MovieMonday: Roma

Here is a beautifully filmed movie from Alfonso Cuarón, who won Academy Awards for directing and editing the gripping 2013 film Gravity.

It is a deeply personal effort -- set in the Colonia Roma neighborhood of Mexico City, in a house very like the one where Cuarón was raised, in a family very similar to his own and in the early 1970s when he was a child.  Its main character is Cleo, the housekeeper/nanny who is much like the woman who helped raise Cuarón and to whom the film is dedicated.

It is a beautiful observation of all these moments and people, and many critics think it is the best movie of the year.

I'm not so sure.

The point of Roma is the depiction of a native woman who has come from the country to work for a family.  She is hardworking, loving and kind.  Without a movie like this, we would never have a chance to meet such a woman and appreciate the life she lives -- part employee, part family member.

There are long, leisurely scenes of Cleo at work, Cleo helping the children and Cleo occasionally bearing the brunt of tension between the children's parents, whose marriage is coming apart. 

 Cleo also is passive, which is not surprising given her station in life. So the movie gives her a boyfriend who abandons her when she is pregnant, reports of political unrest and a picture-window view of 1971's Corpus Christie riot in which paramilitary enforcers killed 100 protesting students, plus a very painful childbirth experience.

Cuarón spent more than 10 years thinking about and planning this movie.  He casted it almost entirely with non-professional actors who acquit themselves well, including Yalitza Aparicio, a preschool teacher from Oaxaca whose portrayal of Cleo feels true.  The director also wrote the screenplay and kept it entirely to himself, revealing each day's shooting scenes to the actors just before the cameras rolled.

The result is moving but not the kind of cinema that large audiences are going to find satisfying.  It feels like family life, which, when you think about it, includes events in sequence but not large plot arcs.  Things just happen.  Time goes by.

The film was purchased initially by Netflix, which planned only to stream it for its 140 million subscribers.  Later, after critics lauded Roma following showings at film festivals, the movie was released in a few theaters, perhaps to make it eligible for prizes in the coming award season.  It is now available on home screens and still at some theaters.

Viewers who admire good cinematography should see the movie on a large screen in a theater because, as I keep saying, it is beautiful.


Film Today

The most popular films at the moment are Aquaman, which introduces yet another comic book hero; a sequel to Disney's 1964 Mary Poppins; an eighth, really nice Transformers movie based on the popular children's toys from 1980s and 1990s; and an all-new Spider Man movie, the seventh 

It's tempting to conclude that the point of movies like these is to sell affiliated toys and T-shirts.  

MovieMonday: The Grinch -- and Grinches Past

Here we have the latest iteration of a holiday tale that had its debut in a children's picture book 61 years ago.  Everyone knows the story by now -- a cranky green-furred animal tries and fails to quash the Christmas spirit in a friendly village called Whoville.

This is the first 3-D computer-animated Grinch story, and it comes from the Illumination group that produced the "Despicable Me" series, among other films, all of which were very popular.

The imagery is creative and lovingly detailed, and the characters -- including the Grinch, in his way -- are winsome.  The narrative remains faithful to the original story's large and small elements. 

Small children will enjoy the story, as will teenagers and adults who remember earlier Grinch encounters from their own childhoods.

The themes, secular then and now, are two:  It is good to be nice, and Christmas is about more than decorations and presents.

Perhaps what is most remarkable is the enduring popularity of a very simple story.


The Grinch Evolution

1957:   Book

"How the Grinch Stole Christmas!", a 64-page picture book, was released in time for the holiday season.  Over subsequent years, it became a seasonal standard, selling many millions of copies. The cave-dwelling Grinch and his antics were the story, augmented with bit parts for his dog, Max, and a little girl, Cindy Lou, against the background of the always happy population of Whoville.


1964:  Cartoon

The estimable Chuck Jones (creator of Wile E. Coyote and other Looney Tunes stars) organized a hand-drawn Grinch television cartoon with the help of author Dr. Seuss (Theodor Geisel.) They added a couple songs -- notably "You're a Bad One, Mr. Grinch" -- and enlisted Boris Karloff, the famed horror movie actor, to narrate.  The cartoon ran about 22 minutes, 25 minutes with credits, and was perfect for a 30-minute children's show.


1994: The Musical

A Minneapolis children's theater group produced a musical play that later became a holiday staple at a San Diego playhouse, then moved to Broadway for seasonal runs from 2006 to 2008 and fanned out in road companies around the country.  The stars were all costumed humans, and the story was stretched, presumably with humorous pranks and songs, into a 90-minute entertainment appropriate for family audiences.


2000:  The First Movie

Director Ron Howard released a more detailed film that starred Jim Carrey as Jim Carrey the Grinch.  The story was padded substantially, giving the Grinch an origin story and paying more attention to Max and Cindy Lou.  Other characters were added, including Cindy Lou's postmaster father and her ga-ga-for-gifts mother, a pompous Whoville  mayor,  and, yes, a sort-of Grinch love interest.  Actors playing the citizens of Whoville were fitted out with unusual upturned noses and pouchy upper lips (see Cindy Lou's father at left), and new songs were added to the cartoon's music.  The whole business clocked in at just under two hours.





2018: The Second Movie

The new film is not quite as long as the 2000 one, but still is much longer than the original story.  It also is attuned to the current moment.  Cindy Lou has an overworked single mom. Whoville has a female mayor. The relationship between the Grinch and his dog is more fully developed and resembles that of  Wallace and Gromit from the popular claymation series of the 1990s.  Before outfitting Max with the book's pseudo-reindeer horn, the Grinch recruits a real reindeer, a sweet plus-sized fellow named Fred, to lead his sleigh.  In addition to a Grinch-Whoville reconciliation, the film ends with a Christmas feast.  Old Grinch songs are sung, plus traditional carols and new hip-hop numbers.


Conclusion

The original Grinch story was an abbreviated version of Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" aimed at the K-3 crowd.  The basic story elements never have changed.

The appeal never seems to subside.  The original storybook is on teachers' and librarians' lists of the best 100 children's books of all time.  Regional theater troupes still perform the musical version in December.  Families still gather around the television to watch the 1964 cartoon and the 2000 movie on television and streaming channels, respectively.  The current film either will get a second theatrical release in 2019 or start streaming on premium channels as well.

For a country that increasingly seems to be populated by non-Christians and adamant atheists, that's pretty remarkable.

MovieMonday: Free Solo

More than 30 people have fallen to their deaths trying to climb El Capitan, a 3,200-foot granite peak in Yosemite National Park.  

In June 2017, two climbers, working together and with ropes to protect them, fell to their deaths.

The next month, Alex Honnold became the first person to climb El Cap "free solo," alone and without ropes.  The climb took him less than four hours and was the culmination of an eight-year ambition.  His preparation and that climb are the subjects of this documentary.

Honnold is an unusual guy who began climbing things -- trees, mountains, buildings, whatever -- when he was 11 years old.  He is now the most prominent climber in the world.  He's been featured on multiple magazine covers because, well, pictures of people tempting death while hanging on sheer mountain faces are pretty darn dramatic. 

The film, from National Geographic, which also ran a Honnold cover, was organized and shot by Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, who also made "Meru," a well-received 2015 doc about a Himalayan climb.

"Free Solo" has had a limited theatrical release and soon will become available for streaming online.    Still, even as it shows in fewer theaters, ticket sales per screen have remained relatively high.  

The movie itself has thrilling photography shot from the ground, by camera-bearing climbers perched on nearby ledges and by aerial drones.  These images, which show best on large theater screens, seem to appeal mostly to men who thrill to stories of physical challenges.  (Yes, there are also some intrepid women climbers.)

Then Honnold is put in context in the observations of other climbers, who describe an unusual sport and small community that I had not known existed, and also the falls that have cost the lives of dozens of them.  

As for Honnold, we hear about a distant but not abusive family upbringing and how he started to learn how to hug people when, he says, he was "about 23."  Almost 10 years later, he adds, "Now I'm a pretty good hugger."  He's an unusual character, but by no means an unpleasant one.

We see him with his head tucked into an MRI machine for a study that reveals his amygdala is virtually dormant, which is not particularly surprising.  The amygdala is the area of the brain that, in the rest of us, reacts automatically to frightening or threatening stimuli.  

Then we learn about Honnold's home, a well-appointed van, and his demanding exercise routine and his girlfriend, a nice person but one who can be a distraction when he is climbing.  (In not entirely credible style, the two are filmed discussing their relationship and their plans and feelings, which looks like acting and seems a bit out of place in a documentary. But this is nit-picking.) 

As one climbing friend observes, "Free solo needs mental armor.  Having a close romantic relationship removes that armor, and you can't have both at the same time."

Anyway.  Alex may be fearless, but he is disciplined.  He practices every part of the El Cap climb multiple times with ropes, and he fills notebooks with observations that he memorizes about every step and handhold of his planned ascent. His girlfriend drives off as the day of the climb grows near.

Then comes the climb itself, which is condensed into less than 20 minutes, not as much as I'd have liked to see.

By the movie's end, it's tempting to wonder what next challenge Honnold will set for himself  and what it will cost him.  It reminds the viewer of the climbing friend's comment earlier on.

"If you're pushing the edge, eventually you find the edge."

MovieMonday: Creed II

This second Creed movie is well made, well acted and enjoyable to watch.  It also is a classic sequel in that it takes a popular original and then piles on More.

The original in this case is 2015's Creed, a film I admired.  "Creed" revived the Rocky franchise and gave it a fresh start.

The "Creed II" setup is this:  Adonis Creed (Michael B. Jordan) has trained with Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) and put together a good boxing career.  He wins the world heavyweight championship and proposes to his girlfriend Bianca (Tessa Thompson).

Meanwhile, in Ukraine, an old Rocky foe, Ivan Drago (Dolph Lungren), seethes.  The Russian fighter killed Adonis' father in a boxing match but then lost everything in Rocky IV and wants his son, Viktor (Florian Munteanu), to reclaim the family honor by defeating Adonis Creed.

Adonis wants to fight to avenge his father's death.  His adoptive mother, Mary Anne (Phylicia Rashad) opposes the idea.  Rocky refuses to participate.  Both believe he wants to fight for the wrong reason.  Adonis fights anyway.  It does not go well.

Then Team Adonis reforms with a new sense of purpose and prepares for a final act, which, like the final act in "Rocky IV" is set in Moscow.

In addition to more old Rocky history, this movie has many more family themes.  Adonis and his father, Adonis and his mother, Adonis and Bianca, Adonis and Bianca and their baby, Adonis and Rocky, Rocky missing his late wife, Rocky missing the son he no longer sees, Ivan and Viktor, both Dragos missing the wife and mother who abandoned them.

Again, the film works fine. Its theme -- a gutty boxer with something to prove and people who matter to him -- may draw new, younger fans to the loyal Rocky audiences who have been arguing for years about which is the best movie from that first six-film cycle.

But this movie, while good, is not great.  The story is effective but offers nothing new, as the original "Creed" did.

The question is whether there is a perpetual audience for more movies with the same plot, with or without Michael B. Jordan and/or Sylvester Stallone

World War I: Guns, Gas, Poetry and Painting

November 11, 2018

Wilfred Owen

One century ago today, World War I ended.  Germany had been defeated and signed a surrender.  All combatants agreed that the Armistice would commence on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918.  

I'm not sure the 11-11-11 symbolism was helpful.  Once an agreement had been reached, why not lay down arms immediately?  There were telegraph wires to send messages rapidly by then, and at least a few more soldiers and civilians might have survived if the order had gone out immediately.  As it was, 17 million persons, military and civilian, already had died.

Meanwhile, in England, church bells were ringing to celebrate the end of fighting when a telegram was delivered to the Shrewsbury home of Thomas and Susan Owen.  Its message was that their son, Wilfred, had been killed in France just one week earlier, cut down by machine gun fire as he led troops across a canal in Ors.  He was just 25.

Like the telegraph, the machine gun was a newish innovation.  More than 50 years earlier, during the American Civil War, the first multiple-shot weapon, the Gatling gun, was introduced by the North.  By World War I, Germany had refined the idea and in 1917 introduced a machine gun that could spit out 600 bullets a minute.  One of those bullets killed Wilfred Owen.

Another innovation of the war was the armored tank, deployed first by the British in the Battle of Somme in 1916 and soon afterward by the German army.  In 1915, the Germans began lobbing chlorine gas during battles; the English responded with gas attacks of their own.  The most deadly gas, mustard gas, was introduced by German forces in 1917; it too was taken up by the English.    

Owen, a tutor and teacher, had been fighting in the British army since 1915.  After more than two years at the front, he was sent back to England to be treated for for "shell shock," which we now would call PTSD.  During that period he wrote war poems that reflected his disillusionment and anger.  He left these behind when he returned to the battlefield in July 1918.  They were published in book form in 1920.

Owen had read his classics:  Homer's "Iliad," the history/poem about theTrojan War and Horace's odes about the internal battles between the assassination of Julius Caesar and the transformation of the Roman republic into the Roman Empire.  

The Romans built their influence with wars of conquest, and Horace was a sort of court poet who was expected to glorify heroism and even death in battle.  

World War I wasn't that kind of war, however, and Wilfred Owen's most famous poem laid out the differences.   

One Horatian line that Owen borrowed was this:  "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori,"  which translates as "It is sweet and honorable to die for one's country."  Owen had seen too much.  He called that notion "The old Lie."

Here is the poem itself.

Dulce et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind; 

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! - An ecstasy of fumbling

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime.- 

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin,

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,- 

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori. 

This poem is strong for its complex structure, for its imagery and for its unflinching description of a soldier's death throes following a mustard gas attack.  

Another artist, painter John Singer Sargent, visited a World War I battlefield and observed soldiers who had been blinded by mustard gas at a treatment station.  From this experience, he made this painting, "Gassed," which was completed in March 1919.
  

The painting is huge, more than 20 feet long, which suggests how strongly Sargent took its subject.  Later, when he was commissioned to do group portraits of British commanders and and statesmen, those paintings were smaller.

So that was the war:  A triumph of military innovations and the death of millions, remembered in art but without a meaning understandable to the men who fought or to their loved ones.

World War I was known for several decades as the War to End all Wars and the Great War.  Then, in 1939, came World War II, which was distinguished by more deaths, deadlier weapons and not so much art.

Hiatus

An unexpected turn of events has landed the Idiosyncratist on the injured reserve list for a week or so.

When the Id returns, there will be a rumination on the centennial of the World War I armistice and a delayed Movie Monday post.

MovieMonday: Bohemian Rhapsody

This is a perfectly enjoyable movie about Queen, the stadium/anthem band of the late 1970s and early 1980s, but it pulls a bunch of punches on its way to wrapping the story into a neat, coherent package.

If you want to know how the script rearranges timelines, adds fake conflicts and ignores unappealing facts to stitch together a not particularly truthy biopic, this Rolling Stone story has the details.

That said, there is much to like, most notably Rami Malek's portrayal of Freddie Mercury, Queen's charismatic and complex lead singer.  We meet him as Farrokh Bulsara, a Parsi baggage handler at Heathrow Airport who talks his way into fronting a band he admires.  Minutes later, he has changed the band's name and his own, and the group are writing and performing many still-familiar rock classics.  

Gwilym Lee also does a nice job as Brian May, the band's cool and very capable lead guitarist; his steadiness contrasts with Mercury's moods and sinuous stage antics.  (The real Brian May is reported to have shaped much of the movie's plot, which soft-pedals Mercury's gayness and drug use, which were central to his public and private identities.  Mercury died of AIDs in 1991.) 

There are nice scenes of Queen composing songs, and also many fragments of performances.  These will appeal to Queen fans who grew up with the music and now are middle-aged, the audience demographic in the screening I saw.  Their enthusiasm, stoked by a monthslong promotion campaign, gave the film a remarkable $50 million opening weekend in the U.S.  

Here are the songs most prominent in the movie:  “Another One Bites the Dust,” “We Are the Champions,” "We Will Rock You," "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" and, of course, "Bohemian Rhapsody." If you have fond memories of these, by all means go.


Context

Queen's performing career ended in 1986.  The movie's opening and final scenes focus on the enormous 1985 LiveAid concert in London's Wembley Stadium.  

The band's cultivation of crowd involvement -- clapping, stamping, singing along, echoing Mercury's phrases, etc. -- prefigure the current situation, in which musicians make most of their money from performances and not from sales of recordings.

Last summer, Kenny Chesney attracted an audience of almost 59,000 to Met Life Stadium, the New Jersey home of football's Jets and Giants.  Over the course of the six-show stand, total attendance approached 390,000 in a region not typically associated with country music.  It's clear that being part of large concert events is central to the appeal.