"Rachel Getting Married"

From my review in The American Conservative of the Jonathan Demme movie:

The movie's better half stars a charismatic Anne Hathaway ... as Kym, an attentionaholic part-time model turned full-time drug addict who is furloughed from a posh rehab clinic for her sister's wedding. Exactly as her levelheaded sister Rachel dreads, Kym's self-destructive antics enthrall the multicultural throngs crowding the grounds of their father's Connecticut estate to prepare for Rachel's big day on which the Reform rabbi is to marry her to a tall, gentlemanly black man from Hawaii.

The highlight of the ceremony is the groom singing his bride a Neil Young ballad. White liberals critics have gone nuts over "Rachel" because the interracial marriage reminds them of a certain black Hawaiian's promise that promoting "mutual understanding" is "in my DNA." I fear, though, that even electing Obama President won't get many black guys to understand the appeal of whiny Canadian folk rockers from the Sixties.

First-time screenwriter Jenny Lumet named the groom "Sidney." She is presumably referencing both Sidney Poitier in Stanley Kramer's 1967 interracial marriage movie "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," and her father, Sidney Lumet, director of 1957's "Twelve Angry Men," one of Kramer's successors as a liberal warhorse. ...

Still, a more entertaining screenplay could be written about the star's off-screen misadventures. Hathaway was in the news in June when the FBI hauled away her suave Italian boyfriend, Raffaello Follieri. Outfitted with clerical cassocks and a claim to be the Vatican's chief financial officer, Follieri had wormed his way into a $100 million deal with Bill Clinton and Ron Burkle to sell off Roman Catholic churches in America to pay for sex scandal settlements. On a rented yacht in Montenegro, the bipartisan cute couple also hosted the 70th birthday party of John McCain.

An equally entertaining movie could be made about the real-life Lumet sisters (who are granddaughters of famed jazz vocalist and beauty Lena Horne). When their dad received his Lifetime Achievement Oscar in 2005, screenwriter Jenny, the sensibly dressed old-fashioned leftist, had the global television spotlight stolen from her by the startling new cleavage of her sister Amy, a would-be model and 1992 National Review contributor ("Baby Cons of America, unite: You have nothing to lose but your parents' guilt.")

Now, Jenny / Rachel has taken sibling rivalry to a new level.

Here's some more material I uncovered. Amy Lumet, who was married to writer P.J. O'Rourke back around then, began her 1992 National Review essay:

A VERY polite gentle man in New York asked me this fall if I was planning to vote for Bill Clinton. Talk about insulting! I pointed to my John McCain hat--"I'm a Republican," I said. The gentleman told me that, in his experience, cute young things tended to be liberal. We need to prove him wrong in a major way.

According to Washington Post gossip columnist Lloyd Grove, Amy worked for McCain in the Senate, but I don't have any corroboration of that, although the opening line of her NR essay suggest that. Wikipedia says O'Rourke and Amy Lumet were married 1990-1993. Was Lumet working for McCain during this period?

And here is a picture of the two sisters (with Mrs. Ozzy Osbourne in the middle)

Above is a popular picture of the two sisters sitting side-by-side at the Academy Awards while their Dad, Sidney Lumet, received his lifetime achievement award. Well, actually, the most commonly available screen capture on the Internet is a picture of just one and a half sisters, because Jenny, the screenwriter of "Rachel Getting Married," normally gets cropped in half because the kind of guys who post screen captures on the Internet only have eyes for her sister Amy.

By the way, P.J. O’Rourke, Amy's ex-husband, wrote this Spring in the Weekly Standard about a visit he recently paid to an aircraft carrier:

I was there to get a journalistic hook--a tailhook, as it were--for a preconceived idea. I wanted to say something about Senator John McCain.... Some say John McCain's character was formed in a North Vietnamese prison. I say those people should take a gander at what John chose to do--voluntarily. Being a carrier pilot requires aptitude, intelligence, skill, knowledge, discernment, and courage of a kind rarely found anywhere but in a poem of Homer's or a half gallon of Dewar's. ...

I can speak to John's honor, duty, valor, patriotism, etc., but I'm not sure how well his self-discipline would have fared if he'd been on an aircraft carrier with more than 500 beautiful women sailors the way I was. At least John likes women, which is more than we can say about Hillary's attitude toward, for instance, the women in Bill's life, who at this point may constitute nearly the majority of the "women's vote."

I wish P.J. all the luck in the world in his battle with cancer.

In other, but still somehow related news, Oprah Winfrey is planning to make a biopic about the Lumet sisters' still living grandma, Lena Horne. Alicia "AK-47" Keys is slated to star..

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer