ELWES & FOREVER

Check out my short column, online at Phoenix Magazine, about "The Princess Bride: An Inconceivable Evening with Cary Elwes"...

...tonight at Mesa Arts Center.

ROBBED

It's been a week since the arrival of the wretched news that Rob Reiner and his wife Michele were murdered in their home in L.A.

This news would have been a gut-punch in any case, but it was magnified coming on the heels of several days of high-profile violence, like the shootings at Brown University in Providence and the antisemitic massacre at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia.

It was magnified further, of course, by the President's loathsome online response, in which he stated that the Reiners deaths were caused by "the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS."

Although it now appears that the perpetrator was a family member and the crime had nothing to do with the President or with Reiner's politics at all, the President seems to have jumped to the conclusion that it was the act of one of his followers, similar to what happened to Nancy Pelosi's husband.

I admit that this thought crossed my mind as well.

What's astounding is our Scumbag-in-Chief's suggestion that it was Reiner's own fault if some MAGA maniac did this to him. It's an epic achievement in the annals of blaming the victim.

Even many of the President's supporters seemed to find this disgusting, and grateful as I am whenever anything somehow moves the needle with them, I have to wonder--this is what did it? Disappearing people off the streets, extra-judicially blowing up boats, turning our back on Ukraine, you got no problem; making the tragic death of a beloved Hollywood star all about him is the bridge too far?

Also: "Trump Derangement Syndrome?" Enough with that crap. It's not a thing, when applied to opponents of the President. It's another attempt by the President and his followers to use grown-up words without the intellectual equipment. Just to be clear: there is nothing whatsoever irrational, let alone deranged, about being horrified, sickened, frightened and enraged by this President.

As for Reiner himself, it turns out he's one of those celebrities so ingrained in our collective experience of pop culture that we may have taken him for granted. For those of us who came of age during his long run as Mike "Meathead" Stivic on All in the Family, he was more like a family member than an actor.

Then he switched to directing, and rolled out, arguably, the most successful string of durable, quotable popular hits in American movie history: This is Spinal Tap, Stand By Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally..., Misery, A Few Good Men and The American President. He certainly proved he was far more than just Carl's son, or Archie's son-in-law.

A day or two later came word of the passing of a far less prominent show business figure: actor, collector and "gorilla man" Bob Burns, at 90.

I interviewed Bob in 1999 for what turned out to be maybe my favorite story I ever got to do for the Phoenix New Times. I chatted with him several more times thereafter but never managed to get to Burbank to see his famous collection. But his book, It Came From Bob's Basement...

...has been on my shelf since 2000; he repeats the same story in it that he told me about a troubling experience he once had in Phoenix. Really nice guy.

RIP, Rob and Bob.

MY COUNTRY, 'TIS OF THEOCRACY

Now playing at Harkins Shea:

God & Country--Produced by Rob and Michele Reiner and directed by Dan Partland, this documentary about Christian Nationalism in American politics is impassioned but lucid and not hysterical. Based on Katharine Stewart's book The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, the movie is presented as a warning to secular or non-evangelical citizens for whom the propaganda and political agenda of that movement may be largely invisible.

The talking heads here are mostly Christians themselves, ranging from Russell Moore to Reza Aslan to Jemar Tisby to Kristin Kobes du Mez to Sister Simone Campbell to Bishop William J. Barber II to Veggie Tales co-creator Phil Vischer. They speak calmly, even a little sheepishly, but firmly and with an indisputable insider's perspective, and their message is: Christian Nationalism isn't about religious practice; it's about amassing political power.

It's not exactly breaking news when we're informed that Christian Nationalists are terrified of and enraged by feminism, LGBTQ rights, secular education, uncensored libraries and abortion rights, or that the movement is historically connected to racism and segregation. But too many people may not grasp the degree to which Christian Nationalism's ultimate aim is a non-democratic, Christian-supremacist America, and the startling degree to which it's making progress.

In support of this, Partland shows us copious clips of wild-eyed rants by Evangelical heavy hitters stating these aims in no uncertain terms. A comedic highlight comes when, in the midst of one of the movie's many montages of preachers bleating and screeching, we see Robert Jeffress say, with a straight face, "We cannot be silent any longer!"

Partland also works to debunk some of Christian Nationalism's favorite falsehoods, notably that America was intended by the Founders as a "Christian Nation" or that the Separation of Church and State is not found in the Constitution. Attorney and author Andrew Seidel observes here that true religious freedom is impossible without Separation of Church and State.

By way of emphasizing its urgency, the movie also notes that Christian Nationalists were central agents of the January 6 Insurrection, despite the irony of President 45 as the object of their veneration. "When I was a young Evangelical minister," notes Faith and Action founder Rob Schenck, "we used Donald Trump as a sermon illustration for everything a Christian should not be."

God & Country shares a twofold difficulty with many other worthy progressive political documentaries. First, though well-organized and smoothly edited, it's full of unavoidable footage of the likes of Ralph Reed, Jerry Falwell, Paul Weyrich, Greg Locke, Pat Robertson, Jim Bakker, Kenneth Copeland and Paula White, not to mention 45 himself, that can be painful for many of us to watch no matter how necessary. Secondly, many of the people who most need to see this movie probably won't watch it. To employ a more than usually apt cliché, it's preaching to the choir.