Bombshell by Charles Randolph - Nine out of 10

Bombshell by Charles Randolph

Nine out of 10

You could probably expect from this motion picture quite different things, depending on which side of the political spectrum you might be, for those exasperated by Trump, those idiots working for him – pompous Pompeo comes to mind – and the fools that (still!) support him, this story is interesting before seeing it for the revelations into how the machine that propelled the Clown to the top of the free world works – though for those interested, there is more material in many more hours in the fabulous The Loudest Voice, awarded at the recent Globes for the remarkable performance of Russell Crowe as the vicious Roger Ailes.

On the other hand, for the Trump fans, the approach to this film would be quite different – by the way, spoiler alert…if you are on that side of politics and share that ‘view of the world’, you should stop here and not go further …a recent reader of my humble lines got quite upset and felt aggravated as a ‘republican’ and fan of the Orange Man – for they might look to it to have confirmation for their biases, admire again some of the anchors they worship, such as Judge Jeanine Pirro, Bill O’Reilly and others, people who furnish a perspective of the world that seems so perverted, ‘fake’, altered beyond recognition for the rest of us who are flabbergasted by a network that can go to any extreme in their support for the ‘commander in chief’ – assuming he is a republican and conservative, for the same thing was anathema when it looked like Obama could or has done it – as evidences by recent events…and all other events for that matter.

Take the most recent killing of Suleimani, the Iranian general that most agree had been a monster, but nevertheless a quite controversial target, given the expected retaliation and the quite dangerous escalation of the conflict that would result from that – the cable news channel is most often placed in absurd situations, for it supports a leader that contradicts himself and had declared years ago that ‘Obama would start a war to get re-elected ‘ – so this applies to him too – then he campaigned on withdrawing troops from the Middle East – and perhaps anywhere else for that matter – only to get sucked in with strikes like the one against the Iranian commander, kept attacking the same Obama for playing way too much golf, only to do that with alarming frequency and spend his time with one hour calls to Fox shows and watching television almost all the time he does not play golf…

For this cinephile, this film is one of the best of 2019 and deserves much more recognition that the nominations it has received – for instance, Charlize Theron as Megyn Kelly deserved to win the Globe more than Renee Zellweger and the same goes for Margot Robbie, whose role looks like a leading one as seen from here – seeing as it deals with major subjects, it is intelligent, touches on issues such as sexual harassment, sexism, abuse of power, equality for women, power for them, but also assault weapons – Gretchen Carlson aka exceptional Nicole Kidman asks her viewers on the show how they feel about banning those types of guns and they overwhelmingly vote to keep them, lethal and extremely deadly as they have proved…perhaps more than 81% want them legal!

The film is also complex in that we learn that the monster in the narrative, Roger Ailes aka magnificent and transformed John Lithgow is not completely despicable, for he had helped so many with hospital bills, propulsion to the top – including alas the most loathsome of all, the cretin of the world – help when they have been down, while some of the victims could be blamed for the association with this vile network, which is feeding conspiracy theories and outright lies to the leader and the republican base, quite simple individuals – there would be quite a few that understand facts, but they just do not care, they want lower taxes and say fuck the world if we get the money we want – who only watch Fox News and therefore get a distorted, in fact alternative reality in which Donald does not lie, and more than 50 % of them (!) think this cataclysm is better than…Abraham Lincoln!

In other words, one might be tempted to feel less pity or empathy – Milan Kundera makes a net difference between the two – for stars of a channel that is ultimately responsible for the Decline of what used to be the Ultimate Model, affecting in this process poor devils like us, those living in ‘emerging democracies’, people that have been under the yoke of the soviets or in other such dire circumstances and when we look up at what used to be our Role Model, we see not just a stupid buffoon, suffering from Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Dementia and other ailments, but a huge segment of the population in awe at what is the Ultimate Ridicule and a network that is splendidly depicted in bombshell that lives on lies, feeds the base only nonsense and relies on anchors that have an extraordinary credibility among their viewers – in spite or because of the immense falsity of what they are peddling – using flagrant alternative versions of the facts, what they attacked viciously Obama for is fair game and even admirable for the lunatic in the White House…

Hence the quandary…on the one hand we certainly feel for the women who have had to suffer, have been humiliated by Ailes, O’Reilly and other scoundrels at Fox, but on the other hand, that seems to be the place where that is the ‘mot de guerre’, the paradigm – on a side note, for a paradigm shift you could consult Vernon God Little, where the hero talks about his grandmother and how we change perspective, perhaps to a degree in the same way that we perceive the anchors that turn against Fox and its manager as ‘ours’, but only after they change their uniforms…

For on the other hand, Megyn, Gretchen and others have been responsible to a large extent for the rise of the Absurd Conservatism, including their stupid ring leader, though we could argue that some of them have been trapped, confused, even raised a challenge for the sexist abuser who – this Trump we are talking about here – is recorded with the Hollywood Access Tapes of infamy, and as mentioned in the movie, he has a long history of attacking women, calling them insulting names and being in general obnoxious, awful as he is with everyone that challenge him, as a pathetic, germ obsessed, paranoiac crook and con man who should be used by the world as a negative example and not as he is now, a representative of a perhaps failing, especially if he gets reelected – now that he is starting a war with Iran as he falsely accused Obama of doing – this year…