News of the World

 

British movie director Paul Greengrass is a master of the set piece, a fairly self-contained, highly charged narrative moment that lets virtuosic filmmakers strut their stuff. Greengrass may be best known to many for taking over the directing of the Jason Bourne franchise after the initial Bourne Identity. Both Bourne Supremacy and Bourne Ultimatum featured intricately choreographed scenes of pursuit in vehicles and on foot and close quarters hand-to-hand combat.

Greengrass's latest film, News of the World, is set in 1870 Texas and so does not have the thrilling complexity of the Bournes or the international intrigue of the 2013 Tom Hanks vehicle Captain Phillips -- but it does deliver the menace of a forbidding landscape as the backdrop for skirmish and slaughter by bitter, defeated hordes, chafing under the bridle of Yankee occupation.

In News, Hanks plays a former Confederate army officer, Captain Jeff Kidd, who travels the Texas badlands reading newspapers to townsfolks for a dime. In a sense, he's taken this as a calling, and Greengrass films the readings as if they were revivals. And that fits because before the war, Kidd was a minister and newspaper publisher (yes, an ironic combination when viewed through contemporary lenses). He answered the call and left his home and wife in San Antonio for the war but never returned. His agitation, palsy and itinerancy suggest lingering post war trauma.

The film's arc, which is neither sparkling nor cliche, has the Captain discovering the wreckage of a wagon and the body of a Black man hanging from a tree, a supremacist message tacked to his chest. The young white girl he was escorting to safety is hiding in the brush. She'd been rescued from a tribe that had killed her family six years before and raised her as a Kiowa. The Captain is charged with her safe delivery to her family, hundreds of miles away.

The young German actress Helena Zengel plays Cicada / Johanna, a fairly demanding role for a child, which has won her a Golden Globe supporting role nomination. The story evolves as one might expect, with Greengrass staging two especially intense sequences -- one in a canyon as the Captain tries to hold off three men who traffic in young girls and a night reading in a settlement run by a racist tyrant.

Hanks, who will be 65 this year, is a Hollywood senior statesman, and -- like Washington, Streep, Clooney -- has a magnitude that brings others into vehicles in which they can shine. Hanks is Hanks throughout News; he can be no one else. But the film also features solid moments from featured players. In addition to Miss Zengel, Michael Angelo Covino as the lead trafficker, Elizabeth Marvel as a Dallas hotelier and Captain's paramour and Fred Hechinger as a good-hearted young marauder are especially good.

Judas and the Black Messiah

 

Like the best of "true story" cinema, Shaka King's Judas and the Black Messiah operates in the past and present. As a dramatized re-telling of the FBI's infiltration of the Black Panther Party in Chicago using a car thief as an informant, the film, which is gripping in its construction and performances, documents J. Edgar Hoover's fixation on suppressing civil rights groups while making oblique references to modern-day protests against police violence.

Daniel Kaluuya and LaKeith Stanfield play, respectively, Chicago Black Panther commander Fred Hampton -- who was killed by city, state and federal agents in a raid on his home in 1969 -- and informant Bill O'Neal, who is depicted as giving crucial intelligence about Panther movement and strategy to field agent Roy Mitchell (Jesse Plemons), who recruited him. Kaluuya and Stanfield present Hampton's energizing oration and O'Neal's agitated duplicity with assurance. They're both captivating.

Kaluuya's performance, with his long speeches and face-offs with rival resistance groups, is the showier piece, and unquestionably deserving of praise, but Stanfield, to me, covers more emotional and psychological ground as a man trapped by his own petty criminality in a scheme that he cannot control. His scenes with Plemons are infused with anxiety and dread.

Hampton was a martyr to the cause of Black empowerment, but O'Neal is also a tragic figure. As presented in King's masterful film, the "betrayer" was collateral damage in a mission he could neither embrace nor would benefit from. O'Neal died in 1990, after running into traffic on a Chicago freeway in the middle of the night and being hit by a car. His death was ruled a suicide.

The White Tiger

Ramin Bahrani has set his ponderous "amorality" tale, The White Tiger, in modern-day India, the world's most populous democracy and a nation of rigid class divisions, crushing poverty and political corruption. His hero is Balram, the cagey driver for a wealthy family, whose obsequious demeanor masks the young man's bitterness. This bitterness sets the sardonic tone of the film's voice-over, but this is no comedic piece, like the similarly themed Parasite of 2019. Bahrani's story is cleverly written but, more than anything, it is unsettling.

Over the course of the film, Balram (a remarkably expressive Adarsh Gourav) is, by turns, treated like a beloved member of the household and like human refuse. The shifts are jarring and, quite likely, are reflective of the deep disdain the rich "big bellies" have for the poor "small bellies," i.e., decency, consistency and other-regard don't matter to those who control everything. (Sound familiar?) This treatment is maddening and there are moments in the film when Balram's sanity (or, at least his reliability as a narrator) seems to be in doubt. His encounter with the eponymous creature, a freak of nature whose birth presages great change, was one such moment.

The film's narrative is a variety of Bildungsroman, but in the case rathe than pushing through challenges to become a better person than circumstances would ordinarily permit, the hero grows up and corrupt, dehumanized by his country and by his relationship with two young members of the household -- Ashok (Rajkummar Rao) and Pinky (Priyanka Chopra). Ashok's seduction and Pinky's self-involvement light the fuse for the story's explosive conclusion.

Sound of Metal

 

Darius Marder's Sound of Metal on Amazon Prime, along with pushing sound editing and sound mixing into new realms, asks some profound questions about human pain and resilience.

Riz Ahmed (in an excellent performance) is rock drummer Ruben Stone, who loses his hearing while touring and must adjust to permanent deafness. Stone is a recovering heroin addict in love with his performing partner, Lou, a woman with a history of self-abuse (Olivia Cooke). To say Ruben does not handle his new reality well would be to rob the character of his intensity and the film of its resonance.

Ruben eventually finds support in a program for the deaf run by a teacher / father confessor named Joe (Paul Raci), who challenges Ruben to do what appears to be the hardest thing for him to do -- sit with his deafness, be present for the world and others, learn to love himself.

Yeah, it's a little 12-Steppy but in the hands of a fine director and a winning cast it not only rings true but echoes long after the screen goes black.

The Little Things

I'm not surprised that John Lee Hancock's picture has provoked praise and scorn and ambivalence from critics. The thriller teams a gristly older detective with a spit-and-polish younger officer to track and capture a serial killer in Los Angeles.

It is fueled by fine performances from Denzel Washington, who is nearly 70, and Rami Malek, 40. They take Hancock's script, which is too often oddly elliptical when it should be more straightforward, and lend it vitality, needed focus and some emotional weight. Without their substantial talents, questions would pester and distract more than they do.

When Jared Leto as the jokey prime suspect is introduced, the tone of the film, which is fairly humorless, becomes, ironically, more menacing. This is welcome because prior to Leto's Albert Sparma's entry, the movie lacked essential tension. Then, the character and the story take a turn (literally) and set up the last act, which will either delight or enrage the viewer.

I found it strange that a film about a series of murders has no on-screen attack and only one crime scene procedural. The story is mostly trailing and fretting and a bit of unproductive navel gazing, which I think is a bigger deal. While I welcomed Joe Deacon's (Washington) weary cynicism at first, in the end it seemed to be more of a device to introduce the crisis for Malek's Jim Baxter than a legitimate exploration of a spiritual conflict among law enforcement agents.

Yes, the ending is jarring but when viewed through a lens of moral relativism -- and when considering the uneasy ground we find ourselves standing on these days -- it might not keep one up at night -- or at least as long.

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom

In his American Century Cycle, playwright August Wilson (1945-2005) crafted 10 plays about the African American experience, each one set in a different decade of the 20th century. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, set in the 20s, was the second work completed.

Award-winning Broadway director George C. Wolfe's Netflix film adaptation is based on a screenplay by Ruben Santiago-Hudson (a stage and television performer who has appeared in Wilson productions) that trims the original two-act script, one of the shortest in the Cycle, into a breathless, 90-minute period piece that retains the play's theatrical intimacy while intensifying the heat.

Much of the film's intensity is contributed by Viola Davis and Chadwick Boseman (one of his last major roles before his death earlier this year) as the eponymous Mother of the Blues, an irascible figure, and a reckless young trumpeter named Levee, who wants the fame that Ma seems to take for granted. Both are marvelous, but Boseman is brilliant as the manic music man, a battered and blustering braggart who is carrying literal and figurative scars of racial violence.

This wonderful production is quite different from 2016's Fences, which also starred Davis along with Denzel Washington, who directed. Ma Rainey, confined to a few hours of a recording session, does not have the epic sweep, the allegorical and spiritual overtones of Fences, which was awarded a Pulitzer Prize, along with another Cycle play that was adapted for the screen, The Piano Lesson.

Wilson's plays are dense and expansive, mixing history and folklore, mind science, philosophy and mysticism as they explore race and the nature of blackness in America. I would imagine they are bears to stage and challenging for audiences because Wilson's language is so rich, his stories so-reliant on the oral tradition. Some monologues go on for pages.

One interesting note concerning Santiago-Hudson's adaptation -- he changed Wilson's n***er to n***a in places when the boys in the band are referring to one another and retaining n***er when recounting threatening events involving menacing whites. Wilson's original script does not contain this distinction.

One Night in Miami

 

The catalytic role in Regina King's impressive directorial debut, One Night in Miami, is that of Malcolm X, played by British actor Kingsley Ben-Adir. It is Malcolm who convenes the meeting with soul man Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.), football legend Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge) and the newly crowned heavyweight champion Cassius Clay (Eli Goree) on the night of Clay's defeat of Sonny Liston for the title. It's 1964. Just months before both Cooke and Malcolm would die violent deaths.

That specter hangs over everything that is exchanged between the four old friends in that motel suite, giving Malcolm's urgency, his paranoia and perhaps monomania such chilling potency. He needs Clay's conversion to Islam to fuel his move to separate from Black Muslim leader Elijah Muhammad and the organization that Malcolm feels has grown corrupt and abusive. Malcolm will need followers to build his own movement, and he wants his friends to step up and energize Black Americans. The men are not altogether receptive to Malcolm's entreaties, but their love and respect for him keep them in the room.

The screenplay by Kemp Powers, based on his stage play, crackles with electricity, awareness and relevance. The lines are knowing and probative of the audience's understanding of the civil rights movement beyond familiar tales of bus boycotts and lunch counter demonstrations. One Night in Miami is not about strategy and tactics; it's about self-awareness, passion, conviction and the need to write one's own history. It's thought-provoking and splendidly acted, with a palpable sense of period and locale.

Our Friend film trailer

This film trailer bubbled up on my newsfeed this morning, coincidentally, the day after a friend and I had a pretty intense conversation about memorializing death.

We came down different paths to arrive at different understandings, he and I, but agreed that much of what folks do focuses on the experiences of survivors, which sometimes are only tangential to the life of the departed. Some monuments are less about loss than about the standing of the living, their prominence. And, we agreed, as long as church and commerce are involved it will ever be thus.

Reflection, reticence, regret.

The language we use -- pass, transition -- suggests not a termination but a continuation, a notion that has come down from antiquity, millennia before Jesus of Nazareth talked about preparing a place for believers.

This further suggests that for some of us the judgment of observers might be joined by the scrutiny of the departed. The acreage devoted to the disintegration of the mortal coil -- some count about 25,000 private and for-profit cemeteries in the U.S. -- is pretty astounding.

The crux for my friend is our apparent failure to imagine the dead within those graves, beneath monuments to what has passed, saying to those standing above, "Keep Living."

Our Friend film trailer

The Mandalorian

Even those of us who do not know Star Wars by chapter and verse have found much to appreciate and connect with in the Disney+ series The Mandalorian, which is planning a third season once 'Rona loosens her death grip.

Series creator Jon Favreau has shaped a conventional quest narrative into a highly affective story of "human" connection, our fractured alliances and identities. Pedro Pascal (Game of Thrones) leads the sparkling, diverse cast as the eponymous warrior/mercenary tasked with delivering a mysterious abandoned big-eyed, big-eared moppet to whichever of the remaining Jedi sorcerers he can find in the universe who will take him. The Mandalorian, who lives by a strict code of discipline, was himself a war orphan (a foundling) and though encased in metal and emotional scarring develops a strong attachment to his young charge.

How Pascal, who is faceless for 95 percent of his screen time, and Favreau, who wrote most of the series' scripts, move the character from cold metal man to warm protector without reducing the narrative to sticky goo is a tribute to both. Those who are open to it would undoubtedly find lessons here about how we assess the value of connections and our duty to one another.

Promising Young Woman

Many parts of writer/director Emerald Fennell's Promising Young Woman are howlingly funny but then they collide into moments of wrenching sobriety and pain, not unlike the brutally cockeyed psychodrama/love story Killing Eve, for which Fennell wrote.

In Promising Young Woman, Carrie Mulligan plays Cassie, a former medical school standout whose life was derailed by a sexual assault -- not hers, but that of a friend and classmate who never recovered. Cassie works at a coffee shop run by a supportive friend (Laverne Cox) and spends her evenings hunting down and entrapping men by pretending to be falling down drunk in bars. When they make their move she unleashes her ferocious malice on them.

A chance meeting with an amiable pediatrician (a charming Bo Burnham) gives the audience reason for hope for this woman who is being consumed by spite and regret right before our eyes. In this way, the film echoes the message in Michaela Coel's brilliant BBC series I May Destroy You.

Mulligan is wonderful as Cassie, an avenging angel whose cause is just but who is so prickly and barbed that the caring world can't get close to her.

Carousel

Seeking some solace from the rancor of contested counts and a constipated candidate who can't seem to get off the can, I settled in the other night to reacquaint myself with Rodgers and Hammerstein's Carousel, the New York Philharmonic's 2013 staged concert production. 

It had been years (decades?) since I'd spent time with romantic wallflower Julie Jordan (Kelli O'Hara) and her rough carousel barker beau Billy Bigelow (Nathan Gunn) [yes, the names, cutesy] and the lusty, musty denizens of a New England fishing village. Julie is poor and in love with burly Billy, who makes woo, loses his job, shacks up with Julie, who he knocks up and then knocks about, falls in with a bad-sort schemer, gets caught during a robbery, and kills himself to avoid prison. He's given a chance by angelic gatekeepers to complete unfinished business  before being admitted to heaven, which he does and everybody sings "You'll Never Walk Alone," tears flow and the audience cheers. 

Yes, it's pretty dark, and, I think, problematic for a modern audience. We see Billy is a charming baritone brute and could shake Julie (poor choice of words) for sticking with him, even after she tells best buddy Carrie Pipperidge (Jessie Mueller) that he hit her. But Julie, being a soprano, goes high and endures, births a daughter, Louise, and keeps the home fires burning for Billy, because this is a lusty bunch. (I don't think it's really the seafood all these folks are crowing about during Act II's opening number.)

Near the end of the show, Billy visits young Louise to urge her to walk the right path and respect herself and while doing so whacks her one and disappears. (Old habits, etc.) Louise asks her mother if it's possible to be hit "hard" and it not hurt. Julie says, “It is possible, dear, for someone to hit you — hit you hard — and not hurt at all.” 

Now, if one were inclined to be forgiving, one might argue that Julie is speaking metaphorically.  "Hit," as in "ton of bricks," not "hit," as in "balled up fist." But, in doing so, what are we telling young women about love, guarding their own safety, the dangers of co-dependency? Sure, setting the production squarely in the time of its composition (mid-40s) might help and saying Billy does indeed pay for his sins might take some of the sting out of the message but, somehow, it doesn't feel like quite enough. As wonderful as the music is -- and it's truly heavenly -- I worry the show is asking women to suffer long and silently for the sake of love. 

Sophia Loren is 86 years old, and in her latest film, Netflix's The Life Ahead, she shares the screen with 12-year-old Ibrahima Gueye in a story that affirmed for this viewer our capacity for goodness and grace, despite our superficial differences and individual traumas. What a welcome message!

Loren plays Madame Rosa, an aged prostitute and Auschwitz survivor living in a city on the coast of Italy, where she cares for the abandoned children of local hookers. Gueye, in his first feature film, plays Momo, the drug-dealing son of a murdered Senegalese streetwalker who ends up in Rosa's care after a kindly neighborhood physician (Renato Carpentieri) asks her to tend to the angry and defiant boy for a short time. His hope is she will be able to salvage what cruelty and abandonment have left.

While the arc of the story is familiar, director Edoardo Ponti (Loren's son) takes a fresh turn at guiding his endearing collection of characters to the film's inevitable conclusion. Most important are a transwoman hooker (Abril Zamora), who is the surrogate mother to another abandoned child, and a generous Muslim shopkeeper (Babak Karimi), who, at Rosa's request, helps Momo mend his faith in God and people.

The film, which is in Italian, is enormously affecting, the scenes between a still radiant Loren and Gueye, who possesses untouched youthful beauty, are moving and memorable.

Small Axes / Mangrove

Director Steve McQueen is deliberate and patient. He slowly unfolds his stories and enwinds the viewer in the fates of his characters. We are invited to read the lines that aren't written -- those in the brows of the characters: anger, resolution, defiance, indignation, resignation, hope.

In the first film of his Amazon/BBC anthology Small Axes, titled Mangrove, McQueen tells the story of nine Black Britishers who were tried in 1968 for rioting after a demonstration in the Notting Hill / West Indian community against police intimidation and brutality turned violent. This is a challenging film; the depiction of the residents' distress and the raw racism of the police and the courts are tough going but it's also an important film and the performances are riveting.

Particularly noteworthy is the work of Letitia Wright (Black Panther) as Altheia Jones-LeCointe, a Black Panther Movement organizer, and Malachi Kirby (Roots), as Darcus Howe, a resistance leader. McQueen and co-writer Alastair Siddons have crafted powerful, bracing scenes for both characters that not only propel the narrative forward but also reveal McQueen's intention for making the film -- to hold England accountable.

Happiest Season

 

Writer/Director Clea DuVall's holiday rom-com Happiest Season (Hulu) is delivered beautifully wrapped in chintz and tinsel but the usual epigrams about the magic of Christmas and love and family have been replaced with sermonettes about good and bad choices -- and I'm down with the change.

DuVall has not completely scrubbed romance out of the rom-com; she's written a pretty hot pairing with Kristen Stewart's Abby and Aubrey Plaza's Riley, chemistry that is more intense than that between Stewart's Abby and her lover Harper (Mackenzie Davis). I think that's deliberate. It seems DuVall has more on her mind than heat.

Harper, who hides her sexuality from her family, brings "roommate" Abby home with her from Pittsburgh for the holidays. She has asked Abby, who is openly lesbian, to keep their secret until she can tell her parents about them after the holidays. Dad is running for mayor, Mom is a control freak, older sister is a disapproving bitch, younger sister is a flake, and on and on. Harper has chosen the path around all of this stress and gets Abby to agree to play along, which she does, reluctantly, and almost immediately regrets it.

What gives the film its freshness and weight is DuVall's commitment to this idea of choices. Our lives are a succession of them. Some get buried, some we outrun and some catch up with us. We choose to pursue. We choose to conceal. We choose to compete. We choose to deceive. And it seems DuVall is saying we choose to love. Which brings us back to Abby and Riley, the "couple" many in the audience might wish would be because Riley is lovely, grounded, out and proud. But Abby has made her choice, and it is not for this woman who seems to get her. She's chosen someone who will take more time. That's new and is as far from the squishiness of "You had me at hello" as one can get.

In the end, after all of the shouting and tussling and accusations and denials and tears we see a frightened family that has chosen to live in fear of one another for forever and they promise to stop. Now that's one hell of a Christmas message.

I don't know him

The first of many wounds Normal People's young Irish couple inflicted on each other during the course of the limited series on Hulu was studly Connell's refusal to declare to his friends he fancied and was sexually involved with the lovely but acerbic Marianne, whom his scruffy pals seemed to disdain. He had too much self-regard, and she, by consenting to the boy's mistreatment, valued herself too little. Gradually, beautifully, in my estimation, it is revealed that theirs were different but equally pitiful motives -- they'd each suffered emotional abandonment.

What makes this story of four tumultuous years in the lives of two damaged and damaging people so compelling is how honest, ironically enough in this instance, their actions seemed to be, that is, how true to the world as it exists off of the page of novels or off of the screen of streaming series.

We failed and failing people -- often with ironclad, clear-eyed reasoning -- will do the most hurtful things to one another -- none more painful than what might be called Simon Peter's sin, refusing to admit affiliation or support, to deny, to say "I don't know him!"

Race and privilege make for a pernicious pair in this regard. They undermine our attempts to build cross-racial alliances because we fear losing favor of those who, frankly, don't deserve it. Black and white folks of my generation, members of that first post-desegregation wave, may have memories of being denied by other-race friends with whom they'd thought to have had a mutual friendship. "I DON'T know him."

As time progressed, the denials have become less stark -- "We're teammates." "We're co-workers." -- but delivered the same message. "I don't KNOW him." And when Facebook made "friendship" a tool for commerce or stealth, it became "I don't know HIM (he knows me.)" And the age of BLM is sorely testing alliances. "I KNOW him but ... "

A friend once shared, with what I felt were the most charitable of intentions, that I was not very open and that puts others off. I accepted the observation as it was intended, without defense or explanation, knowing it was true. "Yeah, I need to work on that," said I. My work has been to try to accept that people will be what their formations have created -- much like what life experiences created in Connell and Marianne -- and, understanding that, own those who own me and deliver the rest to the universe without bitterness. As the Buddha says, disappointment comes not from the actions of others but from our expectations.

In the end, the young Irish couple owned their failure to be friends. They owned the harm they had done to and invited from each other. In short, they owned each another but were prepared to move forward, separately or together, having grown and become wiser.

Watchmen

HBO's Watchmen is conceptually thoroughgoing -- as well constructed as the best among pay television's offerings. Its narrative is complex and its visual aspects spectacular. It also features an unsettling undercurrent of distrust that probably reflects the view many people of color have of law enforcement and elected officials, especially in the South but not exclusively. Skepticism is not solely the province of graphic novels and speculative fiction but here it runs especially deep, etched in the face of Sister Knight (Regina King) and her mysterious grandfather (Louis Gossett Jr.). Her husband Cal / Dr. Manhattan (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) offers placating embraces that run as counterpoint to Knight's battering instinctive rhythms, but then he stands to be destroyed by his passivity. Message? Fight or get beat.

Below is the Peabody committee's citation for the series' award. It refers to the series' depiction of how Americans understand their place in the world. To some, the series reflects uncertainty more than anything definitive or enduring.

"...Watchmen provides new answers to classic genre questions such as what it means to mask one’s identity and who gets to be a superhero, but more than that, it offers a frank and provocative reflection on contemporary racialized violence, on the role of police, and on the consequences of a large-scale disaster on the way Americans understand their place in the world. For world-building and storytelling that fuses speculative fiction with historical and contemporary realities, Watchmen deserves a Peabody."

Lee and Scorsese

Spike Lee may actually be a better documentarian than he is a feature filmmaker -- at least, to me, his non-fictional works are routinely superb. Especially noteworthy is his filming of stage productions -- his recording of the final performance of the relatively little-seen Broadway show Passing Strange (2009) is a favorite of mine. That is why I'm so eagerly awaiting his film of the David Byrne concert / performance piece American Utopia.

Lee, born in Atlanta but reared in Brooklyn, is friends with fellow New Yorker Martin Scorsese, whom he clearly admires. Both Lee and Scorsese are tireless and prolific, projects continuously rolling out of their studios. One of Scorsese's early triumph's was 1978's The Last Waltz, the final concert by The Band, which last year was added to the National Film Registry.

The Last Waltz has been mentioned in previews of Lee's upcoming film, no doubt because they are both about music and iconic figures. Those of us who know The Last Waltz no doubt have favorite performances. This is mine -- The Weight -- where we go to church. Stick around for Mavis's benediction right at the end. "Beautiful!"

The Weight from The Last Waltz

Woke

 

Hulu's new original series Woke puts a bit of Atlanta's struggling millennials wrestling with race and class consciousness and blackAF's plain-spoken irreverence to work in the story of an accommodating Black San Francisco cartoonist, Keef, who is just about to break into syndication with his popular series Toast 'n' Butter when an encounter with profiling police derails his plans, and his self-concept, and he begins the hard work of finding himself and his creative voice. Yes, it's a comedy. And, yes, it's wonderfully insightful. It's not as glib as some other trendy streaming series and has the added value of inanimate objects speaking truth to Lamorne Morris's Keef and the world. Morris gets hilarious assists from T. Murph and Blake Anderson as his woke and wasted roommates Clovis and Gunther, respectively, and from Sasheer Zamata as the editor of an alternative publication who pushes Keef's buttons.

Narratives and Static Images

As you closely read the two photographs above -- Sally Mann's "Candy Cigarette"(top) and Diane Arbus's "Identical Twins" -- think about the narratives these photographs suggest. How do the two worlds differ? What stories do they evoke in your mind as a viewer of these static images?  

Project Power

Jamie Foxx's lastest film, Project Power, is high-concept and derivative but not lacking in entertainment value. The story is about an international cartel peddling regime change in the form of glowing yellow pills that really pack a wallop. The movie's action sequences usually involve characters taking a capsule that will genetically modify them into super humans for about five minutes. That's clearly where the film's substantial Netflix budget was invested and not to A-class narrative scripting. The film has the feel of a series pilot -- just that many unanswered questions remain after the last epochal explosion. Still Foxx, who plays a murky ex-commando on a righteous mission, is always watchable, and he gets decent support from Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a good but sketchy New Orleans undercover cop with a power obsession and Dominique Fishback as a spunky but pouty low-level "power" dealer doing the wrong things for the right reasons.

Chadwick Boseman

I think what has pushed the outpouring of grief for Chadwick Boseman's passing into another realm for me was the South Carolina governor's order to lower the flags for Sunday, and perhaps my knee-jerk skepticism that the gesture was meant to mollify critics among the state's black population. I cannot recall the last time such an order was made at the death of a native son who was an entertainer.

It seems to me that Boseman's death comes at the intersection of several national crises -- conflict, violence, distrust, disease, uncertainty. We were raw, and losing one so suddenly, at least to the public eye, was deeply wounding.

Though Boseman had been a television actor for years before celebrated roles as Jackie Robinson ('13), James Brown ('14) and Thurgood Marshall ('17), those films rode a crest of public interest in stories of great black men (no doubt buoyed by the Obama presidency). His performance as T'Challa in Black Panther (2018) was actually the second time moviegoers had seen the character as he was introduced in the Captain America film two years before. But the world Black Panther the film explored was so different from that promoted by pervasive racist narratives that it sparked a sort of spiritual black nationalism that was not unlike the posture of Black Lives Matter, which was founded several years before, and other movements trying to counter not only anti-black violence but to inspire a spiritual awakening reminiscent of the Black Power movement of the '60s.

The Wakanda salute -- crossed forearms (right over left) pulled against the chest created by Black Panther director Ryan Coogler -- seemed to echo the power salute of earlier black protest but, interestingly, combined ancient African pharaonic poses and the American Sign Language's symbol for "hug" into an affirming resolution.

The Krofft Brothers

The Krofft Brothers drove their psychedelic dune buggy right up to the edge of freaky with The Bugaloos in 1970, after toying with televised weirdness with H.R. Pufnstuf the year before. The Kroffts would shift the strangeness into high gear with Land of the Lost four years later. It was almost like my intellectual and creative evolution was being reflected in the shows by these Canadian puppeteers. The Bugs were a mixed band of cheery and playful British human insects who sang tuneful but forgettable songs and battled a whacked out bush named Benita Bizarre -- played by Martha Raye, who never met a scene she couldn't chew to bits. It was all outrageous enough to delight a 12-year-old who had not learned to be annoyed. "Land" was entertaining to a 16-year-old who was constantly finding the everyday world just too "daily" to bear. What was needed was time-travel and parallel universes and nonsensical storylines that replicated an acid trip without the pharmaceuticals. "Land" delivered and negotiated the tight rope well -- neither falling into complete farce nor taking itself too seriously -- at first. It was inevitable that the ridiculousness would spin out of control -- or maybe I just finally grew up.

Lia Kim and cultural appropriation

Questions of cultural appropriation lurk in the wings when Lia Kim does her thing. I think Kim is amazing, and I don't think she's harming Beyonce by choreographing to her music, but some might ask, reasonably, how Beyonce's message about her parentage -- "Negro" and "Creole" -- and some other African American references translates into movement for the Korean choreographer.

Lia Kim choreography to Beyonce's Formation

Da 5 Bloods

Spike Lee might be the most exasperating movie master in Hollywood. His films are important. His vision is distinctively individual. But, while always beautifully shot, his pictures are often excessive, their narratives sprawling. Lee has always staged wonderful set pieces and directs ensembles like few others of his generation, with the exception of Tarantino. I love how characters in Lee's films talk to one another. He delivers exposition through dialogue masterfully. Although he is a true craftsman, perhaps even an auteur, he seems blind (or indifferent) to his indulgences. He clearly loves his work and the work of other great directors, and he loves the messages he wants to convey, but his films, including the new Netflix feature Da 5 Bloods, feel a bit too self-referential and focused on their own cleverness and craft, and that detracts from the work.

In Da 5 Bloods, four black Vietnam vets, with the flinty and troubled Paul (a tremendous performance by Delroy Lindo) in charge, return to the country to recover the remains of a fallen comrade (played in flashback by Chadwick Boseman) and a cache of gold (reparations) they left buried there. The four squadmates (Clarke Peters, Isiah Whitlock Jr. and Norm Lewis) are joined by Paul's estranged son David (Jonathan Majors) on the excursion. It is here that the narrative gets choppy, implausibilities creep in, and secondary characters and side issues crowd out what should have been more attention to the rudiments of this expedition. Much is glossed over to make room for the interpersonal entanglements and declamations about Lee's most reliable bette noir -- American perfidy and racism.
That is not to say exploring America's mistreatment of blacks has been overdone; in fact, the opposite is true. It's not been done enough, in my view. And that might be why Lee's films feel so overstuffed. He's trying to cover so much ground in a single work that the end result is interesting -- there is no other filmmaker whose work is always worth seeing -- but too often not as enduring or impactful as it might be.

Hoodoo Economics

I don't get economics. I bought this issue when it was first published back in the mid-60s and paid the listed 12 cents. I probably bought a second comic and gave the clerk a quarter for both. In the 50 years since, the price of comics has increased 3,000 percent. Even with the books being really nice and glossy and more substantial how does that price difference make sense? They're not pharmaceuticals! Is it possible that there is no upper limit for the cost of things and at some point in the future we could be paying 40 bucks for a comic book, 15 dollars for a dozen eggs and 75 for a six of domestic beer?