The Five Chinese Brothers

 

I start volunteering with a reading program at a neighborhood grammar school this week, and I've been reflecting on my experience with reading, something I've always loved.

Folks of a certain age might remember The Five Chinese Brothers storybook from their school library. It was one of the first books I read on my own.

The book was written by Swiss-American author and librarian Claire Huchet Bishop and illustrated by Kurt Wiese, and published in 1938. It was based on the ancient Chinese folktale The Ten Brothers.

The story is about the eponymous siblings who have special gifts or abilities. In the Chinese folktale , which has been traced back to the 14th-17th centuries, the abilities were of the super-power variety. Interestingly, in some versions the great talents included diplomacy and strategizing.

Over time, the number of brothers in the tales flexed from five to six to seven, and in at least one adaptation the brothers are sisters.

One retailer on Amazon is selling a hardback of the first edition for $134, which is excessive considering modernized versions and adaptations are readily available, and they don't feature Wiese's dated "pie-face" drawings.

Then again, maybe some buyers think this curious anachronism, which at one time might have been used to shape children's thinking about Asians, is worth owning.

 

The Plague

 

The horror of Charlie Polinger's unnerving debut film The Plague is in how close the picture's story cuts to the bone of the viewer's own experiences with childhood isolation, cruelty, and general confusion. 

 

Joel Edgerton, one of the film's producers, stars as a boy's water polo coach at a summer camp where young Ben, an impressive Everett Blunck, is the new player, paddling fiercely to be accepted as one of the lads while also wanting to befriend another boy, Eli (Kenny Rasmussen), a strange lad who has a serious skin condition. The team has dubbed Eli's pimples and scars "the plague," and spun a story about its contagiousness, turning the boy into a pariah.

 

Check that. One teammate, the stunningly sadistic and machiavellian Jake (Kayo Martin), concocted the story and has imposed his will on the other campers, especially the half dozen in his select circle. Many viewers will be chilled by Jake's cold detachment from the harm he does to those around him, his control over others, how he gets them to do his bidding through sheer will and a needling smile.

 

The nightmare for Ben -- an insecure, gangling 13-year-old whose homelife has been disrupted by divorce -- is finding a safe space in such a toxic place where his attempts to win Jake's favor are disastrous. Edgerton's Coach Wags is well-intentioned but poorly equipped to handle a team of pre-adolescents poised on the edge of true ferality.

 

Polinger's script and direction are razor sharp; his keen insight into human behavior -- not just that of young people, mind you -- makes The Plague an intriguing motion picture, with three terrific central performances by young actors. The film is a bitter but brilliant first feature film for Polinger.

 

X2: X-Men United (redux)

 

 

In 2003's X2:X-Men United -- Bryan Singer's folo-up to his Marvel extravaganza from 2000, X-Men -- a crazed mutant-hunter named Stryker (Brian Cox) secretly stages a mutant attack on the U.S. president (Cotter Smith) so that Stryker's special forces will be authorized to round up and imprison mutants all over the country, starting at a school run by mutant champion Professor X (Patrick Stewart).

 

Stryker, the self-loathing and war-mongering father of a mutant, wants to cleanse the population, make the world safe for normal people. He has created a mind-control drug that turns mutants into compliant servants and then turns them on one another. 

 

Stryker wants a war and is ready to use fear and disinformation to ignite one. 

 

But he underestimates the resolve and resources of those willing to fight forces blinded by hate.

 

Great Lesson.

 

Pluribus

 

What makes Apple TV's Pluribus so compelling?

I think it's the essential question at its core:

What do we do when peace, love and understanding are obtainable but at the risk of individual free will?

The story's central character -- a bestselling author of sci-fi / fantasy fiction -- finds herself one of about a dozen people on the planet who have not been assimilated into a collective that was spawned by an alien transmission.

The audience's assumption is a race of beings light years away thought the Earth could use a communitarian boost and sent the formula. Once absorbed, the assimilated person becomes one with all life on the planet, which means nothing is killed or harvested, which, as one might expect, leads to complications other than the agency matter mentioned earlier.

The dyspeptic novelist Carol Sturka is played by a tireless and committed Rhea Seehorn, the recent Globe winner for her performance. The calculus in creator Vince Gilligan's series has viewers being both drawn to and repulsed by Carol's crankiness and the easy peace the rest of the world seems to have found through "Joining."

Most interesting is recently widowed Sturka's relationship with her "chaperone," Zosia (Karolina Wydra), and the evolution of their platonic and romantic dance. Through this element and a host of others, Pluribus probes perhaps in ways never done before, the human conundrum of uniting heart and mind -- not from person to person -- but in each of us, individually.

Pluribus invites us to search for certainty in existence, make our own choices, avoid the temptation to exploit those who would allow such abuse, and accept that sometimes "love" and "kindness" are NOT the same thing.