MovieMonday: Good Time

"Good Time" is the new -- and misnamed -- movie from Josh and Benny Safdie, the talented New York brothers who have spent the last 10 years turning out stories with gritty urban themes. 

Its star, Robert Pattinson, plays Connie Nikas, a resourceful but ultimately ineffective hood from Queens; his single admirable quality is his absolute loyalty to his mildly retarded brother, Nick.

As the film opens, Connie drags Nick out of a psychiatric session that is making him uncomfortable and angry.   Then Connie and Nick pull off a seemingly well-plotted bank heist that ends quickly with Nick's arrest and transfer to a Rikers Island holding pen. 

Things go downhill from there.  Connie tries to find money to bail out his brother and then learns that Nick has been hospitalized after a beating by other inmates.  He perseveres through plan after failed plan, using cunning and charm to draw in his sometime girlfriend and then several unsuspecting African American people.  There are many tension-inducing plot elements, including a colossal case of mistaken identity, a midnight encounter with a security guard at a faded amusement park and a large bottle of LSD that is seen for a time as the solution to Connie's money problems.  The movie covers a lot of ground in its ever-urgent 100 minutes.

Cinematographer Sean Price Williams has shot the film almost entirely with handheld cameras that focus mostly on very tight facial studies of anguish and desperation. The action is punctuated with electronic music (by Brooklyn's Oneohtrix Point Never) that maintains the atmospheric themes of anxiety and dread.  

"Good Time" is exactly the movie its creators set out to deliver, and it is very well done. 

That said, it is unsettling to watch.  If you're a student of film, you should see it.  If you are not, you should think twice.

Nature Wants Your House Back

Not my house.  At least, not yet.

When you buy a house, the bank wants its mortgage payments and the county wants its property taxes.

These are minor matters in the larger scheme, however.  The real challenge is this:  Nature wants your house back.  Over the long term, nature will win.

Some years back, the Significant Other and I bought a newly built house.

During the first big wind and rainstorm, water pushed under the sill of a slider door and left a puddle on the living room floor.   I cut a piece of lumber to fit the space, nailed it in and caulked it all around.

The next storm ripped a bunch of shingles off the roof.  I called a roofer and had them replaced.

Then a couple skunks dug their way under the house one night.  They got in a fight, and one of them died.  I called a pest control company to remove the (very, very) smelly carcass and a handyman to build a barrier at the skunks' access point.

I planted climbing hydrangeas that grew so well they started covering the windows.  I cut the hydrangeas back; they returned the next year.  I applied herbicide; two years, later the hydrangeas returned again.  I gave up.  As usual, nature had won.

Nature owns the world.  We humans are just squatters.

I think about this sometimes when I see pictures of Detroit houses whose owners have moved on.

In fact, it happens all over the country.  Here is a house that nature is reclaiming in Aberdeen, N.J.

And here is a house in the American South that is being swallowed by kudzu.

Several years ago, a house in our town fell into disrepair. The front yard grew tall and straggly, and dead leaves overflowed the gutters. Then one of the window screens worked its way loose and dangled over the driveway. The paint began to peel, and spots of green stuff, probably fungus, appeared on the roof. I heard that the man of the household had a gambling problem -- he couldn't fight his own demons and nature at the same time. Ultimately the house was sold. It looks fine now, but I still wonder about the man, his wife and their children.


Below is a pioneer homestead cabin built in 1906 and abandoned during the Great Depression.  Structures like these, rendered unlivable, dot the prairies, the Dakotas, Montana and portions of Canada.

Nature has won, and humans, knowing their defeat, cannot muster the energy to tear down the little that remains.

No matter.  In time, nature will see to that.

The Lesson of Charlottesville

If someone had told me two weeks ago that hundreds of self-proclaimed Nazis and white supremacists would show up for a public demonstration in an American city, I would not have believed it.  And yet, 10 days ago, that is what happened.

I am not going to weigh in on the politics here.  Reasonable people already understand that Nazism and white supremacy are bad ideas, and this point has been made, repeatedly, already.  

Let's just talk about one guy instead.  

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At right is the mug shot of the fellow who "allegedly" drove the car into a crowd at Charlottesville, killing a peaceful demonstrator. The event seems to have been taped, and so the only questions are whether or how he will be punished. 

This guy is 20 years old.  He was raised and schooled in the United States and, except for a four-month stint in the military, hasn't done much since high school. 

Since his early teens, he has been a self-declared Nazi and white supremacist.  Here is what I have read: 

1)  In freshman year, he wrote an essay so full of neo-Nazi themes that it was shared with the school principal.  The young man wore a belt decorated with swastikas to school and was observed drawing swastikas on various occasions.

2) He harassed a fellow student, a Muslim, and called her a terrorist.

3) On a two-week class trip to France and Germany, his traveling roommate flew home after only four days because he was so offended by the young man's praise of Hitler, by his description of the French as "inferior" and by his eagerness to get to Germany, which he called the "Fatherland." (Interestingly, the accused man's father died before his son was born.)

4) By senior year, he was known as "the Nazi of the school."

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It is not unusual to find contrarian young people who go against the grain.  It is also legal in this country to believe what you wish.  

On the other hand, let's consider some of the things adults said after the incident:

 -- His mother said that she and her son did not talk about politics.  She thought he was going to Charlottesville because of "something about Trump."

 -- A history teacher said the young man was smart, argumentative, adamant and not particularly receptive to the idea that his beliefs might be wrong.

 -- His high school principal said, "This (he) is one outlier.  That's not who we are."

 -- The school board chairman said he'd never heard of the young man because the board only dealt with students who were facing expulsion.

 -- A man from the neighborhood said he did not know the young man, but "If he's a racist, I don't want to know him."

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One adult, quoted in a news report, said that the event in Charlottesville presented a "teachable moment."  I would argue that many teachable moments were not seized as this young man curdled his brain with stale ideas and vile delusions.

1) Was his mother called to visit the principal after that first freshman paper, and then after the young man was spotted wearing Nazi garb, and then he after bullied the Muslim student?  Was he referred to the school counselor and, from there, to a psychologist or a college ethics professor or perhaps even a clergyman?

2) Did anyone show him photographs of the dead bodies and skeletal remains found in 1945 when Nazi prison camps were liberated by Allied forces?  Did anyone challenge him to explain, after 300,000 Americans died fighting in World War II, how he squared being a Nazi with his US citizenship?

3) When he went on that school trip to Germany, did no one think to call ahead to a German school to ask for someone to speak with the guy?  Germany has spent more than 70 years stamping out the traces of Nazi ideology, and it has no shortage of people who have spent careers on the project.  It wouldn't have been difficult to find one of those people.

Moral Truth

I wonder sometimes how people derive their ethical values.  For many, it comes from religion. Christianity teaches that "All men are brothers," and other faiths all preach some variation of the "Do unto others" idea.  For non-believers, philosophy reasons its way to the same conclusion. 

(We also have many people now who scorn religion and metaphysics and claim to be driven by "science."  Personally, I find this amusing.  By and large, Americans are scientific illiterates, and our current political discussions are largely emotion-driven and boil down to name-calling and finger-pointing.  I wish it were better, but this is reality.)

Even if you have none of the above, there is American history.  I hope every high school student still learns the line, "All men are created equal," one of the self-evident truths enumerated in the Declaration of Independence. 

This young man has turned himself into a pretty twisted person, and he will be held responsible.  But I wish the adults who witnessed his decline had been a lot more "pro-active," as we say, in his formative years.  His failure is not just his but also that of his community.  

Maybe this is the ultimate teachable moment.  

MovieMonday: LoganLucky

Hands down, this is the best heist movie of the year.

Set improbably in West Virginia -- yes, redneck country -- it draws in nice woodsy settings, a local jail and a great big Nascar race.  These are the sorts of things you don't see much in movies today; the novelty works.

The lead, Jimmy Logan (Channing Tatum), has lost his football career to a bum knee and lost his wife, and possibly his daughter, to a jumped-up vulgarian.  As the movie opens, he loses his construction job at Charlotte Motor Speedway.  

He decides to do something audacious and cooks up a finely detailed plan whose execution makes up the bulk of the movie.  The usual knock on back-country people is that they aren't all that bright, but here Jimmy Logan demonstrates that he's dumb like a fox, as people down in the hollow might say.

The movie crackles along, stocked with diversions and broad humor that sustain it through two hours of fun.

The director, Steven Soderbergh (of the Oceans trilogy, among other films) has gathered a first-rate cast with some unexpected appearances -- Daniel Craig as a hillbilly explosives expert now wearing stripes in a county jail run by ex-country singer/actor Dwight Yoakum, and Hilary Swank as an FBI agent.  There are many others.

What also impressed me was the script.  In addition to the range of characters and humor, the plot reflects research and careful construction, and it holds together well.  (Yes, you could pick a nit or two, but there are none of the gaping craters that audiences are expected to overlook in so many movies now.)  

According to the credits, the screenwriter was Rebecca Blunt, and according to industry publications, this was her first screenplay.  Yeah, right, I think.  There is a long Hollywood history of pseudonymous scripts, and this is just the latest one.  

Still, if another Blunt-written film is released, I'm going.  



Note

Another thing I appreciated about "Logan Lucky" was its lack of gunfights.  Perhaps because of this, it is expected to come in second in last weekend's movie sales, well behind "The Hitman's Bodyguard," a buddy film starring Samuel L. Jackson and Ryan Reynolds and featuring lots and lots of gunplay.

This follows another much-admired film, "Baby Driver," whose climax was a series of grinding shoot-outs that killed almost every one of its characters.  Yes, the concept was stylish, but the body count was extremely grisly.

I understand that commercial storytelling requires conflict and that people shooting each other is about as conflict-full as conflict can get.  

But I do wonder sometimes whether years of movies about people settling scores with guns hasn't become a bit of a problem.  Is it possible that impressionable people who see these films come to believe that such conflict resolution is more normal and acceptable than it really is, or at least than it used to be?  

Could this have something to do, at least indirectly, with the 102 shootings in Chicago over this year's very long Fourth of July weekend?  

MovieMonday: Step

Here's a documentary that does what I expect a documentary to do -- show me something I would not see in my everyday life.

It's the story of three seniors, members of a step dance team and of the first graduating class of the Baltimore Leadership School for Young Women, a public charter school with an African American student body.  

The school aims to graduate seniors ready to attend and graduate from college.  The students mostly come from families who have not gone to college, and they mostly are being raised by their mothers.   

The broader story is punctuated by step team practices and events.  The students in the group reinforce each other and take pleasure in their efforts.  They lose a Baltimore step competition and then set their sights much higher, on a Maryland-Delaware-D.C. regional competition late in the school year.  They practice and practice and practice. 

One of the featured girls is Tayla, the only child of a mother who works as a corrections officer.  Tayla's mom is fiercely devoted to her daughter and to the step team -- too devoted for Tayla's liking.  The mom says, "Don't have no out-of-wedlock baby like me!" at one point, and Tayla rolls her eyes.

Cori describes her mom as "a magic wand in human form," and recalls a time when "we were homeless, and I didn't even know it."  Cori is a gifted student with many siblings, and she will need a full scholarship to attend her top college choice. What she craves most is "stability."

Blessin has a mother who has ongoing problems with depression and who is unreliable.  Blessin can remember times when the family refrigerator was empty.  Her grade-point average is terrible, and she missed 53 days of school in her junior year.  But she has potential -- in the first grading period of her senior year, she makes the honor roll.  She also is an enthusiastic leader in the step group.   

The school year starts a few months after Freddy Gray's death in the back of a police van, an event that shook Baltimore.  The step team visits the Gray memorial, and their  advisor tells them, "As young black women, it could have been us." She also says, "As African American women, we are considered the bottom of the barrel." 

If these don't sound like upbeat messages, well, the women who run the school are absolutely devoted to their students -- encouraging and steadfast.  They understand each girl as an individual and work with each one personally.  The college counselor and principal just never give up.  Their support and commitment yield results. 

These are students whose prospects almost certainly would be less bright if they spent grades six through 12 in traditional Baltimore public schools.  What is satisfying about the film is watching the students grow, succeed and enjoy their senior year.

I saw this movie in an empty theater.  I doubt it will gather a major audience.  Those who do see it probably will arrive already believing that we need more schools like the Baltimore Leadership School for Young Women.  

Still, the story is moving.  Why not give it a look?

   

Shoulder Pads Redux?

One standout in the designer collections for the 2017 fall/winter season has been the jacket below from Anthony Vaccarello, the creative director for Paris-based Saint Laurent. 

What is distinctive, to my eye, are the rather broad shoulders. 

Vacarello didn't stop with the jacket.  Here are several other designs with pretty impressive shoulder spans.

Arrayed left to right, the look seems to be heading into Grace Jones territory.  We'll see how that goes.

(Vacarello replaced Hedi Slimane, who left Saint Laurent in 2016 after doubling sales of the high-fashion line in four short years.  Slimane's collections were alternately described as accessible or overly commercial; he also worked in Los Angeles, which may not have been received well in France.)

Vacarello's collection may be seen as something of an homage to Yves Saint Laurent, the most influential fashion designer of the late 20th century.  He popularized pantsuits for women, safari jackets as street wear and big shoulder pads, which he introduced in 1971.

The latter innovation was the fashion equivalent of lighting a match, but slowly.  By the 1980s, big-shouldered womenswear was seen as assertive and strong; the look appealed to baby boomer women moving into executive positions in the work world.

Lesser designers just kept going and going with bigger and bigger shoulder pads until things got really out of hand.  (See below.)

To be fair, Yves Saint Laurent cannot be held responsible for this wretched excess.  Here is an advertisement for one of his 1987 collections.  The clothes are classic and would look perfectly fine today.  The man's fashion sense was impeccable.

Other Designers Now 

In addition to Vacarello, other designers are testing the market for big shoulder pads.  Here are some notable jackets for the fall winter season.


Balmain 

Altuzarra

Alexander McQueen

These are more tailored looks than the loosely constructed pieces we have seen in recent years.  They may be signaling a turn from the all-casual/all-the-time ethic, or perhaps they are aimed at presenting a more flattering, hourglass-shaped physique. 

It's probably a bit early to invest in this look.  But if your mother or grandmother has a few vintage designs in her attic, you might ask her to bring them out so you can try them on with your black pants -- the wool pair, not the yoga pants.  

Note

Yves Saint Laurent was not the first designer to sew broad shoulder pads into women's clothing.  The trend got a flutter in the 1940s, most notably in the costumes Joan Crawford wore in her Oscar-winning title role, Mildred Pierce.  In the movie, Mildred was a hard-working, self-made woman with a difficult daughter.  The film was a hit in 1945 and remains popular today. (Milo Anderson was the costume designer for the film.)

Healthcare -- Just Tell Us What It Costs

The Idiosyncratist has no particular opinion about either political party's healthcare policies; my only observation is that people seem to hate all of them.  

But certain ideas do make intuitive sense.

One of these is transparency -- requiring every doctor, clinic and hospital to post a price list.  This works for dentists and eye doctors and veterinarians. It's time to apply it more broadly.  

Here's a fun video that explains some of the needless complexity that has resulted from not requiring price lists.





One Situation

Last month I got a simple, single-assay blood test for a minor hereditary condition that is well managed with generic medication.  I provided the lab with my new insurance card, and the lab's crack administrative team went ahead and billed my former insurance company, which of course denied the charge.  

I was billed almost $160 for a test that should have cost $20.

After several hours on the phone and on hold, I got the matter worked out. I learned the price only after I had had the blood test and after two insurance companies had run the bill through their elaborate bureaucracies.  It was $27.

Leave aside that it's hard to trust test results generated by a medical laboratory that cannot send a bill to the right insurance company.  Let's talk about the cost implications


High-Deductible Policies

Like many people now, I have a high-deductible health insurance policy.  This does not bother me.  I'm happy to trade $10 copays for full coverage if I get a cancer diagnosis. 

My deductible is $3,000.  Like most healthy people, I don't have that much in the way of medical expenses every year, and so all my medical costs are on me. 

On at least two occasions, I have been able to save money by checking prices.

In one case, I was bit by a dog. (My fault; we were playing fetch, and I mishandled the stick.) In an excess of caution, I decided to get an overdue tetanus booster:  
      My options were these: 1) See a doctor at an urgent-care center for $280, 2) See a nurse at a pharmacy clinic for a little over $100, or 3) Get a tetanus shot from the pharmacist at Costco for $15.
      Since I'm not stupid, I chose the third option.  

In the other, I made use of pharmacies' online price lists.  I found that the 90-day price for my generic drug varied from $20 to $90.  On an annual basis, choosing the right drugstore saves me $280.  I appreciate that.

I'd be happy to do the same with other medical expenses, and I believe other people would too.  

In fact, those new high deductibles could drive down medical costs by motivating people to seek lower-priced alternatives and, indirectly, by motivating medical care providers to set competitive rates.

The only reason this not happening is that medical charges are closely held secrets.  


How It Would Work

If I make a doctor's appointment today, the receptionist will tell me, "We don't know how much the consultation will cost."
       Maybe, with transparent pricing, the receptionist could say, "The doctor bills $100 for every 10 minutes of his/her time; if medical tests are ordered, we will tell you the cost before the tests are done."

If my doctor ordered me to get an MRI at an institution s/he owned, I could consult an online service that compared prices for the same procedure.  An outfit called newchoicehealth.com already does this in some places. 
       Or, even better, I could call my insurance company and ask the price BEFORE I ran up the charge.  Shouldn't health insurers take an interest in cost management, or at least help patients who want to minimize their expenses?

If my kid fell and injured his arm, I could check prices for x-rays and stitches at the several hospitals' emergency rooms in my area and choose one.  Or, more likely, while in the emergency room, I could do the research on my cellphone and argue later if I thought the price of treatment was out of line.  
        (Goodness knows there would be plenty of time.  On my only visit to the emergency room, several years ago, it took the doctor EIGHT HOURS to diagnose appendicitis.)


How to Make It Happen

Some years back, one political party passed a bill called the Affordable Care Act.  The other party has been fighting to repeal that bill or pass its own ever since.  

Unfortunately, neither party has paid much mind to the elephant in the room:  affordability.

Why not a bipartisan bill, two pages long, requiring every healthcare institution and practitioner to post a price list for every service it/he/she provides?  

Yes, the AMA would squeal.  So would all the other participants in the industry that soaks up 18 percent of national expenditure.

My answer to the complaints would be this:  Tough.  People have a right to know the cost of something before they are asked to pay for it.


Note:  Here is yet another article explaining that that we spend too much on healthcare.  From the article:

"According to experts, there are two underlying reasons why the United States spends so much on healthcare:  It uses expensive medical technology, and prices for healthcare services and goods are higher than in other countries."

Movie Monday: Landline

Maybe Tolstoy was wrong.  Maybe dysfunctional families are all the same, too.

"Landline" is a story about a long-married couple and their grown and almost-grown daughters, set in 1995.  The title reflects the era's telephones, which were plugged into walls, and also suggests the connections among family members.

As the story opens in early September, we learn that Ali, a high school senior, is acting out in typical adolescent ways -- cutting classes, sneaking out at night, having sex with a not-official boyfriend and avoiding the college application process.   

Dana, the older daughter, acts out after she begins to wonder whether she should marry her nice but schlubby fiancé.  

The father acts out and has an affair, apparently because his wife disdains his career achievements and also because he suspects that his part-time playwriting is not particularly good either.  

An hour or so into the movie, even the mother, who has played the family heavy through all the drama, does a little fantasy acting out as well.  

On Halloween evening, these plot lines meet up in a crescendo and then resolve themselves in a plausible ending.  Through it all, there is yelling and flouncing around, but the characters behave as real people in a real family might behave.  All very credible.

The actors are fine, the cinematography is fine, the dialogue is fine and the 90s details (pay phones, computer discs, music on CDs) are fine.  But somehow it doesn't work.

In the end, the characters matter to each other but not so much to the audience, which never is invested in how the story will resolve itself.  In fact, the story resolves itself as might be expected.    As a result there is no tension and the pacing feels slack.  

It's not bad, exactly, but I wish I could say I liked it better. 

Note

Each of last weekend's two major movie releases disappointed in ways that could have been anticipated.

"The Dark Tower," based on an eight-book, meticulously plotted Stephen King fantasy series, was seen as ridiculously short at 95 minutes -- this despite the casting of always-watchable Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey.  Presumably this picture was built to launch a series, but a second approach might be in order. 

"Detroit," a based-on-the-facts story about the 1967 riots in that city, is seen as too long.  Given most viewers' unfamiliarity with the long-ago event, a documentary treatment might have been more illuminating and have offered more in the way of context.  

Trump Obsession

About 10 days ago, the leftish New Republic magazine published an article entitled,  "Is Trump Ruining Book Sales?"  The subhead:  "Authors and publishers alike are finding that it's hard to sell books in a political climate where truth is stranger than fiction."

I would posit an alternate thesis that does not involve the president:  It's hard to sell mediocre books, and most books these days are not particularly distinguished.  Plus, more authors are releasing their books online. 

I don't spend much time reading about politics, but I have been surprised this year at how absorbed the press is with the "Trump is ruining everything" theme.   Articles about seemingly unrelated topics -- book sales, history, sports, arts, fashion, whatever -- include everything from slipped-in slurs to wholesale detours to explain why Donald Trump is terrible in every possible way.  

Here are examples from just two days.    

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There’s a Monty Python sketch in which a man in a restaurant is frustrated because everything on the menu seems to have some rat in it. That’s how things are in the age of comrade Trump. It would be great if he would tweet, “I’m the reason you can’t have nice things. SAD! #inwayovermyhead.” No matter what good things happen, there’s probably a bit of Trump in it.

(The above is the first paragraph in what purports to be a review of the Fuck Yeah Fest!, a classy-sounding music event.  The article proceeds through seven more paragraphs about Donald Trump, four paragraphs about two bands, one paragraph about Iggy Pop and a concluding paragraph.)

Henry Rollins

"Enough Trump -- Let's Talk about How Great Iggy Pop Was at FYF"

LAWeekly

August 3, 2017

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"Old Walt is tasked with destroying the dark tower, which is the only thing stopping monsters from taking over the planet. Is this a metaphor for the Trump administration? Don't get your hopes up."

Peter Travers

"The Dark Tower' Review"

Rolling Stone

August 3, 2017

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Of course, the song’s success doesn’t mean that President Trump’s project will fail, or that cranky nativism will give way to happy multiculturalism. Plenty of people might be willing to watch a video by Puerto Rican artists and still not want a Spanish-speaking neighbor next door. (Although Puerto Rico is a United States territory, so if you’re American, get over it.)

Moises Velasquez-Manoff

"The Meaning of ‘Despacito’ in the Age of Trump"

New York Times

August 4, 2017

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Six months into Donald Trump’s presidency, Shkreli captured the zeitgeist of America. Like a millennial version of Trump, he was bombastic, defiant, politically incorrect, indifferent to social norms -- and, according to prosecutors, the truth -- while his expert use of social media attracted a legion of followers. Unlike Trump, he was banned from Twitter after harassing a female journalist.

Misyrlena Egkolfopoulou, Patricia Hurtado and Chris Dolmetsch

"Why ‘Pharma Bro’ Martin Shkreli Is Swaggering Into Jail"

Bloomberg.com

August 4, 2017

Thoughts

The obsession with hating Donald Trump -- and it is an obsession -- is out of hand.  

If you really, really can't stand the guy, there are practical reasons to think twice before disparaging him every chance you get.

1) Assigning Donald Trump responsibility for everything that you don't like has the perverse effect of making him seem more important and powerful than he actually is.

2) Being unable to view general topics without applying a "Trump-bad/me-good" template limits your capacity for critical thought.

Not everything in this world is about Donald Trump.