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Month: October 2015

Stage fright: “Number One Fan” by Dennis Hartley

Published by digby on October 25, 2015
Saturday Night at the Movies




Stage fright: Number One Fan ***

By Dennis Hartley









Is it any wonder I reject you first?
Fame, fame, fame, fame
Is it any wonder you are too cool to fool
Fame (fame)

-from “Fame”, by David Bowie

Back in the early 90s, I shared a train ride with David Bowie. It was the least likely celebrity sighting I’ve ever experienced. I was visiting my parents in upstate New York. During my extended stay, I took a side trip to NYC via Amtrak. On the return trip to Albany, I boarded the train at Grand Central. As I was settling in, I did a textbook double take at the gentleman sitting directly across the aisle from me (I nearly gave myself whiplash). Could it be? No, that’s too weird. All by himself…no handlers, no entourage?


Why would David Bowie be taking a train to Albany? It had to be a look-alike. However, since it took several hours, I had ample time to (discreetly) confirm…yep, that’s him (the different colored eyes sealed the I.D.). Internally, I was freaking out (I’m a huge Bowie fan), but I always hold back and respect people’s privacy in such situations, because I dread coming off like the embarrassingly star-struck interview host Chris Farley used to play on SNL (“Do you remember when you were with the Beatles? That was awesome!”).

With the clarity of hindsight, why wouldn’t David Bowie take a train from NYC to Albany? There’s no law that says David Bowie can’t take a train to Albany, if he should so desire.  For all I know, he was planning to shuffle off to Buffalo from there. And why would I assume that a famous person never travels without handlers or an entourage? After all, he’s just another human being. He takes his pants on and off the same way I do.

But “fame” is a funny thing; as Bowie himself once sang, it “makes a man take things over”. Among other things, it “puts you where things are hollow”, and if you’re not careful, “what you get is no tomorrow.” Apparently, in some cases, “to bind your time…it drives you to crime.” Which brings us to a twisty French thriller called Number One Fan (aka Elle l’adore), a rumination on fame, fandom, crime, punishment, and erm, wax jobs.

This is a film that is difficult to review without inadvertently divulging spoilers (hence the windy preamble), so I will do my best not to. Sandrine Kimberlane stars as Muriel, a divorcee with two teenagers who works as a beautician. Muriel is attractive and outgoing, but seems just a bubble off plum. She regales friends, family and co-workers with bizarrely concocted anecdotes (like the time she “recognized” one of her customers as Klaus Barbie’s daughter halfway through a treatment, and promptly sent her packing sans one waxed leg…under threat of revealing her nefarious identity to the other customers).


She is also a big fan of pop idol Vincent Lacroix (Laurent Lafitte). Her apartment is chockablock with Vincent’s CDs, collectibles, posters, and photos (one of them autographed “To Muriel, with love”). We see Muriel backstage after one of Vincent’s performances, hoping for a brief audience or an autograph. “Not tonight, Muriel,” his handler tells her, implying she’s a frequent lurker. You could say that she is…obsessed.


Imagine Muriel’s surprise when she answers her door late one night, and sees her idol standing there. While she’s still processing whether or not this is even really happening to her, he tells her he desperately needs her help. Vincent’s done a bad, bad, thing. It was an accident, but he needs a civilian to be his, you know, “cleaner”. I can really say no more.

This is the directing debut for actress Jeanne Herry (who also co-wrote the screenplay, with Gaelle Mace) and it’s an impressive first feature, with excellent performances, effective atmosphere, and a unique piano score by Pascal Sangla. In its central themes regarding obsession and duplicity, I detected a touch of Hitchcock (I believe there has been a rule in place since Truffaut’s The Bride Wore Black that every French thriller is required to have a touch of Hitchcock). The film also makes keen observations about the cult of celebrity. Most notably, there’s acknowledgment of the ever-odious duality of “justice” systems everywhere: the fact that there’s one for the rich, and one for the poor.

(Part of SIFF/TV5Monde’s “French Cinema Now” festival, in Seattle thru October 29).

And here’s “number one fan” Chris Farley, in his classic SNL sketch with Sir Paul:


Previous posts with related themes:

New! More reviews at Den of Cinema

—Dennis Hartley

Playing by different rules #Beirut #Benghazi

Published by digby on October 24, 2015

Playing by different rules

by digby

The right knows this and they don’t care. The media should be more circumspect:

According to Republicans, Benghazi remains a burning issue because they claim there are unanswered questions about accountability, and Clinton sits at the center of those questions. Never mind that Clinton has already accepted responsibility for the attack and report after report has found no evidence of administration malpractice. Conservatives insist there’s more territory to mine because Democrats must be held accountable for the deaths of four Americans — over and over again.

Obviously, many of the same, far-right forces chasing Clinton today were much less interested in holding Jeb Bush’s brother accountable for the security failings of 9/11. (In fact, they tried to blame Bill Clinton.)

Following that historic attack, there weren’t years worth of partisan blame games played like with Benghazi today. Instead, a single joint Congressional inquiry into the intelligence failures was formed. In addition, a bipartisan 9/11 commission was created over the objections of the Bush White House. The commission was routinely stonewalled by the White House and denounced by conservative commentators who remained unfazed by unanswered questions. In April 2004, Sean Hannity, currently obsessed with Benghazi, claimed the 9/11 commission had “been politicized.” Days later he doubled down: “I don’t have any faith in this commission. I think it’s become politicized. I think it’s a farce.”

And then there was Reagan and Beirut. Here’s how that American nightmare played out.

On April 18, 1983, Islamic terrorists attacked the U.S. Embassy in Beirut. As PBS explains, “Sixty-three people were killed, including 17 Americans, eight of whom were employees of the Central Intelligence Agency, including chief Middle East analyst Robert C. Ames and station chief Kenneth Haas.”

Five months later local terrorists struck again. During a lengthy air assault from nearby artillerymen, two Marines stationed at the Beirut airport were killed.

Then on October 23, the Marines’ Beirut barracks cratered after a 5-ton truck driven by a suicide bomber and carrying the equivalent of 12,000 pounds of TNT exploded killing 241 Americans, marking the deadliest single attack on U.S. citizens overseas since the Battle of Iwo Jima in World War II. (Fifty-eight French paratroopers were also killed in the Beirut blast.)

One year later on September 20, 1984, came the bombing of a U.S. Embassy annex. Located in Aukar, northeast of Beirut, a truck bomb exploded killing 24 people, two of whom were U.S. military personnel.

So, in less than 18 months under Reagan, several hundred Americans were killed by four separate terrorist attacks in and around Beirut targeting American outposts. And note that after the fourth attack, which killed two Americans, Reagan refused to curtail his re-election campaign for even one day, even though he enjoyed an insurmountable lead in the polls.

What was the Congressional response after the terror attack that killed 241 U.S. servicemen? With the House controlled by Democrats, did they demand years and years of redundant, finger-pointing investigations?

No.

Congress created a single fact-finding commission. Two months after the barracks attack, the commission finished its work and concluded there had been “serious command and intelligence failures and said that the mission was not prepared to deal with the terrorist threat at the time due to a lack of training, staff, organization, and support.”

Recommendations were made and then implemented. “Rather than trying to blame the Reagan administration, the Democrats in both houses worked with their Republican colleagues to fix the problem,” wrote Lawrence Korb, who served as assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration.

There are many links to all that, here, if you are interested.

And, by the way, Reagan “cut and ran” after that attack, just FYI. Which was the right thing to do. But let’s just say that if the shoe were on the other foot …

QOTD: Jebbers

Published by digby on October 24, 2015

QOTD: Jebbers

by digby

In South Carolina today:

Thanks for sharing Jeb.

I have never thought he really wanted it. And I never understood why anyone thought the Republicans were clamoring for another Bush. Poppy was kicked out after one term. Junior left office with a less than 30% approval rating. Every time they get in they leave office with the country reeling in recession. What in the world made anyone think that anyone would want another one?

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Nice little streets you have here, be a shame if anything happened to them

Published by digby on October 24, 2015

Nice little streets you have here, be a shame if anything happened to them

by digby

That is pretty much what the head of the FBI is telling America.

The F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, said on Friday that the additional scrutiny and criticism of police officers in the wake of highly publicized episodes of police brutality may have led to an increase in violent crime in some cities as officers have become less aggressive.

With his remarks, Mr. Comey lent the prestige of the F.B.I., the nation’s most prominent law enforcement agency, to a theory that is far from settled: that the increased attention on the police has made officers less aggressive and emboldened criminals. But he acknowledged that there is so far no data to back up his assertion and that it may be just one of many factors that are contributing to the rise in crime, like cheaper drugs and an increase in criminals who are being released from prison.

“I don’t know whether that explains it entirely, but I do have a strong sense that some part of the explanation is a chill wind that has blown through American law enforcement over the last year,” Mr. Comey said in a speech at the University of Chicago Law School.

Unless you people want to be overrun with crime, you’d better not criticize the cops for anything they do wrong. You’ll be sorry when they pout and refuse to do their jobs and let you die in the street.

Ironically, on the same NY Times front page is this story:

[A]n analysis by The New York Times of tens of thousands of traffic stops and years of arrest data in this racially mixed city of 280,000 uncovered wide racial differences in measure after measure of police conduct.

Those same disparities were found across North Carolina, the state that collects the most detailed data on traffic stops. And at least some of them showed up in the six other states that collect comprehensive traffic-stop statistics.

Here in North Carolina’s third-largest city, officers pulled over African-American drivers for traffic violations at a rate far out of proportion with their share of the local driving population. They used their discretion to search black drivers or their cars more than twice as often as white motorists — even though they found drugs and weapons significantly more often when the driver was white.

Officers were more likely to stop black drivers for no discernible reason. And they were more likely to use force if the driver was black, even when they did not encounter physical resistance.

Shhhh. Don’t say anything. The cops will have their feelings hurt and they won’t do their jobs anymore.

This is actually not an uncommon argument among authoritarians. Recall that he CIA made the same arguments about being held accountable for torturing people too. If you hold CIA responsible for breaking the law and engaging in sadistic immoral behavior they’ll stop doing their jobs and then where will you be?

These institutions used to be respected because people who took oaths to protect their town or their country were mature individuals who had a higher purpose. Now they act like spoiled children who threaten to hold their breath until they turn blue unless they are allowed free rein to do anything they choose. Essentially, they do not believe the rules should apply to them — only the citizens and “the enemy” (and they are often the same thing in their minds.)

It does not appear that the rest of the DOJ agrees with Comey:

Mr. Comey’s remarks caught officials by surprise at the Justice Department, where his views are not shared at the top levels. Holding the police accountable for civil rights violations has been a top priority at the department in recent years, and some senior officials do not believe that scrutiny of police officers has led to an increase in crime. While the department had no immediate comment on Friday, several officials privately fumed at Mr. Comey’s suggestion.

Why Democratic presidents insist on appointing Republicans to this job I will never understand.

Update: Recall this, from a while back. Comey’s also going all over the country telling local yahoos to keep their eyes open for one of the thousands of ISIS terrorists who are in our midst.

He’s a very calming influence on the paranoid American right isn’t he?

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Did Clinton hide the emails in a pumpkin patch?

Published by digby on October 24, 2015

Did Clinton hide the emails in a pumpkin patch?

by digby

I took the historical perspective in the piece I wrote about the Benghazi hearings for Salon yesterday.

In 1950, Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy gave a speech to the Ohio County Women’s Republican Club in Wheeling, WV, where he held up a piece of paper and declared,“I have here in my hand a list of 205 State Department employees that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department.” And so began the McCarthy witch hunt.

The paranoid anti-communist mood in the country preceded his declaration by several years with the original hearings by the House Un-American Activities Committee, the Alger Hiss case and various Cold War shocks from Russia to China to Korea. But McCarthy’s attack marked the beginning of what would become an article of faith in right-wing circles for decades to come: The State Department is a nest of traitors working together to sell out America. (If you doubt it, read the pungent prose in Ann Coulter’s McCarthy apologia, “Treason.”)

McCarthy’s accusations were ridiculous, of course. The numbers of spies he alleged had infiltrated the department ranged from a handful to hundreds and his evidence was non-existent. Even more damning, he could never produce any coherent theory as to why or how this happened and who was responsible for it, but for several years the fiery senator had many people in the country convinced that the State Department was riddled with communists. It was when he went after the Army that his crusade finally fell apart. The right is always willing to believe that a government bureaucrat would sell out his country, but the military is (usually) a bridge too far.

The end of the McCarthy witch hunt did not end conservative hostility to the State Department.  Every Soviet incursion was met with howls of disapproval if there had been even the slightest U.S. diplomatic overture. These were seen as signs of weakness, echoing what they considered to be the greatest error of American statecraft — the “sellout at Yalta” after WWII. In their view, diplomacy, the State Department’s raison d’etre, is nothing more than a flaccid attempt to dilute American power. And even after the red scare petered out, the suspicion that the department was teeming with impotent liberal simps was prevalent among conservatives, always worried that any opportunity for America to exert its will through sheer dominant force might be obstructed by some sort of diplomatic interference. Daniel Bell, who wrote an influential book back in the early 1960s called “The Radical Right,” even described their anti-communism as a “populist revolt against the State Department.”

This suspicion of the State Department has continued even in Republican administrations. During the Reagan administration Secretary of State George Schultz was famously at odds with Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger and there was little love lost between the Bush administration’s Dick Cheney and Colin Powell. When the Democrats have the executive branch it’s much, much worse. There is just something about the State Department that drives conservatives a little bit crazy.
Of course nothing on earth drives them as crazy as Bill and Hillary Clinton, their most hated enemies. The Republicans wasted tens of millions of dollars back in the 1990s trying to destroy them. From Travelgate to Whitewater to Filegate to the Lincoln bedroom, to John Huang/Charlie Tree/Johnny Chung to Monica Lewinsky (none of which, with exception of some furtive extra-marital fellatio in a hallway, resulted in a finding of any wrongdoing) they just could not quit them. And they could not win.
It should, therefore, come as no surprise that when the radical right’s decades-long mistrust of the State Department combined with their decades-long crusade against Hillary Clinton, the result would be an incoherent howl of suspicion, confusion and inchoate rage.

There’s more at the link.

*If you’re wondering about that pumpkin patch reference, it’s a reference to this.

No wonder they’re so angry by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on October 24, 2015

No wonder they’re so angry
by Tom Sullivan

Watching last night’s Hillary Clinton interview with Rachel Maddow this morning. Particularly interested with her concern for regaining Democratic control in the states ahead of the 2020 census. Asked what she did after eleven straight hours of testimony before “Tea Party Trey” Gowdy’s Benghazi committee, she replied, “I had my whole team come over to my house, and we sat around eating Indian food and drinking wine and beer.” And talking about sports and TV. Unwinding. Behaving in private as if they were real people. Diabolical.

But of course, painting Clinton as unfeeling and Other was the point of the hearings, wasn’t it?

Matt Taibbi had some juicy comments on that at Rolling Stone. Never a fan of the kind of Clintonian “transactional politics” that triangulates on policy in service to “keeping Republicans out of office,” Taibbi nonetheless conceded that Trey Gowdy made a pretty good case for that strategy on Thursday. “It’s hard to imagine a political compromise that wouldn’t be justified if its true aim would be to keep people like those jackasses out of power.”

Asked last night about civil rights compromises enacted during her husband’s presidency, policies the Obama administration had to undo, Clinton offered just that as an explanation. “It was a defensive action” to prevent conservatives from gaining further ground. “Sometimes as a leader in a democracy,” Clinton went on, “you are confronted with two bad choices [and ask] what is the least bad choice and how do I try to cabin this off from having worse consequences?”

Taibbi notes that the doofuses on Gowdy’s committee, try as they might to make Clinton the Wicked Witch of the West Wing, simply succeeded in making her more human (something her campaign has struggled to do) while pissing off the rest of us:

The Republicans at the Benghazi hearing made Hillary a proxy for an aspect of this phenomenon that virtually every blue-state American has seethed at in the last decade or so: being accused of treason.

We’ve been told that we hate veterans, that we sympathize with terrorists, that we long for a UN takeover or Soviet rule. It’s said all the time that it makes us happy to see cops shot or soldiers killed in battle. Not only do we hear this on right-wing TV, we see the amazing spectacle of millions of conservatives believing it. To believe this stuff, you’d have to believe we aren’t even people.

[snip]

On a deeper level the Republican committee members were accusing her of not caring about martyred American lives, because, well, “liberals” only care about the victims of torture or police brutality or other special interest groups they can exploit for political gain. In conservative legend, they don’t care about “regular” Americans.

What’s more, even deeper down they know their social and economic theories are as much bullshit as their patriotic preening, and that their own base has seen through it enough to begin viewing them as the Other. Enough to favor making Donald Trump or Ben Carson their pick for the party’s nominee for president.

Meanwhile, the GOP’s decades-long efforts to destroy Hillary Clinton are so many waves breaking against a cliff. No wonder they’re so angry.

Problems in the castle

Published by digby on October 23, 2015

Problems in the castle

by digby

This is embarrassing:

Jeb Bush “will attend a finance meeting this weekend in Houston convened by former President George H. W. Bush and attended by Bush’s brother, former President George W. Bush,” CBS News has learned.

“The session, designed to assess where Bush’s candidacy stands in the face of large-scale staff cutbacks and underwhelming poll numbers, will also be attended by Bush’s mother, Barbara Bush. The governor’s campaign confirmed the meeting will be held Sunday and Monday.”

I have never believed that Jeb! wanted this. I think the Bush machine wanted him to want it so he did it.

Oh, and if you’re wondering why “W” was so rudely dismissive of Ted Cruz, it’s because he’s hogging all that Texas billionaire wingnut cash. That’s supposed to be Bush country.

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Our planet in peril

Published by digby on October 23, 2015

Our planet in peril

by digby

The bad news:

This is good news:

This is very bad news:

The problem is that many of those Republicans who now understand that it’s real (Trump notwithstanding) also think “it’s Gods will”/not man-made/nothing we can do about it. I suspect that’s how many of them have rationalized their beliefs anyway.

Still, it is good news. The crazy denialism is literally going to kill their kids and grandkids. And everybody elses.

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