Being a million miles away, or at least a few thousand, I can’t authoritatively refute reports in the mainstream liberal media that few people turned out in America for the premiere last weekend of the Sarah Palin film Bridge to Somewhere, but I can assure you that here on England’s east coast, it was hugely popular; only tickets for the midnight screenings failed to sell out within minutes. One "bloke" I spoke to, a decorator (Americans would call him a painter), spoke for a great many others when he explained, “I feel that Gov. Palin has articulated a uniquely compelling vision of the American future, and thus of the Western future.”
Ordinarily on a weekend evening in the UK, the local maidens congregate in their respective town and city centres in shockingly scanty dresses, impractical footwear, and false eyelashes to drink too much and throw up all over each other, or allow themselves to be “pulled” (seduced) by handsome and other young gentlemen. Last Friday and Saturday evenings in Ramsgate, though, you’d have been as likely to glimpse The True Elvis sharing a kebab with Princess Diana as a local young woman’s knickers, as the Brits call panties.
Interestingly, pants here are what gentlemen wear under their trousers. The word is also used to connote something substandard. A Yorkshireman might, for instance, grumble of a film he thought crap, “It were pants, innit?” Crap is both a noun and adjective. When a big Scotland Yard honcho resigned yesterday, he blamed his fall from grace on his crap decision not to more rigorously investigate allegations of News Corp. payoffs to the constabulary.
Contrary to what the mainstream liberal American media had led me to expect, I didn’t for a moment feel manipulated by Bridge to Somewhere, not when a piano tinkled poignantly on the soundtrack while Gov. Palin tearfully recounted how much she’d early on hated exposing widespread corruption among Alaska Republicans (because “hey, they’re human beings with families too”), and not even when lachrymose strings accompanied Gov. Palin and handsome husband Todd’s decision to seek professional faith-based counseling rather than “throw in the towel” on their marriage after realizing in 1997 that they were "two different people".
As in most of his own films, I wished that Clint Eastwood would occasionally part his teeth to say his lines, just for the novelty of doing so, but I nonetheless enjoyed him as Gov. Palin's father, Dad. The casting of Morgan Freeman as John McCain, when I first read about it, struck me as hopelessly brash, but by film’s end, he’d made me embrace the Arizona senator’s humanity in a way I’d resisted doing before (because McCain is far too liberal for my taste). It's no exaggeration to say there wasn’t a dry eye in the house at the end of the scene in which McCain apologizes to the people of Alaska for having distracted Gov. Palin from their concerns at a critical moment in Alaskan history, as what moment is not?
As in most of his own films, I wished that Clint Eastwood would occasionally part his teeth to say his lines, just for the novelty of doing so, but I nonetheless enjoyed him as Gov. Palin's father, Dad. The casting of Morgan Freeman as John McCain, when I first read about it, struck me as hopelessly brash, but by film’s end, he’d made me embrace the Arizona senator’s humanity in a way I’d resisted doing before (because McCain is far too liberal for my taste). It's no exaggeration to say there wasn’t a dry eye in the house at the end of the scene in which McCain apologizes to the people of Alaska for having distracted Gov. Palin from their concerns at a critical moment in Alaskan history, as what moment is not?
All in all, two thumbs way up!
Up what?
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