Indie Roundup: ‘Hyde Park on Hudson’

“Hyde Park on Hudson” is a movie that at first blush has all the hallmarks of a prestige awards-friendly movie. It stars a beloved veteran actor — Bill Murray — playing an even more beloved American legend — FDR. It’s set on Roosevelt’s estate in upstate New York, giving the film shades of “Downton Abbey.” And it features the same stuttering monarch from best-picture winner “The King’s Speech.” Yet beneath all that decorousness and good taste, there’s something perverse about this movie. (Note: If you feel that movies about historical events can contain spoilers, give this article a miss.)

‘Hyde Park on the Hudson’ shows FDR’s complicated private life

Franklin Delano Roosevelt may be the subject of the upcoming movie “Hyde Park on Hudson” — starring Bill Murray — but don’t expect to see him signing Social Security into law, addressing the nation after the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, or redrawing Europe with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin at the Yalta conference. Instead, the movie focuses on the remarkably complicated and freewheeling personal life of the 32nd president.

Links (6/6/08)

My regular culling from the internets:

I think we’ve all felt like this sometimes at the office.

Holy crap! The thing people will do for attention. Some guy in China, in commemoration of the Beijing Olympics, stuck 2008 needles in his head.

Werner Herzog is my hero. Check out this bizarre interview he had with Defamer.

Seven gestures that could, just could, get you killed abroad.

Anthony Lane from the New Yorker articulates why I don’t like Sex and the City.

Someone called “The Decapitator” is lopping off the heads of billboard ads and replacing them with bloody stumps. Bloody good work, I say.

Cheap renders of a cool idea for L.A. — The Hollywood Freeway Central Park. Basically, they would cover a stretch of the 101 Hollywood freeway, which is already below grade, with a park.

Top 10 scientists that almost killed themselves for science.[h/t Ted]

And then there’s this trailer for a Korean film called The Good, The Bad, and The Weird.[h/t Joan]

There’s an interesting article about the failed fascist coup against FDR in 1933. I referenced previous here regarding Hitchcock’s WWII era flick Saboteur.

And speaking of that, Behold! Stalin’s crazy attempt at recreating a breed of half-man/half-ape for crude industrial work.

Saboteur (1942)

One of my projects as of late is to watch more Hitchcock movies. Hitchcock has always been, like Ingmar Bergman, one of those filmmakers that I know I need to watch more of but never quite seen to find the time to do so. Sure I’ve seen the major works but it’s those B+ films where you really can learn the tricks of a master. So in recent weeks, I’ve watched The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Wrong Man, Lifeboat, and Frenzy. Yesterday, I watched Saboteur. Like Lifeboat, it was fraught with anxiety about the war and indeed American society itself. In fact, Saboteur started shooting just weeks after Pearl Harbor. A running plea in both movies is for the labor battles and the class warfare of the 1920s and 30s to be put aside so we Americans can defeat the Nazis. (And with all the subsequent post-Reagan triumphalism about the war aside, the anxiety in these movies reminds us that we came really close to losing WWII. If Hitler where just a little less crazy…)

The plot of Saboteur is typical Hitchcock. An good-hearted average Joe named Barry Kane gets fingered as a saboteur in an airplane factory fire. He flees and encounters a variety of salt-of-the-earth type Americas. All of them believe in the common good and the common goodness of humanity to a level that seems impossibly naive these days. The only people who people that acts with the sort of hard-nosed self interest that is fashionable among economists and Ayn Rand enthusiasts everywhere are the bad guys. In particular, one Charles Tobin played with feline malevalence by Otto Kruger (who was weirdly enough was not only the grand nephew of South African revolutionary Paul Kruger but also born in Toledo, Ohio.)

At the obligatory scene in which the bad guy divulges his motivations, Tobin complains the current government (i.e. FDR’s) is not profitable enough. He argues that a dictatorship is much better for business. While watching this, I was reminded of Prescott Bush. Both Tobin and Bush were Wall Street bluebloods who had clear Nazi sympathies and Bush’s name did come up in the congressional investigation into the alleged coup attempt by the monied class against FDR and the New Deal. Fifty years later, Prescott Bush’s idiot grandson has done more to further the goals of Charles Tobin than any other American. He shredded much of the government oversight brought about during the New Deal and pushed America closer than any president in recent memory to a dictatorship. Like the good citizens of the movie, I think that only thing that save us from these criminals is a return to a belief in the common good.

The Garfield Factor: President James A. Garfield on one hand would have probably rejected the New Deal as being against his understanding of the Constitution. On the other hand, being a Civil War veteran and a man with a strong sense of right and wrong, he never would have supported any activity that hinted at treason.

News Rant

Here’s a few news stories/columns that once again illustrates the flagrant wickedness of, as Mike Malloy would say, the Bush crime family. Last year, a German politician got into hot water over comparing Hitler with Bush (to which my response was “Yeah, Hitler is the epitome of earthly evil, but at least he got elected.”) This past week, an article in the Canadian Courier Mail reports that the US is considering turning its bases in Guantanamo Bay into a death camp (link dead) complete with a kangaroo court and an execution chamber.

Meanwhile, Paul Krugman argues that Chimpie McCokespoon and his thugs are radicals bent on destroying the New Deal and social safety net (Social Security, Medicare, etc.) along with it with that obscenely large tax cut that the congress just passed. He writes, “But the people now running America aren’t conservatives: they’re radicals who want to do away with the social and economic system we have, and the fiscal crisis they are concocting may give them the excuse they need.” Yes, that’s right. The country is being sold out from underneath us and the democrats are once again asleep at the switch.

And finally (at least for now), Ted Rall in his weekly (another dead link) writes:

“We warned the Bush Administration that invading Iraq would destabilize the Middle East and spread radical anti-American Islamism. We told the American people that taking out Saddam Hussein without a viable government to replace him would open a vacuum for anarchy, civil war and a power grab by radical Iranian-backed Shiite clerics. Now the antiwar movement’s doomsday scenarios have been fulfilled so completely that military history scarcely mentions a more thoroughly botched endeavor–and we’ll be living with the fallout for years. ”

He then proceeds to paint a very grim picture of the state of the Middle East, where an all but name independent Kurdistan is run by guys that make the Taliban look moderate and who will certainly plunge Turkey (a NATO member, y’know) into a long and bloody civil war. Am I the only one who is waxing poetic for the days when the biggest news stories in the world concerned the president’s genitals?