With 2020 barely on the calendar and impeachment barely heated up, it’s already clear 2020 will not be the year of seeing clearly. Despite that unpleasant reality, we want to begin the decade with a few Factslaps to at least get us off on a true start:
Google intends to scan all known existing 129 million unique books by the end of 2020.
Finland is the world’s happiest country, according to the 2019 World Happiness Report.
Abraham Lincoln believed black people should not have the right to vote, serve on juries, or intermarry with whites.
Mars has the largest dust storms in the Solar System. They can last for months and can cover the entire planet.
51% of Americans fear snakes, most than any other thing in the world.
New Zealand’s native Maori make up only 15% of the population, but over 50% of the imprisoned population.
Mouse sperm is larger than elephant sperm.
In the U.S., meat is treated with carbon monoxide to make it look fresh.
Cows moo in accents specific to their region, just like humans.
Thinking in a foreign language leads to better decisions.
Research shows that if you’re afraid of spiders, you’re more likely to find one in your bedroom.
Tell me where the spirit flees When life has made the choice To bring the body to its knees And let the soul rejoice.
Answer.
Here these are the olden days Here these are the golden days Here these are the days to remember.
For yesterday’s gone And tomorrow’s a song Today is the only glowing ember.
O’ Brother mine! dearest Samuel,
T W E N T Y! Can you fucking believe it? Dude, we may be approaching a record: I looked up double transplants, trying to find the longest living double-organ team, but the records are sketchy. Mayo Clinic is still searching; no word back. I found a case online, in a Dutch medical journal, that said one kidney-pancreas transplant team made it 16 years.
Scrubs.
I still can’t wrap my head around it: We’ve been wed two decades! Guess what movie came out 20 years ago? O’ Brother, Where Art Thou?. So did Memento (one of my favorites), Cast Away, Almost Famous and High Fidelity. The hottest shows in television were The Sopranos, Curb Your Enthusiasm and Frasier. Music sucked (Britney Spears’ Ooops…I Did It Again was all the rage), but we were too busy recuperating to listen to that shit anyway.
Speaking of recuperating, before I begin this unabashedly schmaltzy love letter, an apology.
I’m sorry I nearly annulled this marriage two days in. It’s just my body wasn’t used to being so close to someone, and I guess I tried to wriggle loose; the band with which Dr. Sutherland bonded us briefly schism-ed at the suture. But with some quick counseling, we were back together. And haven’t had a real fight in 20 years. Cite me another couple with such cohesion.
And I can tell you this, without hesitation or qualification: In 20 years, I have never betrayed you. Not once.
That medicinal fidelity wasn’t always the case. Ask Mom. I sucked at taking meds when I was diabetic. I’d miss injections, eat like crap, soar over or crawl beneath my assigned sugar levels. Of course, my failures led to us meeting; sorry, I can’t help but see the past through glasses hued rose since we met. It’s one of the things I love about you.
Now, I take our meds as religiously as pastors take confession. Probably, certainly, more. Ask Mom. I haven’t missed an unhospitalized pill or eye drop in 20 years. That’s 7,300 days of meds, administered 14,600 times, totaling more than 150,000 pills. And that’s a conservative estimate. All that, and not one rejection episode yet.
It may still come. But if you had told me in January 2000 that I’d get 20 years of perfect blood sugars, 20 years of no self-injections, 20 years of not having diabetes nibble off fingers, toes, perhaps feet, I would have not only said ‘Hell yeah!’ I would not have believed the offer.
I know your perspective is vastly different. I am sorry and so torn about that, Sam. The decision your mom Valerie made — despite reservations from your father — remains the bravest act of human love I’ve ever witnessed. To weigh that Decision, have that Talk, all while bracing for the Goodbye. She is as cool under pressure as any nerve-steeled Apollo pilot, and I carry her boy as I would a newborn, swaddled and close to my heart, hoping some of that Flegel bravery will wear off on me. In me.
I told Spencer that we were approaching 20 years. He said he would have guessed it had been longer. I would have guessed it had been shorter. Like, 19 years and six months shorter. Time does flatten a man.
But not you. Over the years, you have grown mythical in my eyes. Once you were a 21-year-old kid from Fargo, 14 years my junior. Now you have risen to deity-level. I now see a truly noble soul, angel pure, who loved dogs, waved “Hi” for family pictures (who else is that sincere in happiness?), and overcame educational hurdles to become an engineer at Red River Valley and Western Railroad. You order disulfiram online are Paul Bunyan. And i get to soldier forward arm-in-arm with you? Who should be so blessed to be your wing man!
Here’s what I love about you, O’ Brother mine:
You make me feel strong. Whenever I see stories of what passes for bravery nowadays, particularly in our halls of law, I think of you. And I’ll say to ourself, ‘That’s great. Ever laid on a gurney, split open from the belly button downward, for eight straight hours — on a gamble?” You are my definition of strength, and I draw from you for it constantly.
You make me feel wise. Knowing how precariously you and I cling together has altered my definition of…well, everything. Time. Life. Death. Illness. Health. Deadlines. Pressures. You have taught me when to let go (though I often fail). To be content when I’m a bug in amber. To, in truth, see the time-strangling beauty of those moments. You are my definition of wisdom, and I need your counsel daily.
You make me feel loved. In every step of this journey, I have never felt alone. You probably figured out early that I tend to get introverted; I still have danced publicly only once in my life (not everyone is as brave as you). But fleeting is the moment when I feel isolated. You are my definition of love, and I look to you every time I need a heart or shoulder.
You know what’s creepy? A doctor predicted all this, five years before I was born: that I would meet a soul named Sam; that he would open my eyes to the beauty of life’s fleeting ways; that I would take him profoundly into myself.
The doctor? Theodore Seuss Geisel. Fucking Dr. Seuss!
Surely, you know the story of Green Eggs and Ham. Or at least the refrain: “I do not like green eggs and ham. I do not like them, Sam-I-Am.”
But read a’ might closer, and you’d swear there was a serendipitous through-line here about us. The story goes like this: Sam-I-Am pesters his friend, Guy-Am-I (!) to eat a dish of green eggs and ham. Guy refuses, even as Sam persistently follows him, asking to eat them in eight locations (house, box, car, tree, train, dark, rain, boat) and with three animals (mouse, fox, goat). Guy still refuses, saying, “I wouldn’t not like them here (Current location) or there (Previous location)! I would not like them anywhere!” Finally, Guy vainly accepts Sam’s offer and samples the green eggs and ham, happily announcing he would eat them anywhere and with anyone and ends the story, saying, “I do so like green eggs and ham. Thank you. Thank you, Sam-I-Am.”
Damn straight, Dr. Ted. Sam, I am.
Those tools in the jewelry business say that a 20-year-anniversary is to be recognized with platinum (a diamond is their recommended gift of 10 years!). I can’t afford their bullshit menu, but I did want to give you the only thing I really own: my word, located just beneath my left rib cage.
It says this: I am with you, to the end. I have your back, and you have mine.
Even that pledge is a pittance, I know, a lowball offer for what you have given me without asking for a thing in return.
So take my arm this time. I have taken yours so often. Rest here for a moment. Rejoice here. Because I have an idea…
You know, a marathon is 26.219 miles. Whaddaya say? We’ve only got 6.219 miles left. Up for more? Why stop now?
It must be Oscar time, because suddenly Hollywood’s credulity is in question. Again.
This is an old refrain the final months leading up to the Academy Awards, which are annually inundated with biopics and historical epics, all vying for statuettes. This year’s favorite accuracy arguments concern popes and the press. Clint Eastwood was pilloried for his attack on the media in his drama Richard Jewell, and Netflix’s Oscar hopeful The Two Popes earned the ridicule of some papal purists who considered the Fernando Meirelles film inaccurate and dumbed-down for commercial audience. (Full disclosure, I also railed about Jewell, though for personal reasons).
To my fellow film critics, I ask: Shouldn’t we be as diligent “truth squadding” movies the other eight months of the year? Either that, or accept Oscar fare as pure entertainment, as we do with, say, summer movies? To hold a film to a higher threshold of accuracy because of its release date is not only unfair to directors; it’s inaccurate for readers and viewers.
The truth is, in 15 years of movie reporting and reviewing, I have never interviewed a feature film director much concerned with getting the facts straight in any “based on a true story” (BOTS) film. Documentary film directors are a different lot (particularly Werner Herzog), though make no mistake: They edit footage with the same intention as their feature film counterparts — to tell a compelling story.
But from Chris Nolan (Dunkirk) to Martin Scorsese (Goodfellas) to Eastwood, details have always taken a backseat to drama. Without exception, directors promoting their BOTS films have told me that their jobs aren’t to teach history (if anything, studios consider that box office death). Instead, they say, their job is to accurately capture the tableau of emotions that spring from that history (directors love the word zeitgeist). Even Tom Hanks, who played the titular role in the much-maligned Somali pirate film Captain Phillips, told me he was drawn to the role because it captured the strains of living life at sea, not the subtleties.
That “capture-the-essence” approach isn’t likely to change anytime soon, particularly given the success of two films this weekend at the Golden Globes, 1917 and Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. In both cases, the directors took on based-on-true stories, but with approaches starkly different from competing filmmakers.
In 1917, the fictional story of two World War I soldiers racing to prevent a suicide march, director Sam Mendes ended the movie with a postscript that said the film was dedicated to his grandfather, WWI vet Alfred Hubert Mendes, who told his family that story innumerable times.
Quentin Tarantino, who directed Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, went even further. He loves to wreak havoc with historical accounts. In Inglorious Basterds, he ends the film with the heroes killing Hitler in an eruption of bullets and flames.
He did something similar in Hollywood, taking the real-life horror of the Charles Manson slayings and giving viewers the visceral ending they would have preferred (and get in most other straight-up features).
Their strategy worked like a Swiss watch. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association showered both movies in awards. 1917 won Golden Globe for best drama and director, while Hollywood took best comedy or musical and best screenplay for Tarantino. Popes, The Irishman and Jewell were all but forgotten.
Even holding a BOTS film’s feet to the fact-fire seems silly. What effective entertainment, on some level, isn’t based on a truth? Just as all music draws from notes that have been played before, so too are the reductive themes in film. Star Wars is essentially a father-son story. Casablanca is about love during wartime. You can’t copyright feelings.
Hollywood executives even go out of their way to point out a film’s factual failings — as long as it’s from another studio. Harvey Weinstein was renown for knocking the veracity of other studios’ BOTS movies. I can’t count how many publicists whispered under the breath when I asked about a competing biopic or historical portrait, ‘I hear it’s not a bad movie. Too bad it’s not true.’
So if Hollywood isn’t going to change its ways, perhaps we need to. Both Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketma, for example, are rife with inaccuracies in portrayals of their subjects, Freddie Mercury and Elton John, respectively. But Rhapsody, which came out during Oscar season 2018, drew much more rigorous examination than Rocketman, released this summer. To scrutinize one but not the other implies one has accuracy issues, becoming in itself a journalistic inaccuracy.
Perhaps the answer is to treat BOTS films the way we treat political rallies, which are eerily similar: both take liberties with facts to win favor with a largely dim-witted crowd that won’t bother to look up facts on their own.
So the job falls to us to watch “true stories” with a boulder-sized grain of salt and the assumption they will require some fact-checking. Who knows? It may even improve our film reviews, a sidebar comparing fact to fiction.
It’s time we decide whether we’re going to treat these films as reporters or audience members. We need to regard BOTS films for what they really are: not a kiddie pool of facts, but a diving board into deeper knowledge. Hollywood films are just the divining rods.
Movie critics already have fallen out of the fact-finding business. Maybe it’s time we work some muscle memory.
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