"Robert Zemeckis’ film 'Here' is an object lesson in how to take a touching idea and make an extremely annoying movie out of it...."

"… a single camera sits in one spot for the entirety of the film as the action jumps back and forth through time.... Starting off as an old man, [the Tom Hanks character] walks into a sunlit modern living room only for the shot to fade away to the era of dinosaurs…. [I]n a bid for self-protection, Zemeckis and co-writer Eric Roth unconvincingly force in some diversity. In the future, when the Youngs have left, we see glimpses of a 2010s black family, the longest of which shows the dad telling his son how to talk to the police in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. Almost nothing else is learned about them except that their housekeeper gets COVID. Hundreds of years in the past, an indigenous couple wordlessly flirt, have a kid and die in the 2,000-square-foot meadow where the Young home will eventually stand...."

From the NY Post review of "Here."

"This Fourth of July holiday is one of the most humbling in our history."

"Even at the height of world wars or the Great Depression, America inspired. But, today, the United States is destroying the moral authority it once had. There will still be fireworks. And the Statue of Liberty still towers over New York Harbor. But it is harder today to convince others that Americans embrace—or practice—the ideals that Lady Liberty represents."

Says Robin Wright in "To the World, We’re Now America the Racist and Pitiful" (The New Yorker).

I'm surprised to encounter reverence for the Fourth of July holiday. If we're going to take this year's events as seriously as Wright wants us to take them, isn't the Fourth racist? Isn't it white supremacy? Why is she calling on us to be truer to its values?

We've had the 1619 Project to instruct us. Shouldn't there now be a call to abolish the Fourth of July as a national holiday? Should we even be calling holidays "national"?

I'm not seeing that suggestion — abolish the holiday. Not yet. It must be brewing out there, though, don't you think? I'm seeing articles that look like they're anticipating that idea and pushing it back before it emerges — aborting it, pre-born.

I'm talking about things like that Robin Wright article, and, more conspicuously, at WaPo — by historian Jonathan Lande — "The Fourth of July is a Black American holiday/Black Americans have long used the holiday to crusade for equality."

"Trump blamed the cancellation of his secret summit talks on a Taliban bombing that killed an American soldier and eleven others in Kabul last week... a face-saving excuse...."

"The idea of a secret summit with enemy combatants astonished even those close to the process.... Trump had hoped to broker an Afghan peace before the Presidential campaign heats up—to convince voters that he knows the art of diplomatic deals.... 'We are committed to continuing negotiations till the end if political settlement is chosen instead of war,' the Taliban said. Trump has also dramatically abandoned other diplomatic initiatives only to resume them in short order. In May, 2018, Trump abruptly called off his summit with the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore, citing 'anger and open hostility' in North Korea’s statements. Less than three weeks later, in an about-face, Trump flew to Singapore. At their first meeting, Trump and Kim pledged a new era in relations between countries still technically at war since 1953.'"

From "Trump’s Stunt with the Taliban Was Not About Negotiating Peace" by Robin Wright (in The New Yorker).

"Mugabe describes himself as both a practicing Catholic and a Marxist, but his birthday party was held at the Elephant Hills golf resort..."

"... near Victoria Falls, just up the road from the haunts of Cecil. Mugabe was honored with seven birthday cakes. One was so large that it had to be carried in by eight men; another was described as the size of a mattress. The celebration reportedly cost a million American dollars, in a country that now suffers up to ninety-five per cent unemployment and underemployment, according to the C.I.A.’s World Factbook. (Mugabe conceded during his last election, in 2013, that at least sixty per cent of his countrymen were jobless). Three-quarters of Zimbabwe’s population lives below the poverty line. 'It’s sad when wildlife is abused, but the Zimbabwean people have been suffering decades of abuse under the wily old Mugabe, who seems never to relent and never to go away,' Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, told me last week."

From "Cecil the Lion and Robert Mugabe," by Robin Wright in The New Yorker.

I don't understand the "but" in the first sentence — "a practicing Catholic and a Marxist, but his birthday party," etc. I mean, I understand it, but it assumes the reader thinks a certain way, and I don't.