Cameron Todd Willingham was Murdered

How the State of Texas Killed an Innocent Man

Trial By Fire: Running Time — 2hr 7min

cast:

Laura Dern … Elizabeth Gilbert

Jack O’Connell … Cameron Todd Willingham

Emily Meade … Stacy Willingham

Jade Pettyjohn … Julie Gilbert

Tinsley Price … Older Karmon

Carlos Gómez … Fire Inspector

Jeff Perry … Hurst

Anniston Price … Older Kameron

Chris Coy … Daniels

Cameron Todd Willingham was murdered on February 17, 2004. He was summarily executed by the State of Texas after being wrongly convicted of killing his three small children by way of arson. We get to relive this chapter in the film, Trial By Fire, riveting true storytelling and exploration of what happens when overzealous law enforcement officials bastardize the Texas Judicial System for their own political gains. I remembered reading about the aftermath of this case well over a decade ago after reading about it in the Houston Press publication. The in-depth article addressed concerns with the way state official’s so-called experts collected evidence.

We get to see in the film the manner in which these officials went about in speculating what happened and the junk science in which they came to their summation. In a nutshell, it was pure hyperbolic garbage. But the fix was already formed to get Cameron Todd Willingham from the very start. Cameron was not a favorite son, favorite citizen or even the favorite town drunk. He didn’t do himself any favors by the way he treated his wife or any of his friends if he ever had any. Willingham, played by Jack O’Connell, slowly becomes a sympathetic character as we watch him go through his trial. We watch as his court-appointed attorney mounts no defense for his client. This alone would easily be grounds for an appeal but it didn’t happen.

In Willingham’s case, he might as well be a black man for what he got as a defense attorney. Willingham’s main crime was that he was poor white trash and uneducated. He and his wife, Stacy, played by Emily Meade, argued all the time, they fought verbally and physically and the cops were called out on numerous occasions to their place. He was combative during his trial and spoke out a lot and that was because his attorney never objected to any of the testimony the state’s witnesses uttered.

The filmmakers effectively pulled off the courtroom drama without having it bogged down to a Perry Mason moment. Willingham was not presented as the father of the year rather more like the anti-social white trash the people around him perceived.

He enters the Texas Prison System labeled as a baby killer. In prison, there are few crimes that you can commit that even prisoners will not tolerate, one of them is killing babies and the other is being a pedophile. Willingham’s incarceration was met with hostility from both the prisoners and the guards. In one scene he attacks a fellow prisoner only because he knew an attack on him was imminent. This action leads to him getting beat up by the guards afterward. In time, Willingham learns to adjust to life living on death row. He lives a solitary life, eating alone, exercising alone, everything alone. There is a moment where he befriends a fellow death row inmate name, Ponchai James. It is Ponchai who gives him the idea of appealing his case. There was a line Ponchai says to Willingham about the attorney he got for the trial that stayed with me. Poncha said, “Poor folks always get the bad ones.” That may be true but that shouldn’t be the norm. Soon it’s time for Ponchai to take his final walk and he doesn’t go easy. It’s somewhat painful to watch, seeing a man dragged to his death. The steel door down at the end of the hall contains a history of dents over the years from death row inmates fighting the death demon.

Liz Gilbert, played by Laura Dern, enters into his life by chance. What starts off as simple correspondence by letters evolve into Liz looking into Willingham’s case files. She discovers a lot of problems with the case including an ineffectual defense by his attorney at the time. Any first-year law student could easily see that what was done to Willingham in his trial was easily trial error. But it seems as if Willingham was born under a bad moon. As obvious as it was to see on the surface that his case was severely mishandled and the evidence didn’t meet any standards of forensic science, Willingham didn’t gain any appeals. There is one scene where Willingham is reading a letter to Liz and it reminded me of the PBS Civil War series where letters from the war were read to the soldier’s wives. It had that resonance to it that gave that scene some meaning.

We also watch as Daniels, played by Chris Coy, as one of the guards slowly evolves into a friendship. In the beginning, he was a brutal abuser to Willingham but in the end, he was looking for a football ‘Hail Mary’ for an avenue to stay the execution. You could see that somewhere in Daniels core, he believed that Willingham was innocent. The scene where they come to collect Willingham for execution was handled with a sense of respect. They could have made it more intense but they were measured because the execution scene was just as hard.

158 men and women on death row have been exonerated through new procedures and DNA testing. It’s too bad Texas put to death an innocent man. Maybe one day the State will admit that they did kill an innocent man based on junk science and fucking hubris.

Ratings: 4 Out of 5 Stars

https://www.innocenceproject.org/

Is The HBO series, Euphoria, Straight Up Porn?

Is it Porn Masquerading as Art?

HBO has a series running called Euphoria. It’s an unflinching look into this generation Z life of social media influences, drugs, sex, parenting styles and a finite look into the struggles for this culturally sensitive group. Euphoria is already being talked about for its frank depiction of underage sex in this context. Episode 2 was also groundbreaking in its depiction of displaying male genitalia in such abundance. Displaying male genitalia is not the norm in Hollywood unless you are doing porn. It was once reported on Entertainment Tonight that the reason you don’t get any depiction of the male genitalia is that Hollywood considers it a weapon. A gun is fine but a dick is something else.

Episode 3, appropriately titled Made You Look, gave us another look at male genitalia but this time it was perhaps the most graphic display for a mainstream media outlet. There was sexting going on involving male genitalia in abundance. Nate, played by Jacob Elordi, is enamored with a transsexual and is constantly texting Jules played by Hunter Schafer. Their texting escalates to the point where Nate starts to text a plethora of dick pics. Nate has a girlfriend, Maddy, played by Alexa Demie. Maddy gets suspicious of the number of text Nate gets while they are on a date. The text continues still while they are having sex. When Nate is in the shower, Maddy opens up Nate’s cellphone and finds the dick pics he has sent to Jules. And there are a lot of them. This, however, isn’t the depiction that crossed any lines. Last week’s episode had more dicks flopping around on screen than at a Liberace venue.

Kat, played by Barbie Ferriera, is a plus-sized individual who lost her virginity in Episode 1. The loss of virginity was memorialized on video and escaped out on the Internet much to her surprise. She successfully had it removed by applying some reverse psychology to her accusers and by threatening to have the parties arrested for distributing child pornography. Kat also has some self-esteem issues surrounding her weight. The thing is though, some people like fat girls. In reading a post surrounding her sex tape, some viewers liked it. She decides to become a cam-girl for the money. One of her admirers contacts her and they set up a video chat. This older guy wants her to be mean to him and he takes her verbal abuse and laughing when he stands up to display his micro-dick.

He gets off to the verbal confrontation where he gets aroused. He proceeds to masturbate while she watches and we watch. This is where the line may have crossed. It’s one thing to depict a person masturbating by panning the camera above the waistline while your arms of flailing but to display a guy actually masturbating is the point of no return.

Has it come to the point in mainstream media, like HBO, to actually show this type of activity? Have we, as a culture, want to see this type of behavior? The guy who was doing the masturbating was a fat guy. Does that make a difference? Would it have been more erotic and stimulating had it been a hot woman? Episode 1 had shown Eric Dane’s erect penis while he put on a condom before he had sex with the transsexual.

Strangely though, that wasn’t the thing that bothered me. It was the rampant use of drugs by the Rue character played by Zendaya. I wanted to choke her to her senses as she climbed further down the hole with the scheming and lying and skating by on the drug testing. That was by far the most egregious act in all of these episodes so far. Overall, nobody comes off as being likable. The little sister is the only one you have sympathy for because she is afraid of finding her sister dead one day. Everybody else needs to just ride in hell. There is not one person with a redeeming characteristic in this telling.

As for the porn label with the fat guy masturbating? Is it or is it not porn? United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart described his threshold test for obscenity in Jacobellis v. Ohio, a hard-core pornography case, stated “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description [“hardcore pornography”], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.”

Perhaps masturbating is not hardcore. There have been mainstream movies that depict unsimulated sex for a while now. And it is safe to say that porn is readily available to anyone these days thanks to the Internet. Are we watching underage teens having sex and we don’t know it? Kat wears a mask to hide her identity and age. Oh, how thinner that wire has gotten as we walk that very precarious thing called life as we let another tower of common sense falter as we open up the doors to more extremes as we lay with dogs.

Yesterday: A Film Review

A Catastrophic look at The Butterfly Effect

Cast

Himesh Patel … Jack Malik

Lily James … Ellie Appleton

Ed Sheeran … Ed Sheeran

Kate McKinnon … Debra Hammer

“What if’s” are basically hypotheses and best guess scenarios to complicated dilemmas. Let’s take, for example, that what if nobody ever heard of the musical act, The Beatles? Would the world be better off not experiencing the group? Would music have changed fundamentally without their participation? Would Richard Nixon not been caught up in the Watergate scandal and have a presidency scandal-free? While none of these things are addressed in the film, Yesterday, it does open up a lot of questions that the film didn’t address. When the trailer for this movie was first released, I found myself wanting to see it, mainly for the nostalgia for The Beatles and for the music in general.

Danny Boyles’s Yesterday could have starred anyone but he went with actors perhaps only known in the United Kingdom who were more than capable of wanting us to go along in this journey and for us to invest something with these characters. And off we go for this ride down this journey of make-believe and should I dare say it, this magical mystery tour.

Jack Malik (Hamish Patel) is your typical struggling musician. He's a good enough musician where he does have the talent, just not the opportunity. Like most musicians who are more than capable, he can’t seem to catch a break. His manager, Ellie Appleton (Lily James), is a long time friend who shepherds him around from gig to gig is what is seen as the most futile of chances. It has gotten to the point where even Malick recognizes the writings on the wall after another disappointing gig playing to a handful of 9 and 10-year-old. He confides in Ellie about his decision to perhaps end his fledgling music career and go back to teaching. She attempts to persuade him to not stop but as he gets out of her car and on to his bicycle, he is not readily convinced.

It is on his way home that he is struck by a bus and wakes up in the hospital where things have changed as we get a clue when Malik says to Ellie the first Beatles line to Ellie, “Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m 64?” She questions why 64? And we are off. Out of the hospital and with his friends, Malik is given a replacement guitar for the one destroyed in the bus accident. Here, he plays Yesterday to break the guitar in and nobody at the table recognizes it as being this classic Beatles song. I have to give a lot of credit to Hamish Patel for actually singing the songs and playing the instruments in this film. He’s a very capable musician and singer and he does it in a way that doesn’t aggravate your eardrums. There’s an emotional connection with his voice when he sings Yesterday.

As the film continues, Malik finds that he has awakened in a world that has no history of the Beatles. As horrifying as that may be, he decides to fill in their legacy by taking on the mantle of bearing the Beatles cross and by appropriating their music. I enjoyed this movie but what I found was that it didn’t address the larger picture of this world without the Beatles. If we were to explore this world and the so-called butterfly effect. The Beatles made the U.S. debut in February of 1964. This was a significant impact on not just the music world, the musical first wave of the British invasion, the historical impact to Liverpool, England and the psyche of millions of teens and the influences on a generational pop culture that inspired thousands.

Let’s take another step, if the Beatles music was never around, we would never have an opportunity to experience solo works of John Lennon, imagine a world with no Imagine. Without Paul McCarthy, there would be no Wings or no Band On The Run. There would be no Beatles catalog for Michael Jackson to purchase. The world would be void of a Stella McCarthy design fashion line. There would be no concert in Bangladesh without George Harrison and no Here Comes The Sun and My Sweet Lord. Ringo Starr would not be married to Barbara Bach and we wouldn’t be hearing It Don’t Come Easy. Though the premise may have been simple, waking up to a world where the Beatles didn’t exist, the ramifications would be like if the Beatles were this large pebble and you tossed it into a lake and the ripples expanded out in the water, this is what the Beatles represents in this world.

The one thing the movie did stick its neck out on was the notion that John Lennon was still alive. John Lennon, played by Robert Carlyle, was effective as we see an aging Lennon living out a quiet life as a painter. It was bittersweet and perhaps reminded us of the cost of fame. Maybe they should have given us at least one other Beatles to see how their lives might have existed in this Beatles-less world? So, if you’re tired of the superheroes films, this is a nice palate cleanser to clear out your Spider senses.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars