“The Apprentice,” a new film biography about the sleazy origins of Donald Trump, has opened in Tucson despite Trump’s attempts to block anyone from seeing it.
Trump’s re-election campaign has attacked the project, calling it “pure malicious defamation” and “election interference by Hollywood elites,” and sent the producers a cease-and-desist letter. The movie premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May.
“The Apprentice” has an 88% approval rating from viewers on Rotten Tomatoes. The movie is playing at the El Con, AMC Foothills, Harkins, and Cinemark theaters in Tucson up to five times a day. Click here to find showtimes.
“The Apprentice” offers a nuanced view of the young Trump as an ambitious but naive social climber, desperately trying to navigate the cutthroat world of Manhattan property deals and politics. Trump is mentored by notorious McCarthy-era attorney and corrupt fixer Roy Cohn, who schools his pupil in the Machiavellian dark arts of power politics. By the finale, Trump has become a self-styled master of Manhattan.
Vanity Fair journalist Gabriel Sherman, who wrote the screenplay, draws a direct line between Cohn’s bare-knuckle tactics and Trump’s modern-day political persona. Cohn (Jeremy Strong) instructs Trump (Sebastian Stan) to relentlessly attack, “deny everything” and “never admit defeat.”
The film paints a scathing portrait.
- In one graphic scene, the dramatized Trump character sexually assaults his first wife, Ivana Trump (played by Maria Bakalova), after she belittles him for growing overweight and bald.
- In another notable sequence, Trump’s character goes under the knife for scalp reduction surgery and a liposuction procedure.
- The film also chronicles Cohn’s efforts to defend the Trump family’s real estate company against a federal housing discrimination lawsuit in the early 1970s and the Trump’s marital infidelities.
“You might find some of these character questions you have about Trump answered,” Abbasi said. “The bigger point we’re trying to make in the movie is that political theater has been going on for a long time in this country.”
The movie title reflects the name of NBC television show “The Apprentice,” which brought Trump fame and fortune over 15 seasons beginning in 2004.
Discover more from Blog for Arizona
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
The incomparable Charles Pierce on Felonious Punk’s interview with Bloomberg’s John Micklethwaite:
On the other hand, maybe they’re better off if he just stands there and bounces his head to the music like a ceramic German Shepherd in the back window of a sedan.
On Tuesday, some genius in the former president’s campaign decided to put him in a one-on-one with Bloomberg EIC John Micklethwait. Moreover, C-SPAN decided to show the event live. It was a triumph in the history of human incoherence. The former president didn’t so much dodge the questions as simply answer the questions that were being asked by the moderator in his head. Micklethwait tried nobly to haul things back to reality, as befits a man whose ancestors were clearly spawned in a Dickens novel, but there was no pulling the former president* out of his own private universe. To wit:
“Roses are red / Violets are blue / I like peanut butter / Can you skate?”
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a62614014/trump-bloomberg-interview-jan-6/
Convicted rapist and felon Donald J Trump was always a punchline.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QikACOGWLgk
From April 2004 on the Late Show with David Letterman.