Here’s to You, Mr. Nichols
Obligatory farewell song:
will finally treat cap with the reverence he deserves
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by Saul DeGraw · November 20, 2014
Obligatory farewell song:
will finally treat cap with the reverence he deserves
cartoon porn Fashion Trends in the 1910s
February 16, 2009
November 19, 2016
June 22, 2009
Thomas Frank (author of What's the Matter with Kansas?) writes in Le Monde diplomatique:
It is the ‘duty’ of American citizens, President Joe Biden announced in his inaugural address last week, to ‘defend the truth and to defeat the lies’. Much of Biden’s speech was an unremarkable stringing-together of patriotic platitudes, but this call for a great truth crusade stood out for its audacity. America is, after all, the homeland of the public relations industry, of televangelism, of Madison Avenue, of PT Barnum. Our leading scholars worship at the shrine of post-structuralism; our brightest college graduates go on to work for the CIA; our best newspapers dynamite the barrier between reporting and opinion; our greatest political practitioners are consultants who ‘spin’ the facts this way or that.
In declaring a national quest for truth, of course, Biden was referring to none of these things. His target was a single man: Donald Trump, the most energetic shit-shoveler ever to occupy the Oval Office.
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This essay is not a brief for free speech absolutism or an effort to rationalise conspiracy theory or an attack on higher learning. It is about the future of the Democratic Party, the future of the left, and here is the suggestion I mean to make: the form of liberalism I have described here is inherently despicable. A democratic society is naturally going to gag when it is told again and again in countless ways, both subtle and gross, that our great national problem is our failure to heed the authority of traditional elites.
Worse, when those traditional elites come together with unprecedented unanimity to insist their high rank proves their correctness and justifies their privilege ... when they say we are in a new cold war against falsehood ... when the news media dumps its neutrality and likens itself to superheroes and declares it is mystically attuned to truth and legitimacy ... when they do those things and then get the biggest news story of the decade fabulously wrong, a society like ours is going to spot the hypocrisy. And we are going to resent it.
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But when they look at liberals, they will shake their heads with disbelief. How could they have thought it was wise to try to enlist the great economic and cultural powers of our time — the masters of Silicon Valley — to try to censor our opponents? Ira Glasser, the old ACLU chief, relates how liberal academics embraced speech codes because they ‘imagined themselves as controlling who the codes would be used against’. What these well-meaning liberals didn’t understand, he continued, was that ‘speech restrictions are like poison gas. It seems like it’s a great weapon to have when you’ve got the poison gas in your hands and a target in sight, but the wind has a way of shifting — especially politically — and suddenly that poison gas is being blown back on you.’
As Glasser’s metaphor suggests, this cannot end well. The mob attack on the Capitol frightened us all. But for Democrats to choose censorship (via the monopolists of Silicon Valley) as the solution to the problem is a shocking breach of faith. There are many words one might use to describe a party that, over the last 30 years, has shown itself contemptuous of working-class grievances while protective of the authority of the respected... but ‘liberal’ isn’t one of them.
Read the whole thing.
Comment →The Rock The Bells family is heartbroken to learn of the passing of Mark “Prince Markie Dee” Morales earlier today. That voice and his presence can never be replaced. Our thoughts and prayers go out to his loved ones. 🙏🏾🕊 pic.twitter.com/Tn6wSJ6soq
— Rock The Bells (@RockTheBells) February 18, 2021
PRINCE MARKIE DEE GOD BLESS YOU FOREVER YOU WERE THE REAL BUBBA
— The Iron Sheik (@the_ironsheik) February 19, 2021
Requiescat in pace.
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All should be well. Please report any problems you might see.
I remembered the name, but I couldn’t place it, so I just checked IMDB. And not to be a jerk, but in his movies, there was just something…missing. I can’t put my finger on it. It worked to his advantage in The Graduate. But some of the others, I think of them as movies that just sort of ran until they ended. I know that sounds like a complaint about writing, but there were so many cases of that. Silkwood, Working Girl, even The Birdcage and Primary Colors. There was a lack of tightness, of urgency in them. Biloxi Blues was fully satisfying, but that was as tight a script as you’ll ever find in Hollywood or Broadway. But like, Wolf – that should have had an immediacy about it, but it didn’t. It had some crisp scenes, but I should have been on the edge of my seat during that movie.
If I have a bias on this, it’s because of a pet theory of mine that you can tell the quality of a director by the performance he gets out of Harrison Ford. The man can be totally alive or totally dead on camera. I haven’t seen Regarding Henry, but Working Girl struck me as one of his bad performances.Report
Side note, look at the list of directors that Harrison Ford has worked with. It’s phenomenal.Report
Regarding Henry blew chunks.Report
@glyph
But Carnal Knowledge is really good!Report
Regarding Henry blew chunks.
I no longer feel like I went quite too hard on the recently deceased.Report
Sorry, that movie made me really mad. Apparently I never got over it.Report
I remember grey carpet.Report
Grey before the movie started blowing chunks all over it, anyway.Report
I don’t know. I liked Harrison Ford in American Graffiti and Star Wars and Indiana Jones and I hesitate to call George Lucas a good director. He seems to be a largely wonderful human being but he is no Kurosawa or Truffaut.Report
Spielberg directed the Indiana Jones movies.Report
Ford on Lucas’s dialog:
“George, you can type this shit, but you sure as hell can’t say it.”Report
I enjoyed Silkwood, but it is in the social realist vein, which I enjoy. I can see how it might seem loose. His movie work can be a bit uneven. His Broadway work was supposedly stronger. And the Nichols and May bits are genius.Report
1) Thoughts go out to his wife Diane Sawyer and his daughter-in-law Rachel Nichols.
2) He won an Oscar for directing The Graduate.
3) Elaine May is still alive at 82.
4) It could be argued that Nichols is directly responsible for the breakup of Simon & Garfunkel.Report
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDUYOiu3N0YReport
Tom, get your plane right on time.
I know your part’ll go fine.
Fly down to Mexico.Report
For those who don’t understand @mike-schilling ‘s lyrics, they are from “The Only Living Boy in New York”.
Paul Simon wrote the song in response to Art Garfunkel [Tom] going to Mexico to act in Catch-22.
Considering that Garfunkel didn’t act in a non-Nichols direction until 1980, it is safe to say that the only people who thought he could act were Nichols, himself, and his mother.
Simon went on to record some more music…Report
I can’t think of another director starting out with such a strong and diverse streak of films (and in only five years): Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Graduate, Catch-22, and Carnal Knowledge are all masterworks. Catch-22 is often overlooked but it’s amazing what Nichols was able to do with a seemingly un-filmable book.
I agree with @Pinky that there is some kind of hollowness to those films, but I think it’s a reflection of the main characters. These four films, in particular, are about individuals that are lost in a changing world and only know how to react in self-destructive (and I would add, typically male) ways – by lashing out at at those around them or shutting themselves off. The movies feel like they just run out because the characters are incapable of leaving the spirals they are in. Even in The Graduate, which has by far the happiest ending, Nichols lets the camera rest on Ben and Elaine as a visual ellipsis. It makes us realize that these two people continue to exist after the cameras stop rolling, and their lives still have to move somewhere – maybe forward, maybe not – with all the same hangups and conflicts they had that morning.
Nichols may have relied on this ellipsis a little too much in his later films, but, man, in those first four he’s completely on fire.Report
DId The Graduate have a happy ending? In the last shot, they’ve both got “What the hell did I just get myself into?” written all over their faces.Report