Daily Archives: October 9, 2017

“She takes marginal characters and makes them the most robust people in the movie.”

The New York Times: Frances McDormand’s Difficult Women. “The actor has built a career, and a passionate fan base, playing supporting roles; now, at 60, she has become an unconventional star.” By Jordan Kisner.

“Frances McDormand, or Fran, as she is called in regular life, cuts a handsome figure on the street. She is 60 and sexy in the manner of women who have achieved total self-possession. She eschews makeup unless she is working, doesn’t dye her hair and despises the nips, tucks and lifts that have become routine for women of her profession. Her clothes are well made — she loves clothes — but utilitarian and comfortable. On this day she was wearing loose-legged cropped pants, black-and-peach sneakers, a navy sweater and a thin headband shoved in and out of uncombed hair as the mood struck.

She doesn’t do press junkets, and for most of the 20 years since she won a Best Actress Academy Award for playing Marge Gunderson, the tremendously pregnant, improbably cheerful police detective in “Fargo,“ she has refused interviews. Her publicist explained to me that his job is to politely tell people to go away.”

“This is what grudging benevolence rooted in a sense of personal superiority and belief in the power of performance looks like.”

The Washington Post: In Puerto Rico, Trump’s paper-towel toss reveals where his empathy lies.

“Nicholas Vargas, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Florida, noted that Trump doesn’t approach everyone in such a state of callous disconnect. In August, Trump said there were “very fine people“ among the white supremacists at a rally in Charlottesville that left a counterprotester dead. Soon after, he pardoned former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, formally expressing concern for a man known for racially profiling Latinos and housing jail inmates outdoors in tents.

In these cases, Trump showed compassion.

“But when it comes to Puerto Rico and the humanitarian crisis there, what we see is a hands-off, bitter, hardly restrained resentment that anything is expected of him at all,“ said Vargas, who studies issues related to race and ethnicity. “This is a man who has the capacity to empathize. It — even in a catastrophe — is just a selective thing.“

These images show a president without mercy for certain human beings, “people unlike him,“ Vargas said. “That is women, people of color — even in the most dire of circumstances.“ “