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"The Apprentice which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival yesterday, promises to explain how Trump came to be Trump, through an account of his mentorship by the ruthless New York power broker Roy Cohn. But the movie, which was directed by Iranian-Danish filmmaker Ali Abbasi and written by political reporter Gabriel Sherman, tells us nothing we don’t already know, both in terms of its plot and, more fatally, its evaluation of both men’s souls.
...It would be hard, in some ways, to think of a less flattering portrait. Sebastian Stan plays him as a hairsprayed vacuum of a man, a blank-eyed megalomaniac whose only gift is his monstrous self-regard. Although it charts his rise from a son of an outer-borough landlord to the spray-tanned face of Manhattan’s 1980s excess, it never grants him the glamour he so desperately sought. The film’s images have the washed-out colors of a VHS tape retrieved from the back of a Goodwill, as if the lens was sprayed with a fresh coat of bronzer before every take. It shows Trump stiffing contractors, scarfing down amphetamines, and raping his wife, Ivana (Borat 2’s Maria Bakalova), when she dares to suggest he could stand to familiarize himself with female anatomy. But while Variety labeled the movie “brutal,” that’s also a word that the film’s Trump and its Cohn, played by Jeremy Strong, frequently apply to themselves, a term that’s been brandished by his critics and embraced by his admirers.
...In an interview after The Apprentice’s premiere, Abbasi offered to screen the film for Trump personally, adding “I don’t necessarily think that this is a movie he would dislike.” But rather than taking him up on that offer, Trump’s spokesperson called it a film that “doesn’t even deserve a place in the straight-to-DVD section of a bargain bin at a soon-to-be-closed discount movie store.” Trump has known for decades that there’s nothing more powerful than the ability to hold people’s attention, and the sickest burn is suggesting that the movie isn’t even worth a hate-watch. The mere existence of The Apprentice flatters his vanity and burnishes his legend. Its most devastating sequence doesn’t involve backstabbing or lawbreaking or even sexual assault. It’s when the film intercuts Cohn’s funeral with Trump undergoing liposuction and a scalp reduction to reduce his bald spot. He’s not a titan of industry or a power player or a future world leader, just a middle-aged man with a bulging gut and thinning hair. Trump can’t sue for that sequence, but it’s the one that would make him truly furious."
Link
Interesting point.
...It would be hard, in some ways, to think of a less flattering portrait. Sebastian Stan plays him as a hairsprayed vacuum of a man, a blank-eyed megalomaniac whose only gift is his monstrous self-regard. Although it charts his rise from a son of an outer-borough landlord to the spray-tanned face of Manhattan’s 1980s excess, it never grants him the glamour he so desperately sought. The film’s images have the washed-out colors of a VHS tape retrieved from the back of a Goodwill, as if the lens was sprayed with a fresh coat of bronzer before every take. It shows Trump stiffing contractors, scarfing down amphetamines, and raping his wife, Ivana (Borat 2’s Maria Bakalova), when she dares to suggest he could stand to familiarize himself with female anatomy. But while Variety labeled the movie “brutal,” that’s also a word that the film’s Trump and its Cohn, played by Jeremy Strong, frequently apply to themselves, a term that’s been brandished by his critics and embraced by his admirers.
...In an interview after The Apprentice’s premiere, Abbasi offered to screen the film for Trump personally, adding “I don’t necessarily think that this is a movie he would dislike.” But rather than taking him up on that offer, Trump’s spokesperson called it a film that “doesn’t even deserve a place in the straight-to-DVD section of a bargain bin at a soon-to-be-closed discount movie store.” Trump has known for decades that there’s nothing more powerful than the ability to hold people’s attention, and the sickest burn is suggesting that the movie isn’t even worth a hate-watch. The mere existence of The Apprentice flatters his vanity and burnishes his legend. Its most devastating sequence doesn’t involve backstabbing or lawbreaking or even sexual assault. It’s when the film intercuts Cohn’s funeral with Trump undergoing liposuction and a scalp reduction to reduce his bald spot. He’s not a titan of industry or a power player or a future world leader, just a middle-aged man with a bulging gut and thinning hair. Trump can’t sue for that sequence, but it’s the one that would make him truly furious."
Link
Interesting point.