On Dinklage Playing Herve Villechaize

Posted on October 16th, 2018 by Adam-Troy Castro

There’s a movie coming up on HBO, this weekend. MY DINNER WITH HERVE. It’s a biopic, covering I don’t know how long a period in the unhappy life of actor Herve Villechaize.

Peter Dinklage plays Villechaize.

And, spectacularly unfair as it might be to say, the casting is not perfect.

First, Peter Dinklage is a full foot taller than Villechaize was

Second, Dinklage has managed a trick Villechaize never could, in that he has a thriving career, and you can even say stardom, that includes many roles where his size is not a factor. Yes, if you want a small guy with gravitas, you do go to Dinklage, and that is why I got so excited when I heard that he was going to be Tyrion Lannister. (Which was ongoing when a certain neighbor of his, a well-known science fiction writer who is gone now, but who claimed to know him well, wanted us to know that UNDERDOG was his “big break.”)

Unlike Villechaize, a profoundly limited actor of whom it is fair to say that no one ever saw fit to ask him to convey any operatic emotions, Dinklage is so good that cosmetic changes are made to roles that are size-neutral, to accommodate him, which is how come the main character of THE STATION AGENT was changed from a lonely withdrawn guy of conventional size to a lonely withdrawn dwarf, and the high-powered attorney of FIND ME GUILTY was changed from a guy of conventional size to one who used a platform on wheels to address the jury. Robin Williams needed someone to play his brother in THE ANGRIEST MAN IN BROOKLYN, and they inserted Dinklage, and not a single goddamned reference is made to his height; nor was there a single height-related joke in the awful PIXELS, where he is just an awful person, and would be even if he was towering..

When Roger Ebert saw THE STATION AGENT, he was sufficiently impressed to say, with an accuracy that would have delighted him had he lived to see it, “There’s no reason why Peter Dinklage can’t play Braveheart.” And so this came to pass, with Tyrion on the ramparts of a besieged King’s Landing, in GAME OF THRONES.

I am very much looking forward to his performance as Herve, but in so doing I want to ward against any facile observations that he has merely taken Herve’s place as filmed entertainments’s go-to-dwarf. Because, honestly, I believe that the place he has actually taken, if there is such a thing, is closer to Brando’s, and that is a substantial victory not just in terms of his own career, but for inclusiveness in general.

(He has, incidentally, been hit with accusations of “white-washing” for allowing himself to be cast as Villechaize, and, honestly, people; if you are among the people who give this credence, you really do need to consider first that Villechaize’s Filipino appearance reflected his medical condition and not his actual French /German background, and second that matinee names the size of Villechaize with the apparent racial mix of Villechaize who can act as well as Dinklage are NOT EXACTLY WALKING INTO EVERY CASTING OFFICE EVERY DAY.)

Tags: Find Me Guilty, Herve Villechaize, Movies, Robin Williams, The Station Agent | Category Movies

The Historical Precedent for George Soros Conspiracy Theories

Posted on October 15th, 2018 by Adam-Troy Castro

This George Soros thing.

This “shadowy billionaire, influencing the left” thing.

I have already addressed the ridiculous claims that that he was a collaborator with the Nazis. I could again, here. I won’t go into the same detail I have, because I want to rush to the next bit. Suffice it to say, in summary, that he was a kid and that he most he did was sit in the room when the guardian who saved his life did a forced inventory of a home. The right has gleefully inflated this to memes of a figure not Soros but identified as Soros in an S.S. uniform, and this is what happens when you trust as your source people who not only don’t care about the truth but have absolute contempt for truth as a concept.
Moreover, while it is true that Soros has given to liberal causes and funds some liberal organizations, that is “shadowy” and “sinister” only if you find some pretext of separating it from the political contributions of the Koch Brothers and Sheldon Adelson, billionaires who gleefully fund the far right. You can’t say it’s sinister only when liberals do it, not unless that is your modus operandi for all things.

And here’s the big point.

I have heard right-leaning Jews buy into this whole Soros as devil thing. I have a relative who does.

And to underline why this is so pernicious a talking point on the right, I want to posit a change in his last name.

To Rothschild.

Starting over two hundred years ago, if you were of a certain political bent, everything you hated about the world was a secret plot of those vile puppet masters, the Rothschilds. Wealthy Jews, whose fingers were, if you believed the floggers of conspiracy, into everything, for their own nefarious purposes. The Rothschilds were responsible for everything, even the things that came before them, the fiends. This nonsense went on from 1815 onward, to the point where they were accused of having a hand in the assassinations of both Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, of bankrolling Adolf Hitler, of funding Isis, and of using their super-villainous control of the weather to send blizzards against the East Coast. Honestly, these guys were, supposedly, into everything, and you can still find conspiracy theories about them bruited on YouTube.

This was all rooted, if you go back far enough, to contemporary concerns about financial interests they might or might not have had in the conquests of Napoleon, but nobody remembers that now. To the point where one conspiracy theorist actually blamed them for whales leaping out of the ocean — it’s supposedly all due to signals being sent through the water by those masterminds, the Rothschilds — they are now suspect because they have always been suspect, and what feeds it, I am here to tell you, is their very name.

Today, if you hear somebody bitching about the evil doings of the Rothschilds, you know who they’ve been listening to. It all comes down to paranoia over the secret councils of the Elders of Zion. Because Jews are scary people, right?

All this bitching, on Fox News and in the White House, about anti-Trump protesters and political activism on the left being (gasp) funded by George Soros…

I am here to tell you, it’s the same thing. In a world where the same people have no problem with the Kochs shoveling wheelbarrows of money to the opposite cause, it’s the same thing.

All this Soros hysteria is just more sucking at the Nazi teat.

Tags: Abraham Lincoln, Adolf Hitler, George Soros, John F. Kennedy, Politics, Race, Republicans | Category Commentary, Politics

In College, Beer Culture Was For Assholes

Posted on September 30th, 2018 by Adam-Troy Castro

I am not a teetotaler.

I do not drink much. I may go months between having glasses of wine, longer still between finding myself at bars which have some interesting concoction, and ordering it out of curiosity. I get mildly inebriated, enjoy the sensation, and then taper off.

I’ve imbibed to excess two or three times, total, enough to establish that I don’t like it.

I in particular loathed beer.

Tried it a couple of times. Attempted to pick up the habit. Ultimately decided it was negative fun and stopped trying.

In college, if you drank beer, I had no problem with you.

What I hated, what I feared, even as a male back then, was the fetishization of beer.

I hated and feared guys who had their empty soldiers washed up and lined up around their dorm room like trophies.

Who decorated their walls with posters advertising various brands of cheap Domestic beer.

Who used the word “Beer!” as an exclamation.

I hated and feared guys who urged me to learn how to drink beer, to practice it, because, you know, it would make me really popular. Guys who said that drinking beer would make me a fun guy because it would give me the opportunity to sit around with other guys and drink beer. Guys who ultimately mocked me as a lightweight because I had decided I didn’t like beer. Not liking beer, these guys said, was my “whole problem.”

I saw so much, guys who bellowed in concert like gibbons, because they had beer and they could now drink more beer.

The praise of certain occasions that — gasp — brought in a keg!

I saw guys brag about how drunk they got their girlfriends. How “crazy” those girls got.

I heard endless bragging about how wasted they were, the hilarious anecdotes about barfing.

The day just before a major campus event where everybody got drunk in preparation, and I walked across the quad and started counting just how many people I saw prostrate in their puddles of barf, before it even started. In the space of one hundred yards I found one guy curled in a fetal position at the base of a stairway, abandoned by friends, his expensive concert tickets still clutched in his outstretched hand. Another guy violently upchucking in the bushes, while two of his friends laughed uproariously and chugged their own bottles. A third guy sprawled like a swastika on the walkway. You could track how close the event was, by how thickly they were scattered on the ground. I saw this, at four o’clock in the afternoon.

Beer I had no trouble with.

Beer culture was for assholes.

Tags: Assholes, Life Wisdom, Politics | Category Life Wisdom, Politics, True Stories