Seriously, was this a case where nobody actually said a version of the next sentence aloud until quite recently? “Actor Will Ferrell has backed out of a movie that would have made light of President Ronald Reagan‘s battle with Alzheimer’s after the premise received condemnation.” …Seriously, what did Ferrell think was going to happen? The American people largely have decided that Reagan was awesome and Alzheimer’s sucks; whose bright idea was it to use the latter to make jokes about the former?
Note that I’m not even angry – Will Ferrell has no chance at permanently changing people’s minds about, well, anyone or anything – just disapproving and bemused. It seemed a… poor career choice for the man. I mean, Anchorman can buy only a finite amount of goodwill…
I am angry. I can’t believe he would even consider doing that.
Well, Anchorman, his Harry Caray bits, More Cowbell, Celebrity Jeopardy, bits of Taladega Nights… When he’s off politics he’s a very funny man. But this… was just mean and bitterness. Reagan belongs to the ages now.
One of the problems with these rewritings of history is that future kids (10-20 years from now) may come upon such works and think they’re really accurate historically-based films. Kinda like my kids wondered if JFK was an accurate film.
The littering of history. And, as a quote I saw but can’t find the source: He’s like a cockroach. It’s not what he eats or carry off, it’s what he falls in and messes up.
JFK actually is an accurate film. It’s just not accurate to history. But it is an astoundingly accurate portrayal of the crazy kind of obsessive.
I can see Farrell deciding to go after Reagan. Farrell probably believes that Reagan really was a bumbling idiot, as that seems to be a popular view in some circles even today. And if he’d found a vehicle other than the Alzheimers to use to portray Reagan in that fashion, he probably would have continued on with it no matter how much people complain.
But the use of Alzheimers, something that many Americans have to deal with when it afflicts their loved ones, turned it from “a brave satire” to “tasteless”.
Dear Moe,
I have been trying to log in to comment on this site for a number of years now without success. I am a patron of yours on Patreon and really enjoy your posts and short short stories.
However, WordPress is an absolutely evil, garmished, fershlugginer platform. On some sites it will let me log in but others it refuses with “invalid username or password” with absolutely no recourse. No “I forgot my name or password” option. When I try to create a new account it rejects my attempts with “that user name or e-mail are already in use”.
I finally created a dummy account on gmail and a user ID that I will not, I refuse to, remember so that I could rant. I think that you are the last remaining user of WordPress, at least in my experience. I can understand why.
Lest you think that I’m just a bumbler that doesn’t understand all this technical stuff I can tell you that I built an analog computer for a science fair in 1959 and have been programming them suckers for more than 50 years.
There, I said it. Too much gin and the gout is acting up. I’ll regret this in the morning but in the scheme of things it will be a minor regret.
Hang in there pard,
Roy
…And then you had to wait because I put a hold on all first-timer comments until I can review them. It just wasn’t your day. 🙂
Thanks for reading. And thanks for being sufficiently motivated to jump through hoops just to give an attaboy or two.