This is a good movie. It is set in early 1964 in Florida, on the night 22-year-old Cassius Clay beats Sonny Liston and becomes the World Heavyweight Boxing. He's also started calling himself "Cassius X," and invited Malcolm X to the match.
Jim Forman (Aldis Hodge,) the standout rusher for the Cleveland Browns, also attends and, like the others, is considering a different career as a film actor. The fourth man, soul singer Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom) seems to be regarded as a bit of a lightweight by Malcolm X, who, given what we know about the man himself, is perhaps the most serious and ardent person in any gathering.
The gathering is at a small motel, and the four friends talk of their lives and their moment.
They characters talk like the old friends they are, over bowls of vanilla ice cream. Of the group, Malcolm X is the most serious and suspects that Sam Cooke is less so.
The next morning, Cassius Clay announces his new name -- Muhammed Ali -- and that he has joined the Nation of Islam. Meanwhile Malcolm X
The movie is well written, drawn from a play of the same name. Its writer, Kemp Powers, also co-wrote and co-directed "Soul," a film I enjoyed several weeks ago.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
Sofia Coppola's new movie, On the Rocks, opened in a few theaters recently and will be available on some streaming services later. I'm not going to theaters now, but I decided instead to revisit her first release, from 2003, this week.
This first film from Sofia Coppola won an original screenplay Oscar, and it is indeed original.
In a way, it's a small movie about the frustrations in two people's relatively small lives. Coppola's insight was to set the story in an unfamiliar environment. It concerns two frustrated people who meet in downtown Tokyo's Park Hyatt Hotel.
Bill Murray plays "Mr. Bob Harris," a middle-aged American film star whose career is winding down. He's taken a lucrative gig appearing in advertisements for Suntory whisky as a break from sitting around the house with his wife and children or "being in a play somewhere."
Harris is fully aware of the melancholy of his personal situation and the absurdity of his on-set work --- wordy Japanese instructions boiled down to a word or two in translation. Given his professional background, he does what is expected to make the filming work, amusingly, which is a credit to Murray's subtle talent, even for those who remember him most fondly from his more broadly comic Caddyshack days.
In a smaller room in the same hotel, newly married Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) waits for her photographer husband, who is mostly out of town on assignments. Charlotte is lonely and facing the big existential question -- what she's going to do with her life.
Bob and Charlotte's paths cross in the hotel's New York Bar, and they see similarities in their situations. Their friendship increases because they both are non-business guests who speak the same language. (This is why the story could not work if the film were set in a hotel in New York or even Buenos Aires.)
There are plenty of extracurricular events to break up the meditations and tensions of the two characters: A young people's karaoke party in Tokyo, Bob's television appearance with "Japan's Johnny Carson" and so on.
Still, Bob and Charlotte are kindred spirits whose relationship is important and approaches, in a way, but does not proceed to the anticipated dramatic conflict or resolution.
The Japanese setting acts effectively as a third principal in the movie, giving it the literal "translation" of the title that refers also to the distance between Bob and Charlotte and their respective places in life.
If you haven't seen it, it's worth a look.
Notes
Scarlett Johansson was still a newbie in this outing, but she has established herself as a substantial actor in it and since. It is perhaps ironic that she has earned most of her fortune playing the Black Widow in Disney's Marvel movies; in fact, a "Black Widow" film is slated for release next year.
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And, yes, the problems of two small people in the context of 2020 don't amount to a hill of beans.
This movie, Steven Spielberg's third, was released in 1982 after Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Its first-year sales were greater than those for the first Star Wars film, a result that gobsmacked Hollywood and established Spielberg as the pre-eminent filmmaker of his generation.
Most of us have seen it before, but let's recap the story. A being from another planet is left behind on earth when his spaceship leaves in the middle of the night to avoid humans investigating their presence in a forest.
The being, eventually named E.T., wanders into the garden shed behind a suburban family house. Elliott, a 10-year-old boy who lives in the house with his mother, younger sister and older brother discovers E.T. and offers acceptance, friendship and Reese's Pieces candies to the puzzled alien.
There is tension in the house because the dad is gone. The mom learns that he is off in Mexico with a girlfriend. One of the boys calls the other "penis breath," which, given how square moviegoers were at the time, caused critics to warn parents not to take children under the age of eight to see the film.
Effectively, E.T. becomes Elliott's imaginary friend -- such are not uncommon comforts for children -- and then, as the two other siblings inevitably encounter E.T., he becomes a family member to be protected from the still-menacing adult men searching the neighborhood and tracking the strange footprints they have found.
E.T.'s physical form also was designed with children in mind. He does not look at all like a human, but he is about Elliott's height, has two arms, two legs and great big eyes that reflect emotion.
In addition, E.T. is a quick study. He learns English by watching television and applies what he learns to voice the film's memorable line, "E.T. phone home", that expresses his dearest wish. E.T. also applies what he already knows (unexplainable, but it works) to contact fellow extra-terrestrials on his home planet. In the process, he identifies so completely with Elliott that, when E.T.'s health declines in an unfamiliar environment, Elliott gets sick too.
The goal becomes to help E.T. return to his home. This effort knits his adoptive family and neighborhood children into a magical effort that leads to the expected conclusion.
The film retains its interest because the children and their world don't seem so different from that of today -- except for those bikes with small wheels and banana seats -- and because it gratifies the sincerity of all children and their wishes to do good. Adults who have happy memories of the story might want to share this movie with younger persons of their acquaintance.
Note
A caveat: In the movie, 10-year-old Elliott's class (presumably fifth grade), is assigned a science activity that may not be familiar to students of this generation: the dissection of live frogs that students have narcotized but that still have beating hearts. This apparently was a middle school project in some locations, but in my city, it was only a high school biology exercise. My impression is that it since has been eliminated and replaced, occasionally by "dissection" of frog-shaped silicone material. E.T. casts the project as painful for big-hearted Elliott and gives him a chance to display his honorable and humane nature; but even the set-up may be more stressful for today's young viewers than the occasional "shit" bombs sprinkled through the script.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is the story of an accomplished musical group, five sisters who are well known among churchgoing African Americans and fans of gospel music but only to a few of the rest of us. It's about time we learned about them.
Lifetime released this movie in April, and it was hugely popular. It still can be found on various streaming services.
Great as the sisters were and are, however, the plot belongs to their mother, the indomitable Dr. Mattie Moss Clark, played with distinction by Aunjanue Ellis (who has been cast to play the mom in King Richard, a 2021 Will Smith movie about the father of Venus and Serena Williams.) Mattie is a rigorous woman, always attired in handsome but modest suits with lovely brooches and tasteful hats.
She is also a devout member of the Church of God in Christ, and she sees her music as central to her devotion to Jesus. She is exacting in both spheres, and not least with her daughters.
The film opens with a Clark Sisters' a capella performance of "Halleluja" -- not the Handel one. Its harmonies are lovely and joyful and infectious, even in a country ever-less receptive to people who believe in redemption and strive sincerely to achieve it.
Then we see some of the tensions. Mattie's second husband, a minister, wants her at home, and she can't always be there, and so the marriage ends. When Mattie has worked out a new vocal arrangement for her daughters' voices, she pulls them out of bed before dawn to practice it. When an adult daughter shows up at the family home wearing pants, Mattie closes the door on her. (This is not that long ago, when serious Christian women like Mattie wore skirts and dresses.)
Mattie and her daughters' work is moving and beautiful. Over time the Clark Sisters' fame spreads from their Detroit home across the country. They are nominated for Grammy awards, release fine albums and, after their mother's 1994 death, continue to dazzle audiences with their religious-inflected songs, many of them written by Twinkie, the second daughter who for a time was estranged from her family.
In fact, much of this film is melodrama. A devout, devoted parent who is also a martinet will provoke rebellion in children. Longtime followers of the Clark Sisters know much of the story, but it is somewhat less approachable for those who are not.
What is approachable is the music. Its religious message is heartfelt and ennobling; it carries the whole enterprise. It's worth a watch.
Note:
One of the sisters withdrew from the group long ago. The remaining four (one at the keyboard) performed this moving number at Aretha Franklin's funeral in 2018.
Banjos and folk music are fine, but African American music -- from jazz to swing to soul to hip hop -- have defined American music more than anything else, and not least because of the redemption themes of music from Black Christian churches. Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye, Whitney Houston, John Legend, the Staples Singers and many others got their starts in churches where the Jesus message gave them their voices during and after not-so-distant Jim Crow era.
I went looking for something new to watch last week and found this movie.
It interested me for several reasons. It was the film version of the second Jon Krakauer book I had enjoyed. (The first, Into Thin Air, is the sobering account of a tragic Everest climbing season.)
What drew me to the book was its focus on Alaska, a state I have visited several times and that figured more in my family's life than in the lives of most Americans.
But my memory of the book was limited. Most broadly, it is the story of a young man whose 62-pound corpse was discovered in 1992 by moose hunters in an abandoned bus in the wilderness north of Fairbanks and within view of Denali, the tallest mountain in North America. The book covered some of Christopher McCandless' history, including his post-college abandonment (with some cause) of his family, and his adventures between then and his death. These included stops in rural South Dakota, Mexico, a desultory downtown Los Angeles and a hippie trailer park.
The movie was made well in 2007 by Sean Penn, who is a bit of an iconoclast himself and whose story valorizes McCandless' search for freedom as emphasized by at least one song in its Eddie Vedder-informed score.
This search for freedom, discussed in book and film, has made McCandless an emblem. His flight to the west is an idea urged first by Horace Greeley in 1865 but one that still resonates and especially in Alaska. But the freedom he seeks, informed by Tolstoy and Jack London, is not defined. And his careful preparation for life alone in the great white north is not enough to protect him from nature itself.
I watched this movie because of a personal wish to get out of the house this year. But I get the impression that the story appeals most to young people grappling with their futures. They project their own views of who Chris McCandless was onto what they know of his life, and they are moved by his courage and his willingness to risk all. Especially in the movie, he lives on as a tragic hero.
Note:
So many Into the Wild fans have endangered themselves trekking to the storied bus (and needing rescue) that it finally was removed just about exactly one month ago to prevent more deaths like the one suffered by Alex McCandless.
