The Poor, Discomfited George Clooney

The usually debonair George Clooney looks discomfitted, here with his new wife, Amal Alamuddin

I wonder why?

Here's the scoop on her, from last March 2014 (I collected these from a variety of sources - there may be more to add):

- She’s Druze, which is an offshoot of Islam.

- She is defending Julian Assange, of the Wikileaks fame in his extradition case with Sweden

- Her mother, Baria, is a foreign affairs editor at Al Hayat, a Lebanese newspaper

- She attended NYU School of Law

- After graduation, she joined the New York firm Sullivan & Cromwell, where she worked for three years before moving to London

- She clerked for Sonia Sotomayor when the future Supreme Court justice was a judge at the US Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, which covers New York

- She's worked as an adviser to the UN Special Envoy, Kofi Annan, on Syria

- She has been been Counsel to the inquiry launched on the use of drones in counter-terrorism

- She's the legal advisor to the King of Bahrain

- Sh has written on international criminal law

- She has edited a book entitled The Law and Practice of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon

- At the Doughty Street barristers' chambers, she represented Yulia Tymoshenko, the former Ukrainian Prime Minister

- She represented Abdullah Al Senussi, former Libyan intelligence chief and Muamar Gaddafi’s right-hand man in a case of alleged crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court


Alamuddin with Julian Assange

Clooney looks peaked and stressed. I don't think it is the new life as a married man, as the new life as a man married to Alamuddin. I wonder what they talk about? The terrible United States, with all those war criminals? The wonderful Middle East, blighted and maligned by the West?

Alamuddin looks like she's close to her family. Family dinners must be something special. Debbie Schlussel writes this about her experience with the family:

Over the past few months, actor George Clooney’s been photographed all over the place with Amal Alamuddin, a very anti-Israel Lebanese Arab who worked for the United Nations and represented Wikileaks’ anti-American former chief, Julian Assange. The Lebanese legal book she authored is extremely anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian. Alamuddin, who was Clooney’s date to the Obama White House last month, is not Muslim. I’m familiar with Ms. Alamuddin (pronounced “Ah-lah-muh-DEEN”) and her family because I met her and them at the wedding of her cousin in the mid-1990s. They are extremely anti-Israel, and I was subjected to their absurd, non-stop anti-Israel questions and comments as the only non-Arab (other than the bride and her family) at a dinner the night before the wedding.

I went to law school with Alamuddin’s cousin (who has the same last name) and the cousin’s wife. I was friends with the cousin’s wife (who is not an Arab), and when they were dating in law school, I repeatedly heard from him about how he hated Israel and sided with the Palestinians and the P.L.O. Later, when I was invited to the the Alamuddin wedding, I was on the receiving end of more of that. As I noted, I was the only non-Arab at the pre-wedding dinner at Chicago’s now-defunct “Uncle Tonoose” restaurant. They all knew I was Jewish, and the conversations and questions directed at me were a mix of myself as both Jewish museum exhibit and target of anti-Israel questioning. Clooney’s future girlfriend was there, too, and she was in her late teens at the time (I was in my mid-20s).

The situation with the Alamuddin family was surreal, as I was asked repeatedly about “Jewish Europeans” “invading” Israel, er . . . “Palestine.”

Clooney, I think, is in over his head. His Druze-lawyer-anti-Israeli wife will be nothing but a handful. What a stupid man.

And one strange thing. He wore the same suit he wore to his wedding at the Golden Globes. Yes he was there for Golden Globes' lifetime achievement award, the Cecil B. DeMille Award, but doesn't that warrant its own "special" suit?

This is the confident and debonair Clooney of a couple of years ago.



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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat

Sham Realism and the Usual Nihilism

Another New York icon for blowing up: The Brooklyn Bridge stylized with a pistol

I've posted below the full article by Armond White Working Class Goes to Hell: Drop and The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby. Once again, movies make a mess of class realism.

The article is posted on National Review Online.

I post it here because I read it just after I posted my recent article on the 9/11 memorial, where I wrote: "A defeatist, nihilistic symbol will produce a defeated people."

White, in the article below, expands on the nihilism of contemporary films. He writes in the article:

Lehane’s popularity among filmmakers, from Clint Eastwood to Scorsese, points to an ongoing class war between out-of-touch professionals who have enjoyed class ascension and self-hating audiences who eagerly accept the worse view of themselves as if confronting hard facts of life. This sham realism [in the film] contains the usual indie-movie nihilism.

He continues:

Cynics love this junk for its simultaneous wallowing in decadence..., sanctimony..., and self-pity...

It is far easier to wallow in decadence, sanctimony and self-pity than to take a stand against these camouflaged evils, expose them, and provide (and live) an alternative life of goodness, choosing God instead of the devil. Our modern world, as I wrote in the article linked above, has left us with

a depressing, generic memorial, which has become the norm in our godless, non-spiritual world.

This norm is not only in our public memorials, but in our personal presentations, where dark, nihilistic clothes now make up standard attire.
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Working Class Goes to Hell: Drop and The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby
Once again, movies make a mess of class realism.
By Armond White
September 11, 2014
Another Dennis Lehane carnival of urban clichés, The Drop uses the story of a quiet, lonely Brooklyn barkeep, Bob Malinowski (Tom Hardy), who outwits the criminals, the cops, and the people around him, for a fable that is sinister, sentimental, ironic, and worthless.

Based on Lehane’s short story “Animal Rescue” (which became the intro to his novelization The Drop), the film belongs to the same trash heap as Hollywood’s other Lehane adaptations such as Gone Baby Gone and Mystic River. It transfers those Boston-based tales to New York, the epicenter of current miscreant mythology. It’s a confabulation of news media, publishing, TV, and Hollywood industries, where hardboiled fiction and urban crime are combined into cheap and trite storytelling (what the book industry calls thrillers) and has become a new dark brand of Americana.

From its opening voiceover narration, The Drop is both fake and familiar. Its characters are all woebegone: bar owner Marv (James Gandolfini), the scared and scarred abused girl Nadia (Noomi Rapace), and Bob himself, so emotionally recessive he thinks and speaks dull-wittedly and stumbles instead of walks — a plot device of slow-boiling rage. (Bob closely relates to the pitbull puppy he rescues.) The underworld subplot involving drop-offs for Chechan mobsters is a dismal, lazy way to deal with the contemporary social challenges and the seemingly inescapable beat-down of working-class life.

Alert, socially conscious viewers might trace Lehane’s genre to The Sopranos and its exurban offshoots, like New Jersey‘s Boardwalk Empire and Maryland’s The Wire (to which Lehane contributed), that twisted the gangster genre into a perverse, overly self-conscious version of social realism. These urban-crime tales excite viewers from the middle class to the underclass by pretending to show how rough today’s pitbull-versus-pitbull world can be. A bizarre form of gallows escapism, they simplify the gradual decline of our cities. It is the pretense of an author like Lehane to pinpoint corruption while also profiting from it.
This distraction from political reality indicts that entire entertainment complex that takes a sentimentalized (and half-understood) history of ethnic struggle that frequently includes criminality, such as Marv’s pathetic get-rich scheming, as the pattern of ethnic desperation. Lehane’s insipid moralizing offers psychological rationales: Americans like Bob, Marv, and Nadia harbor such horrors from their pasts that they have no recourse other than reprobate behavior — which Martin Scorsese’s hysterical film version of Lehane’s Shutter Island illustrated, as does the equally ludicrous The Drop.

Lehane’s popularity among filmmakers, from Clint Eastwood to Scorsese, points to an ongoing class war between out-of-touch professionals who have enjoyed class ascension and self-hating audiences who eagerly accept the worse view of themselves as if confronting hard facts of life. (Note Bob’s strange locution “That‘s unlike me” to explain or disguise an eccentric act.) This sham realism contains the usual indie-movie nihilism. One cop exclaims, “Well, I’ll be damned.” And his female partner responds, “Like you weren’t already.” It’s the same laughably literary conceit as in Cormac McCarthy’s “original” screenplay for Ridley Scott’s The Counselor. Cynics love this junk for its simultaneous wallowing in decadence (Bob’s local parish church is about to close), sanctimony (Bob’s chivalrous defense of Nadia), and self-pity (“You have to be alone forever,” Bob philosophizes).

The class condescension in The Drop has become such a cliché that even Belgian director Michael R. Roskam can imitate the Brooklyn miasma with the same fake fussiness as native son James Gray. This gloomy, hardboiled pathos exposes the filmmakers’ distance from their subject. When Italian director Elio Petri made The Working Class Goes to Heaven (also known as Mimi the Metalworker) in the early ’70s, the defense of lower-class struggle was part of Petri’s combined Communist critique and satire. Lehane sends the working class to hell out of Hollywood/literary pity. It’s nothing less than cultural decadence that should be obvious to anyone who doesn’t have an academic or industry stake in denying the problem. Imagine if the makers of The Drop had kept Lehane’s original title and honestly asked moviegoers to approve the symbolic treatment of their lives as animals?

***

Why would first-time feature director Ned Benson The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby allude to the title of a famous 1966 Beatles song and then deny an exploration into its meaning? That bad idea is a warning. So is the story’s confounding presentation. Benson’s tale of a broken marriage between once-blissful young parents Conor (James McAvoy) and Eleanor (Jessica Chastain) started in two separate films, one subtitled “Him,” the other “Her.” This reviewer endured the remix, a third version subtitled “Them.”

McAvoy’s ornery petulance as the bratty son of a restaurateur and Chastain’s actressy traumatized daughter of a professor make an annoying, mismatched pair. This is the opposite of The Drop, as both these affluent characters are meant to be envied, even in their exasperating, enervated struggle to find the companionship they lost. They suffer in luxe settings and among highly theatrical peers (William Hurt, Viola Davis, Isabelle Huppert) who seem signed on for narcissism (acting out one “heartfelt” confession after another) not truth. Here’s a different kind of class displacement — filmmakers who are so out of touch with the prosperity to which they have ascended that they falsify the terms of their apparent spiritual emptiness. Fatuous Benson, who treats Conor and Eleanor as teenagers, relates it all to a song — and it’s a song he doesn’t seem to understand.

When The Smiths updated “Eleanor Rigby” as “Vicar in a Tutu” (1986), the new song satirized a pre-millennial sense of spiritual isolation. Skepticism, tradition, impudence, and desperation were examined and then redeemed for a powerful and refreshed sense of identity. Challenging pop and religious heritage, and hearing its echo, the Smiths were also marvelously rooted to it. In The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby, Benson and cast seem unaware they are rootless.

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White briefly mentions Martin Scorcese's Shutter Island in his article, where he writes:

Americans like Bob, Marv, and Nadia harbor such horrors from their pasts that they have no recourse other than reprobate behavior - which Martin Scorsese’s hysterical film version of Lehane’s Shutter Island illustrated, as does the equally ludicrous The Drop.

I discuss this phenomenon in a post from 2011, where I write:

A recent program on Television Ontario's news/current affairs program The Agenda had a panel discussion it titled as "Zombie Zeitgeist" and had zombie experts from various universities as guest on its panel...It is astonishing how seriously they all take the topic, including the usually sharp and adroit host of the program Steve Paiken.

I noticed this foray into the "unreal" with two films that Leonardo DiCaprio made, in quick succession just last year: Shutter Island and Inception. DiCaprio's characters enter some abyss (in Shutter Island we find out that he's actually mad) where the laws of reality (including gravity) don't exist, or at least they don't fully and consistently exist.

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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
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Movies and Morals

Woody Allen, Mia Farrow and Soon-Yi in 1992


Allen Family, 2014

I've been a fan of Woody Allen for a while. I think I've watched all his movies, and I've written about his recent films (here, here and here). But, these films are his post-scandal movies, and don't have that biting, self-depracating humor that was quintessential Allen.

He got caught in an incestuous scandal with the adopted daughter of his mistress (Mia Farrow's Korean adopted daughter Soon-Yi). He continued his affair with Soon-Yi (who was 19 by then) after his split with Farrow, and later married Soon-Yi in 1997.

History repeats itself, and Allen and Soon-Yi adopted two children together, who are now in their early teens. One is "Asian" the other blonde and white. One for each of them, I guess.

Below is Allen with Soon-Yi in 2014. Granted Allen is now seventy eight, but he looks like an centenarian. Morals have a way of catching up with you.


Mr. and Mrs. Allen in 2014, at 78 and 44

Allen has a new movie out called Magic in the Moonlight. I guess it is reflex action, by now for Allen, to make movies. He can probably make them in his sleep. But, a film critic at National Review Online has this to say about the film:

In short, Magic in the Moonlight is thin on plot, dialogue, and characterization, and it cannot persuade us that the central romance is real — but it’s gorgeous to look at. You can’t hope to see anything more beautiful onscreen this year than the lives of the genteel wealthy, in the south of France, 1928.

Which is pretty much my point in my review of his latest films: Allen can make films, and even still has the aesthetic eye, but what is the point of his films? Beauty alone is not enough, as I begin to discover in my literary project, by book: Reclaiming Beauty. Allen has never returned to Manhattan, where his true voice was loud and clear. Yes, those contemporary New York stories, and characters, can be a little annoying, but there was an authenticity about them, and some kind of moral judgment for the judgments they make.

Now, instead, he hops around European cities, and travels as far back as he can in time, as though he's running away from truth.

I suppose that's what we should expect from him from now on. What a pity.

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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
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