"In the compulsively watchable 'The Insurrectionist Next Door,' Alexandra Pelosi visits rank-and-file people arrested because of their roles in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol."

"And then, instead of condemning, she asks them about themselves. Her brisk emotional portraits of Americans are disarming, unpredictable, funny, sad, and, yes, at times enraging. Palming her own camera, "Pelosi fires away why’s and what’s-your-deal’s to her polite subjects: a genial former wrestler; a military man who shares a love of wine with his husband; a family guy with a 'Proud Boy' forehead tattoo and a rabble-rousing hit rap song; and a practitioner of parkour who apparently learned about some kind of war in 1776 from a Trump speech."

Writes Nicolas Rapold, in "'The Insurrectionist Next Door' Review: Getting Personal In her latest film, the documentarian Alexandra Pelosi has disarming chats with people who participated in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol" (NYT).

I'm only about a third of the way into it, but I like the style, because it's personal. It de-mob-ifies the mob and shows us individuals. 

Here's the trailer (which is good except for the an annoying music that is not in the movie and that injects urgency and suspense that utterly misrepresents the mood of the movie):

"What was worse — having to be heterosexual or being a politician?"

"One of the great moments" in Alexandra Pelosi's HBO documentary "Fall to Grace," according to Carl Swanson in New York Magazine. The documentarian daughter of Nancy Pelosi is interviewing disgraced former NJ Governor Jim McGreevey.

Pelosi tells me the lesson of the documentary is “Don’t let the worst thing you did define who you are now. Think of it as Tony Robbins for the HBO-documentary set.” I ask her if she worries that she is essentially enabling McGreevey’s need for attention, and she admits that the idea “does keep her up at nights.”

This is my second post of the day about McGreevey. The first was about a NYT article that was either atrocious or brilliant satire. I'm writing this one because I have now watched the "Fall to Grace," and I just want to say it's horrible. Pelosi didn't get much good footage, and we mostly see women in prison going through prison therapy, a topic that could be handled in many different ways by serious film documentarians but is here used to promote McGreevey, whom the women just adore, because he tells them they should not be defined by the worst things they've done.

Why is McGreevey doing therapy in women's prisons? Because he left the Catholic Church (because they won't let you feel good about being gay) and went to Episcopalian seminary (where it's apparently okay both to be gay and to have a gay sexual relationship), but the Episcopalians rejected him for the priesthood anyway. Is McGreevey angling to get back into politics? I bet he is, in which case Pelosi's puff piece is supposed to help. It shouldn't though, because it's so awful. Worst thing about it? The maudlin tinkling piano soundtrack that never shuts up.

"Most of his sexual interludes with men had been furtive; to him, gay culture meant Liberace and Paul Lynde."

One of many hard-to-believe sentences in this long NYT article about James McGreevey, the disgraced former governor of New Jersey. He's 55, not 75. He got into trouble putting his lover on the state payroll in 2004, not 1974. He's a big old fraud in my book, and his effort to cloak himself in "I am a gay American" sentimentality is disgusting.

Relentlessly excavating his heart and soul, he later went into psychotherapy and resurrected the calling he said he had felt since he was an altar boy in Carteret, N.J. Now an Episcopalian with a degree in divinity from the General Theological Seminary, he’s embracing the Lord’s work with the same fervor with which he once pursued politics. 

Look, I hope he's turned his life into service and good works, but this article is fawning — PR-style.

Until recently, Mr. McGreevey and his partner had kept their relationship private. This Thursday, however, is the debut of Alexandra Pelosi’s HBO documentary “Fall to Grace,” which explores his spiritual makeover, so he’s sharing the happily-ever-after. 

Sharing the happily-ever-after? Who talks like that?

Not, he stipulates, because he’s after another ego jolt like the sort he craved as a politico, but because he’s eager to focus attention on his work.

Oh, he stipulates? Sorry, this is just making me believe he’s after another ego jolt like the sort he craved as a politico. Did the NYT writer think that passing along this fawning PR was a joke — a nudge to make us think this is such bullshit? We're shown McGreevey's partner, an "Australian financier," 9 years his junior who — we're told is "[s]turdy and handsome in an unpolished way" and "with taste for modern art." The modern art taste is nowhere to be seen in the photograph of the pair in their "pistachio-walled conservatory with worn-leather sofas and ethnic touches that could have been conjured by Ralph Lauren."

With severely cropped hair, khakis and navy sweater pocked with moth holes (his uniform), the ex-governor has the look of a missionary. Upbeat and charismatic, he laughs easily and often exclaims, “God bless!” Mr. O’Donnell has a warier, more reserved air — at least, when he’s on the record. Wearing smart corduroys and a taupe cardigan, he keeps his phone in hand and peers at the screen through thick-rimmed glasses.

Smart corduroys? Cardigan?

ADDED: The cardigan is the main thing that pushed me over the line to finding this article bloggable, because I'd just read this question in the Gentleman Scholar advice column at Slate:

Out of nowhere, my husband of 21 years has started wearing cardigan sweaters. I can't tell you how much this turns me off—the soft, sloppy, indecisiveness of the garment, not jacket, but not fully committed to being a sweater, either. He will point to younger men wearing them and say, "See? I'm bringing them back." The thing is, I'm not going home with those younger men and I don't know why the younger men are wearing them, maybe it's ironic or something? I don't know. But when I see a man in a cardigan, all I can think is Mr. Rogers. My husband usually has excellent taste but every now and then he likes to rock something positively cringe-worthy. He doesn't like me to tell him what to wear. Do I just suck it up? Or do I draw a line in the sand? Thank you!

I mean, maybe that article was ironic or something... I don't know.

IN THE COMMENTS: Palladian said: Oh my God. That piece has to be satire. Please tell me it's the smartest satire ever written. "

I just noticed the line — in the "smart corduroys" paragraph — "Mr. O’Donnell... at least, when he’s on the record."

AND: More from Palladian: "I'm still trying to imagine how they figured out how to make pistachios work as a load-bearing structural material." 

Pelosi says it's a tax on "free riders" and Limbaugh says "This is the party that celebrates free riders."

After the Supreme Court decision accepting the individual mandate provision of Obamacare by regarding the penalty for not buying insurance as a tax, Nancy Pelosi said:

Who is the penalty on? The penalty is on people who have the wherewithal but refuse to buy health insurance, figuring they won't be sick, and if they do, other people will have to cover it. So these free riders, as they were identified by Governor Romney himself, he said, people have the ability to pay and can't expect to be free riders, and I think that he termed it exactly right. These free riders make health insurance for those who are taking responsibility more expensive. Personal responsibility is a principle of our country. Conservatives claim it. Progressives claim it. Liberals claim it. We all claim it.

So she's using the conservative rhetoric of responsibility. People who don't buy insurance and then take advantage of the healthcare system have been free riders, and it's this free-rider behavior that identifies them as the targets of the new tax. Rush says this is a big "attitude shift" for Democrats. When getting the bill passed, the Democrats mostly called upon us to feel sympathy for people who lacked insurance and to want to help them — a typical liberal theme. They rarely portrayed the uninsured as people who deserved our negative judgment for taking and not contributing — which would sound more conservative.

Rush acts irritated to hear the conservative theme coming from Pelosi.

Alexandra Pelosi "is declining to understand the critique."

Says Ta-Nehisi Coates, attacking the filmmaker for a documentary that shows poor white people in Mississippi and poor black people NYC displaying divergent attitudes toward the government. The white people want the government out of their lives, and the black people accept government intrusion that comes in the form of welfare benefits. Coates assails Pelosi for thinking that by offending "both sides," she can get away with demeaning poor people:

That a person who would use journalism to render whole geographies as cartoons, would journey to friendlier environs and pull the same vapid trick should be expected....

Since when did shitting on poor and working people become worthy of self-congratulation? When did punching down become avant-garde?

That's how Coates frames it. Now watch the video:



ADDED: I love when Bill Maher says (at 8:48):

You and I are not racists. I just gave my imaginary child's college fund to Barack Obama, and your mother is Nancy Pelosi. So of all the people in the world — we are not out to fuck black people.

That's a very crude analysis of racism! They stroke themselves with this belief that because they support the Democratic Party, they are certified non-racists. Where's the self-criticism? Isn't it at least possible that their party's policies represent a low opinion of black people, that they are paternalistic, that they take advantage of a seemingly locked in voting bloc?

Vlog?

Stop me before I vlog again. Or raise some topics and ask some questions, and this might turn into a vlog day.

ADDED: The vlog is done, and will be posted soon. It's about: Mark Halperin's op-ed about the influence of Richard Ben Cramer's book "What It Takes," the prospect of vlogging this blog's commenters (with references to Alexandra Pelosi's documentary "Journeys With George"), and whether children should call their parents by their first names.

AND: Here it is.