MovieMonday: Hostiles

Here is a movie set in the grandeur of America's western interior in 1892, when decades of battles between the American military and Native American tribal warriors are coming to an end.  

Some people describe this as a Western for our day.  True, it has gunfights in the classic mode, but the real story, which is more reflective of our current sensibility, concerns the feelings of the blocked Capt. Joseph Blocker (Christian Bale).

Blocker has spent his career fighting angry Comanche and Cheyenne tribesmen who have slaughtered innocent homesteaders and Blocker's comrades in arms.  And Blocker has done a lot of killing in return.  He's a smart, thoughtful man -- reads Julius Caesar's military reports in Latin, knows the Book of Proverbs -- but years of war have taken their toll.

For his last assignment, Blocker is ordered to escort Yellow Hawk, an aging Cheyenne warrior and old enemy, from the stockade at Fort Berringer in New Mexico to the Valley of the Bears in Montana, where the cancer-riddled old man was born and wants to die.  

Blocker hates Yellow Hawk and doesn't want to do it, but he has spent years obeying orders and he wants his pension.  He relents.

As the caravan of soldiers set out with Yellow Hawk and his family, they come upon Rosalee Quaid (Rosamund Pike), whose husband and children have been slaughtered by horse-stealing Comanches, and she joins the group.  Then there are battles with the same Comanches, then with evil fur trappers, then with a cavalryman accused of murder and, finally, with other bad guys of the expected type.

Through it all, Yellow Hawk and his family are wise, honorable people who offer comfort to the stricken woman and then assistance to Blocker and his team. 

The movie makes clear that American views of the dislocation of natives had begun to shift by the late 19th century.  Blocker's experience makes him understandably wary of people who have not seen the frontier as he has.  We also learn that Blocker isn't a total bigot because, very subtly, we see that he goes out of his way to express his respect for an injured African American corporal on his team.

I wanted to like this movie.  Christian Bale's performance is very good, as is that of Rosamund Pike, although the arc of her story gets a little extreme, which is more about the screenplay.  The fellow cavalry characters get less screen time, but they too are interesting if underdeveloped.  

What bugged me, I guess, was that wise Yellow Hawk and his family were mostly reduced to accessories illuminating Blocker's evolution into a more humane person.   

Plus, the movie is too long.  


Note

I'm not sure American filmmakers are interested in a Western about an actual Native American, but there is one whose story I'd like to see.

The man was Quanah Parker, the son of Peta Nocona, a Comanche chief, and Cynthia Ann Parker, an Anglo American girl who survived a massacre and was adopted by the tribe.  (When she was "rescued" and returned to her family many years later, she was deeply unhappy.)

Over his life, Quanah became a Comanche leader who negotiated for his people.  He adopted Western dress and took up ranching, but he kept his hair in braids, rejected Christianity and had many wives.  He exchanged visits and went hunting with Theodore Roosevelt.  In short, he participated in two very different cultures at a time when such was uncommon. 

People who grow up in Texas learn about Quanah Parker in state history classes, but the rest of the country might appreciate an introduction.

Bird Scooters

First came the Zipcar.  Then there were the unfortunate hoverboards.  

This fall, a new variety of small motorized vehicle began to appear on the streets of Santa Monica and West Los Angeles.  Behold the Bird Scooter.

These resemble those Razor scooters that were a thing about 15 years ago, but Bird Scooters move along on their own.  Riders don't need to push with their legs to make them go. 

Bird scooters are designed for very short rentals -- $1 a ride plus 15 cents a minute.  Most people use them for a mile or two.  With a top speed of 15 mph, they're relatively zippy. So far, they're pretty popular.

Here are a few Iphone photos I took over the course of five minutes near the beach boardwalk in Santa Monica the other day.  (There were more riders and more pictures, but the pictures were too fuzzy.)

Bird riders seem mostly to be millennials and tourists having some fun, but the company's thesis is that it provides "last mile" transportation, which makes some sense.  Santa Monica  is the terminus of a light-rail line that runs from downtown LA, and parking can be difficult to find in the city's commercial neighborhoods.  With a Bird, you can get off the train or park somewhere convenient and then zip by scooter to an appointment or to meet friends.

The founder of the company is, not surprisingly, a guy who used to work at Uber, another app-based service that was conceived as an alternative to arguably over-regulated and under-responsive taxi arrangements in cities around the world.  

You may be seeing Birds scooting around your town eventually.  Like Uber, the company aims to expand.  


Scooter Law Enforcement

Also like Uber, Bird has attracted the not entirely enthusiastic support of city officials in its hometown.  

Mostly the complaints come from the Santa Monica Police Department. The main ones:

-- After reaching their destinations Bird riders leave the scooters on sidewalks, usually near newspaper boxes or buildings. I haven't seen gobs of scooters blocking pedestrian traffic yet, but conceivably that could happen. 

-- Bird scooter riders are traveling on sidewalks when all motorized vehicles are required to travel on the streets.  

-- The Bird company isn't telling every rider that a driver's license is required to operate any motorized vehicle, including a motorized scooter.  

-- Bird scooter riders are not wearing required helmets.  

Honestly, I'm not sure why the fuss. Most bicyclists don't wear helmets here, and there was never any noise about helmets, drivers' licenses or sidewalk-riding bans back in the hoverboard day. The scooters-sitting-on-the-sidewalk thing could be left to the Bird people, who keep track of scooter locations and have an incentive to make sure scooters are available at various spots around town.  

For now, the police are being generous.  They are stopping Bird scooter riders and issuing stern warnings:  Obey the law, or expect fines of up $190.

The fines may be the point.  In Southern California, law enforcement is pretty darn scarce. Response time is more than 33 minutes on occasions when the SMPD chooses to respond to 911 calls or citizen complaints.  Many stores have private security guards, and the Whole Foods has two guards and sometimes three.  Police are most commonly observed issuing traffic citations and jaywalking tickets, all out of concern for public safety.  

If the local constabulary decides to make a priority of regulating dangerous scooter traffic, I think I have a better idea:  Leave those Birds alone. 

MovieMonday: The Road Movie

As usual, I have posted a video trailer at the top here, but I can't recommend it.  The trailer is awful.  The movie, not so bad.

This is called a documentary, but it is just a strung-together set of vignettes -- okay, dashcam videos -- that were shared on social media in Russia between 2011 and 2016.

Apparently dashcams, which in my experience are associated with police traffic stops, are popular in Russia for insurance purposes and perhaps for protection against crazy people or the police.  

If the film's concept is wacky, well, so is the reality.  The roads shown here are two-lane affairs with narrow shoulders, heavily populated with large trucks, and frequently snowy.

There are crashes of all kinds, fiery explosions, fire along the sides of roads and a deliberately lit fire by a woman fueling up her vehicle at a gas station.  There are trucks sliding from one lane to another, fishtailing vehicles, multi-car smashes, animal encounters, soldiers hand-washing a tank and a man discussing prices with a prostitute.  And much more.

The videos also include conversations among people in the vehicles approaching the remarkable scenes.  Every once in a while someone says something like, "Oh, my lord."  Mostly, it seems that people in Russia are like Americans, whose most favorite word now is some variation of "fuck."  A little discouraging, that.

It may be that havoc on the roads, as seen in the film, is common in Russia because Russians are new to the driving experience.  I looked this up.  In 2005, there were 180 cars per 1,000 people in Russia; the number had risen to 315 in 2017, approximately equivalent to per capita US car ownership in 1950.  

Yes, it's a strange idea for a movie, and, no, I wouldn't be interested in seeing many other dashcam features.  Still, it is not overlong at 70 minutes, and it has many funny moments.  It's also an offbeat look at the non-urban parts of a country where American tourists have seen little more than Moscow and St. Petersburg.  

"The Post" and the Press

Everybody who wants to see "The Post" has seen it already.  As a former journalist I have a few observations about the movie, about why it was made and about films that promote political views. 

The film shows how the editor and publisher of the once-sleepy Washington Post saved the country from Richard Nixon the first time by publishing the Pentagon Papers; this is before the Post saved the country from Nixon the second time, which was the subject of another popular movie in 1976.

 Much of the story is about publisher Katherine Graham, whom Meryl Streep portrays as a deferential, fretful former housewife venturing fearfully into the job she has assumed after her husband's death.  This bugs me.  We know from Graham's memoir (out in a new edition now) that she grew into her role, but I prefer to see her as graduating from steadfast to formidable.  My take only.

The other part of the story tells how real news people deal with a bad guy in the White House.

This is signaled early on, when President Richard Nixon tries to deny a Washington Post reporter access to daughter Patricia Nixon's wedding.

Tom Hanks, playing a not entirely convincing Ben Bradlee, asserts that the Post won't stand for the administration "dictating to us our coverage just because they don't like what we write about them!"  

Bradlee's call to arms:   "The only way to defend the right to publish is to publish!"

Acting on this conviction is the meat of the story.

Post journalists and Graham persevere even as their perseverance threatens the very existence of the newspaper.  They are threatened by the Nixon administration and insufficiently supported by their own squishy attorney, who is of course a pudgy blond guy.   


It ends with the Post triumphant and Nixon paranoid, a dark image viewed through the Oval Office curtains, plotting revenge on the Post late at night.  

One irony is that Nixon's Justice Department went after the New York Times and the Post for revealing the lies and and bad faith of two previous, Democratic administrations.  (Nixon was a Republican, of course.) The Pentagon Papers were an honest evaluation of the Vietnam fiasco.   The analysis was ordered by Secretary of Defense Robert MacNamara and completed before MacNamara left office in 1968.  

Nixon was elected promising to end American involvement in Vietnam (which took him too damn long.)  Still, 50 years later, here's a question: Why would Nixon care so much about the release of old information that made his predecessors, not him, look bad?  

Anyway, "The Post" is a big wet smooch to journalists who stand up to government overreach.  Here is a typical review conclusion.  

Steven Spielberg's tense, terrific new drama celebrates the passionate bond 

between a free press and every thinking human being, 

however diminished the species in Trump's America.

Context

Okay, fine.  One thing that movie critics perhaps do not know is that we have had a more recent president who regarded the press and and government leakers as enemies to be prosecuted.  I speak of Barack Obama.

If you don't believe me, here is what Ben Bradlee's successor said:  

Th(e Obama) administration’s war on leaks and other efforts to control information 

are the most aggressive I’ve seen since the Nixon administration, 

when I was one of the editors involved in The Washington Post’s investigation of Watergate. The 30 experienced Washington journalists ... I interviewed for this report 

could not remember any precedent.

This is from Leonard Downie Jr., executive editor of the Washington Post for 17 years.  It is the conclusion of a blistering critique he wrote in 2013 for the blog of the Committee to Protect Journalists.

One journalist who attracted the administration's ire was James Risen, a national security correspondent for the New York Times.  (Risen sounds like a touchy guy, as investigative reporters can be.)  He was frustrated by his editors' foot-dragging and by a Bush administration subpoena that demanded he reveal his sources, but he reserved his greatest fury for the Obama justice department.

In 2014, Risen said this:  

“A lot of people ... don’t want to believe that Obama wants to crack down 

on the press and whistleblowers. But he does. 

He’s the greatest enemy to press freedom in a generation.”

You can read about Risen's travails in this 2015 Vanity Fair article, or in his own, longer first-person article on the Intercept website earlier this month.  

The administration also was aggressive in prosecuting leakers.  Edward Snowden got away, and prominent targets -- Risen and David Petraeus, for example -- got lighter treatment than lesser known ones like former CIA agent Jeffrey Sterling, who is now in a federal prison.


Conclusion

"The Post" was put together in a relatively speedy nine months, and pretty clearly in reaction to the election of Donald Trump.  

You don't have to be a Trump fan -- and I'm not -- to see that projecting every Nixonian evil on the guy may not be accurate.  In fact, the federal bureaucracy has found its voice in the last year.  There have been many leaks from federal employees, ranging from the FBI to the State Department to the regulatory agencies, all followed up by an enthusiastic press and with no consequences imposed other than angry tweets.

This is my problem.  "The Post" sets out to provide moral instruction and to gratify the beliefs of people who believe that Trump is all bad and that Obama was all good.  

The truth, as usual, is more complicated than that.

MovieMonday: The Commuter

This film is a nice piece of work, the sort of thing Liam Neeson has been doing in recent years.  Its genre is action/thriller and, by its own lights, it hangs together well. I found it perfectly satisfying.

The setup is this:  Michael MacCauley, an NYPD detective turned life insurance salesman, is "let go" after 10 years on the job.  On the Metro-North train from Grand Central Terminal back to his Tarrytown home he is given an assignment/opportunity by a mysterious woman (Vera Farmiga.) She offers him a payoff of $100,000 cash if he does as she asks.  Since his family's financial situation is perilous, he begins to investigate.

 As events progress, Michael learns that his movements are being observed and that the offered "opportunity" is not optional.  If he does not do as he has been told, his family, other passengers and railroad workers face unpleasant consequences.  Unnerved but professional, Michael investigates the situation in a credible way.  The level of threat increases in steady increments as Michael races against a tight deadline: the moment when the train makes its stop at the Cold Springs station.

If you have seen even a single movie of this type, you will not be surprised to learn that a broad network of corruption and evil underlies the danger Michael faces.  It's a movie, after all, not realistic but inhabiting a realistic-looking world.  

There are many scary moments.  Michael discovers the body of a dead FBI agent and watches a fellow passenger sacrificed to make a point.  He tangles with various other passengers while trying to identify the person of interest to the mysterious woman. 

There is violence, including some explosions toward the end, but less gunplay than we have grown accustomed to seeing in modern film and no sci-fi plot devices.  For these exclusions alone, I appreciated it.


Note

In addition to having the usual implausible plot, the film reveals that its screenwriters don't know much about real life.  A few points:

--Insurance salesmen don't have to travel into New York City to sell term life policies to family people.  The family people, like Michael MacCauley, live mostly in suburbs.

--Sixty-year-old guys who commute on trains don't read "Wuthering Heights," and they don't talk with other old guys about which of the Bronte sisters -- Emily or Charlotte -- wrote the book.  

--The movie tells us that Michael MacCauley lost his career NYPD gig because of cutbacks after the 2008 crash (contra the usual public employment policy of last-in, first-out.)   "But the bankers of Wall Street got rich," he commiserates resentfully with an old friend.  There is the obligatory scene in which he gives the finger to an arrogant Goldman Sachs guy in a three-piece suit.  (And no, I don't know anybody who works at Goldman.)
      This theme has passed its sell-by date.  With all due respect to Bernie Sanders, Wall Street is not the nexus of evil that it was in days past.  Financial employment dropped by 500,000 jobs between 2008 and 2013 and has continued to drop since then.  Regulation has increased substantially, and stupid banks -- Wells, Citi, UBS, etc. -- are being held to account.  We may wish that Angelo Mozilo had gone to prison, but the fact that he did not is likely because federal insiders protected him.
      Some better candidates for modern-day greedy bad guys are tech billionaires under the age of 40 -- the ones who collect and sell our data, who maintain sloppy protection systems that expose us to hacks, who wipe out established industries, who innovate new ways to evade regulation and who seem to include a large number of horndogs.  
       I'm just trying to be helpful here.  

MovieMonday: I, Tonya

Here we have movie -- a comedy -- that revisits the Tonya Harding story, the one about the top-level figure skater who was run out of the sport in 1994 after "friends" of hers attacked and tried to cripple a competitor.

It is done as a bio-pic, featuring actors who play the parts and then explain themselves in retrospective interviews.  Their stories are self-serving and conflict with each other; no one comes off well, although the film's makers probably would say they view Harding as a victim.  

Harding-the-athlete is the typical child who works hard at something she loves and rises to excellence because of her talent and commitment.  What makes her life interesting are the two barriers to her success:  Not enough money and, worse, the people around her who are vulgar and violent and who teach her that fighting is the only way to get what you want.

The movie is a litany of low-rent behavior and sleazy details, but without them, "I, Tonya," never would have been made.  Happy families are all the same, as we know.

Tonya's mother, LaVon (excellently played by Allison Janney) is a chain-smoking, five-times-divorced waitress whose approach to life is confrontational.  When young Tonya says a girl at school called her "white trash," LaVon says, "Spit in her milk." 

LaVon believes her daughter skates best when angry, and so the mother offers motivational comments like, "You skated like a graceless bulldyke"  and then says Tonya looked like an "ugly fuckin' whore."  

Tonya (Margaret Robbie) grows into a ferocious skating talent -- the first American woman to do a triple axel -- but one who never got the memo about middle-class values. She makes her own, too flashy skating costumes and dances to ZZ Top numbers instead of Saint-Saëns or Stravinsky.  

The cost is lower performance scores because, as judges explain, "It's never been entirely skill," and part of the gig is projecting a "wholesome" image.  Tonya remonstrates in the language she learned at home. 

(The expectation that ice skaters generally and women skaters particularly must be virtuous is a real one.  Skaters are described alternately as "athletes" and "artists," and the real Tonya Harding paid a price for failing to carry herself like all the other ice princesses.)

 Arguably, Tonya's worst mistake is to take up with Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan), the first boy who admires her and who begins beating her a few months later. The psychological and physical abuse continue into their marriage, which ends in divorce.  The film suggests that Tonya reconciled with Jeff in order to project a happy family life more agreeable to her critics.

Jeff comes with additional baggage -- specifically his friend, Shawn Eckhardt (Paul Walter Hauser), a loser who calls himself Tonya's bodyguard and who devises the Three Stooges-style plot to give Tonya an advantage before the Olympics.  Shawn is a broad fellow and is drawn broadly as a low-class joke.  This characterization, like LaVon's language, buttresses the humor of the movie, which otherwise would be difficult to characterize as comedy.  

It's all funny, and we know how the story ends. "I, Tonya" is a fun film about the journey, but it was made with Harding's cooperation.  Other people with different viewpoints, including competitor Nancy Kerrigan, declined to participate.  

That Tonya Harding accomplished a great deal against long odds is undeniable, but reporters who covered the Harding story, including this one from Harding's hometown, take issue with the film's portrayal of its subject.

We all can name films that don't let facts get in the way of their ripped-from-the-headlines plots.  This may be one of those movies.