MovieMonday: Relic

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

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

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

Kay goes to the police department.  

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

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

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

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

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

The Economics

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

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

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

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

Note

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

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

MovieMonday: Waiting for the Barbarians

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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Let us give Coetzee credit for his literary awareness.

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

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

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

                     Those people were a kind of solution.

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

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

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

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

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

Enough already.

MovieMonday: Rebuilding Paradise

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

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

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

But the story deserves more information.

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

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

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

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

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


Notes

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

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

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

The Press and the 2016 Election

The Idiosyncratist is not an avid follower of American politics, but did write and publish these observations in October 2016.   As another dismal presidential election season heats up, not much seems to have changed.  

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This year, we have a divided electorate and two divisive candidates, each of whom seems to want to claim the populist mantle.  One promises to "fight" for us, and the other to "make America great again."

My sense is that most people are eager for the election to be over, perhaps especially members of the press, which seems to have lost its way in the two-year-long campaign season.


How We Got Here

Start with Donald Trump.  At the beginning of the Republican primary season, the party had 17 potential candidates, but 16 of them struggled in the shadows while the "news" network, CNN, gave Trump his own reality show.  For CNN, the ratings were great -- it was like the disappearance of Malaysian Flight 370, all day every day.  It went on for months.
        Trump didn't raise campaign funds until just before he got the Republican nomination because he didn't need money.  He got so much more coverage from CNN and other broadcast outlets that disapproved of him that no other Republican really had a chance. Trump is now the Republican candidate.
         My impression is that CNN now has taken up the cudgel to slay the monster it created.  Even so, it has much to answer for.

Continue with Hillary Clinton.  She's not a natural gasbag like Trump, but she is canny.  Her path to the nomination was paved by the raising of a $2 billion slush fund -- er, charitable foundation -- that scared all the credible challengers out of the Democratic primaries.  Even at that, it took a heavy Democratic National Committee thumb on the scale to help her defeat a 74-year-old socialist.

Clinton also has received many assists from the press.

        --In exchange for the opportunity to interview her, reporters have agreed to submit their questions ahead of time.  These interview opportunities were valuable because many of Clinton's speeches were at fundraisers closed to the press and because she spent more than six months of her campaign without holding a single press conference.

        --In one case, a reporter from an ostensibly serious publication exchanged emails with a Clinton campaign official to make sure the wording of his "news" posts were acceptable to the candidate.

        --In another case, a DNC operative obtained and shared with Clinton the exact wording of a question to be asked in one of the three televised debates.  Some reporter or editor apparently gave out that question, allowing one candidate the opportunity to prepare for it but not the other candidate.

        -- In August, the New York Times ran a front-page story, written by a "reporter," announcing that Donald Trump was so terrible that the traditional objectivity in coverage needed to be jettisoned in the more important effort to assure that he lost the election.  Asked later, the paper's executive editor said he shared the sentiment.

I used to be a reporter, and I sometimes covered elections, albeit smaller contests and against my oft-expressed preference to report on any other topic.  If I had committed any of the acts described above, I would have found myself looking for a new job in public relations.  Or possibly shoe sales.


Downstream Effects

A Harvard study released this summer confirmed what people already sensed about press coverage of the primaries -- that it paid little attention to candidates' platforms and suitability and spent more attention on so-called "horse races" -- who was ahead and who behind at any given point. This gave Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, who had the greatest name familiarity, an early advantage that just kept growing.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out on election day.

If Trump wins, it is fair to expect that everything he does will be scrutinized closely and, even if he has a good idea, that it will be given a full scrubbing.

If Clinton wins, it seems fair to expect that news coverage will continue to support her -- not to do so would discredit the press after its no-holds-barred promotion of her candidacy.


 Institutional Confidence

Americans now lack faith in many national institutions.  This is demonstrated in the Gallup chart below, released following polling in early June.

Television news and newspapers are rated ahead of only "Congress" and "Big Business" when it comes to public trust.  If I ran one of those news zoos, I'd be concerned.

MovieMonday: The Clark Sisters

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. 
         

MovieMonday: Into the Wild

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.

MovieMonday: The Wizard of Oz

This 1939 movie was well-regarded at the time of its release, but it didn't turn a profit until 10 years later.  Then, starting in the 1950s with annual television releases over a half-century, it became one of the most loved films of all time.  Strange how things work.

Its plot comes from a popular children's book published in 1900.  In it, a girl named Dorothy (Judy Garland) is swept into a different world with good witches and bad witches, and where she sets out with three new friends (scarecrow, tinman and lion) to find a wizard who will grant their wishes -- a trip home to Kansas,  a brain, a heart, courage, respectively.  After frustration and a battle with the Wicked Witch of the West, they learn that each of them had what was needed from the get-go.

There are all kinds of lessons here:  Friendship, courage, self-reliance and skepticism toward even the most benevolent fakery.   And, perhaps, a less resonant theme today:  There's no place like home.

For Dorothy, there are parallels in the two worlds:  The three farmhands on her aunt and uncle's farm become her friends in Oz. The mean woman, Almira Gulch (Margaret Hamilton,) who seizes Dorothy's dog becomes the Wicked Witch of the West.   Doctor Marvel (Frank Morgan), a kind charlatan who performs at county fairs, turns out to be the Wizard of Oz.

It is likely that this film never would have been made if Walt Disney hadn't established there was a theater market for full-color children's movies two years earlier with the laboriously assembled  Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. 

This was only the second MGM film with full-color scenes.  In it, Dorothy's Kansas farm home is rendered in black and white while Oz is in full of brightly dressed munchkins, a good witch who travels in a big pink bubble, blooming red poppy fields, a dreamy emerald kingdom and a dreadful witch's castle patrolled by green-skinned goons.

The film was well done, but its delayed popularity also may have to do with demographics.  The Wizard of Oz was released toward the end of the Great Depression, when people had delayed marriage and family formation for economic reasons.  Should we be surprised that that it found its audience only after the adoption of home television and the birth of the baby boom generation?

Now The Wizard of Oz is broadly available on streaming channels.  I hope parents are continuing to share what they remember with their children.  The only reservation, already known to adults, is that the scenes in the wicked witch's castle still frighten young viewers.