Tag: Alec Baldwin

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Tigers, Redbirds, Trump, Porn, and Co-Yo

What a week it was. The football Tigers beat UCLA using a combination of great offense, timely defense, and good ol’ Mid-South heat and humidity. Those California dudes never knew what hit ’em.

And the Memphis Redbirds won the Pacific Coast League championship, beating out all the other teams on the Pacific Coast, including the Nashville Sounds, El Paso Chihuahuas, Omaha Storm Chasers, and the fearsome New Orleans Baby Cakes.

To sum it up: Memphis 2, “Pacific Coast” 0.

It was a week where I found myself agreeing with Donald Trump, at least for a few hours. After a Wednesday night meeting with Democratic Congressional leaders, “Cryin’ Chuck” Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, Trump began his Thursday morning by tweeting: “Does anybody really want to throw out good, educated, and accomplished young people who have jobs, some serving in the military? Really!” Followed by: “They have been in our country for many years through no fault of their own — brought in by parents at young age.”

The paleo wing of the GOP went nuts. Ann Coulter tweeted, “Who doesn’t want to impeach Trump?” Sean Hannity blamed it all on Mitch McConnell for “forcing” his hero to “work with Democrats.”

Trump had seemingly done a complete flip-flop on DACA overnight. My guess is that Pelosi shook Trump’s hand and said, “Oh my, it’s so BIG!!” and Trump agreed to everything she asked, including a deal to save the Dreamers and turn the border wall into a cheery Tex-Mex restaurant.

Sadly, the “deal” only lasted a few hours, and Trump quickly deleted his tweets.

So it goes with this guy. Save DACA. Eliminate DACA. Build the wall, and the Mexicans will pay for it. The wall’s already being built, and we’ll bill Mexico later. Wall? What wall? Trump is a presidential pinball, caroming from one “decision” to another, depending on the last player who flips him.

So what else happened? Oh yeah, Ted Cruz got caught watching porn, or better said, “liking” a porn video with his Twitter account. The New Yorker‘s Andy Borowitz tweeted: “Porn Industry Irrevocably Damaged by Association with Ted Cruz.” Cruz blamed it on his staff, of course. His staff. Huh-huh.

The Emmys happened. Alec Baldwin won an award for his Saturday Night Live impression of Trump. Kate McKinnon won for her SNL impression of Hillary Clinton. And America wept, thinking either of these two comedians would probably make a better president than what we’ve got. Then Sean Spicer got up and reprised his acting gig from the actual White House, and the already fuzzy line between reality and comedy was blurred beyond recognition.

What else? Oh yeah, Trump supporters held the “Mother of All Rallies” in Washington, D.C., on Saturday. About 800 people showed up. Which, as someone pointed out on Twitter, is what happens when you name your march after Mike Pence’s wife. The MOAR crowd was outnumbered by a marching contingent of Juggalos, who are fans of the band, Insane Clown Posse. Write your own Trump joke. You can’t make this stuff up. Though I kind of wish you could.

Back in Memphis, 130,000 people attended the Cooper-Young Festival. I heard a record 37,000 windchimes were sold. I also heard we’re supposed to call Cooper-Young “Co-Yo” now. And I got this from a beardy guy drinking a craft beer, so it must be true.

Overton Park Conservancy director Tina Sullivan went to the Co-Yo Fest and tweeted: “Highlight of this year’s CY Fest was the elderly gentleman asking my opinion on public nudity & saying he might organize a Naked Bike Ride.”

First, I’d like to say that I’m not that “elderly.” And second, I think we should do it around the Nathan Bedford Forrest statue as it’s being taken down.

And in a final somber note to a weird week, British writer Kathy Lette wrote: “Sad news. I’ve just heard that the bloke who invented predictive text has pissed away. His funfair is next monkey.”

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

Going Postal on Mendenhall

CREDIT: Erica Schroeder | Dreamstime.com

I had to go to not one, but two post offices.

See, I wasn’t wearing pants, and I was on the phone with my bank. I couldn’t get to the door in time and didn’t get my package. My lovely postman rang several times because he’s obviously been there before and knows I’m often wiping Nutella off my face before I answer the door.

Now, my friend Desi was a bit stumped at this, because don’t all Southern ladies have bathrobes? Well, yeah, I reckon. But that never occurred to me, honestly. Probably because my bank was calling to verify two very legitimate charges, which I appreciated since last year I had THREE different debit cards due to security breaches.

Note to self, find another bank.

Anyway, I was so stunned that they were actually monitoring that all I could do was kind of freeze in place, my phone in one hand, watching my precious cargo being loaded back up and taken away.

Taken away to the depths of the Mendenhall Post Office. Where it could not be found. That should have been a sign, BUT OH NO! Did I heed said sign? No, for I am an idiot of the highest caliber. For various reasons, I needed a mailbox. So I’d gotten one online at a post office location that I preferred. I printed out everything the site told me, got all my IDs (strangely, no one accepts one’s belly button as proof of birth), and trekked onward. BIG mistake. Let me just cut to the chase. By the time I got back in my car, I had no post office box, and I was in tears.

Erica Schroeder | Dreamstime.com

This is why EVERYTHING at the post office should be done by machines. Machines do not tell you things like they do not have to do what the website says. Machines do not tell you, “Y’all just don’t know. Y’all don’t know how to fill out a form. Y’all can’t come in here with stuff ain’t doing you no good.”

This woman was the most heinous individual I have ever encountered, and I once got stuck in a KKK rally in Brandon, Mississippi. Truth. So I went and finished my errands, got home, canceled my mailbox online, and wrote a complaint that was pointed yet poignant. I know USPS doesn’t care.  I know nothing will be said to this woman, and even if it were, it wouldn’t matter. Some people are just toxic.

A smooth transaction can change a person’s day. You can be having the worst day ever. Run in your hose. There’s a black fly in your chardonnay. But one joke from the woman at Fred’s about how those select-a-size towels probably have a Napoleon complex, and it looks a lot better.

A terrible transaction can change a person’s day. You can be having the best day ever. You don’t have to wear pants. Black Sabbath decide to play your favorite neighborhood bar. Someone gives you something besides chardonnay. But one “I don’t have to do ANYTHING the website says,” and you are suspended between hopelessness and rage to the extent you clutch your pearls, say screw everything, go to Taco Bell, and go home and binge on Netflix and remorse the rest of the day. Because …

PEOPLE SUCK.

I know there isn’t anything nearly as trite as complaining about a government agency, but clichés are clichés because they’ve happened enough to be cliché. People with absolutely no power anywhere else in life will always try to create a superpower at work. When there are no consequences for actions, people do what we do. We act like jerks. I did cancel my order, I did write a complaint, and I know that nothing will change because I am the only one in this situation who was inconvenienced. No one else has a stake. It’s the post office, where else am I going to go? What the woman wanted, she got. She wanted to tell someone no. She wanted to know — or act as if she knew — more than someone else because she has absolutely no power. People who throw fits and fall in them are no different from a toddler. And when we do that, we’re telling the other person, “YOU are responsible for my behavior,” rather than taking responsibility ourselves. Unfortunately, this woman exercised her “No” power with me. I don’t show emotion with this kind of deal. I don’t get loud. In fact, I get like Alec Baldwin quiet. I speak very distinctly. I ask how we’re going to fix this. Most of the time, it works, and we all move on. This time? Not so much. Not only did we not fix the problem, she didn’t get to see me get upset. So we both lost.

Susan Wilson also writes for yeahandanotherthing.com and likethedew.com. She and her husband, Chuck, have lived here long enough to know that Midtown does not start at Highland.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation

It’s been 19 years since Tom Cruise first portrayed Ethan Hunt in an adaptation of the hit spy show Mission: Impossible. That’s longer than the show had been off the air when the Brian De Palma-helmed reboot hit theaters with the now-iconic image of Cruise hanging over a computer terminal, suspended by impossibly thin wires. Since someone born on the first film’s premiere date would be college-aged by now, it’s likely that there are many people in the audience who don’t know the self-destructing message sending spies off on an elaborate and dangerous mission is a callback to the show’s weekly cold opening. But it’s the formula Desilu Productions developed for TV that has allowed the Mission: Impossible franchise to outlive the Cold War. A highly trained team of agents working for a shadowy, quasi-governmental agency undertaking missions so sensitive and difficult that their government will “disavow” all knowledge of their existence if they fail works just as well in the age of terrorism as it did in the days of KGB vs. CIA spy-jinks.

The latest installment, Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation, is nothing if not formulaic, but the movie is self-aware enough to preemptively ask if it’s still relevant. We first meet returning player William Brandt (Avengers‘ Jeremy Renner) defending the Impossible Mission Force (IMF) before a congressional committee as CIA director Alan Hunley (Alec Baldwin) successfully argues that they are redundant and dangerously out of control. Hunley puts the IMFers, including computer wizard Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg), on desk duty, but their first assignment is tracking Hunt, who has once again gone rogue. Hunt thinks he’s on the trail of yet another shadowy, elite force of spies called the Syndicate, but almost no one else believes they exist. Hunley accuses him of making up threats to justify the IMF’s funding with one of the film’s best lines: “Hunt is both arsonist and fireman.”

But since Tom Cruise is both star and producer, we know that the Syndicate is real, and it includes stock characters like the strangely cold, vaguely European mastermind Soloman Lane (Sean Harris), a Russian sadist named the Bone Doctor (Jens Hultén), and British double (or possibly triple) agent Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson). Hunt gets the old team out from behind their desks — and in the case of Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames), out of retirement — to stop the Syndicate from — well, doing something that’s probably real bad. Details like the bad guy’s motivations and the exact nature of the MacGuffin (It’s a list of agents! No wait, it’s a list of bank accounts! No wait, we’ve got to rescue Benji!) are not Mission: Impossible‘s strong suit.

What Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie are all about is crafting high-quality action, and judged by that metric, they succeed. The “gain access to an impossibly secure computer system” sequence is set underwater this time, to spectacular results. But the best part of the film is the second-act set piece in a Vienna opera house that references Hitchcock’s climax to The Man Who Knew Too Much.

While the Daniel Craig/Sam Mendes team has taken James Bond into more serious character territory, Cruise and J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot production company have taken the opposite approach. Rogue Nation plays like a fond memory of Roger Moore-era Bond films such as Live and Let Die, only without the misogyny — or sexiness, for that matter. Even though Ferguson, a British actress making her first foray into the action genre, is captivating onscreen, she and Cruise share only a single extended hug.

Like Adam Sandler, Cruise’s wealth and status remove the usual motivations for doing a movie: He doesn’t need the money, so why bother? In Sandler’s case, the leaked Sony Pictures emails allege his films are little more than ways to get his friends and family free vacations. Cruise, on the other hand, appears to be motivated by the desire to perform increasingly over-the-top stunts. Rogue Nation‘s big moment comes right off the bat, when Hunt, trying to recover a biological weapons cache, clings to the side of an Airbus military transport as it takes off and flies away. At least that’s more fun for the viewer than watching Sandler yuk it up on a waterslide.