megavideo Watch Online Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words
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Writer: Constitution Center
Info The Georgetown Center for the Constitution brings an unparalleled focus to cutting-edge scholarship in constitutional law and theory.
2020
Duration: 116 Minute
Directed by: Michael Pack
Documentary
creator: Michael Pack
This post tracks developments in “Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words, ” a new documentary about the Supreme Court Justice and the toxic confirmation he was forced to endure.
Links: Homepage | IMDB |
11-28-19 | Thomas compares ‘modern-day liberal’ to Klansman in new film
Per the New York Post, “‘I felt as though in my life I had been looking at the wrong people as the people who would be problematic toward me, ’ Thomas says in the film Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words, according to ABC News. ‘We were told that, ‘Oh, it’s gonna be the bigot in the pickup truck; it’s gonna be the Klansman; it’s gonna be the rural sheriff. ’ But it turned out that through all of that, ultimately the biggest impediment was the modern-day liberal. ’”
11-16-19 | Townhall: “Stunning Documentary” Releases May 2020 on PBS
Per Townhall, “Filmmaker Michael Pack conducted hundreds of hours of interviews with Thomas and his wife Virginia to create this stunning documentary, which will see a wide release in May 2020 on PBS. ”
11-13-19 | Cato: “Justice Thomas, Unscripted”
Per Cato, “Drawing on a rich array of historical archive material, period and original music, personal photos, and evocative recreations, Justice Thomas, unscripted, takes the viewer through his complex and often painful life, dealing with race, faith, power, jurisprudence, and personal resilience. ”
10-23-19 | Double Standard for Black Conservatives vs. Black Liberals
Per The Washington Examiner, “‘There’s different sets of rules for different people, ’ Justice Thomas said in the film’s trailer. ‘If you criticize a black person who’s more liberal, you’re a racist. Whereas you can do whatever to me, or to now [HUD Secretary] Ben Carson, and that’s fine, because you’re not really black because you’re not doing what we expect black people to do. '”.
View photos Click here to read the full article. If you watch “Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words” looking for a clue as to Thomas’ inner workings, a key to who Clarence Thomas really is, then you’ll have to wait a while before it arrives. But it does. The reason it takes so long is that Thomas, dressed in a red tie, light shirt, and blue jacket (yes, his entire outfit is color-coordinated to the American flag), his graying head looking impressive and nearly statue-ready as he gazes into the camera, presents himself as a regular guy, affably growly and folksy in a casual straight-shooter way. And while I have no doubt that’s an honest aspect of who he is, it’s also a shrewdly orchestrated tactic, a way of saying: Don’t try to look for my demons — you won’t find them. The revealing moment comes when Thomas recalls the 1991 Senate hearings in which he was grilled on national television as part of the Supreme Court confirmation process. Does he go back and talk about Anita Hill? Yes, he does (I’ll get to that shortly), but that isn’t the revealing part. Discussing Anita Hill, Thomas reveals next to nothing. His métier now is exactly what it was then: Deny, deny, deny. More from Variety Film News Roundup: Clarence Thomas Documentary to Get Theatrical Release Anita Hill's Commission Launches Entertainment Industry Survey on Sexual Harassment Katy Perry and Anita Hill Honored at the DVF Awards Thomas tips his hand, though, when he recalls the moment that a senator asked if he’d ever had a private conversation about Roe v. Wade. At the time, he said no — and now, 30 years later, that “no” has just gotten louder. In hindsight, he’s incredulous that anyone would simply presume that he’d ever had a private discussion about Roe v. He’s almost proud of how wrong they were to think so. In a Senate hearing, when you say that you’ve never had that kind of conversation, it’s in all likelihood political — a way, in this case, of keeping your beliefs about abortion ambiguous and close to the vest. A way of keeping them officially off the table. In “Created Equal, ” however, Thomas is being sincere. He has always maintained that he finds it insulting — and racist — that people would expect an African-American citizen like himself to conform to a prescribed liberal ideology. And in the same vein, he thinks it’s ridiculous that a Senate questioner expected him to say that he’d ever spent two minutes sitting around talking about Roe v. But talk about an argument that backfires! I’m not a federal judge (and the last time I checked, I’ve never tried to become a Supreme Court justice), but I’ve had many conversations in my life about Roe v. Why wouldn’t I? I’m an ordinary politically inclined American. I mean, how could you not talk about it — ever? Abortion rights, no matter where you happen to stand on them, are a defining issue of our world. And the fact that Clarence Thomas was up for the role of Supreme Court justice, and that he still views it as A-okay to say that he’d never had a single discussion about Roe v. Wade, shows you where he’s coming from. He has opinions and convictions. But he is, in a word, incurious. He’s a go-along-to-get-along kind of guy, a man who worked hard and achieved something and enjoyed a steady rise without ever being driven to explore things. He was a bureaucrat. Which is fine; plenty of people are. But not the people we expect to be on the Supreme Court. “Created Equal” is structured as a monologue of self-justification, a two-hour infomercial for the decency, the competence, and the conservative role-model aspirationalism of Clarence Thomas. Since he followed the 1991 Senate hearings, even in victory, by going off and licking his wounds, maintaining a public persona that was studiously recessive, there’s a certain interest in “hanging out” with Thomas and taking in his cultivated self-presentation. The movie, in its public-relations heart, is right-wing boilerplate (though it’s mild next to the all-in-for-Trump documentary screeds of Dinesh D’Souza), and there are worse ways to get to know someone like Thomas than to watch him deliver what is basically the visual version of an I-did-it-my-way audiobook memoir, with lots of news clips and photographs to illustrate his words. The first half of the movie draws you in, because it’s basically the story of how Thomas, born in 1948 in the rural community of Pin Point, Georgia, was raised in a penniless family who spoke the creole language of Gullah, and of how he pulled himself up by his bootstraps. After a fire left the family homeless, he and his brother went off to Savannah to live with their grandfather, an illiterate but sternly disciplined taskmaster who gave Thomas his backbone of self-reliance. He entered Conception Seminary College when he was 16, and he loved it — but in a story Thomas has often told, he left the seminary after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. when he overheard a fellow student make an ugly remark about King. That’s a telling anecdote, but there’s a reason Thomas showcases it the way he does. It’s his one official grand statement of racial outrage. In “Created Equal, ” he talks for two hours but says next to nothing about his feelings on the Civil Rights movement, or on what it was like to be raised in the Jim Crow South. As a student at Holy Cross, the Jesuit liberal arts college near Boston, he joined a crew of black “revolutionaries” and dressed the part in Army fatigues, but he now mocks that stage of his development, cutting right to his conservative awakening, which coalesced around the issue of busing. Thomas thought it was nuts to bus black kids from Roxbury to schools in South Boston that were every bit as bad as the ones they were already attending. And maybe he was right. Thomas, using busing and welfare as his example, decries the liberal dream as a series of idealistic engineering projects that human beings were then wedged into. There may be aspects of truth to that critique, but liberalism was also rolling up its sleeves to grapple with the agony of injustice. The philosophy that Thomas evolved had a connect-the-dots perfection to it: Treat everyone equal! Period! How easy! It certainly sounds good on paper, yet you want to ask: Couldn’t one use the same logic that rejects affirmative action programs to reject anti-discrimination law? Thomas projects out from his own example: He came from nothing and made something of himself, so why can’t everyone else? But he never stops to consider that he was, in fact, an unusually gifted man. His aw-shucks manner makes him likably unpretentious, but where’s his empathy for all the people who weren’t as talented or lucky? In “Created Equal, ” Thomas continues to treat Anita Hill’s testimony against him as part of a liberal smear campaign — and, therefore, as a lie. He compares himself to Tom Robinson, the railroaded black man in “To Kill a Mockingbird, ” viewing himself as a pure victim. Thomas’ wife, Virginia Lamp, who sat by his side at the hearings (and is interviewed in the film), stands by him today. But more than two years into the #MeToo revolution, the meaning of the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill Senate testimony stands clearer than ever. It was the first time in America that a public accusation of sexual harassment shook the earth. The meaning of those hearings transcends the fight over whether one more conservative justice got to be added to the Supreme Court. Thomas now admits that he refused to withdraw his nomination less out of a desire to serve on the Supreme Court than because caving in would have been death to him. “I’ve never cried uncle, ” he says, “whether I wanted to be on the Supreme Court or not. ” It’s an honest confession, but a little like the Roe v. Wade thing: Where was his intellectual and moral desire to serve on the court? By then, he’d been a federal judge for just 16 months, and he admits that he wasn’t drawn to that job either; but he found that he liked the work. Thomas also explains why, once he had ascended to the high court, he went through a period where, famously, he didn’t ask a single question at a public hearing for more than 10 years. His rationalization (“The referee in the game should not be a participant in the game”) is, more or less, nonsense. But his silence spoke volumes. It was his passive-aggressive way of turning inward, of treating an appointment he didn’t truly want with anger — of coasting as a form of rebellion. It was his way of pretending to be his own man, even as he continued to play the hallowed conservative role of good soldier. Best of Variety The Best Albums of the Decade Sign up for Variety’s Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. View photos.
June 27, 2018 9:00AM PT
Paul Rudd and Evangeline Lilly reunite in a tiny-superhero Marvel sequel that's faster, funnier, and more cunningly confident than the original.
“ Ant-Man and the Wasp ” has a pleasingly breakneck, now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t surreal glee. It’s a cunningly swift and delightful comedy of scale, in which Scott Lang ( Paul Rudd), that quipster mensch of a convict-turned-superhero (has there ever been a movie criminal this nice? ), shoots around in his miniaturizing metal suit like the world’s tiniest gadfly, only to loom up as large as Godzilla. Either way, he always has time to deliver a line like “Do you really just put the word quantum ahead of everything? ” The answer is: Yes. “ Ant-Man and the Wasp ” is a fantasy of mutating matter in which buildings collapse into Monopoly toys, a Hello Kitty Pez dispenser gets inflated into a freeway battering ram, and the most fearless of the characters is injected into an ocean of psychedelic sub-atomic protoplasm.
The director, Peyton Reed, also made the first “Ant-Man” (2015), but at the time he’d never helmed a special-effects blockbuster before, and his inexperience showed. He jammed comedy, action, and origin-story mythology into a film that had more amiable spirit than craft. In “Ant-Man and the Wasp, ” Reed keeps the entire movie — one-liners, Macy’s Parade effects, hand-to-insect-wing combat — spinningly aloft. Always an inspired director of comedy (“Down with Love, ” “Bring It On”), Reed has learned how to operate the heavy machinery of a Marvel superhero movie yet keep it all light and fast and dizzying. His combat scenes don’t overpower. They’re well spaced out and actually make visual sense, like a hypnotic one early on in which Hope van Dyne ( Evangeline Lilly), a. k. a. The Wasp, confronts a pack of goons in a restaurant kitchen by popping in and out of micro size, sliding along the edges of a tossed carving knife only to burst into her full ninja self to deliver the knockout blows.
Yet part of the fun of “Ant-Man and the Wasp” is that you don’t have to pretend there’s anything cosmic at stake. How could you? The plot is an elaborate throwaway. Rudd’s Scott Lang is doing all he can to be a good divorced daddy to his daughter, Cassie (Abby Ryder Forston). As he lip-syncs — to the “Partridge Family” theme song! — and digital drums his way through his last few days of house arrest, he is lifted out of his predicament by Dr. Hank Pym, the physicist and former S. H. I. E. L. D member played, once again, by a triumphantly disgruntled Michael Douglas, in a silver coif and goatee, who bites down into the role of this cuttingly tormented science geek.
Hank won’t rest until he extracts his wife, Janet van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer), from the Quantum Realm, where she’s been miniaturized and living for 30 years (one hopes that they have Netflix, or at least QVC), ever since she sacrificed herself by going sub-atomic to defuse a bomb. Hank and their daughter, Hope, have built a tunnel that will theoretically transport them to the Quantum Realm. But the lab on which the project depends — it’s housed in a building that looks like a decaying steel-and-glass Hollywood talent agency — is also coveted by two forces of People We Don’t Want To Root For.
The first of them is Sonny Burch, a trafficker of black-market tech, played by Walton Goggins as the most unctuously literate of oily Dixie sleazehounds. Then there’s Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), a quivering and alienated desperado who, after being damaged as a young girl in a lab accident presided over by her scientist father (a colleague of Hank’s), acquired the ability to phase through objects. Her powers are visually vivid yet a tad vague, and so is her goal: to use the lab to set herself free. John-Kamen plays her like a fallen member of the X-Men turned tremulous indie rock star.
Hank and Hope’s desire to reunite with Janet is certainly understandable, and Michelle Pfeiffer has a lovely, wistful presence, yet the plot of “Ant-Man and the Wasp” is just a MacGuffin, a frame on which to hang the hijinks. The movie is all jokes and movement, fused by the spirit of transmogrification. Scott, who went down to the Quantum Realm before, has a bit of a mind-meld with Janet, which means that in one scene Paul Rudd literally channels Michelle Pfeiffer, and hilariously. He does it by acting indelibly…sweet.
But even that’s just a momentary, let’s-try-it-on lark. The movie keeps referencing Ant-Man’s adventure in Germany, where he joined up with the Avengers in order to…well, I’m going to confess that I had no immediate recall of what, exactly, Ant-Man had contributed to the greater scheme of the “Avengers” saga. Instead of pretending it matters, I’ll just say that he was there, and that the Marvel Cinematic Universe is probably none too different for it.
That each of these films is somehow “relevant” to the greater MCU is a conceit that isn’t always borne out by what’s on-screen. Yet Ant-Man, by living in his own universe of wisecracking micro obsession, justifies his existence. Rudd’s performance has only gained in confidence (having a hit will do that for you). In “Ant-Man and the Wasp, ” he’s direct and witty and alive, as when he surveys Lilly’s Wasp and says to Hank, “Hold on, you gave her wings? ” There’s a prickly hint of ego coursing beneath the surface of Rudd’s presence. That’s what keeps him fresh.
As the Wasp, who with those fluttering wings is a partner (and possible romantic savior) to Ant-Man’s ant-riding cowboy, Evangeline Lilly seizes her moment with a refreshing air of skepticism. Her Hope doesn’t trust the whole superhero thing, and comes off a stronger heroine as a result. If there’s an actor the movie elevates, apart from her and Rudd, it’s Michael Peña, who plays Luis, Scott’s former cellmate and his colleague in the security-consultant business, with escalating stardom. The film’s comic peak kicks off with a nattering debate about what “truth serum” is, and when Luis gets an injection of it, Peña’s rapid-fire confessional monologue (with the dialogue mimed by the characters he’s talking about) has you hanging, in stitches, on every insane word.
“Ant-Man and the Wasp” is a full two hours, yet even when it’s pulling out all the stops, the movie never gives you that sinking sensation you can get when a comic-book film’s extended climax kicks in, and you feel the visual effects army taking over. That’s because Peyton Reed invests every moment of the movie with personality. That’s not quite the same thing as humanity. But it’s enough to qualify as the miniature version.
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