MovieMonday: Addiction Flicks

American Relapse



I saw this in a theater recently, and I cannot recommend it.  It should not have been released because its premise -- for-profit drug rehab outfits taking advantage of addicts -- was largely invalidated by the time filming was finished.  

The setting is Del Ray Beach in South Florida, which seems to attract heroin addicts.  In 2016 alone, there were 596 overdose deaths in Delray's county.  Because addicts with health insurance or Medicaid coverage are eligible for medical treatment, the region also attracted for-profit detox centers, drug-testing labs and "sober homes" that serve as halfway houses between inpatient treatment and community release.  There also developed a market for addicts with insurance; detox centers would pay procurers up to $2,000 for each referral.  (Perhaps it is not a coincidence that Florida also is notorious for very high levels of Medicare fraud.)

Heroin recovery is a lifelong challenge, and the typical relapse rate is 90 percent, which is hard for people who are addicted but which provides recurring business for operators of treatment facilities.  (Addicts without insurance, presumably a lot of them, are out of luck.)

"American Relapse" set out to expose this cynical for-profit/treatment nexus. Unfortunately for the filmmakers, Florida in 2017 passed legislation that clamped down on the worst excesses of the treatment rackets just as filming was under way.  Since then, there have been hundreds of arrests and prosecutions and many facilities closed.  The current situation may not be perfect, but it is demonstrably better.  In other words: Never mind.

Besides the scams, the movie focuses on Allie and Frankie, two recovering addicts who have devoted their lives to getting current addicts into treatment.  This work is heroic; once addicted, users wear out even the most devoted parents and siblings by stealing and lying.  And while public agencies provide "services" to drug abusers, they are no substitute for individuals who understand addiction and who commit themselves to helping individual addicts, even over extended periods.   

Still, you don't need to see the movie to get the latter message.  Allie and Frankie were featured doing the same work in "Dopesick," a Vice network series that covered the same ground for two seasons and still can be found online.


Seattle Is Dying



Here's an hourlong documentary from a local news station that you can watch right here.

For those who have not spent time in West Coast cities recently, it's an eye-opener.  For people who have visited Seattle, Portland, San Francisco and/or coastal Southern California, it rings true.

The presenter opens by talking about homelessness in downtown Seattle and then dismisses the idea; The problem, he says, is addicted people living on the streets.

The movie shows the street people and their behavior, and also police and other citizens expressing their frustrations at laws not enforced and public safety under threat.  There is the repetition of the recent estimate that Seattle agencies spend about $1 billion annually -- or $100,000 per homeless person per year -- with no apparent effect on the homeless population or the situation on the streets.

A woman who has lived on the streets for several years tells an interviewer that the homeless are addicts -- "100 percent," in her experience.

The documentary ends describing a seemingly effective program in Rhode Island, where addicts are removed from the streets and kept in a previously empty military facility while they are treated with substitute drugs -- methadone, suboxone, vivitrol -- that, taken over the very long term, may help them maintain sobriety and resume normal lives.   It may not be a cure-all, but it sounds more promising than anything cities are doing on the other side of the country. 


Note

Let me add some other data points to this stew:

-- As of last year, San Francisco was distributing 400,000 syringes per month to street addicts and deploying 10 or 11 employees full time to collect the thousands of used syringes that were not dropped off in official city disposal containers.

-- I have visited Los Angeles County Superior Court morning sessions twice since January.  (It was a private matter; I am neither a felon nor a court officer.)
          The first time, the judge made the same offer to two different men who had been arrested for actionable possession of non-trivial amounts of meth or heroin: 1) go into drug treatment at government expense,  or 2) take a felony conviction and go to prison for 16 months.  Both men chose the prison option.  California prisons are full now, and many felons serve their sentences in city and county jails.  Because the jails are also full, a 16-month sentence is actually much shorter, generally ranging from two weeks to two months as old prisoners are cycled out to make space for incoming prisoners.
        On my second visit, a man made his first appearance after being apprehended with 72 grams of meth or heroin.  The amount suggested he was a distributor or a street seller with a sizable clientele.  The frustrated judged rolled his eyes and then released the man on his own recognizance and with a court date.

Maybe Later:  Thoughts on Homelessness
   

MovieMonday: Us

This well-written, well-made horror movie does a nice job of scaring filmgoers while suggesting indirectly that its blood and violence flow from unspecified tensions between winners and losers in current society.

"Us" opens with a little girl's 1986 visit to a creepy funhouse on the boardwalk in Santa Cruz, Calif. where something not entirely understandable happens.

Then the film shifts to the current day when that same girl returns to the city.  The grown-up Adelaide Wilson (a terrific Lupita Nyong’o), is on vacation with her affable husband, Gabe (Winston Duke,) and their two children, Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and Jason (Evan Alex.)

Adelaide is clearly uneasy, but it is only when four people are seen standing and holding hands in the family's driveway after dark that her husband and children become concerned.  The beings in the driveway wear red and resemble the Wilsons.  When Gabe asks them to leave, they do not.  Events proceed from there.

One question is who the visitors are -- humans? replicants? extra-terrestrials?  Another question is what they want.  The situation broadens, taking in the similarly beset white family next door and then goes further.  There is some business with the strangers' weapons of choice -- long, sharp scissors.  A couple other elements are young boys wearing masks and large numbers of rabbits, some caged.  All very mysterious and all concerning.

No need to reveal any more.  Horror film audiences, like people who favor scary rides at amusement parks, want to experience the shock and terror personally.

(This writer does not need to seek the thrill of external horror.  The Id family owns a home in New Jersey, which comes with a dreaded annual surprise, known locally as the property tax bill.)

"Us" was written, directed and produced by Jordan Peele, the creator of 2017's humor/horror film Get Out and, before that, the popular Key and Peele comedy sketches.  Peele is developing his skills with each new outing, and this movie is worth watching for anyone interested in the horror genre or Peele's career trajectory.

MovieMonday: Apollo 11

Just in time for the 50th anniversary of the only manned landing on a celestial body not named Earth comes this commemorative documentary of that NASA achievement.

Using film from NASA's archives, director Todd Douglas Miller shows us eight days in July 1969, from the towing of the Saturn V rocket bearing the Columbia and its lunar lander, Eagle, to their takeoff platform, then through the launch, mission and return to earth.

To the extent there is narration, it comes from late television anchor Walter Cronkite with some added back-and-forth between the astronauts and engineers in Florida and Houston.

Perhaps to its credit, the movie does not gloat about US dominance in the space race.  The astronauts land, and, yes, plant an American flag, but speak of peace and representing all earthlings in the pursuit of science.

There are also scenes of crowds assembled to watch the explosive liftoff and the helicopters and aircraft carrier waiting to pick up the three-man crew after splashdown in the Pacific.  There is not excessive fawning over astronauts Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins, who make a point of acknowledging the contributions of hundreds (thousands?) of others whose planning and tracking made the whole thing possible.

Ultimately, the film is an homage, like a television news production but with more camera angles.

A couple things are missing.  First is technical context.

Almost everyone in the US today has stronger computing power on a cellphone or laptop than the entire NASA team did for that ambitious moonshot.  I'd have liked to know more about the size of the team, and the overall effort that went into the whole Apollo 11 project, piece by piece.

In this, I am like Alex Heeney of the thoughtful Canadian website Seventh Row.  He said this in his article about the movie:

     "It keeps you immersed in the action, but at a great cost: most of the time, you don’t know what’s happening beyond the basics. A simple animation was created for the film to help the audience track the flight-path and the key maneuvers, which is extremely helpful.
      "But even as a trained engineer and space enthusiast with a fair bit of background knowledge on the mission, I had trouble following all the intricacies. I felt like I needed footnotes for each scene."

The second missing piece is historical context.  We learn that in 1961 President John F. Kennedy committed the country to a manned lunar landing before 1970.  After his assassination in 1963, the Florida space center was renamed for him and the project continued, perhaps with understandably greater urgency.

Still there are questions, unrelated to Kennedy, that deserve consideration:

  -- Could the Apollo 11 mission have been accomplished faster and more efficiently without live astronauts?   Would the project have been less valuable with the same mounted photo equipment and with machines instead of astronauts scooping up lunar soil and rocks? 

  -- Were Americans so enamored of beating the country's then-enemy, the USSR, which also was said to be pursuing a manned landing, that the risk and cost of Apollo 11 was worth it?
     
Manned space exploration is dangerous, and it was known to be dangerous before before Apollo 11.  In 1967, three astronauts died in the Apollo 1 spacecraft during on-the-ground training before their scheduled flight.

Since 1969, there have been worse casualties.
   -- In 1986, all seven team members of space shuttle Challenger died shortly after a failed takeoff.  One of the team was the first "teacher in space" who had prepared lesson plans for the mission; school students around the country saw the explosion on television in their classrooms.
  -- In 2003, the seven-member team of Space Shuttle Columbia died during an equipment malfunction as the shuttle was near landing on earth.

We now talk of travel to Mars undertaken by private companies, but there has not been a second manned lunar landing, which suggests that such research is not critical in the larger NASA scheme.   We participate in the earth-orbiting International Space Station and have launched far more ambitious unmanned probes to observe and research far more distant parts of our universe.  

Few would question the value of space exploration, but it seems fair to ask whether identifying it with heroic astronauts adds value to the enterprise.


Note:

Here, from a Redditor post last year, is a pretty nice (albeit inexpensive) rendering of the Apollo 11 spacecraft from takeoff to landing.

MovieMonday: They Shall Not Grow Old

This film was commissioned by England's Imperial War Museum and released last year to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Armistice that ended World War One.

It had a brief, limited rollout and now is shown rather sporadically -- once a week in two theaters near me -- to appreciative audiences, albeit older audiences than I usually see in movie theaters. 

The story is not of the war's causes or particular battles but simply the experience of young men who enlisted, who were taught to march and shoot, and who then were sent to fight in hitherto unimaginable battlefield conditions.  After the war they returned to their unchanged homes with memories they carried for the rest of their lives.

Current films have accustomed us to computer-generated imagery of lifelike universes created out of nothing, but this film goes the other way -- showing us cleaned-up and colorized black-and-white still photographs and moving pictures shot in various formats and at various speeds, all discovered in various states of aging and decay.  The movie's narration is also authentic, drawn from recordings of veterans' spoken memories in a 1964 oral history project.

The effect is to show us young men as they were at that time, and to hear them describe their experiences in chipper, stiff-upper-lip styles that probably were not so common in subsequent wars.

The soldiers of World War I experienced the usual privations of filthy uniforms, bad food, body lice and rats, but also encountered weapons developed and refined during and after the Industrial Revolution -- reliable rifles, machine guns, land mines, tanks and various forms of poison gas.  These are observed in the movie, as are their gruesome effects: bloody injuries and bodies slumped in trenches and strewn across battlefields.  (Not appropriate for small children.)

The filmmaker (Peter Jackson, best known for the Tolkien trilogies) has done a beautiful job here.  "They Shall Not Grow Old" manages both to humanize soldiers' experiences and to respect their decency and heroism in terrible circumstances.

The film likely will be available soon on streaming services, but its impact is enhanced when viewed on a larger screen.  I wish I'd gone earlier and seen it in an IMAX theater.


Notes

This movie's title comes from the 13th line (with two words inverted) of a 2014 poem that valorized soldiers killed at war.  Its tone is true to the expressions of soldiers expressed in the movie.

For the Fallen

by Laurence Binyon 

With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,

England mourns for her dead across the sea.

Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit,

Fallen in the cause of the free.

Solemn the drums thrill: Death august and royal

Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres.

There is music in the midst of desolation

And a glory that shines upon our tears.

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,

Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.

They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted,

They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them.

They mingle not with their laughing comrades again;

They sit no more at familiar tables of home;

They have no lot in our labour of the day-time;

They sleep beyond England's foam.

But where our desires are and our hopes profound,

Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,

To the innermost heart of their own land they are known

As the stars are known to the Night;

As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,

Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain,

As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,

To the end, to the end, they remain.

-----

The British do a nice job of commemorations.  I was impressed by another one, Poppies, that was mounted at the Tower of London during the first year of the World War I centennial.

Grandma's Celebrity Gossip

Grandma visits a live television show.

It was my friend Adele Luskin’s 89 birthday coming up, and she wanted to do something special. All her life, she wanted to go to a TV show taping. She did manage to get on the “Price is Right” with her friend Shirley Heilman from their bowling league, but that was 40 years ago, and Bob Barker never invited them to: “Come on down!”

Adele’s nephew Brandon, a nice Jewish boy despite that graubyon of a mother of his, offered to get the tickets.

Adele’s first choice was “Ellen,” but a year it would take to get tickets. That’s because Ellen DeGeneres, like Oprah, gives away everything from tchotchkes to cash money to vacation trips.

Second choice was Judge Judy. In Hollywood she tapes, but no tickets are available because all her courtroom audiences are now paid actors.

And then there’s Dr. Phil. He’s here in L.A., but Adele thinks he’s a dybbuk who’ll give her the evil eye and make her confess she stuffed Kleenex in her bra at her wedding.  Go figure.

Finally, Brandon talked us into “The Jimmy Kimmel Live Show.” Oy vey, what a greis. Brandon, Adele and I went to the show in an Uber car driven by a zokn who smelled like Old Spice and falafels. This is how the kids get around nowadays? Feh!

Way back in the nosebleed section of the theater they dumped us, behind a crowd of shrieking schmendricks who stood up every time the Kimmel kid cracked wise with his Mexican sidekick Guillermo, who looked like he’d been into the schnapps. This we need?

By the time the first guest came out, two hours it was past my bedtime. A lovely actress (Regina King), dressed to the nines, kvelled about a movie she’s in (“If Beale Street Could Talk”.)

Next came a zombie actor, who kvetched on and on about breaking his hand in a fight (Jon Bernthal of “The Walking Dead”.)

Me? Enough already. Take me home.


Vocabulary 

Graubyon:  Vulgar, ill-mannered person

Greis, Zokn:  Old man

Schmendrick: A nobody

MovieMonday: Fighting With My Family

Tolstoy was wrong.  Happy families are not all the same.   Individual families may share similar interests -- doctoring, orchestral careers, say -- but when they do, their enthusiasms are specific unto themselves. 

This movie is about a happy family whose lifeblood is the entertainment/wrestling business.  The story is formulaic and a veritable advertisement for the WWE but, for all that, feels fresh and moving and is fun to watch. 

Here's the set-up:  Ma and Pa Knight (Lena Headley, Nick Frost) are the tattooed and pierced operators of WAW, World Association of Wrestling, in Norwich, England.  For them, WAW has been a way out of dismal early lives.  They wrestle, they train wrestlers, they stage wrestling events and they have raised children who are eager to follow in their parents' footsteps. 

Two of their kids -- Zodiac Zak (Jack Lowden) and Saraya-Paige (Florence Pugh) -- have set their sights on wrestling's big league in the United States.  One wants it more and is disappointed; the other, not so sure, gets a big chance, and, well, you can guess the rest.  

There are family tensions, professional tensions and challenges to be faced, but there is no real break in family solidarity and love.  Much of the film's humanity derives from the Knights' combination of generosity and vulgarity, which contrast with what American audiences have come to expect from hoity-toity British entertainments like "Downton Abbey."  

The movie was inspired by a television documentary about the Knights that was seen by Dwayne Johnson, aka The Rock, a third-generation wrestler and bankable star.  Johnson encouraged this new, more slickly plotted production and plays himself to good effect.  The scriptwriter and director is  Stephen Merchant, who also is cast as a square whose buttoned-up manner contrasts with that of the Knights.  (More family similarities in those two's backstories, when you think about it.)

If you're looking for heaviosity in a movie, this is not the one for you.  But it's nicely done, feels genuine and is well stocked with laugh-out-loud humor.