#Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump--Even though there's no proposal in this movie, which makes the case that Our President is a malignant narcissist, that I don't passionately agree with, I have to admit that I wasn't looking forward to watching it. There isn't enough confirmation bias in my head to make me eager to sit through clips of this pathetic menace at his worst.
But watch it I did, and I'm glad I did. It's a focused, sensible review of the man's outrageous public behavior that seemed, to me, free of Michael-Moore-style facetiousness. The talking heads aren't a lineup of lefty all-stars; on the political side, they're the likes of Bill Kristol and George Conway and a startlingly lucid Anthony Scaramucci, who states, overgenerously, of Trump: "He's not a racist...he's an asshole." I know what's he's getting at there, but the two titles are certainly not mutually exclusive.
The other category of interviewees are the commentators on his psychology. The most incisive of these is John Gartner, Ph.D, who easily debunks the criticism that psychologists shouldn't offer opinions on people they've never interviewed, and differentiates the current diagnoses of Trump's psyche from the infamous (and indeed unfair, in Gartner's view) 1964 Fact magazine article on Barry Goldwater's psychology that gave rise to the "Goldwater Rule." There's also some sharp insight offered by sportswriter Rick Reilly about Trump's character as a golfer.
This movie may, if nothing else, make you feel a little less crazy. And since it hinges on actual footage of Trump it's harder (not impossible, of course, but harder) for his followers to dismiss it as "fake news."
Also, on a personal note: By way of explaining the concept of Id/Ego/Superego, this movie includes some footage from a Canadian educational documentary that I now know is called Freud: The Hidden Nature of Man. I saw that movie when I was a kid, on PBS I think, and it hugely creeped me out and burned itself into my memory. On the other hand, it did, very vividly, teach me about Freudian psychology.
Entwined--In this Greek chiller, a young doctor (Prometheus Aleifer) hangs out his shingle in a remote mountain town full of the same sort of dour, fretful locals that saw Dwight Frye off on his way to Castle Dracula in 1931. Sure enough, the doc stumbles upon a lonely cabin out in the woods. Therein he meets Danae (Anastasia Rafaella Konidi), a compellingly beautiful woman with a grotesque skin condition and a peculiar, rococo manner of speaking. She shares the cabin with a white-bearded, violent fellow.
The doc wants to take Danae away from it all and cure her, but she's in no hurry to leave, and when he tries to go back alone for provisions he can't seem to find his way back to his car. Each time he returns to the cabin, Danae offers him another drink, and acts a bit more seductive.
Co-writer and director Minos Nikolakakis generates an intriguing mix of spookiness, eroticism and poignancy, even though it isn't especially hard to see where the story is heading. This, indeed, may be a strength; at its best Entwined has the eerie, mythic inevitability of a Jungian dream.
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