Gabby Giffords – Memphis Flyer

Hollywood is enjoying its first real post-pandemic summer blockbuster season, which means most weekends have been featuring only one or two new major new releases. But this weekend’s slate of new releases offers the most choice we’ve seen in months.

The most expensive release of the weekend has a local connection. The Gray Man is based on a book by Memphian Mark Greaney. It stars Ryan Gosling as Sierra Six, an above-top-secret CIA operative who has to go on the lam after uncovering some major government misdeeds. Retired Captain America Chris Evans plays against type as the psychopath hit man sent to track him down. Directors Anthony and Joe Russo have worked with Evans before on some small independent movies you probably haven’t heard of called Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame.

Next up is another adaptation of a work by a Southern writer. Delia Owens is a zoologist from Georgia whose debut novel Where The Crawdads Sing became a huge bestseller in 2020. Reese Witherspoon is the executive producer of the film version, directed by Olivia Newman. Daisy Edgar-Jones stars as Kya, nicknamed The Marsh Girl by the inhabitants of the small North Carolina town near where she lives. She’s accused of murdering the town’s star quarterback Chase (Harris Dickinson), and as an outcast, she makes a convenient scapegoat for the mysterious death. Swampy, Southern gothic intrigue ensues.

Lesley Manville earned an Academy Award nomination for Phantom Thread. Paul Gallico’s novel Mrs. ‘Arris Goes To Paris has been adapted for the screen three times. Director Anthony Fabian makes it four. Manville stars as an English maid who becomes obsessed with her boss’ Dior wardrobe, and embarks on an adventure to the City of Lights. French things ensue.

She Will is an intriguing folk horror from director Charlotte Colbert and IFC Films. Alice Krige stars as a film star recovering from cancer in a rural estate best known for a history of witch burning. Turns out the witch ghosts are pissed. Wouldn’t you be?

Gabby Giffords was a Congressional Representative from Arizona married to NASA astronaut Mark Kelly. Then, in 2011, one of her campaign events was attacked by a man with an assault rifle. Six people were killed. Giffords was shot in the head, but survived. Now, Kelly is a Senator and Giffords works for sensible gun control. Gabby Giffords Won’t Back Down is a timely documentary from CNN Films.

French director Claire Denis has been quietly making great films since 1999’s Beau Travail. Her latest is Both Sides of the Blade. The great Juliette Binoche stars as Sarah, a Parisian radio DJ who is caught between her comfortable life with husband Jean (Vincent Lindon) and her sexy ex Francois (Gregorie Colin). Who doesn’t love a good erotic thriller?

We’re almost embarrassed to report this, but it’s receiving enough attention elsewhere for what it illustrates about the right wing in this country that it becomes a duty to hold our nose and do so.

In a column entitled “The Corner” in the online edition of the arch-conservative National Review on Sunday, Kevin Williamson poured scorn on an op-ed written by Gabby Giffords for The New York Times. It will be recalled that Giffords is the plucky, incredibly brave Arizona congresswoman who was shot in the back of the head two years ago by a gun-toting marauder while greeting constituents on a shopping-center parking lot. Giffords was lucky in one sense: By some miracle she survived, while others victimized in the onslaught didn’t (though we shudder to imagine the difficulty of her rehab or the gruesome pain and frustration she has encountered in going through it).

Ever since then, Giffords, now retired from Congress, and her astronaut husband, Mark Kelly, have devoted their energies to raising the consciousness of their fellow Americans about the need for finding some means to arrest the upward curve of gun violence in this country. In her Times article, Giffords regretted the failure of the U.S. Senate to pass moderate legislation requiring background checks for gun purchases in the wake of the Newtown, Connecticut, massacre of school children last December.

Astoundingly, though a majority of senators favored it, the bill was filibustered and blocked by a dedicated minority (Republicans, though Giffords, a Democrat, chose not to mention the fact). She observed, sensibly (and knowledgeably) enough, “These senators made their decision based on political fear and on cold calculations about the money of special interests like the National Rifle Association, which in the last election cycle spent around $25 million on contributions, lobbying and outside spending.” Telling it like it was, Giffords described such behavior as “cowardice.”

To this, the wretched Mr. Williamson retorted: “[B]eing shot in the head by a lunatic does not give one any special grace to pronounce upon public-policy questions, nor does it give one moral license to call people ‘cowards’ for holding public-policy views at variance with one’s own. Her childish display in The New York Times is an embarrassment.”

Not since Rush Limbaugh used his broadcast perch to mock the uncontrolled limb movements of Michael J. Fox, Parkinson’s-disease sufferer and actor-become-advocate of stem-cell research, has there been a public assertion so vile. But, as in Limbaugh’s case, Williamson’s remark served to point out just how unconscionably beyond the pale these professional “conservatives” have become.

As for the accuracy of Giffords’ descriptions, here is confirmation from former Tennessee state representative Debra Maggart, who was chair of the state House Republican caucus until 2012, when, after failing to rubber-stamp a bill being pushed by the National Rifle Association, she was defeated for reelection via a well-funded NRA campaign on behalf of her primary opponent.

In her own op-ed for the Times after Newtown, Maggart, a conservative’s conservative, drew upon her experience to observe, “Because of N.R.A. bully tactics, legislators are not free to openly discuss the merits of gun-related legislation.”

It’s true in Nashville, and it’s true in Washington, and not all the monstrous musings of the Kevin Williamsons can change the fact.