ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT Trailer | TIFF 2022

Parents and Schools

 Imagine you are a child whose single mother works two jobs to support you and your siblings.

If your mother tells you that the neighborhood school is terrible (based on standardized test scores) but you’re stuck because she can’t afford the rent in a nicer neighborhood, you will arrive at that school insulted and angry. Not surprisingly, you will be more likely to misbehave.

If your mother tells you that your grandparents are going to pay the tuition for you to attend the Catholic school in your town, you will feel valued by your family, and you will arrive at the school eager to cooperate with the teachers. (This happens more than you might think. I have donated for years to a too-small scholarship fund in my archdiocese.)

If your mother tells you that you have been admitted to a charter school that she chose because she thought it would be a good place for you to learn, you also will be a motivated student.

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Last year I read a book, “How the Other Half Learns,” about NYC’s Success Academies, a charter network founded by a former city council member who enrolled her own children there. The mostly minority parents LOVE her and the schools, and the students score very, very well on standardized tests. Personally, I never would enroll a child of mine to such a rigid place — one kid got sent home once for showing up wearing black socks instead of the required navy blue ones, for instance — but the teachers are true believers and the parent support is absolute.

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When we were transferred to NY, our son was midway through first grade, and all the city parents had arranged to enroll their kids into their preferred schools several years earlier. So we moved to a pricey suburb with a “good” school district. The principal at his elementary school then was awful in several ways that affected our son directly, and so we transferred him into a private prep that cost a lot but worked better. Plus, we learned later, that prep school went to some lengths to enroll minority students and to make sure they succeeded.

(Okay, the first year at the new school was not great. Our son's girl-focused teacher organized class projects that included making soup, writing to ask governors’ wives for recipes to assemble a cookbook, and sewing a quilt. We still have a picture of the class and its quilt; the look on our son's face would curdle milk.)

He came out fine, but it was more of a slog than he deserved.

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I’m all for school vouchers. I’m also all for requiring “good” school districts to admit a certain percentage of poor children and requiring those children's ineffective home districts to send full per-student funding ($10,000 or more -- per kid, per year -- above the average spent in the "good" schools around here) with the transferring students. The money could go to transportation, tutoring or whatever helps those students thrive.

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Our state now requires suburbs like ours to provide "affordable" housing, for parents who cannot take advantage of our "good" schools. Our town deferred this project as long as it could, but a deadline is coming, finally, in a few years.

So our leaders have rezoned several commercial properties -- mostly not in residential areas -- for really dense rental housing construction in exchange for a few "affordable" units in each.

The majority of the "affordable" new housing requirement -- 75 units -- will be satisfied by a new, 100 percent "affordable" housing complex on city property near downtown and far from the really nice, leafy neighborhoods.

I wonder what a single mother who moves her children into the new "100% affordable" complex will think. She will understand immediately that she and the other new tenants have been isolated, deliberately, from the rest of the town. How long will it be before she and her neighbors start describing where they live as the "our new ghetto?"

How will this affect the attitude their children will adopt when they enroll in their new "good" schools? How eager will they be to take advantage of what is offered? I know neighbors who will be welcoming -- but will their welcomes ameliorate the city's effective hostility to impoverished residents' families after all these years?

I worry about these things.

Leave Dave Chappelle Alone

 

The above clip is from “The Closer,” Dave Chappelle’s latest comedy special on Netflix. (Interestingly, it seems to be the only YouTube clip of that joke that has not bleeped out what is now called the n-word.)

I watch almost no television, but I watched this because it had become so controversial. There are a bunch of things we no longer can say, starting with the word in the clip and continuing with sacred truths held by various groups of self-styled victims. I don’t believe in giving offense personally, but I am a little tired of it all.

The Closer’s humor is vulgar by my standards, but that is to be expected in a country where the average person hears the word “fuck” many, many times every single day. For reasons I do not understand entirely, this show has enraged the trans community, which calls people like author J.K. Rowling “TERFs,” or trans-exclusionary radical feminists. The term condemns other people and most likely makes them less willing to listen to people who use it.

We already do a lot of censoring. This is why so many Youtube posters have protected us from hearing a Black man say the word “nigger.” (Maybe I crossed a line by writing that word, but it was used often by Chappelle in his performance and the audience laughed and laughed — so cancel me.)

In fact, the critics of the broadcast seem to have spent much more time counting its heresies than considering Chappelle’s larger theme.

Chappelle said he had been accused of “punching down” in his discussions of gay and trans people. (Punching down, of course, means attacking persons you regard as less worthy than you.)

In response, he noted that African American women believed that white women had hijacked the @MeToo movement — effectively punching down on minority women. He quoted a Black woman friend who expressed this belief in very strong language.

In fact, @MeToo was launched by a Black woman in 2006. How many African American women did we see wearing Handmaid’s Tale costumes in those ennobling victim demonstrations a few years back? Were those events broadly inclusive?

(Let’s go further. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson both believed slavery was wrong, but they did not include African Americans in their efforts to form the United States. Sojourner Truth was a freed slave who agitated not just against slavery but for women’s right to vote: her most remembered quote — “Ain’t I a woman?” — indicated her frustration with the suffrage movement when she spoke in Akron in 1851. Later, in 1919, a New York newspaper ran a telling editorial cartoon of two suffragettes holding signs to promote the 19th Amendment; the white woman was sneering at the Black one. In all, that’s centuries of punching down.)

So, yes, Chappelle joked about trans people. He defended Rowling, who gave us Harry Potter and who questioned the burgeoning numbers of gender reassignments among young teenagers in recent years and who also noted that many of those adolescents walked back their decisions. Chappelle acknowledged he was a member of “Team TERF” and that he believed that gender was a fact.

Toward the end, however, he said this: “I’m done talking about it. No more jokes about transgenders until we can all laugh together.”

He finished by sharing the story of a trans woman comedian he had come to know and whom he had given the opportunity to perform the opening act at one of his well-attended performances. He described her as “part of my community.”

She respected him as well and tweeted this before her early death: “Punching down requires you to consider yourself superior to another group. [Dave Chappelle] doesn’t consider himself better than me in any way. He isn’t punching up or punching down. He’s punching lines. That’s his job and he’s a master of his craft.”

Note:

Trans employees of Netflix and their supporters protested the release of “The Closer” outside company headquarters last week. Some outsiders showed up with signs indicating they liked jokes or supported free speech. One employee tore up one of those signs and handed the stick back to its owner; not a nice look.

Some of the employees said shows like this one will cause intolerant people to attack trans persons violently. This seems like a bit of groundwork being laid to argue that censors should have edited “The Closer” pre-emptively to protect the vulnerable — and that Netflix should preview and “fix” all future shows for the same purpose.

I don’t think it works that way. In life, we encounter people who are different from us and, initially, we make each other uncomfortable. Awkwardness ensues and is resolved over time, not infrequently by shared humor. To be able to listen and laugh at yourself is helpful in such situations.

Chappelle’s show is a set piece in how he — and we — can get to know persons who are not exactly like us and become friends with them.

PUBLISHED BY

The Idiosyncratist

MovieMonday: One Night in Miami

This is a good movie.  It is set in early 1964 in Florida, on the night 22-year-old Cassius Clay beats Sonny Liston and becomes the World Heavyweight Boxing.  He's also started calling himself  "Cassius X," and invited Malcolm X to the match.

Jim Forman (Aldis Hodge,) the standout rusher for the Cleveland Browns, also attends and, like the others, is considering a different career as a film actor.  The fourth man, soul singer Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom) seems to be regarded as a bit of a lightweight by Malcolm X, who, given what we know about the man himself, is perhaps the most serious and ardent person in any gathering.

The gathering is at a small motel, and the four friends talk of their lives and their moment.  

They characters talk like the old friends they are, over bowls of vanilla ice cream.  Of the group, Malcolm X is the most serious and suspects that Sam Cooke is less so.  

The next morning, Cassius Clay announces his new name -- Muhammed Ali -- and that he has joined the Nation of Islam.  Meanwhile Malcolm X 

The movie is well written, drawn from a play of the same name. Its writer, Kemp Powers, also co-wrote and co-directed "Soul," a film I enjoyed several weeks ago.

No MovieMonday This Week

 

The Idiosyncratist fell down on January 1 and needs a few days off.

For what it's worth, you should see the other guy.

MovieMonday: Soul

This somewhat unusual Pixar movie is not like "Toy Story" or "Cars," but it will appeal to young watchers and draw in their parents as well.

"Soul" opens as the story of Joe Gardner (Jamie Foxx) the frustrated teacher of a middle-school band class whose students, all but one, don't care about music.  Joe is a jazz piano player who wants music to be his life.

Suddenly an opportunity opens, and  Joe proves his chops by jamming with famous saxophonist Dorothea Williams (Angela Bassett) and her jazz group.  He gets the new job of his dreams, but events intervene.   

In his enthusiasm, Joe falls into a sewer that lacks a manhole cover and wakes up as a small translucent being, presumably dying and on a moving pathway to eternity.  

"My life's just starting!" he yells.  "I'm not dying! I've got to get back!"

Joe manages to escape the walkway and finds himself among a group of similar-looking creatures who are not headed for the Great Beyond but instead are being prepared for the Great Before -- except one, 22 (Tina Fey), who has failed many tryouts and is pretty negative about the idea of life on earth.

Suddenly Joe and 22 awaken in Joe's hospital room, where 22 lives in Joe's body and Joe is a big fat kitty cat, again frustrated.  They leave the hospital and pursue a hilarious course through the city, each awkward but, over time, learning from each other. 

This is an unusual story, and it does result in kindness rewarded and lessons learned.  But it would be nothing without its real-feeling animated musical performances and its score, organized by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross and with Jon Batiste's jazz arrangements and compositions.  Here are samples from the soundtrack. 

Worth a look.

Other New Movies

Two other films opened this weekend.  They may attract more viewers, but not me.

I planned initially to watch the big seller,  Wonder Woman 1984. But then came the doubts -- a long, long 2.5 hours, more magical powers employed in difficult situations, another two-dimensional villain, another Kristin Wiig in another silly role and more.  I rather enjoyed the 2017 Warner/DC Wonder Woman, but the sequel seemed less appealing.

         Maybe it's more difficult to care about superhero stories when the number of everyday crimes is rising and everyday law enforcement is stepping back.  Maybe that's why a smaller movie about personal character sounded better.

The other film, News of the World, is from a 2016 novel that I thought was okay but not great.   In it, a quiet hero played by Tom Hanks commits to returning to her relatives a girl who had been held for several years by members of a Kiowa tribe who kidnapped her after killing her parents.  The story is of the road trip between the Tom Hanks character and the girl who has roots in two very different cultures.

           The book is okay, but as one who spent some time in Texas, I found it less interesting than the true story of Cynthia Ann Parker, who at the age of 10 was kidnapped by a Comanche raid that killed most of her family.  Many years later, after she had married a Comanche chief and had three children, she was miserable to be "rescued" and returned to the life of her childhood.  One of her sons, Quanah, survived as a man influential in both his parents' cultures. 

            Now that's a story.  

            

StoryMonday: A Christmas Carol

We seem to have a new film version of Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" every year.  This one, described as inventive and interesting, is said to be in theaters now, but I'm waiting for a Covid vaccination and have no recommendation to offer.

The origin story, a novella by Charles Dickens, was published in 1843.  It traditionally has been promoted as an antidote to overly commercial Christmas celebrations, but this year it may resonate slightly differently.

The story of course is about Ebenezer Scrooge, an old man who has spent his life building his wealth and who is visited on the night of December 24 by three spirits who show him how much he has missed and how much more he can do if he pays attention to the people in his life.

This is a family movie in two ways.  For children, it gratifies the wish for people to be nice to each other.  For everyone else who has made a mistake or two along the road, it affirms that change is possible and can be rewarding.

So if you have finished wrapping presents and have time on your hands just now, here are some ways to take in "A Christmas Carol."

For Children:

There are various cartoons of the story.   A Bugs Bunny one, if you can find it, and one with Daffy Duck (Bah humduck!)  There is the 1962 Mr Magoos Christmas Carol and, hiding somewhere else, the still-popular 1992 "Muppets Christmas Carol."

This can get out of hand, however.  There are Lego and Smurf productions, and I'm not sure I'd care to see Jim Carrey playing Jim Carrey Scrooge.

For a good introduction, this well-done 25-minute version from 1969 won an Oscar for best animated short.

For All of Us

A film critic with a longer attention span than mine watched and evaluated dozens of Christmas Carol films, worst to best, if you would like to see more.  (My only quibble with his write-up is that it describes Dickens' book as "anti-capitalist" when I think the more appropriate term might be "anti-greed."  Marx's "Das Kapital" was published almost 25 years later.)

And you could always read the book itself.  Dickens' work remains approachable and is available in paper, on Kindle, on Nook and from the fine folks at Gutenberg.  There are also shorter children's stories, including " A Quarantine Christmas Carol" to reassure anxious young ones about pandemic interruptions in traditional festivities.

And then there are radio plays, including a 1965 drama starring the fine English actor Sir Ralph Richardson as Ebenezer Scrooge.

Another Christmas Carol that is quite good and also available on Youtube is the  Leeds' Northern Ballet Theatre performance from 1992, the only ballet version that I have encountered.

If, like me, you have read the book, watched several teleplays and films and seen more than one regional theatrical version, you might enjoy this film that speculates about how Charles Dickens came up with his story:  The Man Who Invented Christmas.