MovieMonday: Blindspotting

It's hard to say whether this movie is overambitious or just a bit scattered.   

It was written by Daveed Diggs and and Rafael Casal, two Oakland natives who also star.

In the story, Collin (Diggs) and Miles (Casal) have been friends since childhood.  Collin is ending a prison term and trying to get through his last three days of probation without getting sent back to the slammer.  Miles, his hot-headed friend, is making that difficult.

The plot begins when Miles and a mutual friend pull six handguns out of hiding places in the friend's car while Collin frets in the back seat, knowing that if he is seen around firearms, he will be back in trouble.  

Later, Collin sees a white policeman chase a black man and then shoot the man in the back, killing him. The incident affects Collin's peace of mind throughout the film and is revisited in a confrontation in the final moments of the movie.  

And there is more.  We see the tangled loyalty of the two friends.  The white guy, Miles, is more violent and threatening but faces no consequences for his behavior.  Meanwhile, Collin's more controlled demeanor offers no protection.  In fact, their friendship has driven a wedge between Collin and a former girlfriend whom he still seems to love.

Another theme, or perhaps character, is Oakland itself.  Collin and Miles resent their city's gentrification, and the film itself includes many handsome and affectionate camera shots of traditional Oakland landmarks.  

Much of the dialogue between the two friends and in their reflections is delivered as rap poetry.  It calls to mind Shakespeare and his iambic pentameter, and it signals, perhaps, how seriously the screenwriters took the enterprise.  (This also calls to mind the hit musical, "Hamilton," which is full of hip-hop dialogue;  Diggs won a Tony award for his portrayals of the Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson in the show.)

Finally, for all its serious ideas, "Blindspotting" is stocked with plenty of absurd laugh-out-loud humor.  An odd combination perhaps, but not an unwelcome one.  

In short, this is a hybrid film of many disparate pieces, arguably too many, to create an impressionistic view of a situation that is far from simple.  This will be challenging for audiences who have come to expect carefully blocked, formulaic plots that lead to understandable resolutions, but the effect is interesting.

The title tells the broader theme:  That our preconceptions -- blind spots -- cause us to misread situations and other people, at some cost to them and to us.   That observation feels true to me.


Note

Oakland, or at least the Oakland of the movie, is a pastiche of people from all ethnic backgrounds, of families whose members are of different races and of social events that include much more diverse participants than most of the rest of us encounter in our daily lives.  If Oakland is a stew of ethnic misunderstanding, we must wonder, how much worse is the situation in the rest of the country?
           
In an interview, Diggs said that he worked for a time after college as a substitute teacher in Marin City, the northern neighborhood of Sausalito, Calif., in Marin County.
          
During World War II, African Americans settled in Marin City, apart from Sausalito proper, for shipbuilding jobs.  After the war, the government built housing projects that extended the isolation;  in addition, nearby subdivision developments included deed restrictions that kept black families out until well into the 1960s.  Marin City was an isolated black enclave for many years.  More recently, new condo developments have gone up in the area and probably brought some integration, but even now the separation is observed in the school district.
          
For many years, the Sausalito Marin School District enrollment consisted of black children from Marin City and the mostly white children of military families stationed at the far end of town.  (Local parents generally sent their children to private schools.) When the military installation closed, district enrollment became almost entirely African American.  Now there are two schools, one a charter that is integrated with a plurality of white students and a Marin City school with a mostly black student body. 
          
If Diggs had set his movie in Marin City instead of Oakland, my guess is that it would be a much angrier piece of work.  

MovieMonday: Leave No Trace

"Leave No Trace" is a quiet story, quietly told, with a classic American theme: What happens to people who are not comfortable in traditional arrangements? The movie is short on overt conflict but gets its message across with the actions of its actors.  It is sincere.  It feels like truth.

The main characters are a military veteran, Will (Ben Foster), and his daughter, Tom (Thomasin McKenzie), who have lived an isolated, self-sufficient and respectful existence for years in Forest Park, eight square miles of undeveloped forest on the edge of Portland, Oregon.

One day they are discovered and "rescued" by police and social workers who mean well and want to help.  Will and Tom are relocated to a Christmas tree farm, a rural environment that is effectively a halfway point between a forest and a city.

Teenaged Tom meets classmates in 4-H and Future Farmers of America, and she seems to be finding her way.  But Will, who does not complain and who does as he is asked, is less at ease.  They light out again for the wilderness.

There are general hints about how Will came to prefer life in isolation and about the loss of Tom's mother, but these are not explained.  We observe these two characters as they are.  What is remarkable is how plainly this is conveyed by two fine actors with a minimalist screenplay that respects their situation. The pacing is slow by current standards, but it works.

The director/producers/screenwriters are Debra Granik and Anne Rosellini, who made 2010's remarkable "Winter's Bone," which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and four Oscar nominations but only sold $16 million in tickets. 

"Leave No Trace" is trending nicely, grossing $4 million last weekend, but is unlikely to find a big audience with an American movie-going public whose favorites in the same period were a little-loved vigilante sequel and a second Mama Mia story based on Abba songs from the 1970s.  

I'm grateful for occasional alternatives like these.


Notes

"Leave No Trace" gets its story from a novel, "My Abandonment" by Portland writer Peter Rock, which itself is derived from an actual event.  In 2004, a college-educated Vietnam vet and his home-schooled 13-year-old daughter were found and offered shelter after living four years in Portland's Forest Park.  

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For a number of years, I hiked in another Western forest that was a refuge for people displaced generations earlier during the Great Depression, when unemployment reached 25 percent and stayed there for years.  

Those people, like Will and Tom in the movie, were self-sufficient in ways that are no longer common. They knew how to hunt and fish.  They were comfortable raising plants.  They could identify edible mushrooms and berries.  They cooked their food over fires without setting themselves or the forest ablaze.  

We are more competent now in the digital world, but if the electric grid succumbs to sabotage, we will have a hard time taking care of ourselves.

-----

North America was settled by people who were dissatisfied enough to cross oceans and deserts in search of something better. (Yes, for African slaves the transit was involuntary.) As the country grew, many newcomers weren't interested in settling in or near established cities of the eastern seaboard; they headed west to homestead or to pan for gold or to settle in newer towns or settlements.  As a result, perhaps, Americans are less suspicious of newcomers or restless souls than people who live in more traditional cultures. 

My mother's father, whom I never met, came from people who arrived in Massachusetts 10 years after the Mayflower.  After many generations, his family relocated to Illinois.  When my grandfather met my grandmother, he and his brother were homesteading in Canada's Northwest Territories and spending their winters in the (only relatively) warmer Rocky Mountain hillsides of north Idaho and western Montana.  My grandmother's Irish immigrant family had chased mining jobs from Pennsylvania to Colorado to Butte to the Coeur d'Alenes.

Even today, if you talk to people who have lived in our last frontier, Alaska, you will hear about iconoclasts who don't quite fit anywhere else.  Their personalities range from refreshing to rather difficult, but they are recognizable American types.  

MovieMonday: Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation

This is the third Hotel Transylvania movie, but the first I've seen.  It features Adam Sandler as Dracula, a vampire who runs a monster-staffed hotel and is in the middle of a rough patch.

In this comedy's universe, Dracula isn't nocturnal and doesn't crave mammalian blood, which rather negates the concept.  But he is a longtime widower, despondent and lonely.  We learn this when he looks for love on Tinder -- yikes! don't tell the kids; this is a PG-13 outing -- and only swipes left. 

His daughter, Mavis (Selena Gomez), misdiagnoses the problem and decides that what the Drac Pac needs is a relaxing vacation.  She books the whole monster crew on a cruise that launches, of course, from the Bermuda Triangle.

There are further plot developments involving romantic love ("zings") and danger, but the point is to watch the Transylvanians cavort and dance to music provided by Drac's son-in-law, a human DJ named Jonathan (okay, Andy Samberg).   

Other cast members of note are these:
     --Frank-enstein (Kevin James of "Mall Cop" fame) and his wife Eunice (Fran Drescher), 
     -- Werewolf Wane, the exhausted family guy (Steve Buscemi),
     -- Dracula's crotchety father, Vlad (Mel Brooks),
     -- Murray the Mummy (Keegan-Michael Key of the comedy team Key and Peele), 
     -- Griffin the Invisible Man (David Spade),
     -- and Captain Ericka (Kathryn Hahn), who "zings" Drac but who may not be what she seems.

The music and animated character movements are done well and are delightful to watch.  They also react to old pop music, including everything from "Don't Worry, Be Happy" to "24K Magic," which perhaps is there to make the whole project appeal not to young movie-goers but rather their parents and babysitters.

This is clever and fun for the grownups, but it is worth asking whether kids' movies now are pitched to the adults who buy tickets and not the presumed audience.  

The pace, like everything pitched to children now, is frenetic.  And it is well done, relative to the genre.  Still, the associated product promotions include plastic character sets, stuffed animals, McDonalds' Happy Meal promotions and even a birthday-party set of tchotchkes for children as young as three years old.  All seem to have been negotiated by Sony, whose marketing is subtle and subdued compared to that of Disney.

The movie was the top seller over the weekend, trouncing a flawed Dwayne Johnson pic.  Profits are expected to be even greater after its release in European and Chinese markets.

I had a nice time watching the film, but I didn't hear a lot of laughter from the children in the audience.  Fun as it was, it's tempting to wonder whether entertaining them was the point. 

MovieMonday: Three Identical Strangers

"Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards."*

This oft-quoted philosophical observation describes the concern of this documentary about the fates of identical triplet boys who were raised by different families and only met by coincidence when they were 19 years old. Two of the triplets are still alive and trying to make sense of it all. 

The boys were born in 1961 to a 17-year-old girl in New York City.  Six months later, a well-regarded adoption agency placed them with three different families -- one prosperous, one middle-class and one working-class -- and never told the families that each boy had two identical brothers.  

The film opens with the remarkable story of how the boys came to find each other.  They reveled in the discovery and became close, enjoying each other's company during a yearslong flutter of media fame.  

What was learned later was that they had been separated by design and that the adoption agency had cooperated with a scientist who tracked the each boy's development for comparison with the others.   The young men and their parents were rightly angry about the withheld information and about the triplets' use as "lab rats," as one of them puts it.

Studies of identical siblings separated as infants are valuable to scientists and ethicists.  They offer clues to how much of our personalities, and indeed our lives, are determined by our genetic backgrounds, by our childhood circumstances and by our own efforts.  Even so, the circumstances of the triplets' research remain indefensible. 

(The adoption agency closed years ago, and not just because single motherhood and abortions became common.  The agency had been sued at least twice; once for failure reveal to adoptive parents that their son was born to two schizophrenics who mated in an insane asylum and, in another another case, not revealing that a child had been born to an alcoholic mother and a heroin-addicted father.  
         In addition the agency separated at least 12 sets of identical twins and assisted with research of their personalities as they were being raised by different families.  The twins-triplets research data and information have been stored and barred from release until 2065; a movement is afoot to open the records to the adoptees and their families.)

The movie continues with revelations of the triplets' differences and difficulties over years and discussions with journalists, relatives and the remaining two siblings.  It ruminates on the relative influences of their DNA and their childhoods.  

This personalization frames the issue well, for the triplets' case, but the movie ends with a conclusion that I'm not sure I trust.  Reality, as we know, is complicated stuff.  

Still, the story is a good one.  It is nicely filmed and paced, and it examines an issue that concerns us all.  

MovieMonday: Uncle Drew

Kyrie Irving, the point guard for the Boston Celtics (and formerly for the Cavs) is the title character in this appealing new comedy. 

The movie grew out of a Pepsi Max campaign featuring Irving, whose middle name is Andrew -- Uncle Drew, get it? -- as a trash-talking gray-haired man in sweats who outdribbles and outshoots younger players in outdoor pickup games on blacktop courts.  The series of short movies has drawn many millions of viewers on youtube since 2013, which led to this bankable movie project. 

In the movie, Uncle Drew leads a team of older has-beens who demonstrate that age doesn't diminish talent and that obnoxious jerks deserve their comeuppance.  Not complicated, but satisfying at the metroplex.

The setup is this:  Dax, a pudgy basketball-loving orphan (Lil Rey Howery, the TSA agent in last year's popular "Get Out") lacks the skills to play competitive hoops but has his heart set on organizing a team to win the annual Rucker 50 basketball tournament on Harlem's famous set of outdoor courts.  

Dax meets up with Uncle Drew, who is a baller, as the phrasing goes, and who takes Dax on a road trip to recruit some old friends, played by veterans Shaquille O'Neal, Chris Webber, Nate Robinson and Reggie Miller. 

Together, they work through their issues to coalesce as a team.   Shaq's character has anger management issues and when he slugs another of the group, someone says, "That sucker punch is the first free throw you've ever made."  Inside basketball, that.

The bad guys are an arch-rival team called the Jets, led by Mookie (Nick Kroll) who further motivates Dax by romancing Dax's two-timing, bling-obsessed girlfriend Jess (Tiffany Haddish).

The movie is not complex, but it's a pleasant diversion.



Note

Last week I watched an "adult" comedy that was rated R and seemed unusually reliant on vulgarity and verbal obscenity.  Later, a young friend explained to me that the difference between getting an R rating and a PG-13 rating is that only one "fuck" is allowed per PG-13 movie. 

Skeptic that I am, I looked it up and found that my friend was right.  There was a "fuck" blurted early in "Uncle Drew," but the second one was sound-disabled out of tender concern for the ears of children and tweens.