She (1965)

 

Back Before the Great Awakening (BGA), Hollywood released a slack spectacle from England's Hammer Studios titled She (1965).

The movie, which can be streamed on YouTube, starred the Swiss actress and model Ursula Andress in the eponymous role of the tragic queen of the fictitious East African nation of Kuma. Her name is Ayesha (same as the subject of Stevie Wonder's song Isn't She Lovely), but the queen is also called "She Who Must Be Obeyed," thus the name of the picture.

Because She bathed in a magical fire many years before, Ayesha has eternal youth, but, alas, She is alone, having killed her lover millennia before for cheating on her with a servant girl.

The picture also stars Hammer Studios horror features regulars Peter Cushing, as an archeologist, and Christopher Lee as Ayesha's majordomo, along with Bernard Cribbins as a wise-cracking sidekick and John Richardson as a handsome swain who catches the lonely queen's eye and heart.

Ayeshas is attended by two young Black women who are silent throughout, and her armies rule over a barbaric Black population called the Amahagger. In the 1888 source novel by H. Rider Haggard, the Amahagger is an all-female tribe. In both the book and the film, the queen is white and fierce.

The only female Amahagger with a speaking role was played by the Mexican actress Rosenda Monteros. Her father, Haumeid, was played by duskied British actor Andre Morell.

I remember seeing She when it was in general distribution back when I was a kid. Of course, back then major features played in the cinemas for months and months, were pulled back, sent to drive-ins, and then re-released to the same movie houses six months or a year later.

Movies were distributed widely across the U.S., North and South, which might account for why none of the Black characters in She had speaking lines or appeared in any role that was dominant to the white characters. In this way, She was perfect fantasy fare for Dixie during Jim Crow -- except for that Amahagger uprising against the mean queen.

It's all ridiculous storytelling in these enlightened days of the Great Awakening (GA) but serves as a reminder of how culture both reflects and shapes popular perspectives, as we see with BGA folks believing Black Africans are lesser beings, unworthy and unwelcome in the USA, and women really ain't nothing without a good man.

Life of Chuck

 

On one level, The Life of Chuck, which is based on the Stephen King novella of the same name, is a rich, mentally invigorating viewing experience. Three roughly chronological chapters are presented in reverse order, with two unifying themes threaded through them -- time and mortality.

The title character is played at various points by the ever-versatile Tom Hiddleston (The Night Manager, Avengers), Jacob Tremblay (Room) and the wonderful child actor/dancer Benjamin Pajak. It is not entirely clear if Chuck is an actual person, an archetype or a totem, but whatever the case, he appears to be a soul out of time, in many senses of that expression. His purpose is to prompt those in the narrative world and in the audience to take a breath ... look around ... be in the moment.

On another level, The Life of Chuck is an ambitious and not wholly successful attempt to transfer King's heady contemplations to the screen, despite the constraints inherent in movies. Some notions are most genuinely appreciated on the written page.

Having said that, Flanagan's construction of Chapter 2, Buskers, is beyond exhilarating, with Hiddleston, Analise Basso's Janice and drummer Taylor Franck's Pocket Queen turning an uncanny musing on creativity and mindfulness into a masterclass on sound and movement.

 

Casualties of War (1989)

 

Three years before Rob Reiner's A Few Good Men (1992), Brian De Palma released Casualties of War, the harrowing film of a squad of American soldiers in the jungles of Vietnam who were ordered by their sergeant (Sean Penn) to kidnap and rape a young woman for their amusement.

One squad member (Michael J. Fox) doesn't participate in the assault and tries to help the woman escape, but she is killed by the other members of the squad. Her body is left in the brush.

When the men return to base, company officers aren't interested in pursuing an investigation into the incident or prosecuting the soldiers. The soldier reporting the crime is shunned and threatened by his squad mates, and nearly killed. After an Army chaplain hears of the woman's death, he presses for action. The sergeant and the others are court-martialed and imprisoned.

The film, which is based on true events, is typical de Palma -- chilling and disturbing and brutal -- and it raises many vital questions about codes of conduct, loyalty and solidarity and justice, all of which are especially relevant these days.

Yes, war IS hell, and some men who are put into a cauldron of desperation and madness can turn into devils.

Rental Family

 

Japanese director Hikari's Rental Family is Oscar-winner Brendan Fraser's loving entry into another award-season competition for best actor consideration.

In this film, Fraser delivers an understated but highly affecting performance as a lonesome and emotionally isolated American actor living in Japan, piecing together a living with spot gigs in commercials and the occasional feature film or series.

One acting job asks him to appear at a funeral as a "token white guy." He discovers the funeral is a fantasy being lived by the "deceased" and learns from his employer, Shinji (Takehiro Hira), that such contrived experiences with surrogate performers are common in Japan.

Shinji offers Phillip, who does not connect with people below surface levels, more lucrative jobs that will require complex role-playing -- as the groom at a wedding the bride is staging to placate her parents so that she might begin her life with her female companion and as a gaming partner/friend for a recluse.

The film, which was written by Hikari and Stephen Blahut, spends most of its time on two jobs that lead Phillip into personal emotional spaces he hasn't visited in many years.

He is contracted by a mother (Shino Shinozakito) to pretend to be the long-absent father to her young biracial daughter (Shannon Mahina Gorman) so that she can get into a prestigious school.

He is also hired by a daughter (Sei Matobu) to play a journalist interviewing her aging actor father (Akira Emoto), who is drifting into dementia. Neither the child nor the actor knows Phillip is pretending.

As one might expect, the subterfuge eventually becomes untenable, and Phillip finds himself crossing lines that could spell disaster for him and the agency.

Fraser's Phillip is not expressive without a script, and when he's off the book, when his guard is down, the audience can read his thoughts and feelings on his face. At various times, his face reads perplexed, uncertain, determined, frightened, forlorn, elated, enamored, dazzled, and smitten.

Rental Family is a fine film with a fine star turn from a fine actor.

Hamnet

 

In a pivotal scene near the close of Chloé Zhao's achingly romantic and heartbreaking adaptation of Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet, Jessie Buckley's Agnes (pronounced "Annis") attends the premiere of husband William Shakespeare's latest work, a tragedy titled Hamlet.

Both brittle and flinty from the recent death of Hamnet, their young son (a heart-tugging Jacobi Jupe), Agnes enters the Globe, not believing that Will (a virtuosic Paul Mescal) has written a play bearing the boy's name without telling her, and that so many people have come to see it. She's stunned and mystified and furious.

Agnes is accompanied by her brother Bartholomew (a steady Joe Alwyn), who urges her to keep her heart open, echoing their herbalist/animist mother. Though those words are spoken near the end of the picture, it's great advice to anyone venturing into Zhao's world of love, labor and loss.

Of course, keeping your heart open will be painful. Much is asked of the audience, but nothing close to what is demanded of the players, especially Buckley. She's honest and visceral, fully owning every embrace and every tear. Hers is a showpiece of film acting.

Other standout performers are Emily Watson as Will's loving, puritan mother Mary; and Noah Jupe, older brother to Jacobi, as Hamlet in the Globe staging of the play.

Agnes asks Will during their first meeting to tell her a story that moves him, and Hamnet delivers.

Blue Moon

 

Director Richard Linklater's latest project with actor Ethan Hawke is a dream for lovers of film and/or theater.

Blue Moon has an outstanding script, wonderfully evocative art design and costuming, a transporting score and award-caliber performances by a cast led by Hawke, who transforms into the brilliant but tragic songwriter Lorenz Hart, who co-wrote the song in the film's title and hundreds upon hundreds more.

The movie is set mostly in legendary Sardi's in 1943, on the night Oklahoma! opened on Broadway. Hart leaves his box seat in the middle of the show written by his former longtime songwriting partner and friend Richard Rogers (Adam Scott) and Oscar Hammerstein II (Simon Delaney).

Hart has taken his regular seat at the bar in Sardi's lounge, and it is there he holds court, with the bartender Eddie (Bobby Cannavale) and a piano player in an Army uniform (Jonah Lees), whom he dubs "Knuckles," as supporting players. In meandering, vulgar but fascinating anecdotes, Hart recounts his relationship with Rogers and trashes Oklahoma!'s homespun sentimentality, admitting he's bitter and jealous of the show's success.

Though Rogers, Hammerstein and the show's producers will be arriving shortly for a celebration, Hart announces he is actually in Sardi's to meet a young woman with whom he's been corresponding, Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley of The Substance and Kinds of Kindness), a Yale student who aspires to working in the theater and wants to meet Rogers.

As Hart waits, he regales all listeners -- eventually to include the writer E.B. White (Stuart Little, Charlotte's Web) played by Patrick Kennedy -- with his amorous intentions for 20-year-old Elizabeth, even though Eddie and Knuckles assume the flamboyant gadfly is attracted to men. When Hart explains he is "omnisexual," listeners will no doubt wonder if he is revealing truth, a bit of self-deception, or some emotional or mental disturbance. As we discover, it's all of the above.

As the story progresses, Hart's insecurities, and the alcoholism that destroyed his career and relationship with Rogers, become increasingly visible. His need for affirmation, reflected in his final exchanges with Rogers and Elizabeth, is sad and distressing.

The screenplay, written by first-timer Rober Kaplow and based on letters between Hart and Weiland, virtually sparkles with wit and insightful nuance. It will surely get nods come awards time.

The final minutes of Linklater's tale of love found and lost will slowly ring down the curtain on one of America's greatest theater talents, who nine months after Oklahoma!'s premiere would be found drunk and unconscious on a street corner. Hart died just a few days later, but the American songbook he and Rogers created lives on.

Sisu: Road to Revenge

 

Finnish writer / director Jalmari Helander's Sisu: Road to Revenge is the sequel to his 2022 marauding mayhem movie Sisu, which also starred his brother-in-law Jorma Tommila, as a Finnish WWII soldier battling in the first film thieving Germans and this time sadistic Russians.

Tommila's Aatami Korpi has killed scores of Russian officers to avenge the destruction of Finnish villages annexed by Russia after the war. Homes were destroyed, people were displaced or killed, like Korpi's family. Korpi has returned to the homestead, with the family's Bedlington terrier (a nice touch, BTW) to retrieve what's left of his life.

A Russian officer (Richard Brake) tells a psychopath chained up in a Siberian prison -- Stephen Lang's curdling Yeagor Dragunov -- that in exchange for his freedom and a sizeable monetary reward, Dragunov is to take out Korpi before he makes it back across the Finnish border.

The stage is set for a chase, and like all films in the road rage genre that began with George Miller's Mad Max in 1979, Sisu 2 is structured around escalating levels of vehicular carnage. In this case, deaths start with evisceration and decapitation and increase outlandishly over the picture's 90 minutes.

Tommila is in his mid-60s and is an impressive avenging angel; he doesn't speak a word in the picture but conveys great emotional intensity, nonetheless. Though covered with grime, dirt and blood for the entire movie, Korpi's pure industriousness will win over audiences, even while he's emptying machine guns into a platoon of Red Army fighters.

In a way, Road to Revenge could have been given the pitch line "Wicked for Good," but I understand that's been taken.Finnish writer / director Jalmari Helander's Sisu: Road to Revenge is the sequel to his 2022 marauding mayhem movie Sisu, which also starred his brother-in-law Jorma Tommila, as a Finnish WWII soldier battling in the first film thieving Germans and this time sadistic Russians.

Tommila's Aatami Korpi has killed scores of Russian officers to avenge the destruction of Finnish villages annexed by Russia after the war. Homes were destroyed, people were displaced or killed, like Korpi's family. Korpi has returned to the homestead, with the family's Bedlington terrier (a nice touch, BTW) to retrieve what's left of his life.

A Russian officer (Richard Brake) tells a psychopath chained up in a Siberian prison -- Stephen Lang's curdling Yeagor Dragunov -- that in exchange for his freedom and a sizeable monetary reward, Dragunov is to take out Korpi before he makes it back across the Finnish border.

The stage is set for a chase, and like all films in the road rage genre that began with George Miller's Mad Max in 1979, Sisu 2 is structured around escalating levels of vehicular carnage. In this case, deaths start with evisceration and decapitation and increase outlandishly over the picture's 90 minutes.

Tommila is in his mid-60s and is an impressive avenging angel; he doesn't speak a word in the picture but conveys great emotional intensity, nonetheless. Though covered with grime, dirt and blood for the entire movie, Korpi's pure industriousness will win over audiences, even while he's emptying machine guns into a platoon of Red Army fighters.

In a way, Road to Revenge could have been given the pitch line "Wicked for Good," but I understand that's been taken.

The History of Sound

 

To say South African director Oliver Hermanus's The History of Sound is a gay drama is pretty reductive.

This quiet and pretty film is so much more than a love story; it's mainly about the many things in life we can keep and those we inevitably lose.

Paul Mescal and Josh O'Connor star as Boston Conservatory students around the start of World War I who are drawn to each other by their love of folk songs.

During their meeting at a smoky local pub, Mescal's retiring singer Lionel and O'Connor's commanding composer David perform the folk ballad Silver Dagger, which David insists Lionel, who was reared on such songs back home in Kentucky, sing to bar patrons.

It's an important moment, and song, for the picture's narrative and will resonate as the friends become lovers and then partners on a project to record native songs on Edison wax cylinders all over New England.

Don't mistake, it's the songs -- not the romance between the schoolmates -- that lends weight and passion to the picture. Some might see that as the movie's biggest weakness. They wanted more Brokeback Mountain but skin and heat is not all the story is about.

Astute viewers will realize fairly quickly that David is a chameleonic charmer and begin to wonder, as Lionel does, what is real and what is artifice. But also like Lionel, the viewers' wariness will not keep them from being swept into David's world, his desire to preserve what is vanishing is palpable.

When the friends part after the song collecting project, they lose touch. Lionel goes abroad to perform, but eventually finds Rome and London can't offer him what he had while traipsing through the woods hunting songs with David. The last quarter of the film is Lionel trying to recapture that fire.

O'Connor is a wonderful actor, who breathes life into domineering David, but this is Mescal's picture, from start to finish, for he is like many of us -- not sure of what we want until it's gone.

And, perhaps more to the point of The History of Sound, not sure of who we want to be until we aren't that person anymore.

The Running Man (2025)

 

Edgar Wright's remake of Paul Michael Glaser's 1987 adaptation of Stephen King's The Running Man amps up the social / political commentary, which increases its relevancy but might detract from its longevity.

Hollywood looker Glenn Powell takes on the Arnold Schwarzenegger role of Ben Richards, the title character who competes in a televised race against the clock. Powell's Richards is one of the teeming masses living in slums, cut off from meaningful employment, decent housing and adequate healthcare. (To say the narrative is pointed would be a cheeky understatement.)

Unlike Schwarzenegger's disgraced police officer seeking reinstatement, Powell's Richards is a flinty, black-balled industrial worker who was punished for caring about his fellow laborers. He is looking to make enough money to afford real medicine for his sick daughter and move the family out of the slums.

The corporate / state entity runs sadistic contests in which the poor compete for money in front of studio audiences. Richards promises his wife, Sheila (Jayme Lawson of Sinners), that he would not apply for the big payday, The Running Man. This show is hosted by Bobby T (Colman Domingo) and as heavily edited / fabricated reality TV. But Richards is persuaded by the greasy network chief Dan Killian (Josh Brolin) that his fiery temper would get him across the finish line and into a better life.

The movie is a race against time -- a frequent narrative trope since the '87 flick. Lethal hunters, led by the masked Evan McCone (Lee Pace), are on Richard's tail, using all manner of surveillance and public crowdsourcing to track him. (Ditto with the comment on social / political relevance.)

Richards discovers on his journey toward the finish line underground fighters (William H. Macy, Daniel Ezra, Michael Cera) at work undermining government control and propaganda. They help Richards stay a step ahead but, of course, there must be a final showdown.

Though there's little doubt Richards will survive his ordeal, the future of the other millions is left uncertain -- as is true for those of us in the real world of the movie audience.

Nuremberg and The Mastermind

James Vanderbilt's Nuremberg is an interesting but not fullyu satisfying approach to the much-visited subject of the trial of the surviving Nazi high command after Germany's surrender in 1945 and the death of Adolph Hitler.

Vanderbilt's picture, based on The Nazi and the Psychiatrist by Jack El-Hai, is a character study of U.S. Army psychiatrist Douglas Kelley as played by Rami Malek and Reichsmarshall Hermann Göring, a dedicated Russell Crowe.

Vanderbilt has written an often riveting battle of wits and wills between the self-assured (and self-interested) Kelley and the imperious Göring, as the psychiatrist tries to crack the Nazi mindset.

Kelley is asked by the head of the Nuremberg multinational tribunal, US Associate Justice Robert Jackson (Michael Shannon), to share his insights and analysis with the prosecution team, but Kelley refuses, at first. He hopes to keep whatever he finds during his interviews for later publication. What develops is a strangely symbiotic friendship with Göring, including carrying letters between the German and his family.

Kelley is aided by Army translator Sgt. Howie Triest (a nicely tempered performance by British actor Leo Woodall), who translates interviews between the psychiatrist and the prisoners and offers Kelley invaluable insight of his own. It's Triest's monologue near the end of the picture that lands most compellingly for the viewer.

Though Vanderbilt includes devastating footage of the concentration / death camps taken by Allied Forces during liberation -- including the disposal of mounds of corpses -- the picture falls short of convincingly depicting the monstrosity of the Reich and the men who led it.

Part of the problem is casting the affable Crowe as Göring. Kelley (and, ergo, the film) suggests Göring's enormous self-regard -- depicted in the scene when his escaping car is stopped by American soldiers and he asks them to get his luggage -- made the man incapable of harboring malice toward anyone -- including Jews. He simply did not care about anyone but himself. This is an interesting -- but unpersuasive conceit.

++++

Kelly Reichardt's The Mastermind gives the reliably fascinating English actor Josh O'Connor an opportunity to fully own a picture that plumbs the depths of a character who appears to have few redeemable qualities but manages to convince others to follow him into disaster.

O'Connor's James Mooney is an unemployed Massachusetts cabinet-maker, husband and father of two, son of a judge and art thief in 1970. An unkempt and morose figure, James plans the theft of four abstract pieces from the local museum with three accomplices Larry, Guy and the spitfire Ronnie (Eli Gelb, Cole Doman and Javion Allen, respectively).

The heist is both bungled and successful, with James getting away with the paintings and storing them in the loft of a barn outside of town. When Ronnie gets arrested during a bank robbery, he fingers James as the "mastermind" of the museum job, which leads to James sending his family (Alana Haim and Sterling and Jasper Thompson) to stay with his parents (Bill Camp and Hope Davis) and him hitting the road.

James's desultory wanderings to avoid capture reveal, slowly but wonderfully, the depths of disconnection with the world around him. Though others appear to be drawn to him -- like his starstruck friend Fred (John Magaro), James shows little but the most pragmatic regard for other people, includin ghis wife and children.

And yet, it's difficult to dislike this character. He's so pitiful in his deception that the viewer's heart goes out to him -- which, of course, in real life is how people like James Mooney get through life.

News, Newspapering and New York City

At the turn of the 20th century, New York City was a news mecca, home to a score of daily and weekly newspapers with names like The Times, The World, The Journal, The Herald, The American, The Sun, and The Post.

Literacy amongst white folks in the U.S. was about 90 percent then; 55 percent among Blacks and other people of color nationwide, although one would expect that percentage was larger in urban areas in the Yankee North.

New York was a readers' city, and newsstands offered something for everybody. The Times was the straightlaced newspaper of record (The Old Gray Lady), Pulitzer's World and Hearst's Journal waged wars of sensational yellow journalism, The Herald spun people stories, and The Post spouted Hamiltonian conservatism.

In fact, many general circulation newspapers were politically aligned or at least party sympathizers well into the 20th century.

Partisanship was eventually cooled by market forces that shifted the newspaper's revenue stream from readers to advertisers. Advertisers wanted to reach as many eyeballs as possible, so the newshole became more neutral, and viewpoints moved from the front page to editorial.

In addition, the rise of professional journalism schools infused newsrooms everywhere with staffers trained in the same standards of objectivity that had shaped news service reporting since the 1830s.

Later changes in market forces altered the landscape again and laid waste to legacy media. These changes left public officials under-scrutinized and the general public under-served. Partisan media resurged in social media fragmentation.

That the regime has no truck with traditional journalism practices, choosing to propagate misinformation through social media, and has stacked the White House Press Corps with conservatives surprises nobody who has been paying attention.

It's good that many journos still bristle at charges of bias or "fake news" from a regime shamelessly dedicated to both. But they should not feel compelled to defend themselves in the face of such bad faith.

Rather, adopt the demeanor of the Old Gray Lady when labelled such by its flashy, sensationalistic neighbors. Stay the course and outlive them.

Friends and Baggage

 

It occurred to me that we are a thoroughly transactional society -- more than I once thought.

While some folks still use language like "relationships," more and more of us are using words like "connections," even when talking about our families and closest associates.


Transactional friendships can be compared to traveling with luggage.

For example, our wallets and billfolds are kept close, like intimate friends, and we feel disoriented when we discover they're absent. Panic might even set in.

Other friends, important but not as indispensable, are like carry-ons that we stow nearby, still needed and accessible, but we're comfortable with their absence for a while. We reach for them for amusement and diversion and then put them away again.

Other friends are like the luggage we check at the gate or with baggage handlers. We grow frustrated when they aren't where we need them to be, but we'll make due, and if need be we will acquire replacements if they don't turn up.

When a bag is permanently lost, the traveler might learn an important lesson about themselves and their priorities and attachments and might make better decisions going forward.

Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye

Scientists tell us that 3/4 of the world's population has brown eyes. About 9 percent, blue, and the rest of the colors -- hazel, amber, grey, green etc. -- are distributed in lesser and lesser proportions around the globe.

But fictional heroes and heroic figures in Western literature and visual media almost always have blue eyes. Even common emjois have blue eyes. Seems improbable considering the data, but there it is.

This is changing with the darkening of popular culture, but blue, especially among females, is still the preference.

In her book The Bluest Eye (1970), Toni Morrison distilled predominant beauty standards down to the color in the title. The main character, the young Black girl, Pecola, is driven mad by the oppressive and arbitrary assignment of desirability and value in her community of Lorain, Ohio, which, of course, is a simulacrum of American culture.

Morrison's book has been removed from school libraries all over because of its uncompromising depiction of human destructiveness, not just racism and colorism, but physical, emotional and sexual abuses. She even explores pernicious religious fraudulence as it preys upon Pecola's gullibility, promising miraculous physical transformations for a price.

Morrison, whose brilliance as a storyteller was celebrated with multiple awards, including the Nobel Prize, was never as gauche as to turn the elegant prose in her novels into polemical screeds. Her work is much too elegant and refined for such base amateurism.

Rather, she excoriated systemic racism and cultural bias, sexual hypocrisy and misogyny and fraudulence in stories that were never told conventionally but inventively, surprisingly and searingly.

Attacks on her vision might appear, through some folks' eyes, as unimportant in light of other pressing concerns. But I think it is part of the overall scheme to delegitimize anything -- no matter how exquisitely crafted -- that might awaken our consciousness, remove the scales from our eyes, as it were, and help us see what is being done, and ask "why?"

Cameron's Feminism

You know that scene in James Cameron's Aliens (1986) when Lt. Gorman (William Hope) -- the leader of the expedition of Marines to the planet that Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) has warned is overrun with ferocious skeletal xenomorphs that incubate in human bodies -- freaks out because he's in waaaaaay over his head. Personnel are being wiped out left and right and his simulator training wasn't enough to prepare him for the real world?

At that pivotal point, Ripley (a role that earned Weaver an Oscar nomination, bitches!) steps into the gap left by Gorman's breakdown and is able to save the remaining members of the expedition -- for the time being -- and even offers Gorman the chance for redemption.

Well, ALL of the current administration, not just the "War Department," is Gorman -- dithering, mumbling, blathering about "spit and polish" and readiness and sucking it up and on and on and on.

We've reached the point -- seems like it's been a few light years, frankly -- where leaders disappoint and demoralize those directly reporting to them and the rest of us on the regular. They're not up to the challenges of true leadership. Talking and pretending are NOT meaningful action. It's almost like their understanding is rooted in television. Peter Weir's The Truman Show (1998)? 🤔

Those of us who are still invested in this country's future -- and have not checked out either physically or emotionally -- are waiting for a reality check to set things aright.

In my book, James Cameron is an uber-feminist. The array of powerful women at the center of his epic adventures is impressive and in many ways inspiring -- Ripley in Aliens, Lindsey in The Abyss, Neytiri in Avatar, Helen in True Lies, Sarah in The Terminator, etc.

Maybe turning the wheel over to women (or even capable men, for that matter) who know what they're doing, are clear-eyed and focused and not blinded by their vanity to the distresses they're causing would be the way to go.

Sure, basing real-world decisions on Hollywood mythologizing can be dangerous, but can it be any worse than what we've got?

Who Mourns for Tyrants?

 

In the famous Star Trek episode "Who Mourns for Adonais?" (S2, E2), the actor Michael Forest played an alien being claiming to be one of the gods from Earth mythology, Apollo. He lives alone on a planet the crew of the Enterprise is exploring because of its familiar Greek structures.

When the landing party arrives, Apollo welcomes them to "Olympus" and after dispatching two dispensable landing party members (as was the pattern in this series), he tells Kirk (William Shatner) to order the rest of the crew to transport down, take apart the ship to make their homes and worship him for all of their days.

Apollo takes a shining to a female member of the landing party, an archeologist played by Leslie Parrish, turning her head with divine adornments.

He's confused when Kirk refuses to comply and doesn't understand why these lesser beings wouldn't rush to please him. The inevitable showdown between god and human comes after the pretty archeologist tells Apollo she was not really taken in by his flattery. She was studying him as if he was an interesting alien species. Ouch.

Apollo is finally defeated when the Enterprise destroys the source of his great power. He fades away, literally, having now lost the second thing that kept him alive -- the first being human adoration.

Tyrants live mostly in their own imaginations, picturing what a life of endless affirmation would be like. They panic when faced with reality, represented by the resistance or resentment of those they are trying to impress.

All tyrants, in time, become one with the dust, like the rest of us. No more and no less.

The Irony Age

 

I was sitting on a bench across from the Monument to Desegregation outside of the McKissick M\useum at USC yesterday when a diminutive instructor with a piercing voice led a group of students up to it.

The instructor -- probably a graduate student, probably Middle Eastern as noted by her appearance and accent -- made a point of telling the class they were not interested in the bronze figures, just the base of the monument. They could read what it was about elsewhere. She asked them what minerals seemed to be present in the base, directed them to their study sheets, and walked them through a visual analysis.

Clear and precise instruction, yes, but it struck me as curt and dismissive of the significance of the statute. I wondered if, in light of the current political climate, instructors -- perhaps those most vulnerable -- have been instructed to steer clear of anything that might lead to trouble with Big Brother, that might be reported by an anti-woke crusader in the class, that might bring ICE knocking at doors?

Since we are in the Irony Age, I did not fail to note that these questions came to mind in front of a memorial to openness, in front of a museum dedicated to cultural awareness, in a structure that once was the storehouse for the university's collected knowledge. Pity.

Exhibiting Forgiveness

 

Like the artist at the center of his Exhibiting Forgiveness, director Titus Kaphar pours memory and pain onto a large canvas, invites the world in and leaves it to the viewer to create sense and connection with the work.

The film -- which stars André Holland, Andra Day, John Earl Jelks and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor -- brims with emotion as a family struggles against a history of abuse and addiction to find healing and peace. The answers are not easy and terrain is rocky and is guaranteed to leave many viewers bruised and exhausted. But also, well, blessed.

Albee's American Dream

 

The title character of Edward Albee's 1961 surreal one-act The American Dream -- a young, virile but seemingly vacuous young man -- says in his speech toward the end of the play that he was born with an identical twin from whom he was separated at birth.

"We were torn apart, thrown to opposite ends of the continent. I don't know what became of my brother ... the rest of myself ... except that, from time to time, in the years that have passed, I have suffered losses ... that I can't explain. A fall from grace ... a departure of innocence ... loss ... loss. How can I put it to you? All right, like this: Once ... it was as if all at once my heart ... became numb .. almost as though I ... almost as though ... just like that ... it had been wrenched from my body ... and from that time I have been unable to love. Once ... I was asleep at the time I ... I awoke, and my eyes were burning. And since that time I have been unable to see anything, anything, with pity, with affection ... with anything but ... cool disinterest."

A year later Albee would publish his brutal evisceration of American marital norms and conventions in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Albee (1928-2016) won three Pulitizers for Drama.

Rosemary's Baby Redux

 

A friend knew I was seeing for the umpteenth time Rosemary's Baby Wednesday night. It was being screened at the Nick. He asked me what I thought of the picture after all of these viewings; he said he's never seen it.

The film is an interesting cultural curio, IMO. It was adapted for the screen and directed by a filmmaker cinephiles either get or don't. It's not so much that Roman Polanski is so eccentric -- he is somewhat -- it's that his infamy often gets in the way of his movies.

Some folks appreciate his vision -- Repulsion, Chinatown, Tess, The Pianist, etc. -- and work around all of the other stuff. But many people dismiss him as a serial pedophile and will think of him forever as the absent husband on the night the Manson family butchered his very pregnant wife Sharon Tate and the baby she was carrying. That is a lot to work around, for sure.

Rosemary's Baby was shot in the Dakota, the apartment house where John Lennon was living with Yoko Ono when he was shot and killed by Mark David Chapman. The building has a palpable creepiness and stuffiness that befits the story of two outsiders -- struggling actor Guy and homebody Rosemary -- trying to find their way in the warrens of New York. I think the film is less a story of witches and the supernatural and more about being subsumed by one's environment.

I have always liked the movie but do find Mia Farrow's character a bit more refined in her affect and diction than her Omaha roots would suggest. But that's a small matter. John Cassavetes as Guy is just himself. He's not an actor's actor, IMO, but is surely an actor's director. I would recommend to anyone his largely improvisational film Shadows and any of the pictures with his wife Gena Rowlands.

My final thought is, Ruth Gordon (Harold and Maude) is pure joy to watch.

Oh Revolutionary, Where Art Thou?

 

I don't know with certainty why the counter-culture revolution of the '60s failed (if it failed and didn't evolve into something else), but it seems to me several factors contributed to the anti-establishment movement's foundering.

I think the war in Southeast Asia and the hours upon hours of media coverage of casualties and fatalities coalesced opposition. As the war wound down and the draft was rescinded, campus protests against the actions in Vietnam dwindled, or at least became less urgent.

Colleges and universities began to embrace alternative narratives and founded departments to share viewpoints -- Black Studies, Feminist Studies, etc. These were seen as wins by those committed to challenging the academy's hoary Western canon.

Though Johnson was gone, Nixon was still around to draw fire from "malcontents," at least for the moment. His unintentional self-immolation would remove another target for radicals to "kick around." Revolutions need a villain or villains, and Ford, though chastised for pardoning Nixon, was not viewed nearly as negatively as his two more immediate predecessors, after all, he was president when we pulled out of Saigon.

Some marked "improvements" in American social structures meant the marches, demonstrations and riots of the '60s were seen by many, perhaps hastily, as no longer unnecessary. Urban renewal campaigns that grew out of Johnson's War on Poverty and Nixon's punctuating installation of Affirmative Actions' Philadelphia Plan in 1969 were making measurable differences in the quality of life of the American public, particularly the urban poor, some said.

At the same time, the shocking assassination of public figures in the mid- to late-60s took the wind out of vocal reactionaries, for a while, and gave the perception that the nation was "progressing" -- passing through the fire, if you will.

And, the national soundtrack of protest was changing, becoming more radio-friendly. Helen Reddy's I Am Woman in 1972 was pivotal, I think, as was Marvin Gaye's What's Going On, the year before. Affirmation took the place of the more strident "burn baby burn" of the protest era, and, perhaps regretably to some, made room for Disco Inferno (1976) and a solid decade of platform shoes and sateen blouses.

I don't know if we're entering or have entered a new era of revolution, but the conditions that fueled the movement 60 years have resurfaced -- fatter and fiercer.

They Wanted Revolution

The Fifth Dimension's Save the Country

A few things are instructive to me about this Side 2 opener for The Fifth Dimension's 1970 platter titled Portrait.

Laura Nyro reportedly wrote and recorded "Save the Country" after the RFK assassination in 1968. The Fifth Dimension was a regular and successful interpretator of Nyro's midtown New York pop, but none of their previous selections was as charged as this one from the prolific East Coast songbird.

In fact, much of this album has an edge to it, with a 10-minute medley on the second side comprising a vocalized rendering of the Declaration of Independence, a Billy Davis Jr. rave-up of Sam Cooke's A Change is Gonna Come and a rousing rendition of The Rascals' People Gotta Be Free. It wasn't Country Joe and the Fish or Curtis Mayfield, but it had some attitude, for sure.

The times warranted it. And commenters on this YouTube posting over the years mentioned how relevant the message "save the country" is -- probably due more to American stagnation than Nyro's prescience, TBH. Save The Country

Folks are all over the map about The Fifth Dimension. Radicals back in the day dismissed their LA hipness as lacking ethnic or racial authenticity -- perfect for Simi Valley but unwelcome in South Central.

Others liked their inclusive tunefulness and lack of stridency. They were decidedly apolitical, like other pop / adult contemporary acts of the day -- Sonny and Cher, Vikki Carr, Tom Jones, among them -- and were rewarded with commercial success for about a decade. Davis and Marilyn McCoo have had a profitable commercial run as a husband/wife duo since leaving the group in the '70s.

It appears there have been numerous versions (if not dimensions) of the group since the founding in '67. They're on the small lounge / county fair circuit. I wonder if they're pulling out "Save the Country" for the good folks in Ames, Iowa?

Bugonia

 

First things first, Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos's latest, Bugonia, is a bloody mess. But it is also brilliant, both surprising and typically outlandishness, and anchored by wonderful performances from Emma Stone (Poor Things) and Jesse Plemons (Kinds of Kindness), whose recent 50-pound weight loss is even more apparent here.

Stone plays Michelle Fuller a high-powered dominatrix CEO of a pharmaceutical company in rural Georgia. She's a coutoured bundle of mix-messaging and faux social consciousness in Louboutin stilletos. An amazing creation.

Michelle is kidnapped by Plemons' greasy tinfoiler Teddy and Teddy's neurodivergent cousin Don (Aidan Delbis, who is on the autism spectrum) as part of Teddy's plan to force Fuller, who he believes is a member of an alien race responsible for the destruction of the Earth's eco system, to leave the planet during the luna eclipse, four days hence. 

During the kidnapping, a manic scene in the first 15 minutes of the picture, Lanthimos demonstrates with great economy that Teddy and Don are not the brightest bulbs, at least when it comes to human abduction. But their passion and dedication, mainly Teddy's, seems honest.The cousins manage to sedate and shave Michelle and keep her bound in the basement of their disaster of a home. Most of the film takes place in that space. 

The "negotiations," riveting exchanges that are terrifically shot, don't proceed as Teddy expects, and Don, who is a sweetheart, is never fully persuaded that Michelle is the alien invader his cousin says she is. The situation grows more and more tenuous as the days progress, and it is never clear how the stalemate will be resolved. Lanthimos leaves room for the possibility that Teddy is not COMPLETELY crazy -- he seems too articulate for that -- but the real game that's afoot is not made clear until the final, breathless and explosive reel. 

Bugonia is a remake of 2003 South Korean film Save the Green Planet!, which I've not seen, and compares favorably with black comedies that have been produced by those studios that I have seen, among them The Host, Parasite, Mickey 17. It is most definitely not for every taste, a mordant sense of humor would be most useful.

Good Fortune

 

South Carolina's own Aziz Ansari has written and directed a warm and winning comedy that takes the familiar Trading Places device of swapping lives and lifestyles and turns it into a more thoughtful statement on the intersection of social consciousness and the world of work.

Ansari stars as Arj, a luckless drone in the gig economy hive whose despair at ever landing steady employment is overheard by a junior angel named Gabriel (Keanu Reeves), who decides to take on Arj as a project, over the objections of his supervising angel, Martha, played by Sandra Oh. 

Arj manages to talk his way into a trial position as assistant to a wealthy and oblivious mogul named Jeff (Seth Rogen), who cares for little beyond his own comforts. Though Arj shows initiative and promise, he is fired from the job after using the mogul's company card to pay for dinner with Elena (Keke Palmer) a pretty young stocker in a home improvement store. 

Gabriel believes switching Arj -- who is homeless, living in his car, and showering at a gym -- and Jeff -- who has money to burn -- will benefit both of them. Arj will be more grateful for his own life, and Jeff more sympathetic toward those who have so much less than he. 

The plan doesn't work -- of course -- and Gabriel gets punished by Martha for creating problems when his job was to solve or prevent. As punishment, Gabriel is made mortal and begins his own journal of revelation, which both parallels and diverges from those of Arj and Jeff. 

Ansari's screenplay is clean and clever, his direction sharp and serviceable. Good Fortune is not about flashes of cinematic wonder. Rather, it's about the flashes of recognition that many (most?) moviegoers will experience while watching the characters discover what's important to life -- decency, kindness, consideration, and well-made tacos.

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere

 

 

Scott Cooper directs brawny films about headcases with big hearts (Out of the Furnace [2013], Hostiles [2017], The Pale Blue Eye [2022]) and his take on music writer Warren Zane's Deliver Me From Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska contains those familiar elements wrapped in wonderfully, lyrical moments from a small but important piece of the Boss's life.

In 1981, Springsteen (fighting fit award-winner Jeremy Allen White) is riding the waves of stardom after a string of hit albums. Springsteen is ending a tour with his band in support of the most recent release, The River, and we see them closing a show with Born to Run. This song of rootlessness and rebellion sets the picture's theme, and, it is suggested the nature of the artist's spiritual journey to wholeness.

Springsteen's manager / producer / confidante / guardian angel Jon Landau (the always-welcome award-winner Jeremy Strong) tells The Boss as he sits alone sweating buckets in his dressing room of upcoming promotional and contractual obligations to Columbia Records. Landau, a vitally perceptive person, senses the reclusive Springsteen is showing road-wear. He acquires a rental home for Springsteen away from the city noise where, it is hoped, Springsteen can decompress and begin work on the next record with a trusted engineer (Paul Walter Hauser).

The 30-year-old Springsteen is feeling more that tour fatigue. He is troubled by recurring memories of his childhood and his battling parents, long-suffering Adele and booze-hound Douglas (Gabby Hoffmann and Emmy-winner Stephen Graham of Adolescence). The memories are driving him into dark spaces and he starts to write songs about anger and meanness and entrapment and escape. 

At the same time, he finds some respite in the company of an old schoolmate's sister, Faye (Odessa Young), and they begin a romance that neither Springsteen nor the audience expects to last because of what emerges from his past.

Cooper follows these two complementary tracks and, intriguingly, takes the story of a talented performer with an outsize public profile and delivers an affective study of the emotional costs of the creative process, the pain and elation of seeing reality first fail and then succeed in meeting one's very personal vision.