Dispatches from Vilnius

Spike Lee looked like he swallowed a lemon when Green Book won best picture and tried to escape the Dolby Theater only to be turned back by ushers.  It wasn't so much that he didn't win best picture himself, but Spike like many other critics thought The Green Book tread too lightly over the Jim Crow South -- a Driving Miss Daisy with roles reversed.  This too was a sore point for Spike, as he was beat out by the 1989 dramedy as well.  For now, Spike will have to content himself with an Oscar for best screenplay, his first. It also doesn't help that Peter Farelly was the producer and director.  Past movies include Dumb and Dumber, There's Something About Mary and Shallow Hal, not exactly Oscar-caliber stuff.  But, he hit the jackpot on this one.  Kind of like the way Robert Zemeckis won everyone over with Forrest Gump. Green Book wasn't my first choice.  It was a light film with plenty of cringe-worthy moments like the time Tony Lip gets Don S...

With  Daddy Starbucks  already old news, the Bern prepares himself for a second coming despite the fact there is a load of talented, progressive younger candidates to choose from among the Democrats.  His campaign claims to have already generated $6 million in the first 24 hours of his presidential bid, making him the front runner for now.  The Bern is asking voters to turn a blind eye to all the diversity in the Democratic field and pick a crotchety old man who may or may not be able to survive a full term in office.  Like Trump, he claims he has been blessed with good health , noting that he was a long-distance runner in high school and has the energy to be a full-time president. At this point, the only thing he has going for him is name recognition, but that will change once we get to know the other candidates.  Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Amy Kobuchar,  and Cory Booker all have prominent positions in the Senate, and given the number ...

Much greater damage is being done If there is anything we have learned about this president it is that he doesn't like to be confronted with facts.  Frustrated by the Playboy reporter who threw him a hardball , Trump demanded that he sit down but Brian Karem held his ground.  This seemed to throw the president off his stride, riffing on his chances of getting the Nobel Peace Prize, which Shinzo Abe nominated him for last year, saying he has done much more than Obama ever did for his prize.  All this points to an incredibly insecure man, but we all know this as well. Trump may have finally buried himself in declaring a national emergency, especially when he freely admitted there is no national emergency.  He just wants to speed things along given he didn't make much effort to push the wall his first two years in office.  Why wasn't he attaching the wall to the Republican tax cut package if it was so important to him.  Republicans were literally gi...

This is the indelible image of a boy named Trump, who attended the State of the Union Address as the special guest of Melania Trump.  He became an overnight sensation, but not for the reasons Melania or her darling husband imagined.  The boy simply couldn't make it through the third longest SOTU address in history, as Big Chief Trump sputtered his words out in a Marlon Brando drawl for maximum effect.  He wasn't held up by very many canned applause, until the white ladies all stood up to cheer his proclamation that more women than ever before or part of the American workforce.  He admonished them to remain standing as he appeared to take credit for so many new women in Congress, although he added it wasn't supposed to be that way.  Cheers gave way to guffaws. Despite the numerous lies, or truthful hyperbole, as he likes to call it, no one shouted out "you lie," as Joe Barton did in one of Obama's early SOTU addresses.  Instead, we had Alexandria Oca...

The lead song sums up the movie well.  The lyrics alone are enough to make you gag, much less the two of them singing it on the curb of a convenience store parking lot.  Bradley Cooper tried to bring the 1976 version of the classic story down to a guttural level but it only makes you feel like you have been left in the gutter after an all-night drinking binge. For all the angst over whether Lady Gaga could pull off the role of Abby, it was Cooper who seemed out of his element in this movie.   He plays this role with a kind of morose sentimentality that has become the staple of Clint Eastwood movies, to whom he seems to owe a debt of gratitude for ceding the directorial duties to him.  Clint had other fish to fry. This turgid affair starts in the most unlikely of places, a drag bar in LA where Ally sings along side her drag friends, putting on an Edith Piaf imitation that makes it look like she is in drag herself.  If Cooper had his usual sense o...

In a rather abrupt move, Steve Schmidt jumped the liberal ship MSNBC to serve as Howard Schultz' chief strategist.  Anyone who didn't see this one coming was wearing blinders, because guys like Schmidt never were interested in the Democratic Party.  They wanted to see a new Centrist hero emerge, and Schmidt and many other moderate Republicans and Independents think they have found him in Howard Schultz.  If they waited long enough they probably could have rallied around John Kasich, who is now a retired governor and has presidential aspirations of his own.  May still turn out that way. Schultz embodies the Centrists' fever dream, which Paul Krugman calls "The Attack of the Fanatical Centrists."   In his op-ed piece, he lambastes this movement from the right, which wouldn't get any traction if they didn't label Democrats as lunatic leftists hell-bent on imposing a Venezuela-style socialism on America.  Schultz has played straight into this crowd, at...