Eye-Opening Quotes From Michael Wolff’s Siege: Trump White House (Part Four)

45. “It was a badly kept secret in foreign policy circles that Mohammed bin Salman–MBS–had a cocaine problem and could disappear for days or longer on benders, or on long and frightening (at least for other passengers) trips on his yacht.  He also spent hours every day planted in front of a screen playing video games.  Like Trump, he was often described as a petulant child.” (from Chapter Nineteen – Khashoggi, pg. 247)

46. “In frequent contact with the Crown Prince, Kushner effectively became a crisis manager for him.  To that end, he also bec[a]me the White House’s most prolific leaker of Saudi conspiracy theories and disinformation.

[snip]

Kushner, in an off-the-record conversation with a reporter, [falsely] argued the crux of the Saudi case: ‘This guy [Khashoggi] was the link between certain factions in the royal family and Osama [bin Laden].  We know that.  A journalist?  Come on.  This was a terrorist masquerading as a journalist.'” (pg. 248)

47. “…to one of his after-dinner callers [in a conversation regarding MBS’ possible involvement in Jamal Khashoggi’s assassination], [Trump] put it somewhat differently [from what he had been saying publicly]: ‘Of course he killed him–he probably had good reason.  Who gives a fuck?’ (pg. 252)

48. “Kushner suggested to the Crown Prince that he should order the arrest and quick execution of fifteen plotters involved in Khashoggi’s assassination.  He was considering that, said MBS.” (pg. 252)

49. “Trump, sick of the Khashoggi mess, was privately blaming Kushner for it.  ‘I told him to make peace,’ said Trump to a caller.  ‘Instead he makes friends with a murderer.  What can I do?'” (pg. 256)

50. “In the fall of 2017, Trump told multiple confidants that Haley had given him a blow job–his words…What was far from certain was that what he had said was true, and few around him gave it much credence.

Haley was enraged by reports of a relationship with Trump, adamantly denying that there was any truth whatsoever to this suggestion.”  (from Chapter 20 – October Surprises, pgs. 259-260)

51. “Trump, speaking about his choice of women, had once told Tucker Carlson that he liked a ‘little chocolate in his diet.’

Trump himself told a story about being ridiculed by friends for sleeping with a black woman.  But the morning after, he had looked at himself in the mirror and was reassured that nothing had changed–he was still the Trumpster.  He offered this anecdote to show that he was not a racist.” (pgs. 266-267)

52. “The president also talked confidently about Nancy Pelosi, the likely new Speaker of the House.  He told his friend he hoped she would make it and not ‘get voted out by the rebels.’  She was going on seventy-nine, he repeated several times.  She looked good, he noted, commenting that maintaining her appearance must take a lot of time.  Meanwhile, he said, they got along.  Got along fine.  They had always understood each other.  It would be great if she got to be Speaker again…he knew how to handle Nancy.  Not a problem.  He knew what she wanted.  She wanted to look good.  ‘I know how to set it up,’ said the president.

(from Chapter Twenty-Two – Shutdown, pgs. 282-283)

53. “…senior advisor and immigration hard-liner Stephen Miller, whom Trump described as ‘autistic’ and ‘sweaty.'”  (pg. 286)

54. “The president’s extreme mood swings were alarming for almost everyone.  His rages were now greater and his coherence more in question; Sean Hannity told Steve Bannon that Trump seemed ‘totally fucking crazy.'”

(pg. 287)

55. “New York’s Jerry Nadler–who Trump, during a fight over real estate development in New York in the 1990s, had called a ‘fat little Jew’–would lead the Judiciary Committee…” (pg. 289)

56. “Trump has long admired Ann Coulter’s ‘mouth,’, as well as–he always made sure to mention–her ‘hair and legs.’…Invited to Trump Tower during the transition, she had lectured the president-elect mercilessly, using frequent f-bombs; she was particularly scathing about his ‘fucking moron idea’ to hire his family.  And yet because of her sharp tongue, Trump admired her.  ‘She cuts people down–they don’t get up,’ he said about Coulter with awe.  ‘Great, great television.'” (pgs. 291-292)

57. “‘Honestly, his voice was breaking,’ said the friend.  ‘Ann really fucked him up.  The base, the base.  He was completely panicked.’

On Friday, December 21, responding directly to Coulter’s taunts, Trump abruptly reversed course and refused to accept any compromise on the budget bill because it contained no funding for the Wall.  At midnight, the government shut down [for 35 days].” (pg. 292)

58. “In the White House, the president, to general surprise, announced that he would not accompany his family to Mar-a-Lago over the holidays…

[snip]

“…the stay-behind president became obsessed with the Secret Service detail patrolling the White House grounds, finding them perched in trees in ‘blackface,’ he reported to callers, with their machine guns pointed at him.  He tried to catch their attention, waving from the windows, but they blanked him.  ‘Spooky,’ he said.  ‘Like I’m a prisoner.'” (p.293)

59. “In an empty White House, a young assistant brought his papers and call sheets from the West Wing up to the residence, finding him, she told friends, in his underwear.

[snip]

Trump, who had first taken notice of the woman during the transition, kept repeating, ‘She’s got a way about her,’ his signature, and creepy, stamp of approval for young women.  Now the president was telling friends that he wasn’t staying at the White House because of the shutdown–he was staying because he was ‘banging’ the young West Wing aide.” (pg. 294)

60. “…there was the RICO investigation in New York, which could easily bring about Trump’s personal financial destruction–all those loan applications, all that potential banking fraud.

‘This is where it isn’t a witch hunt–even for the hard core [Trump supporters], this is where he turns into just a crooked business guy, and one worth fifty million dollars instead of ten billion dollars,’ said Bannon, ever on the edge of disgust.  ‘Not the billionaire he said he was, just another scumbag.'” (pg. 299)

61. “…he delivered a scornful critique of Robert Mueller:  ‘What an asshole.'”

(from Epilogue – The Report, pg. 315)

62. “‘Am I safe?’ Trump persisted in asking the caller.  ‘Am I safe?’

He answered his own question:  ‘They are going to keep coming after me.'” (pg. 315)

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Wednesday, September 25, 2019
2:37 a.m.

Eye-Opening Quotes From Michael Wolff’s Siege: Trump White House (Part Three)

34. “Their interview proceeded in a flirty way–Trump playing hard to get and dismissive, Hannity excruciatingly unctuous.

Watching Hannity’s performance, Carlson’s executive producer said, ‘I’m gay and I’ve never hit on a man that hard.’

Trump began the interview with Hannity by needling him for incorrectly identifying the number of NATO nations in his first question (with everyone surprised that Trump in fact seemed to know the correct number).  ‘Tucker wouldn’t screw that up,’ Trump said to a stricken Hannity.  ‘He knows how many NATO countries there are.  You ever watch his show?  I watch it every night.  I’ll let you redo the question, go ahead.'” (pg. 178)

35. “Trump suddenly began screaming to aides about Mattis and his transgender tolerance.  ‘He wants to give trannies operations. ‘Learn to fire a gun and I’ll give you an operation,” Trump mimicked in his mincing voice.”

(pg. 181)

36. “The [National] Enquirer…had worked closely with the film producer Harvey Weinsten, who set up a production deal for American Media in return for its agreement not to publish stories about the cascading sexual harassment and abuse allegations that would eventually doom him.  AMI also joined with Arnold Schwarzenegger, the ex-bodybuilder, former governor of California, and repeat sexual harasser, who, in exchange for the magazine’s silence, used his influence to help the company buy a group of fitness magazines.”

(from Chapter Sixteen – Pecker, Cohen, Weisselberg, pgs. 210-211)

37. “Roger Ailes, the creator of Fox News, with whom Trump was actively discussing his media future in the fall of 2016, called [National Enquirer head David] Pecker ‘Trump’s water-boy idiot.’  Added Ailes: ‘An idiot needs an even bigger idiot to get his water.'” (pg. 211)

38. “…[Marc] Kasowitz, terrified that his offices would be raided like Cohen’s, defended himself to friends by enumerating how many women he had handled for Trump without a hiccup.” (pg. 215)

39. “On August 24, The Wall Street Journal reported that David Pecker had cut a deal to testify.  The same day, the Journal reported that Weisselberg had also accepted an immunity deal and had testified several weeks before.

‘The Jews always flip,’ said Trump.

[snip]

“He developed a riff on the horrors that an Orthodox Jew would probably encounter in jail, one that sketched a vivid picture of a tattooed Nazi cell mate.

[snip]

…Cohen was ‘the only stupid Jew,’ and Weisselberg was the financial adviser whose name, after more than forty years, Trump took delight in mangling (‘Weisselman,’ ‘Weisselstein,’ ‘Weisselwitz’).  Pecker was often mocked by Trump as ‘Little Pecker,’ and his mustache was the target of derisive and obscene remarks.  (Curiously, Pecker bore a resemblance to Trump’s father, who also wore a mustache.)” (pg. 217)

40. “…the special counsel’s budget request had been approved–they had survived that bureaucratic hurdle.  (Trump many not have ever understood that the budget process was a weapon that he could have used against the special counsel–it appeared that no one had told him.)…for all of Trump’s threats, he had made no real moves to interfere with the special counsel’s work and mission.” (pg. 219)

41. “…Trump started to focus on abortion.  Here he was on thin ice:  whenever the issue came up, after only a few sentences of discussion, he would often begin to waver.  His now-standard right-to-life view would revert to his previous, pro-choice view.  In late August, weeks after nominating Kavanaugh, Trump wanted to know:  Was this guy part of a Catholic plot to abolish abortion?

Suddenly alive to the reality of a no-Protestant Court, he continued needing reassurance that Brett Kavanaugh was not just out to make abortion illegal…Kavanaugh, he was told, was a ‘textualist’…Abortion was far from his number one issue.

…Trump felt like he wasn’t getting the full story.” (from Chapter Eighteen – Kavanaugh, pg. 235)

42. “Trump, it seemed, could not get enough of this story.  ‘He pushed her down on the bed and that’s it?’  How long had he held her down?  Trump wanted to know.  ‘Did he just fall on her and go in for a kiss?  Or was it humping?’

When Trump was told that Kavanaugh’s friend Mark Judge, who [Christine] Blasey Ford claimed was in the room, had written a book about his drunken exploits in high school, Trump whacked himself alongside the head.  ‘What kind of idiots did you get me here?’

[snip]

‘This is embarrassing…Catholic school boys.’

[snip]

As Blasey Ford’s story instantly came to dominate the news, Trump conceived quite a sudden level of dripping contempt for Kavanaugh.  ‘He seems weak.  Not strong.  He was probably molested by a priest.’

[snip]

The White House and the Kavanaugh team nixed a possible CBS interview, believing that the nominee couldn’t hold up under hostile questioning…the White House agreed to the promise of a soft interview at Fox, with the questions provided beforehand.

During this treacly sit-down on September 24, a defeated and self-pitying Kavanaugh said he was a virgin in high school and for a long time thereafter.  Trump could barely believe it.  ‘Stop!  Who would say that?  My virgin justice.  This man has no pride!  Man?  Did I say man?  I don’t think so.’

Trump seemed eager to cut his losses and move on.  Only several bracing warnings…prevented the president from sending out a tweet dumping his nominee.” (pg. 241)

43. “Trump’s ire rose yet further when he learned that George W. Bush–among the politicians that Trump scorned most–had come to Kavanaugh’s defense, and that many Republicans believed it was Bush who was keeping the nomination alive.

‘The drunks stick together,’ said Trump.  ‘If he’s a Bush guy, he’s not a Trump guy.  It’s bull that we can depend on him.  Virgin-man will sell me out.'” (pgs. 241-242)

44. “…Trump expressed further concern about whether Kavanaugh was capable of handling himself in a tense public situation.  He began to pass instructions and advice:  ‘Admit to nothing.  Zero!’  He wanted aggression.

[snip]

‘I don’t think he’s that tough,’ Trump would then conclude.

Through it all, there seemed to be an implicit recognition on the president’s part that what Blasey Ford had said was probably true.  ‘If it wasn’t true,’ he offered, ‘she would have claimed rape or something, not just a kiss.'”

…Trump watched Blasey Ford’s testimony in the residence before coming down to the West Wing.  He was on the phone with friends almost the entire time.  ‘She’s good,’ he kept saying.  He thought Kavanaugh was in ‘big trouble.’

That afternoon, watching Kavanaugh’s performance, he was deeply displeased.  He seemed personally offended that Kavanaugh had cried during this testimony.  ‘I wanted to slap him,’ he said afterward to a caller.  ‘Virgin crybaby.’

But he also claimed credit for the fact that Kavanaugh admitted to nothing.  ‘You can’t even admit to a handshake,’ he told the same caller.  He digressed to ‘my friend Leslie Moonves,’ the chairman of CBS, who had recently been under fire after a series of #MeToo accusations.  ‘Les admitted to a kiss.  He’s done.  Forget about it.  When I heard about the kiss, I thought, Done, finished.  The only person who has survived this stuff is me.  I knew you couldn’t admit to anything.  Try to explain, dead.  Apologize, dead.  If you admit to even knowing a broad, dead.’

…seeing the strong Kavanaugh reviews on Fox, Trump’s views seemed to shift.  ‘Every man in this country thinks this could happen to him,’ he told a friend.  ‘Thirty years ago you try to kiss a girl, thirty years later she’s back–boom.  And what kind of person remembers a kiss after forty years?  After forty years she’s still upset?  Give me a break.  Give.  Me.  A.  Break.'”

(pgs. 242-243)

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Wednesday, September 25, 2019
2:27 a.m.

Eye-Opening Quotes From Michael Wolff’s Siege: Trump White House (Part Two)

12. “‘If he was in a bad mood and we were going from office to boardroom–we had to go through the Trump Tower lobby–with these eastern European tourists looking at the waterfall–‘God’s urinal,’ he called it–I would scan for an attractive woman.  ‘Hey,’ I’d say, ‘at six o’clock.’

Girls were the constant.  ‘Erik [Whitestone], go get her, and bring her up.’  And so, me:  ‘Mr. Trump wants to know if you want to come up and see the boardroom.’  He’d hug them and grope them and send them on their way.’

Riding in the limo, ‘He’d just roll down the window and say, ‘What’s up?’ to the ladies.  ‘Hello, ladies…’ to two hot girls.  ‘That was fun,’ he’d say, ‘remind me to do that again.'” (pg. 81)

13. “Once, coming back from Chicago, a young woman, an attractive interior designer who was pitching Trump on a project, hitched a ride on Trump’s plane.  [Whitestone:] ‘He led her into the bedroom with a mirrored ceiling…She comes out, half an hour later, dress ripped off, staggering out, she sits in the seat…and then he comes out with his tie off, shirt untucked, and says, ‘Fellas…just got laid.'” (pg. 82)

14. There was always one or another of Trump’s assistants in the car with him.  [Whitestone:] ‘All his executive assistants were superhot.  ‘Come with us,’ he’d order one of them on the way out to the limo.  He and she sitting next to each other as he tries to grope her, with her blocking him like she’s done it a hundred times before.'”

(pg. 82)

15. “[Whitestone:] ‘…at the hospital, when his grandchild was born, Don Jr.’s kid, [Trump said], ‘Why the fuck do I have to go see this kid?  Don Jr. has too many fucking kids.'” (pg. 82)

16. “[Whitestone:] ‘He’s got a plan.  I’m going to do his campaign commercials: [Trump says:] ‘I want you to use our boardroom set and get a bunch of Arabs and all their Arab gear and we’ll put a sign on the table that says, ‘OPEC’ and we’ll have them going, ‘Hoooluuuuluuuhooo, hoooluuulyyhoood,’ and we’ll have this subtitle, ‘Death to the Americans,’ or ‘We’ll Screw the Americans,’ and then I’ll walk in and I’ll say a bunch of presidential bullshit…and then we’ll make it go viral.'” (pg. 83)

17. “As Whitestone knew, the unbound Trump, to which the insiders at The Apprentice were regularly exposed, was captured on thousands of hours of outtakes.  Those fabled tapes still exist, but they are not controlled by Burnett and MGM.  ‘Like the ark of the covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark, [they are] somewhere on a pallet, wrapped in tape, in a desert outside of Los Angeles.  Eighteen cameras shooting almost twenty-four hours a day are saved on DVDs…We didn’t have hard drives.” (pg. 83)

18. “Whitestone remembered certain moments with particular clarity.

‘Someone said ‘cunt’ and someone else said, ‘You can’t say ‘cunt’ on TV,’ and Donald said, ‘Why can’t you say ‘cunt’?’ and said ‘Cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt.  There, I’ve said it on TV.  Now you can say it.’

And: ‘You’re very pretty, stand up, walk over here, turn around.’  [There was] constant dialogue about who has better tits and then bitter fights with producers about not using this.  ‘Why can’t we?’ he’d say.  ‘This is great.  This is great television.'” (pg. 83)

19. “[Whitestone:] ‘He was as incoherent then…no more, no less…as he is now, repeating thoughts and weird phrases…His weird sniffing thing (‘I have hay fever’)…” (pg. 83)

20. “Sam Nunberg, testifying before the Mueller grand jury, said that when he worked at Trump Tower in the years before the campaign, he saw [Trump’s fixer Michael] Cohen with bags of cash.  Cohen was, for Trump, literally a bag man, dealing with women and other off-the-books issues.” (pg. 84)

21. “…the Trumps had lived a don’t-ask-don’t-tell life…helped by the considerable distance between them allowed by their ample real estate, including at least one house near his golf club in the New York suburbs that Trump kept carefully hidden from his wife…” (from Chapter Seven – The Women, pg. 90)

22. “Melania sometimes spoke Slovenian with Barron, particularly when her parents were around–and they were frequently around–infuriating Trump and causing him to bolt from any room they were in.” (pg. 92)

23. “Even beyond their separate bedrooms in the White House–they were the first presidential couple since JFK and Jackie to room apart–much of Melania’s time was spent in a house in Maryland where she had installed her parents and established what was effectively a separate life for herself.

This was the arrangement.  For Trump, it was workable; for Melania, quite a bit less so.” (pgs. 92 & 93)

24. “Trump had a fetish about being the tallest person in the room; by 2018 Barron, after a sudden growth spurt, was already approaching six feet.  ‘How do I stunt his growth?’ became a chronic mean joke made by Trump about his son’s height.” (pg. 93)

25. “In the fall of 2017, as the New York Times and the New Yorker focused to devastating effect on Harvey Weinstein’s long history of sexual predation, Trump was busily defending him.  ‘Good guy,’ he would say about Weinstein, ‘good guy.’  He was sure that like the Russia investigation this, too, was a witch hunt.  What’s more, he knew Harvey, and Harvey would get away with it.  That was the thing with Harvey, said Trump–he always got away with it.  It was the casting couch, the casting couch!  For every girl who now had her panties in a twist, Trump claimed, there were fifty others, a hundred others, eager and willing.” (pgs. 93-94)

26. “Trump himself had not even an inkling of the new sensitivity regarding women and sex.  ‘I don’t need Viagra,’ he declared to everyone else’s general mortification at a dinner party in New York during the campaign.  ‘I need a pill to make my erection go down.'” (pg. 94)

27. “Nobody discounted the possibility, as a whole genre of stories and theories had it, that the rumoured elevator video of Trump striking Melania might in fact exist.  Inside the White House, the view was that if the video did exist, the incident had happened in Los Angeles, probably in 2014 after a meeting with lawyers that had been arranged precisely to negotiate a revision in their marital agreement.” (pg. 97)

28. “‘I only fuck beautiful girls–you can attest to that,’ he said to a Hollywood friend who visited the White House.  (He had once left a voice-mail message for Tucker Carlson, who had criticized Trump’s hair:  ‘It’s true you have better hair than I do, but I get more pussy that you do.’)” (pg. 97)

29. “Jared sought to have his father, Charlie Kushner, pardoned; that effort went nowhere (Trump wasn’t a fan of Charlie Kushner’s).” (from Chapter Eight – Michael Flynn, pg. 99)

30. “At [Fox founder Roger] Ailes’s funeral in Palm Beach in May 2017, [Fox broadcaster Sean] Hannity, who had flown a group of Ailes’s colleagues and friends down on his plane, found his plan to get back home for one of his children’s sports matches delayed by the collective length of the many encomiums at the funeral.  Stepping out to speak on the phone with his disappointed child, he said, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.  But, hey, wait a minute.  Do you like your life?  Well, we owe that all to Mr. Ailes.  So I’m staying until his funeral is done.”

(from Chapter Eleven – Hannity, pg. 144)

31. “Trump, weary of immigration, was suddenly excited, on June 27, to be handed the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy from the Supreme Court, thus opening a seat for a new conservative judge.  Immigration became, overnight, a forgotten issue, and Hannity an annoyance.  ‘Wetbacks, wetbacks, wetbacks.  There’s more to the world,’ said the president in a complaint to an evening caller.  ‘Somebody should tell Sean.'” (pg. 155)

32. “…Trump continued to blame Bannon for getting him to support ‘the child molester’–Roy Moore in Alabama, the failed Senate candidate whom Bannon had backed.  (More precisely, in Trump’s locution, Bannon had persuaded him to support ‘the loser child molester.’)” (from Chapter Twelve – Trump Abroad, pg. 161)

33. “Melania–rarely approached and certainly never hugged by anyone on Trump’s staff or in his entourage–visibly recoiled from Hannity’s too-close embrace.” (from Chapter Thirteen – Trump and Putin, pgs. 177-178)

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Wednesday, September 25, 2019
2:19 a.m.

Eye-Opening Quotes From Michael Wolff’s Siege: Trump White House (Part One)

I know.  Michael Wolff is an unreliable narrator.  He’s not terribly transparent about his seriously flawed fact-gathering processes.  He relies on a lot of anonymous sources, many, if not all, of them motivated by vengeance which can sometimes put their credibility into question.  He gets basic details wrong that should’ve been caught before publication and he becomes very defensive when this is repeatedly pointed out to him.  Put bluntly, he’s more of a gossipy novelist than an insightful journalist.

That necessary caveat aside, surely some truths have still emerged from his two books about Donald Trump’s Presidency.  Last year, I focused on the first one, Fire And Fury.  And now, it’s on to his latest, Siege.

Once again, Wolff is way more interested in the ongoing soap opera in the West Wing than consistently deconstructing the extreme policies of an increasingly right-wing Republican Party.  Nevertheless, as before, there are citations that stand out, ones that may raise an eyebrow, drop a jaw or inspire a laugh.  Behold:

1. “Hicks –‘Hope-y,’ to Trump–was both the president’s gatekeeper and his comfort blanket.  She was also a frequent subject of his prurient interest:  Trump preferred business, even in the White House, to be personal.  ‘Who’s fucking Hope?’ he would demand to know.  The topic also interested his son Don Jr., who often professed his intention to ‘fuck Hope.'” (Chapter One – Bullseye, pg. 7)

2. “[Rob] Porter had, before the age of forty, two bitter ex-wives, at least one of whom he had beaten, and both of whom he had cheated on at talk-of-the-town levels.  During a stint as a Senate staffer, the married Porter had an affair with an intern, costing him his job.  His girlfriend Samantha Dravis had moved in with Porter in the summer of 2017, while, quite unbeknownst to her, he was seeing Hicks.  ‘I cheated on you because you’re not attractive enough,’ he later told Dravis.

In a potentially criminal break of protocol, Porter had gained access to his raw FBI clearance reports and seen the statements of his ex-wives…Concerned about the damaging impact his former wives could have on his security review, he recruited Dravis to help him smooth his relationship with both women.

[snip]

After finding Hicks’s number listed under a man’s name in Porter’s contacts, Dravis confronted Porter who promptly threw her out.  Moving back in with her parents, she began her own revenge campaign, openly talking about Porter’s security clearance issues, including to people inside the White House counsel’s office, saying he had protection at the highest levels in the White House…Dravis helped leak the details of the Hicks-Porter romance to the Daily Mail, which published a story about it on February 1.

But Dravis, joined by Porter’s former wives, decided that, outrageously, he had come out looking good…he was part of a glam power couple!  Porter called Dravis to taunt her:  ‘You thought you could get me!’  Dravis and his former wives all then publicly revealed their abuse at his hand.

[snip]

…his troubling gross-guy history…annoyed Trump–‘He stinks of bad press’…On February 7, after both of his former wives gave interviews to CNN, Porter resigned.”  (pgs. 8-9)

3. “In the high irony department, Jared Kushner, when he was in law school, and before he met Ivanka, identified, in a paper he wrote, possible claims of fraud against the Trump Organization in a particular real estate deal he was studying–a subject now of quite some amusement among his acquaintances at the time.” (pg. 13)

4. “…if [Jeffrey} Epstein knew some of Trump’s secrets, Trump knew some of Epstein’s.  Trump often saw the financier at Epstein’s current Palm Beach house, and Trump knew that Epstein was visited almost every day, and had been for many years, by girls he’d hired to give him massages that often had happy endings–girls recruited from local restaurants, strip clubs, and, also Trump’s own Mar-a-Lago.” (pg. 14)

5. “That Friday morning, he came down from the residence into the Oval Office in a full-on rage so violent that, for a moment, his hair came undone.  To the shock of the people with him, there stood an almost entirely bald Donald Trump.” (from Chapter Two – The Do-Over, pg. 28)

6. “…what he could not get enough of was Stormy Daniels’s new lawyer, Michael Avenatti.  The man was a killer.  As important, he was terrific on television.  Avenatti looked the part; he looked like he could play a lawyer on television.  This was the kind of lawyer he wanted.

‘He’s a star,’ Trump said.  That’s what he needed if he was going to face this kind of pressure and these kinds of attacks.  ‘Get me a star.'” (from Chapter Three – Lawyers, pg. 46)

7. “…Dershowitz was among the most brilliant and successful television lawyers in the country–and Trump, most of all, wanted someone who could play a lawyer on television.  Acting, in his view, was the greater and more important legal skill.

[snip]

…Dershowitz was invited to dinner at the White House to discuss representing the president.  He was just the kind of lawyer the president thought he needed: an aggressive advocate who could argue his case on television.

Over dinner, Dershowitz asked for a retainer of a million dollars.

Trump, ever believing that part of the legal game was not paying your lawyers, told Dershowitz he would get back to him.  But the conversation was over.  Never in a million years would he pay a lawyer a million bucks up front!” (pg. 47)

8. “Trump had never warmed to his vice president–indeed, Mike Pence had annoyed him from the first weeks of his administration…Trump demanded subservience, but when he got it he was suspicious of the person providing it.  The more Pence bowed, the more Trump tried to figure out his angle.

‘Why does he look at me like that?’ Trump asked about the way Pence seemed to stare at him near beatifically.  ‘He’s a religious nut,’ Trump concluded. ‘…they say he was the stupidest man in Congress.’

[snip]

Early in the administration, an article in Rolling Stone had quoted Pence referring to his wife as ‘Mother.’  The moniker stuck.  Since then, Mrs. [Karen] Pence has been known throughout the West Wing as Mother, and not with affection.  She was seen as the power behind the vice presidential throne–the canny, indefatigable, iron-willed strategist who propped up her hapless husband.

‘She really gives me the creeps,’ said Trump, who avoided Mrs. Pence.”

(from Chapter Four – Home Alone, pgs. 52-53)

9. “[Ronny] Jackson was a popular get-along figure, not least because he was casual about prescribing medication.  He kept the president stocked with Provigil, an upper, which Trump’s New York doctor has long prescribed for him.  For others, Jackson was regarded as a particularly easy Ambien touch.  He got along especially well with the men–an ‘old-fashioned sort of drinker,’ in one description.  He got along much less well with the women, accruing several complaints.” (pg.54)

10. “In the first week of [The Apprentice’s first season] production, [sound engineer Erik] Whitestone was assigned the job of putting the microphone up Trump’s shirt.  Given the physical proximity this task required–you had to reach under the jacket and shirt–everyone else on the production team had resisted it.  Trump, with his size, height, and glowering demeanor, was not only off-putting; for no clear reason, he would unzip his pants and pull them down part-way, exposing tighty-whities…

Not long after the show’s production got under way, Whitestone, now on permanent Trump-mic duty, took a day off and someone else, an African American sound technician, was given the assignment.  Trump flipped out.

A frantic Burnett found Whitestone at home.  Trump had barricaded himself in the bathroom.  ‘Donald won’t go on until you get here,’ said [Apprentice creator Mark] Burnett.  ‘So get here immediately!’

An hour later, Whitestone came rushing in to find Trump screaming from behind the bathroom door.  ‘Erik, what the fuck, they tried to fuck me up…They put dirty fingerprints on my collars, they tried to fuck up my tie.’

…every single morning of the shooting season, for the next fourteen years, Whitestone would show up at Trump’s apartment…” (from Chapter Six – Michael Cohen, pg. 80)

11. “‘He kept saying how much he wished he’d never given Don Jr. his name and wished he could take it back,’ recalled Whitestone.” (pg. 81)

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Wednesday, September 25, 2019
2:10 a.m.

The Disaster Artist (2017)

Is Tommy Wiseau a manipulative asshole?  The Disaster Artist sure seems to think so.

The mysterious creator of The Room, one of the worst films of the last decade, has been such an impenetrable enigma in real life, we still don’t know how old he is, where he’s really from or how he was able to sink millions into his memorably awful production without filing for bankruptcy.  What we do know, or at least what this film persuasively argues, is that he’s not a people person but rather a raging narcissist.

As played by James Franco in The Disaster Artist, he remains an elusive figure, a long-haired Svengali to a young aspiring actor who looks up to him not because he’s gifted but because he’s absolutely fearless.  They’re drawn to each other because no one else believes in them.

That aspiring young actor is Greg Sestero (Dave Franco) who sees in Tommy something he doesn’t recognize in himself, an ability to project raw emotion in front of complete strangers.  After befriending each other in 1998 following an acting class run by a very good Melanie Griffith, the two men become inseparable.  When Greg talks about his love for James Dean and how he’s always wanted to visit the crash site where he died, Tommy suggests they take the 300-mile journey right then and there.

Soon, they talk about becoming stars themselves and eagerly drive from San Francisco to Los Angeles.  Greg is amazed that his mentor already has an apartment there that he barely lives in.  Less amazed is his appalled mother (Megan Mullally) who reminds him that his modelling money will only last him 2 weeks.

Greg immediately acquires an agent (Sharon Stone in a forgettable cameo) and a cute girlfriend (adorable Alison Brie in a bit of a thankless role; give her something funny to say, for God’s sake) who he meets at a local club while she’s tending the bar.  He doesn’t manage to land any roles despite getting auditions but he’s making a bit more progress than Tommy (his own tryouts aren’t going much better) who is already growing resentful.  Tommy’s also depressed about all the rejection he’s facing.

There’s a scene where Tommy approaches the real Judd Apatow in a restaurant and interrupts his panning of The Phantom Menace to his dinner companion to pitch himself.  Apatow declares he’ll never make it no matter how long and hard he tries.  He delivers a really funny line to end the scene.  Pro-tip: he’s not a Shakespeare guy.

Crushed, Greg reminds Tommy of their pact they made at the Dean site.  And he also makes a fateful suggestion.

Nearly a year later, Tommy plops down the first draft of The Room on another restaurant table right in front of his young friend demanding he read it right there in one sitting.  When he’s done, Greg accepts the role of Mark, the deceptive best friend of the lead character.

Neither man is fully aware of what they’re about to embark on.  But those who have seen The Room already know.  Nobody can’t stop the plane crash that’s coming.

What follows is a series of snippets into the production of the film, only some of which are really funny, unfortunately.  Clearly, the best sequence is the frustrating shooting of the famous “Oh, hi Mark!” scene set on a rooftop that doesn’t exist (like the real film, this is all done through a questionable chroma key effect).

Despite writing his own lines, Tommy can’t remember them as he opens that door.  Hearing Seth Rogan, in one of his best performances, who plays the script supervisor and ends up directing a lot of The Room himself, repeat his short monologue again and again after a blown take is gold.  There are so many blown takes that even the off-camera cast and crew can recite his own brief speech from memory which is even funnier.  It’s only a belated suggestion from Greg that finally ends that particular torture.

As the cast and crew quickly realize they’re trapped in an illogical turkey they can’t escape (except for the fortunate ones who get fired midway through), they enter survivor mode hoping the shoot, which ends up going almost 20 days longer than planned, doesn’t destroy them.  (They also hope the film is never seen.)

All the while, James Franco’s Tommy is a unrepentant dick, showing up to the cheap-ass set hours later than scheduled, hiring a guy to secretly record the crew members badmouthing his lack of talent in order to expose them, refusing to have the air conditioning on during hot days, not allowing actors drinking water, forbidding anyone from using his private, makeshift bathroom (which is only protected by a curtain and not even obeyed), and insulting the physical appearance of his attractive co-star Juliette (Ari Graynor).  It’s hard to sympathize with an earnest hack when he goes out of his way to alienate everyone around him.  He’s always aware of what he’s doing.  (Hey, it worked for Kubrick and Hitchcock.  But they also had talent.)

Even Greg isn’t spared.  In a scene that feels like an invention for the film (The Disaster Artist is based on the real Greg Sestero’s award-winning memoir), the young man, who by this point has grown a not so spectacular beard, manages to snag a guest spot on Malcolm In The Middle, thanks to an unlikely, spontaneous offer by the real Bryan Cranston.  (The girlfriend works out with him.)

Unfortunately, Mark is scripted to show up inexplicably clean shaven in the latter stages of the movie.  But Cranston wants him to keep the beard because he’ll be playing a lumberjack.  An aggravated Tommy forces his only friend to make a difficult choice instead of being reasonably accommodating.  Not sure I would’ve made the same decision.

I really wanted to like The Disaster Artist.  It reminds me of the superior Ed Wood which remains Tim Burton’s greatest achievement.  But it’s not consistently funny and I didn’t care for James Franco’s performance.  (He was rightly snubbed for a Best Actor Oscar nomination which many thought he would receive.)  The real Tommy Wiseau has a very distinctive accent but he speaks fluent English, no broken, off-beat patois.  Franco sounds like a stoned, less polished Balki from Perfect Strangers.

Franco’s a good looking guy but the subtle make-up doesn’t ugly him up enough, quite frankly.  He still looks like Franco, only now in rock star mode.  And then there’s the fact that we really don’t like his version of Tommy.  With the exception of that brilliantly recreated photo of the real Wiseau’s vampire face on The Room billboard and a quip to the ageless Mullally during their only encounter, he’s just not funny at all.  (The real Wiseau’s abysmal acting in The Room is far more amusing.)  He’s certainly not charming enough to put up with for very long.  He’s too exasperating and mean.

The man is so selfish that when he manages to put together a premiere screening for The Room, he invites Greg without also apologizing to him for fucking up his career.  He won’t even see him act on stage in a small-time LA production of Death Of A Salesman, even though he’s waiting for him outside the auditorium.  Aware that Greg is resentful (Tommy’s antics also cost him an important relationship), Tommy only convinces him to go by saying he should attend for himself, not for his buddy.

Unlike Ed Wood’s touching, heartfelt relationship with a dying, desperate Bela Lugosi in the Burton film, Greg and Tommy’s often awkward partnership (which, incredibly, still endures in the real world today) feels mighty forced and unconvincing.  Wood greatly respected the Dracula star for all he accomplished in the horror genre while Lugosi was relieved that he could still be remembered in his dying days with great fondness despite doing a precipitous header into the ocean of addiction.

What exactly does Greg get out of associating with the talentless Tommy, a man easily offended by even the softest inquisition and threatened by even the smallest amount of professional and personal success his only friend achieves?  How about a control freak with a Trumpian sense of revisionism.

Speaking of rewriting history, at the recreated premiere, the packed audience is at first completely dumbfounded by the opening scenes of The Room, then the laughter starts.  As it builds and builds, especially from the cast and crew who lived through it all, an embarrassed, teary-eyed Tommy bolts from the theatre only to be talked into going back by Greg, who once again is placed in the role of reassuring comforter.  He’s The Tommy Whisperer.

When the movie ends and there’s both a standing ovation & an enthusiastic chant for its writer/director/star (really?), Tommy climbs back on stage and in front of a blinding spotlight, makes a bold declaration no one accepts.

Costanza was wrong.  It’s still a lie whether you believe it or not.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Sunday, September 22, 2019
3:52 a.m.

The Room (2003)

If Chandler Bing was a real person, I can only imagine one reaction he would have to The Room:

“Oh.  My.  God.”

Every once in a while, there is a film with sincere intentions, a film that wants to be taken seriously, a film that hopes to be loved.  But because it is made by someone who has no idea what they’re doing, the result isn’t compelling drama, but an unintentional comedy.

Tommy Wiseau cannot act.  Tommy Wiseau cannot write.  Tommy Wiseau cannot produce.  Tommy Wiseau cannot direct.

But to be fair, he has really bitchin’ hair.

In The Room, his critically unacclaimed disasterpiece, he plays Johnny, a supremely generous banker engaged to Lisa (Juliette Danielle).  She looks like she’s still in college.  He looks like a brutally beaten Lars Ulrich.

They’ve been together for either five or seven years, depending on who you ask.  They’re supposed to be married in a month but blabbermouth Lisa can’t stop telling her nihilistic, busybody mom (Carolyn Minnott) and her incredulous, inconsistently supportive friend Michelle (Robyn Paris) that she doesn’t love him and is merely tolerating him at this point.

Then why the enthusiasm for him in not one but two remarkably unarousing sex scenes?  Honestly, she’s not that good an actor.  At no time during these specific sequences does she make it clear to the audience that she’s just going through the motions.

Let’s talk about those scenes for a moment.  They’re like bad soft porn accompanied by the obligatory R&B soundtrack which has to compete with excessive moaning and groaning.  At one point because of how awkward he’s positioned, Tommy Wiseau looks like he’s not aiming correctly.  That sure looks like a weak-ass titty fuck to me.

Why is Lisa not feeling him anymore?  She prefers his hunkier best friend Mark (Greg Sestero), who looks like he walked off the set of The Bold And The Beautiful.  But he’s conflicted about their affair.  Well, not that conflicted, really.  All Lisa has to do is indicate it’s go time and they have their own set of sizzle-free fornicating with their own R&B soundtrack punctuated by their own excessive moaning and groaning.

The Room clearly doesn’t have enough plot so it generates temporary, meaningless throwaways to fill out the running time.  Early on, we meet Denny (Philip Haldiman), the couple’s creepy neighbour who literally walks in during their pre-coital pillow fight hoping to watch the real action.  He later confesses his love for Lisa to Johnny but the man doesn’t care probably because he knows nothing’s going to happen between them.

Later on, Denny is confronted by a pistol-wielding drug dealer demanding an overdue payment.  Why is this happening on a roof and not in the streets?  (Two words: chroma key.)  Nothing happens because Johnny and Mark save the day.  That leads to a very annoying conversation between Denny and Lisa & her mother who fail repeatedly to get the full story out of him.  If Johnny is footing the bill for him, why exactly does he need to sell drugs?

Lisa’s mom, who likes Johnny for the most part, doesn’t understand Lisa’s reluctance to go through with the marriage.  A bitter old hag who may or may not be dying of breast cancer (which is casually mentioned and then conveniently ignored for the rest of the movie), she insists the financial stability Johnny represents should be paramount (even though he was just denied a promised promotion).  To hell with her feelings.  Oh, and don’t get her started on that jerk Harold!

As The Room further delays Johnny’s inevitable discovery of Lisa and Mark’s heatless canoodling, out comes the football.  Let’s play football in a very cramped part of the building.  Let’s throw the football around in a nearby park.  Hey, I know, let’s put our tuxes on and throw the football around outside for absolutely no reason.

Johnny eventually overhears Lisa confess her indiscretion without mentioning Mark’s name and decides to surreptitiously record all her future phone calls, only one of which we actually hear on tape.  This turns out to be completely unnecessary.

At a surprise birthday party organized by Lisa (who in one scene wonders out loud why she is even doing this), she can’t keep her hands off Mark, and Johnny has not one but two physical confrontations with him.  There is no tension.  But there is much amusement.

As the party attendees keep being directed elsewhere (hey everybody, let’s all go on the roof; hey everybody, let’s go back in the house; hey everybody, let’s go outside and get some fresh air), we learn that Lisa is pretending to be pregnant which of course an oblivious Johnny cheerfully announces to everyone.  For someone so eager to bolt, why does she keep making up reasons to stay?

When the big blowout with Lisa finally happens, it feels more like an excuse for Tommy Wiseau to break and smash all of his low-budget props in one scene, than a defining moment.  And to make odd noises while he dry humps the abandoned red dress he buys for her in the opener.  Thoroughly defeated, he does something my old college professor warned us about in TV Broadcasting class.  Let’s just say he wasn’t a big fan of self-harm endings.

A stupendous flop during its brief release in 2003, The Room has since become an ironic, highly profitable cult film, not unlike Showgirls (which at least had good supporting performances and conveyed an appropriately sleazy, cut-throat Vegas atmosphere).  Not one to lose face, the shameless Wiseau (who makes Van Damme sound like Olivier) now claims he never made a drama at all, but rather a black comedy.

You don’t get laughs like that through meticulous planning.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Saturday, September 21, 2019
4:10 a.m.

Ma (2019)

Be nice to Black girls.  They never forget.

Some of the white kids who humiliated young Sue Ann at her high school more than 30 years ago are about to learn this lesson the hard way.  And so are their own teenage sons and daughters.

Sue Ann is played as an adult by the Oscar winner Octavia Spencer.  It is a character with a few too many parallels with Annie Wilkes (played by another Oscar winner Kathy Bates).  While the Misery villain worked in a hospital in a previous life, Sue Ann assists the no-nonsense Alison Janney (in a very good, unbilled performance) at a veterinary clinic where she has access to knockout drugs.  While Annie was obsessed and infuriated with her favourite novelist, Sue Ann has never gotten over Ben (Luke Evans) and the cruel prank he and his friends played on her in high school.  Despite her long simmering fury, she remains deeply in love with him.

Also like Annie, Sue Ann lives an isolated life out in the woods away from civilization after a failed marriage.  The only lingering evidence of such a union is her own teenage daughter Genie (Tanyell Waivers) who she routinely abuses and often keeps home from school for no reason.  There’s clearly nothing wrong with Genie (she doesn’t need that electric scooter).  You wonder if Sue Ann herself has Munchausen by proxy disease.

I remember seeing Juliette Lewis as a rebellious teenager in the excellent Martin Scorsese remake of Cape Fear.  Now in Ma (in which she delivers an affable performance), she has one of her own.  A recent divorcee from California now back in Ohio, her home state, Lewis takes a job at the local casino while her impressionable daughter Diana Silvers is befriended by a group of bad influences, all wannabe burnouts who do nothing but drink and get high on weed because apparently there’s nothing else to do here.  They’re too young to gamble and too stupid in general.

Early on, they try to get any random adult to buy them booze (they’re all 16).  This is where they meet Sue Ann for the first time.  At first, she declines to help them out.  But then she notices the van they’ve been riding around in.  Now she’s super friendly and helpful.  Red flag number one.

True to her word, she delivers most of what they ordered (she has to make a substitute for a drink not found on the shelf).  As they start drowning their boredom at an abandoned ruin, Sue Ann rats them out which goes curiously unnoticed.  (Fortunately an arriving cop doesn’t bust them.)  She also creeps on their Facebook profiles.

Shortly thereafter, she invites them to down more hooch in her basement.  Red flag number two.  Despite some initial hesitation among the crew, the kids follow her inside.  There’s a bizarre moment when she suddenly points a gun at one of the boys and then orders him to strip nude.  Then, she laughs and falsely claims the gun doesn’t even work.  Red flag number three.

Now at this point, you would think the kids would cut off all contact.  (Honestly, it should never have gotten this far.)  But nope, not only do they return again and again, even more teenagers show up.  Sue Ann is given the nickname of Ma and starts getting a little too clingy.  She’s already eye fucking Silvers’ new boyfriend.  She loves his Instagram.

It takes way too long for Silvers and her gullible friends to finally pull back.  One girl makes the fatal mistake of posting a harsh video that repeatedly denounces Sue Ann which of course she sees.  She gets so pissed off over it she hastily leaves in the middle of her pedicure.

Movies like Ma depend greatly on smart casting.  I hate to say this but Spencer is completely wrong for the role of Sue Ann.  There’s this brilliant little thing that Kathy Bates did as Annie Wilkes in Misery where she slightly tweaked her line readings at times and subtly adjusted her facial expressions accordingly to reveal a deep psychotic malevolence beneath her overly cheerful, nurturing facade.  It was what made that character so disturbing and creepy.  You didn’t always know what would set her off.  No matter what, she was always in control.

Spencer, still nursing a serious grudge over that high school prank, can’t quite achieve the same effect.  Her presence is never as unsettling as it should be.  When she suddenly pops into a scene to freak out our young protagonists, there’s not even a jolt from such a hacky, overused technique.  There’s no ingenuity with the little horror depicted here, much of it relegated to its final half hour.

Desperate to keep the kids in her life, she calls them to meet at their former favourite gathering place (she works around the phone ban by getting a new number), the aforementioned abandoned ruin, and proclaims with crocodile tears that she’s got cancer.  One of the girls notices she’s a thief.  For her part, Silvers ultimately and correctly comes to the conclusion that this is yet another ruse to keep her retro basement rages going.

Unlike Annie Wilkes who was depicted as pure evil (she got fired from her nursing job because a number of patients died on her watch), Sue Ann is seen more sympathetically, albeit up to a point.  It seems pretty obvious that the real reason she was ostracized in high school is because she’s Black.  It feels like an act of cowardice to not follow through on that point.  All of her tormentors are white.

Honestly, with a different actor as the heel, more pointed writing and some actual surprises, maybe this revenge story wouldn’t seem so generic and unpersuasive.  It’s certainly missing an atmosphere.

When we reach the final act, Sue Ann suddenly turns homicidal (don’t go jogging when you see her driving) and at times, the movie starts getting really silly.  I mean, are we really serious about that impromptu photo session?  As the villain continues to deteriorate and lose all sense of reason, so does the movie.  (That is not a satisfying ending.  The alternate finish, included as a bonus feature on the DVD and Blu-ray, is even worse.  Snippets of it appear in the original trailer.)  Ma’s three central storylines are in constant conflict with each other and as a result, we neither hate nor like Sue Ann.  We’re more confused about the contradictions in her fractured personality.  The complications kill her heel heat.

Early on, Diana Silvers (a cute, talented actor who’s having a remarkable 2019 despite only being in the business a couple of years; she’s also in Glass and Booksmart) befriends Genie at school not knowing who her mother is.  Her act of kindness is the smartest decision she makes.  For the sake of our survival in future horror movies, all white characters should follow her lead.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Monday, September 16, 2019
4:09 a.m.

Brightburn

We’ve all done it.  We’ve all gotten mad at our parents for not letting us get our way.  Our solution was to pout and scream and pound the floor like it owed us money.  It rarely worked in our favours, though.   In Brightburn, Brandon Breyer’s method is to get brutally violent.  Now he gets results.

Conceived as a horror version of the Superman origin story, Brightburn begins with a couple trying and failing to make a baby of their own and ends with them belatedly regretting adopting a demon child from space.

For you see, Brandon arrives in a sphere-like spaceship which crashes on the couple’s farm.  The wife, Elizabeth Banks, stops riding her husband, David Denman, just seconds before their future nightmare loudly arrives.  (She’s a painter, he runs the farm.)

After a quick montage of the happy family raising their adopted son in brief home movies, we move ahead to just before Brandon’s twelfth birthday.  He’s an excellent student which makes him a target for bullies.  But the cute girl in his class likes him.  She’ll regret that crush.

Shortly thereafter, the hidden spaceship calls out to Brandon in an indecipherable alien language.  One night, Banks catches him trying to get to it.  His parents locked it away under the barn.  Soon, it won’t stay locked any longer.

Once he correctly translates the message he’s being sent, he turns heel.  Don’t fuck with this kid.  He holds a grudge.

The family takes him to a local eatery for his birthday but it all goes wrong when Brandon’s uncle gives him his first gun.  Denman won’t let him keep it.  Brandon gets so mad he pounds the electricity out of all the video games, albeit temporarily.

Later, Brandon and his parents go camping.  Away from Banks, Denman gives a humourously awkward sex talk.  He unwittingly gives his growing supervillain son terrible advice he’ll take to heart.

Brandon’s hot aunt is also his guidance counsellor.  When she insists on being honest with the sheriff’s department because of an incident that happened during gym class, at night he makes an uninvited visit to her house and threatens her.

He hangs around long enough to be spotted by his infuriated uncle, the one who gave him the gun, who drags him out of the house hoping to drive him back home.  Brandon has other ideas.

Let me pause a moment to talk about Brandon’s supervillain costume.  He has the Superman cape which allows him to fly but he also wears a ski mask that looks like it was designed by Man-Thing.  Why is he hiding his identity in the first place and why only some of the time?  A lot of the townsfolk, including his powerless classmates, can’t stand him anyway.  Everyone quickly learns he’s a freak of nature.  He’s the only mutant living on this planet and a not very intimidating one at that.   And for a guy who wants to be anonymous, why leave behind your initials at most of your crime scenes?  Someone has a pretty big pre-teen ego.

Also, once he becomes fully aware of his capabilities, why does he even bother staying with his parents?  If his mission is to indeed “take the world”, why put up with their crap any longer?  There’s a scene where an irate Denman knows he’s lying about where he’s been.  Brandon gets so angry he throws him against the wall.  Then he goes upstairs to take a shower!

The horror scenes are surprisingly gruesome.  One character has to remove a piece of glass from their eye.  Another has their jaw permanently dislocated.  This isn’t a fun movie.

Long before his wife, Denman accepts the kid is uncontrollable.  Something needs to be done.  But Banks, who has always wanted a child of her own, refuses to let anything bad happen to him.  Her stubborn denial makes her incredibly stupid.  (You can adopt harmless earth babies, you know.)  It isn’t until she discovers Brandon’s meticulous drawings of his crimes hidden under his mattress that she finally clues in.  Ironically, she is the only one who knows his weakness.

Brightburn is by no means as horrendous as some overly harsh critics asserted during its modest theatrical run back in the spring.  But I agree that it disappointingly squanders its full potential as a true blood anti-hero horror film.  I liked David Denman as the dad but the kid, Jackson A. Dunn, just isn’t creepy enough.  However, he kind of resembles the teenage Damian from the laughable Omen II.

Elizabeth Banks is given the thankless task of being the dopey mom, the devoted, overprotective caregiver who deep down knows it was a stupid idea to raise this kid, but her bond won’t let her see reason until it’s too late.  I want to see her in something good again like Catch Me If You Can.

Brightburn isn’t as original a concept as the filmmakers think it is.  We saw a similiar approach in Chronicle, a found footage-style thriller where a teenage kid comes in contact with some unexplained alien material and turns heel himself, exacting revenge on his grumpy father, then on the rest of his town.  I didn’t like that film, either.

Like the villain in the Jeepers Creepers franchise, Brandon is pretty much unstoppable and so we have no real reason to care about the outcome.  If the creators of Brightburn believe they have a franchise of their own here, they’re the only ones.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Monday, September 16, 2019
3:18 a.m.

Dead Silence (2007)

Just how bad is Dead Silence?  Even its screenwriter hates it.

Leigh Whannell, the Australian scribe who wrote Saw and Insidious, documented his frustration with the production on his own website.  In an essay appropriately titled Dud Silence, he explains that his original screenplay was rewritten by an uncredited script doctor and that’s why the film turned out so badly.

Yeah, that’s the reason.

A young man drives to a Chinese takeout place on a rainy night and when he comes back to the apartment he shares with his wife, she’s dead.  Moments before he leaves, the couple receives a bizarre package, an old, odd ventriloquist dummy named Billy.

The audience knows what just happened.  But a teary-eyed Billy is in shock and like wrongly skeptical police detective Donnie Wahlberg (we could do without all that smugness), he wants answers.  Now.

Jamie, now a widow, returns home for the first time in years.  His dad, the awesome Bob Gunton (the nasty warden from The Shawshank Redemption), has remarried again.  Wife number three is hotsy totsy Amber Valletta (The Transporter 2).  There’s something…off about them, though.  Gunton looks like shit, almost ghostly.  Why is this babe with him?

Jamie has bad memories living in this huge mansion.  His dad is suddenly…nice towards him.  He’s not buying it.  Jamie’s here to be reminded of a poem.  It’s about this infamous ventriloquist, Mary Shaw.  She died under mysterious circumstances decades ago.

Childless through her entire life, she considered her dolls her babies, all 101 of them.  They’re all buried with her in separate, child-size coffins in the same cemetery.  After her death, we later learn she herself was transformed into a doll.  Kooky broad.

Billy was one of her treasured companions.  Who sent him to Jamie and his wife?

Not getting much help from dear old daddo, Jamie turns to the local coroner who is so spooked about Mary Shaw he won’t even say her name at full volume outside.  His own wife has totally lost it.  She natters to herself constantly and thinks that dead crow she tries to feed is still alive.

But of course, she only seems completely out of it.  She speaks to Shaw’s spirit.  She urges Jamie to bury the doll.  So he does.  But Wahlberg, the dumb bastard, digs the fucking thing up.  He’s smart enough to know it’s evidence in Jamie’s wife’s murder.  But not so swift at intuiting that he now possesses her actual killer.

Once we know the whole story, we understand Mary Shaw’s rage.  The coroner tells Jamie about a kid who made the mistake of heckling the ventriloquist during a show in the local theatre.  He later ends up missing and is never found until the finale.  Jamie also learns something terrible about his dad.  And he finally discovers why his wife was murdered.

Up to this point, Dead Silence is seriously lacking in sufficient chills (despite the plethora of weird looking dolls) but it’s not terrible.  While Jamie is a bland hero, there’s at least some good character performances.  Any movie that includes Bob Gunton in the cast is not a complete waste.  (He was also good in a smaller role in The Lincoln Lawyer which I recommend.)

But what is up with that ending?  Are you fucking kidding me?  I’m aware this is a supernatural thriller and that affords you a lot more creative freedom than stories grounded in reality, but this is not believable, not at all.  I thought it was a joke.

There’s another thing that bugged me about Mary Shaw, this business with the tongues.  Her gimmick is to rip them out of her victims’ mouths and collect them so she can speak using their actual voices.  But as anybody with a brain knows, you also can’t talk without a voice box.  So, why doesn’t she rip those out, too?

The only possessed doll movie I’ve ever really liked is the original Child’s Play and that came out over 30 years ago.  It knew what it was doing.  Dead Silence is like a dying fish flapping around on dry land.  No wonder Leigh Whannell wants to bury it.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Monday, September 16, 2019
2:42 a.m.

Isn’t It Romantic (2019)

Isn’t It Romantic is the story of a woman who happens to be big but also happens to be attractive.  She lives in a world that sees the former but denies the latter.  She is also a human doormat who’s given no respect for her authority at work.

Then, one day, while on the subway, she thinks a stranger is interested in her.  She is mistaken.  He’s a mugger.  But she’s a fighter and he doesn’t succeed.  Despite being triumphant, she knocks herself out by running unintentionally into a pole.

When she awakens, a handsome doctor appears to be flirting with her at the hospital and she is confused.  When she’s discharged, other men, some she knows, some she doesn’t, treat her the same way.  Something’s wrong.  Why isn’t she being ignored or treated like a servant?

When she goes back to her apartment, it’s no longer “shitty”.  Even her little poodle is warmer to her.  He’s now obedient.

After a short while, the woman, played by Australian comic Rebel Wilson, comes to one unmistakable conclusion:  she’s “trapped” in a PG-13 romantic comedy.  How does she automatically know the MPAA rating?  She can’t say “fuck” or “fucking” or “motherfucker” without being loudly censored.  And there’s no sex, much to her disappointment.

But the truth is she’s not in a movie within a movie.  She’s dreaming.  And this isn’t an original premise.

I recently rescreened the 1991 comedy Delirious to give it a second chance.  (I thought it was average when I was a teenager.  Now it’s awful.)  In the film, John Candy plays a soap opera writer who also knocks himself out by accident and seemingly wakes up as a character in his own show.  But like Wilson, he too is in fantasyland.

In Delirious, Candy is deeply smitten with the diva of his show, Emma Samms, who can’t quite quit her ex-husband co-star.  But the woman he should be involved with is Muriel Hemingway, the aspiring actress hoping to land a role on his production.

In Isn’t It Romantic, Wilson is stunned to hear an Australian accent coming out of the mouth of Liam Hemsworth, who has an American one when she encounters him at her architecture firm.  In the real world, he doesn’t see her as an equal.  (He’s the presumptuous son of an important client.)  But in her own comatose fantasy, he can’t stop calling her “beguiling”.

However, the movie clearly wants her paired with Adam Devine (her love interest from the obnoxious Pitch Perfect franchise).  They’ve been friends forever and he’s been trying to date her for just as long.  She has such low self-esteem that when she catches him looking in her direction, she thinks he’s really eyeing an outside billboard that prominently features Priyanka Chopra.

Naturally, while in her romantic comedy fantasy, there’s a scene where she’s walking with Devine and he spots Chopra choking at an outdoor cafe.  After rushing over to successfully perform the Heimlich, Chopra is not only appreciative but interested.  (She ultimately gives him the unfortunate nickname, “Mush”, because he’s soft.  He doesn’t care.)  Wilson suddenly feels incredibly jealous.  So she starts seeing the persistent Hemsworth who, of course, like Emma Samms in Delirious, is too good to be true.

In the opening scene, we learn that Wilson loved Pretty Woman as a kid.  But her bitter mother Jennifer Saunders soured her on not only romantic comedies in general but the very idea of finding love with a man altogether.

As an adult, she gets into a rant with her RC-obsessed assistant (who watches them all day long on her computer instead of working for the parking garage architect) about the genre’s numerous, maddening cliches.  Wilson has a curious encyclopedic knowledge for a cynic.  How disappointing that all of her witless observations have been made numerous times before.

And that is the biggest problem with Isn’t It Romantic.  It doesn’t take us anywhere new.  As many critics have already pointed out, it doesn’t really hate romantic comedies at all.  Its idea of satire is to shamelessly admit it’s a blatant rip-off.

Consider Wilson’s neighbour.  In her real life, she wrongly assumes he’s a ladies man.  But in her fantasy, he’s the obligatory, swishy gay best friend who magically shows up whenever she’s in a pickle which is far too often.  He’s not funny at all.

There’s actually only one laugh in the movie, a quick little sight gag, and it’s not even that particularly inspired, a quality sorely lacking throughout the entire movie.  (Not even the two musical numbers, both so-so covers of late 80s pop hits, can enliven the proceedings.)

Over time, not realizing she’s only imagining all of this, Wilson first believes she needs to find true love in order to return to her sad, lonely real-life existence, a belief that is completely abandoned during another standard romantic comedy set piece.  (Muriel’s Wedding already covered this ground in a much more satisfying manner without copping out.)  When she eventually wakes up from her fever dream, though, she will just as quickly revert back to her original assertion, defeating the purpose of feeling empowered, unless you consider her now jerky behaviour towards her work underlings in the real world “feminist”.

The power of the genre is apparently so undeniable that Isn’t It Romantic can’t even stick with its feeble satirical tone.  In the final act, it reduces itself to a puddle of sentimentality, a shift it hasn’t earned any right to pursue.  And that too is a standard feature of these types of films.  They ultimately take their often unpersuasive romances too seriously.

I’ve never really warmed to Rebel Wilson or Adam Devine in their numerous on-screen appearances (they often grate with their constant mugging and overbearing characterizations), but I must say here they deliver their least annoying performances to date, which admittedly is not saying much but is still preferable.  They were far more unbearable in the Pitch Perfect movies.  If only they were given stellar material here.

But Wilson does look fabulous in the Julia Roberts Pretty Woman dress and especially when she returns to work with a new confidence.  If only we cared about the character in that dress.  And if only she realized what the audience knows from the very beginning.  Like Amy Schumer in the equally terrible I Feel Pretty, she shouldn’t need to bang her head to accept herself.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Thursday, September 12, 2019
11:03 p.m.