Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu

 

Fans of the enormous Star Wars franchise might feel actor/writer/director Jon Favreau's latest entry in the exuberant series, The Mandalorian and Grogu, spent most of the picture's $165 million budget on spectacularly creepy creatures rather than narrative. The movie is predictably and unquestionably eye-popping, but it also feels a bit like a retread.

In this installment, the helmeted bounty hunter (Pedro Pascal when unhelmeted) and his cuddly omnivorous baby buddy Grogu (a green animatronic puppet that is movie marketers dream) are commissioned by an officer of the New Republic (an always welcomed but regretably wasted Sigourney Weaver) to rescue Rotta (voiced by Jeremy Allen White), the son of the beastly Jabba the Hutt (first seen 40 years ago in Return of the Jedi). Rotta is reportedly the prisoner of Lord Janu (Jonny Coyne), a competing scoundrel who runs a gladiator circus.

As usually happens in these tales, the mission hits a few snags and reverses, and the Mandalorian himself gets sidelined for a while. At this point, the film shifts into a sweet but draggy gear featuring Baby Grogu. This gives the audience a bit of a breather after a non-stop 60 minutes of flight and fight before the final reel's showdown.

The Mandalorian and Grogu is replete with Jon Favreau signature wit and the occasional tender moment. It will undoubtedly be an enjoyable snack for moviegoers who might be more eagerly anticipating Ryan Gosling's Starfighter to be released next May.

I Love Boosters

 

The second feature film by Hip-Hop's most colorful Marxist, writer/director Boots Riley, I Love Boosters, doubles up on the surreal aspects in Sorry to Bother You (2018) and doubles down on its messages of worker outrage and collective revolt.

For this outing, Riley -- who is also the frontman and creative force for The Coup and co-founder of rock/rap hybrid Street Sweeper Social Club with fellow corporate critic Tom Morello -- has fashioned a trippy tale of resistance set in his beloved Oakland that skewers many of capitalism's sacred cows.

KeKe Palmer (Good Fortune, One of Them Days, The 'Burbs) is the leader of a trio of haute-couture thieves who swipe clothing from stores, the "boosting" of the title, for reselling at considerably reduced prices.

The scheme -- which hasn't paid off in the way Palmer's "Corvette" dreamt it would -- gets complicated when Corvette targets a local high-end designer, Christie Smith (a especially brassy Demi Moore), whose work aspirant designer Corvette admires.

When Corvette and partners Sade (Naomie Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige) decide to stage a hit from inside one of Smith's Metro Design stores, their plan is thwarted by another booster, a young Chinese woman with a futuristic device whose programming is a hilarious goolash of physics and political philosophy. The film is ingenious in its convolution and one either goes with it or not.

With cameos from Don Cheadle and Boots Riley regular LaKeith Stanfield, truly outlandish costuming, radical polemics, whiffs of new age hucksterism and demon possession, and an unbelievable vehicle chase through an urban mall, "I Love Boosters" is an irresistible old-school "freak-out" for those hip enough to hop on.

Obsession

Writer/director Curry Barker's romance nightmare, Obsession, will be a treat for Blumhouse horror fans who like their love gooey and their gore with heaping helpings of humor.

After making a wish using a new age-y magic stick, the lonely and seemingly vacuous music store clerk Baron (a terrific Michael Johnston) becomes the fixation of his lovely and vivacious co-worker Nikki (an amazingly unhinged Inde Navarrette), to the shock and awe of their besties Ian (Cooper Tomlinson) and Sarah (Megan Lawless).

The night the spell is cast, the formerly independent Nikki moves in with Baron, called "Bear," and they begin an intense though fairly conventional courtship that in short order gets spiced with clingy Nikki's lies, outbursts and threats. 

Baron, who was out of his depth even while longing for attention from the self-assured Nikki, finds himself in the course of a few weeks gasping for air and grasping for sanity in the smothering, suffocating relationship. Barker presents this journey to discovery with moments of genuine, dark hilarity and cringe.

Maybe in crafting this fangoria, Barker reached into his past to relationships that started blissfully and ended badly or worse, or maybe he reflected on personal moments when failing to act or acting rashly meant an escalation of troubles. 

Whatever the case, Obsession offers a deliciously warped turn of that weepy cinema slogan from 1970, "Love means never having to say you're sorry."

Is God Is

 

Writer/director Aleshea Harris's Is God Is joins the work of Jordan Peele, Ryan Coogler, Steve McQueen, Barry Jenkins, Melina Matsoukas and J.D. Dillard, among others, in the growing catalog of post-modern Black filmmaking.

Harris has turned her stage play into a wonder of a road trip/quest/phantasmagoria that doubles as a womanist musing on rage and retribution.

The movie stars Kara Young (of the recent celebrated Broadway restaging of Proof) and Mallori Johnson as twins Racine and Anaia, respectively, who are survivors of a childhood fire set by their psychopathic father (Sterling K. Brown) to punish their mother Ruby (Vivica A. Fox) for some perceived slight, leaving them and their mother scarred.

The inseparable twins, who long before moved from their home, are summoned to their mother's deathbed to receive her final wish -- find and kill their father and anyone currently in his life as payback.

The comparatively less scarred Racine has been her disfigured sister's defender for years, so she accepts her mother's commission with enthusiasm; Anaia is not so driven.

The twins follow their father's fairly cold trail to the home/church of the preacher/healer Divine (a refreshing turn from the always-welcome Erika Alexander), for whom he torched and abandoned Ruby and the twins. He eventually dropped Divine, as well, after impregnating her.

From there, Racine and Anaia find their father's lawyer (Mykelti Williamson), who, too, was attacked by his murderous client and is waiting for him to return to finish the job. He warns the twins of the self-destructive force of revenge, but they head out to their father's current home, where he lives with his wife Angie (Janelle Monae) and their twin sons, Riley and Scotch (Justen Ross and Xavier Mills).

The final showdown contains the much-anticipated face-off, but also important revelations about the sisters that might invite audiences to re-evaluate much of what has come before.

Maybe some will ask if there can ever be such a thing as "righteous indignation," and if there is, who does it belong to? God?

Dame Helen Mirren

Seeing Dame Helen Mirren with King Charles at the Royal Garden Party reminded me that I was "introduced" to the celebrated actress, who is now 80, via movie puzzle-master Peter Greenaway's beautiful, bawdy and brutal The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989) -- a film that's quite a mouthful, in more ways than one. 

Mirren plays the titular wife to Michael Gambon's Thief, a bitterly boorish and brutish man who is a nightly patron of what must be the most remarkable restaurant in England, where the Lover, the proprietor of a bookstore, is also a frequent diner.

Because the Cook and his crew secretly despise the Thief, they help the Wife and her bookish Lover (Alan Howard) "get busy" in various spots and at various times during the Thief's interminable dinners.

As the Fates would have it, the Lovers are eventually discovered. The Thief's thugs torture the bookish Lover in a horrible and grossly poetic fashion. The Wife, enraged by the death of her Lover, works with the Cook (Richard Bohringer) and his crew to avenge the Lover's death in the most "delectable" way imaginable, putting an end to the Thief's reign of terror.

It's a tour de force that is not to everyone's taste, but was a wonderful "howdy do" to Helen Mirren, whose work never fails to fascinate. She won an Oscar for playing Charles' Mum in The Queen in 2006.

The Sheep Detectives

 

Kyle Balda's The Sheep Detective is a marvelous whodunit in the style of Knives Out but with CGI sheep as the lead investigators.

The human-to-animation ratio is about 50:50, with the most "human" aspects of the movie's clever story in the care of the sheep.

When Hugh Jackman's gentleman shepherd George is found dead outside of his trailer in a lovely little English village one morning, his loyal flock -- led by whipsmart Lily (Julia Louis-Dreyfyus) and Mopple with the encyclopedic memory (Chris Dowd) -- go on the hunt for the killer, basing their investigation on the murder mysteries George read to the flock every night.

The sheep uncover clues missed by the town's lone and hapless police officer, played by Nicholas Braun. How they lead the officer to these discoveries is rich and imaginative. He finally gets it together, and in true Christie fashion, each of the possible suspects -- the local butcher, the town vicar, a neighbor farmer, the owner of the town's inn, the victim's estranged daughter -- is revealed to have reason to see gentle George dead, but, as with the best of these pictures, their true means and opportunity are not revealed until the last reel.

The Sheep Detectives is a surprisingly fresh and enterprising treat that even though it features some terrific animated furry critters is not a kid's picture. It is a murder mystery, after all.

Doing Good, Being Good

 

Why do institutions of religious systems appeal to folks wanting cover for their misdeeds?

Why do thieves and predators so often profess belief in divine goodness and morality? Is it just hypocrisy? If so, you don't need to be in a church to be a hypocrite, you just need to say one thing and do the opposite. Why get God involved?

The answer is no doubt quite complex, pulling from the behavioral and social sciences, lots of variables, and there probably isn't one answer that fits all cases. But I think one thing might tie most cases together -- society's assumptions about "people of faith."

Having belonged to more than my share of churches over the years and across the spectrum, I think inquiries could start with the buildings.

Domes, steeples, statuary and emblems of faith in wood, stone, glass and steel show affiliation, but they are also indicators that "good things" are going on inside God's house.

Sanctuary codes come to mind. For centuries, wrong-doers were protected from arrest if they made it to the altar. Lawmen would not pursue them for fear of their own eternal damnation. (This thinking was more common before the era of separation of church and state but might be resurrected in this new age.)

Today's thieves and sex offenders aren't seeking sanctuary from the police and solicitors, but I do think they believe agents of the law don't question church-going people (especially clerics) because a person who draws close to the Creator can't do bad things at the same time. (This might be the primitive thinking behind hanging the Ten Commandments in schools.) Some might also be thinking that miscreants who hide behind God won't escape Final Judgment.

Believers themselves show markers in their clothing, speech and behavior and recognize one another by them. This is that in-group and out-group thing we seem to be so fond of. And, people being people, in-group folk are not scrutinized because they are saying and doing the right things. Once thieves and predators have mastered the code -- the passwords and high signs -- they can get away with a lot.

And do.

The Devil, You Say?

The inside front cover ad in the May 1973 issue of After Dark: The National Magazine of Entertainment was for director Gerard Damiano's The Devil in Miss Jones, a picture that folks in-the-know say bridged the gulf between art house cinema and pornography.

I've never seen the movie, despite it being christened with legitimacy by mainstream critics like Judith Crist and Bruce Williamson, so I can't attest to its artfulness. I did watch the trailer though, and the movie sounds intriguing.

Miss Jones stars Georgina Spelvin (last name misspelled in the ad, but no matter, it was a common adult film starlet moniker) as a dead woman who makes a bargain with the devil's minions that were she allowed to return to the living she would commit every waking moment to lust and carnality. Satan could not resist that deal and off she went to do just that.

Spelvin -- nee Shelley Bob Graham -- turned 90 in March. According to her bio she appeared in more than 70 adult films during the 70s and early 80s (that's sort of hard to believe but whatev). Spelvin also appeared in mainstream pictures and on television, often in cameos as herself.

With such an impressive record of adult film performances, I am tempted (sic) to dub her "Porn's First Lady," but alas that title is already taken. 😆

Midas and the American Dream

For many of us, when greed is mentioned, the cautionary tale of King Midas springs to mind. Midas wished to be able to turn all he touched to gold, but in the end gained unimaginable wealth and lost his humanity.
On its surface, that ancient story might set tragic avarice in the world of powerful men, but that's not reality, is it?
Greed is not restricted to those who have already accumulated wealth or prosperity and just can't get enough.
Folks who don't have the proverbial "pot to pee in" or "window to throw it out of" can also be fixated on having more and more and more -- not necessarily more of what they need, just more.
Economists say U.S. citizens are currently carrying nearly $1.3 trillion in credit card debt, and I suspect that figure will skyrocket in the coming months. I also suspect most of this debt is borne by people living beyond their means.
About half of all monthly credit card balances are carried by people who earn less than $50,000 a year. Economists say they lack the necessary reserves to pay for emergencies or are responding to impulses triggered by Madison Avenue pitchpeople or social media influencers or their need to have more than the Joneses across the street.
Both the financial burden of daily living and the spirit of acquisition drive the American economy -- and make communitarianism, socialism, egalitarianism and related theories so threatening. This is also why concepts like "affordability" seem so foreign to the executive and his ilk, a class of people defined by accumulation and impulsiveness, whose god is capitalism wrapped in a thin democratic veneer.
The spirit of Midas is at the core of the executive's appeal, a man fans say has a magical touch, even fans whose existence is defined by their inability to pay their bills, save for emergencies, afford health care, suitable housing, etc.
And yet this need to have more -- especially more than the neighbors across the street, across the state line, or across the ocean -- is deep in American soil and water.
That slogan "America First" is not just a nationalist's battle cry -- it's a siren song for the greedy and selfish that too many of us rally around.

Labelle at Carnegie Hall 1973

 

Fifty-three years ago, Labelle performed at Carnegie Hall, a single-night performance that served as a marker of the group's transition from R&B "girl group" stylists to mistresses of funk, belting out Nona Hendryx's original compositions and dressing like David Bowie.

The year before Carnegie Hall, the trio -- Hendryx, Sarah Dash and leader Patti LaBelle -- released Moonshadow, a decent record that featured a nearly 10-minute rave up of the famous Cat Stevens song. I saw them perform that song and other numbers from Moonshadow as an opening act for Al Green at the Carter Barron Amphitheatre in D.C. in Aug. '72.

In '73, Labelle released the lukewarm Pressure Cookin' album, but the following year was their megahit Nightbirds, and that Grammy Hall of Fame anthem to Creole hoochie, "Lady Marmalade."

The 8 p.m. Carnegie Hall appearance included readings by poet Nikki Giovanni and only a half dozen songs -- Wild Horses, I Sold My Heart to the Junkman, Over the Rainbow, (Can I Speak to You Before I Go To) Hollywood, Four Women and Moonshadow.

As we can see from this ad in After Dark, tickets ranged from 3.50 to 6.50, or 30 to 60 bucks today. And, interestingly, tickets to shows at the Carnegie Hall do generally run about that according to the venue's website.

The Attention Economy

 

The regime's takeover of media enterprises is rooted in the general public's "need for the feed."

The executive, himself, is sustained by media creation and consumption. His media diet is like his actual dietary intake -- fast, highly processed, nutritionless. And he and his Cabinet -- an assortment of Twinkies, Moonpies and Yoo-Hoos -- are fine with that. After a full day of consuming trash on Fox News, he graces us with his nightly flatulence on Truth Social.

And now, the emptiness of media messages from properties already under the regime's influence/control is evident in once-respected CBS's reporting mandates that bear the strong odor of hands-off/hands-up to keep MAGA nation engaged.

None of this is completely new; some part of the developed world's economy has been based on selling public attention since mass media were invented.

But, one of the reasons -- perhaps the main reason -- legacy media struggled after the arrival of "new media" is advertisers discovered a more reliable, quantifiable way to monetize consumer attention. Advertisers -- who knew they were wasting money on media buys but were never sure how much -- no longer settled for newspapers' coverage and reach reports, which were wishful approximations, at best. Ad space/time buyers could actually measure which ads readers viewed and for how long. Eureka! When these measures were refined, print media revenue pipelines dried up.

Newsrooms responded with staff layoffs and the gradual shift from product thrown on lawns and delivered to mailboxes to that delivered via computer screens. And that, to quote the poet, "has made all the difference."

Now, information and news compete with scantily clad influencers pushing protein powder and Ozempic for some portion of those 960 waking minutes the average person has to give their attention to something. More and more that something is online.

Researchers tell us that from 2004 to 2023, pleasure reading among Americans declined by 40 percent -- 40 PERCENT. How do we get out of this?

I asked AI how one leaves the "attention economy," and it offered, without irony, "Leaving the attention economy means reclaiming your time, focus, and cognitive autonomy from the constant pull of algorithm-driven platforms. It’s not just about avoiding social media — it’s about reshaping habits, environments, and values so that attention is no longer commodified for profit."

Maybe pick up a book?

As Stephen King famously said, “Reading takes time, and the glass teat takes too much of it.”

Amen.

Michael (2026) III

 

Antoine Fuqua's Michael (2026) includes the scene of Jackson's first rhinoplasty procedure.

The surgeon (Albie Selznick) tells Jackson (Jaafar Jackson) his face is fine as it is. But Michael says his nose isn't symmetrical; he wants it fixed. At one point, he also mentions his vitiligo and says he's using some topical treatment.

When he arrives home after the procedure, father Joseph (Colman Domingo) from whom he's slowly pulling away, stops the bandaged singer timidly making his way to his room. No words are exchanged -- "Why did you do it?" etc., just Joseph saying "May God" and letting Michael continue to his room.

The scene is most likely an apocryphal construction; neither man is alive to say if it is accurate. But I feel it pointedly captures one of the enduring mysteries around Jackson's public persona, i.e., what fueled his physical transformation?

The picture suggests some possible causes, but the most compelling for me is the subtext of Michael's slow disassociation from the person he was. He may have felt his personality (soul?) was imbalanced, that he was emotionally unsymmetrical? That he was trying to keep what comforted him -- the other members of his family as they were when he was a boy -- while pushing forward toward what challenged and frightened him -- the world.

This detachment might have also been the fuel for his brilliant creative spark, both as a composer even though I don't think he actually played an instrument, but more importantly as a master of movement.

I cannot think of anyone outside of the world of classical dance who showed greater control over their physical form than Michael Jackson. He was transcendent.

Michael (2026) II

 

I don't broker irony these days -- that would be like trying to sell kudzu in Alabama -- but I do find contradictions in the roiling discussion around Antoine Fuqua's Michael (2026) to be notable.

Critics and audiences are sharply divided over the picture that tells the story of Michael Jackson's rise from child phenomenon at age 8 to uniquely enigmatic adult megastar, roughly the years from 1966 to 1988. Jackson died in 2009.

Critics say the picture, which stars Jackson's 29-year-old nephew Jaafar (brother Jermaine's son), lacks depth and vital insight, covering familiar territory about parental abuse, while showcasing the abilities of the sumptuously talented Jaafar in recreated live performances of the Jackson 5 and Michael's solo work on stage and in the studio. In sum, the picture is a well-crafted but ultimately disappointing narrative about a mysterious cultural icon.

Audiences, particularly Jackson's Black fans, defend Fuqua's film as celebratory and respectful, especially in its treatment -- actually, lack of treatment -- of charges of child abuse leveled against Michael in his later years, beginning in 1993. Insiders say later chapters of the film will deal with that period -- how remains to be seen.

(While I found persuasive the claims against Jackson featured in Leaving Neverland, the 2019 film that has been removed from circulation by the Jackson estate, many (most?) others said, maybe reflexively, that the documentary was a hit job and a money grab. New charges have surfaced since the release of Fuqua's film, this time involving a family of four siblings who were close to Jackson for many years.)

Some Black fans might be conflating criticism of the film as cinema with criticism of the gifted young Jaafar, who quite likely triggers precious memories of his uncle. They might be reading criticism of Michael's importance to Black music, which is undisputed. Or they might be feeling white critics are attacking Black cultural agency and identity, which, if true, would add another level of irony to the mix.

Some Black defenders have warned white reviewers to tread carefully, and I find that dangerous and chilling. Not only does rejecting sincere reflection echo the drumbeat of the current administration's punishing paranoia, but it would suggest Michael's legacy could not withstand the scrutiny.

Gauntlets being thrown down in defense of Jackson run counter to the man's most enduring public image -- that of a unifying spirit, perhaps embodying in the most glaring personal display possible the blurring of racial, ethnic and cultural lines. The work he did in 1986 with Lionel Richie and Quincy Jones to create the "We Are the World" video and movement is a testament to his enduring affirming legacy as globalist and unifier.

How fans find peace with the contradictions in a revered figure is ultimately an individual struggle, but I don't believe anybody gets there by denying contradictions exist.

TBH, the intimate and tragic documentary This Is It, released just after Jackson's death, gives me more insight into the man than Fuqua's impressive biopic. I remember seeing it twice in one day in two separate theaters because it was so riveting.

Michael (2026)

 

Director Antoine Fuqua's Michael, the glitzy biopic about the King of Pop, will undoubtedly make a billion dollars, set toes a-tapping during screenings with its many musical numbers, and serve as a fantasia for fans of the revered Jackson, who died in 2009 at age 50.

It will also undoubtedly be met with puzzlement and skepticism from viewers who wonder if the film's narrative, written by Jim Logan (Skyfall, Gladiator, Any Given Sunday, among other fine films), is a sanitized tribute or the unvarnished truth? My call is it is more of the former than of the latter.

Jaafar Jackson, son of Michael's brother Jermaine, carries the weight of the picture on his slender shoulders, channeling his uncle's voice and movements to uncanny effect. Fuqua's splendid staging of Jaafar's singing and dancing is rightly to be celebrated.

The young Jackson's performance is often mesmerizing, but I wondered if his closeness to the subject of the film was not as much of a benefit as it might appear on first pass. Though he was only 7 when his uncle died, I can imagine expectations that he "get it right" were always present as he worked on the picture, which is produced by the Jackson family, wth the notable exception of Janet. What a burden!

Jaafar's work on the picture might have even more in common with Michael's professional life -- at least as presented in the film. Beginning when Michael was a wunderkind (the winning child actor Juliano Valdi), he was berated and beaten by his father, Joseph (Colman Domingo). Joseph was the brutal Svengali who shaped Michael and his four brothers into the Jackson 5 and rode their celebrity out of relative penury in Gary, IN, into enviable prosperity in Encino, CA. He insisted on perfection, pushing the boys unmercifully, as mother Katherine (Nia Long) stood at a distance, silent but unapproving. Everyone feared and resented Joseph, and that was his intent.

Domingo has a legendary range and an appetite for highly distinctive character parts; he appears to be at his most powerful playing villains (Bobby T in Running Man, Mister in The Color Purple, William Burke in Candyman, for example). Here, Domingo's Joseph is an unnerving presence, even when off-screen, for he has deeply wounded the film's title star. In fact, that appears to be the message of the picture, which will certainly strike more than a few as pat and unpersuasive.

I can imagine some taking exception to saddling Joseph with all of his youngest son's peculiarities -- his elfin-voice, predilection for toys and exotic animals, his strange fixation on the fairytale about the eternal boy Peter Pan and his "happy place" -- Neverland.

Some will question Logan's pop psych rendering of Jackson's infamous pathology, excluding the charges of misconduct with children, which do not appear in the picture -- at least not directly. There is a curious subtext during some scenes where Jackson is interacting with young fans, but that's all.

Others might question Katherine's role in her son's pathology, in his emotional immaturity. She tells Michael that he is special, different from his brothers, and all other children. This might have created a different kind of psychological scarring that the picture does not plumb.

Still, Jaafar Jackson's impressive performance is central and crucial to this uneven unraveling of the rise and fall of one of the most enigmatic of contemporary entertainers. And for that reason alone, it is worth the price of the ticket.

Armory memories

 

My neighborhood and school in Northeast D.C. were in easy walking distance to the Armory on East Capitol Street.

We good Catholic schoolchildren from St. Benedict's would parade in orderly fashion to the Armory for the water show or the flower show or some other "kid-friendly" event. I always thought the Armory had something to do with the Arboretum, which I still visit routinely when in the District.

Yeah, I always associated the Armory with "soft stuff," so you can imagine my surprise the day I saw armored vehicles on a neighborhood street, heading to the Armory, I was told.

What? Why? Memory is foggy but through the mist I see battleship gray, steel and turrets! Who knows how much I was borrowing from TV's "Combat!", but soldiers and armored vehicles were on the move.

I am pretty confident I was unaware of war as a "real thing" before that day, even though the U.S. was deep in the military conflict of Vietnam. It's not something 6-year-olds think about, I guess. And, besides, Catholic schoolchildren were at war with the devil.

From that day on, though, "armory" has meant "war," "war" has meant "guns," "guns" has meant "soldiers," "soldiers" has meant "shooting," and "shooting" has meant "dead people."

We all have to grow up sometime, right?

Colman Domingo

 

I did not know who Colman Domingo was before seeing him in his featured roles in the musical Passing Strange on Broadway back in 2008.

Domingo, 56, had appeared in small parts on television and film before then but somehow had escaped my attention. And that was my loss.

Domingo has proven to be a force of nature, taking on leading roles and supporting parts with equal gusto and impact, IMO. His list of acting credits over the past 30 years is enviable -- Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Selma, The Color Purple, among them -- and he's also produced and directed in TV and film.

Domingo was nominated for leading actor Academy Awards in two consecutive years and for two very different parts -- Divine G in Sing Sing (2004) and the title character in Rustin (2005). He won an Emmy for a guest appearance in HBO's Euphoria in 2022. He is no stranger to complexity.

Domingo's guest host role on SNL last weekend has been on blast since then; heralded as a game-changer. He will next be seen as Joe Jackson in the upcoming biopic Michael, and I am wondering what he does to bring to the screen a man who, we're told, not only built his gifted son's career but also destroyed his self-image.

I am also wondering if that part of the story will be in explicated in the movie, and, if not, if Domingo and director Antoine Fuqua will work it in somehow.

Proof

 

I read David Auburn's prize-winning play Proof last week because of its Broadway revival with Ayo Edebiri and Don Cheadle. I quite likely won't get to see this New York production, but I fully expect a local company -- Trustus, quite likely -- will mount one sooner rather than later. I think it would have broad appeal.

This spare but marvelous story is about a brilliant but mentally deteriorating University of Chicago mathematician named Robert and his 25-year-old daughter, Catherine, and her worries that, along with inheriting her father's facility with numbers, she might succumb to his mental illness. Is she one of the worried well?

Auburn sets the action on the back porch of Robert and Catherine's home. The story moves back and forth in time, a common device in modern drama that gets around the possible tedium of linear exposition, while unraveling the play's central puzzle.

The father/daughter relationship is the play's main concern, but it is given wonderful context by the two other characters, Claire, Robert's older daughter and Catherine's sister, and Robert's doctoral student/protege Hal, who all but lives in the professor's house as he explores his teacher's most recent recorded thoughts. Is there something groundbreaking there or just the ramblings of a withering mind?

As with many other classic and contemporary playwrights (O'Neill, Williams, Hellman, Miller, Albee, Jacobs-Jenkins) Auburn delves into tangled webs of family dynamics -- the celebrated and withholding father, the child who got out, the child who stayed, and the ward who might be trying to claim his own inheritance.

Auburn elegantly wrestles with love, anger, resentment, condescension, pain, forgiveness -- against a cold background, literally and figuratively, and reveals many relational truths.

A play with mathematics at its core would not ordinarily suggest warmth and humanity, but Auburn offers abundant "proof" that it is indeed possible.

Vive la resistance!

 

I was catching up with a longtime friend who was visiting Soda City the other day on a swing through the Southeast.

I asked him about his adventures since he's partially retired now; his job had taken him all over the world. He told me he wasn't traveling as much and was volunteering, along with others in his neighborhood, walking young Latinx children to school because the kids' parents did not feel safe from ICE.

"What do the children call you?"

"They just call us 'teacher'," he said. "To them, we're part of the school."

His language fluency helps tremendously with this mission, which I think is more authentically "Christian" than anything MAGA world has or can offer.

Resistance takes so many forms, doesn't it?

Dogma redux

 

The regime's bumbling fight with the Vatican led me to rewatch Kevin Smith's sporadically entertaining 1999 flick Dogma, which tells the story of two banished angels (Ben Affleck and Matt Damon) who find a loophole to get back into Heaven.

The loophole involves a New Jersey church that will offer papal reconciliation to anyone passing through its doors on a certain day. The angels, who were exiled to Wisconsin, begin to make their way to New Jersey, unaware that if they succeed all of creation is voided because God can't be proven wrong about their banishment.

At the same time, a Catholic abortion clinic worker with a special lineage (Linda Fiorentino) is commissioned by God's herald (Alan Rickman) to stop the angels. She would be accompanied by assorted human and celestial beings (Smith, Jason Mewes, Chris Rock, Salma Hayek), each contributing to the picture's dissertation on Catholic theology and the wide gulf between practitioners and the pulpit, presented in the most outrageously wild and often stunningly vulgar way possible.

I was still a regular attendant at Mass in 1999, so the picture resonated with me differently then. I wondered about the non-Catholics, though. Would they get the serious questions under the gags -- and there are many of both? I suppose I still do wonder that.

Smith's films are always heavier on wit than craft, I think, and Dogma is certainly that. It is worth noting, however, that Smith's claim that institutions are failed by their strictures is still relevant and very true.

Also in the cast are George Carlin and Jason Lee, and Bud Cort and Alanis Morissette have cameo roles as God.

August Wilson's Century Cycle -- Gem of the Ocean

 

August Wilson seems to have had a lot on his mind when he wrote Gem of the Ocean -- history, religion, folkways, maybe even politics, but most assuredly America's tradition of racial oppression and exploitation. Maybe that's why his major characters have such enormous speaking parts ... lots and lots of words, lots and lots of stories. Is it too much?

In Act One, Aunt Ester describes a dream in which Solly was leading a group of men in a ship across the water but the ship capsized and the men were lost. While this image connects with Solly's past as a conductor on the Underground Railroad, it also, because of the fate of the passengers, suggests to me a connection with the mythological figure of Charon, who conducted souls into the netherworld. It is curious that Aunt Ester asks to be taken back across the water. Why? Solly, of course, is determined to get his sister out of Alabama where white folks "have gone crazy." A fateful decision that maybe Ester foresaw.

Solly: "What good is freedom if you can't do nothing with it? I seen many a man die for freedom but he didn't know what he was getting. If he had known he might have thought twice about it." (Act One, Scene Two). August Wilson does not make it easy. His characters are complex and seemingly conflicted. Solly's determination to free his sister from a crushing existence in Alabama seems to suggest life two generations after Emancipation was not significantly better for blacks. Is he suggesting that life in bondage would be preferable to impoverishment?

Wilson describes Black Mary as Aunt Ester's protegee, which to me is an odd description. Ester's wisdom comes from her age (or agelessness). Black Mary is described as a young woman in her 20s, which suggests she did not make the crossing from enslavement to freedom. She seems to be defined most by the house and her relationship to Ester and her brother Caesar, with whom she differs not only in age but in temperament. She also differs from Citizen Barlow in that she's found some piece in loneliness.

"One after the other they come and they go. You can't hold on to none of them. They slip through your hands. They use you up and you can't hold them. They all the time taking till it's gone. They ain't tried to put nothing to it. They ain't got nothing in their hand. They got nothing to add to it." (Act One, Scene Four) Black Mary doesn't seem to be bitter, just resigned to the emptiness.

August Wilson's Century Cycle -- Joe Turner's Come and Gone

 

Joe Turner's Come and Gone is as dense in character storytelling as Gem of the Ocean but it feels a little less mystical, despite Bynum's "shining man" visions. I love the characters and because there are more female characters than Gem, the play has a different feel or texture to me, more romantic, perhaps.

“August had an incredible ear and he wrote the dialogue the way he heard it, adding his own magic touch as well. His characters are people who paint with language. They speak, in a sense, almost poetically by nature. One must honor and pay attention to the ways and style of our grandparents who migrated from the south where they were “southern colored people” and when they came north the only thing that changed was the location. In August Wilson’s writing there is no time to comment on what you say just respect the cadence, the couplets and triplets. These people have incredible wit, honesty and integrity. To survive in this country chasing the American dream it was imperative. Sometimes it takes three sentences to express one passionate, urgent, thought. It’s mellifluous, poetic and never pondered. It is part of the beauty of who we are descendants of the African griots; the keepers of our history, our culture, who never let us forget the glory of who we descended from. That’s August Wilson.” - Ruben Santiago-Hudson

Bynum's first monologue about finding his song is vital to understanding the world that Wilson is creating in Joe Turner. Bynum might very well be mad but the notion of an individual's song is a part of many native people's folklore. The monologue's power and artistry is reflected in the number of people who have recorded it on YouTube. This is one of the best presentations I have seen.

Mattie: Make him come back to me. Make his feet say my name on the road. I don't care what happens. M ake him come back.

Bynum: What's your man's name?

Mattie: He go by Jack Carper. He was born in Alabama then he come to West Texas and find me and we come here. Been here three years before he left. Say I had a curse prayed on me and he started walking down the road and ain't never come back. Somebody told me, say you can fix things like that. (Act One, Scene One)

Seth and Bertha Holly's boarding house seems to be a port for the disconnected, lost or those searching for others. That Great Migration from the South was not always direct and certain. As Mattie suggests, here route was much or circuitous and now that her mate has moved on she's not sure of her fate. Wilson's play overflows with the anxiety that accompanies rootlessness.

The characters Herald Loomis and his daughter Zonia are fascinating inventions who invoke much contemplation on the nature of the fatherhood -- at least, Wilson's perspective of it. Loomis and daughter arrive at the boarding house looking for his wife and his daughter's mother from whom they were separated on their trek north. Loomis seems to grow more desperate as the play progresses, convinced his Martha is nearby and eager to find her because their daughter is rapidly becoming a woman.

Loomis: Look at you. You growing too fast. Your bones getting bigger everyday. I don't want you getting grown on me. Don't you get grown on me too soon. We gonna find your mamma. She around here somewhere. I can smell her. You stay on around the house now. Don't you go nowhere.