10 Made For TV Christmas Movies To Watch This Holiday Season (by synopsis)

If you have seen one Hallmark Channel Christmas Movie, never mind a made-for-TV Yuletide offering from Lifetime or UP, you have seen 75 of them. In all likelihood, this movie will end with a Christmas Tree lighting, a group of carolers who look like department store models dressed up in Victorian costumes, and the leading lady kissing the leading man while the leading man’s little boy looks up, merrily, because the nuclear family is complete and isn’t that Jesus’s – excuse me, Santa’s true miracle? By the end of Countdown to Christmas, you generally have seen so many tree lighting ceremonies that your eyes glaze over. But in this year, 2020, well, those numerals speak for themselves, folks, and in real life, you’re not going to any tree lighting ceremonies. Those have been canceled. Stay home, save lives. You wanna see a festive gathering, the Made for TV Christmas Movies are your only choice. And that makes our annual breakdown of Made for TV Christmas Movie synopses, emphasizing the Hallmark Channel, not just merry but mandatory. I know, I know, every content mill and aggregate farm has already rolled out a similar list. But just as my dad did not put up our Christmas tree until Thanksgiving weekend, Cinema Romantico does not put up the Hallmark Christmas synopsis post until the Monday after. You’re welcome. 

10 Made For TV Christmas Movies To Watch This Holiday Season (by synopsis)

10. Christmas Unwrapped. “An ambitious yet pragmatic reporter learns the true meaning of Christmas when she investigates a millionaire and beloved member of the town who insists that all the gifts that arrive on Christmas every year are from none other than Santa himself.” LET’S GO!!!!!

9. If I Only Had Christmas: “At Christmas, a cheerful publicist teams up with a cynical VP and his eclectic team to help a charity in need.” A synopsis that does not look like much at first but sneaks up on you by checking all the pertinent Hallmark Countdown to Christmas boxes. It leads off with that wholly unnecessary “At Christmas” – you don’t say? – and then proffers the proper stereotypes - a cheerful female lead, a cynical male lead - while rounding it off with an eclectic supporting cast and a charity to ensure we understand the season is about giving, not receiving. 

8. Beaus of Holly. (Ion). “When Holly boldly proposes to Phil, he confesses he needs to first work things out with a long-ago ex. Having booked a romantic holiday sleigh ride, despondent Holly pours her heart out to sleigh driver, Jake, who takes a refreshing interest in her, until Phil returns.” Two puns in one title is excessive and bumps it down the list. Still, I’m including it because that sleigh variation of a Meet Cute in, like, the back of a taxi is pretty inspired.  

8. A Christmas Movie Christmas (UP): “Eve and her cynical sister Lacy find themselves trapped inside a Christmas movie where they are the stars.” How had this movie not happened yet?

7. Christmas Waltz: “A woman makes an unexpected connection with her dance instructor after her storybook Christmas wedding is canceled.” Is it really so unexpected? 

6. Cranberry Christmas. “A separated couple plays pretend, using their ‘perfect marriage’ to give their town’s Christmas festival a boost. Along the way, they question if rekindled love is possible, or something they should leave in the past.” I confess, it’s not the synopsis winning me over here so much as the synopsis’s accompanying promotional still. That kind of emphatic Christmas cheer can only be pretend. 

5. A Christmas Carousel. “Lila partners up with the Prince of Marcadia to repair the Royal Family’s carousel by Christmas.” The elegant simplicity of the synopsis paired with the literally noble concept is just 👌.

4. A Timeless Christmas. “A man travels from 1903 to 2020, where he meets a tour guide at his historic mansion and gets to experience a 21st century Christmas.” This reminds me, I keep meaning to pitch my college football comedy in which a member of the 1901 Michigan Football team travels from the 1902 Rose Bowl to the 2022 Rose Bowl where he meets a comely Rose Bowl usher and gets to experience a 21st century college football game.

3. Forever Christmas. “When workaholic TV producer Sophie starts working on a holiday reality show about Will, a handsome man who celebrates Christmas every day of the year, she finds herself falling for her mysterious new star.” The yearly synopsis that reminds us of the dangerous game Hallmark is playing with tone. You twist the dial one degree on something like “a handsome man who celebrates Christmas every day of the year” and this movie tips straight into pure horror. I mean, really, what sounds scarier, “Black Christmas” or “Forever Christmas?”  

2. Love, Lights, and Hanukkah! “In the height of the holiday craziness, Christina gets back a DNA test and learns that she's actually Jewish. This leads her down a path of self-discovery, even finding romance along the way.” I admire Hallmark’s determination to become more inclusive, but if you really want to honor the Jewish faith wouldn’t you schedule an entire block of rom com programming for the High Holy Days?

1. Time For Us to Come Home for Christmas: “Five guests are mysteriously invited to an inn to celebrate Christmas. With the help of the owner Ben, Sarah discovers that an event from the past may connect them and change their lives forever.” Agatha Christie + Christmastime? Yes, please!

Ray of Light

My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife showed me “Funny Face” for the first time last week. I retain the right to review the movie in full at some point in the future, though I will say it does not completely work, significantly falling off in the second half, partially undone by the fact that despite its two legendary lead performers they simply have no romantic chemistry whatsoever, proof positive that the greats can’t fake it. Not that such critiques matter. The stuff here that’s good is so good it’ll melt your face off, stuff like the “Funny Face” scene itself, though not the actual number, not quite, more the moment just before Audrey Hepburn as the bookish Jo Stockton begins singing with the debonair photographer Dick Avery (Fred Astaire).

Standing in the latter’s dark room, Jo leans against the wall and sighs “How could I be a model,” one of those immaculate, peerless Hepburn line readings where she stretches out the first syllable on the last word, rendering it “moooodel”, like it’s some distant phrase she’s trying to sound out. “I have no illusions about my looks,” she continues. “I think my face is funny.” Her face is not really funny, of course, duh. In fact, the funniest thing in the whole movie (and I mean that as a compliment) is that she says this while the movie literally frames her like the Movie Star she is. 

Heavens to murgatroyd. 

Dreaming of Going to the Movies Part II

(Dreaming of Going to the Movies Part I)

My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife was out of town the last week of February and I intended that Sunday to catch a matinee of “Portrait of a Lady on Fire.” Alas, I lazed my morning away, sleeping too late, drinking coffee too long. “I can just watch a movie at home,” I thought. And I did. That, I have come to realize, was my last chance to see a movie at the theater in 2020 and I gave it up to stream something. All I do now is stream movies. It’s funny, sort of, if you had asked off the cuff in 2020 what filmmaker I might risk my life for in order to see his/her new movie, it’s likely I would have said Kelly Reichardt, or Sofia Coppola. But “First Cow” hit theaters two days after March 11 and “On the Rocks” was just recently showing in theaters, ahead of Chicago’s latest stay at home advisory. I didn’t risk my life for either of them.

---------------

A few weeks back, the Washington Post’s Megan McArdle wrote a column warning us to be prepared to say goodbye to movie theaters. She shepherded us through the usual streaming-era apprehensions about the industry being on the brink before suggesting that even if some movie chains keep kicking as a vaccine is found and produced and distributed, statistics suggesting significant portions of the populace might refrain from taking it based on, I dunno, the sage advice of a relative’s Facebook meme? McArdle wondered, then, if for the foreseeable future movie-going was worth the risk? Pivoting off her piece, Will Leitch suggested that it was not, even if, as some studies have shown, no COVID cases have been traced to a movie theater. But the fear, Leitch wrote, was more than enough. McArdle’s Post colleague, Sonny Bunch, sounding an awful lot like our Carnival Barker-in-Chief espousing some mind over matter bunkum, claimed that fear is exactly what’s killing movie theaters. Technically, he might be right. But why it’s up to us to take a needless risk for an industry that long ago yoked itself to nothing but tentpoles in a country where the (current) leadership has shrugged and left us all on our own, who knows. 

At the New York Times, A.O. Scott proffered his own State of the Cinema piece, wondering if we would even want to return to the movies when all this is over. His arguments stemmed from the streaming age, too, combined with a general audience indifference to those pre-show messages of no talking and no cellphones, etc., in some ways foreshadowing the current civil liberties tumult that is doing no favors in eradicating COVID. Movie-going has its annoyances, granted, but, gees, there are few things I have missed during the Pandemic like going to the movies. Even if the seats are dusty, the projection is off, the audience members talkative, it’s easier to disappear into a movie in the darkness of the theater then it is at home, no matter how disciplined I am in hiding my phone in the other room or telling myself beforehand not to let everyday distractions distract. I enjoyed watching “Mission: Impossible – Fallout” on my teensy seatback screen on a flight home from Berlin wedged into a middle seat, I truly did, but that couldn’t compare to watching it in my neighborhood theater on opening night, surrounded by so many like-minded folks, three-fourths of the way into my Daisy Cutter when Ethan Hunt HALO jumped into the club and I smiled so wide I felt like I was going to burst. In July, when Tom Ley, Editor-in-Chief of Defector, Tweeted that the last time he was truly, 100-percent happy was watching “Mission: Impossible – Fallout” for the first time, I knew exactly what he meant. 

---------------

I’ve been having dreams lately about going to the movies. Well, not going to the movies, really, but wanting to go to the movies. You kids, you young ruffians probably don’t remember this but once upon a time to see when a movie was playing you had to check the times for various theaters in your newspaper. If you didn’t subscribe to the paper, which I sometimes didn’t, then you had to go buy one. I’ve been nostalgic for those movie times, lately, surfing through old Google images of them, like the one above. (Shout-out to some extinct movie theaters from my hometown - plus, Raul’s!) And maybe because I’ve been Googling them, I’ve been dreaming about them too. 

In the dream, I go out, early in the morning on a Friday, excited to see what movies are opening, and pick up a paper from a vending machine on the corner. I bring it home and, over coffee, flip to the movie times. But I keep flipping and flipping and it’s just blank page after blank page. There are no showtimes. No movies are playing. 

The Trial of the Chicago 7

It makes sense that Netflix’s dramatization of seven prominent counterculture members (and Black Panther Bobby Seale) being tried for inciting a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention would be both written and directed by Aaron Sorkin. After all, Sorkin wrote the screenplay for “A Few Good Men” and “The Social Network”, the former turning on a military trial and the latter pivoting off two depositions.  If “A Few Good Men”, however, proffered a garden variety argument about right and wrong, it was also a true crackerjack entertainment, so eminently watchable it seems to be running on cable TV 24-7 while “The Social Network” stood out by lingering in moral grey areas. In “The Trial of The Chicago 7”, on the other hand, both written and directed by Sorkin, his patented monologues, pithy conversations and bleeding heart take all the piss out of the true story. There is nothing wrong, of course, with utilizing the medium of the flickering myth to reimagine truth. But rather than rendering a counter myth, a la Oliver Stone’s “JFK”, Sorkin is essentially transforming the Chicago 7 into his own mouthpiece, subsuming their radical politics in the name of something superficial. 

“The Trial of The Chicago 7” opens with a whoosh by bringing its myriad players onto the stage at once in advance of their anti-war demonstrations in Chicago at the DNC. Rather, however, than cutting straight to the riots, which once unveiled are rendered in too stagy a manner, isolating individual moments, to convey the true power of the mob, Sorkin flashes forward to the trial’s beginning before flashing back to the various events resulting in the court case. Though members of the 7, especially Abbie Hoffman (Sacha Baron Cohen), sought to create a courtroom spectacle, and though Sorkin’s dialogue demonstrates sympathy with the defendants, his taste proves more in line with the horn-rimmed glasses and conservatism of the prosecutor, Richard Schultz (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). 

Spielbergian soft light pouring through the windows gives the proceedings a ring of stateliness that unintentionally dulls the flower power, the latter further compromised in the movie’s penchant for awards-beckoning close-ups and swelling orchestral music rather than subversive pop hits of era, a quaint aesthetic that feels more true to a John Grisham adaptation than how a fellow beatnik like, say, the late Hal Ashby might have conveyed this material. If only. The actors portraying the 7, in addition to Mark Rylance as their attorney William Kunstler, are uniformly sound in so much as they ably embody the distinct trait afforded them in the screenplay. But no actor manages, or is allowed the necessary room to, sculpt a true character, innately evoking the grounds for that trait. 

Presiding Judge Julius Hoffman, meanwhile, may well have been a single dimensional real-life life person but as played by Frank Langella in low-angled shots looking up at him smug and self-impressed in doling out count after count of contempt of court he comes across less like a hanging judge than a version of his reactionary White House Chief of Staff from “Dave.” In the moment when Hoffman, orders Black Panther Bobby Seale (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), in Chicago for entirely different reasons that day and without a lawyer of his own, beaten and then gagged, “The Trial of the Chicago 7” briefly threatens to ignite. History, alas, dictates that Seal then be removed from the proceedings, emblematic not so much of how he tracked a different line than his fellow defendants than how his incendiary Black Panther politics are simply too much for a two-dimensional portrayal of good & evil to contain.

Ultimately the real drama is found in the relationship between the 7’s most most prominent members: Tom Hayden (Eddie Redmayne) and Abbie Hoffman. Hayden, founder of the Students for Democratic Society and co-author of the Port Huron Statement, treats the legal proceedings with respect in hopes of currying a fair trial while Hoffman, colorful founder of the Yippies, transforms the trial into a mockery by way of making it into a show. Unlike “The Social Network, however, which turned in part on the distinct push and pull between Eduardo Saverin’s rose-colored viewpoint and the ruthlessness of Mark Zuckerberg, Hayden and Hoffman do not escalate their dramatic back and forth so much as find a middle ground, pledging belief in a system they ostensibly are antagonizing, oddly, insultingly reducing the legacy of the Chicago 7 to compromised mush. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: Lost in America (1985)

As “Lost in America” opens, David and Linda Howard (Albert Brooks and Julie Hagerty) are about to take their upper middle class lifestyle to the next level by moving into bigger home on the heels of David’s forthcoming promotion. The camera glides through their current house, lingering over various moving boxes. “It’s all just stuff,” as Lester Burnham once excoriated in “American Beauty”, another movie of middle class woe. Of course, that 1999 film found reason to hope, even if finding it in the strangest of places, ending with something like a mystical ascent to peace of mind by getting out. “Lost in America”, on the other hand, not only knows there is no getting out but that complaining about where you are is poor form. David isn’t even asleep as “Lost in America” opens; he’s literally wide awake, lying in bed and openly wondering if this new home and new position will make him feel complete. His air suggests he already knows it won’t and yet is unsure what else someone in his position is supposed to do. The next morning, when he phones a Mercedes dealer, weighing whether to buy one with his expectant salary increase, he’s almost trying to talk himself out of it. He knows the car would merely be a status symbol but is inexorably drawn toward it nonetheless, epitomizing the tractor beam of corporate America, living for the future, as David says, eternally fretting the present is good enough. 

That’s not to suggest that Brooks the director views Brooks the character as some kind of tragic figure. If anything, David is a privileged yutz who doesn’t realize how good he’s got it, brought home in the film’s inciting incident when he doesn’t get the promotion and quits. “Only in a movie by Brooks would the hero quit to protest a ‘lateral transfer’ to New York,” the esteemed Roger Ebert wrote. “There’s something intrinsically comic about that: He’s taking a stand, all right, but it’s a narcissistic one.” Indeed, in the aftermath of quitting his job, David invades, more or less, his wife’s office and asks – nay, demands – that she quit too, hardly giving her the space to think it over for herself, summarized in that patented incessant Brooks prattle and Hagerty’s just as patented fluster. That David works in advertising is spot-on given this scene, and so many others, where he essentially reduces his own sense of throwing caution to the wind to making a pitch, rendering his own rebellion as nothing more than a desperate sales job. Later, after he’s convinced Linda to cash in everything and hit the road in an RV, she loses it all in an all-night gambling bender, causing David to pitch the casino manager (Garry Marshall, deftly underplaying opposite Brooks’s classic kvetching) an opportunity to return their money as a PR stunt in nobility. The scene’s hysterical double meaning portrays the American Dream has a hapless bet against the bank and how a yuppie’s rebellion is still contingent on significant sums of money, both “Lost in America’s” funniest joke and its most piercing truth.

We do not see the actual sequence in which Linda loses their money, just the aftermath, where Hagerty’s zombie eyes feel as true to the moment as Brooks’s still-in-his-bathrobe confusion. That we don’t see the moment, however, also teases the possibility that Linda did it on purpose, hinted at in the inevitable argument over their suddenly being broke when she admonishes him that truly dropping out would mean truly having nothing rather than, in his term, a nest egg. David, however, cannot quite wrap his head around such truth, not even when they are reduced to begging for small jobs in a small Arizona town. In an interview with a job counselor (Art Frankel), David earnestly asks about executive positions, causing the counselor to just laugh hysterically, looking at the client across from him like nothing more than the button-down, faux-idealist he is, unable to survive even a few days outside his bubble. 

Brooks directed, of course, and so the movie mostly focuses on his character which isn’t really a problem until these closing sections. Well, not even a problem, really, so much as an opportunity missed. If David can barely conceal his self-pity, Hagerty plays these scenes with a palpable sense of enthusiasm, getting up early to make breakfast, watching aerobics on TV, even happily bringing her teenage boss at the fast food place where she lands work. If it teases the antithesis of David’s own empty self-realization, “Lost in America” leaves that idea hanging, never quite willing to compare his arrogant incredulity against her apparent newfound earnestness. Still, the denouement is side-splitting in its brevity, David and Linda surrendering to the charade and accepting that lateral transfer to New York, sucking it up and admitting that to get anywhere in America you better learn to eat shit. 

An Ode to the Closing Credits

Recently on the news site Twitter dot com, the comedian Mike Birbiglia sent a social media open letter to streaming platforms, asking them to play the credits to movies since they are, after all, a part of the movies. The director Rian Johnson, whose Twitter spirit remains unbroken despite, I imagine, most of his time spent there getting DMs about his calculated destroying of so many childhoods, agreed: “Even beyond respect for the folks who worked on it, the credits are the cool down coming out of an ending, they’re part of a movie, and this shit with cutting them off or popping a “you might also like” thing up has got to stop.” You’re telling me. My observation is undoubtedly not new but the number of times My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I have tried, desperately, in the 10-second aftermath of some movie ending to stop the streaming platform from moving on to the next piece of content to consume only to come up just short is no less frustrating than galloping up the L platform steps only to have the train doors close in your face a split-second before pulling away. It’s like any time some stupid TV channel runs stupid advertisements over the closing credits of “Top Gun”, depriving us of seeing the actors’ names displayed over a clip of the character, an extra special kind of joyous culmination more movies should employ; “Logan Lucky” only could have been improved by going this route.

My first day on the job as a movie theater projectionist, the man in charge explained how to set the lighting cues for each film, ensuring that twenty or so seconds of darkness right after the movie ended precipitated the lights coming up just a bit which finally precipitated the lights coming all the way up. If logically I understood the progression, emotionally I never could quite square it, this notion of people needing light to flee before the movie was all the way over. There are infinite reasons I knew My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife was the only one for me, but chief among them was her desire to watch all of a movie’s closing credits. Boy, did that send my heart aflutter. 

Credits, after all, can be educational. Maybe some actor you don’t know thrilled you and you want to see who it was. Maybe the movie was set in Maine and you want to see if they really filmed in Maine or if Canada stood in for the 23rd state. Maybe the costume design impressed you and you want to see who was responsible for such solid work. Even Team ZAZ, the funnymen extraordinaire, knew outtakes could teach, utilizing their patented comedic credits for a little informative outreach.  

One of my earliest movie-going memories is “Ghostbusters.” Even now if you asked me to associate that comedy of paranormal investigators with an image or a phrase, I might say Sedgwick Hotel, if only because to my six-year old mind that whole experience was such a grand night out, a party in a movie theater. That’s why the closing credits were a party, underlined by the exploded marshmallow lining Sigourney’s Weaver’s head like a wedding crown, as if this was the reception. Ditto “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home”, replaying scenes from the movie just finished behind its end credits, which was magically apropos to my 9-year old heart since all I wanted to do was stay in the theater and watch that one all over again. Stanley Tucci’s “The Impostors” turned the closing credits into one big party too, the entire cast literally dancing off the set to Louis Armstrong’s recording of “Skokiaan.” 

As the credits roll at the conclusion of “Michael Clayton”, on the other hand, and the eponymous law firm fixer takes a taxi ride after doing the right thing, the camera sticks with him in close-up for the duration, unspooling the end credits the whole way, impressively rendering it as a moment of double-layered reflection. The end credits of “Calvary” revisit every location where Father Lavelle and his daughter Fiona had a conversation, this time showing those places devoid of people, as if the problems and questions of faith of two people don’t amount to a hill of beans in the natural world. 

When “An Education” ended, totally unexpectedly (at least, to me) the familiar, wonderful warbling of Duffy appeared, singing her for-the-movie tune “Smoke Without Fire.” I was enraptured; it was like a show had broken out at no additional cost. It’s a reminder of how selecting a song for the closing credits can make or break you. See: “The Bourne Supremacy,” “Mistress America”, “Ocean’s Eleven.” 

Of course, most movie closing credits are not so creative and yet still entirely essential. As Johnson says, they are the cool down, an idea my main David Thomson also espoused years ago in the pages of Movieline, noting how at the end of “Million Dollar Baby”, everyone in his auditorium sat through to the end. This was out of respect for the names on the screen, sure, but also a way to recuperate, to dry their eyes and pull themselves together before heading out into the night. Perhaps the most people I can recall staying in their seats even as the credits rolled was “No Country For Old Men”, the wallop of “Wait, That Was The End?” prompting patrons to require a few extra minutes to come to terms. 

And that is why, even now, despite being overplayed and parodied to death, like the ratatouille transporting the food critic straight back to his childhood, whenever I hear Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On”, I am transported back to the River Hills/Riviera (RIP) in Des Moines, Iowa on the afternoon of December 20, 1997 and the closing credits of “Titanic.” I had to sit through every name to find the strength to gather myself to haul myself out of my seat and up the aisle and, even then, I still felt as if I were staggering, not yet ready to reface anything as taxing as the rest of the day, never mind the rest of life.

As such, in the end, no closing credits experience as ever been more emblematic than “From Here to Eternity.” Because like most classic Hollywood cinema, “From Here to Eternity.” front-loaded all its credits; when it ended, it ended. And because I was watching at home, alone, when the screen blank and the room went silent and I realized I still needed time to recover, I thought to myself, distressed, “Where are the closing credits?!”

The Ultimate American in Paris

“Emily in Paris”, the much-publicized new Netflix series from “The $treet” impresario Darren $tar, has been criticized in some quarters for both its absurd, simplistic portrayal of social media and predictable Parisian clichés. All of that, however, bothered me far less, if at all, than how a woman from the states – Emily (Lily Collins) – with her beachy waves and her corporate commandments [throws up in mouth] in tow comes to live in a European city – Paris – is so damn American. What’s more, though another character chastises her belief in fanciful American movies rather than movies that show life as it is, the personal side of “Emily in Paris” sticks to familiar American rom com banalities, all conveyed in typical Netflix non-subversion, busy as hell but congenial, refusing to challenge, refusing to make you think, even for a second, at all, just meant to be consumed like so many empty calories. None of this would even be problem, though, if the show itself knew this but $tar and his team still operate under the notion that Emily is falling under Paris’s sway when, in fact, she is both resisting attitudinal shifts in any real way and instead innately impressing her own American attitude on everyone around her. Get the hook, I kept wanting to say to Emily’s boss Sylvie (Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu).

I mean, you wanna make something about an American in Paris, make something about an American in Paris, but don’t feed me this horse hockey. And that, as it had to, got me to thinking about American in Paris movies. Who is the ultimate American in Paris?

No, not him.

Not them either. Too arty. 

Ah, that’s a little more like it. A wide-eyed Steve Buscemi in “Paris, je t'aime” who runs afoul of Parisian etiquette, not an Ugly American archetype so much as an American In Over His Head.

Greta Gerwig, meanwhile, as hapless Frances Halladay is too down in the dumps to enjoy her spontaneous Parisian getaway at all.

Still, Buscemi and Gerwig are on holiday and being on holiday...that’s not so American. No, Tom Cruise working in Paris in “Mission: Impossible – Fallout”, zooming his motorcycle through the scenic streets, oblivious to the architecture, nose to the action-adventure grindstone amid so many blissed out café dwellers, that’s pretty darn American.

But not quite as American as Sam (Robert DeNiro) in “Ronin.” Because Sam is not only in France on a job, he goes to the French Riviera and pretends to be a tourist in the name of getting that job done. Doing more work by pretending to have fun? That is as American as it gets.

The Sharks

Among the most famous movie opening scenes is undoubtedly “Jaws.” You know, comely young woman goes for a swim at dawn, gets eaten by shark, it’s terrifying. It’s not just the shark circling her from below, though, it’s the camera. Granted, Steven Spielberg is not the kind of director, I don’t think, to get consciously caught up in the notion of the Male Gaze, but this scene demonstrates how that Male Gaze is inherently prevalent in a man’s camera whether he’s conscious of it or not. In a sense, “The Sharks” turns that notion around. Not for nothing does it begin with its young Uruguayan protagonist, Rosina (Romina Bentancur), running down a seaside road, looking over her shoulder. She’s running away from her father, yes, but she may as well be running away from the camera itself. She reaches the ocean and steps a few feet out into the water. Her father stands on the shore, pleading for her to come back. She does but not before casting her eyes toward the sea, her arms drawn up against her, as if suggesting she does not want to be seen, as if sensing something is out there. As she wades back to shore, the camera picks up a dorsal fin emerging from the water. And though ensuing events suggest the sharks in these waters are real, the electronica music that explodes on the soundtrack at the brief glimpse of this fin seems to suggest otherwise, or at least suggest the tangible and metaphorical might blur into something else altogether.  

Rosina, we learn, was running away because she attacked her sister, leaving such a prominent scar around her sister’s eye that she’s wearing an eyepatch. Like many of the exact details in “The Sharks”, what caused this violent outburst remains unexplained, but when Rosina says she is sorry, the way in which Bentancur says it makes it difficult to believe her character means it. Rosina’s home life is noisy and cramped. Her father worries over money, her mother worries over a lack of running of water and trying to get a beauty salon up and running in their home. All of these details feel lived in but also beside the point, hardly making a mark on Rosina, introverted almost to the point of being incommunicative. Her clothes are markedly at odds with her sister’s, not so much boyish as nondescript, bulky shorts and tee shirts that virtually subsume her, like she doesn’t want herself to be seen. Director Lucía Garibaldi’s camera frequently underscores this idea in outdoor scenes, wide frames where Rosina can disappear amid the landscape, though at home the camera is frequently right in her face, blocking out everyone else as if they don’t matter. 

If Rosina’s fashion sense suggests a tamping down of her sexuality, she still possesses urges. Taking a landscaping job at her father’s behest, she becomes smitten with Joselo (Federico Morosini), a slightly older boy. Initially he reciprocates, though a scene in which they fool around takes a tawdry turn. Like the scenes at home, Garibaldi keeps the camera locked in close-up on Rosina’s face as Joselo pleasures himself just off screen, issuing her commands, the camera placement underlining how in this moment he literally reduces her to nothing more than an object of his gaze. And when he’s done, he’s essentially done with her. That the character treats Rosina halfway-politely in their subsequent scenes only fuels the heartbreak. 

As “The Sharks” progresses, the more the literal beasts fade into the background, as the locals quests to find them and kill them mostly occur offscreen while the purported slowdown of tourism is just mentioned, never shown. No, the real predator and prey becomes Rosina and Joselo, after he spurns her, a metaphor which works because it never becomes overwrought. Then again, Rosina’s state of mind as she messes with an unknowing Joselo is inscrutable almost to the point of frustration; you long for some insight into her state of mind. But Garibaldi is content to let her actions speak for themselves, which grow bolder and more deranged, culminating with a sequence on the beach and in the water that might make one ask how no one sees her, though that’s the point, her presence unnoticed when it’s not in the context of physical attractiveness. And the closing shot repeats the opening one, just flipped, with Rosina not running away but marching straight toward the camera, toward us. Ye been warned. 

Build the Wall

Despite taking place in Vermont, some 2,900 miles from Mexico, Joe Swanberg’s 56-minute film “Build the Wall” is not about the border. The wall does not pertain to a mythical Canadian barrier either but to a small partition in someone’s rural, Green Mountain State backyard. Still, if you name your movie “Build the Wall” here, now, in this political climate, it is not a coincidence. And what Swanberg, returning to the movies from TV where he has spent the last few years, does in his preferred manner of carving out easygoing narratives through observation of human interaction and indifference, is essentially repurpose the notion of building wall into something inviting rather than alienating.

“Build the Wall” turns on Kent (Kent Osborne), about to turn 50, having an old friend from L.A., Sarah (Jane Adams), pay a visit to coincide with his 50th birthday. If this visit, Kent says, has something to do with a project they are working on, that project is never defined in detail - nay, never defined at all. No, this seems more about rekindling a romance that might have almost been, evinced in Adams’s laugh, which is always a little bit more than it needs to be, conveying the intention that “hey, I’m into you”, which Kent happily responds to. Her staying, however, is thrown into some flux that seems more mental than actual, however, because of Kev (Kevin Bewersdorf) showing up to build the wall as a birthday present to his friend. Bewersdorf plays his role with his comical thousand yard stare, like Kylie the opossum in “Fantastic Mr. Fox”; you’re never sure if anything’s getting through.

Kev is not bothered by Kent’s insistence that his friend sleep outside so as not to interfere. As Kev explains, he’s already been sleeping in his truck and will gladly bathe in the brook, go to the bathroom in the woods. This sense of connecting with nature is elemental to “Build the Wall”, glimpsed not just in Kev’s nature-loving lifestyle but the chair Kent reclines in under some trees and Sarah’s bouts of axe-throwing, first learning, then perfecting. Swanberg juxtaposes these outdoor moments with little moments of interpersonal drama stemming from consumerism, like Kent’s miniature vacuum cleaner, opening him up to mockery from Sarah. She literally orders and ships him a bigger and better dirt remover, outing his absurd insecurity, as if his small-scale existence is not enough compared to her Hollywood one, which might have been more effective had Swanberg truly explored her left coast backstory. 

Kent’s life is enough, though, which the conclusion makes clear, cutting between his lame attempts to get a fire going and a spontaneous kind of party that pops up around the wall, hosted by Kev and his gradually expanding stone-hauling workforce. The soiree is less perfunctory than, simply, perfect, transforming the wall not into a barrier for division but a rocky table for fellowship.

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Last Party (1993)

“The Last Party” was released in 1993, before Robert Downey Jr.’s more public travails with drugs, though he has been and is in the movie itself open about his experiences using them as a child and throughout his youth. And though the documentary, directed by Mark Benjamin and Marc Levin, never explicitly states that he has curbed his drug use entirely, there are numerous moments, especially in the company of his father, RDJ Sr., when we get the sense he is presently sober or at least trying to be sober. That makes it strange, then, that “The Last Party” is presented as akin to a madcap kind of Hunter S. Thompson-ish descent into the 1992 Presidential Election since it is never as drug-fueled or as gonzo as a Thompson version of this movie might have been. An early transition from a trip Downey Jr. takes to the movie studio where he filmed 1992’s “Chaplin” to the site of the Democratic National Convention in Manhattan might have suggested politics as entertainment or theatre but this cut comes dressed up in Downey Jr. explaining to the camera how he feels about Chaplin and how the studio where he filmed it has become a kind of of holy place for him and how this experience has inspired him to try and make a difference. Indeed, the opening shot is him asleep, in front of a TV, suggesting “The Last Party” is nothing less than a manifestation of that most dangerous of Twenty-Tens trigger words: woke. 

Granted, there is a distinct irony at play in “The Last Party”, filtering its view of American politics through the lens of celebrity. There is an early scene where Downey Jr. interviews Spike Lee and the film director laments how America leans too hard on celebrities to shepherd them through this landscape. He cites a few celebrities (including Michael Jordan which, in the wake of “The Last Dance”, felt to me like a cosmic, 20-year early rejoinder to notions of whether His Airness had a responsibility to weigh in on politics) and Downey Jr. chimes in with Arnold Schwarzenegger thought he may as well have simply given his own name. And though Downey Jr. interviews plenty of political figures from, as they say, Both Sides of the Aisle, he frequently counters it with another celebrity weighing in, playing right into Lee’s sentiment. I half-wonder if the modern RDJ who espouses some conservative views and glides through the Marvel universe seemingly on the search for an escape hatch, would have sarcastically skewered his own reliance on celebrity. Young RDJ, even though he sometimes seems to be side-eyeing the right wingers, comes across so sincere in his attempts at enlightenment, however, even when he’s cracking jokes about not knowing who Al Gore is, he becomes, dare I say, earnest.

At the same, though, Downey Jr. cannot help but indulge his sense of the spotlight. In a scene with some Wall Street high rollers who literally break into a greed is good chant, doofuses, every one, but doofuses that run the world, the doc diffuses the scene with a cut to RDJ crawling through a fountain for the faux-benefit of all the business analysts and consultants lunching right beside him. Later, he sits in a public place and, stripped to his skivvies, meditates, or acts like he is since he seems to spend most of his meditation time interacting with the crowd, less a search for Zen then performance art. The ensuing conversation he has with a young boy who calls out his artful b.s., however, is real and sweet, evoking the deft line the documentary toes. His parents don’t vote, little kid explains, and he seems sad about it.

This moment, in conjunction with others, like Downey Jr.’s scenes with his father, draw the allegory that Patti Davis, daughter or Ronald Reagan, offers, of America essentially being a dysfunctional family. Wendey Stanzler’s editing, juxtaposing protestors from both the DNC and the RNC throughout, underlines this idea, making it seem as if two opposing factions are just shouting at each other from across the table, over and over, giving face time to so many arguments on so many topics but never coming to any kind of resolution or even real insight aside from I’m Right, You’re Wrong. The argument is the point. In one meta moment, Downey Jr. talks through his own documentary’s thesis out loud, a light bulb virtually going on above his head as he realizes that in the wake of the Cold War the enemy in America shifted from Them to Us. It’s a line you have undoubtedly heard myriad times in the last four years and given that you’re hearing it in a movie from over 25 years ago merely underlines how America’s divisions are not fake news, just old news. 

Which Kate Winslet Would You Call Upon to Save the World?

If I knew Kate Winslet was in “Avatar 2”, About to be Released Since 1983 ™, I had forgotten it. But I was reminded recently when I scrolled across an article explaining that in learning to free dive for her role as an apparent water person in Cameron’s forthcoming sequel to his 2009 smash she filmed a scene in which she held her breath underwater for more than seven minutes. That broke the previous record held by Tom Cruise who in filming “Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation” held his breath underwater for over six minutes. What record, you ask, given that a free diver once held his breath underwater for 22 minutes? The Hollywood Stunt & Action-Adventure record, of course, underwater division, all of which are ratified by a panel of judges at Disney-MGM Studios every December. But this new record prompted an even more important question. If only a few weeks ago we wondered which Tom Cruise movie character above all others should be enlisted to save the world, it was evident in this stunning news that the question had been altered: which Kate Winslet character would you call upon to save the world? Glad you asked!

Which Kate Winslet Would You Call Upon to Save the World?

Of course, given the roles that Winslet favors, you can immediately rule out many of her characters. I love Julia in “Hideous Kinky” but she would forget halfway through that she was supposed to be saving the world and start doing yoga instead. Nancy Cowan would just shrug and drink scotch and Sarah Pierce would put a hot towel over her face and go to sleep. Ruth Barron would join a doomsday cult and Clementine Kruczynski would fan the apocalypse’s flames. April Wheeler might have had a chance to save the world if that blowhard Frank didn’t drag her down. Ophelia? I mean, come on, man.

No, to start finding Kate Winslet characters that would save the world we have to dig a little deeper, think a little harder. Maddy, the laundress who smuggles the Marquis de Sade’s manuscripts outta the insane asylum in “Quills”, she’s got the gumption to save the world. 

Bitsey Bloom, despite her terrible name, has the gumption too. But 47.6% of America would assume that, because Bitsey is an investigative journalist, she is lying about the end of the world. And besides, “The Life of David Gale” was a terrible movie.

Dr. Erin Mears from the CDC had to deal with a bunch of pesky bureaucrats and know-nothings who didn’t get what the big fuss was about this whole MEV-1 thing and, oh my God, how relevant/terrifying does that sound now? She also doesn’t make it to the end of the movie. Maybe more people around her should’ve worn a mask, huh?

Irina Vlasov, the Russian-Israeli mob matriarch of “Triple 9”, doesn’t make it to the end either but I didn’t buy it. The reason for her getting blown up was too big a stretch for the character as presented. And besides, if it was one boxing match to determine the fate of the world, I’m taking Marvelous Marvin Hagler despite finishing his career with a loss than the undefeated Rocky Marciano. And so I might just choose Irina too. She ain’t going out like that.

Even so, I am slightly more inclined to choose Tilly Dunnage of “The Dressmaker” over Irina. 57% on Rotten Tomatoes be damned, Tilly has got the kind of take-no-shit verve you’d want to stare down the end of all things.

On the other hand, Hester Wallace has the rationale, the know-how; she breaks the Enigma! And yet.

What blog do you think you’re reading? Where else did you think this was going to end? Batman? Superman? Wonder Woman? Black Panther? The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? Please. My superhero is Rose DeWitt Bukater. She chopped off a dude’s handcuffs with her eyes closed. I rest my case. And I’ll see you in New York Harbor, after the world’s been saved. 

Richard Jewell

There is a framed photo on the wall of Bobbi Jewell’s (Kathy Bates) Atlanta apartment of her son, Richard (Paul Walter Hauser), predominantly featured in the background of many scenes. Looking like law enforcement Glamour Shots, it appears almost out of place, like something you’d expect in an SNL sketch about the character. But this image solidifies in our mind the idea of Richard Jewell that solidified within the nation’s mind in the immediate aftermath after he was wrongly fingered, though never officially charged, for the bombing of Atlanta’s Centennial Olympic Park in 1996. He was portly, a wannabe, a mama’s boy. Clint Eastwood’s film, then, is not merely reclaiming Richard Jewell’s name but his identity, embodied in Hauser’s excellent, layered, moving performance, observant and oblivious, humble and high on his own supply, awkward and endearing. The early scenes where he works as a supply clerk at a small law firm might almost feel too much like set-up, eager to belong and convinced that he does, but in his role as Richard’s unlikely buddy, attorney Watson Bryant, Sam Rockwell makes them work anyway, coming put off by this clerk’s overbearing nature but also, eventually, won over by Richard’s good intentions in spite of himself. 

If Richard is unable to get out of his own way, so overzealous in his commitment to enforcing the law that he gets run out of a job as campus security, it is this weakness that proves a strength at the most necessary moment, in Centennial Park during the 1996 Olympics when he comes across a suspicious backpack and insists it be searched, urging people to get back and saving lives when the bomb is found. One moment the entire park is dancing in unison to the “Macarena”, which is no nostalgia trip but a deliberate piercing of an innocent bubble, the world changed as the bomb explodes and nails scatter across the ground, a simple insert shot that demonstrates how Eastwood’s famously spare aesthetic can work better than big budget effects, a specific detail that makes it more real and nauseating. The bomb explodes not only Richard’s bubble but his mother’s (Kathy Bates) too, though they don’t know it at first, as Richard is fitted for a hero, interviewed on The Today Show. A fictional FBI agent, Tom Shaw (Jon Hamm), unhappily relegated to Centennial Park duty, however, having missed his own chance to play hero, wastes no time in honing in on Richard for hitting a so-called faux hero profile, setting himself up for heroics. Hamm’s patented smug superiority makes it believable that Shaw would railroad an innocent man, even as it’s here where you can detect Eastwood tipping the scales. 

Shaw is not the only transgressor against Richard Jewell. There is also Kathy Scruggs (Olivia Wilde), the Atlanta Constitution Journal reporter who breaks the story that Richard Jewell is a prime FBI suspect in the bombing. She scores this tip not so much from diligent reporting as cozying up to Shaw at a bar and seducing him, the scene ending by implying that she has slept with him to garner the scoop, evoking the government and the media as literally being in bed together. It’s the kind of defamation Eastwood undoubtedly believes in. (Famously, NBC’s Bob Costas stood up for Richard Jewell. Costas, of course, is nowhere to be found in “Richard Jewell.”) However true, hackneyed, or asinine you find this argument to be, a reviewer would be derelict in not pointing out that Kathy Scruggs was a real person (she died in 2001) and not one shred of evidence exists to suggest her sleeping with or seducing a source was true. 

Here we have a movie that is all about restoring the reputation of a man who was slandered, arguing just how un-American such slander is, that then turns around and slanders a woman in service of arguing against slander in the first place. To paraphrase the 42nd President of the United States, it takes some brass to attack the media for doing what you’re doing. Wilde, meanwhile, is giving a performance living up to the descriptions of Scruggs in this AJC piece by Jennifer Brett in the wake of the movie’s release, playing the role as a wild child with vulnerability. Eastwood, though, hangs her out to dry, epitomized in a newsroom scene where Bryant, working as Jewell’s lawyer enters to ream her out, as all her co-workers figuratively look away. It is a cowardly portrayal by Eastwood and works against his excellent portrayal of Jewell and Hauser’s superb turn, working in harmony to essentially disavow the unambiguous hogwash Eastwood is peddling in his own film’s the other half. If Richard is repeatedly counseled that the system he believes in is trying to take him down, Hauser’s Richard can’t help but believe in the system anyway, a moving grey area juxtaposed against Eastwood’s insistent notion of black and white. 

Waikiki

There is a moment early in Christopher Kahunahana’s “Waikiki” when Kea (Danielle Zalopany), a part-time hula dancer, is performing in some Hollywood haunt, the camera gliding past tables of spectators, eventually landing in a close-up of Kea as the performance ends. Her face is fixed in a smile betrayed as painted on both by how frighteningly wide it is and that slight tremble in her eyes and jawline, like she’s struggling to maintain it. Indeed, director Christopher Kahunahana has deemed his feature film debut as “an allegory for the contemporary issues which plague Hawaii’s people”, including “the loss of Hawaiian identity.” The song being performed by Kea is the old tune by Hawaiian-born Andy Cummings sharing the film’s own title, the one in which he longs for the sands of the famed Honolulu beach. Of course, when Cummings wrote the song he was suffering through a winter in Michigan. In Kea’s case, Waikiki is just over her shoulder, out the open air window behind her, transforming this moment into one where what’s right in front of her (or, right behind her) is no longer even accessible, as if emblematically cut off from her native land. And even if characters and portions of “Waikiki’s” narrative are disappointingly facile in their conception, moments like these, when Kahunana proffers lyrical imagery extending deep below the surface, the film soars. 

As “Waikiki” opens, the soft light of morning wakes Kea up. The camera switches to an exterior shot, however, and that is when we realize she is sleeping in her van, a single image conveying her homelessness. Other moments like this, when she brushes her teeth at a public shower on a beach, as well as her struggle to scrounge up enough cash to rent a room where she can live, suggest a kitchen sink kind of movie. However, even these early moments are dotted with dreamy flourishes, scattered flashbacks of memories that seem to come to Kea apropos of nothing and a shot of her boyfriend, Branden (Jason Quinn), slouched on the curb of some empty street smoking a cigarette. In the latter, notes of “Waikiki” drift across the soundtrack, rendering this harsh reality far from the city’s tourist center as something like a hazy hallucination, easily forgotten by those who do not live it.  

Branden, however, is a character who goes nowhere, an abusive partner mostly on hand to scream at Kea and punch walls, existing as a scary opposite. He also suggests she is crazy, a moment that puts the plot, as much as there is one, in motion when Kea hits a vagrant, Wo (Peter Shinkoda), in the middle of the street in the middle of the night with her car. If at first Branden does not believe her when she calls him for council, he then pleads for her to just leave the hurt but not dead man in the street. Instead she gets Wo inside her van and looks after him, even though he spends most of the movie in silence, causing her to look inward as she alternately chastises and reaches out to him.

The arc of this relationship feels foregone virtually from its conception, negating any sense of suspense that it might otherwise seek to exude. Then again, if the moments it yields can sometimes feel as if they are drifting too far into the territory of unbelievable, like a two-person bike ride along some undefined stretch of industrial Honolulu, trying to get passing trucks to honk, this divergence from reality also emerges as the point. If Kahunahana plays a little too coy with Kea’s exact mental state, providing cursory images of prescription bottles, we are nevertheless left with the powerful suggestion in the denouement’s flood of imagery that she is suspended in some netherworld, a Hawaiian emotionally, mentally, spiritually disconnected from her native land.

State of the Union

On November 7, 2000, Election Day, Gore v Bush, I was in the process of moving halfway across the country, from my native Iowa to Arizona. The plan was to drive from Oklahoma City, where I had stayed that Monday night, to Albuquerque, where I would bunk down, watch the returns and then press on to Phoenix the next day. Plans changed. A blinding snowstorm walloped the Texas panhandle and I crawled 70-something miles in whiteout conditions to Amarillo where I booked a motel room and collapsed in exhaustion. (I recently listened to Leon Neyfakh’s podcast recounting of the 2000 Election and one Gore staffer recalled that throughout November 7th the concern was not Florida but a snowstorm in the southwest. “Hey!” I thought. “I know that snowstorm!”) So even if America descended into a constitutional crisis that night, I still felt more relief than dread, happy just to be alive. What I remember most is less Florida being called for Gore and then Florida being taken back from Gore and then Gore conceding and then Gore rescinding his concession than the next day, making the long 600+ mile haul across three states, pointedly forgoing any talk radio, any news at all. There was something strangely surreal and eerily beautiful about driving through a huge chunk of America I’d never seen on a day when the fate of America was hanging in the balance. I drove beneath wide New Mexico skies and through Flagstaff at sunset (which I can still see, I swear, when I close my eyes) and then plunged down I-17 in the pitch black and into the Salt Valley. Cars were still passing me on each side of the road; people were still pumping and paying for gas; workers were still toiling away for wages at the Denny’s where I stopped along the interstate for pancakes. Nobody knew who the hell was going to be President but America kept on keeping on.

---------------

I have thought frequently in the last couple years of this Pierre Bonnard painting, “View from the Artist’s Studio, Le Cannet”, one I have written about before, that My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I saw at the Milwaukee Art Museum back in 2017. The accompanying placard explained that then, in 1945, while the war that ravaged his European continent was only beginning to wind down, Bonnard, briefly ignoring the strife, simply looked out his back window and painted what he saw. I found this profoundly moving in the moment, one in which both the ACA’s prospective repeal and replace for a bunch of shit scribbled on a cocktail napkin was in its hell-raising 11th hour and half the MAM had been closed off to accommodate Scott Walker officially announcing his Foxconn grift. I kept thinking of Bonnard’s painting the last week as Election Day bled into Wednesday and then into Thursday and then into Friday and then into Saturday morning. My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife signed up for a fruit CSA a few months ago, leaving us with a never-ending bounty of apples, and I liked to eat one, stand at our front window and look out at the Japanese Maple in our courtyard, admiring nature’s placid indifference.

---------------

Like Auric Goldfinger summoning a plethora of criminal masterminds to his place and then showing them exactly how he planned to rip off Fort Knox, our President, you-know-who, King Big Brain I, His Imbecility, had telegraphed his Election intentions for weeks, months. In a nation roiled by a Pandemic that he has predictably, obtusely met with a combination of magical thinking, cruelty and patented laziness, mail-in voting seemed the smart way to go for an impending Presidential Election. As such, he monkeyed with the Postal Service to ensure delays in mail-in voting while encouraging his supporters to vote in-person, bellowing about how Election Day should end on Election Day, even though that’s not how it works, so that in states where myriad mail-in votes would still need to be counted late into the week, he could get huffy about how they were fraudulent and illegal. If logically I knew it was coming, and if rationally I knew the Election would never be called on Tuesday with so many votes left to tally, emotionally I still struggled as the count dragged on and on. And yet. In the image of so many election workers, weighed down by PPE, committed to their task no matter what, I found inspiration.

As the Election results bore out, America is a divided country. It almost always has been and pretending otherwise, like so much We’re All In This Together COVID advertising rubbish has gone to show, is folly. What made the last 4 years especially concerning, however, were Big Brain I’s fascist tendencies and how even as one side decried and, yes, resisted them, the other side enabled, willfully ignored or shrugged them off as no big deal. It’s why when, in the middle of an Election, the President of the United States went on camera and deemed it fraudulent, illegal, yada yada, it was terrifying, every single thing I feared might come to pass when he was first elected in 2016. In my anxiety, though, I underestimated the democratic process, the heroic civil servants who payed no mind to the would-be King’s toy saber rattling and his minions making New Age Brooks Brothers riot poses and just kept counting, and just kept counting, and just kept counting.

Despite the intimidation and the outside noise, democracy remained indifferent.

keira knightley is so fucking relieved

 

keira knightley lights another cigarette

 

keira knightley self-medicates

 

keira knightley cries in the tub

 

keira knightley sits in the tub

Ray of Light Black Cloud

Saturday Night Live, 10/8/1988 – Tom Hanks as Peter Jennings, Phil Hartman as David Brinkley

Peter Jennings: “Well, David, throughout your career, you’ve been known for your cynicism, but certainly you haven’t lost that much faith in the presidency.”

David Brinkley: “Well, Peter, as I get older, I find I’ve lost faith in a good many things – country, family, religion, the love of a man for a woman. I’ve reached a point where it’s struggle to get up in the morning, to continue to plod through a dreary, nasty, brutal life of terrible desperation at the end of which we’re all just food for maggots.”

Peter Jennings: “Food for maggots, indeed.”