MovieMonday: Soul

This somewhat unusual Pixar movie is not like "Toy Story" or "Cars," but it will appeal to young watchers and draw in their parents as well.

"Soul" opens as the story of Joe Gardner (Jamie Foxx) the frustrated teacher of a middle-school band class whose students, all but one, don't care about music.  Joe is a jazz piano player who wants music to be his life.

Suddenly an opportunity opens, and  Joe proves his chops by jamming with famous saxophonist Dorothea Williams (Angela Bassett) and her jazz group.  He gets the new job of his dreams, but events intervene.   

In his enthusiasm, Joe falls into a sewer that lacks a manhole cover and wakes up as a small translucent being, presumably dying and on a moving pathway to eternity.  

"My life's just starting!" he yells.  "I'm not dying! I've got to get back!"

Joe manages to escape the walkway and finds himself among a group of similar-looking creatures who are not headed for the Great Beyond but instead are being prepared for the Great Before -- except one, 22 (Tina Fey), who has failed many tryouts and is pretty negative about the idea of life on earth.

Suddenly Joe and 22 awaken in Joe's hospital room, where 22 lives in Joe's body and Joe is a big fat kitty cat, again frustrated.  They leave the hospital and pursue a hilarious course through the city, each awkward but, over time, learning from each other. 

This is an unusual story, and it does result in kindness rewarded and lessons learned.  But it would be nothing without its real-feeling animated musical performances and its score, organized by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross and with Jon Batiste's jazz arrangements and compositions.  Here are samples from the soundtrack. 

Worth a look.

Other New Movies

Two other films opened this weekend.  They may attract more viewers, but not me.

I planned initially to watch the big seller,  Wonder Woman 1984. But then came the doubts -- a long, long 2.5 hours, more magical powers employed in difficult situations, another two-dimensional villain, another Kristin Wiig in another silly role and more.  I rather enjoyed the 2017 Warner/DC Wonder Woman, but the sequel seemed less appealing.

         Maybe it's more difficult to care about superhero stories when the number of everyday crimes is rising and everyday law enforcement is stepping back.  Maybe that's why a smaller movie about personal character sounded better.

The other film, News of the World, is from a 2016 novel that I thought was okay but not great.   In it, a quiet hero played by Tom Hanks commits to returning to her relatives a girl who had been held for several years by members of a Kiowa tribe who kidnapped her after killing her parents.  The story is of the road trip between the Tom Hanks character and the girl who has roots in two very different cultures.

           The book is okay, but as one who spent some time in Texas, I found it less interesting than the true story of Cynthia Ann Parker, who at the age of 10 was kidnapped by a Comanche raid that killed most of her family.  Many years later, after she had married a Comanche chief and had three children, she was miserable to be "rescued" and returned to the life of her childhood.  One of her sons, Quanah, survived as a man influential in both his parents' cultures. 

            Now that's a story.  

            

StoryMonday: A Christmas Carol

We seem to have a new film version of Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" every year.  This one, described as inventive and interesting, is said to be in theaters now, but I'm waiting for a Covid vaccination and have no recommendation to offer.

The origin story, a novella by Charles Dickens, was published in 1843.  It traditionally has been promoted as an antidote to overly commercial Christmas celebrations, but this year it may resonate slightly differently.

The story of course is about Ebenezer Scrooge, an old man who has spent his life building his wealth and who is visited on the night of December 24 by three spirits who show him how much he has missed and how much more he can do if he pays attention to the people in his life.

This is a family movie in two ways.  For children, it gratifies the wish for people to be nice to each other.  For everyone else who has made a mistake or two along the road, it affirms that change is possible and can be rewarding.

So if you have finished wrapping presents and have time on your hands just now, here are some ways to take in "A Christmas Carol."

For Children:

There are various cartoons of the story.   A Bugs Bunny one, if you can find it, and one with Daffy Duck (Bah humduck!)  There is the 1962 Mr Magoos Christmas Carol and, hiding somewhere else, the still-popular 1992 "Muppets Christmas Carol."

This can get out of hand, however.  There are Lego and Smurf productions, and I'm not sure I'd care to see Jim Carrey playing Jim Carrey Scrooge.

For a good introduction, this well-done 25-minute version from 1969 won an Oscar for best animated short.

For All of Us

A film critic with a longer attention span than mine watched and evaluated dozens of Christmas Carol films, worst to best, if you would like to see more.  (My only quibble with his write-up is that it describes Dickens' book as "anti-capitalist" when I think the more appropriate term might be "anti-greed."  Marx's "Das Kapital" was published almost 25 years later.)

And you could always read the book itself.  Dickens' work remains approachable and is available in paper, on Kindle, on Nook and from the fine folks at Gutenberg.  There are also shorter children's stories, including " A Quarantine Christmas Carol" to reassure anxious young ones about pandemic interruptions in traditional festivities.

And then there are radio plays, including a 1965 drama starring the fine English actor Sir Ralph Richardson as Ebenezer Scrooge.

Another Christmas Carol that is quite good and also available on Youtube is the  Leeds' Northern Ballet Theatre performance from 1992, the only ballet version that I have encountered.

If, like me, you have read the book, watched several teleplays and films and seen more than one regional theatrical version, you might enjoy this film that speculates about how Charles Dickens came up with his story:  The Man Who Invented Christmas.

MovieMonday: The Big Lebowski

This 1998 film, which is pretty wacky, has achieved cult or near-cult status for several reasons, not least because its characters may say "fuck" more often than in any other movie.  (Someone actually made a count.)

This, and other charms, have given Lebowski an enduring popularity among filmgoers who enjoy watching people do dumb things or struggle in ridiculous situations.  And, honestly, the talky dialogue is often hilarious.

The movie was the seventh from from the Coen brothers, Ethan and Joel, following "Fargo," which won two Academy Awards (actress, original screenplay) and was filmed in the Upper Midwest.

I'm going to speculate here that the Coens decided to choose a sunnier setting for their next outing and came up with Malibu -- either that or they had retained the services of actor Jeff Bridges, who lives in Malibu, to play the lead role of the Dude, and all the pieces fell into place as they wrote their screenplay.

Where "Fargo" is a crime/comedy with a dark edges, Lebowski is a comedy/crime story with eccentric characters and a lot of property damage.

That latter sets the story in motion.  The Dude, a drifter who favors Black Russians that turn his mustache milky, is disturbed one day by two thugs who bang into his apartment, push his face into the toilet, pee on his rug and demand to know where the money is.

The Dude explains that he is the Dude, and while he seems to have the same official name as a rich guy in Pasadena, he does not have a wife named Bunny who is being held for ransom.  After the thugs leave, the Dude is very angry because, as he says repeatedly,  the fouled rug had "really tied the room together."

He gets into his battered car and drives to confront the big Lebowski at his mansion.  There, the Dude demands the replacement of his rug, which is not offered, but he hears later from the big L, who desires his assistance.  From there the plot is off to the races, and we learn, again and again, that things are not always as they seem. 

There are three hostile nihilists; a pornography king who employs enforcers; an avant artist Maude Lebowski (Julianne Moore), daughter of the non-Dude with her own enforcers;  a nasty but silent 15-year-old, and, just for the humor of it, a "brother shamus" who follows the Dude around and whom the Dude assumes is an Irish monk, presumably a Brother Seamus.

The local bowling alley is the Dude's hangout, where he and two teammates are in a finals tournament.  They are dim Donny (Steve Buscemi) and, more dramatically, Walter Sobchak (John Goodman) a Jewish convert and a hothead prone to overreactions that cause the Dude to step up as a calming influence, but without much success.  When asked to represent the Pasadena Lebowski's interests, the Dude takes Walter with him, which is not as helpful as might have been hoped, given Walter's oft-mentioned military experience.  

Besides Coen regulars Buscemi and Goodman, another one, John Turturro as Jesus (Geesus) Quintana, is there not to advance the plot but to promote, humorously and in his own way, his bowling team in its coming competition with the Dude/Donny/Walter squad.  

There are repeated riffs -- bad guys storming into the Dude's apartment (which really could use a deadbolt), more and more damage to his old car with its tape deck and Creedence tapes, and at least two Dude fantasy sequences occasioned by violence and spiked White Russians.

Since I'm speculating about how this story came together and since the plot isn't entirely coherent or even the point of the exercise, I will venture further and guess that another Malibu resident, Sam Elliott -- he of the distinguished mustache and gravelly voice -- was drafted to provide some semblance of narrative structure as the Stranger.

  

The Stetson-wearing Stranger introduces the story in an opening accompanied by a Sons of the Pioneers chorus of "Tumbling Tumbleweed" and as an actual tumbleweed -- no doubt imported as a prop -- rolls down a Malibu beach toward the Pacific Ocean.  Midway along and at the end of the film, The Stranger meets the Dude over sarsaparilla and beer, respectively, in the bar at the bowling alley.  

In their final conversation, the Stranger puts a question to the Dude:  "Do you have to use so many cuss words?"  The answer seems to be, why not?

"The Dude abides," the Dude says as he leaves to join his bowling team, leaving the Stranger to put the Dude and his story into perspective. 

Notes

-- The Dude is a fashion-casual fellow whose street attire not infrequently consists of pajama bottoms and a distinctive sweater, a Pendleton Westerly that reportedly came from Jeff Bridges' personal wardrobe.  

The Portland-based Pendleton Woolens company drew on Native American designs for the Westerly, which was sold from 1972  until sometime in the 1980s.  It was reintroduced sometime after 2010, presumably to appeal to Dude  enthusiasts. 

-- Sam Elliott appeared with Lil Nas X in a 2020 Super Bowl commercial that made use of Elliott's Western look and Nas' very popular "Old Town Road."    Good song.

A Christmas Playlist

Most of us have nice stereo systems and the ability to design our own playlists with songs playing from serial albums or randomly from several albums.  At chez Id, we do the latter with classics from several generations. 

Early in December, we start playing our holiday version, a family tradition.  If you're into such, I recommend these titles.

Lou Rawls

"Christmas is the Time" was first released in 1967, and many of the same songs were on subsequent holiday releases.  Rawls, who died in 2006, had a smooth, memorable voice and great accompaniments, including the guitar solo on the title track.

(An old jazzer friend recommended "Stormy Monday," the Rawls/Les McCann collaboration from 1962.  It's not Christmas music, but it is very cool.)

Andrea Bocelli

"My Christmas" also is a favorite.  Bocelli, the fabulous Italian tenor, has great pipes, and I sometimes wonder whether his collaborators don't tend to over-orchestrate his numbers.  That is not the case in this  duet with Mary J. Blige.  

Sarah McClachlan

Wintersong

"Wintersong" is the first of Sarah McLachlan's two holiday albums, and it seems to be the more popular one.   The songs, like this one, are rendered simply and in a low-key wistful tone that has its own appeal.

Ray Charles

"The Spirit of Christmas," released in 1967 by the fabulous Ray Charles and the Raettes, features about the only version of the The Little Drummer Boy that I can stand to hear.  Don't miss his version of "Baby, It's Cold Outside," with Betty Carter.  Like all his work, a fine piece of music.

Peter Kater
 

"For Christmas," pianist Kater's solo rendering of traditional music, has been popular since its release more than 30 years ago.   This all-piano album of traditional music, is well done.  Sing along or just enjoy the familiar tunes.

Earth Wind & Fire

 

Who doesn't want to have a little funk at this time of year?  "Holiday" was released in 2014 and, happily, includes December, a seasonal repositioning of its possibly most joyful song.

Willie Nelson

Yes, Willie is traditionally a country singer,  but this album (like "Starlight," which Texans used to call Willie's grandmother album) treats traditional favorites in Nelson's own style.   

Josh Groban

"Noel" employs simple accompaniments to feature Groban's fine voice, as on this French Petit Papa Noel.

Frank Sinatra

Old Blue Eyes released this classic during his swing period with Capitol Records, and it remains a seasonal pleasure.   (Another Sinatra classic from that period, is "Songs for Swingin' Lovers," with arrangements by Nelson Riddle.  Just saying.)

Michael Bublé

This album, aptly titled "Christmas" is also appealing.  This singer has a nice voice, and his phrasing is good.  I do like this horn-informed cover of the Elvis classic.

Note:

My enthusiasm for Mariah Carey's classic Christmas single, as performed by her, remains undiminished, as noted last year and in 2016.

Earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal took notice as well:  How Mariah Carey Built "All I Want for Christmas Is You" into a Holiday Juggernaut

MovieMonday: Mank

This movie is mostly about another movie -- "Citizen Kane" -- that many regard as the finest film ever.  That earlier movie is mostly associated with Orson Welles, who starred, directed, produced and co-wrote it.

"Mank" is about the other writer, Herman Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman).

(I watched "Citizen Kane" again before seeing this new film.  There is a very short plot summary here.)

The film opens as Mank, one leg in a huge cast after a car accident, is taken to a house in the Mojave Desert east of Los Angeles.  He is there to recuperate and, under orders from Orson Welles, to produce a Kane screenplay in 90 days.  Actually, 60 days.   

Mank is a complex fellow -- one of the  writers who left New York for less lofty but higher-paying film assignments in Los Angeles.  He's good when he's on point, but his alcoholism makes his work erratic.  A California associate, John Houseman (Sam Troughton), has been assigned to bird-dog the writing effort.

Mank's script will be about Charles Foster Kane, a rich young man who buys a newspaper, then many other newspapers and who aims for political glory, only to lose all that he values and then die, old and alone in a massive pleasure dome, ala Kubla Khan of the Samuel Tayler Coleridge poem.

"Citizen Kane" resembles a then-living American, William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance), founder of a newspaper empire who has his own "pleasure dome," San Simeon, high above the California coastline.  Hearst has taken an interest in filmmaking to promote the career of his blonde mistress, Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried.) Hearst died 10 years after "Citizen Kane" was released and probably did not appreciate the characterization.  Marion Davies was said to resent her portrayal.

Mank's moments are intercut with scenes from his earlier experiences in California.  The film is made in black and white, and the cut-in scenes are rendered, script-style, like this:  "INT: San Simeon -- night"

On Mank's first visit to San Simeon, he is told, "George Bernard Shaw was right -- it's what God might have built if he had the money."  In that scene, Hearst establishes himself as tight-lipped and peremptory, but Davies and Mank begin to form a friendship.

Mank also visits the MGM offices, where he watches a "writers' room" working on a script and then sees chief Louis B. Mayer (Arliss Howard) tell an all-hands gathering that the studio must cut all wages by 50 percent until the new president, FDR, reopens Depression-closed banks. 

He also talks with other writers when the Writers Guild (like other labor unions) are being formed.  They are knowledgeable about the looming Nazi threat and sympathetic to a more collective government, with Mank saying, "Socialism is where everybody shares the wealth, and Communism is where everybody shares the poverty."    

During that period, California was a business-oriented Republican stronghold.  But one renegade named Upton Sinclair (Bill Nye) had become a problem.  Sinclair, the muckraking journalist and socialist, registered Democrat and ran in 1934 for the office of  California governor.  Mank observed the film industry's apparently staged campaign of faked stories from everyday voters favoring the Republican candidate, who did in fact win the election.  

The movie is directed by David Fincher  -- "The Social Network," "Gone Girl," "Fight Club"-- and is done well.   The acting is excellent, but the script drops literary references like crazy, apparently to establish Mank's intellectual erudition.  (He calls Hearst "Cervantes" and Louis Mayer "Sancho," not flatteringly; and he likens Davies repeatedly to "Dulcinea," in references, duh, to Don Quixote.  There are many others.)

Orson Welles (Tom Burke) is almost entirely absent.  He and Mank talk over the phone and then argue at the end over whether Mank will get any credit for the screenplay.  On the other hand, Welles' name has been associated almost exclusively with the original film since its release in 1941.

Note

Early in this movie, Mank is advised to "Tell the story you know."  

In fact, the script for this film about a screenwriter was written by the director's late father, Jack Fincher, a screenwriter himself.

This happens again and again in all forms of art.

How many self-portraits do we have of famous painters?  Photographer Cindy Sherman has made a career of photographing herself in different costumes and roles.  

Televisions shows about people who make television shows started (I think) with  "The Dick Van Dyke Show" and continued to "30 Rock."  

"Chorus Line" and "Chicago" and "Singin' in the Rain" are musicals are about musical plays.  

Thomas Wolfe's "You Can't Go Home Again" is just one of many novels by and about novelists.  

Readers with other examples are invited to share them in comments.

MovieMonday: Let Him Go

This is a well-plotted movie with an unusual plot arc that moves from family sorrow to Gothic horror, all set in the largely empty western interior from Montana to North Dakota in the early 1960s.

The main characters are Margaret and George Blackledge (Diane Ladd and Kevin Costner), long-married ranchers whose son is killed in an accident.  

A couple years later, the son's widow, Lorna (Kayli Carter), remarries and leaves the Blackledges' home with their toddler grandson to live with her new husband, Donnie Weboy (Will Brittain) in an apartment in town.  

That there was tension between Lorna and Margaret is hinted; that Lorna is uncomfortable with her new husband is suggested more strongly.  

Then Margaret, sitting in her car in the grocery store parking lot, sees Lorna and her son being abused  by the new husband.  

Margaret decides to investigate, nice-lady style, by taking a fresh-baked cake to the new family's home the next day.  There she learns that Lorna, Donnie and grandson Jimmy have upped stakes and left without leaving a forwarding address.

George, a retired sheriff who is stoical but no less resolute, understands his wife.  When she loads the car and says she is going to find their grandchild, he joins her.  

The strong relationship between these two is rendered effectively and in a minimal style.  The losses of a son and then a grandson resonate but without noise.  The quiet harmony of their life in the first act contrasts with the drama that follows.

Their journey takes them to the North Dakota home of the Weboys, a family whose line of work is unclear but who scare everybody in the surrounding region.  The Weboy sons provide the muscle, and their mother, Blanche (Lesley Manville), is the family leader -- plainspoken, brassy and downright menacing.  

One short visit to the Weboy house convinces the Blackledges that they must rescue their grandson and also his mother, if she is willing.

Naturally, this is not a simple matter.  Margaret and George work together as a team (and with a Native American character imported apparently to provide a useful ally) as the conflict gathers suspense and moves to its fiery end, which is difficult to watch but is faithful to the story as it has been laid out.

This movie was made in 2019 and was released on November 6 on about 2,500 screens, a lot this year, where it sold well, again for this year.   It is available now for streaming at a cost of $20 and is best watched on a large screen.  

The source material is a novel of the same name by Larry Watson, who seems to mingle personal and action themes and who is familiar with the northern interior between the Rocky Mountains and the upper Midwest.

The screenwriter and director, Thomas Bezucha, decided to make the film after reading the book. Michael Giacchino, a veteran film musician, has delivered a score that enhances the film's themes.

Note

Let Him Go was shot in Alberta, Canada, in locations that are similar enough to the sites in the story.

A Thanksgiving Wish

This is a day to be grateful for friends, family and the comforts we enjoy.  But there are many people suffering the effects of two major hurricanes, two weeks apart, in November.  If you believe that all men are brothers, you might consider a contribution to relief agencies that are now active in the region.  

Two major hurricanes, Eta and Iota, lashed Central America earlier this month.  The Guardian, a serious  English newspaper, has a retrospective here and links to previous stories at the bottom of the article.  

The problems:  heavy flooding, landslides, hundreds of deaths, many thousands of families whose homes were destroyed and further destruction to economies already damaged by the pandemic.  Additionally, people crowding into shelters have increased the spread of Covid.

These three agencies get high marks for efficient management from Charity Navigator and are on the ground already in Central America.

Doctors without Borders 

Catholic Relief Services

World Vision

A fourth agency, the  Red Cross is unrated.  Its downside is its large bureaucracy, but that is also an upside:  The Red Cross has teams all over the world and decades of  experience alleviating all manner of human turmoil. 

Further photos from Central America this month, all from Reuters:

MovieMonday: Extraction

In a year when Marvel has decided to defer releasing new superhero movies until theaters reopen, this Netflix movie may have benefited by attracting some of the genre's audience.   Extraction was scripted and directed by MCU veterans (Joe Russo and Sam Hargrave, respectively) and stars Chris Hemsworth, who played Thor in three Marvel movies.

Here's the setup: Tyler Rake (Hemsworth), a grizzled mercenary, has been living in a country shack and doing not much more than drinking when when he gets a call:  "We landed the whale."

His new assignment is to rescue Ovi Mahajan (Rudhraksh Jaiswal), the 15-year-old son of a now-imprisoned Mumbai drug lord.  Ovi  has been kidnapped by henchmen of another drug lord based in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh.  

(An interjection:  Why would these drug lords care about each other?   Their bases are in different, very populous countries, after all.  Why start a war with a gang 1,500  miles away?  Even if you really hate the other guy, why kidnap his son?  You don't need ransom money.  Why not just kill the child and and leave the body where it lies?  I know, I know -- action movies generally have plot holes, but geez.)  

Tyler arrives in Dhaka where he uses his buff build and combat training, plus guns, to get the boy out on the street, where they are pursued in a long, well-orchestrated sequence of car chases, also with guns blazing.

Then, after it turns out that the mercenary group's plan to get Ovi out of Dhaka has been foiled, Tyler and Ovi end up hiding in "the worst-smelling sewer in Asia" until they are rescued, surprisingly, and there is an interlude in which the characters reveal their motives. The final act involves these two, a new ally, the mercenary team, many police officers, multiple helicopters and much collateral (human) damage -- all while the Dhaka drug lord watches through binoculars from a marble porch, rather as if he is observing a cricket match.  

I don't want to be unkind here.  This plot has more in the way of human motivation than most shoot-em-ups.  There is a father-son theme that explains Tyler's empty life and is echoed in other situations.  A foggy memory reveals its meaning over time, and there is a recurrent underwater motif.  Some scores are settled and, at the very end, there is a suggestion that a prequel or sequel may be in the offing.

Some critics believe the plot reverts lazily to a white-man-rescuer theme, but there may be reasons for that.  First, if you have well-established Chris Hemsworth as your star and a big-budget premise, you're not aiming for the indie market.  (Remember the film's originators came out of Marvel.)  Second, setting this movie anywhere in the U.S. would have been ruinously expensive.   The South Asian location added interest, reduced cost and provided work for local actors and craft talent.  

Finally, the funding didn't come come a major U.S. studio, and there appears to have been some participation by investors from India -- not least because the working title was changed from Dhaka  to Extraction and because virtually the entire movie was shot in India.  The film has attracted much attention in the Indian press and presumably a large audience in that country as well.  

Potsdam, Truman, Chopin and Mom

In late summer 1945, the leaders of the the United States, Great Britain and Russia gathered in Potsdam for a conference after the end of World War II in Europe.   The goal was to reach an agreement on what to do with territories Germany had held.   The setting was depressing, and, worse, the discussions were tense and unavailing even after a welcome Allied victory.   It was a long two weeks. 

By many reports, the most pleasant part of the conference was an evening entertainment planned by the Americans.  A grand piano was set out on the portico, and music was provided by an American violinist and pianist currently serving in the military.  

The two played several pieces together, and then US president Harry Truman, a pianist himself, played Paderewski's Minuet in G.  

To end the evening, the other pianist, Sgt. Eugene List, played  Frédéric Chopin's "Waltz in A Minor," Truman's favorite.  The musician did not know the piece from memory, and he was surprised when the president offered to stand by the piano and turn the pages as List tickled the ivories.  (None of the other conference attendees or aides was confident enough to take the job.  Wimps.)

Later, in early 1947 and after List had resumed his career as a concert pianist, he was invited to the White House to perform for a diplomatic reception.  Once again, Truman asked to hear the "Waltz in A Minor."

Harry Truman

This engaging biography lets us understand the serious but low-key man who was president during a consequential period in the middle of the 20th century.  It opens with his grandparents' settlement in the "Muzzuruh" part of Missouri and continues through his foreshortened schooling, his several careers in banking, farming, artillery leadership in the Battle of the Argonne Forest, among others,  and ultimately to political office and the presidency.  The story is further enhanced by local and political context and observations about Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower,  the presidents who preceded and succeeded him.  

Definitely worth a look.

Frédéric Chopin

This Polish composer was born in Warsaw just about a century after the invention of the piano.  (Its predecessor keyboards were big pipe organs and small harpsichords,  which were useful but not particularly expressive.)  As a child, Chopin took to the piano and became known for for his performances and, later, for his musical compositions as well.  

He and the instrument were enormously influential as European music moved from its Classical period to the Romantic one.  The piano's capacity for loud or soft intonation and for staccato or legato renderings, plus its pedals' accommodation of further nuance, allowed more emotive renderings of music. Chopin, Franz Liszt, Robert Schumann and others made full use of these new tools by writing music that allowed pianists to draw more sensitive shadings from the notes on their music scores.     

My Mother

My mother, like several of her children, studied piano as a child.  One of the happiest days of her adult life must have been when she and my father bought a used baby grand piano.  She played often, and Chopin was her favorite composer -- or maybe, on some days, it was Mendelssohn.  Much as I enjoy the waltz that was Harry Truman's favorite, the Chopin waltz I like best is  Op. 64, n. 2, perhaps because I remember my mother playing it or maybe because it is moving and beautiful.

Mom died young, but not as young as Frédéric Chopin.  Dogged all his life by poor health,  he died in 1849 in Paris of complications from tuberculosis.  He was just 39 years old.

Note: This review discusses the latest of many books on why Chopin remains essential to audiences, performers and musicologists.

MovieMonday: The Life Ahead

The headline appeal of this new movie is that it stars Sophia Loren.  

Loren, the serious and seriously beautiful actress of the last century, plays Madame Rosa, an 86-year-old Holocaust survivor, retired streetwalker and, now, informal foster parent of other prostitutes' children.  

The action starts as Madame Rosa walks down the street with a parcel.  The bag, with two vases inside,  is snatched by a young boy who runs away with it.  

Shortly after the robbery, her friend and neighbor, Dr. Cohen, brings thief and vases up to her apartment. Cohen asks Madame Rosa to take the wayward boy into her care.  

Rosa says no, of course.  She is a serious women, and, not surprisingly, the kid looks like trouble to her.  

The doctor offers money and then more money.   He says the 12-year-old boy, Momo (Ibrahima Gueye),  "needs a female figure, someone who commands respect."

When she agrees, finally, and the doctor leaves, Momo (short for Mohamed) behaves obnoxiously toward the two younger children in the apartment.  One is the child of Rosa's dear friend, Lola (Abril Zamora), and the other, a Jewish boy, is sure his mother will come to get him soon after months of absence.  

Momo, born in Senegal, has lived in Italy since he was three, but he has been mostly on his own since his mother was killed by his father three years later.  

Rosa is a good caretaker with the right children, but she is a not a pushover or a sweetie pie.  She calls Momo "a little shit," and he, like many in the neighborhood, refers to her as "the old bag."  

But Momo has skills.  He's very good at selling street drugs.  He can draw, and he enjoys music.  He's curious about why Rosa leaves the apartment for the building basement every now and then. When Rosa pressures an Islamic grocer (Babak Karim) to give Momo a part-time job, the man shares his books and rugs and the two get to know each other, but slowly and with friction.  

So, yes, Momo loosens up in Mama Rosa's home.  But for every 1.5 steps forward, there is at least one full step back.  Meanwhile, there are signs that Rosa's health is declining.  When Momo shows concern, her own coolness thaws a bit.

Essentially, the story is about human loss, starting with Jewish Rosa whose family died at Auschwitz, and continuing with her friend Lola, whose father wants to meet his grandchild but is not so certain about his sex-worker daughter who is also transgender.  Add in the other boy and the widowed grocer, and it's a full deck of people hungry for family.  The setting, a skeezy neighborhood of prostitutes and drug dealers and carabinieri and graffiti, presumably was chosen to pile on the tension faced by the luckless characters and make the theme more complex.  

This story was told first in a 1975 French novel set in Paris and, second, in a 1977 French film starring Simone Signoret.   I watched part of that film, and it wasn't the great actress' best work.  

This newer version was cowritten by Edoardo Ponti, Sophia Loren's son, who also directed.  Her presence, wearing her age (so Italian, that) and carrying herself with dignity and fear and without false drama, makes it much more interesting than it would have been with a lesser actress.   In addition, Momo's energy and anger are on full display in this movie, and actor Ibrahima Gueye's every movement reads true.   

Notes

The Life Ahead was filmed in the Italian city of Bari, along the Adriatic Sea.  It was filmed in Italian and dubbed into English for American viewers, and this does not work, at least for this viewer.  

It's not that the characters' mouths are obviously speaking a different language -- Italian is rather mellifluous, after all -- but that their dialogue has been rendered in idiomatic US English, which feels jarring given the Italian setting.  So do the occasional insertions of Italian exclamations.  "Mala fangul!"

Fortunately, this Netflix explainer, also in US style, shows how to adjust the setting to watch the movie with Italian speech and English subtitles.  Much better.

A New Indie Film: Teen Goths

The theme of this movie is an evergreen one:  Growing up is hard to do.

The story is about a young woman whose father has died, whose writer mother is on a book tour and who is stuck at her grandparents' house during an eventful summer when she takes up with some neighborhood Goths.  As the trailer indicates, the film Goths are teenagers who wear black clothes and listen to death rock, not the guys who sacked Rome almost 2,000 years ago.  

The release was years in the making and was filmed in Portland, Oregon, the city where I grew up.  Its star is a young woman whom I know and like.  I am not going to discuss the film  because our friendship might interfere with my objectivity.  And, yes, yes, the notion of objectivity in published reports has become quaint, like a 20th-century artifact --  similar, perhaps, to the Lawrence Welk program my grandparents used to enjoy.

(I will say this much:  Part of a scene from the film was released to friends and family a couple years ago.  It was set in a graveyard at midnight, which sounds neo-Gothic, but the lighting was pretty awkward.  If I were the cinematographer, I'd have done the shoot under a bright-but-ominous full moon.  To be fair, however, Portland's cloudy, wet climate would frustrate that goal just about every month of the year.)  

Personally, I thought the Goth trend ended sometime in 2000 or so, but I was wrong.  When  I looked on the internet just now, I found an offbeat advice column that ran a letter in 2019 from a distraught mother who wrote Help! My Daughter Is Becoming a Goth!  Going Goth still may be a way, safer than many,  to declare your autonomy at a time when you are an adolescent and need to scratch that itch. 

Make of this what you will.  My Summer as a Goth is now streaming on Amazon and other online services.

An Invitation

The Id is not offering a review of this film but would welcome reactions from others who have seen it.  These can be posted in the comments section below for the edification of others interested in the plot, the characters, the humor, the setting or any other related matter. 

Other readers will benefit from your insights.

 

MovieMonday: Being There

If you think this year's political season has made Americans more jaundiced than ever before, you might consider this much-admired satirical comedy from 1979 as a bit of an antidote. 

The story opens as a middle-aged man awakens in his handsomely appointed suite one morning and is told by the maid that "the old man" has died.  

The middle-aged man, called Chance, does not react but instead watches television.  We have no idea how Chance came to be in this spot or who the old man was, but we learn that Chance always has lived in the fine house and always has been the gardener on its grounds.  He also has access to the old man's handsome, traditional wardrobe of expensively tailored clothing.

Today we might call Chance "differently abled," but he is more different than that.  He has no affect and is slow to speak, choosing his words with care.  His demeanor, modest and polite, presumably models the behavior of the old man who has died. 

After the maid departs, lawyers come and explain that Chance must leave the home as well.  He packs a leather suitcase and, for the first time in his life, steps out the front door of what appears to be a classic townhouse in a now-rundown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. 

Chance is not prepared for reality on a street.  If you have read the source novel or about this film, you know that he whips out his television remote to turn off some trash-talking young men who confront him.  This, of course, does not work as he expects.

Fortunately for him, Chance is bumped in the leg by a limousine whose chauffeur apologizes and whose occupant, Eve Rand (Shirley MacLaine), invites him to her home.  When she asks his name, he says he is Chance the gardener, which Eve hears as Chauncey Gardiner.  The transformation is complete.

Eve's house is even fancier than the one Chance left (and looks a lot like the Biltmore Estate in North Carolina).  Her much older husband,  the prominent, influential Ben (Melvyn Douglas), is dying and under the care of his personal physician.  Ben takes a liking to Chance/Chauncey and is the first among many.

There are many things Chauncey cannot do:  He cannot read or write and, he cannot manage more than a very polite response to any provocation or event.  As he explains repeatedly, "I like to watch television."  Commercials, cartoons, yoga classes, whatever -- if it's on television, he's happy to watch.  

But Chauncey's appearance and manners appeal to the others in the Rands' orbit, including politicians and journalists who listen carefully as he describes the seasons of a garden and the tending of plants.  They  conclude he is speaking metaphorically and sharing great wisdom.  His fame spreads, and the story, like any decent satire, dials the level of farce to 11, and then beyond. 

Being There is bit of a play on the "wisdom of little children" theme.  But children have emotions, which Chance does not.  His situation cannot be taken literally, happily, and the show's politicians aren't nearly as irritating as those we were expected to take seriously in last week's election.

The film also can be seen as a critique of the television obsession of its period, which looks quaint in retrospect.  We advanced citizens of the new millennium are much more absorbed with our cellphones.  

Note

The novel and screenplay were written by Jerzy Kozinski, a  Polish Jew whose family survived the Holocaust by taking new names and passing as Christians.  Kosinski, an energetic and enigmatic young fellow,  arrived in New York in the early 1960s and began writing books, the most approachable of which is Being There.

In addition to writing, Kosinski was a lively conversationalist, popular among New York literati and with television hosts.  He also led an exotic, if not publicly exotic, life on the side.  We cannot know how much his personality was formed by his challenging childhood, but when Chance says, "I like to watch," we know that he got the line from his creator.

Kosinski's first book, The Painted Bird, was described alternately as the story of his own ghastly childhood in the 1930s and 1940s, then as fiction and, finally and by others, as the English version of a similar novel released earlier in Europe.  A 1982 article in The Village Voice seems to document much more uncredited writing help from editors and others.  Kosinski took his own life in 1991.

MovieMonday: The Trial of the Chicago 7 -- and Portland

If I have one regret about this movie, it is that I didn't wait five or 10 years to see it.  

The subject matter has been on famed writer/director Aaron Sorkin's mind for years.   (I enjoyed his earlier projects, The West Wing television series and The Social Network movie years before I started a blog.) 

My impression is that Sorkin chose to release this in the current year of "unrest" in American cities.  The plot concerns a 52-year-old clash between Chicago cops and Vietnam protesters and the long, long federal trial in which the presumed protest leaders were prosecuted for inciting violence during the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

That 1968 violence was seen on television (lots of TV cameras happened to be in the city at the time, of course) and has been understood ever since as caused by heavy-handed policing ordered by then-mayor Richard Daley.  This year, the protest violence seems more organized but almost certainly will not result in incitement charges. 

The movie involves eight men's trial in the courtroom of Judge Julius Hoffman (Frank Langella at his best), who is angry, punitive and possibly demented.  Seven of the men are represented by William Kunstler (Mark Rylance) who comes across as more gentle and humane than the real-life Kunstler, whose career was devoted to the defiant defense of underdogs, not all of them admirable, against the man.

The eighth defendant, Black Panther co-founder Bobby Seale (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), is adamant that he did not participate in the protests and does not know the other defendants.  His rage builds when the judge refuses to allow him to defend himself, or even to speak for himself, in court.  An extreme overreaction by the judge, which did happen, causes Seale to be separated from the group prosecution.  

And then there are seven.

Between courtroom scenes, we get to know the defendants:  Abbie Hoffman (Sacha Baron Cohen) and Jerry Rubin (Jeremy Strong) are irreverent/arrogant Yippies who push the judge's limited tolerance even further.  Rubin also teaches demonstrators how to make Molotov cocktails, perhaps in a reference to this year's protests, or perhaps to suggest there is some mystery about whether the Chicago 7 really started the violence in Chicago's Grant Park.

There are apparent inventions in the service of the plot.  Did Richard Nixon's new attorney general, John Mitchell, really order the post-inauguration prosecution of demonstrators in Chicago?  Also, why the fictional enlistment of the previous president's attorney general, Ramsey Clark (Michael Keaton) as a witness for the defense when such never happened?   In addition, there is no mention of Lyndon Johnson, the previous president whom Clark served and who was so reviled for the escalation of the Vietnam War that he declined to run in 1968.   (Imagine the Chicago unrest had Johnson been the nominee.) And, no, there was no noble reading of the names of military dead during the trial.

The trial ran from early April 1969 to late February 1970, but the film is shorter, thankfully.  It has some points to make, but I'm not sure how relevant they are today.

Then and Now: Portland

I do not fault Aaron Sorkin for seizing the moment and releasing a film about an earlier period of American political rupture.  He knows more than I ever will about the Vietnam protests and the subsequent Chicago trial.

But I was raised in Portland, Oregon. My high school is up the street from much of the protests that started after the ghastly George Floyd death and have continued ever since.  After school in my senior year, I walked downtown to work at the city's main public library, an experience I remember fondly but would not want a child of mine to have today.

I don't understand why the local Resistance caused $1 million damage in downtown because its preferred candidate lost the 2016 election, or why anonymous threats of violence caused the city leaders to cancel a traditional Rose Festival parade the next spring in a far-out, lower-class (and increasingly minority) neighborhood because a group of Republicans planned to participate.  

By July 9 this year, downtown "protests" had caused an estimated $9 million in private business losses.  Those businesses now are mostly closed, but the fires, the police overtime, the healthcare costs for cops or photographers targeted with blinding lasers are not calculated.   Or at least not reported. 

Back when I lived in Portland, I never saw those noble protestors tutoring poor kids with me at the school not far from my house on Saturdays in the then-scary (now whiter and gentrified) neighborhood.  I don't think the "BLM supporters" (haha) spend their mornings pressing doorbells to urge people to vote for Joe Biden.

My friends who are walkers during the daylight hours describe a one-mile street of now-closed and boarded-up businesses that may be closed permanently in the downtown hub of the city's much-admired light rail system.  

Protesters have torn down statues near and far, including one of an elk, a native animal -- apparently, just because.

There seems to be a palpable protester interest in being oppressed by the local cops, who refuse to play along.  Police restraint in the face of threats -- name calling, projectile-tossing, commercial-grade firework explosions, fires set, threats to burn down houses with American flags on the porches -- is admirable but also has caused a massive escalation in police retirements.  Fun as it is to spray ACAB (all cops are bastards) messages all over town, sometimes those officers are needed.  Now, when arrests are made, the usual response by the district attorney's office is to fail to press charges.  (And I speak as one with personal, substantial complaints about the Portland constabulary's disinterest when people in my family would have appreciated some justice.)  

I could go on and on and on.  But, for the foreseeable future, how many entrepreneurs will set up businesses in now-affordable but empty downtown Portland?  How many lawyers and accountants will relocate their offices to suburbs near their children's schools?  How many travelers will want to stay at cool niche hotels when Antifa enforcers decide which cars may travel on downtown streets?  Who will go downtown, even after the pandemic, for local theatrical or symphonic performances or to visit the very good local history museum with its demolished entry and now-toppled statues of the abominable Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln? 

For his next project, Aaron Sorkin might want to apply his considerable talents to the current moment in a city like Portland. 

Note:

Here is the first of two 2015 stories wondering about the state of the state of Oregon. I may refer to others in future posts.  

MovieMonday: Bullitt

Bullitt, now over a half-century old, is remembered still, and with justice, as an iconic action movie.  The icons, of course, are Steve McQueen and a very cool Mustang.

In fact, the story itself is well constructed.  A Mafia informant is brought from Boston to San Francisco on a Friday to testify at a trial that an oleaginous California politician, Walter Chalmers (Robert Vaughn), hopes will advance his political career.  Chalmers asks specifically for Lt. Frank Bullitt (Steve McQueen) to protect the witness until his court appearance the following Monday.  Bullitt is a local hero in the eyes of the city press.  (Did I mention that the movie is set in a distant past?)

A wild weekend ensues.

The witness is picked up at the Mark Hopkins Hotel on Nob Hill and transported by a cab driver (Robert Duvall) to a nondescript hotel room looking out over the noisy Embarcadero (then called Embarcadero Drive, apparently).  That night, while one of Bullitt's men is on guard in the dingy hotel room, the witness unlocks the door for reasons known only to himself.   The door is opened, both men are shot, and Bullitt has a mystery on his hands.

He scrambles to the hospital where a suspicious gray-haired man arrives at the emergency room, and Bullitt senses the man is up to no good.  Bullitt finds the cab driver and tracks the "witness'" movements of the previous day and again spots the gray-haired baddie.

There ensues a long chase scene all over San Francisco -- but not, I believe, in a logical geographical sense -- as Bullitt in his Mustang chases his bad guy and the bad guy's partner in their shiny black Dodge Charger.    A second set of shots is fired.

Smarmy Chalmers continues to be a pest while Bullitt's captain (Simon Oakland) stands by him.  Bullitt's research takes him from the famous Enrico's Restaurant in North Beach to a police morgue where unexpected Boston face photos are phoned in and printed out in a 20th century office, then to a motel south of the city and finally to SFO and a tense and dramatic climax of the type that never will be staged in an American airport again.   

Through it all, McQueen is resolute, calm and focused.  He is the kind of cop you would expect to drive that Mustang.   (Critics sometimes have said Steve McQueen mostly played Steve McQueen, but the same could have been said of Cary Grant and other movie stars.   In fact, McQueen's life, which included a difficult childhood and ended at age 50 of a lung disease related to work-related asbestos exposure, might be expected to yield a man like Steve McQueen, on-screen or off.) 

The weak spot in the story is Cathy (Jacqueline Bisset), Bullitt's beautiful girlfriend who seems to be there, occasionally, for three reasons:  Posing as eye candy, being in the right place at a couple helpful plot moments, and driving a canary-colored Porsche.  Toward the end she says some lame lines that are the fault of the screenwriter and not the actress.  

Still, all these years later, the film is worth watching. 

Notes

This movie was part of a revival, or perhaps a refinement, of the action genre.   It was released the year after the fifth of five James Bond movies that featured Sean Connery, another poised but very cool character.

Bullitt was followed in 1971 by the first of Clint Eastwood's five Dirty Harry movies, which also were set in San Francisco.  Eastwood's detective, Harry Callahan, also was involved in chase scenes, but his personality was more edgy and threatening -- "Make my day" anyone?  Let's remember, between 1968 and 1971, the American appetite for nonconformity had increased as the Vietnam War continued.

-----

The Bullitt Mustang cachet endures.  Apparently two cars were used in the filming, and McQueen, in character, drove in many of the chase scenes.  One car was assigned to get beat up in the tougher moments, and it went to a scrapyard, even over early opposition from car fans.

The remaining one was bought by an investor/auto enthusiast who held it for years and, at his death, bequeathed it to his son, who sold it at auction in January for  $3.4 million — $3.74 million including buyers fees.  

The enthusiasm has not gone unnoticed at the Ford Motor Company, which has been releasing derivative Bullitt Mustangs, presumably to eager audiences, since 2001. 

MovieMonday: Time

Amazon Prime released this film Friday.  It examines the notion of equal treatment under law in the story of a wife who raises six sons while her husband is locked up in Louisiana's notorious state prison,  Angola.

Sibil and Robert Richardson were buying a house and raising four sons on the day when, desperate for cash after a promised business loan fell through, she drove him and his nephew to a credit union in Shreveport.  Robert drew his gun but did not shoot, collected about $5,000 and was arrested almost immediately after he left the building.

The two were charged by the state of Louisiana and offered plea deals.  Sibil took hers, and Rob did not.  She was sentenced to 12 years and released in 3.5 years.  

Rob, guilty of armed robbery, got a tougher deal.  Louisiana law allows judges to assign prison sentences of 5 to 99 years for the armed robbery, which gives sentencing judges an enormous amount of leeway.  

The judge in his case sentenced Rob to 60 years in prison with no hope of parole.  

NB: Bank robbery also can be prosecuted as a federal crime.  In the federal system, the maximum prison term for armed robbery of a bank is 25 years.

Quite a disparity there.  

The film focuses less on the final effort to get Rob a chance at parole and more on home movies that Sibil, who calls herself Fox Rich,  has made for him over the years.  We see their sons as toddlers, as they grow up and as the twins start college and the oldest son receives his white coat as a newly minted dentist. 

The film necessarily cannot share much about Rob's experience, but Fox is a remarkable woman.  She speaks often at public events about the longer sentences typically issued to Black felons.  

(Think about it:  What justifies such a long sentence for a first-time failed robbery with no shooting and all the money recovered immediately?  What is to be gained by sentencing a family man unlikely to repeat his single bad act to an effective life sentence?)  

While Fox is angry, and with cause, but she also is practical.  She works to feed her family.   She is active in her church.  She is unfailingly deferential in phone calls to inquire about a long-promised but often-delayed answer to her question about Rob's possible eligibility for parole.    (My fuse goes off fast when I get the runaround from bureaucratic paper pushers -- but it may be easier for me to get results in such cases than for a person who is African American.) 

Most of all, Fox is honest.  She visits the robbed credit union and apologizes personally for the robbery to the two women who work there.  When they suggest she should apologize also to her relatives for the difficulties visited on them, she does that too.  Her sincerity and steadiness redound to the benefit of her husband and children.

The film ends on an upbeat note, sorta, but the message -- unequal justice under law -- stands.

The able film director, Garrett Bradley, won a prize for Time at Sundance in January.  She takes an interest in African American topics, and we can expect to see more from her as her career progresses. 

One minor quibble is the one-word title.  It can suggest the time spent in prison or time lost in the raising of children, but it inevitably requires an explanation to potential viewers.  Still, it is difficult to imagine a better alternative.

Notes

Rob Richardson was held in Louisiana's state prison, known as Angola.  In fact, he is not the only Black convict who has had complaints about the place.   Following are three other stories, all of them worse.  We can hope that the state's justice system has improved since these men were sentenced.

Malcolm Alexander

Alexander was 21 when he was found guilt of a rape he absolutely denied committing in 1980, and after his incompetent lawyer presented virtually no defense in a one-day trial.  He was sentenced to life in prison without parole.  

(The lawyer also promised to file an appeal but did not do so.  The lawyer was disbarred later, but too late to help Alexander.)

In 1996, the Innocence Project took up the matter and learned that the most important physical evidence -- a rape kit cultured from the woman's vagina and a semen-stained towel -- had been destroyed by 1985.  (Troves of potential DNA evidence were tossed in those years before they even could be evaluated, but the action in Alexander's case was unusually swift.) 

Alexander continued to maintain his innocence.  In 2013, more evidence from the crime scene was discovered in the police crime lab.  Three hairs, collected but never studied, were tested for DNA and found to have come from someone who was not Alexander and not the victim. 

This constituted reasonable doubt -- actually considerable doubt -- about Alexander's guilt.  He was released early in 2018 after serving nearly 38 years in Angola.  

-----

Archie Williams

This was another black-white rape case.  Baton Rouge police showed multiple lineups of suspects to the victim, always including Williams, and they urged the victim to identify Williams as her assailant, even though she had said that the man who attacked her was taller than she was -- Williams was shorter -- and had a scar on his chest, which Williams did not.  

Eventually, under pressure from the police, she said that her attacker was Williams.

Williams, 22  at the time, was convicted and sentenced in 1983 to life without parole.  

In 2019, just 36 years later, a judge ordered a review of the bloody fingerprints found at the crime scene. The fingerprints proved that Williams had been telling the truth.  He was released from prison after spending most of his adult life there for a crime he had not committed.  

-----

Glen Ford 

Ford was a yard man who worked behind a Shreveport jewelry store.  The store owner, Isadore Rozeman, was found shot dead in the store in 1983. 

 

Ford was known to be in the vicinity at the time of Rozeman's death and, afterward, with two other men, sharing materials stolen from the store.  Some of the stolen goods were found in one of the other men's homes; the same house had pawn shop receipts issued to Ford from the store.  

Ford was arrested and charged with murder.   His court-appointed lawyers had no experience in criminal law, and prosecutors issued peremptory challenges to assure an entirely white jury in a district whose population was 50 percent African American.  The judge in the case also was white.  Ford was  convicted without a murder weapon linking him to the murder and with evidence from confidential informants -- most likely including the other two men (suspects) withheld.  He was sentenced to death in 1984, sent to Angola and spent almost all of his time there in solitary confinement.

The Innocence Project raised many challenges -- white judge, all-white jury, among them -- but Ford was stuck until a confidential informant told police in 2013 that someone else confessed to him that he had committed the murder that had sent Ford to prison.

Ford was released in 2014, after 30 years of very hard time.  He was diagnosed a few months later with the Stage-3 lung cancer that progressed rapidly and killed him less than a year later.

MovieMonday: Uncut Gems

This movie, Adam Sandler's latest, was released in theaters at the end of last year.  It promised a totally new type of role for Sandler, but my thought at the time was, eh, maybe not.

The classic Sandler vehicle is 1995's Billy Madison, in which he plays the unaccomplished son of a father who forces him to repeat his school years, starting with grade one, to prove that he can manage and inherit the family business.   Indignities ensue, but it is a comedy, and all works out well.   Trivial and not very interesting.

Fortunately this story is not so simplistic.  Now middle-aged, Sandler plays Howard Ratner,  a Jewish jeweler in the New York' diamond district who lives on the edge, always on the edge. 

Howard has an exasperated wife, Dinah (Idina Menzel), and three nice children in New Jersey and an equally exasperating girlfriend, his comely employee, Julia (Julia Fox) who lives in his vulgar bachelor apartment in the city.  As the film begins, we learn that he owes his goyish brother-in-law, Arno (Eric Bogosian) $100,000.  

But of course Howard has a plan.  His ace in the whole is an Ethiopian rock studded with opals that arrives in his office in an unusual fashion and at a fortuitous moment -- when Kevin Garnett (the real one, then of the Boston Celtics) arrives, accompanied by Demany (Lakeith Stanfield), who is showing the out-of-towner around the jewelry district.

Garnett is taken immediately by the stone, which his character suspects will bring him power or luck.  He insists on taking the stone with him and plans to purchase it later.  As security, he gives Howard his diamond- and emerald-encrusted 2008 NBA championship ring.

 

Howard takes the ring and pawns it because he has a bigger plan.  He always has a bigger plan, and he's always one step away from a disaster.   And, by the way, he likes to place bets on professional basketball.

So it goes, and goes, and goes.  For those who are unfamiliar with the intricacies of NBA sports betting or the consequences of messing with unsavory characters in the diamond district, keeping up is a challenge, but but the tension is constant. 

For Sandler, the film demonstrates an acting range that he seems to have been seeking in recent years.  Same for Kevin Garnett and some character known as the Wkend -- wins all round.

For brothers Benjamin and Josh Safdie, whose last film, 2017's Good Time, was more popular with critics than audiences, this Netflix release has sold well in the U.S. and abroad, even though its full theatrical run was cut short by the pandemic.  The Safdies' approach to stories is novel and worth interest. We will be seeing more from them over time.

Said shorter, Uncut Gems is worth a watch.   

Poetry for Children: Paul Revere

 This is a great poem to share with children from the age of five or so.  It is a compelling action story in verse form.  (You can print it out below or find it online in various formats.)

What makes it so good?

1)  It needs no pictures.  Kids grow up with vivid imaginations, and hearing this lets them put those imaginations to use just with words.  It also suggests, indirectly,  that reading -- just words on paper -- can be interesting and, yes, fun.  

2)  The powerful phrasing of the piece invites the reader to render it with the needed drama to carry the ideas.  We don't get many opportunities like this in the writing we see on screens these days.

3) Hearing it 20 times or so — and children DO enjoy hearing their favorite stories many, many times — will cause young ones to remember large portions of the poem and to be able to recite them from memory, an accomplishment that is rewarded with praise from grownups.  Such attention is always gratifying to early learners.

4) It can be inclusive.  We all know that Paul Revere was not the only rider that night to warn of a planned British attack.  (Longfellow's aim was not to diminish the others but to valorize patriotism and courage as symbolized by one of the group.)  

           One of those other riders, we have learned from the New England Historical Society, was a free Black man.  This is a nice point to be able to share.

            In addition the poem works fine if you know a girl who might prefer to hear about "Paula" Revere.  (Many girls admire horses, remember.) Adding a second "a" to the first name does not disrupt the tempo.  And, hey, it could have happened.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five:
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.

He said to his friend, “If the British march
By land or sea from the town to-night,
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry-arch
Of the North-Church-tower, as a signal-light,—
One if by land, and two if by sea;
And I on the opposite shore will be,
Ready to ride and spread the alarm
Through every Middlesex village and farm,
For the country-folk to be up and to arm.”

Then he said “Good night!” and with muffled oar
Silently rowed to the Charlestown shore,
Just as the moon rose over the bay,
Where swinging wide at her moorings lay
The Somerset, British man-of-war:
A phantom ship, with each mast and spar
Across the moon, like a prison-bar,
And a huge black hulk, that was magnified
By its own reflection in the tide.

Meanwhile, his friend, through alley and street
Wanders and watches with eager ears,
Till in the silence around him he hears
The muster of men at the barrack door,
The sound of arms, and the tramp of feet,
And the measured tread of the grenadiers
Marching down to their boats on the shore.

Then he climbed to the tower of the church,
Up the wooden stairs, with stealthy tread,
To the belfry-chamber overhead,
And startled the pigeons from their perch
On the sombre rafters, that round him made
Masses and moving shapes of shade,—
By the trembling ladder, steep and tall,
To the highest window in the wall,
Where he paused to listen and look down
A moment on the roofs of the town,
And the moonlight flowing over all.

Beneath, in the churchyard, lay the dead,
In their night-encampment on the hill,
Wrapped in silence so deep and still
That he could hear, like a sentinel’s tread,
The watchful night-wind, as it went
Creeping along from tent to tent,
And seeming to whisper, “All is well!”
A moment only he feels the spell
Of the place and the hour, and the secret dread
Of the lonely belfry and the dead;
For suddenly all his thoughts are bent
On a shadowy something far away,
Where the river widens to meet the bay,—
A line of black, that bends and floats
On the rising tide, like a bridge of boats.

Meanwhile, impatient to mount and ride,
Booted and spurred, with a heavy stride,
On the opposite shore walked Paul Revere.
Now he patted his horse’s side,
Now gazed on the landscape far and near,
Then impetuous stamped the earth,
And turned and tightened his saddle-girth;
But mostly he watched with eager search
The belfry-tower of the old North Church,
As it rose above the graves on the hill,
Lonely and spectral and sombre and still.
And lo! as he looks, on the belfry’s height,
A glimmer, and then a gleam of light!
He springs to the saddle, the bridle he turns,
But lingers and gazes, till full on his sight
A second lamp in the belfry burns!

A hurry of hoofs in a village-street,
A shape in the moonlight, a bulk in the dark,
And beneath from the pebbles, in passing, a spark
Struck out by a steed that flies fearless and fleet:
That was all! And yet, through the gloom and the light,
The fate of a nation was riding that night;
And the spark struck out by that steed, in his flight,
Kindled the land into flame with its heat.

He has left the village and mounted the steep,
And beneath him, tranquil and broad and deep,
Is the Mystic, meeting the ocean tides;
And under the alders, that skirt its edge,
Now soft on the sand, now loud on the ledge,
Is heard the tramp of his steed as he rides.

It was twelve by the village clock
When he crossed the bridge into Medford town.
He heard the crowing of the cock,
And the barking of the farmer’s dog,
And felt the damp of the river-fog,
That rises when the sun goes down.

It was one by the village clock,
When he galloped into Lexington.
He saw the gilded weathercock
Swim in the moonlight as he passed,
And the meeting-house windows, blank and bare,
Gaze at him with a spectral glare,
As if they already stood aghast
At the bloody work they would look upon.

It was two by the village clock,
When he came to the bridge in Concord town.
He heard the bleating of the flock,
And the twitter of birds among the trees,
And felt the breath of the morning breeze
Blowing over the meadows brown.
And one was safe and asleep in his bed
Who at the bridge would be first to fall,
Who that day would be lying dead,
Pierced by a British musket-ball.

You know the rest. In the books you have read,
How the British Regulars fired and fled,—
How the farmers gave them ball for ball,
From behind each fence and farmyard-wall,
Chasing the red-coats down the lane,
Then crossing the fields to emerge again
Under the trees at the turn of the road,
And only pausing to fire and load.

So through the night rode Paul Revere;
And so through the night went his cry of alarm
To every Middlesex village and farm,—
A cry of defiance, and not of fear,
A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,
And a word that shall echo forevermore!
For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,
Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed,
And the midnight message of Paul Revere.