Shirley (2024)

 

John Ridley's Netflix biopic on Black Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm's groundbreaking run for president in 1972 is a tender treatment of its human subject and a sensible -- though not riveting -- dissertation on American politics -- as it was 50 years and may be more so today.

As written by Ridley and portrayed by the ever-reliable Regina King, Chisholm, a schoolteacher who represented a district in Brooklyn, is a sharp woman with one-too-many blind spots regarding political gamesmanship. 

The congresswoman often presents as too self-assured for one so new to politics. But her determination wins followers; they like her boldness and the possibilities her candidacy promises.

Shirely gathers together a cadre of advisers, fundraisers and organizers (played with assurance by Lance Reddick, Terrence Howard, Lucas Hedges and Brian Stokes Mitchell), and with the support of her devoted husband, Conrad, (an endearing Michael Cherrie), launches into a campaign that is underfunded and understaffed, lacks competitive infrastructure and a message that will resonate beyond Bedford-Stuyvesant.

Ridley tracks the months leading up the Democratic Convention in Miami and Chisholm's efforts to work around the skepticism and push through the resentment of political veterans and her myopic view of the power of her image. She underperforms in every primary and finds herself with few delegates going into the convention when she joins a group of other Democratic contenders in challenging California's winner-take-all delegate rules.

If the winner-take-all rule is disallowed by the National Committee, the other candidates on the ballot stand a chance of stalling frontrunner George McGovern's ascendance on a first vote and forcing him to commit to their agenda items. In return they would pledge their delegates to him. 

The outcomes, of course, is history; Shirley Chisholm did not become president but she inspired the careers of many other women and people of color to "bring a chair" to the table if none had been provided for them.

Shirley is a solid piece of filmmaking that would have benefitted, I think, from less political intrigue and more spirited interaction between the players working against impossible odds to make change.

The Zone of Interest

 

A short answer to the question "what makes director Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest such an extraordinary film experience" is the manner in which he has taken familiar horrors and made them new.

Zone is the startling and chilling account of a commandant of the Nazi's Auschwitz concentration camp and his family living next to the razor wire and billowing chimneys, clearly at peace with what was happening just over the wall.

Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller play the highly efficient and ambitious Nazi officer and his vain and equally officious wife. They sleep separately, exhibit little caring or affection for one another and see to their duties in keeping with the Fuhrer's orders.

Glazer keeps the human suffering and extermination off-screen but manages to make what is presented -- the soulless, spiritual and emotional hollowness of this family -- as repellant as scenes of lines of men, women and children being marched into gas chambers. The couple's four children play in the family courtyard and pool as shots ring out in the distance, signalling the pistol deaths of prisoners, paying no more attention to it than they would to birdsong -- maybe less.

Meetings of camp commanders and annihilation engineers are clinically strategic and include talk of transport, forced labor, cremation of hundreds of thousands of prisoners a week. These passages, while ghastly, are not as disturbing as the depiction of the family's housekeepers dividing up clothing stripped from camp women or a teenaged boy admiring this collection of harvested teeth.

The Zone of Interest is an artistic work, methodical in its pacing that asks do horrible people commit horrors or does the imposition of horrifying visions and beliefs create horrible people.

I suspect both are true.

The Saint (redux)

've been revisiting episodes of the classy British (redundant?) detective series The Saint from the '60s. Roger Moore was the star and played a world-renowned detective and bon vivant who traveled the globe doing good by helping to solve crimes.

One of last night's episodes -- The Pearls of Peace (1962) -- was set in a fictitious fishing village in Mexico where an idealistic young friend of Moore's Simon Templar named Brad (Bob Kanter) finds himself stranded after being swindled and blinded during a fight with an unscrupulous comrade (Robin Hughes). The two men went to Mexico to dive for pearls of great price, with the younger leaving his beautiful but vain girlfriend (Erica Rogers) back in New York with a promise to return a wealthy man and worthy of marriage.

When Templar finds young Brad, he meets the older woman who has been caring for him for the past three years, Consuelo (Dina Paisner), who has been helping the young man hunt for valuable pearls with no luck. She has been tucking away money from her job as a waitress to help pay for Brad's operation that might restore his vision.

She tells Templar she is distressed because if his eyesight is indeed restored he won't think she is beautiful and will leave her, presumably because she has tawny skin and dark hair.

Quite a dilemma and for the times quite an interesting statement about race. Though Templar was supportive of the angelic Consuelo and brutally frank with the gold digging girlfriend, his final word was inner beauty was more important and enduring.

While certainly true, the statement falls short of challenging the beauty standards of the day -- no doubt to keep advertiser dollars flowing in -- and declaring Consuelo possessed both outer AND inner beauty. That would have been quite the saintly move.

Brewster McCloud

 

Director Robert Altman's outrageous 1970 gem Brewster McCloud introduced cinephiles to Altman's muse, wackadoodle Shelley Duvall (Nashville, Three Women, Popeye), and to title star Bud Cort's signature pre-pubescent understatedness, which would be on full display the following year in the alt-cinema classic Harold and Maude.

The picture is the biting tale of a manchild living in the basement of the Houston Astrodome, where he is building a set of mechanical wings so that he might one day take flight.

It's not clear from Doran William Cannon's screenplay why Brewster is doing this or what sort of being is his mentor and protector Louise (Sally Kellerman), who from the markings on her shoulderblades may be a fallen angel, but it all seems to relate to the general crappiness of humankind and the need to escape from hatefulness and greed.

A companion plot involves the investigation of the murder-by-strangulation of some of Houston's most prominent misanthropes, with each victim being defiled by bird poop.

In the movie's especially rich title opening, aging socialite Daphne Heap (Margaret Hamilton of Wizard of Oz fame) is shown dressed in red, white and blue and bedecked with bunting while rehearsing the Star Spangled Banner in the Astrodome backed by an all-black marching band.

Heap, who appears to be tone deaf, scolds the band harshly for playing in the wrong key. In retaliation, they launch into Lift Every Voice and Sing, often referred to as the Black National Anthem, as the opening credits roll.

Altman, famous for his sardonic wit, understood the tension created by the juxtapositioning of these two works -- tension that has not abated in the 50-plus years since McCloud took flight.

I think it is important to note that in the movie's final reel police chase after Brewster-on-the-wing around the stadium. Though he has created a marvelous flying contraption, he is still trapped inside a cage. A fitting metaphor, I think, for those of us tired of putting up with the world's shit but realize this is the only world we've got.

The Strawberry Statement

 

In director Stuart Hagmann's 1970 student protest flick The Strawberry Statement, Bruce Davison plays a crew rower at a Bay Area university who gets swept up in a campus strike, meets a pretty young feminist (Kim Darby) and joins a group of anti-war / anti-racism activists who have taken over the university, demanding it give back land taken from a neighboring Black community. The land has been dedicated to the expansion of the school's ROTC program.

The story is based on James Kunen's experiences during a demonstration at Columbia University in 1968, and the film is an interesting artifact from a time of social disruption and unease that doesn't peddle pat answers or pablum.

Davison's Simon is a footloose gadabout who wanders into the activism sphere solely looking for a hookup. Soon the protest rhetoric, animosity of the university establishment, hostility of the police and the indifference of the greater community are too much for the 20-year-old to ignore. He turns a fight with a conservative oarsman into a red badge of courage and gets elevated as a martyr to the cause of pushing back against the "bullshit."

For her part, Darby's Linda is as confused by the protesters' agenda as she is about her own need for liberation and Simon's intentions. She is drawn to his energy, if not his dedication, and becomes his companion, which, of coures, does not comport with the Women's Lib agenda.

Though the film is an interesting "statement" in its own right, Hagmann's tone (and camera) swings madly between whimsical and didactical. The familiar California folk rock musical score is of the moment but the closing scenes of the gassing and beating of students by the police are shocking and seemingly endless and feel disassociated from what had come before.

I suspect that was purposeful, suggesting demands to "give peace a chance" are often answered by truncheons and boots.

Sound familiar?

Carnivale (redux)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwtMpL-zxEY

During its short run (2003-2005), I was completely hooked on Daniel Knauf's Carnivale, despite its end-of-days hokum and endlessly evolving mythology.

Set during the Great Depression, the story told of a ragtag roving circus traveling through the dusty Southwest, unwittingly on its way to a showdown between agents of goodness and wickedness.

Sweat, dust and dirt, sweltering heat and blinding wind storms filled the screen weekly. I loved the feel of the show. Carnivale won Emmys for its production values but was overlooked for performance awards. Maybe the size of the cast worked against them.

Michael J. Anderson played the diminutive leader of the band, Samson, a former weightlifting dwarf who answered to the mysterious (hell, everything about this show was mysterious) Management, who sat shrouded in a trailer, visited only by Samson and one or two others.

Nick Stahl as escaped prisoner Ben Hawkins and Clancy Brown as evangelist Brother Justin were the incarnations of light and darkness, although it was never clear who was which. That question and a host of other puzzlers made the show intriguing but also frustrating to those who really like narratives to have definitive meaning.

Though it lasted only two seasons -- to the great disappointment of its fans -- it was a bit of a game changer, at least to me, in how it handled themes of faith and morality. (See especially the season 1 episode titled Babylon) Criminality and lasciviousness were written on every page, judgment meted out with relish, but Knauf and company seemed interested in the grayness of human existence not dogma. This notion is present in the series' opening monologue, delivered by Anderson.

The series is grim and because it was cancelled prematurely leaves many loose threads dangling but it is a fascinating treatment of the duality of human beings, as we struggle with right and wrong along unfamiliar paths, into uncertain futures.

Live Fast, Die Young

 

Saturday Night Drive-in ~ Live Fast, Die Young

Back in '58, California high-schooler Jill gets lousy grades, picked on by her teachers and the other school kids, talks trash with her out-of-work-bum-of-a-washed-up-jock of a father, and runs away because her life is "for the birds."

Man-Hating Big Sister Kim joins her on the run, and they become thieves, seducing and hitting up drunks in bars -- all because their trashy mother ran off with a lousy salesman and they ain't got no education.

Two real choice dames in this Eisenhower-era cautionary tale about the dangers of being an independent woman!

Starring a pre-Mannix Mike Connors and dreamy Troy Donahue.

Feud: Capote vs. The Swans

I'm sauntering through Jon Robin Baitz's Feud: Capote vs. The Swans, a Hulu series that I'm finding fascinating and exhausting.

Tom Hollander's Capote is a scarved, behatted masochist who has revealed the unseemly underbelly of New York high society in an Esquire article that leads to the end of his relationship with a quintet of women, The Swans, and banishment from their inner circle. Naomi Watts (Thanks for the catch, Peach!) is wonderful as chief Swan Babe Paley, socialite and wife of media executive Bill Paley (a fine Treat Williams), with whom Capote was especially close and whose friendship the writer missed the most.

I found particularly intriguing episode 5, an imaginary day-long meeting between Capote and Black ex-pat author James Baldwin during the dark days of Capote's alcoholism. Baitz admits the day never happened, and is an encounter between two highly influential gay men of letters, contemporaries but not friends, who responded to alienation and truth in very different ways. Baldwin left America for France many years before Capote's crisis.

Baldwin, played convincingly by Chris Chalk, is Capote's counselor and comforter, pushing the acerbic writer -- who is struggling to finish an imposing new work titled Answered Prayers -- to finish what he has begun, revealing America's falseness and social disparities.

The conversations between the two men are some of the most insightful in the series, with Capote sharing startling awareness of racial dynamics not explored in previous episodes. Capote, famously biting, is likely not to have ever uttered these words or had these thoughts, is just Baitz's tool to air them, but that is fine by me.

Baldwin's part in the epiphany may strike some as a little regressive, magical Negro intervention, but Chalk's portrayal is so self-possessed and clear-eyed I never felt Baldwin was any more than a man shaking some sense into a friend who was wasting his gifts and time.

Were we all to be so lucky to have someone who cared that much to tell us to cut the crap and get back to work!

American Society of Magical Negroes

 

Kobi Libii's debut feature, American Society of Magical Negroes, is tanking in its theatrical release, but I trust it will find a more appreciative audience when it arrives on streaming, which will quite likely be soon.

I enjoyed the picture and appreciate what Libii tries to do in blending the cinematic trope of deferential Black secondary characters with the reality of African American endangerment because of the itchy discomfort of some white folks.

The fine young actor Justice Smith (The Get Down) plays Libii's alter ego in a story I take is rooted not only in the filmmaker's study of motion picture history regarding depictions of race but in his own lived experience. Smith plays Aren, a struggling textile artist (I can't imagine any other kind) who has been navigating L.A. with a quick smile and a quicker apology.

One evening, after an especially disheartening art show, he finds himself accused of taking a young woman's purse at an ATM. The situation is "miraculously" de-escalated by David Alan Grier's mystical Roger, who invites Aren to a recruitment meeting. At the meeting, Aren is introduced to the eponymous group whose role is to help ease the anxiety of white folks for the safety of Black folks because dis-ease equals death.

Yes, that premise is a lot to swallow, but it didn't strike me as being that much more challenging -- considering current events -- than Spike Lee's Bamboozled (2000) or Robert Townsend's Hollywood Shuffle (1987), both of which wrestled with race and racism to wildly divergent audience response.

Aren earns his "Magical Negro" wings and is assigned a client, Jason, a vacuous and self-involved co-worker at a social media platform. Aren is first assigned to helping Jason (Drew Tarver) earn a promotion but shortly also to woo a bright young designer (An-Li Bogan), to whom Aren himself is attracted.

Aren has been warned, however, that he must never act in his own behalf or all of the Magical Negroes will be powerless to help anxious white folks. This, in turn, would endanger Black folks everywhere. Things go awry, as one might expect, which leads to a final act that is both clunky and inspired (that tonal unevenness, again).

Smith, a skilled stage actor, is bright and engaging and is the reason the picture works as well as it does, I think. A less likable protagonist would have made it much easier to dismiss the whole thing as a sad misfire.

I understand why many audiences might be frustrated by the film's uneven tone and its under-developed narrative structure, but I still think it introduces intriguing ideas that are worth exploring in more depth.