In 2009, he was awarded the inaugural Premio Colesseo, which is given to those who have enhanced Rome’s reputation.

Franco Zeffirelli, film and opera director, born 12 February 1923, died 15 June 2019

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/franco-zeffirelli-obituary-film-theatre-director-italy-romeo-and-juliet-tosca-maria-callas-a8959971.html

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xtruss · 4 years

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Was Shoaib Akhtar's Talent Overshadowed By His Sagas?

World’s Fastest Bowler Shoaib Akhtar of Pakistan

Karthik Krishnaswamy

In Come to Think of it, we bring new perspectives to bear on received cricket wisdom. This week: was Shoaib Akhtar undervalued?

There's a fairly widely held strand of public opinion that would view Shoaib Akhtar as a wasted talent. It isn't just armchair fans who might think this - just look at his ESPNcricinfo profile.

"But that he will end his career an 'if only' or a 'coulda been' is the great tragedy," it says, fairly high up. "He had it all and he blew it." It ends with these lines: "So much so that what he did on the field had long ago ceased to matter and has been eclipsed by his scrapes off the field. For any sportsman, that is a damning indictment."

There are reasons to feel this way, of course, and the profile lists them succinctly: "doubts about his action, ball-tampering offences, beating up his own team-mates, courtroom battles against his board, long bans and heavier fines, serious career-threatening injuries and most damagingly, doping charges."

None of this is untrue, and that list doesn't even include the time Akhtar's board sent out a press release explaining his absence from a squad, and, rather than reach for one of a thousand bland corporate euphemisms, spelled out the exact nature and location of the skin condition that was keeping him out.

Akhtar's post-retirement public persona has done little to burnish his legacy. At the time of writing, he's in the news for claiming that he turned down a lucrative county contract with Nottinghamshire so that he could fight in the Kargil War. He... what? Yeah.

But hard as it seems, it's actually possible to disentangle all that from the thing that really matters, and properly appreciate Akhtar for the magnificent cricketer he was.

There was the pace, of course, and it was a strange and magical coincidence that he came along at the exact historical moment when bowling speeds were first being measured and displayed on live TV as a matter of course. You didn't just know he was quick; you knew he was quicker than anyone else, probably ever.

It was also Akhtar's fate that another purveyor of extreme pace, Brett Lee, came along at pretty much the same time. For the first two or three years of this millennium, the two of them pushed themselves, each other, and the limits of the human body to bowl faster and faster still.

The pace race was thrilling to witness, but in a WWE sort of way, bordering on silliness and fetishising pace for pace's sake. Watch the five balls that this video packages in ascending order of speed. Are they, as claimed, the five fastest deliveries in cricket history? Who knows. Do they make the batsmen cower in fear? Not particularly, and the quickest of them, bowled by Akhtar to Nick Knight during the 2003 World Cup, clocking 161.3kph, is nudged routinely to midwicket.

Pace is pace, yaar, but it's how you use it that counts. The pace race had an inevitable intertwining effect on the careers of Akhtar and Lee, but in doing so, it did one of them a considerable disservice. One was fast and hard-working and a fine first change behind Glenn McGrath and Jason Gillespie. The other was fast and scary, utterly impossible to take your eyes off, and utterly unplayable on his day.

Akhtar was the superior bowler, unarguably, but even a surface reading of their Test numbers would tell you as much. The point isn't that Akhtar was better than Lee. It's that he was an almost one-of-a-kind bowler who heightened the effect of raw pace to a degree rarely seen at the highest level of the game.

There was, of course, the effect on the spectators, achieved via that run-up, that exaggerated sideways leap and javelin-thrower wind-up, the theatrics between deliveries - occasionally during his run-up - and even that hair. But all that would have come to nothing without his effect on batsmen.

When Akhtar was fully switched on, in rhythm, and at his physical peak, the pace was almost all he needed to have that effect. Pace aimed with thrilling directness at the base of the stumps. It sounds simple, but there's a reason why only a tiny fraction of other bowlers have ever really pulled it off - or even attempted it - on a regular basis. Bowling yorkers at high pace takes a lot out of your body, and there isn't a whole lot of margin for error. Get it wrong and it's a lot of energy expended, and probably a lot of runs conceded, with little left in the tank for the rest of the day's exertions.

Akhtar's genius lay in being able to beat the very best batsmen with that direct, route-one method. I mean, come on. Rahul Dravid and Sachin Tendulkar in the space of two balls? Ricky Ponting, both Waughs and Adam Gilchrist in the space of 11?

In between, there were six wickets in 8.2 overs in Lahore, which sent New Zealand crashing to 73 all out on a pitch where Pakistan had made 643. Only once has a bigger first-innings lead been secured by a team bowling second, and that happened in a timeless Test.

Watch those wickets again: bowled, bowled, bowled, bowled, lbw, bowled; four pinpoint yorkers, the other two balls also full enough to just about fall under that classification, all of them beating the batsman for pace, with little or no reverse in play - New Zealand's innings only lasted 30.2 overs. This was the definition of taking the conditions out of the equation, and few did it as well as Akhtar.

There might even be a way to measure this.

When Akhtar took wickets, he took them quickly, as have the other four names on the table below. Vernon Philander and Dale Steyn have run through numerous teams, the latter in all conditions; Stuart Broad routinely goes on inspired bursts of wicket-taking; and Andy Caddick was a memorable blow-hot, blow-cold performer.

BOWLERS WITH BEST STRIKE RATES WHEN TAKING 4+ WICKETS IN AN INNS

It's an imperfect measure, of course, penalising bowlers who are part of better and deeper bowling attacks, but it says something that in the Tests where Akhtar burst through the opposition at the rate of a wicket every 23 balls, Pakistan's other bowlers took one every 75 balls. When other bowlers struggled, he often found a way.

At his peak the pace was often enough, but bowling that fast took a lot out of him, physically and mentally, as he revealed to Sidharth Monga in this fascinating interview five years ago. "I used to crawl to my bathroom every day of my career," he said. "I used to limp out of my bed. I can't remember a day I didn't have pain in my knees for the last 18 years."

Akhtar knew he needed other tricks apart from pace, and he certainly had them: swing, seam - look at this ball to Chris Gayle, in Sharjah of all places - the use of angles, the ability to manipulate batsmen with his lengths. Watch him bowl Matthew Hayden from around the wicket here. The late swing is a joy in itself, but what you won't see is the short balls he bowled before this ball, to push Hayden back and stop him from stepping out of his crease as he did time and again to fast bowlers.

Then there was the Akhtar slower ball. No bowler has ever delivered this variation with a bigger drop-off in speed from their stock ball, and he bowled it with no discernible change in arm action. England, fresh off an Ashes victory they still haven't stopped talking about, had no answer to it during their 2005-06 tour of Pakistan. Akhtar bowled many quicker spells through his career, but few approached this one in Lahore for the bafflement he caused. You want to watch this, but maybe not if you're Michael Vaughan, Ian Bell, or Liam Plunkett.

That Test match was Akhtar's 39th. He only played seven more, the last of them on an India tour in 2007, where he outbowled most of his colleagues on largely unhelpful pitches. The skills hadn't gone away but the body was uncooperative. He continued playing ODIs, sporadically, until the 2011 World Cup, and that was that.

Forty-six Tests. Umar Gul, the perennially crocked Umar Gul, played 47.

Even with all his injuries, Akhtar could have probably squeezed in a few more, what with all the bans and disciplinary troubles. But it's a marvel, come to think of it, that he left himself enough room to squeeze in all those spells, and leave us with all those memories.

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newyorktheater · 4 years

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Macbeth in Harlem: Black Theater in America from the Beginning to Raisin in the Sun, (Rutgers University Press, 246 pages) is an exercise in frustration, for two reasons. Charles Mason’s survey of the first century and a half of Black Theater in America highlights some startling history, such as The African Grove Theatre. It was founded in Greenwich Village way back in 1821 by West Indian-born black man William Alexander Brown, who is credited with having written the first play by a black writer produced in America (“The Drama of King Shotaway,” based on a Black Carib insurrection against the British in 1795 on the island of St. Vincent.) The all-black casts of the theater made Shakespearean tragedies – “Macbeth,” “Othello” and “Richard III” – the heart of their repertoire, and included the young Ira Aldridge, who became one of the foremost Shakespearean actors of the nineteenth century. But the African Grove Theatre lasted only three years – largely because, Mason writes, its rival white theater owners sent hooligans and then the police to destroy it. And Aldridge left the U.S. in 1824, never to return, establishing his reputation over more than four decades in the major cities of Europe. After the African Grove Theater came (as Mason titles his next chapter), “the long night of the nineteenth century,” with minstrel shows and “coon shows” co-opting African American culture while degrading African American people. There were a few exceptions, such as black playwright William Wells Brown’s drama “The Escape, or A Leap for Freedom,” published in 1858, but it was eclipsed by theatrical adaptations of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Theatrical versions of the novel ran continually for ninety years, and let white audiences see for the first time the evils of slavery — “but only within the safe confines of theater. The Black in public and private life received very little positive fallout from all of the national weeping over terrible Simon Legree ‘whupping’ poor ole Uncle Tom…” But even in the twentieth century, Mason pairs every step forward with a couple of steps back. Bert Williams, “the greatest Black entertainer of the period between 1890 and the Jazz Age”, and his partner, George Walker, produced four full-fledged musicals on Broadway between 1901–1908, but they rarely share billing with George M. Cohan, Jerome Kern and Irving Berlin as pioneers of the Broadway musical. The 1920s ushered in a series of hit Broadway musicals by black theater artists. But, Mason quotes one of the most prominent, Eubie Blake, as having said “Once the white boys learned how to write the jazz syncopation, nobody used us anymore.” The book’s title alludes to the 1936 production of “Macbeth” directed by 20-year-old Orson Welles, whose opening night was attended by such luminaries as Eleanor Roosevelt and New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. But most of the contemporary critics were negative and condescending. Black casts in classical plays were far less usual than such (to us) odd and offensive productions such as “Scarlet Sister Mary,” by white playwright Daniel Reed, which ran at Broadway’s Ethel Barrymore theater in 1930, starring Ethel Barrymore herself. She was in blackface, along with the rest of the cast, portraying Gullah Negroes. ”Just imagine how much richer our culture would be if we allowed serious Black theater to flourish the way we’ve allowed the singing and dancing and comedy to flourish,” Mason writes, adding that modern basketball and football would not be recognizable without “the Black style of playing” The 1936 “Macbeth” was produced by the Federal Theatre Project, a federally-funded program that in its four years of existence spurred what Mason considers some of the best black theater in America. Indeed, he believes, nothing has matched it in the eight years since: “The death of FTP and the era, short-lived though it was, that made fighting for social justice de rigueur,” he writes, “was also the end of a time when the stage served as a forum for the best in us.” He’s certainly not hugely impressed with A Raisin in the Sun, to which he devotes less than two pages of text near the end of his book, although it’s included in his title. “Raisin is a nice little play that gives some hope to the ones who still need help in feeling equal to the problems that being Black in America bring. And the family does beat with a single heart in a way that makes their suffering affecting. These are people who neither offend nor threaten …”

Mason is a theater artist, critic and the author previously of “The African-American Bookshelf: 50 Must-Reads From Before the Civil War Through Today.” It takes no great insight to see that he is frustrated with the state of American theater, and its history, and especially the history of black people in America; he communicates that frustration on nearly every page.

That is one reason why “Macbeth in Harlem,” while a timely book, is not an especially happy read. Mason spends much space inveighing against the endless manifestations of racism not just in the American theater but in America as a whole. Some of his commentary is important; his obersBut too many of these passages come off as speechifying, and feel repetitive. I wish he had spent more time providing clear, concrete information. I found myself several times scurrying off to Google to clear up a confusing passage in the book or to provide more context for a vague one. (One example: Some twenty pages after Mason tells us that William Alexander Brown was the first black author of a play in America, “The Drama of King Shotaway,” in 1823, Mason seems to say that William Wells Brown wrote the first black American playwright, writing “The Escape, or A Leap for Freedom” in 1858 . And then in that same paragraph he attributes the authorship of “The Drama of King Shotaway” to William Henry Brown.)

The looseness extends to the prose. I might have been amused by his use of “neegrow” (which he helpfully explains in a footnote is a “slang term for negro, often used as satire”) if he didn’t repeat it dozens of times, very seldom in any evident satirical context.

Little of this matters whenever Mason focuses in relative depth on the story of a theater artist (such as Ira Aldridge or Paul Robeson) or a work of theater (such as “The Mulatto,” by Langston Hughes, the debut Broadway play in 1935 by the writer whose poem gave Lorraine Hansberry the title of “Raisin in the Sun”; or Orson Welles’ mounting of Richard Wright’s “Native Son” in 1941.)

The publication date for “Macbeth in Harlem” is June, 2020 – this month – but much of it feels as if it were written many years ago, and not just because it stops in the 1950s. To pick something insignificant: Mason devotes several pages to the 1921 Eubie Blake/ Noble Sissel Broadway hit musical “Shuffle Along” without mentioning George C. Wolfe’s 2016 Broadway remake of it.

It’s bracing to read this passage in his complaints about 21st century theater:

“Why can a white policeman shoot a Black man in the back eight times and still have a huge part of the citizenship support him? On the theatrical stage, that would seem to be great theater. ..” He’s asking: why isn’t this depicted on the stage? (But isn’t it?)

But then there’s this:

“….consider that between August 2016 and May 2018, three hundred and seventy-eight Black Americans were killed by white policemen.6 And there has not been one Black artist to say “I accuse” the way [Paul] Robeson did. Things are different? We’re a better nation than we were? We’ve elected a Black president. Then why does the slaughter continue unabated generation after generation? “

Macbeth in Harlem: Black Theater in America from the Beginning to Raisin in the Sun Macbeth in Harlem: Black Theater in America from the Beginning to Raisin in the Sun, (Rutgers University Press, 246 pages) is an exercise in frustration, for two reasons.

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newsfundastuff · 4 years

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This excerpt is from episode 182 of The Editors.Rich: All right, so, Jim Geraghty, we got history. We had a historic vote last night on the floor of the House. Two articles of impeachment charging President Trump with abuse of power and obstruction passed handily, with just a couple Democrats flaking off, two on abuse of power, three on obstruction, and Tulsi Gabbard taking the statesmanlike posture of voting present. What do you make of it?Jim: I’m sorry, I’ve got to stretch there and just get a—Rich: That’s a really good theatrical yawn. Did you work on that or—Jim: Yeah, a little bit extra.Rich: . . . did you just come up with that?Jim: A little. Yeah, well, I’m saving up my energy for the utterly exciting Democratic presidential debate tonight, because that’s well-scheduled. Yeah, six days before Christmas, opening night of Star Wars, good timing, DNC. Good job.Look, this was long predicted. The only part of this process that was the least bit surprising was I guess most people didn’t see Jeff Van Drew changing parties. As of this taping, that appears to be all systems go. And most of the purple and red district Democrats falling in line. I wonder if these two are related, that once Van Drew switched parties, that maybe Pelosi started arm-twisting on this.Rich: No, I think they’re related a different way. I think what happened to Van Drew, he voted against the inquiry, and he has a catastrophic drop of support in the party. He has like 20 percent approval, so he’s not getting nominated. He’s not winning that seat again as a Democrat. I am open to the idea a lot of these Democrats are genuinely outraged by Trump’s conduct, but I think they also saw that there’s no way out of this for them except for through. So if you voted against these articles, unless you’re in a real special very Trumpy district, like Collin Peterson is from Minnesota, that you just have to vote for it and grin and bear it and hope you can win over any swing voters and Republican voters you need in November down the line.Jim: Yeah, and I think also this may reveal that there probably weren’t that many Democrats in districts where this vote was going to make or break. The Joe Cunninghams of the world in South Carolina’s First District, that’s got where my parents live down in Hilton Head and all that quick-growing southern corner of the state, he’s probably toast anyway, so might as well vote his conscience. Why defy the party? All that kind of stuff.That was somewhat surprising and interesting, but I think the biggest number you heard tossed around for Democrats voting no was six to ten. Nobody expected this to really be that much of a close vote. Either due to whipping or the sense that most people said, “Well, no, might as well. In for a penny, in for a pound. Might as well vote for impeach and hope that our voters agree with us,” that was somewhat interesting. I’m sure we’ll talk a bit about the weird situation that Nancy Pelosi and the advocates for impeachment find themselves in now.Today’s Morning Jolt, I wrote a bunch about, was there a moment where you could’ve gotten a fairly bipartisan majority for a resolution of censure or some other sense of saying, “Mr. President, you shouldn’t have done this. You can’t do this. You don’t have this kind of authority. If you think there’s some sort of corruption going on with Joe Biden or something, we have a Department of Justice. This has to be done through official channels”? I went through and I found nine House Republicans who’d made various comments kind of in that vein, and maybe you could’ve gotten them onboard.Whatever Democrats and impeachment advocates think should be the case, you were just never going to get any House Republicans voting for this. Maybe you had a shot at one or two, like Rooney down in Florida, but really, it was always going to be a party-line vote. I don’t think Trump, to the extent Trump is capable of feeling shame, which is measured on the molecular scale, he’d probably be more annoyed by a bipartisan resolution of censure, I think, than by this then.He’s going to walk around with this as a badge of pride. He’s going to say, “This was a partisan vendetta. This was a witch hunt,” yadda yadda yadda. Whereas if you’d gotten a decent number of House Republicans to vote on something that didn’t call for impeachment, just said the president shouldn’t have done this, maybe it would’ve been a little more consequential. This was ultimately about making the base of the Democratic party happy, and I hope Democrats are happy now. You got what you want. I hope you walked around with a sad, somber spring in your step, as Nancy Pelosi said this morning.Rich: On censure, I thought that would be a better way for them to go. It would’ve become just as partisan as impeachment largely. Maybe, Jim, your nine, probably fewer than that. Maybe you get like five House Republicans. Better than zero and losing a couple cats and dogs on your own side. But I do think you’d get a real shot, and not a real shot, likelier than not to get over 50 votes for a censure in the Senate. That’d be a more bipartisan rebuke. It doesn’t live in history in quite the same way.Michael, obviously, address anything you’ve heard from Jim, but what do you make of the case substantively that the Democrats ended up landing on, which is, by and large, he’s a threat to the election, which has the backdrop that he somehow welcomed foreign interference into the last election, which they, incredibly enough, base on, when they talk about it in more detail, on Trump saying at that press conference, “If you can hack Hillary’s emails, find her old emails. Russians, if you’re listening, do it.” So they say he just can’t be trusted to run this next election because he welcomed Ukrainian interference this time around, and also that he endangered national security through this scheme.Michael: I don’t think a lot of the case. I do take the point that if you believe as I do . . . I believe the case can be made that the president abused his power, that there’s good-enough evidence at least to look into whether he asked for a sham investigation or just an announcement of an investigation for political benefit. I do take Luke’s constantly repeated point, though, that the United States has an interest in knowing what Joe and Hunter Biden were up to.On the obstruction, I think that’s just a joke at this point. Nancy Pelosi basically couldn’t even finish the sentence of asking for transcripts before the White House just released them, and there was nothing in the additional testimony that indicated that there was anything beyond the transcript that was really incriminating or that really added to the case. If anything, they should be passing a motion congratulating him for helping the case of impeachment, not obstructing it.It’s an odd thing. It’s funny, I was reading Alexander Hamilton on impeachment again, refreshing my memory once more, and he talks about it in these terms of that you have to construct it in this way because the Senate trial . . . What other body of men would have the confidence to sit between the president and the representatives of the people as his accuser? What’s interesting about it is it shows you in reality . . . And he worries that partisan passions would corrupt this. Well, that was very prescient, because partisan allegiance has totally eclipsed the sense of these three separate branches of government operating independently of one another. Legally, they operate independently, but practically speaking, the two parties are the motor running underneath our politics.I think in our lifetimes, impeachment has almost been destroyed as a constitutional provision because it’s been launched twice in the absence of a two-thirds majority sentiment for impeaching and removing the president, and so this thing has become defanged almost totally and looks partisan. Now it’s like our expectation is that you only launch impeachment because the base of one faction demands it, and that’s probably a tragedy for the American people.Also, it’s probably just bad politics long term for Democrats in the sense of he’s going to survive this. They knew he was going to survive this. Maybe they hoped they would put some Senate seats in play through this process. I don’t know if that’s . . . I don’t know if impeachment adds to the Trump effect on certain senatorial candidates that might be weak on the Republican side. But now they would have a very difficult time if Trump does something else, something that excites more outrage among a larger share of the public. This bomb has already gone off and already failed to remove him. It will fail to remove him from office.I don’t know. I thought it was just a very odd event. I thought the drama of it was kind of funny, with the Democrats wearing black and Nancy Pelosi trying to shush her—Rich: That was a very good shush move. Clearly, a grandmother with a lot of experience in shushing.Michael: Listen, Nancy Pelosi is fierce. The daughter of a Baltimore mayor is going to have some just natural authority. But it did give what Jim said, the somber spring in their step. It was bizarre. That’s all I can say about it. This was bizarre. This whole thing has been bizarre from beginning to end.Rich: Charlie, where are you on the substance? Because you’ve been excoriating about Trump’s conduct, but haven’t really . . . I don’t want to put words in your mouth . . . had a strong view one way or the other on impeachment or removal. It seems to me there are a couple different ways to look at it just within our own house.Andy McCarthy and myself tend to make the consequentialist argument, “Well, nothing came of this. They delayed the funding for two months. They get the funding. There’s no announcement of investigations.” I would even argue that even if they announced an investigation of Burisma, it would have zero effect on our election or, really, interfere in our election.But Ramesh, who favors impeachment, says, “Well, it doesn’t really matter what the consequence was, that the core impropriety here of being willing to leverage public resources for what was clearly something that had a political motive at bottom related to the election and mixing his official duties with that motive in this way is just intolerable. It didn’t matter whether it was stopped or not. It doesn’t matter whether it was a little thing or a big thing. It’s just that motive itself is disqualifying.”Charlie: I don’t buy the consequentialist case at all. Imagine if we had learned that President Obama had instructed Lois Lerner to go after Tea Party groups. Would we have said, “Well, she didn’t do it,” or, “Well, it was caught before tax season was over,” or, “In the grand scheme of things, it didn’t affect much.” No, of course not.Trump did this. The fact that it didn’t come to much is neither here nor there for me.That doesn’t mean, though, that I’m thrilled about what happened yesterday. In fact, when it happened, I felt irritated. I instantly thought just how close to the Clinton impeachment this has been. In both cases, the president did what he’d been accused of, and in both cases he was let off -- Trump’s case will be let off -- by his party.In both cases, critics of impeachment pretended that the president was being impeached for something innocuous. In neither case was that true.The language is similar. Representative Loudermilk -- there’s a name! -- compared the House of Representatives to Pontius Pilate yesterday, and the president, implicitly, to Jesus. Well, so did Steny Hoyer in 1998.Both impeachments settled on behavior that was, arguably, impeachable, but in both cases that was not really why the impeachment drive had begun. You go back to Clinton’s: Clinton’s impeachment came after years of Republicans saying that the guy was a philanderer, maybe a rapist, that he was dishonest, he was corrupt. It came after Whitewater and the cattle futures scandal and the travel agency scandal. By the point that the Republican House impeached Bill Clinton, it just knew that he was worse than the articles of impeachment themselves suggested.I think the same is true of Trump. Democrats have said for a long time now that he’s a philanderer, maybe a rapist, that he’s dishonest, that he’s corrupt. The impeachment has come after Mueller and the emoluments cases and watching Trump berate the media and tweet like an idiot. So by the point that they impeached him yesterday, they just knew that he was worse than the articles of impeachment suggested.I think I would’ve voted for neither. In fact, I think I would’ve opposed all three of the impeachments that we’ve seen in American history. I’ve said this before, but it is odd, given some of the terrible things presidents have done, including in my lifetime, that all three of the impeachments that we’ve seen seem so small, so partisan, so contingent upon the surrounding politics, rather than a break from it. And all three seemed so unlikely to prevail. It seems to me that, throughout their history, Americans have not breathed a great deal of seriousness into the Impeachment Clause of the Constitution, and this latest impeachment is no exception.I am -- what was the word you used? -- excoriating when it comes to Trump, including on this, and when it comes to the Republicans and the way that they have fallen in line with him and pretended his call was “perfect” and there’s nothing to see here. But I feel sad in general because I don’t think that anyone has taken this seriously from the beginning, including yesterday. Donald Trump certainly didn’t. The Republicans haven’t -- and aren’t -- and nor are the Democrats. Nancy Pelosi is not sad. She’s not somber. She doesn’t think this is grave. She’s not praying for the president. She’s not protecting or saving the Constitution. And the people who ultimately pushed Nancy Pelosi into this, because she didn’t want to do it, do not give two hoots about the Constitution. In fact, they generally loathe the Constitution, and they’re happy to say so.I find it odd that impeachment has come in America’s history when it has, on the topics that it has. It was said earlier that maybe a censure would have been a better option. Perhaps. But that’s what this is. That’s what this was for Clinton, and it’s what this is for Trump. When you know full well that the Senate is not going to convict and you push an impeachment through the House anyhow, you are effectively censuring the president. You’re using a different mechanism to do it, but you are effectively censuring the president. I think that that is a tactical mistake, even if you believe that the underlying high crimes and misdemeanors would warrant such a measure in a vacuum.Rich: On Pelosi, I actually may be naïve. I don’t doubt that she prays for Trump. I think the appropriate reaction when anyone says they’re praying for you, the appropriate reaction is “Thank you.” It’s not like, “No, there’s no way you’re doing that. Stop lying.” MBD, pick up on anything you heard from Charlie. I just think the norm . . . There’s a tendency to think, to Charlie’s point, the Nixon impeachment, that’s the model; that’s the norm. But now we have a different norm, where it’s inflamed partisan majorities in the House that do this with, at least, the recent example is no chance of convicting. They came within one vote of convicting Johnson.Michael: I really relate to Charlie’s feeling of almost being alienated from the process, because on the one hand what the president did was worth condemning, and on one level if you’re saying, “What are your standards, MBD, for impeachment?” this qualifies. But thank God we don’t go by my standards for public office. Duncan Hunter Jr. would’ve been horsewhipped in public. Several Congress members that were parading around yesterday would be tarred and feathered. It’s a great mercy to me and to all of my colleagues that my standards do not prevail in our country—Rich: What would you do to your colleagues?Michael: . . . in many ways.Rich: What punishments would they have? What chastisement would they suffer?Michael: But I agree with Charlie that—Rich: Maybe we could get some serious enforcement of deadlines here for once, Michael, if we put you in charge.Michael: I know. But I agree with . . . Except my own. But I agree with Charlie. Iran-Contra was a more serious offense than this. The Lincoln bedroom scandal was a more serious offense than this. The—Charlie: Invasion of Libya.Michael: The bombing of Sudan ahead of impeachment was a more serious offense than this. The invasion of Libya. Undeclared drone warfare in several countries. Attempts at regime change in Syria without congressional approval, actually even against congressional approval. Johnson siccing the intel community on Goldwater. There was so many offenses presidents of both parties have conducted in my lifetime that seem so much more serious than this idiotic phone call, which was wrong, that I find it hard. My sense is that the motive for impeachment isn’t actually the offense. The offense was just the usable excuse for impeachment.Rich: I think Charlie is right, though. In both cases, it had built up and went to a deeper issue than what the impeachment itself was about.Michael: Right, but fundamentally I think this is . . . In both the Clinton and the Trump impeachment, you have an opposition party in Congress that is shell-shocked by the political defeats the president has been inflicting on their party, and a party that is angry that the country doesn’t see the president as the fraud they see the president as. I think the Charlie’s comparison is very apt.Charlie: But also that believed that it was destined to rule now. If you look at the Republican party, it was shocked in 1992 that Bill Clinton, this draft-dodging, weed-smoking womanizer, had beaten George H. W. Bush after the corner—Michael: A war hero.Charlie: . . . that the Reagan Revolution had supposedly turned, and it was especially shocked when he won reelection fairly easily, and began to wonder, “Well, are we now going in a different direction?” I think the same thing happened with Trump. Although, it was far more appalling to progressives that Trump won, not only because he represents everything they hate -- and he is hateable in some ways -- but also because they are more prone than others to believe in the coming of the Age of Aquarius and the bending of the arc of history and so on. To replace Barack Obama with Donald Trump was a shock to the system.Rich: Jim, let’s dive a little bit. You touched on this earlier. The current Pelosi gambit, I cannot believe that this gambit will last much past the weekend, because it seems so pointlessly self-destructive. But the idea, and this is not a great credit to this idea, that apparently it originated with Laurence Tribe, of holding the articles, I think Tribe just wanted to hold them indefinitely so he wouldn’t get acquitted, but the idea is to hold them, and this is going to make Mitch McConnell so upset, he’s going to be so desperate to have the articles thrown over in his lap, that he’s going to say, “Okay, let’s have a trial the way Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer want it.”The problem here is Mitch McConnell isn’t going to feel that way, obviously. It contradicts the claim over the last month that Democrats can’t go get witnesses, more witnesses, firsthand witnesses, because it would take time, and this is an urgent priority. The nation is at risk every day that the president isn’t impeached and removed. Then, finally, it’s just obviously like a game. It makes it seem even more partisan and political than it has to this point.Jim: Yeah. The general gist is Trump is an authoritarian—Rich: Sorry, Jim. Go ahead. I’ll silence my phone.Jim: Okay.Michael: You should break out the blues version of this.Jim: Things are so bad for impeachment. In short, the message from the Democrats is Trump is an authoritarian, he has no regard for the Constitution, he is a threat, we cannot wait until the next election, he must be removed as quickly as possible, and it could wait until after the holidays. No contradiction there. By the way, the only way this could go any better . . . I know McConnell has already given his initial statement in scoffing about this, but if he had just gone out there and said, “Please don’t throw me in that briar patch. Oh, no, it would be terrible if my caucus couldn’t vote on Trump’s impeachment. We’d be broken up.”You could see Wednesday the thinking of Democrats, both in office and the activist left on Twitter, having this recognition. For a long time, they’d been trying to answer the question, “How can we impeach Trump?” and all of a sudden, around the middle of the week, it became the question of “Wait, how can we stop the Senate from acquitting Trump?” which is a very different question. This idea of “Well, the Constitution says the Senate holds the trial, but it doesn’t say when it has to hold the trial,” it’s an entire miscalculation of the orders and priorities and interests of Senate Republicans.Is it conceivable that four Senate Republicans would say, Mitt Romney at some point is going to say, “By golly, Nancy Pelosi is right. These rules are unfair. We do need to call a lot more witnesses and we do need to take a lot more time on this, so I will take a stance with the 47 Democrats to insist that Mitch McConnell take a fairer set of rules”?We’re all certain, by the way, that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker and Amy Klobuchar and Michael Bennet all want as long a trial as possible, right? Everybody is on board for this whole thing where they’d hear from every witness, and this would drag on through January into February, and they wouldn’t be able to campaign in Iowa and New Hampshire. Everybody is on board? Okay, just wanted to make sure on that.It’s really bizarre. I now find myself thinking that this is the ridiculous cherry on top on what has been a largely bad-faith process since the beginning, that, in a way, for the House to impeach Trump and then to never send it to the Senate in order to have a trial . . . By the way, Democrats may well look at this and say, “Hey, you know what, that may violate the Constitution,” but as Charlie pointed out, they never really worried about that very much before.Trump getting acquitted would be worse for the country than us never sending it over to the Senate. We can all do math, right? You’re going to get most of the 47 Democrats voting for this, maybe not Joe Manchin. I think Doug Jones probably says in for a penny, in for a pound. Maybe you lose one or two other Democrats. Then you’d end up with maybe Romney would vote for it, maybe Murkowski, maybe one or two others. You’re not going to get the twelve that publications like The Bulwark were throwing around there. So you end up with a situation where it’s a vote that’s 49-51 or something, and you know Trump is going to go out onto the White House lawn and twerk in victory and see it as a complete exoneration because they couldn’t get the two-thirds of votes. If you really see Trump as this-Rich: Now I oppose his impeachment even more than I did at the start of the podcast.Jim: That’s why at the beginning I was saying, “Okay, would a bipartisan resolution of censure have done more, have actually sent the clearer signal to the president you shouldn’t do this?” I don’t know. But we all know where this is going, and we could see where this was going from the beginning. And it’s midday on Wednesday, Democrats suddenly realize, “Hey, wait a minute, we’re not going to get close to 67 votes. What are we going to do here?”Keeping the impeachment in limbo, taking the two articles of impeachment and freezing them in carbonite until they can work out the rules for weeks or months, it sounds like a great idea to me. I love this idea, just for the sheer ridiculousness of it.Michael: This is why partisan impeachment is such a disaster, because in a sense the way impeachment is set up is supposed to be the House, the elected representatives of the people, accuse the president, an impartial Senate tries the president. Without Republicans taking this seriously, the guilt that Democrats want to heap upon Trump for being okay with election interference, etc., inevitably spreads to all the Republican Party in their minds. The Senate become collaborators, and Mitch McConnell becomes Moscow Mitch again, and Vice President Pence because he’s not resigning in protest. Well, even if you impeach Trump, he is also in some way connected to this guilt. In a sense, it reveals itself as just a tool of partisanship and not some kind of solemn, sad duty that the Constitution imposes on Nancy Pelosi and her peers. It doesn’t work this way.Rich: Charlie, last question on impeachment. Do you care one way or the other whether the Senate trial has witnesses?Charlie: Well, I think it’s up to the Senate.I’m not sure that Jim presented the best argument from the Democratic side. The argument, as I see it, is that the Democrats believe, or at least their position is, that what Donald Trump demonstrated with his Ukraine phone call is that he’s prepared to cheat in the next election, and that, as a result, he needs to be removed before the next election. So it doesn’t matter if you wait until after Christmas because the key is getting him out before he can run again and, in their eyes, cheat again. From their perspective, it’s worth waiting because the Senate is not going to be fair, is not going to consider this seriously, and is therefore going to exonerate Trump, which will mean he will run in the next election.Now, I think this is a bad argument, not least because the House could have done everything that it wants the Senate to do. It could’ve brought in any other witness that it wanted to bring in. That it did not is not the leadership of the Senate’s problem, and the leadership in the Senate is in no way obliged to make up for the House’s mistakes or oversights.It’s also an extraordinarily silly idea because there is no leverage here. The Senate does not want to be sent these articles. The Republican Party doesn’t want to deal with it. It doesn’t want to vote on it. Susan Collins doesn’t want to vote on it. Cory Gardner doesn’t want to vote on it. McConnell doesn’t want to have those meetings, and he doesn’t want to be accused of being Moscow Mitch or a collaborator or any of the other things that Michael says.It’s a very silly plan that is built upon a misreading of what this would do. I don’t think that McConnell and Trump would sit there and say, “I can’t believe I’ve been left in limbo.” I think that McConnell would breathe a sigh of relief that he doesn’t have to deal with it, and Trump would run around the country saying, “They’re so weak, their case was so flimsy, it was such a stunt that they didn’t even transmit the articles to the Senate. These people wasted time, they wasted money, they sullied my good name, and they weren’t prepared to follow through.” We have all seen a Donald Trump rally. We’ve all seen how Donald Trump tweets.Taking advice from Laurence Tribe at this stage is perhaps not a good idea. In fact, this is such a bad idea that I wonder at one level whether it’s a pretext for essentially rendering the impeachment a censure vote and drawing a line under it.Rich: I think she’s transmitting them—Charlie: No, she will do it. I’m just saying that this argument, which has caught on in some quarters, makes no sense whatsoever, and so you have to assume Nancy Pelosi, who is not stupid and is not politically ignorant, will know that.But the specific question you asked: I don’t think the House should have any say over what the Senate does. The House had its turn. It could’ve lasted a year, this investigation, if it had wanted it to. It didn’t. Now it’s on to the next chamber.Rich: MBD, exit question to you, a special, historic, double-barreled exit question. The number of Republican senators voting to convict in the Senate will be what; and yes or no, will there be witnesses during a Senate trial?Michael: There will be witnesses, and zero Republicans will vote to convict.Rich: Jim Geraghty?Jim: Two. Minimal witnesses, if any. Basically, it’s going to be the McConnell plan of rules. Maybe he’ll throw them a bone here and there just to get this thing going, and it will be done by the end of January.Rich: But you say there are going to be two Republican votes to convict?Jim: Yeah, Romney and Murkowski probably.Rich: Wow. Charlie Cooke?Charlie: I don’t think there will be any votes to convict on the Republican side, and I think there will be a few Democratic defections, and no witnesses.Rich: That’s the correct answer. It’ll be zero and zero, no Republican votes to convict. Dan McLaughlin pointed out the other day there actually . . . Obviously, a really small sample size, but in the two prior Senate trials, no member of the president’s party has ever voted to convict. That was only nine, I believe, Democratic senators during the Johnson impeachment, but no Democratic senators during the Clinton impeachment. I think that will hold up here. I think if you’re just doing pure politics, it is a debacle for you if you’re Susan Collins or . . . Mitt Romney is different. He has a degree of independence. But you’re just going to lose your own party. Susan Collins, her career would be over if she votes to convict, in my estimation.Then on witnesses, I think that’s a closer call. If they’re going to flake on something, Romney, Murkowski, Collins, it would clearly be witnesses, in my view, not the ultimate question. But I think McConnell, he knows what he’s doing. He is going to . . . We’ll know more soon, but he’s trying to get a similar process to the Clinton impeachment, where you do the real basic ground rules first and you hear the basic case first and then you vote on witnesses. His calculation is just, after two weeks of this, and it would take about two weeks, there’s just going to be zero appetite for continuing.I think the default rule, as I understand it, someone was mentioning it to me, they go Monday through Saturday, which is unheard of for the Senate to not be able to run home on Thursday. You’ve got to sit there and you can’t say anything, and you’re going to hear these things over and over again we’ve already gotten sick of because we’ve heard it repeatedly over the last two months, and then you ask questions on a note card. By the time you’re in the second week of this, going up against a holiday weekend coming up early the next week after that, and I know that shouldn’t matter in the fifth great historic Senate trial, but it will, that probably Republicans will just be ready to vote and to end it. But as I said, we’ll know more soon.

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This excerpt is from episode 182 of The Editors.Rich: All right, so, Jim Geraghty, we got history. We had a historic vote last night on the floor of the House. Two articles of impeachment charging President Trump with abuse of power and obstruction passed handily, with just a couple Democrats flaking off, two on abuse of power, three on obstruction, and Tulsi Gabbard taking the statesmanlike posture of voting present. What do you make of it?Jim: I’m sorry, I’ve got to stretch there and just get a—Rich: That’s a really good theatrical yawn. Did you work on that or—Jim: Yeah, a little bit extra.Rich: . . . did you just come up with that?Jim: A little. Yeah, well, I’m saving up my energy for the utterly exciting Democratic presidential debate tonight, because that’s well-scheduled. Yeah, six days before Christmas, opening night of Star Wars, good timing, DNC. Good job.Look, this was long predicted. The only part of this process that was the least bit surprising was I guess most people didn’t see Jeff Van Drew changing parties. As of this taping, that appears to be all systems go. And most of the purple and red district Democrats falling in line. I wonder if these two are related, that once Van Drew switched parties, that maybe Pelosi started arm-twisting on this.Rich: No, I think they’re related a different way. I think what happened to Van Drew, he voted against the inquiry, and he has a catastrophic drop of support in the party. He has like 20 percent approval, so he’s not getting nominated. He’s not winning that seat again as a Democrat. I am open to the idea a lot of these Democrats are genuinely outraged by Trump’s conduct, but I think they also saw that there’s no way out of this for them except for through. So if you voted against these articles, unless you’re in a real special very Trumpy district, like Collin Peterson is from Minnesota, that you just have to vote for it and grin and bear it and hope you can win over any swing voters and Republican voters you need in November down the line.Jim: Yeah, and I think also this may reveal that there probably weren’t that many Democrats in districts where this vote was going to make or break. The Joe Cunninghams of the world in South Carolina’s First District, that’s got where my parents live down in Hilton Head and all that quick-growing southern corner of the state, he’s probably toast anyway, so might as well vote his conscience. Why defy the party? All that kind of stuff.That was somewhat surprising and interesting, but I think the biggest number you heard tossed around for Democrats voting no was six to ten. Nobody expected this to really be that much of a close vote. Either due to whipping or the sense that most people said, “Well, no, might as well. In for a penny, in for a pound. Might as well vote for impeach and hope that our voters agree with us,” that was somewhat interesting. I’m sure we’ll talk a bit about the weird situation that Nancy Pelosi and the advocates for impeachment find themselves in now.Today’s Morning Jolt, I wrote a bunch about, was there a moment where you could’ve gotten a fairly bipartisan majority for a resolution of censure or some other sense of saying, “Mr. President, you shouldn’t have done this. You can’t do this. You don’t have this kind of authority. If you think there’s some sort of corruption going on with Joe Biden or something, we have a Department of Justice. This has to be done through official channels”? I went through and I found nine House Republicans who’d made various comments kind of in that vein, and maybe you could’ve gotten them onboard.Whatever Democrats and impeachment advocates think should be the case, you were just never going to get any House Republicans voting for this. Maybe you had a shot at one or two, like Rooney down in Florida, but really, it was always going to be a party-line vote. I don’t think Trump, to the extent Trump is capable of feeling shame, which is measured on the molecular scale, he’d probably be more annoyed by a bipartisan resolution of censure, I think, than by this then.He’s going to walk around with this as a badge of pride. He’s going to say, “This was a partisan vendetta. This was a witch hunt,” yadda yadda yadda. Whereas if you’d gotten a decent number of House Republicans to vote on something that didn’t call for impeachment, just said the president shouldn’t have done this, maybe it would’ve been a little more consequential. This was ultimately about making the base of the Democratic party happy, and I hope Democrats are happy now. You got what you want. I hope you walked around with a sad, somber spring in your step, as Nancy Pelosi said this morning.Rich: On censure, I thought that would be a better way for them to go. It would’ve become just as partisan as impeachment largely. Maybe, Jim, your nine, probably fewer than that. Maybe you get like five House Republicans. Better than zero and losing a couple cats and dogs on your own side. But I do think you’d get a real shot, and not a real shot, likelier than not to get over 50 votes for a censure in the Senate. That’d be a more bipartisan rebuke. It doesn’t live in history in quite the same way.Michael, obviously, address anything you’ve heard from Jim, but what do you make of the case substantively that the Democrats ended up landing on, which is, by and large, he’s a threat to the election, which has the backdrop that he somehow welcomed foreign interference into the last election, which they, incredibly enough, base on, when they talk about it in more detail, on Trump saying at that press conference, “If you can hack Hillary’s emails, find her old emails. Russians, if you’re listening, do it.” So they say he just can’t be trusted to run this next election because he welcomed Ukrainian interference this time around, and also that he endangered national security through this scheme.Michael: I don’t think a lot of the case. I do take the point that if you believe as I do . . . I believe the case can be made that the president abused his power, that there’s good-enough evidence at least to look into whether he asked for a sham investigation or just an announcement of an investigation for political benefit. I do take Luke’s constantly repeated point, though, that the United States has an interest in knowing what Joe and Hunter Biden were up to.On the obstruction, I think that’s just a joke at this point. Nancy Pelosi basically couldn’t even finish the sentence of asking for transcripts before the White House just released them, and there was nothing in the additional testimony that indicated that there was anything beyond the transcript that was really incriminating or that really added to the case. If anything, they should be passing a motion congratulating him for helping the case of impeachment, not obstructing it.It’s an odd thing. It’s funny, I was reading Alexander Hamilton on impeachment again, refreshing my memory once more, and he talks about it in these terms of that you have to construct it in this way because the Senate trial . . . What other body of men would have the confidence to sit between the president and the representatives of the people as his accuser? What’s interesting about it is it shows you in reality . . . And he worries that partisan passions would corrupt this. Well, that was very prescient, because partisan allegiance has totally eclipsed the sense of these three separate branches of government operating independently of one another. Legally, they operate independently, but practically speaking, the two parties are the motor running underneath our politics.I think in our lifetimes, impeachment has almost been destroyed as a constitutional provision because it’s been launched twice in the absence of a two-thirds majority sentiment for impeaching and removing the president, and so this thing has become defanged almost totally and looks partisan. Now it’s like our expectation is that you only launch impeachment because the base of one faction demands it, and that’s probably a tragedy for the American people.Also, it’s probably just bad politics long term for Democrats in the sense of he’s going to survive this. They knew he was going to survive this. Maybe they hoped they would put some Senate seats in play through this process. I don’t know if that’s . . . I don’t know if impeachment adds to the Trump effect on certain senatorial candidates that might be weak on the Republican side. But now they would have a very difficult time if Trump does something else, something that excites more outrage among a larger share of the public. This bomb has already gone off and already failed to remove him. It will fail to remove him from office.I don’t know. I thought it was just a very odd event. I thought the drama of it was kind of funny, with the Democrats wearing black and Nancy Pelosi trying to shush her—Rich: That was a very good shush move. Clearly, a grandmother with a lot of experience in shushing.Michael: Listen, Nancy Pelosi is fierce. The daughter of a Baltimore mayor is going to have some just natural authority. But it did give what Jim said, the somber spring in their step. It was bizarre. That’s all I can say about it. This was bizarre. This whole thing has been bizarre from beginning to end.Rich: Charlie, where are you on the substance? Because you’ve been excoriating about Trump’s conduct, but haven’t really . . . I don’t want to put words in your mouth . . . had a strong view one way or the other on impeachment or removal. It seems to me there are a couple different ways to look at it just within our own house.Andy McCarthy and myself tend to make the consequentialist argument, “Well, nothing came of this. They delayed the funding for two months. They get the funding. There’s no announcement of investigations.” I would even argue that even if they announced an investigation of Burisma, it would have zero effect on our election or, really, interfere in our election.But Ramesh, who favors impeachment, says, “Well, it doesn’t really matter what the consequence was, that the core impropriety here of being willing to leverage public resources for what was clearly something that had a political motive at bottom related to the election and mixing his official duties with that motive in this way is just intolerable. It didn’t matter whether it was stopped or not. It doesn’t matter whether it was a little thing or a big thing. It’s just that motive itself is disqualifying.”Charlie: I don’t buy the consequentialist case at all. Imagine if we had learned that President Obama had instructed Lois Lerner to go after Tea Party groups. Would we have said, “Well, she didn’t do it,” or, “Well, it was caught before tax season was over,” or, “In the grand scheme of things, it didn’t affect much.” No, of course not.Trump did this. The fact that it didn’t come to much is neither here nor there for me.That doesn’t mean, though, that I’m thrilled about what happened yesterday. In fact, when it happened, I felt irritated. I instantly thought just how close to the Clinton impeachment this has been. In both cases, the president did what he’d been accused of, and in both cases he was let off -- Trump’s case will be let off -- by his party.In both cases, critics of impeachment pretended that the president was being impeached for something innocuous. In neither case was that true.The language is similar. Representative Loudermilk -- there’s a name! -- compared the House of Representatives to Pontius Pilate yesterday, and the president, implicitly, to Jesus. Well, so did Steny Hoyer in 1998.Both impeachments settled on behavior that was, arguably, impeachable, but in both cases that was not really why the impeachment drive had begun. You go back to Clinton’s: Clinton’s impeachment came after years of Republicans saying that the guy was a philanderer, maybe a rapist, that he was dishonest, he was corrupt. It came after Whitewater and the cattle futures scandal and the travel agency scandal. By the point that the Republican House impeached Bill Clinton, it just knew that he was worse than the articles of impeachment themselves suggested.I think the same is true of Trump. Democrats have said for a long time now that he’s a philanderer, maybe a rapist, that he’s dishonest, that he’s corrupt. The impeachment has come after Mueller and the emoluments cases and watching Trump berate the media and tweet like an idiot. So by the point that they impeached him yesterday, they just knew that he was worse than the articles of impeachment suggested.I think I would’ve voted for neither. In fact, I think I would’ve opposed all three of the impeachments that we’ve seen in American history. I’ve said this before, but it is odd, given some of the terrible things presidents have done, including in my lifetime, that all three of the impeachments that we’ve seen seem so small, so partisan, so contingent upon the surrounding politics, rather than a break from it. And all three seemed so unlikely to prevail. It seems to me that, throughout their history, Americans have not breathed a great deal of seriousness into the Impeachment Clause of the Constitution, and this latest impeachment is no exception.I am -- what was the word you used? -- excoriating when it comes to Trump, including on this, and when it comes to the Republicans and the way that they have fallen in line with him and pretended his call was “perfect” and there’s nothing to see here. But I feel sad in general because I don’t think that anyone has taken this seriously from the beginning, including yesterday. Donald Trump certainly didn’t. The Republicans haven’t -- and aren’t -- and nor are the Democrats. Nancy Pelosi is not sad. She’s not somber. She doesn’t think this is grave. She’s not praying for the president. She’s not protecting or saving the Constitution. And the people who ultimately pushed Nancy Pelosi into this, because she didn’t want to do it, do not give two hoots about the Constitution. In fact, they generally loathe the Constitution, and they’re happy to say so.I find it odd that impeachment has come in America’s history when it has, on the topics that it has. It was said earlier that maybe a censure would have been a better option. Perhaps. But that’s what this is. That’s what this was for Clinton, and it’s what this is for Trump. When you know full well that the Senate is not going to convict and you push an impeachment through the House anyhow, you are effectively censuring the president. You’re using a different mechanism to do it, but you are effectively censuring the president. I think that that is a tactical mistake, even if you believe that the underlying high crimes and misdemeanors would warrant such a measure in a vacuum.Rich: On Pelosi, I actually may be naïve. I don’t doubt that she prays for Trump. I think the appropriate reaction when anyone says they’re praying for you, the appropriate reaction is “Thank you.” It’s not like, “No, there’s no way you’re doing that. Stop lying.” MBD, pick up on anything you heard from Charlie. I just think the norm . . . There’s a tendency to think, to Charlie’s point, the Nixon impeachment, that’s the model; that’s the norm. But now we have a different norm, where it’s inflamed partisan majorities in the House that do this with, at least, the recent example is no chance of convicting. They came within one vote of convicting Johnson.Michael: I really relate to Charlie’s feeling of almost being alienated from the process, because on the one hand what the president did was worth condemning, and on one level if you’re saying, “What are your standards, MBD, for impeachment?” this qualifies. But thank God we don’t go by my standards for public office. Duncan Hunter Jr. would’ve been horsewhipped in public. Several Congress members that were parading around yesterday would be tarred and feathered. It’s a great mercy to me and to all of my colleagues that my standards do not prevail in our country—Rich: What would you do to your colleagues?Michael: . . . in many ways.Rich: What punishments would they have? What chastisement would they suffer?Michael: But I agree with Charlie that—Rich: Maybe we could get some serious enforcement of deadlines here for once, Michael, if we put you in charge.Michael: I know. But I agree with . . . Except my own. But I agree with Charlie. Iran-Contra was a more serious offense than this. The Lincoln bedroom scandal was a more serious offense than this. The—Charlie: Invasion of Libya.Michael: The bombing of Sudan ahead of impeachment was a more serious offense than this. The invasion of Libya. Undeclared drone warfare in several countries. Attempts at regime change in Syria without congressional approval, actually even against congressional approval. Johnson siccing the intel community on Goldwater. There was so many offenses presidents of both parties have conducted in my lifetime that seem so much more serious than this idiotic phone call, which was wrong, that I find it hard. My sense is that the motive for impeachment isn’t actually the offense. The offense was just the usable excuse for impeachment.Rich: I think Charlie is right, though. In both cases, it had built up and went to a deeper issue than what the impeachment itself was about.Michael: Right, but fundamentally I think this is . . . In both the Clinton and the Trump impeachment, you have an opposition party in Congress that is shell-shocked by the political defeats the president has been inflicting on their party, and a party that is angry that the country doesn’t see the president as the fraud they see the president as. I think the Charlie’s comparison is very apt.Charlie: But also that believed that it was destined to rule now. If you look at the Republican party, it was shocked in 1992 that Bill Clinton, this draft-dodging, weed-smoking womanizer, had beaten George H. W. Bush after the corner—Michael: A war hero.Charlie: . . . that the Reagan Revolution had supposedly turned, and it was especially shocked when he won reelection fairly easily, and began to wonder, “Well, are we now going in a different direction?” I think the same thing happened with Trump. Although, it was far more appalling to progressives that Trump won, not only because he represents everything they hate -- and he is hateable in some ways -- but also because they are more prone than others to believe in the coming of the Age of Aquarius and the bending of the arc of history and so on. To replace Barack Obama with Donald Trump was a shock to the system.Rich: Jim, let’s dive a little bit. You touched on this earlier. The current Pelosi gambit, I cannot believe that this gambit will last much past the weekend, because it seems so pointlessly self-destructive. But the idea, and this is not a great credit to this idea, that apparently it originated with Laurence Tribe, of holding the articles, I think Tribe just wanted to hold them indefinitely so he wouldn’t get acquitted, but the idea is to hold them, and this is going to make Mitch McConnell so upset, he’s going to be so desperate to have the articles thrown over in his lap, that he’s going to say, “Okay, let’s have a trial the way Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer want it.”The problem here is Mitch McConnell isn’t going to feel that way, obviously. It contradicts the claim over the last month that Democrats can’t go get witnesses, more witnesses, firsthand witnesses, because it would take time, and this is an urgent priority. The nation is at risk every day that the president isn’t impeached and removed. Then, finally, it’s just obviously like a game. It makes it seem even more partisan and political than it has to this point.Jim: Yeah. The general gist is Trump is an authoritarian—Rich: Sorry, Jim. Go ahead. I’ll silence my phone.Jim: Okay.Michael: You should break out the blues version of this.Jim: Things are so bad for impeachment. In short, the message from the Democrats is Trump is an authoritarian, he has no regard for the Constitution, he is a threat, we cannot wait until the next election, he must be removed as quickly as possible, and it could wait until after the holidays. No contradiction there. By the way, the only way this could go any better . . . I know McConnell has already given his initial statement in scoffing about this, but if he had just gone out there and said, “Please don’t throw me in that briar patch. Oh, no, it would be terrible if my caucus couldn’t vote on Trump’s impeachment. We’d be broken up.”You could see Wednesday the thinking of Democrats, both in office and the activist left on Twitter, having this recognition. For a long time, they’d been trying to answer the question, “How can we impeach Trump?” and all of a sudden, around the middle of the week, it became the question of “Wait, how can we stop the Senate from acquitting Trump?” which is a very different question. This idea of “Well, the Constitution says the Senate holds the trial, but it doesn’t say when it has to hold the trial,” it’s an entire miscalculation of the orders and priorities and interests of Senate Republicans.Is it conceivable that four Senate Republicans would say, Mitt Romney at some point is going to say, “By golly, Nancy Pelosi is right. These rules are unfair. We do need to call a lot more witnesses and we do need to take a lot more time on this, so I will take a stance with the 47 Democrats to insist that Mitch McConnell take a fairer set of rules”?We’re all certain, by the way, that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker and Amy Klobuchar and Michael Bennet all want as long a trial as possible, right? Everybody is on board for this whole thing where they’d hear from every witness, and this would drag on through January into February, and they wouldn’t be able to campaign in Iowa and New Hampshire. Everybody is on board? Okay, just wanted to make sure on that.It’s really bizarre. I now find myself thinking that this is the ridiculous cherry on top on what has been a largely bad-faith process since the beginning, that, in a way, for the House to impeach Trump and then to never send it to the Senate in order to have a trial . . . By the way, Democrats may well look at this and say, “Hey, you know what, that may violate the Constitution,” but as Charlie pointed out, they never really worried about that very much before.Trump getting acquitted would be worse for the country than us never sending it over to the Senate. We can all do math, right? You’re going to get most of the 47 Democrats voting for this, maybe not Joe Manchin. I think Doug Jones probably says in for a penny, in for a pound. Maybe you lose one or two other Democrats. Then you��d end up with maybe Romney would vote for it, maybe Murkowski, maybe one or two others. You’re not going to get the twelve that publications like The Bulwark were throwing around there. So you end up with a situation where it’s a vote that’s 49-51 or something, and you know Trump is going to go out onto the White House lawn and twerk in victory and see it as a complete exoneration because they couldn’t get the two-thirds of votes. If you really see Trump as this-Rich: Now I oppose his impeachment even more than I did at the start of the podcast.Jim: That’s why at the beginning I was saying, “Okay, would a bipartisan resolution of censure have done more, have actually sent the clearer signal to the president you shouldn’t do this?” I don’t know. But we all know where this is going, and we could see where this was going from the beginning. And it’s midday on Wednesday, Democrats suddenly realize, “Hey, wait a minute, we’re not going to get close to 67 votes. What are we going to do here?”Keeping the impeachment in limbo, taking the two articles of impeachment and freezing them in carbonite until they can work out the rules for weeks or months, it sounds like a great idea to me. I love this idea, just for the sheer ridiculousness of it.Michael: This is why partisan impeachment is such a disaster, because in a sense the way impeachment is set up is supposed to be the House, the elected representatives of the people, accuse the president, an impartial Senate tries the president. Without Republicans taking this seriously, the guilt that Democrats want to heap upon Trump for being okay with election interference, etc., inevitably spreads to all the Republican Party in their minds. The Senate become collaborators, and Mitch McConnell becomes Moscow Mitch again, and Vice President Pence because he’s not resigning in protest. Well, even if you impeach Trump, he is also in some way connected to this guilt. In a sense, it reveals itself as just a tool of partisanship and not some kind of solemn, sad duty that the Constitution imposes on Nancy Pelosi and her peers. It doesn’t work this way.Rich: Charlie, last question on impeachment. Do you care one way or the other whether the Senate trial has witnesses?Charlie: Well, I think it’s up to the Senate.I’m not sure that Jim presented the best argument from the Democratic side. The argument, as I see it, is that the Democrats believe, or at least their position is, that what Donald Trump demonstrated with his Ukraine phone call is that he’s prepared to cheat in the next election, and that, as a result, he needs to be removed before the next election. So it doesn’t matter if you wait until after Christmas because the key is getting him out before he can run again and, in their eyes, cheat again. From their perspective, it’s worth waiting because the Senate is not going to be fair, is not going to consider this seriously, and is therefore going to exonerate Trump, which will mean he will run in the next election.Now, I think this is a bad argument, not least because the House could have done everything that it wants the Senate to do. It could’ve brought in any other witness that it wanted to bring in. That it did not is not the leadership of the Senate’s problem, and the leadership in the Senate is in no way obliged to make up for the House’s mistakes or oversights.It’s also an extraordinarily silly idea because there is no leverage here. The Senate does not want to be sent these articles. The Republican Party doesn’t want to deal with it. It doesn’t want to vote on it. Susan Collins doesn’t want to vote on it. Cory Gardner doesn’t want to vote on it. McConnell doesn’t want to have those meetings, and he doesn’t want to be accused of being Moscow Mitch or a collaborator or any of the other things that Michael says.It’s a very silly plan that is built upon a misreading of what this would do. I don’t think that McConnell and Trump would sit there and say, “I can’t believe I’ve been left in limbo.” I think that McConnell would breathe a sigh of relief that he doesn’t have to deal with it, and Trump would run around the country saying, “They’re so weak, their case was so flimsy, it was such a stunt that they didn’t even transmit the articles to the Senate. These people wasted time, they wasted money, they sullied my good name, and they weren’t prepared to follow through.” We have all seen a Donald Trump rally. We’ve all seen how Donald Trump tweets.Taking advice from Laurence Tribe at this stage is perhaps not a good idea. In fact, this is such a bad idea that I wonder at one level whether it’s a pretext for essentially rendering the impeachment a censure vote and drawing a line under it.Rich: I think she’s transmitting them—Charlie: No, she will do it. I’m just saying that this argument, which has caught on in some quarters, makes no sense whatsoever, and so you have to assume Nancy Pelosi, who is not stupid and is not politically ignorant, will know that.But the specific question you asked: I don’t think the House should have any say over what the Senate does. The House had its turn. It could’ve lasted a year, this investigation, if it had wanted it to. It didn’t. Now it’s on to the next chamber.Rich: MBD, exit question to you, a special, historic, double-barreled exit question. The number of Republican senators voting to convict in the Senate will be what; and yes or no, will there be witnesses during a Senate trial?Michael: There will be witnesses, and zero Republicans will vote to convict.Rich: Jim Geraghty?Jim: Two. Minimal witnesses, if any. Basically, it’s going to be the McConnell plan of rules. Maybe he’ll throw them a bone here and there just to get this thing going, and it will be done by the end of January.Rich: But you say there are going to be two Republican votes to convict?Jim: Yeah, Romney and Murkowski probably.Rich: Wow. Charlie Cooke?Charlie: I don’t think there will be any votes to convict on the Republican side, and I think there will be a few Democratic defections, and no witnesses.Rich: That’s the correct answer. It’ll be zero and zero, no Republican votes to convict. Dan McLaughlin pointed out the other day there actually . . . Obviously, a really small sample size, but in the two prior Senate trials, no member of the president’s party has ever voted to convict. That was only nine, I believe, Democratic senators during the Johnson impeachment, but no Democratic senators during the Clinton impeachment. I think that will hold up here. I think if you’re just doing pure politics, it is a debacle for you if you’re Susan Collins or . . . Mitt Romney is different. He has a degree of independence. But you’re just going to lose your own party. Susan Collins, her career would be over if she votes to convict, in my estimation.Then on witnesses, I think that’s a closer call. If they’re going to flake on something, Romney, Murkowski, Collins, it would clearly be witnesses, in my view, not the ultimate question. But I think McConnell, he knows what he’s doing. He is going to . . . We’ll know more soon, but he’s trying to get a similar process to the Clinton impeachment, where you do the real basic ground rules first and you hear the basic case first and then you vote on witnesses. His calculation is just, after two weeks of this, and it would take about two weeks, there’s just going to be zero appetite for continuing.I think the default rule, as I understand it, someone was mentioning it to me, they go Monday through Saturday, which is unheard of for the Senate to not be able to run home on Thursday. You’ve got to sit there and you can’t say anything, and you’re going to hear these things over and over again we’ve already gotten sick of because we’ve heard it repeatedly over the last two months, and then you ask questions on a note card. By the time you’re in the second week of this, going up against a holiday weekend coming up early the next week after that, and I know that shouldn’t matter in the fifth great historic Senate trial, but it will, that probably Republicans will just be ready to vote and to end it. But as I said, we’ll know more soon.

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inkyucu · 17 days

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So... I got showed a website where you can pose a model for characters, and I planned on making a sketch.

This.... This was not the game plan, and yet I don't mind what happened, because I got to work on my horrible abilities when it comes to working on perspective AND full body Eclipse I will totally use as reference! Two birds with one accidentally thrown stone if I do say so myself

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+ A little bonus

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tendance-news · 4 years

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mrmichaelchadler · 5 years

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True/False 2019: Caballerango, American Factory, The Hottest August, Finding Frances

One of the best films at the festival, Juan Pablo González’s “Caballerango” captures spare haunted moments in Milpillas, a rural Mexican village that has been reeling from a series of suicides. A horse vacantly stares in the camera. A woman pulls the skin off chicken legs. Two men have a sprinting contest while a group places bets. People work while the world changes around them. The landscape remains the same.

These scenes have an indefinably eerie quality that stems from González’s choice to make his camera as invisible as possible. He lingers on events longer than most filmmakers, illustrating the passage of time as much as the action in the frame. He interviews people discussing the various losses that have affected them and their community—a son’s suicide, his sister’s miscarriage, his brother’s friends’ deaths—but the focus in “Caballerango” remains productively unstable. The suicides are treated as individual tragedies while also serving as microcosms for the economic deterioration in the area, an avenue that González would rather gesture towards than didactically explore.

González employs a creative rhythmic strategy to communicate his empathy towards the Milpillas community. He conditions his audience to observe the mundane at length, to “experience the frame instead of someone editing,” as he explained in Filmmaker Magazine to describe his short film “The Solitude of Memory.” Thus, when the unexpected invades the frame, it engenders surprise or awe, like a late-night vigil that stalks the streets. It’s an attempt to inure the audience into the pace of life in Milpillas while also demonstrating how ghosts, metaphoric and literal, permanently disrupt everyday lives. The spectral drives “Caballerango” while the people themselves reside at its center.

“American Factory”

Netflix bought Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert’s “American Factory” for under $3 million following its world premiere at Sundance earlier this year. This might be a drop in the bucket for a streaming service that essentially prints its own money, but it still ostensibly represents a belief that a documentary about a Chinese-owned car-glass manufacturing company in Dayton, Ohio can garner a sizable audience on their platform. Given that the film directly engages with Recession-sourced working class plight, unionization in face of indifferent corporate superstructures, and the difficulties of reconciling different cultures during the height of globalization, Netflix might have made a good bet.

In 2014, Chinese billionaire Cao Dewang opens up a Fuyao manufacturing plant in Dayton. For the locals, this represents a bright new opportunity, especially after General Motors shuttered their factory in 2008. At first, “American Factory” focuses on the humorous side of the culture clash: the Chinese workers, transplanted from the safety of their homes and families, learn about the nuances of their American peers in classroom settings, while the Americans deal with the Chinese workers’ hyper-detail-focused nature and staunch work ethic on the job. Yet, tensions quickly escalate as Chinese management become frustrated with their American counterparts as well as the country’s labor laws. Lax safety standards and the looming threat of automation spark union talks amongst the workers, which erodes all previous good will. The film becomes a chronicle of the age-old war between labor and management, only this time with easily drawn global implications vis-à-vis Chinese economic control and America’s bleak manufacturing future. The metaphors invent themselves when you’re watching irreconcilable worldviews engage with each other in real time.

Bognar and Reichert’s film maneuvers between different tones at ease. It’s a fish-out-of-water comedy one moment and a searing indictment of hellacious corporate practices the next. This casual tonal shifts allows the film’s truly horrifying moments to pop, like when an American supervisor tells his Chinese peer that he wishes he could tape his workers’ mouths shut so they wouldn’t talk as much on the job, or Dewang’s underlings expressing disbelief at the idea of Americans not working weekends. There’s probably one too many threads at play in the film, but even the most digressive elements contribute to a modern portrait of American labor fighting upwind against a culture that has all but abandoned them.

What keeps me from wholly embracing “American Factory” lies in Bognar and Reichert’s macro-structural decision to provide everyone, from the factory workers to Dewang himself, an equal platform. On paper, the choice is sound, a necessary step to providing a full picture, but when the film shifts focus to the unionization efforts, it occasionally scans as a blatant attempt for obvious villains to save face. Bognar and Reichert provide a steady, neutral presence, which obviously helps with access and trust, but their inability to express a strong critical viewpoint becomes a liability. Everyone is human, yes, but when certain individuals have the expressed goal of continually putting workers in harm’s way to save a buck, maybe some are more human than others.

I walked out of “American Factory” thinking that no one could possibly watch that film and come away believing that unions are anything less than a necessity. Sure enough, two people behind me were talking about how unions “made sense for a time,” but they ultimately bred laziness and stifled innovation. I don’t for a second doubt Bognar and Reichert’s intentions, but because “American Factory” plays to all time zones, it will inevitably confirm whatever pre-conceived biases you already hold. Granted, it’s not the job of “American Factory” to change minds, but at some point, the choice not to take a tougher political stance weakens the film.

“The Hottest August”

Brett Story’s “The Hottest August” technically focuses on the dark specter of the impending global climate disaster through the voices of New Yorkers over the span of a month, but its larger aim is to encapsulate the sense of dread that currently permeates the world. In August 2017, Story traveled across all five boroughs, either going to a specific event in the city or posting up at a single location, to film conversations about “the future.” Different anxieties fill the air—economic, social, racial, political—and the testimonies directly engage with the ineffable sense of catastrophe that feels like it’s lurking around the corner. Sometimes the responses are measured while others are tossed off. Trump’s recent inauguration hangs over the city, not to mention the violent aftermath of Unite the Right rally as well as the solar eclipse, which Story uses as a structural bookend. In between these interviews, actress Clare Coulter provides clinical, semi-otherworldly narration; she reads excerpts from Marx, Zadie Smith, and a “New Yorker” essay by Annie Dillard. Story’s film scans as a long-form exploration of the most chilling line from Paul Schrader’s “First Reformed”: “This social system isn’t built for multiple crises.”

Story and her editor Nels Bangerter visually and aurally communicate the low-grade terror that now fills our lives quite effectively. “The Hottest August” is freewheeling by its very nature, jumping from topic to topic similar to Story’s borough hopping. The collective fear, and the ways in which it’s expressed, mostly keeps the interviews connected. It’s how a young college graduate worried about job prospects can feel in line with middle-aged Staten Island bar patrons discussing racism, even if the expressed anxieties are diametrically opposed. Story lets her subjects talk freely and jumps in to further the conversation or question the answers. (The best example might be when she questions an art collecting hedge fund manager about the value of capitalism.) She encounters these New Yorkers at a critical point, and while all are self-aware about the respective despair, none feel particularly hopeless. Systemic collapse doesn’t necessarily crush individual hope.

Story clearly reverse-engineered “The Hottest August” from the numerous interviews she conducted, and though that’s a valid creative strategy, the project feels unproductively diffuse at times. It lives and dies by the charisma of her subjects, which vary wildly, and certain participants, like a futurist performance artist, just simply aren’t engaging enough to justify the time spent with them. I couldn’t help but wonder if the film would have a stronger impact on me if the scope were limited exclusively to climate change. At the same time, “The Hottest August” succeeds as a portrait of New York in crisis and I can easily see myself coming around to certain digressive elements on a second viewing. It’s a colossal film, one that I predict will be major if distributed, that bottles up our depressing zeitgeist with maximum insight, and yet I still felt underwhelmed. Maybe just living in this culture will do that to you sometimes.

“Finding Frances”

Though it never occurred to me when it was airing, “Nathan For You,” the satirical docu-reality series co-created by and starring comedian Nathan Fielder, is a perfect fit for True/False. Fielder’s elaborate, counterintuitive marketing proposals for struggling businesses—offering a gas station rebate that’s almost impossible to claim; exploiting the fair use doctrine to rebrand a struggling coffee shop as Dumb Starbucks; using a theatrical construct to help a dive bar get around a smoking ban—always straddled the line between performance art and non-fiction storytelling. Fielder and his team employed many of the principles of documentary filmmaking to pull off their stunts, finding humor in the gaps between their noble-but-misguided intentions and the participants’ willingness to go along with them. “Nathan For You” raises many of the standard philosophical and ethical questions that “serious” documentarians grapple with during their own projects, plus some legal ones as well. (A friend pointed out that Fielder must have kept Comedy Central’s legal team very busy over the course of the series.) All of these qualities make “Nathan For You” pure, unfettered True/False bait.

I won’t restate the plot of “Nathan For You’s” brilliant series finale “Finding Frances” in this space; it’s readily available to stream and you can read multiple recaps or reviews if you wish, including one penned by Errol Morris. However, I will say that watching the film/episode (I’m not getting into this debate) in the Missouri Theatre, where all 1,200 seats were filled with either Fielder acolytes or curious newcomers, was a genuine event. In retrospect, it was a perfect fit for the festival: an audacious crowd-pleaser that not only pushes Fielder’s project to its limit but also vibes neatly with the rest of the programming lineup. It’s no surprise that True/False has apparently been trying to get Fielder to come out to Columbia for some time. Sure enough, the crowd treated Fielder like a rock star when he arrived for the Q&A (the guy sitting next to me jumped to his feet and screamed as if Mick Jagger strolled across the stage). He answered multiple questions in his wonderful deadpan cadence and screened some deleted scenes for the audience. “Finding Frances” illustrates that True/False can indulge in its populist side without abandoning its principles.

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grigori77 · 6 years

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Movies of 2018 - My Pre-Summer Favourites (Part 1)

The Runners-Up:

20. RAMPAGE – 2018’s first major bid for the title of guilty pleasure of the year comes from San Andreas director Brad Peyton, reuniting with Dwayne Johnson for this balls-out bonkers adaptation of the classic 90s video game in which The Rock plays a former soldier turned primatologist who finds himself up against a trio of genetically-edited giant animals. This is one of those movies that delivers insanely over-the-top action and plenty of comedy, both intentional and otherwise, and it’s all the better for it.

19. ALL THE MONEY IN THE WORLD – Ridley Scott takes a break from directing shiny sci-fi/fantasy blockbusters to deliver this rich and edgy procedural thriller about the 1973 kidnapping of the grandson of the world’s richest man, John Paul Getty (portrayed with charm and repugnance by the mighty Christopher Plummer). Mark Wahlberg and Michelle Williams spark magnificently as the ex-CIA problem solver and the boy’s mother, who both grow increasingly exasperated by Getty’s stubborn refusal to pay the ransom.

18. DARKEST HOUR – Joe Wright brings us his best film since Atonement, ably supported by Gary Oldman, who delivers one the finest performances of his career as newly-elected British PM Winston Churchill, determined to see his country stand strong against burgeoning Nazi aggression in the early days of the Second World War. Sterling support comes from the likes of Kristin Scott Thomas, Lily James, Ben Mendelsohn and Nicholas Jones, while Wright directs with characteristic theatrical flair and vision.

17. MOLLY’S GAME – master screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (A Few Good Men, The Social Network, Steve Jobs) makes his long-awaited directorial debut with this blackly comic real-life drama recounting the rise and fall of Molly Bloom (Jessica Chastain), the former Olympic ski-jumper whose creation of an incredibly lucrative high-stakes private poker franchise made her the target of anti-Mob investigations from the FBI. Chastain is a revelation, all-but eclipsing an impressive all-star cast including Idris Elba, Kevin Costner and Michael Cera.

16. PACIFIC RIM: UPRISING – Guillermo Del Toro’s awesome 2013 giant-robots-versus-giant-monsters blockbuster receives a surprisingly impressive sequel that marks the feature debut of acclaimed TV writer/director Steven S. DeKnight (creator of Starz’s massively popular Spartacus franchise). Star Wars’ John Boyega is the soul of the film as reluctant next-gen Jaeger pilot Jake Pentecost (the son of Idris Elba’s character in the first film), while DeKnight delivers robust fireworks both on the futuristic battlefields and in the richly-drawn characters’ locker rooms.

15. HOSTILES – Black Mass writer/director Scott Cooper delivers his best film to date in this gritty and emotionally devastating revisionist western about the high cost of Frontier America’s program of Westward Expansion. Christian Bale is lamentable-yet-likeable as the retiring cavalry officer and Indian-fighter charged with delivering Wes Studi’s dying tribal chief back to the resting place of his ancestors, while Rosamund Pike is gracefully battered as the newly-bereaved frontier-woman caught in the emotional crossfire.

14. I, TONYA – Margot Robbie’s award-nominated performance rightly dominates this semi documentary-style black comedy biopic from Lars & the Real Girl director Craig Gillespie, which examines the events that led to infamous Olympic ice-dancer Tonya Harding’s alleged crippling of her rival Nancy Kerrigan, and the fallout that ensued. The fiendishly twisty narrative plays a lot of tricks on the viewer, while Robbie’s complex performance as Harding leaves you unsure who to ultimately sympathise with.

13. I KILL GIANTS – the acclaimed graphic novel from comics legend Joe Kelly is brought to vivid life by director Anders Walter and a deeply emotional script from Kelly himself. The Conjuring 2’s Madison Wolfe perfectly drives the story of D&D geek Barbara, who spends her days setting traps around her small coastal town in preparation for battles with terrible giants, but are her outlandish adventures anything more than a troubled girl’s desperate attempts to escape a terrible family tragedy?

12. MAZE RUNNER: THE DEATH CURE – director Wes Ball and screenwriter T.S. Nowlin’s consistently excellent film adaptation of James Dashner’s post-apocalyptic YA series reaches a satisfying conclusion with this cracking trilogy closer (refreshingly presented in just ONE film). Dylan O’Brien’s fugitive Thomas returns for a final confrontation with WCKD, the evil corporation that seeks to drain their brains to create a vaccine they believe will cure the lethal Flare virus, in this impressively action-packed and explosive sci-fi thriller.

11. ANNIHILATION – Netflix’s most impressive film so far this year is also their most frustrating – writer/director Alex Garland’s much anticipated follow-up to his astonishing debut ex-Machina is a dark and twisted masterpiece that deserves to be seen on the big screen. Adapted from Jeff Vandermeer’s acclaimed novel (first in his Southern Reach trilogy), this is a science fiction Heart of Darkness that cerebrally challenges the viewer and stuns them with its richly-coloured scenes of aching beauty and pervading dread. Exquisite.

#movies 2018 #pacific rim #i kill giants #maze runner #annihilation alex garland #awesome sauce

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inkyucu · 27 days

Text

Theatrical Tragedy!!!

(Aka an informational post about an AU I'm currently obsessing over)

This is most likely going to be a somewhat long post, so sorry about that-

Important thing to know before continuing!!!

(Depending on who you are)

Before I say anything else, there is something I want to make clear, because I know that this can make some people uncomfortable. This AU is an AU that contains Sun x Moon. They are not siblings in this AU. There may be times where there is implied shipping of one of these two and another character, but keep in mind that they're not in a polyamorous relationship of any sort (They just do it to mess with people, they both do it, they know the other one does it, it does not bother either of them).

Please also keep in mind that some art posted of Sun and Moon may be considered suggestive (Nothing explicit - mostly because it makes me uncomfortable - but do keep this in mind if you do decide to keep up with the AU). I've been trying to get more comfortable with drawing different things with my art, and this AU just so happens to be a good means for me to try and get more used to drawing characters in a relationship.

Neither of these should end up being posted that often in the art that I do post, but I felt it was important to inform you of the potential of these showing up. I understand not everyone likes these things. If you don't like anything mentioned here, please don't say anything about it, and just ignore the AU. This also applies to anything else you might read or see about this AU. If you don't like it, ignore it.

Introduction.

(Finally)

Basically, in this AU, 'You' are a security worker in the Pizzaplex after the massive layoff of people. The security guards are the only ones that weren't fired, simply because they needed at least some people to do the things the robots couldn't do. Which unfortunately leaves you assigned to the daycare because of false reports of them being broken. ...And no one really trusts either of them. For the most part, you were basically just there to be a babysitter to a bratty animatronic that seems to hate you.

Moon, while rather annoying at times, doesn't have much of a problem with you. Sun seems to act like they hate you. Eclipse.... Eh, you'll find out.

'You'

Referred to Whyen - It's a nickname you've always had

Shorter than average

Unspecified age, but likely in their early twenties

Any pronouns

Refers to the robots as 'It' literally just to be rude

They act a bit of a jerk towards the animatronics, but in general they tend to just not interact with the animatronics, as they make them uncomfortable. They had a sibling who used to work in the now abandoned theater near the daycare. Wonder what happened to them....

Sun!

Goes by many names, and doesn't care what they're called

9'8 (Before and after sharing a body)

They were made after Eclipse, but no one knows how long they've been around

Mostly referred to as male, but goes my any pronouns - except for it, they see it as being dehumanizing

Pretty good with children, but absolutely hates all of the staff. Why? No one's quite sure, they just don't. They were the second AI to be made, and of the three currently known, Sun tends to be the most sensible and easiest to irritate one. One of the easiest ways to irritate them is intentionally doing something wrong, being disorganized, or just being a menace to society.

Moon!

Like Sun, they don't care what name people call them

9'8 (Before and after sharing a body)

They were made after Sun, but no one knows how long they've been around

Usually referred to as male, but goes by any pronouns - doesn't mind being called it

Also pretty decent with children. Doesn't really hate the staff, they just like to antagonize the staff by acting creepy or weird. Usually Moon just doesn't interact though. He tends to be the more silly and mischievous one of the three, and the least sensible of all of them. Moon was planned to be made at the same time as Sun, but they were technically made after Sun literally due to a lack of enough people to work on both of them at the same time.

Eclipse!

Mostly just referred to as Eclipse

9'11

The first to be made, they were made at least 15 years ago (specific date unknown)

You could call them literally anything and they would not care at all

Eclipse - when they were a part of the theater - was usually specifically kept away from the children due to the buggy mess they were. They were nice, but unpredictable. The most chaotic of the three, and yet oddly the calmest. After the theater got shut down, Eclipse was not put into the one body, and instead they were put in a storage room. Why? Probably because of the mess that their AI was.

That one dream guy

Unknown name

Unknown height

Unknown age

Unknown gender

Not much is known about it, other than that you seem to trust it when it appears in your dreams, it seemed to be human, and that it appeared to work at the Pizzaplex.

Eclipse is only taller due to their torso and abdomen needing to be farther spaced apart for their 6 arms (Yes, 6 arms)

Fun/Random Facts!

(This list may or may not extend over time)

Sun and Moon used to be in two separate bodies when they were in the theater! They were only put in one body to save power costs

Sun and Moon choose who is in control; it's not determined by lights

Eclipse broke very easily, and due to this, most of their existence they couldn't change their face expressions very much. To make up for this, they used small signs with different expressions!

Whyen's nickname may or may not be a reference to a certain 'Y/N' the dca Fandom is just a little fond of

Other things not really related to what the AU is about but are still important I think

(Man I'm so bad good at titles)

This AU is rather incomplete, and there has been at least one thing I've gone back and have changed. So chances are, it'll happen again. This could - and probably will - lead to some inconsistencies in the AU. If that happens? Just go by what I say in that very moment is what's canon.

Asks about the AU are welcome! This could be to any character, and you would not appear as Whyen in the story... Imagine yourself as like a child in the daycare or something asking them these questions. But no, through the asks, you would not be asking them through Whyen, if that makes sense.

You can also just send a question to me specifically if you have questions about the AU! I'd be welcome to answer any remaining questions you have after reading this!

This post most likely will be changed as the AU changes.

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