It is not many songs that can claim the affections of both Brazilian deaf-mute transgenders and the late Saddam Hussein, but “I Will Always Love You” is one of them.
Seriously. Obviously I have my differences with the late Iraqi dictator over torturing political opponents, gassing the Kurds and whatnot, but I had a certain respect for his taste in music. He was said to have had quite a collection of Sinatra LPs, mostly from the Capitol era — In the Wee Small Hours and Songs for Swingin’ Lovers. And at the end of his life Saddam was certainly swingin’.
But that was the dictator after hours, in his wee smalls, with a box of Quality Street and one of his many mistresses. For the public face of his musical tastes, he favored the Bodyguard soundtrack. From The Times of London, and their report on the 2002 Presidential “election” in Iraq:
Party officials have chosen the Whitney Houston song ‘I Will Always Love You’ as the campaign theme tune. The song accompanies the dawn-to-dusk election broadcasts on the three state-controlled television stations, which feature almost continuous footage of Saddam.
Amazing. All over Baghdad, folks were switching on the radio to find Whitney ululating “I will always love you-oo-oooaahooeauooooeeeuoaaaoooo…” And, also all over Baghdad, folks in the next apartment were sighing, “Terrific. Saddam’s got those Shi-ites at Number 23 wired up to the cattle prods again. Might as well forget about any sleep tonight.”
As the nation prepares to mark 25 years since Sept. 11, 2001, Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Michigan, may be facing the risk of renewed scrutiny and fresh political attack.
El-Sayed is a leader of a new crop of candidates from a wing of his party that opposed American wars and capitalized on anger over anti-Arab sentiment in a state with a robust and active Muslim community. But now he is attempting to adapt — and in some cases delete — past statements that may run afoul of a broad, general election audience.
As El-Sayed heads into the fall general election campaign against Republican Rep. Mike Rogers, El-Sayed, a former public health official, has already been forced to distance himself from the views of Hasan Piker, a popular Twitch streamer who has appeared at El-Sayed’s campaign events and who generated controversy for declaring that “America deserved 9/11” before later retracting the remark.
Meanwhile, El-Sayed’s past references to the deadly attacks have continued to surface, including two deleted social media posts verified by CBS News that have not been previously reported. In those posts, he calls for the American public to muster the same outrage for the COVID-19 death toll that they displayed after 9/11.
Superb ruling by the Supreme Court! There is absolutely zero standing for the National Trust to sue. Simply not liking a building does not constitute injury. Basic Article III limitation.
D.C. Circuit Judge Neomi Rao set the table for this decision with her brilliant dissent…
The program is scheduled to begin Sept. 10, but some day care operators say they still have not received the funding needed for teachers, classroom supplies and furniture. Several have warned parents that their centers may not be able to open if the money does not arrive soon, reports the New York Times.
The delays have also affected city-backed bridge loans intended to help providers cover expenses while waiting for their contracts to be processed. Some operators say they have turned to personal loans, family members and their own savings to keep their businesses running.
“Yes, they have a 2-K program, but they didn’t set up the infrastructure to make it work,” said Nurita Love, who operates four Bronx day care centers preparing to offer four 2-K classes.
Promises are easy. Infrastructure is hard.
THAT’S BECAUSE HE PALLED AROUND WITH TERRORISTS, AND ANYBODY WHO SPOKE THE TRUTH WAS PILLORIED FOR IT:
Everything Respectable People believed in that era was wrong. I remember being shocked when on a random say in 2010 I decided to look up what happened to ACORN and found that the DOJ shut them down and the Fox News watchers were right.
MARRIAGE KEY TO HOUSING AFFORDABILITY: Most of the time when the public forums have discussion about the growing crisis in affordable housing, the focus tends to be on government measures designed to making it cheaper and faster to build new homes.
But a new analysis by the American Enterprise Institute’s Housing Center and the Institute for Family Studies makes a strong data-driven case for the idea that reversing America’s declining marriage rate would go a long way to returning home ownership to its central role in the American drea,
SPACE: Watch Rocket Lab launch Japanese radar satellite to orbit early on Sept. 1. “Synspective is assembling a constellation of about 30 Strix satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO). These spacecraft — which are named after a widespread genus of owl — use synthetic aperture radar (SAR) to study our planet both day and night, and in all weather conditions.”
THE FUTURE AND ITS ENEMIES:
One thing I notice is that the people angriest about SpaceX and the other economic development wins Louisiana is posting are not the Left. They're the old-money, establishment white Democrats and in particular the trial lawyers.
Those guys are utterly furious that the Legislature built some legal protections for the aerospace industry into the state statutes in this past session, without which SpaceX probably doesn’t come here.
After all, Louisiana has a very well-deserved reputation as a judicial hellhole, so a large industrial undertaking like SpaceX would rightly be skittish about coming here.
The trial bar is a big loser in this exchange, which is something they aren’t used to at all. Not in this state. So they’re doing everything they can to stir up outrage over it, declaring that Jeff Landry and Susan Bourgeois sold out the state and so on.
Exit quote: “It does seem like a dead-ender move, though.”
The job of selling a blockbuster Hollywood theatrical release doesn’t stop until the last screening in the last theater on the last day of the movie’s theatrical run… and sometimes not even then. “Always. Be. Closing” as Alec Baldwin once said, performing David Mamet’s dialogue, and this maxim remains operational even when the audience is already in their seats, their money has been spent, and the movie has begun spooling through the projector.
Because once the movie is over… and if you’ve done your job well… the audience becomes your evangelists. They will emerge from the theater and head back out into the world where they will immediately begin doing the job of selling your movie to their friends and family.
In this context, the ending of a movie is critical, but so too is the opening. If you don’t hook the audience right away, you risk losing them. And even if the rest of the movie is a lead-pipe banger with an ending that is just so, you still will have spent valuable time overcoming the initial disappointment you created when you stumbled during the opening sequence.
Sometimes simply setting the tone is enough. Sometimes it’s a chance to tell the audience something about the movie’s main character in a way that feels fun rather than the hum-drum delivery of basic plot points (“Die Hard” does an excellent job in this regard). Sometimes, as with the opening aircraft carrier sequence in “Top Gun,” these sequences are designed to introduce the audience to a world they’ve never seen before. And sometimes it’s a chance to show the audience how dastardly the movie’s villains are so that when we do finally meet our heroes, we’ll know exactly how much they’re up against.
The opening of “Beverly Hills Cop 2” checks many of those boxes…. it introduces us to the villain first and to our hero second… and if you can watch this without a smile curling across your lips, if at least one toe doesn’t start tapping, then I don’t know what to tell you:
George Lucas obsessed over the opening shot of the original Star Wars – the small “blockade runner” spaceship first appearing onscreen before the giant triangular Star Destroyer eventually envelopes the entire movie screen. In Skywalking, his 1983 biography of George Lucas, Dale Pollock wrote:
As the effects footage improved, the atmosphere at [Industrial Light & Magic] lightened. “Some guy across the stage would say, ‘Oh, another first!’” remembers Richard Edlund. “Some other new thing had been done that we knew hadn’t been done before. This was going on every day and was very exciting.”
The most important shot in Star Wars was the opening one—the looming Star Destroyer would either make or break the movie’s credibility. “If somebody sat down in a theater and saw this monstrous thing come over the screen and keep coming and coming, and they were awed by that, then we had our audience just where we wanted ’em,” says Edlund. “But if they laughed, we were dead.” Edlund shot the opening sequence five times until he was sure nobody would laugh.
They didn’t:
The screening of Star Wars for cast and crew came three weeks later, on May 21 at the Beverly Hills headquarters of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. It, too, was at 10:00 A.M. on a weekend, with a luncheon that followed at Dr. Munchie’s, a local restaurant. Lucas first showed a classic Chuck Jones cartoon, Duck Dodger in the 21st Century, and the laughter quickly cut through the tension in the audience. As Star Wars began, the laughter abruptly ceased. “We all sat with our mouths open, and all you could hear throughout the audience was ‘Wowwww!’” remembers Richard Edlund.
* * * * * * * *
The May 25 release date drew ever nearer. It was time to screen Star Wars for a real audience. As he had with Graffiti, Lucas scheduled a Sunday morning screening at San Francisco’s Northpoint Theater on May 1, inviting a carefully selected cross-section of the movie audience—a small delegation from Fox, including Ladd and his wife, and Lucas’s family and closest friends. George and Gary had their tape recorders to gauge the audience reaction. They didn’t have long to wait; as soon as the opening crawl ended and the Star Destroyer appeared on the screen, the audience went crazy. “I was relieved more than anything else,” Lucas remembers. “It was a very high moment—I knew the film worked.” Privately, he and Kurtz were disappointed that the reaction wasn’t quite as enthusiastic as it had been for American Graffiti in the same theater five years earlier. Lucas now felt secure, however, that Star Wars at least would make back Fox’s investment. “But I had no idea of what was going to happen,” he insists. “I mean, I had no idea.”
That opening shot was the beginning of a franchise that would print endless amounts of money (until it didn’t, of course).
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