MovieMonday: The Rider

What does a man do when an injury makes him give up the only work that ever mattered to him? 

That is the subject of "The Rider," a half-true/half-documentary film set on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.  

The young man is Brady Blackburn (played by Brady Jandreau), who lives in a mobile home with his father, Wayne (Tim Jandreau), and his sister, Lilly (Lilly Jandreau, whose autism is observed but not discussed).  All the other characters are played by Lakota Sioux as well.

Brady (actor and character) is a rodeo bronc rider who suffered a serious head injury in a competition.  When we meet him, much of his scalp has been shaved, exposing the long incision from a surgery that replaced a piece of his skull with a metal plate.  In addition, he has a seizure problem that causes his right fingers sometimes to clench up.

All Brady wants is to go back to rodeo riding.  His friends are rodeo riders.  The people who know him know him as a rodeo rider.  He tells them all that he's just waiting to heal, but his doctors have told him that he never should ride again.

Brady takes a job working at a grocery store and does not complain, but it's clear his heart is not in the work.

"I believe God gives each of us a purpose," he says. "For a cowboy, it's to ride."  

Movingly, we glimpse Brady's sensitive core.  We see it when his father, broke, sells Gus, the family horse.  We see it when Brady visits Lane Scott, a talented cowboy paralyzed in a rodeo accident and still eager to reminisce about the sport.  We see it when Brady gently convinces an unbroken horse to take a saddle and a rider. 

Brady Jandreau's performance stands out for its openness and sincerity.  For a movie made with amateur actors, "The Rider" feels true.  

The film won a directors' prize at Cannes last year and is only the second by Chinese-born filmmaker Chloé Zhao, who was raised in Beijing and educated in London and American cities.  

Zhao has said she was drawn to the American Plains as she had been to the plains of Mongolia in her childhood.  This shows in the beautiful vistas of "The Rider," which suggest why Native Americans today might remain more connected to the land than the rest of us in our built-up environments.

I doubt that a U.S. director could make such a personal film about Native Americans without feeling required to cover the history behind their current circumstances, which generally are pretty bad.  This approach may be more respectful of the characters and their story. 

MovieMonday: Love After Love

This is a nicely done movie that observes how a man's death affects his wife and two grown sons.  

Early on, Glenn (Gareth Williams) is a wheezing but happy presence at a family picnic and, shortly afterward, a helpless lung cancer patient who needs basic care to use the toilet and to breathe.  After his death, he is zipped into a body bag, and we watch what happens after a critical thread is ripped from the tapestry that has been his family.

There is rich material here.  If you have lost a parent or spouse or child, you know that bereavement is more than crying at the memorial service and then feeling twinges of sadness afterward.  Adjusting to such loss is the cost of love.  It is deeply personal, and it is a process without shortcuts. 

Here, the wife and mother, Suzanne (Andie McDowell, very good) works to maintain her composure as best she can around her children.  To her credit, she blows up only once, among others, and then loses her patience a couple other times, appropriately.  Over time, she opens herself to replacing the love she has lost.

Her son, Nick (the excellent Chris O'Dowd), seems to continue to function at work and in life, but lashes out irrationally at girlfriends, causing pain to them and to himself.  He also is hard on his mother, reverting at one point to an inner child who doesn't want her to repaint the living room or throw away any of his childhood stuff.

The second son, Chris (Jame Adonian, in a role less fully realized), seems more discombobulated initially, but appears to gain perspective somewhat faster than his brother.

The movie does not move smoothly, but at times lurches from one family gathering to another, frequently attended by a silent grandmother whose purpose and thoughts are a mystery. There are also encounters among friends -- how else to display what is going on in the characters' minds?  The plot involves uncomfortable conversations and even yelling, but all are organic to the story and feel true.

There are several filmic repetitions -- naked lovers in similar poses, Suzanne bewildered at a high school dance and then dancing with a new suitor near her age. These help to knit up a necessarily un-smooth story line.  

The film is the first full-length feature written and directed by Russell Harbaugh, who has acknowledged that the situation, if not its details, owes much to his experience of his own father's death.  It revisits Harbaugh's shorter 2011 Vimeo film, "Rolling on the Floor Laughing," that considers a piece of this movie's narrative and is easy to find online.


The Title

The film takes its name from this Derek Walcott poem. 

Love after Love

The time will come 

when, with elation 

you will greet yourself arriving 

at your own door, in your own mirror 

and each will smile at the other's welcome, 

and say, sit here. Eat. 

You will love again the stranger who was your self.

Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart 

to itself, to the stranger who has loved you 

all your life, whom you ignored 

for another, who knows you by heart. 

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, 

the photographs, the desperate notes, 

peel your own image from the mirror. 

Sit. Feast on your life. 

There's nothing wrong with this poem, and it is fair to guess that its discussion -- of a person changed by love, by loss and by the synthesis of the two experiences -- resonates for Russell Harbaugh.  


As a film title, however, I'm not sure it's a great choice in a commercial sense. 

Rajneeshpuram and Cults

If you watched the long, long Netflix series about Rajneeshpuram, you saw many portions of an interview with Philip Toelkes.

Toelkes left a successful law career to follow Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, and never looked back.  He exudes comfort and self-assurance in his interview, as do some other Rajneeshees.

As the television series ends, Toelkes tells the camera that the Rajneesh (now known as Osho) was "all about freedom."



Let's unpack this thought.  If you had gone to Rajneeshpuram in the early 1980s, here is what would have happened: 

-- You would be given a new name.  Toelkes became Swami Prem Niren.

-- You would be issued new clothes in the "colors of the sun," ranging from pink to orange to red to maroon to purple.  You also would be given a long beaded necklace, called a mala, that featured a picture of the Bhagwan.

-- You would be assigned living quarters and eat at communal meals.

-- You would work (called "worship") 10 hours or more for seven days a week with breaks for meals and for an afternoon lineup with all the other sannyasins to watch as the Bhagwan/Osho was driven past in one of his many, many Rolls Royces -- this to honor a spiritual leader who had not spoken publicly since before he left India.

-- You would be expected to give whatever money you had to the greater project.

In short, your personality would be submerged into the group identity, and your life would be organized for you, 24-7. 

Maybe the dynamic breathing and dancing and sex and exhortations to joy were great.  

But it doesn't sound like freedom to me.


Readings

Win McCormack, now the editor of the New Republic, reported on Rajneeshpuram from Oregon in the1980s.  Recently, the magazine has run relevant pieces of that work, grouped by topics that include "Police State," "Mind Control" and  "Money Machine."  A lot of good stuff there.  

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The cult was sex-positive (to put it in the nicest light), but it was child-negative, favoring abortion and sterilization.  One boy who spent his early childhood among sannyasins in Oregon and Europe was Tim Guest, whose mother joined and whose father did not. Guest's autobiography, "My Life In Orange," juxtaposed stories of free-range childhood with memories of sadness and abandonment.  This Observer review covers the high points.  Tim Guest died of a morphine overdose in 2009.

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Another of the sannyasins interviewed in the Netflix documentary, Jane Stork (Ma Shanti Bhadra), also wrote a book, "Breaking the Spell," about her experiences in India and Oregon.  A review of the book in an Australian paper discusses the writer's change of heart after she had been drafted to join murder plots and after her daughter had been abused sexually.


Cults 

We still read of the cults of the 1960s and 1970s.  They grew out of the human potential movement, which had its basis in psychotherapy and eastern philosophies.  

It is true that most people have benefitted from those therapies and from mindfulness and meditation.

But the few exceptions were pretty awful.  Here are two cases that share elements with the Rajneeshpuram story.

Synanon, which began as a 12-step program for narcotics addicts, attracted a thousand or more people over time in California but managed only to rehabilitate about 70 drug abusers.  It evolved into an increasingly rigid religion led by founder Charles E. Dederich. Synanon-the-church bound members for life, separated parents from children, broke down personalities in nasty group sessions, gathered an arsenal and attacked people who left or others who helped people to escape.  Famously, Dederich deputized two members to put a rattlesnake in the mailbox of an attorney representing a woman who had left the group.  The lawyer survived his bite, but Synanon imploded not long afterward.

Jonestown began as the People's Temple, a large Christian congregation led by Jim Jones in San Francisco. Jones was politically popular until he was not, at which point he took more than 900 followers to establish an agricultural community in the middle of a wilderness in Guyana, South America.  There were the usual abuses, and in late 1978 a California congressman named Leo Ryan came for a visit.  As Ryan was leaving, Jonestown goons shot him dead. Afterward, Jones convinced his followers to drink cyanide-laced punch in a ghastly mass suicide.  

Congressman Ryan's daughter moved up to Rajneeshpuram a few years later.  She is believed to have given her inheritance money to that cult. 

M̶o̶v̶i̶e̶TVMonday: Wild Wild Country

(The Idiosyncratist is in suburbia, where the only new film is a Dwayne Johnson thing based on a 1980s videogame.  It may be fine, but I decided to watch a six-hour Netflix program instead.)

Here we have an overlong, not particularly revealing documentary with a title that doesn't suggest anything about its content.  It probably should have been called "Rajneeshpuram," because that is the subject.

It is the story of a cult that began in Poona, outside Mumbai.  After some unpleasantness with the Indian government, the group decided to relocate in 1981.  It bought a 64,000-acre plot called Muddy Ranch in a mostly empty area in the state of Oregon.  

Eventually, several thousand Rajneeshees settled there, setting up a city with housing, roads, a sizable airstrip, a health center and secluded housing for its leader, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, as well as parking for his large fleet of Rolls Royces.  

The documentary consists of old film footage and interviews with now-older Oregonians and former sannyasins, as the cult members were known. 

The story that unspools is one of conflict between the Rajneeshees and 1) the people of Antelope, OR, a town of 40; 2) officials of Wasco County, population 25,000; 3) Oregon prosecutors and, 4) the U.S. Attorney based in Portland.  

The sannyasins vastly outnumbered local residents, but this did not stop the group from developing a paranoia about their new home.  Some of what they did:

-- Moved enough sannyasins into Antelope to vote in a new mayor, take over and expand the police force and give the town a new name, Rajneeshee.
-- Established another new city, Rajneeshpuram, on the ranch and set up a second, also very heavily armed police agency that seemed prepared more for war than peacekeeping.
-- Stationed roadblocks at various points on ranch roads, deployed foot and helicopter patrols across the ranch and also wired key ranch locations with listening bugs. 
-- Arranged sham marriages between American sannyasins and foreign ones to evade immigration laws.  
-- Poisoned two county officials with salmonella-laced glasses of cold water offered on a hot day's visit.
-- Imported thousands of street people from all over the country to pad the local voting rolls and take over Wasco County government.  When the street people became belligerent, they were drugged with Haldol.  When the new voter registration plan was kiboshed by the state, the street people were dumped in cities around Oregon. 
-- Distributed salmonella in restaurant salad bars and kitchens in the county's largest city.  The effort sickened 750 and sent hundreds to hospitals. The effort was a dry run for a planned larger poisoning to suppress voter turnout in a coming election. 
-- Set fire to the county planning office.
-- Planned the killings of the US Attorney in Portland, other county officials, the Rajneesh's personal doctor and possibly an investigative reporter at the state's largest newspaper.

This is weird stuff.  The documentary hints strongly that the Rajneesh's personal secretary, Ma Anand Sheela, the effective cult CEO, organized all of it.  But putting the plans into action involved many other actors. 

Sheela spoke daily with the Rajneesh, and she claimed the skullduggery was his idea.  (He had not spoken publicly since 1980, which raises the unposed question of how he continued to inspire his devoted worldwide congregation of 10,000 or more during those years.)

When the whole thing broke up in 1985, the Rajneesh started talking again and blamed Sheela.  He pled guilty to immigration fraud and returned to India.  She served a relatively brief prison term and moved to Switzerland where, surprisingly, she now operates a nursing home.  Some other sannyasins served short sentences.

This documentary has received a lot of attention and praise.  Many reviewers puzzle that the Rajneeshpuram story did not receive more national attention back in its day.  

My guess is that if it had happened in or near a major city, it would have got more attention.  Rajneeshpuram was three hours outside Portland, Oregon's largest city, and in a part of the state that is largely unpopulated.

The city where hundreds of people were poisoned has fewer than 20,000 residents and not a big news presence.  If it had happened in Chicago or San Francisco or New York, it would have been a big story.  

The interviews in the documentary don't add much.  Yes, Sheela talks, but it is hard to trust her word.  The Oregonians from the nearby town, mostly older ranchers, come off as bigots at first and then, as the story proceeds, maybe not so nutty after all.

A lot of interview time -- too much, I'd argue -- is given to three former sannyasins.  All are well-spoken and appealing.  They do not account for the popularity of the cult, or of any cult, for that matter.

What's missing from the documentary is any discussion of the internal workings of Rajneeshpuram.  I've read up a bit on this and will discuss it tomorrow.  

MovieMonday: A Quiet Place

This is an unusually effective horror movie, especially given the simplicity of its premise. 

As it opens, we meet the Abbott family tiptoeing through an empty small town and picking up items they need at stores.  Nobody says a word, and the parents, Lee (Jim Krasinsky) and Evelyn (Emily Blunt), watch their children to be sure they maintain a careful silence.  

As they walk quietly home, one of the children turns on a battery-powered toy, and we see the consequences:  An alien force appears out of nowhere and snatches the boy, who is lost forever.  

We learn that the aliens cannot see or smell but depend instead on their aural sense to locate their prey.  Making noise means certain death for humans and animals.  


The Abbotts may have outlasted the first attacks that killed their neighbors because they know sign language -- their oldest child is deaf -- but that opening sequence raises the question of whether they can survive over the long term.

As a practical matter, the very limited dialogue requires more of the actors, whose behavior and nonverbal interactions must make the audience care about their characters.  This is done well here, particularly in Blunt's portrayal of the mother's concerns.  

Events proceed, the threat escalates, and parents and children do their best to protect each other as the film reaches its climax.  There are plot holes, as in all such movies, and the film ends with a moment of success but without a final resolution.  

That said, the story is tight and not over-ambitious.  It also is well paced with an efficient 90-minute running time.

Krasinski, best known heretofore as Jim, the amiable paper salesman in "The Office" television series, cowrote and directed the movie. He seems to have the skills for more such work.

The cinematography, by Charlotte Bruus Christensen, deftly counterposes the beauty and intimacy of a farm family's life with the lurking threat that shows itself only late in the film. The contrast enhances the overall effect.



Note

Recent movies, including this one, go to great lengths to portray women as powerful agents who confront evil, protect the helpless and perform acts of great heroism. 
        
This is not inappropriate.  Older films typically portrayed female characters as passive or in minor supporting roles or as victims needing rescue by strong men.  
        
Still, the degree of the corrective pendulum swing is remarkable. 

Grooved Pavement, on the Road and in Music

I passed the sign below one day last year as I drove down a rural highway in New Jersey.  

Then I passed a similar sign on the other side of the same road on my way home.

At first I thought the local highway department had messed up its sign order.  But then I slowed down and looked more closely.  I saw that the "Y" didn't quite fit with the other letters.  

It seemed that someone who saw those signs had a flash of inspiration and decided to act on it.  He or she used yellow paint to cover the original "D" and then black paint to replace the letter with a "Y."  "Grooved" had become "Groovey."

Yes, the new word is misspelled, and, yes, the free-lance sign doctor defaced public property in a technical sense.  But it was silly and fun.  I enjoyed seeing those signs.

In fact, the word "groove" and the term "grooved pavement" have sparked other ideas over the last century.  Here's what happened.

Word Origin

"Groove," the noun, comes from groeve, a 14th century Middle Dutch-to-Germanic word for a furrow or ditch.  The term seems to have been mashed up with the Old English word grave, which came from the Latin word, grava, which meant an excavation for corpse or coffin.  Both words indicated a break in the surface of the ground.  

Long before highway engineers started specifying grooves in pavement for safety reasons, the word had another meaning.

Thomas Alva Edison

Historians might trace it to 1888, the year Thomas Alva Edison produced the first gramophone, a machine that played music or speech.  Originally, the music was described as "engraved" (again from the Latin) on soft wax cylinders and revealed when a needle read the engraving and a horn amplified the sound.

Edison refined his machine, first substituting harder wax on the cylinders and then, in 1912, engraving the music on discs made of shellac. (Vinyl came later, in the midcentury.) 

Sometime during this period the engravings came to be called "grooves."  A phonograph's needle was said to read a record's grooves.  (Also the disc came to be described not as a "recording" but a "record.")

Perhaps it is not surprising that public works officials found the word "groove" handy when describing the new highway innovation.  Can you imagine a highway sign that said "Engraved Pavement Ahead"?   Of course not.  "Engraved" sounds refined.  Paving is just paving.

So "Grooved Pavement" it became.


Grooves of Music

For music lovers, the phonograph was life-changing. In all previous ages, if you wanted music around the house, you had to play your own instrument. Now you could listen to anything you wanted, whenever you wanted it.

Records -- and then radio -- expanded the American music diet, which before had consisted mostly of church hymns, regional music and classics from the European canon.  

The music genre that came into its own in this period was jazz.   It had its origins in music made by African slaves in the American south, and was refined and improved in the African American isolation of the post-Civil War period.  By the 1920s, jazz music anchored the Harlem Renaissance and exploded into an international phenomenon.

One indication of the significance of jazz and recognition of its origins was "The Jazz Singer," a 1927 movie that was one of the first talkies.  The plot involved a young Jewish guy who rebelled against his father's wishes to perform popular music in blackface.  The idea is cringe-inducing to post-millennial sensibilities, but most likely was regarded as an homage at the time.

Dizzy Gillespie

Jazz musicians were early adopters of the word "groove," which came from the surfaces of records and which they used to describe their music.  

In 1945, trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie composed and released "Groovin' High," a bebop standard that for many years was part of Miles Davis' regular repertoire.   

Further evidence of the g-word's association with a cool musical style came in an Oxford English Dictionary definition that included this example of its proper usage as a verb:  "the rhythm section grooves in true (Count) Basie manner."


Then the beats, those hep cats of the 1950s, took up the word.  In Richard Gray's history of American poetry, he wrote that, to Lawrence Ferlinghetti and his ilk, "...the word 'beat' suggests keeping the beat, being in the groove.  More specifically, it implies the jazz beat, bebop and swing." 

Then came rock and roll, which also was influenced by jazz, but which caused somewhat inapt white applications/appropriations of the groove concept.  There was a 1960s pop song called "A Groovy Kind of Love" that you possibly can find online even now if you have the stomach for it.

All was not lost, however.  African American musicians kept the word alive with R&B, soul and funk inflections, including King Floyd's "Groove Me" and Earth Wind and Fire's "Let's Groove." 

Through it all, jazz artists and bands kept releasing music that was true to the groove aesthetic.  Here is "The Groove Merchant," which was composed by Jerome Richards and was a big hit in 1969.




This recording seems to have been made to promote the sale of the song's sheet music, at an affordable price, for middle school and high school jazz bands.  Turns out there are lot of kids who like to groove.

While African American popular music has been caught up with hip hop for the last 20 years or so, jazz has maintained its worldwide audience.  The music sells well.  The clubs are crowded. The annual festivals in Monterey and Montreaux attract many thousands of fans.  



Back to Grooved Pavement

Those engineers who put up "Grooved Pavement" highway signs may not have anticipated this, but their verbiage inspired some music.

Here is a song titled "Grooved Pavement," which appears to have been written after the turn of the millennium.  It's funky and has a good back beat.  It offers solo riffs and unison sections for horn groups. It's a genuine groove.



Jimmy Kimmel, the late-night television host who seems to care about music, posted this arrangement on his Youtube channel.  

The composer is Victor López, a now-retired music teacher/school principal in Miami who who wrote the piece with student jazz groups in mind. 

If you look on Youtube, you will find dozens of school bands' renditions of "Grooved Pavement," starting around 2005. There's a lot of enthusiasm in those performances, but the sound quality is not so distinguished, alas.  

I tried to get in touch with López because I was impressed with his output.  He wrote lots of music for student bands, he wrote charts (arrangements) of other composers' music for student performances, he played trombone and he conducted music for groups of all ages.  He's officially retired now, but he's lived his life in music and in the process promoted the enjoyment of music for many, many people.  The people who made "The Jazz Singer" movie would call him a mensch.

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Here's another song with a similar title, "Grooved Pavement Ahead," as performed by a pretty good high school band.





This piece was written by Brad Ciechomski, a New Englander who also teaches music in schools.

I got him on the phone and asked him the question I would have liked to ask López:  How did you come up with that title?

Here's his answer:

"I was driving down a road one day and came to a sign that said Grooved Pavement Ahead: Next 4 Miles.  I thought to myself, 'Let's groove for the next four minutes.' " 

After a little back-and-forth with his music publisher, he had the title. 

Ciechomski also gave some context.  Most sheet music sales these days, he said, are to schools.  The price of charts for commercial hits is too high for school budgets, and so a certain small number of music teachers, including him, write their own material and rescore music to suit the talents of students in their bands and orchestras.  Like López, his range of activities is pretty impressive, which to me indicates not just energy but gusto.

He added that pieces like his "Grooved Pavement Ahead" appeal to students who have been raised hearing rock music in their homes.  

For them, he explained, "The groove is easy to grab onto." 

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And there's more.

--For six years, starting in 2010, "Grooved Pavement" was the name of a weekly world music show at WMUA, the student radio station at the University of Massachusetts.  The timing suggests that the show may have been given its name by a student who played the López song in a high school band.  (I'm just guessing, of course.) You still can find the show's eclectic weekly playlists on its Facebook page.

-- Scot Sax, a Philadelphia/Nashville/Los Angeles songwriter and performer released an album titled "Grooved Pavement" last year.   Sax, who also identifies as Mr. Chocolate, works in various musical genres.  He too seems to have been inspired by street signs. Here's the album cover.

--There's also a techno song called "Grooved Pavement" that has nothing to do with jazz but has a thrumming open that perhaps aims to evoke the experience of driving on actual grooved pavement.

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The point is that words wander and beget new concepts.  What started as a new name for a technical innovation was adopted by musicians to describe a new kind of music and then picked up by highway engineers to describe a new kind of road surface; that latter inspired another subset of music titles and, finally, a jokester in New Jersey. 

If you think a "Grooved Pavement" sign might promote some creativity in your household, you can buy one online for less than $100.

MovieMonday: Ready Player One

Steven Spielberg has made fantasy films before, but this one is much more concerned with technology and, specifically, the tension between virtual reality and real life.  

The human aspect may be the way Spielberg could try out a special effects-laden superhero fight between good and evil.  Hard to tell.  

It's another unusual turn from a director who has made many kinds of films, most of them successful.

As is the case with many movies now, it takes its story from a young-adult novel. The plot involves a virtual reality universe called OASIS, which is a popular escape from the earthly dystopia of 2045, when life "is a number everybody is just trying to escape."

Early on, we meet Wade Watts, an orphan who lives with his aunt and her unpleasant boyfriend in a trailer on a shelf in the Stacks neighborhood of Columbus. 

When Wade straps on his VR headset and lands in OASIS, he becomes Parzifal, a streaked-blond avatar who hops into a DeLorean car, closes its wing door and then joins a drag race/battle involving other vehicles -- one a motorcycle driven by a cute female avatar named Art3mis -- and obstacles including a virtual King Kong.  The reason for the race is not clear, but its practical purpose is to get the action going. And of course the movie ends with an epic battle, another stock element in action movies of all genres.

In between, Parzifal and his friends join a competition to find/win three keys left by the sorta-dead OASIS inventor, who promised the winner a really cool Easter egg that will confer hidden powers and control of the VR paradise.  

Naturally an opposing team of greedy bad guys wants to take control of OASIS and use it to make money.  Naturally the bad guys are led by a CEO-type guy in a business suit; naturally his avatar also wears a business suit.

It's not a complex story, but it can be hard to follow the plot twists, which involve conflicts on earth and in the OASIS universe.  The main characters step back and forth between the two spheres, real and virtual, and their earthly connections make the movie's theme more humanly resonant and, well, Spielbergian.  

The computer-generated imagery, done by George Lucas' Industrial Light & Magic shop, is excellent throughout.  The movie is worth watching for this alone, and particularly in 3-D.  

The film is well-stocked with references to 1980s pop culture, a plus for people who care about Hall and Oates, Buckaroo Banzai and historical Atari games.   

The plot is more credible than a superhero plot when it comes to  characters' motivations, but not much more. 


Notes

This is mostly a guy movie.  When I saw it, the theater was filled with mostly with single men and bro-friends in pairs; there were also a father and his tween-aged son, and one woman with her boyfriend.  

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There are lot of movies now that assume a dismal future.  Off the top of my head, I came up with these: two Mad Max films, "The Matrix," the Hunger Games trilogy, "The Road," "Logan," "Robocop," "Blade Runner" and "Blade Runner 49."  

Maybe it's easier to fight imagined battles than to take up current issues.