12/4/2023 0 Comments Peter isherwellIt was one political humiliation for Bush who suffered many after his reelection, including how poorly his “Mission: Accomplished” photograph atop of an aircraft carrier had aged as the Iraq War escalated. Miers ultimately withdrew her nomination. Tom Coburn privately said she “flunked” in demonstrating the intellectual rigor needed to be a SCOTUS justice. After meeting with the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2005, then-Sen. The choice received fierce backlash from even the Republican Party. Her close loyalty to Bush caused the president to nominate her over anyone who actually served in the judiciary. But she had worked in the Bush White House as first a staff secretary and then deputy chief of staff for policy. Up to that point, Miers had been a lifelong political animal in the Republican Party who had never served as a judge on any court. Bush-whose administration is a favorite subject matter for McKay- did attempt to put Harriet Miers on the Supreme Court in 2005. While Trump did not nominate Arpaio to the SCOTUS, President George W. The small character of the sheriff (who we’ll come back to) is likely inspired by Joe Arpaio, a former sheriff in Arizona whom Trump pardoned in 2017 after the law officer was found guilty of criminal contempt. Take her bizarre crisis at the start of the film where she’s nominated an abusive, violent, and racist southwestern sheriff with no judicial experience to be a justice on the Supreme Court. The former president made these incredulous assertions as California was ravaged by historic wildfires-and in the same year the former president also told Americans that COVID-19 was “a hoax” exaggerated by the DNC and that it would go away in spring 2020 “like a miracle.” Orlean’s similar disinterest and inability to engage in reality is a maddening recreation of this, as is her abuse of cronyism and nepotism, including by making her son White House chief of staff.īut she is not only Trump. Just last year, as Don’t Look Up was preparing to film during the pandemic, Trump told Wade Crowfoot, California’s secretary for natural resources, that he thought the earth was going to “start getting cooler – you just watch.” When Crowfoot responded that he wished the science agreed with the president, Trump added, “Well, I don’t think the science knows, actually.” Like Trump, Orlean is a former reality television star who preposterously rose to national politics and is vocally outspoken in her anti-intellectualism and anti-science ignorance. But the figure she’s clearly most emulating is the orange hued man who was president when cameras first rolled on the movie: Donald Trump. And that’s because, truthfully, there are multiple nods and references to all of our most recent national leaders in Streep and McKay’s unholy creation. When the Don’t Look Up trailer first dropped, you would be forgiven for thinking that there are hints of Hillary Rodham Clinton, the woman who almost was the President of the United States, in Meryl Streep’s blonde female POTUS with a penchant for pant suits. Meryl Streep’s President Orlean Influences So here are all the winks, allusions, and implications we caught on our first viewing. Indeed, the movie is technically a fictional story, just as it’s supposedly a comedy, but the fact that there are echoes of the real world in each larger than life cartoon character allows it to play differently. While McKay wrote and began preparing this project before COVID, it all lands a little more horrifyingly now… not least of all because the film’s most caricatured personalities all have the haze of truth around them. The film is clearly meant to be a parable about humanity’s inability to face the hard truths of the existential threat posed by climate change in the last 40 years, but it also arrives deep into the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic (and new emergence of the Omicron variant). That’s the bleak vibe and pitch black humor at work throughout Don’t Look Up, a passionate, strident, and intentionally abrasive dramedy which takes a page out of Stanley Kubrick and laughs at the end of the world. At least they’re getting a break from trying to force reality into those people’s thick skulls. Randall Mindy and Jennifer Lawrence’s PhD candidate Kate Dibiasky sit down to dinner with family, friends, and even a new fiancé, before the comet strikes. This was supposed to be a comedy, right? That’s what the marketing and 1960s-inspired opening title cards suggest for Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up, and yet one might think the happiest moment in the whole thing is when Leonardo DiCaprio’s Dr. The following includes major Don’t Look Up spoilers.
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