Time Enough At Last -- The Twilight Zone (1959)

 

The 1959 episode "Time Enough At Last" is often cited by fans of the original Twilight Zone as their favorite of the 150 or so produced during the series' run ('59-'64).

For the unfamiliar, Burgess Meredith, who would later famously portray Penguin in the campy Batman television series, played Henry Bemis, a bookish, bespectabled bank teller working for a pesky bank manager and married to a nagging woman both of whom berated him for wanting to do the only thing he really enjoyed -- read.

While Henry is holed up in the bank vault reading during one lunch break, the world is obliterated by atomic blast, and Henry emerges the lone survivor. He wanders the desolate landscape that was once his town and finds no one.

Fearing complete isolation, Henry considers taking his life (with a pistol that appears to have been left over from a Hollywood western) but then sees in the distance the public library is still standing. Oh joy! There he finds all the books he could want to read, now that there's time enough to do so.

He stacks dozens of books on the library steps and begins to settle down to read, but stumbles, knocking his glasses to the steps where they shatter to pieces (quite unlikely considering their thickness but it's television).

The irony, of course, was rich and, apparently, appealed to the Cold War viewing public. Some may have sympathized with Henry's plight; others may have denounced him for trying to check out at a time when the country needed all hands on deck. But who knows?

The episode's popularity has not waned over the years. In fact, some argue it has grown as Rod Serling's dystopic allegory of mid-20th century anti-intellectualism, societal upheaval and the elusiveness of solitude have become 21st-century realities.

The Blue Bird (1940)

 

Toward the end of Walter Lang's 1940 fantasy The Blue Bird, Shirley Temple, playing a bratty German peasant girl in search of the elusive bringer of happiness, ends up in the Land of the Future with her younger brother, played by fellow child actor Johnny Russell (who, interestingly, like Temple ending up working in the State Department many years later).

In the Land of the Future, they visit with unborn children waiting to be called by Father Time to board the boat fo Earth and deposited into the loving arms of parents waiting for a bundle of joy.

Brother and sister watch as two older unborn children who have fallen in love while waiting for their turn to be born react when one is called to board and the other is not. They weep and wail over being parted. It's all too much for the bratty peasant girl, who is shown with tears streaming down her face.

When she and her brother magically arrive back home (not unlike the sepia-toned conclusion to the Wizard of Oz, the film that The Blue Bird was made to compete with in theaters), the children are no longer spoiled and entitled but bright-eyed and loving. The transformation is quite remarkable!

There's just no end to the wonderful things fixating on the unborn can do!

Nope

 

Jordan Peele’s approach to story and storytelling is distinctly outré, startling and fresh. Perhaps his biracialism lends him and his films both a cultural specificity and wider social application.

Get Out was about racial annihilation AND spiritual predation. Us was about intra-racial class distinctions AND social stratification. Both told through the lens of sci-fi / speculative fiction.

Peele’s latest film, Nope, is a deliberately paced and seductive space invasion tale set against a background of horse wrangling. Daniel Kaluuya stars as O.J., the son of the only Black horse trainer for Hollywood (Keith David). When his father is killed during a strange rain storm, O.J. and his rootless sister, Em (a delightful Keke Palmer) take over the operation just as the number of strange events around their ranch increases. They eventually figure the source of the peculiar happenings is hiding behind a stationary cloud bank.

With the help of an appliance store skywatcher (Brandon Perea) they prepare to capture the alien (which looks like a Christo installation) on tape and sell the revelation to the highest bidder (Oprah?). The film is about how wrong things go for the trio.

Peele is a thoughtful and insightful creator with a trenchant wit; all of these qualities are woven into Nope, a wonderfully peculiar and puzzling exercise.

The Worst Person in the World

 

Norwegian writer / director Joachim Trier was nominated for an Oscar this year along with his frequent collaborator Eskil Vogt for the screenplay for The Worst Person in the World (2021), the only foreign language film considered. It lost to Kenneth Branagh's Belfast, a much more cinematically dynamic picture, with a more conventional structure and story arc.

Told in 12 chapters with a prologue and epilogue, "Worst Person" is the story of an emotionally rootless young woman, Julie (Renate Reinsve), who might best be described as chronically indecisive rather than girlishly whimsical, although the latter might be a first impression.

She meets a serious older man named Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie), the creator of a hardcore comic books series. They make for an unusual couple in his tribe of 40-somethings with children. Julie enjoys Aksel's attention at first but his tendency to condescend wears on her. She gets restless and combative.

One evening on her own, she crashes a wedding reception and meets Eivind (Herbert Nordrum). Despite both being in committed relationships, they flirt and exchange sexual fantasies but refrain from "cheating." Another chance meeting between the two at Julie's bookstore gives her reason to begin to pull away from Aksel.

The break-up conversation is the most probing exchange of its kind I've seen rendered in film. It is alternately wounding and conciliatory. Trier films it with jump cuts and shifting perspectives to reflect the passage of time and the confusion between two highly verbal people, who use words as weapons. A brilliant bit of writing.

Julie's life with Eivind seems to offer her some of what living with Aksel lacked, most particulary someone who held as little interest in self-reflection as she did. That's not to say this pairing would be any more satisfying, for Julie is without clear definition or purpose, which is why she skates through life, endearing herself to others at one turn and tearing herself away at the next.

All three principal players are terrific in these interior roles, and Trier knows how to make room for ambiguity. All three characters are well acquainted with uncertainty and how difficult that makes recognizing when you're happy. (Hulu)

The Cider House Rules (1999)

 

For The Cider House Rules (1999) Lasse Hallström worked from a screenplay by novelist John Irving of his own sprawling work, which depicts all manner of human trials, including agonizing over unwanted pregnancies.

At different points in the film, two women -- the spirited Candy (Charlize Theron), the daughter of a Maine lobsterman, and Rose, the daughter of the crew chief of migrant apple pickers (Erykah Badu) -- face unwanted pregnancies. Candy's is presumably through sex with her WWII fighter pilot boyfriend Wally (Paul Rudd) and Rose's through sex with her father Mr. Rose (Delroy Lindo).

Candy's pregnancy is terminated, illegally, at the clinic by the wilfully compassionate Dr. Larch (Michael Caine) and his relucant assistant and "adopted son" Homer (Tobey Maguire), a young man barely out of his teens. Homer, who has only known life in the orphanage and the clinic, objects to abortions but is committed to "being of some use in the world."

Homer soon leaves the orphanage with Candy and Wally and joins a crew of migrant apple pickers in Wally's family orchards, where he meets the spitfire Rose and her congenial but controlling father, Mr. Rose (Delroy Lindo). When Homer notices Rose growing listless, depressed and frequently ill in the morning, he discovers she's been impregnated by her father. Homer confronts the man, who warns him to mind his business. But the young man, telling them of his medical training, prevents Rose from performing an extraction on herself, quite possibly saving her life.

That Hallström's film is moral without being moralistic is one of its strengths -- it's also beautifully shot with many superb performances. The tone is not preachy or reductive but profoundly human and intimate, recognizing we are not perfect, mistakes and bad decisions are parts of life, and often the rules that are forced upon us -- like those posted in the bunkhouse for the migrant apple pickers -- are written by those who know nothing about us or our worlds, though they would pretend to.

Albert Ayler

 

My observance of Independence Day has moved away from patriotic celebration to meditations on the spirit of freedom and some of the persons who I feel embody it.

Free jazz saxophonist Albert Ayler (1936-1970) was so unbought and unfettered in his unorthodox approach to playing his instrument that he never found an audience during his short career beyond ardent fans like jazz pioneers and innovators John Coltrane and Don Cherry. I find his work endlessly fascinating and transporting despite its challenging structures.

Ayler was born in Cleveland but had his greatest success (relatively speaking) in Europe, making his first recordings in Sweden in 1962. The following year, he relocated to New York and was soon signed by the experimental label ESP-Disk, which released his classic record Spiritual Unity, which might be the best loved of Ayler's albums (again, relatively speaking).

Ayler's music is difficult -- atonal and arrhythmic. His most familiar compositons begin with him playing alto or tenor saxophone phrases from hymns or other spiritual songs, military marches or children's ditties and then spinning wildly into cacophanous improvisations, on early recordings accompanied by bass and drums, but later with piano, other saxes, trumpet, spoken word and singing.

Though there have been about 30 releases of Ayler's recorded music (studio work, concerts, compilations), not one of them has sold well. He remains an acquired taste, an elusive, uncompromising artist with stark vision of what music should be, how instruments should sound.

Because of this commitment to a singular vision, Ayler lived a penniless existence until his tragic death in 1970. He disappeared from his home in early November and his body was pulled from the East River more than two weeks later, a presumed suicide.

Toward the end of his life, Ayler showed signs of emotional disturbance and dissociation even as his music was growing more accessible, leaning toward the more R&B and rock 'n' roll stylings of his youth without completely abandoning his free form vitality. His last live sessions were in France four months before his death, recordings from these performances were finally released last month, nearly 50 years later.

The Black Phone

 

The 'tweener siblings at the center of Scott Derrickson's Stephen Kingsian chiller The Black Phone -- bully magnet Finney (Mason Thames) and mouthy badass Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) -- are growing up in Denver in 1978 surrounded by violent schoolmates and adults who are either clueless or menacing.

We meet them during a string of teen boy abductions, about which sister Gwen appears to receive messages in her dreams. This enrages their drunken father (Jeremy Davies), who orders the girl during a lashing to forget about the visions because they only bring trouble.

When Finney himself is kidnapped by The Grabber (a wonderfully masked Ethan Hawke), he discovers in his basement prison the eponymous telephone, which is connected to the realm where previous victims dwell. Most of the movie's action involves Finney receiving ghostly guidance from the other victims, trying to avoid their fate, and sister Gwen praying, sometimes with artful profanity, for help from heaven as she pieces together clues from apparitions.

The sharpness of these two young actors and Hawke, who never disappoints, makes up for some shortcomings in the film's narrative, which is based on a story by Joe Hill.

Essential questions about The Grabber's motives and the spirit world connections suggest that the story is not a fully realized supernatural tale but an allegory for a boy's coming of age, when he finally finds and defends himself.