October 20, 2008

"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

14 comments:

Anonymous said...

Does the movie make a big deal of the interracial aspect of the marriage? I thought you said before (or maybe it was a review somewhere else) said that it no character in the movie ever commented on it.

Anonymous said...

That's only a "review" in the loosest sense of the term.

Steve Sailer said...

Duh.

If you want to read the review, buy the magazine.

michael farris said...

"Jenny, the sensibly dressed old-fashioned leftist"

You might want to edit that, for a while I was confused, thinking the older blond lady on the right was Jenny, whereas it appears she's the one on the left of the picture (and I wouldn't call her 'sensibly dressed' except in comparison with Amy).

And although Amy seems to be the extrovert of the pair I'd say Jenny is actually the more attractive.

John Craig said...

Gotta agree with Mr. Farris. "Sensibly dressed" usually connotes a much plainer outfit, usually something downright dowdy. Jenny Lumet is dressed up in a liberal sort of way, with that vaguely ethnic/exotic-looking skirt/wrap and mostly hidden but probably fancy-yet-flat shoes. (High heels are definitely Republican.)

On the other hand, I'd hate to think of Amy's enhanced breasts as the mark of a conservative. (Hmm....After a quick mental scan of all the women I've known who've had enhancement, I think I can safely say that augmentation crosses party ines.)

Halfbreed

Anonymous said...

What is most remarkable about the whole story is that Sidney Lumet won the Lifetime Achievement Oscar over three years ago yet is still alive and kicking. Participants in those dead-celebrity betting pools pay careful attention to the Lifetime Achievement award, as getting one is usually a clear sign to stop buying green bananas, if you catch my drift.

Anonymous said...

Who paid for Amy's implant's?

Anonymous said...

I find women like her hot and I am not ashamed to say so.

Anonymous said...

Two thoughts: A)This movie sounds good--I may see it! :) B)Those are some BIG melons!!

Truth said...

"Steve, where's your commentary on the flood of black man/white woman couplings promoted by the heavily Jewish media? Where's the focus on this issue?"

Why would Jews promote this when it's been proven that their miscegenation rate, and decline of religious fidelity is higher than anyone else's?

Anonymous said...

After reading this article I will be conducting a detailed examination of the differences between Black, White and Interracial gazongas, and will report my findings if I ever finish.

Anonymous said...

"Steve, where's your commentary on the flood of black man/white woman couplings promoted by the heavily Jewish media? Where's the focus on this issue? etc."

Let me guess; you were just dumped for a black guy.

Anonymous said...

There's never going to be any large scale black/white coupling of any long-term duration. Anybody who works and lives in a heavily black area knows that. The more we're around each other the more we know it ain't gonna work.
Though I am aware of the predictive power of IQ as far as general life outcome in statistical terms, even I was surprised to hear that the IQs of married couples are within FIVE points of each other. Now people don't go around asking each other's IQ. The same is probably true for close friends. It just happens. Barring some weird demographic shift where people had little choice about their mates, there will never be large scale, long-term mating between blacks and whites. Unless there is some dramatic leap in the AVERAGE IQ of blacks, there won't be a lot of intermarriage with them.
With middle-eastern people it seems to be more a matter of religion and culture than race, though they are quite aware of their own ethnicities. However, Christian Arabs and Armenians, Jewish Persians and atheistic Turks assimilate with whites pretty well in America. Even some east Indians do.

Intermarrriage happens fairly often with Asians and whites, but only when one of the groups has relatively few options from among their own race. I wouldn't have said this 30 years ago--I thought living in the same society would make us all the same. Guess what? It doesn't.

Anonymous said...

I doubt very much there is even one person in America who "can't find a spouse and have kids" because suitable partners are constantly hooking up with members of other races instead. If you're the lone exception to this role, you have my condolences, but the "competitive interracial mating game" of which you speak doesn't exist. For starters, the interracial dating/marriage rate is still quite low.