The Sty of the Blind Pig (1974)

 

 

In 1974, PBS broadcast a production of Philip Hayes Dean's The Sty of the Blind Pig, masterfully directed by Ivan Dixon. (A link to the YouTube video of the Blind Pig broadcast is below.) Dixon was best known to television audiences as Kinchloe on Hogan's Heroes and to movie buffs as the male lead in Nothing But a Man (1964), opposite Abbey Lincoln.

Like Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun (1959), Dean's play is set in the Chicago apartment of a Black family -- the scolding and sanctimonious matriarch Weedy Warren (Maidie Norman) and her long-suffering and repressed daughter Alberta (Mary Alice). The pair are frequently visited by Weedy's brother, called Uncle Doc (Scatman Crothers), a boozy gambler who is trying to get back to the sportin' life in Memphis.

It's the early years of Civil Rights protests in the South, a region both familiar and foreign to the Warrens. (Out of sight ...) From her seat by the living room window, Weedy needles her daughter about her appearance and secretiveness, and Alberta pacifies her mother with grudging compliance. Uncle Doc ineffectively referees disputes between his sister and his niece.

One day, a sightless musician who calls himself Blind Jordan (Richard Ward) knocks on the door asking after Grace Waters. Alberta lets him in, tells him she doesn't know the person he seeks, but soon joins him in his search, which, as one might expect given the symbolism invested in the story, leads to the discovery of a different kind of grace.

Being a theater kid, I remember lending the broadcast my rapt attention, not picking up on every nuance Dean had woven into his wonderful play but enough to appreciate how important this story was. Later, I came to further understand that it was telling the world, at least that portion that watched public television, something about the souls of Black folks.

The play was also telling African Americans who may have been feeling as if they were in another country that life was unavoidably complex, a strange mix of the profound and the profane, and the blood spilled over the years -- in slaughterhouses, under lynching trees and in city streets -- may have blinded some to the truth but gave others greater clarity.

This play is one of many I would likely never have seen if public broadcasting had not scheduled programs that spoke to all of us.

 

The Name of the Rose redux

 

 

    In Jean-Jacques Annaud's 1986 thriller The Name of the Rose, Sean Connery stars as a spirited and independent medieval Franciscan friar, William of Baskerville, investigating the deaths of monks in a remote Italian abbey. He is accompanied by a youthful novice named Adso, played by Christian Slater. They discover much devilment going on within the hallowed halls of the monastery, which is also a scriptorium for copying sacred texts and a library for storing them.

    William, a sagacious scholar, was originally called to the monastery to take part in a debate on heresy but found himself called to ferret out "Satan's work." All of this is happening during the time of the Catholic Church's inquisitions, when skeptics and questioners were harassed, driven out or burned in the name of God.

One fascinating aspect of both the film and the novel, written by puzzle-master Umberto Eco, is the maze of stairs that is the heart of the monastery, connecting the various stacks where the books are stored but rarely distributed or read. Only a few librarians can navigate the stairs.

    What a wonderful metaphor for religious and political institutions that use byzantine dogma to confine followers and confound outsiders. They are unholy bedfellows, aren't they?

    Those of us who are serious and sane and trying to make sense of GOPer religio-politico plans and messages might find ourselves looking at a nonsensical web of half-baked concepts, fully baked falsehoods, circular reasoning, contradictory claims and hypocrisy. Venturing in is not for the faint-of-heart, and if we're not up to the challenge might find ourselves overwhelmed.

    Those familiar with the film know how it ends -- the real culprits are revealed, the human devils are struck down and the structure built to sustain all of this deceit destroys itself, reduced to ash and rubble.

    Amen.

 

Mission: Impossibe -- The Final Reckoning

 

Christopher McQuarrie has directed the four most recent Mission: Impossibles; the earlier installments were directed by a variety of other Hollywood notables -- De Palma, Woo, Abrams, Bird.

McQuarrie's pictures, which have all starred Tom Cruise as undercover superstar and reliably insubordinate agent Ethan Hunt, are big concept / big bang thrillers known for complicated plotting and outlandish stunts, many Cruise famously performs himself. 

Except for the stunt work, the films are constructed like the TV series of the '60s and '70s -- receive the mission, pull together the squad, infiltrate the enemy, set a "plan" in motion that will result in the bad agents turning on themselves and adjust to the occasional setback and disruption along the way.

Speaking of bygone days, Cruise will be 63 in July and looks amazing for a man of his years. We're left to wonder if it's all diet and routine (with a little Scientology thrown in) or are those abs as sculpted as his face, which still reads as "toothy badass" from where I sit. But no matter, his features and feats meet expectations of audiences drawn into the spiraling world of intelligence, counter-intelligence and existential threat.

The Final Reckoning delivers on all fronts with Cruise's Hunt "finishing" a mission left hanging two years ago (Dead Reckoning), in which a malevolent artificial intelligence called The Entity sits poised to take over the nuclear arsenals of all of the nations on the planet that have them -- including, of course, the U.S.  Hunt has a key that will give him access to the soulless brain.

After receiving a plea from the president (Angela Bassett) to turn himself in, hand over the key and not go rogue again, Hunt reassembles what remains of his team (Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg and Hayley Atwell) and recruits a few more (Pom Klementieff and Greg Tarzan Davis) to locate The Entity's brains in a sunken Russian submarine near the Bering Strait, use the key to immobilize it and avert global annihilation. He must do all of this while avoiding being captured or killed by the evil master mind Gabriel (Esai Morales) who wants to takeover control of The Entity, which we're all aware would be impossible.

McQuarrie, who also co-wrote the screenplay, takes full advantage of the series' expansive story world, taking audiences on a trot through world cities, into the blood-chilling depths of the northern Pacific and finally into the skies above South Africa, with the countdown to disaster pushing events along. 

Final Reckoning will make hundreds of millions in theaters and through streaming but it will also continue Hollywood's steady drumbeat of resistance against whitewashing through deliberately inclusive casting and narratives that challenge bias, ancient tropes and stereotypes. Yeah, Ethan Hunt is still a white guy saving the world, but the messaging in Final Reckoning is clear -- "team" means all of us.

Final Destination: Bloodlines

 

I am unabashed in my affection for the Final Destination franchise, whose pedigree extends back to the beloved X-files TV series and film.

As I told a friend, I'm a fan of the movies' commitment to the conceit that Death is a relentless hunter and humans are the game. Some of the game try mightily to outwit the hunter and might successfully delay being bagged, but, in the end, the hunter will win. Well, we ARE talking about Death here.

Death as an invisible but sentient force is off-putting to some, and I can appreciate that, but this creation is not original to this 25-year-old franchise. In fact, Final Destination clearly draws from classical myths about the Fates, the goddesses of destiny who stood above all other deities.

In Bloodlines, audiences -- who come for the creative gore more than the story, which, again, is pretty much set -- are introduced to an extended family whose grandparents escaped death back in the '60s because of a premonition.

College student Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) is failing her courses because she can't sleep, her dreams interrupted by scenes of people dying in a catastrophic disaster in a tower restaurant called The Skyview.

Directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein stage a long but impressive opening sequence that is unmatched by any of the individual "reckoning" moments to follow. Still, it whets the appetite for a feast of tension and "tongue-in-cheekery". The movie is loaded with visual and musical puns. (You'll never hear the Isley Brothers' "Shout" or any of the other music in this picture quite the same. LOL)

Stefani meets with her grandmother Iris (Gabrielle Rose), whose premonition at The Skyview saved many lives from being lost in the tower collapse. Iris has been locked away in a fortress that keeps Death at bay; but Death has been playing catch-up and reaping the descendants of those who survived and Iris has been keeping track. It's not clear at this point how she's been doing this since she never leaves her home. In fact, we must take it on faith that she's been able to get food and other vitals without human contact for 30 years.

As the Fates would have it, Iris is brutally killed in one of Death's ingeniously diabolical Rube Goldberg convoluted Mousetrap-y devices (for those who remember both Goldberg and the board game), leaving her granddaughter covered in bloody goo and holding a book that Iris said might change her family's fate.

On the matter of the family -- an assortment of annoying Boomers and Z-ers -- they all seem to be addled and vacuous, incautious and weary of dire warnings of Death descending. They're easy to like for their comedic appeal and not difficult to say goodbye to, as is inevitable.

Amidst all of the death and devastation, writers Guy Busick and Lori Evans Taylor have inserted some grace notes about family unity that sweeten, just a bit, the bitterness of watching death by lawnmower, MRI and runaway train, but doesn't turn the movie into a sentimental goo.

It's gooey, yes, but not sentimental, except in Tony Todd's appearance as William Bludworth, a medical examiner and one of The Skyview survivors who worked with Iris to create her fortress and track the deaths. Todd was actually in the final stages of cancer when he filmed his scenes for Bloodlines and died in November.

 

Thunderbolts*

 

 

 

Jake Schreier's Thunderbolts* (the asterisk is part of the title) takes the Marvel Cinematic Universe in a refreshing direction, with stars Florence Pugh and Sebastian Stan leading a decidedly second-string ensemble of stealth fighters as the heroic misfits Russian assassin Yelena Belova and American Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes, respectively.

 

They are two of a half dozen supercharged agents, who dub themselves the Thunderbolts, the reason is an important part of the film's narrative world. They are set up to fail by a scheming CIA chief whose name is too long to include here and played with impressive cheek by Julia Louis-Dreyfus. The agents are loose ends of a discredited program that was operating off-the-grid and wreaking havoc with the nation's readiness to respond to intergalactic threats (see every previous MCU installment for that history).

 

What make Thunderbolts* such an enjoyable update of the Marvel Universe's sprawling mythology is the affability of the players and the brightness of the writing. The humor is on the scale of Deadpool and Guardians of the Galaxy in profane sharpness; the language is decidedly street but the picture's treatment of the characters' backstories is inventively tender. 

 

The wild card in this picture is Lewis Pullman's disarming character Bob Reynolds, a morose laboratory subject with extraordinary abilities and a lethal dark side. Bob's character fits the movie's reflective tone and the narrative's turn away from numbing sequences of CGI-enhanced battles to more quieter moments that explore the human connections among folks who are quite a bit more than human. Yes, the picture is still loaded with amazing stunts of daring and destruction but is much more than that.

 

The choice to make this turn in a reliable winning formula may reflect the creative team's determination to state, both directly and obliquely, that our survival depends on getting over our pettiness, we all have our bad shit, and pulling together to save and serve the collective. 

 

It's a needed message presented for our consideration.

 

The Surfer

 

 

Few living film actors do "crazy" with greater ease than Nicolas Cage.

In Irish indie director Lorcan Finnegan's The Surfer, Cage physically, mentally and emotionally unravels on the screen. He raves as the title character tries to get access to a local beach near his childhood home in Australia. He wants to surf the waves with his teen-aged son (Finn Little), and grows increasingly, well, Cage-y, as the film progresses.

Cage's unnamed character's quest is frustrated by a band of bully boys led by an oily shaman (Julian McMahon), who terrorize and drive out foreign visitors, and drives mad The Surfer and The Bum (Nicholas Cassim) living in his car on the rise above the beach after losing his son to the bully boys.

The film is pretty contained, the action limited to the environs of the bully boys' surf-side enclave and the parking lot just above. Cage's outsized personality fills the space but it doesn't make up for the noticeable lack of wave footage or actual surfing.

The ending unfolds predictably, but leaves one to wonder if taking the film in a different direction -- one that explored more deeply its psychological underpinnings -- would have been a better call.

As it is, the audience is left pondering if the delusion we had been riding stops at the shore or extends all the way to the horizon.

 

The Accountant 2

 

It's been a fat minute since the Gavin O'Connor / Ben Affleck vehicle The Accountant stormed into theaters in '16, so one can be forgiven if some of the finer points of the tale of the killing autist have receded.

As introduced then, Affleck's Christian Wolff was a CPA by day and a hired assassin during his off-hours, which seemed to exceed those during which he was actually crunching numbers. In the O'Connor-directed sequel, Wolff's backstory is filled in a bit -- he's a member of a tribe of savants trained by a school for neurodivergent sleuthing youths, led by the nonverbal Justine (Allison Robertson). Wolff's stony facade begins to crack and let some sunshine in, slowly and winningly.

Wolff is recruited by Treasury Department agent Marybeth Medina (a returning Cynthia Addai-Robinson) after her mentor Ray King (the always-welcome J.K. Simmons) is killed while trying to recruit a spectral assassin known as Anais (Daniella Pineda) to find a missing mother and son trapped in a trafficking operation near the U.S. / Mexico border. Medina needs help making sense of the web of King's investigation, so she calls "the accountant," following the final message King left.

Wolff joins the case and brings in his rival assassin brother, Braxton (nobody plays a cantankerous but lovable sibling better than Jon Bernthal) and off they go, kingpins and cartels swirling about. In the moments between the mayhem and the gun-play, writer Bill Dubuque (The Accountant, Ozark) has scripted some nice scenes that explore just a bit of the nature of autism (everything about this story feels timely AF) and the brilliance (and affection) that lies beneath the surface of what some shallower minds would perceive as an empty well.

As with the first film, the body count is enormous but certainly not on the scale of the John Wick series. Still, Affleck -- a performer who doesn't always get a fair shake from critics -- is on his game from start to finish. Yes, the movie hits its mark and plays by the numbers but it's a thoroughly enjoyable and humanizing picture, too.

 

Sinners' Music

 

 

If one needed even more reasons to love Ryan Coogler’s masterful Sinners, look to the use of music in the film’s complex narrative.

This movie’s musical integration moves seamlessly from church to field to cathouse to juke joint, from dusty trails to highways to ocean waters, from the Delta to Dublin. It traces many of the strands of American cultural and political evolution – including enslavement and integration.

Just as this story of the vampiric undead set in the Jim Crow South rides on history and testament, folk tradition and myth, faith and magic, the film’s music is infused with these threads.

Just as the images provoke deep reflection about Coogler’s intended messages, these songs and performances will undoubtedly lead invested audiences to see how much music contains America’s worldview – how we view ourselves, one another and the world.

As is true about music in other contexts, Coogler’s selection of voices – and most importantly that of Miles Caton as the bluesy young reprobate Sammie / Preacher Boy – will lead many to think about its power to ignite passion (and other things) and to liberate.