Recent Reviews
The Cagneys
A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935)
Something to Sing About (1937)
Angels with Dirty Faces (1938)
A Lion Is In the Streets (1953)
Man of a Thousand Faces (1957)
Never Steal Anything Small (1959)
Shake Hands With the Devil (1959)
Tuesday March 31, 2020
First Super-Hero: ‘Hank’ Gowdy?
This is one of the first references I‘ve seen to a superhero—or, I suppose, super-hero. It’s from a 1915 newspaper, under a “standing of the clubs,” and in reference to Boston Braves catcher and first baseman Hank Gowdy:
A few things worth mentioning beyond “super-hero”:
- Gowdy was definitely super in the 1914 World Series against the Philadelphia A‘s. In four games and 16 plate appearances, this was his slash line: .545/.688/1.273. That’s eons ahead of his career line, .270/.351/.358, and the Boston Braves won in four. Then Connie Mack sold off all his best players. Above, they‘re tied for last in the AL.
- “The Kissel Kar sign” was apparently an advert for this car company, which started in 1906, ended in 1942, and was headquartered in Wisconsin.
- The Fenway park. Wonder when they dropped the definite article. Also, the Braves used Fenway? For a time, according to Wiki: “...the Boston Braves used Fenway Park for the 1914 World Series and the 1915 season until Braves Field was completed.”
- Those quote marks around “Hank.” Love that.
- “... perfectly legitimate income.” Because some didn’t think so? I guess we‘re never able to forgive athletes for being good enough to get paid to do what we do for fun.
- The 1915 World Series would be betweeen the second-place teams in the above standings, and feature the exact same cities but completely different teams: Instead of Boston Braves (NL) vs. Philadelphia A’s (AL) it was Boston Red Sox (AL) vs. Philadelphia Phillies (NL). Has that ever happened before? Red Sox won in five. The Phillies would be the last of the original 16 to finally win the World Series—65 years later in 1980. You gotta believe.
If anyone knows any earlier references to super-heroes, let me know.
Monday March 30, 2020
‘Totally Under Control’: What Trump Said About the Coronavirus in the First Months of the Pandemic
For future reference:
- Jan. 22: “We have it totally under control. It's one person coming in from China. It's going to be just fine.” Via Poliltico
- Jan. 30: “We think we have it very well under control. We have very little problem in this country at this moment—five—and those people are all recuperating successfully. But we‘re working very closely with China and other countries, and we think it’s going to have a very good ending for us ... that I can assure you.” Via Poliltico
- Jan. 30: White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow: “We see no material impact on the [U.S.] economy. The pandemic is, of course, in China, not the United States.” Via Washington Post
- Jan. 30: Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross: “[We don‘t] want to take a victory lap [but] I think it will help to accelerate the return of jobs to North America, some to [the] U.S., probably some to Mexico as well. ... I think there’s a confluence of factors that will make it very, very likely more reshoring to the U.S. and some reshoring to Mexico.” Via Washington Post and New York Times
- Jan. 31: U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar: “Today President Trump took decisive action to minimize the risk of novel coronavirus in the United States [by declaring a public health emergency and restricting travel from China]. ... We are working to keep the risk low.” Via NPR
- Feb 2: “We‘re gonna see what happens, but we did shut it down, yes.” Via Reuters
- Feb 7: “Just had a long and very good conversation by phone with President Xi of China. He is strong, sharp and powerfully focused on leading the counterattack on the Coronavirus. He feels they are doing very well, even building hospitals in a matter of only days. Nothing is easy, but ... he will be successful, especially as the weather starts to warm & the virus hopefully becomes weaker, and then gone. Great discipline is taking place in China, as President Xi strongly leads what will be a very successful operation. We are working closely with China to help!” Via Twitter
- Feb. 11: “The virus that we’re talking about having to do, a lot of people think that goes away in April, with the heat. As the heat comes in, typically that will go away in April.” Via The Hill
- Feb. 11: “And by the way: The virus. They‘re working hard, but it looks by April, in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away. Hope that’s true. But we‘re doing great in our country. China, I spoke with President Xi, and they’re working very, very hard, and I think it's all going to work out fine. Rough stuff, I tell you, rough, rough stuff, but I think it's all going to work out good. We only have 11 cases and they‘re all getting better.” At campaign rally, via YouTube
- Feb. 24: “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA. We are in contact with everyone and all relevant countries. CDC & World Health have been working hard and very smart. Stock Market starting to look very good to me!” Via Twitter
- Feb. 25: White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow on CNBC: “We have contained this, I won’t say airtight but pretty close to airtight.” Via Politico
- Feb. 26: “The risk to the American people remains very low. We have the greatest experts, really in the world, right here. ... We‘re ready to adapt and we’re ready to do whatever we have to as the disease spreads, if it spreads. We‘ll spend whatever is appropriate.” During a press conference in which he announced Vice President Pence was coordinating the government’s response. Via The New York Times
- Feb. 26: “And again, when you have 15 people — and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero — that's a pretty good job we‘ve done.” Via Washington Post
- Feb. 28: “Now the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus. You know that, right? The coronavirus. They’re politicizing it. We did one of the great jobs. .... And this is their new hoax. But you know we did something that's been pretty amazing: We‘re 15 people in this massive country. And because of the fact that we went early—we went early—we could’ve had a lot more than that.” At a campaign rally in South Carolina. Via YouTube
- March 2: “I think it's very safe [to hold campaign rallies].” Via The Hill
- March 5: “With approximately 100,000 CoronaVirus cases worldwide, and 3,280 deaths, the United States, because of quick action on closing our borders, has, as of now, only 129 cases (40 Americans brought in) and 11 deaths. We are working very hard to keep these numbers as low as possible!” Via Twitter
- March 5: “Well, I think the 3.4 percent [mortality rate] is really a false number. ... Because a lot people will have this and it's very mild. They‘ll get better very rapidly. They don’t even see a doctor. They don't even call a doctor. You never hear about those people. So you can't put them down in the category of the overall population in terms of this corona flu—or virus. So you just can't do that. So if, you know, we have thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of people that get better, just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work—some of them go to work but they get better.” On Sean Hannity's Fox News Show. Via Politico
- March 6: “But I think, importantly, anybody, right now and yesterday, that needs a test gets a test. They‘re there, they have the tests, and the tests are beautiful. Anybody that needs a test gets a test. ... The tests are all perfect, like the letter was perfect. The transcription was perfect. This is not as perfect as that, but pretty good.” At the CDC. Via Wired
- March 6: “You know my uncle was a great person. He was at MIT. He taught at MIT for, I think, like, a record number of years. He was a great supergenius, Dr. John Trump. ... I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it. Every one of these doctors said, ’How do you know so much about this?' Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for president.” At the CDC. Via Wired
- March 6: “I like the numbers being where they are. I don't need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn't our fault.” At the CDC. Via NBC News
- March 8: “We have a perfectly coordinated and fine tuned plan at the White House for our attack on CoronaVirus. We moved VERY early to close borders to certain areas, which was a Godsend. V.P. is doing a great job. The Fake News Media is doing everything possible to make us look bad. Sad!” Via Twitter
- March 9: “So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!” Via Twitter
- March 11: “We made a life-saving move with early action on China. Now we must take the same action with Europe. ... A number of new clusters in the United States were seeded by travelers from Europe.” In address to the nation from the Oval Office. Via Politico
- March 13: “No, I don't take responsibility at all.” At Rose Garden press conference backed by CEOs. Via YouTube
- March 17: “This is a pandemic. I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.” Via The New York Times
Sunday March 29, 2020
Quote of the Day
“Beware of stories you want to be true.”
Ben Bradlee, executive editor of The Washington Post, 1968-1991, taken from the HBO documentary “The Newspaperman: The Life and Times of Ben Bradlee” (recommended)
Sunday March 29, 2020
Box Office: No Time to Die
This photo was posted on Twitter the other day. It's from the Uptown area of Minneapolis—yes, the same as in the early Prince song. It's also the arthouse theater that ran a calendar schedule in the ‘70s and ’80s where I first saw so many classic films: from “Casablanca” to “A Clockwork Orange.”
I like the callout below the marquee to the post-credits scene in “Ferris Bueller.” Nice touch.
My first blog post on the Covid-19 epidemic related to China closing all its theaters in January/February. If I thought the same would happen to us I didn't think it would be this soon. I also couldn't imagine it. China is an authoritarian country so it can do this. In the U.S., I thought, it would take businesses to do it. And they wouldn't do it; they'd lose money. But they did it. They stepped up. Relatively quickly. SIFF closed all its local theaters on March 13. Regal closed its theaters nationwide on March 16. SIFF canceled its annual film May/June film festival on March 18. Studios pushed back release dates for the 25th James Bond movie, the ninth Fast & Furious, Wonder Woman 1984. The Bond movie is appropriately titled “No Time to Die.”
Of course, box office dwindled down to nothing:
- March 6-12: $134 million
- March 13-19: $58 million
- March 20-26: $5,176 *
* How is money still being made in theaters? Apparently, two movies are still playing somewhere. One is titled “Lost in America.”
Against this backdrop, then, it was huge news that China was reopening its theaters. It had flattened its curve and could now tentatively celebrate with re-releases of “Avengers,” “Avatar,” “Wolf Warrior II” and “The Wandering Earth.” From The Hollywood Reporter:
China's theater operators have faced two interrelated difficulties: convincing customers it is safe to return to the multiplex in large numbers and convincing distributors that there are enough customers to resume marketing and releasing their most valuable film titles—and without the latter, it would seem hard to achieve the former.
Agreed. The germaphobe part of me thinks this is premature. It still feels like no time to die.
Saturday March 28, 2020
'I Want Them to Be Appreciative'
Not enough is being written about yesterday's press conference. The New York Times barely mentioned it in their COVID-19 coverage. Not even a headline. They glossed over it. Any other president says shit like this in the middle of a global pandemic—about which he's given nothing but mixed messages from the get-go—and it would be front-page news. Trump says it and everyone shrugs. Just Trump being Trump. Meaning being such a solipsistic raging asshole that everyone is left without words. We‘re all speechless. Covid renders us breathless and Trump renders us speechless. Maybe that’s why the Times didn't cover it. Because what the fuck do you say?
Here's the exchange. Early on, he touted the administration response in his usual vague terms:
We‘ve had great success over the last month. We’ve, as you know, the millions and millions of pieces of equipment have been delivered successfully by us, purchased and delivered, and we‘ve made it available to the states and the governors have been very gracious—for the most part, I would say. A couple that aren’t appreciative of the incredible job. They have to do a better job themselves.
It took 20 minutes for a reporter to follow up on that nasty aside by asking if he could be more specific about the governors, and Trump interrupted, and we got this horror-show of a response:
Well, I think we‘ve done a great job for the state of Washington and I think the governor, who is a failed presidential candidate as you know—he leveled out at zero in the polls—he’s constantly chirping, and I guess complaining would be a nice way of saying it. We‘re building hospitals. We’ve done a great job for the state of Washington. Michigan, she has no idea what's going on. And all she does is say, “Oh, it's the federal government's fault.” And we‘ve taken such great care of Michigan. You know the care we’ve taken of New Jersey.
“We‘ve taken such great care of...” How specifically? “We’re building hospitals.” What hospitals? Where? The one I know about in Washington state is the temporary field hospital being built on the Shoreline soccer field, but that seems to be a county effort. In the meantime, we‘re short on masks, respirators, tests. And we were ground zero in the U.S. for a time. For the time when Trump was dismissing all of this, saying it was under control. Just one person. Just 15 and they’re all getting better. And it‘ll all just disappear like a miracle. It’s the Democrats' fault. It's being politicized. It's a hoax.
The reporter then followed up again—asking specifics about the governors of Washington and Michigan—but Trump interrupted again:
All I want them to do, very simple, I want them to be appreciative. I don't want them to say things that aren't true. I want them to be appreciative. We‘ve done a great job, and I’m not talking about me. I'm talking about Mike Pence, the Task Force, I'm talking about FEMA, the Army Corps of Engineers. There's no country in the world could have done what the Army Corps of Engineers has done and is doing. Now they‘re going in and building literal... They’re going into hotels and renovating hotels. That should be for governors to do. That should be for states to do.
Masks, respirators, tests. Again and again. That should be the mantra. “I don't want them to say things that aren't true,” says the man who can't open his mouth without lying. What untrue things are they saying? Apparently that Trump isn't doing a good job. “We‘ve done a great job,” says the man who can’t open his mouth without making it all about him, without trying to pull us into his demented worldview. He says it as if it's a fact. As if he's given evidence of anything he's done to ameliorate matters for states and hospitals and nursing homes and nurses and doctors and first responders.
There have been more evil people in the world but there has never been a more worthless human being. Never has one man expected so much from so many for doing so little.
Friday March 27, 2020
My Talks with Trump I
I suppose it really isn't Trump's fault. He's always been this way and it's always worked for him. Why should he change when the idiot way he's always acted has taken him to the White House?
The bigger fault lies with the people who support him. It's idiot Americans who aren't paying attention and give him a good grade for the way he's handled the COVID-19 pandemic: Dismissing it in January, constantly saying we have it under control in February, claiming it was a Democratic hoax in late February, then telling the world he always knew it was a pandemic and treated it accordingly in early March. Now, in late March, as our numbers leap past every other country (86k vs. 81k for China), he wants to end the social distancing by Easter, or two weeks from Sunday. Why? Just cuz. Cuz he needs it to get the economy going to get re-elected. Has he done anything throughout this crisis except spread misinformation while blaming others for his own ineptitude? Fox News is equally awful. They tout whatever he says. Whatever shift he makes, they make, and pretend they‘ve always made it. They’re 1984. Who can watch that crap? What idiot takes it seriously?
Thursday March 26, 2020
Quote of the Day
It is not possible for a grown-ass nation to make a more miserable human being its leader. https://t.co/9FTtjyS6sU
— David Simon (@AoDespair) March 25, 2020
Monday March 23, 2020
My Top 10 Movies of 2019
I usually apologize for posting my top 10 list late—and this is by far the latest I’ve ever posted this thing—but screw it. If I’d rushed it, I couldn’t have added about half these movies (#s 1, 3 and 9 for starters). They would’ve slipped into the gap. Plus, as you know, it’s been kind of a fucked-up year. In January, I was down with a virus (not that one … I don’t think), then I was playing catch-up throughout February. And this month, yeah. This shit show.
In that regard, most of these movies are available for streaming on Amazon (“The Farewell” is free if you have Prime), while “The Irishman” and “Dolemite” are on Netflix. Stay safe.
10. A Family Tour
At a hotel in Taichung, Taiwan, a film director who’s been exiled from Mainland China and now lives in Hong Kong, is seeing her mother—traveling with a tour group—after five long years. The meeting is outside a hotel and includes her husband and 4-year-old son. It should be heartfelt. It isn’t. It’s stilted and slightly awkward, and then it’s interrupted by the tour director, who leads the mother away. The sense of violation is immediate—maybe particularly for me, since my own mother suffered a stroke three years ago. At that moment, I was really hating on the tour director. Turns out, she allowed this meeting, and others, to happen, despite risk to herself. What we’re witnessing is the long arm of authoritarian rule. Even in another country—ostensibly the same country—it can come between a parent and child.
9. 63 Up
It felt a bit like attending a class reunion; I kept getting reacquainted with forgotten friends. “Oh right, Tony, the wannabe jockey who becomes a cabby, who’s got a joie de vivre and is always on the run, always on the make. And Nick, the farmboy who doesn’t “want to answer those kinds of questions” (about girls), who becomes a scientist and moves to the states and marries one beautiful woman, then divorces, then he marries another beautiful woman. I guess it pays to not answer those kinds of questions. And of course Neil, unforgettable Neil, who at 7 was a cute Liverpudlian boy with Beatle bangs who skipped along sidewalks and wanted to be an astronaut, and who at 28 was homeless in the Scottish countryside, unable to answer questions without rocking back and forth, in the midst of a psychological breakdown.” I could never forget him. Not in a million years.
8. The Irishman
When introducing characters throughout the movie, Scorsese will often freeze-frame the shot and let us know when/how the character died—usually it’s brutally—and I assumed that’s where he was leading us during the extended denouement: to the death of Frank Sheeran. But that’s the one he doesn’t give us. He shows us Frank buying a coffin. He shows him estranged from his family—his four girls—and FBI guys showing up to try to get more info on the Hoffa case. But then this too goes away. Everything goes away. The nurse taking his blood pressure doesn’t know from Jimmy Hoffa, and Frank is more and more irrelevant, more and more alone, until he asks the departing nurse to leave the door open to let a little light in. And that’s where Scorsese leaves him. He doesn’t end him. He leaves him in purgatory.
7. Dolemite is My Name
This is the first Eddie Murphy movie I’ve loved since the 1980s. What’s fascinating is he’s playing someone the exact opposite of Eddie Murphy. Murphy was a hit on “SNL” at age 19, a hit in the movies at age 21, a standup phenomenon at 22, and the star of the biggest box office movie of the year, “Beverly Hills Cop,” at age 23. Not many actors were hotter, sooner. And in “Dolemite” he plays a dumpy, middle-aged man who missed his shot. But Murphy makes this credible. He has hurt in his eyes.
6. Avengers: Endgame
There’s a need for the MCU to move on, so I guess this is the right call. But some part of me feels we didn’t get enough Iron Man vs. Captain America. It’s not just the clash of personalities. They represent the two halves of America: its ideal (democracy/Cap) and its messy reality (capitalism/Iron Man). It felt like more could be said with this dichotomy—things that might help explain us to us. But pause a moment to consider the triumph of this series.
5. JoJo Rabbit
I don’t know if it’s the funniest movie of the year, but it’s certainly the most original. Playing the Beatles’ German-language version of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” over the exuberant opening credits? And associating this happy 1964 music with the mania Hitler caused among Germans who adored him? Wow. There’s a scene where a Gestapo agent tells JoJo to ignore the rumors that Hitler has only one ball because it’s not true—he has four of them. I’d say that’s actually writer-director Taika Waititi. He’s certainly got some big ones. He even plays Hitler in this, to comic perfection.
4. The Farewell
The Chinese title is more direct, “Don’t Tell Her,” which is a little ironic since the point of the movie is a particularly Chinese lack of directness; keeping an unpleasant truth from a beloved family member. The cultural absurdities here may be specifically Chinese but the family absurdities are universal. I love the final scene in China: Billi in the cab with her parents being taken to the airport, and watching her Nai Nai through the rear window waving and getting smaller and smaller and smaller. That’s all of us, eventually, saying good-bye to loved ones. Or being the loved one.
3. Corpus Christi
Is Bartosz Bielenia a shapeshifter? In Jan Komasa’s “Corpus Christi,” he plays Daniel, a 20-year-old criminal who pretends to be a priest in rural Poland, and throughout the character seems both immoral and holy, male and female, child and man. He’s a not-good person who becomes one. He repairs a community. I think he enjoys what he does—he’s good at it—but don’t be fooled into thinking he’s a good kid. He’s not. Maybe that’s why he makes such a good priest.
2. Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood
It’s not until we see the title at the end that we realize we didn’t see it at the beginning. We also realize why. At the end, it’s an admission. The author is basically saying he did his best but he can’t change history like he did with “Inglourious Basterds.” He’s breaking the fourth wall. He saying this is just a wish-fulfillment fantasy, a fairy tale, a once up on a time… I’d argue it’s the most poignant moment in any Quentin Tarantino movie but I’m not sure what else would rank. Poignant isn’t a word we normally associate with the man.
1. Pain and Glory
This is my favorite Almodóvar. He’s usually too quirky or pungently sexual or something for me, but this one hits home. Because it’s a portrait of the artist in winter and I’m a writer in autumn? Because the artist, director Salvador Mallo (Antonio Banderas), has a sense of failing his dying mother, and I’ve been probing that wound since my own mother died last August? The movie is Almodóvar’s, specifically his, but it doesn’t feel narrow. It’s as wide as life. It forgives everything but bad art.
Shout-outs as well to “Us,” “Good Boys,” “Ford v. Ferrari,” “Toy Story 4,” “Knives Out,” “Joker,” “Shazam!,” “Mike Wallace Is Here,” “Monos,” and, oh sure, “Parasite.” Why not.
Past years:
Saturday March 21, 2020
Walking Seattle During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Message left on Capitol Hill, Seattle, Washington, USA, Earth
Last Sunday—just last Sunday—I was talking to my brother in Minneapolis and told him that we in Seattle we pretty fairly locked down now. For several weeks, it was “Should we ... or shouldn't we?” and now we'd definitely landed on the shouldn‘t side. We were trying to socially distance ourselves and be vaguely responsible. I still went to Trader Joe’s that morning, and had taken a walk the day before to Volunteer Park. But even the latter instance, I told my brother, made me worried. I was like: Should I be walking? is this safe for me and others?
“Now you‘re really overthinking it,” he said.
The New York Times recently raised the same point: Is it OK to take a walk? Their quick answer: Sure, just stay six feet away from everyone you don’t know, everyone not in your family. All of which makes sense. To be honest, I was already practicing it. Last Monday, I did the same walk out to Volunteer Park but veered off before I got there because it became too crowded. it was like everyone was going to Volunteer Park, which shouldn't be the game plan. Tuesday, to avoid the crowds, I walked down to the International District and over by the waterfront. That was less crowded but more depressing: a lot of homeless, Chinese in masks, and shuttered businesses. Thursday, I went for a run; Friday, a bikeride. Today, instead of heading north toward Volulnteer Park, I walked east toward Lake Washington. It was good. I like walking the less-populated neighborhoods, where, if you need to, you can just step into the street if someone is coming toward you. I try to do this with a smile but sometimes forget. We‘re all in the same boat, and should be banding together, but ... Yeah. You might kill me and I might kill you. It’s the weirdest of vibes. But I try to smile.
I did run into a friend of my wife, and we had a good conversation from 10 feeet apart. She complained about the social isolation but she's an extrovert. To me, that's the easiest part of all of this. The hardest part is anticipating where we‘re going. Right now, the world is basically divided between those who understand exponential math and those who don’t, and the latter group is ruining us. Six days ago, despite (at best) spotty testing, the U.S. had the sixth-most confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the world: 3,774. As I write, we have the third-most confirmed cases in the world: 25,493. Our curve ain't flattening at all. And we still have spotty testing.
Stay safe, everyone.
Friday March 20, 2020
Success at Any Price
Here's Otto Friedrich on John Howard Lawson, the first member of the Hollywood 10 to speak before HUAC, and a playwright before his Hollywood days:
Lawson's second Broadway production, Processional (1925), brought him success at the age of thirty. Subsequent titles tell a story: Loud Speaker (1927), The International (1928), Success Story (1932). Success lured him west, as it lured so many others, and the Hollywood titles began to tell a different story: Dream of Love (1928), Our Blushing Brides (1930), Bachelor Apartment (1931), Success at Any Price (1934) ...
He was the first president of the Screen Writers Guild, and he made no secret of his ideological views. Writing in New Theatre magazine in 1934, he announced that he had joined the Communist Party, and he added, “I do not hesitate to say that it is my aim to present the Communist position.” There was something sad about Lawson's efforts to “present the Communist position” on the screen. In 1938, the same year in which he wrote Algiers to introduce Hedy Lamarr, he also wrote Blockade, Walter Wanger's account of the Spanish civil war, which somehow failed to say which side was which. “This I accepted because it was the only way in which the picture could be undertaken,” Lawson said.
Not only did it fail to say which side was which, it failed to mention which country they were in, or that it was even a civil war; it actually seems like a war between different countries. So the great Hollywood movie about the Spanish Civil War that was made during the Spanish Civil War doesn't mention either “Spain” or “civil war.”
In a few grafs, Friedrich lays out the absurdity of the HUAC attacks. HUAC says it was concerned with communist infiltration of Hollywood and the messages these spies were lacing into movies. And yes, there were communists in Hollywood in the 1930s and '40s. But even the most vocal of them, given a dream project, still produced pablum.
The Coen brothers played off this nicely in “Hail, Caesar!”
Thursday March 19, 2020
Four Days in the COVID-19 Pandemic
Via John Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center:
What everyone in the U.S. should be asking: What does South Korea know and when did they know it?
Meanwhile in the U.S. we went from 3,700 confirmed cases to more than 14,000. And a lot of people can't even get tested. I have a friend, C., who tried to get a test because she'd been short of breath with a cough. Meaning she had two of the three indicators. But the clinic told her no. They were worried she had it and might infect others.
So you can only get the test if you exhibit symptoms, but if you exhibit symptoms please don't come in and get the test. Somewhere, Joseph Heller smiles.
Monday March 16, 2020
Trump to Govs: ‘Get It Yourselves’
“Respirators, ventilators, all of the equipment—try getting it yourselves,” Mr. Trump told the governors during the conference call, a recording of which was shared with The New York Times.
“We will be backing you, but try getting it yourselves. Point of sales, much better, much more direct if you can get it yourself.”
from the New York Times article “Trump tells governors to seek out respirators and other vital equipment on their own.” See also David Leonhardt's excellent piece, “A Complete List of Trump's Attempts to Play Down Coronavirus,” with its straightforward subhed, “He could have taken action. He didn't.”
Monday March 16, 2020
Movie Review: Platinum Blonde (1931)
WARNING: SPOILERS
“Platinum Blonde” is named for Jean Harlow but Loretta Young gets top billing, and the two actresses could probably switch roles. Harlow, a brassy type, is cast as a rich society dame, rather than the newspaper reporter Young plays, while the fine-featured Young could totally play the socialite. Overall, it’s not bad. Directed by Frank Capra before he became Frank Capra.
He became Frank Capra with “It Happened One Night,” in which a rich girl falls for a rougish reporter, and that’s basically this, too. Quick question: How often was this the plot of early talkies? And how often was it written by a former reporter?
“Platinum Blonde” has four credited screenwriters and at least one of them was a journalist. Jo Swerling had a helluva life. Born in Ukraine, his family immigrated to the U.S. when he was young and he grew up on the Lower East Side. As a kid he peddled newspapers, then became a journalist, then a playwright. That led to Hollywood, where wrote “Pennies from Heaven,” “Pride of the Yankees” and “Lifeboat.” He also helped write, or added scenes to, “Gone With the Wind” and “It’s a Wonderful Life,” before writing the Broadway book for “Guys and Dolls” in the 1950s. For “Blonde” he gets an “adaptation” credit but it makes me wonder: Adapted from what? There’s no play, novel, or short story listed. From the story by Harry Chandlee and Douglas Churchill maybe?
The fourth writing credit, for “dialogue,” goes to Robert Riskin, who became a frequent Capra collaborator: “It Happened One Night,” “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,” “You Can’t Take It With You,” and “Meet John Doe.” Apparently it was on the set of this last film that Riskin, who resented Capra for taking credit for their collaboration, finally blew up. He waggled 120 blank pages in his face and yelled, “Put the famous Capra touch on that!” They never worked together again. Riskin married Fay Wray in 1942, they had two kids, he had a stroke in 1950. His last five years were spent in a home/hospital for old movie stars, where, according to Ian Scott’s 2006 book, “In Capra's Shadow: The Life and Career of Screenwriter Robert Riskin,” his regular visitors included Edward G. Robinson, Jack Benny and Jo Swerling. No Capra. When he died in 1955, the funeral was well-attended. Again, no Capra.
If all of that sounds tragic, wait until we get to the male lead of “Platinum Blonde.”
Method man
So who’s the rougish reporter who somehow rates both Jean Harlow and Loretta Young? His name is Robert Williams, and if you’re saying “Who?” welcome to the club. It’s partly the name. Could anything be more bland? It’s partly the tragedy. He died shortly after the movie was released.
Just what was it about actors in 1931 movies anyway? I recently reviewed “Behind Office Doors,” starring Mary Astor and Robert Ames. Astor would, of course, go on to win an Oscar as well as play the femme fatale in “The Maltese Falcon” starring Humphrey Bogart. Ames would die of alcoholism that same year. For Williams, it was peritonitis.
Williams had sad, hooded eyes and a natural acting style. Other actors see him as ahead of his time. In 2008, on Turner Classic Movies, Christopher Plummer said: “To watch Robert Williams act was like seeing a comic using the Method, long before the Method became famous with Marlon and Monty.” Is he just talking about this movie or others? There’s not many others. Williams was mostly a stage actor who was just beginning his Hollywood career—making four movies in 1931. This was the last.
It begins with a rumor of a scandal among the high-brow Schuylers, and cynical society reporter Stew Smith (Williams) is sent to check it out. The Schuylers bribe Bingy (Walter Catlett), the comic-relief reporter from the Times (who seems like an early, outre version of Phil Silvers), and try the same with Smith but “no soap” as they used to say. He gets Mrs. Schuyler to spill the beans and they run it big. The Schuylers don’t forgive him, but Ann, the original Schuyler sister, does. She makes eyes. Initially I was wondering what kind of game she was playing but it turns out she has a thing for working-class types; and she likes this one enough to marry him.
Some of Riskin's dialogue isn't bad:
Stew: I begin to get goofy ideas and they concern you, Ann.
Ann: None of your ideas could be goofy, Stew, if they concern me.
Stew: Well, my name is Smith. ... I am white, male and over 21*. I‘ve never been in jail—that is, not often. I prefer Scotch to bourbon, I hate carrots, I hate peas, I like bad coffee, and I hate garters. I make seventy-five bucks a week, and I got eight hundred and forty-seven bucks in the bank, and I don’t know yet whether your eyes are blue or violet.
Ann: That's because you‘re too far away, Stew.
[They kiss.]*Is “white, male and over 21” a play on “free, white and 21”?
Each assumes the other will give up their lifestyle—she’ll shack up in his apartment, he’ll become a kept man in her mansion—but money talks and his lifestyle walks. He winds up with a valet and those garters he hates. For a time, I got whiffs of “The Blue Angel”—the man who loses himself in love or lust—but it’s not so grotesque or horrific as in von Sternberg. The two clash, and the clashes culminate when one old reporter friend after another shows up at the mansion to bend an elbow in prohibition times.
If you’re wondering where Loretta Young is in all of this, it’s mostly on the sidelines. She plays Gallagher, the “sob sister” of the paper, who’s often hanging around Stew with her big doe eyes. She obviously loves him but he thinks her one of the guys:
Stew: There you go, talking like a woman.
Gallagher: Well?
Stew: Well, you’re my pal, aren’t you? Don’t turn female on me.
Don’t know which requires a greater suspension of disbelief: a reporter marrying into society, or seeing Loretta Young as just a pal. And prefering Harlow to her? To be honest, I never really got the Harlow thing. There’s something thick and even mannish about her features. She turned 20 this year, Young—who’d been a star for several years—turned just 18. Williams was 37. So it goes.
Theory of continuity
As with another 1931 “Blonde” title—“Blonde Crazy” starring Jimmy Cagney—we get an Albert Einstein reference. Stew says, “Say, I interviewed a swell guy the other day: Einstein. Yeah, swell guy. Little eccentric, doesn't wear any garters. Neither do I, as a matter of fact.” That’s how the garters thing begins.
In the end, of course, the scales fall from Stew’s eyes and he and Gallagher wind up together. Boy meets girl, boy goes for richer girl, boy leaves richer girl for the girl we knew was right for him all along. Classic Hollywood.
Interesting thing about the above poster? All the writers are listed but not Riskin. Because he was merely “dialogue”? Instead, the third-billed writer on the poster is Dorothy Howell, for “continuity.” Howell actually started out as Harry Cohn’s secretary at Columbia. Can't find a Times obit for her but there's more on her here. Riskin and Sweberg didn't get Times' obits, either. Capra, of course.
Sunday March 15, 2020
Tweet of the Day
Trump in January (first US case): “We have it totally under control. It's one person coming in from China.”
— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) March 15, 2020
Trump in February (36 confirmed cases): “We have it very much under control in this country.”
Trump today (3,000+ cases): “It's something we have tremendous control of.”
Sunday March 15, 2020
U.S. Box Office Has Worst Weekend Since 2001
Anyone go to the movies this weekend? Not us. We‘re kind of hunkered down as the coronavirus situation in the U.S. worsens and there are few (no?) signs of leadership from Washington, D.C. So the leadership has to be us.
People are definitely staying away. The second weekend of Pixar’s “Onward” came in first place with $10.5 million—a drop of 73%. Is that a big drop? God, yes. It's big for a shitty live-action movie let alone a good, Pixar movie. A 30-40% drop is probably more common. Second place was a Christian movie from Lionsgate, “I Still Believe,” which grossed $9.5. Vin Diesel's sci-fi superhero/live forever flick “Bloodshot,” came in third with $9.5.
Overall, Box Office Mojo reports we spent a total of $53.9 million domestically at the box office. For the 11th weekend of the year (i.e., this one), that's the lowest since ... 1995. Unadjusted.
How long has it been since we had any weekend that low? Here are the lowest weekend totals for each year this century:
- 2019: $73.4 million (Feb. 1-3)
- 2018: $85.8 million (Dec. 7-9)
- 2017: $69.3 million (Aug. 25-27)
- 2016: $83.7 million (Dec. 9-11)
- 2015: $74.1 million (Oct. 30-Nov. 1)
- 2014: $66.1 million (Sept. 5-7)
- 2013: $85.0 million (Sept. 6-8)
- 2012: $67.9 million (Sept. 7-9)
- 2011: $75.3 million (Dec. 9-11)
- 2010: $82.2 million (Sept. 10-12)
- 2009: $90.8 million (Oct. 30-Nov. 1)
- 2008: $68.2 million (Sept. 5-7)
- 2007: $77.9 million (April 27-29)
- 2006: $71.6 million (Sept. 8-10)
- 2005: $82.9 million (April 15-17)
- 2004: $71.3 million (Sept. 24-26)
- 2003: $67.5 million (Sept. 5-7)
- 2002: $72.6 million (Sept. 6-8)
Box Office Mojo's numbers get a little odd in 2001. They list two weekends worse than our current one—both holiday weekends:
- April 13-16, Easter weekend: $26.2 million
- Oct. 5-8, Columbus Day weekend: $2.9 million
$2.9 million? My immediate thought was the anthrax scare after the 9/11 scare, and maybe theaters were shuttered, but I can't find any evidence of that. And it doesn't explain the Easter weekend fiasco before any of that happened. The next year's Easter weekend grossed $136. The previous one, in 2000, grossed $80.
Either way, this weekend was historically bad at the box office. And it's going to get worse as more people stay away and more theater chains close. In fact, it should probably be worse already. We're not taking this seriously enough. Cf., what China did.
Sunday March 15, 2020
A Failing
“The US is on course to be severely ravaged by the coronavirus outbreak due to a delayed and dysfunctional testing regime and misleading messaging from the Trump administration, public health experts have warned.
”As of Friday, there were more than 1,600 confirmed cases of the Covid-19 virus across the US, with 41 deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control. ...
“This muddled response was exacerbated by Donald Trump who, reportedly fearful of the impact upon the stock market and his own re-election prospects, initially dismissed fears over the coronavirus as a ‘hoax’ before stating that infections were ‘going very substantially down, not up.’ The administration promised millions of testing kits would be easily available to Americans.
”All of these pronouncements have proved untrue ...
“Anthony Fauci, who heads the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, admitted in testimony to Congress this week that authorities had failed to respond swiftly to the spread of coronavirus. ‘The idea of anybody getting [testing] easily the way people in other countries are doing it, we are not set up for that. Do I think we should be? Yes. But we are not,’ he said. ‘It is a failing. I mean, let’s admit it.'”
Oliver Milman, environmental reporter for The Guardian, in his piece, “Coronavirus: Trump's stumbles and testing failures pave way to disaster, experts say”
Sunday March 15, 2020
Three Trips to Trader Joe's
I usually do our weekly shopping at Trader Joe's on Sunday morning. I used to go at 8 AM (Madison, Capitol Hill, Seattle), but a few months ago they pushed back the opening to 9. Something to do with when trucks could arrive with new goods? I rarely went at 8 AM anyway, and not because I wasn't up that early but because that's when the Type-A folks tended to go, and it's no fun fighting for space with them. I'd usually wait until they cleared out. 8:30, 8:45 wasn't bad. But then the switch and it hasn't been as good. 9:30, 9:45 is much busier.
Two weeks ago, doing my usual Sunday run, there were entire shelves unstocked. Like the cereal aisle? Almost all gone. I assumed some trucks hadn't gotten through, and it wasn't until I was talking to my father later that day, and he mentioned that they'd been stocking up on some items in anticipation of the coronavirus situation, that the other shoe dropped.
Last Sunday, my wife went with me. She normally goes to yoga on Sunday mornings but that class was canceled for the time being. In the store, a lot more people looking worried. A lot more facemasks. Purell by the cash register. But the shelves were better stocked.
This morning, a beautiful, crisp morning in Seattle, with the mountains way out, it was still busy at 9:30, 9:45. But not as busy? The shelves looked like they were being depleted again. Barely any pasta left, for example. Even I grabbed more than I normally would. Are customer-service centers like Trader Joe's giving time off for older employees? One hopes. These people are part of the front lines, too.
Will they stay open long? Today, Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio ordered all bars and restaurants closed. “Every day we delay, more people will die,” he said.
Meanwhile, this morning on Twitter, during his National Day of Prayer, the president of the United States: defended the medical screenings at airports even though they are causing huge crowds to breathe the same air for hours and hours—the exact opposite of what is recommended; talked up the “catastrophe” of H1N1 Swine Flu response and incorrectly stated that Joe Biden headed it up; attacked Chuck Schumer; talked about a full pardon for Michael Flynn; and defended his claims of a Google website.
Saturday March 14, 2020
‘Should We Be Doing This?’ A Coronavirus Update from the U.S. Epicenter
Two weeks ago today.
I‘ve always been a germaphobe—I had a sickly childhood, etc.—but I always feel guilty about it. Some part of me thinks I’m just being too paranoid about germs and sickness and disease. I should be braver. I should be a better person.
So throughout the novel coronavirus/COVID-19 situation, I‘ve been two minds about things.
A week ago Tuesday, we were hosting a farewell dinner for one of our friends, who was heading back to Australia to look after her mother after the death of her father last summer, and some part of me wondered, “Should we still be doing this? Is this responsible?” More cases and more deaths were being reported in Seattle and King County, where I live. A death in February at a hospital three blocks from where I live was reported two weeks after the fact. The thing seemed to be getting bigger and closer. It was supposedly deadlier than the flu and much more contagious. Or was it the same? I assumed the former because responsible people said so while Fox News said no. That’s the giveaway. That's the tell. I wondered “Should we be doing this?” but I didn't see a way out. What was the alternative? Not going anywhere for anything? Holing up for weeks at a time? Or longer? That would never happen. The economy would stagnate. The stock market would crash. Businesses wouldn't allow it. Plus the world wasn't as germaphobic as me, so this thing would continue to spread while we were holed up.
Anyway, we had the dinner, and the next night I went to a work event where people were still inclined to shake hands. I always offered a fist, which led to laughter and a move to touch elbows, and people joking, as you do in a crisis, with gallows humor. All last week, too, the first week in March, we had workers at our place. They were painting our bathroom, the final stages of a remodel that began last June. (Yes, last June. Don't ask.) And while some part of my brain was thinking, “Is this smart? Is this responsible?,” another part wondered, “If not now, when?” So we did it. I still don't know if it was smart, but it's partly why I wasn't as worried as I might ordinarily be. The world was coming in and we were going out and that's the way it had to be.
But changes kept happening. The thing kept lapping up on us. A dinner got canceled last Saturday so we went to the movies, “Emma.,” at SIFF Egyptian. There was a good crowd there but the people behind the concession counter were now wearing gloves and there was hand sanitizer next to the napkins. Thursday, two days ago, we went to the movies again, “The Traitor,” at SIFF Uptown. Yes to gloves, yes to hand sanitizer, but now there was only one other couple in the theater. Then yesterday SIFF announced it was temporarily shuttering its doors.
SIFF was actually late to the party. Cancelations have been happening for a while. Initially it was annual events like the Emerald City Comicon, which was scheduled for this weekend but was postponed until the summer. That made sense. But what about non-annual events? What about the baseball season? Broadway? We were going to New York for a week in April, and we had tickets to “West Side Story,” and I was hoping for a Yankees or Mets game. Initially the prices seemed exorbitant. Then I began to wonder if they might go down becaues of COVID-19? Then I began to wonder if they might happen at all? And yes, they‘re not happening at all. And yes, we’re not going to New York.
The NBA canceling the rest of its season seemed the big one. That's when I went “Wow.” I'm trying to remember the timeline, the cancelations came so fast and furious. I kept relaying them to my wife. A section of Italy. No wait, all of Italy. Gov. Inslee warned against gatherings of more than 250 people; then it shrunk to ... 50? Then all bets were off. We were also trying to be brave and not panic and carry on. People reported that Seattle was a ghost town and I responded that it was less ghost town and more like a 2014 Seattle Seahawks game. Ha ha. Then it became more like a 2014 Seahawks playoff game. Then it was the Super Bowl. Today, this morning, I opened my second-floor window and leaned out for fresh air; and I was just hanging there, watching the world go by, when I realized the world wasn't going by. No one was out. It was Saturday morning, 8:30, and my office overlooks Boren Avenue, which always has traffic on it, car and foot, and I usually see people walking along Cherry Avenue, too. But it was maybe 15-20 seconds before I saw my first person—a jogger down on Terry. Then I saw a woman walking on the other side of Boren. And eventually a few cars. But just a few.
More people have been getting in touch lately. Familly and friends, texts and phone calls and email messages. “You guys OK?” It was my sister last weekend, and I told her it's a little odd seeing the world becoming more me than me. I think I was kind of proud of that; now not. Now I feel I should‘ve been more me than me.
I finally ran the numbers last week—Wednesday or Thursday. Very contagious, no vaccine, 1% mortality rate (conservative estimate). If everyone gets it, that means 78 million people die. Conservatively.
It was just two months ago, Jan. 8, that The New York Times first reported China had identified a pneumonialike illness with this subhed: “The new coronavirus doesn’t appear to be readily spread by humans, but researchers caution that more study is needed.” It was just two weeks ago, Feb. 27, that Trump accused Democrats and the news media of exaggerating the coronavirus threat. He said it was like the flu, which has a .1% mortality rate and a vaccine. His then-chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, told conservative activists that journalists were hyping the coronavirus because “they think this will bring down the president; that's what this is all about.” Their current line is that everyone should look forward; they‘re saying that no one should politicize this. But they already did. Which is why they don’t want us to look back at it. They are horrible people. Fuck them. But never forget.
I'm not of two minds about it anymore. And I‘ll be fine with the social isolation. I’m a writer and a reader and a movie watcher. I'm a walker and a biker and a jogger. There's tons of Cagney films to watch. There's tons to stream. So I‘ll be fine as long as I’m fine. I hope I'm fine. I hope you're fine.
More soon.
Wednesday March 11, 2020
Trump: ‘People Are Surprised That I Understand It’
“Trump's press conference on Friday at the CDC was a Trumpian classic, heavy on braggadocio and almost entirely lacking a sense of the seriousness of the crisis. 'I like this stuff. I really get it,' Trump told reporters, his face partly hidden under a red ‘Keep America Great’ hat. ‘People are surprised that I understand it. Every one of these doctors say, ”How do you know so much about this?“ Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should’ve done that instead of running for president.‘ At another point Trump compared the situation to the Ukraine shakedown. ’The [coronavirus] tests are all perfect. Like the letter was perfect. The transcription was perfect,' he said.
from Gabriel Sherman‘s Vanity Fair piece, ”’He's Definitely Melting Down Over This': Trump, Germaphobe in Chief, Struggles to Control the Covid-19 Story“
Chickens coming home to roost. This is what we get for electing an idiot. It's amazing how quickly the virus has spread and how much damage it's done, and how little leadership there is from Trump or anyone in the GOP—who are following the idiot Trumpian line of trying to calm the markets and wind up making it all worse. I was doing some backtracking on the NY Times site and it's basiclaly a two-month old story. Here's one of the first times it was mentioned: January 8, when it was called Wuhan pneumonia, it hadn't been linked to any deaths yet, and the subhed proclaimed that it ”doesn't appear to be readily spread by humans." Again: January 8. Two months ago. Simpler times.
At least I agree with Trump's last two sentences: He does have a natural ability; and he should've done that instead of running for president.
Wednesday March 11, 2020
Movie Review: Motherless Brooklyn (2019)
WARNING: SPOILERS
Sure, it's a great idea. Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown” is the great modern film noir—one of the greatest movies ever made, really—and it was about a 1930s-era LA private investigator who pulls a thread and discovers the corrupt ways in which his city was built: How water was stolen from the north to make LA and the arid south thrive. The man behind this theft is corrupt not only in business but in his personal life: He raped his own daughter and now wants the grown child from that crime—both daughter and granddaughter—to molest all over again. In the end, he reaches for her with tentacled arms. Meanwhile, his daughter, the movie’s femme fatale, who has always been more victim than victimizer, is killed and no one pays for it. There is no justice in the world. There’s just … Chinatown.
In Edward Norton’s “Motherless Brooklyn,” based on the novel by Jonathan Lethem, a 1950s-era NYC private investigator pulls a thread and discovers the corrupt ways in which his city was built: How Moses Randolph (Alec Baldwin), obviously based on Robert Moses, was the behind-the-scenes, out-of-control power that leveled neighborhoods and built bridges and pushed people and undermined democracy. He is not only corrupt in business but in his personal life: He raped a black maid in a hotel in the 1920s and is now being blackmailed about the grown child from that crime. As we watch, and make connections with Polanski's film, we wonder if the girl is safe, and whether there will be justice in the world, or just more … Chinatown.
Other connections. “Chinatown” was filmed during the Watergate hearings, and there are echoes of Nixon’s crimes in the storyline. “Motherless Brooklyn” was filmed during the Trump era, and there are echoes of his monstrosity here as well.
But forget it, Jake, this ain’t no “Chinatown.”
“The Wire” Redux
What is, right? But this adheres so close to that storyline you can’t help but compare them. Again, great idea: Robert Moses as Noah Cross, with a bit of Donald Trump tossed in. And played by the guy who plays Trump on “SNL.”
It even opens with the pulling of a thread—a literal one. Lionel Essrog (Norton) has Tourette’s, a photographic memory and is on the spectrum. He’s got issues, in other words, including pulling on the threads on his coat. But the photographic memory makes him useful to private dick Frank Minna (Bruce Willis), who nicknames the orphaned young man “Motherless Brooklyn.” Both Lionel and Coney (Ethan Suplee) are backing up Minna on a case they know nothing about, and which leads, after a kidnapping and chase, to the death of Minna. Now Tony (Bobby Cannavale) runs the joint. But it’s the twitching, cursing Lionel that needs to pull at the thread of Frank’s death. He needs to know who killed him and why.
After some leads he winds up at a public hearing about urban renewal, in which the real power is the aforementioned Moses Randolph. Also present: community organizer Gabby Horowitz (Cherry Jones), her beautiful assistant Laura Rose (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), and a bearded, bummy-looking rabble rouser, Paul (Willem Dafoe). Lionel, pretending to be a reporter, buys Paul dinner and listens as he rants about Moses. Then he goes to the library and discovers—alley oop—Paul is Moses’ brother. Then he goes to a nightclub in Harlem, which is like “The Wire” redux. A Miles Davis-like quartet is led by Omar himself, Michael Kenneth Williams, while the joint is run/owned by good ol' Bunnie Colvin, Robert Wisdom, who is called Billy Rose here, and who is the father—or the uncle?—of Laura Rose.
The chase to find answers is a bit long so I’ll cut to it. Laura is the daughter of Moses Randolph—he raped and impregnated a black maid in a hotel in the 1920s—and Minna found out, got evidence, and with Billy Rose tried to blackmail him. That’s why he was killed; Billy Rose gets it, too.
But the pieces just don’t fit together well. In “Chinatown,” they just pop into place—ah, of course!—and create a picture of true horror and corruption. Here, you struggle to make them connect, and the picture they create is … I guess kinda bad? Maybe? I don’t buy a lot of the relationships, particularly the brothers. Is Paul that dumb? Is Moses that unnecessarily cruel? Is a woman as beautiful as Laura Rose really interested in our twitching, Tourette's hero?
I didn’t buy that Moses would agree to meet Lionel in that private pool, and where, dripping, he gives a not-bad speech about the nature of power:
Do you have the first inkling how power works? Power is feeling, knowing, that you can do whatever you want and not one fuckin’ person can stop you. And if someone else has a dumb idea that you don’t like, well, that’s the end of that idea, or the end of that person if you want.
If I want to build highways while the rest of the country is broke, I’ll punch through any damn neighborhood I want. If some Negro slum is where I’m going to put my federal project, or the off ramp of my bridge, well, the goodie-goods can shriek and moan all day long. … And if you think I’m gonna let some chip who never should’ve been born, or your small-time boss, or my brother with his ideals and his forgeries in my name slow down the work I’m getting done in this city, then you’ve got a lot to learn about how power works. Because those people are invisible. They don’t exist.
Right, there’s even a character similar to Polanski’s Man with Knife (“We don’t like nosy people”) but not nearly as memorable or brutal. Lionel gets beat up, but dashingly so. Not like Nicholson with that bandage on his nose for half the fucking movie.
Plus Norton is no Polanski. But who is?
Do happy endings resonate in a noir?
I mean, good god, there’s even a happyish ending. Lionel gets the deed to Frank’s place overlooking the ocean, where he winds up with Laura, the way-too-beautiful Laura. Do happy endings resonate? In a noir?
Here. Imagine Moses with Laura, and about to do to her what he did to her mother, and Lionel there, aware, and helpless to stop it. That’s a noir. And that's the true power Moses alluded to by the pool. That's Chinatown, Jake.
Again, it’s a nice try. It’s going for the king. But as Omar said, you come at the king, you best not miss.
Tuesday March 10, 2020
Movie Review: Pain and Glory (2019)
WARNING: SPOILERS
It sounds better in Spanish: Dolor y Gloria. Two opposites that almost rhyme.
This may be my favorite Almodóvar. He’s usually too quirky or pungently sexual or something for me, but this one hits home. Because it’s a portrait of the artist in winter and I’m a writer in autumn? Because the artist, director Salvador Mallo (Antonio Banderas), has a sense of failing his dying mother, and I’ve been probing that wound since my own mother died last August? The movie is Almodóvar’s, specifically his, but it doesn’t feel narrow. It’s as wide as life. It forgives everything but bad art.
It’s Almodóvar’s “8 ½”—and not. Early on, Salvador talks about how his film career made up for what he missed in his secondary education. That bit is actually worth a sidebar in itself. His mother, Jacinta (Penelope Cruz), wants her son to be educated—to have the opportunities she and her husband (a mostly absent, near-Joseph figure) never had—so she works hard and admonishes young Salvador (Asier Flores) and sucks up to the local Catholic hierarchy to get him into seminary. There, they discover he’s got a beautiful voice, make him choir soloist, and totally neglect his other studies. He never gets the superior learning his mother desired. Almodóvar doesn’t underline this irony, he leaves it for us to connect the dots.
The point is there’s a lot he doesn’t know. Early on, Geographia is splashed across the screen and in voiceover he tells us his knowledge of that subject is limited to where he wound up in the world while promoting his movies. Cue cartoon airplane landing on a cartoon map of the world. Then we got the title card Anatomia, and I smiled, thinking of the obvious Felliniesque pleasures there. But this is how the movie is not “8 ½.” Since he was 30, Salvador has suffered chronic pain. We get a list of his ailments, some of which are also mine: acid reflux, asthma, tinnitus, headaches. His back pain has gotten so bad he’s actually stopped working—to the surprise of everyone. An actress-friend tells him she thought he’d be the last of them to quit work; he nods. A doctor asks him if he misses the work and his eyes turn hard. “Not a day goes by that I don’t think of it.”
Has Almodóvar read Philip Roth’s “The Anatomy Lesson”? Or is it common for artists to give their alter egos chronic pain? Maybe it’s partly wish fulfillment. “If only there was something that could stop me from doing this every fucking day.”
In Antonio’s eyes
I assumed, early on, we were watching a long, slow suicide, but it’s the opposite. It’s about forgiveness and redemption and the long way back.
The movie opens with Salvador in a pool, doing underwater therapy, and flashing back to his mother and three other women talking men and singing while washing clothes in the river. The song ends “That’s how my blindness started,” and we cut back to Salvador and wonder if we’re going to find out how his blindness started.
Kind of. Did he seek out Alberto (Asier Etxendia) to clear away the clutter in his life—their 30-year feud—or was heroin the true motivation? I lean to the latter. On the set of an early film, “Sabor” (“Flavor”), Salvador, on coke, hated the way Alberto, on heroin, interpreted his character. They fought over it, and Salvador dismissed him in the press and maybe truncated his career, and you can see the pain and anger in his eyes when Salvador has the audacity to show up, unannounced, at Alberto’s home after all these years. But their interaction is glorious. Salvador is apologetic (sorta), his eyes holding a playful “I’ve been bad” look, and Alberto softens when he sees how frail he is and after Salvador smokes heroin with him. Seemingly hours later, but maybe days, he shows up at Salvador’s door, enthusiastic. He thinks they’re best friends now. He’s a sweetheart with bad taste—his clothes are a horror show—but he knows art. While Salvador sleeps, Alberto snoops, and finds and reads a Word doc, addicion, which begins in lovely fashion:
“My idea of the movie theater was always linked to the breeze of summer nights. We only watched movies in the summer.”
It’s a story about Salvador’s first love, Federico (Leonardo Sbaraglia), and Alberto wants to turn it into a one-man theater piece, but Salvador says no. Does he not trust him? Probably. Does he not want to accede control over his own story? Definitely. But eventually he acquiesces. Why? It’s another peace offering. The two are supposed to be publicly reunited at Cinematheque for a showing of a new print of “Sabor,” but they never make it. They do heroin instead, and Salvador feels he’s too stoned to be articulate and artistic before a crowd. The desperate event planner, however, phones him, and holds up the phone to the audience, and now he has to be on. In order to clear his mind, Salvador does coke again. Which is when the old Salvador emerges.
He’s trying to explain the feud from from his older, wiser perspective, but the more he talks about it, and the more coke kicks in, the less forgiving he becomes. With Alberto standing off to the side, mouth agape, completely betrayed, Salvador talks about Alberto’s “tediousness” and “lethal rhythm” for the character. Finally Alberto slaps the phone away and yells at him. Up to this point, the scene is hilarious, but now we fear a bit for Salvador. He’s slighter and frailer, after all, and Alberto is enraged. Then, in a flash, there’s a look of hard anger in Salvador’s eyes, and you see the director there. You see the imperiousness. Alberto backs off. So much of the movie, truly, is in Banderas’ eyes.
Of course, Salvador still needs heroin; thus Addicion as peace offering. And it leads to Salvador’s second reunion—one that, admittedly, requires some suspension of disbelief. We have to believe that the real Federico was finally back in Madrid, and in that neighborhood, and just happened to see the sign advertising Alberto’s one-man play and checked it out on a whim. And there, tears in his eyes, he sees his own story unfold before him.
The addicion of the title is two-fold—love and drugs—and Federico and Salvador ended badly:
“I believed the strength of my love would defeat his addiction. But that didn’t happen. Love is not enough. Love may move mountains, but it is not enough to save the person you love.”
So we get our second reunion, late at night, at Salvador’s place. It’s a charming scene. As the two talk, Salvador seems smitten again, and steals glances over at Federico. Federico wants to stay the night (you can tell), and Salvador wants him to (you can tell), but also doesn’t want him to, and in the end doesn’t wins out. But it rekindles something in him. The flame of love? Not giving into it but holding onto it? Afterwards he doesn’t return to heroin. He picks it up and puts it down. He begins to try to get it together again.
From Paterna, with love
I think I was right about the suicide, by the way. At one point, we see Salvador reading in bed:
“Life disgusts me as a useless medicine. It is then when I clearly feel how easy it would be to get away from this tediousness if I had the simple strength to want to really push it away.”
He highlights this part. I love the highlighting. Me again.
Throughout the movie, we get flashbacks to Salvador’s childhood in Paterna, and the beautiful cave-like apartment by the sea. There, a young Salvador teaches an illiterate laborer, Eduardo (Cesar Vicente), his ABCs, while Eduardo, probably without knowing, teaches Salvador who he is. At one point, Eduardo showers naked, beautifully naked, in a bucket in the kitchen, while Salvador throws himself onto his bed, hot and flushed. During Addicion, we saw flashes of classic Hollywood movies from the period—Marilyn, Liz Taylor, “Splendor in the Grass”—and that’s what this reminded me of: Natalie Wood trying to satisfy her desire for Warren Beatty by tossing herself onto the bed.
The movie’s third reunion is more tangential than the others and requires another grand coincidence. A flyer the adult Salvador receives for an art gallery includes a painting/sketch of a small boy—him—and he visits and inquires about its author. It came from a Barcelona flea market but it’s anonymous, though there is a message on the back. He buys it and reads it. The message is from Eduardo, to him, thanking him for teaching him to read and write. He sent the sketch when Salvador was in seminary but his mother never passed it along. Because she was busy? Because she feared what it meant? “Every time I write,” Eduardo wrote, “I think about your hand guiding mine.” The adult Salvador reads this and his eyes fill. Then we see him at his computer, writing “El Primer Deseo.” He’s working again.
“Dolor y Gloria” swept the recent Goya Awards. It was nominated for 16 and won seven, including film, director, screenplay, actor, and supporting actress, Julieta Serrano, who plays Salvador’s mother late in life. She tells him how she wants to be buried, admonishes him, hands him the egg with which she uses to darn socks. Their conversations are serious, and humorous, and heartwarming. “Have I failed you just being the way I am?” he asks.
Serrano is apparently a legend in Spain but my immediate thought was dismissive. “That’s supposed to be what Penelope Cruz ages into? I don’t think so.” But it all fits. All those flashbacks to Paterna? They’re not flashbacks. At the very end, after the adult Salvador undergoes surgery, we see, for a second time, young Salvador and his mother forced to sleep in the train station to Paterna. But this time the shot widens, and we see the boom mike operator, and the clapperboard holder, and finally Salvador, still alive and directing “El Primer Deseo.” At first I thought he was finally filming what he’d been remembering. But then I realized, no, he hadn’t been remembering it. All that time, during his inactivity and time of dolor, he’d been filming the movie in his head. “Not a day goes by that I don’t think of it,” he’d told the doctor. Exactly.
I’ve seen this movie twice now and could watch it again. Each time, I leave it with my heart less empty.
Monday March 09, 2020
Quote of the Day
“People aren’t one thing. People are complicated.”
Baseball legend Buck O‘Neill, as quoted in Joe Posnanski’s piece on Tris Speaker, his 18th-greatest player of all time
Saturday March 07, 2020
HUAC and the Battle of 1898
Amid Otto Friedrich's great account of the Hollywood 10—the unfriendly witnesses to appear before HUAC in 1947, and the bluster back and forth—in his great book on Hollywood in the 1940s, “City of Nets,” is this appearance by the 11th member of the Hollywood 10, Bertolt Brecht, who, here, despite Friedrich's description, reminds me of nothing so much as Droopy Dog, disarming his opponents with a kind of lugubrious, disinterested stillness:
Brecht always looked a bit like a raccoon, or a fox, sharp-eyed, wary, quick, but never more so than now. He also smoked one of his cheap cigars. “I was born in Augsburg, Germany, February 10, 1898,” he said. The committee seemed strangely unready for him. “What was that date again?” Thomas* asked, as though he had missed something important. “Would you give that date again?” asked Stripling**. The date was repeated. Representative John McDowell*** echoed it: “1898?” Brecht repeated it: “1898.” The committee then offered Brecht an interpreter, David Baumgardt, a consultant in philosophy at the Library of Congress, and Stripling resumed his interrogation: “You were born in Augsburg, Bavaria, Germany, on February 10, 1888, is that correct?” Brecht docilely agreed to the misstatement. One of the attorneys, Bartley Crum, intervened to say that it was 1898. Brecht agreed again. “Is it ‘88 or ’98?” Stripling asked once more. “Ninety-eight,” Brecht said.
This account gave me great joy this morning.
* J. Parnell Thomas, U.S. representative from New Jersey's 7th district, and chairman of HUAC, who, a year later, would face corruption charges (relatives on the payroll, fraud, kickbacks, tax evasion), to which he would ironically plead the Fifth; he was convicted of fraud and sentenced to 18 months in prison.
** Robert E. Stripling, chief investigator for both HUAC and its forerunner, the Dies Committee. A civil servant, he resigned after Democrats took control of Congress again in January 1949. In a quote in the New York Times, he said he would return to Texas to rest and then “accept a position offered me in the oil industry.”
*** McDowell, a representative from Pennsylvania, wasn't re-elected in 1948 and committed suicide in 1957.
Friday March 06, 2020
Joe's Top 100: 21-30
Hey, not bad! I tweeted this after Joe posted Greg Maddux (#31) as his 31st greatest player of all time:
My guess the next 10 includes these guys, in whatever order:
— Erik Lundegaard (@ErikLundegaard) February 25, 2020
Pujols
Eddie C.
Tris
Trout (#27?)
Rickey (#24?)
Randy
Lefty
Turkey Stearnes
Frank R. (#20?)
Grover Cleveland
Nailed Trout; nailed Rickey; guessed 7 of the 10 correctly. But instead of Tris Speaker, Turkey Stearnes and Frank Robinson, we got Johnny Bench, Pop Lloyd and Joe Morgan.
The Turkey Stearnes sub is interesting. For a few weeks now, I‘ve assumed Eddie Murray would be the highest-ranking player from Joe’s previous list (#64) who wouldn't make this one, but now it seems it's Stearnes (#58). I'm curious what Joe learned in the intervening 7-8 years to make him change his mind that way. You can't go by the stats, obviously, like with bWAR with Eddie Murray, so what was it? And did he plan on having Pop Lloyd in his top 30 last go-round? If so, no wonder he stopped; he was running out of room.
If he's still thinking about including Turkey Stearnes, then he's definitely running out of room. He‘ll either have to give up one of the Big Three of the Negro Leagues (Satchel, Josh, Oscar) or a top 100 bWAR player (Babe, Walter, Ty, Willie, Hank, Barry, Roger, Rogers, Tris, Honus, Stan, Ted, Alex, Lou, Mickey, Frank, Mike). Those are your 20 remaining. I assume. I mean, gotta be, right? I can see leaving off Cap Anson, for fuzzy 19th-century numbers and for doing everything to keep African Americans out of Major League Baseball, but none of the others are like this. The least legendary is probably Tris Speaker, but he was still a 20th-century player (1907-28), and by bWAR he’s the ninth-greatest of all time. You can't leave him off.
Anyway, here's Joe's latest 10:
No. | PLAYER | CHANGE * | bWAR | ALL-TIME | POS |
30 | Johnny Bench | X ** | 75.2 | 77 | C |
29 | Eddie Collins | 11 | 124 | 13 | 2B |
28 | Randy Johnson | X | 101.1 | 29 | P |
27 | Mike Trout | NEW *** | 72.5 | 87 | OF |
26 | Grover Cleveland Alexander | 6 | 118.9 | 15 | P |
25 | Pop Lloyd | NEW/X | n/a | n/a | SS |
24 | Rickey Henderson | X | 111.2 | 19 | OF |
23 | Albert Pujols | 24 | 100.3 | 31 | 1B |
22 | Lefty Grove | X | 107 | 25 | P |
21 | Joe Morgan | X | 100.6 | 30 | 2B |
* I.e. change from the previous list. So Eddie Collins moved up 6 spots, Albert Pujols 24 spots.
** I used the X designation if they weren't on the previous list, which ended at No. 32, but I assumed they would have been if he'd continued.
*** I used the NEW designation for someone who probably wouldn't have been on the previous list. Mike Trout is the highest ranking NEW player. Unless it's Pop Lloyd.
We have two active players in this portion: Trout and Pujols. Both Angels. The previous highest-ranked active player was Justin Verlander at No. 75. Overall, there are only six actives: Scherzer, Kershaw and Miggy are the others.
I was an idiot for guessing Frank Robinson for his #20 since this portion doesn't go to 20. That's tomorrow. I assume him over Schmidt, also #20. One of the two anyway. I also think A-Rod will come in at #13. In the next 10, we‘ll also see Mickey, Rogers, Tris. Maybe Josh Gibson? Not sure where the Negro League legends will fall. Also not sure how much bWAR cred Joe gives to the steroid junkies Barry and Roger. I hope they’re not top 10 but Joe often disappoints on the subject.
Twenty days to Opening Day.
“Who's pitching? Randy? Let's go.” In the mid-90s, Tim, Mike and I regularly got to watch one of the greatest pitchers in baseball history.
Thursday March 05, 2020
Movie Review: Corpus Christi (2019)
WARNING: SPOILERS
Is Bartosz Bielenia a shapeshifter? In Jan Komasa’s “Corpus Christi,” he plays Daniel, a 20-year-old criminal who pretends to be a priest in rural Poland, and throughout the character seems both immoral and holy, male and female, child and man. In the poster, he bears a slight resemblance to Pres. Obama … or Gilbert Godfried. It’s a shame his eyes are closed in the poster because in the movie his eyes are everything. They’re moist and sad; they draw us into this world.
“Corpus Christi” is a great film about a not-good person who becomes one. At least he does good things. He repairs a community. I think he enjoys what he does—he’s good at it—but don’t be fooled into thinking he’s a good kid. He’s not—not really. Maybe that’s why he makes such a good priest.
What we’re good at
We first see him in a juvenile detention facility, where several boys gang up on one. Are they raping him or just beating him? Daniel isn’t the one, nor among the several; he’s the lookout, a nonentity. We also see him helping the priest, Father Tomasz (Lukasz Simlat), but I couldn’t help but wonder if his faith was genuine. As he sings and prays, I flashed on Alex in “A Clockwork Orange,” seeming pious during prison Bible study but happily imagining torture. But Daniel isn't that.
For the longest time, we don’t even know why he’s in there. Turns out he killed a guy, and that guy’s bigger older brother, Bonus (Mateusz Czwartosz), is now in juvey and wants revenge. Is that why Daniel is allowed out on work-placement? Or was it already scheduled? In his farewell, Father Tomasz urges him to follow the right path, but a quick cut shows Daniel doing shots and snorting cocaine in a nightclub, then banging a girl in the bathroom. On the bus to rural Poland, he gives the busdriver grief when asked to put out his cigarette. He’s that guy.
Was the priest ruse a way of getting out of working in the town’s sawmill? Or is he answering back against Eliza (Eliza Rycembel), the pretty girl in the church who assumes, from his manner and tracksuit, that he’s just another laborer? At the same time, he is drawn to the church. He goes on his own. He winds up calling himself Father Tomascz and proves a welcome help to the parish priest (Zdzislaw Wardejn), who seems a bit tired of it all, to be honest. Daniel is asked to do more and more, and when the priest has health issues Daniel is asked to fill in. He needs help with some of it—relying on Google to learn the confessional litany, for example—but overall he proves a natural.
It’s partly his rebelliousness. Prior to the dedication of a new factory, the town’s mayor/business leader (Leszek Lichota) tries to put the young priest in his place. A few minutes later, Daniel asks everyone—everyone—to get down on their knees for the factory’s benediction; then he leads a prayer against the sin of greed.
It’s partly the fact that he, too, is a sinner. He’s committed crimes, and is one the run. His off-the-cuff sermons are marvels:
You know what we’re good at? Giving up on people. Pointing the finger at them. To forgive doesn’t mean to forget. Forgive means love. To love someone despite their guilt. No matter what the guilt is.
He’s drawing this sermond from his own experience but is directing it at the town. Before he arrived, there was a late-night car accident—teens in one car, a middle-aged man in the other, everyone died, and for some reason the town blames the man and shun his widow. They send her hate mail and scrawl nasty graffiti on her house. It’s like Twitter but real life.
Eliza’s brother was one of the teens and she shows Daniel video from the night of the accident; the kids drinking and getting high. So why was the husband to blame again? Daniel gives her a look but she’s not accepting that reality. So with everybody. The townspeople flee the truth even as Daniel’s truth—his past—catches up with him. None of us are very good at this. We’re all sinners here.
The final sermon
What to make of the ending? I do like Daniel’s final wordless sermon before he’s returned to juvey. And just as he was the lookout at that earlier beating, so others look out as Bonus, who has six inches and maybe 75 pounds on him, tries to kill him. He fights back—that European headbutting thing—and is pushed, stunned and bloody, into the glare of the day, where he stumbles down a path even as a fire erupts behind him. That’s the end. It's abrupt and chaotic and maybe that’s the point. I'm still puzzling over it.
“Corpus Christi” is a beautiful film: quick and fascinating, deep and spiritual, violent and sly and sexy. It takes place in rural Poland but everyone can identify. The above sermon will never not have meaning.
Wednesday March 04, 2020
Why the GOP is Awful and Keeps Winning
From “No More Nice Dems” by Joseph O‘Neill at The New York Review of Books:
...by conventional measures, and certainly by comparison with the Clinton and Obama administrations, the national GOP has long been a disaster. Every Republican administration from Reagan onward has crashed the economy and exploded deficits. (Trump has already achieved the latter.) Their track record on health care is one of failure. Their handling of national security has been catastrophic (see the September 11 attacks, the rise of ISIS, Trump-Russia, climate change). Their criminality and corruption is scandalous: fraud, perjury, bribery, Boland Amendment violations during the Iran–contra affair, obstruction of justice, tax evasion, theft, and misuse of public funds are just some of the crimes committed by Republican administration officials and operatives—and that’s without counting those chalked up under Nixon and Trump.
I should recite that every morning until I have it memorized. We all should.
O‘Neill goes on to talk about how, despite all the above, the GOP keeps winning but I can’t access that part of the article since it's under a paywall. I should just pay but I already subscribe to so many. Can you buy an issue? Wouldn't that be nice? Like off a newsstand? I haven't seen it as an option. I hope that's the point of Joseph O‘Neill’s article. I hope we‘re going there.
I have my own answers as to why the GOP keeps winning. Something like: Fox News, Kochs, Mercers, Rush. Mix with ruthlessness. Rich people pay for propaganda, propaganda works, and don’t give a fuck. It's also why the criminality and corruption. They break the rules to win. They break the rules to rule. Power is all. They don't give a fuck.
Not so with Dems. We already know that but do we really know that? Last Friday I was having drinks with friends and got into the world's most boring argument: We rehashed 2016 again. It was the whole “Bernie woulda won” argument when Hillary did win (by 3 million) and would‘ve won the electoral college if not for 1) Comey, 2) Russia, 3) Bernie Bros. I know. I shouldn’t have even gone there—last Friday or here—and that's not the point. It was an annoyance but not the point. The point is that both of my friends planned to vote for Elizabeth Warren in the Washington state primary, and told me that my Joe Biden choice, already made, was “throwing my vote away.” I believed them. Last Friday I believed them. And now look. And no, wait, that's not the point, either, that's just another annoyance. The point, damnit, is that for a time last year one of my friends volunteered for Warren. He thought she was the best, smartest candidate who would make the best, smartest president, but he stopped volunteering for her; and I asked him why he stopped volunteering for her, and why her support suddenly eroded. She seemed to be flying high there for a while, right? What happened? And my friend said in one debate she prevaricated on whether taxes needed to be raised for her programs, and Bernie didn't (he said yes), and that's why he stopped volunteering for her and why he felt her support suddenly eroded.
That one answer in one primary debate.
God, we want perfection. Imagine Trump supporters falling away because he gave one wrong in one primary debate. He gives so many wrong answers he is a wrong answer. He's the wrongest answer this country has ever produced and his support has never fallen away. Because money + propaganda + ruthlessness.
Democrats have money but they don't have the 24/7 propaganda machine. But they can get ruthless. And need to.
Tuesday March 03, 2020
Movie Review: A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019)
WARNING: SPOILERS
You want to like a movie about someone so likeable. You want to like a movie that’s so well-liked: 95% critics rating on Rotten Tomatoes; 92% audience score. That’s almost everyone.
The filmmakers even framed the story right. Writers Michah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster (“Transparent”), and director Marielle Heller (“Can You Ever Forgive Me?”), don’t make the movie about Mr. Rogers; they make it about someone interacting with Mr. Rogers. It’s about someone cynical and lost; someone who needs help.
They did all that right. But they blew it in the execution. Man, did they blow it.
Kitchen talk
Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys) is a cynical magazine writer who has a reputation for taking cheap shots, and who, in 1998, is assigned to write 400 words on Fred Rogers for an Esquire theme issue on heroes. They fly him to Pittsburgh to do the interview.
Me: Wait. They fly him to Pittsburgh? For 400 words? How much money did Esquire have to toss around back then?
But sure, whatever. I’ll give this a pass since it’s my profession and Hollywood always screws up your profession. Lawyer, doctor, cop: They never get it right. But I doubt it was ever 400 words. Watching, I assumed it would be the cover story. Which, yes.
Besides being a cynical journalist, Lloyd is a shitty husband and father. He’s married to the beautiful Andrea (Susan Kelechi Watson, way above his pay grade), and they have a baby, but Lloyd seems disconnected from both. He doesn’t know how many diapers they use; he doesn’t know how to put a baby seat in a cab. She does it all. Because even though she’s an attorney and he’s a freelance writer—which is like the perfect job for a stay-at-home parent—she’s the one who looks after the baby. He’s too distant. He’s closed off emotionally. He’s still full of anger.
And why is he distant, closed off, full of anger? Because when he was young, his father, Jerry (Chris Cooper), left his mother as she lay dying. He left them all. He abandoned them in their time of need.
Actually, that’s pretty shitty. That would be tough to forgive.
And that’s where the movie finds fault in Lloyd: In his inability to forgive his father.
Wait, what?
You see, the man who abandoned them in their time of need, is now, in his time of need, looking to reconnect. He shows up at Lloyd’s sister’s wedding, and not exactly hat-in-hand. He’s got a big personality, and makes a drunken speech, and calls Andrea “doll,” and he and Lloyd get into a fight, a real fist fight, and it becomes a Jersey shore free-for-all kind of thing—the groom gets involved, too—and it’s under these circumstances, with a cut above his nose, and a black eye, that Lloyd flies to Pittsburgh to interview the wonderfully gentle minister and children’s TV host Fred Rogers (Tom Hanks) for a 400-word blurb in Esquire magazine.
Turns out Lloyd is not just a cynical journalist but a bad one. At one point he asks Mr. Rogers if being Mr. Rogers is a burden, and there’s a pause, and rather than let his subject fill the pause—and kids, this is Journalism 101—he does it himself. And in the worst way. He says to Mr. Rogers, “OK, let’s assume it’s a burden.” Wow. I can’t even. Apparently Mr. Rogers was a tough interview because he was curious and empathetic and asked a lot of questions, and here Mr. Rogers keeps asking Lloyd about his father until Lloyd can’t take it anymore and stands up and leaves. He walks out of the interview he’s conducting. Now I know I talked about ignoring the ways Hollywood screws up your profession, but that’s about the dumbest thing I’ve seen even a movie journalist do. You leave your own interview? That’s not how it works.
Fleeing this conversation about his father, he returns home to find his wife sitting at the kitchen table talking and laughing with ... his father, of course. And his father’s new wife. And his father’s new wife is holding the baby. And when he asks them to leave, quietly seething, everyone tries to calm him down; then his dad berates him; then his day says, “My jaw,” and collapses and has to go to the hospital.
Look, sure, Lloyd is a distant father, an uncommunicative husband and a shitty journalist. He needs to fix all these things. The one thing he doesn’t need to fix? His reaction to seeing the father—who abandoned him and his sister and his mother—talking and laughing with his wife at the kitchen table. But the movie sides with the wife.
By this point I think I was angrier than Lloyd was. I thought: If my wife’s mother abandoned her as a child and then tried to reconnect late in life, which my wife didn’t want, vehemently so, even getting into a fight with her at a big shindig; and then the mother and her new husband showed up at our door when my wife is away .... do I invite them in? And if my wife returns and simmers at seeing us all laughing in the kitchen, am I disappointed in her behavior? How about this: If the mother then collapses, saying “My jaw,” and we all have to go to the hospital, but then my wife insists on not staying with her mother—whom she hates—but trying to do something productive, like work, do I say, with stern disappointment, “Everyone who’s important is in this hospital right now.” Because that’s what the movie does with Lloyd.
At this point, with nowhere to go, he has a Daliesque nervous breakdown. Everything gets swirly and he imagines a tiny version of himself on the set of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” with his wife as Lady Aberlin and his dad as the “speedy delivery” guy, and a giant Mr. Rogers there holding his tiger puppet: mew mew mew. It’s bizarre and creepy. Then he dreams of his mom on her deathbed. She’s not in pain; she’s serene. And she says this:
Mom: I know you think you’re doing this for me. Holding onto this anger. [Pause, smiling, triumphant] I don’t need it.
He: [Nods, kisses her hand, understands; finally understands]
By this point I could’ve punched a hole in the wall.
But of course now Lloyd can forgive his dad. And because he forgives his dad, he becomes a better husband and father. Then he becomes a better writer—writing a 10,000 word piece that’s partly about him, and mostly about Mr. Rogers, and his editor is like, “Yep, we’re putting that on the cover.” His dad dies, sure, but the family is whole again, and everything is grand in the Land of Make-Believe.
Can you ever forgive me?
The sad thing is how good this movie could’ve been. Read the 1998 feature it was based on, “Can You Say ... Hero?,” then read the 2019 follow-up piece, “My Friend Mister Rogers,” which is also by Tom Junod, which is the real name of Lloyd Vogel. This is how it begins:
A long time ago, a man of resourceful and relentless kindness saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself. He trusted me when I thought I was untrustworthy, and took an interest in me that went beyond my initial interest in him. He was the first person I ever wrote about who became my friend, and our friendship endured until he died. Now a movie has been made from the story I wrote about him, which is to say “inspired by” the story I wrote about him, which is to say that in the movie my name is Lloyd Vogel and I get into a fistfight with my father at my sister’s wedding. I did not get into a fistfight with my father at my sister’s wedding. My sister didn’t have a wedding.
God, that’s good. That lede is Joseph Mitchell-good: “resourceful and relentless kindness.”
There’s a profundity to Fred Rogers that the movie doesn’t begin to approach. Why did he become a TV host? Because he was appalled by 1950s television. “He considered the space between the television set and the eyes of his audience sacred,” Junod writes, “and from 1966 to 2000 he taped nearly 1,000 episodes of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, trying to make that space less profane.” The movie gives us the “You were once a child, too” story, but it doesn’t nail it the way Junod does. Rogers asked an in-house writer to put together a manual to help doctors talk to children. “She worked hard on it,” Junod writes, “using all her education and experience in the field of child development, but when she handed him her opening, he crossed out what she’d written and replaced it with six words: ‘You were a child once too.’”
This is how much Junod conveys Fred Rogers’ graciousness: I felt bad for hating the movie. I should’ve been a better person about it. I should’ve forgiven its lies. I should’ve said the writers and producers and director were children once, too.
Interesting that many of the movies released in the fall of 2019 touch on the theme of forgiveness. It’s Daniel’s sermon in “Corpus Christi”: “To forgive doesn’t mean to forget. Forgive means love. To love someone despite their guilt. No matter what the guilt is.” It’s a theme in Pedro Almodovar’s “Dolor y Gloria.” Salvador has to forgive Alberto, and Federico, and himself. I wrote that Almodovar's movie forgives everything but bad art, and I guess that’s me, too, and thus this review. I’d like to forgive “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.” But I can’t.
Now get the hell out of my kitchen.
Monday March 02, 2020
Miller Time?
“In the past three and a half years, the Trump Administration has dismantled immigration policies and precedents that took shape in the course of decades, using current laws to intensify enforcement against illegal immigration and pursuing new ones to reduce legal immigration. Trump has slashed the refugee program; virtually ended asylum at the southern border; and written a rule denying green cards to families who might receive public benefits. [Stephen] Miller has choreographed these initiatives, convincing Trump that his political future depends on them—and on going even further.”
Jonathan Blitzer in his New Yorker feature, “Get Out,” about Trump immigration adviser Stephen Miller. The piece makes me think yet again that there's a low threshold for rising in the Republican party. You just need to be an asshole, and vocal about it, and make the right connections. For Miller, it was: contrarian political column at Duke -> press secretary for Rep. Michelle Bachman -> communications job with Sen. Jeff Sessions -> Trump campaign adviser. That's how a 30-something asshole got to run U.S. immigration policy. A good, infuriating piece.
Monday March 02, 2020
Can You Say John 8:7?
What follows are the thoughts of Minister Fred “They Call Me Mister” Rogers during the 1990s Clinton impeachment scandal, as relayed to journalist and friend Tom Junod, on whom the Matthew Rhys character in “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” is based, in Junod's Atlantic piece “My Friend Mister Rogers”:
Last week I woke up thinking how I would like to go on the air and say something like “Whoever is without sin cast the first stone” or “The Lord's property is always to have mercy” or some other outlandish thing, and then ask for a minute of silence to think about forgiveness for those who want it. In fact if our country could dwell on forgiveness for a while I think that would be the one real positive outcome of the pain which must be pervasive in the White House and beyond. I‘ve already written letters to both the Clintons and the Gores saying that often “enormous growth comes out of enormous pain.” I trust that will be so for all of us. The attitude which makes me (sometimes physically) sick is the “holier than thou” one.
The beginning and end of this quote reminds me a bit of Twitter. At the least, Twitter seems full of people without sin who are waiting beside their pile of stones. Is the middle part of the quote sadder? Ideally, yes, “enormous growth comes out of enormous pain,” but I don’t think that translates to the Republican party of Newt Gingrich, George W. Bush, Sarah Palin, Mitch McConnell, Donald Trump, et al. At all.
Anyway, read Junod on Rogers. It's better than the movie.
Sunday March 01, 2020
Box Office: ‘Wendy,’ ‘Burden’ Open
Six movies opened this weekend and these were two of them:
What's the significance? Wendy Burden is my wife's best friend, the maid of honor at our wedding, and the author of a very good, very funny memoir, “Dead End Gene Pool,” which should be the next book for your book group. I‘ve recommended it to a few groups and they always love it. Several years back, Wendy was visiting us in Seattle and we were standing in line at one of the shops down at Pike Place Market when a teenage girl in front of us, who kept looking back, interrupted and asked, “Are you Wendy Burden?” She’d read the book, loved it, etc., and had to tell her so. It was nice. That kind of thing doesn't happen every day, you know.
Anyway, I‘ve never seen two movies—let alone two movies opening on the same day—that spelled out a friend’s name. So I had to mention it. Sadly, neither did gangbuster business: “Wendy” finished 36th ($30k in 4 theaters), “Burden” 40th ($20k in 5 theaters). Neither got a fresh rating from critics, either. So it goes.
The big movie for the weekend was the horror/sci-fi amalgam “The Invisible Man,” starring Elisabeth Moss, which grossed $29 mil. The third weekend of “Sonic the Hedgehog” finished second ($16), the second weekend of “Call of the Wild” finished third ($13).
“1917” is still in the top 10 and pulled in another $2.6 million for $155.8 domestic, $362 worldwide. In terms of true WWI movies (i.e., not “Wonder Woman”), it's now the biggest WWI grosser of them all. Well, unadjusted. Adjust for inflation and it's got competition:
- “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” (1921): $430 million
- “Sergeant York” (1941): $450.9 million
- “Lawrence of Arabia” (1962): $519 million
The other big post-Oscar grosser has been “Parasite,” of course, and this weekend it grossed another $1.5 million for a domestic total of $51.5. That's the fourth-best domestic showing for a foreign-language film ever. “Hero” is third with $53.7; “Life is Beautiful” is second with $57.2, while “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” soars above everyone else (on invisible wires) at $128.
Speaking of: Chinese movie theaters are still closed because of the coronavirus. Since mid-to-late January, its total gross has been around $120k. A year ago, during the same timeframe, the Chinese box office grossed about $900 million.
Don't forget to read “Dead End Gene Pool.”