MovieMonday: Little Women

This is at least the seventh film presentation of a novel that was released 150 years ago and has been in continuous publication ever since.

Little Women is the story of four sisters coming of age in Concord, Mass., during and shortly after the Civil War.  The author was Louisa May Alcott, who was raised in a very similar family.

The film is beautifully made and is the third from Greta Gerwig, whose previous works (Frances Ha and Lady Bird) were much admired.  The acting is also very good, particularly by Soairse Ronan, who plays Jo March, the second sister and a writer whom the film and the book treat as a stand-in for Alcott herself.

The other sisters are Meg (Emma Watson,) an aspiring actress, musician Beth (Eliza Scanlen,) and budding artist Amy (Florence Pugh.)  Their father is off fighting for the Union forces, and the mother, Marmee (Laura Dern,) is generous and kind.

The next-door neighbor is Theodore/Laurie (Timothée Chalamet) a wealthy young man who from the look of him couldn't beat any of the Marches in an arm wrestling match. He is very fond of Jo.


Two Problems

Alcott was a writer whose work helped support her family when she was urged by her publisher to write a story about her youth.  She turned out Little Women in a matter of months.  It was published initially in two volumes -- one about the girls' teen years and the other about their early adult lives.

For some reason this film tells the story in back-and-forth scenes instead of sequentially.  Since most growing-up narratives show how young characters grow into their adult selves, it’s a little hard to understand why this production jumps around so much.

Second, and more worrisome, is that the film seems at odds with its subject – Jo March/Louisa May Alcott.

Everything we know about Alcott suggests she would be very comfortable in the current milieu of third (or fourth) wave feminism, and this seems clear in the movie as well.  Part of that, for her, meant that she preferred not to marry.  She also did not want Jo March to marry, but she was warned by her editor that stories about women needed to end in marriage or death.  In the  movie, the girls' Aunt March (Meryl Streep) strongly urges them to take a transactional approach to marriage, seeking husbands who will provide financial security. 

If there is a problem with this movie, it is that it tries to have it both ways.

(Spoiler alert: If you do not know the story and plan to see the movie, please stop reading now.)

Jo's older sister falls in love with and marries a low-earning tutor, and financial tensions arise.  Younger sister Amy, who resented Jo when they were children, accepts a proposal from Laurie after Jo spurns him.  (Jo's refusal of Laurie has puzzled Alcott fans for, well, forever.)

Jo herself, per the book, enters into a companionate marriage with a middle-aged schlubby fellow named Friedrich Bhaer, apparently in a grudging concession to her publisher's exhortation.

In the movie, however, Bhaer is played by Louis Garrel, a handsome 35-year-old French filmmaker.  Jo plays coy when he visits the family, but her sisters understand immediately that she is in love with the man.  A joyous ending ensues.

Alcott herself never married and said often that she preferred to support herself by her writing.  Given that, it seems odd that a movie that depicts its star almost as Alcott herself would settle for such an ending.

But women like romance, and this is a movie made for women.  At least 90 percent of the audience in the very full theater where I saw it were female – teenagers to senior citizens.

Louisa May Alcott would not have been pleased.

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

It's just possible we're seeing a bit of Star Wars fatigue here.

This final movie in the third Star Wars trilogy had a great opening weekend, selling $176 million of tickets in the U.S. and Canada.    But that total was 20 percent lower than sales for its predecessor, The Last Jedi, which itself generated less enthusiasm than the 2015 film, The Force Awakens.

Let's remember the history:  The first trilogy, which opened in 1977, was the product of George Lucas' absorption in classic mythical ideas:  the hero's journey, the forces of good and evil battling for the soul/identity of a warrior and battles between oppressors and resistance fighters.  There are themes of family lost and found, and of the responsibility of a given soldier to colleagues in battle.  There is also the occasional consideration of redemption.

All these are found in this new movie -- and in this latest trilogy -- but without the focus that Lucas brought to the original story.  It feels like a machine assembled of old, once-useful parts, but to less effect.

So, while The Rise of Skywalker looks good and was made by people who know how to make movies, it's striving for something that it cannot achieve.  It's a bit of a clunker.

Counting the Ways

The plot is labored, convoluted, incongruent with the plot of 2017's The Last Jedi and, effectively, incoherent.  I am not going to discuss it here.  Those who want to know more can find internet discussion boards where devotees have been dissecting its elements in great detail for days now.

(One missing point is an examination of what death means to the human-looking looking residents of that galaxy far, far away; one character flat-out admits he's already died at least once, and two or three others seemed to have expired in earlier movies, only to reappear, conveniently, here to juice up the narrative.)

The characters are well-played, but in roles don't demand much of them.  The exceptions are valiant, wonderful, noble Rey (Daisy Ridley) and, more, Kylo Ren (Adam Driver).  Each is challenged, sort of, to answer the most basic existential question:  Who am I?

The movie clocks in at two hours and 22 minutes.  At least twice in the second half, there comes a climactic scene that leads the viewer to think, okay, so that's the resolution and we're near the end.  But it isn't near the end. In fact, this long movie feels longer than it is.

Familiar 

The filmmakers have gone to some lengths to gratify the nostalgia of Star Wars aficionados.  Some points:

-- Light sabers.  These are passed around with the reverence traditionally accorded to crown jewels.
       In addition, there are many, many light saber duels, which tend to make a cynic (okay, moi) think, why don't these characters use their revolver-like blasters to blow holes in their enemies and just kill them instead?

-- The Millennium Falcon.   This main vehicle of the Resistance is well into its second generation and, yes, there is an emotional association because Han Solo won the MF in a card game with Lando Calrissian.  Meanwhile, the bad guys (thoughtfully outfitted in black to help viewers keep things straight) have assembled several massive Death Stars and many, many fleets of newer space vehicles over the course of three trilogies.   Couldn't technical mismatches like those prove troubling over the course of time?
          Luke Skywalker's X-wing fighter also makes an appearance, and so do enemy TIE fighters.
          On the plus side, Billy Dee Williams returns as Gen. Calrissian, which is rather nice.

-- Tatooine.  Star Wars heroes land several times on the dry planet where Luke Skywalker was raised, including on one occasion when Tatooinians(?) just happen to be celebrating a once-every-44-years celebration of their ancestors.

-- Chewbacca, the big furry friend who doesn't talk but is a crack mechanic and wingman who can revive long-abandoned space vehicles, without fuel and on a moment's notice.  Plus R2D2, C3PO, BB-8 and Babu Frik, a new small furry mascot with attitude that has been described in some reviews as "adorable."  Adorable?


And Another Thing

There are also derivative elements at work.  As was the case in this year's Avengers: Endgame, the Resistance fighters must hunt down a needed item to help them find the bad guys' hidden redoubt.  This search takes them to a low, dark reality that owes a lot to the dark street scenes in Blade Runner.

In addition, there are references to gunfights in old Westerns: Resistance fighters make their way into enemy strongholds and dart around, unnoticed by cameras or sensors, as they peek from behind corners to see storm troopers and either avoid them or confront them with their blasters.  This might have worked in 1977, but even century-old houses are outfitted with security cameras, Alexas and/or Ring doorbells now.  It seems fair to wonder how long audiences will go along with the idea that high-tech death stars manned by paranoid enemies will not be similarly equipped.

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As much as I admire the Star Wars movies overall, if Lucasfilm (now a Disney subsidiary) launches a fourth trilogy, I'm pretty sure I'm not going to watch it. 

All I Want For Christmas Is You

Above is the first video recording of Mariah Carey's 1994 Christmas classic.  Now, a quarter-century later, it is the No. 1 song on the Billboard Top 100.  That's some staying power.  What follows is a 2016 post.

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This may be the catchiest pop/rock Christmas song of all time.  

It was released before and included in Mariah Carey's first Christmas album, "Merry Christmas," the best-selling Christmas album, worldwide, in history.  Even now, people download the song hundreds of thousands of times each year.  It's popular from Australia to Japan to Scandinavia.  

AIWFC begins with a slow, almost sad recitation of the singer's disinterest in the holiday and bursts open only at the end of the line, "All I want to for Christmas is you."  Then the musical notes tick up a few tones, the syncopation comes to life and the rest of the song is glorious energy, a particularly effective matching of lyric and score.  

If you wander through stores or tune your car radio to a pop station, you will hear the song many times a day all through December.  It gets more play than Bing Crosby's White Christmas or Elvis Presley's Blue Christmas, and certainly more than Wham's Last Christmas.

Carey still makes holiday appearances where she sings the song, and of course it has been covered by other singers and musical groups.  But the version above is the one with the staying power. 

In addition to singing, Carey co-wrote All I Want with Walter Afanasieff during an especially productive time in her early career.  They collaborated on two other songs for Merry Christmas, her fourth album.  

Affanasieff is a Brazilian immigrant with Russian parents and a sixth sense for shaping music that appeals to people.  His many film credits include producing "My Heart Will Go On," the Titanic song that was 1998's best-selling single.   He has composed and orchestrated music for dozens of contemporary musical artists and groups, including The Hanukkah Song, another holiday number, for KennyG. 

Affanasieff is not as famous as Carey, but his fireplace mantel is crowded with Grammy statuettes, and he has left his marks all over the last 40 years of the American songbook. 

On the 20th anniversary of the AIWFC release, he was interviewed about the Merry Christmas album.  He said neither he nor Carey anticipated the success of their breakout song.  Some of his comments:

         "There are always three different areas that Christmas music goes into: Traditional Christmas songs, fun kiddie songs like "Rudolph" or "Frosty," and then you have your love songs, which are like “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire,” “I’ll be Home for Christmas,” all those kinds of songs.  (For the album) we decided to write one of each.
         "It was always the same sort of system with us. We would write the nucleus of the song, the melody primary music, and then some of the words were there as we finished writing it. That went very quickly .... 
         "(All I Want for Christmas) was very formulaic; not a lot of chord changes. I tried to ... put in some special chords that you really don’t hear a lot of, to make it unique and special .... That part of it took maybe an hour, and then I went home. 
         "Then for the next week or two Mariah would call me and say, 'What do you think about this bit?' We would talk a little bit until she got the lyrics all nicely coordinated and done. And then we just waited until the sessions began ... in the summer of ’94 ... and started recording.  
         "And that’s when we first heard her at the microphone singing, and the rest is history."

2019 Notes

People just keep trying to do things with this song. Michael Buble and Barbra Streisand have a cover, and Lady Antebellum has a ballad version.  If you want your school band to perform it, there's a chart for that.  You can find saxophone, French horn and trombone renditions online.  For all I know, it's being performed around now in cities with annual those Tuba Christmas recitals.  And there are remixes all over TikTok.

There's an All I want for Christmas children's book.  A documentary, just about the song, is said to be in the works. Carey's third video of the number dropped this week.  

This song is so infectious it makes me want to sing along and dance whenever I hear it.  I don't see why we can't have Labor Day or Halloween versions too.

MovieMonday: Richard Jewell

This is not going to be a review of a movie, but here's a recap of the plot:

Richard Jewell (played very well by Paul Walter Hauser) is a security guard in Atlanta's Centennial Park, a concert venue,  during the city's hosting of the 1996 Olympics.  He observes a backpack abandoned under a park bench, investigates and sees what look like bombs and sounds the alarm.  When the bombs explode, one woman is killed, a man running to the scene has a fatal heart attack and about a hundred people are injured.  Without Jewell's action, many others would have died and been hurt.

Jewell initially is heralded as a hero but then becomes the lead suspect in an FBI investigation because he "fits the profile" of a lone wolf bomber.  True, he is eager to be a police officer, and is a "wannabe" who spends hours poring over criminal procedure manuals.  He is pudgy and naive and has been excessively officious in security guard jobs.

But being a person who "fits a profile" is not evidence.  In this story, the lead FBI man at Centennial Park, Tom Shaw (Jon Hamm) is upset that the bombing happened on his watch and is very motivated to find the bomber.  Per the movie, he leaks to a local newspaper reporter that Richard Jewell is the lead suspect.  She files the story, which is picked up, immediately and internationally, by the many news organizations who have teams in Atlanta to cover the Olympic Games.

From then on, Jewell and his mother are staked out at their home by teams of journalists and cops.  Their belongings -- Tupperware, vacuum cleaner, underwear and so on -- are collected and taken to an FBI lab.  A member of the Olympic security team visits the apartment for a home-made dinner and wears a hidden wire to record the conversation.  Finally a lawyer/friend named Watson Bryant (Sam Rockwell) convinces Jewell to stop identifying with the lawmen who are determined to charge him with capital murder.

After 88 days, the ordeal ends because there is no evidence against Jewell and one matter of timing that suggests strongly that he is innocent.

This story deserves telling if only because the subsequent apologies from the press -- none came from the FBI, apparently -- were so much quieter than the reports of possible charges that made him a public enemy and a figure of ridicule.

The movie is well made, nicely paced (if long, as usual now) and interesting to watch.


The Problem

Richard Jewell seems to be becoming yet another Rorschach Test for political tribes in this country.  Since it is a Clint Eastwood production and Eastwood is some kind of traditional conservative -- possibly even a Trump supporter -- it seems to be attracting a certain kind of audience.  When I saw it, I moved seats two times in the theater because people in my rows kept talking back at Jewell's accusers on the screen.

My guess is that when Bombshell, a retelling of the story of Fox News harasser Roger Ailes and his blonde victims, goes wide, Team Blue types will attend to watch their own views gratified. 

It's interesting that entertainment and, worse, news media, have adopted political brands so as to gather like-minded consumers unto themselves.  If there was a day when people could tolerate information not refracted through their preferred filters, that seems to be over now.

That said, let's examine some of the complaints about this film that are threatening to overshadow its story.

Kathy Scruggs

Olivia Wilde plays Kathy Scruggs, the actual police reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution who broke the Jewell story.  In the movie, she meets FBI agent Shaw in a bar and, after she runs her hand up his thigh and suggests they have sex, he tells her that Jewell is the person of interest.  Then she tells him she will confirm what he said with a second source -- a common requirement with controversial stories but not seen here -- and then she convinces her skeptical editor to run with the story because "everybody in town" already knows that that Jewell is the suspect.  Hmm.

People are furious about the sex-for-scoops angle because Scruggs is now dead and there is no proof that such happened.   (This is a pretty hackneyed plot point in mostly male-casted movies to advance information that moves plots forward and allows the introduction of sexy female characters.)  The Atlanta paper, which learned the script included this unproven point, seems to have forced an acknowledgement in the film's credits that not every single action in the largely true movie may have happened as seen on the screen.

I would add two points here:

--  The AJC's recent article about Scruggs, full of outrage at her treatment in the film, describes a hard-drinking, tough-as-nails reporter who was very competitive about getting the story.  It quotes her brother saying this:

“The world needs to know she was as good a journalist as the world has ever seen.  Whenever something would happen, the police would call Kathy. They always trusted her to get the scoop because they knew it would be handled right. She was proud the FBI called her about Jewell. She was proud of the way she reported it to begin with.”  The brother also said Scruggs took various medications for physical and mental reasons, sometimes with bad interactions.

Also from the article:  “'Law enforcement loved her, just loved her,'” said co-author Kent Alexander, a former federal prosecutor. The book (The Suspect) does note the time police responded at 3 a.m. when Scruggs refused to get out of a taxi outside a Buckhead hotel. She was drunk, naked and sitting in the driver’s seat."

Reporters on the police beat who are loved by the police aren't necessarily the best reporters because they can get too close to their sources and favor the police.  It's easy to see how such situations can develop because those reporters typically have their desks in cop shops and spend a lot of time with the boys in blue, but it's a real hazard.  And, if those reporters aren't nice, the police avoid dealing with them.

It is unfair to use any of the above to justify the idea that Scruggs had a sexual relationship with a source, but it seems possible that some of the mythology about her may have become exaggerated over the years.

I worked with a couple of those brassy, brave, hard-drinking female reporters, and they were not quite as they wanted to be seen.  The tough exterior was about as thick as an eggshell; underneath there was a vulnerable, often troubled person.

-- It may be that Eastwood and his screenwriter included this characterization as a poke at the New York Times, which hired a female reporter in 2017 after she admitted to having a three-year affair with a Senate staff member whose work was relevant to her beat.

There were denials that the reporter had received leaks from her lover, but even that would have been irrelevant until very recent times.  Until 2017 I never heard of a journalist who had a sexual relationship with a source.  Such a person would have been fired and -- since journalists can't keep secrets -- never worked in a newsroom again.


That FBI Guy

If this movie plays fast and loose with a real character's story, it goes way too easy on her FBI source.

According to the book mentioned earlier, an actual FBI official named Don Johnson almost certainly told Kathy Scruggs that Jewell was the prime suspect in the bombing, and the leak was relayed over drinks in a bar.

So why is Don Hamm playing an FBI agent named named "Tom Shaw," and not "Don Johnson?"

And, when you think about it, which is worse -- a government agent exposing a suspect who has not been charged or even investigated, or a reporter who learns the suspect's name and runs with it?


Notes

Like Jewell, who died at 45, and Scruggs, who died at 44, Don Johnson also died early.  It seems fair to guess that the stress of being accused was hard on Jewell's health, and it is known that Scruggs was tormented by her role in promoting the false accusation, even if she believed it at the time of publication.

The one who is left alive is Boby Jewell, Richard's mother.  It's a hard thing to outlive a child.

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The actual bomber at the Olympics in Atlanta was Eric Rudolph.  In the two years between that event and when he was identified, he built and detonated bombs at two abortion clinics and a lesbian bar.  He then hid  in the Appalachian forest for five years before he was caught scavenging in a dumpster.

He acknowledged his actions in exchange for two life sentences with no hope of parole.

One question worth asking is whether a broader FBI search shortly after the Atlanta bombing -- instead of an apparently exclusive focus on Richard Jewell -- might have spared the lives lost in Rudolph's subsequent bombings.

Grandma's Celebrity Gossip

Our popular California columnist, busy as ever, vows this will be her final 2019 post. 


That Miley Cyrus is at it again. She’s the one with the singing hillbilly father (Billy Ray Cyrus) who never taught his daughter how to act like a proper lady. She’s the one on TV “twerking” her tuchis in front of the world with that no-goodnick one hit wonder and yekl, Robin Thicke, whose father was that nice Canadian boy (Alan Thicke) a real mensch who was on the show Growing Pains, and he did the commercials for Fruit of the Loom underwear.  Robin died playing ice hockey with his other son -- the good one.

Anyway, so this Miley Cyrus has been cavorting for years with the actor Liam Hemsworth. He’s Australian or Irish or whatever and has been in movies like The Hunger Games and other schtus for kids with short attention spans. Finally, in 2018 they got a marriage license and less than a year later -- Splitsville. She’s decided he’s a shikker and she now prefers the company of women only. Already she’s been caught cavorting with a new bummerkeh. Oy veh, and so many tattoos they both have they look like they just stumbled out of Uncle Billy’s Circus Sideshow.

Bill Cosby? In the news again. He’s the one who was tossed in the hoosegow for slipping all those women mickeys and doing the nasty to them. His wife Camille filed for a get and was ready to take her half of everything, but she changed her mind and decided to remarry him in the prison chapel. She said, “I still love him, and he makes me laugh.” If you asked me, she got a good look at him, realized he could drop dead any minute, and decided to hold out for the entire estate – all the mazuma.

And speaking of farchadat celebrities, Kim Kardashian, the one with the hooties so zaftig she could use them as a flotation device, now wants her husband, Kanye West, to get breast reduction on himself. She said they’re too big and he needs a “Diddie Downsizing.” That whole pack of narrs is addicted to plastic surgery, worse even than the late great Joan Rivers.

I’ve said enough already.


Vocabulary

Bummerkeh is Yinglish (which apparently is something like Spanglish) and means a female bum. i.e., a bad person, not a derrierre.   Possibly derived from the Yiddish word for "potato," but possibly not.

 Get, or gett is the Hebrew word for divorce.  There's a longer version, gettelsheen, but the single-syllable word is more common in the Anglosphere.

Schtus, roughly translated, means "nonsense," as Grandma's context makes clear.

Yekl is an over-assimilating immigrant.  The word traces to a short 1896 novel called Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto. In it, a young man named Yekl takes a different name, Jake, after getting off the boat at Ellis Island.  Grandma suggests that Canadian-born Robin Thicke has become, like Yekl, a shallow and ungrounded fellow.



Note

Billy Ray Cyrus made his fame with the 90s single, "Achy Breaky Heart," but more recently he has worked with rapper Lil Nas X, on Old Town Road, a 2018 monster hit in the new Country Rap genre.  

MovieMonday: Marriage Story

This is a movie whose title is technically inaccurate.  It is not a story about a marriage but rather the disintegration of one.  It is beautifully written and very well acted

The husband, Charlie Barber (Adam Driver,) is a director of theatrical plays, and the wife, Nicole Ryder Barber (Scarlett Johansson,) is a film actress who has been invited back to her native Los Angeles to appear in the pilot for a television show.

His professional life is in New York, and hers is in Hollywood.  They go to a mediator to talk about things but refuse to talk about things.  They agree to divorce amicably -- without lawyers and without hostility.  She packs up their son, eight-year-old Henry (Aszhy Robertson,) and heads west to her mom's home in Laurel Canyon.

Most of the rest of the story is played on Nicole's turf.  She is happy to have left behind a life in which she felt her existence subsumed into Charlie's greater local prominence.  Charlie asserts, several times, that they have "always been a New York family," and Nicole reminds him, also several times, that he turned down an opportunity to run LA's Geffen Playhouse for a year.

She consults a lawyer (Laura Dern) who offers tea and sisterly commiseration and then crafts an aggressive plan for Nicole get full custody of their child.

He consults a nasty shark of a lawyer (Ray Liotta,) then switches a more amiable fellow (Alan Alda) and then goes back to the shark after Nicole's lawyer begins showing her fangs.

There is a terrible exchange between the lawyers in a courtroom and then an even more blistering one between Nicole and Charlie.

Nobody dies, but there is no way the end of such a process can leave anyone undamaged.  So it goes.

Personally, I would have liked to know a bit about the divorce's effect on Nicole and Charlie's child, but the film is long as it is and honestly has no room left for further emotional distractions.  (Still, children almost always prefer to have both their parents in the same location.)

The writer and director of this piece is the esteemed Noah Baumbach,  who has acknowledged that personal experience informed the story.  The movie is excellent and feels quite true -- but it still is difficult to watch.

Johanssen, Driver and Dern almost certainly will be nominated for Academy Awards next year.


Note

Here again, Netflix has released a "movie" for a very short time in theaters just before making it available on its streaming channel.  Marriage Story was not shown in any theater near my home of the moment, a Metropolitan Statistical Area with a scant 1.75 million residents.

My place has a nice television, sound system and Netflix subscription, but I lost the television habit when I went to college and never really got back to it again.  I'm willing to dial up Netflix occasionally, but I've been happy not to spend much time with it, even with all the wonderful binge-watching opportunities on offer.

Except when theaters are full of patrons checking Instagram messages on their cellphones, I prefer seeing movies with a group of other people and observing how they react.  It's not the same as going to a play, of course, but it's an experience, not a distraction running in the background while I take urgent phone calls or am in the kitchen getting a snack.

Maybe when I'm old and frail, I'll change my mind.  We'll see.

MovieMonday: Knives Out

Here we have a well-made movie whose plot resembles that of a  20th century mystery novel or film -- one corpse, many suspects, an inscrutable detective and a many-pieced puzzle whose resolution is not revealed until the very end.

It opens with a deep autumn view of a grand brick country house in Massachusetts.  A string quartet renders a slow tune in a minor key as police cars pull up to the place.

The matter at issue is the death of a famed, wealthy mystery writer, Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plumber), who is discovered by the housekeeper who brings up his morning breakfast and finds his stiff body with slit throat.  Police investigators arrive, examine the 85-year-old man's corpse and conclude immediately that he killed himself.  Happens all the time, right?

As the cops question the man's children, private detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) sits listening in the next room and occasionally plinking a piano key.  Blanc has been hired to investigate the death, he says, but he does not know by whom.  Over time, he establishes that Thrombey spent his last evening on earth settling old scores and disinheriting his progeny and their children -- before and during his own birthday dinner party.

The relatives are his son, Walter (Michael Shannon); daughter, Linda (Jamie Lee Curtis); Linda's two-timing husband, Richard (Don Johnson);  daughter-in-law Joni (Toni Collette) and the progeny's progeny, including obnoxious Ransom (Chris Evans), son of Linda and Richard.

Blanc seeks help from Marta Cabrera (Ana de Armas), the nurse who tended to the dead author and was the only one smart enough to beat him regularly at the Go board game.  Blanc does not wear a Sherlockian deerstalker hat, but he calls Cabrera "Watson."

A major theme in this piece, of course, is knives.  The film shares its name, but not its score, with a famous Radiohead song, and it features an ornamental circle of knives that, among all the other gewgaws in the overstuffed mansion, is shiny and features as the background for many interviews.  Plus there is a comment from the dead author.

Make no mistake.   This is not a matter like Agatha Christie's 1935 Murder on the Orient Express with Hercule Poirot drinking his tisane in a prissy fashion, and it certainly doesn't resemble Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) in The Maltese Falcon.  Benoit Blanc is a cool character with a broad Southern accent and a tendency, when thinking,  to flip coins into the air and catch them.

The script has been updated further to include themes of the current day:  Political arguments around the family dinner table, a reference to a line from the Hamilton musical, seeming familial affection for nurse Cabrera but inability to remember the country from which she emigrated, cellphone messages and, of course, claims of pride for hoity-toity influencers.

The screenwriter and director,  Rian Johnson, seems to have been concocting the story over many years, and he has said he'd like to make a sequel with the Blanc character.

In fact,  he and Daniel Craig may get the chance.  The film received good reviews and sold more tickets than might have been expected its first weekend, given a limited promotion budget.

The question is whether film audiences -- here and outside the Anglosphere -- are interested in such stories any longer.

MovieMonday: The Irishman

This is the latest, and possibly the last, mob movie from Martin Scorsese, and it's very well made.
 As we have come to expect from the director,  The Irishman has a strong script, excellent cinematography and fine editing.

The acting is particularly distinguished, and its three major cast members all play against the types that made them famous in their early careers

-- Robert De Niro, whose breakout roles were as crazy men in two earlier Scorsese movies (Mean Streets and Taxi Driver) is the title character, Frank Sheeran, a Teamster who works for decades as a mob enforcer and hit man.

-- Joe Pesci, a reckless mafia wannabe in 1990's Goodfellas, now plays Russell Bufalino, the capo of a Pennsylvania crime syndicate; Bufalino is a very careful man who never gets his own hands dirty but presides over all manner of criminal activity.

-- Al Pacino, the very buttoned-up Michael Corleone of Francis Coppola's Godfather movies, here portrays Jimmy Hoffa, a vulgar man of galloping ego who, in this telling, is assassinated by Sheeran at the direction of Bufalino.

The source material for the script is a 2004 book published after Sheeran's death and based on interviews in his final years.  (A Vanity Fair article this month and a second book, both inspired by the movie, challenge many of the claims in The Irishman.)

A typical mob story -- at least in the period between the first  Godfather  movie and the last Sopranos episode -- would juxtapose the professional and personal lives of made men.  And, to be fair, this movie has a couple baptisms and a funeral, plus a minor character, a daughter of Irishman Sheehan, who appears now and then with a solemn stare that acts as a sort of external conscience. 

BUT.  At heart, this is a rundown of a man's career on the far side of the law.  Sheeran is a loyal agent, an Irishman trusted by Italian mobsters.  He's involved with the sabotage of another union's challenge to a Teamster local, the killings of various inconvenient characters, battles between Teamster factions, and even the provisioning of weapons for the failed Bay of Pigs effort to overturn the Cuban revolution and reopen the Havana gambling casinos, which, per the story, were financed by Teamster pension funds before they were seized by Fidel Castro.

When Teamsters national president Jimmy Hoffa (Pacino) appears, he offers a complete contrast.  He does not keep a low profile.  He calls people "cocksuckers" and evidences a growing disdain for the Italian mobsters with whom he does business.  He also grows to hate Robert F. Kennedy, the early 1960s attorney general who takes out after organized crime.   "That cocksucker Kennedy has got his nose up my ass whatever I do," he complains.

Eventually Hoffa spends several years in federal prison ("goes to school" in mafia parlance) and comes out determined to regain the Teamsters presidency.  "This is MY union," he says repeatedly.  He's angry at the No. 2 guy who has taken his job and at an ungrateful president whom, he says, the Teamsters helped get elected.  There is a hint, not explored, that the JFK assassination was a conspiracy.

For Bufalino, who goes to some lengths to avoid attention, Hoffa gets to be too much of a problem.

Over the years, Sheeran does as he is told and, if he is uncomfortable, he does not show it.  He has regrets, yes, but the work he has done has bound him to what he probably would regard as a manly self control.  This is subtle acting by De Niro, hard to carry off but very effective, as usual.

The story is bracketed by hints of its provenance, starting and ending with scenes of the Irishman, alone in his 80s and living in a wheelchair in a senior citizens facility.


Notes


Through some computer-generated ju jitsu, De Niro looks age-appropriate as a Teamster selling sides of beef off the back of his truck in the late 1940s and also in his wheelchair at the turn of the century.  Sounds strange, but it works.

-----  

The release of The Irishman in theaters has been unusual, and perhaps for several reasons.

At 3.5 hours, it is much longer than a typical film.  This may be because Scorsese wanted to cover most of the moments in the book in order to support the thesis that Frank Sheeran was a credible witness when he admitted killing Jimmy Hoffa.

It's possible the proposed length of the movie may have dampened studio interest in funding the production.  Or maybe there was concern that the film would have limited international appeal -- that people outside North America would not care about a story whose hook was what happened to Jimmy Hoffa (who that?) 45 years ago.

Either way,  it's not entirely surprising that Netflix, which is trying to position itself as an originator of quality content, was the outfit most willing to write a $175 million check for a Scorsese production.

In fact, the streaming service designed a theatrical rollout that seems aimed mostly to build interest in watching the film on television at home.

The Irishman was released on Nov. 1 at a handful of theaters around the country.  (The nearest to me was in a state college town more than 250 miles away.)  Then, last Friday, the film opened in more theaters.  Two days from now, on Wednesday, it will be available on Netflix.

This six-day teaser run opportunity seems to have caused a number of theater chains just to say no.  Certainly it will be easier and cheaper for people to watch the film in their living rooms or on their computers.

I'd be curious to know how many viewers avail themselves of the Netflix fast-forward capacity to skip past the slow-seeming parts of the movie.  (I'm guessing Netflix wouldn't share such data if it does collect it, however.)

MovieMonday: Pain and Glory

This movie opens with Salvador Mallo (Antonio Banderas with graying hair and beard) in a therapy pool following spinal surgery and then, as a child, playing by a river while his mother (Penélope Cruz) and her friends wash their family linens.

The story that follows is a series of Mallo's recollections of his life between those two events, and how they sort themselves in his mind.

We learn that the aging Mallo is a famous film director whose professional life is blocked by the pain of the movie's title -- the loss of his mother and physical maladies ranging from the back matter to an ongoing choking reflex.  Said shorter, Mallo is suffering a quiet but real existential crisis.

After agreeing to attend the screening of a 30-year-old film of his, Mallo skips the event, smokes a little heroin (apparently safer than injecting the stuff, FWIW) with the film's star and sets in motion a process of revery and re-examination.

This is not a formulaic movie but one that cuts between current moments and memories.  If Mallo seems to be liking the heroin a bit much, well, he also is gaining perspective. The movie gets more interesting as it goes along.

In some ways, this is a small film, skillfully made but with a powerful cumulative effect.  It calls to mind the famous line from Søren Kirkegaard:  Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.

If Pain and Glory shows up in your local art house, it's worth a look.


Notes

Pain and Glory was written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar, Spain's most lauded filmmaker, and the lead character has much in common, superficially, with Almodóvar himself.  But the auteur has gone to some lengths, in the movie and associated interviews, to assert that it is NOT autobiography.

The film inevitably gets compared with 8 1/2, another blocked-filmmaker story by Federico Fellini.   That 1963 movie apparently WAS autobiographical and made when Fellini was suffering a mid-career panic over what film to make next.

MovieMonday: Midway

If Midway really was the hot shit it thinks it is, we’d have something to talk about. 

But this spare-no-expense production about the most vital naval battle of WWII merely 

plasters the latest in digital effects over the same war-time movie tropes 

that Hollywood has been pedaling (sic) for decades. 

This is the lead from a not-uncommon review of a World War II movie released last weekend, timed no doubt to attract viewers with Veterans Day on their minds.

Midway is a fairly traditional, patriotic war movie, and it comes from Roland Emmerich, whose most popular film by far was 1996's Independence Day, another fairly traditional movie that peddled war-time movie "tropes" in an imagined life-and-death battle between earthlings and alien invaders.

The last big World War II movie I can recall is 2017's Dunkirk, which was about troops dreading near-certain death and finally being rescued by civilians' quiet heroism at Britain's lowest moment.

In fact, the traditional aspect of Midway feels like a bit of a novelty in the current world of film.

-----

The story here, of course, is the battle of Midway, a four-day naval and air encounter between the United States and Japan that was the pivotal moment of the war in the Pacific.

The story takes its time getting going.  It opens in 1937 Tokyo when a US Naval Intelligence officer, Edwin Layton (Patrick Wilson) begins to detect a potential threat in a conversation with a respected Japanese admiral.  Then we see the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, then the retaliatory if symbolic Doolittle Raid of US bombings on Japanese cities and, finally, American and Japanese naval forces planning for a battle that would determine which country's navy would dominate Pacific Islands from the Philippines to Malaysia to Indonesia and perhaps Australia.   And the battle itself.

The movie is studded with famous actors playing the roles of people involved: Woody Harrelson and Dennis Quaid as admirals Nimitz and Halsey, Ed Skrein as fearless pilot Ed Best, Nick Jonas as valiant gunner Bruno Gaido.

Previous war movies did not have one advantage that Midway does:  Computer-generated imagery of the Pearl Harbor attack and the Midway battle.  These are beautiful in a terrible way and interesting to watch.  Midway was conducted across hundreds if not thousands of miles, and in a day before drones or satellites could detect an enemy's locations or movements.  No movie before this has shown with such clarity the squadrons of fighter planes and torpedo-equipped planes bearing down on each other and on ships at sea.

The American service members, as is typical in heroic war movies, come across as decent, hard-working team members in pursuit of a dangerous but essential goal.  Some of their dialogue is clunky, true, but honestly, the film sketches out enough broad themes that it has no time for the examination of the interior motivations of individual characters.  (If it did, we could binge watch on our television sets over many seasons.)

In fact, some have said the movie's run time, two hours and 18 minutes, is too long.  I'm not sure I see it.  Earlier this year, Avengers: Endgame ran just over three hours.  Martin Scorsese's new film, The Irishman, is a half hour longer still.



The China Connection

Midway may be the most expensive independent (i.e., not studio-funded) American film ever.  Emmerich's movies since Independence Day have not been particularly profitable, and a good portion of this film's reported $100 million budget came from Chinese investors who presumably believe it can find a good market in that country.

The Chinese influence shows, chiefly in references to Japanese cruelty during its occupation of China starting in the late 1930s.  In fact, the film's depiction of Japanese behavior before and during the war is accurate and, if anything, minimized. 

One other edit may be a little less so.  The original script called for one of the American service members to act "insubordinate" in a minor matter; that scene was removed.    China's leadership does not tolerate insubordination of any kind these days, if it ever did. 


Previous War Movies

This is the third Midway movie.  The first, The Battle of Midway by legendary filmmaker John Ford, was an 18-minute propaganda piece released in 1942 that still can be found online.  After Pearl Harbor, Hollywood joined many other industries to contribute to the war effort.

The second, also titled Midway, was released in 1976 and starred a huge cast of older actors -- Henry Fonda, Charlton Heston, James Coburn, Glen Ford, etc.  It WAS a traditional war movie, and what it lacked in CGI it made up for in a more careful explanation of how US intelligence outmaneuvered its Japanese counterpart and engineered the huge victory.  It's tempting to guess that this release, during the US bicentennial and a year after the withdrawal from Vietnam, was timed to revive American confidence.

Honestly, I cannot recall other gung-ho American war movies.  The prominent Vietnam films were Apocalypse Now, Platoon, and Born on the Fourth of July.  After our involvements in the Middle East, we got American Sniper, Zero Dark Thirty, and The Hurt Locker.

If the US has a history of jingoistic rah-rah movies about war, it sure hasn't been during the years when I have been paying attention.    Only superhero films (Avengers: Endgame, anyone?) have good guys v. bad guys stories today.

MovieMonday: Parasite

This South Korean film won the prestigious Palme d'Or prize in May, beating out a Tarantino favorite at the Cannes Film Festival.  Its general topic is inequality, which is trending worldwide these days.  It may find an audience in the US, but its numbers worldwide -- mostly in South Korea but also in Europe and Asian markets -- are relatively much greater.

The writer/director is Bong Joon-ho, whose last film, Snowpiercer, was a post-apocalyptic battle between the haves and have-nots who are last surviving humans.

This movie's plot involves two families.  The Kims and their son and daughter live in a stink-bug infested urban apartment whose windows look out on drunks pissing in the street.  They don't have jobs, but they get by doing side work and using the proximity of their neighbors' routers to connect their cellphones with the internet.

The wealthy family are the Parks, who live in a big, beautiful home on a hill.  The father has an important job doing something, and the mother manages the house with the help of a housekeeper.  There's nothing wrong with the Parks, exactly, but they are more than a little credulous.

When a college-student friend of the Kims' son alerts him to an opportunity to work as an English tutor for the Parks' daughter,  he and his sister forge the school documents he needs to get the job.  Later the Kims' daughter talks her way into the house as an art counselor to the Parks' nine-year-old-son; after a little googling, she explains to Mrs. Park that the boy has much in common with 1980s primitivist Jean-Michel Basquiat.

In short order, Ma and Pa Kim displace the Parks' housekeeper and chauffeur, and the family's future looks good.   The comedy-of-manners setup is complete.  But can it last?

The answer is no.  It turns out that two other desperate people have been depending on the Parks, and when those two figure out what the Kims have done,  they are not willing to take the situation sitting down.  Events continue in an increasingly tense and frightening manner that leads to an almost operatic climax featuring kitschy American toys of the sort I haven't seen in the US for many years.  Then comes a resolution that viewers may or may not find convincing.

-----

Film critics perhaps are not keen observers of economic situations, and it shows in scribblings about this film.

-- The plot ... "keeps the finger of blame pointed firmly towards the systematic failings responsible for putting the Kims in the position they're in. . . ." -- except, really, it doesn't except.  There is no  discussion of any "systematic" anything.  There is a family that is rich and comfortable and another family that is poor for some reason but is also resourceful at exploiting opportunities.

-- "Wealth buys you out of the social contract—the need to behave a certain way, to tolerate others. Poverty imposes more rules, limitations and boundaries that if unchecked, will suffocate. There is conflict in this: The wealthy become acutely aware of the inconvenience of empathy. The poor laugh darkly at those who plan for the future."
     This generalization may have some truth, but it's not a truth reflected in this film.  There is no discussion of the sources of the Park family's wealth.  The relationships between Parks and Kims seem straightforward, without condescension on the one side or resentment on the other.  The Kims do not "laugh darkly at those who plan for the future."
      The only hint comes when the nine-year-old Park son who observes that all the Kims smell the same, perhaps because of their basement apartment -- this makes the Kims worry that the Parks will figure that their household helpers are relatives and not four independent contractors who are working in the Park family home.

-- "Suffice to say, the wealthy in any country survive on the labor of the poor, whether it’s the housekeepers, tutors, and drivers they employ, or something much darker. (Papa) Kim's family will be reminded of that chasm and the cruelty of inequity in ways you couldn’t possibly predict."
      Yes, the "cruelty of inequity" comes up in the climactic scene, but if it were a major theme of the story one would expect a talented filmmaker like Joon-ho to have developed it much earlier in the plot.

-----

South Korea has had almost continual economic growth since 1960, but it started from a very poor place.  Over time its manufacturing economy has given way to more high-value production and knowledge work.   South Koreans often are described as the most competitive people in the world -- more competitive than the Japanese and much more competitive than the Chinese.   Relentless competition is hard on people and wears them down.  

MovieSunday: The Lighthouse

There have been many reviews of this historical/mythical/horror film but none that seems to boil the
story down to its essence:  the struggle between two men for control of a great big phallic symbol, one with a powerful light at its tip. (Gee, what could that last be?)

When I saw it, the audience was almost entirely men, plus a few women and who came with husbands or boyfriends.  Just saying.

Now let's talk about the film.

The moment is the late 1890s, a time before sonar, electric lights or indoor plumbing.  The setting is a lighthouse whose beacon and foghorn warn ships away from the shallows near a small island off the Atlantic coast of New England.

Onto the island comes a former lumberman, Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson) to spend several weeks as the second of two "wickies" who tend the lighthouse.  The lead wickie, Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe), took up his job after a long career as a seaman.

Wake quickly makes clear that he's the boss and orders Winslow to do the scut work.  Winslow hauls coal in a wheelbarrow, wrestles barrels of oil up and down stairs, fetches water from the well, empties chamber pots, cleans floors and whitewashes the lighthouse exterior.  Over time, he comes to resent Wake, who drinks copious amounts of liquor (gin, no doubt, given the age), shares sea dog superstitions about seagulls and a little about his foreshortened family life.  Late every night, Wake locks himself in the top of the lighthouse, tending its enormous light and refusing Wake any access, which Wake deeply desires.

"The light is mine!" says Wake.

The atmosphere of the story makes that first act more interesting than it sounds.  First, the film is shot in black and white, and in an almost square format, 1.19:1, that has been mostly unseen since the days of the early talkies.  The lighthouse living space after sunset is dim and uncomfortable.  And there are loud, dissonant noises from the pulsing foghorn and roaring boilers that punctuate the natural outdoors in full daylight.

On his last evening at dinner with Wake,  Winslow agrees finally to drink with the other man.  Unfortunately, a major storm the next morning delays Winslow's pickup for an unknown period.  The two men's drinking and and dancing and fighting continue until the gin is gone, at which point they switch to kerosene.  The final act is marked by hallucinatory experiences, disturbing revelations and suggestions of mythic characters from puzzling mermaids to Neptune to Proteus to Prometheus, and, finally, to what seems to be outright insanity.

 The Lighthouse is not the sort of film that will attract a mass audience, but that doesn't mean it isn't worth a look.  Its two actors play very well against each other in a well-managed background of increasing tension.  The filming and technical effects seem just right for the time and setting.

Like virtually every entrant in the now-popular horror genre, The Lighthouse plot contains what feel like several false steps and a conclusion that doesn't exactly add up.  Presumably the point is to invite viewers to decide for themselves what is real and what is imagined.

MovieMonday: The Current War -- Director's Cut

This film sets out to personalize an 1890s battle between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse, the two innovators who wanted to standardize how electricity was delivered to American homes and businesses.

There's plenty of material for a story about this situation, but this presentation mostly does not work.

The lead character is Thomas Alva Edison (Benedict Cumberbatch), the most famous inventor of American history.  He does not invent the light bulb but develops the first usable light bulb and patents it.  At the time of the movie, Edison is promoting his distributed current (DC) with  installations in New York.  In addition, he is working on other big ideas, including the phonograph and moving pictures.

Edison is also what a young friend of mine would call a "dick."   He hires a penniless immigrant named Nikola Tesla (Nicholas Hoult) and mistreats him, breaking promises.  He goes to some lengths to smear George Westinghouse (Michael Shannon,) whose alternating current (AC) system proves more practical and less expensive in demonstrations in smaller cities in the East and Midwest.

Westinghouse hires Tesla and pays him well; together they develop one of the first hydroelectric power systems, a "dynamo" set at the base of Niagara Falls that provides electricity to Buffalo, NY.

The movie tries to build tension as Edison and Westinghouse compete to install an electrical system that will light up the night at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, but it doesn't deliver a satisfying resolution.


The Problems

Making films that personalize historical figures is a fraught business because what matters most is what those persons have done.  Who cares what Galileo was really like?  Does it matter what Abraham Lincoln had for dinner the night he announced the Emancipation Proclamation?  The challenge is to link personal observations with historical or artistic or scientific significance.

This movie sketches in the characters of Edison and Westinghouse and their private and public lives, but it jumps around in jerky shots and short scenes that are often out of sequence.  The intent may have been to avoid making the thing feel like a sciency costume drama of the Gilded Age, but the effect is to make the audience think constantly, "Wait -- what?" It's distracting.

The Current War also doesn't make use of its ancillary characters.  The most memorable line about Tesla, the enigmatic polymath, is that his name will never be on anything -- haha now.  Edison's loyal secretary, Samuel Insull (Tom Holland), appears in many scenes, but his gotcha moment comes when he asks Edison whether the great man wants to be remembered as P.T. Barnum or Isaac Newton.  (This when Edison is attempting, falsely, to name the electric chair he commissioned as a "Westinghouse."  Much also is made of Edison's avowed opposition to the death penalty, possibly to make him less obnoxious to post-millennial audiences.)

In another odd characterization, J.P. Morgan (Matthew Macfadyen,) the premier financier of the US Industrial Revolution who funded both inventors' electric companies, comes across as unexpectedly passive, but is described by Edison's young son as having a funny nose.  Maybe the real J.P. had a red nose like Rudolph the Reinder, but why mention that and say nothing about Edison's near-total deafness?

Then there is a single Civil War scene, scattered across several acts, of Westinghouse as a young Union soldier encountering a Confederate soldier pointing a pistol at his face. This may aim to demonstrate how Westinghouse handles challenge, but it comes out of the blue and is like nothing else in the plot.  Why not highlight instead the inventor's patenting an air brake for trains (one that is influential even today) just a few years after the war?


The Provenance

The first version of this movie earned mixed reviews in 2017 at the Toronto International Film Festival, and a scheduled broad release was canceled.  Its director, the well-regarded Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, took the opportunity to rejigger the film, adding and subtracting scenes to come up with this current version.

Timing was another problem.  Harvey Weinstein was executive producer of that earlier version, and the TIFF airing came a month after Weinstein was charged with multiple abuses of women.  The film now in theaters lists Martin Scorsese, a Gomez-Rejon mentor, as executive producer.


Note

I doubt this is taught as such in schools now, but Edison and Westinghouse and Tesla were, in their day, rather like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs in ours.  People might enjoy imagining the thrill of being able to read after sunset after thousands of years of campfires and whale oil and candles. The thrill of the new is always changing, and it wouldn't hurt if we could put it in perspective.

MovieMonday: The Rise of Jordan Peterson

This documentary is scheduled to open at theaters later this week, but good luck finding it if you want to see the thing.

The problem is the subject matter -- a Canadian professor who has studied psychology, literature, philosophy, religion, biology and evolution -- and who has spent a lot time thinking about all of it.  He's become a youtube celebrity, and his practical book on how to get your act together if you're unhappy with your life has sold 3 million copies, often to young men who seem to appreciate the message.

For this he has earned a remarkable amount of disdain. 

-----

From all reports, the film presents a neutral view of Peterson, including comments from people who disagree with him.  It seems to have grown out of a 44-minute television documentary that was aired last year by the publicly funded Canadian Broadcast Corporation and then expanded into a feature-length story about Peterson as a person and his family and what he believes.

Peterson earned oppobrium in 2017 when he said he opposed a Canadian law that was taken to mean that it would be a prosecutable crime not to call non-cisgender people by their preferred pronouns.  His logic, if I understand it, was that he would take the matter under consideration on an individual basis but that being compelled to obey was a step too far.

(In the US, the First Amendment prohibits government regulation of speech.  Our country is a cacophony of noise, often ranging from ignorance to hate, but at least we're mostly spared battles about what people are allowed to think and say.)

-----

I don't spend a lot of time thinking about Jordan Peterson, but last year I watched a couple youtube videos of him.  In one, he maintains his cool during an onslaught of accusatory questions posed in an interview by a British television reporter.  In the other, he talks with Camille Paglia, an American scholar who is too idiosyncratic to be accepted at a major university but who is always interesting. Personally, I enjoy discussions when serious people trade views without calling each other Nazis or communists.  

Here, from early 2018, is an Atlantic article (the Atlantic not being a retrograde right-wing publication) by a Southern California-based male essayist, Conor Freiersdorf, who wonders why Jordan Peterson is seen as social anathema. 

Later that year, a female columnist, also in Los Angeles, suggested in an Atlantic column that Peterson scares "the left" because his fairly traditional advice comes as a revelation to young men like her son, who have not been exposed to such in their formal educations.

It was the female columnist's piece that led Eric Levitz of New York magazine to publish a piece titled "The Left's Hatred of Jordan Peterson Is Perfectly Rational."

-----

Anyway.  The audacity of a neutral Peterson bio-doc has attracted the ire of contemporary activists who seem to value conformity over all else.  Examples:

1) When one or more employees of a theater in Toronto said they thought the film's scheduled run should be cancelled, the theater cancelled the run.

2) The same thing seems to have happened at a theater in Brooklyn.

3) Somewhere near Portland, OR, a pastor arranged to show the blocked JP movie at his church but decided against it after receiving an anonymous message that said the following:

                    “Several community organizations are planning to shut down your showing 

                  of the Jordan Peterson propaganda film.  While many of us aren’t Christian 

and some even flat-out condemn the religion, we do not want any harm 

             to come to your place of worship or those within.  However, we cannot allow fascism to continue to rise and will not tolerate its presence in our city, 

whether it is on the streets or on the waterfront or in a church. 

Read some history books, read about eugenics, read about sex and gender and 

then compare it to Peterson. Pray on it if you must. Do the right thing. 

As much as we joke about it, we really don’t want to have 

              to bring out the guillotine to fix society.”

(Translation:  “Nice little business church you got here, mister. It’d be a shame if something were to happen to it, know what I mean?”  Also in Portland, a similar threat caused the cancellation of a general city parade several years ago because members of a Republican group planned to march in the event.  Apparently the appearance of people who belong to another, perfectly legal national party was too dangerous to be tolerated.)

4) Of the three cities where I spend time each year, no theater seems to plan to show this film.

-----

The film's distributors have gotten the message. Peterson has attracted a great deal of interest in the last couple years, but one branch of what is now called "cancel culture" has been activated to limit the exposure or profitability of a film, even a non-hagiographic one, for fear it might find an audience in theaters or with nonprofit groups.

The net effect of all this is that if you want to watch The Rise of Jordan Peterson, you're going to have to stream it at home on your television set or your computer or your cellphone.

Haha: The incredible shrinking house

Nashville's Million-Dollar Homes Are Shrinking Fastest in U.S.

Do not fear.  If you spend a million bucks on a 5,000-square-foot house, it will not turn into a 4,000-square-foot house before you move in with your family and furniture.

Translated:  You get less home for your money in Nashville these days.

At the moment, however, expensive houses and condominiums are being developed much faster than the market can absorb them.  The article seems to be based on listing prices, not sale prices.

MovieMonday: The Addams Family

Someday there may be another Addams family movie that is worth watching.  This is not that film.

As everybody born within the last 90 years knows, the Addams family -- Morticia, Gomez, Wednesday and Pugsley -- are just like the rest of us except they live on the dark side.  They enjoy spiders and mummies and blasting caps and crossbows.  They are devotees of the macabre.

Ever since Charles Addams sold his first cartoon about these people to the New Yorker in the late 1930s, people have enjoyed the contrast in print, on television and in movies.  Addams-style humor also has been applied to various monsters and Transylvanians.

Since the last movie about this group was dropped in 1993, it was time for another one.  What seems to have happened is that a bunch of B-list writers and animation artists assembled a weak plot sprinkled with flat humor that is not funny enough to generate laughs or even chuckles.  And it got made into a bad movie.

About 15 minutes after the movie began, I started checking my watch.  I wanted to leave but stuck it out to the end.  Now let's talk about this hot mess.

----

This film opens with Morticia and Gomez' wedding, a Goth-to-the-max affair that so irritates narrow-minded yokels that they form a pitchfork brigade and chase the poor newlyweds out of town. 

The couple end up "somewhere horrible, somewhere corrupt, somewhere where no one in their (sic) right mind would be caught dead in."  Yep, it's New Jersey.  

Along the way the they find Lurch, an escapee from an abandoned insane asylum (huh?) lying on the road.  Then they travel up the road and find their dream home -- the dark, empty asylum itself.

Then the focus shifts to 13 years later.  Daughter Wednesday and son Pugsley have joined the family, which has not stepped out of its house or sent its children to school but is planning a get-together with relatives two weeks hence for Pugsley's "mazurka" (apologies to Chopin), an Addams tradition in which the lad will demonstrate his swordplay skills.

Then, all of a sudden, the Addamses realize they are not alone, and that there is a neighborhood of less eccentric humans just down the road.  At the same time, those humans notice there is a creepy old house up at the top of a hill.  Who knew?

Turns out the normal town is called Assimilation and was built by one of those television decorators, Margaux Needler.  It is the sort of place where children sing and dance to a catchy song whose lines include "What's so great about being yourself when you can be like everybody else?"

Margaux hoists her enormous blonde coif up the hill, introduces herself to Morticia and Gomez and  explains that their "off-brand" home needs to be updated so as not to frustrate her planned sale of the 50 houses she has developed in her adorable, pink-streeted town. 

Tensions arise, and there is conflict.  Ultimately, comity (but not comedy) prevails. 

So the story is about tolerance.  The Assimilationists are intolerant of the Addams family, and, to be fair, sometimes the Addamses are a little intolerant themselves, but not so much as their newfound neighbors.  Tolerance, of course, is a brand new, never-before-considered lesson that all of us can take to heart.

As for the film's script, the gags are weak and often strained, and the antics of the 3-D animation characters are not fun to watch even though those characters are "voiced" by famous entertainers.  

Honestly, theaters should pay moviegoers to watch dreck like this, but what do I know?  People bought $30 million in tickets last weekend.

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Those who are not acquainted with Addams family history may enjoy a recent and under-edited article, The Cultural History of "The Addams Family", on Smithsonian.com.


The article covers the bases and then concludes:   "The latest film looks to be, technologically at least, as far from the Charles Addams originals as Cousin Itt is from a barber."

In case you had forgotten Itt, a character introduced not by the original artist but in a 1960s television series, is depicted at right.  For some reason his vocals were done by Snoop Dogg.  No typecasting there, but no humor either.