"I'll take 28 and 9."

My response when Meade texted me this photo from downtown:

Nothing is inconceivable after it happens. What is the thought you don't want to think that would make it conceivable?

Let me quote one more thing from the new episode of "The Daily" podcast, "The Attempted Assassination of Donald Trump." 

The reporter Glenn Thrush talked about the forthcoming investigation of the security provided to Trump:

I think this is going to be regarded as one of the darkest days in the history of the Secret Service. Now, all of us who have covered the White House have traveled with agents — tremendously high level of professionalism. And the job is difficult, bordering on impossible at times, but allowing someone to have a clear firing line to a major presidential candidate in the middle of this kind of highly polarized environment is frankly inconceivable.

That seems to demand a link to the "inconceivable" montage from "The Princess Bride" — the one that ends with "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

Allowing the clear firing line is not inconceivable. In fact, nothing is inconceivable after it happens. But maybe it was inconceivable before it happened. Yet even then, I think it was only inconceivable to those who chastely excluded ugly thoughts from their lovely mind. Knowing that it happened, now you can't turn away. You must find the additional elements to the story that make it make sense.

Thrush adds that "the FBI and folks at the Department of Justice were fairly unvarnished in private, in their criticism of the way that the Secret Service planned this." We need "a significant investigation." Obviously. Who can be trusted? I'll bet we never learn what really happened — why the Secret Service did not secure that rooftop.

"Make mental note to watch 'My Dinner with Andre' again soon."

That's something I blogged on July 6, 2005, in a post called "My declining NYT habit."

I was stunned to see that in the top post of a search of my archive this morning, 2 days after re-watching "My Dinner With Andre," and one day after blogging "A big theme in this movie is whether, when things connect up, it's not just a coincidence but something mystical and important...."

What do you think? Mystical and important?!

I don't know, but what I was searching for was the topic of habit. In the movie, there's some discussion — blogged here yesterday — of the problem of doing things out of habit. There is, one person thought, "a great danger" of "fall[ing] into a trance" and no longer "seeing, feeling, remembering."

Well, I was just wishing I'd created a tag for "habit," because it would collect some good material, and it's a topic I want to think about. I like my habits. I think my habits are good.

"The Ant-Man and Clueless actor, who will appear alongside Fetterman at a Wednesday night fundraiser, initially reached out to the candidate last summer..."

"... just after Fetterman inserted Rudd into a tweet mocking Republican state lawmaker Doug Mastriano for issuing an official letter requesting an audit of the 2020 presidential election. 'In light of recent bizarre, unhinged requests on official letterhead from Pennsylvania electeds, my office formally requested Paul Rudd to re-enact scenes from "I Love You, Man" with me,' wrote Fetterman, who used his own office’s letterhead to issue the request. (While his campaign operations have grown significantly this year, the post that prompted their relationship came at a time when Fetterman, a bona fide Rudd Head, was personally writing all of his tweets.)"

From "THE JOHN FETTERMAN, PAUL RUDD BROMANCE YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT IS HERE/The duo will reenact scenes from I love You, Man at a Wednesday fundraiser for the Senate nominee’s campaign, finally turning the candidate’s year-old wish into a reality. 'Never in a million years did I imagine that it would actually end up happening,' Fetterman tells Vanity Fair" (Vanity Fair).

It's a fundraiser now, but was it, implicitly, part of fundraising at the time the letterhead was used, a time  Vanity Fair calls "last summer"*? The tweeting and letter-writing happened in July 2021. Still, Fetterman was a candidate back then too. He'd announced in February 2021.

The idea of using stars to read an old movie script as a fundraiser originated in 2020 — a year before Fetterman's letter — when the Democratic Party of Wisconsin got the cast of "The Princess Bride" to do a virtual table read of the script. This got a lot of press and was roundly praised as delightful and innovative, and, remembering that, you see Fetterman's idea as less weird and wacky and more clearly about fundraising.

I don't think it was the right place to use official letterhead, especially when you want to be critical of other people's misuse of letterhead.

_________________________________

* When people say things like "the things we did last summer" and it's October, don't you think they mean the most recent summer?

"I want my father back."

@mandypatinktok

One of our favorite experiences from TikTok last year.

♬ original sound - Mandy Patinkin and Kathryn G

"At the center of much of this creative coordination is Wisconsin’s Ben Wikler, chair of the state party Democrats, who was focused on comedy two decades ago, writing for the Onion and working for Al Franken..."

"... on his books and radio show, before rising in the political world. Now, his state party is the leading beneficiary of these fundraisers, raising more than $7 million since August, part of the $58.7 million it’s reportedly brought in over the past two years. David Mandel, former 'Veep' showrunner and 'Seinfeld' writer, says of the virtual format: 'I give credit to Ben Wikler for really weaponizing it.' Americans don’t particularly want to be politically lectured to by Hollywood, Mandel says. 'But they do like it when Hollywood people do what they’re really good at, and that’s to entertain,' he says. 'We entertained the fans and that’s what we weaponized.'"

 From "'Princess Bride,' 'Seinfeld' and more: How nostalgic cast reunions became a Democratic fundraising weapon" (WaPo) (you get to watch the actors on Zoom reading their lines from the old script).

"My heart made that sound when the six-fingered man killed my father. Every 'Princess Bride' fan who wants to see that perfect movie preserved from Hollywood politics makes it now."

Tweeted Ted Cruz, quoted in "'The Princess Bride' Cast Reunites for Wisconsin Democratic Party Fundraiser" (Variety).

The cast members participating in this unusual fundraisers are Cary Elwes, Robin Wright, Carol Kane, Chris Sarandon, Mandy Patinkin, Wallace Shawn, and Billy Crystal. The director Rob Reiner is also participating.

Here's the IMDB list of the whole cast of the 1987, in case you want to figure out who's not going along with this event. Peter Falk and Andre the Giant are no longer among the living. But Christopher Guest and Fred Savage are not in the group. All the other non-participants in the credited cast are English actors.

Actually, Christopher Guest, though born in New York City, "holds a hereditary British peerage as the 5th Baron Haden-Guest." He would be entitled to a seat in the House of Lords, but the membership was reformed in 1999. He's expressed interest in seeking election to the House of Lords. So I can see why he'd want to stay out of American politics.

As for Fred Savage, this might have something to do with his nonparticipation.

"This isn’t real stuff. It isn’t. It truly isn’t. That part of it, that Barnum and Bailey—you know, say anything, do anything you want, you know, I mean, like, you know, Donald Prince Humperdinck—Trump Jr. is not somebody that I really care about."

Said Hunter Biden (in the "Good Morning America" interview) embedded in the previous post. I had to look up the reference. I did understand the children's book reference he made to "Alice in Wonderland," but even though I've seen the children's movie "The Princess Bride," I did not remember this particular character name. Let's read the Fandom Wiki on Prince Humperdinck and see if we can understand what Hunter Biden was trying to get across:

Prince of Florin, he becomes betrothed to Buttercup (in the novel on the excuse that he will need to continue the royal line because his father is dying). He does not care who his bride is, as long as she is very beautiful....

The primary antagonist, Prince Humperdinck is incredibly intelligent, cocky and has excellent tracking and hunting instincts. He can track the location of animals, and is able to trace events that have happened in a particular place.

Buttercup herself says there is no greater hunter than him, proclaiming that he "Can track a falcon on a cloudy day."

Humperdinck is the prince of the fictional kingdom of Florin. He is the finest hunter in the world; his tracking abilities are so great that he is able to tell which of two sets of tracks belonged to the loser of an hours old swordfight, and to determine that a wrestling match had occurred between a man and a giant. Behind his princely demeanor, however, he is vain and cowardly, "with a heart full of fear."...

So... to Hunter, Trump Jr. seems like... the hunter? 

Oh, who knows what Hunter meant. Probably some combination of cartoonishly, pointlessly evil and the way he looks:

I didn't blog the death of Stan Lee, so why am I blogging the death of William Goldman?

Both were important writers in American popular culture whose work did not reach out to me personally. But I will link to the Goldman obituary (WaPo), because I have consumed his work. It loomed large in the part of the culture where I lived. I've never had any interest in superhero comics. Never read them. Never cared. Have no opinion other than it's something I see other people like. Those other people can talk about the meaning of Stan Lee. But Goldman is another story.

IMDB lists 34 movies he wrote. I've seen:

1990 Misery (screenplay)
1987 The Princess Bride (book) / (screenplay)
1976 All the President's Men (screenplay)
1966 Harper (screenplay)

Big Goldman films I avoided (and these are all films from the 1970s, when I would go to see every well-reviewed movie unless I actively avoided it):

1976 Marathon Man (from: his novel) / (screenplay)
1975 The Stepford Wives (screenplay)
1973 Papillon (contributing writer - uncredited)
1969 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (written by)

Looking at that, I have 3 thoughts: 1. "The Princess Bride" was great, 2. I must have really not wanted to see "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" to have never — in all these years — happened into watching it, 3. Goldman seems to have been a competent, successful, mainstream writer, and good for him, but I have no sense of him as original, profound, or speaking to me.

Now, let me read the long WaPo obituary and see what I'm missing:

Mr. Goldman, who learned his trade from a screenwriting guidebook he bought in 1964 at an all-night bookstore in Times Square, abhorred film schools and auteur theory. In profanity-laced interviews, he repeated his mantras: “Screenplays are structure,” “stories are everything.”

“It’s not like writing a book,” he said to the publication Creative Screenwriting in 2015. “It’s not like a play. You’re writing for camera and audiences. One of the things which I tell young people is, when you’re starting up, go to see a movie all day long. By the time the 8:00 show comes.... you’ll hate the movie so much you won’t pay much attention to it. But you’ll pay attention to the audience. The great thing about audiences is, I believe they react exactly the same around the world at the same places in movies. They laugh, and they scream, and they’re bored. And when they’re bored it’s the writer’s fault.”

And that's the attitude about movies that has taken over in the last 40 years and why I'm not interested in movies anymore. This grand effort to preemptively stomp out all boredom bores me.

"There are a lot of movies about reading. I think there are a lot of people who consume movies that cater to their self-image as a reader of books."

"It's quite silly," I wrote in the comments to the post about the trailer for the high-action, special-effects HBO movie based on "Fahrenheit 451." My comment was inspired by a comment from Ron Winkleheimer:

I'm surprised that HBO made this movie since the people in charge are all leftists. I suppose they are still flattering themselves about being the side that's in favor of knowledge and learning and free speech and all that.

What are the movies about reading that cater to this vanity I'm imagining exists?

Here's "25 best movies about books" (Stuff), but many of these are about writing books. The central character is a writer, not a reader. "Neverending Story" "The Princess Bride," "Fahrenheit 451," "Misery"... those fit my search.

Here's "When movie characters read books." For example, the guy in "Friends with Kids" reads "Cod," so, yeah, you get it: That guy! The guy who reads "Cod." Matilda reads "Moby-Dick." You know what that means!

Anyway... it's a hypothesis. Something else reading-related that I was reading this morning is "RuPaul’s Drag Race Recap: Fun, Friends, Maybe More" (New York Magazine):

[A] fun and playfully shady conversation between several of the queens has Asia O’Hara reading Vixen for wearing someone else’s wig during last week’s Best Drag runway. It’s an understandable thing to pick at, and the Vixen responds good-naturedly about it. Until Aquaria butts in.

“Can we talk about how your best drag is someone else’s wig, though? That’s confusing.” Game over. As the Vixen prepares to go fully in on Aquaria in response, a spider crawls its way up someone’s tulle and wreaks total pandemonium* with its mere existence....

Boldface added. I had to look up "reading" in Urban Dictionary:

In gay culture, the act of pointing out a flaw in someone else (usually publicly and in front of them) and exaggerating it.

Gay guy 1: "Those shorts weren't made for you, honey. Look at that muffin top. More like a cupcake top!"

Gay guy 2: "Bitch, why are you reading me?

Also, "read":

To tell someone about themself, mostly used by gay black men.

"That was a read honey!"
"Don't do it hone[y], I will read your ass"

Great slang. Perfect!
___________________________

* Pandemonium — originally "The abode of all demons; hell, the infernal regions" (OED) — is now usually "Utter confusion, uproar; wild and noisy disorder; a tumult; chaos." Like this:

"I would like to be with Senator Cruz for a moment and I would like to respectfully ask him, since he quotes all the lines from 'The Princess Bride' and certainly all of my character, Inigo Montoya’s, lines..."

"I would like to know why he doesn’t quote my favorite line?... After the princess flies out the window and falls into Andre the Giant’s arms.... Inigo says to the Man in Black, 'I have been in the revenge business so long, now that it’s over, I don’t know what to do with the rest of my life.' Senator Cruz, if you’re going to say those lines, you’ve got to say the other line, too.... This man is not putting forth ideas that are at the heart of what that movie is all about. I would love for Senator Cruz, and everyone creating fear mongering and hatred, to consider creating hope, optimism and love. Open your arms to these people, these refugees trying to get into our country, and open your hearts."

Said Mandy Patinkin.



ADDED: Mandy Patinkin has said he wants "to be with Senator Cruz for a moment" to have a respectful conversation. Cruz should take him up on that!

Quick, find a TV!

Aaron Rodgers is on "Jeopardy!"!

Today, at 4:30 Central (that is, in 20 minutes).

Double exclamation point intended.

UPDATE: Spoiler:

Aaron won, despite his Daily Double loss on an easy question. He connected the name Steve Wozniak to IBM, rather than Apple. He knew the name of the actress who was in "The Princess Bride" — Robin Wright — and both Meade and I thought the look on his face suggested that he knew her... perhaps... really well. One of the other contestants was the husband of Gabby Giffords, and Giffords was in the audience, which made me feel like rooting for him, so she'd enjoy things, but I rooted for Aaron nonetheless. I realized early on that Aaron had an advantage: great hands. You know that buzzing in is key to winning on "Jeopardy!" None of the 3 got the Final Jeopardy answer, which required some lateral thinking. The category was "Business," and we were asked to identify 2 men from the early 20th century. It was a mistake to try to recognize them or just to name 2 important businessmen from that time. The key was that they were in motorcycle sidecars. If they'd just been on motorcycles, I think people would have gotten it, but I guess the show thought that would be too easy. They were Harley and Davidson. None of the 3 could identify Gregory Peck from a photograph, nor did any of them know the comic strip "Dilbert," or the 2 actresses in the movie "The Breakfast Club."

My preference for fictionalized historical movies, with a particular note on the ones with a fictional country.

I'm thinking about why I don't want to see the movie "Selma" and why the only movie from last year that I took the time to watch was "The Grand Budapest Hotel." I also don't want to see "American Sniper," and I avoided the movie "Lincoln," even when it was staring me in the face on television and even though I love Daniel Day-Lewis. Maybe I just don't like to watch actors pretending to be particular historical figures. It's too much of an impersonation, and invention and originality is problematic. And maybe it's the distraction of the distortions done for dramatic effect, which seems to be the case with the character of LBJ in "Selma." I'm fully interested in history and am, right now, thoroughly immersed in the series of Robert A. Caro books about LBJ. I want to get as close to understanding the great historical character as I can, and any 2 hours immersed in those books serves that interest better than watching dramatic scenes in "Selma."

Here's the earlier blog post where I talk about the Maureen Dowd column criticizing the movie for making a "faux" "villain" out of LBJ. And here's a new piece in The New Yorker by Amy Davidson saying "Why 'Selma' Is More Than Fair to L.B.J." I dislike LBJ and regard him as a great villain (even if his particular form of villainy put him on the good side of some issues), and I don't really care whether the film is "fair" to him or not. If I saw the movie, it would be to pursue my own  interest in the way media massages the story. I'd write a blog post. The post would quote the line: "This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."



That's the end of "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," a great, great movie with a historical setting and a fictional story. Jimmy Stewart plays the part of a made-up U.S. Senator, Ransom "Ranse" Stoddard. The West, of course, was a real place, not a fictional place, and so it doesn't fit the category I really want to talk about in connection with "The Grand Budapest Hotel."

"The Grand Budapest Hotel" has a fictional historical story, set in a fictional Eastern European country, Zubrowka. (The name Zubrowka comes from the traditional Polish bison-grass flavored vodka.) Here's Wikipedia's plot summary for the movie — a lot about a vaguely explained war in the 1930s and its impact on a posh hotel. It is completely weird and fantastical and yet it conveys quite deep emotions about love and loss, and the resonance with history feels profound and comical. One feels history without needing to fuss over the accuracy. There can be no accuracy. I love that.

Zubrowka is the last country named on Wikipedia's "List of fictional countries," which I found because I was thinking about how great it was to have a fictional country in "The Grand Budapest Hotel" and wanted to think of other movies with a strong feeling of history in a particular place, where the place is fictional. Before looking, I thought of the great comedies "The Great Dictator" (Tomania) and "Duck Soup" (Freedonia and Sylvania). Wikipedia's list of fictional countries doesn't have "The Great Dictator," and not everything on the list has a fictional country used to tell a historical story. So I'm not looking for things like Florin (in "The Princess Bride") or Oz, because these are fantasy lands, not any kind of stand-in for a real geographical place on Earth, or Eastasia and Oceania in "1984" or Gilead in "The Handmaid's Tale" because these stories are not set in historical time but in the future.

So there's a category of movie that I want to say I love, that I want to put above the usual historical movies, but I haven't found enough examples to make a proper category. Perhaps "The Grand Budapest Hotel" is too original to define a category. In that case: grand!

Movies seen and not seen.

Yesterday at the Sundance theater here in Madison, Wisconsin, it was opening night for the "Sex and the City" movie. Women were swarming around and inside the place. Some arrived in groups of 4 and wearing short, tight dresses. The "caffe" area that, at Sundance, replaces the concession stand, had a party atmosphere. Were they serving drinks? I think they were.

But we weren't there to see "Sex and the City." We were there to see "The Fall." Unlike the ladies in little dresses, we did not dress like characters in the movie. That is, we did not wear loincloths or red masks with rectangular eye holes or helmets or diaphanous gowns. But we were just as eager to take in the show on opening night.

Here's the trailer that got me:



Watching the trailer again, I can see that it absolutely accurately represents what is in that movie, so if you like that, go see it. If you don't, don't. Here's the Roger Ebert review that the trailer summarizes in one word ("Magnificent"). And here are a few more Ebert words:

Either you are drawn into the world of this movie or you are not. It is preposterous, of course, but I vote with Werner Herzog, who says if we do not find new images, we will perish. Here a line of bowmen shoot hundreds of arrows into the air. So many of them fall into the back of the escaped slave that he falls backward and the weight of his body is supported by them, as on a bed of nails with dozens of foot-long arrows. There is scene of the monkey Otis chasing a butterfly through impossible architecture.

The monkey belongs to Charles Darwin, who's out on a quest with the Black Bandit, an Italian anarchist, an escaped slave, and a Indian (whom the man has described as an American Indian but the girl has pictured as a man from India). The alternating sequences of fantasy and storytelling reminded me of "The Princess Bride." And there's a satisfying ending that reminded me of [click for spoiler]. 

The movie has gotten mixed reviews. To the extent that these say the story isn't coherent, I think they are wrong. Pay close attention and you'll see how it makes sense. You have an impoverished 5-year-old child who is listening to a story told by a suicidal, drug-addicted man. The fantasy sequences are the combination of his words and her visualization.

The story takes place in the early days of Hollywood and filmmaking is a theme. The man is in the hospital because he was paralyzed in a fall doing a movie stunt, and in putting a story into words he is like a screenplay writer and the girl is like the director, so the slippage between his story and her imagination tells of the writer's loss of control of his story as it is made into a movie. The little girl is in the hospital because she fell out of an orange tree doing her work as a migrant picker. In her eagerness to see the man's story in her head, she's a movie fan.

ADDED: Importantly, this movie was made without CGI. They made models like this:



Better get that explosion right the first time. I hate CGI — I feel visceral revulsion to it. The beauty of "The Fall" is clearly film beauty, not computer tricks.

Comfort movies.

Do you have a comfort movie? This would be a movie you rewatch in times of stress, when you want to create a comfortable environment for yourself. My son John says he uses the "Back to the Future" movies to mellow out at exam time. He says a lot of people his age -- mid-20s -- have "The Princess Bride" as their comfort movie? So, what's yours?

When I was in college -- in the days before home video -- one campus cinema always showed Marx Brothers movies at exam time. It was understood that this was what you watched to escape the stress. I was trying to think of what I would have now that fits in this category. I was going to say "My Dinner with Andre," "Slacker," "Fast ,Cheap and Out of Control," and "Grey Gardens." But John is disqualifying these choices on the ground that these are actually movies that I consider great, not the sort of junk food that we're trying to talk about here. It's true that I don't have any not-actually-great movies that I like to rewatch for comfort's sake. He says that I use TV reality shows for this. He's right. You know, the other day I watched three episodes of an old season of "Survivor."

(Song that John is playing that is amusing me while I write this post: "Nuages"... by Django Reinhardt. I'm looking for a YouTube clip of that for you, but what I'm seeing is that everyone tries to play that song.)

HEY: This post has a vlog:



And John never found the clip.

OH: I thought of one -- look, we watched it the day I wrecked my car -- "Serial Mom."

Is Stone Reader a good documentary? Tonya is praising the film Stone Reader, so I feel compelled to dissent and say that this is a ridiculous excuse for a documentary, though people who enjoy the pacing of, say, NPR radio may enjoy it. (Sideswipe at NPR: This morning they went on and on about people in India who made clay pottery. Why they kneaded the clay by hand and used a potter's wheel! We listened our way through each supposedly bizarrely primitive step of the pottery process that will be familiar to anyone who ever took a ceramics class.)

Stone Reader is the dragged out search for an author of a book the filmmaker read and loved a long time ago. Tonya writes: "You must see this film if you are a bibliophile." I'd say if you're a bibliophile, just read, don't waste time watching a movie about how long it takes to find an author--with numerous pointless shots of things like raking leaves (you know, time is passing, and the author is still not found) and the filmmaker's son opening his new Harry Potter book and interviews with people who might know where the missing author is that go on and on and then conclude with the news that the interviewee does not know (and, yeah, I know Citizen Kane kind of proceeds in that way--"Rosebud? Never heard of it!"--but this is not Citizen Kane). Read the customer review "10% actual content, 90% padding" at Amazon. And check out the inflated price of the DVD--which I paid. (Sure, it has a lot of special features, but what consolation is that? There's no special feature that gives me two hours of my life back.)

Stone Reader feels like a 2-hour public service announcement about the benefits of reading. Can a good movie be made about reading? What movies are there about reading? I can think of The Neverending Story and The Princess Bride, which use the device of reading a book to enter into a story (which Alice in Wonderland does too). I can think of really only one decent movie that really is (pretty much) about reading: La Lectrice. It's hard enough to do a film about writing, but reading? Reminds me of that episode of Seinfeld--The Pitch--where George and Jerry pitch the idea of the show about nothing:

JERRY: ..Well, as I was saying, I would play myself, and, as a comedian, living in New York, I have a friend, a neighbor, and an ex-girlfriend, which is all true.

GEORGE: Yeah, but nothing happens on the show. You see, it's just like life. You know, you eat, you go shopping, you read.. You eat, you read, You go shopping.

RUSSELL: You read? You read on the show?