Thomas F. Cook

I wasn’t going to review this but The Times review, once again, proved that their reviewers are hacks and unqualified to review a high school musical.

My biggest complaint about this movie, which will not have a wide release or be seen by very many people, is that the preview for it gave away the entire story. Basically it was Schindler’s List with a non-German protagonist. In fact, one of the most interesting things about the story, is that Nicholas Wintin, the person whose life is being depicted, sought no recognition for what he accomplished.

The movie is, oddly, a reminder that everyone — especially England — tried to appease Hitler by not going to war with him and giving in to his demands. Why countries like Austria should be sacrificed and then the southern part of Czechoslovakia which was called the Sudetenland (sorry about the spellings if I’m wrong), is beyond me. But that is what happened. And then in the northern part of the country, the government was replaced with the German/Nazi government, so that Czechoslovakia became the 2nd country swallowed up by Germany, before its invasion of Poland.

In any case, it’s against this time frame and urgency that Nicholas Wintin and others began a kinder transport from Prague to London. At the London end, Wintin and his mother did most of the difficult work: finding people to foster the children, raising 50 pounds for their eventual return (the equivalent of about $4,000 in today’s money), and getting their visas. They managed to save 669 children, most of them Jewish. Another 250 were on the last train but it was prevented from leaving and of those 250, only 2 children survived the camps. Also in the way was Holland, which had banned Jews from entering their country. As they said in the movie, only 200 children survived the camps. He and the others in his group saved 3 times that many.

The Times critic complained about the present-day story, and said it was self-congratulatory which is as wrong headed as can be. Anthony Hopkins makes it very clear that he doesn’t want to think about the Holocaust or the children that he was not able to save. And when forced to, cries only in front of his wife. So it may not be a Times pick while The Tuba Thieves and Knox Goes Away and even Snack Shack are. But at the end of the movie, which was in one of the lower theatres at AMC Lincoln Square — theatres that are reserved for the not well attended — the entire audience burst into applause at the end. And I thought it was well deserved.

I wanted to see this, without having read the reviews or even seen any previews, because I was always a little curious about “Mother Cabrini,” or “Madre Cabrini,” as she’s referred to most of the time in this movie, and mainly because of the hospital that bore her name here in NY until it was closed and turned into condos. She’s also the first American saint which is defined as “beatified.” A saint in Guam, Diego Luis San Vitores, lived and worked in 1627 – 1672 and established the first Catholic church in Guam, but was not beatified until 1985 or thereabouts. They used to take their time. They don’t anymore.

Anyway, the theatre was packed and I had my seat on the aisle. I was slightly curious why it was so full and then they started to play the previews. If it wasn’t a cartoon made by Pixar, which I always turn out by closing my eyes and staring at the floor and waiting until it’s done assaulting me, it was a preview that gave a distinct smell of being about Jesus or faith. I couldn’t tell specifically, but the clips were often of these maudlin speeches or badly acted moments, and then Greg Kinnear appeared in one of the movies and I thought, “Oh God, this is one of those conservative Christian movies that have been making money hand over fist, by catering to people who want to reinforce their belief system.” The worst of these are scripts that try to “prove” the existence of God or Jesus by telling the story of the Bible, which they, like Moslems or Mormons, believe is a fact and not written by human hands. Or they’ll the story of someone who was briefly dead and “witnessed” heaven. Needless to say, you can’t quote yourself to prove something is true, nor can you quote someone who isn’t in the room to prove something is true. It’s called hearsay.

The worst that this group has made was about sex trafficking and the heinous part about that movie is that it repeated the lie that gays are harvesting children for some aspect of their blood that will keep them youthful. This is something the disgusting actor Jim Caviezel repeats over and over. It disqualifies the entire movie.

Cabrini, I had to watch, at times, half asleep because it gets into that badly written ham fisted speechifying that usually comes from the pulpit. But there was a slightly interesting and I think intentional twist to this movie. It emphasizes, (over emphasizes because of it’s bad writing and bad filmmaking) the fact that immigrants are important and should be treated with respect. And not only that, when Mother Cabrini, after being told by John Lithgow who plays the NYC mayor in this movie, that she would have been a great man, says, “No. A man couldn’t do what I did,” the women in the audience burst into cheers.

NM that she hadn’t done anything by that point and most of her achievements took place after this fictional moment. The movie undoes everything the Trump party is trying to do now: immigrants are important, not just an issue to be dealt with; and women have power.

The audience is asked, during the credits, to wait for a new song by Andrea Bocelli and his daughter, who he now tours with, but I didn’t stay. The movie sucks, as far as script, plot, writing, etc. We don’t get to know a single orphan or hospitalized patient. In fact the hospital doesn’t get built in this movie. All those accomplishments are summarized in text at the end. The men are cartoons of men — in the manor of Snydley Whiplash. John Lithgow does what he can, but even the mayor’s character is mostly a joke. I’d say the lead actress was good, especially with the preaching speeches she had to make. But the audience loved it. Any every one of them stayed to hear this beautiful new song. But even though I hated it, I do hope that Trump voters and others of that kind hear the message about immigrants and women. They probably won’t.

This is a short one and I’m not even going to look for a poster to go with it. It documents the fashion designer’s career rise at Givenchy and Dior, and then his nearly overnight collapse after he was filmed saying anti-Semitic garbage to some people who were near him. It opens with the film, probably one of the earlier cellphone videos, where he claimed to “love Hitler,” and then told one of the girls that he would have gassed all of them, including all their ancestors or “forebears,” as he puts it. He apparently did this two other times — occasions which were not filmed but have been documented. He lost his job right away and he went to trial for anti-semitic hate speech and got off with a 6,000 Euro fine.

The minute he came on the camera — and I imagine he’s around my age now — about 66 or so, because he started out in London in 1980 where the “new” designer movement began, I couldn’t look at him. He stares directly into the camera, mostly, which gives this intense and what I felt was a deeply dishonest stare. He reminded me of a teacher I had who could not, whether on purpose or not, maintain a proper distance when he spoke to you. That man was also a furious and demented liar. I was going to say “self-serving” but all lies are self serving.

I could never, in the whole 2 hours of the movie — when he was young in the 80s or older in 2021 — feel anything about him. And it was especially interesting when they contrasted him a few times with another designer who came from that London group: Alexander McQueen, who took the reins of Givenchy after Galliano moved to Dior. In the documentary about Alexander McQueen, which could be a companion piece to this one, it’s clear that McQueen was suicidal and that he was openly stating so. Why people didn’t see this is beyond me since he talked about it so much and even wanted to include his suicide in one of his shows, which he thought was be a wonderful ending. In that movie, there’s some humanity in McQueen and his suicide briefly intrudes into this movie about Galliano, when Galliano claims to be devastated by McQueen’s suicide. But that too seemed disingenuous. He probably didn’t give a shit.

There are a few tiny and welcome moments when we get a non-interested party point out the obvious — that the arrogance dripped from Galliano when he ended his show as if he was the final model, usually sashaying down the aisle and taking the longest to get there and back. And there was another comment I can’t even remember anymore — maybe the rabbi who had talked to him and learned that he knew absolutely nothing about the Holocaust. (How in the world is that possible?) But for the most part, this is a puff piece — a rehab piece that’s intended to show how he is able to come back and be his creative self again. But really, he should just shut up and retire. Do some scrap booking and blame the Jews for everything, and France’s strict hate speech laws. I can’t find the original video online anymore — it may have been removed — but this is a sorry/not sorry story in the same vein as Mel Gibson’s rant and Kanye West, Trump, and PewDiePie, who find themselves in need of rehabilitation but aren’t willing to either apologize or dig deep enough to even think about what they did, or why. They usually end up saying, “well it wasn’t so bad,” or “i didn’t mean it like that,” or, “Its taken out of context,” or in Galliano’s case, “I can’t believe I said that. It’s not me.”

It is he.

I don’t know why I add my 2 cents to every book and movie I read or see, because there’s so many people out there doing the same and it’s sort of pointless.

But one things this book and author did which has been driving me crazy for about 100 years, is he made a very forceful distinction that what we used to call “race riots,” was just a way of making ourselves believe that it was black people who were rioting. He states clearly that almost all the riots that we refer to as race riots were “white race” riots.

And the very sad thing about this period: of 1917 to about 1922 is that that it has continued to infect this country, even to this day, as Trump, son of a Klansman and raised to hate blacks and women, tries to scuttle congressional negotiations on the border, in order to have an issue to run on.

In the very last pages of the book, he mentions Fred Trump’s arrest during his participation in a Ku Klux Klan rally in Queens, but anyone with even some slight memory of hearing about Hollywood and “naming names,” and Eugene McCarthy and even the movie Oppenheimer where they’re grilling everyone about being a member of a union or the communist party, knows that the crimes that started in World War I under the administration of Woodrow Wilson continued year after year, including the disenfranchisement of blacks in the south.

But I just read one of the most astute opinion essays the NY Times has ever published — and I’ll look for the link later — but the thrust of the article is how our institutions and in particular the Supreme Court — have blank-washed history to make the story of for example, native Americans and the white immigrants that came to this country, non-existent. She was using Killers of the Flower Moon as an example: the main character of that movie is basically killing, beating and even poisoning his wife, an Osage Indian with whom he has two children, in order to steal her money. The Robert DeNiro character is a horror: talking about the superior qualities of the Osage and his love of the Osage, all the while plotting to murder them so he can marry into their money and take it.

And then recently, I saw a brief clip of Bill Maher talking to Quentin Tarrentino about the movie 1917. I shut off the interview because I loathe Bill Maher and am just barely able to tolerate Quentin, but in the brief moment I heard Bill Maher say that they couldn’t make 1917 today because there are rules about minority representation and inclusion and, he said, “unfortunately there were no blacks in world war 1.” Well this is utterly false and a perfect symbol of the word I invented up there: “blank-washing.” More than 300,000 black men participated in World War I, mostly as ditch diggers and other menial tasks, and they were heavily segregated. (This is still the Woodrow Wilson era, who was probably one of the most racist presidents we have, up until the recent you know who.) In addition there were fighting troops, namely the Harlem Hellfighters, who suffered worse casualties than many of the white companies. And this book talks at length about their hope that they would be treated as Americans but were instead hounded out of prosperous cities like Tulsa by white rioters, and the white terrorism of lynching blacks continued for another 50 or 60 years, and sometimes still takes place. But as far as Bill Maher is concerned, no blacks served in World War I and because of the burden of having to include p.o.c. in movies, 1917 couldn’t have been made.

Anyway, this book is an eye opener and should become a standard text for understanding the last 120 years of American behavior and why, as Joseph Campbell put it, Woodrow Wilson joined America with England’s attempt to remake the world as a white one.

I attended a fairly famous production of this play in the summer of 1981 but I can’t find any information about it online. It offended hordes of people because the director staged it like an S&M fever dream, with Achilles decked out in full leather gear and Patroclus wearing leather chaps and jock strap. There was a little homosexual kissing, and this and that. I was in London, enrolled in a class called Shakespeare In Performance, and a second class about Virginia Woolf and TS Eliot. We saw about 21 plays in 2 months.

Anyway many of the people in my class were horribly offended and couldn’t stop using the word faggot to describe the actors and the show itself.

Others were offended by the offended and told them to grow up. Basically I think the director was trying to show how Troy, in its 7th year, was simply devolving into decadence, in the same way that William Friedkin tried to show that every gay man in the world was turning to S&M sex in “Cruising,” which came out a few years before. That wasn’t true, of course, and despite what so many weirdo Christians think, Rome didn’t collapse because it was tolerant of homosexuals.

Anyway, every time someone tries to modernize Shakespeare it’s because they want to show the similarities between what he wrote then and what’s happening now. (Most of the time.) This one was good to read — although it was a tough read I must say — because of the fatigue of the war. The Trojan war was said to have lasted a decade and this takes place about the 7th year. Everyone’s forgotten why they are fighting and Helen, herself, doesn’t seem to understand that all these soldiers going and coming from war are fighting because of her. Everyone is corrupt — even to a certain extent the characters who give the play its title. It reminded me of how (as Maureen Dowd put it this morning) a monster is feasting on America. Everyone is exhausted.

There are no such things as rights. No one is born with rights. A baby doesn’t have a right to be born and an elder person doesn’t have a right to compassionate care. You don’t have the right to read, eat or pee or own a weapon, whether it be knife or a gun. Rights are invented and I think it was very important that our declaration of independence speaks of rights as being inalienable rather than God given. Most people tend to say, “It’s my God given right to… whatever.” No it’s not. “God,” if you will, aborts more babies than any medical abortion, through miscarriages. Those babies did not have a right to be born and even if somehow, the universe stated that they did have the right to be born, the biggest serial killer of all, defied that right through miscarriages.

Inalienable actually means that the right established as inalienable can’t be transferred to someone else, like a king, or taken away or removed by law. Luckily, or maybe not, the declaration only mentions three inalienable rights and they pertain to living humans: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It does not mention property, no matter how hard George Bush tries to insist that it does. These are purposely vague terms, but paired with the term inalienable they are powerful. It would take the bill of rights to get into the specifics.

Anyway, the point of this is that Trump, instead of suing for blanket immunity during his time as president — Richard Nixon was the last president to assert this but sort of acknowledged that it wasn’t going to play. Anyway, he should be thanking his lucky stars that there is no immunity for him because it is the rule of law that has allowed him to continue to thrive.

When you think about leaders who reach that stage of hubris where they can’t be touched — in other words — immune, the world reaches out and proves that you are exactly wrong. Nicolae Ceaucescu and his wife were marched into a courtyard and right up to the moment that were shot in the head, kept stating that “you can’t do this.” Mussolini, not to mention his boy toy Hitler, thought they were immune and eventually discovered they were not immune at all — Hitler taking the coward’s way of suicide in his bunker and Mussolini ending up hung upside down from a telephone line.

Other examples — unfortunately too numerous to go into much detail: Pol Pot, Pinochet, Stalin, Lenin, Franco, hundreds of African despots, the Guptas of South Africa and Jacob Zuma, King Msweti of eswatini (formerly Swaziland), and Robert Mugabe, Khaddafi and the current ruler of Turkey, Erdogan (who has not met his end yet) and Belarus’s Lukashenko and of course, Putin, who apparently plans to take his place among his former leaders. Some of these people just end up in ill health and die of disease. All of them, think or thought that they were immune.

In the United States, it is the peaceful transfer of power which prevents people rising up and killing their leaders (although Trump tried to create a coup against himself, technically, and felt his troops would kill the other people.) As so many people, frustrated by the naturally slow tendencies of the court system to get things right, have said, “Why isn’t he in jail?” Well it’s for the very reason that he is now trying to destroy. The law. Without the law he and his wife could be taken out and shot, all the while insisting that “they” can’t do that.