The South Korean movie “Parasite” won big at the Academy Awards earlier this month, including best picture. The first non-English movie ever to win best picture, and President Trump restrained himself for one whole week before letting loose a cry over it.
It seems he didn’t complain when the news of the film’s award first broke because he didn’t understand that it won as the best film overall. He thought it only won for best foreign film. It was a reading issue.
I’m not sure if it was the first non-English film to win for best picture. CNN said it was “the first foreign language movie” to do so. I’m guessing, in CNN-speak, anything not English is foreign. Even if the organization giving out the awards is supposed to be international.
Also, I found that “Hamlet,” 1948, with the title role played by Laurence Olivier, was a foreign movie that won best picture. In foreign-style English!
This reminds me of one of my pet peeves: people of U.S. persuasion on social media who don’t know that on most of the social media sites we’re in a minority. All the social media sites are international. Complaining about foreigners on Facebook talking about foreign things is ridiculous, when that’s about 75 percent of the membership.
I have read diatribes on various social media, saying that we, the U.S., had the name America first. It’s right there in “United States of America,” they say, totally oblivious to the fact that the name America was given to the entire New World around 1507. That’s 269 years before 1776, the year that anyone in the colonies thought to adopt the name USA.
Trump is annoyed that the South Koreans are giving us so much trouble in terms of trade, whatever that’s about. Now atop that, “they” went and gave one of their movies this big fat award. “They” should be investigated. And locked up.
But what he did next, according to CNN, made me think CNN misread the calendar and had gone with an April Fools story. I checked that I was really on CNN and hadn’t accidentally landed on a spoof site. I had to find a video of Trump saying these words to believe it. I found it. It’s true.
He said, “I’m looking for, like — let’s get ‘Gone with the Wind.’ Can we get, like, ‘Gone with the Wind’ back, please? ‘Sunset Boulevard,’ so many great movies.”
When I was sure he said it, my mind kept reeling.
Honestly, the thought had never even crossed my mind, that Donald J. Trump might be an aficionado of old movies. Does he like other Billy Wilder movies besides “Sunset Boulevard”? “Some Like It Hot”? “One, Two, Three”? Or only racist dramas?
It makes me realize just how little we know about this guy. We don’t know what country he works for; we’ve never seen him pet a dog; we’ve never heard him sing a song (we’ve only seen him move his mouth while others sing).
What about Chaplin’s “Little Dictator”? That would suit him naturally.
What’s the attraction for him of “Gone with the Wind”? Clark Gable’s line, “Frankly, my dear I don’t give a damn”? Or is it that it is arguably the second-most racist movie ever made, following “Birth of a Nation,” with pretty clothes instead of white hoods?
Too bad for Trump he doesn’t read. Since he liked the movie so much, I’m sure he’d love the book. To Margaret Mitchell the Ku Klux Klan was a benevolent community service organization.
Does he personally identify with Norma Desmond in “Sunset Boulevard”? A fading celebrity, trying to keep the fire going, always bragging about her huge number of fans who still write her fan letters?
Here in Washington state, researchers are looking into improved cattle feed that could cut down on methane emissions. Crosscut tells us they could “solve the problem of methane emissions from belching, farting dairy cows” using feed additives like kelp and biochar — a charcoal-like substance made by burning organic matter — to reduce cows’ emissions.
Might this work for humans too? Imagine how much better off we’d be if Trump would take in a bull-sized portion of kelp and biochar in his taco bowls every day to reduce his harmful emissions.
Dr. Wes Browning is a one time math professor who has experienced homelessness several times. He supplied the art for the first cover of Real Change in November of 1994 and has been involved with the organization ever since. This is his weekly column, Adventures in Irony, a dry verbal romp of the absurd. He can be reached at drwes (at) realchangenews (dot) org
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