Monday: Hamilton: The Movie

This film of the original Broadway play became available  for television viewing  Friday, just in time for the Fourth of July.   It had been scheduled for theatrical release in October 2021, but nobody knew if movie theaters would re-open by then or if audiences would be willing even to go to theaters.

So the film opened on Disney+, the entertainment giant's new streaming effort.  No, you cannot watch it on one of those free trials that Hulu and other services offer.  But look at it this way: A month or three of streaming is much, much cheaper than a ticket to the play ever was.

I saw the Hamilton in New York in late 2015 with the same cast and loved it.

But I was wary of this filmed version.  I wondered whether it could convey the enthusiasm that Hamilton generated in Broadway audiences.  In fact, it can't.  But what makes up for that is a three-camera production that shares all the full-stage scenes and also close shots of actors' faces in key moments.  And the actors in this are great.

We all know the story.  If you want detail, you can read my discussion or, better, Ron Chernow's  absorbing biography, Alexander Hamilton.

Lin-Manuel Miranda, a Puerto Rican immigrant, read that book and made the material his own by writing this play, scoring it with hip-hop songs and nods to operatic recitative dialogue, and then casting African American, Hispanic and Asian actors in the key roles.  The effect is so powerful that it is impossible to imagine Hamilton with a white cast. 

Think of it as a huge 21st-century expansion of the idea of Woody Guthrie's song, "This Land Is Your Land."  Most Americans can trace their ancestry to immigrants or Native Americans who were treated badly or worse, but the message we have for each other now is this:  This land belongs to you and me -- to all of us.

It's a generous theme, and I hope we will keep it in mind as a pandemic foments emotional  frustration and rage, and, worse, anarchy by people aiming to burn down the whole foundation without offering a better alternative.  This too shall pass.

Meanwhile, watch Hamilton.  It's just right for this moment.


Notes

If you are under the age of 30, you probably know the Hamilton score by heart.  If not, this highlights video will bring you up to  date.

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Hamilton creator Miranda was one of those high school theater kids (musical theater in his case), and he has said that he knew from an early age that if he wanted to make a career of his passion, he needed to come up with new productions that told stories about people like him.  His first play, In the Heights, set in the neighborhood where he was raised, was very popular in New York theaters and has been made into a film that is waiting to be released.

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7/11/2004 -- Today is the 196th anniversary of the Hamilton-Burr duel. Last week, David Crow at Den of Geek examined the antagonism between the two men and what was at stake and asks whether Hamilton really did "throw away my shot." 

Free Speech in Troubled Times

(An old colleague, Jeff Unger, brought this piece to my attention.  Jeff makes a daily practice of posting interesting bits of writing on his Facebook page.) 

“To an Anxious Friend”  

William Allen White 

July 27, 1922

You tell me that law is above freedom of utterance. And I reply that you can have no wise laws nor free entertainment of wise laws unless there is free expression of the wisdom of the people – and, alas, their folly with it. But if there is freedom, folly will die of its own poison, and the wisdom will survive. That is the history of the race. It is proof of man’s kinship with God. You say that freedom of utterance is not for time of stress, and I reply with the sad truth that only in times of stress is freedom of utterance in danger. No one questions it in calm days, because it is not needed. And the reverse is true also; only when free utterance is suppressed is it needed, and when it is needed, it is most vital to justice. 

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This is the beginning of an editorial White published in the Emporia Gazette, the Kansas daily he bought as a young man.  He seems to have written it at a moment of national stress (between the end of World War I and the beginning of the Depression.)  The implication is that the "anxious friend" wants the suppression of free speech and the imposition of order.  In some ways, we are at a similar junction today.  Here are some of the protest signs I saw in news reports last month.   I'm not sure I understand all of the messages, but they all are speech.

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Here is  the final paragraph of White's piece: 

So, dear friend, put fear out of your heart. This nation will survive, this state will prosper, the orderly business of life will go forward if only men can speak in whatever way given them to utter what their hearts hold - by voice, by posted card, by letter, or by press. Reason has never failed men. Only force and repression have made the wrecks in the world.


Note 1-- Here is the full editorial.

Note 2 -- After dark, July 4: We are back in our staid suburb after spending the early part of the year in a major urban area.  The noise of fireworks going off, previously an annual event only on this day, has lost its charm.

Sleeping at night was difficult this spring.  The Sinaloa cartel moved a major amount of meth into Southern California, which meant low prices for addicts who enjoy long walks and screaming, irrational epithets from midnight till dawn.

Plus this:  explosions.  The first time, these woke me at midnight and I called 911 to report what I feared were gunshots or bombs.
           Silly me.  "They're fireworks," said the police dispatcher.  "What do you want us to do?"
           The effect, besides wakefulness, is a certain air of menace or dread, which seems to be the intended purpose.  I understand the fireworks, like the shootings, have been much more common in New York City.

MovieMonday: The Great Mouse Detective

This still-enjoyable movie from Disney was among the first to use CGI, or computer-generated imagery.

Disney began doing cartoons the hard way with Snow White, which featured laborious hand-drawn cel-by-cel movements and a multiple image camera that moved characters and backgrounds at different speeds as a story progressed.  Later cartoon productions were clunkier and produced with much less attention to detail, which showed.  By the middle of the last century, the character-driven Warner Brothers cartoons were valued, but those and Disney classics are the only ones remembered today.

Besides good animation, this comic film is a loyal, mouse-driven derivation of the Sherlock Holmes stories and books written by Arthur Conan Doyle and published between 1892 and 1927.

Its story begins in London when a toymaker is kidnapped after giving his daughter a handmade gift.  The daughter, Olivia, seeks help from a gentleman, Dr. David Q. Dawson (Watson.) She needs help  to find Basil of Baker Street (named after Basil Rathbone who played Sherlock in a the mid-20th century film series, no doubt,) to find her father.

Dawson is a kindly fellow, and together the two find Basil's mousehole under the Baker Street apartment where a gentleman upstairs (Sherlock?) plays a violin in silhouette in a window in the evening moonlight.

Basil's landlady, Mrs. Judson (Hudson in the books) welcomes Olivia in a motherly way, and Basil agrees to help find Olivia's father, who has been kidnapped by an agent of the dastardly Ratigan (Professor Moriarty.)

From there, the adventures and conflicts build and build, climaxing finally in battles over and inside London's most famous timepiece.

This film is fun to watch for children and adults.  It also is true enough to the character of Sherlock (who always has been what we would now call "on the spectrum" but whose hard shell is cracked by the distress of innocent victims) and Watson to prepare children for later literary or film versions of Conan Doyle stories.

Besides being more visually arresting, the film is anchored more in history than popular culture of the current day.  Almost 35 years after its release, Mouse Detective retains interest because it refers to old stories that don't rely on tropes like Lego/DC superheroes, Pokemon characters and twerking animals.  (Twerking was a 1980s dance phenomenon that was said to have ended in 2013, but you wouldn't know it if you watched more recent children's animation.)

If you share time with a young person who has seen this movie, by the time the person is 10, for instance, you can enjoy the Rathbone movies that date to 1939, or the still-enjoyable British Granada television series that features Jeremy Brett as Sherlock.  A young person who has enjoyed Mouse Detective many times (as children do with favorite books or videos) will appreciate instantly Sherlock's deductive reasoning, his reliance on Watson for human interaction and his absolute and unswerving focus on solving mysteries.

In short, this cartoon is nearly 35 years old but still worth enjoying.


Notes

This movie was enhanced by the participation of two film legends.

The first was the late Henry Mancini, who scored the movie and is most famous for "Moon River" the song (with lyrics by Johnny Mercer) for the Breakfast at Tiffany's film (that I mean to see someday) and the "Pink Panther Theme" from the Peter Sellers movie series.
           If you have a moment, enjoy the first minute or so of this Mouse Detective scene, in which the three heroes search for clues in a factory of wind-up toys (a perfect setting for a Disney movie.) The musical accompaniment matches the action perfectly.  Mancini also contributed catchy music for Ratigan and his goon team.

The second is also-late Vincent Price, who voices the character of Ratigan, a rat, yes, who aims to replace the mouse monarch of England on the1897 occasion of the actual Queen Victoria's 50-year jubilee.
            Price died in the last century after a long film career as a master of evil.  You can almost hear him twirling his mustaches as he reads his lines with devilish glee

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Contemporary parents are getting mildly leery of this film because it includes a mouse chanteuse singing and stripping off (some) clothing in a performance at a sleazy riverfront bar, and because Dr. Dawson is made briefly silly after being served a mickey at the same locale.  So while film experts recommend the movie only for children over the age of six, some parents are upping the minimum recommended viewing age to eight.

             Difficult as it is to protect children now from all the coarsening content of our popular culture,  if parents focus their distress on a 1986 Disney cartoon in which honorable good guys help a frightened young heroine, the parents surely will have their hands full every time a child uses a computer tablet or walks outside the family home's front door. 

MovieMonday: One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

This is an odd film.  In some ways it reflects a period of national tension not entirely unlike our own.  In other ways, it feels like an artifact from a time capsule.

The movie takes its title and plot from Ken Kesey's 1962 novel.  The story is driven by one R.H. McMurphy (Jack Nicholson,) who has cleverly arranged to get himself transferred from prison to an insane asylum.

When he arrives, the lead doctor tells McMurphy he is there to be evaluated. "The people who sent you here think you've been faking it to get out of your work detail," he says.

This is true, of course, but McMurphy tells the doctor "I'll cooperate  with you 100 percent!"

Well, haha with that.  Murphy is a recidivist known for fighting and, most recently, for a tryst with a girl of 15.  "She told me she was 18!" is his story.

McMurphy joins a ward with 17 other patients, some unresponsive but many who are not noticeably wacky and who are also unusually compliant.

He sets out immediately to upset the quiet order of the place.  First he refuses to swallow his morning pill, presumably a downer, as the other patients do.

Then he challenges the cold, controlling head of the ward, Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher,) pushing for the ward television to be turned on for his group to watch the first game of the 1963 World Series.  He's clever about it, but she prevails and the series goes unwatched.

Next McMurphy coaxes the tall, silent Native American, Chief Bromden (Will Sampson) into a basketball game that provokes great glee.  Then he liberates an asylum bus to take his group on an unauthorized fishing expedition and just keeps upping the ante with booze and hookers, which we all know are the true cures for psychosis.  Or maybe it was a 1970s thing.

Over time, the asylum administrators consider sending McMurphy back to the big house, but Nurse Ratched demurs.  "I think we can help him," she says, persuading the others.

You wouldn't guess it from the pacing, but this is a pivot point with consequences that cause McMurphy to change his mind.   Good actors relish sharing the moments when their thinking changes -- and it's missing here.  That missing piece, taken with several smaller false steps, renders the movie's resolution much less satisfying than it could have been.

Still, Nicholson's energetic portrayal of McMurphy is great, and the gradual unveiling of Bromden's story is moving.  The other inmates are mostly along for decoration around the edges, but they do their best.  (Two of the minor ones are Martini, the pre-Taxi Danny Devito, and Taber, played by Christopher Lloyd before his Back to the Future appearances; I thought those guys looked familiar.)

Cuckoo's Nest did strike a chord when it was released in 1975, however.  It debuted six months after the U.S. pulled its last troops out of Vietnam, capping a period of abiding anger, protest and mistrust of authority.  At the next year's Academy Awards, Cuckoo's Nest won the five "big" Oscars --  best picture, best actor (Nicholson), best actress (Fletcher,) best director and best screenplay.

One indicator of its declining appeal over the years may be its ranking in the American Film Institute's listing of the Best 100 American Movies.  The list was first released in 1998, when Cuckoo's Nest came in at No. 20.  When the list was updated in 2007, it had dropped to No. 33, and not because there were 13 more significant films during the intervening years.  (There has been no third iteration of the list.)


Notes

Some of the enthusiasm for the film in its day must have been sparked by familiarity with Ken Kesey.   He wrote the novel while he was studying at Stanford, working at an insane asylum and presenting himself as a subject for the now-famous early testing of LSD and perhaps other psychedelic pharmaceuticals.
          After the release of his second book (the more critically acclaimed Sometimes a Great Notion) in 1964, Kesey pulled together a busload of similarly minded Merry Pranksters who toured the country over years, including the first Summer of Love and until the end of the turbulent 1960s.  This 1999 documentary by Zane Kesey, the author's son, presents the story with contemporaneous film and commentary from people who were there.

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Kesey's work in the asylum informed his view that many people lodged there were not particularly insane.  I have not visited such institutions, and I have no idea whether they did or do house people as mildly disordered as the ones in this film -- but I'm skeptical.  Certainly the Cuckoo's Nest residents have almost nothing in common with the street people I encounter from time to time.

         In fact, the movie was released the same year as the unanimous Supreme Court ruling that people could not be committed involuntarily to asylums if their behavior did not endanger themselves or others.    I wrote about this decision several years ago.   Important as it was, we have not come to grips with its consequences, and we should be concerned that prisons now hold the largest numbers of people with brain diseases.

Homeless Town

A Southern California pier

I went to sleep early last night and woke very early.  Happens sometimes.

The light will come up soon on the West Coast, and a member of the local methamphetamine community is bellowing a common phrase using the F-word (a communication fetish of the group) on the public path not far from here.  He and his fellows often tweak and roam the streets during the dark hours to protect their possessions from theft.

It was worse a few weeks ago when several members of the tribe pitched camp in the visitors' parking lot of the building across the way.   As usually happens, the group relocated after the police dropped by a few times.


Two Hours Later

Full daylight, and a man downstairs is yelling.  "Get out of here!"  "You don't belong here!" "I'm calling the police!"

I walk to the end of the hallway, and see an older woman on her phone at the back entrance.  She is calling the police.  "I opened the door, and he rushed past me."

Someone in the downstairs apartment near the door sends a message:   "If you see a tall homeless looking man that is half dressed walking around our complex please know that he is not supposed to be here."

A few minutes later we are told the intruder has left the building.

MovieMonday: Da 5 Bloods

This latest Spike Lee Joint was in the works last year and wasn't planned for release just now.  But it arrived on Netflix, not in theaters, last week, and perhaps at an optimal moment. 

The original script, written by able television writers, was about white Vietnam vets revisiting their "tours" "in country," and most likely was based on news reporting about same.  It didn't resonate with the usual sources.

But Lee took it and made it his own, focusing on African American soldiers' participation in an unpopular war that cost 58,000 American lives and whose name echoes even to Americans born since 1975, the year that war was abandoned.  

In this iteration, the story involves four older black veterans gathering in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) with a plan to find the remains of the "best one of us all," Norman (Chadwick Boseman,) who died in battle; the four older friends want to find his remains and take them home for permanent burial.

They also are there to find a fortune in gold bars they found and buried before they left; some want personal wealth and others want reparations for African Americans who made up a disproportionate number of the front-line soldiers who fought and died in Vietnam.  Much discussion ensues on the matter.

The plot here is broad and, frankly, weak, but Lee makes the most of it by layering in context.

Da 5 Bloods opens with a several-minute montage of American culture between 1965 and 1975:  Muhammad Ali's refusal to be drafted,  war protests met with police shootings on campuses, Malcolm X, Angela Davis, two failed presidencies and, then as now, a country deeply divided. 

What works about the film are, first, its characters, whose bond is strong all these years later; second, the early battles seen on film and then repeated almost totally in current moments,  and third, the relevance of its Vietnam lessons in a current day marked by frustration and anger that could not have been anticipated when the Da 5 Bloods was assembled.

All the acting here is excellent, but the role of Paul, played by Delroy Lindo, commands attention for the Vietnam memories/PTSD that deepen and disturb him as the story unfolds.   (Note to producers: Organize a King Lear film or Broadway play around this actor.)

 Paul's son, David (Jonathan Majors of last year's The Last Black Man in San Francisco,) arrives to support his deeply conflicted father, who alternately loves and repudiates him.  

Then, too, are the observations of the war's remnants:  One of the four, Otis (Clarke Peters,) visits an old lover and meets the grown daughter he never knew he had.  An angry Vietnamese peddler who cannot sell his chickens yells at Americans who "killed my father and my mother!"  Vietnam is a different country now, but it still bears the marks of French colonialism and the American war.

What also stands out is the musical score of Terence Blanchard, a musician who has worked often with Lee and whose themes blend seamlessly with the script moments.  Also included are solo vocals by Marvin Gaye and the opening scene's accompaniment by the Chamber Brothers' version of their song, "Time Has Come Today," which certainly will endure longer than other pop/rock music of the Vietnam era.

Notes

In the film Paul's son says that he was not named for the Biblical David but for a member of the Temptations, presumably the Temps' lead singer, David El Ruffin, during the late 1960s.
         The four veterans' first names -- Paul, Otis, Melvin and Eddie -- just happen to be the first names of the first Temptations group.  The last of the 5 Bloods, the late Norman, has the same name as the Temptations' first producer, who is remembered for his efforts to secure for his artists full and equitable compensation for the popular music they made.
        These names, as well as the film score, suggest that Spike Lee is serious about his music.  Personally, I would like to attend a Michael Jackson Dance Party of his in Brooklyn one August, but I fear that my own dancing would embarrass me.

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Yes, there are references to Francis Coppola's Apocalypse Now (which itself was inspired by Joseph Conrad's novel, Heart of Darkness) and, yes, the veterans' reunion begins in an actual Vietnamese bar named for the Coppola film.  And, yes, when the four veterans and one son set off upriver in a boat, they do so to the only European music in the piece, Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries," which also was featured in the film.  But, no, the plot of Da 5 Bloods only imitates the plots of the other two works in places.  It is a different story and deserves to be understood as such.  

MovieMonday: The Interview

This 2014 film is a hybrid -- an "action adventure comedy" about a pair of television celebrity promoters who get sent to North Korea to assassinate a real person, the hermit kingdom's pudgy dictator, Kim Jong Un.

The television dudes are on-camera talent Dave Skylark (James Franco) and producer Aaron Rapoport (Seth Rogen, who co-directed) of "Skylark Tonight," a low-brow product that revels in gotcha revelations, as when (then-accused) homophobe Eminem says, "I like men," on camera.

"We could be serious," Aaron, the serious one, says.  "I can't keep doing this, okay?  We have to change."

Out of the blue, opportunity knocks.  It turns out that Kim Jong Un is a big fan of "Skylark Tonight."
He invites the pair to Pyongyang, where Kim will sit for his first live global television interview.

We know why this idea occurred to screenwriter Dan Sterling.  In 2013, Dennis Rodman, the flamboyant NBA star, visited a fan of his, Kim Jong Un, three times in North Korea.  At least once, Rodman was asked to seek the release of a Korean-American missionary held in a North Korean prison.

In this story, the celebrity-promoting journalists are invited to meet their fan, Kim, and are contacted by the CIA before they get on the plane.  A comely spook summons David and Aaron to remind them that North Korea is not a nice place because its ruler "is willing to let millions and millions of his own people die."

"We want you to take him out," she says.

She outfits the two with a well-concealed, slow-acting poison that can be administered very subtly and that will do its work only after Dave and Aaron have left the country.

This is a big job, and of course the effort goes wrong almost immediately -- but not before a stern but beautiful Kim lieutenant takes an interest in Aaron.

Meanwhile, Dave and Kim get on like long-lost brothers. They both love Katy Perry, and Kim assures Dave that, "We have many fat children in North Korea."

The two take a ride in the tank that Kim tells Dave was a gift from "Uncle Stalin."

"Oh, we call him Stallone," says Dave.

The dialog and humor are good here -- adolescent, yes, but not nearly as vulgar as has become common in recent years.  And, while honest, the film doesn't bludgeon home its message.  Audiences understood long before 2014 that North Korea was not a really nice place to live.

Ultimately, Dave and Aaron prevail in their mission.  The film ends on a hopeful note.


Problems Releasing a Film Then and Now

The Interview was edited and ready for an October 2014 theatrical open when a wrinkle arose.

Turned out that little fatty Kim was thin-skinned.  We in the US are happy to disparage our leaders, although the assassinations of four presidents have perhaps made us less eager for domestic entertainments about same.

And, to be fair, the international community would not weep bitter tears even now if Kim Jong Un were to leave this earth.

But when this movie was being promoted for wide release, it did attract attention and resentment in North Korea.  Threats from an organization called Guardians of Peace ("possibly" linked to North Korea, said the FBI) were issued.  Sony Pictures, which had undertaken to distribute the movie, was the subject of an enormous IT hack.

In addition, the amusingly named Peace Guardians threatened to bomb movie theaters that dared to show the film.  Wise international security experts pooh-poohed the idea.  They acknowledged that the Norks had sunk a non-military South Korean ship and also had launched a long-range but not nuclear missile just to show they could  attack Japan or other distant targets.  But the experts said these provocations were not serious and were merely efforts to gain attention. 

In short, people probably wouldn't be incinerated while watching The Interview at the cineplex, experts assured. 

Sadly, the "probably safe" reassurance wasn't entirely convincing to major theater chains or to potential viewers.  Most of the chains refused to book the film.

The solution was one that didn't optimize sales but did salvage the film.  It presaged the situation we are observing today. 

The Interview was introduced in fewer theaters, most of them independents, on December 24, 2014.  It also was released on Christmas Day on a pay-per-view basis. which allowed families who traditionally attended a movie on the holiday to watch it on the big screens in their homes.

Now, when the fear is indoor exposure to Covid-19, similar film rollout plans are being tried.

Theaters that open will sell tickets for fewer seats.  Home viewing options, for pay or on streaming services, will be available earlier and perhaps at higher prices.

Now, as then, we are feeling our way through hazards that we had never been anticipated before.