Only in America

History repeats itself again.

The natives led by "Butcher" Bill Poole fought to keep out the Irish led by John Morrissey in what was loosely depicted in the movie Gangs of New York led to the Irish control of the politics of New York and the Tammany Hall machine until the 1930's when they were deposed by the end l election if Fiorella LaGuardia.

The same is likely to happen with the extinction of MAGA.

 

I'm kind of a fan of Pedro Almodóvar—I say 'kind of a fan' because I haven't really worked very hard at seeking out more of his films. The Detroit Film Theatre would show them pretty dependably when I lived there, but since I moved they haven't just been showing up at a movie house near me, so the ones I have are mostly those that have jumped out at me from DVD sections in thrift stores. I should probably go buy some definitive collection pack and be done with it.

One that I watched for the first time not long ago (though he made it in the late '90s) has an opening scene set in 1974 Madrid, under Franco.

Franco's a guy I had never really learned as much about as other early/mid 20c baddies. That SoB took power in Spain in 1939 and they didn't get to construct anything on a democratic constitution again until 1975–1982.

The movie's opening sequence is interesting because people are all cowering isolated in their apartments, having been told endlessly on their TVs that they live in a hive of scum and villainy and carnage and that all their neighbors are terrible people who want to rape and kill them. A scream is heard from a neighboring apartment, confirming everybody's fears, so they cower tighter. Scream turns out to be a woman in labor. She and her woman friend go out in the (largely deserted) street trying to find a ride to the hospital, which almost nobody wants to give her (what if she's a 'terrorist'?). Ends up having a son in the back of an off-duty city bus.

Movie then flashes forward 20 years and the rest is all the son's story, living in vibrant democratic end-20th-century Spain.

But oy, that took a long time.

Interestingly, Almodóvar based that film on a novel by an English author. Moving it to Spain and giving it a Franco flashback were Almodóvarisms, I think.

And, he was able to sign Penélope Cruz to be the young mom in the first sequence—something like, I dun᠎no, 4 minutes of screen time.

 

Ah. The lemmings syndrome.