Here's A Nice Piece Of Shit
A movie about "the Walt Disney of Israel" is a light rom-com set at a concentration camp.
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One of the more interesting parts of watching Reagan was all the trailers that came before it, exposing some viewers like me to the sort of shadow Hollywood that exists to feed culture slop to piggies on the other side of the lifestyle divide. Which isn’t to defend the regular Hollywood’s culture slop, which is generally also pretty bad.
Whereas regular Hollywood’s culture slop tends to consist of millionth iterations of comic book adaptations and remember-that style sequels to movies that came out 30 years ago, Flyover Hollywood tends to produce Hallmark-style faith-based films, star vehicles for problematic actors canceled for posting too much, and kook documentaries. One of the trailers I did catch was of the third variety, something with the admittedly amazing title LOVER OF MEN.
This one is a documentary apparently positing that the twelfth US president, Abraham Lincoln, was gay. A lot of the talking heads who appear in it seem to be liberal professor types (I kept expecting the Ancient Aliens dude to pop up for some reason), but the fact that this trailer was playing before Reagan would seem to betray both its true aims and its target demographic. I assume this is some new version of the Lost Cause Myth, which once again reimagines the Civil War as not being about slavery, but this time around, instead of claiming it was actually about States Rights, it will claim that the Civil War was just some example of wokeness run amok. I mean come on, it was spearheaded by a gay man! Just look at his fabulous top hat!
Lot of ins, lot of outs, lot of what-have-yous there. The irony here is that the Civil War may have been kinda sort caused by a possibly gay man, only that man’s name was James Buchanan. (Sorry, I just read The Demon of Unrest. It was… uh… detailed).
Aaaanyway, one trailer that apparently also played before Reagan, but that I did not see at my own screening, was for something called “Bau: Artist at War.” (Hat tip to Chapo Trap House, which was how I learned about this one).
Bau: Artist at War is a black-and-white Holocaust drama from Reagan director Sean McNamara. It stars Emile Hirsch in the title role, which I guess kinda-sorta qualifies it as a canceled actor vehicle, but it’s actually much weirder than that.
In an accent somehow even more low-energy than Jon Voight as the ex-KGB agent in Reagan, Hirsch plays Joseph Bau, a man described as “Israel’s Walt Disney,” who used his skills as an artist to survive life in the Plaszow concentration camp. He went on to become “Oskar Schindler’s right-hand man” and even got married inside the concentration camp — an event apparently referenced in Schindler’s List and which gets an entire movie built around it in Bau: Artist at War.
The movie, starring Inbar Levi as the future Rebecca Bau, depicts this period in Joseph’s life as a sort of screwball romantic comedy intercut with Zales diamond commercial music, where characters with full heads of thick hair refuse to let death camp life get them down. They’re having a grand ol’ time! Doing jokes on the guards and suckin’ and fuckin’ in their barrack beds. (More like plow-schwitz, am I right?). Incredible stuff here.
I’d tell you when and where you could see this one (IMDB lists a limited release date of November 1st), but considering they couldn’t even get a decent quality trailer uploaded to YouTube, I’m not holding out much hope for it actually playing somewhere. I hope it got someone a nice tax write-off.
Other Stuff
The Debates!
Yes, I watched the debates. We discussed it on the Frotcast, but this tweet kind of summed it up. Seymour Hersh also had a solid write-up. Overall, Kamala Harris did a great job making Trump look like an old moron (they’re eating cats and dogs! I saw it on the TV!), and in that sense, she was a massive upgrade over Biden. In terms of looking competent enough to win an election, she did great. Of course it was still incredibly depressing watching the supposedly lesser of two evils bend over backwards to reiterate how much she wanted to do more fracking, keep giving money to Israel, and wildly misrepresent the US’s actual military commitments around the world. But hey, I guess we can’t have everything. Or even really anything (healthcare? please?).
Oh, and also she repeated the canard that “shutting down the border” will somehow stop Fentenyl overdoses. Have you people watched literally any movie about drug smugglers? How many of them depicted poor people from Central America sneaking the drugs over the border in their pockets? Seems like they mostly use planes and boats, which you’d imagine would be more efficient. (“More than 90% of interdicted fentanyl is stopped at Ports of Entry where cartels attempt to smuggle it primarily in vehicles driven by U.S. citizens,” says the notoriously liberal Department of Homeland Security).
If history is any guide, if we really wanted to stop drugs from getting into the country, we’d be better off worrying about the CIA.
A new study shows that undocumented immigrants paid nearly $100 billion in federal, state and local tax revenue in 2022 while many are shut out of the programs their taxes fund. The findings run counter to anti-immigrant rhetoric that undocumented immigrants are “destroying” social programs.
In 40 states, undocumented immigrants paid higher tax rates than the top 1% of the income scale in those states.
Admittedly not as catchy as “they’re eating your cats!”
Kneecap is getting re-released!
I loved Kneecap, the psuedo-biopic about the Irish-language rap trio of the same name. “The Irish language 8 Mile I never knew I needed,” I called it. But hardly anyone saw it. Well, now you have another chance.
The movie will return to theaters in such major markets as Universal City, Calif.; Phoenix, Ariz.; San Diego, Calif.; Miami, Fla.; Orlando, Fla.; Atlanta, Ga.; Chicago, Ill.; New Orleans, La.; Boston, Mass.; Kansas City, Kan.; Las Vegas, Nev.; Dublin, Ohio; Tulsa, Okla.; Knoxville, Tenn.; Houston, Texas; New York, N.Y.; and San Francisco, Calif. [Variety]
How the hell did Dublin, Ohio sneak in there? I mean good for you guys, I guess, but damn.
Tim Robinson is in a movie!
I’m hesitant to read too much about a movie I’m definitely going to see, but the reviews out of TIFF are starting to hit for Friendship, an Andrew DeYoung feature debut starring Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd, in which Robinson plays “a klutzy man-child of a suburban dad whose everyman demeanor becomes short-circuited after being taken under the wing of a friendly neighbor.”
No release date yet, but I’m sold. Oh! He’s also in a new show! Robinson will write and star in The Chair Company for HBO.
“After an embarrassing incident at work, a man (Robinson) finds himself investigating a far-reaching conspiracy.”
Again, sold.