Monthly Archives: September 2019

09.29.19
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The Trump and Judy Show

Let’s talk about legends and the people who inhabit them.  The common dictionary definition:

Legend:  An extremely famous or notorious person, especially in a particular field.

Of course, that’s only part of the story.

Renee Zellweger gives an astonishing performance as the legendary Judy Garland in the self-titled new film, Judy.  It’s not so much that Ms. Zellweger exactly recreates her singing voice or her entire autobiography during the last few years of her life.  It’s that somehow, and in so many ways, she captures the essence of Judy’s legend.

Make room on your shelf, Renee!

Or at least what we believe was, or could have been, her essence.

It’s there in her tremulous voice, her humor, her raw vulnerability, her fight, the nuances of her mannerisms and her underfed yet somehow still powerful physicality.

Not only is a tour de force of determination in her every and many close-up(s), it’s a channeling of duality.  She shows us the core of what we publicly saw of Judy in her many stage, screen and TV appearances AND she gives us a peak into the charming and yet not always admirable part of her humanity that we never knew and might not have ever imagined.

None of us are ever one thing all the time.  We are a mix of light and dark, good and bad, strong and vulnerable and, trite as it may sound, love and hate.

This is amplified ten times over with those we’ve crowned as our legends.

No doubt Donald J. Trump will go down as an extremely different type of legend in our history, but a legend nevertheless.  Most American presidents in history occupy legendary status during their era and for many the legend manages to sustain through generations and even centuries. (Note: See above definition).

Sigh… I really need to stop looking at pictures like this #coolobama #sighagain

The breadth of career, the various distinctive looks, the marriages, the overly insistent publicity, the rise and fall and rise again – these are among the many things Trump and Judy share.  It may be a sobering thought but it doesn’t make it any less true.

What is also true is that ultimately those are artificial markers we, as society, have constructed for ourselves in order to understand how one human rises into the public consciousness and manages to stay there for years, decades and very often even beyond that.

Roughly as long as the shelf life of a Twinkie #thatsalongtime

Trump and Judy might both be modern day legends but in so many other, more important ways, they couldn’t be more different.

Trump from the beginning used his role as a renowned entertainer to divide people.  The phrase that cemented his stardom in the mass media zeitgeist was, YOU’RE FIRED!  He ran for the presidency on a platform of Make America Great Again but never before in American history has the country been this divided.  While Trump certainly did unite a significant subset of the country he polarized us a whole and continues to do so as he and his presidency amble towards impeachment.

Haven’t we been crawling there all along? #itstime

A deeper dive into specifics allows us to see this is not where it ends.  Trump’s talent is self-promotion, grievance and sheer rage/anger.  It can be amusing in cynical, seemingly too politically correct times but it doesn’t cause true pleasure like the lilt of a spectacular musical note.  Nor does it allow us to relax and let down our guard when we watch a scene in a film or on TV where a performer is bold enough to expose publicly the kind of vulnerabilities we keep secret for fear of risking our own personal shame.

With Trump weakness is BAD, not a given.  It is an aspect of our ourselves so impossible to admit that it must be put through his own personal, branded wood chipper and spew out as aggressive disdain and a call for destruction of whomever we deem as the other.

What my brain will do to 2016 – 2020

Rather than cleanse ourselves through a good cry or the spontaneous live energy of a song delivered by a legendary vocalist, we cloak ourselves in an adrenalin rush of negative performance art that blocks out everything else.  We are assured that no matter what our problems are it’s the outside world that is responsible for them.

The system that’s failed the collective us has made us believe that what we deem as our many rights have only been made wrong by weak leaders in today’s age.

The Trump worldview harkens back to his late eighties mantra that it’s you against the world and that greed and gold and gilt for you and your family are what’s good.

Gee thanks, Gordy #UGH

If you don’t have those it’s the fault of the Mexicans, the drug lords, the non-white invaders, the too privileged leaders who are a disgrace for selling out the real Americans, those people whose bodies they used and willingly stepped on and over to get them where they are today.

What made Trump legendary from the beginning was his lack of shame and ability to vomit out his authentic self no matter what the elite thought of his antics.  He was a crude, trash-talking, show-off with seemingly endless cash, with an amusing glint in his eye and an ability to crack an off-color double entendre or blatantly dirty jokes in public the way we and our families all did in private behind closed doors.

Trying to think about Trump as a legend #imtrying

Whatever we say about Trump he evokes for many what publicly passes as an authentic self.  Many would argue Judy did the same, from her Wizard of Oz days on through the territory covered in this latest film of her life.

Certainly, the public persona of any legend is not truly authentic.  No persona, light or dark, good or bad, can ever be all things any human being is in any given moment or in total.

Except Julie Andrews… she is EVERYTHING

What is most important when we speak of our legends is considering not who they are or were but what they truly do for us and why.  In whose company do we want to live in through our eternities?  Which of these legends, despite their humanness, gave us something positive to consider, and which others of them brought us down as a collective whole?

Renee Zellweger – “Over the Rainbow” (From Judy Soundtrack)

09.23.19
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MEH-MMYS

 

The 2019 telecast of the Emmys will probably be remembered for three things:

  1. The British invasion of winners, especially Fleabag creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s unexpected and very deserving trifecta for Outstanding Lead Actress/Writer in a Comedy Series and Outstanding Comedy Series.

Slay!!! #triplethreat #firstimesinceTinaFey

  1. The stupendously unfunny voice-over quips of Thomas Lennon, a fairly unknown actor/comic who so annoyed so many people on social media during the telecast that he himself referred to how much his job sucked before the program was even over.
  2. The fact that not a single primetime program from ANY of the four major TV broadcast networks (CBS, NBC, ABC and FOX) took home even ONE Emmy in any major category during the entire 180 minute broadcast.

To be sure there were some high notes:

– Billy Porter became the first out Black gay man to win Best Actor in the first series ever on network television centering on the trans community.

Best hat since Aretha!

– Comic moments by two television legends, 90 year old Bob Newhart and 97-year-old Norman Lear, that left almost everyone else in the dust.

– The youthful exuberance (and humility) in the acceptance speeches of Jharrel Jerome (When They See Us) and Jodie Comer (Killing Eve) when they were rightly (and a bit surprisingly) honored as outstanding lead actor in a limited series and outstanding lead actress in a drama series, respectively.

So why did the show itself alternate between being a rudderless mess and a crushing bore???

Sarah Silverman during the Emmys has never been so relatable #ILoveYouSarah

A host might have helped, though that’s not a guarantee. Maybe…the right host, then? Of course, that would likely mean finding someone who appears on a Fox show since each time a network gets its turn broadcasting the Emmys it seems to only want to employ one of its own to appear center stage.

It’s not that Seth Meyers, Jimmy Kimmel, James Corden, Jimmy Fallon or even Carson Daly 2015 could have guaranteed a better program. But perhaps they might have offered a…. fighting chance?

Why the shade, Chairy? #ahem

Are our television fiefdoms now as polarizing as our politics? #UBetTheyR

(Note: How else does one explain Tim Allen showing up and landing like a thud in the middle of nowhere to plug the last season of his Fox series, Last Man Standing?)

BUZZ-KILL #seewhatIdidthere

Still, even without a host you knew we were in trouble when an animated character, aka Fox’s own Homer Simpson, showed up in the opening as a kind of faux host only to be leveled into the ground and disappear. His duties were then taken over by blackish’s Anthony Anderson in an embarrassing routine where he and his Mom steal several Emmys and put them in her large purse in order to presumably smuggle out of the theatre.

Did someone actually write a bit where a person of color was stealing someone else’s awards with a family member on national television?

Super cringe

When Anderson then passed the faux host torch to Bryan Cranston I thought perhaps it was just me having a drug flashback to my Breaking Bad television binge watching days in a much simpler time. Alas, this was not to be.

The minutes and hours wore on and our patience began to wear thin. Why did everything feel just plain off and weird? Like a high school dance where I thought I was wearing a great outfit but the pictures revealed otherwise, it all seemed ill fitted and pimply-faced.

The LED set flashed frighteningly oversized still photos of nominees as someone announced their names from backstage and in another moment would suddenly turn into an assaulting piece of Game of Thrones scenery/logo or an electrically insistent pastel hue that picked up the color in some presenters’ outfit.

Like.. did we need to see Fleabag’s bloody nose?? #whatweretheythinking

At one point there was even a musical number where a gold gowned person with a Meryl Streep mask could be seen juggling bowling pins. I couldn’t swear they were bowling pins or even a female in the gown but I do know I saw the image a second time just before the show cut to commercial.

Given television’s penchant for reruns it might have been nice to relive at least a few more clips from the very best of television in the past year. We were told by Television Academy chairman Frank Scherma that we are now in the PLATINUM age of TV and yet clips from the best of 2019 were few and far between while those that were shown were so short as to come off as practically unintelligible.

Me, to the producers

With TV this good, here’s an idea for next year. Just give us more of the best of and get a witty host or a smart host or maybe even a live action host who’s merely smart enough or only slightly witty.

Until then, we can entertain ourselves with tons of award winning/nominated 2019 TV we might have missed. That would include:

1- Every episode of When They See Us, Chernobyl, Fosse/Verdon and Succession for dramas. (Note: No, they are NOT too depressing and/or off-putting).

2- Every episode of Fleabag, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, The Good Place and Russian Doll for comedy.

Schitt’s Creek too!! #catherineoharaisaGODDESS

3- Any random episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, Saturday Night Live, Late Night with Seth Meyers or The Late Show with Stephen Colbert for timely political satire.

Aside from fashion and hate watching, they’re the real reason awards shows like Emmy2019 exist. Or used to be.

Kelsea Ballerini – “Better Luck Next Time”

Editors Note: The Chair’s predictions scored a 16/27, which is approximately 59% — still better than Electoral POTUS’s approval rating, so we’ll take that as a win.