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."

-----

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.

Grandma's Celebrity Gossip

Grandma

The latest report from our popular, California-based columnist


Twenty years ago or so, Adele, myself and the two Sylvias used to have lunch at that place on Melrose with the wooden benches. They thought it was fun, like sitting at a picnic table.

Me, I thought it was more like a prison camp. I brought my own cushions.

Anyway, the hostess was a nice girl named Francesca. A bit of a zhlub and a noshnik, she was always with the Jenny Craig jokes. Us she called her blue-haired ladies.

I nearly plotzed when I  found out that not only did she drop dead, but she was the daughter of Conrad Hilton and Zsa Zsa Gabor. Who knew?

Her father, one of the richest men in the world, left her a measly $100,000 in his will. Had I known he was such a schnorrer, I would have tipped better.

Zsa Zsa is 97 and hasn’t spoken a word in 20 years -- not since she klopped the Beverly Hills cop. In bed she’s laid up, the arestant of that husband of hers, Prince Frederic von Shmuck (von Anhalt). Prince-Schmince. In Austria, if you fill out a form and send them a check for $150, anybody can get a title. What, you never heard of Prince Matchabelli or Duke Ellington?

My Grandson Ronnie and his wife Shelby took me and their two kids, Leah and the other one, to see “Wicked” at the Pantages. It’s a musical based on “The Wizard of Oz,” but with lousier songs. Oy, so noisy it was, worse than those tchepping Muppets.

Outside were the usual no-goodniks roaming the boulevard dressed like Batman, Spider-Man, Michael Jackson, and other cartoony characters. Having his picture taken with them was Adam Sandler. Him I never liked with the smutty movies. I told Ronnie to ask him if he was any relation to George Sandler of the department stores, but instead, he told him I was a big fan of “Water Boy”-- a movie I never in my life saw.

Then Adam Sandler took a picture of me and him with his camera. He said he would post it on the Tweety Pie, but Ronnie said, so far, he hasn’t seen it.

Go figure.

Grandma's Celebrity Gossip

Our popular guest columnist dishes the dirt and shares Thanksgiving memories.

Grandma

All the girls at Giselle's were passing around the magazine with pictures of Bruce Jenner dressed like a woman.  This I needed to see?  He's got the mazuma, so it was no shmatte he was wearing, but all the same, a nothing of a dress -- a red sleeveless mini with the bra straps showing.

And those shoes!  Size 13 stilettos, and legs like zweigels.  Not age appropriate for a 65-year-old man. He was also wearing Spanx, which is like a girdle, but without the rubbery smell.  Kim Kardashian wears one to hide her gigantic tuchis, so go figure.

One big michegoss Julia Roberts is having with her in-laws is about Thanksgiving.  Her father-in-law's mortgages she stopped paying last month.  He's a schnorrer who's got more houses than Carter's got liver spots.  Her husband's family never liked her ever since she broke up his first marriage, which caused his mother Patti to drop dead from heart failure.  Julia's sister-in-law Jyl (yeah, like that she spells it) calls her "Satan."  So, Satan's presence they don't like so much.  But her presents?  That's another story.  Oy vey.

Listen, my family's Thanksgivings were no stroll in the park.  My sister-in-law Esther, when she was still a kalleh, once did something so farchadat . . . but I can't tell you now.  Wait till she's dead.  Anyway, our Thanksgiving table was always divided into two sections:  kvetching and non-kvetching, but by the end of the meal, it was one big kvetch fest.  So you can just imagine what all the simchas were like at the Schoen household:  shlemozzls!

Doris Day (below) turned 90, but she doesn't look a day over 83.  The schmoozers?  Who knows? The nuchschlepper with that piece of shlock on his head is probably named Barry.  They're always named Barry.  Feh!