Crazy Bad Movie

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In a world awash with food, entertainment, travel options, who do you trust for recommendations? There used to be a food critic, a TV or movie reviewer in your daily paper. You might not have agreed with his or her every judgement, but you knew their foibles and biases so knew how many grains of salt to apply to their calls. No longer.

First, what’s a daily newspaper? Second, reviewers and critics twenty, thirty or forty years younger than me have different tastes and often seem unfamiliar with anything earlier in the history of the world than 2000. It makes them likely to overrate the latest flash in the pan. Even worse is the crowdsourced sites that rely on aggregating a bunch of opinions. Rather than Siskel and Ebert giving thumbs up or down, we get an average of the unnamed. This leads to weird results. A poor review of a French restaurant, for instance, because the food hd weird sauces.

Case in point, “Crazy Rich Asians.” Reviews for this adaptation of a best seller have been almost universally rapturous. It has been called a return to the classic rom coms of yesteryear and even a modern version of the screwball comedy. It has achieved a Rotten Tomatoes score of 93, which is probably higher than “Citizen Kane,” and a 74 Metacritic score with only one negative review out of 43. Well, make that two put of 44. I know because I took their advice and have lived to repent.

It first needs to be noted that review averages on Yelp, Trip Advisor or Rotten Tomatoes seem to suffer from grade inflation. The normal distribution of very few As and Fs and a whole lot of Cs doesn’t seem to apply. And, in the case of “Crazy Rich Asians,” another factor may be at work. Many of the reviews seem more interested in political correctness than critical acuity.

It appears to have been obligatory to applaud “Crazy Rich” for being the first big budget, major studio film with an all-Asian cast since “The Joy Luck Club” in 1993. One gushing piece in Vanity Fair by Wesley Yang quotes unnamed New Yorkers saying, “I cried just seeing Asians on the screen.”

Well, I wanted to cry having been encouraged to plunk down hard-earned dollars for “Crazy Rich Asians” when it turned out to be saddled with a plot lacking in suspense, plausibility, serious or comical conflict or cleverness. Add to that a pair of co-stars, Constance Wu and Henry Golding, that are bland individually and without the necessary chemistry as a couple.

The film has Asians, and they are rich, gaudily, repulsively so, but the only crazy is in the supporting characters who overdo the screwball, perhaps to compensate for the vacuum at the film’s heart. The classic screwball comedies had plenty of funny supporting players (Eric Blore, Edward Everett Horton, Eugene Pallette, Walter Connolly, Mischa Auer, Kenneth Mars, Tony Randall, Charles Coburn, Charlie Ruggles) but they also had a role in advancing the plot. Awkwafina, Ken Jeong and Jimmy O. Yang just do shtick while we gaze at Singapore luxury and wait for the plot to stop idling.

To put this film in the same breath with the classics of the genre shows a lack of discrimination that ought to be essential equipment for a critic. I adore the great screwball comedies and this is no “My Man Godfrey,” “Bringing Up Baby,” “The Lady Eve,” “It Happened One Night,” “I Was a Male War Bride,” “Ball of Fire,” “Nothing Sacred,” “His Girl Friday,” or “Twentieth Century.” They raced by in an allegro 77 to 102 minutes. “Crazy Rich Asians” plods tediously for 120 soporific minutes.

Nor is it up to latter day entrants like the best of the Doris Day films, (those with Rock Hudson or James Garner, like “Send Me No Flowers,”) “When Harry Met Sally,” Notting Hill,” “French Kiss, “What’s Up, Doc,” “Moonstruck,” “Born Yesterday” or “Silver Linings Playbook.” The film is undermined not only by the blandness of the leads but by the fact that they lack the dizzy, odd couple, yin and yang, back and forth, love-hate pioneered by the relationship of Kate and Petruchio. Such prickly tension characterizes almost all of the great rom com relationships — Clark and Claudette, Cooper or Fonda with Stanwyck, Lombard with Powell or Barrymore, Cary with Kate or Rosalind or Loy or Dunne or Sheridan or anybody.

This film concerns not sweet and sour or leather and lace but nice and nicer. And the reason the course of true love doesn’t run smooth isn’t their volatility but their docility. The groom’s mom and grandma disapprove of the prospective bride. Rachel is not one of them — not rich, not Asian-Asian but Asian-American, not steeped in tradition but modern, not subservient but liberated.

Sociologically interesting, dramatically less so, especially since we know the couple will get together, though how is not clear since they both seem too meek to stick up for themselves. And the conflict arrives so late in the show that the obligatory unknotting of it then seems like a hasty afterthought. The film is all wealth porn, minimal build-up and no payoff.

Which brings us to the real problem. Comedy is hard, and a specialized skill. The script doesn’t understand the complex architecture of a set-up and pay-off, the split-second timing that comedy requires. The director, Jon Chu, may know his way around a camera, but nothing about his previous work — “GI Joe,” “Justin Bieber’s Believe,” “Jem and the Holograms” or “Now You See Me 2” suggests he knows his way around a comedy, farce, or rom com.

The great film comedies were made by experts in the form, Hawks, Wilder, Capra, Sturges, Jewison, Reiner, Allen. And many of them featured actors who also had a feel for comedy. They may not have been the biggest stars, but they were consummate pros in this genre. They knew what the pompous Freudian analyst told Kate Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby, “The love impulse very frequently reveals itself in terms of conflict.” And they knew how to make that hilarious. This film knows how to make crazy rich Asians look glamorously well-dressed, but neither romantic nor comic.

Why Do We Weep?

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Not because John McCain died. Everybody dies, and for the 13 months since his diagnosis with glioblastoma, from which there is rarely an escape, we knew his time was short.

Not because we agreed with his politics. Many of us, even those within his own party, disagreed with his brand of conservatism, though it increasingly looks reasoned, just, and in the American tradition compared with the fevered, self-serving, divisive and amoral mutant form that has replaced it.

Not even because he was a war hero. Many of us thought the war in which he fought, and for which he suffered so terribly from the cruelty of the foe, was a colossal mistake militarily and out of step with American values philosophically.

We weep because of his fundamental decency and because he embodied a kind of Americanism now in short supply and easy to parody — the Davy Crockett “Be sure your right and then go ahead” cussedness of the Scots-Irish, an ethos characterized by another of their heroes, James Webb, as “ fight, sing, drink, pray.”

Born during the Great Depression, he had more in common with the World War II generation of his father (and mine), than with those that came afterward. He believed, as he often advised, in living for something larger than oneself. In the hard school of Depression and World War they learned to care not only about ‘me’ but also about family, neighbors, and country. They did not believe that sacrifice, public service or doing one’s duty was a fool’s game. They believed helping others was at least as important as helping oneself, and that preserving our institutions was the essential work of a citizen.

They also believed in playing by the rules — even in war, even in business, even in politics. McCain loved to fight for a cause, but not to destroy his antagonists. He famously refused the chance at early release from torture in a POW camp not because it might be used for propaganda or because the rules said any release should be on the basis of first in, first out. Not because his comrades would have thought less of him, though they might have. But because he would have been ashamed of himself for taking advantage of his father’s position, and because an officer and a gentleman does not cut in line but puts the well-being of his comrades before his own.

In 2000, in a hard fought primary battle, McCain was a scrappy, ill-funded, maverick outsider running against the son of a president and heir to a fortune. Rather than soil his patrician hands, George W. Bush allowed his gutter fighters, Karl Rove and Ralph Reed, in South Carolina to circulate or ignore false stories branding McCain a traitor in Vietnam, claiming he had an illegitimate black child, and that he had given his wife a venereal disease. He lost, but he did not dishonor himself, as the winner had.

When similar smears were used against Barack Obama, McCain famously refuted them on nationwide television, calling his rival a decent, family man. When John Kerry was slandered for his Vietnam service, McCain stood up for him, as well. And though McCain never repudiated Vietnam and Kerry became an outspoken critic of the war when he returned from combat, McCain became friends with his fellow veteran and senator and collaborated with him to normalize relations with Vietnam.

That was only one of many instances of working across the aisle to get things done, even with conservative bete noire Teddy Kennedy. Putting country before party made him anathema in some hard right Republican circles, but he proceeded full speed ahead to speak out against the Bush administration’s use of torture, to work with Democrat Russ Feingold to regulate campaign finance, to seek less punitive immigration laws, to seek sanctions against apartheid-era South Africa.

In keeping with his willingness to treat people of good will from both sides of the aisle as fellow citizens, he designated the two men who denied him the presidency, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, to deliver eulogies. In keeping with putting country first and despising petty tyrants, he banned the sitting president from attending the service. There are limits.

Among his last legislative acts was denying Trump a win on the repeal of Obamacare, not because he was in favor of the policy but because eliminating it with nothing to put in its place would have hurt his constituents, and because the method used was an affront to the regular order of the Senate that he championed.

Though dying of the terrible disease that killed him, McCain had more courage and rectitude than the rest of his party when it came to standing up to Trump’s transgressions. No doubt he saw it as his duty to repudiate a populist demagogue as a threat to the country he loved and served — a last stand for a lifelong crusader.

McCain could be wrong, but when he realized the error of his ways he fessed up. He loved to spar with the press, but stood up for the critical part played by the fourth estate. He took his job seriously, but not himself. He regarded himself as a representative of the people, not their superior. He was a happy warrior for causes in an era of meanness, spite, and polarization. In preference to partisan stand-offs and stasis, he sought collaboration to accomplish good things for America,

We weep because he was a good man of a sort increasingly hard to find, perhaps even an endangered species. He favored straight talk, comradeship, and the courage to be unorthodox while preserving, protecting, and defending traditions.

He regarded politics as a means not an end. He was a patriot, but not prideful; a gentleman, but not a stuffed shirt; a man you would expect to be a good neighbor and a reliable friend. His long time aide Mark Salter said he was “a romantic about his causes and a cynic about the world.”

That is, he knew the worst about men. He’d seen it first hand. But he still believed in fighting the good fight alongside a band of brothers to change the world for the better. His model for grace under pressure was Hemingway’s Robert Jordan, but there was also a huge admixture of Don Quixote in the man. And if that hybrid doesn’t bring tears of amusement and admiration to your eyes, what will? We shall not look upon his like again. More’s the pity.

The Epistemological Presidency

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For those who don’t recall their sophomore philosophy class, epistemology concerns the question of how we know what’s what. That is, can we believe the evidence of our senses? How do we tell fact from fiction, belief from knowledge, information from supposition? Without consensus on this problem, all further reasoning about ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics is moot,

Ordinarily, this issue would be distant from day to day civic concerns, but the Trump administration is a special case. From the first day of his campaign, observers noticed the candidate’s remarks had only a passing acquaintance with the agreed upon facts of everyday life.

Falsehood is not unusual in the political realm, but it has now been elevated to a daily torrent of bunk. Those who keep count say the tally since inaugural day has topped four thousand untruths and is now averaging seven official lies a day. It keeps the fact checkers working overtime.

Generally, the lies we encounter are subtle and venial, these are bald-faced whoppers. In fact, Trump and his minions make it a habit to refute the notion of objective reality and to suggest whatever they claim today is self-evidently true and everything else is fake news, or as Kellyanne Conway memorably put it — “alternative facts.”

Now, Trump’s least trustworthy mouthpiece, Rudy Giuliani, has gone Kellyanne one better, expressing the governing ethos of this administration with lunatic pith — “Truth isn’t truth.” His clarification only made it worse. If two people describe an event differently, (he said, she said), each has his own truth, so there isn’t only one true truth.

Perhaps we are meant to believe we are in the land of quantum physics, Heisenberg’s uncertainty, Schroedinger’s cat, and the multiverse, but for more traditional-minded folks this sounds a lot like the patter of the bunco artist. Most of us tend to believe there is an objective reality, not a world where wishful thinking makes things so. In short, we operate on this side of the looking glass.

Philosophers generally do too. Francis Bacon began his essay “Of Truth,” by alluding to the Bible. “‘What is truth?’ said jesting Pilate and would not stay for an answer.” But Bacon goes on to say that there is an answer. There is truth, and there are lies. He notes that poets lie to give pleasure and merchants to gain an advantage, but in civil life to lie debases man’s nature, as an alloy debases a pure gold or silver coin. “These winding and crooked courses are the goings of a serpent.”

Montaigne, a wittier commentator than Bacon, thought the trouble with lies was their endlessness. “If falsehood had, like truth, but one face only, we should be upon better terms; for we should then take for certain the contrary to what the liar says: but the reverse of truth has a hundred thousand forms, and a field indefinite, without bound or limit.” This is Trump incarnate, described over 400 years ago.

In the novel, “Alas, Babylon,” the protagonist can hardly bear to lie because his father, a judge, only punished him with an old-fashioned whipping once, but it was memorable. “He implanted the virtue of truth through the seat of his pants,” for the sin of telling a lie. And the judge explained his severity to his son. “Lying is the worse crime. It is the indispensable accomplice of all others.”

It make sense that a judge should feel so strongly about the matter. Courts are finders of fact, and layers of blame. Their business is to decide who speaks the truth when “he says” and “she says,” not to suppose that each person is entitled to his own truth.

In the worst case, prior to the Trump administration, of an untrustworthy president and his minions, Richard Nixon and those who abetted him eventually found themselves in legal jeopardy. By the time the dust settled, forty-eight men were found guilty of crimes, not counting the unindicted co-conspirator.

They were in contempt of court, committed perjury by lying under oath, committed burglary, and obstruction of justice. One was an Attorney General of the United States, one a former Attorney General, others had worked for the CIA and the FBI, three were White House Counsels, like Trump’s man Don McGahn.

He has apparently learned the lesson of Watergate, even if no one around him has. He has spent thirty hours testifying to the Special Counsel’s investigators, truthfully presumably. He no doubt doesn’t want to end as half a dozen Nixon attorneys did — disgraced, disbarred, and/or serving prison terms.

What is truth? In cases like this, it’s what keeps you from being indicted, convicted, incarcerated or impeached. Nixon found out the hard way that, “If the president does it, it isn’t illegal,” isn’t true. It’s a lie. And the price for lying to the wrong people is high.