#that seems to be hypnotizing the voters has no effect on me

[mizzmellos]

the poll you did about mello’s made me wonder, what’s your favorite thing about his design?

bob cut & feather coat 💖 but the burn scar is my 3rd favorite thing so it's a tough choice lol. i also think it's really funny when people draw mello as going through like, burn-scar puberty and getting twice as manly post-explosion LOL

also worth mentioning many people want to erase the powerful energy mello harnesses with the bob swing^

[bmclassahan]

Oscars 2018 Preview—Part I

“Women are so qualified they should just go for it. It’s not just about cinematography, it about believing in yourself and that anything’s possible. I believe the job of the cinematographer is to visualize emotion—things we as women are inherently good at." - Rachel Morrison, Cinematography nominee for Mudbound

You are about to enter a controversial exhibition at a prestigious museum. Why you were drawn enough to it to go on this particular day at this particular time is a mix of the initial visceral reaction you felt to the shockingly crude and offensive advertisement you saw on your cell phone, and your deeper engagement with the aesthetic purveyed by this museum’s artistic director, what is he saying here with this ad and does the exhibition serve to highlight our fleeting fixation on these jarring microimages, will we be wondering when we are inside this, this square, about our relationship with these devices, which were left behind on the floor in the first room, will we still be lingering on the sick qualities of the medium used to bring us here, as well as what most likely is a reflection of the problematic person from whom these ideas sprung? Will you be participating in the purported social experiment of the installation? Will you be doing so self-consciously, acting as you are supposed to act, or will you be doing so because you have lost yourself in this world, if there is another world to lose yourself in? What are the rules of engagement, what if you are the one who needs help? Are people to be trusted? What do you do when a man doesn’t stop pretending to be an ape?

Such are the questions posed in the film The Square, the 2017 Swedish entrant for Best Foreign Film at this year’s Oscars. I can’t help but wonder how those questions apply to the show and broader film culture. What are the boundaries of the squares in which we walk into, how do we choose to walk into them, how do we justify our choices there, how do we determine notions of giving, of helping? Is the square what we walk into or what we were in before? The Oscars will, quite literally, be seen through millions of rectangles, and the winners grouped into the neat brackets of history. But they remain as a subjective collective of decisions held up against the ideals of an objective reality that is anything but. There is a man in the room whose performance is progressing closer to a reality we wish was false. He keeps poking you in the head and knocks your drink off the table. Now he is standing on top of the table and about to do something you wish you hadn’t seen, now he is making you complicit in a reality you wish was false. But on we watch, adjusting our spectacles, and sharpening our perception. And the show goes on and on and on…

“What precisely is the nature of my game?” -From Phantom Thread, script by Paul Thomas Anderson

Whew, wow alright, thanks for sticking with me. This is the 6th anniversary of the site (I thought about being cool and not saying anything, but whatever). So really, thanks for sticking with me on that front. You’ve endured countless words from me over these years, 54.3 million to be exact (but who’s counting), and have been gracious enough to listen to me ramble on the virtues of Lego Batman and hologram Luke Skywalker. Heck, some of you even defended me when I misnamed the Battle of the Seven Armies on TheOneRing.net. Surprisingly I haven’t been trolled too much, which is nice, because I have a fragile ego and that sort of thing probably would have made me end the Jedi Academy. In all seriousness, though, I really appreciate the love I’ve received for my book (PSH, PTA, and Batman, Oh My!- still available on Amazon). I mean, who would have thought I could have produced a 5-star rated book? Even Paddington 2 didn’t get to 100% on Rotten Tomatoes. 

[Orchestra starts playing]

Anyways, for this year’s Oscar column I chose to do a sort of hybrid between the will win/should win format and the highlighting-a-few-films approach I chose last year. For one, I don’t want to spill the beans on my Oscar pool picks (not that I’ll win anyway). But mostly I’m finding myself less concerned with what will win and more so with different aspects of the films under consideration and a few categories that feel particularly rich with intrigue. What follows then is a series of awards and films and my thoughts on them. 

The Shape of Water: With 13 nominations and positioning as a Best Picture contender (if not in pole position for Director), The Shape of Water has resonated well with the voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. But a funny thing happened to me when I saw it—I didn’t like it. I certainly don’t think The Shape of Water is a terrible film, but something about it felt flat to me, which is a surprising feeling to have with a Guillermo Del Toro film, as he’s been so brilliant with movies like Pan’s Labyrinth, Hellboy, and Pacific Rim. What I have come to boil down as my main issue is that the fish-man doesn’t really seem to have much of a personality, he’s a vacant, generic other-type that acts in the ways you expect him to- suffers, loves, attacks- and maybe that is the point, that he is supposed to be serving as an archetype of disavowed, racially categorized people, but it just seems to me that Del Toro could have gone further with building out a distinct personality, as much as he does with the effects rendering the lifelike qualities of the being’s body. Take the alien in E.T. for example (as unfair as it is to compare anything to E.T.). You feel for the little guy because you see him do silly things like put a blonde wig on. With The Shape of Water you get a cool, yet kind of weird, sex scene. That being said, Sally Hawkins is fantastic and would be a cool winner (not to mention Octavia Spencer and the surprisingly snubbed Michael Shannon).

Cinematography: The Shape of Water is also nominated here, but I think it would be the least compelling victor when stacked against the others. Rachel Morrison’s work in Mudbound is really something, despite being somewhat compressed in scale for what one would imagine would be the majority of viewers seeing the film through Netflix. Even on the limited plane of the television screen you can still appreciate the depth, lighting, and texture of her shots, which shows how adept she is at both the landscape panorama and close-up (also, of course, check out her work in Ryan Coogler’s astounding Black Panther). This wouldn’t be a BMC’s Film Blog Oscar preview, though, without a call for a Roger Deakins victory—could the Deaks finally pull one out (this is 14th(!) nomination) for his hypnotic dark future dreamscape of Blade Runner: 2049? Bruno Delbonnel and Hoyte van Hoytema would be worthy winners as well here—Delbonnel’s decision to shoot The Darkest Hour war scenes from a birds-eye view is a neat way to symbolize the perception of a leader making battle decisions from afar, with van Hoytema giving Dunkirk an on-the-ground feel that immerses you in the terrifying environment of war.

“Elio, Elio, Elio...”

- from Call Me By Your Name, script by James Ivory

Screenplay: It’s cool that a superhero movie got nominated for best original screenplay, even though the particular one that got the nod confounds at least this critic’s mind, but it would have been better if Wonder Woman, which was a potential best picture nominee, got the nod here, particularly for how deftly it charts Diana’s course, from a warrior used to the ways of Themyscira to a superhero fighting on the World War I battlegrounds of Europe. With the chosen field, I’m rooting for The Big Sick’s screenwriting team of Emily V. Gordon and Kumail Nanjiani, along with James Ivory’s adaptation of Andre Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name novel. Look, Call Me By Your Name has to win at least something or it would be this year’s Oscars mistake-for-the-ages du jour. Any voter not completely floored by Michael Stuhlbarg’s ridiculous monologue at the end, not to mention all that came before, from the opening lines calling out an “intruder” in the midst, through the war memorial tête-à-tête, should be ashamed of themselves.

Best Supporting Actor: I’m again somewhat befuddled by The Shape of Water’s entry here, as I think it’s debatable whether Richard Jenkins is even the best supporting actor in the movie, with Shannon playing the type of weird nutjob that is often the righteous hallmark of this category. Jenkins is fine in this and a really good actor in general, but his inclusion at the omission of Armie Hammer for Call Me By Your Name is particularly mind-boggling. Hammer effortlessly projects the surface-level confidence of his character, Oliver, able to gracefully glide through the world and subvert its normalcy by playing a hidden game beneath the surface.

Alright, that’s all for now, check back in a few days for Part II…

Michael Stuhlbarg, with Timothee Chalamet and Armie Hammer, from Call Me By Your Name

[petescholtes-blog-blog]

You send me: Why Minneapolis elected Ilhan Omar for this moment

(Mural by Mohammed "Aerosol" Ali in Birmingham, England, July 2019, painted in "solidarity" with her; photographed by the artist for BBC News.)

Why is my freshman congresswoman being "primaried" in the August 11 election, by a political newcomer who raised six times as much money between April and June, including half a million dollars from big donors favoring conservative policies toward Israel?

You probably already answered that question as near to your satisfaction as you can, if you live in the Fifth District of Minnesota and can vote, or mailed your ballot in anticipation of alleged presidentially-induced delays at the post office.

But if the suspicions raised by this race about either leading candidate remain, like piles of un-recycled mailers, I have a theory as to why: A politics based on the presumption of guilt came to town. It lost, or won, but affected us either way. Because suspicion poisons everything. Without the ability to really test the null hypothesis — the default truth that what you see is a coincidence — belief can be a light out of the darkness, a north star into a black hole, or the sparkle in the eye of a face at the bottom of a well.

So let's talk about what we know. As Rachel Cohen reports in Jewish Currents, the contest here for the Democratic-Farmer-Labor nomination for Congress doesn't seem to be about actual policy differences between the candidates regarding Israel or the Palestinians. Omar and her lead challenger, Antone Melton-Meaux, have the same position on the Boycott Divest Sanctions (BDS) movement, for example, which is really more of a BD movement at this point. Both candidates defend the right to boycott, as Omar did last year with a resolution co-sponsored by John Lewis, a right most federal courts have also upheld, overturning recent anti-BDS laws in three states (though not Minnesota, where Omar argued against the law that passed). Both candidates also oppose BDS strategies, reasoning that they're counterproductive to encouraging negotiations toward a two-state solution. To the same end, they join most Americans in opposing Israel's plan to annex much of the West Bank, though Omar would condition aid against it, and Melton-Meaux would not.

Beyond that consensus, Omar has expressed approval of BDS itself, via a single text message from a campaign aid to the website Muslim Girl in 2018, stating that Omar "supports" the "movement." That message, along with her refusal (on expressly articulated principle) to join the House in condemning BDS, gave reporters license to call her and Lewis's resolution "pro-BDS," and Omar the "face of the movement." On the same narrow basis, Melton-Meaux claimed in April that the congresswoman "supports sanctions on Israel."

People are what they do, and I'm not here to attack Melton-Meaux, who seems to have done good things before writing that astoundingly disingenuous op-ed. But his campaign is about Omar, not him, or rather about someone who isn't really Omar at all, which is the problem. Omar never called for sanctions against Israel or any other country. To the contrary, she has consistently and vocally opposed sanctions, sometimes to a political fault: Her "present" vote on the Armenian genocide was a stand against sanctions on Turkey. Her argument in every case is that sanctions harm people, not governments — which appears to be right, to take the example of Iran. Even her bill to sanction Brunei, for stoning people to death for being LGBTQ, targets the travel and assets of officials, not civilians.

Whatever you think of that position, it's integral with Omar's opposition to arbitrary force or punitive retribution of any kind. She's called for an end to the "cycle of violence" everywhere, whether from undeclared war, terrorism, riots, repression, or criminal justice that metes out more harm, as she sees it. Nine months after being smeared as a coddler of terrorists for writing a judge to ask for leniency in the sentencing of a young man who had not yet taken up arms with Isis, Omar did the same for the middle-aged man convicted of threatening her life. In both cases she asked for a "restorative" approach that would help the person repair himself, not just the community.

With similar trueness, after she and Lewis introduced their "right to participate in boycotts" resolution, Omar spoke of "support" only for "efforts to end the [Israeli] occupation and achieve [a] two-state solution," and argued against condemning BDS on the grounds that "if we are going to condemn violent means of resisting the occupation, we cannot also condemn nonviolent means."

A Somali-born refugee and the first Muslim to wear an hijab in Congress, Omar may recognize better than most how essentialist judgments can thwart a person's autonomy. That she became the media "face" of BDS, while her identically-voting white colleagues of Christian or Jewish heritage did not, is one of many such ironies not lost on her, I imagine. But acting as if some double standards are too contemptible to dignify with an answer, or even an acknowledgment, seems to be part of her armor against them.

(Hugging John Lewis in 2018, in an uncredited photograph posted by the congresswoman this year on his 80th birthday.)

Of all the falsehoods sent sailing like stones at Omar, none bothers me more than the idea that the personal attacks against her didn't happen — that a massive, dangerous smear campaign was just "Twitter fights" with the president, or criticism of her "record." The torrent of Omar fictions began in August of 2018, a week after her primary win, and by July 2019 reached a crescendo of six fake stories per month debunked by Snopes. In the first month of her term, she was accused of defending Isis, based on that letter to a judge, a claim pandering to "sharia" conspiracists like her would-be assassin. In February came unfounded and increasingly dishonest charges of antisemitism, based on Omar's seemingly unwitting use of two antisemitic tropes (hypnotism and money), for which she apologized unequivocally, followed by a third one (dual loyalty), for which she did not, by that point apparently not wishing to enable those seizing on her words to keep changing the subject from what she'd been talking about: the Palestinians, and how any discussion of their treatment is policed out of existence. This time, the charges against her pandered to Christian evangelicals, with the apparent hopeful side-goal of alienating some Jewish voters from her or her party's base. But the criticism of her words was roundly picked up by Democrats, whom Omar joined in the House to vote for a resolution condemning antisemitic language. Only Republicans voted against it.

Then came the video in April shared by the president of the United States, a montage of Omar and 9/11 that aimed far beyond the earlier audiences, this time to falsely link the congresswoman with the worst attack on U.S. soil in history. If the videographer thought Democrats wouldn't defend her, they were wrong. But death threats against Omar increased. April also brought a disinformation campaign about Omar and U.S. and Somali casualties in the Battle of Mogadishu, this time aimed at veterans, whose benefits the congresswoman has consistently voted to keep and expand.

In July came the apotheosis: the president's serial fabrications about Omar on camera and at rallies. He riffed on much of the above, but added the lie that she had expressed "love" for al-Qaeda, that she said al-Qaeda made her "proud," an appalling implicit incitement to violence that Republican leaders mostly played along with. It was, I wrote at the time, "the break with reality that a more fundamental break with humanity requires," in a month of detention center atrocity stories in the news, and with growing numbers of young Jewish activists arrested in front of ICE offices across the country chanting "Never again is now," including here. Trumpists were plugging their ears and going "na-na-na-na-na-na-na" to all this. Which was scary, because a reality war could go anywhere — and that's exactly what it did. The president’s tweet of a video with a September 13 timestamp claiming to show Omar celebrating 9/11 was the same basic impulse that would kill 150,000 Americans in a viral pandemic due to denial, inaction, and corruption.

The warning of a year ago also came after the Poway synagogue shooting in April, which brought home, as Omar and Illinois Representative Jan Schakowsky were early to note, how much antisemitism and Islamophobia had merged on the extremist right. Muslims and Jews had already been grappling with their entangled oppressions for years, partnering on issues like gun violence, as a local group of women did here starting in 2016. Particularly in the wake of the El Paso shooting, the ongoing lying about Omar's immigrant community had a uniting effect outside the president's cult.

(Volunteers sweeping and painting names at the George Floyd memorial in Minneapolis, June 12, 2020; photographed by me with the subjects' permission.)

None of those lies will wash here, where the George Floyd street memorial is a garden of flowers and art six miles north from the Bloomington mosque that was bombed three years ago, in the neighboring Congressional Third District. Contrary to Islamophobic fantasy, the Fifth is 63% white, with an active Jewish left and center, of which many are also on record in support of Omar, including Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey. Given the math of her 2018 landslide, Omar could have won her seat without a single Somali American vote. Her current campaign's internal polling shows an approval rating of 74%.

To supporters I know across demographic categories, Omar is someone there for everyone — and a threat exactly because she challenges leaders who aren't. Like the largest protest movement in American history, which began in her district on May 25 — she puts the moral dilemma of American exclusion, of all exclusion, at the center of politics. Her "radical love" is the inverse of John Lewis's "good trouble," because left humanists have a parent's love of country, not a child's. They hold the world to something better. A month ago, Omar called on reporters to ask state and U.S. senators who were blocking meaningful police reform these questions: "How come you are not listening to the cries of the mothers and the fathers in our communities? How come you are not listening to the people who are telling you that we don't feel like our lives matter equally in this country?'"

I have never seen a U.S. representative host so many town hall meetings on issues important to her poorest and least powerful constituents — two events per month, from one spring to the next. At one, on Black mental health, I watched an audience member literally seek help for herself and her family from the experts onstage. Observing such events, New Hope city councilman Cedrick Frazier wrote that at every meeting with Omar he saw, she "stayed long after the event ended to talk with and answer questions from the people in attendance."

She has also consistently shown up at important protests, not necessarily to speak, but just to be there, as when she went unrecognized in her mask and headscarf at the first, overwhelmingly nonviolent George Floyd protests. She meets regularly with important local activist groups, like MN350 and MIRAC, whose memberships spiked last summer. That increase, beyond our physical proximity to Floyd's life and death, suggests why the movement and unrest happened here as it did. Fifth District residents who took to the streets in response to his killing — (again) overwhelmingly with nonviolence, often numbering in the tens of thousands, and protesting every weekend day for six weeks after the last fires from three nights of riots were out — built on already record-high levels of left activism and organization before the pandemic: for immigrant rights, the climate, and Black lives. It was protesters — medics but also ordinary participants — who used their bodies to shield and rescue all but two souls in the uprising.

This outcome reflected a culture as well as an infrastructure, and it touches everyone. Omar's teenage daughter, Isra Hirsi, helped lead the U.S. chapter and St. Paul march of the global Youth Climate Strike on September 20 — one of the largest international protests before the Floyd marches. Young MN350 volunteers poured into presidential primary campaigns, especially for Omar's friend Bernie Sanders, whose local appeal to voters was headquartered out of her own campaign office. MIRAC's Mari Mansfield painted the long list of names on the street at the George Floyd memorial on 38th and Chicago, of unarmed people of color killed by police. "It's all civil disobedience now," she said, when I lamented missing a MIRAC training on it before the pandemic. The Black Lives Matter protests in every corner of Minnesota will have similar ripple effects going forward.

Omar herself turned her office into a food distribution center after the unrest, and raised hundred of thousands of dollars for local organizations seeking to transform policing. “I saw Ilhan in the streets nearly every single day," wrote Minneapolis city council vice president Andrea Jenkins. “Unbeknown to most of us at the time, Ilhan’s father was in the hospital with COVID-19.” Nur Omar Mohamed’s death was announced on June 16.

(”Close the camps” protesters blocking traffic outside the ICE office at Fort Snelling on July 30, 2019; Youth climate strikers in St. Paul, September 20, 2019; both photographed by me.)

My point is not that Omar is a leader for this moment, but that this moment already elected her two years ago. The congresswoman speaks to both left and humanist values because both of those things are resurgent in mirror opposition to Trump. Like so many of her constituents, but also American leftists more generally, she draws no distinction between appealing to the best in everyone and defending like a sister those left out of that "everyone." "We need to jettison the zero-sum idea that one person's gain is another's loss," she wrote in the Washington Post earlier last month. "I want your gain to be my gain; your loss to be mine, too."

At her police reform press conference, with the Minnesota Legislature's People of Color and Indigenous Caucus, Omar set off another extremist conservative firestorm when she announced that, "We are not merely fighting to tear down the systems of oppression in the criminal justice system. We are fighting to tear down systems of oppression that exist in housing, in education, in healthcare, in employment, in the air we breathe." But that statement is threatening only if you believe, as some Americans apparently do, that "systems of oppression" benefit you.

In her first 19 months in the 116th U.S. Congress, Omar introduced 39 bills, four of which have passed, all amendments. She also succeeded in getting her MEALS Act — providing kids school lunches regardless of whether schools are open in the pandemic — included as part of the CARES Act. You can read the other 34 bills and judge for yourself if there's a wasted effort among them. (She's made a case for each, which is for you to weigh.) But there's something self-fulfilling about claiming a lawmaker doesn't get anything done when you're blocking or ignoring their legislation. Much as the burden of proof is always on the accuser — because you can't prove a negative — I'll leave it to Omar's opponents to make the argument that any of these laws would be bad for the United States: that, no, we should not eliminate fossil fuel subsidies, keep corporations convicted of fraud out of politics, cancel student debt, award grants to zero-waste projects, stop stigmatizing kids unable to pay for school meals, make school lunches free, cut off military aid to human rights abusers, or join the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Similarly, in a pandemic, I'll let them explain why we should not aid small businesses, cancel rent and mortgages, cancel school lunch debt, or move food stamps fully online.

Omar co-sponsored 601 other pieces of legislation, 72 of which passed the House, nine the Senate, and seven into law by the grace of the president's signature. Those dramatically dwindling numbers suggest a political problem that is not Ilhan Omar. She has addressed that problem, whether you agree or disagree with her, by endorsing progressive candidates nationwide, including here in her own district, where she campaigned for Richfield mayor Maria Regan Gonzalez and Crystal city councilperson Brendan Banks. She's also built her Democratic coalition. After the censure from Democrats and the president's attacks on her last year, she made a public show of unity with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has now endorsed her.

Omar is not the Mother of Dragons some imagine. She's just been through the worst fires of war and politics, and has come out the other side a congresswoman from Minneapolis. Most likely, that's what she'll remain next term.