Jan 15 2015

The Daily Show (Hunger Games)

What’s the trouble with Florida?

I’m torn.  Rubio got a 3 part web exclusive extended interview and I guess I’ll include it below for completeness, but that doesn’t mean you have to watch it.

Also the real news and this week’s guests.

Rubio–

This Week’s guests-

The Daily Show

Julianne Moore will be on Oscar whoring for Still Alice.  This film is not without its controversies-

For all its strengths, Still Alice belittles the real-life tragedy of Alzheimer’s

by Catherine Shoard, The Guardian

Tuesday 14 October 2014 15.08 EDT

As a professor diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s in Still Alice, Moore is, predictably, brilliant. Yet the film betrays a nervousness about how much the audience might care about its heroine’s decline. So it lifts the stakes higher and higher; a Jenga tower of stacked tragedies soundtracked by an endless irony klaxon. Alice’s Alzheimer’s isn’t just early onset, it’s a rare genetic type with a 50/50 chance it will be passed to her kids. Her daughter is undergoing fertility treatment, which may enable her to test the embryos in case they’re carriers. Alice – and her husband – are neuroscientists who specialise in memory. So Alice is able to have enough insight into her condition to deliver a paper in it to the Alzheimer’s society.

Yet, in my experience, Alzheimer’s doesn’t really require extra upping of dramatic ante. It’s pretty eventful as it is.The everyday becomes apocalyptic. You’re constantly pitched into fresh traumas, new horrors, occasionally leavened by humour or humanity. Just coping with someone else’s suffering rips you up (my grandmother’s been dead a decade and I still dream of her every week). Going through it must be like getting stuck on the worst ghost train imaginable.

Not only is added excitement unnecessary, it’s dangerous. Still Alice deals in exceptions: exceptionally young, exceptionally rapid, exceptionally ironic. Even more than biopics of Iris Murdoch and Margaret Thatcher, which flagged the pathos of their subject’s memory loss, it perpetuates the notion that dementia is more tragic when it affects the intellectual.

rustymancuso581

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