TRUMP GOT YOU DOWN? WATCH THESE MOVIES
The new president inspires some serious reappraisals of films’ themes and plots
The Internet is having a field day drawing comparisons between the U.S. president and villains from Batman and Harry Potter movies. Mark Hamill has been reading the president’s tweets in Joker voice while the search for Trump’s horcruxes is still raging.
Talking about Trump through the movie prism isn’t just being used for laughs. The new president has also inspired some serious reappraisals in film.
A recent ad in the Los Angeles Times alludes to Donald Trump’s travel ban as a reason the Weinstein Company’s Oscar contender, Lion, is so relevant. The film is about an adopted Australian man who goes searching for his birth family in India. The boldfaced marketing move, describing the challenge to get child star Sunny Pawar a visa, rebrands the movie for the current political climate, recognizing that Oscar voters and audiences are likely looking at the movies to help digest what’s going on.
Moonlight is also being reconsidered in awards conversations. The film’s empathy for the marginalized (it’s about a gay, black man) has become an argument for why voters may pick it over the detached fairy tale in presumed Best Picture frontrunner La La Land. Meanwhile, an article in Vulture considers Alfonso Cuarón’s dystopian take on Bush-era border control, Children of Men, as the most relevant movie of 2016, a decade after its release.
The president also got me looking back at old titles with fresh eyes, recent headlines lending new dimensions to films that were already great to begin with. The movies below are my picks for necessary viewing in the Trump Era.
Inherent Vice
In Paul Thomas Anderson’s hypnotic and towering detective tale, an adaptation of the Thomas Pynchon novel, Eric Roberts plays sleaze-ball real estate developer Mickey Wolfmann. He has a reputation for treating women like property, uprooting black communities and associating with a biker gang called the Aryan Brotherhood. Go ahead and call him a doppelganger for Donald Trump, but Inherent Vice’s connection to the current moment runs deeper than that.
No other film captures our disillusionment, watching the Obama era grind to a halt at Trump’s red carpet, as Anderson’s prophetic yarn about the dying days of the counterculture.
Joaquin Phoenix sports Neil Young mutton chops and looks ever-hazy as private eye Doc Sportello. He stumbles down a Marlowe-esque rabbit hole, trying to solve a missing-persons case involving Mickey Wolfmann and Doc’s ex-girlfriend Shasta Fey Hepworth (Katherine Waterston).
The mystery may be a wild-goose chase, but the story is in the details. Doc bounces around between dazed hippies, the iron-fisted LAPD, black militants who’ve lost their fight and freshly repurposed Nazis. All the while he’s witness to how fear and paranoia — over Charles Manson among other things — provokes everyone to collude with a nefarious entity called the Golden Fang. That tentacled-outfit is by turns a drug cartel, a tax shelter for dentists, an anti-subversive coalition and the Nixon administration.
The Golden Fang is really an allconsuming metaphor for “the man”: the powers that be, gobbling up a splintered and vulnerable society that allows its consciousness and idealism to be co-opted by capitalist interests. In Inherent Vice’s kaleidoscopic view, that’s the collective tragedy.
The film divided critics upon its release over two years ago, some having difficulty grooving to its dizzying tempo. To be fair, Anderson packs the film with so much rich detail and competing hues, balancing the slapstick and tragic within a single frame, that a second viewing is absolutely necessary.
Scenes in Inherent Vice are at once hilarious, frightening and heartbreak- ing; an emotional maelstrom you’re probably familiar with after reading a tweet from Donald Trump.
Medium Cool
The late Haskell Wexler’s explosive and critical look at the media during 1968’s social unrest is the perfect antidote to every “Fake News” tweet from Donald Trump.
Wexler mixes fiction with docu- mentary footage (you often can’t tell them apart) while following a jaded reporter played by Robert Forster who questions his own role in manipulating people and stories. The bitter conversations Forster’s John Cassellis has in the film are sadly still discussed today: black representation, a crumbling school system and access to guns. The action culminates at the Democratic party’s convention. Wexler follows his characters into the actual Chicago riots, which looks like a scene from yesterday’s news.
At the time, the film was about the fight for media attention. Today, the film might be about the media’s fight to exist.
Taxi
Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi rolls around Tehran in Taxi, having humorous, heartfelt, philosophical and often bitter conversations with his passengers about life under an oppressive regime. The film is a window into the community that Trump has vilified with his travel ban; a chance to see the humanity affected by inhuman policy-making.
Panahi himself is living under a 20-year ban from filmmaking for being critical of his government. That’s why Taxi is clandestinely shot entirely by dashcam within the private space of a vehicle. There’s movement but he’s still trapped.
Americans should probably get used to that feeling.
Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb
Think about how hastily Trump issued his travel ban, without consulting Homeland Security or the Department of Justice, creating confusion nationwide. The premature strokes from Trump’s pen, and its effect, make the doomsday scenario in Stanley Kubrick’s absurd comedy Dr. Strangelove more plausible than it has ever been.
Have a laugh over the incompetent (and possibly impotent) politicians and generals with their fingers on nukes. And then think about how frightening the world is.