Film

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      HBO to develop George Santos’s ‘Gatsby-esque journey’ into movie – report

      by

      A book about the improbable rise and rapid fall of former congressman George Santos has been optioned by HBO Films, it was reported Saturday, and will be produced under the guidance of Frank Rich, a former New York Times columnist known for executive production credits on Emmy awards-winning Succession and Veep.HBO reportedly optioned the rights to Mark Chiusano’s The Fabulist: The Lying, Hustling, Grifting, Stealing, and Very American Legend of George Santos, published last week.Chiusano, a former Newsday reporter, told the Guardian last week that the story of Santos, who was expelled from Congress last week after a damning ethics report that focused on his use of campaign funds and also faces criminal charges, was at its heart “a tragedy”.“He is someone who is clearly very ambitious and wants to live a kind of wealthy life, a life of fame and notoriety, and he is trying to attain essentially a version of the American dream, which so many people have sought over the years,” Chiusano said.A movie interpretation of Santos’s political career may have literary precedents to follow. Part of the New York district three that Santos served includes Great Neck, transposed as Little Egg in the story of Jay Gatsby, the (fictional) character who created his own fictional life in F Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby.According to Deadline, the adaptation of The Fabulist will be written by Mike Makowsky, who wrote the screenplay of HBO’s crime drama Bad Education, and will tell the “Gatsby-esque journey of a man from nowhere who exploited the system, waged war on truth and swindled one of the wealthiest districts in the country to achieve his American Dream”.The disgraced ex-congressman fired off a series of tweets late Friday night announcing he would file complaints about misdeeds involving former colleagues Nicole Malliotakis, Mike Lawler, Nick LaLota and Bob Menendez.By Sunday, Santos’s controversial expulsion ahead of a criminal trial continued to attract political comment. Former Trump White House chief of staff and ABC political analyst Reince Priebus acknowledged splits within the Republican party on the vote to expel and the issue of the legislative body acting independently of voters in Santos’s district.“True, he lied. He has a big mouth, all of these things. You know, I do think there is a concern with taking that power away from the people in the district,” Priebus said.Santos, he added, was “a victim of himself. But he is also paying the price for having a big mouth, for being almost a comedian in front of his colleagues, who are now his judges. And he paid the price. And that’s a good lesson about, when you get in trouble, you keep your head down; you keep your mouth shut.”But the immediate aftermath of a year of Santos headlines has left an emotional vacuum – and the prospect of a hotly contested election in the New Year in which Democrats will hope to recover a seat they lost in 2022. New York Magazine, which exhaustively chronicled the Santos’s political epic, echoed the line from Dr Seuss: “Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.” More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘The footage is very honest’: uncovering the real Lady Bird Johnson

      by

      Lady Bird, as Claudia Alta Taylor Johnson was better known, is a nickname that conjures the frivolous and fanciful, but the fiftysomething woman from east Texas who emerges in Dawn Porter’s elegant documentary The Lady Bird Diaries was a paragon of substance. She was also a documentarian in her own right, chronicling her time in the White House over 123 hours of audio recordings that were released after her death in 2007.Apart from the footage of wildflowers that Porter shot on the Johnson family ranch in Texas, the film entirely relies on archival audio and video recordings from the time of Lyndon B Johnson’s presidency, from the 1963 assassination of John F Kennedy to 1969. Building on an ABC News podcast, Porter’s work is a visually mesmerizing collage of mid-century America and one of its most fascinating characters.“[Being a first lady] is traditionally a feminine thing. It’s usually about children and reading and food gardens,” Porter said. “And those things are worthy.” Johnson, though, occupied herself with more than rose gardens. She was a shadow politician, serving as the president’s adviser as well as his tutor, even giving her husband grades on his speeches as we hear in one recording. “I don’t think there were a lot of A-pluses,” Porter said. “I think there was always room for improvement.”The Johnsons’ high expectations for each other mirrored the intensity of their devotion. “In a lot of ways, it’s a love story,” Porter said. “I think some of the best marriages are where each person thinks the other person is the smartest and most capable person. Her daughters confirmed that when I met them. They said, ‘Daddy thought Mother was the smartest person he’d ever met.’”Finding archival footage featuring her film’s subject was a bit of a treasure hunt, as scant material was catalogued with her name. “When we started and put in the words ‘Lady Bird Johnson’, very little came back,” the director said. Porter had better luck when she searched by the date and the names of other people who had been on the scenes of Johnson’s recounting. “She’s not noted in the description of the footage, and yet she’s right there in the middle of all of these events,” Porter said. “And I think that’s the story for a lot of women.”Johnson’s recordings brim with intimacy, and include material on her anxieties about her husband’s mental and physical wellbeing as well as her own apprehensions about living in the public eye. She also chronicled her work life, from campaigning for her husband’s second term to her environmental and anti-poverty efforts. She was the first president’s wife to hire her own staff, which was presided over by Liz Carpenter, a fellow Texan. (Carpenter’s teenage son, who liked to record himself singing, owned the tape recorder that Johnson used.)Porter’s film paints Johnson’s work on the “beautification” of Washington DC as more than an act of aesthetic improvement. “She was going into some of the most impoverished neighborhoods in the District of Columbia, which are primarily Black neighborhoods, and she was making the connection that kids need outdoor space, they need playgrounds, they need calm, beautiful places. She wasn’t just planting flowers.” The film touches on a few controversies, including the time when the singer Eartha Kitt publicly chastised Johnson at a luncheon, sounding off on the Johnson administration’s handling of the Vietnam war. But the point of view is unwaveringly Johnson’s. “This is not a tell-all movie,” Porter said. “What I wanted to do is add her perspective to what was happening.“She really was documenting this history in her tapes, and she was so accurate,” Porter said. “I’ve done a lot of films where people will tell me a story, and then we’ll go back and look at the archive and it’s similar, but memory is imperfect.” Lady Bird’s version of events, however, shared an uncanny precision backed up by the trove of film.Porter’s next two projects are about a reporter who embedded with the New York police department and ended up proving the innocence of a handful of wrongfully convicted inmates, as well as a film on the musician Luther Vandross, who died in 2005. While some documentarians like the immediacy of shadowing living subjects, Porter said that working with pre-existing footage guarantees an added layer of authenticity. “They’re not being interviewed for your movie so they’re not performing for you in any way,” she said. “The footage is very honest.”The choice not to interview anybody for Lady Bird came naturally, and it’s unlikely viewers will mind the absence of talking heads. “I wanted it to be her story. And also make the point that she’s there, she’s everywhere,” Porter said. “You just have to look for her, and then you’ll find her.”
      The Lady Bird Diaries is now available on Hulu in the US More

    • 200 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson: I was asked to run for US president by multiple political parties

      by

      Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson has revealed that multiple political parties approached him last year to see if he would run for US president, after a poll revealed 46% of Americans would support his campaign.Appearing as the first guest on Trevor Noah’s new Spotify podcast What Now?, the actor and former WWE wrestler said a 2021 poll of 30,000 American adults led to “the parties” contacting him to ask if he was interested in running at the end of 2022.“That was an interesting poll that happened and I was really moved by that,” Johnson said. “I was really blown away and I was really honoured. I’ll share this little bit with you: at the end of the year in 2022, I got a visit from the parties asking me if I was going to run, and if I could run.“It was a big deal, and it came out of the blue,” he added. “It was one after the other, and they brought up that poll, and they also brought up their own deep-dive research that would prove that should I ever go down that road [I’d be a real contender]. It was all very surreal because that’s never been my goal. My goal has never been to be in politics. As a matter of fact, there’s a lot about politics that I hate.”However, Johnson, who has described himself as a “centrist” and “political independent” and publicly endorsed US president Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign, has openly shared his interest in running in the past. In 2016 he told GQ: “I can’t deny that the thought of being governor, the thought of being president, is alluring.” A year later he told Variety the 2024 presidential campaign was a “realistic consideration”.His sitcom Young Rock even hinges around him running for US president in 2032, with Johnson playing his future self as he gives interviews about moments in his early life that structure every episode.Responding to the aforementioned poll in 2021, Johnson wrote on Instagram: “I don’t think our Founding Fathers EVER envisioned a six-four, bald, tattooed, half-Black, half-Samoan, tequila drinking, pick up truck driving, fanny pack wearing guy joining their club – but if it ever happens it’d be my honour to serve you, the people.”But last year he seemed to have changed his mind, telling CBS Mornings it was “off the table” because of his duties as a parent of three daughters, who are now aged 22, seven and five.“The most important thing to me is being a daddy, number one, especially during this time, this critical time in my daughters’ lives,” he said.On Noah’s podcast, Johnson said his job as a wrestler often took him away from his eldest daughter, Simone, “and I don’t want that for my little ones now”.“That was one of my primary discussions with the parties, who were ultimately like, ‘Yeah, but the other ones have done it like this’,” he added.Johnson didn’t rule out running in the future, telling Noah: “If that’s ultimately what the people would want, then of course I would consider it.” More

    • 238 Shares109 Views

      in US Politics

      Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life by Arnold Schwarzenegger review – self-help tips that are more gain than pain

      by

      Arnold Schwarzenegger wants you to know that you’re a lazy piece of shit. But he’s going to tell you politely; with care and a few encouraging suggestions. He’s going to be good-natured and nonjudgmental about it. Or a bit judgmental about it. But only because he doesn’t want you to be a lazy piece of shit any more. Instead, he wants you to be useful.If that titular phrase sounds like something a parent tells their kid when said kid is hovering about after school, that’s because it’s exactly what Schwarzenegger’s disciplinarian policeman father used to tell him (and, indeed, Arnie went on to sponsor a nationwide after-school programme). Schwarzenegger, 76, is now in the “fourth act” of his life. He’s been the world’s most famous bodybuilder, a Hollywood movie star, a surprise (mostly hit) governor of California and now an author and quasi-motivational speaker – the catalyst for which was the viral videos he posted during the US pandemic lockdown.I remember, in April 2020, watching Schwarzenegger on Twitter with his pet donkey Lulu and miniature horse Whiskey. The animals were “demonstrating” social distancing guidance, while their owner radiated warmth in a terrifying time. Then came a different register: his stirring, home-filmed speech after January 6 in which he compared the storming of the Capitol to Kristallnacht and pleaded for the protection of US democracy. Maybe we had underestimated him. Zeitgeist-capturing animal lover; rhetorician for the ages. Who knew?Arnie knew. Because people – “naysayers” – have underestimated him his whole life and he doesn’t want you to doubt yourself for a second. Be Useful is a hybrid work. Part Jordan Peterson’s bro life-hack manual slash pop philosophy (the book’s subtitle, Seven Tools for Life, is very similar to Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life); part Instagram motivational quotes slash Arianna Huffington’s obsession with “thriving”, it is threaded through with relevant memoir.Self-help can be a dubious scene to be a part of. Not financially – the industry is booming to the point where life coaches will charge money for others to take their life-coaching courses in what is, as far as I can tell, a Ponzi scheme for dream-journaling. But there’s the toxic masculinity of an Andrew Tate (and, to a lesser extent, Peterson) or the woo-woo of the wellness crew. Much of it is uncomfortably gendered, with polar extremities of dangerous and twee.But Schwarzenegger, far from the cyborg killing machine of his catchphrase film role, is an amiable instructor. A lot of the basic stuff here works. His idea to beget ideas is walking, which, as he points out, is not an original one (he must have thought of it while standing still); he’s just seconding Nietzsche and Aristotle. He recommends incremental changes at first, which is what most primary care doctors might suggest. Lots of advice is similar to that found in 1980s and 90s classics of the genre that either attempted to compensate for the booming rat-race class or else leaned into it. He talks about surrounding yourself with supportive people. All this is good, sound practice. There are the usual Nelson Mandela and Dalai Lama citations. There is, mercilessly, nothing wacky.And there’s plenty of humour to offset the more Sandhursty bits. When he talks about “putting the work in” during drama training, he jokes that he wants his money back for the accent-removal classes. He chops off the bottom half of every pair of his joggers so he can work on his calves more easily. He’s also extremely smart (it still bums him out that bodybuilders are dismissed as airheads) and obsessed with knowledge. One section is called Be a Sponge. His approach is the opposite of Goveism; Schwarzenegger can’t get enough of experts. Whether it’s being taught how to bricklay to make ends meet, or being schooled on the history of gerrymandering as a rookie politician, Schwarzenegger wants your help. And, in turn, he’ll pay it forward. Sometimes literally, as when donating $1m to Covid relief efforts or in time and mentorship, when teaching kids with learning disabilities to bench-press. He hates the phrase “self-made” because, while he recognises it’s meant as a compliment, he believes the opposite – namely, it takes a village (specifically, in his case, Thal in Austria, and then a man called Fredi Gerstl).There’s always a concern with books such as these: will they acknowledge the discriminatory nature of social hierarchical structures and institutions, economic circumstances, health issues and various other impediments to fulfilling potential? Schwarzenegger nods towards them, but more so takes the line that if he, a kid who grew up in a house with no running water, can make it, then anyone can. People will have their views on that, although he’s transparent that one person’s version of fulfilment (pushing through groundbreaking environmental legislation) might differ from another’s (wholesome family; a good job that pays the bills). He loves pain, because “pain is the measure of growth potential”. I sort of love pain in the service of growth – which is why I’m happy to swim in 4C open water – but most of us would be a bit pissed off if, say, a lackadaisical surgeon butchered our aorta during what was supposed to be a routine procedure. Arnie just sets about counting how many laps he can do to the bathroom while stuck in hospital.The triumph of this book is that it’s quite rare in the self-help canon – or what publishers now term personal development – to not make a cynic such as myself roll their eyes, and this one doesn’t. It’s a shame that whoever was responsible for the jacket blurbs takes a shoving-a-finger-in-your chest approach that isn’t replicated by the variable tone inside, which is sometimes dogmatic but often reflects the genuine kindness and enthusiasm of its author. Be Useful, it turns out, is very helpful. More

    • 213 Shares99 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘Our political situation is such a fragile thing’: Robert De Niro on fatherhood, family – and Trump

      by

      For a very long time, the actor Robert De Niro was reticent in interviews. He was solitary or shy or inarticulate – biographers couldn’t decide which. Then Donald Trump was made president, and public De Niro – the De Niro we read in magazines, who appeared at Hollywood events – became openly, angrily, exasperatedly chatty, at least on politics. Trump was a New Yorker, like De Niro, but not a good New Yorker, it turns out. He was a “fool”, a “bozo”, a “national disaster”. How could he have become president? Why weren’t more Americans embarrassed, or terrified? “Fuck Trump!” he shouted while appearing at an awards ceremony in 2018. It was an offhand remark that earned him an ovation. During an interview later that year he added, “I feel that more people should speak out against him, not be genteel about it.”This is the De Niro I meet on Zoom, one afternoon a few months ago. Outspoken De Niro. Politically frustrated De Niro. He is bethroned in a hotel suite in Cannes, grey-haired and lined of face, present as an irked but not unpleasant grandpa. (He recently turned 80.) It is shortly before the actors’ strike and long before Trump’s appearance at a New York courthouse on charges of fraud. “I’m going to go into this,” De Niro says. “The political situation we’re in in my country, it is crazy and absurd – we lost control. I see the phenomenon of Trump, the phenomenon of people not standing up to him, people who ought to know better… They’re causing great concern in the country and a lot of anxiety. I feel like since he’s come on the scene – even after being president – it’s like when an abusive parent rules a household, only it’s not just one household it’s the whole country. We’re like, ‘What’s this guy going to do next? What’s he going to aggravate us about?’” The actor shrugs. “Is he just doing this to aggravate people? To make people unhappy? Maybe he is.”De Niro and I are meant to be discussing his latest picture, Killers of the Flower Moon, which recalls a dark period in 1920s Oklahoma during which members of the Osage Nation were murdered for their oil rights, and in which De Niro plays William Hale, a benign-seeming ranch-owner who is in fact at the root of much of the period’s evil. (The film is based on David Grann’s nonfiction bestseller of the same name.) But Trump keeps getting in the way. At a press conference earlier in the day, De Niro had suggested that Hale’s kind of immorality – his entitlement and greed, his racism, his disregard for anyone outside his own bloodline, all of it wrapped up in a kindly aspect – is easy to spot in contemporary politics, in what was a not-so-veiled swing at Trump and a broader swipe at members of the Republican party, accessories to the chaos.When I mention his allusions to Trump, De Niro says, “Of course. He allowed more of it to come out” – the racism, the disregard. “One of the main tasks of being a leader, the responsibility, is to lead. Even when the masses are turning in a certain the direction, you have to show them the right way. And that comes down to personal integrity, what you know is right and what you know to be wrong, what you stand for.” Trump is “doing whatever he can to be the boss,” he goes on. “He just wants to be in charge. He has no moral centre.”In Killers of the Flower Moon, Hale is similarly unprincipled, bigoted, and vengeful. Many if not all of his actions are propelled by avarice. Asked what appealed to him about playing the character, De Niro replies, “I don’t know if he appealed to me. He’s… I don’t know.” Then he adds, “The older I get, people do things that I just don’t understand. I have no pretence to know.”“What sort of things?” I ask.He gives a brief answer that he boils down to: “The state of the country.”A few years ago, a suspect package was mailed to one of several New York restaurants De Niro owns. Similar packages were delivered to other outspoken Trump critics, including Joe Biden, then a former vice president. The event proved De Niro’s concern that things were not OK. “It was sent by somebody crazy,” he recalls now. “But I don’t want to make it simple. All you can do is keep an eye on them. Suppress or repress it. Because it’s always going to be there. People have their reasons.”Killers of the Flower Moon is De Niro’s 10th collaboration with the director Martin Scorsese. (Their first, Mean Streets, was released 50 years ago.) Of De Niro, Scorsese said recently, “Bob doesn’t talk a lot.” (In a typically halted style, De Niro has said of the director, “There’s a connection, but it’s hard for me to define.”) I ask now why Trump has made De Niro, a man so diffident even his close friend and collaborator has described him as taciturn, suddenly so forthcoming.“It upsets me so much that somebody like him could get so far in our political system,” he says. “Many New Yorkers were on to what a fool he is, a joke. But when the country started buying it? I mean, he didn’t win by much. He didn’t win the popular vote. She won. But look what happened. What’s scary is it’s such a fragile thing, to swing like that. And the odd thing about Trump is that if he had any brains he could have become president again. But he doesn’t care. He did stupid things. He’s not somebody who should ever be allowed close to leadership in this country again.” (Remarkably, or perhaps not, Trump is currently polling highly as a 2024 presidential candidate.)I ask, “The fragility he created, do you think it’s still there?”“Yeah,” he says. “Don’t you?”I nod.“I mean, I wish the media would not give him much attention, would ignore him. But it’s like watching a train wreck. You’re fascinated by it. What will eventually happen is he will die away. He’ll become not even an afterthought. It’s like the pandemic. We had it. Now people are forgetting. And it was only three years ago.”De Niro was born in New York during the Democratic presidency of Franklin Roosevelt. His father, the painter Robert De Niro Sr, studied under the German émigrés Josef Albers and Hans Hofmann, briefly waited tables with the playwright Tennessee Williams, and worked as a night watchman at the Guggenheim Museum alongside Jackson Pollock, who De Niro Sr considered both peer and friend. De Niro’s mother, the artist Virginia Admiral, briefly counted the writer Anaïs Nin as a mentor, and transcribed several volumes of her diaries. (For a time, both Admiral and De Niro Sr wrote erotica for Nin, who paid a dollar a page.) De Niro’s early life was bohemian. An only child, he grew up quietly in the company of adults and books, loved but not coddled. His parents, who called him Bobby, separated when he was two – they divorced a decade later – and he lived with his mother, who stopped painting despite a promising career and began a successful typing business.Still, it is De Niro Sr who has loomed large over De Niro’s life. At auditions early in his career, De Niro would mention his father’s name in case the casting director had heard of him. He would later hang his paintings on the walls of his business ventures, including his restaurants, to generate interest in his father’s career. When I ask if legacy is something De Niro considers, he replies, “Yeah, I think about legacy,” but goes on to discuss his father’s work rather than his own. “I think about his legacy,” he says. “I’ve tried to keep it going. To me he was a great artist, he was a genuine artist. And it’s not like I want to revive whatever he did. I just want my kids, my grandkids, to know who he was, what he stood for.”De Niro Sr died in 1993, on his 71st birthday; Admiral died in 2000, aged 85. De Niro has described his father as witty and affectionate but prone to loneliness and severe self-criticism. (De Niro Sr was gay, though not publicly, and his sexuality was never discussed between father and son.) That the senior artist’s star never exploded led slowly to bitterness, and he fell into poverty. De Niro has talked before of how he considers it his responsibility to maintain awareness of his father’s work – to “see him get his due”.I ask De Niro now what he thinks his father thought of his fame.“I think he was proud of me,” he says. “At the same time, a little jealous, or envious, and so on. But he always… He was proud of me. And what I remember is I was proud of him when I was a kid – he was an artist. But that’s normal. People in families have certain feelings. It doesn’t mean they don’t love the family member, that they’re not loyal to them.”I ask about their relationship.“We had an OK relationship,” he says. “ He was not with me, we didn’t live together. But I would see him, spend time. I would always go to his shows, take the kids to his openings.” Sometimes father and son would run into each other in the street and talk, or De Niro would visit his father while he worked. “We had what I suppose people would call an understanding,” De Niro has said. “We were close in some ways but not in others.” The painter regularly requested his son sit for a portrait, but the son demurred. (“I wouldn’t sit still,” he has said.) A couple of years ago, De Niro, while showing a journalist around his father’s SoHo studio, which De Niro has preserved faithfully, said, “I wish I had listened more to my father so I could speak more carefully about his work.”I ask now, “Why is this important to you?”“It just is,” he says. “It’s family. Tradition.”“It’s for your children,” I say.“It’s for the family, yes.”Not long before De Niro and I meet, it is announced that he has had another child – his seventh, and his first with his current girlfriend, the actor Tiffany Chen. When I offer congratulations he nods plainly. And when I ask how things are going, he says, “It’s going OK,” shrugs, and screws up his features into a kind of parent-face that suggests he might be muddling through.We both laugh.De Niro has said of child-rearing, “It’s always good and mysterious and you don’t know what the hell is going to happen.” I ask if he agrees with that statement now.“You never know,” he says.“That’s still true?” I ask.“Of course it’s true!” he says. “It’s true for everybody.”“It’s still mysterious?” I ask.“You never know what’s going to happen,” he says. “They surprise you.”I ask if things get easier.“It doesn’t get easier,” he says, becoming pleasantly private. “It is what it is. It’s OK. I mean, I don’t do the heavy lifting. I’m there, I support my girlfriend. But she does the work. And we have help, which is so important.”I ask if he enjoys fatherhood.“Of course I do.”“What about it do you enjoy?” I ask.“All of it! With a baby it’s different to with my 11-year-old. My adult children. My grandchildren. It’s all different.”“In what way?” I ask.“Well, I don’t talk to the adult children the way I talk to my baby,” he says, in a way I think suggests exasperation, “or the way I speak to my 11-year-old, though she’s pretty smart. But… I don’t know if you have kids.”“I have two,” I say, adding, “I think that’s enough for me.”Smiling, De Niro says, “Well, that’s understandable.”Talk turns to his upcoming plans. When I ask De Niro his intentions for the next couple of years, he mentions a Netflix series I was unaware he had scheduled, what might be another piece of make-work for which the actor has been regularly, often unfairly criticised. (A student of the acting coach Stella Adler, a two-time Oscar winner, the force behind Raging Bull and Taxi Driver and The Deer Hunter, one of our greatest actors, he is also responsible for Dirty Grandpa.) But soon another, more plain ambition is revealed. “And to stay alive,” he says.“You think about that?” I ask.“Of course I think about it, at my age,” he says. “You think about it at your age, why wouldn’t I think about it at my age?”He looks briefly off camera to his publicist, then goes on, “It’s not going to stop me, but you think about it.”“What do you think about?” I ask.“I’m aware of it,” he says. “You think more about time. Every summer, every new season, everything, you say, ‘Well, I’m going to use these few months of the summer to be with my kids, my family.’ I can’t wait until the next – I don’t know what’s going to happen. So each thing becomes more important. Everything I do, time-wise, is important. Whatever I’m thinking about doing in two years, I’d better think about doing it now.”I ask, “Do you enjoy being older?”“I don’t mind,” he says. “I have no control over it. What am I going to do? I might as well give in and go with it.”And with that his publicist rises, and De Niro gives in and goes with it.Killers of The Flower Moon is in cinemas nationwide from 20 October. This interview was completed before the SAG-AFTRA strike commenced More

    • 113 Shares149 Views

      in US Politics

      Why do Republicans hate the Barbie movie? – podcast

      by

      Moviegoers flocked to cinemas last weekend for the highly anticipated release of two of the year’s biggest movies – Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer and Greta Gerwig’s Barbie. But conservatives have slated Barbie for being, among other things, too ‘woke’, anti-men and even … Chinese propaganda.
      Is the outrage real or is it just another example of politics employing a culture war to rally the base? Jonathan Freedland and Amanda Marcotte try to figure it out

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Oppenheimer biographer supports US bill to bar use of AI in nuclear launches

      by

      A biographer whose Pulitzer prize-winning book inspired the new movie Oppenheimer has expressed support for a US senator’s attempt to bar the use of artificial intelligence in nuclear weapons launches.“Humans must always maintain sole control over nuclear weapons,” Kai Bird, author of American Prometheus, said in a statement reported by Politico.“This technology is too dangerous to gamble with. This bill will send a powerful signal to the world that the United States will never take the reckless step of automating our nuclear command and control.”In Washington on Thursday, Bird met Ed Markey, the Democratic Massachusetts senator who is attempting to add the AI-nuclear provision to a major defense spending bill.Markey, Politico said, was a friend of Bird’s co-author, the late Tufts University professor Martin J Sherwin.A spokesperson for the senator told Politico Markey and Bird “shared their mutual concerns over the proliferation of artificial intelligence in national security and defense without guardrails, and the risks of using nuclear weapons in south Asia and elsewhere.“They also discussed ways to increase awareness of nuclear issues among the younger set.”J Robert Oppenheimer was the driving force behind US development of the atomic bomb, at the end of the second world war.Bird and Sherwin’s book is now the inspiration for Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s summer blockbuster starring Cillian Murphy in the title role.The movie opens in the US on Friday – in competition with Barbie, Greta Gerwig’s film about the popular children’s doll.On Friday, Nolan told the Guardian: “International surveillance of nuclear weapons is possible because nuclear weapons are very difficult to build. Oppenheimer spent $2bn and used thousands of people across America to build those first bombs.“It’s reassuringly difficult to make nuclear weapons and so it’s relatively easy to spot when a country is doing that. I don’t believe any of that applies to AI.”Nolan also noted “very strong parallels” between Oppenheimer and AI experts now calling for such technology to be controlled.Nolan said he had “been interested to talk to some of the leading researchers in the AI field, and hear from them that they view this as their ‘Oppenheimer moment’. And they’re clearly looking to his story for some kind of guidance … as a cautionary tale in terms of what it says about the responsibility of somebody who’s putting this technology to the world, and what their responsibilities would be in terms of unintended consequences.”Bird and Sherwin’s biography, subtitled The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer, was published in 2008.Reviewing for the Guardian, James Buchan saluted the authors’ presentation of “the cocktails and wire-taps and love affairs of Oppenheimer’s existence, his looks and conversation, the way he smoked the cigarettes and pipe that killed him, his famous pork-pie hat and splayed walk, and all the tics and affectations that his students imitated and the patriots and military men despised.“It is as if these authors had gone back to James Boswell, who said of Dr Johnson: ‘Everything relative to so great a man is worth observing.’” More

    • 100 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      Daniel Ellsberg, Pentagon Papers whistleblower, dies aged 92

      by

      Daniel Ellsberg, a US government analyst who became one of the most famous whistleblowers in world politics when he leaked the Pentagon Papers, exposing US government knowledge of the futility of the Vietnam war, has died. He was 92. His death was confirmed by his family on Friday.In March, Ellsberg announced that he had inoperable pancreatic cancer. Saying he had been given three to six months to live, he said he had chosen not to undergo chemotherapy and had been assured of hospice care.“I am not in any physical pain,” he wrote, adding: “My cardiologist has given me license to abandon my salt-free diet of the last six years. This has improved my life dramatically: the pleasure of eating my favourite foods!”On Friday, the family said Ellsberg “was not in pain” when he died. He spent his final months eating “hot chocolate, croissants, cake, poppyseed bagels and lox” and enjoying “several viewings of his all-time favourite [movie], Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”, the family statement added.“In his final days, surrounded by so much love from so many people, Daniel joked, ‘If I had known dying would be like this, I would have done it sooner …’“Thank you, everyone, for your outpouring of love, appreciation and well-wishes. It all warmed his heart at the end of his life.”Tributes were swift and many.Alan Rusbridger, the former editor-in-chief of the Guardian, said Ellsberg “was widely, and rightly, acclaimed as a great and significant figure. But not by Richard Nixon, who wanted him locked up. He’s why the national interest should never be confused with the interest of whoever’s in power.”The Pulitzer-winning journalist Wesley Lowery wrote: “It was an honor knowing Daniel … I’ll remain inspired by his commitment to a mission bigger than himself.”The writer and political commentator Molly Jong-Fast said: “One of the few really brave people on this earth has left it.”The MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan said: “Huge loss for this country. An inspiring, brave, and patriotic American. Rest in power, Dan, rest in power.”The Pentagon Papers covered US policy in Vietnam between 1945 and 1967 and showed that successive administrations were aware the US could not win.By the end of the war in 1975, more than 58,000 Americans were dead and 304,000 were wounded. Nearly 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers were killed, as were about 1 million North Vietnamese soldiers and Viet Cong guerillas and more than 2 million civilians in North and South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.The Pentagon Papers caused a sensation in 1971, when they were published – first by the New York Times and then by the Washington Post and other papers – after the supreme court overruled the Nixon administration on whether publication threatened national security.In 2017, the story was retold in The Post, an Oscar-nominated film directed by Steven Spielberg in which Ellsberg was played by the British actor Matthew Rhys.Ellsberg served in the US Marine Corps in the 1950s but went to Vietnam in the mid-60s as a civilian analyst for the defense department, conducting a study of counter-insurgency tactics. When he leaked the Pentagon Papers, he was working for the Rand Corporation.In 2021, a half-century after he blew the whistle, he told the Guardian: “By two years in Vietnam, I was reporting very strongly that there was no prospect of progress of any kind so the war should not be continued. And that came to be the majority view of the American people before the Pentagon Papers came out.“By ’68 with the Tet offensive, by ’69, most Americans already thought it was immoral to continue but that had no effect on Nixon. He thought he was going to try to win it and they would be happy once he’d won it, however long it took.”In 1973, Ellsberg was put on trial. Charges of espionage, conspiracy and stealing government property adding up to a possible 115-year sentence were dismissed due to gross governmental misconduct, including a break-in at the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, part of the gathering scandal which led to Nixon’s resignation in 1974.Born in Chicago on 7 April 1931, Ellsberg was educated at Harvard and Cambridge, completing his PhD after serving as a marine. He was married twice and had two sons and a daughter.After the end of the Vietnam war he became by his own description “a lecturer, scholar, writer and activist on the dangers of the nuclear era, wrongful US interventions and the urgent need for patriotic whistleblowing”.Ellsberg contributed to publications including the Guardian and published four books, among them an autobiography, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, and most recently The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.In recent years, he publicly supported Chelsea Manning, the US soldier who leaked records of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, who published Manning’s leaks, and Edward Snowden, who leaked records concerning surveillance by the National Security Agency.On Friday, the journalist Glenn Greenwald, one of the Guardian team which published the Snowden leaks in 2013, winning a Pulitzer prize, called Ellsberg “a true American hero” and “the most vocal defender” of Assange, Snowden, Manning and “others who followed in his brave footsteps”.Steven Donziger, an attorney who represented Indigenous people in the Amazon rainforest against the oil giant Chevron, a case that led to his own house arrest, said: “Today the world lost a singularly brave voice who spoke truth about the US military machine in Vietnam and risked his life in the process. I drew deep inspiration from the courage of Daniel Ellsberg and was deeply honored to have his support.”In 2018, in a joint Guardian interview with Snowden, Ellsberg paid tribute to those who refused to be drafted to fight in Vietnam.“I would not have thought of doing what I did,” he said, “which I knew would risk prison for life, without the public example of young Americans going to prison to make a strong statement that the Vietnam war was wrong and they would not participate, even at the cost of their own freedom.“Without them, there would have been no Pentagon Papers. Courage is contagious.”Three years later, in an interview to mark 50 years since the publication of the Pentagon Papers, he said he “never regretted for a moment” his decision to leak.His one regret, he said, was “that I didn’t release those documents much earlier when I think they would have been much more effective.“I’ve often said to whistleblowers, ‘Don’t do what I did, don’t wait years till the bombs are falling and people have been dying.’” More