On Friday January 17, former congressman Chris Collins was sentenced to 26 months in federal prison for his lying to the FBI and conspiracy to commit securities fraud. It is a fittingly ignominious end to a particularly nasty and petulant politician.
Here is a portion of a speech that Donald Trump gave to the so-called “Value Voters Summit” in October 2019:
Michael Kearns, the Erie County Clerk, is on a nativist anti-immigrant jihad that is as stupid as he. Check out this article at WGRZ. It begins,
The Erie County clerk’s office wants a matter of possible voter fraud investigated.
Dr. Hicks -
It’s fair to say that many, maybe even most filmgoers who are looking forward to The Irishman, Martin Scorsese’s epic return to the gangster genre, have one question in mind: will it be another GoodFellas?
And can you blame them? Scorsese’s 1990 film may have been dismissed by critics at the time as a retread of Mean Streets, the movie that put him on the map in 1973, but it has stood the test of time to become one of the most enduringly popular films in cinema history.
What a difference three years make.
The “Green Light” statute, enacted earlier this year, will permit undocumented immigrants to obtain a New York State driver’s license. It goes into effect in mid-December. It is not — and should not — be a DMV apparatchik’s job to determine who is or is not eligible to be present in the United States.
In devising Anya, a contemporary drama about a couple who encounter an unsuspected genetic wall when they try to have a child, filmmakers Jacob Akira Okada and Carylanna Taylor were concerned that the scientific aspects of the story be presented as accurately as possible. They appear to have succeeded, though the result is a movie that may appeal more to scientists than viewers looking for an involving story and engaging characters.
Buffalonian William Kemmler was an illiterate drunkard who made a living selling vegetables from a cart in the 1880s. His name is remembered not for what he did in his life, but for how he left it: having murdered his girlfriend in a drunken rage, he was the first man put to death in the electric chair. That device was the invention of another Buffalonian, Alfred Southwick, a professor at the UB School of Dentistry.
Republicans love to complain about what they term “political correctness,” often going so far as to assert that being empathetic or mindful of others’ feelings is destroying western civilization as we know it.
Except, of course, when there’s some virtue signaling (another favorite right-wing trope) of their own to do.
The big film release of the weekend — on Netflix, as so often happens these days — is Dolemite Is My Name, the first film that star-producer Eddie Murphy actually seems to have cared about in many a year. (The director is Craig Brewer, of Black Snake Moan and Hustle and Flow fame.) Prepare for it by meeting the real Dolemite as interviewed by The Public contributor Ed Grant.
For all the noise you hear about the occasional A Quiet Place 2 or Marshall being filmed in Buffalo, there’s a lot more professional film production going on here than you’re likely aware of. The proof of that will be in screen next weekend as the 13th edition of the Buffalo International Film Festival presents no fewer than seven feature films that were made here, in whole or part.
This is the second — and hopefully the last — epitaph I need to write on the political career of Christopher Collins. The first is here. His governmental record is, on balance, replete with abject failure. He was a disastrous County Executive who spent wildly to implement dubious corporate hocus-pocus, with little effect. He raised taxes and cut critical services on which citizens relied.
It’s no secret that the cult of Judy Garland fans were drawn to her suffering as much as to her abilities as a performer. That seems to be the intended audience for Judy, now playing at the Dipson Amherst and Eastern Hills Mall theaters, which recreates her abilities as a stage artist but mostly focuses on the sad state of her life in the months prior to her presumably accidental death in 1969 from an overdose of barbiturates.