Arts & Entertainment

Ethics Dunce And A Tie With Rep. Broebert For Worst Apology Of The Week : Drew Barrymore

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

[Note: This post takes no position regarding the validity and justness of the Hollywood writers’ strike.]

Tough choice: is the now middle-aged former child star turned talk show host’s apology even more unethical than Broebert’s discussed here? It’s certainly more ridiculous, even though Drew’s was teary and seemingly sincere, unlike the Republican’s. In fact, this apology is unique in my experience: Barrymore was apologizing for something she had announced she was doing, then she went ahead and did it anyway. What is that?

The Writers Guild of America (WGA) has been on strike since May over more equitable wages and working conditions. Even though it is a talk show and theoretically shouldn’t require writers, “The Drew Barrymore Show” does employ some, and thus is officially being struck. Nonetheless, Barrymore announced that her show would metaphorically cross the picket lines to premier tomorrow as scheduled. Her announcement predictably attracted a “scab” response from the WGA and others on social media. Then Barrymore posted the mea culpa video excerpted above on Instagram.

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Ethics Dunce (And A Tie For Worst Apology Of The Week): Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO)

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

One of Donald Trump’s proteges, Rep. Lauren Boebert, behaved so outrageously at a a Denver theater last week during a performance of the Broadway musical “Beetlejuice,” that she was asked to leave by the theater managers. She was loud, sang along with the performers in places, got in arguments with audience members, was ostentatiously groped by her male companion, and perhaps most objectionably, vaped during the performance, which is what you see her (in the middle of the frame, second from the aisle) in the act of doing—see the little puff?— in the security camera shot above. She also took a selfie during the second act. As she and her date were ushered out, the distinguished member of Congress actually uttered the magic phrase I regard as signature significance for an insufferable celebrity jerk, “Do you know who I am?” and threatened consequences for the staff.

That’s not all. She had her office deny that she had been vaping, not realizing that security cameras memorialized it. And still that’s not all. Here is her head-exploding “apology” for acting like a 17-year old raised in a barn who had never been at a live theater show in her life:

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Ethics Quiz: Oprah’s Surprise

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

I did not see this coming at all. Obviously, neither did Oprah Winfrey.

On August 31, Winfrey and Dwayne Johnson united on their Instagram and TikTok accounts to promote their People’s Fund of Maui, which they had co-launched with a combined $10 million donation. The fund would support the victims of the Maui wildfires, and O joined with The Rock to call on the public for more contributions. The following accompanied their joint video, shot in Hawaii, naturally:

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Friday Forum, Open For Business

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

It’s come to this.

I’m playing “The Learned Judge” in a lightly staged concert version of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Trial by Jury” this weekend at the Georgetown Law Center. (That’s a different production of the show above.) The cast is made up of current students and alums from the past 50 years. Gilbert’s resolution of the musical law suit in which a jilted bride is suing a rogue for breach of promise of marriage is that the judge (me) decides to marry the plaintiff himself, a decision that she is delighted with. In announcing this “judgment,” I came down to the young woman, a first year law student, playing the plaintiff “Angelina” and placed my arm around gently around her waist, then transitioned to holding her hands in mine as we sang the final bars of the show.

The director asked that I only place my hand on Angelina’s shoulder rather than around the waist, because the production might be criticized for endorsing sexual harassment.

But you all chat about whatever ethics matters are making your lives interesting, exciting, or miserable.

When Ethics Alarms Don’t Ring: The Education Secretary’s Play List

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Wow. What an idiot.

Here are some sample lyrics from the songs our Education Dept. Secretary loves:

“Out o’ town, put it down for the Father of Rap And if yo’ ass get cracked, bitches, shut your trap. Come back, get back, that’s the part of success.”

“Fuck all you hoes. Get a grip, motherfucker!”

“My my, I’m big huh, I rip my prick through your hooters I’m sick, you couldn’t measure my dick with six rulers”

Secretary Cardona can listen to, read and love whatever he chooses, but his tweet—he quickly deleted it, of course, after multiple social media commenters explained to him that the tweet called into question his priorities and judgment—is a red flag to parents who don’t want their children to be immersed in a sexually-obsessed culture when they need to learn academic skills. This is the official who is overseeing U.S. education policy, and he saw nothing inappropriate about endorsing songs with lyrics like “Fuck all you hoes.”

Ethics Dunces: “Snow White” Star Rachel Zegler, And Disney (Of Course)

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I thought actress Sarah Porkalub, who trashed the (ridiculous) Broadway production of “1776” that had given her the chance to play South Carolina’s Continental Congress delegate Edward Rutledge as an Asian woman (Don’t get me started!), was the most irresponsible and arrogant performer I had heard about in decades, and, in fact, she might still hold the title. But it’s now a close competition, as Rachel Zegler, Disney’s star of the almost as ridiculous live-action re-imagining of its animated 1937 classic, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” as “Snow Latina and the Seven Whatever-the-Hell-They Are” has been allowed to insult her film’s progenitor, which, among other things, is substantially responsible for her employer’s very existence.

“It’s really not about the love story at all, which is really, really wonderful,” Zegler has blathered. “I mean, you know, the original cartoon came out in 1937 and very evidently so. Um… there’s a big focus on her love story with a guy who literally stalks her! Weird, weird, so we didn’t do that this time…People are making these jokes about ours being the PC Snow White, where it’s like, yeah, it is — because it needed that… our version is a refreshing story about a young woman who has a function beyond “Someday My Prince Will Come.'”

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Insufficient Mockery Alert #1: The “Jewface” Controversy

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Jonathan Turley likes to begin his posts on oft-visited topics (like speech suppression on progressive college campuses) by reviewing all of his past posts on the matter. If I started this post like that and listed all of the ridiculous, hypocritical, wokey, DEI-inspired casting ethics controversies EA has highlighted, there would be no room for the post itself. But I will supply a sampling…

Let’s see: a black actress can play Anne Boleyn, and James Earl Jones can play the Celtic King Lear, but a white actor is engaged in racism by playing Othello. Hmmm. Gay Hollywood actors (most of them are, after all) can play straight characters, but Tom Hanks apologized for playing a gay character (and winning an Oscar for it) in “Philadelphia.” Lou Diamond Phillips simultaneously asserted that as a Filipino actor he is entitled to play anyone—after all, he has made his living playing Hispanics, South Americans and Native Americans— then in the same interview said “I happen to agree that casting Caucasian people in what are supposed to be ethnic roles is not kosher.”

Yes, it’s Calvinball! The minority communities, supported by progressive DEI fanatics, make up the rules as they go along—whatever keeps whites, heterosexuals and non-disabled actors out of roles. Back in 2019, I designated this “the dumbest casting controversy yet”: that was when Bryan Cranston was criticized for playing a quadriplegic without being actually paralyzed from the neck down. Well, the DEI maniacs have gone way, way beyond that, and conveniently, the most recent ridiculous Calvinball installment is relevant to today’s nonsense.

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Ethics Verdict: “Rich Men North Of Richmond”

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Cutting to the chase: It’s ridiculous that this standard issue country ballad is a culture war battlefield. Anyone who took the time to watch Ken Burns’ documentary on the genre will immediately recognize the themes, though Anthony’s blue collar anthem is a bit more whiny than most. Jeez, man, stop bitching and do something about it: that’s the American way! Though I guess he is, by exploiting the politicization of everything today to make a lot of money with a song that doesn’t offer anything new or original, just the familiar “Those rich politicians up North don’t care about us hard-working folks, so life is a struggle and it ain’t getting any better.”

Well, I’d rather listen to this than “Imagine.”

Here are the lyrics:

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“Painkiller”

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

“Painkiller,” the new Netflix series about the origins of the opioid crisis largely created by the despicable machinations of the Sackler family and Perdue Pharma, could not be better timed. Just three days ago there was another development in the fall of the Sacklers, as the U.S. Supreme Court temporarily blocked the implementation of the 2021 $6 billion deal in federal bankruptcy court that would have blocked future opioid lawsuits against family members, who added to their vast fortune by creating and peddling OxyContin to complicit doctors and unsuspecting members of the public.

OxyContin was introduced in 1995 as Purdue Pharma’s breakthrough drug for chronic pain. The company employed an unethical marketing strategy that family scion Arthur Sackler had pioneered decades earlier, lobbying doctors to prescribe the drug and increase its dosage by dangling gifts, free trips to “pain-management seminars,”( aka all-expenses-paid vacations), paid speaking engagements, and ego-stroking visits from comely sales reps with cheerleading credentials.

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Ethics Quote of the Week: Benjamin Franklin

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

“Thinking aloud is a habit which is responsible for most of mankind’s misery.”

Benjamin Franklin, quoted in the 2008 series “John Adams,” spoken by Franklin (Tom Wilkerson) as advice to Adams (Paul Giamatti)

I wasn’t looking for more perspective on Donald Trump’s most recent disqualifying outburst when I revisited the first two episodes of HBO’s 2008 series “John Adams” after many years. My wife and I were just seeking something intellectually stimulating, inspiring and real to watch after completing the bizarre fictional entanglements of “The Affair.” By pure happenstance, however, a dramatized conversation between John Adams and Benjamin Franklin following a session of the Continental Congress in 1775 had immediate relevance both to the post and several of the comment threads following it in which Trump defenders praised his apparently unbreakable habit of blurting out or typing every thought that jumps into his head.

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