MovieMonday: 42

This seemed like a good week to watch a movie about Jackie Robinson, the first African American to play major league baseball in the United States.  A brave, strong man.

After all, Friday was Jackie Robinson Day across the MLB.  (Most years, the day is celebrated on April 15, the anniversary of the day in 1947 when Robinson first took the field in a Brooklyn Dodgers uniform.  But this has been an unusual year.)

Also this Friday, Chadwick Boseman, the actor who played Robinson in the 42 film, died four years after a diagnosis of serious colon cancer.   

Apparently Boseman had been sick two years ago when he played valiant  T'Challa in Black Panther.  He must have been even more sick when he when he acted in this year's Da Five Bloods.  He seems to have been a private man (unlike many celebrity "influencers") and to have preferred to share his struggles only with family and very close friends.

In this, like the characters he played in those three films, Boseman left a legacy of character, of self-control, and, for those of us who believe in such things, of grace.  

Back to the movie:  The story opens with Robinson playing baseball in the Negro Leagues when he is invited by Brooklyn Dodgers GM Branch Rickey (Harrison Ford) to join one of the Dodgers' farm teams.  Rickey justifies the move as good business -- there are many Black baseball fans, after all -- but Rickey has personal and religious reasons as well.  

The first thing Robinson does is to phone the love of his life, Rae/Rachel (Nicole Behari) and propose to her.  Then they head for Florida, where spring training and Robinson's many more trials begin.  They are bumped off an airplane to make room for white passengers.  People in the neighborhood where they are quartered issue threats and hound them out of town.  

But the baseball is good, and Robinson proves himself (batting .665 over a short pre-season) and is traded up to play in Ebbetts Field, then the Dodgers home stadium.  He is issued a jersey whose number is, yes,  42.  

Rickey has warned Robinson that he must be the bigger man when he is called vile names, when he is beaned by pitchers and when runners sliding into his position at first base attempt to spike his ankles. His teammates' initial reactions range from hostile to cool.  

Robinson is human, and the frustrations are awful.  Over time, his even temperament and his skill win admirers who should have supported him in the first place.   But it's never easy.

This movie has been criticized as formulaic to the point of hagiography, but I'm not sure how it could be otherwise.  It's all true, after all.   The point is that an honorable man endured despicable pressure from colleagues, fans, other teams and their fans and won them over to become the Rookie of the Year and lead the Dodgers to win the National League pennant in 1947. 

His stoicism opened the national pastime to uncountable fine stars -- think Willy Mays, Hank Aaron and Roberto Clemente, among many others -- and, in a more commercial sense, to MLB's survival over the long term.  That's a lot of pressure to put on one human.

But it's not easy to watch.

Notes

When the film was released, Chadwick Boseman spoke of his own discomfort in facing the verbal slurs  he faced just playing Jackie Robinson around the 5:45 point of this online interview.

Movie Monday: The Thin Man -- One, Two and Three

This 1934 mystery movie is the first of perhaps the most popular series of Hollywood movies ever -- at least until Marvel and Harry Potter came on the scene.

As the preview notes, constantly, the plot came from a book by Dashiell Hammett, who wrote many, many hard-boiled detective stories. (More about him later.) 

The film's leads are Nick Charles (William Powell), a retired private detective and his equally devoted wife, Nora (Myrna Loy), an heiress who also takes an interest in the detecting game.  They are fun to watch, and their comfortable life probably was also fun to observe during the Great Depression.  

After a trip by train to New York, Nick is importuned by the daughter of his inventor friend to help find her father, who has disappeared.  After a bit of protest, Nick finds himself drawn into the mystery.  The other characters include the inventor's ex-wife, his son, his lawyer, his secretary/girlfriend, her other man-friend, and others.  Moments of investigation and inquiry are interspersed with witty exchanges between the Charleses and involving their terrier, Asta.  Weapons are displayed -- always 38-caliber pistols -- but the action is tame by current standards.  (In those days, there weren't so many psycho criminals, apparently.). Toward the end, all the characters gather and Nick reveals the murderer and answers all the associated story questions.  

One remarkable aspect of the movie is the Charles' appetite for cocktails, which continues to a somewhat lesser degree in subsequent Thin Man stories.   This may have been a reaction to the 1933 repeal of the 18th Amendment, aka prohibition, which perhaps whetted the country's appetite for distilled beverages or at least for seeing them consumed on screen after 13 long dry years.  

The Thin Man was one of the most popular movies of 1934.

After the Thin Man, released two years later, features an unpublished Hammett story and a screenplay  by two film pros who capitalized on the parts of the first movie that seemed to be most appealing to audiences.  

In this case, Nick, Nora and Asta arrive back in San Francisco on the Sunset Limited, where Nick is met by a squad of reporters and an old friend, "Fingers," who has served his time in the pen and briefly purloins Nora's handbag, which is returned.  They go home to their lovely home overlooking the soon-to-open Golden Gate Bridge --  in Pacific Heights or maybe atop Telegraph Hill (hard to tell).  

That evening, they set out for dinner with Nora's relatives, including some fuddy duddies who are not fond of NickoLOSS, as they call him.  Another problem has arisen, of course. Nora's cousin Selma Landis, is married to a nogoodnik who has disappeared.  

Turns out Selma's husband, Robert, has been drowning his sorrows and hatching extortion plots for several days at the Lychee Club, a restaurant with a full orchestra, a cast of dancing girls and a singing star with a dodgy brother -- all of which adds interest to the movie and suspects to the mix when Robert  Landis is found shot dead.

A vigorous police investigation ensues, led by a lieutenant named Adams who is easily frustrated and whose favorite word is "Phooey!" which is another nice touch.  Selma, of course, is the main suspect.  

Nora inserts herself into the investigation even after Nick tries to ward her off.  She's smart, too, and they are a nice team.

As in the previous movie (and Agatha Christie novels, among other detective stories of the period) the entire cast gathers for a scene in which Nick explains what really happened and identifies the killer.

At the end, a new plot element is revealed to build interest in the next movie. 

Personally, I found this Thin Man more fun than the others two.  Others may disagree.  

Another Thin Man, released in 1939,  finds Nora and Nick -- now with Nicky Jr. -- back in the Big Apple.   One of the first New Yorkers they meet is a bellhop whom Nick previous sent "up the river" but who is not resentful -- 20th century crooks were a different breed, apparently --  and who promises to gather some of his friends and their children for young Nick's first birthday a few days hence.

Then it's off to Long Island and the home of Colonel MacFay, a business partner of Nora's late father.  On the way that dark evening, the car passes a body lying on the road with a knife sticking out of its torso.  When the Charleses go back to investigate, the body is gone.  There are also armed guards stationed at the gate to the MacFay estate and at its front door.  

So something's up.  Naturally, the Thin Man's help is required.

The cast includes MacFay's assistant, his adopted daughter, Lois, and Lois' boyfriend, plus skeezy guys named Dum-Dum and Diamond Back, and others.  MacFay is found dead, of course, which requires an inquiry and the expertise of Nick and, yes, Nora, who is also paying attention.

The orchestra and dancers in this case are at the West Indies Club, where Nora shows up unexpected and is romanced by a Lothario.  Another family touch is that Nick calls his wife "Mommy!" when he is feeling sentimental.

The principals reconvene at the end of a weekend in the New York hotel suite, where the bellhop and his buddies have shown up, each with a child, for the promised birthday celebration. When the situation gets tense, someone suggests suggest putting the toddlers in the "pen," or play pen, a term that distresses the ex-cons for a moment (and is the kind of good-natured wordplay that fits in a Thin Man plot.)

Again, after the larger group gathers, Nick unravels the mystery. 

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There are three more Thin Man movies that might appeal to binge-watchers.  The three here are well-made and fun, but enough for this writer.

Dashiell Hammett

This much-admired novelist's school career ended well short of his school graduation. He dropped out (like others of earlier, periods) to help support his family.  In 1915, at 20, he signed on with the Pinkerton Detective Agency, where he worked for five years before and after his Army service in World War I.

While stationed in Europe he contracted the tuberculosis that left him in ill health and forced his resignation from the Pinkertons.  Fortunately, that short professional career gave him the insights that enabled him to write detective stories and crime novels.  His first was published in 1922. 

Perhaps Hammett's most famous character  is Sam Spade, the detective in The Maltese Falcon, a book that was turned into three movies -- two long forgotten, and the third, starring Humphrey Bogart, which is a film classic.  Another Hammett character, perhaps more quietly influential in crime stories over generations, is the Continental Op, who is discussed and placed in context on this website by someone who seems pretty familiar with the material.

Hammett's heroes typically were unsentimental tough guys, and Nick and Norah Charles are a tad more sentimental than these. In fact,  The Thin Man was published first in Redbook, a women's magazine.  

Purists in the genre would call Nick Charles (and certainly Nora) more soft-boiled than hard-boiled.  My recollection of The Maltese Falcon is that the Sam Spade of film is also a touch more sentimental (soft-boiled) than the character in the book. 

Hammett died at 67 in January 1961.

MovieMonday: Relic

This is a pretty good horror film with at least two unusual twists:  It is a story about three generations of women and with a theme of senile dementia.

Set in a nice, oldish house outside Melbourne, Relic opens as Kay (Emily Mortimer) and her young adult daughter, Sam (Bella Heathcote), travel from the city to find their mother and grandmother, who has not been seen for a number of days.

When they arrive, the mother-grandmother, Edna (Robyn Nevin), is nowhere to be found.  Her house is a mess, and there are notes that Edna has left in various places to remind herself of basic household matters, a sign of forgetfulness.

Kay goes to the police department.  

"She's in her 80s.  She forgets things," she tells the officer. A police search of the area around the house finds nothing.  

Kay sets to work cleaning the place.  One day Edna appears in the kitchen, barefoot and wearing her bathrobe, which has a spot of blood on it.   A medical person comes to check Edna's vitals and, except for an unexplained bruise, finds the grandmother well enough.

But Edna is not well.  She forgets things she said the day before.  There are a note and a verbal reference to an unidentified "it."  Dark patches appear at various spots in the house.  The gathering question is whether there is something more than memory loss that is afflicting this grandmother.

The final scenes are suitably horrifying but, like other films in the genre, there is not a logical explanation for what has happened.  There cannot be a logical explanation.   It's a horror film.

It is a credible first feature for Australian director Natalie Erika James, who cowrote the script. 

The Economics

While movies now tend to be longer, this one is relatively short at 89 minutes.  Its pace is not fast.  It does not leave the viewer thinking that a lot of film was left behind on the cutting-room floor.   This brevity, taken with the three-actor cast and a story set almost entirely in a single house, suggests a very limited budget.  

This is not unusual for a director's first film and not unusual for horror films.   Roger Corman, Hollywood's "King of the B movies" directed and produced hundreds of films between 1954 and 2018, including many horror pictures.  Made him pretty rich.

When you think about it, horror stories are cheaper.  Fake blood is cheap, ominous music is not expensive, the bad guy is either invisible or only shows up for a few scenes and the stories don't involve many actors.

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Comedian Jordan Peele launched his directing career by making -- what else? -- horror movies:  Investors put up $4.5 million for 2017's Get Out and $20 million for last year's Us.  Both films grossed more than $175 million in US theater ticket sales.  Even if you leave aside the promotion budgets and the credits back to multiplexes, both movies "earned out" handsomely.  Peele is a smart man, and whatever project he proposes (no matter how long the pandemic continues), investors will want to participate.  Not many filmmakers can feel so confident at this moment.  

Note

The Idiosyncratist has observed more than the usual number of new horror films being released this year.  In a way, it seems odd.  Why would the audience for fright be higher during a year marked by a scary disease, massive economic uncertainty and a contentious presidential election? 

My guess is that streaming outlets are looking for more content and are snapping up inexpensive horror films that never found distributors or audiences.  Audiences are looking for something new to watch in their living rooms, and the current price model -- $3.99 to $19.99 per rental -- isn't going to be enough to cause  the Disney or Marvel to commit to making or releasing new films in their traditional styles.  

MovieMonday: Waiting for the Barbarians

This movie is drawn from a 1980 book of the same name by J.M. Coetzee, a much-admired novelist raised in South Africa.  It is an observation of life on the frontier of a militaristic empire, a desolate land whose inhabitants are nomadic and regarded as barbarians.

Its plot, if it has one, unfolds in an outpost run by an aging Magistrate (Mark Rylance,) who has been at the job long enough to learn the native language and who administers justice with an emphasis on fairness, not punishment.

"I'd feel like a foreigner if I went back to the capital," he admits, "and the capital too must have changed since my years there."  

This observation comes after an inspector from the capital, Colonel Joll (Johnny Depp with his hair combed) arrives to identify and suppress an expected barbarian uprising against the imperial regime.   The colonel does not speak the local language and is unfamiliar with the region, but he is confident that his methods -- "pressure" and "more pressure" -- will help him find the "truth." 

At the fort, Joll meets a native man (who either stole some sheep or brought his son in for medical care) and sets to work.  After some pressure, the man is dead and the son injured and traumatized.  The inspector and his team set out, with the son, seeking their truth. 

The main story question, of course, is who are the real barbarians?  The second question is whether the Magistrate has gone native.

Later Joll and the gang return with similarly abused prisoners, including The Girl, a blind woman who needs crutches to walk but who, unusually, speaks English.  The Magistrate ministers to her wounds in a way that is either Christlike or creepy.   Hard to tell.  

At one point, the Magistrate asks the Girl, "What do you feel toward the people who did this to you?," a question that only could be asked in a film made after the year 2000.

Events proceed from there to an unsurprising and bleak ending that more or less supports the theme.

Book and film never identify a location, but the Asian features of the film's nomadic people, and its setting on grass-covered plains edged with snow-capped mountains suggest the steppe region between Eastern Europe and Central Asia.  (The movie was filmed in Northern Africa and Italy; the novel's point is that cruel colonialism is the same wherever and whenever it occurs, which may be fair enough.)

Rylance's role is like that of the gentle, honorable man he played in 2015's Bridge of Spies.  Johnny Depp plays against type, if you take Jack Sparrow or recent news reports to indicate what his type is:  He is stiff, rigid and unyielding, not a challenge for any actor.  Robert Pattinson, who plays Joll's assistant, doesn't get enough screen time to make an impression, which suggests it took a lot of editing to find the story line in this story.

Notes

The director of this movie, Ciro Guarra, is the Colombian who won much praise several years ago for Embrace of the Serpent, the story of an Amazonian native man in his youth and then in old age as his tribe is dying out.  It is not surprising that a novel like Waiting for the Barbarians would attract his interest.

On the other hand, think about Guarra's position in this situation.  If Coetzee, the author of Barbarians (and a  Nobelist in Literature) wants to write the screenplay, are you going to say no?  

I read a good bit of that book.  It is told from the Magistrate's point of view, with much more introspection and nuance.  The script's action has been compacted, understandably, but the screenplay's pacing is uneven at best.  Also unsatisfying is its failure to give its native people, the barbarians, much of a voice.  The ending makes sense, in a way, but is not particularly satisfying. 

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Let us give Coetzee credit for his literary awareness.

The title of his book and this movie is drawn almost certainly from a poem by Constantine P.  Cavafy, a Greek poet who understood classic Greek literature and lived between the last third of the 19th century and the first third of the 20th.  The poem is here.

For me, the poem's last two lines are the most interesting:

                     Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?

                     Those people were a kind of solution.

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Let's also talk about those sunglasses Johnny Depp wears in the movie-- the ones with opaque dark glass and a gold cross above the lenses.   They are exotic and unfamiliar to contemporary viewers, but they are a filmic meme that was mentioned (but not described as such) in the source book.  

Anyone who took a psych class in the last third of the 20th century remembers unseeing sunglasses (making formulaic bad guys seem soulless) as part of the guards' attire in the Stanford Prison Experiment, which we can hope has been forgotten by now.   That experiment set out to replicate the Milgram experiments of the 1960s, which seemed to prove that Americans, like Germans, would be perfectly comfortable inflicting torture on disobedient suspects.  The Milgram conclusion has been roundly challenged, and I hope truly, for more than 20 years.

In fact, the origin of the meme seems to be an old movie called "Cool Hand Luke," which I never saw and have no plan to see.  In that story, a nasty cop or prison guard wears mirrored sunglasse, i.e., the cop is soulless and cannot see or be seen.  The bad cop never speaks but administers cruel justice.  

So it was with the prison experiment, and so it is with the Waiting for the Barbarians book and story.  It's obvious, cheap and overdone.

In honest drama, the victims AND the victimizers are actual individuals.  

Enough already.

MovieMonday: Rebuilding Paradise

This documentary, to be released soon, starts with great on-the-scene footage from various sources that illustrate the darkness, heat and flames that overcame Paradise, Calif. early in the morning on Nov. 8, 2018.  By noon, the city had been reduced to ashes and 85 of its residents had died.

Director Ron Howard must have decided almost immediately to make this documentary, which observes grieving citizens over the next six months as they resolve to restore what they have lost.  It highlights a former mayor, the school superintendent, a police officer and several families.

It would require a heart of stone not to be moved by the grief and dislocation these people experience, and by their resolution to restore a century-old town set on a beautiful ridge between two large stands of forest and next to the Feather River.

But the story deserves more information.

-- The movie discusses, briefly, that fire seasons are longer now.  Why that is and what to do about it are not discussed.

-- The fire was started by a spark from a PG&E power line that was strung in 1921, and people are understandably furious at the utility.  (I have been told that standing under some of those wires will make your body thrum and vibrate.)  But besides PG&E, California has a Public Utility Commission.  Did that PUC evaluate plans and budgets for  maintenance of long-range electrical wiring when considering rate proposals?  Wildfires are not a new threat. 

-- The Federal Emergency Management Agency apparently denied physical clearance or financial settlements to people who put trailers on their now-empty lots or who didn't go through approved processes for rebuilding.  In the movie it sounds petty and makes people angry. What's with that?

-- The Paradise event was part of a much larger fire known as the Camp fire.  The Los Angeles Times published this nice series of charts and maps that illustrate how devastating that fire was.  It's worthwhile context not provided in the film.

The movie is not maudlin, and it is straightforward and honest about the people whose stories it tells.  I just wish it had a little more meat on its bones.


Notes

Ron Howard also directed Backdraft, a 1991 feature about two firefighters.  I never saw that movie, but Roger Ebert, the popular movie critic who died in 2013, had reservations that are similar to my own here. He wrote this:

"Never before in the movies have I seen fire portrayed by such convincing, encompassing special effects. Unfortunately, they are at the service of an unworthy plot."

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The Idiosyncratist cares about matters like these.
           In September 2017, 10 months before Paradise burned, I wrote The West Is on Fire after a trip to Washington and Idaho.
           In October, the Tubbs fire, set off by private electrical equipment outside a house, killed 24 people as it raged for days across almost 40,000 acres in California's Napa-Sonoma region.  It destroyed 5,600 structures, with the greatest damage in the city of Santa Rosa.
           In November 2017, two fires in eastern Tennessee killed 14 people, burned almost 18,000 acres in the Great Smokey Mountains National Park, and destroyed 2,500 homes in towns surrounding the park.
           Also in 2017, I wrote about Land on Fire, an absorbing study of wildfire over time and in the current moment.
           Next up for me is 1491, which uses history, archeological data and soil studies to describe the much larger Native American population and how those groups used the land and its resources for their own purposes.