I watched “Emilia Pérez” this week. It’s, shall we say, a rather experimental film. One critic described it as “Mrs. Doubtfire” meets “Sicario,” plus a musical. Written and directed by a Frenchman (and filmed almost entirely in Paris), it has received a buttload of cultural criticism; one critic noticed none of the characters in this Mexico-set story spoke Spanish with a Mexican accent. To this I can only shrug; it was so weird and imaginative it seemed to take place in a world where accents were the least of anyone’s worries. The plot, in a nutshell:
Rita, a female lawyer (Zoe Saldana) frustrated with her work, is plucked off the street, literally, by a Mexican drug lord, Manitas, who wants her to do an unusual service: To relocate him and his family, separately, to a place where his enemies will never find him or them. His motivation: He intends to complete his gender transition and become a woman. For this service Rita will be rewarded with riches beyond her wildest dreams. She does so; this is the first act. Manitas, now Emilia, is in London, his wife and children in Switzerland. After some years, Emilia misses her children and wants to live with them again, and Rita is again enlisted to reunite them, this time with the cover story that Emilia is a long-lost aunt, and this is where the Mrs. Doubtfire stuff comes in. The story gets even more spirited from there, and I won’t tell you more, other than to say: I liked it short of loving it. The performances were excellent, and I even identified with Emilia in the sense that we have similar high-school-linebacker-size bodies; every time I saw her in the frame with the Hollywood-tiny Saldana, or Selena Gomez, who plays her wife, I was startled by the contrast.
As a rule, the Oscar-bait films come out at the end of the year and I haven’t seen many this year. I get dispirited by 10 months of superheroes, toy-based crap, animated garbage and so forth in the local multiplexes, and can’t always find a dozen free weekends between Labor Day and the King holiday to cram all the good stuff in. I think the last thing we saw in theaters was “Megalopolis.” But we’ve set aside tonight for “A Complete Unknown,” so there.
Anyway, I’ve come to admire art that really swings for the fences, and while “Emilia Perez” has many many flaws, it does indeed do that.
It’s been a weird week. Every time I look at a news site, I see further evidence we’re doomed. I don’t want to look away, as many have; it’s our responsibility to stay woke, as we once said. But there are days I have to think about the movies for a while. So I leave you with some bloggage, OK?
A smart piece on Pamela Paul, departing NYT columnist.
Finally, a photo I’ve vividly remembered from my college years, and could never find, until the name the photographer gave it when it made the contest rounds came to me all at once, burped up by my memory. A quick Google, and there it was. Not wanting to violate whatever copyright might still pertain, here’s a link. The backstory: The Ohio KKK held a rally on the Statehouse steps and some anti-racists showed up to fuck up their shit, so to speak. One made it all the way to where the Grand Wizard, or whatever those douchebags call themselves, was standing and delivered a fine blow, caught at the exact instant of impact by a UPI photographer. Title: “The Wizard Gets Walloped,” an image that regrettably will probably be duplicated in our own time. This may mark me as old-school, but I love, purely love, black-and-white news photography, and no video will ever change that.
Have a good weekend, all. Welcome to new readers. Thanks for stopping by.
Mark P said on February 7, 2025 at 10:24 am
I don’t think we’ll see a resistance motivated enough to sock it to one of Trump’s Red Hats. (I mistyped “Hat” as “Hate”: Red Hates. Maybe that’s appropriate.) One major difference between the US today and Germany in the 1920’s and ‘30’s is that Trump never really needed the equivalent of the Brown Shirts to protect his rallies. No one took him and his movement seriously enough to push back with the necessary intensity. And that’s still true. The Red Hates are so damned stupid that they don’t see where this country is headed; they don’t recognize the similarity between the US today and Russia in the ‘90’s, when the oligarchs were looting their society. I am not sure the Republican rank and file will ever reject Trump/Muskism. There were dedicated Nazis in German even as the country was turned into rubble. I’m afraid that’s where we will be in a short time, and we won’t have an Allied Control Council to straighten us out. It’s strange though, that their leader is so unheroic. If Hitler was an evil genius, Trump is a lard-assed dunce. Hitler’s speeches were apparently inspirational, but Trump’s are idiocracy-worthy.
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Deborah said on February 7, 2025 at 10:39 am
There’s an excellent latest episode of the Ezra Klein Show which is an interview with Kara Swisher about Musk. I follow Swisher on Bluesky and sometimes listen to her own podcasts when I think about it. She has written about tech for years and knows Musk well. The interview goes into some depth about who Musk was before and how and why he changed from an Obama liberal to an asshole Trumper, it basically boils down to power. I don’t know how to give you a link except through the NYT, this should be a gift article if I did it right https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/07/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-kara-swisher.html?unlocked_article_code=1.vE4.MG2N.ThMrO2-F4G_C&smid=url-share
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Deborah said on February 7, 2025 at 10:43 am
Also, Nancy I wanted to ask you what the scuttlebutt is in Dearborn about Trump’s comments about taking over Gaza for development and displacing the Palestinians somewhere else? I’m not reading anything about it anywhere??
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nancy said on February 7, 2025 at 10:59 am
Well. Yesterday there was a story about how a local group calling themselves Arab Americans for Trump had changed its name to Arab Americans for Peace. Quote: “The talk about what the president wants to do with Gaza, obviously we’re completely opposed to the idea of the transfer of Palestinians from anywhere in Historic Palestine,” Bahbah said. “And so we did not want to be behind the curve in terms of pushing for peace, because that has been our objective from the very beginning.”
They got played. Post-coital remorse, basically.
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Dexter Friend said on February 7, 2025 at 11:15 am
https://media.gettyimages.com/id/97288320/photo/united-states-jeffery-berry-national-imperial-wizard-of-the-knights-of-the-ku-klux-klan-grand.jpg?s=612×612&w=0&k=20&c=gZaaeXGW69bKrkN_rOsaD8y70LvNBzBirIPiDfigmbw=
Auburn , Indiana. Jeff Berry, son of a former co-worker. My missed photo-op: on the way to work, I saw a sheriff’s deputy lighting a Klansman’s cigarette.
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Dexter Friend said on February 7, 2025 at 11:41 am
https://cache.legacy.net/legacy/images/cobrands/bryantimes/photos/2714e9671cb986e687241fafc569ef99dba3dc83_20250207.jpgx?w=176&h=176&option=3
Today in the local Bryan online, 2 obituaries featured men posing with their dogs. This kind of thing slays me.
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Minnie Fleming said on February 7, 2025 at 12:06 pm
I hope the punch made that Klu Klux Klown bite his tongue.
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SusanG said on February 7, 2025 at 2:41 pm
Marianne Faithfull died. The world has ended. I’m bing watching MadMen and eating potato chips. Broken hearted.
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Sherri said on February 7, 2025 at 5:11 pm
Called my Congress people again today, asking them to stand in the way of Elon Musk and bring Congress to a halt until his unconstitutional and illegal destruction of the federal government is stopped. I was able to talk to a person in Suzan DelBene’s office, and left voicemail for Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray.
The staffer in DelBene’s office said I wasn’t alone.
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Jeff Borden said on February 7, 2025 at 6:11 pm
The klansman looks eerily like Jerry Falwell, who may not have worn a robe and hood, but was every inch a racist segregationist. I’m reading “The Big Con” by Joe Conason, which examines the immense amount of grift on the right and why conservatives are so easy to rob. The televangelists know exactly what they’re doing. Damn, they’re despicable.
As a fan of unintended consequences, I’m just waiting for all the little MAGA poodles to start howling once they learn how hard they’re going to get screwed by their orange idol. For example, while tRump and Elmo are set to destroy USAID, did anyone know the agency buys $2 billion in U.S. grains every year for distribution abroad?
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Heather said on February 7, 2025 at 6:55 pm
Jeff Borden, there’s a farmer on TikTok crying that he’s going to lose his farm because he’s not getting subsidies from some federal program or other. He says in past TikToks that he voted for Trump. They call this the “finding out” phase.
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Sherri said on February 7, 2025 at 7:20 pm
A handy tool for calling your representatives is 5calls.org. Type in your address, select your area of concern, and it will bring up the numbers of your representatives along with talking points should you need them. Personally, while there is a lot of crazy shit going on, I’m focusing on Musk’s illegal and unconstitutional takeover of the federal government, because to me, that’s the biggest thing that needs to be stopped right now, because it’s creating the most irreversible damage.
Your Senators should be told to grind the Senate to a halt and vote no on every appointment, and your Representative should be told absolutely no deal on any budget or debt ceiling until Musk is stopped. The GOP majority in the House is so thin that it’s unlikely they’ll be able to get a deal done without Dem help, so this is really important.
If your representatives are Republicans, call ‘em anyway. It’s important to let them know how unpopular having an unelected unaccountable billionaire destroy the federal government is.
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susan said on February 7, 2025 at 7:39 pm
Sherri- Good luck with Cantwell. She’s not there.
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Sherri said on February 7, 2025 at 8:33 pm
Among the other things I’m watching is what the administration is doing to scientific research in this country. I think this is coming from the Russell Vought wing of the administration.
Today the NIH announced that the overhead on grants will be slashed immediately to 15%. This will gut university research. The way research grants work is, they are for a certain amount for research, then an additional percentage, negotiated by each university, for overhead, for use of university facilities for doing the research. At the University of Washington, for example, this overhead rate is 55%. At Harvard, it’s 69%.
As of today, the NIH is slashing that to 15%. Not just for future grants, for current grants as well. This is straight out of Project 2025, part of the plan for destroying universities.
If the Trump administration were a bunch of plants from China to destroy the US and make China the dominant country in the world, I can’t think of how anything would look different.
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Sherri said on February 7, 2025 at 8:53 pm
If you receive your medical care from a university medical center (as I do), that center probably just took a huge budget hit today.
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Sherri said on February 7, 2025 at 11:53 pm
Remember all the worry about computers and Y2K? This is much worse, and self- inflicted. Musk is not a coder of much talent or experience personally, and his gang of hacker boys do not have experience in large codebase systems, particularly life-critical ones like the FAA uses. Hell, I used to do systems programming for a living, and I wouldn’t dare make changes to a working system after walking in the door only a couple of weeks. There’s no way they can understand the dependencies among systems after this short a time, nor the system requirements and constraints, especially since they refuse to talk with the people who’ve been doing the work.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/02/elon-musk-doge-security/681600/
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David C said on February 8, 2025 at 6:18 am
47 sacked the Kennedy Center board and made himself chairman. Can Kennedy Center honors Kid Rock, Ted Nugent, and Lee Greenwood be far behind?
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Deborah said on February 8, 2025 at 9:57 am
This is all so gross. We use Northwestern Medical system in Chicago and LB usually goes to UNM for surgeries. Medical research is so necessary, I don’t get why they’re doing this except to pay for tax cuts for the ultra wealthy. How can the entire population in the US not see this blatant theft. What happens to all of the people participating in medical trials for various conditions?
I’m reading my 4th book during the Trump term. This one is Colson Whitehead’s excellent The Underground Railroad, and I can tell you it’s really hard to read any of it without weeping. When I think that the Trumper’s want to ban teaching that hideous period of our history it makes me ill, and supression of history can only lead to repetition in the future. I used to ask myself how people could have been so cruel during the Holocaust and during the times of slavery, but now I can see the cruelty happening again and growing right before our eyes.
The last book, Prodigal Summer was excellent too and much easier reading.
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Deborah said on February 8, 2025 at 11:04 am
Alex linked to this gorgeous piece of writing on Bluesky by Sarah Kendzior https://sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/the-miners?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1175745&post_id=156712179&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=43a8hi&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email your really need to read it. Sarah has been warning us for ages of this theft of our country by transnational organized criminals and we all thought she was too shrill and too far out. Well here we are.
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Jeff Borden said on February 8, 2025 at 11:05 am
Colson Whitehead rocks. Check out his crime novels, which are excellent: “Harlem Shuffle” and its sequel, “Crook Manifesto.” The man can write.
If China, Russia or Iran installed their own puppets, they wouldn’t have done as much damage as tRump and Project 2025 are doing in these first few weeks. And while the occasional brave judge may stand up to this insanity, the tsunami of malice is almost overpowering. We’re ceding the future to China or India or whomever while we race backwards in time. But, hey, Lumpy is bringing back plastic straws! Huzzah! USA! USA! USA!
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Jeff Gill said on February 8, 2025 at 11:20 am
“Toy-based crap”? You better not be talking about Woody & Buzz here.
My wife had her retirement celebration on campus yesterday, and all her accolades were well earned (I enjoyed how stunned she was to receive an honorary letter from the athletic department, which is really not something she ever thought of “earning”). And it was soothing to me standing by and watching last Friday with the board and today with faculty & staff give her these honors, after having to skulk out box in hand from my last two full time jobs. It just brings some balance to the universe, even as currently prevailing forces are leaning more towards the kind of mindset that pushed me out of work I loved. Joyce is ready to spend more time on green growing things and teaching the willing, and may retirement give her all that and more.
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Suzanne said on February 8, 2025 at 12:46 pm
I have been reading Kendzior for a number of years. She spelled out what would happen and it happened. She was the town crier that some heard but few listened to. She tried to prepare us but her pleadings fell on deaf ears.
With this administration, I know that my cancer surviving body doesn’t matter to those who proudly claim to be pro-life as they cut funding for life saving medical research, as they disavow Darwin but by their policies, encourage only the survival of the fittest (and richest), and as they refuse to feed the hungry while praising God for their great wealth.
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Sherri said on February 9, 2025 at 12:22 am
Good thing Elon Musk is going to fix the air traffic control system, with his noted fixation on safety: https://futurism.com/the-byte/cybertruck-ford-pinto-comparison
I think there are maybe three or four different centers of power in this administration. One, obviously, is Musk. He cares about getting rid of regulations and taxes, and thinks that by definition, anyone who works for the government is dumb. He doesn’t want the government telling him he can’t do anything, or taking any of his money.
Another is Russell Vought. He is a Christian Nationalist, and wants to destroy things that he regards as anti-his brand of Christian. So the NIH overhead cut is him, because universities, particularly R1 universities, are where children of evangelicals learn that they’ve been lied to, so he hates universities.
Stephen Miller is probably another, though he doesn’t seem to have gotten off to a fast start. He hates immigrants, especially brown immigrants, and wants to deport them all. He’ll deport as many brown people as possible, immigrant or citizen. Birthright citizenship is him.
And then I suppose Trump is a power center, though mainly for saying crazy things to fill the headlines everyday. All he cares about is what’s in it for him, personally. He wants to punish everybody who every criticized him, he wants to direct as much money as possible to his own bank account, and he wants to appear to be the toughest, most manly man on the planet. So he wants to expand the US so that he’s in charge of more, he wants a sovereign wealth fund so that he has a slush fund like his buddy MBS, he’ll impose tariffs because he thinks they make him a tough negotiator. He also hates brown people, and is obviously going senile.
Everyone else just sucks up to Trump but doesn’t seem to have much in the way of ideas independent of Trump.
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Julie Robinson said on February 9, 2025 at 6:16 am
Jeff G, congratulations to Joyce on her retirement. It really is a good life, though neither as quiet or laid-back as I expected. Part of that is dealing with medical issues, appointments, prescriptions, labs, and insurance for three seniors. And when one of those is full-time cranky, guarding my own mental health too often gets short shrift.
So while I’ve read all three Colson Whitehead books mentioned above, I’m not in a place for them now. Nor to read all the excellent articles being posted here.
Suzanne, since I’m a crone who can no longer bear babies, I’m quite sure my body doesn’t matter to them either.
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Jeff Gill said on February 9, 2025 at 7:53 am
Julie, that’s what will make this interesting, as we spent the last five years doing that while helping Joyce hold onto her (insurance bearing) job. We’re down to my mother, living in memory care, and grimly tracking her steady cognitive & physical decline versus the eight months we can afford there for her before we turn to Medicaid . . . which may not be there for her, or in the same way as currently explained, come November.
I have a colleague in the warming center effort with whom I do not always agree, let’s just say, but there is so much room for me to cut her slack as she’s still juggling three declining elderly family members, with the usual insistence of ability and refusal of assistance that’s available . . . except for from her. So she’s not always tracking what we’re doing, and I so get it. You can be in a major meeting but your mind is asking how old the milk in a fridge an hour away is, and what paperwork has to be ready for the next medical appointment.
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alex said on February 9, 2025 at 8:46 am
You can be in a major meeting but your mind is asking how old the milk in a fridge an hour away is, and what paperwork has to be ready for the next medical appointment.
So true. When I think of the last few years of my working life, I was pretty much present in body only, and then only begrudgingly, especially after they made us return to the office after COVID. During that time my mom passed and my dad became a lot more needy and my boss became a lot more toxic, so I took an early retirement and don’t regret it at all.
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alex said on February 9, 2025 at 9:05 am
Some worthwhile observations by David French (and it’s free):
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/09/opinion/trump-populism-bannon.html?unlocked_article_code=1.vk4.Hdg5.FxIzKZuPvz2u&smid=url-share
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Suzanne said on February 9, 2025 at 9:53 am
This is also worth reading:
https://backloop.substack.com/p/the-polycrisis-and-the-collapse-of
“Polycrisis,” while coined decades ago,[9] is thought to be a helpful neologism for understanding how we are not facing many separate crises each one of which can be addressed independently, but rather we are facing multiple interconnected and inter-causal crises no one of which can be addressed within the bounds of that crisis alone.”
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