Peter Sellers (left), Peter Medak and Spike Milligan on the set of “Ghost in the Noonday Sun,”
The Hungarian-born filmmaker Peter Medak survived Nazi occupation during World War II and communism under the Soviet umbrella. But Peter Sellers was a force of nature all his own.
By many accounts, the British comic genius severely damaged Medak’s career when in 1973 he enticed the director to make a pirate comedy concocted by friend and cohort Spike Milligan, then decided on the second day of filming he didn’t want to be a part of it. That was the beginning of a nightmarish shoot that would end with the disastrous “Ghost in the Noonday Sun” being shelved and the blame heaped on Medak, who was one of the hottest directors in the world going into the shoot, but afterward wouldn’t make another film for five years.
But Medak’s new documentary “The Ghost of Peter Sellers,” while intending to set the record straight, isn’t a hit piece on Sellers, but a nuanced portrait of a troubled, often self-destructive talent. And it is an introspective piece from a filmmaker who still, nearly a half-century later, lives with the guilt and psychological wounds from the experience that need addressing. Continue reading “Review: ‘The Ghost of Peter Sellers’ revisits an outlandish film and its troubled minds”→
As the cathedral in Chartres reopens, sacred and profane struggle with Covid-19 constraints
The French poet Charles Péguy described Our Lady of Chartres as a star of the sea, rising above oceans of wheatfields on the plains of La Beauce.
It is more prosaic to approach the Gothic masterpiece from the autoroute, but its majesty is nonetheless stunning.
I visited Chartres because it falls within the 100km “perimeter of liberty” accessible to Parisians under Covid-19 regulations.
The cathedral’s website announced that it would reopen to visitors on the afternoon of May 14th. They would be required to wear masks. Fifty could enter at a time, if they observed social distancing.
The rules changed overnight. The prefecture, the arm of the interior ministry which is responsible for religious affairs, grew alarmed at the prospect of Parisians flocking to the beauty spot 86km to the southwest of the capital.
“This is the contradiction we’ve been living with since the beginning of the epidemic,” Fr Emmanuel Blondeau (56), the rector and parish priest, said. “The state says: ‘Stay at home but go to work. We’re lifting the lockdown but don’t move. Don’t go to Chartres, which is the most beautiful town in France.’”
Father Emmanuel Blondeau, rector of Notre Dame de Chartres cathedral on the day the Gothic and Romanesque church reopened to townsfolk and people wishing to pray. Photograph: Tala Skari
They don’t understand what Mass means to Christians. They think it doesn’t matter, but it matters to us
“In my life, I have watched John Kennedy talk on television about missiles in Cuba. I saw Lyndon Johnson look Richard Russell squarely in the eye and and say, “And we shall overcome.” I saw Richard Nixon resign and Gerald Ford tell the Congress that our long national nightmare was over. I saw Jimmy Carter talk about malaise and Ronald Reagan talk about a shining city on a hill. I saw George H.W. Bush deliver the eulogy for the Soviet bloc, and Bill Clinton comfort the survivors of Timothy McVeigh’s madness in Oklahoma City. I saw George W. Bush struggle to make sense of it all on September 11, 2001, and I saw Barack Obama sing ‘Amazing Grace’ in the wounded sanctuary of Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
“These were the presidents of my lifetime. These were not perfect men. They were not perfect presidents, god knows. Not one of them was that. But they approached the job, and they took to the podium, with all the gravitas they could muster as appropriate to the job. They tried, at least, to reach for something in the presidency that was beyond their grasp as ordinary human beings. They were not all ennobled by the attempt, but they tried nonetheless.
“And comes now this hopeless, vicious buffoon, and the audience of equally hopeless and vicious buffoons who laughed and cheered when he made sport of a woman whose lasting memory of the trauma she suffered is the laughter of the perpetrators. Now he comes, a man swathed in scandal, with no interest beyond what he can put in his pocket and what he can put over on a universe of suckers, and he does something like this while occupying an office that we gave him, and while endowed with a public trust that he dishonors every day he wakes up in the White House.
“The scion of a multigenerational criminal enterprise, the parameters of which we are only now beginning to comprehend. A vessel for all the worst elements of the American condition. And a cheap, soulless bully besides. We never have had such a cheap counterfeit of a president* as currently occupies the office. We never have had a president* so completely deserving of scorn and yet so small in the office that it almost seems a waste of time and energy to summon up the requisite contempt.
“Watch how a republic dies in the empty eyes of an empty man who feels nothing but his own imaginary greatness, and who cannot find in himself the decency simply to shut up even when it is in his best interest to do so. Presidents don’t have to be heroes to be good presidents. They just have to realize that their humanity is our common humanity, and that their political commonwealth is our political commonwealth, too.
Watch him behind the seal of the President of the United States. Isn’t he a funny man? Isn’t what happened to that lady hilarious? Watch the assembled morons cheer. This is the only story now.”
In its guidance, the FDA said that hydroxychloroquine has “not been shown to be safe and effective for treating or preventing COVID-19.” – Source: Business Insider
“Here’s what’s crazy:We don’t know whether the President of the United States is self-prescribing hydroxychloriquine against all medical advice, or is lying that he is so that OTHERS will take it against all medical advice. The fact that each seems plausible is totally insane.” – Joshua A. Geltzer, Former White House, DOJ
Pas De Merde 