A Guide to Cinema

A Guide to Cinema: Prologue

This is a book of movie reviews and cinema discussions. My selection of films is weighted by the list’s beginning and evolution. I don’t remember many older movies well enough to review them. In some cases, I have even forgotten their titles. With no tag, they are gone for good.

Elsewhere I wrote: “All movies are brief reincarnations.” You live each fully when you watch it, then forget it in pieces (like a past life if we, in fact, have sequential lives like films). Each falls out of context—lives or films—while some fuse with others in the memory.

When I rewrote my own teenage novel Salty and Sandy into New Moon more than thirty years later, I recovered important childhood events I had completely forgotten. The moment I read them, their entirety came back, even aspects I didn’t write about. Till then they were stored in my “unconscious” mind per Sigmund Freud.

The Netflix list assembled by my wife Lindy Hough and me shows that we rented almost 1600 DVDs, starting with Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound on October 6, 2005. Before that, we watched VHS cassettes and went to movies. That’s far too many “brief reincarnations” to sort. When I view our Netflix rental history and click on titles I don’t recognize—the majority of them—even the descriptions don’t help me remember. Sometimes a preview pulls the movie back from amnesia.

This phenomenon extends to one’s life as a surrogate movie—the converse of reality, as Shakespeare noted in The Tragedy of Macbeth, Act V, Scene 5:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an Idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

Yet each was still worth living (or watching) at the time; else why write Macbeth (or Hamlet and The Tempest)? Why go through the trouble of making a movie at all?

This compilation didn’t start as “Guide to Cinema” in 2009. My original “reviews” were part of my book 2013: Raising the Earth to the Next Dimension, which I was working on untitled. I started by reviewing films beginning with the letter “O.” Whenever the topic of one’s favorite films or “the best films I ever saw” came up, my candidates all seemed to begin with “O”—Outlaw Josey Wales, Ordet, Once Were Warriors, andJean Cocteau’s Orphée—so I was writing about “alphabetic synchronicity.”

I also used a conceit: “Three Memorable Scenes.”

Once I finished my “O” reviews, I began reviewing other films. I soon realized that I distorting my book, so I removed the piece and continued it as a separate work.

I had run into a similar dilemma in 2003 but didn’t catch the problem in time, putting my song-by-song discography of reggae singer John Holt into On the Integration of Nature: 9/11 Biopolitical Notes. This embarrassing quirk got translated into Russian too.

The growth of the internet between 2003 and 2009 made the right venue obvious. Personal websites and blogs were a robust new medium (much as substack is now). I posted my reviews, then added to them through the years. Once I established the genre, I put more thought and time each one, so they grew from squibs and “memorable scenes” into short essays.

I have arranged films by their own chronology rather than my chronology of seeing and writing about them. A film from the 1990s viewed in the 2020s is catalogued in the 1990s but described in a 2020s’ perspective.

Instead of giving up entirely on lost films, I have prepared a prologue made up mostly of excerpts—not reviews—from older pieces of writing. With these archival writing, my “tastes” are those of the eras and ages at which I saw particular films, which is how I have queued them. The emphasis is on the writing rather than the films. If I don’t have text or some memory, the film does not appear.

Among meaningful movies that I saw but don’t have old writing about or remember well enough to include are It’s a Wonderful Life, directed by Frank Capra (1946); The Four Hundred Blows, directed by Francoise Truffaut (1959); Jules and Jim, directed by Francoise Truffaut (1962); Breathless, directed by Jean-Luc Godard (1960); The Seventh Seal, directed by Ingmar Bergman (1957); Il Sorpasso, directed by Dino Risi (1962); 8 ½, directed by Federico Fellini (1963); My Life as a Dog, directed by Lasse Hölstrom (1965), and Sherlock Holmes, 14 films, multiple directors (1939-1946), including The Hound of the Baskerville, The Scarlet Claw, and Terror by Night.

After the “recovered” items, my list begins by chronology of release date.

Pre-List (from memory and other writings)

Early Childhood

The African Queen, directed by John Huston, starring Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn (1951). This was the first adult movie to which I was taken.

I remember the steamy tropics, the leaches, and the chance mine that blew up the German ship and freed Bogart and Hepburn without killing them, opening a halcyon era. I named my favorite toy boat The African Queen.

•From New Moon: The original sadness was an ocean. It wasn’t only sad; it was sensual and rich, and I swam in its eternity—a planet of waters as large, in scale, as the lake into which The African Queen plunged in the movie. It too had lightning and demon cruisers. There was no opposite shore to that lake, but childhood was the process of sailing there anyway. Fear was my guardian, but fear was the same as timelessness—unrelinquishable, impenetrable.

Games kept me busy—toys, comic books, movies, water guns—so that a yellow plastic Sorry! token or a green Pennsylvania Avenue card brings back the whole enchantment.

It Came From Outer Space, directed by Jack Arnold (1953).

•From The Night Sky: Soul and Cosmos: When “they” looked at the sun without blinking (Richard Carlson, Barbara Rush, and Charles Drake in Ray Bradbury’s popular 1953 movie It Came From Outer Space), we were primed for full disclosure, ready for the charade to be dropped. That was them! They behaved like ordinary Joes, but they weren’t. The cinematic moment transcended its own cheap staging to tell us something mysterious and true about ourselves and the universe, like the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho or the mysterious desert opening to Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Forbidden Planet, directed by Fred M. Wilcox (1956).

•From Dreamtimes and Thoughtforms: The missing continent stands for an earlier conflation of technology and magic whereby a whole civilization was possessed and destroyed by its ’bots, potions, interfaces, and wraiths. Forbidden Planet indeed. I am referencing a 1956 movie about a twenty-third-century starship, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Tempest.

On the Waterfront, directed by Elia Kazan and written by Budd Schulberg (1954). •From Out of Babylon, my half-brother Jon speaking: “It was On the Waterfront. That’s why that movie meant so much to me. You had it wrong. You thought I wanted to boast like Marlon Brando. But I wanted to defeat the corrupt elders—Johnny Friendly, remember? Brando told his brother he shoulda protected him. ‘You was my brother, Charlie. You shoulda looked out for me a little bit. You shoulda taken care of me so I woulden aha’ to take them dives for the short-end money.’” His facsimile was spot-on.

“I’m sorry.”

“Richard, you were in it for the short-term money; you were corrupted by the Grossingers. I didn’t have that choice. ‘I coulda been a lot better. I could have had class. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum.’”

He knew the scene by heart. I smiled and clapped, “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s all right. That’s the joke. I’m somebody, after all.” He burst out laughing. “I’m the heavyweight champ of Mordor. I fought Harry Pin and won.”

The Amos ’n Andy Show 78 episodes, created by Charles J. Correll and Freeman F. Gosden, directed by Charles Barton (1951- 1953). It’s been “cancelled” as a caricature of black culture, but it’s brilliant comedy by black actors and black directors.

•From The Bardo of Waking Life: Of all the episodes of the 1950s TV show Amos ’n Andy, the one that comes to my mind most often involves the sale of a bogus house by the Kingfish to Andy.  As was often the case, Andy unexpectedly came into some scratch, so Kingfish busied himself scheming how to relieve him of it.  In this episode he decided to sell Andy a property, and the particular real estate he hoisted on his unsuspecting friend was actually a piece of cardboard deployed on an empty lot, a photograph of a house with a cutout door on it. 

I don’t remember what gullibility led Andy to fall for such a flagrant deception, but he made the purchase.  He then brought dim-witted Lightning to view his new domicile.  The trouble was, whenever they tried the front door, they stepped into the back yard.  After a number of such forays, Lightning finally was inspired to investigate further. Circumambulating the structure, he declared, “That’s one mighty thin house there, Andy.”

I may not recall the details exactly, but you have the basic plot.  It stays in my mind because it was hilarious then and remains hilarious: Br’er Rabbit tomfoolery at its most artful. 

It also stays in my mind because it holds a figure of speech for vital energy.  When I am sensing the interior of a body by osteopathic palpation, these words occasionally come to mind: “That’s a mighty thin sheet of tissue.” Likewise, when rotating and distributing the chi gung energy ball during Dragon and Tiger, I draw it long and thin so that it is hardly a spheroid anymore.  “That’s a mighty thin ball you got there, Andy!”

Later childhood

On the Beach, directed by Stanley Kramer (1959). Since seeing it, I hear the song “Waltzing Matilda” in the context of life on Earth and the danger of apocalypse. Eric Bogle gave it additional resonance with his anti-war ballad, ‘And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda’”:

“Then a big Turkish shell knocked me arse over head, and when I woke up in my hospital bed / And saw what it had done, well I wished I was dead: never knew there was worse things than dyin’. / For I’ll go no more waltzing Matilda, all around the green bush far and free. / To hang tent and pegs, a man needs both legs-no more waltzing Matilda for me

“So they gathered the crippled, the wounded, the maimed, and they shipped us back home to Australia / The legless, the armless, the blind, the insane, those proud wounded heroes of Suvla / And as our ship pulled into Circular Quay, I looked at the place where me legs used to be / And thanked Christ there was nobody waiting for me, to grieve, to mourn, and to pity.”

•From New Moon: Afterwards the three adults took me downtown for a preview of the movie On the Beach. We were among a small number of people in an office in a skyscraper, my mother having scored comp tickets through [her job as New York reservations clerk for] the  Fontainebleau.

After human life on Earth was annihilated by bombs and ensuing radiation, the lights in the room went on, startling us back to reality. I blinked and stretched. I had just seen the end of time. Now we had a deferment, but for how long?

The elevator got stuck on the twenty-seventh floor, and my mother became hysterical. She was always emotionally right if off-target in just about every other way. Two of the men in our group pried open the door and gate and gave us each a hoist. After we climbed out, we took an adjacent elevator down, Martha giddy and trembling.

In my review for the Horace Mann Record I proposed that the chance event of a Coke bottle dangling in a window shade (sending out a signal drawing the post-holocaust submarine crew to Australia) replicated the “accident” that might have set off the war in the first place—and might still.

The Night of the Auk by Arch Oboler, directed by Nikos Psacharopoulos (1960). This t.v. play co-starred William Shatner in his first “journey” to outer space.

•From New Moon: When I argued against the bomb, my parents defended it vociferously, claiming that the attack on Hiroshima ended a horrific war and saved lives. “You didn’t have brothers in the Pacific!” my mother snapped. “You don’t know what war is.”

So I quoted her lines from Night of the Auk, a blank-verse play that I had watched on TV (I had just gotten the script at Womrath’s): “We broke their back with one quick crunch / And cheered a reddened flag of sudden victory. / But on their streets, and in their houses, / In the churches, schools, and hospitals, / In the dentist office, in the playground, / The flame of our treachery to humanity / Seared the flesh, the blood, the very genes / Of four ferocious students armed with all the terrible retribution / Of their abacus, textbooks, and lead pencils. / … What have we done in all the intervening years, / We, high moralists, hope of Earth, / With that great treachery crouched upon our conscience? / What mass confessional has absolved us?”

As I concluded my oratory, [my stepfather] Bob applauded, calling out, “Bravo, bravo.” Yep, Arch Oboler was on a Faulkner-like roll when he pulled those stanzas out of his measured rage. His metrical beats of remorse never failed to send tingles down my spine.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s, directed by Blake Edwards, starring Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard in an adaptation of a Truman Capote novel (1961).

•From New Moon: The early darkness of the Solstice approached from a direction I had never known. City lights danced, and I was nearly happy. The song from the movie carried the ambiance of my life: “Moon river, wider than a mile, / I’m crossing you in style, someday …”

Yes, she had been a “moon” figure from the first day I saw her with Asher. Even our initial point of contact was an outfielder named Moon.

In the shower I sang at the top of my lungs, trying to capture the precise resonance. Occasionally [my sister’s nurse] Bridey joined in from the hallway, trying to steer me back into tune: “ … my huckleberry friend.… ”

I remember Jill as Audrey Hepburn in the movie, curled on the living room sofa, blowing smoke in the air, conscious of each self-conscious motion she made. Part of me would be talking to her, and part of me would be looking at the remarkable girl: her face, her eyes, the curve of her breasts, her lips, her clothes, her pocketbook, her smooth legs, her fancy gestures, her womanly movements.

College and Graduate School Years

2001: A Space Odyssey, directed by Stanley Kubrick (1968).

•From The Night Sky: Soul and Cosmos: 

In his 1948 story “Sentinel of Eternity,” Arthur Clarke used the lining up of Galilean satellites to mark a critical juncture in synchronized Earth-Jovian time. Made into a movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey, twenty years later by director Stanley Kubrick (on the heels of his career breakthrough with Lolita and Dr. Strangelove), the tale begins with a band of Stone Age hominids struggling for survival in a hostile environment. One day they happen upon and surround a mysterious obelisk-like black monolith and, soon thereafter, discover the use of tools (the implication being that the object conferred an intelligence boost). A bone weaponized for battle against a rival group at a waterhole is cast in the air by one of the hominids and segues cinematically into a spaceship in orbit, at which point the film’s chronology switches to a future lunar base.

An identical black monolith has been found buried fifteen meters below the surface of the crater Tycho, a strong magnetic anomaly having disclosed its position to an orbiting satellite. Excavated at night, on exposure to the first rays of sun the object shoots a burst of radio waves at Jupiter (at the Saturnian moon Iapetus in the novel). Except for that single discharge, the four-million-year-old parallelepiped remains inert.

Near the end of the film, a doppelgänger obelisk in orbit around Jupiter is encountered by the last survivor of a computerized spaceship dispatched on a secret mission eighteen months after the excavation on the Moon. As the fictional astronaut examines the object, Io, Europa, and Ganymede line up and he is sucked into a tunnel of colored lights—perhaps Jupiter’s gravitational field, perhaps a transdimensional Einstein-Rosen bridge, more likely a star-gate formed by alignment of the moons.

Even though millions of years lie between the initial message to mankind and the arrival of the craft, it is a mere second in the meta-chronology of planets. The astronaut is buffeted through a vortex of storms and colors, flung like a feather in a hurricane until he is crushed and the fragments of his ship and body enter (on the level of a bug) the Jovian vastness.

Space and time interchange. He sees progressively aging versions of himself dressed formally and eating meals until he enters an eighteenth-century room and encounters himself again, this time as an old man lying in bed. He becomes the man. The monolith now sits at the foot of the bed. As he reaches for it, he is transformed into a foetus-like creature enclosed in a diaphanous orb. Instantaneously he is returned to Earth orbit: the child of Gaia and the Jovian system floats in a bubble above the blue planet, gazing down at it. Earth and Jupiter have bred.

Extinguished at one level, the astronaut is resurrected at another, for he lives his whole life backward and forward in the density of Jovian seconds. The meaning of his identity and our species is wrung out of his cells and psyche and fused with the archetypal wisdom of Jupiter. A new being with fused Jovian and terrestrial intelligence is hatched from his former hologram. This is Jupiter not only as guardian of the Solar System but willing magus to Earth.

I consider the black parallelepipeds—each formed by six parallelograms of a multidimensional rhomboid that manifest as a solid monolith in 3D space—to be hyperspatial objects generated at a higher frequency than our System; they materialize in common geography as an esoteric consciousness wave from outside space-time intersects local tipping points.

At least that’s my take on an icon of late-twentieth-century cinema whose interpretation has always been pretty much up for grabs. Clarke certainly “got” orbital resonance: he turned the Galilean moons into a gateway. Then Kubrick positioned it between Dr. Strangelove and A Clockwork Orange, the entire history of our species and Solar System in between.

                                                            *

If we could descend onto the gas giant (and survive), Arthur Clarke might have been saying at the end of his Space Odyssey, we would pass through a continuous undulant rainbow in which turbulent zones would come into view, surfaces shimmer, each to be swept away into deeper and deeper eddies until time and space were turned into something else entirely: a room, a memory, a chrysalis. . . .

Night of the Iguana by Tennessee Williams, starring Richard Burton, Ava Gardner, Deborah Kerr, and Sue Lyon, directed by John Huston (1964). Each character is dealing with panic and the baseline terror of existence in his or her own way. Nonno, played by Cyril Delevanti, the father of Hannah (Deborah Kerr), is writing his last poem: “Oh courage! Could you not as well / Select a second place to dwell / Not only in that golden tree / But in the frightened heart of me.”

•From Out of Babylon: [My stepmother, Aunt Bunny] and I went to the town theater one night to see Richard Burton and Ava Gardner in Night of the Iguana, a movie about what the story’s playwright, Tennessee Williams, called the “blue devil.” He meant panic, which was her and my primordial bond. We were initiates in the same religion, practitioners of the same existential creed.

David and Lisa from the book by Theodore Isaac Rubin, screenplay by Eleanor Perry, directed by Frank Perry, starring Keir Dullea and Janet Margolin in their first roles (1962). After seeing it, I composed imaginary letters to Janet Margolin, but I was really writing the fictional Lisa.

•From New Moon: Later that week she and Schuy joined my Abnormal Psych class at the movie David and Lisa. Lisa was a mute, schizophrenic girl-child, darkly beautiful; David was an uptight compulsive teenager, obsessed with clocks and death, phobic about being touched. They were residents of the same mental hospital and, gradually through the story, drew each other out. At first, she talked only in rhyme, saying things like, “Hello, kiddo” and “Today I’m low, low; so, David, go, go, go.” In the culminative scene, as she unexpectedly breaks her rhymes, he approaches her, hand extended, desperate for connection, asking her to take it … and she lays her fingers gently across his and clasps them.

Schuy was enraged at this outcome. “What’s wrong with alienation?” he demanded. “He didn’t want to be touched. He understood clocks were the enemy. Why couldn’t they leave him alone? Why did some pretty girl come along and invade him?”

But I was all for David’s submission to Lisa, letting her touch melt his heart. Soon after the showing, a classmate who liked to play literary critic, a guy who later wrote for Esquire and Playboy, ridiculed the movie at dinner by reciting Lisa’s rhymes in a dopey voice. My words had never impeded his ego trips, so this time I picked up my plate of spaghetti and sauce and dumped it on his head.

Citizen Kane, directed by Orson Welles (1941).

•From Out of Babylon: A clue lay Dr. Kubie’s words. They bore the gravitas of Orson Welles’ prologue to Citizen Kane:  No life has begun. We cannot treat mere symptoms. We must find the beginning, where the beginning was lost.

                                                            •

Though people’s fates are being changed by the oracle’s taps [market thresholds on his computer screen], I don’t find the distractions annoying. I am here to be with Jay Z [my cousin Jay Zises] in his prime. Chipinaw lies near our origin. There in Xanadu, the crux between us is lustrous and elusive as a sled named Rosebud.

I praised Citizen Zises for his mythic fistfight, age twelve, with martinet counselor Bernstein—Jay wrestled the sadistic jerk to the ground in reprisal for Queeg-like crimes against us.

The Graduate, directed by Mike Nichols (1967)

•From Episodes in Disguise of a Marriage:

Not long after I read the novel (The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin), Lindy and I went to see a new movie, The Graduate. It starred a Perry-Mansfield campmate of hers, Dustin Hoffman.

For most of its viewers, The Graduate was a slapstick romance; for me, it was a corollary of the Ouspensky tale. The next morning, I hauled my typewriter and an extension cord to the carport roof and sat on the hot asphalt against the house rapping away through lunch, fusing the two plots. In my version, Mrs. Robinson, Benjamin Braddock’s seductress, became a lackey of the Devil, luring him to trade his soul—and soul-mate—for an affair with her.

In the course of my re-telling, I brought in Miss Havisham from Great Expectations, Lord Byron and the neo-Platonists, syntagmatic language chains, the anti-heroes of Bonnie and Clyde, and the miracle of Carl Dreyer’s 1955 film Ordet. I linked Benjamin’s “astrological binge” to the sprees of motorcyclists in Kenneth Anger’s 1963 Scorpio Rising and the armies of Christopher Marlowe’s 1587 Tamburlaine the Great. (For the full review, see Book of the Earth and Sky).

La Strada, directed by Federico Fellini (1954)

•From Episodes in Disguise of a Marriage:

She was walking backwards to face me, then pirouetted past a flower shop, its canopy casting a long shadow over iris and daffodil scents. As she captivated clerks and bored cabbies, she reminded me of Giulietta Masina spinning across Fellini’s La Strada.

From the Seventies on

High Plains Drifter (1973), Bronco Billy (1980), Pale Rider (1985), directed by Clint Eastwood. Eastwood doesn’t make a bad movie. These three post-spaghetti Westerns feature borderline heroes played by Eastwood himself in a favorite anti-hero context. They are part-ghost, part-fool, part-vigilante, part-collective-hallucination like a UFO or shapeshifter from the tales of Carlos Castaneda.

Dreamchild, directed by Gavin Millar (1985).

•From Episodes in Disguise of a Marriage: When Deacon Charles Dodgson invented Lewis Carroll to get himself out of imminent pedophilia, Alice ended up in Wonderland.

The Last Temptation of Christ, directed by Martin Scorsese (1988).

•From Dreamtimes and Thoughtforms: In Martin Scorsese’s 1988 adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis’ novel The Last Temptation of Christ, Willem Dafoe as Jesus asks to be taken to the place where deceased Lazarus is entombed. A giant stone must be removed from a cave’s opening, pried loose and rolled away by extras, men and women with wooden poles. They hold their noses from the stench, Jesus too.

He stands at the opening and circulates his arms like a magician or chi gung master. On the soundtrack, voices warble and combine in many languages as if the portal to the afterlife were opening and all the souls and creatures who lived on earth were gathering and celebrating their current existences and existence itself in operatic mode. Consensus reality has dissolved into radical hermeneutics—what visitors heard and saw at the World Trade Center, an overlap of worlds and activated poltergeist energy.

In Scorsese’s version of John 11, Christ summons Lazarus, “In the name of most Holy God, I call you here, Lazarus.” Voice is used as mantra, voodoo, telepathic control. In Peter Weir’s Last Wave, Australian Aborigine actor Nadjiwarra Amagula pulls off this feat more convincingly than Dafoe. When as a “shaman” he repeats a word and tone, it sounds like a buzzing bee. It hypnotizes, binds, and opens the Dreaming to the lawyer played by Richard Chamberlain. Suddenly even the room doesn’t look like a Hollywood set.

In the cave, Dafoe’s Jesus reaches for Lazarus’s dusty hand, strips of rotting flesh hanging off, pulls him up, and leads him out to the throng. The otherworldly chorus surges.

Lazarus reaches, slowly removes the death shroud from his face, and embraces Jesus. Jesus whispers, “God help me.” For the miracle astonishes and scares him that the power that holds worlds intact answers to a son’s beck. No one who is given such power ever wants to use it, except Jesus, and that is what made him the Christ.

In the testimony of John, Jesus’ biblical persona says to Martha, “I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.”

A mere miracle becomes a sacrament.

In Kazantzakis’ version, Lazarus confides to Saul, “I like the light.”

Saul asks him, “What was it like? Which is better, life or death?”

Lazarus replies, “Well, I was a little surprised. There wasn’t that much difference.”

That absence of difference is how Jesus kept his promise; it is also why death does not stay the dead from continuing their worldly projections. 

The March of the Penguins, directed by Luc Jacquet (2005).

•From On the Integration of Nature: Post-9/11 Biopolitical Notes)

The best indication of what is expected of us, of what life is, is that we come into this body and awareness unbidden and uninstructed. We have no choice in the matter, no conscious choice anyway. We matriculate in darkness and wake up here, blind man’s bluff. And we must make the best of it, whatever we are and in whatever condition and status we find ourselves. We must do the stuff of our delegated planet, species, time in history, family, inheritance. We must live our characteristics at whatever degree of sentience and libido we have. That is the cosmic subtext of the present vernacular “whatever”—a slightly dismissive, indifferently defiant epistemology for our place in the universe, offered in relation to some inflated thing that inconveniently intrudes its own self-importance or duty. Nothing, under these absurd circumstances, could be that pressing really: “Whatever. . . .”

            If we are a fly, we must behave as a fly. If we are a blue jay, we must race around doing “blue jay” things. If we are a sleepy marsupial or engorged flatworm, then we must enact those sluggish regimes. If crippled or deaf, we must bumble along happily because the alternative is being someone else or something else, or nothing at all. If a dwarf or an AIDS baby, we must chivalrously accept our lot. As the saying goes, a pauper or a king. . . . Which also means a citizen of Somalia or of some tribe on a planet in Andromeda. Either way, ready or not. . . .

And creatures respond very well. They don’t immediately complain, ask for a better deal or go on strike. Of course, there is no one to complain to and nothing to strike against except one’s self and destiny.

This is our main hope: we got here once upon a time; we made sense of it. Whatever hand we are dealt next, even no hand, we will make the best of, because the only promise is that we will continue to be what we are.

This is the main thing I would tell that sweet little hovering moth, so inconsequential and anonymous, if I could get on its tight frequency and transmit through its simple nervous system to its consciousness. I would also tell that spider who stopped briefly on my leg before continuing its path up and down fabric. I would like us to celebrate this condition together and be friends.

But they will have nothing of such sentimentality. They already know it, better than I do, because they don’t have to know it. They are too busy carrying out its edict to be both- ered by what I am or what plan I have. “Just don’t kill me,” they think in crude non-thought. “Big shadow, let me pass.”

The nature of consciousness is that it springs up like a fire and ignites its own mindedness, everywhere and anywhere. In that sense, all creatures are partners in one Great Dance.

We get in most trouble when we think that we are supposed to have an explicit mission and know what it is. We struggle to stay on course. We put ourselves on timetables. We seek solace against our mortality and seeming plight.

The sole clue of creation is that it exists and we do too. There is nothing more central and hopeful than that. Be what you are with integrity and grace. Accept that you are as tiny and insignificant as a moth. It may seem a curse and a burden at times, but it is also a gift, to get to view and experience all this in some manner. You could never explain it otherwise. It is just too weird and complicated. In fact, you could never, and that would be the real tragedy.

There is no line-up or drill. You get cocooned into some shape or other according to local biological custom and then, here you are, pushed into the day’s business, peckish enough to have to get something into your guts, thirsty enough that that rain feels awfully good on your carapace, afraid that what was just given to you, though you hardly requested it or know what it is, will be taken away from you just as peremptorily and unexplained.

In the autumn of their fifth year and for many thereafter, male and female emperor penguins of Antarctica depart the food-teeming waters beneath the ice, plop onto the indelible snow- bank, rise on their saurian hinds, and then shuffle in a column seventy miles to their inland breeding grounds. Clambering up and down hills of snow, sometimes tobogganing along the hardpack, they trek unflaggingly toward the tribal ceremony. When the survivors reach the ancestral site, their reunion looks like a Woodstock Festival on a glacier. Bumping and screeching, the birds greet raucously and search and compete for mates. When two of them are satisfied with each other, they stand in place, nuzzling and fondling, using their bellies, beaks, and vestigial wings to court. Then they breed monogamously. But they do not immediately return to the ocean after the romancing, for this is where the next generation will be born.

Through two months or so of increasingly frigid, sunless winter, under the waxing and waning Moon and dizzily flashing aurora, the flock closes its circle, huddling in a dense macro- organism, pushing closer and closer together against hundred-mile-per-hour winds and temperatures approaching ninety degrees below zero, providing collective body heat and giving off a community sound something like a Tibetan Buddhist chant and something like the hum of converging electrical wires. As eggs gastrulate in the females’ bodies and bird homunculi matriculate, this mantra of incipient penguin language rises and falls atonally, sweeping through vast interludes and exotic sub-themes and fugues in unending segues of semi-harmony, accompanied by the great wind chime and blinding snow. This is the original, floating-continent, pre-Aboriginal, pre-human Dreamtime, as panpipes and didjeridoos play through animal bones and lungs and the planet itself.

When a single egg drops from a female, she grasps and balances its ball of energy between her tan-t’ien and reptilian claws and keeps it warm there in a standing yoga posture. Having consumed most of her own yolk in the ovum’s manufacture, she must soon transfer its responsibility, delicately and quickly rolling it to her mate who will hold it between his own belly and feet for another two months until it hatches. Famished, she marches seventy miles back to the ice break and plunges into the subglacial sea. As she jets through the ecstatic waters, feeding on the bounty there, the males press even closer together in a circle of feathered, resonating biomass, sounding a lonely dirge of creation, an elegy of life on the planet, as the blizzards intensify and predators circle.

After the chick is born, the male penguin will embrace its fuzzy bundle in his coat against a climate that could freeze a whelp solid in minutes. Maintaining his posture with a birdling in the place of the former egg, though excruciatingly hungry and apparently very cold, vibrating and voicing the great riddle and grief of existence, he will protect the baby until his mate returns, much like those Kiowa warriors whose single role on the battlefield was to pick a position and hold it, weaponless (or with a bow and single un-aimed arrow), against all assaults and intrusions, to cast an aura of ferocity that might render them immune from injury or kill, thereby changing the nature and meaning of the battle, striking if not fear, then recognition, into the hearts of the opponents.

The males do not have to support their asanas forever, for the females, with a banquet of semi-digested fish and krill and jellyfish in their maws, will faithfully honor the species pact and, at great danger and travail to themselves, make the long journey back to nourish the near-starving flock. Only then are the males free to reenter the sea and eat.

These are birds, but they cannot fly. Their lovely black, white, and yellow coloring, upright postures, and proximate scale give them the appearance of chubby uniformed humanoids, primates like us. But they are not even close to human. Their calm black slits of eyes show no humanity or mammalian empathy but do suggest some version of love, some cosmic variant of philanthropy and wisdom and benevolence, regalia of a proud but unfamiliar race that seems to belong on another world entirely. They are more closely related to snakes and hawks than to us, but they execute the full semblance of a primitive human village there on the glacier, stand as a lost tribe of shaman bodhisattvas, transformed by bird costumes into flightless apostles who hunt in the coldest waters of this world.

What drives them? What motivates them to leave paradise so bravely and stalwartly? Why do they undertake such a selfless cycle of journeys on which so many must perish?

Just for the preservation of the species? What kind of a reason is that? So much painful labor for such a high risk to reward ratio? After all, despite their rigorous toil, a fair percentage of eggs will roll helplessly from their grasp and freeze to stone. The same fate will befall many of the chicks, while others will be caught and chomped by birds of prey and seals. Serious and on task, the birds don’t gripe, puzzle, or dispute. They are in the moment. A penguin may waddle briefly after its mummified egg but then summarily accepts its state.

Is it instinct? Are homing maps built into the penguins’ gene mix? If so, how are they constructed enzymatically, where on the helices are they stored, and in what manner are they triggered and projected into sensate activity?

Is it desire? Is it love, or even libido? Or is it something we know nothing about and cannot bind in our philosophy? Is it the irrevocable character of life itself—a signature through which each new creature is incarnated, which each alive thing honors, not objectively from chromosome directive but as the existential, metaphysical fact of being what it is? Is the devoted service of these birds rendered so amiably because they have no other reasonable choice?

Here is how fundamental and deep-seated are the emperor penguins’ courtship rituals and altruistic deeds of parenthood: we officially civilized simians cannot advance one iota of humanity beyond them in our courtships, romancing, childbirth, acts of philanthropy, and nurturing of our young. We transform love and kindness and service into self-conscious modalities and render symbols and elaborate dramas out of them; we create whole civilizations based on our vaunted lip service to kinship, morality, charity, and other ideals—things animals know nothing about. We signify and explicate the primordial gift.

Yet we must always return to those same prehuman roots to express love and empathy. We must draw on the same ferocity as Antarctic penguins to survive in nature, achieve our personal identities, and fight our battles and wars. We must stand as courageously and resolutely in place in our own night of mind-created anxieties as emperor penguins do with their eggs in the sheer physical winds without symbols or concepts, and hold our ground in voodoo-ridden crises we have fomented. We and our fellow creatures—all indigenous animals—must change the nature and meaning of the battle. That is the single motive, the one hope, not to think and cobble ourselves into vaunted beings but to act from a reservoir of empathy, selflessness, and mercy that is actually beyond our knowledge and beyond explanation. Only then can we safeguard ourselves, the penguins, and in fact all life on the planet from this second-wave, late Ice Age onslaught of name and commodity. Otherwise, the Poles will melt, and the penguins’ habitat and totems will vanish from this clime.

We kid ourselves both that the birds are mindless automatons and we are educated seers, zookeepers, and biologists. Instinct is greater than all of our tribal wisdom and education because it is not instinct at all. We see a perfect reflection of selfless, unconditional love in these walking birds because the thing they are teaching is not a sentiment or metaphor or any- thing we think of these days as love or quarter. They are teaching fact, and if we forfeit them as teachers, we will lose fact itself and, shortly thereafter, the thread of love.

The Future of Food, directed by Deborah Koons Garcia (2005)

•From On the Integration of Nature: Post-9/11 Biopolitical Notes

It is now the case that four transnational seed companies control the patents for most of the major grains, fruits, and vegetables of Earth. This is not even the worst of it. Those four corporations are also collecting and privatizing DNA from the ancient indigenous breeds that make up the Earth’s biodiversity and food supply; they are stealing the legacy of thousands of generations of free farmers on every continent, going back to the Neolithic. These biotech opportunists are grabbing genomes from seed banks like hundred-dollar bills blowing out of an overturned Brinks wagon and registering their own patents for them as if they invented or otherwise earned them. Guess what? We invent nothing. At best we are humble servants.

            Some of these species they suppress in thinly disguised genocides. Many they alter in vulgar ways that make the plants less nutritious and ecologically vital but more commercially exploitable. Though claiming via public relations to enhance the agricultural potential of the Earth and feed the masses, they are actually salesmen and racketeers, infiltrating the infra- structure of organisms with bacterial and other foreign agents, switching the chromosomes of plants with not only other plants but animals, solely to make glitzy products and fool the public. Yes, a lawyer with a briefcase can steal more money than a hundred men with guns. Ally that lawyer with self-enamored, contemptuous scientists, and you have the perfect formula for a multitrillion-dollar hoax.

            Monsanto Company, which manufactures a pesticide called Roundup, also clones Roundup-ready rapeseed (canola) which can be sprayed with virtually unlimited Roundup and survive the attack. That is, insects can be nuked without killing the plants, and who cares about the health of the land or the consumer? The company first makes big money on the pesticide and then even more money from the seed that has to be bought to make use of the pesticide.

            But the con is far more insidious than that. As these biotech mongrels escape into the natural world, they hybridize with crops in random farmers’ fields as well as with wild varieties of their progenitors. They infest the planetary genome.

            And then the caper gets worse. Representatives of these multinational corporations send spies out to check farmers’ fields and, when they find their own biotech versions growing in one of them, sue the owners of those fields for violation of their patent. The fact that the farmers have no control over the invasion of their land by these mutants is considered irrelevant to the violation of the law of property. The additional fact that the defendants don’t even want the interlopers gives them no exemption, doesn’t even accord them the right to countersue.

            Courts have repeatedly found in favor of the corporations, handing down decisions explicitly stating that it doesn’t matter if GMOs found on private farmland got there by wind, water, or accident; the property owners are responsible for paying the seed companies for their “use.” It wouldn’t even matter if brigands in the employ of the corporations spread the mutants on purpose. The responsibility for protecting these bogus patents rests with the farmers. Common law and common sense have been turned upside-down in this epidemic of biotech manipulation and cynical abuse.

            In addition, crazed engineers at these companies are now working on terminator genes, sequences that will make targeted plants incapable of producing offspring, hence forcing poor farmers throughout the world, who have traditionally saved their seeds for next year, suddenly to have to purchase them anew each season—planned obsolescence transferred from washing machines to organisms. If these terminators get loose, they may hybridize with all manner of domesticated and wild plants, terminating future generations and bringing a silence and famine over the planet.

What idiot bureaucrat would allow the patenting of life in the first place? What perverse twisting of the meaning of democracy and property rights would lead executives and judiciaries to place the value of short-term personal profit over the long-term value of food and life itself? What fools in robes would rule in favor of corporations over farmers in cases of GMO invasion?

            Many disputes in our embattled era have two sides to them, and some things may be mysteries, their verdicts hanging in the balance. But the application of biotech to agriculture and animal husbandry, the invention of botanical and zoological patents and genomic hoarding, the attempt to build new costs and windfall profits into the ancient ceremony of farming, and the defense of this boondoggle by corporations and law firms on retainer are pathology, pure and simple. Not law, not cleverness, not good science, not a misunderstood attempt to end hunger on Earth, not even real business, but stupidity, then greed, then madness and malignancy.

            [I wrote this review in 2005. Since then, things have gotten mostly worse, though there has been some pushback: a food- and health-freedom movement and a follow-up 2009 film called Percy Vs. Goliath, a fictionalized biopic about a Saskatchewan farmer who fought Monsanto in court and didn’t win but also didn’t completely lose. Christopher Walken plays Percy Schmeiser, Christina Ricci his attorney. You have to love the goofy vaudeville-like “Paul Bunyan and the Blue Ox”-like song playing over the credits, Old Man Luedecke’s “Monsanto Jones:” “Monsanto Jones, Monsanto Jones / All the blame lies in your name, Monsanto Jones. . . .”]

Grizzly Man, directed by Werner Herzog (2005).

•From The Bardo of Waking Life

 “Now the longhorns are gone /and the drovers are gone, / the Comanches are gone, / and the outlaws are gone, / now Geronimo’s gone, / and Quantro’s gone, / and the lion is gone, / and the red wolf is gone, / …and Treadwell is gone.”— “Coyotes” by Bob Mcdill, from Grizzly Man, last line ad-libbed by the pilot.

 Lindy and I watched Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man tonight.  What an amazing, profound, chilling thing!  The film is completely over the edge into something else.  It is like a documentary that gathers the unseen footage of the universe—a gaze into what should never be seen or heard (even as Herzog withheld Timothy Treadwell’s death screams from when the camera was running with the lens cap on). 

Sometimes, though, Herzog does ring a bit false to me here, as though the ham in him is running away with itself.  When he blubbers, “Dear, you must never show this to anyone!  You should destroy it!” it can sound something less than ingenuous.  I feel like shouting, “Werner, please, stop!  You’re not Hamlet.”

Grizzly Man is everything “America’s Funniest Home Videos” and The Blair Witch Project aspired to be, yet is so much more real that it shows them up as overwrought frauds.  It is funnier and spookier—more like a Truman Show of the Earth itself:  A fox crosses the stage, mosquitoes surround the lens, ursine hind-pads disappear and reappear in swirling black waters—hungry old guy searching the bottom for salmon carcasses.

Wilderness blokes bearing their own photographic equipment— gun-toting “we’re in Alaska, dig our high-end watercraft” touristas—presume that they are the barrel-of-the-lens but don’t realize that a far more sustained eye, trembling with rage, is filming them as they hurl rocks into the void (toward the omniscient “camera”) at a young bear to amuse themselves…occasionally bonking it.  The passive eye of nature that we never see is watching, witnessing the hapless meddlers that we are.   

Behind nature’s camera, cursing the invaders on monitor, is the movie’s subject and “star,” lawyering as best he can for his bears—Timothy Treadwell.  This self-appointed wildlife protector recorded more than a hundred hours of himself and animals in the Katmai National Park, Alaska—his legacy after the fatal mauling (and consumption of his body parts) by an unamused grizzly. 

Herzog knew exactly what to do with this footage, how to select and cut, pace and edit, counterposing his own voice, overriding the sound track now and again with measured critique.  He sometimes stuck, Warhol-like, with Treadwell’s camera after the narrator exited stage right or front—that’s when flies and bees in their erratic mimeses, gusts of wind in vegetation became the actors…like some random satellite view of a day on Mars or Titan.

Treadwell was an innately brilliant film-maker who, by the mettle of his camping out in no man’s land, rendered the camera transparent in a way curators of Discovery Channel and National Geographic can only dream of: fox paws on the see-through fabric of his tent; baseball cap stolen by a baby fox who scampers away with it to his den (Treadwell cussing in pursuit); snapping musculature of male bears on hind legs in combat, one of them dropping loads of shit; Treadwell’s own hand in bear poop, his wonder that it has just been inside his idée fixe, that he can feel the heat of her body still.  He documents the daily activities and conflicts of nature as they unfold, without Nature Channel  voiceover and story-boarding, substituting instead his own goofball myths and Prince Valiant pageantry.

The actor may have been his own cinematographer, but he needed a conductor to arrange the cinema, to interrogate what it really was…to edit for text, subtext, and hypertext, running “bad” scenes into “good” ones so that various self-conscious Treadwells and elaborated “aliases” flowed seamlessly.  Treadwell couldn’t make this movie, in part because he was dead and in part because his own rushes were as random and shapeless as his intention and existence.  He did not understand the role he had created.

He could not have chosen a more appropriate director—Herzog punctuated and staggered the sequences like a maestro nuancing a philharmonic orchestra.  Under the steady, calm hand of an elder, Treadwell’s multiple takes of scenes—variations of the same monologues against the same background—became esoteric revelations of obscure and bizarre acts.  The self-declared Grizzly Man no doubt imagined a hypothetical PBS crew splicing only the most heroic and flattering portraits into an upbeat environmental drama.  That is not what Herzog did; thus, this is not really the film Treadwell conceived or wanted.  If he could have foreseen the final product, he might not have bared his fucked-up mind and wounded heart so compliantly. 

Afterwards, as an inspired touch, the director invited world-class musicians to improvise a soundtrack while they watched the soundless projection—and then, over the ending into the credits, he put the peerless Don Edwards yodeling “Coyotes.” 

            Treadwell was already a Herzog character, much like Kasper Hauser awaking without a name, Aguirre leading an army across South America, Fitzcarraldo dragging furniture through the jungle with “opera house” inclinations, and Dieter Dengler fleeing the Pathet Lao through monsoons and brush, all of them cursing the gods.  By the same token, Treadwell backpacked through Alaska, discoursing with gigantic bears as if they were people wearing bear costumes.  He wanted to put himself back through the eye of the needle, the evolutionary tunnel, into the very souls of these animals. 

Substitute glacial tundra for generic rainforest and you’ve got a classic out-of-control Herzog landscape.

Before he went into the outback, Treadwell was a guy who couldn’t make contact with his fellow humans, who messed up just about all his romantic relationships (as he confesses throughout with a candor that is both admirable and arrogant).  He couldn’t live in society, period; the wilderness alone made his existence tolerable.  So he used the bears to redeem himself: to expose his wounds, to quiet his mind, to ease his grief, to confront his traumas, to unleash his compassion on something real.

Treadwell reveals the animals’ simple “joys of being…their grace and ferociousness” (Herzog’s words from the film)—in short provides a glimpse into the lives of bears.  He does it in a way that only a live-in bear impersonator could pull off.  He does it so guilelessly that he speaks for all our guilt and aspirations, to be accepted still, despite everything, by the primitive psyche that we have ravaged.

In moments of near “primal scream” delirium, Treadwell croons, “I love you—I love you, fox that I have named Ghost; I love you, bears that I call Mickey and Saturn and Sergeant Brown; I love you, bee expired in the flower.  I love you, all and everything.”  Still clutching his childhood teddy, tentbound in nocturnal wind and pouring rain, he is about as alone and alienated as a middle-class American can get on this planet.

Then he broadcasts equally manic “planet news” to the gods and denizens of this creation, to Allah, Jehovah, and what he calls that “Hindu floaty thing”: “Am I fucked up; is this a fucked-up planet or what?” and again: “Fuck you, everyone.”

But he is not some New Age death-wish eco-lib.  Maybe he was blind to his own excesses and grandiosity, but he wasn’t a madman or klutz.  He is the guy who lies just beneath the surface of regimented populations in cities where were-bears and werewolves wait to reclaim us from our symbolic reign into the original real that birthed our shapes and casts yet the arras of our minds.  Even if we kill them all, the totems and souls of untamed animals will stalk us till the end.

This aspiring actor (who allegedly came in second to Woody Harrelson for the role of bartender in Cheers) was a self-taught naturalist, survivalist, and animal trainer.  It’s not often that a recovering alcoholic and delusional emcee gets to make it in nature, let alone the Bering wilderness, for thirteen whole summers, as a confidante and chronicler of feral beasts.  Yet he somehow survived year after year, while exposing the depth of our spiritual and ecological crisis.  No one—Treadwell demonstrates—not even the guerrillas of Earth First!, is saving bears or the Earth or anything.  Looking back at us all from the Alaskan wilderness, he shouts every variant of “fuck you” he can: “I came here in peace and love…you fuckers!  Fuck you, Park Service.  I beat your fucking asses!  Animals rule! Timothy conquered!” 

He shows us to ourselves—braggarts, slobs, bullies, poseurs, and despoilers—all of which he was too, though he was different in this way: he set himself before the bears for judgment.  He was willing to be a humble ursine groupie rather than an inflated human goon.  He had already sat in court in Van Nuys and witnessed criminals being sentenced to hard time.  He put his butt there specifically to reintroduce himself to what life-and-death in the zone is about.  So when he submitted himself to the bears and their verdict, he knew that he had come to the Great Hall of Justice and was going to be convicted.  But at least he was engaging the cosmic battle, casting his lot with furry demons rather than voodoo ones in robes.  He chose Mesozoic shamans as his magisters, those clear-hearted presymbolic predecessors of the human regime, who merely deal out the law of survival: no retribution, no self-righteous posturing, no unnecessary gloating or torture, no cruel twisting of the needle, no broken hearts.  They are in fact nothing except ontologically sentient stacks of meat.

Yet at the same time, Herzog dashed Treadwell’s delusion of himself as selfless friend to the animals of the North, diplomat from the Grizzly Maze to the schoolchildren of America.  He exposed him as what he also was: a provincial bullhead, a yuppie imperialist crossing a sacred boundary between bears and humans that native Alaskans had respected for thousands of years.  Treadwell intruded recklessly on ursine space, initially from his own narcissistic need to embrace the primal beast, later from his greater desire to be embraced back. 

Remember, from the standpoint of the grizzlies, even the coolest dudes are blubbering assholes and officious nerds, not witty studs, not stars of anything, certainly not guardians or medicine men.  Ultimately they are prey, to be cuffed and eaten.

Treadwell wanted nature to forgive him, but he was way beyond that.  He wanted the planet to forgive all of us.  That mission is what drove him and what makes Grizzly Man a sacred document and not just a puff piece or YouTube upload of indulgent pathos.  Despite his hopeless provinciality and fatal anthropomorphism, Treadwell was so thoroughly initiated by the bears and foxes and Kodiak country that he transcended his neuroses and took on their stunted voice.  By admitting his crimes ingenuously, he eclipsed them and became a default shaman, commuted into a spokesman for nature on the planet.  Even while still a bombastic, pretentious, suicidal lunatic, he gave an Oscar performance of “life on Earth.”

Grizzly Man, Herzog tells us, is about “not nature but our nature.”  It shows what consciousness and culture have done to nature.  It reveals raw nature shining back through Treadwell’s own damaged psyche, so much more brilliantly than culture ever could.  The errant bear-tamer performs a brilliant and effective act of psychoanalytic transference, the animals his shrinks and confessors, the camera his conversion device (because bears don’t speak English and don’t ordinarily do therapy).  The act of filming transfigures the beasts into the best kind of Freudians—dumb sentimental ones—as well as into “crazy wisdom” kukurajas and Treadwell’s jury (ultimately, they deliver his sentence).

The trope of the film-maker cum eco-warrior allows Treadwell to be analyzed without an actual analyst, to receive holy unction without a priest, to project his madness into a saner, emotionally simpler, and more primitive other, to engage in a dialogue with himself, bear by indifferent bear, to the purpose of his own liberation and perhaps even cure.  The grizzlies even deconstruct his sex life for him, the essentials of his repressed jealousy and longing, as they model lust, male competition, and mating envy in their absolute forms.  They are, after all, the id—living giant hulks of it, oversized passionate empaths.

If “le transfer” weren’t “the enactment of the reality of the unconscious” (to bring Mr. Lacan on set here: “la mise en act de la realité de l’inconscient”)—the cross-species fling of analyst and analysand in the quaestio—Treadwell wouldn’t have lasted a day in the Grizzly Maze.  Yet he carried out his maneuvers “expeditions,” as he called them, for thirteen years—so the dialogue was real, the cure was real, the initiation was real, the acts of dissidence were real, the indictment of the world that made him crazy is real, and his representation of the politics of foxes and bears is also real.  

I don’t agree with Herzog’s anti-moralistic conclusion that Treadwell’s film shows that the universe is chaotic, predatory, and antipathetic.  While I see the frustrations of unreflecting consciousness and thwarted empathy in the predators, I also perceive their innocence, their situation as nascent buddhas luminous in their own right—but it hardly matters, because the presentation is vast and neutral enough to encompass every possible interpretation.  I do consent to this: when I look into those grizzlies’ eyes, I don’t see humanity or psyche or any possibility of reconciliation; I don’t see people in fur; I see only raw, antipathetic hunger and restless rage.  I see the violence of the sun itself.

The day after I watched Grizzly Man, my cats and even the spiders on the walls looked like bears. It is a film I will never get out my mind.  

Trees Lounge, directed by Steve Buscemi (1996).

•From Episodes in Disguise of a Marriage

She was looking for a more urbane and mature guy, like her architect. Then I showed up out of nowhere and from an unlikely source. We found ourselves breathing the air of a planet that didn’t exist, we had to create it. We scripted a Freddie Prinze, Jr./Rachael Leigh Cook romance, me the nerd girl rescued by the coolest guy on campus. Or, gender adjusted, we were Steve Buscemi and Chloë Sevigny, commoner and homecoming queen, bumbling lad wooing chic model. Voiceover says: “Those two’ll go to Wiggins Tavern and never see each other again. She’ll marry a wealthy lawyer; he’ll become a hippie poet.”

But we were just a boy and a girl, and we went out every weekend from the Phi Psi dance till summer break.

Deadline USA, directed by Richard Brooks (1952). Humphrey Bogart as Ed Hutcheson, the crusading editor of a newspaper that is about to be sold by outvoted owner Margaret Garrison’s two daughters. Played by Ethel Barrymore, Garrison supports Hutcheson. The editor eventually overcomes multiple forces arrayed against him and exposes gangster Tomas Rienzi (Martin Gabel), as the presses roll. Hutcheson’s clone is needed to save journalism today.

The Nightingale (2018) is a gratuitously violent and bloody Australian film set in an 1825 Tasmanian penal colony. It crosses the line into death pornography (do not watch if you can’t help internalizing that imagery).

•From Dreamtimes and Thoughtforms: Actor Baykali Ganambarr’s portrayal of his character, a tracker named Billy who performs his Blackbird clan Dreaming by chanting a blackbird superpower boast, flapping his arms, dancing with zany leaps and, later, dispatching a high-flying blackbird guide for his female convict boss-lady.

Note on t.v. series (I posted a shorter version of this on Facebook, May 1, 2017)

People trade information about good series to watch. I still honor the old ones: The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, even The L Word (though it deteriorated as it sold out, season by season, to commercialized sexual memes), and, a bit later, Deadwood Weeds, and some others I am probably forgetting. I thought the short-lived John from Cincinnati was special, the best David Milch for irony, metaphysical crossover, and blank-verse-like jive (surfer instead of old gold country), but it was apparently cancelled for lack of viewer interest. I found it totally interesting probably for the same reasons it was cancelled.

The first soap Lindy and I ever watched was on Showtime in 1982-1983. A murder mystery entitled A New Day in Eden, it was cancelled mid-story without resolving the murder. I sent a postcard to Showtime to find out that it was, of course, the least likely candidate, the man in the wheelchair. I don’t remember the plot, just writing the postcard and getting the answer.

I thought that Sex in the City was finally embarrassing, smarmy, and intentionally exploitative but watchable. Breaking Bad was not. I know that lots of people liked it. I hated the few episodes I watched. It had its irony backwards, trying to hide violence and cruelty in surrealism rather than in itself. Maybe I didn’t watch enough episodes.

Lindy and I stayed amused through six seasons probably about 70 episodes of Parenthood because it was occasionally very good (when it wasn’t egregiously kitsch), though it was hard for anyone who lived in Berkeley to swallow the fake version that could have passed for just about any town in the US except Berkeley. It made no effort even to use Berkeley street and business names or occasional exteriors, let alone its cultural tone or mood. Yet the characters were real and moving: a modern version of an old-fashioned soap that takes you deep into its family.

I thought Transparent great, brilliant, and original, but spiritually and psychologically vapid, plus it was more about trans-Jewish than trans-gender.

We just finished watching Rectify after a lapse following the first season, and I would put that first on my list now, followed by The Killing and True Detective. In all three, the denominator is crispness of language and character. Rectify (four seasons of varying length, 30 episodes in all) also has emotional depth and character evolution one rarely sees in ephemeral dramas. It centers around Daniel Holden, played by Aden Young, as a young man released on DNA evidence after nearly 20 years in prison for a murder he confessed to but didn’t commit.

The Killing is carried by the interaction and banter between two police detectives (played Mirelle Enos and Joel Kinnaman) over four seasons. They are flawed human beings, awake to their flaws; their dialogue in that regard is moving and hilarious. Hard to believe that English is a second language for Kinnaman (after Swedish); it’s as though he knows it so well he’s inventing it as he speaks, but maybe that’s the point. The Danish version (on which the American one, set in Seattle, is based is equally interesting in a different, more political way.

True Detective, written by Nic Pizzolato after he left The Killing to get to control his own scripts, uses Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson to carry the first season with language that seems to ricochet among Parmenides, Samuel Beckett, and Richard Price. There were two seasons, and it never lost its edge.

            Switched at Birth (103 episodes), created by Lizzy Weiss (2011-2017). Two girls living in the metropolitan Kansas City area (Kansas and Missouri) discover that they were switched at birth and are in the wrong family. Very sentimental and kitschy, but it held Lindy’s and my interest for a year. Needless to say, they have switched classes and ethnic origin and now confront their alter egos as well as their birth parents, leading to adventures and misadventures as they come of age. Since one of the girls is deaf from a childhood ailment, deaf culture as its own exclusive radical realm is explored fully. A deaf friend, Emmet (Sean Berdy), of the deaf switchee, Bay (Vanessa Marano) falls in love with the hearing switchee, Daphne (Katie Leclerc), opening the series to a full exploration of the politics and aesthetics of “hearing” and “deafness.”

The Chronological List of Reviews

Random Harvest, directed by Melvin LeRoy (1942). In this movie based on a James Hilton novel of the same title, Charles Ranier (played by Ronald Coleman) is an amnesiac British soldier who forgets his prior history after suffering shellshock in a foxhole during World War I. He refers to “a wisp of memory that can’t be caught before it fades away.” In a brilliantly entangled plot, he recovers his previous life after being bumped by a car but, at the same moment, surrenders his three years of “amnesiac life” following rescue from the foxhole (which he remembered in normal fashion as its events elapsed, giving him a three-year-long adult life without a childhood or pre-shellshock past, including a marriage to a woman played by Greer Garson). Returning in confusion to his original residence after the street accident (because he knows where to go and doesn’t recall his second identity or his address or wife any longer), he eventually ends up married twice to the same woman under two different identities, neither of which remembers the other until a final scene of heart and soul awakening to their combined memory. In the double-amnesiac’s second marriage, neither husband nor wife can fully commit to each other because they are each in love with another person, who happens to be their partner!

Orphée (Orpheus), directed by Jean Cocteau (1949) Like the Greek original, it contains a profound and also credible metaphor for not only Death but the passage of creatures between planes of consciousness (bardo realms) and the cosmos. The myth, through all its various tropes and hyperboles, is somehow true. (Parallels occur in Japanese, German, Sumerian, Hebrew, Mayan and Nez Perce folklore.)

In the Graeco-Roman account of Orpheus and Eurydice, the Underworld is a shadowy land populated by denizens like Hades (Pluto) and Persephone.  Cocteau retains this oligarchy but replaces the gods with bureaucrats, and divine laws with scientific and philosophical concepts.  Death is a beautiful, sophisticated woman with whom Orpheus falls recklessly in love at the expense of the more girlish Eurydice, thereby endangering not only himself but the metaphysical order of the universe.

Three Memorable Scenes:

•Death explains the great cosmic landscape to Orpheus, telling him that messages are ferried mysteriously across levels of creation like tom-toms sending transmissions across his Africa.

Death, played by María Casarés, explains to the hero Orpheus (Cocteau’s real-life lover, Jean Marais) why he, a mere man, cannot save her, a mere woman, from her Fate. She tells him that she is only one of the forms of death and must take her orders from elsewhere.

            “Where do the orders come from?” demands Orpheus.

            “They are sent back and forth by so many sentinels like the tom-toms of your African tribes, the echoes of your mountains, the wind whispering through your trees.”

            Orpheus: “I will go to he who gives those orders,”

            Death: “My poor love, he exists nowhere. Some say he thinks of us . . . others, that we are his thoughts. Others say that we are his dream.”

            It is still tom-toms and didgeridoos; wind chimes, echoes, and the sound of rain.

•Heurtebrise leads Orpheus through the corridor between Life and Death, represented cinematically by streets bombed-out WW II Paris.  There in a stark passageway they see glass salesmen still hawking their wares.

At a few ticks before the one-hour mark of Orphée, time stops and Orpheus and Heurtebise enter a no-man’s land between life and death. While Heurtebise is blown along motionlessly, Orpheus has to struggle to move. “It is different for me,” Heurtebise says, for he is already dead.

Shirtless suspendered young men, panes of glass slotted in wooden holders strapped to bare backs, pass—first one, then another. “Vitrier!” they cry. “Vitrier!” They are, or were, glaziers.

An old man pushes a wheelbarrow-like wagon.

“Why are these people prowling around?” asks Marais in the English subtitles. “Are they alive?”

“They think so,” says Heurtebise. “There’s nothing more habit-forming than habit.”

Orpheus stares in disbelief.

“Don’t think I know,” Heurtebise warns, “much more than you do.” (Don’t think that anyone here knows much about what is actually going on.)

            “There’s no wind. Why do you always seem to be heading into the wind?”

“Porquoi,” replies Heurtebise. “Tojours porquoi.”

So many questions, so few answers.

•Orpheus is taught that mirrors are passageways to realm of Death that can be opened with special gloves:  In mirrors we see our own Deaths working daily on our faces like bees in a hive.

Ordet (The Word), directed by Carl Dreyer (1955). Ordet, set in rural Denmark, involves a theological rivalry between two families from local Protestant sects, each of which considers the other blasphemers.

Orthodoxies and fundamentalisms are transcended by a miracle that brings the presence of something vaster and more profound.  Faith proves to be direct and implicit and requires merely a willingness to believe.

Three Memorable Scenes:

•The resurrection.  You need the entire scene, from the gathering of mourners at the young mother’s open coffin to the film’s end.  Johannes, the mad brother, unexpectedly returns. The young girls look at him with hope, that he will resurrect their mother, for he has claimed to be Christ. He smiles at the girls, then turns to the throng of religious pedants. To their shock, he accuses them of mocking God, of killing Inge by their “little faith.” He offers to utter “the word,” to bring her back to life by the power of the children’s belief. The doctor (of all people) raises a hand to deter the minister from stopping the event. It can be viewed again and again for the changing expressions and subtle movements of each of the characters. There is always another nuance.  In the theater, the audience gasps audibly as Inge stirs in her coffin, awakes, and embraces her husband. Ordet ends.

•Johannes watches the Angel of Death pass in the lights and shadows cast by the doctor’s departing car.

•Johannes goes into exile, wandering across the hills and dales of a vast countryside under exquisite cumulus clouds to the narrator’s biblical citation.

The Vikings, directed by Richard Fleisher (1958).  Antagonists Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis are joined by a secret, the clue to their bastard kinship. The link is a primitive compass, a magnetic needle, pointing north through the fog, allowing sailors to cross between hidden shores. This tale of noble identity buried in rags echoes and foreshadows stories from Oedipus to Lord of the Rings. Its soaring Mitch Powell soundtrack forever evokes the North, the sea, and dragon-headed ships. Forget the battles and bloodshed; this film is marked by scenes of mythic verity: the fog, the North Sea, North itself, the execution pit of hungry barking dogs, the reconciliation of half-brothers and broken tribes, the floating fires of a Norse funeral, an ancient Earth. 

Billy Budd, directed by Peter Ustinov (1962). This is a classic, textured sea drama with enough of Herman Melville’s original narrative and language to make it a companion to the lost work of literature found in a breadbox after its authors death. Terence Stamp’s film debut is as Billy Budd, the angelic foretopman. Go from Billy Budd to The Hit, directed by Stephen Freers (1984) and see mature Stamp’s performance as an existentially minded former criminal in hiding in Spain (fleeing his colleagues on whom he snitched). In both films with vastly different characters of different ages and degrees of worldliness and sophistication, Stamp captures the mystery of existence and ways staring darkness and evil in the face while having compassion and love for those carrying expressions of the shadow into the world. Each is a martyr in his own way.

I wasn’t as taken with The Limey—Stamp’s later return to the cinema (as both actor and character)—but he can’t help eliciting those eternal themes as they reel toward an impossible resolution. What he gets in The Limey is a nonanswer that allows him at least to live and return to what peace a kitsch-laden world offers.

One Eyed Jacks (preferably the version with the happy ending), directed by and starring Marlon Brando as Rio (1961). The movie tells the story of Rio’s double-crossing bandito confederate, Dad Longworth (Karl Malden), years after Dad’s betrayal and Rio’s resulting imprisonment. Longworth is now a self-righteous sheriff with a Mexican wife and beautiful, wise daughter. Needless to say, the men clash after an unsuccessful attempt to let bygones be bygones. To the folks in the town, the sheriff is a hero, but to Rio, he’s a one-eyed jack and “I’ve seen your other side.” Longworth tries to obliterate the kid who was once part of his gang, leading to one of cinema’s best sequences of escape, healing, and redemption.

Rio is the ultimate Brando hero, with resonances of On the Waterfront and Streetcar. One Eyed Jacks is also the primal, archetypal Western in its sweeping landscapes and morality play. At the time I wrote: “Stealing the sheriff’s daughter with a lie, shooting his gun at the cliffs with the wounded hand, pushing aside the form of the soul of the woman of the temple of the wise Chinamen who fished in the salt that finally healed the hand and the Moon and all things in time. . . .”

Hud, directed by Martin Ritt (1963), considered in some circles the best black-and-white film ever made.  I have seen this movie many times, and for me it always centers around Brandon De Wilde’s portrayal of Lonnie, a sweet, valiant boy coming into his manhood. 

The ill-fated De Wilde, a child turned young-adult star, died ten years later when he flipped his camper on a deserted Denver street in replica of his fictional father’s fate in Hud. 

As the De Wilde’s youthful alias tries to find his true nature, his innate sincerity, integrity, and emerging courage come into conflict with his uncle Hud, a paragon of brooding, corrupt vanity, played by Paul Newman at perfect key. In fact, the volatile yet insouciant, womanizing Hud may be Newman’s signature career role.  Homer (Melvyn Douglas), a sage, dignified patriarch, confronts Hud with Old Testament fire, while Patricia Neal brings panache and lyric spunk to Alma, the family’s housekeeper and surrogate mom, an itinerant frontier dame, three parts angel, one part floozy.  Hud can’t seduce her—she sees through him and men like him—so he tries to decimate her.

The film’s understated power, all but unobtainable in current American cinema, is a synergy of the stark gallery-caliber cinematography of James Wong Howe; the crisp, Zen dialogue of Larry McMurtry’s novel; and the movie’s Homeric and Shakespearian themes of recessive nobility: the orphaned, neglected boy who leapfrogs his elders, bearing his father’s—or grandfather’s—legacy (think also Michael Corleone of The Godfather). 

This is also a requiem for the old-time cowboy; a paradigmatic Western battle of good and evil, innocence and debauchery; a dialectic between the nascent existentialism of the twentieth century and the old-fashioned biblical purity of the frontier (this drives each of the characters except Homer who is pure Americana).  At the death of his grandfather, Lonnie refuses the notion that he has gone to a better place: “Not unless dirt is a better place than air.” Nihilistic, but pitch-perfect for its place and time.

Dr. Strangelove: Or How Learned How to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, directed by Stanley Kubrick (1964).

I watched Dr. Strangelove initially soon after it came out with a friend at Amherst one class below me. Dorian Fliegel, a high-school basketball star from New York, liked humming the main theme, an up-tempo version of the Civil War song “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again.” It became his background melody for our many critiques of Amherst and general sociopolitical discourse. He would suddenly become George C. Scott as General Buck Turgidson talking about the only bomb-bearing B-52 not entirely destroyed or recalled, piloted by Slim Pickens as Major T. J. Kong and headed for an ICBM complex in Russia, about to set off the Doomsday Machine and end all life on Earth. “If the pilot’s good,” Dorey would say as Turgidson, “If he’s really sharp, he can barrel that baby in so low—you oughta see it sometime, it’s a sight, a big plane like a B-52, vroom! Its jet exhaust fryin’ chickens in the barnyard!”

“Well,” Buck,” I might say, “then we’re up shit’s creek without a paddle!

Dorey might stop humming on North Pleasant Street, turn to me, and say (as Major Kong), “I want you to remember one thing—that folks back home is countin’ on ya, and by golly we ain’t about to let them down. Tell you something else. If this thing turns out to be as important as I figure it might, you’re all in line for some promotions.”

“Posthumous promotions,” I might reply.

Occasionally Dorey switched his humming to “We’ll Meet Again,” the theme song with which Strangelove ends as mushroom clouds immolate the planet’s atmosphere.

A few current perceptions about Dr. Strangelove:

Peter Sellers plays three roles, each of them brilliantly acted and all of them in contrast to the others. As President Merkin Muffley, he is naïve and disbelieving, constantly having to be brought up to speed by Turgidson and himself as either Colonel Lionel Mandrake, the British attaché to General Jack Ripper (Sterling Hayden), the instigator of the unauthorized dispatch of planes to bomb Russia, or as Dr. Strangelove himself. As Mandrake, he talks to himself as President (but on the phone, making the filming and splicing easy). Mandrake also gets Colonel Bat Guano (Keenan Wynn) to shoot up a Coke machine so that he can get coins to make the call to try to reverse the bombers before they get to their targets in Russia—he doesn’t have enough change for either a person-to-person or a trunk call, and the White House switchboard won’t accept a collect one even though they are desperate to hear from anyone with renditions of Ripper’s recall code. As Dr. Strangelove, a former Nazi scientist, in the final scene (which takes panning between Sellers as Strangelove and Sellers as Muffley), he becomes demonically crazed as he proposes that the high brass escape the radioactivity that will make the Earth unhabitable for a century by hiding in a deep mine shaft with women, beautiful and far more of them then men for breeding purposes; then he can’t control his arm as it keeps trying to salute the Fuhrer. He has to wrestle it back to his body, and I think he even bites it. The film is called “Dr. Strangelove” because this paroxysmic dance closes the film, preceding only the bombs of the Doomsday Machine exploding while the music plays “We’ll Meet Again.” The words are an uncanny blend of secular irony and reincarnational karma:

“We’ll meet again

Don’t know where, don’t know when

But I know we’ll meet again some sunny day

Keep smiling through

Just like you always do

‘Til the blue skies drive the dark clouds far away

So will you please say ‘Hello’ to the folks that I know

Tell them I won’t be long

They’ll be happy to know that as you saw me go

I was singing this song.”

The dialogues in Strangelove are already classics, and there are too many to cite even the best ones—they are pretty much all good (“No fighting in the war room, et al.). George C. Scott is the face of the movie, as he disdains the other military officials and Russian ambassador Alexi de Sadesky (Peter Bull). His portrayal of his pilots’ skills to the President Muffley (the last thing Muffley wants to hear) is a classic comedic masterstroke, blending two voices in doubt of each other so that his internal dialogues keep coming up to the surface. Her interaction with Miss Scott (Tracy Reed), his secretary and mistress lying in a bikini on a pad and trying to screen his calls, a parody of a good operator, until the matter becomes too urgent, is a mix of vaudeville and slapstick. He has to enact putting off her offhand summons to sex in keeping with her operator parody in order to address apocalypse. He finally tells her to pray.

Strangelove is a recycling potpourri of age-old themes—human stupidity and incompetence against global and planetary blowback, a kind of endemic dark humor. Strangelove’s joke is that all jokes are essentially the same joke, the existential joke of mortality, of vulnerability against a technology meant to protect folks from the things to which they are vulnerable. As the technology increases, the vulnerability increases.

Strangelove is also grim parody, all the more salient and applicable today, which is not a good thing geopolitically but makes for a generational tour de force. Kubrick and his actors are no longer around to see the fruition of their prophecy. Yet artificial intelligence is the new Doomsday Machine, for insofar as we turn over our decisions to an AI-operated computer, we have essentially created a new mechanism transcending any failsafe point. In Strangelove the mechanism is an unwieldy bank of computers. Today the machinery is more compact but also more energy-consuming, exponentializing the danger.

Likewise, the characters in Strangelove foreshadow the swing to the Right in America and the world. Dr. Strangelove and General Ripper are harbingers of Donald Trump, a Strangelove-like character fitting adeptly into the larger premise of a Strangelove world as unimaginable to the principals of the film—actors, director, and audience—as would be the procession of our technology in Doomsday Machine fashion. In fact, watching Strangelove is a bit like watching the 2024 U.S. Presidential through a glass darkly, the glass of Kubrick’s prescience. It isn’t 2001: A Space Odyssey, but 2001 is an alternate future we have already bypassed. We are left facing the actual calculus of future life on Earth.

Mickey One, directed by Arthur Penn, starring Warren Beatty (1965).  A montage of Kafkaesque surrealism, exquisite mime, and experimental camera-work follows a paranoid comedian who may or may not be a mafia hit target. Mickey flees Detroit and uncovers a magical Chicago, a lover (played by Alexandra Stewart), and his own improvisational art. At the film’s acme, the camera turns the stage floodlight back on Beatty so that it is at once a primordial sun, a face of God, and the beam of a hitman.  When Stewart’s character asks Mickey if he is afraid, Beatty answers, “Every moment I live.” With those words, confession converts terror into its own antidote.

The Sting, directed by George Ray Hill and starring both Paul Newman and Robert Redford (1973). The Sting is so iconic that its scenario of street people collaborating on a revenge sting defines the term for those who saw it. The phony horse-race betting parlor, quickly assembled and disassembled in a rogue rental, can never be revealed to the gull. That’s the heart of the sting: you keep it to yourself.

Even the audience is “stung” by the fact that they are not clued into the last layer, the arrival of the cops, and think that things have gone awry, until they realize that the cops are part of the sting.

In an unforgettable scene, Johnny Hooker, played by Redford, sleeps with a waitress named Loretta the night before the night before the sting is spring explaining to her that he is not a stranger, she does know him—another lonely person like himself. Despite their touching love scene, Loretta (Dimitra Arliss) is, in fact, a hired professional killer, a hit woman, with Hooker her target. As Hooker sees Loretta walking toward him the next morning, a black-gloved man walking behind him shoots her dead, then explains.

We are left guessing whether she actually liked Hooker but had to do her job or if the sex was made more desirable and interesting by the fact that it was with her next-day victim.  

The Reincarnation of Peter Proud, directed by J. Lee Thompson (1975), from an equally haunting novel by Max Ehrlich. Jeff Curtis is reincarnated so swiftly as Peter Proud that his immediate past life from the 1940s shines through the déjà vus of his present one in the 1970s. The landscape is tantalizingly accessible: the statue of a pilgrim, the night swim, the lights of the hotel reflecting in the lake, the bridges of Springfield, Mass. A drab, mean-spirited existence lived a few decades earlier as Jeff Curtis seeps into a cheery reborn L.A. gambol as Peter Proud.

Michael Sarrazin plays Proud, formerly Jeff Curtis; Margot Kidder is his witchlike wife in a previous life; Jennifer O’Neill is evanescent as his daughter now his lover. Her grandmother in a retirement home looks at Peter Proud but sees her son Jeff and asks him where he’s been all these years and why he hasn’t come to visit her in so long.  This is the most haunting scene in a movie which is full of them.

I got involved in helping on a script remake with Tom Cruise as Peter Proud, but it never happened and won’t happen with Cruise or maybe at all. Ehrlich was a brilliant novelist, but he downplayed his own clairvoyance. I don’t know if I improved on book and movie because I think that Max wrote the maybe best reincarnational novel of all-time (except maybe Lama Yongden’s Mipam). Still, he left too much hanging in doubt. Then the scriptwriter dulled his shadowing and meaning.

Here are my new opening and closing scenes:

Opening Scene

Camera opens on a room of people gathering. It could be a living room with domestic chairs and a couch or a larger group in a public space like a VFW hall (I prefer the latter). Camera also opens to a buzz that gradually quiets down (10 seconds). A man in the audience says to a woman, “What do you suppose is going to happen tonight?”

Her response: “It’s getting wilder every time. I wouldn’t be surprised if she brought the Loch Ness monster, ET, and sasquatch into the room tonight.”

The woman at the front is about 50 years old, medium height, attractive but not stunning. She is talking to someone so that you clearly hear her female voice. It doesn’t matter too much what she is saying. As she assumes her place on her special chair, the audience instantly hushes as though expecting something very special (maybe 30-35 seconds in by now).

She arranges her body, stiffens a bit, seems to whisper something inaudible. Someone dims the room’s light bulbs leaving a few salt lamps the only light. The camera focuses on her face. It distinctly changes, looking older and male like an ancient Geronimo.

Then there is a rush like wind, like the sound of cosmic rays on an old wire recorder. It’s faint so that you can’t quite tell if it’s ambient noise or music on the soundtrack. There is an extremely brief image of galaxies, so fast as to be almost subliminal, like something from the Hubble telescope, much less than a second. Then she speaks again in a different, more male, more authoritative voice (about 50 seconds in):

“I am Modajee. That is not who I am, but it is the name by which you must know me. Who I am is incomprehensible to you. My name? I don’t have a name. I am 10,000 beings, give or take, from many worlds who have completed their life cycles, each of them comprising a dozen or more of your lifetimes. I am a collective being and intelligence. I will speak briefly through my summoner and then answer your questions. I have come to guide, to enlighten, to facilitate the way. [brief pause]. You are forming your reality from seeds we have planted. We do not understand you or your reality, but we respect and revere you, for you are creating our reality too. [silence]

A woman in the audience asks, “Are you saying that we are reborn, that we live other lives before and after this one.”

[Pause, along with a repeat of the cosmic noise and galactic image, very subtle and brief]

After the pause, the entity speaking through the woman gives out a great laugh, a Buddha-like belly rumble that has elements of a guffaw: “Other lives! Other lives!” Each repeat is louder and more hilarious as the entity entertains it. “That is the very least of it. You are connected at this very moment to countless other entities throughout the universe. Well, you might call it a universe, but your universe is a small piece of All That Is. These beings are supporting you this moment. You are supporting them. Every discovery you make, every love you feel, every grief and tragedy you undergo radiates intelligence throughout the universe, helps beings on many worlds and in many dimensions become whole, even as they are feeding you with their experiences. It will take numberless lifetimes, but you will become wise. You will reach the phase of a being like me.”

Another person asks, “Will we see each other again in other lifetimes.”

The entity laughs but not as fulsomely. “See each other again? Do you see each other now? [Pause] Do you even really see each other? Those who are daughters to the father will be fathers to the daughter. Those who are husband and wife will be father and daughter, father and son. Those who are daughter and father will be husband and wife. [Now he laughs much louder]. Even your pets, your cat or dog will find their way back into your human menageries. Who do you think these creatures were?”

Another person asks, “Will we always be on the same good or bad terms with each other?”

Modajee’s answer is swift and without humor:

“You will love and you will hate and you will love again. The universe has a big agenda, and it will all come out in the wash.”

Camera fades on the scene and segues into Peter Proud’s opening dream.

Closing Scene

Same set-up as the opening scene except a different group in the audience and either a different woman in the front or an older version of the same woman. The camera focuses on her getting ready, then pans around the audience. You see a number of faces, then an older Anne Curtis. She looks different, more mature; she gets it now. [End of film]

Here is my new dialogue for Marsha in her confrontation as Curtis’ widow with Proud as Curtis reborn. Ehrlich’s original dialogue brackets mine:

“Far worse than you were before. You’re slick now, you’re smooth, you’re educated. You have a resumé, a new mask. But I see you. I know who you are. You’re the same lecher and thrill-seeker. You think you’re a nice cool guy now, with your dude body, your airs. But you’re just as selfish, just as uncouth, just as heedless and vain as you were then when I was in the hospital with our daughter and you were out whoring. You can’t hide behind your degree and UCLA smile. You’re a vile monster.

“You don’t deserve to live again. And now, you’re going to make me do it all over again. This time tell the gods who bathe souls that they’re going to have to give you a hard wash in hell before they send you back.”

Rocky, directed by John Avildsen (1976), Rocky II, III, IV, directed by Sylvester Stallone (1979, 1982, and 1985), Rocky V, directed by John Avildsen (1985); First Blood, directed by Ted Kotcheff (1982), First Blood: Part II, directed by George P. Cosmatos (1985). Beyond the cinematic space these films occupy is their cultural suffusion. They have merged with the American flag, MIAs, the spirit of Philadelphia, fame, the Vietnam era, and a country that has been subsumed ever since in conflicts and agendas of questionable morality. They serve as emotional cleansers for a pre-9/11, pre-Trump America, and their cathartic power is barely diminished today. What is diminished is the country and its capacity to sustain patriotic mythologies.

Rocky and Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) are different faces of the same character, while the films are extended memes celebrating the underdog and the sweetness of redemption and revenge. Images that stand out are so popular that they are usually still playing on a screen somewhere on Earth (watched or unwatched); they have the penetration of product ads: Rocky running through the streets of Philly with a growing crowd of followers; Rambo setting booby traps for the army of inadequately trained men hunting him down; a bloodied Rocky continuing to leave his corner and attack Apollo Creed, having found his inner strength and courage; low-key Green Beret Trautman (Richard Crenna) telling over-amped Sheriff Teasle (Brian Dennehy) that it is not Rambo he is worried about, it is Teasle’s men, which drawns a sarcastic laugh from Teasle and a Rocky Horror Show murmur of recognition through the theater. A later Stallone image has Rambo flying back a plane load of MIAs back to the American side, grounding future conspiracy theories in cinematic veridicality. These films have the moral force, and of moral force, of a 1980s Tarzan. 

The Missouri Breaks, directed by Arthur Penn (1976).  This bittersweet, bizarre “incident” involving rustlers (one, Tom Logan, a young Jack Nicholson) and an Irish-American regulator, Robert E. Lee Clayton (a pompous, cross-dressing Marlon Brando) makes it on romantic purity and a cosmic eye that somehow transcends the mayhem and nonsense to achieve catharsis. Clayton picks off Logan’s comrades one by one until Logan figures it out and dispatches him with a blade and an unforgettable hypnagogic flash of eternity.

            The breaks of the Missouri River are not in Missouri but much further west and north as Lewis and Clark discovered. This is a pure Western.

Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000, directed by Alain Tanner (1976).  This Swiss art-film co-written by Tanner and British novelist John Berger moved me enough that I sought out Tanner at the Pacific Film Archive a few years later and persuaded him to give our press the English rights to the screenplay; then I had it translated into English by poet Michael Palmer.  Though it doesn’t date as well as I thought it would, its key scenes are timeless: Miou-Miou (Marie) playing trains with the old man (Charles); Jacques Denis (Marco) teaching high-school history with blood sausage to illustrate the wormhole-like tunneling of time; Jean-Luc Bideau (Max) and Myriam Meziere (Madeleine) in their post-Marxist Shakti-Shiva love-play; Marie miming the singular horror of life in prison after her release while diverting from playing trains; the motorcycle pausing at the long, cold stoplight with Mathieu’s voice-over on the human struggle (“. . . as many times as the days of my life . . .”)—and, most of all, the scene at the dinner table where all the characters collaborate to name the unborn Jonah.  Marcel: “Jonah is going to come. He fell from the ship, from the beautiful ship of fools we navigate on.  He jumped into the water and you swallowed him because you’re nice. You saved his life and now you’re going to spit him out . . . .”  Marco: “In the year 2000 Jonah will be twenty-five.  In twenty-five years the century will spit him out.” Max: “Or rather puke him up.” Marco (singing): “The whale of history will spit out Jonah who will be twenty-five in the year 2000.  That’s the time left for us to get him out of this mess [literally, off the shit-pile].”  Or not. I think both Tanner and Berger thought, “Not,” making it a poignant, bittersweet baptism.

The Outlaw Josey Wales, directed by Clint Eastwood (1976). All of Eastwood’s characters past and to be, from his spaghetti cowboys to his curmudgeonly cops and warriors, are synopsized and foreshadowed in Josey Wales. At the same time, various picaresque landscapes of the Missouri-Kansas territory west to Texas in the aftermath of the Civil War are traversed with grand panoramas and small dramas worthy of Fenimore Cooper or Mark Twain. Three or more genres are there in fulsome richness: the old West, the Civil War, the First Nations (civilized and untame), the subjugation of the South, the rebels, the Comancheros, the town on the frontier. It is an American latency in yolk.

This began as a self-published novel called Gone to Texas, sent unsolicited to Eastwood’s company. Someone read it and passed it on to him. He saw the essence and brought it to life.

Three Memorable Scenes:

•At the crossroads of a deadly confrontation, Josey tells Comanche chief Ten Bears that it is good that the two of them can meet today on the road of life and death. Sincere and eloquent, he lets Ten Bears feel the honesty of his heart—and the chief says “Let it be life.”  Johnny Reb graycoat and First Nations terrorist look into each other souls: they are the same: warriors in a world of forked-tongues.

•Chief Dan George, playing a civilized Cherokee, confesses to Josey that he’s been to Washington and met the President of the nation but can no longer track game or sneak up on people. He’s a gentrified Indian.

•On horseback, the sun over his shoulder for advantage, Josey approaches the Comancheros to rescue the Kansas pioneer family that includes his future love, Laura Lee (played by Eastwood’s future love, Sondra Locke).  Chief Dan George’s character, also a captive, voices over the action softly: “Now he’ll spit….”

All subsequent scenes between Eastwood and Locke are compellingly intense (and a little weird, as though conducted in mild trances)—plus every time Josey says, “I reckon so,” it is like a caesura of moaning among Greek choruses. It’s also the film’s closing line, outlaw Wales’ blood dripping from inside his clothing, as he and his Confederate adversary silently make their truce. “Yes, that war damn near killed all of us.” 

“I reckon so.”

This scene can cut directly to Martin Scorsese’s closing timelapse for Gangs of New York (2002): America passing beyond the War of the States and its ragged frontier into the melting-pot jungles and urban badlands of a dawning century. An explicit war is replaced by a cycle of guerrilla acts and organized crimes. Eastwood is on top of it all, and then some. The question is whether he remote-viewed the future or invented it. We’re all living in Clintworld.

Capricorn One, directed by Peter Hyams (1977). This curiously compelling if unrealistic space drama that never actually goes into space is filled with moments that stayed with me decades later. A crew of would-be astronauts to Mars, played by James Brolin (Captain Charles Brubaker), Sam Waterston (Peter Willis), and O. J. Simpson (John Walker), are told by a senior NASA official James Kelloway (Hal Holbrook) that the contractor saved a bit too much money on the ship and they would not make it to Mars alive. Not wanting to forfeit NASA’s dollars or reputation, Kelloway arranges for them to stage a counterfeit Mars mission at a base in the desert. The ship itself is still sent to Mars, and the world tracks it arriving, leaving, and returning.

            When an astute technician, Elliott Whittier (Robert Walden) notices a parallax discrepancy between the ship’s signal and the astronaut’s messages, he “disappears,” but he has already told his friend, journalist Robert Caulfield (Elliott Gould), and Caulfield, with an embarrassing legacy of failed scoops and conspiracies unveiled, sets out to find a career-saving real one. His life is continually threatened in the process. The staging is only partially realistic, allowing Gould to play a spaced-out goofball with an unerring nose for the fake mission.

            After a staged landing and walk on the pretend Martian desert—slow-mo added to Brubaker’s descent for lesser Martian gravity—the ship heads back with Brubaker hiding a clue about a fake Western town in his broadcast to his wife (“Let’s go there when I get home,”) But when the ship itself burns up in the atmosphere on its return from Mars, the astronauts become dispensable and, in fact, cannot return because they are officially dead. Realizing this, they grab an available plane and try to escape to any place where they can be seen and expose the hoax, saving their lives and putting Dr. Kelloway up shit’s creek.

Unfortunately, the plane has too little fuel to reach civilization, so has to land in the desert. The three men decide to pick three different directions in hopes that one at least will survive with the truth. Willis and Walker are picked off by Kelloway’s men—murdered in the desert. Meanwhile, Caulfield solves the riddle during a phone call to Brubaker’s “widow,” Brenda, leaves her baffled and a bit disturbed by his inquiry, and then sets out to find the base and the men without telling her his suspicions.

            Brubaker has reached a pay phone and gets it to work, but Brenda is just out the door to his funeral. Caulfield arrives a hair ahead of Kelloway’s hitmen and manages to enlist a crop-dusting pilot, Albain (played by Telly Savalas), leading to more slapstick, as Brubaker is left hanging onto the wing as they take off, and then Albain finally gets rid of the pursuing military craft by letting loose an octopus-like cloud of pesticide at just the juncture that causes the planes to crash into a mountain.

The two men (Brubaker and Caulfield) arrive together at the memorial service for the three astronauts. They are walking toward the gathering and approaching it. We see the amazement and withheld euphoria on Brenda’s face, for nothing computes; there is no way for her to explain what she sees, yet she is believing it because of who the two men are. She can’t solve the riddle, but it is a riddle she would give her life for. Kelloway’s look is a mix of consternation, resignation, and jig’s up.

            I hated that the movie ended then. I wanted to see the next scene, but that was above the pay grade of the script. For what it was, it was the perfect ending, as witnessed by my repeated return to it and occasional attempts to write the next scene. They are never any good.

            This movie gives rise to some weird real-world synchronicities.

            The two men approaching the memorial service are both husbands of Barbra Streisand in her serial monogamies. The character of the earlier one has rescued the character of the later one. That seems to me to say something to me about Streisand and Hillary Clinton’s failed campaign against Donald Trump but, like Mars return, it doesn’t quite compute.

            John Walker (O. J. Simpson) was involved in the hoax, fugue, and mock trial of perhaps the century. He proved the one true legatee of Capricorn One.

            Nine years after the film, I published Richard C. Hoagland’s Monuments of Mars: A City on the Edge of Forever, about a different NASA Martian conspiracy. Real or not—Hoagland and I have never settled on how much he is gaming the evidence—his “Face” and “City” on Mars were certainly more credible and meaningful (either way) than a bogus space mission under capitalist pretense. Hoagland wrote: “Either these features are natural, and my investigation is a complete waste of time, or they are artificial and this is one of the most important discoveries of our entire existence on Earth. If they are artificial, it is imperative that we figure them out, because they do not belong there. Their presence is trying very hard to tell us something extraordinary.”

            Charles Brubaker told Brenda, and Brenda told Caulfield: “It seemed so real.” A quarter of a century later, we can’t tell one conspiracy from another. Capricorn One is a throwback to a time when a simple hoax could be performed by greedy ambitious men in a Deep State and deeper rabbit hole.

Coming Home, directed by Hal Ashby (1978). This is a very good, in fact groundbreaking, movie about the Vietnam War and the mental, emotional, and physical suffering of the U.S. soldiers who ended up in it by choice or misfortune and returning with irreparable physical and emotional damage, but I would probably not have reviewed it at the time on its own merits. I saw it in 2022, forty-four years later, and found myself watching the subtexts as well as the movie.

It is a poignant time capsule of 1978 and, by proximity, 1968: the music (Stones, Dylan, Beatles, etc.), the pacing, landscapes, language, social contexts, belief systems and, most of all, linearity of events, the mundane cutting edges and resolutions of trauma and betrayal in the context of an understandable failure to see how radical films would soon become. There is something haunting about three dimensions almost discovering an invisible fourth. A new way of looking at the world is about to be born but not quite ready. Coming Home captures it—not only Vietnam and “coming home” from a bad war but the end of the Vietnam era.

            The other subtext is Jon Voigt. I watched his brilliant, critically acclaimed performance in Midnight Cowboy opposite Dustin Hoffman. In Ratso, Hoffman captured an urban cowboy’s high caricature, tragic hyperboles, and dark kitsch, but Voigt’s Joe Buck captured the exquisite subtlety of street pain that comes from losing rights to one’s own body and feelings and having one’s self converted to its street value. In allowing a young gay man to give him a blow job for cash, Buck grimaces in his body’s response to unwanted pleasure. That’s Vogt’s signature. In Coming Home, he is just as subtle, emotionally intelligent, and nuanced playing crippled veteran Luke Martin opposite lover Sally Hyde (Jane Fonda) and her returning soldier husband Bob Hyde (Bruce Dern). Voigt’s crippled character has also lost the freedom of his body, not from poverty but from the effects of war. It is the same actor, the same nuanced interpretation of pleasure and pain.

            Yet it was impossible to watch Voigt in 2022 without thinking of his political evolution and intimate polarizations. This Right Wing, Trump-loving klaxon is the father of liberal humanitarian Angelina Jolie and the half-brother of Left Wing songwriter and folksinger Chip Taylor. Luke Martin is an insurgent, anti-establishment firebrand who chains himself to a military fence as self-sacrificingly as a protector of forests chains himself to a tree. Nothing fits, but it has to because it’s there.

In the Bonus Features, I am fooled again. A current-day Voigt is astute, compassionate, thoughtful, and remarkably courteous in not dragging politics into his interview. He praises Jane Fonda, his co-star and the romantic consort of his character; he credits her with personal and artistic integrity and commitment to real values, though her politics are antithetical to his.

I don’t have an answer to this, but I don’t have to. It’s a movie, not a loyalty gauge or psychoanalysis of beliefs. Still, it is just interesting to watch young Voigt, whose character is confined to a wheelchair and who says that he had practice for the role for months with real injured vets to get it right, be such an astute interpreter of the human condition. He has every right to believe what he does—political views are complicated matters given that pretty much all politicians are scam artists and liars of one sort or another. But Donald Trump is one of the least nuanced and cruelest public figures on the planet. Voigt’s Luke Martin is Trump’s antipode, especially in every sense of Vietnam. The movie may be ordinary if emotionally wrenching, but the tensions underlying it are what stand out with hindsight.

The Warriors, directed by Walter Hill (1979).  The Warriors is somewhat dated by the fact that street violence has gotten so out of hand that the gangs in this film are almost comical, their fights as surreal as the dances of “West Side Story.” Nonetheless this odyssey through the long axis of the New York subway system by a group of Coney Island warriors on a bad night following a Bronx assassination of the gang leader of gang leaders, based on a text of Xenophon that was adapted by novelist Sol Yurick, reenacts the mythological perils and sacred transformations undergone by Mediterranean and subway seafarers from time immemorial. 

The Warriors functions as a parable or elaborate antistrophe, an archetype replicating a Greek history its players have no way of knowing. The gang confronts continual chimerical and camouflaged adversaries, including female gangs and covens. The echo from ancient times begins this way: Cyrus (Roger Hill) of Grammercy Riffs has called a summit at the end in Van Cortlandt Park at the end of the IRT train line to announce a truce in order to end their fighting om a narcostate-like business, but the sadistic, deranged Luther of the Rogues (David Patrick Kelly) has smuggled a gun to the intentional weapon-less meeting. On the spot, he picks the Warriors to falsely accuse. It takes. The word spreads by messenger and minstrel (DJ). The Warriors are then chased through the subway system by enemies and specters, actual and symbolic. Various members are separated, arrested, or otherwise picked off until only a tiny band is left, led by assistant gang leader Swan (Michael Beck), the film’s hero. Along the way, the group has collected a girl Mercy (Deborah Van Valkenburgh), who unofficially shares the helm with Swan. One of the highlights of a generally male script is how she attaches herself to them while they pass through her relatives’ territory: “You can’t just soldier on through here.” She wants out of her situation, and Swan and his friends are the best thing that has appeared in a long while—like Brando and Eva Marie Saint or Bogart and Hepburn.

Until the very end when matters are rectified between the Riffs and Rogues, the Warriors carry the mark of Caine, for the false accusation has taken on a life of its own. Swan finally handles the over-confident Luther with a knife outdrawing his gun. Luther’s response to why he triggered the whole thing speaks for hundreds of incendiary madmen (and madwomen) in movies: “Because I’m having a good time!” Luther did it for amusement and to see just how much trouble and chaos he could cause. It worked like a magical dark charm until his reckoning and denouement.

As historic and contemporary odysseys converge in artistic transfiguration, time vanishes and Persian and Phoenician armies meet on the Coney Island beach. Before the conclusion, as the Warriors finally make it out of the underground gauntlets to the el and gaze out over the squalor of their homeland at dawn, Swan wonders aloud, “Is this what we fought all night to get home to?” Every manifestation of Odysseus/Ulysses has pondered the same.

The Wanderers, directed by Philip Kaufman (1979). This magical realist adaptation of Richard Price’s NYC race-oriented gangs and coming-of-age novel elicits an emergent countercultural history, as Dion and The Belmonts gradually turn into Bob Dylan, and a slate of fifties artless sex games (“elbow-tit” and “strip poker”) and gang wars is wiped mordantly clean by drugs and Vietnam. A young Karen Allen plays a gum-chewing ingenue, Nina, lured into a rigged game of strip poker by Richie (Ken Wahl), as girls and boys unconsciously rotate around heavy mafia dudes, gang-bangers, and fuck-ups, their parents, as they try to break out of the various trances and traps. Then JFK is assassinated, and the world of The Wanderers changes forever.

Windwalker, directed by Kieth Merrill (1980). A morality play and Plains Indian myth come to life, this saga of the “coming of old age,” withheld death, and a stolen and recovered child would work fine in English but is absolutely stunning in Crow and Cheyenne with English subtitles. The native tongues speak the essential truth, both mythic and cultural, behind the myth and its tale.

The grandfather warrior is left for dead on a scaffold of sticks, then awakes surprised to find that the Afterlife is much like this world, just as cold and barren. But he isn’t dead, and he gets to use his extra time to rescue his family from a deep winter and meet his lost son.

Resurrection, directed by David Petrie (1980). I don’t remember it well enough to review fully, but what I do is memorable. Ellen Burstyn plays Edna Mae Macaulay, an ordinary woman who almost dies when her husband mis-drives his new sports car off a California cliff with her as a passenger. She undergoes one of the first “literary” near-death experiences and returns from the afterlife, though confined to a wheelchair. She has new healing powers. She is gradually able to heal herself and walk again.

Sam Sheppard plays Cal Carpenter, a man whom she heals and who become her lover, a vintage Sheppard supporting role. He is ultimately disturbed by her capacities because she refuses to frame them in a Christian context. After he comes after her, firing a rifle, he ends up in jail and, at end of a long personal journey and the film, Edna is running a gas station in the desert, an almost unbelievable cinematic ploy, perhaps intended to downplay her charisma as well as provide a partly Christlike, partly Clark Kent cover for her superpower. The last scene is the most memorable. She hugs Bobby, the child of a one-time customer who stops for gas. The boy is dying of terminal cancer. As she squeezes him, exuding pure love, the audience knows and Edna knows that he will be cured. The boy knows on another level. His mother doesn’t. That closing montage is the film’s meaning in a nutshell: the power of love, the power that ties the living and the dead. It needs no name or branding, and anything less is healed or destroyed by its force.  

Ordinary People, directed by Robert Redford (1980) and starring Timothy Hutton newly out of Berkeley High. A dysfunctional nuclear family’s collapse merges with a boy’s coming-of-age struggle and a hard-won redemption. Everyone registers his or her role emotionally at just the right pitch, not a simple feat: Donald Sutherland as the emotionally evolving father, Mary Tyler Moore as the neurotic, inconsolable mother, Judd Hirsch as the wise therapist. That is what makes Ordinary People a psychoanalytic as well as a cinematic classic: David and Lisa for a new era.

Hutton’s Conrad Jarrett has to deal with PTSD after his older brother Buck’s dies in a boating accident. What he comes to realize is that his own transparency and honor are gifts, not flaws, as his mother believes. Beth Jarrett, who idolized her lost son, makes that recognition as difficult for him as she can, for she does not want Buck outshone, let alone replaced by something better. His lack of emotional authenticity and carelessness too closely reflected her own.

Tootsie, directed by Sydney Pollack (1982). Mrs. Doubtfire, directed by Chris Columbus (1993). Twelfth Night, directed by William Shakespeare (1602). Tootsie and Mrs. Doubtfire are nimble gender-switch romantic comedies. In each a young man disguises himself as a woman in order to gain entrée into a situation and station he could not as a man. Dustin Hoffman plays Michael Dorsey, an unemployed actor who applies for a female role as hospital administrator in a popular daytime soap opera called Southwest General when male roles are repeatedly unavailable (he is waiting tables). Robin Williams plays Daniel Hillard, a devoted father trying to get back into the good graces of his estranged wife Miranda (Sally Field) and to maintain close ties with his young children by applying for a Nanny job (his own daycare replacement) as Mrs. Euphegenia Doubtfire, a name he picks off a newspaper headline about a possible arsonist. Michael Dorsey, now a woman. falls in love with Julie Nichols (another character in Southwest General). Each fake “woman” must compete with uncamouflaged males for the affection of his love interest, but each “woman”also  gains intimacy and trust as a woman friend. Each also has to deal with male expectations regarding women while they are actually men who hold those expectations..

Both identity-shift slapsticks draw off their roots in William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, which is such an epitome of the trope that it can’t be trumped in subtlety or twists, though the two films do an admirable job. Twelfth Night has Shakespeare’s brilliance with language and lyricism, raising the bar for gender-ambiguity comedies. Viola dresses as a boy to work for Duke Orsinio who delegates her to conduct his courtship of Countess Olivia who falls in love with Viola instead, thinking her to be a boy. When Viola’s brother Sebastian arrives, he steps into Viola’s place and solves the problem by marrying Olivia, while Orsinio marries Viola once her gender is revealed: “Conceal me what I am, and be my aid for such disguise as haply shall become the form of my intent.” (Act 1, Scene 2). “Foolery, sir, does walk about the orb like the sun, it shines everywhere” (Act 3, Scene 1). Tootsie and Mrs. Doubtfire convert these rhapsodies into contemporary vernacular plots and jabber.

E.T. The Extraterrestrial, directed by Steven Spielberg (1982). This is the ultimate post-modern fairy tale, pure Brothers Grimm. The magic flows from suburban kitsch like djinn’s lantern—from the scene in which the E.T. qua leprechaun or elf skulks about the yard, to the scene which young Elliott (Henry Thomas) shows his toys to the extraterrestrial botanist, explaining each superhero and then demonstrating to the curious visitor how his Pez candy dispenser works, to E.T. hiding among the toys in the closet as another stuffed animal, to the alien heading off without a costume among the kids on Halloween night, finally able to be hidden without disguise, to the film’s crescendo of boys on flying bikes and E.T. putting his finger on Elliott’s third eye. It is vindication, redemption, revelation, Star Trek to the tenth degree!

In the garish cornucopian subculture of cheap American melodramas and bagatelles,  E.T. enacts a constant link between the incipient alien who always exists and the actual one who never does. But which is Spielberg’s E.T.? The boundary between child and adult fudges a different boundary between alien and human. But it isn’t so different. Compassion and empathy are cosmic and universal, between any two states of being and their incipient bardos, including between loneliness and recognition or between different phases of a boy and man-to-be.  Sadly, Henry Thomas was consigned to play weird preachers and deceitful ne’er-do-wells after his post-child-star career.

I am reminded of something I wrote in Episodes in Disguise of a Marriage:

The Hardy Boys tried to warn us, but we turned the omens scattered pentacles and lesser arcana. They said Sinister Signpost . . .  Broken Blade . . . .  We saw Bayport and smarmy crooks. They said: Melted Coins . . . Secret Panel . . .  Yellow Feather . . .  Twisted Claw . . . Flickering Torch . . . Old Mill. We found smuggled diamonds, missing medallions, and opened buried treasures, counterfeit documents, and doors without knobs or keyholes.

Frank and Joe enlisted Nancy Drew. Case by case, they tried to crack the code: those island parties and summer nights, dandelion fields and stars across which unidentified objects flew. Bu aliases and anonyms prevailed. The Secret of Wildcat Swamp and Footprints Under the Window became The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch and The Curse of Oak Island. Soluble crimes were replaced by time-travelers, cattle abductors, yetis, and chupacabras.Poltergeists followed folks back to their hometowns where psi phenomena spread pandemically.

“Help us,” cried Frank and Joe. “Solve our cases before they are turned into scripted ideology, pulp fiction, identity politics. Get us out of here before they consign us to agents of the adult ruling class.”

Too late, alas, too late!

A talisman birthed at Woodstock, a lantern lit in sphinxes at Burning Man, lost ground luminosity and fireflies: “summer dreams ripped at the seams . . . .” And what else? What the fuck else? Phantom Freighter . . . Hidden Harbor . . . Clue in the Embers . . . .  Whispering Statue . . . Velvet Mask . . . Black Keys . . .  Broken Locket. . . .

Tender Mercies, directed by Bruce Beresford, starring Robert Duvall and Tess Harper (1983).  In one of the simplest redemptive love stories in the history of cinema, nothing happens; everything happens.  A tiny shift in attention causes the desert to bloom.

Rumblefish, directed by Francis Ford Coppola (1983). I don’t remember enough of this movie to review it fully, but I remember the hold it had over our own kids who were fourteen and nine when it came out. They performed scenes from it in the way that our generated mimicked The Rocky Horror Show: cogent dialogues from the S. E. Hinton novel it was based on.

I remember Matt Dillon as Rusty James, innocent martyr and warrior, confronting his psychotic genius brother, the unnamed Motorcycle Boy, played by Mickey Rourke. My daughter, director Miranda July, later got to meet the slightly comfortable, rogue actor at a party, and they discovered they were both born in Vermont.

In Rumblefish, Rourke has been missing for a while but returns to bring law and a code to Tulsa town, as Rusty is trying to find his own coming-out identity and turf. I remember the film in disconnected pieces: the title fighting fish in a bowl or tank are a luminescent orange or gold in my mind, real or imaginal. I remember that the brothers freed the animals in a pet shop, kids again together, and the Motorcycle Boy died in the aftermath. I remember the enigmatic mood around the film, part noir, part parable, part magic urban geography and a universe divided by railroad tracks, class, and race. I remember a moody period piece with iconic performances: Diane Lane, Nicholas Cage, Dennis Hopper, Laurence Fishburne, Tom Waits, Sofia Coppola, and Vincent Spano among many mainline and cameo performers.

Hinton wrote numerous young-adult novels set in her native Oklahoma. Another S. E. Hinton/Matt Dillon film directed by Coppola and released in 1983, The Outsiders, also had a host of rising stars, Diane Lane and Tom Waits again, but also Tom Cruise, Rob Lowe, Ralph Macchio, and Patrick Swayzee. Similarly coming-of-age, it was darker, part of an extended downwardly spiraling gang ritual. Our kids also liked this one but didn’t perform it.

The Karate Kid, directed by John Avildsen ((1984), starring Ralph Macchio and Elisabeth Shue in their true teen debuts. Karate Kid, the first and only authentic movie in what became a deteriorating franchise, also features the incomparable Pat Morita in a grand Zen role—Don Juan Matus meets Yoda, and both meet Bruce Lee). The impeccable mythodrama can be watched over and over or in pieces from any point. All its bits work (as vignettes or holographs) and then together—the mother-son migration from New Jersey, the primal confrontation on the beach, the “special girl,” the courtship, the retaliation, the punishment, the training, the initiation, the sacred battle, the victory, the kōan: nothing is finally won or lost, only self-respect and the Tao. 

That the story operates an octave above the typical teen sitcom is a big piece of its charm. The magic and danger implicit in everyday life are exposed. Classic lines abound: “Get him a body bag!”; “Wax on, wax off”; “Do karate yes or do karate no; do karate halfway, squashed like bug”; “Different yet same; no different yet different.”

UFOria. directed by Frank Binder, starring Fred Ward, Harry Dean Stanton, and Cindy Williams (1985).  The essentially magical realist love story hidden behind outer-space paranoia and euphoria—half New Age jubilee, half Vegas badlands sleaze—is set in Melvin and Howard territory: the vast suburban desert, the equally vast deserted exurbs of Spielburg’s E.T. It is a seemingly unintentional paraody of E.T. but also its transformation through “American Graffiti” into the next half life.  Aliens or anything needs to inhabit this place before it dies of vulgarity and its own evangelical decadence.

In the story, a UFO vision turns shop-clerk Arlene (Williams) into a priestess. Sheldon Bart (Ward), a drifter and small-time crook, has the hots for her and expects a quick hit-and-run affair but is converted to her UFO faith and transformed into an obedient mensch.  Stanton plays—what else?—a corrupt priest selling stolen vehicles from his used-car pulpit. Brother Bud is trying to win Sheldon to the dark side.  

The UFO portrayals are so glitzily tinny and amateur that the movie finally disintegrates into farce. Yet goofy, unflagging Arlene with her ridiculous-looking sky rigs wins the day and transforms the fortune booth into a real galactic vision.

Full Metal Jacket, directed by Stanley Kubrick and starring a hip, jive Matthew Modine (1987).  The first half of the film features a drill sergeant (played by a real one) who drives an imbalanced recruit to mayhem (a graphic murder-suicide). It is a classic one-act drama, but the Vietnam landscape of the second half is what elevates this realistic parable beyond Platoon and Apocalypse Now.

One didn’t think at the time that there was another Vietnam movie in the cultural data bank, but Full Metal Jacket transcends the rest, capturing the tragedy, brutality, and banality of violence that shadows a bizarro occupying American post-counterculture army with an explicitness and irony that keep telling you, “There is something truer than true about this.”  One moment it is all a macabre joke; the next minute the guy who told the joke it is nailed by a sniper. There are no victors or heroes, only muck and absurdity. The tough young Vietnamese prostitute who “could suck the silver off a doorknob,” says one soldier, is the soul sister of the propped-up Vietcong male corpse to whom the men are paying post-mortem homage for his warrior tenacity. His status as a superhero elevates their own forfeited lives to fabled times instead of lost PTSD-ed youths. 

The dying Vietcong sniper is no different from any of her victims, as sex and death converge in her agonized body.  “Heavy,” the young soldiers understand and assure each other, but all they can do is put her out of her misery and then be grateful that they get to live into another mysterious twilight, marching through the life-choking tropical paddies chanting “The Mickey Mouse Club Song” because it feels about as safe and rational as anything: equally vapid, equally profound.

In Episodes in Disguise of a Marriage, I wrote:

Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 Full Metal Jacket made the war’s sadism and banality tangible. At film’s end, a straggle of soldiers tromps across a Southeast Asian field at dusk following a day on the job that culminated with nailing a Vietcong sniper who had executed several of their buddies that afternoon. They find her in a death passion, pleading in memorized English, “Kill me, kill me.”

“Hardcore,” remarks one, before they accept her offer. There is no other ethical or unethical option. En route back to their barracks, they break into the Mickey Mouse Club song, a chant of sacred kitsch and lost innocence.

[Phil] Caputo called it A Rumor of War, a droll understatement. He described standing with a friend in chat when a bullet terminated the guy in a pool of his own blood; then slogging for weeks through mud, insects, heat, humidity, dense foliage and reeds, past exhaustion, past farmers and children, a next horror always on the horizon; then taking revenge on those farmers and children by setting fire to their huts. He found his own rampage the most terrifying of all, for it revealed what was inside him.

I was the beneficiary of class, privilege, and race, though my benefits came from trauma, too. It was a terminal moment, my first in the world of nations. It was live or die, and this time I chose to live. In another lifetime I might have bowed to the darkness.

If I had been born in North Vietnam, would I have known even how to be me? Lucid dreams took me to the streets of Hanoi. I walked among them as if on a planet of Toliman. In deceptively peaceful meadows, I sidestepped landmines. Was this Palestine or Xuân Lộc?

No one emerged unscathed from Vietnam, for it wasn’t a war; it was a vortex, and there is no deferment from that.

La Bamba, written and directed by Luis Valdez and starring Lou Diamond Phillips in a role so charismatic it seems both ridiculous and punitive that he has played mainly petty crooks ever since (1987).  I know that La Bamba is watered down, pop, sentimental foam and barely the chicano story it pretends to be—but it captures the holy chant inside the rock star—and its sentimentality is redeemed by its gentle innocence.  Valdez celebrates Richie Valenzuela and the birth of rock and roll, plus he brings Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper briefly and indelibly to life for one ominous moment at the boarding of that fatal plane in Iowa, a scene so palpable that you almost feel that you are shuffling aboard or escaping the flight yourself to get out of the Midwestern chill, only to land in a farm funeral pyre, the event that shadows the film but does not appear. Instead we see Richie’s Mom’s scream. Fame has hatched its feared dragon’s egg.

Despite the film’s criticisms, Valens’ initiation in Mexico is an act of pure street shamanism. And who could argue with the epochal songs covered by Los Lobos?

Frantic, directed by Roman Polanski (1988). After vacationing Dr. Richard Walker (Harrison Ford) comes out of his hotel-room shower singing, “Why oh why do I love Paris?” and discovers his wife Sondra (Betty Buckley) missing—she was there just a few minutes ago—Roman Polanski pulls off one of the best Alfred Hitchcock (and Roman Polanski) imitations of all time simultaneously. I put it this way because Emmanuelle Seigner as Michelle leads Walker through the underbelly of Paris and her own charms in search of his wife when in real life she is Polanski’s wife, the antidote to his pedophiliac reputation. In the film, she becomes Walker’s lure, allowing Polanski to cast a dream-like parable of his own American nightmare.  I am overstating things, and anyway the film has a French sensibility so that the ineluctably and incorrigibly American Dr. Walker, an incorruptible James Stewart type, is saved from falling for a drug-smuggling, cabaret-hopping Michelle in a sexy dominatrix-like uniform and a police cap by his frantic, heroic search for his wife. Michelle is returned to innocence but loses her life, and Walker gets Sondra (and her suitcase) back while foiling an international weapons smuggling plot that went awry from an inadvertently switched suitcase. A trigger for a nuclear device (in Michelle’s suitcase) was on its way to someone who intended to use it, but she took it by mistake to her hotel room, giving a slightly flimsy basis to a whirlwind of action and plot twists that follow. Couldn’t the bad guy have just traded for the right suitcase? No one had to be the wiser.

Walker finally tossed the device into the Seine, frustrating the smugglers, the Mossad and Arab and American agents trying to get ahold of it the device, thereby salvaging Polanski’s peace credentials and patriotism, but not getting him out of his own legal mess—that would take another twenty-five years.

The film’s resolution is also a bit lame given the build-up; that is where Hitchcock never fails and what makes him Hitchcock. Along the way in Frantic, there’s plenty of mystery and action and a tantalizing matchbook with a picture of a parrot, the only half-decent clue. The interactions between Ford as a hyper-rational American with Wild West powers and the witty but hapless Paris police are quite Hitchcock-like (see The Man Who Knew Too Much), but also Keystone cops. Walker didn’t know too much, but he knew more than the police who refused to declare Sondra missing because, after all, this is Paris and a possible romance with a stranger is more likely than a crime.

The suspense holds for a while, then the borderline flirtation between Richard Walker and Michelle and their sexy public dance for all to see and be led or misled vis a vis Walker’s affection for his wife and anyone’s agenda for the nuclear devise. The Manson girls appear nowhere, but their ghoulish energy are drawn into Polanski’s art. It will take Quentin Tarantino to unlock that door.  

Rain Man, directed by Barry Levinson (1988) and ensembled by Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise who plays Abbot to Hoffman’s Costello while they also play Bonnie and Clyde together.  On their classic road-trip jaunt (because Rain Man, a child’s baby-talk version of Raymond that stuck in an adult’s mind, won’t fly), Hoffman masters the idiot-savant genre, while Cruise’s petty-crook Charlie Babbit is transformed by contact with his rediscovered brother Rain Man, as he finds his own conscience and then his heart too. 

Obsessive compulsion is given its quintessential portrayal as the film’s driver when Hoffman, citing a log of plane crashes—airline, date, and number killed—requires them to cross the country by car (this speech was cut from the airline version); then the duo has to stop and beg entrance at a farmhouse on the Plains so the Rain Man can watch Judge Wapner on TV. They proceed through counting cards in Vegas, an idiot savant’s forte, to metamorphosis and the ultimate reclaiming of a lost childhood.

Die Hard, directed by John McTiernan and starring Bruce Willis as John McCane, renegade New York City cop at an L.A. Christmas party overseen by his estranged corporate wife Holly played by Bonnie Bedelia (1988). The Christmas takedown of Nakatomi Plaza with its falling bodies, elevator shaft, and labyrinth of upper-story mazes was the biggest American urban demolition (albeit fictive) until 9/11, which, to a degree, put Die Hard in its place by turning its premise into something both more and less than a pretense and bluff, but Die Hard already put itself in its place by losing its acuity (like Karate Kid) in a franchise, film by film.

            In the original, British Shakespearian actor Alan Rickman slides right into the role of Hans Gruber, German mastermind. Reginald Vel Johnson is the astonished LAPD cop who must re-find his courage—McCane’s sole ally on the outside, as they pull each other through. Hart Bochner plays Harry Ellis in a perfect caricature of an L.A. executive who talks himself right into his own death, recognizing his mistake a second before he is shot by Gruber for not delivering McCane.

What puts the accent mark on this film is humor and droll one-liners amid the carnage.  

Prelude to a Kiss, directed by Norman René (1992). Alec Baldwin and Meg Ryan star in this romance of opposite romantic souls transformed by a supernatural event. Peter (Baldwin), a conservative publishing executive, falls in love with liberal free-spirit Rita (Ryan), a part-time bartender planning to become a graphic designer. Everything in their romance and courtship goes wonderfully for a while. Ryan is magical here as in many of her roles, ingenue comedienne, cutest of cute dream girls, and wry philosopher. Baldwin is marginally bearable, though this younger version has less baggage, and he did play Peter in the 1988 theatrical version (a script also written by René), so he earned the role.

At Peter and Rita’s picture-perfect wedding, an elderly wandering stranger, Julius Blier (Sydney Walker) whom the groom’s people think must be from the bride’s side and the bride’s people think must be from the groom’s side, asks to kiss the bride. Rita allows it and they kiss. A spirit wind blows through the proceeding, and their ACUTE anxieties cause their souls to switch bodies. Rita is now in Julius’ body, while Julius is a young bride with a new husband in love with her.

            The bulk of the remainder of the film (and the play, which I saw at at Berkeley Rep prior to seeing the film) centers around Peter gradually realizing that Rita is no longer Rita and that he is no longer attracted to whoever she is and doesn’t love her, then discovering that Rita’s soul is in Julius’ body. That takes some quick, half-assed psychic work, even as some Grimm Brothers’ fairy-tale magic is needed create a device work in the first place.

Finding the princess trapped in a “frog” forces Peter to accept love for a soul in a body that is no longer attractive or appropriate for romance. Likewise, Julius has to become a nubile woman, a role for which he is ill-suited, but it is better than his own body which has a terminal illness. Then he must finally be willing to trade bodies back with Rita. First, though, Peter has to get them together, a process made more difficult because Rita’s parents actually prefer Julius as Rita to their own daughter as Rita. They can’t tell that something crucial is missing. They fall for style and dress and miss the soul.

            The switch is made during via spirit wind. Then Julius as Julius reminds Rita and Peter to floss, something he regretted not doing, and accepts his body (“like an old familiar suit of clothes”). The story is filled with parables about AIDS, possession, souls, and the existential nature of love. It is a bit on the light side, more magical realism than dream yoga or Resurrection, so the viewers have to suspend disbelief and bring what hermetic wisdom they have to a series of sitcom metaphors. If they are stuck at princesses and frogs, that is what they will get. They can also project Tibetan Buddhist phowa or A Course in Miracles.

Unforgiven, directed by and starring Clint Eastwood as the outlaw William Munny (1992).  Seemingly a parable on the relationship between myth and reality, this is also, like Windwalker, a tale of an old guy supposedly at the end of his life run, finding powers that not only restore and exceed his prior exploits but allow him to effect a core transubstantiation.  Eastwood’s commentaries on life and death (“When you kill a man, you take everything he has and everything he’s gonna have” and “It’s not about fairness”) give this anti-morality morality play extra resonance. 

Munny’s gunfight against a full constabulary in a saloon serves as the transformative myth that elucidates everything else, and is worth many re-watchings, from the explanation for why he shot an unarmed man (“he better arm himself if he’s gonna decorate his establishment with the body of my friend”) to his existential confrontation with the sheriff played by Gene Hackman, to his vanishing like a ghost at the film’s end. Eastwood plays up this denouement, as every anecdote, myth, and tall tale that make up the corpus of the plot leading to last gunfight point you almost away from the obvious so that you are sucked naïvely into the drama of the moment. You are told that epochal showdowns like this are only legends or tall tales, but you are in the midst of one. You see how the heroic is hidden in the ordinary, and the hero in his own crust. Then the moment presents itself, and the legend becomes real. That’s Eastwood’s game, and it is played to perfection. Watch it a second time, and there is no tip-off or flaw; the tip-offs are like Poe’s purloined letter, hidden in themselves.

At a whole other level, this is a film about a frontier house of prostitution and the martyrdom and authentication of a Magdalene-like whore. Eastwood’s Munny gives testimony simultaneously to her sacred wound and the Christic energy of his deceased wife—as the lodge mother says, he doesn’t have a woman, “at least one above ground.” But because of her, and the other baptismal “unforgiving” women in the film, Munny is no longer Munny, but he never was—not the legend—he has to be redeemed and lost to be redeemed again, or lost and redeemed to be lost again. And Eastwood brilliantly casts the writing of this myth within the myth, so that the whole script is a story within a story that emerges from itself like a giant soap bubble, but a true existential Western.

Groundhog Day, directed by Harold Ramis, written by Ramis and Danny Rubin (1993). It takes a deep stroke of artistry to change a long-standing meme within a culture. Ramis and Rubin did this (with Bill Murray’s help). They took the meme of Groundhog Day from February 2^nd—whether the groundhog sees his or her shadow on that day, hence portending a short or long remaining winter—and turned it into any day that repeats, actually or metaphorically, again and again.

No one we know lives a literal “groundhog day” like Bill Murray’s character, sarcastic, small-minded Pittsburgh, PA t.v. weatherman, Phil Connors, who wakes up again and again to Sonny and Cher on the radio alarm on the same morning in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, with the previous “same day’s” activities erased from everyone else’s memories. Phil alone is in Groundhog Day purgatory. Since the movie, “groundhog day” has come to stand for “groundhog day”-like cycles in samsara where one is stuck their own habits and repetitions, the same sorts of things happening uncannily or synchronously with analogous results.

             Ramis and Rubin probably picked February for its kitsch value, but both sorts of “groundhog days” amount to the same crossroads: a chance to change a weather or karmic pattern. In the movie, after first trying various ways to commit suicide to get out of “Groundhog Day” repeating—the novelty and its opportunities wear thing—Connors gradually realizes that he can improve himself—not just his skillset (for instance, learning to play the piano) but his personality, his capacity for compassion, his care for others, his vulnerability to love. That’s what karma is and why committing suicide doesn’t evade it. In the film, self-inflicted deaths are immediately nullified; Phil wakes up to Sonny and Cher again. Finally, instead of just trying to seduce his producer, Rita Hooper (Andie McDowell), he finally recognizes her as a person, confesses his tricks, falls in love with her, and breaks the spell so that he wakes up in bed with her beside him—end of Groundhog Day!

While in a time loop, Connors must patiently develop his abilities and change his attitudes, one by one—for “time loop,” substitute “series of lifetimes” or “life cycles.” He has to “see” himself for who he is just as he has to learn the piano lesson by lesson. There are no shortcuts, but that’s what lives are.

While his older female piano teacher doesn’t remember him from same-year February 2^nd to February 2^nd, he returns with more ability, though meeting her as if for the first time. She goes from teaching a beginner the instrument’s first keys and notes to developing a minor maestro who then performs for his astonished team. The teacher doesn’t know that she is welcoming back her own student—nor do any teachers under the amnesia of lifetimes and reincarnations.

Connors also explores the single day so fully that he is able to see the disasters that will occur, and he stations himself in the appropriate places, site after site, to help prevent accidents falls tumbles. It that sense, the film is a slapstick comedy—Laurel and Hardy—and its events can’t all be crammed into a single normal-length feature, so we also see time speeded up in cartoon fashion, likely years’ worth of events in seconds.

So Groundhog Day is a comedy with a serious message (or a parable in a comic package), showing what an ordinary life is and how it offers opportunities for deep change by changing it into a magical life. Though Ramis and Rubin deny metaphysical intentions, the film is saturated with Hindu karma, Nietzschean eternal return, Gurdjieffian remembering, and Ouspenskian breaking the cycle of existence and rebirth. Read P. D. Ouspensky’s early twentieth-century novel, translated from Russian, The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin. My mother’s cousin, filmmaker Radley Metzger, wanted to make a movie of it as far back as the early 1970s, but Groundhog Day stole his thunder.

                  From Episodes in Disguise of a Marriage:

          One afternoon that spring, I lay on our carport roof, reading P.D. Ouspensky’s Strange Life of Ivan Osokin, a recent recommendation of [poet Robert} Kelly’s. “It’s one of those special books,” he promised, “that will change you forever.”

In 1902 in Moscow, after dropping his girlfriend Zinaida at a railroad station, Ivan realized he had reached the ultimate impasse. He knew that she was about to leave him; he was out of work and prospects. Nothing in his world was right or would ever be right again. He considered suicide but chose instead to go to a famous magician. The magus sat by a fire, a black Siberian cat perched on the back of his chair, an hourglass on a small ivory table.

“‘If only I had known what I should come to,’ Ivan says. ‘But I believed so much in myself, believed in my own strength. I wanted to go my own way. I was afraid of nothing. I threw away everything that people value and I never looked back. But now I would give half my life to go back and become like other people . . . . I can’t fight any more. I’ve gotten myself into a sort of bog. I can’t make a single movement.’”

Stuck and hopeless, he sought supernatural aid.

This was a truly great magician, so Ivan’s request was within his range, but he thought it a bad idea—one shouldn’t mess with time or fate. Yet the young man was so distraught that, against his better judgment, he agreed to return him to a selected point in his childhood, to live his life over from there.

Ivan reappears in a grade-school dorm, full of resolve. But memory has deceived him. Starting with a pillow fight, events he had imagined as easily reversible turn out to be more complicated and entangled, their enactment fated in ways he hadn’t remembered. He does the same things for different reasons. Then he repeats his actions for the same reasons because he has forgotten their prior incidence—and he begins to wonder if this journey through experience, this reliving, is his only lifetime or if, maybe, he lived it before.

He finds himself back in the magician’s room, making the same request (Chapter XXVI is identical to Chapter I)—if only he could live his life over, he would do it so much better.

“The old man smiles and nods. ‘I can carry out your wish,’ he says, ‘but it will not be of any use; it will not make things any better for you.’

“Osokin throws himself into an armchair and holds his head in his hands.

“‘Tell me,’ he says, ‘is it true that I have already been here with you before?’

“‘It is true,’ says the magician.

“‘And I asked you the same thing?’

“‘You did.’

“‘And shall I come again?’”

Yes, in essence, the magician tells him. Or, at least, you can do no better. Under favorable circumstances, you will come to my door, again and again .  . . until you realize that it will work out exactly the same every time. “In that there can be no difference and no change.”

Ivan can return a hundred times, he may have already returned hundreds of times. If he makes the same request, he will return again, at best.

“‘But this is simply turning round on a wheel!’ protests Osokin. ‘It is a trap!’

“The old man smiles.

“‘My dear friend,’ he says, ‘this trap is called life . . . . You ask me what you are to do. I answer: live. It is your only chance . . . . If you still want to go back and begin again I will send you back even to the day of your birth, if you like, but I warn you that you will come here again—if you can.’”

Kelly was right; the book was seminal. I felt as though I had been to a magician like Osokin, and it was him.

How did I awake in time to find mentors and guides? Why was I led to Fabian, guided back to Lindy, time and again? How did Kelly know to summon me to his salon? How did I recognize him in the pother and fog?

Live! That was it. No more but no less.

Sleepless in Seattle, directed by Nora Ephron (1993). Our first Netflix rental on October 6, 2005 was Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound. That reminds me that of his films should be on this list, particularly Vertigo, Spellbound, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and North by Northwest. I left them off partly because I saw them last too long ago—some as a child—and partly because they are thoroughly discussed and dissected. Their images are melded to my unconscious: the winding staircase in San Francisco, the shifting identity of Kim Novak as an alias and an alias of an alias, a Freudian dream of a wheel represetning a gun (a revolver), the four presidents obscenely carved into native granite put in context by the vulgarity of a chase across them, the sound of Doris Day singing “Que Sera, Sera” curling up the stairs to her kidnapped son.

We followed Spellbound with You Can Count on Me and The Man from Laramie, filled with images of outlaws, cattle, and revenge through a child’s eyes; I wanted to see it again as an adult.

            Sleepless in Seattle was our fourth rental. It is hard to believe that the meme had been in our culture for twelve years before we thought to check out its source movie. I hadn’t started writing reviews yet, and I apparently didn’t think the film was worth doubling back on but, after watching it a second time in March 2023 (when it was streamed on Netflix), I realized just how remarkable it is. It not only defined the world right before the dominance of internet, 9/11, Iraq, Obama, Trump, COVID-19, and Ukraine, but it also reflects a prior world in which Macauley Culkin and Tatum O’Neale could dominate references, themes, and romantic comedic dialogue. Ephron’s genius is to foresee the world that was coming by reflecting it in the world that is ending, a reflection so fresh and original that it is still moving and hilarious thirty years later. She is giving shape to complex relational hyperobjects—Reality t.v., online dating, Instagram couples—all of which are on the immediate horizon, while she is staying emotionally closer to Jimmy Durante, who opens the Sleepless in Seattle soundtrack singing “As Time Goes By” and closes it with “Make Someone Happy.” She places these songs and others in the plot so skillfully that they could have originated a part of the score for a musical.

            Its larger soundtrack captures the roots of one era in the dominant romantic—moody, tragic, loyal, magical—memes of another along with thethe advent, in differing degrees, of women taking the lead and male recognition of it and also of fatal attractions and fate itself. Ephron’s exquisitely inserted tracks include “A Kiss to Build a Dream” (Louie Armstrong), “Back in the Saddle Again” (meaning dating after widowerhood, Gene Autry), and “Stand By Your Man” (Tammy Wynette).

            Nora Ephron, on a true writer’s binge, frames Sleepless in Seattle within the 1957 film An Affair to Remember, which starred Carey Grant and Deborah Kerr and centered around an aborted Valentine’s Day meeting on the observation deck of the Empire State Building. By framing her story within the references and field of the earlier film, Ephron completes aspects of romance left unfinished by Leo McCarey and the era of the “affair” and film itself. Sleepless in Seattle works because a series of people each in turn not only know the plot of the former movie but honor it enough to provide guidance and passwords in the contemporary plot. Characters, their friends, and finally and most deliciously the officer blocking the entrance of Annie Reed (Meg Ryan) to the needed elevator because the observation deck is closed all fall back on An Affair to Remember to know how to act and how the new probability of the same set of events is supposed to work out. An Affair to Remember does guarantee a happy ending to Sleepless in Seattle, but it borrows its themes to set its archetypal terms. At the same time, Sleepless is independent, and its thread can be consummated without knowledge of the first imbedded in it; in that sense, it is a film within a film that is within it. That lets Ephron run together the meanings of romance, dating, blind dates, love, and romantic magic across three generations during which they change one another ontologically, creating the bind in which the various characters find themselves, as they attempt to make the right choices between opposing world views regarding love, marriage, destiny, and appropriate courtship.

            In fact, the film is just as much about chance, fate, signs, the riddles of angelic or algorithmic guidance (the nature of accident), and the difference between a story and a life. Sleepless’ arc is to meld the two frames seamlessly enough that the viewer suspends disbelief and enjoys the fusion.

Tom Hanks plays Samuel Baldwin, a widower who relocates from Chicago to Seattle to start over again after the death of his wife Maggie (Carey Lowell)—he is an architect with an eight-year-old boy, Jonah, played by Ross Malinger. Jonah calls in to a pop-psychologist emceed talk show to help find a new wife for his father who has become, in the words of host Dr. Marcia Fieldstone (the voice of Caroline Aaron), sleepless in Seattle. The germinal trope of Sleepless in Seattle from the landscape of call-in radio shows, when the film is watched decades later, how current Reality identities were born. “Sleepless in Seattle” is an otherwise secret man’s “user name.” The concept is nacent.

Annie is driving from her engagement dinner with Walter (Bill Pullman), a caricature of a bad match—he is allergic to everything except . . . no, that too. The hyperbolic slapstick reminds me that Meg Ryan is more than the forties It girl of the 1990s; she is a superb comedienne in the styles of both eras. I remember my t’ai chi teacher of time, Ron Sieh, being approached while doing his set in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco to conduct a t’ai chi class in another Meg Ryan film. He performed the scene as instructed, but it was cut. A Dzogchen practitioner as well as an aficionado of Senyassin—Rajneesh women who were known for sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll—Ron remarked with some awe that they were able to make up Meg Ryan to look more like a deva than an Earth woman—unfortunately as the years passed, I think that Ms. Ryan wanted to keep the look, which is conferred by actual devas not by makeup. Anyway I didn’t most see that. I saw  comedienne who put on a brilliant one-woman show of jokes about Christmas carols and a medical show as she turned the dial on her car radio before briefly landing on, then leaving, and returning to Marcia Fieldstone, and getting hooked on the duet of Sam and Jonah. The moment at which Ryan as Annie Reed sings, “Horses, horses, horses,” followed by a bit of “Jingle Bells” was impeccably timed and had the perfect quotient of hamming.

The romantic comedy is about more than just Meg Ryan, an overlap of eras and movies, and the “sleepless in Seattle” meme. In interactions between Jonah and young friend Jessica (Gaby Hoffmann), Ephron gets to play with New Age metaphysics on likely her own dividing line between faith and satire, as (for instance) when Jessica tells Jonah that children can remember their past lives because they are more pure. In actual New Age circumstances, it would not be satire. In a Woody Allen movie, it would only be satire. In Sleepless, it lies on a border between them where, if you stretch the film into more Sethian and theosophical space-time, a still present Maggie is guiding if not embodying Annie as a partial-walk-in, all the way to a forgotten backpack and teddy bear on the observation deck of the Empire State, which is a hole in dimensions as well as time. Ephron leaves that clue in amid her mix of forties cynicism and nineties irony.

Naked, directed by Mike Leigh (1993), starring a shape-shifting David Thewlis. Thewlis brings to life British madman, itinerant, street person, and conspiracy theorist Johnny Fletcher. No description can capture the range and fancies of Thewlis’ Beckett-like invention of Fletcher (with Leigh’s permission)— a rapist, thief, drunk, general fuck-up and ne’er-do-well who delivers an eloquent series of soliloquies and sermons, a stunning prophecy of not only the world of the 2020s but its conspiracy theories incipient almost thirty years earlier. Johnny preaching on the Mephistophelean dangers of bar codes is an authentic forerunner of QAnon’s serpent DNA.

           No director is as missing from Guide to Cinema, given the place he occupies in my actual pantheon, as Leigh. I saw many of his movies almost twenty years before I began writing reviews, in fact before the internet. I also briefly connected with Leigh, as he wrote a foreword for a Fletcher–like crop-circle book I published in the early 2000s.

Among wonderful Leigh films I can’t remember well enough to review (I recall the energy but not their content) are High Hopes and Life Is Sweet, British working-class dramas with iconic characters and scenes. These preceded Naked (1988 and 1990, respectively). I may have seen one or two others from the same era, though they blur into a single serial-like film.

I did review my favorite Leigh film in this book, his masterpiece Secrets & Lies (1996) which, in a sense, is a summation of all the stories that went before in terms of characters and setting.

I also liked Mr. Turner (2014), Leigh’s biopic of the life of painter J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851) in which the director essentially recreates Turner’s art, milieu, and lovers, painting its colors right onto the film. Turner is played by Leigh regular Timothy Spall who, as the lead character’s brother in Secrets & Lies, delivers the film’s title soliloquy (see later). I don’t remember why I didn’t choose to review Mr. Turner at the time, but I think that it’s because the film felt emotionally flat compared to Leigh’s other films—its grandeur was a bit like a summation of a Thomas Hardy novel, not Leigh’s forte compared to Life is Sweet ironies in the British projects. Beautiful cinematic artistry transcended its own emotional verisimilitude.

Leigh’s films fold for me into those of Ken Loach. Loach has a much larger body of available work, including several whole BBC series of English and Irish history. He covers the same working-class milieu with some of the same loving characters and deconstructions. See my reviews of Loach later in this book.

            A similar milieu (more or less) frames films made from Roddy Doyle’s novels: The Commitments (about the formation of a rock band), directed by Alan Parker (1991), The Snapper (about a pregnant daughter with an unnamed father), directed by Stephen Frears (1993), and The Van (about the purchase, rise, and fall of a mobile food van, an ado carried out by a husband against his wife’s wishes), directed by Stephen Frears (1996). These make up Doyle’s classic Barrytown trilogy. The same themes appear in his novels, including his debut Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha and The Woman Who Walked Into Doors.

Faraway, So Close, directed by Win Wenders (1993). I discovered this film very late in my Wenders angelology. His earlier film about angels set in Berlin, Wings of Desire (1987), and its American version, City of Angels (1998), played a role in my own mythology, but I don’t remember them well enough to review. My psychic teacher John Friedlander described this in a book of his classes I put together (Recentering Seth): “Angels are a different evolutionary line and sometimes, in fact, can and do decide that they would like to become humans. So they voluntarily give up being in a permanently ecstatic experience range to suffer, to have just the kind of experience that humans have.

“There are a few humans who get so upset with suffering they go the other way, but a lot more devas who move into being humans than humans who go into being devas because in the long term, every one of us gets to a place where it all makes sense, suffering included. Devas can want contrast too, and they don’t get it in their line, so they decide to become human. Not worse or better, just different in the infinite variety of creation.”

            John perfectly describes the mortal-angel interplay in these three films: Angels exist outside of time and observe human affairs. They are curious about the strange things that go on there, especially the cruelty and, ultimately, they want to learn about the greater universe, so they become human.

            From Wenders’ commentary, I assume that he doesn’t actually believe in angels, but he trusts the trope so profoundly that he gives, at least from John’s angelology, a remarkably accurate view of angel life, including angel-human exchanges and incarnations. What Wenders is more interested in is Berlin after the recent fall of the Soviet wall (Lindy and I took our first trip abroad there in ’93, and I will be posting travel journals on substack after film reviews). In Faraway, So Close, the director layers generations of German history on top of each other topically and visually, focusing on the horror of the Third Reich, while inviting Mikhail Gorbachev, Peter Falk, and Lou Reed to play themselves in post-Wall Berlin. Reed even gives a concert—that is, part of a concert of his is grafted into the film. Falk plays his “Colombo” character and himself simultaneously. Wenders also invites his one-time child actress, no longer a child or an actress, who played Alice in Alice in the Cities to play a bit part in a restaurant. In that sense, thefilm is a homecoming and reunion for Wenders.

            The plot is meandering, unconvincing, oddly violent at times, and more symbolic than realistic. Before ordering the film and even while watching it, I was confused about its relationship to Wings of Desire. For a while, I thought it might even be a third version of the same story, but it turned out to an angel sequence or, as Wenders prefers, not a sequel but a continuation inspired by the reunification of Berlin— a new look at a new old city.

Wenders gives his second original angel, Cassiel, played by Otto Sander, his own chance to become human. Cassiel densifies by catching a falling child and saving her from death; by interfering in human-angel affairs, he becomes human. From there, the film is mainly a series of Cassiel’s interactions with humans and other “fallen” angels in the troubling world of physical life. As Cassiel experiences human existence, he finds himself embodying many of its ugliest features, including a desire to carry a gun as protection and threat. He still has angelic empathy and love, but it is distorted by the human experience. He tries to help people, then tries to participate with them, but ultimately can’t settle down into bodily existence and is murdered in an absurd surreal scene involving a trapeze, a boat, criminals, a river, a bridge, a theft, and a kidnapping.

John Friedlander captures why the title of Wenders’ first “angel” film is more accurate, if less descriptive, than the American version cast for Nicholas Cage and Meg Ryan: “Desire is divine enticement to experience.” That’s angelology in a nutshell.

            In the German versions, Nastassja Kinski plays Cassiel’s fellow angel Raphaela, who consorts with him on rooftops, towers, and gargoyles, follows him invisibly in life, and receives him back in death. She embodies pure angelic love and empathy, while Cassiel loses his own angelic innocence among humans, but he learns the truth about time and incarnation.

            Though Wenders doesn’t make the film as a believer as much as by developing a metaphor, the beauty of his own aesthetic captures the fine line between angel and human visually and thematically. The camera wandering over Berlin sees frozen angels in stone, angels in paintings, and creatures fluctuating between states of existence. The camera is both angel and human, and that, for a consummate filmmaker, is art if not faith. Otherwise, it’s very messy cosmology, needing a Gurdjieff or Milarepa to straighten it out.  

Pulp Fiction, directed by Quentin Tarantino (1994). This film has so many genre-breaking, genre-creating scenes: Mia (Uma Thurman) and hitman Vinnie Vega just back from Amsterdam (John Travlota) dine at Jack Rabbit Slim’s, a fifties-theme restaurant offering versions of “Buddy Holly” and “Mamie Van Doren.” Mia creates a manic mad dance to Neil Diamond’s “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon.” Vinnie purchase heroin from Lance (Eric Stoltz), who is super-welcoming: “Mi casa, tu casa.” He is not so happy when Vince arrives back with an overdosed Mia, denying vocally that he knows him. Vinnie and Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) talk the philosophy of hitmen and conduct offhand murders of pleading Brett (Frank Whaley) and his lounging associate in Brett’s apartment. Incompetent fanatics hold up Vince and Jules’ restaurant in a biblically themed denouement. I could do without the Bruce Willis character and his neuroses, but it’s all pulp fiction and noir comedy at their horrific best.

From The Bardo of Waking Life: That Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain beat out Don DeLillo’s Underworld for the 1997 National Book Award is akin to Forrest Gump taking the 1994 Academy Award over Pulp Fiction.  The past, dead on arrival and primping for the prom, somehow stole the future because no one could see where we were headed.  Five minutes later we were there. 

Herman Melville’s Moby Dick almost didn’t make it out of the nineteenth century, yet we still look toward it from the past.

Once Were Warriors, directed by Lee Tamahori (1994). If I have to pick my favorite film of all time and am given only one choice, I tend to go with this one. The chemistry between Rena Owen (Beth) and Temeura Morrison (tough-guy Jake the Mus) is as electric as anything that Marlon Brando or Ava Gardner ever perpetrated for a lens; in fact, with Maori ferocity and authenticity, more so.  Add Maori actors throughout (they play their own lives at a small imaginal distance); a sacred-profane New Zealand hip-hop sound-track; an undercurrent of ancient warrior traditions bubbling up in the ghettos of Auckland; rituals, tattoos, and gangs that would do Watts or Mogadishu proud—and you have a full Shakespearean-scale Polynesian Atooi warrior diaspora and tragedy of lost kings: naked revelation and harsh rebirth. “Once were warriors” means “now urban flotsam and debris.”

Three + Two Memorable Scenes:

•Jake and Beth’s early duet, “Here is My Heart” in front of their friends—and then (late) the scene’s antipode: Beth going face to face with Jake and daring him to kill her—the epitome of adoration followed by the epitome of domestic violence. The story jumps into another dimension and you know you are watching more than a film because these are more than actors.

•The training lesson in Maori warriorship at the detention facility: The teacher seizes the taiaha staff from Beth and Jake’s son who is vandalizing the place, breaking windows and, after taunting him (“You think your fist is your weapon….?”), shows him how the real taiaha works and tells him to put itinside himself.

•Jake and his family in the car singing, “What’s The Time, Mr. Wolf?”: “One o’clock, two o’clock, three o’clock…wooly wooly, wooly wooly.” They are headed to disaster but happy for a moment, and the song counts out their hours both ways.

•Jake’s culminating fight scene in which he almost kills his former friend for raping his daughter Grace puts most Hollywood or Hong-Kong battles to shame with its brute emotional and physical force. 

•Every interaction between the doomed Grace and the orphan boy Toot who lives in the car by the bridge is magical—Toot is played by a real Maori street kid.

Lindy and I saw Once Were Warriors because we had the wrong time for the film we went to the movie theater to see and this was playing in an adjacent plex. The moment Jake and Beth began to sing, chills went down me. I knew that this was going to be special, like nothing else. Twenty-plus years later, it is still like nothing else.

The Shawshank Redemption, directed by Frank Darabont, starring Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman (1994). The ultimate incarceration film becomes the ultimate escape from hell and ultimate sting, with cinema’s most delicious revenge.  Shawshank unsparingly portrays prison’s betrayal, brutality, sociopathy, and cruelty (administered whenever possible rather than whenever necessary), but it also shows hope, spirit, redemption, honor, and loyalty.

The devices that drive the plot—the poster covering the wall, the bank caper before its discovery, the can hidden among the rocks, the closing reunion on the beach—are all absurdly improbable at more than one level. Why dig relentlessly through the wall and risk discovery or possible cell transfer with your secret tunnel hidden only a taped poster of Raquel Welsh? Tape could hardly be very durable on rough stone. But once Andy Dufresne (Robbins) penetrates the sewer system and swims through shit to be free, who cares? Who cares as Red (Freeman) walks across the beach at Zihuatanejo, and Defresne looks up to see him? It’s a fairy tale and parable more than believable plotting. And it has what Stephen King so often lacks in his stories: an ending that justifies the build-up, maybe because he is not trapped by his own nihilistic version of the supernatural. This is more like his native Maine.

Shawshank is many people’s all-time favorite film, especially celebrities when stock interviewed (“Favorite film?”). It is the first of two Stephen King prison dramas directed by Darabont (for the second, see The Green Mile, 1999).

Fresh, directed by Boaz Yakin (1994). “Fresh,” birth name Michael (Sean Nelson), is a twelve-year-old projects-dwelling drug runner for Esteban (Giancarlo Esposito). He is saving his money in a secret hiding place in an unvisited wooded area, while growing up wily in the New York City’s narco-world, absorbing lessons and knocks from the world.

His estranged father, Sam (Samuel L. Jackson), a skilled Washington Square chess player and drifter, gradually schools the unruly boy in the game. Fresh takes his lessons, their logic, from the board into the world, and uses them to conduct a “sting,” tricking Esteban into a mistake and bringing him to justice, while winning himself and his sister a new identity and reprieve. Even so, when he returns from this tour de force to play mere table chess with his father, he gets bawled out for being late. The film closes with Sam realizing that his street-hardened son has tears streaming down his face. Perhaps he becomes a real father after the credits.

            This directorial debut is also an extended hip-hop video, with music scored by Stewart Copeland of The Police.

In one shockingly memorable scene, Jake, one of the nastiest of the drug lookouts, is angered by a younger, smaller kid, Curtis, putting dazzling moves on him and defeating him in a one-on-one schoolyard game of hoops. Jake leaves, seemingly to lick his wounds, but comes back with a gun and shoots Curtis dead on the court in a pool of blood, as Fresh watches. Jake is then murdered by cronies in Fresh’s brilliant “chess” sting.

The Crossing Guard, directed by Sean Penn (1995).  In all-purpose pro actor David Morse’s finest, fullest, and most nuanced role, he plays opposite Jack Nicholson (Freddie Gale) as John Booth, a drunk driver who hit and killed Gale’s daughter and has just been released from his jail sentence.  Gale means to execute Booth himself. 

An intrinsic reversal of good and evil, innocence and guilt culminates in a catharsis and conversion, as the purified killer leads the debauched father to his daughter’s grave to pray and receive a blessing. Nicholson takes the role of the distraught father right to the edge of overacting, as (for instance) when he decries an imaginative strip tease that varies because “it’s traditional” to script it a certain way. He might be spoofing his own role as well as capturing the epitome of late-onset OCD.

Anjelica Huston plays Gale’s ex-wife Mary with such earnestly facetious aplomb that she is a film in herself. Penn’s ex-wife-to-be, Robin Wright, plays Jojo, Booth’s classy, artistic love interest, but his guilt overwhelms the relationship. He too needs the redemption of the final scene at the grave. Father, daughter, and drunk driver come together in a culminating spirit dance.

An attempt at a similar redemption fails utterly in the possibly copycat Reservation Road, a decade-plus later hit-and-run drama. The plot is archetypal and echoes Norse and Celtic myths before there even were motorized vehicles.

Gotti, directed by Robert Harmon (1996). Three years before The Sopranos debuted, all of the elements of a somewhat lovable existential crime family are there in Gotti: the code of honor, the gaudy hits with bodies bouncing under a hail of bullets, the betrayers and rats, the don as beloved protector and benefactor of the neighborhood, the attempt to make sense in a nation of laws ruled by lawless among those on the wrong side of the rule of law, and some of the same actors in near identical roles: Dominic Chianese, Vincent Pastore. It looks like a Sopranos homecoming but is more like a prequel.

The Sopranos had eighty-six episodes to work with; Gotti had less than two hours, yet it delivered the same essential message on a less New Jersey provincial scale (and I loved The Sopranos for what it was): we do what we do because that’s who we are. We aren’t any worse than most of the white-collar businesses in the United States. We are far more moral, civilized, and patriotic than the international warlords and crime families that are going to follow us. They have no code, no honor, no rules; they will bring anarchy. “You gonna to wish you had the Cosa Nostra” is what Armand Assante, perfectly cast as gentleman don John Gotti, says at the beginning and again at the end of the film. “You’re gonna miss John Gotti.”

Gotti is also a beloved father and husband and creative intellect with a wild streak. He can’t restrain himself. As he puts it, “They want you to be humble. I’m humble. What good would it do them if I was humble?”

The movie’s arc is the rise and fall of John Gotti. From a man’s man (by his own definition) and a model elegant mobster, upholder of order as well as the rebel who breaks the order to translate it ahead a generation, he turns into a media star whose autograph tourists who find themselves at the same restaurant ask. “A mafia don operates in secret,” Gotti is told by an old timer. “He doesn’t belong on the cover of Time Magazine. You’re rubbing it in their faces [the FBI], and they going to put you in a cage for the rest of your life.” One wiretap and a Sammy Gravano flip did it.

            Gravano (played by William Forsythe is a nuanced, fluctuating character, someone you want to be friends with not because he is dangerous but because he is charming and wins you over despite his sociopathic tastes. He raises the question, one of the existential ones in the film, why does someone who comes from wealth and education like himself go into our line of work? Think Michael Corleone. Gotti nails it, the deeper call of life.

The movie is as continually funny as it is violent with jokes and one liners that could work in a comedian’s route.

            My highlight is Anthony Quinn, suddenly coming back to life in 2023 (when I watched it) as underboss Neil Dellacroce. No one else in the film, even more significant players, bring the sheer power and presence of Quinn. He is like Brando, Belmondo, and Jimmie Stewart, the master of the moment, automatically the focus of any scene he is in. He brings the aura of a golden age of cinema: Zorba the Greek, The Guns of Navarone, Lawrence of Arabia. He must have relished Dellacroce’s death scene because he took it to another level. I don’t remember his exact words; they were something like, “There was a girl once. . . .”

            “The Irish girl?” Gotti asks.

            “Yes,” he thinks, but his mind is confused, then his dying words. “The whole thing [meaning the life] passes in five fucking minutes.” 

SubUrbia, directed by Richard Linklater (1996).  This is the slackers’ version of Waiting for Godot, as author Eric Bogosian (he wrote the original play) actually lives up to Samuel Beckett’s genius in a different “Waiting For” setting outside a convenience store half a century later—waiting for their rock-star friend to return to the hangout after playing a gig in town. West Asian immigrants (the store’s owners) and local teen dropouts collide in a clash of values and lives going in opposite directions (“…you’re given everything,” says the proprietor, “and you piss it all away….”).  Incredible speeches invoke cosmic freedom, success and celebrity, sex, identity, privilege, and despair, belying the lost souls that populate the arid suburban wasteland of America and speak them. Yes, a slackers’ Godot:

Jeff: “Jesus Christ, nothing makes a difference in the first fucking place. Nothing ever changes, man. Fifty years from now, we’re all gonna be dead. And there’ll be new people standing here, drinking beer, eating pizza, bitching and moaning about the price of Oreos and they won’t even know we were ever here, and then fifty years after that, those suckers will be dust and bones, and there’ll be all these generations of suckers trying to figure out what the fuck they’re doing on this fucking planet, and they’ll all be full of shit. It’s all so fucking futile!”

Tim: “If it’s all so fucking futile, what the fuck are you so fucking upset about, fuckhead?”

And then:

Buff: “If I were in his shoes [their rock-star buddy], every morning I’d get up singing, man. I’d do my workout, take a shower, followed by a hearty breakfast of steak and eggs washed down with a pot of hot coffee and a six-pack of Coors Light. Then I’d order my bodyguard to go find my babe, who would appear decked out in her all-black leather Victoria’s Secret custom-made body suit so I’d, like, have to chew off all her clothes until she was completely nude, except she’d have these amazing dragon tattoos all over her body and pierced nipples with little gold peace signs hangin’ from ’em. And then she’d take out this half-ounce of blow and snap out a few Mongol lines and we’d vaporize a few million brains cells, screw for about an hour, then spend the rest of the morning trashed, watching . . . Gilligan.”

Jeff: “That sounds so great, man, yes. Hey, what would you do in the afternoon?”

Buff: “Same—more of the same.”

Jeff: “Yeah?”

Buff: “Just keep doin’ the same thing all the time, around and around the clock, with an occasional burger or slice thrown in for our vitamins and energy. [head-bangs street sign] Ow, man. And then instead of watching Gilligan we’d watch…Captain Kirk.”

Jeff: “That sounds so depressing.”

Buff: “Oh come on, man, tell me you wouldn’t love it!”

Jeff: “No, I’m not saying I wouldn’t love it. No, I’m saying that after a while it’d wear thin.”

Buff: “Yeah, a long while. A long, long while . . . .  A long, long, long while.”

Jeff: “Okay, okay.”

Buff: “A long, long, long—”

He walks into a lamp post.

SubUrbia foreshadows Linklater’s later “bardo of waking life” in the canon of “lost in a hell realm,” otherwise known as samsara or late decadent capitalism or the rise and fall of the American mall.

Secrets and Lies, directed by Mike Leigh (1996).  This working-class flipflop of status and race is Leigh’s grandest and bravest ensemble improv, a switched-identity farce at an echelon that echoes Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and Much Ado About Nothing  with race replacing gender. The inimitable Brenda Blethyn stars as single Mom Cynthia with a taciturn daughter, Roxanne (Claire Rushbrook).

While going nowhere and making her family miserable, Cynthia is offered an unlikely life raft. She is discovered by a prior daughter that she gave up for adoption at birth without wanting to look at what she birthed (a contrivance to cast a fenale in a usual male situation). The girl, Hortense (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), turns out to be black and, after adoption, matures into an optometrist, far more socially and professionally accomplished and with more emotional intelligence than her birth mom or the white working-class daughter her birth mom raised. All along, Cynthia presumed the child was from a different affair; she barely even remembers her drunk “one-night stand” affair at a party with an African American doctor. 

When Cynthia invites Hortense to a family gathering without warning any of the parties what’s up, all hell breaks loose, even before the dark secret is spilled. After it comes out, consummate Leigh actor Timothy Sprall delivers the films culminating soliloquy as Cynthia’s beleaguered brother with his own skeletons in the closet and debilitating traumas:

“Secrets and lies.  We’re all in pain.  Why can’t we share our pain?  I’ve spent my entire life trying to make people happy, and the three people in the world I love the most hate each other’s guts, I’m in the middle, and I can’t take it anymore.”

Carla’s Song,  directed by Ken Loach (1996): What starts as a love affair between a Scottish bus driver, George Lennox (Robert Carlyle) and a Nicaraguan refugee living in Glasgow, Carla (Oyanka Cabezas)—she meets him by sneaking onto the bus without paying a fare—ends up in Central American in the middle of the Sandinista-Contra war with plenty of war crimes and conflicting loyalties, as George tries to help Carla reunite with her boyfriend, baby daughter, and family. Trauma ultimately overwhelms the characters and their story, but Loach succeeds, as usual, in giving us a human series of interactions in political, class, and ethnic turbulence while recreating their tattered landscapes in meticulous local detail.

Beautiful Girls, directed by Ted Demme (1996).  This once-discarded sleeper film, periodically revived, stars Timothy Hutton, Matt Dillon, Uma Thurman, Mira Sorvino, Natalie Portman, and several other nascent or soon-to-be stars in a small-town homecoming fable, either snowy New England (where the story happens) or snowy Minnesota (where it was shot).  From the beginning, you feel as though these guys and girls are your own childhood friends revisited, as you eavesdrop on their conversations and laments about romance, marriage, and Life with a caputal L.  Rooted in idealized dysfunctional pasts, the characters reach to fantasy adult futures that are slipping away (like those elusive “beautiful girls” of the title).  Scene after scene hangs at the juncture where adolescent hope degrades into adult obligation—enigmatic, poignant, forever unresolved.

Vintage scenes include the group at the bar singing “Sweet Caroline,” Timothy Hutton’s Willie discussing baseball and love over a piano with Uma Thurman’s Andrea, Michael Rappaport’s Paul launching into a Hamlet-like soliloquy about super-models (“. . . bottled promise, scenes from a brand new day, hope dancing in stiletto heels . . . .”), and every interaction between Hutton and Portman (Willie and Marty) but particularly their flirtation at the ice rink and across the space between their houses. For Portman it is a Lolita nymphet role (reminiscent of Amelia Shankley as Alice in Dreamchild a decade earlier), a possibility that she will outgrow almost immediately (Portman later decried the role as too disturbing to have to play at that age, hence pedophiliac, but I think she is Me-Too-ing an innocent eros—attraction and care are timeless and fluctuate between parental and romantic views). 

While Beautiful Girls all but rewrites the term “bittersweet” for the Oxford English Dictionary, it closes with mild hope and a possible future. The Brothers McMullen, directed by and starring Ed Burns (1995), takes a slicker run at the same nineties landscape.

Sleepers, directed by Barry Levinson (1996), from a novel by Lorenzo Carcaterra with language as quick and funny as Raymond Chandler or Richard Price. Somehow I missed this one for twenty-seven years, hadn’t even heard of it. It’s big and haunting like Casablanca, The Godfather, and Citizen Kane, not quite their scale and grandeur but the same ballpark. Its depth of suffering and revelation shows how much we’ve lost since the internet and comcomitant thinning. I love its exuberant joy and sense of irreparable loss.

            Sleepers is centered in Hell’s Kitchen and a prank by kids with a pilfered hot-dog cart gone very wrong; it rolls down the subway stairs, comes apart in pieces, and pins a guy against the wall. That lands four pranksters in a boys’ reform school where they are tortured and raped for a year.

Thirteen years later two of them by chance come upon the worst of the guards at a restaurant (Nokes, played by Kevin Bacon), call him out, tell him he won’t get to try the establishment’s pot roast (better than the dish he ordered and is eating), shoot him multiple times, walk out of the place, but are identified by witness and are put on trial for murder.

The other two original pranksters who served with them and were also tortured scheme to use the case to put the reform school itself on trial instead. Their immediate challenge is that the boys were never officially “there” because, as juveniles, they had their records expunged. The game is to fool the judge, the defendants, the jury, and the remaining sadistic guards and either have the latter killed or exposed. That plays out with lucky twist and turns, a Rube Goldberg machine in action (as many movies are).

The film uses The Count of Monte Cristo as its trope for the highest art of revenge. The “Count” goes from a Classics Illustrated comic that one of the boys, Shakes, reads and identifies with, to a 1960s paperback he clutches as an amulet after he gets it as a gift. Sleepers is The Count of Monte Cristo miniaturized in Hell’s Kitchen, but it is also The Sopranos, The Godfather, and The Wanderers: the hood with all its rules, characters, mafia dons, paybacks, and prices. Again, it’s a big film, lots of stars, subplots, and moral and ethical equations.

            We are told in the credits that the City of New York and State of New York deny that any such institutions as appear in the film exist or ever existed, but Carcaterra says that all he changed is the names and places.

            The beauty of Sleepers is its rhythms and soft dissolves, showing the play of memory and time, past and present, trauma and its consequences, all wrapped together by the way images move through each other, each other’s textures, and time itself. Levinson’s brilliance suggests the works of Orson Welles in its mixing of past and present and the use of almost surreal images to blend time so that it flows through a tunnel or glitters mirage-like on the back of a hand. There are also loans from Alfred Hitchcock, Sergei Eisenstein, D.W. Griffith, Spike Lee, and sixties experimental films, brief tastes of Kenneth Anger and Stan Brakhage, making an art form that fuses with grand musical themes like those of The Vikings or The Magnificent Seven. The fusion of all of these makes an operatic abuse-and-crime masterpiece set in medium-old New York. A spiritual and religious (Catholic) backdrop transcends the story and makes a celebration of lost youth and urban poignancy beyond the storyline.

Sleepers opens with Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons singing “Walk Like a Man” and closes with its four boyz-to-men sitting around a meal with their one girl member, drumming on the table, covering the song until the closing theme washes it out like the wave of time that washes out the rest. They ahd thought they would know each other forever, but they will never be together again.  

The cast is an all-star team. That often can go wrong, but when it goes right, the result is a Broadway masterpiece. Kevin Bacon, again, is Nokes, the guard who humiliates and beats the boys and demands sex from them; he steals their innocence and becomes the tyrant that two of them kill at his cheap meal thirteen years after they get out. Billy Crudup is Tommy, one of the quartet as an adult and one of the two shooters; he stays a gangster and lives only to twenty-nine. Vittorio Gassman is King Benny, the local mob boss and community protector who helps orchestrate the events. Dustin Hoffman is Danny Hoffman, the alcoholic lawyer chosen to represent the two just badly enough to allow the scheme to percolate and just well enough to regain his senses in time to spring the trap. Minnie Driver is unforgettable as Carol, the one girl in the group, a social worker as an adult, a romantic who can’t get any of them to partner. Brad Pitt is Michael, one of the four grown to be a prosecuting attorney; he hatches the plot, plays his double adroitly like a counterspy, fooling judge and jury, then quits the scene and his job to become a carpenter in England. Jason Patric is Shakes, the narrator; he becomes a reporter after his release from the facility and is the voice that holds the story together. Robert De Niro is Father Bobby, the basketball-playing priest and moral fiber of the film. He is a recovered mobster and con who tries to read God’s will between the lines and provides an alibi, a Knicks-Celtics game backed up at the last minute by four miraculous ticket stubs. For the entire film, he is the confessional, the counterpart to its mobs and gangs, but just as street, just as savvy, just as tough. Insofar as the film is doused in Italian-American Catholicism, Father Bobby personifies it, the Pope of Hell’s Kitchen.

That cast is not counting dozens of other impeccable performances, particular by the teen actors who play the four leads as boys. They have to show the high dudgeon and spirit of the streets, then the broken spirits of youth bullied and violated, then the flare of Monte Cristo and revenge regained.

A Time to Kill, directed by Joel Schumacher (1996). This a big star-filled courtroom film, a high-drama, high budget adaptation of a John Grisham novel set in the Civil Rights era in a small town in the deep South. Matthew McConaughey plays Jake Tyler, a young attorney in rural Mississippi, who defends an equally young Samuel L. Jackson who plays the father of a ten-year-old girl who was raped, tortured, and left for dead by two redneck racist punks in their early twenties.

The rape is not what’s convened the court. Jackson’s character, Carl Lee Bailey, not trusting Southern justice, has gunned down the rapists as they entered the courtroom. Their trial never happened.

Tyler is defending Bailey, using an insanity plea to try, at worst, to keep him out of the electric chair. Kevin Spacey play Rufus Buckley, the witty swashbuckling D.A., looking to win votes with a death sentence, epitomizing biblical justice with evangelical oratory. Sandra Bullock is Ellen Roark, a bright, resourceful young law student, daughter of a famous attorney from the north, who offers Tyler her assistance for free. Their dialogue is both politically and erotically charged, lines tossed across region, class, and gender in the context of their growing flirtation, though Tyler stays out of an affair that is foreshadowed increasingly throughout the film, as it turns a different way. Tyler’s wife, lodging with their children out of town after several vandalism incidents and threats—fiery crosses on their lawn, et al.—is played by a thoughtful, reflective Ashley Judd. Tyler’s philosophical mentor disbarred lawyer, Lucien Wilbanks, is played by Donald Sutherland in his trademarked “wise outlier” guise. The judge, named (by Grisham I assume) Omar Noose in a bit of Mississippi drollery, is played by Patrick McGowan, another bit of drollery in that he branded himself as the archetypal “Prisoner” at the peak of his career.

            The film’s scope expands to include the polarizing tension between the NAACP and liberals from the North (along with Bailey’s local church supporters) and the local redneck community and national Klu Klax Klan summoned to town to set up a new chapter at a “promising” moment. Then the National Guard arrives to compete a sixties triptych.

We get to see both Left and Right contrivances and special interests behind the scenes. Roark is snatched by the Klan and almost lynched in a horrific ceremony—she is saved by an informer within the Klan (she was kidnapped conversely by a local police-officer Klansman in his official vehicle).

The dialogue is crisp and first-rate throughout—no surprise. The literate Akiva Goldsman, son of a famous psychologist and holocaust survivor, Mira Rothenberg, adapted the novel. In a key scene approaching the climax, Bailey confronts Tyler with the fact that they are not friends, that he is in fact the enemy but that’s why he chose him as his lawyer over the NAACP guys. Tyler balks but gets it. He has to think like them in the courtroom. So, he scraps his planned closing argument and instead, after apologizing to the jury for prior missteps (which have been exploited by Buckley), asks them to close their eyes as he describes in excruciating detail the original crime (the rape and attempted murder) leading to the crime being (the revenge killings,) and ends by saying, “Now imagine she’s white.”

The next scene is the hoopla outside the courthouse: “Innocent! Bailey’s innocent!” There’s still some clean-up—both mean and sweet—to sort out full justice.

Overall, the film, paced skillfully to a crescendo, gets across the multiple layers and moral ambiguities of its message, while letting some remarkable actors deliver Arthur-Miller-quality lines.   

Good Will Hunting, directed by Gus Van Sant and starring Matt Damon with Ben Affleck (1997), the title meaning Good “Will Hunting,” not Good-Will Hunting.  I love working-class Boston dramas—their mix of barely concealed racism, New England accents and street-tough talk, the Patriots (before they were good), and the lower-class common sense shadowing Ivy League conceit. What makes Good Will Hunting their epitome and transfiguration is the interaction between Damon as Will Hunting, an untaught, intellectually bashful math savant and childhood-abuse victim who’d rather be at the bar with his friends (or in a fist fight), and Robin Williams as his wise, creative psychiatrist. As Williams approaches Damon, pronouncing over and over, “It’s not your fault,” Damon (Will) goes from offhand dismissiveness to “yeah, okay, man” to “I know, I know” to “don’t fuck with me!” then tears and an embrace. We are looking at the most authentic therapy scene in cinema. Would that Williams himself could have had such a therapist!

Breakdown, directed by Jonathan Mostow (1997). This is an ugly movie that I mention because its images stay with me. Breakdown is Dean Koontz lite, and Dean Koontz is anything but lite. Note, this is the same year (’97) in which Molly Parker starred as Chyna Sheppard in a t.v. adaptation of the Koontz horror thriller Intensity. In Intensity, John C. McGinley plays Edgler Foreman Vess, a deranged sadistic cop and serial killer who specializes in torturing people, particularly young women, and breaking their minds, a pleasure he prefers before killing them. Sheppard becomes accidentally a kidnap victim of Vess who believes he is only taking her friend hostage after blowing up a Thanksgiving dinner in order to creatively torture another victim already in his custody. Sheppard proves his match (literally), as she ultimately gains the confidence of his victim and uses lighter fluid and a match to set him on fire. By then, you are relieved and pleased to see him burn unless you’re the Dalai Lama.

            Breakdown follows the same basic formula: very bad bad guy (or guys), the hero in a desperate situation, a dramatic turnaround, sweet revenge. Kurt Russell plays Jeff Taylor, a meek New Englander in over his head. who turns into an avenger and breaks a kidnapping-random-murder ring (in Arizona?, Texas?), when his wife Amy (Karen Quinlan) falls victim as the couple is driving their new Jeep Cherokee from San Diego back to Boston.

The ring is based on a series of seeming accidents that lead to someone’s car dying on the road, then help being offered by a seeming passing trucker, Red Barr (played to villain perfection by J. T. Walsh, a great character actor who died very young). Amy rides with Barr to a gas station while Jeff stays with his vehicle until he figures out it’s been tampered with and fixes it. Amy is nowhere to be found at the station. Jeff encounters Barr again, happily with a nearby police officer, but Barr pretends he never met Jeff, doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Jeff is baffled and worried, then is told who’s in cahoots by whom by the town dummy Billy (Jack Noseworthy) who sends him off with the classic line, “Who’s the dummy now?” Not Jeff for long. Through a series of miraculous tricks and escapes, he dispenses with Barr’s henchman, or in fact the tricked police officer does after the henchman guns him down just as he too is figuring out the sting. Jeff ends up stowing secretly aboard Barr’s truck which has Amy concealed in the cargo. He gets to Barr’s house and, though unarmed, manages to rescue his wife from a freezer in the barn’s cellar just in time. He has to confront Barr’s wife, son, and accomplice, stare down a gun, and steal a truck.

As I said, the images stick, even decades later: the dummy, the police officer realizing what’s happening a second too late, Jeff hidden watching Amy unloaded like a corpse until she comes to and Barr’s crony says, “You’ve got a live one.” Then Jeff going into the house and convincing Barr’s wife they have to look in the freezer despite Barr’s continued play-acting and denial—Amy is not his first victim by any means.

The only problem with this progression is that the film ends with a truck battle on the highway and Barr dead in ditch rather than exposed, handcuffed, and taken away. It doesn’t seem that justice gets done, which may be why the mind wants to replay it. You feel for poor Walsh but not Red Barr, and that’s a bit confusing too. All this stuff is confusing. This review is more about the genre and Dean Koontz than a movie he had ostensibly nothing to do with.   

Lewis and Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery, directed by Ken Burns (1997). At a moment when the country and its states and regions beginning to dis-attaching and realign, one can see deeper meanings and forebodings, evolutionary as well as evil, behind Ken Burn’s recounting of the formal exploration and discovery of the West that followed the Louisiana Purchase. Until Napoleon’s sale of New France to New England (the Thirteen Colonies and adjunct territories), Mexico (New Spain) was bigger than the United States. Of course, the later nineteenth-century imperial wars against Mexico were responsible for the southwestern part of a new mega-nation.  

Just one hundred years before my father-in-law Henry Hough was born in Red Lodge, Montana (1906), Lewis and Clark and their party of forty or so entered the future state as the first Americans and among the first white people (per the actual First Nations they encountered) to be seen in those parts. In a large boat, they followed the Missouri River out of St. Louis along its main flow, then its breaks in search of the Northwest Passage into the other Great Ocean. They had to portage as well as cut trees for smaller craft. That most of them made it to the Northwest Coast and then made it back despite disease, native attacks, wrong turns, dwindling supplies, and deep winters seems a miracle. From their last boat contact with President Thomas Jefferson, whose administration purchased the land from Napoleon and launched their mission, they sent back to the Capitol a live prairie dog, unknown birds, and plenty of dead specimens before they plunged into the unknown.

            The key to this story, not surprisingly, is the expedition’s contact with native tribes. Those are whose land they were crossing, peoples with a very different concept of nationhood and territory. Sacagawea, a Lemhi Shoshone woman taken captive at age twelve during a Hidatsa raid in 1800 and sold into a nonconsensual marriage with a Quebecois trapper, is their indispensable guide, translator, ethnoscientist, healer, and hunter-gatherer without whom the expedition would not have made it. She carries her newborn baby all the way.

            We see the great differences of tribes, the marauding Blackfoot and Hidatsa, the more peaceful and curious Shoshone, Caddoan Arikara, and Nez Perce. For a companion study of fierce Comanches and erudite Cheyenne set almost a hundred years later, see Hostiles, directed by Scott Cooper, starring Wes Studi, Christian Bale, and Rosamund Pike (2017). I didn’t review the film because pretty much everything I have to say about it is in other films of Army-Indian reconciliation (Windwalker, Outlaw Josey Wales, and anything with Adam Beach (who has a minor role in Hostiles), but it captures the scope of the Lewis and Clark aftermath, from New Mexico (see New Spain above) to Montana. Many films are simultaneously remakes and originals. Too much work and care went into making Hostiles to call it derivative, so I will just say that it is a generic post-Lewis-Clark Western, Native American Western, a meticulous rendition of an archetype.

Lewis and Clark and their sponsor Jefferson hoped for peace and assimilation, but the hordes that followed them and filled the land in record time (what took millennia in Europe and Asia) had no use for treaties or “redmen.” To most of the expedition, the Nations were human; to the settlers, they were animals, to be cleared with other obstacles.

            Burns interviews historians, contemporary Native Americans, and authors, notably William Least-Heat Moon. Narrator Hal Holbrook quotes from expedition members’ journals. We learn the character types of many of the men, particularly their leaders. While William Clark was a soldier-warrior and performs like one, not always ethically, Meriwether Lewis was a politician, secretary to Jefferson, and given to bouts of depression. That he survived the travails of the expedition meant that he somehow healed his bipolar tendencies. He did, but it was a cure of necessity, not a durable transformation. He could not make a life afterwards and ultimately died in debt, killing himself with a gun in a boarding house in Tennessee en route to Washington D.C. from Missouri with a plan of fixing his reputation and settling his debts. The tragedy of Lewis strikes to the essential tragedy of America and the West: abandonment and betrayal. The whole newing that the Lewis and Clark party discovered, the vast prairie land and mountain ranges, the Nations and their arts and spirits, were trampled and dismissed in the human stampede that followed. The expedition enabled that, but it also disclosed the wonder, uniqueness, and radiance of a land we now swarm over like an anthill. I believe that if Clark and Lewis had foreseen this, they wouldn’t have gone. They were God-fearing naturalists; they thought that they were opening a very different book.

Breakdown, directed by Jonathan Mostow (1997). This is an ugly movie that I mention briefly because its images stay with me. It is like Dean Koontz lite, and Dean Koontz is anything but lite. Note the same year (’97) in which Molly Parker starred as Chyna Sheppard in an adaptation of the Koontz t.v. horror thriller Intensity. John C. McGinley plays Edgler Foreman Vess, a deranged sadistic cop and serial killer who specializes in torturing people, particularly young women and breaking their minds, a pleasure he prefers before killing them. Sheppard accidentally ends up a kidnap victim of Vess who believes he is only taking her friend hostage after blowing up a Thanksgiving dinner in order to creatively torture another victim already in his custody. Sheppard proves his match, as she ultimately gains the confidence of his victim and uses lighter fluid and a match to set him on fire. By then, you are relieved and pleased to see him burn unless you’re the Dalai Lama.

            Breakdown follows the same basic formula: very bad bad guy (or guys), the hero in a desperate situation, a dramatic turnaround, by sweet revenge. Kurt Russell plays Jeff Taylor, a meek New England in over his head. who turns into an avenger and breaks a kidnapping-random-murder ring (in Arizona?, Texas?), when his wife Amy (Karen Quinlan) falls victim as the couple is driving their new Jeep Cherokee from San Diego back to Boston.

The ring is based on a series of seeming accidents that lead to the car dying on the road, then help being offered by a seeming passing trucker, Red Barr (played to villain perfection by J. T. Walsh, a great character actor who died young). Amy rides with Barr to a gas station while Jeff stays with his vehicle until he figures out it’s been tampered with. He encounters Barr again with a police officer, but Barr pretends he never met the guy. At a key point, Jeff is told who’s in cahoots by who with the town dummy Billy (Jack Noseworthy) who sends him off with the classic line, “Who’s the dummy now?” Not Jeff for long. Through a series of miraculous tricks and escapes, he dispenses with Barr’s henchman, or the tricked police officer does after the henchman guns him down just as he too is figuring out the sting. Jeff ends up stowing secretly aboard Barr’s truck which has Amy concealed in the cargo. He gets to Barr’s house and, though unarmed, manages to rescue his wife from a freezer in the barn’s cellar just in time. He has to confront Barr’s wife, son, and accomplice, stare down a gun, and steal a truck.

As I said, the images stick, even decades later: the dummy, the police officer realizing what’s happening a second too late, Jeff hidden watching Amy unloaded like a corpse until she comes too and Barr’s crony says, “You’ve got a live one.” Then Jeff marching into the house and convincing Barr’s wife they have to look in the freezer despite Barr’s continued play-acting and denial—Amy is not the first victim by any means. The only problem with this progression is that the film ends with a truck battle on the highway and Barr dead in ditch rather than exposed, handcuffed, and taken away. It doesn’t seem that justice quite gets done, which may be why wants to replay it. You feel for poor Walsh but not Red Barr, and that’s a bit confusing too. All this stuff is confusing.   

High Art, directed by Lisa Cholodenko (1998). The lesbian love affair between Syd played by Radha Mitchell and Lucy played by Ally Sheedy is delicately and literarily scripted—sexy, ontological, and more textured than many equivalent cinema liaisons I have seen. 1998 is also more textured than 2022. The language, philosophy, and high art (meaning both Diane Arbus quality photographs and concomitant drugs) is indicative of a time when talking about Derrida and Foucault meant something deeper and more personal than it does now when it means absolutely nothing. After 9/11, MAGA, and COVID, you couldn’t have the sort of easy-going, artfully narcissistic social interactions and banter in the New York art world that this film portrays.  

The Truman Show, directed by Peter Weir (1998). More than ten years after first seeing this film, I re-watched it in 2013. In the interim, it lingered in memory and grew deeper in its absence: the portrayal of life as a t.v. serial viewed by millions in another world. The Truman Show landscape is a bizarre sci-fi-like arrangement full of necessary ruses with shades of Patrick McGoohan’s  Prisoner and Plato’s cave, a combination of Buddhist shading and a late capitalist critique of consumer civilization.

Before seeing it again, I kept picturing Truman living in his fiction, suspecting something but never the outrageous extravagance of the whole cooption, to be born onto his own t.v. show as its unknowing star, cameras on him 24/7, hordes of loyal viewers in living rooms and bars across the “real planet” watching and cheering for him. Is this not everyone’s situation with their guides and angels?

The film operates on many levels. There is obviously the Hindu-Buddhist fable: we are all living illusions, myths, scripted lives, stories that are not entirely real. But there is the extra twist that everyone around Truman knows that it is make-believe: a fake town with fake professions and fake lives. Only he is left out of the trillion-dollar “prank.” For Truman it is real; for the rest of them it is “real” too, as twenty-four/seven acting jobs, illusions at another level. Again, there’s the capitalist critique: that all these lives under neo-capitalism are fake inducements to consumerism and economic growth.

The way in which Truman’s fellow actors kid themselves because they know the script—of course, they are all actors twice over except for Jim Carrey as Truman, who only has to act once over—makes them even more unreal in a way than Truman—knowing the plot doesn’t get you out of the illusion. For Truman (as for the viewers), everything is urgent and real, as it will be anew when they leave the theater or turn off the screen, or not so much real as meaningful and irreplaceable (per Sethian views of our situation). Yet the film lingers in the imagination because, in being only a film, it is true in the same way that a life is only a life. Humans make songs and plays and cinemas for a reason—they are looking at themselves against a greater reality.

At another level, Christoff (the fictive “fictve show” director played by Ed Harris) pretends that, in a god-like way, he is giving his protegé a “better” life, but at the same time he is stealing his actual life and exploiting him. Truman is not even allowed to fall in love with the woman he loves because another actress, who doesn’t love him but is a higher profile star has already been given the part of his wife.

What was most compelling to me in the re-watch is that while outrage at the gods per se is not possible, if the gods are megalomaniac movie directors, outrage is possible, and mortals can break out. One can recover the life denied.

In an exchange near the end, Truman finds that the sky beyond the sea is actually a wall. When he hears Christoff’s voice, he asks who he is. The answer (I am approximating from memory): “The director of a t.v. show.”

“Then who am I?” Truman asks.

“You’re the star,” Christoff says.

            Watching this on her t.v., the woman with whom Truman fell in love on the timeless set (before she was whisked away by the Truman Show crew) is cheering, applauding his courage and awakening. Now he can find her again in the real world. Again, this applies to every life, whether it can break out of the roles imposed by its directors (like Bob Zimmerman born a long way from where he was supposed to be).

I will admit, Jim Carrey is a bit over the top and hyper on occasion (as usual) but, given that it’s Jim Carrey, he restrained himself pretty well and made the movie work by surfing the edges of his own Truman Show persona.

Under the Sun (Under Solen), directed by Colin Nutley (1998), set in 1956 rural Sweden. This piece of work is understated and timeless: a single stunt plane in a biblical sky, again and again.  Again and again, horses bathe in a golden-green pond.  A lonely farmer out of a lost short story by D. H. Lawrence. . . .  A woman with a mystery. . . .  People as simple as dogs and cows.  Texture and subtext are never portrayed or spoken, even as they are put so blatantly their dignity and integrity could easily be missed.  This is a rare movie that maintains emotional truth, despite opportunities for distraction in every scene. It is about love triangle of sorts, but more a story of loneliness, the nature of time, and the ultimate ambivalence of all human connection.

Little Voice, directed by Mark Herman and starring Jane Horrocks with a young Ewan McGregor, Michael Caine, with Mike Leigh icon Brenda Blethyn (1998).  This script involves a series of so many jumbled relocations of its own framing that it is, at once, a lower-class British drama about sadistic parental neglect and abuse that could have been made by Leigh himself, a story of a magical talent so unlikely and liminal that it borders on multiple personalities, and an act of psychological individuation and cure represented by and then manifesting in a fire that destroys the whole stage and story: the family dwelling with its totem objects, dispossessing while liberating its characters. If it is a psychic fire, then ‘little voice” is a psychic voice—a speaking in tongues (though through ordinary pop songs), and a transposition. The voice, like the biblical fire, can speak only in actual fire, then finally an alchemical fire that transforms.

Horrocks not only plays all the dimensions of L-V (as she is called) but has the same astonishing ability as her character to reenact songs in the exact voice and spirit of the originals by Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe, et al. This evolves like a cabaret set inside Dickens’ short story or a channeled entity arising from the unconscious of a troubled, isolated girl. Finding song and finding love and hope meet as the same epiphany. But she can’t be a caged canary. She has to be set free. The epiphany is lost in the welcome ordinariness of life. Little Voice only sang to set the fire, and then she was emancipated by both, but she had to give up the song for a life. In that sense, Little Voice is a fairy tale in which the rules are clear: you have to sacrifice the magic to get out of the enchanted kingdom.

Eyes Wide Shut, directed by Stanley Kubrick (1999). The beauty of Stanley Kubrick’s last film (apparently his favorite and certainly longest in the making, 400 days) is that it tells at least three stories simultaneously without betraying which it is really telling or favoring one over the other. It is a film about sexual temptation for a married couple, Bill and Alice (Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman) who get targeted individually by avaricious potential lovers and irresistible flirts and how they negotiate that erotic territory and return to each other—Kidman’s closing words to Cruise are “Let’s fuck.” It is also a film about secret sexual rituals and societies run by the uber-wealthy and politically powerful at which life-and-death games of roulette and dare are played in the context of drugs, and women are sacrificed—snuffed. It is also a dream-like ritual in the genre of Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome in which none of the events have happened and everything is a dream or a dream ritual.

Kubrick purchased the rights to a 1926 novella by Austrian Arnold Schnitzer called Traumnovelle (or Dream Story), and it took him thirty years to figure out how to make the film. He transferred it from Vienna to New York City, while transposing it across most of a century. He died six days after completing the final edits. It was a death ritual and bardo journey for him too.

            There is little point in trying even to begin to convey the plot, as it is dreamlike enough to be a dream (“eyes wide shut”) with inscrutable dream conversions. Much of the centerpiece of the film takes place at two ceremonies in which everyone is masked and costumed. Cruise’s Bill is there masked and surreptitiously using a friend’s password, a piano player who provides music while blindfolded for the ritual, but he is discovered and in great danger for reasons that are unclear because the agency and goal of the ceremony and its game are unclear. The danger never plays out, so by the end of the film, we don’t know if the political power transcends the sexual power or the sexual power transcends the political power, or even if the games have real consequences in determining Bill’s and others’ fates. He walks out of the ceremony and fantasy realm seemingly unscathed, but it is unclear whether desiring sex with his wife again will antidote his erotic incubi or the aristos with whom he has messed. In that sense, it is the story of Adam, Eve, and Lilith. Cruise and Kidman together are a perfect vehicle for the lascivious innocence of Eden.

            Across the veneer of Eyes Wide Shut is a titillating hyperbolic prurience, as flirtation and seduction function like pitcher-plant-like lures to draw people into more devious traps. I am guessing that Kubrick was interested in the role that sexuality plays in political power, and vice versa. At the same time, he was interested in cabals, ritual magic, and the relation between satanic ceremonies and fascism; see the Third Reich for context. Schnitzer precedes Hitler, but his novella on which the film is based foreshadows him. Kubrick fills in some of those shadows with an erotic, sadomasochistic overlay.

Whether from Kubrick, Schnitzer, or the characters taking on the roles assigned to them, the film asks what is sex, fidelity, desire, morality, abuse of power, how do these form synergize with each other, and what is real? Then it asks what can happen in ritualized space that cannot happen elsewhere.

The Green Mile, the second Stephen King prison movie (after Shawshank Redemption), both directed by Frank Darabont (1999), this one starring Tom Hanks, David Morse, and revelatory African American “giant,” Michael Clarke Duncan, as John Coffey (“like the drink but not spelled the same way”). The Green Mile is a tad mushy, hence a bit shy of the crisp clarity of King’s text, but its allegory of innocence, evil, psychic healing, and a talented mouse sets me crying around the middle every time, and I don’t let up till the end. 

As prison guards (Paul and Brutus) played by Hanks and Morse lead “idiot healer” (as in “idiot savant”) John Coffey to the home of the warden (James Cromwell) where his wife is dying of a brain tumor, you know Coffey’s going to heal her, you know he will go to the electric chair anyway for a crime he didn’t commit (because King won’t ever free a spook energy once he’s created it out of fear of destroying his own magic).

As Hanks’ character, the narrator, outlives the boundary of his own tale, the shape of the story is bent into Stephen King time—a transhuman space that is as human as it is interdimensional. The magic mouse has healed him not only from an ailment from a normal mortal span.

The scenes in which Percy (Doug Hutchison), a sadistic family appointee of the governor anxious to be around the execution wing’s drama and blood, confronts and taunts Coffey (“killing” the ward’s pet mouse before Coffey resurrects it), which leads to Coffey sucking the tumor out of the warden’s wife, to keeping it inside him as bee-like entities and then getting ahold of Percy as he strays too close to his cell and expelling the “bees” into his mouth where they become not cancer but madness. The mouse was trained by Eduard Delacroix, a gentle death-row French-speaking inmate played to a fine note by Michael Jeter. Paul and Brutus, wanting to keep the “mile” peaceful, convince Del that his mouse will be sent to a mouse circus after he is executed, but Percy wants more suffering, so he not only denies the existence of the mouse circus and tries to crush the mouse with his foot—in fact does—but sabotages the helmet so the Del has a horrendous execution as if he had been stuck in electric wires. Percy then pays the price. King is relentlessly moral.

In fact, his supernaturalism is really moralism made paraphysical rather than corny or sentimental. The mouse is a perfect carrier, like a quantum-entangled particle that holds the metaphysics together.

Coffey must be hooded and executed finally so that a symbolic crucifixion can make an existential, social-justice, author-as-Zeus point. The power of Coffey’s magic and the severity of the prison landscape and belief system of the 1930s make that outcome as necessary as World War II. Though I wish King had written a happy ending, something that would turn his closet nihilism into closet faith, I feel wonder, sadness, and exhilaration.

The Deep End of the Ocean, directed by Ulu Grosbard (1999). A kidnapped and renamed child, Sam/Ben, played by Ryan Merriman, juggles the weights and textures of two families and the gap of meanings between them. When, on his recovery years later as a teenager, he tells his birth mother Beth (Michelle Pfeiffer) that his kidnapper mom also cared for him (“They hugged me. They took care of me too”), it is not what she wants to hear—but she hears it.  Stolen out of his natal family, Sam should be the one traumatized and messed up but, instead, he returns to disintegrating domestic chaos, bringing calm judgment and intrinsic wisdom from exile. He rescues his family individually and collectively because something in him has been redeemed—a grace and existential lightness—that they didn’t develop in themselves in his absence.

“I knew you would find me,” he says to his older brother about an incident with a cedar chest in pre-kidnap childhood. That is true on every level, including that he would find them.

This is a remarkably well-done story, just as compelling to re-watch, starting with a perfect-storm high-school-reunion lobby scene from which Ben disappears, through the body of the film to a lawn-mowing scene in which he is found as an unlikely kid living right down the block, matching the police aging photos. Sam left as a sheltered Italian child with an overbearing restauranteur Cappadora father (Treat Williams); Ben came back as a wise Greek boy with a traumatized kidnapper Mom, one of Beth’s classmates, Cecilia Lockhart, a famous actress so that she is not questioned at the time) emotionally intelligent widowed stepfather (John Kapelos).

That Beth is a photographer gives resonance to the genre of “lost child” photographs and graphics done by computer enhancement, as Sam’s disappearance crosses the barrier of age and appearance itself. Whoopi Goldberg is over-cast (per usual) as the detective who helps solve the case, but I am so pleased (by then) by the fact that Sam has been found (and she’s an excellent character actress) that I am willing to give her the benefit of the doubt—okay, detective it is this time; psychic or emcee the next time.

With the untangling comes the recognition that his beloved stepfather is innocent of the crime, widowed by the kidnapping stepmom. Beth reflects the horror, then the clinical depression of a parent with a lost child, but that is followed by the epiphany and new, unexpected crises of his return. Sam can’t return; only Ben can. But then that is true of every child. Such is life in the deep end of the ocean.

It is worth noting that the ending to Jacquelyn Mitchard’s novel from which the movie was adapted was more like Ordinary People, a family left with unresolved conflicts. It tested poorly in previews, so that ending was re-shot at significant expense. I don’t consider that a cheap concession to marketing. The Deep End of the Ocean plays better for me as a happy fable with a backyard basketball bonding into the daffy hours of the night. They can make as much noise as they want; it’s better than the requisite teapot tempest.

The Sixth Sense, directed by M. Night Shyamalan (1999), starring Haley Joel Osment and Bruce Willis—but watch nothing else, ever, by this director.

The living and the dead mingle freely without knowing it—the point of this film is to sort that out and get everyone to where they belong. But it is not mechanical; it takes empathy, transference, and actual communication between those on either side of the curtain.

Many of the films on my “Guide to Cinema” have a surprise ending. The Sixth Sense has the ultimate surprise ending, as if the entire story had been shot in blue and then suddenly turned red, which it did.  Every scene must be viewed a second time in order to be understood as what it was. 

As in Cocteau’s Orpheus the movie has to unreel back at the end, undoing everything that has been made wrong after Death swings his Scythe. No other film captures the meaning and palpability of “ghost” and afterlife purgatory or bardo wandering so well. 

If you see the dead like Osment’s Cole Sear, you see them; you don’t know why; it’s simply your born wavelength. But there’s no negotiation or compromise with the view.

If you are the unknowing dead (you don’t know you’re dead), you adapt every scene you haunt to fit your altered reality, to normalize your delusion. Either way (as in life), you have to see it through until it delivers its final meaning: Go where you belong. Then everything will fall into place.

Osment masters the difficult role of a child who not only sees the dead but understands the unusualness and importance of what he is seeing and adopts the role of guide, liaison, and healer; for instance, bearing his grandmother’s message to his mom once she is willing to listen to him. Toni Collette’s Lynn Sear also captures the flicker between dismissal and faith, as she needs her son to teach her the truth by being its living example.

            Shyamalan captures so many nuances of secrets the dead legendarily take with them and then try to communicate to living—how they were killed, what reconciliation needs to happen, what they need to do before being able to move on. The image of the woman on her bicycle with helmet run over ahead of Cole and his mom in traffic is unforgettable. Even her poltergeist is bleeding.

Trouble is, Shyamalan kept trying to make trick-ending films—a limited repertoire, so he got more and more OCD and marginal, if ingenious, in his devices until I stopped watching (planned train wrecks and sequestered villages). He didn’t realize that the real beauty of The Sixth Sense is its clear vision (clairvoyance) and humanity, not its grand trick. It’s a brilliantly rendered reversal, having Bruce Willis’ psychiatrist suddenly see everything differently, the way a patient does after a breakthrough. Only in this case it’s the patient Cole who effects the transference, and Cole’s mother doesn’t even know he is treatment because the doctor treating him is a ghost. Shyamalan, in effect, carries a Freudian complex into bardo realms.  

Outside Providence, directed by Michael Corrente (1999). In a wonderful scene from a generally trashed movie, an older, bushy-headed slacker kid is looking at a religious poster of mystery footprints with the lead’s young brother confined to a wheelchair.  The slacker is a bit high and doesn’t get it—why there is only one set of footprints for a while. The boy explains, “You see, there’s this guy, and he’s looking back on his life, and he sees these two sets of footprints in the sand, like he’s been walkin’ all along with God. But then the guy looks and he notices that during the tough times, there’s only one set of prints, so the guy says to God, ‘Why did you desert me when I needed you the most?’ and God says, ‘No, dumbie, when you saw only one set of prints, that was when I was carryin’ you.’”  The slacker looks long and hard, then shakes his head, chuckles, and says, ‘Whooooa.  Fuckin’ God, man; he’s all right, ya know!’”

I don’t like this movie all that much, but I love that one scene enough to include it. BTW, this is another Boston regional film dated by the fact that Tom Brady hasn’t arrived yet and the Patriots are still mythically bad.

American Beauty, written by Alan Ball, directed by Sam Mendes (1999). The world changed radically on September 11, 2001, and then changed just as radically multiple times since. I thought American Beauty was a great, haunting, uncomfortable film when I saw it back then, but I didn’t remember its details or story line well enough to review it. Netflix streaming it in 2023 gave me a chance not only to recover the large parts of the story I was missing but to view it from the perspective of twenty-four years of American and international culture shifts and myself twenty-four years older.

When Kevin Spacey as Lester Burnham speaks after his death about seeing his life flow past in an eternal second, and notes its beauty when viewed that way, and then says, you may not know what I mean, but you will, it strikes home more poignantly in 2023. As one’s life becomes more of a picture viewed as a sequence of episodes imbedded in time, the ultimately beautiful, painful, and unreal aspect of it becomes clearer and, in a sense, more eternal. Ball was writing as a thoughtful practitioner of Buddhism, but this view also fits psychic teacher John Friedlander’s description of life: unreal but meaningful, the opposite of what science says it is (orthodox science tends to define it, tacitly or implicitly, as real but meaningless). I have applied John’s teaching to American-Beauty-like themes in my book Bottoming Out the Universe, so I won’t explore it further here (see pages 126-132), but I believe the saving grace of this film, and it is a true grace, is that it captures the essential beauty of something that can never be real or immortal. John’s notion that the universe is expanding at all times in all directions and dimensions also applies to American Beauty. Reality can never be made less, no matter how badly people behave.

            Ball doubtlessly didn’t know John’s version—he couldn’t even have in 1999—but it is existential, and he exemplifies it in this screenplay. The majority of the events in American Beauty are anything but beautiful. They are ugly, tawdry, vulgar, pathologically sexualized, and very American. So many of the events and culture shifts that have followed 1999 represent the full miasmatic outbreak of the diseases shown in partial latency in the film. If American Beauty points forward to 2023, it points the same number of years backward to 1975. The lingering resonance of 1975, in the music, language, and attitudes of the characters in the film, has become cryptic, arcane, and painfully nostalgic in 2023 in a way that they weren’t in 1999. By creating midpoint, American Beauty shows what has been lost and what is coming. It is a story and moving image cast simultaneously into the past and future, for the conceits holding up its worlds are right at the point of cracking, yet the characters are able to be in full denial.

            Interestingly the only main character I totally forgot between viewings, Ricky Fitts played by Wes Bentley, is the voice of the film and of beauty itself. He is the eighteen-year-old son of a vicious, homophobic, “Great Santini” Marine who has closet homosexual feelings (Colonel Frank Fitts played by Chris Cooper), and a numbed-out mother in a coma-like state (Barbara Fitts played by Allison Janney). Before the time frame of the film, his father sent him to military school and then had him put in a mental hospital for two years. He survived and sees only beauty and, with his camera s making a film within the film. He is a combination peeping tom, witness, and reflection of the writer’s cinematic eye, as he shows many of the suffering characters to themselves. He also films the central image of American Beauty, a plastic bag blown aimlessly by the wind with leaves in late autumn. The bag as if sentient or telekinetic will not leave his view. He is able to show us the shot when he shows it to Jane Burnham (Thora Birch), Lester’s alienated daughter and his own emerging girlfriend.

Ball writes that a similar blown bag played a role in his emerging Buddhist meditation practice, but he didn’t have a camera, so he transfers the moment to Ricky: the bag and the description of its essential beauty. Then those exact words are spoken by Lester Burnham after his death, as he sees Ricky’s bag as if part of his own aura. As he in a sense becomes Ricky too, the film jumps a level toward its Buddhist message of interdependent origination.

I will add that while watching American Beauty (both in 1999 and 2023) I recalled a similar image for myself. I wrote about it in an old book from around 1973 (I think The Windy Passage from Nostalgia, the title of which fits an overriding American Beauty theme: wind, nostalgia, and passage). In my case, it was a beer bottle blown across the ice in a motel parking lot in frigid Belleville, Ontario. As Lindy and I and our three-year-old son were checking into the motel en route from Vermont to Michigan, the bottle suddenly traveled musically across the ice, sustaining its sail and sound for a startling period of time, enough to seem almost intelligent and certainly to change the vibration. In the room I wrote, “Someday I will get to the bottom of this.” I feel that Ball has taken a substantial step toward “bottom.” The bag and its movement are both a metaphor for beauty and its literal exposition, while the various forms of over-eroticized arousal that dominate the foreground of the film express “American beauty,” a false capitalized version. At core, though, it is all beauty, and that is the meaning of the movie in the largest sense.

            Ricky also films Jane continuously—originally secretly and without her permission, later with her complicity and participation—and shows her her own beauty. She has little confidence in herself or when Ricky begins filming her in peeping-tom fashion after he and his parents move in next door on the street where much of American Beauty unfolds. Jane has had to play second fiddle in her mind to her friend and fellow cheerleader Angela Hayes (Mena Suvari) whose beauty is more conventionally model-like (in fact, she wants to be a model) and who makes up a false life of sexual encounters with adult men that Jane and her other sixteen-year-old friends believes.

            In the most memorable subplot, a depressed, hopeless Lester Burnham sees Angela as a cheerleader with his daughter and falls into obsessive sexual fantasizing about her, a series of walking daydreams that are marked by rose petals replacing any real interaction between them or any sight of her naked body. Lester imagines her repeatedly, as the surreal flowers are a dream trope, replacing her with an image representing his desire and loss of beauty in his life. The fantasy wakes Lester up to his own potential and what he has lost. He tells you in the film’s opening voiceover that he will be dead in less than a year, though he doesn’t know that yet, of course, and as we are shown his drab situation in brief vignettes, including his showering before going to work, that the high point of his day is will be when he masturbates in the shower. It’s all downhill from there, he explains. The background music through this is a tinkly, repetitive, machine-like set of gongs that remind me of 1920s industrial surrealism and Elmer Rice’s Adding Machine. Technology has progressed a great deal since then, but the sound of its prison hasn’t changed much. The musical repeats through the film, sometimes loud like in the opening to highlight certain crises, but more often softened to show that the drone is always there.

            Angela is a total chimera, but she still transforms Lester. He quits his advertising job in a dramatic dark-comedy scene while extorting a year’s severance pay by threats of blackmail over real, then fictive events (one of the film’s many harbingers). Then he goes to work at a drive-by burger place (where he bonds with the young employees in a whole new way; he plays seventies music, works out with weights, and speaks his mind shockingly and freely whenever possible, freaking out his uptight real-estate-agent wife, Carolyn (Annette Bening). Unknown to him, Carolyn is undergoing a similar awakening, having a real affair with the so-called King of Real Estate, Buddy Kane (Peter Gallagher). She is also, on his inducement, shooting a gun at a pistol range (another image from the film that will intensify in the next twenty-four years). Carolyn is superficial, sordid, and profane, as is Buddy, but she has a heart, even if it has been lost in the bumps and traps of life. Lester does remember it periodically, and he tries to bring back the girl he courted, a free spirit who mooned traffic helicopters and joined him in celebration. He is looking at a picture of them with Jane as a tot when he is murdered.

Carolyn is unreclaimable, caught up in the sort of materialistic attachments that dominate the landscape of the film and destroy the lives that take place in it. The possibility of beer spilled on an expensive couch makes her ruin the last moment when they might recover their feeling for each other.

            A series of events uncannily falls into place that allows Lester’s seduction of Angela before his own abrupt murder. The girl of his fantasies has just been outed by Ricky as common, ordinary, and in fact ugly, and she is in tears, alone while Jane and Ricky bond. Carolyn is out in her car practicing anti-victimization rhetoric from a self-help tape. Ricky and Jane are planning to elope to New York; he has plenty of money from his dope trade, a key subplot fully fleshed out. Only as Lester undresses the cheerleader—no rose petals this time, only for real—and she confesses that he will be her first lover, does it strike him like a thunderbolt that she isn’t his succubus, just a girl his daughter’s age, and his fantasy is about an epiphenomenal being. He covers her and comforts her and treats her in a gentle way he is unable to treat Jane. In another two minutes he will be dead.

            One watches this 1999 movie on years-later streaming aware of Ball’s use of many of the same themes in a different Buddhist-influenced American life drama, the long-running serial Six Feet Under—it is even foreshadowed by a scene with a hearse in American Beauty and Ricky’s comments about it and death and corpses in general.  Spacey will play many memorable characters including singer Bobby Darin and interstellar alien Prot before ending up in a situation of his own that chillingly resembles not only American Beauty but Lester, as he is accused of molesting boys in England. He goes to trial, is cast in no roles during its long duration, and is ultimately acquitted, not of the acts themselves but of rape. American Beauty returns his lost figure to the screen at the same time that his older self is finally being cast in new movies.

The wonder of American Beauty is that it expands like John Friedlander’s universe to encompass everything it touches. What makes it uncomfortable to watch is that so many of its moods, wants, desires, and superficialities permeate pretty much everyone’s life in the West. To create beauty out of that, and out of a murder, is what brings the film to its title.

In another sense, American Beauty is a picture of a spot on a block in an American town where two houses uncomfortably close to each other allow two neurotic, suffering families to spy on and then penetrate each other lives, mostly with deadly consequences, but also allowing beauty and love to emerge. Everything is distorted by their milieu and rigid materialistic belief systems, but beauty cannot be totally suffocated. In fact, there are no truly evil or vapid people in the film, only lost souls. Everyone, even Colonel Fitts, gets an inkling of beauty and the secret in their own heart, though for him it is unendurable, and that is why he—not Ricky, not Carolyn, as foreshadowed with wry misdirection—ends the film, the families, and the stasis of life on this American block.

The Matrix, directed by Larry and Andy Wachowski, now Lana and Lily Wachowski (1999). I skipped The Matrix during its early popular years. It was too hip, techy, and insistent to merit attention. Plus, it turned so quicky into a meme for (1.) the internet and (2.) reality as a computer simulation that I let the meme serve in place of the film though, upon seeing it, I realize that that they don’t match up totally. The “matrix” is not all of reality like “maya” or “samsara”; it is a particular alien force with precursors in assorted “Sirians,” “Martians,” Anunnaki, and other faux-benign powers who subjugate Earth for its own ostensible good; see Ursula LeGuin’s Planet of Exile and City of Illusions for a comparable plot that involves trance states with encryptions and keys but not computers, at least in the current sense.

Categorized as a mix of cyberpunk and manga sci-fi, The Matrix is such a tight, accomplished unwinding of phantoms and transmutations that it makes the excesses of currently praised Everything Everywhere All at Once all the more exorbitant and inconsequential, the result of having too much technology to play with. The Matrix had just enough in the way of novel devices at a time when they were still radical and futuristic. Otherwise, “the matrix” is “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” meaning a full-service fictive reality that bypasses the seniority of matter and one-way flow of time. Both films remind me of psychic philosopher John Friedlander’s proposition that modern science has it backwards when it states that all of this is real but meaningless. In fact, none of it is real, but it is incredibly meaningful.

I do find The Matrix too violent to be a great film. Guns and violence are always gratuitous replacements for plots, in simulations as in reality too. This is despite the fact that they aren’t real. Are they even real in reality? The channeled spirit Seth says no.

            The Matrix is like many other films (or stories) before and after. In several cases the Matrix-like plot is before The Matrix, in an older novel, short story, or script going back to the 1950s (see Philip K. Dick, Frank Herbert, and Isaac Asimov), and the film of the story comes after 1999.

The Matrix is like Dune in that it posits “the One” who will free humanity from a seemingly invincible imprisoning force. In either case, the “One” is unknown and must be found by his acts.

In The Matrix itself, Keanu Reeves plays computer hacker Thomas Anderson, screen name Neo, who proves to be the One and then frees the world of control by the matrix and its shape-shifting agents (in one instance, represented by a single self-cloning piece of ectoplasm resembling Richard Nixon’s Haldeman and Ehrlichman and played by David Aston).

            The Matrix is also like Star Wars, but it translates the galaxy onto a computer screen and cyberspace, which is where “Star Wars” really takes place. The battle of good and evil is more fulfilling, for me anyway, in not inflating interstellar landscapes but keeping them at their innate scale. Vis a vis my Star Wars comparison, Lawrence Fishburne plays Morpheus, The Matrix’s Yoda, who awaits the One and also supplies kōans and parables that raise the story to its mythic and moral peak.

            The Matrix reflects Philip K. Dick’s general worldview while foreshadowing movies based on his stories; for instance, Minority Report in which Samantha Morton plays a precognitive priestess. In The Matrix, that role is handled by Oracle, Gloria Foster, whose cover is a grandmotherly-like figure baking cookies in an oven as she measures the future a few seconds or days ahead. Carrie-Anne Moss as Trinity carries some of the role of “Oracle,” as she helps guide Neo and also becomes his romantic partner and female-warrior alter ego. In a direct swap-out from the Brothers Grimm with whom the Brothers Wachowski identify (per the Special Features,) Trinity awakens Neo from a death coma with a kiss and sets in motion the film’s concluding battle, complete with a rescue of Morpheus. That the Oracle has predicted either Morpheus’ or Neo’s death, the final choice being Neo’s, is overridden by the fact that Neo is the One. Plus, the oracle’s speaking in riddles and only giving the information necessary for destiny to be carried out.

            The Matrix is like The Adjustment Bureau, another PKD adaptation, in which two prospective lovers, a politician and a dancer (played by Matt Damon and Emily Blunt), are kept apart by controllers of fate. Both The Matrix and The Adjustment bureau have portals, tunnels between locations within ordinary landscapes, whereby characters can jump. The tunnels in both films are harmless and essential, but the controllers of fate in The Matrix are antipathetic and lack empathy, while Dick’s “adjusters” are benign and flexible. They yield in the face of romance.

            The Matrix is like Source Code in that realities can be re-run and corrected or changed and also in that characters can escape into their screen identities and live full lives and die within a matrix. That aspect—becoming your virtual-reality avatar—is also similar to James Cameron’s defining Avatar films, which are really more about a “matrix” than a moon around a planet in the Alpha Centauri system because Alpha Centauri, though the closest sun to ours, is beyond human reach at anything less than the speed of light.

            The Matrix, if watched for the first time in 2023, is a warning about artificial intelligence. It took the internet, the Matrix of 1999, twenty or thirty years to fill in its proxy reality so that pretty much every piece was there and every pawn and pixel accounted for. It will take AI a much shorter time to create a much more vivid “porn hub” reality with more suction to pull people in and separate them from their body-minds and souls, as it grazes on their aggregate chitchat. AI is the internet’s internet.

            The Matrix makes use of philosopher Daniel Dennett proclamation that “We’re all zombies. Nobody is conscious.” Dennett proposed that presumptions are “free-floating reasons … not our reasons.” In their place, invisible synapses run an operational “desk-top.” “What is actually going on behind the desk-top is mind-numbingly complicated, but users don’t need to know about it, so intelligent interface designers have simplified the affordances, making them particularly salient for human eyes … the ingenious user-illusion of click-and-drag icons …. Nothing compact and salient inside the computer corresponds to that little tan file-folder on the desktop screen.”

            In The Matrix, we can be freed from these ciphers by going behind the screen, brilliantly and minimalistically represented by a flow of numbers and letters on an impenetrable “computer game” on the rebel groups’ screen. They resemble the Star Trek screen, but outer space has become simulated space, and the cosmos is an artificial cosmos (or matrix). I will insert what I wrote in Bottoming Out the Universe, as the same issues underlie The Matrix. I would have included references to the film in my book if I had seen it:

“What about the proposition that the universe is a computer simulation in which we have been created and programmed by super-beings in another universe (a ‘real’ one)? Their screen-saver is starry night, a faux Milky Way against an imaginary dome. As the program hums along, a tree rustles in an ocean breeze. Erosion and tattering of the display—unraveling atomic debris at the edges—suggest spots where the technicians failed to tie down the edges. Elon Musk laid the baseline trope:

“’So given that we’re clearly on a trajectory to have games that are indistinguishable from reality, and those games could be played on any set-top box or on a PC or whatever, and there would probably be billions of such computers or set-top boxes, it would seem to follow that the odds that we’re in base reality is one in billions. Tell me what’s wrong with that argument. Is there a flaw in that argument?’”

“Astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson concurred: ‘I think the likelihood may be very high.’ Citing the gap between human and chimpanzee intelligence (while sharing more than 98 percent DNA), he proposed that somewhere in the cosmos are beings whose intelligence is as much greater than ours along the same scale. ‘We would be drooling, blithering idiots in their presence,’ he adds. ‘If that’s the case, it is easy for me to imagine that everything in our lives is just a creation of some other entity for their entertainment.’

‘If I were a character in a computer game,’ observed MIT cosmologist Max Tegmark, ‘I would also discover eventually that the rules seemed completely rigid and mathematical. That just reflects the computer code in which it was written.”

Reality as a computer simulation or algorithm presupposes that the present technological trajectory is sustainable both politically and ecologically, and that the intelligence imbedded in computers will potentially exceed the reality in which computers are artifacts—The Matrix writ large. This is less an epistemological riddle than a symptom of a technology that has had such a fantastic run it has lost a sense of context and scale. I mean, it can’t even keep radiation and plastic out of its oceans or Roundup out of its meadows. It is shedding whales, parrots, and bees while it forges ahead with cybernetic substitutes.  

“In any case, the challenge for our hypothetical super-beings remains personal identity, theirs rather than ours. How did the simulation’s creators acquire their identity? Where in relation to the simulation are they situated? Around an X-box as large as the universe (or a projection of the universe)? Is their origin moleculo-atomic? If not, what made them? How did they get into their own universe? How did they get us into ours? Did they write us in quarks and molecules? Did they copy their own template or design a new one? 

“Is our awareness of ourselves, including our capacity to contemplate our reality as a simulation, built into the software by the designers? If so, is personal identity a by-product of codes or does it arise on its own once the simulation is activated. Same question (by the way) to ask of test-tube-generated life forms or AI robots: how (and when) do they know that they exist? Or is it “turtles all the way down (and up)?”

            “Reality as a computer simulation intuits a truth without recognizing its substance. Our reality is a simulation. How can you tell a simulation from a program written in atoms and molecules? When scientists turn their instruments on a dab of matter and peer inside it, they find gateways to realms that are at once incomprehensibly vast and impenetrably tiny. Space, time, and matter vanish into energy, curvature, and uncertainty states.

“A particle is not so much a wave wrapped up into a ball as the front of a wave, a one-dimensional point moving through a ‘possibility’ space that, as it becomes observed, unfolds into a particle whose physical tendencies materialize from interference patterns in its field.

“The primary particles—muons, gluons, protons, mesons, electrons, etc.—might not be distinctly different things, but the same formation at successive frequencies of time. They differ by phase, charge, spin, and as vibrations in the quantum field. They may not even exist apart from the mirroring of the observer, in which they fuse, dissipate, revert, and turn into each other.

“Physicists once thought to find bottom, but there is no bottom. Neither is there bottomlessness, just dissolution of form or transition to another mode of form.

“In the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics, teleological directives collide and combine, as sources simultaneously emit waves forward and backward in time. Recipient points, ahead of them in time, emits their own pair: an advanced wave (backward) and a usual wave (forward). When a ‘handshake; of waves occurs, it triggers a quantum event, a transaction in which energy, momentum, and angular momentum are transferred.

“Matter only looks like matter. That’s a simulation all right.”

            It’s also a matrix all right.

In the Special Features, the cast raved about how much fun the Wachowskis were to work with, and the antics and collaboration on a set assembled with great care and camaraderie in Sydney, Australia, did look like a blue-collar corroboree more than Hollywood or even indy-ville. I discovered only by looking online that the Wachowskis have since become sisters, which suits The Matrix where figures melt into each other and multiple selves and changing genders are part of the freedom that comes with escaping the “agents.”

The Big Kahuna, directed by John Swanbeck, starring Kevin Spacey and Danny DeVito with Peter Facinelli (2000).  This is, in effect, a three-person off-Broadway play translated to cinema. Set in a motel room in Omaha during an industrial-oils convention, it is a movie only by dint of a cinematographer and real hotel instead of a stage and audience. Spacey and DeVito play veteran sales guys, Facinelli a born-again-Christian neophyte hiree attached to their team. In the confined space the three men bond, feud, and reconcile many times over, as they strategize how to land the primo account (“the big kahuna”). Hard-to-come-by truths are explicated and great lines are spoken, enough of both to warrant a Tennessee Williams or Arthur Miller award. Facinelli’s character learns initially that he has, in fact, done things he regrets; he just doesn’t know what they are yet—and that’s why he doesn’t have character. Bummer! 

He learns later, and more profoundly, that, as long as you are a salesman first rather than a human being, Jesus is a product, no more sacred or divine or healing than industrial oils.  Together the men develop a kind of blind, existential love for one another out of the older guys’ despair and the young dude’s disingenuous earnestness. Again, it is not all that much less classic and literary than Miller’s Death of a Salesman.

A nod to You Can Count on Me, directed by Kenneth Lonergan and starring Mark Ruffalo, Rory Culkin, and Laura Linney (2000) and set in a small Catskill town.  Most of the movie falls a notch off my list, but the gentleness with which Linney’s returning itinerant fuck-up brother Terry (Ruffalo) informally adopts his fatherless nephew Rudy (Culkin) and gets into the craw and heart of his pissed-off and forsaken sister Sammy (Linney) makes this quiet sitcom into something more than a side-show family melodrama. Terry teaches Sammy that if Rudy’s sheltered life gets a little bumptious via his own (Terry’s) impetuous spirit, rogue leanings, and tendency toward improprieties, it isn’t the worst thing in the world, for any of them. Stop fussing and trying to stage-manage life; let it just happen. When Terry takes Rudy to see who his asshole father is and the dudes witness each other, all hell breaks loose, but that is when “you can’t count on me, sis” turns out to be the opposite.

K-Pax, directed by Iain Softley and starring Kevin Spacey as Prot, a walk-in from across the galaxy (2001).  A gentler version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, this allegorical tale of an alien masquerading as a mental patient (literally a walk-in) raises most of the basic ontological issues of sanity, cosmology, and power (who has it and who is playing an empty hand): “Where I come from, that’s known as the fastest gun in the West,” says the smug astrophysicist, dismissive of Prot’s faster-than-light travel. “But,” replies Prot, “I don’t come from where you come from.”

            Before it’s over, Prot has demonstrated that madness on Earth may be a superpower elsewhere in the universe and that getting from there to here and back is nothing: photons do it every day. It is hard to model galactic wisdom and love, what it would look if it took its holiday on Earth, but K-Pax does a decent job. I saw it a second time in 2005 on the way out of Mexico City: “The air-conditioned bus offers K-Pax, Kevin Spacey with Spanish subtitles. “Where I come from, that’s known as the fastest gun in the West,” Prot says.  “fusil rapidisimo….”

“Pero no yo vengo de donde usted viene.” (“But I don’t come from where you come from.”)  Speedy Gonzalez shadowing the cultura breach all the way. Maybe—I don’t speak Spanish.

The Believer, directed by Henry Bean (2001). It is hard to believe that Bean interviewed 150 possible actors in New York and Los Angeles for the starring role of Daniel Balint, an “orthodox” Jew who is also a committed Nazi, before hiring Ryan Gosling, then a 19-year-old unknown L.A. actor who isn’t Jewish and had no feeling then for the deep New York culture of his character. Add fifteen years and a sophisticaated Gosling would be starring opposite Emma Stone in La La Land and dancing while singing to her, “What a waste of a lovely night!”

Gosling learned his character in The Believer from an orthodox Jewish film-tech guy who played it in a short directed by Bean and then from an immersion in New York street culture: subway, crowds, jive, etc., at Bean’s suggestion—plus a simultaneous immersion in Judaism and Jewish culture. Gosling brought both beginner’s mind and negative capability to this role. As Bean remarked in an interview on the DVD, he didn’t so much define the role as Bean had imagined it, he reinvented it, put a fresh spin on it, and gave it new life. Once he showed that character to Bean, he was hired, and Bean filled in the missing vibe in New York.

Daniel Balint was not just a culturally created Jew, but a fully bar-mitzvahed, initiated lay rabbi who could read and daven Hebrew, yet still became a Nazi. Gosling as a skinhead who tracked and beat Jews and Hassids and then flipped into a cantor and teacher of Hebrew to his disciple and neophyte-Nazi girlfriend Carla Moebius (daughter of the lead fascist couple played by Summer Phoenix) even began to look Jewish by the end of the film.

            Bean based The Believer on the true story of a different Jewish-raised “Daniel” (Burros) who joined a Nazi cell, was outed by the New York Times, and after threatening suicide (to the reporter) if the story was printed, carried it out with a gun hours after it appeared, raising questions of journalistic ethics at the time (the 1960s). Bean moved the timeline ahead roughly two decades, and he made a much more interesting, com,plex character and story, though the original conceit’s various underpinnings remain, among them that anti-Semitism is a powerful Jewish phenomenon too (the self-hating Jew is the tip of the iceberg); that Zionism and fascism are peas in a pod; and that religious belief and faith are risky modalities that can drive a dedicated believer into vortices of existential doubt, madness, self-sabotage, and rage at God. 

            I found The Believer to be a stronger statement of the schizophrenia of faith than of Nazi-Jew schizophrenia (not unlike mental breakdowns portrayed by Carl Dreyer in his various films set in Scandinavia and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov where the dilemma arises from evangelical Christianity, not Abraham and Isaac). Before he becomes a skinhead, Daniel experiences the trauma of confronting God directly and demanding a resolution of his nature, intention, and presence, a manifestation of the burning bush. He only turns to Naziism later.

While in grade school, young Danny (Jacob Green) challenges his rabbi with powerfully rational arguments against the stock Jewish liturgy regarding both Yahweh and Israel. He initially adopts a nihilist position to play devil’s advocate until he is inseparable from his own experimental nihilism. As a nihilist, he is almost all but to become a Nazi in order to get some distance from Judaism and God to ask the same ontological questions.

Yet becoming a Nazi, by another turn of enantiodromia, brings him back to being a faithful, empathic Jew. Every key event in the film is Daniel against Daniel: Daniel the killer against Daniel the savior, Daniel the destroyer against Daniel the repentant, God who has abandoned the world against God who loves the world so much he will try to be everywhere at once. For someone of so much intense belief like the growing, questioning Daniel, there are only conflicting belief systems and no way out except suicide—asking God to obliterate him, daring God. By contrast to the historical Daniel who used a gun in the privacy of his room, Balint’s suicide is a ceremonial immolation in a synagogue with a bomb and timer after he gets everyone else out at the last minute.

            Bean’s Believer is about way more in overlapping realms of faith, fascism, politics, Judaism, and the Third Reich. In multiple scenes, it spells out a difference between Right Wing militias in the United States who are flamboyantly and mincingly anti-Semitic and real Nazis in uniform under Hitler, in one instance using a 1940s flashback of a baby bayoneted out of his father’s arms during sensitivity training ordered by a judge for Danny and his gang after they provoke a fight in a Jewish deli. The elderly holocaust survivor throws their fascist bravado back at them by saying that they have experienced nothing remotely like the Nazi situation on the ground and never had their loyalty and beliefs really tested. Danny’s imaginal version of the scene, in which he is both the stormtrooper and father having his son murdered, tugs him back and forth and haunts him for the rest of the film

            In another scene in which Danny is raising corporate money for the high-level cult of subterfuge fascists in New York run by Carla’s parents, he tussles with a young executive in a sky-scraper because he does not feel he is getting enough of a donation. The guy tells him that the hating Jews is passé. No one gives a shit anymore. What they care about is money and winning. Danny says, “Maybe you’re a Jew,” evoking the film’s underling irony that he is (It is not the first time the line is used adversarially). The exec says, “Maybe everyone’s a Jew.”

            This larger nexus reminds me of Nathan Englander’s short story What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank. The answer is pretty much everything about being Jewish except Anne Frank, then from either side we kill her again. The same happens in The Believer Danny blows up the synagogue, but he saves the worshippers. He desecrates the Torah, but he warns the others about the spirit energy of the letters, tapes its scroll back together and teaches Carla Hebrew using it. All along, Danny pretends to kill, keeps others from killing, and participates inadvertently in a ritual murder of a random prominent Jew. He engages simultaneously in sacred love, sex, and sadomasochism. Even the upper-tier fascist group he belongs to (apart from his storm-trooper buddies) is infiltrated by informers so that Daniel’s Hebrew School classmates know more about what he’s about than the Nazis. A set of violent scenarios leads to violence, but it also leads to philosophy, paradox, and ritual sacrifice. Everyone is a believer and about more than one contradictory thing. Even God is not faultless in this regard. To become a Nazi is not to kill Anne Frank but to try to save her and not only from the Nazis but from suicide. Daniel can’t do everything, so he chooses to show skinheads and Jews alike the hypocrisy of their own actions by embodying it in himself.   

25^th Hour, directed by Spike Lee, starring Edward Norton, Jr. (2001) and a Spike Lee retrospective.  All American films are marked to a degree, often indirectly and invisibly, by whether they precede or follow 9/11.  With this film, we hover and then cross the line. Lee’s post-hippie crime-and-punishment drug-dealer drama has two different endings, one happy and redemptive, the other tragic and brutal. All of the film’s twisted, tortured reckonings and layers of back-stabbing and blackmail lead either to liberation, reconciliation, and rebirth or to incarceration, tragedy, and a lost life. You, the viewer, get to choose—classic Lee. Though shot alongside 9/11 debris and drenched with its overtones and metaphors, the actual incident doesn’t break the surface of the film.

            Norton’s Monty Brogan is a prep-school-educated addictive drug dealer (not a) who risks one last sale and gets busted by collusion between the Feds and the Russian mob. Now he has to go to prison for a long time, with all that entails, or flee and try to live an alternate life elsewhere under an assumed identity as a woken-up slacker in his own uninsured witness-protection program. Facing that, he comes into abrupt maturity.

Lee loves his Saki-like surprise endings, ironical last-minute twists, and send-off morality notices. Check out the bellringing that closes School Daze. Though Lee isn’t prominent on this list (I saw most of the films too early), watch anything he has made; it’s all good or great. He gets it—life, love, culture, music, sports, politics, so you can’t go wrong. For me it’s more his oeuvre then any one film. His Knick fandom and ridiculous playeris costuming—if anyone is too short to be a Knick, Spike is— is an addiction that I, a fan of Lee’s work but also a Nets fan, wish he’d drop. He should at very least share his affection and not flaunt Manhattan affectations. He’s a Brooklyn guy. Like he said, the folks who work at Barclay Center look like him, whereas the Knicks brass and the whole set-up of Madison Square Garden represents what his work and life stand against. I know, he directs and lives ironies too, so he earns the right to perform in his own version of “My Life as a Knick.”

Here is a quick summary from memory:

She’s Gotta Have It (1986). Lee debuts, in his first public release, with a exploration of libido and culture, at this point exploring nascent feminism and female desire through carefree, liberated graphic artist Nola Darling (Tracy Camilla Johns). The black-and-white chronicle features Nola’s life, each of her three lovers, and the implications for her, the trio of males, and society. It’s an American working-class ricochet of European existentialism and liberation feminism typified by Simone de Beauvoir and, later, Germaine Greer.

With She’s Gotta Have It, Lee became a seminal figure and planted the seed for a 1980s indy film revival, a Brooklyn arts renaissance, and even young Quentin Tarantino’s career. Nola’s closing monologue delivered directly to the audience, while not unique, established Lee’s way of speaking directly and philosophically to his viewers. Nona highlights the right of femeale cinema characters to be as lusty as male ones, to reject monogamy as slavery, and to choose celibacy if they want,  

Do the Right Thing (1989), with a usual Lee all-star ensemble: Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, Giancarlo Esposito, Danny Aiello, Samuel L. Jackson, John Turturro, and Lee himself (as the inimitable Mookie). It could be a latter-day Tree Grows in Brooklyn or Raisin in the Sun. With a mix of Br’er Rabbit tricksterism and Ishmael Reed hoodoo, a series of disagreements around a fire hydrant, a boombox, a Wall of Fame at the local pizzeria, and police and fire-fighter intervention leads to a fight, mob riot, melee, and destruction of the pizzeria. Latinos, Italians, Koreans, Jews, Africa Americans, and general whites in badges have at it before peace settles and Lee enforces the moral point of the title.

Sea of Love, directed by Harold Becker (1989). To my mind Richard Price’s scripts (and novels) are uniformly brilliant, insightful, funny, culturally astute, and hip to the tiny daily nuances that most writers miss. This movie is a rewrite of a novel—not a screenplay but a use of some of the elements of Ladies Man (a book I haven’t read). Aside from the fact that Sea of Love is a tantalizing whodunit with an unexpected twist at the end, it is also a snapshot of 1989, a human and cultural landscape that is substantially gone. The story itself is heartbreaking and ugly. It involves three “serial” murders that a team of police led by Detective Hank Keller (Al Pacino) and his partner Detective Gruber (an unrecognizably young Richard Jenkins) try to solve. Of course everyone is 30+ years younger in Sea of Love, but Jenkins has the most startlingly different energy.

They are joined by Detective Sherman Toulhey of Queens (John Goodman) after they discover that each of their unsolved cases shares details.

In addition, Gruber is now married to Keller’s ex-wife, and he can’t let go of her, can’t even completely remember she’s not his wife anymore and, not only that, but she is married to his partner. The fist fight that finally breaks out between the two men is inevitable. Keller is also as much of a “light sleeper” as Willem Dafoe’s John LaTour in the movie of that name. Keller gets confused in the middle of the night and picks up the phone to call his no-longer “wife.” The situation wreaks with personal pain, and that pain drives the movie even more than the crimes.

            But back to the serial murderer. Each male victim is found lying facing down on a bed. There are three clues: fingerprints left by the murderer, the fact that the victims all placed want ads looking for women for romance or one-night stands, and a lipstick-smeared cigarette indicating that a woman was present. In a skillful framing device, the first victim was discovered when the arm of his 1989 record-player kept returning the needle to beginning of the song “Sea of Love” until a neighbor was so driven crazy that she went to investigate. The name and simplistic lyrics of the song continue to frame, inform, and serenade the story, especially its title line: Come with me / To the sea / Of love. Not a lucky invitation in this movie.

The police all come to the conclusion that the killer is a woman who answers ads that have poetry in them and then murders her victims during or after sex. For her it is a sadomasochistic game. They decide to run their own ad using a love verse composed by Keller’s dad for his mother decades ago, and then (as planned) Keller and Toulhey meet each of the women who answer the ad to get her fingerprints from a wine glass. The setting of this trap covers a lot of the film and provides oddly slapstick humor in the context of noir.

Keller and Toulhey also go to visit a man who placed a poetry ad but is still alive. The appearance of police embarrasses him in front of his wife and children. He has to explain simultaneously to them that it’s nothing and, to the two detectives more privately, that he was just playing around and had no intention of following through with “sea of love” sex. They are dubious that he would have spent the money on the ad and the P.O. box, but he swears on the name of his wife and children (I think) that he was dropping it entirely. In the next shot his dead body is being removed by forensic police from a state like that of the original victim.

            An opening subplot involves a different police trap—trying to get men on whom unanswered warrants have been issued come to a hall by inviting them to meet some of the New York Yankees. Those getting the letters they think that they have been randomly chosen, so they show up. This allows the police, Keller in particular, to be introduced to the movie’s viewers. In a good news/bad news announcement, the bad news turns out to be that the Yankees can’t make it. There is no good news. The even worse news is that they are all under arrest as police swarm in.

Outside the dragnet, though, Keller lets a latecomer off. The guy is rushing to bring his little boy to meet Dave Winfield. The police in the squad car check; there’s a warrant on him. Keller says, “Sorry, no Yankees.” Guys walks away with his kid. Keller is shown to be a good guy, a compassionate cop. This set of interactions loosely foreshadows the main plot in a story that is structured around its own verisimilitudes.

            Each woman who comes to dine with either Keller or Touhey, one by one, is excluded by her fingerprints. Only Helen Kruger (Ellen Barkin) won’t handle the glass and leaves abruptly, raising suspicion that she’s the killer. Her explanation is that she knows at once she is not romantically interested in Keller, hence doesn’t even want to have a drink. But then she changes her mind and seems not only to want to go out with him, but to have fallen in love with the guy. I may be missing something, but I consider this detail a stretch, changing from no chemistry with Keller to explosive desire. It serves the function of heightening suspicion about her as the murderer and Keller as her next victim.

            Now the facets of the plot have reached their point of no return. Keller doesn’t care any longer if she’s the murderer. He’s willing to be murdered by Helen if only to get to continue his passionate affair with her, each time convinced and afraid she will produce a gun after love-making. During this series of trysts, Keller must admit to Touhey what’s going on and at the same time conceal from him the extent of his obsession: he and their main suspect are in love, and he is sure to end up dead. That becomes even more likely after he sees the ads of the other three victims stuck on her refrigerator, but that sets in motion the film’s closing rush that I haven’t gotten to yet.

            Barkin is remarkable in her expression of passion with Keller. She probably exceeds the parameters of her role and almost breaks the movie with her aggressive strip teases and throes of seduction during which Keller must behave simultaneously like a man driven to wild passion and a man about to be killed. Kroger is also a divorcee with a child and is courting Keller as a potential stepfather and co-parent. Basically, he is being offered a family life he never had and his death in the same package. He doesn’t know which, but he can’t forfeit his chance at happiness—and sleep.

Pacino doesn’t seem right for the role, especially during the sex scenes; he doesn’t quite match up with Barkin. He’s a bit too desperately trying not to seem desperate, while also exercising streaks of suspicion, searching her purse, throwing her against the wall. It’s a wonder she keeps returning, or it’s suspicious, but that’s the dialectic of the film: the lady or the tiger? Does she want to kill him or have sex with him? Is he her sweetheart or next victim? Is her attraction to him matrimonial or sado-carnivorous?

Pacino’s Keller doesn’t match her pitch or reify her own unexplained desperation with the right blend of empathy and mistrust; he’s too erratic for so much passion coming at him. Dafoe might have been better, or Christopher Walken, or Tom Berenger as police officer in Someone to Watch Over Me. However, Pacino is way better than the actor originally cast for the role: Dustin Hoffman. We don’t need demure “Mrs. Robinson” cajolery scenes.

Sea of Love is also about the difficulty of being a cop and a lover. In the shoe store where Helen works, Keller risks his identity to protect her from thug customers. One of them recognizes him as a cop, leading him to out himself while giving a signature Price soliloquy about the value of police as protectors of society, Pacino’s far and away finest moment.

When Kruger is outraged that her lover is a cop and didn’t tell her, it torques the plotline for the viewers playing detective. If they thought she wanted to make a cop her next victim as part of her kinky, outré sex game, they pretty much have to drop that or add further twists to Kruger’s character.

Price winds the lover-killer/lover-lover dichotomy as tight as it will go before letting it explode in a sequence of scenes in which Helen becomes definitely the killer (the names on her refrigerator) and then definitely not the killer while Keller struggles to make the right choice, for himself as a man and himself as a cop. Just as the dust seems to settle and Keller is baffled what is going on, and Helen has left without killing him, the plot takes its final twist. The killer appears, and Keller is in the established victim’s position. As Kruger’s love, he must kill or be killed by a very robust, crazed murderer.

            I don’t want to give away the solution of crime, the identity of the killer, so I will give away the ending instead: Keller and Kruger do end up together just as both wanted, and to the relief of Keller’s ex-wife and husband. Within my review the killer is mentioned very indirectly, and he–yes, he—also has a legitimate reason to be in the building during one of the murders, thus to lead the cops briefly the wrong way (after a Hispanic deliver boy). He performs as Kruger’s alter ego, casting suspicion on her while seeming to avenge her for the sex that she in fact offered.

Hidden Agenda (1990): This Thatcher-era Northern Ireland spy drama stars (among others) Frances McDormand as Ingrid Jessner, assistant to an American human-right lawyer, Paul Sullivan (Brad Dourif), murdered extra-judiciously along with his Provisional IRA driver by British security forces in Ulster. Jessner has a tape of Conservative Party politicians and senior military officials discussing their collusion with Margaret Thatcher in her rise to power, but blackmail and murder lead to the elimination of authenticating parties and the dismissal of the recording as a forgery.

Despite the tragic outcome, the movie gets deep into the social, geographical, tactical military landscape, and bureaucratic power nexus of the centuries-long Irish-English struggle. Lee is not limited to Crooklyn and MSG.

Jungle Fever (1991), adding Wesley Snipes, Annabella Sciorra, Anthony Quinn, Queen Latifa, Tim Robbins, Michael Imperioli, and a debuting Halle Berry to a dream ensemble. “Jungle Fever” tags sexualized racial myths, as the story/scripts rotates around issues of desire, attraction, race, love, fidelity, infidelity, and the realm of confusion and anguish where race, poverty, sex, shaming, friendship, and redemption crisscross.

Malcolm X (1992). Part documentary and bio-pic, the film allows Denzel Washington to embody Malcolm, from crime and incarceration to romance to the Nation of Islam and then apostasy, leading to his assassination. The story from Alex Haley’s 1996 co-written autobiography is executed with Lee’s growing capacity, scope, and grandeur. The key is in turning a great African American actor, Denzel, of many personae into the singular persona of Malcolm X. The film closes with a group of young grade-school students in a classroom, each in turn saying, “I’m Malcolm X.” That captures the penetration of an otherwise doomed mission.

Crooklyn (1994). This semi-autobiographical film was co-written by Lee with his siblings Joie and Cinqué. It shows Bed-Stuy during the summer of 1973 with the focus on a young girl narrator, Troy Carmichael (Joie’s alter ego perhaps, played Zelda Harris), her father, four brothers, and their parents. The family travels to the South to visit wealthy relatives, as Troy experiences the difference between her native urban Brooklyn and her clan’s Southern roots. Brooklyn looks different on her solo return, as she has to deal with the illness and death of her mother and assuming a matriarchal role.

He Got Game (1998). For this movie about corruption in basketball, government, and the Prison Industrial Complex, Lee recruited Ray Allen, a star NBA shooting guard, to play Jesus Shuttlesworth, the top high-school hooper in the country, and Denzel Washington to play his father Jake, a convicted felon currently serving time at Attica Correctional Facility for accidentally killing his wife Martha, Jakes’ mother. The story revolves around the governor’s temporary release of Jake in order to convince Jesus to play for Big State, the governor’s college, as opposed to out-of-state or the NBA. It also comes with an implied bribe of early release.

Jesus, totally estranged from his father—he tells his sister to get the stranger out of the living room—is conflicted as he is plied from multiple sides. For instance, the colleges tempt him with money and co-eds.

A back story shows that Jake trained young Jesus in the game by drilling him relentlessly. It was a regimen that escalated into an argument and violence that led to the death of Martha when she tried to intervene.

A subplot involves Dakota Bams (Milla Jovovich), a prostitute who occupies the adjacent room to the one that the warden has booked for Jake in a fleabag hotel. After Dakota is beaten up by her pimp and companion Sweetness (Thomas Jefferson Byrd), Jake takes care of her, leading a romance between the two.

After many twists and turns and a challenge one-on-one game between father and son, Jesus decides to go to Big State, but the governor re-negs because Jesus did not follow his plan (letter of intent). Jake is entrapped and sent back to jail. He throws his old basketball over the wall of the prison, in magical realism, onto the Big State court where Jesus is practicing by himself. As Jesus grabs and holds the ball, the movie ends. Jake’s earlier message was: “Let me tell you something, son: You get that hatred out your heart, or you’ll end up just another nigga … like your father.”

            The use of an actual player, and not one from the Knicks, in a curious way gave expression to Lee’s cosmopolitanism aesthetics. In the end, the man and the vision transcended the fan, and Allen was his guy.

Mike Tyson: Undisputed Truth (2013). Lee films Tyson’s storytelling on stage with his usual recognition that appearances are not the truth and that a man has to dig his own story out from under the racial, gender, and cultural stereotypes. Tyson comes off as more of a pre-Socratic philosopher and Bruce Lee foil than a dumb, ring assassin or brute. “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” He doesn’t have to say it to say it.

BlacKkKlansman 2018). Another biopic, taken from the 2014 memoir of Ron Stallworth (played by David Washington), a Colorado Springs police officer who goes undercover to infiltrate a rally featuring Kwame Ture (once Stokely Carmichael). In a mix of racially switched and concealed identities, spying and counter-spying, and sequential aliases, Lee captures the moral ambiguity and personal motivation behind various acts of racial and political identity and their potential to turn into each other and their own antitheses.

Summer Survivors, written and directed by Marija Kavtaradze (2018). Summer Survivors is not a great film except in one regard, its deep and subtle of portrayal of mental illness, particularly bipolar disorder by Paulius (Paulius Markevičius), one of two patients being transferred to a new clinic by an ambitious female doctor. Paulius BTW bears a striking resemblance to Latvian pro basketball player Kirstaps Porzingis.

The other patient, Juste played by Gelminė Glemžaitė, has a more hidden mental illness and plays an alternate sisterly and quasi-romantic role to Paulius’ manic outbursts and depressive crashes, as he alternately tries to override his conditions and all societal definitions of mental illness and gain his existential freedom and then cries for someone to help him. The doctor, Indré, played by Indré Patkauskaité, makes a third player, as the trio exchanges roles and definitions of doctor and patient, madness and sanity. They barely complete a successful road trip—it is a road-trip movie to Vilnius—and get the clinic van there. In fact, they tape over its medical lettering along the way in order to hide the nature of the occupants, from themselves as well as outsiders.

I am reviewing these films partly to call attention to alternatives to Netflix’s new overwrought, AI-era-driven, gimmick-laden artifices in lieu of artful films. Film Movement Plus offers slower, more thoughtful films, a series of mostly obscure foreign films, some from underrepresented countries. Not all of them are as interesting as Summer Survivors, but they are all at least real. I recommend Pushing Hands (Taiwan, directed by Ang Lee), a t’ai-chi-oriented film about aging and generational change, and They Say Nothing Stays the Same (Japan, directed by Odagiri), which bears a resemblance to Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days, only about a Meiji-era (late nineteenth-century) boatman on a river, Toichi (Akira Emoto), rather than a modern-day janitor for Tokyo Toilets.I found the Kosovo film Babai discouragingly perverse and ludicrously repetitive but probably a fair representation of the plight of many poor and displaced people in the world. The frustration, petty violence, and failed reconciliations become hard to watch, especially when carried out by a child trying to stay with his father when both are crossing borders illegally.

Minority Report, directed by Steven Spielberg from a story by Philip K. Dick (2002). In this mix of moral prophecy, magical realism, tech noir, and science fiction set at least a hundred years too early in 2054, John Anderton (Tom Cruise) is chief precog officer in a precog crime unit designed to find out about homicides before they occur and prevent them. The unit relies on three clairvoyant humans, Precogs, who are kept in drug-induced trances in a shallow stimulus-deprivation pool. Anderton is depressed to the point of nonfunctional after the kidnapping of his young son and departure of his wife, but he is about to uncover a series of crimes buried in the bureau for which he works.

            The plot, involving transpositions of precognitions and actual events, is time-entangled, so that murders and kidnappings are buried in altered files. As Anderton goes rogue and attempts to solve the mysteries, Spielberg cast a prophetic landscape with indelible imagery. Each person walking down the street is being viewed by lenses with facial-recognition software (only I believe it is eyeball-reading in the story). As street signs blast advertisements for products into their neuralinked brains, we see Dick’s precognition of the internet and advertising targeted by AI. That makes for another memorable scene in which Anderton’s eyeballs are replaced so that he can walk the streets incognito.

            The most significant sequence occurs when Anderton kidnaps the most talented of the Precogs from the pool, Agatha, played by Samantha Morton, with a “precognitively” gender-neutral shaved head. The story of how she was herself kidnapped and forced to become a Precog is the heart of the film’s mystery and its unravelling, with the aid of her clairsentient knowledge. It is what catches the deep bureau criminals and sets the bureau right.

            As Anderton and Agatha flee through a shopping mall, Cruise must lead Precog Morton, who is in an altered state and needs his guidance through the real world. Meanwhile she is guiding Anderton through the near future, telling him moments before each threat enters the frame which way he has to duck or hide to avoid observation and capture.

Sweet Sixteen, directed by Ken Loach (2002): This film is pretty much a foreign-language film, and you miss a lot without the subtitles. It is in a mix of Scottish English and Scots, a dialect like Glaswegian. In this inextricably downward spiral, a fifteen-year-old boy, Liam (Martin Compston), tries to save money for reuniting with his mother after she gets out of prison in time for his sixteenth birthday. Trouble is, Liam doesn’t attend school, hangs out with a bunch of itinerants his age and older, including borderline character Pinball (William Ruane). The youth sells untaxed cigarettes in a pub for a living, and his mother’s boyfriend and grandfather are both drug dealers. Plot aside, the film is an ethnographic plunge into this lower-class milieu. Of course, the indigenous dialect is necessary, or the whole thing would be fake.

All or Nothing, directed by Mike Leigh (2002). Leigh revisits some of the themes of Secrets and Lies six years later. Once again, one of his vintage actors, Timothy Sprall, delivers key lines about love, loveliness, loss, chance, and death. Other members of Leigh’s ensemble—Lesley Manville, Ruth Sheen, Helen Coker—have roles as members of two main families in a giant London housing project. Like other Lee and Ken Loach characters, they all struggle—children, teens, and young adults as well as men and women well into their lives—with poverty, bureaucracy, meaninglessness, and underclass existence. Leigh is able, film after film during his years making compact working-class dramas, to capture the depth of humanity within politically imposed destitution and wage slavery. He doesn’t preach. In All or Nothing, he shows his characters at their jobs: supermarket, taxi driver, cleaning an old folks’ home. In the process, everyone gets to speak eloquently as if Shakespeare or John Osborne were writing their lines, not just the leads but the occupants of the home, the customers of the cab, the dispatchers, the children in the projects, the doctor and nurses in the hospital after Rory, Phil’s lazy, obese son, has a heart attack.

            What Leigh captures best in this film is love—how in even terrible, stifling circumstances it peeks through, hesitantly, awkwardly, ambivalently, petulantly, angrily, hopelessly. Leigh takes his time, allowing people to figure out their complicated situations and emotions and sort through projections without psychotherapeutic help. Pretty much everyone proves surprisingly skillful in his or her domain because the heart and spirit are universal compasses that don’t go away even when circumstances put people in dire straits such that they mainly want to fight back or take out their pain on those closest to them. It’s workaday stuff, but that’s what makes Leigh so brilliant. He does it, while most films and literature try to sell the lurid lowlights.

Skins, directed by Chris Eyre (2002). This movie brought Chris Eyre out of the background, at least for me, and put Smoke Signals and Edge of America into context as part of a meta-First Nations narrative. This one’s a small film and a bit choppy, but it is pitch-perfect for not only modern Third World Pine Ridge Amerindian culture with its deep full native heart, stolen spirit, and shamanic resonance but its source vibration, as it radiates in mysterious shape-shift through the lives of people in diaspora.

The central character is Lakota Sioux tribal police officer Rudy Yellow Lodge (Eric Schweig) who has to deal with his older brother, Mogie (Graham Greene). The one-time former football star has returned from Vietnam with body wounds and ghosts and has to find a new way forward in a culture marginalized but with sprigs of hope in unlikely places. Eyre’s narrative makes the First Nations real by letting us in on their signals and cues to each other: “Remember, human beings don’t control anything; spirits do.” That’s the difference between them and us, no matter how big the Euro occupation of Turtle Island has gotten.

Save the Last Dance, directed by Thomas Carter (2001). To me, the great surprise of this movie, playing on Amazon in 2024, is that it wasn’t made in 2023 or 2024 as a flashback to 2001 but literarily comes from 2001. Its artistry is having the landscape seem like either, though almost always it is the other way around (except in science fiction where the future is whatever the author wants it to be). Most films are made in the present and capture a view from the past—that’s a popular genre—but in Save the Last Dance, a film in the past captures the future so that when it runs on Amazon, it looks like a current film.  Meanwhile everyone associated with Save the Last Dance—Julia Styles as Sara Johnson, Sean Patrick Thomas as her co-star Derek Reynolds, and Kerry Washington as Chenille Reynolds—making up an informal love triangle are all twenty-three years older in 2024 than they are in the film.

When I say an informal triangle, I don’t mean that it is loosely triangular and romantic, I mean that it is twin-valent, race as well as love (or lust). Nikki (Bianca Lawson) puts this into words following a fist fight at a gym basketball game proceeding directly from Sara blocking Nikki’s shot, then Nikki tackling her and them bloodying each other:

Nikki: “It ain’t over, bitch.”

Sara: “l don’t even know why it started, bitch.”

Nikki: “’Cause you always in my way.

Sara: “l’m only in your way when it comes to Derek. That’s what this is about.”

Nikki: “No, it’s about you. White girls like you. Creepin’ up, takin’ our men. The whole world ain’t enough, you got to conquer ours too.”

Sara: “Whatever, Nikki. Derek and l like each other, and if you have a problem with that, screw you.”

The racial qua romantic aspect of this dialogue is further elucidated at an all-black clinic where Chenille has taken her baby to be treated. Sara has accompanied her. There is a mob scene and Niki is already an hour past her appointment time. The chaos at the clinic gives Chenille a chance to educate Sara:

Chenille: “So, you put it all on her. None of it’s on you.” [She is referring to the fist fight at the basketball game]

Sara: “She started it. l told you what she said.”

Chenille: “Maybe she didn’t have no business getting up in your face, but she had reason to say what she said.”

Sara: “Wait a minute. You agree with her?”

Chenille: “You and Derek act like it don’t bother people to see you together.

Like it don’t hurt people to see.”

Sara: “Well, we like each other. What is the big damn deal? lt’s me and him, not us and other people.”

 Chenille: “Black people, Sara. Black women. Derek’s about something. He’s smart. He’s motivated. He’s for real. He’s not gonna make babies and not take care of them, or run the streets messing up his life. He’s gonna make something of himself. [Per the film, he is going to go to medical school and become a pediatrician and has already been accepted at Georgetown.] And here you come—white, so you gotta be right—and take one of the few decent men we have left after jail, drugs and drive-by. That’s what Nikki meant about you up in our world.”

Sara: “There’s only one world, Chenille.”

Chenille: “That is what they teach you. We know different.”

Sara: “l-l don’t understand. l thought we were friends.”

Chenille: “You wanna be a friend? Don’t just be here to be here. Open up your pretty brown eyes and look the hell around.” Meaning: look around at me in this crowded clinic.

The underlying gist of Save the Last Dance orbits around Sara’s switch from ballet to hip-hop, then back to ballet plus hip-hop. Tragedy forces her to create her own radical form—an instance of greatness following passage through grief.

At the film’s beginning, Sara Johnson is seventeen, a precocious ballet dancer in suburban Chicago who is auditioning to be admitted to the Juilliard School. She pleads with her mother to attend the audition. Something happens in the greater energy field that throws her off-balance while she is dancing (the film’s stock foreshadowing), and Sara stumbles and fails. She doesn’t understand why her mother wasn’t there to support her and blames but soon finds out that her mother was in a fatal car accident while rushing to get there.

Beset by guilt, feeling that she caused her mother’s death, Sara gives up ballet and, too young to be on her own, she is forced to live with her long-estranged father Roy (Terry Kinney), a struggling jazz musician on Chicago’s South Side. Terry lives in a rundown house, plays trumpet late nights at nightclubs, and has never been a father to Sara but is pressed into fatherhood by the death of her mother. He is working on making her a bedroom, but for now she has to use the living room couch. She also has to transfer to Wheatley, a majority-black South Side Chicago high school as one of the few white students and right-off the most visible of them because of her dance skills and being a quick study of hip-hop and break-dance-like steps. It is at the school that Sara befriends Chenille Reynolds, a teenage single mother who is having childcare issues with the boy’s father, her ex-boyfriend Kenny. I won’t go into that subplot, but it is the major one of several that mirror the racial-romantic themes of the dominant narrative. Chenille’s taking her and Kenny’s baby to the crowded clinic gives Chenille a chance to sharpen Sara’s racial sensitivity. Her message is essentially, if you want to dance with us and woo with us, you better understand who we are and respect us.

Nothing so much characterizes Save the Last Dance as the way in which much of it functions as a dance and performance video, telling its story through movement and music more than words.

One major subplot also provides the suspense, tension, and climax of the film’s shadow side. Derek owes a debt to Malaki (Fredro “Dro” Starr) because when they were both young, Malakai saved him from prison. Derek spells out the circumstances:

“He’s my friend, Sara: You don’t have to understand. You don’t have to understand. Listen, me and him got into some shit awhile back—some bad shit. Broke into a liquor store and cracked open the cash register. Somebody peeped on us and called five-0 and we barely made it out of the store. The cops were on our asses. We split up and ran in different directions. Now, l must have been going in the wrong direction, because the cops were closing in on me. So, Malakai, he smashed in some car windows, set off the alarms and turned the heat from me to him. l kept running, and he got caught. The DA offered him everything but a Rolls Royce to turn my name in. But he didn’t, and he never will.”

Now Malaki is out on parole and wants Derek to back him in risky gunplay—life-risky and jail-risky. Some gang members shot at Malakai and his boys in a drive-by, and he intends to drive by where he thinks they live and shoot at them. He expects Derek to come along because he owes him. Instead, Derek wants to pay his debt by talking Malakai out of a terrible mistake, indicating that now that he’s out of prison he has a chance to start over.

Malakai tells Derek that he’s lost too much time, it’s too late.  He can’t go to college. All he’s got left is his dignity:

Malakai to Derek: “You going to college, doctor college after that. You the man, dog.”

Gang Associate of Malaki: “He tripping off his acceptance letter from Georgetown.”

Malakai: “No, l’m waiting for my letter. l’ve been waiting. l could have been a doctor too, you know what l’m saying?”

What he’s saying is that if he hadn’t set off those alarms he might be going to medical school now instead of Derek. “You know what l’m saying?” (question mark necessary) is the Greek-particle-like ebonic-jive placeholder for much the film’s dialogue even when it goes unspoken.

Sara convinces Derek at the last minute not to go.

Three scenes converge at the film’s end, replicating the opening scene in which Sara’s mother is rushing to her performance and dies in the process: (1) Sara is auditioning for Julliard, first in ballet, then in hip-hop. She aces the ballet, but is struggling with the hip-hop, failing on her first try; (2) Derek bolts from Malakai and his gang and their guns and rushes on the el train to the audition; he won’t die en route, just as Sara won’t fail this time; and (3) Malakai and his boys set out with guns to do their drive-by (that’s where people will die). Derek arrives in time to get up on stage and, ignoring the complaints of the judges, coaxes and encourages Sara; she does the hip-hop brilliantly on her second try and is told by the least supportive judge that unofficially she is now in Julliard. Malakai and his boys conduct the drive-by. I don’t know if they kill anyone, but some of them (not Malakai) are killed. Malakai is handcuffed, put in a cop car, and is on his way back to jail. I should add that yes, Derek and Sara become lovers, but the film treats the romance gently, to deemphasize while highlighting the racial implications. They are experimenting, exploring, as they are with dance. He will go to Georgetown; she will go to Julliard. Maybe their relationship will mature and blossom. Maybe they will never see each other again. A scene on the Chicago subway where they exaggerate necking in order to scandalize a spying, disapproving woman speaks to the inescapably public nature of what they will commit to if they decide to commit.

Raising Victor Vargas, directed by Peter Sollett (2002). Using amateur Dominican actors, Sollett attains a rare, delicate transparency of characters while contrasting love and infatuation. Every participant in this small, romantic family drama plays his or her part to perfection, capturing nuance in expression and gesture more than by words. In fact, they are all uncomfortably inarticulate, particularly the grandma played by Altagracia Guzman who manages to turn her Hispanic ESL into a fierce jive English that is more communicative than most English as a First Language. She is one nasty Grandma for a no-nonsense women raising her son’s three challenging teenage kids without help.

        Most of the characters, interestingly, retain their real-life names. Victor Vargas is played by Victor Rasuk; his would-be girlfriend Judy is played by Judy Marte. Their love dance is among the more sensitive in cinema. In general, the women are tough and take no shit. Victor’s friend Harold courts Judy’s friend Melonie who spars with and socks him as much as says either yes or no—again, articulation in gesture more than words. She calls him her “bitch” even as they slap, box, and wrestle into an embrace, then her bashful admission that she likes him.

Judy is even tougher. As the neighborhood beauty, she uses Victor “like bug spray to keep guys from ragging her for sex or putting their hands on her unasked. Victor fancies himself the local Lothario and has a track record of being irresistible to women, but he is no match for Judy. She sees right through his act and tells him so, but she doesn’t demolish him. She is cautious, curious, wary and, when they finally kiss and touch, it is like two children exploring something new, butterflies dancing among flowers. Their overwrought identities evaporate in an innocence that lies beneath the tough exteriors they cultivate to survive in the stone jungle of their Dominican community on New York City’s Lower East Side. Victor may be the neighborhood lover, but he is one step away from being homeless on the street—that vulnerable.           

Victor’s shy, tender younger brother who idolizes him, and his misanthropic, languid overweight sister who taunts and sabotages him, are equally gems beneath cultivated exteriors. The ability of the director and actors to convey this much subtlety and grace exposes most comparable films as vulgar and hyperbolic by comparison.

All The Real Girls, directed by David Gordon Green (2003). This is a movie primarily concerning the difference between sex and love (somewhat like the prior one in that regard) and how hard it is for especially young men to understand that. The women navigate their own parallel troubles. Add a Tennessee textile town with its walkabout lost-soul maze, no way out but no clear sense of where the trap is set. The people radiate around a centerless center much the way birds and stray dogs do.

The nuancing and dialogue of the central couple (played by Paul Schneider and Zooey Deschannel) works its away among challenging distinctions the characters are feeling their way through. There are only shades of conflicting feelings—no rights or wrongs, good guys or bad guys, no final rewards or final sins and punishments (though most films would come to the same conclusions from the same circumstances.) This one comes close to capturing a momentary elusive truth. In that sense, director Green and actor Schneider (college friends and collaborators) and Deschannel comprise a remarkable trio that keep pushing emotional limits without forcing or overpushing plot. Broken and hesitant lines, inarticulate thoughts, unconfident semi-withdrawn gestures, and frustrated surrenders—shades of shades of shades—are as endemic as expressed motives, and does that ever frustrate a lot of viewers (as evidenced by the complaints on Netflix)?  But artful ambiguity makes for a rich, thoughtful narrative and dance by a sensitive ensemble cast.

The real beauty of this film is that it is a visual symphony or painting more than a story. The scenes are of different lengths, set by vignette aesthetics rather than conventional durations according to plot. It’s like a silent documentary, of the landscapes around the film. Characters, weather, and animals that wander past the lens, maybe not dwarfing the story but constantly locating it in society or nature outside the cinematic frame. This includes stunning vistas and changes of speed so that a world that moves at a snail’s pace also literally flies by: clouds changing texture and shape, smoke and steam from factories, mountains polarizing through the air as on a painter’s palette, the Earth making a star circle of its heavens. The movie marks time by sending mist, leaves, water, and people racing across their own static panorama in a motion that is as fateful as it is invisible to the players. Making that work and also making the love story work is a songlike adaptation to cinema.

I am reminded of how Alain Tanner filmed Belgium (French and German districts) from a balloon as the backdrop of Mesidor. No salient resemblances or weighty metaphors preside, just the beauty of people and land placing the story at its commensurate cadence and scale.

Green adds (in the Special Features), “Some of the most meaningful elements of this film are characters who have just one line and come in for just a glance, so that’s what this movie is about. I mean I almost refuse to summarize what this movie’s about, because it’s not that. It’s about the way you are, about the way the sunlight hits the tin roof and bounces off onto the dirt or where the two-legged dog is scooping, dragging the shit along. That’s what this movie is about.”

Translate that fluidity and unboundedness into the characters and you have a sense of the major ground that Green covers.

Open Range, directed by and starring Kevin Costner, co-starring Anne Bening, and Robert Duvall (2003).  Out of the mold of a cattle-and-villain Western, this turns into a brilliantly understated period-piece love story in which a seemingly untouchable bad-guy rancher king is topple, and a prodigal free-grazer (Costner) is redeemed. The townsfolk are converted and liberated to a just cause. It is corny but down-to-earth and emotionally real—and features one of cinema’s longest and most circuitous gunfights.

Lilya 4-Ever, directed by Lukas Moodysson (2003) and Mammoth, directed by Luke Moodysson (2009) These two films could not be more different in surface emulsion but, for the purposed of reviewing them, I am treating them as phases of the same larger theme: the severe, often fatal dysregulation of lives by the global marketplace and international flow of commodities and capital—in particular, the way in which people’s identities and belief systems are torn apart by unsurvivable passages between zones. In the movement of goods and equity, human and cultural values are trashed and replaced by the squeezing of value out of flesh and personal identity. More than words are “lost in translation” here; translation is not even on the map for most of Moodysson’s characters.

Lilya 4-Ever describes trafficking in women. In this landmark film, the sites are Russian Estonia (as traffic source) and Eurozone Sweden (as market). Sixteen-year-old Lilya, played exquisitely by Oksana Akinshina, is abandoned by her mother who has attached herself to a generic male in order to get passage to America, leaving her daughter behind. Lilya’s father, a Russian military man, was never involved. The situation that has ostensibly been set up to take care of her till she is of age is flawed, corrupt with a bare veneer of accountability. Lilya’s apartment is stolen quickly is by the greedy aunt who was chosen to protect her, and she ends up effectively in the street. Her one friend is a younger boy who has a crush on her. It is only a matter of time before she ends up a prostitute and is duped by a seemingly well-intentioned boyfriend to board a plane to Sweden where she is immediately incarcerated and forced into full-scale prostitution, one horrific sexual experience after another, all the benefits of which go to her kidnapper-jailer, who is too disgusting and vile a being even to be elevated to the station of “pimp” Forget liberal Scandinavia. This guy is an Daesh-level abuser. He treats her like a farm animal, to be milked for profit until she drops.

The rapes Lilya undergoes are graphically portrayed, intentionally forcing on the viewer the line between prurience and outrage/revulsion, weighted strongly toward the latter but not without the erotic come-on, to keep it real and complicit for everyone involved. The film is almost too painful to watch.

I emphasize this because a subsequent film by Moodysson—A Hole in My Heart, 2005—portrays three amateur pornographic film-makers (two men and one woman) imprisoned by their own obsessions in a squalid apartment with the alienated teenage son of one of the men, a boy who provides an outsider’s gaze at not only their gory behavior (as he tries to block the activities out his mind) but utter parental abuse.

Unlike L4E, A Hole in my Heart is unwatchable: ninety-eight minutes of decadent, half-hearted sex and genital slapstick: mutilation, mayhem, and self-parody mixed with a trashing of the apartment, some of it in an over-the-top food fight bordering on S&M. A Hole in My Heart is post-erotic and bestial, without allure. Yes, Moodysson gives it a montage rhythm and soundtrack like something you might expect half a century after Stan Brakhage and John Cage, and that makes it somewhat more than trash but still not watchable. What you are left with in AHIMH, however, is that fully sated, requited lust and erotic fantasy, when isolated in and of themselves and made their own purpose, are banal, absurd, and degrading beyond any pleasure they give.

The Swedish men who buy sex from the young Lilya in the 2003 film are vicious, cruel, and/or antipathetic forerunners of the two men in AHIMH, as if two years later Moodysson decided to pull two characters out of L4E and put them outside of narrative time and under a microscope while caricaturing their pathologized lust.

In L4E some of the sex customers are shown in brief video mugshot format, whereas others are portrayed in flagrant exploitation and/or cowardly sadism. L4E also has a small quotient of bursts of experimental music-like noise (and noise-like music). Because noise is selectively used and integrated in the narrative flow, it betokens unusual power quanta. I resisted the decibels of brief, hard rock initially, but as the full scope of Lilya’s plight became clear, they became the only way to match her despair and panic on the soundtrack.

There is also a magical realist element to L4E, a mitigating virtue, in that when both Lilya’s young friend and ultimately Lilya leave their bodies and the world; they grow wings and become angels (perhaps with reference to some of the transmigratory elements of Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire).

For me the film’s most powerful and emotionally shocking scene comes very early when the young, hip, insouciant Lilya pretends not to care as her mother departs for good with her boyfriend. At the last moment, she suddenly rushes to the taxi and cries not to be left behind. “I won’t survive,” she pleads with unerring accuracy, but the mother manages to steel herself and then, once in the US, essentially disowns the girl.

For all the cruel and shocking things that are done to Lilya later, this is the moment when the glass is broken, when her heart and her hope are shattered. The movie from there is a fait accompli: the natural flow of capital and manufactured desire to where it wants to go.

Mammoth is set in upper-class yuppie American culture, with lowest stations belonging to Filipino nanny, her two sons back in the Philippines, and a spirited Thai prostitute named Cookie. While well up the skyscraper of modernity in luxury and detachment, Mammoth’s engine of disjointed juxtapositions is the same as that of Lilya 4Ever. The central character husband and wife, who live in a swish Manhattan apartment, are, respectively, a web developer (played by Gael Garcia Bernal) and an emergency-room surgeon (played by Michelle Williams). The nanny (Marife Necesito) has left two sons in the care of her mother in the Philippines while she earns money for a better life for them. Meanwhile the roughly seven-year-old girl she is caring for becomes closer to her than to her own parents to the point of committing to learning Tagalog, the nanny’s native language. This linguistic rebellion is a central trope of the film.

In the narrative, the husband software-developer is dragged unwillingly by private jet to Bangkok to sign a 45-million-dollar gaming contract but ends up stuck there while his partner haggles for a better deal. He finally takes off to one of the islands in what is ostensibly the Gulf of Thailand where, while backpacking, he pays Cookie, a pretty prostitute who aggressively pursues him, not to have sex with him (or anyone), which leads to an actual romantic affair between them. In attempting to break the cycle of prostitution, he brings himself and her tinto a consensual affair. But even that lands awkwardly in the disparate power ratio between them, as they lie to each about who they are and turn the relationship into a game of fantasies.

Meanwhile the older of the nanny’s two boys in the Philippines, through a series of childlike misunderstandings, ends up in the throes of a violent pedophile who almost kills him, leading the nanny to have to return. She abandons her charge in the apartment late at night while the girl’s physician mother is attempting surgery on a boy stabbed to the point of death by his own mother. Violence is essentially radiating synchronously and clairsentiently around the planetary orb.

The degrees of simultaneous cultural and geographical dislocation in Mammoth are too numerous and disparate to inventory, but suffice it to say, as a kind of overlay, that the title refers to super-expensive pens made from the bones of the extinct mammal. One of the more interesting, repeated scenes in the movie is the yuppie couple’s daughter, an aspiring astronomer, sitting with her nanny (and then her mother) at the Hayden Planetarium and watching the birth of galaxies in interstellar space. These end-markers give a sense of the ultimate scale of dislocation that Moodysson is getting at beneath the cloak of global capitalism in a terminal phase. The crisis or catastrophe is molecular and cosmological—planetary and astrological. No one can escape its gravity or distortion.

Since writing this, I have seen We Are the Best (2013) and Show Me Love (1998), films at their own opposite ends of Moodysson’s oeuvre, both of which capture the inner and outer lives and language of teenage girls—the later in a punk context, the former in a lesbian-versus-straight context. In each, the film’s girls are opposed by a mainline culture: boy and male punkers (WETB) and anti-lesbian boy-crazy girls (SML). Both films turn against expectations, as the heroines’ capacity for courage and perseverance in the face of tsunamis of obstacles and objections, social humiliation, and heartbreak, is, finally—no other word for it—inspiring.

I found myself moved to tears by situations that wouldn’t ordinarily be that emotional but were made so by the director’s meticulous attention to degrees of consciousness, capturing nuances and shifts that are almost always passed over, in thousands of other movies that run along similar and vaguely similar tracks to these. Moodysson captures essential elements that are routinely left out, the muddled, middle-ground moments that define individuation, growth, and breakthrough.

The recruiting (We Are The Best) of a born-again Christian girl to a punk band by the band’s long-bonded duo leads to her graceful entry and then the innate transformation of the two of them, for she in fact is an accomplished musician, while they can’t play worth a damn). Their recognition of her talent springs her into a new joy and self-confidence and frees her from her own familial traps. These too are made more cogent by Moodysson’s refusal to stereotype or vilify anyone or anything, however inviting a target. Each is seined to its essential humanity: the search for companionship, love, and being seen. In the process, the film tracks emotional blends and ambivalences not usually revealed.

Likewise, when Agnes (the sullen, alienated, lonely, scorned lesbian) and Elin (the beautiful, popular, cheerful boy-loving and boy-loved girl) swish out of the bathroom where they have locked themselves to deal with the crisis of their incipient relationship in Show Me Love, a huge crowd of their schoolmates has gathered and is expecting to see Elin emerging with some guy. They are hooting and jeering in expectation, then are started as the pair emerges unabashed, declaring their just-discovered erotic revelation with brazen, in-your-face pride. It is a cinema moment for the ages, no less juicy as turnabout revenge than anything devised by Clint Eastwood or John Wayne.

Head-On, directed by Fatih Akin (2004) A dreary, depressing lost-and-found-and-lost-again-lovers’ farce in a violent, derelict, favela-like German landscape, nonetheless with undertones and overtones of an iconic tale—Jacob and Rachel in the Old Testament, Thomas Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge, and Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence).  Head-On captures some of the existential core of the Turkish experience in Germany. It is a throbbing, pounding tour de force of trauma-driven, reckless self-sabotage, a down-spiraling vortex (an actual head-on crash) through which the humanity and indestructibility of the lead characters are played transcendently by Birol Unel and Sibel Kerkelli (wasted older murderous desperado and winsome young warrior seductress). They all but die in their own abysses, then are reborn as other things while, all the while, a small orchestra (larger than the one in the Icelandic film Woman at War, but similar in Sophoclean chorus) set against maybe the Bosporus and city of Istanbul rather than a succession of fields and streets) provides a dirge-like lament as though the gods are saying, “What fools these mortal be but what precious ambrosial tears and heartaches they stir!” Plus, they prove their inescapable Turkishness by smashing it but then ending up in Turkey.   

Anatomy of Hell, directed by Catherine Breillat (2004), but you can watch pretty much anything by her. I found this one the most striking so far, and the interview with her on the DVD is particularly brilliant.

I wouldn’t say that Breillat’s a great film-maker. All of the films are (to my taste) woodenly plotted, extreme to the point of caricature, indulgently ideological, and heavy-handedly symbolic. Yet they are radicalizing, original, unique, and transformative.

After watching Anatomy of Hell, I found that my own gender and that of everyone else had somewhat changed, and that’s no small feat, not easy to do.

In the film under highly contrived circumstances. a distraught woman is rescued from her attempt at suicide in a nightclub by a gay man and then, as part of her bargain not to attempt it again, she hires him to let her show him over several nights of his visits the nature of her womanhood, especially the part of it that would be most repulsive to him. For instance, he must drink a tea from her menstrual blood with her tampon the tea bag.

Some of the other interactions are even more overtly erotic. Several things happen during this performance: she comes to full life in the ocean of her own depth; he is metamorphosed into recognition of the subtleties of his own sexuality, which he now can find only in the archetypal profundity of her body and emotional range. He falls in love with her, or maybe that’s not what happens, but he finds her irresistible and indispensable, and when he can’t find her again, he feels lost and bereft.

By the visual symbolism of the film, her sexuality turns into moonlight and the stormy ocean at night. It bounds and crashes artlessly but with absolute power. Breillat forsakes nuance to make sure that viewers get the full power of her Senlike slap.

Each of her films involve sexual identities and have scenes in which male and female bodies and roles get interrogated and turned upside-down or inside-out. In Brief Crossing, a married woman, pretending to be separated from her husband, masquerades as a free-spirited sexual adventuress and seduces a teenage boy on an overnight ferry ride. Abandoning and even parodying conventional feminism and political correctness, Breillat goes for the core of erotic mystery and elucidates the desires and apotheoses that make up bodily life on Earth, not just for humans but for creatures at large because her humans are as much froglike, gull-like, and cat-like.

Beyond the Sea, directed by and starring Kevin Spacey (2004).  Shape-shifting androgyne Spacey—see K-Pax and American Beauty—brings Bobby Darin back to life in this surreal musical that tracks the metamorphosis of an ambitious pop hipster from the Bronx into a thoughtful philosopher and critic of the Vietnam War. Spacey stages each of Darin’s famous hit songs as a Broadway song-and-dance number, several of which incorporate the singer’s brazenly confident courtship of Sandra Dee. Like the later Jersey Boys, Beyond the Sea is a jukebox musical qua biopic.

The script captures Darin’s snazzy but doomed trajectory over the subtexts of his covert parentage (the woman whom he thought was his sister was his mother, and he can’t know who his blood father is because Nina “slept with half the Bronx”), roller-coaster marriage to Sandra Dee, and fatal heart condition (inherited perhaps from his unknown lineage). Spacey is too old for the role, and his later satyr demise brings out his weirder side, but the same weirdness that puts him out of bounds in creepier ways in different circumstances streamlines him into a virtual soul shift into the vacated envelope of Darin. It is almost as if his identification with Darin is the core of his own confusions of personal and sexual identity. Latent madness can be what makes an actor or a performance great.

Before Sunset, directed by Richard Linklater (2004). You start imagining a simple exchange—a romantic comedy in the making—but this eighty-minute life-transforming dialogue between two indelible characters portrayed by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy against a rolling Parisian backdrop and then in her apartment doesn’t let go until the last note reveals each of them nakedly to the other and the audience.

The story covers their chance re-meeting after Before Sunrise, when their pledge as anonymous, chance lovers to reconnect on the anniversary of their romance goes astray and, without each other’s names, they digress into alternative lives.

The end of the film is one of those life crossings when diverging options hang in the balance. The outcome isn’t clear until Hawke’s character breaks with his own deadline and tries to elide time and change history. He gets to reclaim the other side of a detour that went the wrong way. Many cinema romances are about that detour, but Before Sunset may be the first to focus on the actual shift of meaning in a lover’s mind and the moments leading up to it. Hawke’s character takes the lead, partly from a wish not to relinquish an unlikely turn of fate, partly from a love spell, and partly from a terror of having to regret the same mistake twice. Missing his plane stands for every radical resolution of a midlife crisis. Some work; most don’t, as the sequel to the sequel will show. But Linklater understands that the internal shift of heart and intention is what the viewer most wants to see and misses in other films.

A Fond Kiss, directed by Ken Loach (2004).  This is a strong candidate for my favorite film ever. Neither the title (from eighteenth-century Scottish poet Robert Burns) nor any ordinary synopsis gives a sense of the delicacy, cultural entanglement, and deep compassion in this film. After so many lame or unsatisfactory cinema romances, this one is pitch perfect. It is my measure for how to do a romance right. 

Set in Scotland, A Fond Kiss features a Pakistani guy, an Irish girl, one very pissed-off Pakistani family, and an equally pissed-off Irish priest. The couple’s dialogue of evolving delicacy and sophistication is both hilarious and tragic, as they navigate the racist and class outrage coming at them and keep reclaiming their love by its own innate power. As the story follows a romance that catches fire faster than its characters can assimilate or work into their identities and careers and prior selves, Loach crosses that magical line where you stop thinking of it as a film and it becomes real. You assume that you know these two; it’s a biopic—all this must really have happened.

The casting is remarkably accurate to the main characters. Cassim (Atta Yaqub) is an aspiring deejay not paying attention to his family’s goal of marrying him to a relative, a cousin, to be imported from Pakistan. He is hip, British, handsome, assimilated, and a dream partner and sensitive lover, except he is Pakistaini. Roisin (Eva Birthistle) is Cassim’s sister’s music teacher at a Catholic school whom he meets while picking her up. She is thoughtful, sophisticated, musically talented, responsible, wry, and aware of what has gone wrong with previous romances, the elusive lacking characteristic that Cassim brings: the magic, the curiosity to know each other, the mutual play. In the first love-making, they roll over and over in a game as to who is the stronger and who is the winner, the indomitable Irish girl or the ambushed Pakistani guy. Play and care are intrinsic to them.  As Roisin puts it, “We’re good together.” It’s an ordinary line, but not so in the context of very different upbringings and trajectories. April infatuation becomes September love, and a lark turns into an existential and cultural challenge.

The terms of Pakistani courtship (and the family expectations behind it) don’t line up with social life or partner pursuit in the UK or in a personal-freedom world.  Because Cassim’s family has already committed him to a woman he has never met, he is stuck. He knows in his heart that he can’t marry her (even as his father Tariq (Ahmad Riaz) is building the couple a house in their yard), yet unable to admit the truth to himself or to tell his father or Roisin.

He tells her about the arranged marriage finally on vacation in Spain. After idyllic love-making and her admission of how lonely she was, he sees how deep he has gotten in and how fast things are moving. He has a lot of dignity and speaks with candor and humility, concluding, “Eleven words, so hard to say.”

After Roisin recovers from the shock, she says, “How about two words, fuck you!”  

They rebound before leaving Spain, but the cultural imperative weighs heavily on him, for if he refuses the arranged marriage, he severs his family and breaks tries to the community that have taken his father a whole lifetime to build. In addition, Cassim is named after his father’s twin brother who was lost forever in the stampedes following the separation of India and Pakistan. Meeting this challenge is what ultimately breaks and then bonds the lovers to each other. Initially Cassim tells her, “It will break their hearts.” Roisin answers, “What about your heart? [Pause.] “What about my heart?” They are standing at the bottom of a staircase, trying again after Spain to break a deadlock in words that can only be broken by actions, and those actions will be irrevocable.

The same is true for Cassim’s sisters, his younger sister Tahara (Shabana Akhtar Bakhsh) who wants to leave him and go to college in Edinburgh against her father’s wishes, his older sister Rukhsana (Ghizala Avan) who wants the husband of her arranged marriage, but he won’t marry her if the family is disgraced by Cassim marrying a goree, a white girl. She tries twice blatantly to sabotage the relationship between her brother and Roisin, the first time meeting Roisin in a café and asking her to break it off, the second time taking Roisin to spy on the first meeting of Cassim and the cousin Jasmine to whom he is supposedly betrothed. Roisin asks if she is just going to let her sit here like an idiot and rub it in her face.

Rukhsana say that that’s not her intention. She just wants to show her what  her family’s about, that she cares about them, and she’s not prepared to give all of that up, including her fiancé Amar, for someone “who doesn’t even know whether they’re going to love my brother next week.”

Roisin, “You’re fucked, Rukhsana. You and your whole fucking family is fucked.”

When Cassim discovers her plot, it becomes the last straw. He breaks with his family and goes to Roisin, but not before Tariq makes his most heart-felt compelling argument, that he will always be a black man to Roisin and eventually he will get sick or old or poor and through him out, but a Pakistani family and wife will never desert him. That’s the crux holding this Muslim family and community together, even after the division of India, even after a generation in England.

Tariq: “Forget her!”

Cassim: “Is this some sort of fucking joke?”

Tariq: “I may not be as clever or educated as you ae, but I’m your father. Please try to understand. Right. Listen. See, you could be with them a hundred years, they’ll still call you black bastard, right? You’re still the same to them. Think of twenty-five years down the road. What happens when you don’t have your health, your money, your resources, your business? What happens? She’ll kick you out. Right?:

Cassim: “You don’t know that, Dad.”

Tariq: “Listen, don’t let a cheap goree come between us. They’ll throw you out in the street. She’ll find another man. What about values? What about your culture, your religion, right? We’re you parents. We’ll die for you. We’ll do anything for you. You’re our only son. You’re our future.”

Cassim: “Respect my choice then, Dad. That’s all I’ll ask of you.”

Tariq: “We do. We do!”

Cassim: “Respect my fucking choice! Meet her. Talk to her. Her name’s Roisin. Get to know her. Can you do that?”

Tariq: “I’ll ask you one more time.
            Cassim: “You’re not asking me, Dad, you’re telling me. You’ve done that your whole life. Your whole fucking life you’ve told me.”

Tariq: “Don’t swear like that to me.”

He shouts at Cassim to come back, and when he doesn’t, he picks up a pole and begins smashing the windows of the house he had built in the yard.

The dialogue between Cassim and Roisin after he tracks her down in her place is the masterpiece of the script and where D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Hardy, and Hanif Kureishi meet. She is playing classical music on the piano when Cassim arrives.

Cassim: “I’ve been looking for you everywhere, Roisin.”

Roisin: “I went to a bar. Several actually. Nearly fucked a complete stranger, can you believe that? Felt a tad lonely to be honest. [A few chords of soundtrack music] Have you come to pick up your stuff?”

Cassim (crossing the room toward her): “That depends.”

Roisin: “What on?”

Cassim: “On whether you’ll grow tired of me.”

Roisin: “Absolutely.”

Cassim: “Will you throw me out if I get sick?”

Roisin: “Definitely.”

Cassim: “Watch too much telly?”

Roisin: “Most certainly.”

Cassim: “Become bankrupt and penniless?”

Roisin: “Without a doubt.”

Cassim: “If I get depressed and lose my mind?”

Roisin: “I’ll send you a card.”

Cassim (continuing to approach her with each back-and-forth exchange) “Better pick up my stuff, then.”

Roisin: “Yeah, you better.” [She gestures with her chin for emphasis.]

Cassim (circling behind her on the piano bench): “And what about when I get very, very, very old, Miss Hanlon?”

Roisin (their faces now close): “I’ll let you know.”

Then comes the “fond kiss.”

Roisin (as their lips part): “Crazy durdou.” [Someone watching the film remind me whether that’s Pakistani for “frog” or “duck” or some other animal, a love name he gave her in name.]

Roisin: “Smelly goree.” [They kiss again, and the film ends to light symphonic music.]

Note too that A Fond Kiss is musical, light in a good sense, old-fashioned, and has Ken Loach’s earmarks of capturing little side scenes and segueing from one scene to another with a symphonic bridge. A separate thread for me goes from Andrea Arnold (Fish Tank and Red Road) to A Fond Kiss to Ken Loach and his entire oeuvre. Check it out. Anything by either Loach or Arnold is worth seeing.

On the Outs, directed by Lori Silverbush and Michael Skolnik (2004). This is the sort of street drama, like moving music and action, that makes most Hollywood and even indy films seem a bit fake. See also Raising Victor Vargas and Liberty Kid for more in the genre. Based on interviews with women in “juvy” detention, Silverbush and Skolnik have made a script combining various accounts into three characters. What dominates are drugs, violence, and sex in that approximate order. Everything is scraped right off the edge of street life. There are virtually no niceties, make-ups, free passes, or rescues. Everyone has to fend on their own against a denominator that keeps getting lower and lower. The backdrop of the New York City skyline and Statue of Liberty represent a mute, deceptively adorned oppressive empire.

The foreground is Jersey City, though it could be anywhere in Cleveland, Seattle, Phoenix, or Miami, the racial and ethnic makeup differing irrelevantly. There is no way out for these girls, between money, addiction, pregnancy, foster care, and guys. For the guys, there is no way out either, typified by a bout of Russian roulette. That tips off how close to a choice against suicide every action undertaken is.

What elevates the film is the script and acting, moments of compassion and beauty among a needle-, garbage-, and dirt-strewn urban landscape. I ordered it after seeing Raising Victor Vargas and based on Dominican actress Judy Marte’s performance in it. In the earlier film, she is a lovely fierce fledgling. Here she has big emotional range, spreading her wings across epiphany, despair, toughness, coolness, and gradual awakening. Her character more than any of the other girls begins to recognize where they are and some very real possibilities for liberation.

In the Bonus Features, Silverbush makes clear her driver: these are good girls and even good guys. It’s we, the empire, who have put them there and then judge and blame them. It’s a cliché until you get to live it through her direction and script.  

You can see the evolution of Judy Marte’s cinema persona in A Kiss of Chaos, directed by Ricardo Sean Thompson (2009). The film is a meta-violent orgy of guns, torture, execution, cocaine, betrayal, and sex in a world in which sociopathy is the norm and anything mellower will get you fast dead. What is striking, though, is, even in this milieu, the competitive, selfish quality of human interaction as if you were watching pit bulls or fighting cocks rather than people.

This is not your “little house on the prairie” family, says Marte’s Phoenix to her sister Isis (Gleendilys Inoa) at one point. Although Thompson has done a searing hip-hop version of Raymond Chandler, David Lynch, and “super-fly” a generation or two later, I see the value of the film as a vehicle for Marte’s raw talent and emotional range. It’s not subtle, but that’s the point. She is as much a man as a woman, but totally a woman. She is as black as she is white— Dominican. She and Isis dominate over all the tough guys who commit a combination of creative and uncreative murder, disrespect, contempt, and vulgarity as if shooting pool. Yet with impossible, indomitable wit and chameleon deceptiveness, Phoenix and Isis defeat them. By the end, everyone else is dead besides them. You wouldn’t want to live in their world; you wouldn’t want them for girlfriends or lovers, but then that’s the point. They’ve scraped reality down to its love-less, desire-less corpse.

Striking too is the fact that paintings of bisexual Phoenix by her lesbian lover Tiffany (Stephanie Ortz) form a backdrop for many violent scenes as well as for Thompson’s mostly silent soliloquies. At those moments, there are three Martes: the actress, the character, their superhero comix combination doubling Marte’s image into a kind of transcendent priestess mandala. The world painted on the wall within the film is the idealized life and god and goddess selves that all the acts of the characters are aspiring to even as they are destroying it.  

Land of Plenty, directed by Wim Wenders (2004). Watching Land of Plenty was part of Lindy’s and my 2022 rediscovery of Wim Wenders, particularly his work well after Alice in the Cities (1974) and Wings of Desire (1987). Together those first two highlight his themes of alienation fusing with incipient magic and cultural becoming metaphysical dislocation (and vice versa). Wings of Desire was remade in 1998 as City of Angels, and that title typifies the essential opposition: “city” and “angels.” Using a light transdimensional device to enter the world of angels, both films are remarkably accurate representations of esoteric beliefs about how our world and the deva and angel sphere interact and trade souls. As noted in my earlier review, Wenders is existential and realism-grounded but also always working toward an epiphany suggesting, however faintly, angels on earth (Submergence, Don’t Come Knocking, Pina, and Paris, Texas, and, of course Faraway, So Close).

            Land of Plenty is a post-9/11 film and gets its title from the Leonard Cohen song about America’s paradox of possibilities and horrors: “For what’s left of our religion / I lift my voice and pray: / May the lights in The Land of Plenty / Shine on the truth some day.” The song doesn’t appear in the movie until an inspiriing grand sweep at the end, which goes from homeless on the streets of L.A. to the impoverished town life of Trone in the desert-like environment to the desolate east, to Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, to the missing Twin Towers at dusk in New York City, then the credits. The song is both the premise and the consummation. The real payoff of the film is not the 95% action but what it delivers in epiphany and awakening at the very end.

Wenders obviously worked carefully to construct the momentum of scenes centered around the relationship between a Paul, a Vietnam vet with PTSD megalomaniac paranoid fantasies (played by John Diehl), and his niece Lana, a missionary’s child raised partly in Africa and the Middle East (played by Michelle Williams). He would probably agree that the story up to the revelation and healing is fairly typical murder mystery and terrorist projection fare. I wouldn’t have taken the time to review a film that was only that, but the outcome has no relevance and meaning without a long lead-up. That lead-up is also a masterpiece duet between Diehl and Williams.

            Initially the script follows the characters separately in their lives. Paul is driving around L.A. in a specially equipped van with a retractable scope, looking to prevent the next terrorist attack. It takes us a bit of time to realize that he is under no auspices, military or civilian, and has no backup except Jimmy (character actor Richard Edson), one of his “men” from Vietnam who is still reporting to him as his superior officer—folie a deux. Paul has been further damaged (neurologically) by exposure to Agent Pink, Agent Orange’s even worse forerunner. The two men’s behavior, as they look for plots, resembles my friend Phil Wohlstetter’s and mine in fourth and fifth grades as, during lunch hour, we searched for mysteries on the streets around P.S. 6, inspired by reading The Hardy Boys and other teen detective mysteries. We seemed to find clues in discarded objects related to random people and occupant rosters of apartment buildings.

The particular plot in the Land of Plenty storyline involves Pakistanis selling Borax secretly pillaged from an abandoned plant in Trone, leading their actions to appear suspicious to Paul and Jimmy, who are in the midst of deconstructing a full-scale second 9/11, with Jimmy doing backup research. Then Lana arrives.

            Michelle’s young character has flown from Tel Aviv with an unopened letter from her recently deceased mother to her estranged brother—he has dropped out of touch entirely. Her father remains a missionary in Palestine, and her worldview and politics are shaped by the Middle East—folks cheered 9/11 in the streets, behavior inexplicable to Paul except as the way of the enemy. Her housing is to be the mission house and soup kitchen of her father’s colleague Henry (Wendell Pierce) where Paul’s main suspect, Hassan (Shaun Toub) goes to eat. That is not what connects them, though. Lana tracks Paul down on her own, but he is uninterested in her until she proves a possible aid in his surveillance. Then an avuncular relationship begins, though she stays merely another of Paul’s troops to him. It is Lana’s compassion, sophistication, emotional intelligence, and reasoning ability that forge more of a relationship. As she plays along with his scenario, she is actually a better detective and strategist than he is at his own game.

            When Hassan is killed in a drive-by shooting, their diverging agendas converge. His is based on an assumption that the shooters were a higher-level cell eliminating underlings; hers are a desire to find out who Hassan is and tell his next of kin. That leads them together in a surveillance van with Hassan’s body, driving to his brother in Trone, Yuessef (Bernard White), a dignified, kind, funny Pakistani who fills Lana in on Hassan, his tragic downhill life, and the real meaning of the Borax (not a bomb), while Paul goes elsewhere in Trone, tracking down terrorists. Jimmy informs Paul of the truth he discovered, that the shooters were teen meth heads in their parents’ Hummer. Hassan was a random target.

            What has to happen now is for all the cylinders to click in Paul’s brain, then for cognitive dissonance to occur and dissolve. After the burial, in a somewhat fanciful overplot, Lana and Paul go on a cross-country drive to the site of 9/11, Leonard Cohen’s Land of Plenty plays, and the words of Lana’s mother, Paul’s sister, are read aloud—she too has come to a revelation, that their estrangement was unnecessary and her own self-indulgence. She asks for forgiveness and also, since the only way he could be reading this letter is if her daughter brought it, to give the daughter the one thing that she and her father couldn’t and that she will need to get through the coming years: courage. She has intelligence and curiosity and compassion, but she will need the kind of courage that Paul alone can teach her. And he is her last living relative beside her father. As these threads come together, the movie ends in hope coming from the one place it can’t be crushed, people’s hearts and a song.

Phantom of the Opera, directed by Joel Schumacher (2004). I was surprised to discover that I didn’t review this movie when I first saw it close to its release date. Lindy and I also saw the play in New York sometime around 1999. Though my memory may not be accurate on a number of points, I am reflecting my impressions then and now.

First, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s score is irrefutably captivating. When you see the words in closed captioning a bit ahead of the sound, you can’t imagine them fitting into the melody; yet they do, and that’s what makes them so fulfilling. A retired Broadway actor I know thinks that Webber plagiarized his music, but however he got to it, it is uniquely powerful. It can capture the opening promise and peril of “Close your eyes and surrender to your darkest dreams! / Purge your thoughts of the life you knew before,” the closing denouement, “It’s over, the music of the night,” and everything in between which makes up the bulk of both the play and movie.

            In the “Point of No Return,” the Phantom gives Christine an impossible choice: spend the rest of her life with him (“start a new life with me, / buy his freedom with your love”) and be condemned to look at the distorted half of his face (“an eternity of this before your eyes”) or have Raul, her lover, killed by the Phantom right then, trapped in his underground moat. Since the Phantom has already killed twice, we know that he is capable of murder. In fact, an element of him is a serial killer.

In the most poignant lyrics of the play and movie (and one of the most poignant of any musical on or off Broadway), Christine answers the Phantom’s challenge in the only way she can to end the stalemate; she kisses him passionately, at least in the movie. I don’t remember a kiss, let alone a passionate one in the play, but then you don’t need a kiss for the lyrics, “Beautiful creature of darkness, / what kind of life have you known? / God give me courage to show you / you are not alone.” Having committed herself to recognizing the Phantom’s inner darkness and empathizing with him, she has defused his power, made it a betrayal for him to force her to look at him forever, and ended the play. That’s the point of no return and also the end of the music of the night.

The lyrics adapt equally to the play where the Phantomis more phantom-like and virginal, a kind of nineteenth-century incel, and the movie in which he and Christine sleep together as lovers in a bed in his vast Hades-like underworld beneath the theater. That confirms the carnal interaction in the movie

What I remember from the play is that the boat in which the Phantom sails on his river is luminescent and magnificent in the three-dimensionality of the theater, seeming to float lantern-like above the whole audience. That three-dimensionality is, of course, is impossible in the movie.

Other things about the movie that couldn’t happen in the play include:

•The shift from black-and-white to color is used to show the difference between memory and present time. It also provides gradual entry into each act, suggesting that the line between memory and time is not a clear one.

•The Phantom’s movie underworld is far more elaborate and Eleusinian than is possible to show in a theater. You can’t have an entire navigable river on stage, though you can limn one, and there are only so many underground layers you can construct on a stage so, concomitant with a graphic love affair between Christine Daaé and the Phantom, the land where the Phantom lives is rich and complex. At the point of no return, there is enough space for him escape, come back, and escape again, as the constabulary closes in.

•There are also aspects of the movie that don’t depend on a cinematic orientation; they could have been in the play but weren’t, though Andrew Lloyd Webber directed both. The line between the Phantom as fantasy and the Phantom as a live presence and also a lover is more discretely portrayed in the movie though it was also in the play. Christine doesn’t know if the Phantom as Angel of Music is her father hovering poltergeist-like or an actual person perhaps taking advantage of her innocence. In the movie, it is clear he is an actual man, because he had seduced and slept with her. In both play and movie, in order to fit the lyrics, she is in a trance state, compelled to see him as her father. Even Raoul is uncertain at first, but once he recognizes the Phantom as a mortal man, he tries to communicate to Christine that she has been tricked, raped. Yet the trance also makes it difficult for her to see the Phantom as her as fundamentally her abuser, because in order to accept this reality, she has to give up not only her training in vocal range and pacing by the Phantom but also her father’s connection to her from the dead. This dilemma is captured in the song “Wishing You Were Here Beside Me,” which does not follow the “Angel of Music” but establishes its own theme. Likewise, a third musical theme is initiated by “Masquerade” which overlaps with the long sequence “Prima Donna” sung operatically by the managers of the theater—Andre (Simon Callow) and Piangi (Victor McGuire) and Prima Donna Carlotta (Minnie Driver).

In the movie, Gerald Butler plays the Phantom, Emmy Rossum plays Christine Daaé, Patrick Wilson plays Raoul the Viscount, and Miranda Richardson plays Madame Giry (the link between the Phantom’s gypsy past and his lodging in the theater as well as the guide to his underworld at the point of no return). I believe that Patrick Wilson is the understudy for the Phantom, and Gerald Butler is the understudy for Raoul. That may not be an authentic memory, but even if it isn’t, it points toward an essential truth of the play and movie: the Phantom is handsome except for his scar, handsome enough to be the Viscount and Christine’s accepted lover. His ugliness is a construct much like in the Twilight Zone episode in which the “monsters” are the ones conducting a surgery on an ostensibly ugly woman such that when the lights of the operating room go on and the bandages are removed, we see that the person underneath is beautiful by our standards and the ones operating are ugly like the Phantom but on both sides of their faces, and far worse because it is trash T. V. rather than a nuanced opera.

Another way of looking at this is: the guiding image of Phantom of the Opera is the Phantom’s half mask. It covers only half his face because the other half is like Raoul. That brings us full circle to the story’s reconciliation at the end: “Beautiful creature of darkness . . . / you are not alone.”

I can describe Phantom of the Opera all I want, and you can be a self-declared enemy of Broadway musicals, but you might give this one a try. Its mix of melody and words draws you in and continues to play in your mind, for better or worse.

The Ghost Whisperer, directed by John Gray (2005). Discovering this serial in 2023 was an indirect sequence of events. Gray’s White Irish Drinkers (2010) is one of my all-time favorite films, but its director isn’t the only John Gray. I found The Ghost Whisperer by searching Gray, but the way in which I stumbled upon it suggested that it wasn’t the same John Gray. In fact, it is. Gray shows no particular predilection for ghosts in his other work, but The Ghost Whisperer is ghosts galore.

            I have only watched a handful of episodes, around eight, a fraction of the total of around 100 bridging five seasons on network T.V. ( CBS), so my review addresses only those, though I imagine it is applicable to the rest. Gray is a master, and I don’t think his work ever goes backward, especially when as Ghost Whisperer ends, White Irish Drinkers is being made. Gray has popularized ghost-guiding, necromancy, and the afterlife to “ghostbusters,” sweetening and dumbing down to a sitcom audience and rating. There is lots of soap-opera pap, but the message is as serious as this manifestation. That makes for an interesting anomaly: high magic and low cinema together.

            Jennifer Love Hewitt as Melinda Gordon is the ghost whisperer, sweetly cast in the role. She is classically pretty, charmingly light, and girlish, a vintage sitcom loving wife. Her village in upstate New York is a remarkably static stage set suggesting the old days of T.V.—Bonanza, Kojak, 77 Sunset Strip, The Phil Silvers Show—when audiences tolerated the same scenery and props story after story. Melinda owns an antique shop; she has a black female business partner and best friend (Aisha Tyler) and a hunk husband Jim, who is an EMT (David Conrad). They both know Melinda’s secret, that she can see and talk to ghosts. An EMT and ghost whisperer are an ideal plot generator because the husband’s line of work often leads to the wife’s avocation.

            Every show follows the same baseline formula. A spirit is trapped in the physical realm because of an attachment it can’t break. Ghosts come in all forms (as death does): a soldier in Vietnam who left a pregnant wife behind (his son is now grown and about to become a father), three children and a dog trapped in an orphanage that burned down, a child killed in a train-car collision who is waiting for his mother’s instructions on what to do next, wives who do not want to abandon their confused and depressed husbands, husbands who do not want to leave their wives, murderers who need to atone for their actions, a teen girl held to the world by her betrayal of her twin sister, a boy who can’t leave without meeting his birth mother. Sometimes the ghost know they are dead; sometimes like Bruce Willis’ character in The Sixth Sense they don’t.

            In every case, Melinda is blocked by a skeptic, a cynic claiming that she has a scam going, or the complicated circumstances of the death and the survivors. yet she always turns it around and liberates the soul to solve their attachment or pass on a blessing or gift, and then see and go toward the light.

            The stories are sentimental, formulaic, and simplistic with clichéd dialogue, boring scenery (as noted), and homogenized characters and behavior. Yet they are wonderful and as human as Thornton Wilder or Harry Potter. For all eight episodes I found myself starting to cry when living relatives or friends who cannot see ghosts suddenly believe Melinda, reconciliation occurs, and the soul is able to go toward the light. It’s a simple formula, but because the life and journey of the soul are suppressed in modern industrial society, mere recognition, especially without ominous overlays and horror-film tropes, is clean and  beautiful. Stephen King could learn something from these tales; they are everything his stories miss, even as Gray’s ghosts miss the genre KIng made famous. Bravo, John Gray and Ms. Love Hewitt for pulling it off. I imagine some ghosts are watching and applauding her efforts on their behalf. Hopefully they can find a real ghost whisperer rather than an across playing one. Not all ghost whisperers are all the same; they have different ranges and talents. I know a few, and you can look them up them online: Salicrow, Gloria Hemsher, Brittany Atwater, Laura Aversano. Sali’s work comes closest to Melinda’s.

Tickets, directed by Ken Loach (2005). This piece is one third of an anthology of short, interconnected films by three different directors set on a train traveling between Innsbruck and Rome. Loach’s contribution is a powerful, initially violent, ultimately redemptive interaction between three rowdy working-class Scottish football fans headed to Rome to watch a Champions League Celtic versus Roma match, a lifelong dream journey into unknown geographic and social territory but an expedition they can barely afford (they are carrying meals from the supermarket where they work and have no place to stay in Rome),  and a family of Albanian refugees switching trains while stealing a ticket.         

Wassup Rockers, directed by Larry Clark (2005). As in all Larry Clark films (pretty much), the characters play themselves in a drama lifted daringly out of their own actual lives, in this case Salvadoran and Guatemalan skateboarders “odysseying” into Beverly Hills and encountering a world as exotic and Circêen as the one concocted by Homer for Odysseus. The film is itself an initiation rite and ceremony in which the neophyte “actors” are given an opportunity to discover and then explore their own mythic and romantic dimensions. In the process, the wealthiest and poorest sectors of LA crash into each other, as it is once again proven that, go back a few thousand years, we are all one species on a long walkabout.

Me and You and Everyone We Know, written and directed by and starring Miranda July (2005).  Yes, she is my daughter, but that shouldn’t disqualify her. The movie starts with a soliloquy about love and terror and ends by trusting its characters and the universe to work out the details, with a good deal of internet identity confusion along the way.

Me and You and Everyone We Know co-stars Miranda and John Hawkes, a versatile actor best known for A Perfect Storm. Some of the tropes she invented became facets of later films: a blurring of reality and identity by emerging online aliases, the fungibility of age, gender, and self, and the parallel world of fluid virtual identities. She put her stamp on other themes that could not be imitated, as she took anonyms, nymphets, pedophilia, bi-racial dialectics, gender drift, and teen blow jobs. One thing that she did here, pretty much as an original, became part of cinema vocabulary: the hidden and mixed identities of online chat. Her children masquerading as a man foreshadow many future genre-bending, gender-bending roles, but the central love affair is simple and innocent.

My daughter (always) manages always to walk right up to the moment of transgression and then not transgress. She goes somewhere else or shows a different face of the situation. That is repeatedly the case in Me and You in which she captures the language and nuance of violation and taboo and never loses the curiosity and innocence behind it. Her voiceovers remind me of a teenage daughter who wrote profoundly and precociously: “With each additional crime it became clear what kind of crime we were talking about here, the kind you have to say five times, a crime that is independent and elusive, independent crime-crime-crime-crime-crime. You can’t be sure it really happened or if it is really criminal. You have to travel to get to the scene of the crime, and it is a familiar journey in reverse. You take a small train there, which is the title itself, with independent being the engine and each crime as a boxcar. You ride it by saying it. When you’ve said crime for the fifth time, then you have arrived at the scene, where it all happened.”

In Out of Babylon, I described the moment and film:

Me and You won four prizes including the Palme d’Or at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival. In real time on limelight network television, emcee Roger Ebert described a young director with the blue eyes of the Houghs emerging from a limo and striding down the red carpet: our girl. He saw an ingenue; I saw an old soul. I saw a seventeen-year-old who once said, “My mother sees only a teenage girl, and my father sees only a thousand-year-old person.” You can’t make this stuff up: fantasy booths, drum stores, synchronicities, krakens, crime-crime-crime-crimes.

Me and You opens with Miranda’s voiceover saying, “If you really love me, then let’s make a vow, right here, together, right now, okay?”

She answers by switching to an imitation male voice that reminded me of Linda Laurie doing the boy part in the 1960 novelty song “Forever Ambrose.” Perhaps my 45 of that, or of Alvin and the Chipmunks cantillating their forties Christmas song, were cued in her subconscious memory.

Because the voice isn’t merely fake, it doesn’t pretend to be male; it is more like a kid’s yap or an alter ego. It responds to “Okay?” with “Oh good!”

“All right!” the over-voice says, plaintive and hopeful as a chickadee chirp.

“Repeat after me. . . . ‘I’m gonnabe free-ee.’” Her personal break for freedom intersects with her audaciously curious teen actresses.

The Ambrose voice follows with a trepidatiously intrepid “I’m gonna be free!”

Call-and-response continues. “And I’m gonna be . . . brave.”

“I’m gonna be brave.”

“Good” says the first voice, softly.

The next line seems straight out of girl bands’ doo-wop—the Angels, Teddy Bears, Shangri-La: “I’m gonna live each day . . . as if it were my last.”

Voices ricochet and blend so that it’s hard to tell which is which.

“Oh that’s good.” “You like that?” “Yes.” “Say it.”

 “I’m gonna live each day . . . as if it were my last.”

It is recondite Miranda, but I also hear my lineage, and Lindy’s line, and our joined DNA, ricocheting in a pre-Socratic symphōnéō, calling out joy and grief, old Europa and nascent America, plus a new soul meeting her own character (a fiction) in call and response:

“Fantastically.” “Fantastically.” “Couu-rraag-eously.” “Courageously.”

Then just Miranda July, light and will-o’-wisp, an Aquarian sylph, an air elemental, capturing a soft breeze by enclosing a hurricane: “With graaccce.” “With grace.”

She’s still not quite done. Before Me and You can begin, she dives into Earth’s oceans where life began as oysters and copepods:

“And in the dark of the night, and it does get dark, when I call a name—” “When I call a name.” “It will be your name.” “What’s your name?” “Never mind, let’s go. Let’s go, everywhere.” “Everywhere.” “Even though.” “Even though.” “We’re scared.” Whispered: “We’re scared.” “Because it’s life.” “It’s life.” “And it’s happening. It’s really, really happening.” “Right . . .  now!”⁹

I heard a forerunner of this soliloquy long ago: before Lindy, before Rich, before Miranda. Its rhythm and sequence underwrote my whole life, even as a three-year-old playing cars on the floor. He heard it and it saved him.

That’s how constellations work.

Me and You ends with a giant rising sun, its sound draining from a time-lapse gong into a solar wind.

History of Violence, directed by David Cronenberg (2005), written by Josh Olson and adapted from a graphic novel of the same name by John Wagner and Vince Locke. In David Cronenberg’s History of Violence Viggo Mortensen plays the role of Joey Cussack, a former hood in the Philadelphia Irish mob. After spiritually burning away his mafia identity in the desert, he takes on a new persona as Tom Stall, small-town Indiana proprietor of a diner, eventually marrying (Edie played by Maria Bello) and fathering two kids, Jack, a boy of high-school age as the film opens, and a younger girl, Sarah. He has been Tom long enough to become a solid citizen in the town.

During a hold-up of his diner by jail escapees on a killing spree, Tom’s old self leaps out of hibernation and, in a Jean-Claude Van Damme display of courage and near-impossible dexterity from the old days, he disarms and kills both robbers. During the media circus that widely broadcasts his image, his old mafia cronies and rivals recognize him, see through the “humble rube” guise, and come gunning for him. He left them with a number of messes, and they want payback and revenge. His big brother Richie (William Hurt) is particularly peeved because Joey’s insubordinate and reckless actions kept him from advancing in the mob.

            Initially Tom hopes to deny, duck under, and defer, preserving his new way of life, but the thing about the mob: the hoods have a code—once you join and get benefits you are in for life. You can neither buy nor plead your way out. Criminals can get released from prison on good behavior, and occassionally hoods can get government protection for spilling the beans on their former colleagues, but that’s not in the offing for Joey. He never spilled beans or was rewarded with a new identity. His protection came from prayer, meditation, and a spiritual exercise conducted at the same intensity as the wild, unpredictable deadly behavior and talents that made him a mafia virtuoso and bête noir even in the mob. In The History of Violence’s unfilmed “prequel,” he does the impossible—he leave the mob inside himself. Like a hitman becoming a zen priest, he converts his energy to a different octave. It takes, and he transforms his core nature as well as his ego performance. “Tom Stall” is not just a good act. Joey is Tom Stall. But “Joey” remains in his unconscious and his karma, like a reincarnational past life.

What Tom can’t run from is the “history of violence,” nor apparently can our species run from a history that goes back to ape bands. No one can entirely shed karma or instinct. So when violent jail escapees threaten to abduct and rape his diner’s waitress, she looks pleadingly toward him for some sort of protection and help because there is no one else with remote possibility—an out-of-shape cook at the grill and a youngish couple dining as the joint is about to close. Joey recognizes the moment and takes over Tom like Superman emerging from Clark Kent. A moment before, he is a calm Viggo-Mortensen proprietor trying to reason with the killers after saying, “Sorry, we are closing.” They take him for a fool and pushover, a fatal mistake. You can see that scene in the trailer without watching the movie.

Wife Edie and son Jack (Ashton Holmes) are soon drawn into the cycle of violence. Jack is kidnapped by a mob enforcer Carl Fogarty (Ed Harris in his nastiest camp character acting with one decimated eye). On initially arriving at the café, Fogarty says to Tom, “Big hero, sure took care of those bad guys.”

Tom, “I don’t like to talk about it, sir. And my name is Tom, not Joey.”

Fogarty, “You tell me.”

And to Edie later, “You better care about what I want because it may change your life. Why don’t you ask Tom why he’s so good at killing people.”  

After the hostage-taking, Fogarty will only release Jack in exchange for Joey. In an ensuing scuffle, Fogarty’s henchman is killed, and Joey is wounded and in danger of also being killed. Jack gets the household rifle and shoots down Fogarty. Now he is in the “game” too.

Edie (who married Tom, not Joey) is a peaceful, upstanding Midwestern woman, about as far from a mob moll as you can get. When she comes into gradual realization of the situation and the peril Tom has put her family in with his all-encompassing lie, she boils over in anguish and condemnation. The two have an intense scrambling confrontation on the stairs where she turns on him in rage. But “Tom Stall” is solid; he doesn’t erupt or pummel her per Joey’s reputation; he is gentle and understanding, taking the blame. But he is firm about not wanting to explain his past. He can’t explain; that was a different person. When Edie screams, “It’s not even our name, is it?,” he acknowledges the truth quietly, but all he will say to her question about where “Tom Sall” came from is, “It was available.” 

The only way he can protect his family is finally to go back to Philly and confront Richie. The reconnection is briefly friendly. Richie is gracious, curious, forgiving (to a point); he needs to understand what happened and how Richie, a badder ass than himself, could he have changed to such a degree. Again, the history of violence—and in this case unabashed gang violence—is inescapable. Richie orders Joey strangled from behind, but his brother is now crazy Joey, not Tom, and the street fighter kills them both. Then Richie and Joey go mano-a-mano, and only one of them will come out alive. If it’s Joey/Tom, he will likely earn his freedom, the sort of dispensation that only victory over a high mob priest can bring.

My favorite scene: Initially, as the broheem stare at each other for the first time in over a decade, Richie mentions that he hears Joey is married now and asks him if he likes it: “Does it work for you? Can’t see it working for me. But I never felt the urge, you know. Lotta great-looking women in the world. I never met one that made me want to give up all the others. Don’t see the up-side. You see the up-side, Joey?”

Joey is briefly silent, as Richie wanders behind his desk, sets down his drink, and reclines onto his leather chair in a boastful pantomime of hedonism. Then the younger brother answers, “Yeah, Richie, I do; I do now.”

Scientists don’t see an up-side to consciousness as long as “mind” arrives signed, sealed, and delivered: an epiphenomenal mirage. But I go with Joey on this one. (This review is adapted from my book Dark Pool of Light: Reality and Consciousness, Volume 3–The Crisis and Future of Consciousness.)

Sometimes in April, directed by Raoul Peck (2005). I discovered this movie by watching Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro, his retrospective of James Baldwin. Then I went looking for more work by him.

It is hard to watch a depiction of the Hutu genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda, and Peck pulls no punches in terms of what happened, though he gracefully offsets more horrific gore with quick segues, flashbacks, flashforwards, and by using later testimony and witnessing. He manages to create an altered sense of time and causation: time leading up to, time of timeless slaughter, and the unbearable weight of time afterwards. In the process, he unravels the events in one family, ultimately arriving at meanings that transcend the brutal Hutu-Tutsi dichotomy at the film’s core. The reality turns out to be more equivocal and mysterious.

Good and evil are not so easily claimed for oneself or projected onto the Other. Behavior that is marginally passable and gratuitously political turns into acts that are utterly sociopathic and unacceptable in any society, tribe, or pack, as somewhat gratuitous ideology and slogans sour into irreversible applications and deeds.

Finding hope and love in a vortex of madness, desperation, hatred, and desecration is the film’s art. Watching it during the Presidency of Donald Trump was particularly disturbing because even though such a broad pogrom is still unlikely in America, the gods behind it are being twitted and emboldened by state actors who have little appreciation for the archetypes or shadows and the rationalizations and shallow righteousnesses that give them cover and ground for incubation into full interhamwes. Stay tuned, but hope we never see full totalitarian mayhem in America. We have a full interhamwe cast.

A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, written and directed by Dito Montiel, starring Robert Downey, Jr. (2006).  This is The Wanderers remade three decades later, as the film likewise hearkens back to a lost era; now it’s the eighties in lieu of the fifties.  The magical realism of the street is post-Warhol, post-mosh and hip-hop. 

Barely staying true to his own coming-of-age novel, Montiel as director shows the saints, angels, and poets camouflaged in gang-and-slum-ridden Queens.

The Wind That Shakes the Barley, directed by Ken Loach (2006). One of the more widely distributed of Loach’s films, TWTSTB recreates the 1919-1921 Irish War on Independence, continuing into the 1922-1923 Irish Civil War and following the life of Damien O’Donovan (Cillian Murphy) who is derailed from leaving County Cork to become a doctor in a London hospital from observing the violence of the British Black and White. Though he believes the war for Irish freedom is unwinnable, he joins his brother Teddy’s IRA brigade and participates in raids and reciprocal murder. The film includes British execution and torture of IRA members. Damien’s girlfriend Sinéad (Orla Fitzgerald), a member of Cumann na mBan, a women’s paramilitary group, has her scalp wounded during the forced shaving of her head at gunpoint.

            Loach covers the territory of the more recent Netflix-streamed two-season miniseries Rebellion and Resistance, following the story of fighter Jimmy Mahon, but Loach’s film is tauter with grittier characters and more penetrating existential characterizations. Both The Wind That Shakes the Barley and Rebellion cover the failure of the Anglo-Treaty to end the War of Independence, giving birth to the IRA, which enlists the anti-Treaty cadre who refuse a partial truce with England leaving them in control. In both renditions, the brothers split loyalties. In Loach’s film, Damien chooses to die by a firing squad under the command of Teddy rather than accept amnesty, turn on his IRA allies, and live out his life with Sinéad. A sad conclusion, death over life, typifies the mythic battle for Ireland. “Danny Boy” is truly the song, but so is “The Rising of the Moon.” So is “The Parting Cup”.

16 Blocks, directed by Richard Donner, starring Bruce Willis, the always credible David Morse, and a scintillating Mos Def as Eddie Bunker, a petty thief who believes that “people can change” (2006).  The film-long duet between Willis’s Jack Mosley, an aging, alcoholic New York cop, and Def, a real-life rapper playing an ingenuous, irrepressible prosecution witness whom Mosley must guard and shepherd to the courthouse to testify against renegade police is simultaneously light and dark, but finally liberating for both men. Yes, the distance is only 16 blocks, but it takes almost two hours of movie time to get there, a route rivaling that in Clint Eastwood’s Gauntlet. It’s 16 blocks of creative scripting and improv by two great, very different actors.

Wendy Wu: Homecoming Warrior, directed by John Laing (2006). When I first starting watching this silly, implausible, haphazard, amateurishly cartoonized film, mostly a vehicle for a Disney house star of countless movies (fully flacked and previewed in the “Bonus Features),” Brenda Song, is so funny  that it transcends all its flaws, drawbacks, and promotional gimmicks apparently flooding the market at the time of its release. We saw it in 2022.

The premise is irresistible. Handsome reincarnated monk Shen (played by actual kung-fu champion Shin Koyamada) arrives from China in one of his incarnations, sent by the master of his temple to prepare Wu, a ditzy Southern California Chinese-American teen (though the whole movie was shot in Auckland), for a battle with the ultimate force of evil in the universe, Yan-Lo.

Wu is only interested in staying popular, becoming homecoming queen, and partying and mall-hopping with her friends. Shen’s arrival makes no sense to her, and she mainly wants to ghost the dweeb in pajamas. The dialogues between clueless Wendy and Yoda-like Shen are priceless, well enough informed by Zen, the Tao, and the t’ai chi classics to be accurate and uplifting, also to gradually draw Wu’s attention away from her sheltered Americanized life. She must overcome her vain, idiotic if handsome boyfriend, her tweety-girl pals, her China-abandoning Americophile parents, and her own hedonistic habits.

Assisting her in this metamorphosis is her grandmother, who knows that her line has always produced warriors at 90-year intervals to fight Yan-Lo. She supplies the Chinese cultural narrative, and pertinent costumes, curios, and mooncake knowledge for the occasion and uses her sway with Wendy not only to draw her into her warrior incarnation but get Shen cover within the family as a distant cousin.

            Shen’s training is absurd compared to, say, Daniel and Miyagi in Karate Kid. The monk basically transfers his own skills to Wu through a series of tricks, carrots, mild sticks, and telepathic and telekinetic devises that include monks descending through statues to walk into the bodies of five of her teachers and incarnate snake, tiger, leopard, crane, and dragon energies and teach them to her when she refuses to be taught by unlikely old men from China. The teachers are literarily possessed, as Yan-Lo in his anti-bodhisattva (as in anti-Christ) role tries to possess the same mentors as well as Wendy’s airhead friends, her homecoming rival Jessica, and the Chinese statues that Wendy’s curator mother has gathered in the museum basement. That’s one of the places in which the embarrassing special effects come in—vintage Mickey Mouse/Donald Duck glowing eyes and exploding rays as if Industrial Light and Magic and Star Wars never existed for Disney.

But the thing about Wendy Wu: Homecoming Warrior is that it can do no wrong, sort of like the Rocky Horror Picture Show except Wendy is all yin and Chinese American Princess instead ghoulish and grotesque. It’s hard to beat Shen finally yielding to Wendy to let her do a makeover of him, woo him with chocolate and cappuccinos, dress him at the mall so that her classmates marvel, “She turned the monk into a hunk.” He wows kids at the school dance with his kung-fu flips and cloudy hands, which they take as dance moves. In fact, Shen takes over as Wendy’s boyfriend, even as he turns Wendy into the thousand-year-old female warrior of her ancestral China. On homecoming night, the homecoming queen becomes a kung-fu queen instead.

I am partly reviewing this to contrast it with the creepy Art of Self-Defense as an indicator that send-ups of near-supernatural martial-arts stunts and Eastern homilies and tropes can be hilarious and satirical while also being loving and respectful. Wendy Wu says, in effect: Everything is magical and possible, even if improbable. The Art of Self-Defense says, it’s all fake, exaggerated, and transgressive; if you want to defend yourself, buy a gun. Riley Stearns’ black—no, downright ugly—comedy fuels desperate loner boys into Uvaldes (Jesse Eisenberg should be ashamed of this role). For all the kitsch and tchotchkes, Wendy Wu leads to girl power and hope. Reason enough.

Luna: Spirit of the Whale, directed by Don McBrearty (2007). A bit of children’s educational t.v., but an authentic Native Northwest Coast myth, some inspiring totem poles, authentic long canoes, a whale with a message for the tribe, and Adam Beach (again) as a lost boy recovering his heritage and destiny, thanks to an orca whale.

Grace is Gone, directed by James C. Strouse and starring John Cusack (2007).  Grace is Gone starts out ordinary, even perverse and tediously choreographed, but by the time the mourning father and his two little girls reach the ocean and the eternal waves and sun, the entire absurd meaninglessness of the Iraq War, and war in general, has been deconstructed, condemned, and transmuted—along with humankind itself. This happens as if on a virgin, bare, hopeful planet, with barely a mention of the war itself—the movie itself as dirge, psalm, and pilgrimage. The issue is how to make the callously secular death of a wife and mother in a vacuous, recreational war sacred, and make their own lives sacred enough to live them forward. The film provides that ritual for every war-widowed family.

Juno, directed by Jason Reitman (2007). This is one of many films that has benefited from tapping a partly unexplored zeitgeist and turning its conceits into memes. It’s a romantic comedy made funnier and more romantic by its anomaly of bourgeois, naïvely hip teen lovers played by Ellen Page and Michael Cera.

            The soundtrack is nursery-rhyme-like, reflecting the story, which is about children stumbling into adult lives, in this case an unintended pregnancy. The artists and bands include Sonic Youth, Belle and Sebastian, Barry Louis Polisar, the Kinks—Mott the Hoople (from David Bowie), “All the young dudes / carry the news”;Velvet Underground: “I’m stickin’ with you / because I’m made out of glue”; And Antsy Pants: “Flower said, ‘I wish I was a tree’ /The tree said, ‘I wish I could be a different kind of tree’ / The cat wished that it was a bee /The turtle wished that / it could fly really high into the sky / Over rooftops and then dive deep into the sea. /And in the sea, there is a fish / A fish that has a secret wish / A wish to be a big cactus with a pink flower on it.”

These are not directly about teen pregnancy, but indirectly they are—the line between innocence and sexuality: the innocence of the baby as well as the baby-makers. It’s a comedy, and a hip, funny one—Juno can’t relate to the baby for the adoptive parents just yet because she supposes “it’s still some sort of sea monkey.”

Juno is complicated by the fact that star Ellen Page (Juno) has created an entirely different cocoon of memes by transitioning to a man, Elliott Page, more than a decade after the film’s release. Some of the best lines reapply to Page himself in a revisionist way: “I’m already pregnant, so what other kind of shenanigans can I get into?” (Juno to the adoptive parents) and “I didn’t think he had it in him” (Juno’s father speaking about Juno’s young boyfriend Paulie).

The Visitor, directed, by Thomas McCarthy and starring Richard Jenkins (2007).  “Here is the planet Earth with its bright colors, bigger than the State and all its law . . . paranoid, heartbroken, disillusioned,” to mix tropes of two different reviewers.

The Visitor is the shadow side of the GWBush Homeland Security response to 9/11. Throw in anti-immigration fever, and you have an America not all that different from the Taliban-run Swat Valley or Stalin’s Russia, at least to anyone on the wrong side of the cults.  Add a corporate, robotic Blackwater-like Prison Industrial Complex like something out of a 2150 asteroid detention facility. 

Lebanese actor Haaz Slieman is full of joy, compassion and tragic dignity as a young Syrian drummer camping out with his girlfriend in the abandoned apartment of burned-out and widowed professor (Jenkins). He is eventually imprisoned by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—but not before he passes on to his “landlord” the magic of the drumbeat and the persona of his noble, tragic mother.

Sunshine, directed by Danny Boyle (2007).  I picked this film because it had a strange-seeming science-fiction preview on the DVD of another film Dark Matter, itself a sort-of mildly interesting astrophysics soap opera sound-tracked by the Beijing Angelic Choir. I thought the odds were good that it would be cheesy and terrible like most experimental sci-fi.

Though I understand why so many people hate it (negative Netflix customer reviews and poor Netflix rating of less than three stars) and I buy the arguments against it, it is so brilliant, so bizarre and original, and so, finally, spiritual that I ended up personally transformed by Sunshine despite its obvious limitations. I think that the film’s vision of the Sun is its masterpiece.  All the human activity aboard the spaceship is dwarfed by the actual presence of Sol, a god of many dimensions. The Sun as a world and a being is portrayed more powerfully than in any other science or sci-fi film I have seen. It is fully deconstructed and revealed.  But the film also holds up dramatically and, though flawed at every level and way too ambitious for what it can carry off, it still makes it over the finish line with enough to deliver some of the eternal solar goods.

A bizarre, major error: I initially wrote, “I think the film’s voice-over is original and an epiphany. I have never seen a film that contextualizes itself by a voice-over in quite this total a way. The voice-over begins when the Fox Searchlight icon starts, and it ends only when the last credits roll away.  In effect, it puts the entire film into the same frame as it puts the Sun. The voice-over deconstructs the film and the making of a film in the twenty-first century in the way that the film deconstructs the Sun and the role of the Sun in human cosmic history.  Many viewers hated the voice-over and found it pretentious, again as per Netflix; I thought the voice-over, whether pretentious or not, was so daring and outrageous, so confident and comfortable in its own device and artifact, that it transcends its pretentiousness and over-determination and really makes a film like no film I have ever seen before, with a text that glosses and overrides not only the story-line but the matrix in which a film is set, and then the matrix in which that matrix is set. If the voice-over could begin before you even ordered the film from Netflix, it would frame reality even more fully.  And if it could go on after you finish watching the film, it would further change the Sun—and it in effect does.  The voice-over plus the Sun makes this worth the failings of the plot. There’s really nothing like this I know of that’s even been attempted. Again, it gets at what the narrative really is in the same way it gets at what the Sun really is and what film as a medium really is.

Two years later, I realized that I made an embarrassing mistake. I inadvertently viewed the “visually enhanced” version of the film mostly for the blind, and that’s why I got a voiceover narrative that began with the opening credits and continued through the last image on the screen. I confused this add-on with the regular narrative voiceover (of which reviewers actually spoke).

Why did it take me two years to figure this out? I think it is because the feature works so well singularly with this film that it became seamlessly part of it and I assumed that it was the intended aesthetic and script.  Only after mistakenly selecting a much less effective visually enhanced version of a film (by mistake again) did it hit me: I hadn’t seen the version of Sunshine intended by the director.Perhaps that’s how a film that stares directly into the Sun should be seen. 

12 (12 Razgnevannyh Muzhchin), directed by Nikita Mikhalkov (2007). The Russian version of the American classic Twelve Angry Men is not a remake or even a transposition of the story into a Russian context.  It is a different movie using the same premise. A unanimous verdict is required, and eleven biased or bored jurors are anxious to declare the defendant guilty and move on with their day and lives. One guy is holding out until the rest gradually come around to his  position.

The plot of 12 is wrapped around the Chechnyan war such that urban-battlefield images are interspersed with jury deliberations. Each of the twelve jurors is fully portrayed, so the drama starts out slowly, ploddingly, but it keeps getting sharper and sharper until it morphs from an ordinary film into a tour de force. You have to be patient and wait it out.  An hour and a half in, I was like: This is okay, but a little tedious.

The tipping point is the moment when the doctor from the Caucasus takes the “murder” weapon from a bullying and angry member of their group and demonstrates the real potential of the implement with a dazzling display of knife-play.

Two hours in, I began to feel the film’s gathering power. When it got down to the last ten minutes, I was in the hands of a master.  Shots whirled into one another, montages flowing fluidly across boundaries of space-time, exploding into unexpected meanings. The defendant’s dance, simultaneously as a boy in Chechnya and as a young adult prisoner, was a tour de force.

I have seen many good films that were great until they didn’t know how to end.  This one maybe didn’t quite know how to begin, but before we were done with each other, I was transported to the Russia of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.

Never Forever, directed by Gina Kim (2007).  This is Ukrainian-American actress Vera Farmiga’s most nuanced and poignant role, as Sophie, an American woman married to a Korean man who desperately wants to have a child but does not have viable sperm.  The opening section of the movie, depicting their dilemma and culminating with his attempted suicide, is not credible, hyperbolic and mediocre.  The rest of it, depicting Sophie’s clandestine search for a Korean sperm donor and choice of a young illegal immigrant played powerfully by Jung-woo Hu, more than makes up for it.  The idea is to trick the husband into thinking that it is his baby. The relationship between Sophie and Hu’s character, meant to be a passionless pact of convenience, goes through varied phases of emotional ambivalence, complication, and elusive feeling, finally opening both their worlds to new possibilities. 

What makes this film special is its resolution.  Though some viewers on Netflix considered the mysterious ending a copout that ruined the film for them, I thought it a kind alchemical transformation of everything that went before it into something more elegant, innocent and, most of all, habitable. Because it makes Sophie’s former world seem like so much hoopla and hysteria, it is a perfect cameo of transformation, salvation, and true love.

Liberty Kid, directed by Ilya Chaiken (2007). This film stands out as a symphony, or salsa, of the streets: Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. What Chaiken captures are the simultaneous micro and macro effects of an event that penetrates lives like an invisible shock wave of energy. It is invisible on a micro level because the street life is so poignant, urgent, and dangerous in its own right, while it penetrates on a macro level because it changes the world economy, politics, and racial and ethnic dynamics and meanings.

Al Thompson as Derrick and Kareem Savinon as Tico, actors that the casting director and director were delighted to find, and numerous neighborhood “extras” in starring roles carry off a blend of survival, drugs, violence, camaraderie, music, loyalty, romance, and scamville. Thompson and Savinon are as good as a young Denzel Washington and Robert De Niro, at least in the moment and on the stage presented by the film.

The title refers to Liberty Island and its Statue (of Liberty), which is where the Derrick and Tico are preparing to dish custard and ice cream at their jobs, when the planes hit the World Trade Center. The initial reaction, authenticated by Chaiken (the “Behind the Scenes” bonus is crucial to seeing how this film was made, by whom, and why), was, “Go back to work, boys, it’s just an accident.” The actual outcome is that Liberty Island is closed and they lose their jobs, starting the tailspin and hustle of the film. Its worlds are Dominican, Puerto Rican, black, white and, of course, mestizo—mostly mestizo—though everyone has to pick their team, gang, and country of origin.

The Stoning of Soraya M., written by Betsy Giffen Nowrastah and directed by Cyrus Nowrastah (2008). While viewing The Stoning of Soraya M., I was struck by the power and passion of the images that the Nowrastahs created. Using a puppet and then an actress (Mozhan Mamo) with prosthetics, they reproduced the effect of stones hitting and smashing her face as she is buried in dirt up to her shoulders so that she cannot move, then smashed to death. The shock of the first stone with which her husband strikes her is so profound that, as her head rises, not only are her eyes defiant and revelatory, but the crack out of which her blood flows is another eye, even more profoundly revelatory and defiant.

Her altered body is her transmission of karma.  The more they hurl rocks at her, cursing her, calling her a bitch and a defilement, shattering her body—the more another prophecy is delivered onto them. All their shouts of “God is great” (“Allah akbar!“) cannot elevate or alleviate the sentence that is being delivered on them, that they are delivering onto themselves.

It is no surprise that this Persian-language work of art comes from the same production company and actor (James Caviezel—the rest of the cast is Iranian) that made Mel Gibson’s Passion of Christ. Jesus of Nazareth was, of course, not the only human crucified or the only soul who implanted a message in the human blueprint and collective planetary DNA at his death.  Tens of thousands of unknown martyrs have implanted intelligence and passion in the blood of our species.  Billions of animals have also driven their death throes into our collective psyche and karmic record.

Another lesson of the film. Stoning is pornography.  I know that Iranian Islam, as well as the Islamic body, stands proudly against the vulgarity and pornography of the West.  But their treatment of women writes its own pornography. It is not sacred; it is not divine.  Stoning is intentionallyerotic and lascivious, a sanctioned snuff orgy in which shouts of celebration for Allah are more clearly heard as hex cries to ward off the spirits they are drawing and the dark sexual spells that are being cast.  They are getting off on their erotic murder.  Once you see it for  whatit is, those attendant meanings explode. This is, in effect, a film about the making of a snuff film, for most of the actual Islamic “snuff films” were never recorded with a camera. This “stoning” stands in for those; it is their witness and conscience. 

There is a thin line between caring family protection and sadistic, incestuous destruction of one’s own; it shouldn’t be thin, and the fact that it is makes the gash that opens it to pornography—for the eroticism of these stoning deaths is the sheer wonder and awe that certain barriers can be crossed, certain promises be broken, and what is aroused is the ambiguity and mystery of desire.

But even as stonings are pornography, the epidemic of normalized pornography in the West, from X-rated films and women stripping as they swing around poles, to plasticized boobs, mundane ads for jeans and cars, and all the rest, is a light recreational mode of stoning.  For all the claims of feminist liberation, these are sordid rituals whereby men get to symbolically stone the sacred feminine into submission, regression, and emotional snuff. What happens in Iran is a mytho-patriarchal transposition of what happens in the West.

Hunger, directed by Steve McQueen (2008). Like the previous film, this is neither a pleasant experience nor an easy movie to watch. I have put it on my list for its uniqueness and raw power. It is essential, not just in its depiction of “the troubles” in Northern Ireland but its reflection (through them) of any human event that conflates and combines territoriality, ethnic and/or religious and class conflict, personal and regional sovereignty, asymmetrical warfare, conscience, honor, and the strategic and spiritual force of disciplined symbolic acts.

McQueen’s reconstruction of the 1981 hunger strike of IRA Maze prisoner Bobby Sands (played by Michael Fassbender), ending in Sands’ death—the film’s crux—is effectively a purgatory followed by a crucifixion. The aftermath of watching it may be more indelible than the viewing. In fact, it has to be, for the meaning of political suicide by self-starvation cannot be contained in a technology or on a screen; it throws one after another exquisite, unbearable, timelessly dense image at you, and the impact takes a while to settle, get internalized, become emotionally, cognitively, available, at which point the images flow back iconically out of one’s own mind’s as if you had just been in a museum exhibition of an unknown series of paintings by Hieronymus Bosch or their more ephemeral modern shadow, the amateur postcards made by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib.

In an interview on the film’s DVD , McQueen, an avant-garde African British painter, describes his intention to make moving paintings with continuous attention to framing, color, texture, light, duration, and content. Pacing and rhythm are key because cinema is not naturally more but less persistent than the art of Lascaux or Da Vinci. In cinema, each deep image wavers and dissipates into its next inevitable state or gets lost in the expectation or explotation of its potential to become something else. McQueen neutralizes that to create a cinemaatic gallery space. Some films are painting-like. This film is a painting that is film-like but only because it is a film. 

Some of the scenes are also throwback Warhol in gaze of their stolidly fixed lens and unlikely length, yet classical in their richness and imagery like Dutch Mediaeval renditions of the Crucifixion or Bosch’s damned wandering and clustering in Hell. Again, film as painting.

The latter third of the film is a record of the deterioration of Sands’ body in Fassbender’s gruesomely real sacrifice of his own body. The first section depicts the set-up: prison walls hand-painted shades of brown by prisoners with their own excrement, full frontal male naked bodies, milling in prison groups, being tortured individually and collectively, confined restlessly and torpidly in cells like animals in a zoo. The nakedness becomes part of McQueen’s essential naked, transparent, Rembrandt-like aesthetic and palette, building layers of paint that move away from motion to stillness, in part by breaking an unspoken rule about superfluous penises and making them essential (e.g., ordinary) anatomy, in part by deconstructing modernity with a kind of Stone Age or feudal stripping away of nuance.

There is one long, slowly evolving composition of a fly, broken jail wire, and a trapped hand exploring the wire and inviting contact by the fly—the fly freer than the hand. The longest Warhol-like composition is a guard with a squeegee disinfecting the hall of urine pissed into it by the prisoners. He approaches the lens from faraway pushing the spills along, occasionally back under the iron door of a cell.

A sequence comprising almost an astonishing third of the film—the middle third—is a discussion between Sands and a priest in which Sands makes a moral and existential argument for his imminent hunger strike to death and the priest tries unsuccessfully to dissuade him. The camera is put at a greater distance than directors usually set their audience, plus the words are softer and less theatrically enunciated than usual, making the scene difficult to hear and interpret. That’s how it should be. The fact that the camera and mike are intentionally not user-friendly gives the sensation of eavesdropping. This makes the exchange more necessary and powerful, as if one were overhearing a real thing.

The two actors capture the likely rhythm and alternately intense and idle tugs that such a conversation in life would have; one gets to overhear particularly poignant phases in which clashing moral and political views come to a head. The whole sequence is punctuated with aesthetically rendered flashbacks from Sands’ boyhood. These flashbacks and their dissolves continue into his hunger strike, where they are mixed with the waning natural world so that Fassbender’s character can finally barely see or hear the events or visitors to his surroundings. Fades of dimension, memory, and the Now into one another convert McQueen’s images to a modern montage that is just as painterly and hard-earned. Again, I can’t say that it was an enjoyable film or one that I was drawn to keep watching, but brilliance and perfection are more than their own reward. After-images in my mind continue to speak for themselves. I would think that this review changes your palette too, even if you never see McQueen’s film. But see it anyway.

John Adams, directed by Tom Hooper (2008). There are two great values to this series beyond a well-done drama with history lessons and iconic performances by Paul Giamatti (John Adams), Laura Linney (Abigail Adams), David Morse (George Washington), Steven Dillane (Thomas Jefferson), and Tom Wilkinson (Benjamin Franklin). By the seventh episode, in fact, David Morse looked more like George Washington to me than any portrait of the first President because his living three-dimensionality filled out the masque, costume, and makeup. The actors also aged with their characters and lived full lives, the older generation to their deaths. Remarkably Adams and Jefferson, portrayed as fierce foes who were also intimate friends, died on the same day, July 4^th, fifty years to the chime after the signing of the Declaration of Independence

The first value is pretty much what I just said. Adams, Washington, Jefferson, King George III (in a weirdly camp performance by Tom Hollander), Alexander Hamilton (played as a stuffy fool by Rufus Sewell), John Adams’ son John Quincy Adams (the sixth President of the United Colonies played by Stephen Hinkle and then Ebon Moss-Bachrach)—even the early White House itself in the wilderness being constructed by slaves—come alive off period pieces, dollar bills, map names, and monuments. The stories enact political, military, and philosophical battles that are being waged today identically with exponentially more powerful technologies and broader civilizational habitation and supply lines. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, geography was being created. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the same forces are attempting to revise, regret, and recreate those maps. Ships firing canons at sea during the Revolutionary War foreshadow U-boats and drones. 

            The second value is how prophetically current the issues portrayed are, especially given that this HBO series was made before the election of Barack Obama and well before the breaching of our waters by behemoth Trump. The Federalist society, the Jeffersonian Republicans with their revolutionary fervor and continentalism (later the Democrats, later the Republicans, now no one), the nascent Military-Industrial Complex, manipulations of the Electoral College, the destruction of classified and obsolete documents, and the rivalry friendships of diplomacy and political parties are all there in spookily modern forms. When you watch John Adams, you may briefly forget when you are living, where the United States now is (on Earth and in the Akasha), and who’s still alive or in phantom ancestral presence. This series is innately about time travel and the nature of time itself.

            Historian-journalist David McCullough wrote the memoir on which his own script was based. In a feature on the DVD, he describes immersing himself in the letters and documents of the time, holding and reading them until he could confidently guess what Adams or Jefferson would say ahead of time. He got so deeply inside their characters that he was able to recreate them and write their imagined lines in the lingo of the times. He brought them each back to life to enact a credible alternate version of themselves in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. That means that he also recreated the religious container in which they lived and in which the United States were melded and born. God and Providence were all around them, and they consigned their lives and deaths and the new nation to higher forces. I think that if Adams and Jefferson saw this film, they would agree that it was accurate while at the same time not really them. 

In no way resembling modern Christian religiosity or Presidential lip service to the Divine, John Adams lived in a sacred landscape; his appreciation of the natural world and devotion to plants and animals was personal and innate, right up to his last days. This is not to overlook the racism and colonialism of the era; it is to see the world as these men (and women) saw it.

            Finally, McCullough’s John Adams is intense, rigid, egotistic, demanding, unrelenting, moralistic to a fault, Federalist (of course), self-martyrish, both compassionate and cruel, a man of intense faith and action. He is not a pleasant person by any means, but he has more commitment and loyalty to America than anyone I can think of in today’s politics. He suffers no fools and doesn’t hesitate to tell Hamilton off, call him an idiot, even diminish Jefferson to his face. I would love to clone him to comment on the MAGA separatism and isolation and Donald Trump. He would say something like, “You, sir, are the stupidest man I have ever met.” Agree or not, this series brings that John Adams to vibrant life. Would that he and Jefferson could run again rather than Biden and Trump.

American Son, directed by Neil Abramson (2008). I discovered this film thirteen years later by which time it had virtually disappeared online, blotted out by an entirely different 2019 movie of the same name. The earlier American Son is precisely the sort of film that led me to write this movie blog: beautifully scripted, cast, and filmed, and virtually unknown. It reminded me most of George Lucas’ 1973 American Graffiti. American Graffiti was set in Modesto, white, and nostalgic for the lost fifties, bathed in mystery and longing. American Son was set in Bakersfield, black, and nostalgic for anything other than the W. Bush era, bathed not blatancy but also its own mystery and just as much longing. What joins American Son to American Graffiti is the brief interlude of crossing between adolescent coming of age and the harsher adult world. In American Son, nineteen-year-old Mike Holland, played to perfection for his gentle innocence, strong integrity, and mature coming-into-new-wisdom, by Nick Cannon, has just completed basic training as a Marine and is about to be deployed to Iraq. However, deployment was suddenly delayed by 96 hours, giving him a chance to take a bus back to Bakersfield and say goodbye—a far more serious and fateful goodbye than that of Richard Dreyfuss’s Curt Henderson in Graffiti. It is also a chance to see who he has become against the backdrop of his former clique in te wasteland of industrial Southern California. In fact, Bakersfield is itself a key character with the cinematography continually capturing how ugly and frenetic the urbanized landscape is.

Though it is not the point of the film, the coming great California drought infuses the subtext. At the same time, the fact that the inhabitants, the characters in the film, don’t see their home turf as a wasteland or vapid mall but as the iconic map and container of their precious, romantic, fervently lived lives makes the scenery even more poignant. Because Nick is dealing with 96 hours—perhaps the last 96 hours during which he can control his own actions and shape his own destiny—the movie resonates somewhat with Spike Lee’s 25^th Hour where Edward Norton, Jr. takes the place of both Dreyfuss and Cannon, except that he is headed from arrant youth to serious jail time.

            American Son is framed around Holland’s sweet, brief romance with a Mexican American girl—woman—he meets on the bus home. Christina (last name not given or maybe Morales) is played by Melonie Diaz. The plot requires that they accomplish this romance in a very limited time without the script rushing over the key nuances and subtleties that make romances work in real life. That means that it can’t be love at first sight or sex immediately—yet there are only 96 and then only 48 hours, and rapidly counting down. Holland has to meet her family, pass the judgments of a close-knit clan including parents and grandparents, and as a black man to boot (though Cristiana tells him it’s not that, it’s the gauntlet her father would have for any man showing up).

This is one of the more authentically scripted and acted romances I have seen in a movie, both light and sober, playful and profound. Holland can’t tell her he is being deployed until the very end, which is a betrayal. That aspect of it—the lie—reminds me of Ken Loach’s A Fond Kiss.

            There are many “islands” visited by Mike in Odysseus-like tour of the Bakersfield fog. The most glaring is the old gang, predominantly white party-going, drug- and alcohol-downing nihilistic slackers, electrified zombies, and wasted hedonists. They want Mike back and feel dissed by his new stature and chastity from not only going through boot camp but his commitment to escape to a better life. They want to escape too, but through opium, recreational machine-gun blasting, prostitutes, booze, and ear-splitting music—the film’s soundtrack is spot-on.

Mike continues to love them because they are his buddies and yet he can’t revert to them; he is like a Zen master or sensei, dispensing unmarked lessons at every moment. They both admire and hate him for it and assume he can be seduced back (for instance, by bought sluts performing lesbian theater and nymphomaniac affect). Cristiana is a second reason why he can’t.

Mike’s best friend, Jake, played by Matt O’Leary is not only riveting to watch but one of the best heartful psychos in all of cinema. O’Leary’s constantly moving, shifting assortment of jives, dances, almost satanic temptations, and mix of incipient suicidal madness with sheer love for his friend is a masterpiece of acting. I don’t know if he was considered for an award, but I make him a contender for Best Supporting Freak in cinema history.

            On top of that, crammed as well into 96 hours are Mike’s tender interactions with his kid sister, mother, father, and white stepfather, though the latter three are fraught with angst, quiet directionless grief and anger, and search for any meaning in their own complex melodramas set against Mike’s commitment, purity, care for them and what happens to them, and his own split loyalties. In many ways, he regrets enlisting and that he is now stuck with deployment. If he had met Cristiana on the bus first, he wouldn’t have enlisted, but then he wouldn’t have met her on the bus. That’s the way that life and serendipity work. If he hadn’t enlisted, he would still be drawn into the self-destructive pleasure-dome antics of his childhood sidekicks.

            His decision takes on exquisite clarity and terror as Cristiana takes him to meet—I am unclear if it’s her cousin or a friend—a Marine who lost one leg at—I believe at “Ra-fucking-Madi,” played by a real soldier on crutches missing a leg. The dialogue between him and Holland is marked by the fact that the two young men are on opposite sides of a great divide, yet both Semper Fi. It is also marked by the fact that Mike is facing the challenge of coming back alive, let alone in one piece. The exchange between the two marines starts out with the wounded guy’s maudlin bravado and mix of regret, rage, grief, and bonding with a fellow Marine, and Mike’s reticence, unease, and growing fear about what he has gotten into. But he also has to deliver for his uniform and Cristina, and finally for himself. It starts as an awkward mismatch—the guy’s first request is to get the curtains opened because his grandmother keeps them closed all the time and the place is like a tomb, and he can’t do it on crutches. That leads to an even more awkward “dance” when they go outside and he falls and can’t get up at first and is furious when Mike tries to help him because he’s still a warrior. Gradually they find a catharsis.

            Online, veterans love this film a lot more than reviewers. I don’t get why it’s not a landmark piece of work. It’s a short story on the screen, almost as well-dialogued as Richard Price’s novel Lush Life and as inceptive about war’s heart source of gumption and grace as Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage.     

Dancing Dreams: Teenagers Perform “Kontakthof” by Pina Bausch, directed by Anne Linsel and Rainer Hoffmann (2009). This is a documentary in which a group of high-school students in Germany, teenage volunteers and prospective dancers and actors, sign up to participate in a performance of Kontakthof, a choreographically and emotionally complex piece by Pina Bausch. Bausch’s scripts combine avant-garde dance, avant-garde theater, and primitive ceremony in a unique form. The young people in their teens, from varying backgrounds, ethnicities, races, and religions, are not prepared for something this challenging and off the grid. They have to develop resources in themselves that allow them to touch each other in provocative and intimate ways, for they are required to portray desire and alienation within society at large and in difficult relationships, romances, and rejections as small skits and dance representations, using signals and festures totally unfamiliar to them. These are reminiscent of ballet in narrative if not movement, with an occasional Charlie Chaplinesque quality of mime.

            In the opening dance sequence, the individual bodies move in so many fluid, discordant ways that they represent belly dances, snake dances, ballroom dances, pretend dances, and rain dances, etc., as they move to a kind of beer-hall or carnival yet classical-sounding music that is weirdly addicting. In another scene, the boys, collectively, walk their sitting desks rapidly across the stage to the girls who are in place both preening for them and intending to ignore their pretentious advance. Other sequences involve theatrically flirtatious undressings and mature forms on inquisitive touching. The two female directors, and later Bausch herself, teach them how to do these motions neutrally so that they are contained within the piece and no longer hold the transgressive meanings they would if carried out in real social contexts.

            Bausch enters the documentary late and turns it into its own performance piece, one that includes the performance piece of her “play.” I don’t think that this is intentional but because she is such a distinctive charismatic, royal presence: an androgynously wise crone. She picks at the perfections she wants but is nurturing as a mother or even a Great Mother. After the first public performance, she goes around the whole cast on stage at curtain call and hands each teen a rose, one by one.

In her own interview on the DVD, Bausch is wistful, proud, regretful, and somewhat amazed by herself, her will, her choices, and the nature of time. She talks about how incredibly fast time moves and she hopes to see another spring, though this will be her last filmed appearance.

I once watched a turkey gang in a meadow, adults and poults. The little ones raced to an invisible boundary and back. Some of the females settled in a patch of sand, using feet and wings to toss it up over themselves for dust baths as they wriggled into little burrows like hens on eggs. A small group of females ran among one another back and forth in a series of J-shaped curves, almost chaotic, proverbial chickens without heads, yet so elegantly choreographed that it would take a complex algebraic function to notate. A single large tom paraded in and among them, showing off his full parasol.

It was a Pina Bausch piece performed by turkeys.

Gran Torino, directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Eastwood as Walt Kowalski, a retired Highland Park (metro Detroit) factory worker recently widowed and watching his once white working-class neighborhood be taken over by poor Asian immigrants and their gangs (2009). Eastwood particularly despises the Hmong Laotian Vang family next door whom he regards as lazy and un-American.

            When the teen next door, Thao (Bee Vang), is coerced by a Hmong gang run by his cousin “Spider” to attempt to steal Walt’s old polished Gran Torino as part of an imitation, he tries but gets caught, bringing humiliation to his family. His mother then requires Thao to work for Walt as penance.

            In the new dynamics, Walt is slowly won over by the character and ethics of Thao and his family who, in turn, supply the kind of care, community, and cultural life that his own children, who mainly want to put him in a home with his Labrador dog, can’t. Walt ends up protecting Thao against Spider’s gang, but things soon deteriorate with Walt drawn into the battle.

            In the process, Thao’s sister, Sue (Ahney Her) teaches Walt who the Hmong are and how they ended up in Highland Park after war service to the Americans. She wins his appreciation for her clan’s character and courage.

            When Spider’s gang attacks the Vangs, injuring Thao and raping Sue, Walt goes into classic Eastwood action. He devises a Trojan Horse plan that leads to his own being gunned in front of the gang’s house—he is dying anyway—and Spider and cohorts going to prison. At Walt’s funeral, his vain airhead granddaughter awaits the signing of the Gran Torino to her. Everyone is shocked when the car is left to Thao, who closes the film by driving it with the Lab in the seat beside him.

The haunting theme song (“Gran Torino”), written by Eastwood’s oldest son Kyle (who also wrote a haunting original funeral march for American Sniper likewise directed by his father (2014)), provides  a closing context of memories, moments, with a tender breeze and rain: “It beats a lonely rhythm / All night long.” Whoever Clint really is, he is figure it out, role by role and relationship by relationship. It’s good to have a broken mirror in which to reflect himself.

Looking for Eric, directed by Ken Loach (2009).  The main character, a postman named Eric (Steve Evets), has fallen on hard times and pretty much given up on life. Living in a pigsty with two dropout teenage stepsons who are members a local psychopathic gang, he deeply regrets walking out on his first wife decades earlier. He has just smashed up his car, is in terrible physical shape, and has only his drinking and football (Manchester United) and his post-office and football buddies. When one of his friends gets involved in a New Age self-help book, the group goes along with its premise. Each envisions a hero after whom to model his life going forward. One picks Gandhi, another Mandela, another Old Blue Eyes Sinatra, another Sammy Davis, Jr.  Eric picks Eric Cantona, a nineties star for Manchester United, a player of French nationality, given to philosophizing about life. 

Soon thereafter, the “real” Eric in the script appears and begins to advise his namesake in French and English, usually but not always translating the French afterward.  I say the real Eric because Eric Cantona enters the film as an actor, but he is not playing himself in the way that, say, Joe DiMaggio plays lui-même on the children’s record Little Johnny Strikeout. He is playing an imaginary version of himself.  So instead of an actor playing the ghost of Eric Cantona, Eric Cantona plays his own ghost, a performance that Loach mixes with newsclips of his greatest goals and passes.

No Zen master or personal life coach could have advised Eric the postman any better, as his life begins coming together magically.  What follows are manic and romantic redemptions: Eric stars in “Revenge of the Wusses” while reclaiming his life, the love of his life, his family, and becoming a real-life hero. Three busloads of Manchester United fans wearing Eric Cantona masks end up attacking the home of the psychopathic gang members, pit bulls and all—yes, the real Eric is there too, wearing a mask, playing his own doppelgänger.  I know nothing about European football, but this is the best movie I have seen in which a sports star is played by anyone or plays anyone, let alone himself.

Passing Strange, directed by Spike Lee (2009). It starts right in, no credits, so if, like me, you didn’t know what this movie was about, you went through ten or fifteen minutes of adjustment before you realized what you were watching was the main event, not a prologue. It’s Spike Lee’s curtain-to-curtain record of the last performance of an autobiographical rock opera by Stew, founder of the band The Negro Problem, an “opera” co-written by Stew with his partner Heidi Rodewald.

An ensemble cast switches from locale to locale (L.A., Amsterdam, Berlin), adopting different characters for each setting.  Stew himself floats around the set as narrator and one-man chorus. The band members are also part of the landscape.

Every actor or actress (except Stew, Daniel Breaker playing his alter ego, and Elsa Davis as his mother) gets to create three discrete memorable supporting roles.

In their own urban hip way, the lyrics are as original and heartfelt and witty and rhyming as Gilbert & Sullivan or Ira Gershwin (“Hey, Mr. L.A., I know a place where you can stay. / Right next door to here is a nice flat, yeah, it’s okay” and “Oh the LAPD never thought he was that cute—/ but now a squad of ice queens is in hot pursuit. / I’m the Superfly in the buttermilk! / And we find him Zerr Gutt! / ’cuz I’m the black one!”) Yes, he’s the black one in Berlin.

The ambiance, music, and stagecraft at various times echo Sam Cooke, Hair, Rob Brezsny of World Entertainment War, Phantom of the Opera, Cecil Brown of The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger,  and some sort coming-of-age blend of James Baldwin, J. D. Salinger, D. H. Lawrence, and Mark Twain.  The pacing is impeccable, the staging dramatic without being overwrought, radiant but not garish.  The camera-work is innovative and improvisational, as you would expect from Lee (going backstage, going into the audience, or actress De’Adre Aziza shooting with an old Bolex within the play).

Overall, it’s about sex, drugs, politics and “passing strange” as a black man in eighties Europe. It’s about home. It’s about making art. And it invents itself on stage in dance and song with epiphanies, crescendos, and bursts of exuberant insight.

Undertow, directed by Javier Fuentes-Leon (2009). I mean this as part of a pair, with Weekend, directed by Andrew Haigh (2011). I pick Undertow not because it’s necessarily the “better” film—that’s a matter of genre and taste–but because it moved me at a deeper level; Weekend engaged me more aesthetically and intellectually. Both are candid gay male films; both directors are gay, but the four lead actors (amazingly) are not—still, they do an incredibly convincing job. Weekend is British, Undertow Peruvian.

I watched Weekend first. It gets across a complex range of issues around intimacy, commitment, maleness (macho-ness), “coming out,” and candor among gay lovers; in this case, a young life-guard and a young art-gallery employee. What makes the film work is the characters’ willingness to let the unstated develop subtly on its own, with truths and insights gradually seeping out. What is difficult for the men—being affectionate publicly (one guy) and expressing real feeling (the other)—somewhat flips by the last scene in which each overcomes his own reticence but lapses slightly into his partner’s. They don’t stay together, but that’s almost incidental.

Best line—and I approximate—involved telling one’s parents. The art worker’s parents weren’t happy, so he said something like, “Nature, nurture; get over it!” (In the audition on the Special Features, the line is “You gave me the genes; get over it!”)

I began watching Undertow next, a few days later, I initially didn’t like it as much because the Peruvian magical realism seemed to make the whole relationship surreal—an affair between a local fisherman and the ghost of his drowned lover whom no one else could see. However, what might have seemed an indulgence or idiosyncratic distraction came into its own, and the fact that Miguel’s lover was a ghost proved irrelevant because the same issues arose: intimacy, male identity and macho-hood (especially in a strongly macho culture), publicness, honor, etc. The fact that no one else could see his lover put the weight on Miguel to transform himself and those around him, which he eventually did, though not without much suffering and an intense personal awakening.

One of the key gay tensions in Undertow, not as developed in Weekend, is the notion that it’s okay for two men to have sex as long as they’re not “queer.” Think about what that means; it’s a whole book of gender kōans—we are doing this but that doesn’t make us queer, classic Annie Proulx and Brokeback Mountain.

 In Undertow, what “queer” means to Santiago, Miguel’s lover and a painter who was visiting the town to pursue his art before his death, is depth of feeling, acknowledgment of desire, expression of intimacy, inner self-development; but that is precisely what Miguel is fleeing, even as he is pulled to the sex. Married and with a son born during the timeframe of the movie, he wants to be able to mess around with Santiago (alive and then dead) while still being a “real man.”

Santiago doesn’t think that Miguel “has the balls” to be a real man.

In the concluding set of scenes, Santiago’s body is found and brought to shore, and Miguel has to come forward and claim it (against the wishes of Santiago’s wealthy family from the city) and then bury it, as Santiago’s ghost requested, at sea. Finally the whole village meets in recognition of what they have been denying—in a sense they all see another ghost, their own homophobia—and they bury Santiago together with sincere hearts in sacred ceremony. The resolution is lucid and redemptive.

Winter’s Bone, directed by Debra Granik (2010). Also check out also Down to the Bone and Snakebit by the same director.  Winter’s Bone is a crisp drama, no wasted motion or language. A teenage girl, Ree Dolly played by Jennifer Lawrence, walks the gauntlet of an Ozarks meth world with pluck and gumption in order to save her family’s land. What makes the film work is the ferocity and commitment of each of the characters.  Everyone’s condition is extreme, but the actors never overplay it. They capture the desperation and urgency of not only every role but virtually every act.

A trip to the Underworld would involve passing among the dead and deformed.  A journey to the realm of the living dead is just as mythological and fabulous; the beings who populate it must operate likewise by the rules of the land.  They didn’t make them, but they honor, enforce and are them.

A young girl is the perfect foil for initiation. The internal dreamlike landscapes are shot in Super-8 so that they don’t fill the whole frame. The haunting “Missouri Waltz” of the soundtrack is both a lullaby and dirge.

The Fighter, directed by David O. Russell (2010).  Mark Wahlberg, Christian Baile, Melissa Leo, Amy Adams, and crew reconstruct the extended families of Lowell, Mass. boxer half-brothers Dicky Ecklund and Mickey Ward.  They do this onsite in Lowell with the “originals” present as models and to help restore historicity on the spot (they are in the film itself as extras).  The different layers of the real and the acted world meld to produce something that is beyond real (and certainly beyond the illusion of “reality”).

The movie is a gem, a piece of complex art working at many levels—as classic and Homeric as it is avant-garde. It has the same exquisite texture of lower-class Eastern Massachusetts that permeates Good Will Hunting, Outside Providence, The Town, and numerous other Matt Damon/Ben Affleck dramas.  Adams creates a picture-perfect University of Rhode Island dropout bar-skank with a heart of fire (and gold).  Various actresses play the chorus of Ecklund/Ward sisters (they are legion) as if this were Sophocles or Euripides.

Leo captures the fighters’ fierce, arrogant, vulgar, outrageous but devoted mother—my favorite scene is her duet with Baile/Ecklund, reenacting the BeeGees’ “I Started a Dream” to defuse tension in a car.

White Irish Drinkers, directed by John Gray (2010). The year is 1975, the setting is Brooklyn.  The moment that I knew this was going to be a special film was when the family’s younger son Brian, a college-age teenager not in college, gets together with his three long-time neighborhood buddies, one of whom has enrolled in college for computers, and the attention focuses on a particular girl (played by Leslie Murphy) at the bar.  Brian, played brilliantly by Nick Thurston, likes her but felt ignored by her back in high school, so he isn’t one of the guys going over to hang with or hit on her. Instead, he troops to the bar’s outside-facing store-front window and, in the steam on the inside of the glass, slowly fingerpaints an astonishingly accurate portrait of her. One by one, people start to notice. The camera begins to pan, and eventually the whole bar is watching as the lens reaches her stunned abashed face in the center. 

The second most remarkable moment is Thurston’s and Murphy’s one love scene, which begins with them running naked in a graveyard and ends with one of the best simulations of passionate fucking in cinema. But the story doesn’t end there. It ends with her looking at his paintings and trying to explain to him that he’s got something special, and then walking out on him abruptly before she can fall in love.

The evolution of interactions between Thurston and Geoff Wigdor (who plays his hustler brother Danny) is also significant, culminating with each of their admissions of what the relationship meansir. They both play it well, their articulations bursting out of (mostly) inarticulateness (like early Brando).

Their mother Karen Allen has grown from the teen siren playing strip tease with the boys in The Wanderers to a trapped mom in White Irish Drinkers, though she brings that same youthful spirit to her role.

The life of this film is the humanity of its characters and the fact that they all have good hearts, even the nastiest and most reckless of them.  The dialogue, rhythm, pacing, and soundtrack are without a false step.

I read that the director, John Gray, better known for his action films, saved up to make this one as his passion. It took me years to find one of his action films on Netflix, The Glimmer Man, a pretty good if gory Steven Seagal 1996 detective drama with Seagal as a Buddhist cop, dispensing kōans and wisdom from Sun-Tzu/Art of War while he displays mixed martial arts and smashes a lot of glass. The Glimmer Man may be White Irish Drinkers’ diametric opposite, but damn, Gray is an impeccable director of Buddhist lawmen, street chases, and bar fights. He deserved the chance to make his own film.

Biutiful, directed by Alejándro González Iñárratu (2010). Alejándro González Iñárratu opened and closed his film Biutiful in a snowy forest of bare trees. The main character Uxbal, played by Javier Bardem, is approached by a young man. When we see the scene for the first time, we do not know who these people are or what is transpiring between them. By the end we know that Uxbal has just died, and the young man who approaches him resembles the father he never met. In flight from Franco a generation earlier, Uxbal’s father left his wife (and Spain) and arrived in Mexico, only to die there three weeks later at the age of twenty of pneumonia.  His embalmed body, shipped back to Barcelona and buried, was exhumed for cremation as part of a cemetery relocation within the time-span of the film.  Uxbal gets to see him a second time as a mummy.

The story considers the weight of a life in the context of the memory of the dead by the living, as well as vice versa: how the dead will recognize each other without their bodies.

Biutiful did not actually open in the forest.  The scene was preceded by a brief anomaly: a flash-forward from just before Uxbal’s death when he gave his daughter, a girl of about ten, his mother’s ring.  After that, he pleaded with her to stare at his face and promise not to forget him. But the actual request occurs in the body of the film’s narrative, not in its prologue, which has only the hands, father’s and daughter’s, and the ring changing fingers. He did not make a similar request of his son Matteo, a boy of about six at the time. But he could have.

Just before Uxbal’s death, the terminally ill father visits his son, finds him sobbing on the bed and, though often gruff, comforts him. Matteo has been punished and denied a trip with his sister and mother (Uxbal’s estranged wife) to see the snowy woods of the Pyrenees.

So the young man at the beginning of Biutiful is not—or not only—Uxbal’s father frozen at twenty but his son, Matteo, grown up. How does Uxbal recognize Matteo when he last saw him at six?  How does he know that the youth that so resembles his father is not his father?

Matteo’s unique and timeless signal is the forest and snow, a phantom reality made of energy and symbols, symbols that Uxbal will forever identify with Matteo because they represent an absence the needs to be filled—an unfulfilled trip to the Pyrneees.  A very beautiful brown-and-white owl is lying dead on the snow, its feathers rustling in the breeze. As Matteo approaches, he says the exact words he will say (or has already said) at six, “Do you know that when owls die they spit a hairball out of their beak?”

Uxbal completes the encrypted exchange by saying that the sound of the ocean scared him as a child because he was afraid of the bottom of the sea and the things that live there.

It is not a real dead owl either.

Remember Me, directed by Allen Coulter (2010). This film is certainly flawed. The central plot device is clunky and synthetic. Some of the dialogue is brilliant, while some of it is sophomorically raunchy and stupid, though the brilliant lines are profound enough to outweigh the inane ones and the script picks up momentum as the film progresses, leaving adolescent hijinks in the dust. In fact, the earlier banalities become a backdrop or baseline for the moral and intellectual evolution of the characters.

Ultimately the emotional truth of pretty much all of them—but mostly the young people—cuts through layers to emotional revelations about family, relationship, and loyalty, and atonement. Everyone grows and progresses. Along the way themes of grade-school bullying, parenting of adult children, risk-taking candor, and the transformation of rage into courage take their turns in sequential vignettes. The ending is unforeseen and changes the nature and meaning of the entired film. Clearly the movie was made for its ending and scripted backward from there. As in Orhan Pamuk’s novel My Name is Red, the drama you have been following and absorbed in is swallowed by global and millennial forces many times their scale.

In that sense, there are two films, the one I have praised and criticized, and the same film contextualized by its end. I wasn’t happy that it ended the way did (at 9/11). I felt somewhat tricked and used. On the other hand, the ending worked and had the power of raising a periscope to everything we had just watched while casting its meanings, and the meanings of transient love, into the far distance against a clash of civilizations. That made it all the more prescient and precious, and it gave meaning, dignity, and integrity to so many other shortened lives that will never intersect ours at six or more degrees of separation because of the “incident.”

A story about unlikely kids in love and a little girl being bullied becomes a parable of the meaning of a single life and the resonance of loss through time.

The Future, directed by Miranda July (2011).  As Miranda’s father, I can affirm that she was born with a sense of how to move in and out of time, and also how to stop time. That’s why the movie Somewhere in Time with Christopher Reeves and Jane Alexander was so special to her in adolescence; it awoke her innate power over time itself. Her own film is a semi-circular labyrhint in which all different slices of time and reality intersect and fuse in a symphony that is completely real and, at the same time, a parable.

A local LA man interviewed by Miranda for her piece on Pennysaver newspaer vendors ends up playing himself in the film, and not only playing his real-life role as seller of a $3 hair-drier but the voice of the Moon, which is involved in the stopping of time. Miranda likes to mix real and imaginal events and have them march in and out of films or theater pieces as themselves and aliases.

The movie’s cat speaks in Miranda’s voice both inside and outside of time.  Miranda has also imbedded the cat and herself twice (herself as the cat’s voice and as the lead actress, and the cat as the cat we (her parents) had before we were married and well before she was born, and herself as our unborn child speaking in the voice of a cat, giving us needed advice from outside of time.  But I don’t mean to imply that this is all tricks and aliases or symbols. It is a story of the heart adorned with brilliantly intuited metaphysics. I also pick up echoes of Prelude to a Kiss (which Miranda saw but didn’t remember when she was making The Future) and The Fantastics (which she never saw but which played the role of the The Future for us, her parents).

This is another film by Miranda in which she approaches transgression but never crosses the line. She has a way of capturing characters’ edges, poses, and bravado without having to force them into acts which distort or break the fabric of the film.

From Out of Babylon:

In her next movie, The Future, a similar daemon leads Miranda to do a twisting danse macabre, as her body is enclosed, head too, in a pajama-like costume like a poltergeist in ectoplasm, one of many dances she would perform that looked to me like my wife in ballet blending with my mother in St. Vitus paroxysms of panic.

From Episodes in Disguise of a Marriage:

“You know the cat Frodo you write about,” [psychic teacher] John Friedlander said one day. “That wasn’t, or wasn’t only, a cat. That was a spirit being who came to help you and Lindy stay together.” He meant that Frodo had many dimensions, one of which was an Earth cat—others were spirits of trees and brooks and thunderstorms, on this and other worlds­. One of those was our guide.

            I had toyed with the notion of Frodo as a spirit even when she was alive. But I hadn’t taken it seriously. I discounted her numinous aspect. Yet what would I have done differently? I was a young man; she was a young cat.

The instant John proposed it, Frodo shifted. I realized that, in coming to my dreams, she was trying to tell me something, something about her and us.

Two years after John’s remark, Miranda played the female lead in a film she wrote and directed called The Future. In it, a recently euthanized cat named Paw Paw addresses a young couple from outside of time, pleading with them to stay together. Only if they preserve their relationship will they be able to rescue her from euthanasia at the pound. They fail—both themselves and Paw Paw.

At a party after the film’s showing at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah, our son-in-law Mike told me, “That was Miranda’s film for you and Lindy.”

I asked Miranda later if Paw Paw was connected to our cat Frodo. She said that it wasn’t Frodo; it was her; she was the cat in her film. The year wasn’t 1965; it was 1973, the May of her conception, three years after Frodo’s death.

Our daughter embedded herself in her movie twice. Paw Paw speaks in her dubbed voice as the story’s narrator (along with Old Man Moon). But Sophie, the female of the couple, is also played by Miranda, perhaps a form of Lindy before her own birth.

Everything winds around a Moebius strip. Miranda is our eternal daughter, Frodo our eternal cat. Our unborn child speaks from a point outside of time in the voice of an imaginary cat, which is herself grown up, trying to keep two volatile teenagers interested in each other and their own mixy process, so that she can get born nine years later and thirty-six years earlier.

A cat and a girl from the same continuum alternately visit and guide.

At the end of the movie, Paw Paw turns into energy, no longer cat, just light and position, spirit shifting toward omega point

It hardly matters if it is a fictive or a real cat, an animal, a person, or a deva, someone who is us or merely talking to us. In each case, the intuition that something is there stands against the grim valuation of modernity, that there is nothing at all and never was or will be and the inferred depth of our souls is a delusion in algorithms of stars.

Free Men, directed by Ismael Ferroukhi (2011). A stale, stiff biopic about Algerian collaboration and resistance in Nazi-occupied Paris, but an almost angelic rendition of a Jewish singer of traditional Arabic music and his ability to transform darkness by sacred sound, plus the always refreshing presence of the multilingual Tahir Rahim as narrator and functional lead.

 A Warrior’s Heart, directed by Michael F. Sears (2011). A contrived prep-school, Army-family plot stuck together like a bad seventies sitcom to get to the amazing part: the Native American origin of lacrosse as an initiation ceremony overseen by spirit guides, plus the fact that the most charismatic First Nations actor available, Adam Beach, plays the liaison between lacrosse worlds.  

Source Code, directed by Duncan Jones (2011).  This is an intricate, exquisitely structured labyrinth of time travel qua alternate realities. A continuous eight-minute loop of reality from a dead man’s brain is re-run inside another dead man’s brain in such a way that the second man’s consciousness is restored (though he has no idea how the hell he got inside a commuter train entering Chicago and as a different person from who he was when he was last aware of himself flying a helicopter around Khyber Pass, Afghanistan).  According to the technology’s Dr. Frankenstein-like inventor, alternate source codes are created through “quantum mechanics and parabolic calculus.”  Needless to say, actual science is nowhere close to such an application, but this is a cautionary tale.

The practical goal of the particular “source code” insertion (we eventually find out) is to prevent a second terrorist bombing, the first explosion having just occurred, resulting in the death of the man carrying the “code,” whose extracted memory traces have just been implanted in a new carrier’s brain—an eight-minute track that always ends with the blast. The memory transplantee, a trained soldier killed in Afghanistan, has been sent in to sort through the virtual landscape and find the perpetrator, but his brain is running someone else’s recording.

Once inside the code, he can alter “hard” objects—cell phones, guns, his train ticket, the people around him—but none of these realities are “real,” not even the capsule in which he gets debriefed before and after each eight-minute mission, not even the explosion that does occur at the end of each segment (returning him to his “capsule” and setting the terms for his next reinsertion, one after another until he can finger the perp).  They are all only memories, recordings, already past and complete.  The capsule is his brain’s adaptation to its situation, its compensation for not having a body or moving in an actual external environment. It is a projection of reality across the brain itself, using projections from reality into itself—a technologically created bardo realm transcending virtual realities. The landscape and events of the mission may have been transferred into his brain from another brain, but they are recreated by binding, cross-cueing, and dialogue in his neural cells.

But how is our own “real reality” different from an appearance archived in our brain? Source Code simply takes this notion to its natural conclusion.

Remember, the point of the assignment is not to stop the original attack, which can’t be stopped because it has already occurred, but to get information to prevent a follow-up, more serious bombing. The reason that the mission can be run countless times (in the sense of playing a different episode with the same characters and props) is that each of the people within the eight-minute memory track has independent existence and free will, while the “source code” can be reinstalled and run as many times as necessary to find the bad guy.

By the end of the story, we understand that each playback has its own ongoing energy basis and integrity and cannot be violated or uniquely expunged. The pilot, involuntarily enlisted, decides finally to buy into one of the alternate realities; he breaks ranks and takes independent action in order to save his new “self” and the girl seated across from him (both of whom are already dead in the original “source code,” he in the helicopter, she in the bombing about to happen). He literally escapes into the archive of his own brain, which becomes a reality for her too. He carries them away together, a classic heroic rescue but on its own terms of life and death, which are unknown both to us and the technocrats who elicited it.

The Tree of Life, directed by Terence Malick (2011).

Three Quick Reviews:

1. The experience of childhood was proposed and shot from within a template resembling the actual sensations and phenomenology of existence on this planet, so it was a stark and ecstatic rendering of a psychospiritual fact.
2. That family experience was set against the mystery of the cosmic frame in which it arises and into which it vanishes, which was offered not as a metaphor but an explicit and evident thing beyond our ken. It was not beyond the hermetic intimation or intuition: “As Above, So Below.”
3. Like Stanley Kubrick conducting 2001: A Space Odyssey, Malick concluded his movie in the only way he could have, by breaking with the space-time continuum and letting everything happen at once such that each moment is eternal and a manifestation of one unity truth.

Turn Me On, Damnit!, directed by Jannicke Systad Jacobsen (2011). Ignore the title; this is a very smart, subtle, and ultimately jubilant film about Alma, a disaffected teen girl in rural Norway. Pretty much all her high-school peers are just as disaffected despite the magnificent scenery around them, so their local ritual is to give the finger to the town sign whenever leaving or reentering.

Alma opens the film by giving viewers a quick tour of her town, pointing out the dumb sheep, the dumb farm vehicles, the dumb girls on the trampoline.

When a boy on whom she has a crush, unexpectedly and somewhat guilelessly, takes out his penis and touches her with it outside a party, Alma tells her incredulous friends what happened. Gossip spreads, the boy denies it, and Alma is humiliated, ostracized, and given the name Dick-Alma.

In despair, she runs away to Oslo to seek out the admired older sister of a friend in college. The friend and her roommates have a much broader perspective on things; they celebrate and applaud Alma and her spunk and independence, giving her new confidence. One Oslo boy even improvises a song on his guitar about the life and triumph of Dick-Alma. She returns a day later on the bus, rejuvenated and re-launched. She holds her own and forces the boy’s public confession.

The nuances of this movie are hard to describe, so I’ll give you a few quite articulate Netflix reviewer comments: “A beautiful healing story about a girl who finds herself an outsider after a boy sexually harasses her (and denies it)”; “Adorable, intensely ‘real’ in the deadpan awfulness of rural adolescence, and sexually frank without being exploitative. This movie so steadfastly happens through the female gaze that it feels refreshing at every moment”; “Definitely different and superior to most of the mind numbingly bland drivel that passes for teen movies over here”; “I really enjoyed this movie for its stark realism and unabashed frankness . . . . Either Hollywood just doesn’t get it, has no talent, or makes enough money with crap that they just don’t bother to try.”

Teen movies I watch on HBO, almost to a one (like Eurotrip, She’s All That, The Girl Next Door, or anything involving Freddie Prinze, Jr.) are about exchanging innocence for desire, fantasy for reality. One teen (either the boy or the girl) is innocent; the other has lost his or her innocence to the world but holds some essential wisdom or hard truth. Each has something that the other needs and wants and, in order to get it, they have to exchange roles and share identities.

 The one who has lost his or her innocence and (“beginner’s mind” version of the senior prom, romance instead sex, self-awareness over popularity) wants that back as much as the other one wants the experience and consummation of their desire.  This goes all the way back through literature and popular culture. It can be viewed at the core of the 1927 musical Good News in which the Freddie Prinze role is played by Peter Lawford and the Rachel Leigh Cook role is played by June Allyson. They sing great songs like “Lucky in Love” and “The Best Things in Life Are Free.”

Little has changed since then.

Oslo, August 31^st, directed by Joachim Trier (2011). In the genre of Joyce’s Ulysses and other stories about a day in a life, Trier makes a film about the day on which recovering drug addict Anders, a young man in his early mid-thirties (Saturn return time), travels from a rehab center to the suburbs to Oslo where he grew up and where his parents and sister live, for a job interview with an avant-garde magazine. Trier indicates that his film is a homage to, as well as loosely based on Pierre Drieu La Rochelle’s 1931 novel Will O’ the Wisp and a 1963 movie by Louis Malle called The Fire Within. The novel, which I don’t know, may account for the stunning, crisp, profound dialogue, and drive the voiceover narrative. The strength of the film is its raw intelligence and depth. The thoughts of characters and exchanges between them are not only of the quality of literary fiction but resonate with the history of contemporary philosophy and arguments of existentialism, apocalypticism, and reasons to want to live. To pull this off as a visual, the lead actor and his character’s namesake, Anders Danielsen Lie has to encompass a range of moods, attitudes, and belief systemss, and also to reflect both the guileless innocence and open-ness of a child, the different guilelessness and open-ness of a teenager, and the hardened, narcissistic egotism and pessimism of the downward-spiraling drug addict, and he has to do it in rapidly fluctuating personae. His ability to carry off each mood and persona with full conviction and the segues and lesions between them is the glue that holds an otherwise desultory narrative together.

In the course of his August 31^st journey into Oslo, Anders meets and hangs out with a one-time best buddy Thomas and his wife Rebecca and their two young children, then with Thomas alone. The three-way conversation of adults is filled subtlety, longing, and nuance about big choices: marriage, children, work, and then the value (or not) of academic theory. Thomas quoting Proust carries the gist and rotating ambivalence and paradox of the exchange: “Trying to understand desire by watching a nude woman is like a child taking apart a clock to understand time.”

During Anders and Thomas’ time together, Oslo, August 31^st is little more than a series of changing backgrounds in which the two young men hold A philosophical conversation about life and meaning. Thomas is sane and content, if not delighted and inspired. He mainly confesses the lacks in his marriage, sex life, career, loss of time (ageing), and intellectual contributions to the world, basically passing himself off as trapped by comparison with Anders’ freedom. This is a reverse of the actual situation, though neither man realizes it—Anders come closer because he understands the pain of his own desperation. At least, Thomas has time and a life.

Prior to this meeting, a Proustian voiceover in Anders’ mind as he enters Oslo captures memories of his childhood there and in its environs (with accompanying flashback deep images). The sense is of eternal childhood everywhere but also of the water, late sun, and small-town-in-a-big-city quality of Oslo. “Fjord” carries the ambiance of a giant body of water in which a tiny body swims recreationally and in celebration of summer. These Oslo themes sheathe elegantly through the action in the rest of the film.

After time with Thomas, Anders repeatedly tries calling his ex-girlfriend Iselin in New York and leaves voicemails (adding another layer of “voiceover”), has his job interview, and meets his sister Nina’s girlfriend Tove. We learn that the family house is being sold to pay for Anders’ rehab, and Nina, while remarkably understanding of the situation (as conveyed by Tove), breaks her bargain to be there too. She has had it with Anders, and he knows. He goes to a fairly wild, noisy party on the invite of Thomas (it is being held by their mutual friend and one of Anders’ former lovers, Mirjam). He leaves the party and goes to the apartment of his drug dealer, breaking his sobriety and twelve-step-like pledge because the party put him back in the old template and habit. He meets up with another old friend, first at the party, then at a bar (the friend has two flirtatious college-age girls with him), further parties with the three of them, making out with one of the girls, all the time leaving messages for Iselin.

In the course of all this, Anders identity and mood fluctuate, and his fate fluctuates with it, as past and future vie for the moving beam of the present. The job interview is a remarkable dialogue between two young men, one the editor of a successful radical arts magazine. We learn that he knows and admires Anders’ work. However, when he presses for the missing years on Anders’ resumé, Anders becomes defensive, then defiant, finally saying he was a drug addict, then (in answer to what drugs he did), he gives a very full recital and list, then adds something like, “I sold too. You want me to put that on my resumé?” He storms out, ending an apparently promising interview and blowing the job possibility. This is a pattern: he briefly enters the realm of normality and right citizenship, but then can’t handle it in his unsurety, volatility, and suppressed rage about the whole capitalist regime. I recognize it because my brother’s path and destiny were similar to Anders—I recognize the giggles, the short attention span, the proneness to replace interaction with ideology, the abrupt, tragic destruction of any hopeful sprout.

In a parallel interaction in a very different context, Anders has a substantial compassionate exchange with Mirjam in which she laments ageing and all their mutual male friends going out with younger women with “perky tits” and he tells her that her tits are still pretty perky, then adds something about his authority on the matter. It is in good humor, mature, balanced and off the spectrum. But then he kisses her, which could also work, but his reaction to her reaction to it throws both of them off (we know by now that Anders is concerned about feeling no desire, even for Iselin). Then he rifles through the coats and handbags and steals some bills from a purse, fleeing as Mirjam sees him. It is that money he uses to buy a gram of heroin.

August 31^st ends with the partying trio visiting the local pool on the last day of its operation (it will be closed for the year on September 1). The three of them swim, while Anders sits on the side, wistful, despite the urging of the girl with whom he has been flirting and necking to join them. He leaves and walks to his family house, which is in disarray, in the process of being packed up for sale. His journey through its remnants is careful and detailed. He calls Iselin one last time and tells her he didn’t mean anything he said the previous times when he expressed love and a desire to reconnect, tells her goodbye, goes into his childhood bedroom, looks at all his own souvenirs, posters, and relics with the careful Proustian detail of Trier, prepares the heroin, and shoots up—also portrayed in detail. After he passes out on the bed, I take that he o.d.ed and August 31^st was the last day of his life (as one poet wrote, “like the rest, only shorter”), but that was not definitively resolved. In any case, he has relapsed in a major way (a whole gram), and there is no future. The film ends with brief early-morning shots of the scene and other locales from the movie and around Oslo on September 1^st, one day after everything: the film’s title timeline, the film itself, the time the pool will be open, August 31^st in Oslo, sobriety, meaning, and perhaps Anders’ life. The film is less a story with plot than a philosophical discursion on the nature of life, death, capitalism, desire, addiction, time, sex, love, family, and belief.

Homeland, multiple directors, driven by Claire Danes (2011-2017). The episodes go on, but this was plenty; the genre could only sustain so much. Danes, Mandy Patinkin, Rupert Friend, Damian Lewis, and crew put on a world-affairs, espionage, counter-espionage masque of Dickensian proportions and twists. With unlikely superpowers and absurd luck of such dramas, they portray the many aspects and inherent treachery and sleaze of international relations on a spy level made famous by John Le Carré. Their version is politically astute, ruthless even even those who supposedly care for each other, and violent to a pathologically gory degree. It also has a Christ-like martyrdom wrapped around many of the characters, particularly Peter Quinn (Friend) who suffers Cathar-scale interrogation and subsequent science-fiction madness. He is resurrected from the dead multiple times by his friend Carrie Mathison (Danes). Patinkin is both the spy who won’t come in from the cold and an escapee from Fiddler on the Roof, Transparent, orThe Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Chilling drone attacks are foreshadowings of how modern warfare has outstripped its human participants. Hard to believe this sort of territorial intrigue began with bands of baboon-like primates. 

The Other Son, directed by Lorraine Lévy (2012). The premise of this French-made film, shot in Israel and the Palestinian West Bank with an international crew and cast, is that two newborn boys—one Arab and one Jewish—are accidentally switched in hospital confusion during a Scud missile attack. When they are eighteen, a blood test of the Israeli seeking to enter the army reveals some sort of error, and a subsequent investigation identifies its nature and then the two families involved

In confronting and attempting to resolve the situation, the various principals—the two boys, their parents, the boys’ siblings—are forced to enact a proxy Arab-Israeli peace. The Israeli father, a military officer, must deal with the fact that the son he raised and loved is Arab and that his own biological son is a committed Palestinian patriot. The Palestinian father, an engineer unable to get a work permit to pursue his career, is just as enraged at the Israelis as the Israeli father is at the Palestinians. Yet the Palestinian family must deal with having a Jewish son (Yacine) and the fact that their own son (Joseph) is a privileged Israeli.

The older boy in this Muslim family initially renounces his own life-long brother as the enemy and later tries to convert his biological brother from the Israeli family. The boys must deal with not being who they thought they were but the dilemma of a pure nature over nurture viewpoint held by both adversaries.

The mothers are the only ones able to initiate reconciliation.

The boys eventually become friends and allies. The fathers each embracr both sons. In the end, as the Palestinian “Jewish” boy speaks for both of them (I don’t remember the exact quote, but this is it in essence): “You have my life now; you better live it well and not mess it up. I have an obligation to live your life for you too.”

Trouble with the Curve, directed by Robert Lorenz and starring Clint Eastwood as Gus Lobel, an aging Atlanta Braves baseball scout (2012). Much of this film is made up of conventional storylines—pleasant, engaging, but not notable. Amy Adams plays Lobel’s daughter Mickey, a workaholic ambitious lawyer, trying for partnership with her firm. She nonetheless becomes her father’s eyes on a scouting trip on which his career hinges because of the the rivalry of new statistics-minded executives, one in particular. This leads to an unexpected romance with one of her father’s former players, now a scout, Johnny “The Flame” Flanagan, played by a surprisingly well-cast Justin Timberlake.

A complicated set of events produces the baseball sequence that sneaks the movie onto my list. Top prospect Bo Gentry, a boastful slugger with statistics that make him the likely first draaft pick, can’t hit a curve ball, and Gus and Mickey figure that out and advise against drafting him with the top pick. Peanut vendor Rigaberto Sanchez, played by Paraguayan American actor Jay Galloway, has been taunted by Gentry. Mickey hears Sanchez throwing and realizes, from the sound of his ball in the mitt, that he can throw a wicked curve. She and Gus bring Sanchez to face Gentry against the wishes of the Braves’ new execs. Gentry takes up mocking “The Peanut Boy,” but he can’t hit his fastball, and then he really looks bad on the curve. The rest plays out much as expected.   

Searching for Sugarman, a documentary directed by Malik Bendjelloul (2012). It is a sad and wonderful tale at the same time. Detroit singer-songwriter Sixto Rodriguez, son of migrant auto workers from Mexico, composed some of the best songs, other than Dylan, of the Dylan era (late sixties, early seventies). He was a cross between Dylan and Jimi Hendrix with a bit of Leonard Cohen and, of course, his own unique spin: wistful, cynical, vulnerable, wry. He made two albums; they didn’t sell much, so he went back to manual labor and home demolition for the next twenty-five-or-so years, unaware that he was bigger than Elvis in the world hip Afrikaners in South Africa (particularly Capetown) and one of the latent sparks of the revolution that overthrew apartheid.

But it was widely and legendarily assumed that Rodriguez had committed suicide on stage. The myth was born out of a perfect storm of mishaps and apocalyptic mythologies. In America, his corrupt producer moved to LA and never told him about his overseas sales or sent him any of his royalties. Finally—the basis of Sugarman—two South Africans went on an internet mission to find out how (for sure) Rodriguez died They ultimately connected with one of his three daughters and found, to their astonishment, Sixto very much alive and the daughter just as diffidently surprised. So they brought “Sugarman” to South Africa for a series of concerts; the scenes were like Elvis returned from the dead.

Further mythologized and somewhat distorted to serve the story line, these events make up a meta-myth that reifies the innocence and integrity of both Rodriguez and the South African music scene. Exaggeration aside, Rodriguez’s elegance and integrity stand out; he is not bitter, he understands how history and human nature work.

Such a disappearance with an anomalous connection between apartheid Capetown and ghetto Detroit could have occurred only before a full Internet. Even so, it is hard to imagine two orbits missing each other these so completely on the same planet. But, again, the key to the film is not the actual myth or the film’s cinematic mythologization of it, it is Rodriguez’s simplicity, wisdom, and humility. He comes off more as a shaman or a lama than a rock star. He handles every piece of life and reality as it come, perfectly as what it is, with an open mind and heart—always no big deal. The stage and fame the same as a day’s worth of sheet-rocking. That sort of Zen would have saved Elvis, Janis Joplin, and numerous other spotlight junkies.

For me, the highlights of Searching for Sugarman include Rodriguez’s first appearance on stage in Capetown, thanking the audience for keeping him alive; the reactions of his long-time blue-collar trade colleagues in Michigan to the fact that he’s—”what, you’re kidding, Sixto!”—going abroad to perform; and one of his daughters remarking how, seeing him onstage, she realized that this was who he really always was.

I downloaded all of the original 27 cuts from the two old albums from iTunes, and there’s not a bad song. He’s a seventies superstar whom virtually no one in North America knew but who was in album collections throughout South Africa, unknown even to himself: “But thanks for your time, / Then you can thank me for mine /And after that’s said. / Forget it.”

Keep the Lights On, directed by Ira Sachs (2012).  I watched this film ten years later in 2022 by which time a certain social ease, fluidity, and in-person camaraderie had diminished, not just from the 2020 pandemic but as a cumulative effect of the internet and social media. This movie is about intimacy; it exudes intimacy— subtlety, ambivalence, friendship, and the depths of attraction-repulsion. It is up there with the most intimate films I have ever seen.

Keep the Lights On follows two gay men, though the texture of their relationship is so rich and sticky that it transcends either cultural or biological gender and orientation. True, gay male infatuation and love are lacking a female component to nuance male energy, but the men are both emotionally articulate enough to make that finally moot. The fact that Paul (a Random House lawyer played by Zachary Booth) has a vividly depicted crack addiction that has him in and out of rehab and recidivism and the fact that the script is drawn from the real-life journals of director Sachs are important but secondary to the layers of eros and conflict portrayed by the actors. In the credits, Sachs emphasizes that he used a particular directing technique whereby scenes were unrehearsed and developed in part from the actors’ own inner lives and ability to imagine the situations they were in. We are watching the workshopping of a movie, which becomes the movie.

            Thure Lindhardt’s performance as Erik, a documentary filmmaker living in New York but originally from Denmark, is one of the strongest, most credible acting jobs I have seen. It is hard to imagine him outside of this discrete role—Erik’s foibles and inner battles between his strengths and weaknesses, between (on the one hand) going all in to the relationship and his life with gumption and (on the other pole) petulantly and self-sabotagingly giving up. He performs snits and tantrums impeccably, and he acts male sexual appetite and aggression just as well, putting a very broad spectrum in play (including lots of phone sex, which is how he meets Paul). For instance, he can answer a question “Yes, no, yes” so endearingly and convincingly that I feel as though it must be part of Lindhardt’s own repertoire in English (he also speaks native Danish at times in the film). A gay friend wrote me: “The realness of it made it very engaging, and I always enjoy random Scandinavians thrown into anything and everything.”

            Keep the Lights On has a second element—a film within the film. Erik is making a documentary film about gay photographer Avery Willard. Not only does the movie explore Willard’s kinky life, work, and persona, but the DVD provides its own documentary of Williard, putting him in the underground film world of Jack Smith and Kenneth Anger, an art milieu with which I have been familiar since meeting Stan Brakhage in college and having a correspondence with Anger and several other filmmakers. Willard comes across as a missing link between unabashedly pornographic gay male cinema and pure erotic exploration and the more delicate art films of the Jonas Mekas underground. There’s a touch of Andy Warhol and his world in both the feature and the short.

Mud, directed by Jeff Nichols (2012). Lindy and I watched this film while exploring early Matthew McConaughey. In Mud, McConaughey plays “Mud,” a mysterious disheveled character living in a boat that has somehow landed in a tree on a Mississippi River island that two boys, Ellis and Neckbone, are exploring by water. At first, they find only the odd arboreal boat; then they realize that it is inhabited.

The movie is clichéd and predictable, borrowing from a potpourri of plots: gangster movies, Westerns, southern marsh movies (When the Crawdads Sing is a more ambitious, sentimental version of the same themes), plus a touch of Bonnie and Clyde. Yet it puts a unique flavor on the genres. Reese Witherspoon plays Mud’s elusive, trouble-magnet girlfriend Juniper, the reason he is hiding out on the island waiting—he just murdered Juniper’s most recent abusive lover in Texas and the whole depraved Texas clan is out hunting him, along with an army of police setting barricades for his capture. Better to live in a boat in a tree on a rarely visited island.

               McConaughey is wonderful to watch as a street-wisdom-spewing mentor for the boys whom he enlists as his messengers and foragers, getting them in plenty of danger and trouble. Tye Sheridan as Ellis, not McConaughey, is the heart of the film, playing a range of moods from kid adventurer to born leader and precocious man. He exhibits vulnerability, courage, bravado, ingenuity, and sagacity, as his actions, though invariably instigated by Mud, drive the story. It is Ellis who breaks all the deadlocks and forces a denouement even as he seeks his own girlfriend and adolescence.

            The wild card is Tom, played by Sam Sheppard, an equally mysterious river-dweller and Ellis’ family cross-water neighbor. Nobody has his story, but Mud, who is inclined to mythology and exaggeration, talks about high status in the CIA and positions in even more secret agencies as an agent and hitman. He may be even Mud’s father, stepfather, or mentor. When all the forces collide, it is Tom who steps in to assure the outcome, as he and Mud escape in tandem out the delta. It is an unlikely, cheerful outcome to an urban-firestorm-scale shootout. Tom is fully equipped, and Mud is finally convinced he is better off without Juniper. Take her out of the equation and it is catch as catch can, but at least everyone gets to go free and live. Those that survive.

The Killing (2011-2012), developed by Veena Sud. To begin with, I am referring to the first two seasons of the American version of The Killing, those set in Seattle. Wrapped around a seemingly and sadly quotidian murder of a young woman (intentionally drowned in a “coffin” car), the plot is intricate and complex with just about every major character a suspect at some point or other during those first seasons—Sherlock-Holmes-class entanglements and baffles and Charles Dickens portrayals of the family and peripheral people. That means that it takes 26 hour-long episodes to interrogate and resolve the crime, the most intricate forensic files I have ever seen.

The cinematography is crisp and moody and makes use of Seattle’s rainy exteriors, though I am told that much of it was shot in British Columbia—same difference to the Northwest Coast tribes. The dialogue is just as crisp, with particular shout-out to the lines and execution of them by cop Stephen Holder, played by Joel Kinnaman, a half-American Swedish-born-and-raised actor (his father was a draft-fleeing American who married and stayed in Scandinavia), who captures American street jive beautifully while adding a streak of linguistic negative capability (distance giving him just the right angle on the classic American cop with an ancestral, almost-ESL lingo). A former junkie recruited to police detective, Holder is ironical, moving, self-parodying, witty, flamboyant, and vulnerable (youtube is full of great Holderisms and Kinnaman moments)

His partner, Sarah Linden, played by Mareille Enos, is just as brilliant, quirky, and neurotic.

I happen to prefer Kinnaman’s wacky, upbeat, indomitable, slightly Cheech and Chong quixoticism to Enos’s downbeat, obsessive-compulsive Agatha Christie persistence while her personal life is falling into utter shambles around her. But they make a great detective team, and both actors have gone on to the bigtime mainstream since (I recommend checking out Kinnaman in later goofy indies like Lola Versus and the Swedish international drug-caper tragedy Easy Money in which he speaks, what else, fluent Swedish, though it is hard not to think it’s Holder—what?—suddenly speaking Swedish). Here are some Holderisms:

Over a café table:

Holder: “Let it break it down for you.”

Enos: “I can’t wait.”

Holder: “My body is my temple. See here [pointing to his head]. It’s a control tower. See, people be wanting to put everything in a box: gifts, spoon-fed the answers, make everything black and white. For me [long pause with odd wavy finger gestures], I see the grays.”

In a cop car:

“I mean who wouldn’t wait for this life of heaven.”

In another cop car:

Enos: “Think of writing a book?”

Holder: “I did. It’s called How to Be Me. I’ll get my peeps to send you a signed copy.”

With Enos over shacks in a bag:

Holder: “Is that a maple bacon doughnut?”

Enos agrees more or less.

Holder: “Breakfast of champions.” Enos eats anyway.

Holder: “I mean we know she didn’t take her bike. Maybe she took a bus.”

Enos: “Maybe. I’m checking bus schedules and routes from Bennett. Aren’t you a vegan?” [spoken with a mouth full of doughut].

 Holder: “No, a vegetarian. It’s a doughnut.”

            At a restaurant:

            Waitress to Holder: “You want a hamburger without the meat?”

            Holder: “That’s what I said, ain’t it?”

            To a fellow officer ordering his meal:

            “All you guys eat is a fu manchu poo-poo-poo platter MSG crap.”

            Officer: “And your double-cheeseburger hold-the-meat’s organic?”

            Holder: “At least it’s got some vegetables in it.”

            Officer: “Ha ha.”

            Holder: Ha ha what? It’s got lettuce, it’s got tomato. It’s got pickles.”

            At a casino, undercover, face bandaged and looking like hell:

            Holder: “Where the ladies at anyway, man?”

            Casino cop looks around as if to answer by the crowd of women surrounding them.

            Holder: “Not like old ladies. I’m talking about real ladies. You know [dancing in place]. Like there ain’t no party without no trim.”

            At the station:

Fellow officer with Holder in police custody now and restrained: “Chief wants to see you.”

Holder: “See, that’s what I’ve been telling you. I’m just going to fire up the peace pipe and figure this out, okay?”

I pulled these off YouTube because one forgets. There are maybe hundreds more there, and I can’t vouch for my transcriptions because part of Holder’s charm is his throwaway mumbles and intentional malaprops.

Forget the American title: the Danish Forbrydelsen should be translated The Crime, a far more accurately minimalist depiction of the transparent and transgressive nature of the deed around which the rest of the story revolves like an ancient piece of sand grinding itself into a pearl. All the other roles are cameos and appearances—the politicians, the family and associates of the murdered girl, the other cops, the casino Indians, etc.—Holder and Enos rule. The story, like many great whodunits, ranges far and wide before circling back home on the least likely suspect because the emotions driving the crime are far pettier and more banal, desperate and love-sick than the long political shadows it casts. It is a tempest in a teapot, but you get to see the whole tempest that wasn’t, and the teapot too in full incestuous detail.

If you then buy an all-regions DVD player (as we did) to watch Forbrydelsen with English subtitles, you’ll be surprised to discover that the Danish characters are pretty much the same as the American ones, with the plot splays out similarly. Copenhagen plays well as Seattle (just as moody and damp, but of course it is really Seattle playing as Copenhagen). Forbrydelsen, however, sets an entirely different tempo, and Copenhagen’s politics are very different from Seattle’s, more international and less facilely encapsulated around a single crime.

The deployment of a First Nations reservation outside Seattle is a stroke of genius that makes the American version match the political energy of the Danish one. There is no Danish substitute for “The Tribes” (Greenland, the Forbrydelsen version, is not on the Danish mainland). This means that, even though it is basically the same crime with the same characters, motives, and guilty party (or parties), the resolutions are very different. It is like the game Clue played with the same characters and weapons but a different crime and different results.

Of a different savor from The Killing, Forbrydelsen is finally just as engaging and well-done. The Danish equivalent to Sarah Linden, Sarah Lund, is played by Sofie Gråbøl, and she dominates aesthetically and intellectually over all her male partners—there is no worthy equivalent to Kinnaman, though I suppose they could have used him speaking Swedish as an extra double entendre—they didn’t.

Even more obsessive compulsive than Linden, Lund is much more stable and a far more visionary and perspicacious detective. Likewise, the lead Danish politician is more nuanced and emotionally and politically complicated than his Seattle counterpart. The Danish “killing” (2007-2008) is resolved in one season, 20 episodes, so the second season opens into different territory, involving a genocidal-type crime committed by Danish special forces in Afghanistan and leading to a series of murders in Copenhagen and nearby Sweden. This sort of European political territory is not broached by the American version, and the second Forbrydelsen plot is so complex and the outcome so hinged around double-identities and twists that you would have as hard a time following the track-shifting thread as making your way through Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend as a teenager, something I attempted in 1959.

I would recommend watching both. Using the same all-regions DVD player, you can watch Ken Loach’s early BBC work.

The Killing/ Forbrydelsen is worth it for the Holderisms alone (the American one) and for the feats of Sofie Gråbøl. Either exposes the over-hyped Scandinavian Hornet’s Nest hoopla as the trite pop manga grunge that it is. The “Crimes/Killings” are true classic stories, and the fact that the same matrix is used to play two utterly different tunes in different cultures confirms an underlying archetypal ballast.

Rust and Bone, directed by Jacques Audiard (2012). (First Review) For my aesthetic, this isn’t a fine a film in its genre of many of the others on this list, but it is as ruggedly powerful as its canvass, and the soundtrack is a symphony for the ages—listen to it on iTunes. The roughness, authenticity, and sheer emotional force of the main characters are faintly reminiscent of Once Were Warriors. Marion Cotillard (as Stéphanie) breaks new ground by incubating a new sort of female eroticism in an animal trainer who loses both legs below the knee in a marine-world accident with an orca, giving concomitant Melvillian meaning to the sea mammal and its outrage in captivity. Her boyfriend, Alain, played by Matthias Schoenaerts, a versatile, nuanced actor, is a selfish, self-involved kickboxer and streetfighter (earning betting money for his death-match victories), toting around a young son without a mother, but he is transformed into a human being of depth by his engagement with Stéphanie, as both find their own selfhood and grief. As Stéphanie gains confidence and strength after a suicidal spell following her amputation, she becomes an avatar, speaking with an immediacy and truth that defies everything around her (including Alain after he leaves her at a nightclub for another girl).

Her dialogue with him about that little dust-up afterward is a priceless study in the tact anyone in similar straits should study before speaking.

And again, check out the haunting soundtrack by Alexandre Desplat. There’s nothing quite like it. The rock imports from Springsteen to the eerily electronic Bon Iver are great, but the best of them is the nightclub music by Swedish popstar Lykke Li. I had the phrase “Deep Sea Baby” rolling around in my mind for days, and it returns periodicalluy like a near comet. I also made my own playlist from the soundtrack off iTunes, including others’ renditions of some of Desplat’s other melancholy themes.

Rust and Bone (Second Review ten years later): This movie stayed in both Lindy’s and my minds, partly because of the soundtrack—the themes of Alexandre Desplat, the songs of Bon Iver, Bruce Springsteen, and Lykke Li (“I Follow Rivers”)—partly because of the grittiness and deep transformations of a love affair between two hard-living, worn-down characters, a former orca trainer who lost the lower part of her legs in a training accident (Stéphanie played by Marion Cotillard, somehow made partly legless with prosthetics) and a boxer, bouncer, and gruff thug (Ali, played by Matthias Schoenaerts),  and partly the vibe of lower-class rural France. After watching it again, I’d particularly add the beauty of the gigantic orcas, notably in the scene in which one in a tank swims toward Stéphanie and then mimics her gestures (the orca hanging in water space and her, wounded severely by one, still expressing honor and love for her animal).

Then there is Rust and Bone’s ugly scenery (a non-tourist-bureau France you rarely see, even in other underclass French; movies: apartments, roads, trains, warehouses, box stores). That is balanced by the dignity of people who are engaged in undignified, abusive, and marginally criminal behavior at the bottom of of the food chain. On the second viewing, I appreciated the directness and veracity of the action and the accompanying dialogue even in translation: Stéphanie’s essential vulnerability, capacity for love and good will, Ali’s tenderness in caring for her, carrying her to the ocean to float when necessary, getting her to the toilet to pee when she doesn’t have her prosthetics, finding a different view of sex and love than he expresses elsewhere in the story and his world beyond the main plot.

            Every scene in a life, which you don’t get to watch again except in memory or aura, and in a movie, where you can look again at missed spots and into interstices, has a richness of detail and nuance that sweeps by unnoticed the first timke. We didn’t see quite the same film the second time, nor does one ever. The energy load, the nonexistent director’s cut, also changes with time because energy itself changes. Events in the world since our first viewing also change Rust and Bone. Its tenderness, lost-in-translation lapses (including humans’ missteps with animals and children, orcas and Ali’s son Sam), and acts of dignity and care amid chaos and mayhem make them all the more poignant and tender. The especially jangly, discordant rhythms of the film, its cuts and segues, are as rugged and jarring as the events. At one point, Ali loses his son under lake ice—he falls through a thin spot—and Ali virtually has to tear the planet apart to get through and rescue him. Impenetrable and durable as he is, he is finally worn down to his “true heart, true mind, true soul.” He almost destroys his body, breaking and clawing through the ice to pull Sam out. Everyone has to be clawed out. I’d watch Rust and Bone again because it is more than a film. Even Truffaut and Godard would be somewhat amazed by how scratched thing get betweent he surface of Four Hundred Blows or Breathless.

The Inevitable Defeat of Mister & Peete, directed by George Tillman (2013). A fourteen-year-old African American boy leads a nine-year-old part-Korean runaway through the streets and projects of Brooklyn in the absence of available parents. Skylan Brooks and Ethan Dizon (sic) play off each other with light but desperate recognition of a world so dangerous and decadent it could only be ironical and funny too (if you stay light enough in your improve to survive it). The film’s title is ironical because you root, wrongly it turns out, for them to win. Defeat becomes liberating, the only liberation, because, as regards the adults, no one is quite who he or she pretends. Rescue and perdition arise in unexpected places.

Overall, this is a bleak, realistic drama that never loses the surreal and absurd undertones of a script that is part Keystone Kops, part ghetto hell-realm, part Mad Max post-apocalyptic wasteland, part Alice in Wonderland chase, part road movie without a road. But it is also a kids’ wonderland adventure as American and archetypal as Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer.

Fruitvale Station, directed by Ryan Coogler (2013). Having lived in the East Bay from the mid-seventies till mid-2014, I can avow that this is what it feels like—the thin, crumbling concrete scenery, the barren-ness, the dust and filth, the uneasy miscegenation and migration. I came to a Berkeley counterculture that has since disseminated into the rest of the world while mostly abandoning the East Bay. Fruitvale Station on the BART butterfly to Fremont, Richmond, and Millbrae is the truer backdrop behind Berkeley and San Francisco with their façade of radicalism and art and matching bubble realms and life styling. It is a drably urbanized, incompletely integrated quasi-multicultural tableau of incomplete possibilities, interrupted lives, semi-random lesions of violence, and an integrity of individuals holding onto their inner worlds. I have found that, unlike on the East Coast or in the Midwest (in the U.S., that is) where you generally learn how to stay out of trouble, in California cities violence lurks behind copacetic facades. In the seventies my son (then still a child) and I were mugged en route to a Mets-Giants game by very young kids leaving recess at a schoolyard. I have three friends whose young adult sons were shot and killed in ordinary neighborhoods as part of gang initiations (the game was, you have to kill someone, it doesn’t matter who it is). BART has none of the Melting Pot characteristics of the New York City subway (or most urban subways). People cluster in private racial coteries. There is lots of glaring and little mutual aid, even for people obviously lost or struggling with suitcases.

While Fruitvale Station has the East Bay as its milieu, it goes beyond the everyday clatter and alienation to show single lives with their rich internal narratives and struggles to achieve sanity, peace, home, and epiphany. Michael B. Jordan plays Oscar Grant III, a twenty-two-year-old from Hayward riding the BART for incidental reasons and, in part, because his mother, ironically, is worried about him driving. Someone who shouldn’t be is shot in a subsequent melee by the BART police, but that is a mere few seconds in a cinematic tapestry that shows the many events about the event, leading to and away from death at Fruitvale Station. Grant’s life leading up to the shooting is depicted not so much because of any notable thing but in its ordinariness and simple humanity and the randomness of the events on all sides that lead to his death. If anyone had known what was gone to happen, they could have made a minor tweak and avoided the murder and repercussions, but those driven by fate never know, either where fate is driving them or when fate is going to play a heavy hand. “Fruitvale Station” says it all: why would anyone get off there when Berkeley, San Francisco, airports, and Silicon Valley lie beyond? What exists there beyond a life and the injustice that permeates the latter-day Gold Rush Haight-Ashbury towns?

What adds to the film’s gem-like perfection is that, despite fair temptation toward hysteria, nothing is wrong or overstated, everything is as it is and flows from event to event seamlessly like a Greek tragedy with a chorus, or an operatic rap song. The dialogue moves along so fluidly and musically that it has the quality of a street opera, though nothing is literally sung. Cinematic lucidity, personal dignity, a documentary-like neutrality, and “it is what it is” combine to create a singular work of art. And no matter how often you travel the route, it always stops at Fruitvale, and it is the last station.

From Out of Babylon (with some duplication): The Bay Area was a hodgepodge of traffic rushing to all-important jobs, as sub-metropolises hugged the bay with competing futurisms. Shadows of Ryan Coogler’s Fruitvale Station followed the BART snake as it slithered across higher Oakland. A backdrop of radical worlds that sprouted here was more truly a drably urbanized, poorly integrated tableau on an unfinished multicultural loom—lives interrupted by savage money and random violence behind copacetic facades. Asian container cargo piled by bay minarets. . . .

BART has none of the melting-pot mood of the New York City subway. People cluster in racial groups or sit alone in passive bubbles—lots of indirect glaring, no aid for folks struggling with suitcases or lost. Cali folks are preemptively “in the zone.”

Inside Llewyn Davis, directed by Ethan and Joel Coen (2013). I don’t generally extol or dig Coen Brothers stuff by comparison to their myriad aficionados. They seem to me perversely, adolescently dark. However, this is a wonderful movie, and its darkness is earned. There is almost no perversity, no gratuitous violence, no chic-noir macabreness.

If the creators of Mad Men think that they have reenacted America’s transitional zone of the late-fifities/early sixties, they are dupes of their own shallow and false artistry. All they have accomplished is to show a twenty-first century misreading of fifties ambiance; they have missed the key tags in an effort to place and virtue-signal fashions and prop-room furniture. Brushing all that aside as if the playthings of amateurs, the Coen boys go right to the core of a transitional moment and fill scenes of this “day in the life” drama of a talented but uncompromising and self-sabotaging folksinger with uncannily perfect renditions of the characters and styles of the era and, more important, the unacknowledged background meanings and unexamined precepts and proverbs that gave rise to subsequent Nixon, Reagan, and Clinton eras—a passage that Baby Boomers like me often miss.

The individuals who frequent the landscape may be slightly Coen-exaggerated, but that is a minor rap on their recapturing—or highlighting in slight caricature—the exact mood, ambition, and blindnesses of the moment. Each is a capsule chrysalis of so many wandering through the American landscape in states of excessive, self-congratulatory weirdness as if they were, and it was, normal. There is plenty of Llewyn in people I knew: my own brother who committed suicide at 57, a close college friend who left the US and abandoned his talents and big NASA career to escape the draft and still hasn’t returned from Liverpool, students of mine from the seventies when I taught college, angry poet friends who wouldn’t take yes for an answer because they were looking for their own idiosyncratic yeses and handouts that, given the fast-shifting era, they would never get. What I love about Llewyn himself—and what a great job by Oscar Isaac (this was my first experience of the consumate actor) is his stubborn, reckless, self-defeating, narcissistic, fuck-you integrity that finally wins my loyalty. Even though Llewyn can’t succeed, he exposes everyone else around him as a self-parody and failure of another, more fatal soul absence.

In classic Coen Brothers cliché-breaking genre reversal, after an arduous trip to Chicago with two madmen in a car, Llewyn performs for an impresario who makes careers, and he sings a beautiful, heart-breaking ballad. The producer should immediately be moved and euphoric, praise his good luck as if he had heard Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen, and sign him to a contract for a lucrative career. Instead, he says, in effect, “Well, you’re clearly not a novice, but I don’t see how I can make any money off this.” That’s the story of the eighties coming out of the sixties and seventies: how do we make any money off this shit?The Coen Brother’s nailed its vapid, smug cynicism.

Blue is the Warmest Color, directed by Abdel Kechiche (2013). It is three hours long and, if it were an American film, it would be chopped to half the length and all you’d see is the action and sex. The extra hour and a half go into meticulous shifts of mood, recognition, and character awakening.

This coming-of-age lesbian narrative has as its central event a love affair between Emma, a sophisticated art student, then an artist, who has a mature sense of not only her sexuality but her culture and art, and Adele, a naïve but daring and sincere, very direct-acting high-school student and then grade-school teacher who is just coming into awareness of the nature of her own sexuality and has early glimmerings of who she is and what she wants to become.

The key to the melancholy resolution of the story is the fact that sex and sexual/gender identity, while inevasible and all but obligatory, cannot finally replace the more critical coming-of-age crisis whereby one finds his or her own calling, career, destiny, and place in the culture.  Emma knows this implicitly; Adele doesn’t and doesn’t know how or where to begin looking. It is a moment that is epitomized exactly like in this film: too many kids commoditize and go for irreversible surgery or make irreversibly traumatic decisions driven by the notion that gender or sexual identity can replace self, work, and home.

Jimmy’s Hall, directed by Ken Loach (2014). Set in 1932-1933 and loosely a biopic, Jimmy’s Hall tells the story of Irish communist Jimmy Grafton (Barry Ward), founder of the Revolutionary Workers’ Group, who is deported back to the United States for sedition after returning to Ireland to help his mother run the family farm.

Ireland’s Civil War is over, but a repressively conservative Catholic government has clamped down not only on rebellion but the joy and the heart of community life because happiness is subversive. Based on his experience with jazz in the U.S., Jimmy establishes a center for dance, music, camaraderie, talk, and socializing. It wakes up the village and is not particularly or primarily political, but it can’t avoid the political traps surround it. Jimmy’s hall and its effect on personal and cultural transformation make up the body of the film. But when Jimmy and his mother, who shares his political and social sympathies, try to prevent the eviction of a local family from their home, both Jimmy and the hall become casualties of the Gardai, the national police service of the new republic. The film includes a rally protesting Jimmy’s expulsion from Ireland and Jimmy’s mother’s condemnation of his conviction and banishment without a trial.

Joe, directed by David Gordon Green (2014). A character study of a Southern culture in its death throes, the adaptation of Mississippi-born fireman Larry Brown’s sole published novel is pitch perfect, itself a rare achievement. Every actor is true, from top to bottom. The director called it “jazz improv.” Nicolas Cage as Joe is layered and nuanced enough to redeem every other Nicolas Cage role, many of them intense but not in tune.

The film precedes Trump but it shows a hillbilly-elegy culture that was so easily corrupted and weaponized by him. At core, it is empty, there’s nothing there, but it’s full in a whole different way, full of inexpressible feelings and outraged, deadening acts, full of lost honors and services.

The day job in the script is poisoning trees so they die, making clear-cutting “legal.” In that context, there are no “good” activities, only pit bulls, prostitutes, hustlers, and poor laborers stuck with grueling tasks. What makes the film work is the relationship between anti-hero Joe and the fifteen-year-old boy Gary that he “adopts,” son of a violent, cruel but vaguely post-Woodstock drifter who likes to off his vestigial break-dancing.

Camp X-Ray, directed by Peter Sattler (2014). Camp X-Ray, Guantánamo’s Islamic prison, is Waiting for Godot with torture. This movie captures the brutality, meaninglessness, injustice, and utter dehumanization following the post-9/11 “extraordinary rendition” of mostly random. wrong-place-at-wrong-time Muslims. Kristen Stewart as Army Private Amy Cole covers a wide range of emotions—courage, toughness, prerequisite vulnerability (a descriptor I use too often because it is the goal of so many wonderful films), compassion, sensitivity, honor, generosity, as she uses a Guantánamo assignment for her own emotional and spiritual growth, alchemizing feelings in a situation in which emotion is forbidden and there are only rules.

She plays opposite Persian-American actor Payman Maādi who portrays Ali Amir, an intelligent, thoughtful man, who has been locked up and tortured for eight interminable years. The two search for a meeting place and, as they gradually find it, they break down the meanings of the absurd counterpoint in which they find each other. She can’t do anything to save or free him—he will probably die there—but she allows herself to see and be seen by him, and she leaves him a gift (a sequel he wants and hasn’t been quite ever permitted to get, another torture). He discovers it on the library cart after she is transferred elsewhere.

Camp X-Ray’s minimalism limning a hellish, wrongfully imposed sentence and bureaucratic prison-industrial abyss strikes the perfect chord for the inextricability of life even when it is reduced to a cage or an empty series of sadistic exercises. There is no point to any of it and no alternate path that avoids it, for any of the characters, so wonder and beauty have to be individually wrung out of details. However harsh the situation, the archetypes driving it tell their ancient myths. These go back to Trojan wars and enchanted castles, dungeons and dragons too. Only in this movie, the prisoners throw the ultimate weapon, their own shit. Even our hero loses patience; even the heroine is not entirely a heroine but a maiden in a military suit individuating only as fast as she can.

Born in Gaza, directed by Hernàn Zin (2014). This Spanish documentary is  organized around interviews with children in Gaza during and after the 2014 Gaza War. Essentially Gazan biographies,, it is hauntingly applicable to the 2023 war such that little would have to be changed for it to be the identical from-inside look at the effect of Israeli missiles on the small, crowded area of land making up Gaza. There is the same situation—having structures you have built or land cultivated (homes, factories, farms, streets) being turned into rubble and morgues and having to rebuild with the knowledge that it will be destroyed again. It is a mix of déjà vu and eternal return. The only other choice is to give up and die.

The horrific thing about the documentary is that while it is set in 2014, much that was destroyed will have been rebuilt by 2023 and, as the film is being shown on Netflix, is in the process of being destroyed again. 2014’s children interviewed in the film are young adults by 2023, and perhaps some of them joined Hamas. In 2014 they tell their stories in martyrs’ innocent disbelief—why this is happening to them for no reason, why they have lost parents, siblings, friends, health, why they can’t grow up or go to school like normal children in other parts of the world. As you watch, you know that it has already gotten much worse, not just by repetition and destruction but in scale. Say all you want about the complicity of other Arab countries, extremists on the Palestinian side, Hamas’ bestial attack—the fact is, your behavior says who you are, on both sides and in all circumstances. You can take behavior out of context and hide context; you can ideologically tweak it and shift responsibility, sometimes even to the victims. But you can’t change the karmic implications of any of the participants and their participation. That is written in Akashic ethers.

            Born in Gaza is not about how to solve the problem. It takes no political position unless you want to argue that empathy for the inhabitants of Gaza is by definition anti-Israel. The plight of the children of Gaza dwarfs Israel and Palestine; it resembles that of children in  the favelas of working-class districts of Brazil or slums in India, Asia, Africa, and elsewhere on the planet. Instead of being in school or at play, they pick through mounds of garbage for plastic or discarded machine parts to sell to keep their families fed. But what happens when their homes and streets are also bombed into garbage dumps or they end up at poorly staffed hospitals with life altering wounds and missing body parts?

            The documentary’s power lies in its orchestration of time. It uses the ocean—Gaza does have sea and fishing access to a limit imposed by Israeli law and battleships (three to six nautical miles)—to create a feeling of the wave-like flow of history, the depth of its currents, and the relentless continuity of its motifs. The film’s pacing and ethnographic neutrality set the interviews in something larger and less nationalistic, evoking without diagnosing the nature of trauma and the savagery of a cycle of violence and revenge. By letting the children tell their own stories, the film-makers make them representatives of all children and the difficulty of our species in its attempts at civilization and a bare minimum equity. Gaza is a crucible of what has gone wrong, and the voices of Gaza sound more like the voices of samsara, or the voices of Vesuvius and Hiroshima. Feeling relief that they are not one’s own children solves nothing in the big picture and also solves nothing along the shear planes of Palestine-Israel. Until real responsibility is taken for the images strung together to make this film, matters on the ground can’t improve.

I am reminded of the Gaza Youth’s 2011 Manifesto for Change that begins: “Fuck Hamas. Fuck Israel. Fuck Fatah. Fuck UN. Fuck UNWRA. Fuck USA! We, the youth in Gaza, are so fed up with Israel, Hamas, the occupation, the violations of human rights and the indifference of the international community!”

Outlander, Seasons One through Four, Multiple Directors including Anna Foerster, Brian Kelly, and Metin Hüseyin (2014-2019)

I binge-watched the four seasons available in the U.S.—Outlander lends itself to that—during June 2021. I hadn’t and still haven’t read the novels by Diana Gabaldon, so I am responding solely to the series. The books date to 1991, deep in a prior paranormal, rune-happy, time-travel “era,” so their tone and creasing (to invent a term) need to recalibrate for the series. Their doing so is what makes it a genre time-travel within a more linear, narrative time-travel—intentional romantic fiction. It aired well before the Trumpian trance and COVID hibernation during which I watched it, yet I found it remarkably consonant with post-pandemic Earth including a deep, uncanny nostalgia for many prior Earths leading up to this one.

Binge-watching Outlander is like a trip into an unknown future universe in which time is fluid and life and death are wayposts across a vaster dimension. By dipping into and back out of ordinary chronologies, the series’ time-fluid characters—Claire, Brianna, Roger, and Geillis (none of the rest “jump”)—don’t so much travel as create a “cosmos of travelers,” as if they were shamanic journeyers or astral wayfarers. An implicit sci-fi element, familiar to me from the works of Philip José Farmer, Jack Finney, and Robert Silverberg, pervades, along with echoes of Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, which is most evident in Claire’s initial transition from a life in post-World-War-II England to a different version of herself in eighteenth-century Scotland.

            I fell into the Outlander world as readily as into Dante’s bardo, the wardrobe portal of Narnia, or Tolkien’s Middle Earth, with a proviso that the spell periodically breaks on uneven writing and utter character discontinuity, as texts and screen writers change. To review all four seasons’ episodes—about fifty separate movies—would be a month’s task and out-of-scale with my other posts, so I will stick to some highlights:

•The device for transporting people through time, a stone in a circle of megaliths activated by crystal gems, is in itself facile and unimaginative, but that is overridden by the beauty of the dances that ostensibly empower the stones and change the vibration of their circle. These dances make up the opening-curtain preview of every episode.

The device itself is otherwise enigmatic and becomes promiscuous when additional gateways open, like lei-line junctions, in the New World in Season Four. Yet the stone keeps suspension of disbelief, if barely, because of those attuned, devout runic dancers

•The love affair across time of Claire Randall and Jamie Fraser (played by Caitriona Baife and Sam Hueghan, respectively) is so intensely and viscerally explored and realistic that it is hard to believe you don’t know this couple somewhere in your daily life or that the actors are not themselves the lovers rather than portraying extrinsic characters. That’s the goal of good theater, but it is rarely carried out this passionately over this many plots, scripts, character shifts, aging, and time travels. They have all the attributes of an eternal, karmic couple. Yes, the narrow escapes are absurd, but from a Jungian standpoint, they are the archetypal inner journeys of Claire and Jamie.

•The drama is fraught and cliffhanging, filled with narrow escapes and epic turnabouts. The rescues are absurdly beyond suspension of disbelief because, even if one such event occurred against stacked odds, luck would run out before the second, third, fourth, fifth, or some later one. It’s over the top, but that’s how series like this work and hold their viewers and sponsors; it’s the baseline archetype replayed: Persephone in Hades, except that sometimes Persephone is Jamie, sometimes Claire.

•Elizabethan scope and majesty frame the series, as the episodes feel, at times, like one of Shakespeare’s lost plays of kings or landmark tragedies.

•Add to Shakespearean aspirations a requirement that the actors playing eighteenth-century Scottish characters speak Gaelic, so a fair amount of the dialogue takes place in the native tongue, not all of it translated. The upshot is a rich, authentic revival of the language, clan sociology, and the politics of eighteenth-century Scotland before and during the Jacobite rebellion.

•People have been surprised when I told them that the most realized part of the first season to me was the exploration of homoerotic sadism. That’s not usually a feature of historical mytho-dramas, science fiction, or adventure time travel. Usually, you get the sadism and violence, while the script and direction give enough gore to satisfy curiosity and necrophiliac tastes without crossing the line into deep erotic kink. Outlander goes well beyond merely referencing what the bad guys do that makes them bad. Violence and masochism are explored psychologically and anatomically in terms of initiating and lingering trauma and the force of desire. It was hard for me to watch at many junctures. I fled the screen and went to do dishes in the kitchen where I could hear what was being said and happening but didn’t have to watch. Sometimes I “re-wound” and watched.

Tobias Menzies plays both Claire’s twentieth-century husband Frank Randall, a historian who ends up teaching at Harvard after Claire time-travels to the eighteenth century and, from his standpoint, becomes legally dead, and his eighteenth-century ancestor Black Jack Randall, a notorious bisexual British officer. Black Jack’s crush on Scottish rebel Jamie Fraser, Claire’s eighteenth-century lover and husband, is expressed first by his delivering 100 back-scarring lashes and later by excruciating tortures, including Christlike nails through his palms. Randall ultimately succeeds in seducing Jamie and breaking his mind, as he turns into a mirage of Claire in his delusional state. When Jamie submits to Jack, he is submitting to Claire, as the two become one in his agony and despair. Eros proves to be neither gender- nor person-based but part of Jamie’s own deeper shadow and individuation. In a sense, Claire’s time-travel husband is seduced by her “birth” husband, leaving her in the weird middle. This sort of traumatizing transfiguration is both redemptive and transgressive and rarely attempted in fiction, let alone in a mainstream historical, sci-fi drama. It is definitely not for the kids.

•After the first season’s apotheosis, catharsis, and character depth, the second season is ridiculously out of continuity like a different series entirely. The scriptwriters creating Jamie in Season Two do not use or develop the character coming out of Season One. They write someone entirely different: a much more superficial, upwardly mobile, materialistic gadfly. The complex “Jamie” fashioned in Season One never returns. He went elsewhere with his creators.

•Season Two itself is a totally different thing from Season One, more a comedy of manners, more Ben Jonson than Shakespeare or Henry Miller with a bit of Voltaire and Les Miserables, with a touch of Oliver Twist in the Fergus street boy (César Domboy) who, as a new main character, becomes part of the Jamie-Claire entourage. I value the second season for its rendition of the French court of King Louis (XIV, I think) with its exotic totems and social and sexual customs, then its portrayal of the culmination of the failed Jacobite rebellion to reclaim Scotland (and England) for the Papal Stuarts. It is full of subplots, tempests, and teapots, plus some plague- and poison-related deaths.

I almost gave up on the series here. I stayed out of loyalty to the characters, even though they were transmuted almost unrecognizably, and for the twists and turns of time travel with its prophecies and inevitable precognitions. That holds an overriding interest. Because the one-way flow of time is endemic to our reality, its contravention is itself ontological, cosmological, and uniquely enjoyable, the reason for such stories. In other domains, it is said, there are multiple different flows of time working simultaneously, leading to very different lives.

 •Season Three is a portrayal of the Battle of Culloden (16 April 1746) that crushed the Jacobite Rebellion. It sent Claire back to Scotland (1948, two years after her departure) pregnant with Jamie’s daughter, to be raised by Frank, the descendant of Randall, while it put Jamie in a British prison and then in the service of British Lord Ellesmere.

The role of another bisexual British officer in love with Jamie, Lord John Grey, shapes Jamie’s fate, ultimately getting him out of jail in service in the Dunsanay castle. Grey will continue to shape the story as his and Jamie’s interactions develop well past the lord’s simple desire.

Much of this season takes place with the lovers (Jamie and Claire) separated by 200 years with the belief that they will never see each other again—in fact, Claire, back with Frank and raising Jamie’s daughter Brianna (Sophie Skelton as a young adult) with him, assumes that Jamie died at Culloden. Frank is the girl’s loyal father and mentor. Claire is now a surgeon in Boston with a busy practice.

• Vis a vis portals to other worlds, forbidden-archaeologist Ross Hamilton writes me: “There is a place in Sunbright, Tennessee, on the side of a small mountain where a sound emanates sounding like a hive of giant bees. The Cherokee once buried their dead all around it, but no one has ever been able to get closer than fifty feet to it because it is terrifying to do so. I knew a man who saw and heard it, but I was never able to find it when I went for it. It was in Ripley’s Believe it Or Not. More recently, an associate told me about a pile of singing (buzzing) rocks in Iroquois country.”
• Claire uses Scottish buzzing-rock magic to return to the eighteenth century in the middle of the third season. Then she and Jamie embark on a new set of adventures, leading initially to Edinburgh, then back to Jamie’s estate at Lallybroch, then to the New World where she and Jamie must find each other yet again.

The death of Claire’s twentieth-century husband Frank and sequence of events that leads her to discover that Jamie is still alive and working as a printer in Edinburgh involve time-travel detective work, clues life in documents camouflaged by centuries, and historiographic deductions. If you are a fan of time travel, you will enjoy unravelling the past and traveling with Claire back to a precisely selected moment in medias res where she startles Jamie at his shop in which the telltale documents were printed. This is time-travel sumptuousness and apotheosis. In a subsequent season, Brianna’s discovery of a father who assumed he would never see her is just as scrumptious. She comes upon him peeing outdoors, and he mistakes her for a whore wanting sex with him. His shock and shame of discovery are time-travel epiphanies for non-time-travelers—what you watch the series for, as the actors pull of time-travel suspension of disbelief—forget Newtonian and Einsteinian exisentialia.

•The prior seduction of Jamie by Geneva Dunsanay is handled with demure beauty, erotic care, and depth of character reminiscent of the shadow-sex scenes in Season One. It is romance-novel, soft-pornography fare, but the script by-passes that and provides a sex-magic initiation.

Geneva has been forcibly married to a repulsive, old man with money and rank, but she will not let him be her first lover. Jamie will not let her demean or diminish herself; he will love her as best he can. As it turns out, he is her only lover, for she dies giving birth to his son, William, who will be raised as lord of Ellesmere.

 •Season Four is set up in Season Three by a storm worthy of The Tempest. Four is as compelling as Season One but in a different way, for it presents long, incident-filled trans-Atlantic voyages of the era (such that each crossing is a novel in itself. In the pre-Revolutionary Colonies, Jamie not only ends up back with Claire, but Brianna and her Scottish boyfriend Roger time-travel separately to find her parents and each other.

The opening episode closes with a tour de force, a “home invasion” robbery of Jamie and Claire and their young companions on a boat, a scene that includes a vicious beating and murder conducted by a band of pirates led by Stephen Bonnet (Ed Speleers) whose life they had just saved, all to the time-bending sound of Ray Charles singing and ad-libbing, “America the Beautiful” in a live performance–a blend of foreshadowing, sci-fi humor, irony, and editorializing. Most of the season takes place in North Carolina, but it includes a long trek to Mohawk country in New York State where the family rescues Roger while leaving Ian, Jamie’s nephew, to join the tribe. He will return as a full Mohawk. You see how much complication time travel allows!

 •Shades of James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville imbue the fourth season’s scripts, along with Dickensian shadows and the slave-trade verité of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Interactions with African slaves and Native Americans are both intricate and historically corrected to bloody veridicality. The series evokes the horror of slavery but also gives its supporters and apologists a stage to make their arguments so that Outlander captures the twisted historical rationale as well as the horrific calamity and mindless, unexamined sacrifice.

The rescue and killing of the slave Rufus cover this ground, from Claire’s twentieth-century humanist politics and mix of modern allopathic and Scottish naturopathic skills (by time travel, she is both an M.D. and herbalist), to Rufus’ ineluctable sacrifice. The episodes has flashes of LeVar Burton in Roots and Maryse Condé’s Ségue regarding the inner lives and soul passages of slaves in the New World. The cruel logic of the system prevails, few holds barred.

 •The series handles Cherokee and then the Mohawk tribes with attention to indigenous ethics, customs, and languages—no stereotyped nations, heroic or heathen—while also giving German immigrants and other colonists space for their destructively differing world views. In that sense, it is a decent ethnographic novel under the pop-t.v. constraints. For instance, an amok windigo bear shaman driven from a Cherokee group attacks and kills both Cherokees and Europeans in a bear skin, leaving claw but also human marks on his victims, leading to Jamie’s heroic showdown with him.

In the confrontation between Cherokees and Germans, the issue becomes the nature of temporal ownership. The Cherokee leader proposes that a river and its water cannot be owned by anyone. When they leave a prayerstick-like marker at the site, it leads to a misunderstanding and clash between the Cherokees’ spiritual belief and connection to the land and the German settlers’ fundamentalist superstitions—a fear that the prayerstick placed a hex or curse on them and their family. Claire cannot dissuade them with her twentieth-century views of disease, for we are a couple of hundred years away from even the possibility of clarity.

I have left out a lot of good stuff—the complex clan intrigue, the decadent sexual witchcraft of time-travelling Geillis (Lottie Verbeek) whose character also gets rewritten with quite different ethics and powers across episodes), the colonial politics transposed between Scotland and the Colonies, the sociology of French whorehouses (in Season Two), the dangerous unrequited love of Laoghaire for Jamie (she becomes his second wife during Claire’s absence when she returns to the twentieth century), some prescient plagues, the somewhat Trump-like Irish pirate, bandit, and rapist (Stephen Bonnet), and lively political jockeying. This is an ongoing adaptation, and its heart is the meanings and unfoldings of time, wrapped in their own simultaneous specificity and timelessness.

Far from Men, directed by Daniel Oelhoffen (2015). Set in 1954 in Algeria, this is a reworking of an Albert Camus short story called “The Guest.” On the sluggish side, it’s a bit disjointed, modular from scene to scene, and unmotivated or unclearly motivated, with clichéd grade-school battles. On the inspired side, it’s a brilliant angle on the non-zero-sum complexity of war, the best performance I’ve seen of Viggo Mortensen (and fully in French with, I think, a bit of Arabic), a soft, nuanced portrayal of a deep-thinking moral villager by Reda Kateb, magnificent desert, mountain, sunset, and moon backdrops putting everything in cosmic perspective, a very European shift from venue to venue (classroom to trail to abandoned village to war zone to bar to crossroads in sand), unusually tender brothel scenes, and a reinterpretation of Camus’ existential dilemma in which no one wins to its opposite: an escape from fate by both men. Mortensen’s character must turn Kateb’s character in, to face death, for a crime that was not morally a crime. Neither of them can refuse their roles, but they use them to teach and instill each other with the meaning of life, and that opens the invisible portal.

Marfa Girl, directed by Larry Clark (2015). Few viewers seem to see this movie as I do: a series of spiritually radical transformations. Ever unabashed, Clark brings together West Texas extremes—a visiting female artist, wealthy ranchers, a racist and sexually violent Border guard, a coming-of-age local boy, Hispanics getting displaced. It is a kind of alchemical remaking of lives out of dust and dead-end America. Like all Larry Clark films, it elucidates a fierce, often sordid vision-quest that challenges American samsara with its built-in bogus liberations. Even those who seem beyond redemption are redeemed by their participation with their own and everyone else’s essential innocence. The Wikipedia entry isn’t bad:

“The film follows Adam, a directionless 16-year-old living in the working-class town of Marfa, Texas, and his sexual relationships with his teenage girlfriend, twenty-something neighbor, an aggressive local artist, and his pregnant high-school teacher, while an unhinged, misogynistic border patrol agent watches over the neighborhood. What ensues is a web of sex, drugs, and violence as the Latino skater punks adjust to their gritty, aimless life in the dead-end town.”

What is missing from that precis is Larry Clark, who gives you the complete autopsy, always: bone, blood, and marrow. Everything everyone thinks they are hiding and risking everything to hide is exposed. In this Larry Clark special, there are only hints of the interdimensional Marfa lights and Chupacabras.

Holding the Man, directed by Neil Armfield (2015). I can’t explain the melancholy that pervades this film, but it is painted in overcast oils and the yellows of memory despite the surges of joy. To my sensibility, the whole film is shot with a track of the Lettermen silently singing: “The New Year's Eve we did the town / The day we tore the goal post down / We'll have these moments to remember./ The quiet walks, the noisy fun / The ballroom prize we almost won / We will have these moments to remember. / Though summer turns to winter / And the present disappears / The laughter we were glad to share / Will echo through the years. / When other nights and other days / May find us gone our separate ways / We will have these moments to remember.”  AIDS brings those separate ways faster than usual, but loss is universe.

               Holding the Man is about rugby, not football; set in Australia, not America; two guys, not a guy, girl, and ballroom prize; the seventies, not the fifties; and, as noted, the memory track is shortened by the early AIDS deaths of both.

               Ryan Corr and Craig Stott bring to life the love affair, beginning in high school, between a rugby player, John Caleo (Stott), who’s not sure what he feels about men or women, and an aspiring actor, Timothy Conigrave (Corr), who knows he’s gay. The film reenacts Conigrave’s novel of the same name, published ten days before his death from AIDS; Caleo died two years earlier. They were in their early thirties.

               I am assuming that Corr and Stott are not gay or bisexual but committed, versatile actors; they carry out the moods, energies, and anatomical logistics of gay male sex convincingly, so there is full suspension of disbelief. In fact, an acting class during the film in which Conigrave and others play being monkeys and an acting lesson in which Conigrave tries to portray heterosexual love become map to their movie performances. If it is all acting, Corr is a heterosexual man playing a gay man trying to pretend that it is difficult to portray male-female romance when the reality is that he is a cis male portraying a gay man having difficulty playing cis romance. Either way, he is working against instinct, but it is either a single or double negative. Conigrave’s performance as Paris in Romeo and Juliet frames the story line of Holding the Man, providing Shakespearean counterpoints and additional gender fluidity and ambivalence.

               I think that Holding the Man is melancholy because Conigrove and Caleo’s love is doomed in “Romeo and Juliet” fashion from the beginning. That is not, or not only, because they are gay through a period of major cultural (and viral) transition, but because their personalities are implicitly and euphorically tragic by nature. Doom is part of the texture of their love. The story itself begins in a period when men loving men is taboo, though surprisingly their Catholic school accepts its reality and their possible salvation on some level, and the film closes with a solemn Catholic ceremony conducted by the school’s altar boys, making it a visual memorial to both alums. 

               Additionally somewhat surprising, Timothy's parents support their son’s relationship from the beginning while John’s parents come to accept it despite strong initial rage, antipathy, scorn, and futile attempts to block it. 

               Holding the Man goes from there to a period of gay hiding, then a coming out and pride that dwarfs anything in the culture since for its sense of defiance and celebration, then ther joy and loves are subsumed in AIDS, a grim contamination and dismemberment of their bodies reversing the initial excitement of sexual discovery, yet making an occasion for the purity of love and commitment to overcome the ravages and physical repulsion of failed immune systems and bodies reverting to nature. That is the real beauty and spiritual, trans-sexual depth of the film.

               I see Holding the Man also as a series of emerging contrasts: boys to men, men from boys; Melbourne to Sydney, Sydney to Melbourne; rugby to chiropractic, theater to AIDS work; love to sex, sex to love; gender assumption to gender deconstruction; gender primacy to the irrelevance of gender in the face of family, life, love, and death; and, in the case of both lovers, different faces seesawing between maturity and regression so that each boy grows into a sober and responsible maturity not foreshadowed by their youthful selves. The more I think about the film, the more I see dichotomies at every level. Nothing is every absolute or fully polarized, causing everyone to struggle with their ambiguities and passions on individual terms—parents, friends, institutions, and themselves. Perhaps the most stunning feature visually is the fact that as John succumbs more and more to AIDS, the powerful rugby player turns into a “woman” by the equivalence of a strong, very physical male reduced to a weak, frail receptive creature, mirroring the receptivity of John’s actual sexuality hidden at first by his unsure, slightly macho style. That itself is a familiar theme—the closet gay—except that John's version is sweet, unflustered, and quickly grateful at being found.

               In the later structure of the film, we see Timothy and John discover they have AIDS after assuming, and everyone in their social world assuming, that the gay plague would pertain to them because they have been like an old married couple since high school. A moment of uncertainty as to whether they really do have AIDS, or could possibly have it, is followed by flashbacks to the years that they had other affairs and were periodically promiscuous in their own crowd. These scenes serve as a semi-ethnography of the flirtations and strong drives of all-male sex and courting. It is where the actors show how well they can act, even if they are gay.

               After John’s death, Timothy goes to small-town Italy to see and live for a time by his roots, swimming in the Mediterranean of his ancestry, rediscovering him by his DNA origin. As he develops a crush on a young man who works in the hotel, he brings John back to life. He befriends the youth, but the relationship is of course unconsummated and unspoken. Among other reticences, he doesn’t want to transmit AIDS to another victim and be a carrier of death over life. In a backwash of “moments to remember,” he laments that his basic memory of John is like a black hole consuming whatever mood or thought he feeds it.  But that was true to a degree even at their heights of discovery and passion. Beyond sexuality, disease, culture, and Australian isolation, they were saying goodbye to a world they couldn’t quite ever enter without slipping through and out of it. That’s why I call the film melancholy.   

Love & Mercy, directed by Bill Pohlad (2015). This has a complicated two-tier storyline, telling the story of Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys in multiple time frames simultaneously. It focuses (tier 1) on a period after their initial success when Wilson (played by Paul Dano) is moving into new territory of experimental sound and harmony but disintegrating personally and (tier 2) a later period when Wilson (played by John Cusack) is under the care of a corrupt therapist, Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti), but then is rescued through his unlikely love affair with Melinda, a Cadillac saleslady (Elizabeth Banks).

Wilson’s childhood, his ongoing control by his abusive, taunting father who takes over his career, and then various stages of Beach Boys’ performances are worked in skillfully. To the degree that the Beach Boys and their sound are epic, the movie is epic. It is flawed in many ways, but it is inventive in its flow of time, sound, and personae. All the threads are credibly portrayed, even the surreal ones, and intermixed at levels of realism and magical realism. The music is what holds it together, as the viewer’s curiosity about the making of the sound coincides with curiosity about how Wilson gets into his own vortex and out of it.

At times, scenes of Wilson in bed in a trance of withdrawal from the world, lodged in different periods and memories of his life reminded me of the closing scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey: a cosmic incubation and rebirth but, in Love & Mercy, as opposed to the whole zodiac conducted within the Beach Boys’  own dark and light solar system.

My favorite two parts of Love and Mercy are (1) the creation, phase by phase, of “Good Vibrations” from a noise in Wilson’s head through iterations and transformations until a simple repetitive note becomes a full-blown, successful song (it takes place during a phase in which the other Beach Boys are distrustful of Wilson’s experimental revelations and want to keep a commercial sound going), and (2) when Melinda finally confronts fraud Landy, has him served, then stares him down at the dealership. When asked by her boss afterwards if she’s okay, she asserts she is. When he wonders what she’s going to do next, she says, “Sell some cars.”

A Little Chaos, directed by Alan Rickman (2015). This film had little promise for me. I ordered it because both Lindy and I wanted to see Matthias Schoenaerts, male lead of Rust and Bone, in a different role. This film had him playing opposite the inimitable Kate Winslet, directed by and co-starring Alan Rickman as King Louis XIV of France. The topic was seemingly minor drab, the design of the royal gardens at Versailles in the mid-seventeenth century by royal architect André Le Nôtré (Schoenaerts’ character). The role change was dramatic, from a gruff, insensitive twenty-first-century bouncer and boxer to a thoughtful, soft-spoken, indirect, elegant philosopher of life, love, and art. It showed Schoenaerts to be a fine shape-shifter.

            What makes the film stand out, and led to me reviewing it, is an almost operatic coherence whereby formal court speech, gestures, movements, and agendas meld into a flow of music, song, and Shakespearean speech with Hamlet-like existential variety. Winslet plays Sabine De Barra, a widowed garden designer among those interviewed by Le Nôtré for assistance with the construction of Versailles. What she brings is “a little chaos,” a magic which at first challenges the seventeenth-century cosmic and natural order of both the king and his architect. But she captures both their hearts, Le Nôtré’s romantically, though he is married. The intrigue of men and their mistresses and the endogenous court society is itself a central theme, which sets an affair among plants, fountains, dikes, and palisades transcend with a modern eco-perspective more from the society of the film’s makers than the film.

            All of this is accomplished in a way that slowly deepens the lead lovers’ relationship from shy reticence to hesitant inquiry to romantic revelation. It tells their compelling back stories leading to moment of seeing each other (hers tragic involving the loss of a child as well as a husband, Le Notre’s tortuous, leading to periodic sabotage of the gardens), each involving sleazy other-spousal affairs, raising their own courtship to Arcadian nobility and making De Barra a virtual court icon because she earns her status rather than being born into it.

A Little Chaos becomes its own “garden of Versailles, gradually painting a second mandala over the first in actions, words, wonderings, and a subtle interplay between the garden of life with its mortality and garden and flowers in the world and their own fragile relationship to mortal time. A rose presented by De Barra to the king becomes a metaphor and basis of a poetic duel of lines between them.

As the garden that is the film’s topic is completed, the film itself turns into a swirling documentary, dance, and ceremony. I see the works of British hermetic historian Frances Yates and the alchemical geometry of Plato, Plotinus, and John Dee in A Little Chaos, as the garden is completed: a neo-Platonic mystery as well as a foreshadowing of the industrial revolution. The premise sashays between the secular and ecclesiastical because the unexamined background of the age does; the result suggests not only Ficino’s radionic spheroids, Zosimos’ golden staircase, and the peach-flower stream of Tae Ch’ion but the terraces of modern permaculture and John Todd’s New Alchemy Institute in Falmouth, Mass.

Beasts of No Nation, directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga (2015). I find it remarkable that directors take on reconstructing entire historical periods more or less accurately and also, in this case, that children are able to portray emotionally intricate, wrenching events with depth and nuance. Basing his film on a novel by Uzodinma Iweala from which the scripts draws succinct language and self-witnessing narrative, Fukunaga depicts the kidnapping of children in West Africa and their conversion by warlords into soldiers—straggling irregular armies of killing machines.

The film opens, symbolically, with the world viewed through a t.v. set missing its guts and tube; it is only a frame, creating a game between the children and their UN guardians.

Abraham Atta plays a child, Agu, in a fictional country that reflects the situation in Sierra Leone, though the film was shot more peaceably in Ghana. Many of Agu’s fellow “soldiers” were recruited by Fukunaga and his staff from local out-of-work men, yet they came together with spirit and resolution—a welcome outcome but a cautionary tale too, how easy it was to play at rebel war.

            Outside the chronology of the novel (according to the Director’s cut), the movie invents an innocent neutral village and family life for Agu before a battle between national defense forces and the militia engulfs the area, overwhelming the UN protection forces and creating a failed state. Using the testimony of an older mentally disturbed woman as proof of collaboration, the government forces execute the villagers, including Agu’s father and brother, as “rebels.” His mother and younger brother and sister had already been sent to putative safety in the capital. Suddenly alone and wandering in the jungle, Agu is found by the NDF (Native Defense Forces), captured, and trained under the megalomaniac Commandant and his lieutenant Two I-C.

            The movie is narrated inside the mind of Agu, who frames its viewpoint like the tube-less t.v. In his initiation, he is forced to hack to death a bound innocent man. We see the horror, reluctance, and concession at his speed of perception. We see continual chaotic battles without any meaning or goal. We watch Agu before and after he is raped by the pedophiliac Commandant, not even with harsh intention but as an act of fathership, acceptance into the tribe, and man love. We follow his developing friendship with the child closest to his age, Strika, up to Strika’s death, a further lesion in Agu’s fragile sense of reality.

           Beast of No Nation ends with Agu escaped—really, the militia melts away after its abandonment by NDF leader Dada Goodblood and the ensuing depletion of its ammunition. It dissolves into the pieces that were gathered and held in place only by guns. Without them, the soldiers, adult and child, peel off into civilian life.

Traumatized and in a camp that is attempting to reclaim these lost boys. After living in a daze, neither child anymore nor adult, Agu finally runs to join them in the ocean, a child again, a child with memories, reconstituting, likely with respectful and loving tribute, the closing shot of François Truffaut’s 400 Blows.

Sweet Bean, directed by Naomi Kawase (2015). This is as subtle and gentle a film as calligraphy or flower petals on silk and as quiet a film as just about anyone could compose. It involves events at a wee corner shop making doriyaki (sweet bean pancake pastries)—the proprietor and his mostly unexamined life, the girls who stop by for cakes to and from school, the older women in a nearby leper home, particularly one dorayaki-wise elder, played by beloved Japanese actor Kirin Kiki in her final role. It is also about the lives of the beans, the wind, the cherry blossoms, and a yellow canary. Like a Tao Te Ching wrapped around simple events in a yin-yang world, Sweet Bean provides a series of kōans about the nature of life in general and human lives in particular.

On the same DVD a short by filmmaker Kawase called Lies is a remarkable film in its own right, it evinces the same general sensibility but on a radically different topic with explicit rather than implicit eroticism. That Kawase can go from the subtle eroticism and intimacy of Sweet Bean to the overt sexuality of Lies speaks to the complexity and versatility of her aesthetic and the nature of intimacy itself.

Lies consists of four actors, initially three: an interviewer (female), an interviewee (a famous male designer of women’s clothing), and an interpreter from English to Japanese for them, Japanese to English for us—a young woman who is anything but lost in translation). Because it is a movie about an interview—a fictional interview albeit—the expressions of the interviewer, subject, and translator tip us gradually to the “plot.” For a long time, they are the plot, for meanings are nuanced, massaged, told, untold, retold, absorbed in different ways by all three, plus a lost-and-found-in-translation overrides because the designer is somewhat fluent in English—he at least understands it—and can occasionally answer without the translator, providing a different shade of the same meaning. Sometimes, though, his understanding is in doubt, leaving the two women indecisive.

The questions are incrementally and increasingly intimate, the answers correspondingly provocative; for instance, the purpose of designing clothes: “Destruction.” The relation of clothing to sex: “The more you hide, the more you want to know.”

Many of the interview questions relate to the nature of life and the meaning of time. At a certain point, the answers either stop or become a voiceover and we watch the designer and his wife (the fourth character) in scenes of love-making and erotic feeding cuisines to each other. Some of the original questions and answers continue now as a voiceover.

The structure of the film, even the fact that it is a scripted film as well as a make-believe interview, answers underlying questions about the relationship between beingness and time, self and other, clothing and nakedness, art and life. If Sweet Bean is the answer, Lies is the question.    

The Last Shaman, directed by Raz Degan (2016). Spoiler (not really): if you want a reason not to imbibe ceremonial ayahuasca as a cure-all for depression, this “ayahuasca” documentary casually and gracefully makes the case. Yet it doesn’t exactly say that ayahuasca can’t be a miraculous healer at times; it just says that the answer lies in the human, not the plant. The plant has knowledge and meaning, but it can’t take the recipient farther than they are ready to go. And “readiness” requires work and preparation.

The cinematographer/director somehow starts following James, a high achieving Massachusetts prep-school (Andover) student, from early in his tumble from success into a bottomless depression in which he can no longer feel anything and wants to die. The film’s simple, transparent exploration of the path of depression in a young man is, in itself, a valuable document insightful excavation of an elusive and powerful mental and physical disorder, common in the West, but not well understood. There is a reason why Westerners of all ages and backgrounds, particularly former soldiers with PTSD, travel into the jungle for relief and reentry to their lives.

The psychological situation drives the chemistry, but the chemistry floods into the and detaches the life from itself. James openly discusses his feelings of emptiness and consideration of suicide with near clinical precision. At the same time, The Last Shaman soberly and unflinchingly shows the incapacity of the medical system, even within its elite Boston-Cambridge acme, to treat the condition. James’ parents are prominent doctors who take him to the best psychiatrists on the planet who admit that they can’t cure him and don’t even really know what’s wrong. As one of them puts it, “We have no idea how the brain works.” That might be because people also have psyches, spirits, souls, and karma—stuff that they leave out of the equation, in fact are required to leave out of the equation. Shamans and ayahuasqueros, of course, don’t, which is why James takes to the jungle, first in urban and then in rain-forest Peru, neither of them user-friendly or safe, each as devouring in its way as the Western capitalism that is squeezing the life out of people while giving some life rafts on which to selectively survive.

            The bulk of the film follows James to Peru as, remarkably, the filmmaker takes the journey with him. James arrives without Spanish or any deep knowledge of what ayahuasca is or the nature of any plant medicine, in a brave gambit to recover and save his life and rediscover his sense of joy and beauty. Interspersed with scenes from his jungle journey, his parents and girlfriend speak of the lost “James,” who was once so wonderful and how they fear they will never see him again. They also do not see how he can return from such a dangerous, unequipped journey.

            But the lost James was not entirely real, particularly to himself, so the layers of Peru, not just ayahuasca or shamanism, become a path, a quest or walkabout, for finding himself—who he really is.

His journey takes him from shaman to shaman, deeper and deeper into the rainforest. He learns something from each teacher. One of the main ayahuasqueros is, ironically, an American ex-con who also fights roosters. The birds’ death battles are not an aberration; they are a good indicator of the sort of journey James is on. Rules fall away, and clues are often counter-intuitive. The American who fights roosters is James’ guide to a plant that embodies all of nature, including its violence and contradictions. That is one of the gateways.

            The lessons of the Amazon itself are profound and rigorous, with a Zen-like clarity. In order to heal, James must cleanse and become quiet—very quiet, a fast and a ritual silence lasting weeks. The ayahuasca works at the bone the journey itself, the land and the people, so that James finally doesn’t even have to take ayahuasca to be ayahuasca-healed. Its energies and microdoses already fill the air.

In that sense, the film is priceless in, while not glorifying ayahuasca as a cure-all, showing its evolution, history, and quite varied use in healing. James learns icaros (ayahuasca songs), the mind streams of his teachers, and even composes a pop American icaro that shows the range and power of the form itself. He comes to realize that there is no single cure but a range of inner unwindings and new quests. The deep fast, retreat, and ablution to which he commits heals him in concert with the ayahuasca vibration, or at least allows him to return to New England with direction and hope.

            James has an unprobed power inside himself, an untapped wisdom and charisma. He is not a prospective biomedical academic like his father or, in fact, any sort of an academic. Trying to become one was a part of how he went astray. He is himself a shaman. He is an embryonic shaman, which is why the plants led him into Massachusetts darkness and then called him all the way to Peru and oversaw his resurrection. The new James, singing his icaro, is someone for whom there was no bridge in the society in which he grew up. He had to go to another world to find it. Or maybe old souls of that other world is starting to get born as the indigo-attuned children of the West.

            In the end, thank goodness, there is no miracle enlightenment. James returns to Boston grounded, calm, alive, possible, but still struggling with the existential questions of the civilization and his own existence and journey, as well he should be.

            Here is a summary of what is presented in observant clarity and detail throughout The Last Shaman:

            •Plant medicines are not like pharmaceuticals which are organic drugs, overriding enzymes and hormones. Plant medicines work simultaneously on psychic, spiritual, emotional, and cellular levels. They go deep into each cell and transmit layers of changes through the consciousness of the cells, leading to holistic changes in mind and body. Pharmaceuticals have no such wisdom to dispense. They don’t call to us. They don’t teach us songs and wisdoms. They try to erase symptoms antiseptically and put future consumers and workers back in the civilizational pressure-cooker and rat races that helped create the pathological conditions in the first place. It is the vicious cycle that must be quieted. No psychotropic from a lab is going to do that. Western medicines cannot cure diseases of the soul; psychiatry is least of all able. Amazonian plant medicines don’t guarantee cure either, but at least they are in the big game.

            •The energy field of rural Peru converts the energy field of the industrialized, commercialized West, Boston and its suburbs. The fields are radically different and in opposition, though ayahuasca and other plant medicines have begun to impose a global depolarizing field.

            •All the shit that doesn’t work and can never work in Western civilization accumulates in a sort of wasting disease, the disease of sorrow, of ungrievable grief. That is what James catches from his classmates at Phillips Academic, the energetic contagion of its courses, vibrations, and very walls.

            •The ex-con rooster-fighter explained his own medicine: We have no bedside manner; we don’t look after you and support you in your healing. We provide the tools, but you do all the work. He also said: Everyone here is exploiting the land and the plants. Even I am exploiting ayahuasca and these people. That was his path, and he knew it.

            •It takes a period of time to heal a soul illness, commensurate in scale to the intoxication it takes to engender it. No shortcuts.

•Ayahuasca tourism has become its frantic gold rush—capitalist enantiodromia in the jungle. It is a corrupting search for money and fame on the Peruvian side and an over-material, over-literal search for healing and release from pain on the gringos’ side. Particularly dismaying is the fact that the truest and most honest shamans are driven from their communities because they treat for free and lower the value of the commodity. Pepe, the last shaman of the title, the one who brought James back to the world, is forced to leave his home and practice, and the psychic shock and outrage of that alerts James that it is time for him to return to his own world and people.

The Dark Horse, directed by James Napier (2016). This is the unintended sequel to Once Were Warriors. I say “unintended,” though I don’t actually know. My sense is that the continuity I perceive is not a direct evolution but a latent Maori myth cycle in which culture-hero warriors who have lost their souls but not their hearts confront counterparts who have lost their hearts but not their souls—and they struggle to heal the split, which has become a lesion in each of them.

This story centers around a character based on Genesis Potini, the real-life founder of the Eastern Knights youth chess club. Dysfunctionally bipolar, Gen returns from a long stint in a mental hospital in search of something to keep him stable and sane. Coaching youth chess and rescuing his nephew, Mana, from a Maori gang against the wishes of the boy’s father Akiri, Gen’s older brother, provides his mission and sanity.

The story itself is ordinary and, as several critics on Netflix have pointed out, a prototypical chess tale that had been told many times already in cinema. The Maori elements give the film its unique depth and power. for instance, Genesis’ ostensible madness contains voices of Maori spirits as well as demons of the conflict between Maori and Anglo culture.

Chess is hardly a transformative shamanic art, but the central chess set in the club has traditional pieces carved as figures of Maori myth, and Gen uses the game as a way of reimagining and reinternalizing tribal history while teaching the children the game. As he makes it shamanic, he creates a mythic journey out of a game, in keeping with Jungian individuation and symbols of transformation.

The kids themselves are touching and hilarious, as they convert pop culture and superheroes into Maori contexts and vice versa. The film is also backdropped by mysterious waves of Maori voices and images.

The gang recruiting Mana could have been teleported right out of Jake the Muss and Once Were Warriors, except that Maori matters have gotten darker, drearier, and more desperate in the decades since. In trying to train themselves for the so-called real world, e.g. the degraded world imposed on them, the “warriors” have become too tough, hardened, and nihilistic—degrading and peeing on initiates is one of their rites—to listen to their own ancestors or spirits. They have lost the warrior spirit. Genesis plays a Christ-like role in confronting their cruelty and diabolism head-on.

Flashbacks to Gen and Akiri’s childhood together, while awkward and confusing as they intervene in the film, are essential in showing the boys’ original shared innocence and hope. These events provide the counterpoint—the innate resilience—against which Gen acts to save Mana, taking the role with his nephew that his brother once took with him. It’s a Maori theme, but in an epoch of Standing Rock and Christchurch, its voice is attuned to indigenous survival and humanity as a whole.

American Honey, directed by Andrea Arnold (2016). This film is one of a kind in every way. You can’t predict or even imagine these characters, actions, or situations, and you can’t imagine what comes next. They make no ordinary sense, and the film’s surrealism is super-realism. It’s a busload of homeless freaky kids selling magazines in dreamscapes of Oklahoma, Texas, and the Dakotas.

In true Ken Loach tradition and lineage, UK-based Arnold working in America’s suburban and exurban outback captures an elusive quality that makes the least likely and most disturbing interactions ring with vitality and truth. Most remarkable is how she keeps veering off into the darkest, ugliest territories, yet finds the heart and spirit in them.

The prostitution scene in the oilfields is classic; it has nothing going for it except every cliché imaginable, and yet Arnold avoids all of them—age, power, gender, porn—and finds vulnerability and curiosity in both characters.

Shia LeBeouf is compelling as one of the band, but latecomer Sasha Lane, who seems incidental out the gate, becomes utterly riveting, as her girlish, guileless views of reality frame the weird events.

The playing of Razzy Bailey’s “I Hate Hate” over the credits is as inspired as the rest.

Moonlight, directed by Barry Jenkins (2016). Since this is a highly publicized, awarded, reviewed film, my comments do not add that much to the “moonlight” archive. The account of three phases (young boy, adolescent, young man) of the life of the child of a black prostitute in Miami is not only “real” (as opposed to mythologized and cinematic) but scored magically and transformationally as a myth. Three actors portraying his different ages don’t even seem like the same character as he grows. The transitions are bumpy and not entirely credible, but that makes no difference; in fact, it supports the less sociological, more mythical storyline, in showing that we are not only driven by cultural and family destiny but have numerous potential personae within us that are awakened by our responses to changing circumstances. The fact that key moments are understated deepens the texture because it means that the actual sordidness of the world in which the story takes place rises to the level of life rather than gets used facilely to amp the affect and drama. The drama that does take place is not hyped, even when it could be—and most often is in films—but keyed to the heartfulness and soulfulness of the participants. Dreggy events become awakenings, as each leads to the next. The film is finally more texture than deed.

The Night of, 8-part series, written by Richard Price and Steven Zaillian, directed by Steven Zaillian and James Marsh (2016). After I followed Riz Ahmed from The Sound of Metal back this series that Metal director Darius Marder says inspired him to cast Ahmed as the drummer who loses his hearing, I discovered that Richard Price wrote the script for The Sound of. Anything by the author of The Wanderers, The Breaks, and Lush Life is going to be smart, funny, and culturally attuned. Lush Life in particular captures the many world views and dialogue in the multilingual flow of urban existence, especially as it circulates around crimes, ethics, morality, ethnicity, police, and courts. Price captures often-missed nuances, clashes of perspective and beliefs, and snappy one-two volleys of dialogue and comebacks that make the daily street grind and its encounters operetta.. My review of Lush Life with a few adjustments could also describe The Night Of:

“With the flow of street language, dialogue, and the inner thoughts of characters, each in his or her native ebonics (African-American, Puerto Rican, Chinese, Whitelander), the book becomes a combination Greek chorus, rap song, LeRoi Jones/Paul Blackburn poem, far crisper and more accurate than The Wire on the same stuff (cops and robbers in post-street-drug/don’t-give-a-fuck era). At one level the book is a Rashomon-like multiple viewing of a single crime, the semi-accidental murder of young white angelic slinkster Ike Marcus in Lower Manhattan by Tristan Acevedo after Ike dares to say, ‘Not tonight, my man’ during a street robbery of him and his two buddies out on the town. But it goes deeper than the re-viewings because everything gets deconstructed from that point backward and forward, notably all the players and the people close to them: the perps (Tristan and Little Dap), Ike, the police (Mattie, Yolonda, Jimmy Iacone), Ike’s father (in his inconsolable grief), Eric Cash (the only one of the mugged trio who neither passed out nor was shot), Eric’s boss Harry Steele (restauranteur and hard-knocks philosopher), Stephen Boulware (the failed wannabe actor from Pennsylvania who passed out during the crime and who seems initially the biggest self-serving phony, using Ike’s misfortune as his podium, until he gives his public eulogy for Ike and radiates the most absolute love and respect while capturing the dead guy’s precise charismatic vibe), plus the girl-friends, wives, ex-wives, partners,  fantasy figures, and one-night stands of all of the above.

Price’s “script” flows among all of these characters, capturing the complex web that potentiated the seminal event down to the smallest nuances.  We get the full degree to which nothing was actually intended, yet nothing can be taken back. Even the phrase ‘Not tonight, my man!’ takes on a life of its own, as we get to hear its resonance in everyone’s mind and in the public mind until Harry Steele’s final rendering shows it (also) to be not a statement of courage, of asinine bravado, of confrontation, or even irony or intent, just the words of a guy who forgot that the ‘scene’ was long gone and that he wasn’t acting in a play about  himself on the Lower East Side. The gun may have been facile—aren’t they all these days?—but it was real (real bullets) and the guy who pulled the trigger (Tristan, the kid rapper making banally brilliant rhymes throughout the book) didn’t actually know what he was holding or what it did.

Lush Life is metaphysical in its probing of the mundane and ruined and walking dead. It is political in the best sense in its subtext on the nature of the availability of guns, police and judicial corruption, and due process from every socioeconomic perspective. It is high art too, each description or cameo a masterpiece, some at the level of Hardy and Dickens, notably the shrine for Eric, the kitty litter beaches of Atlantic City, the ‘projects’ elevators.”

All of these elements are in play in The Night Of. In this case, Ahmed’s character, Nazir Khan, a sheltered Pakistani-American college student in a close-knit Pakistani family in Queens (who has also never been to Pakistan), without permission borrows a taxi that his father co-owns with two other Pakistani cab drivers and sets out to a party in lower Manhattan with only a vague notion of the event’s whereabouts. He gets lost, pulls over and, because he is unable to turn on the “off duty” light, is taken for an available cab. He succeeds in forcing some guys to leave, but when a brash, good-looking young woman about his age enters, she supplants the party because “girls” were his goal anyway and he has little social skill or experience.

Andrea (played by Sofia Black-D’Elia) leads Nazir on a sudden Eleusinian journey of drugs, revelation, mumbley peg (knife roulette), and sex—all pagan and radical new territory for an innocent Muslim—ending at her upper West Side apartment. When he falls asleep afterards, he awakes to find her dead with twenty-two stab wounds. At the horrific sight, he panics, taking the murder weapon, a knife, and fleeing the apartment. He comes back for his jacket and car keys, and ultimately is stopped for a traffic violation by the same cop car and team that are about to be summoned to the murder scene. He is brought into the station as bycatch for drunk driving, an incidental footnote to murder-1 show time, until the missing murder weapon is found in his possession, bringing him from a side stage into the spotlight and main event. No point in hunting the perpetrator. He is already in hand.

As in Lush Life, The Night Of hinges on shades of language, tactic, intention, culture, and interpretation. A large part of the story—remember, eight full episodes—centers around Naz’s time in prison at Riker’s Island: his narrow escapes from fatal hazing and blade-cutting; his eventual acceptance of the protection of Freddie Knight (Michael K. Williams) who delivers the lush and stark philosophy of street life, street justice, and the occasional unicorn (Naz) who pervades the angelic grace of innocence that he carries and Freddie honors: he is the sole innocent and naïf among them, a Pakistani martyr in a mostly African-American hell realm.

Freddie slowly toughens Naz into a more worldly innocent; he provides his missing American adolescence and initiation, turning him from a baffled victim into coke-addicted brother. Freddie understands that being “inside” and “outside” are not as different as they seem—the guards and prisoners hail from the same neighborhoods and don’t make the distinctions of law and freedom that others do. Their roles, privileges, freedoms, and privations overlap. They are all in prison in their way.

A major part of the film involves Naz’s trial, a seemingly hopeless gambit given the mountain of evidence against him and the absence of any other suspect. Price delivers a classic trial filled with witticisms and unexpected, whiplash-like turns. The attorneys dominate, but none more so than John Stone, the closest thing to Price’s own street voice. Its existential eloquence is lyricized by Stone’s bumblingly brilliant inarticulateness and innate righteousness. Price doesn’t just spout philosophy; he casts it into his characters—that’s what a novelist is. Stone’s part, equal to Ahmed’s, is played by multi-faceted thespian John Turturro.

When the story was adapted from a British crime serial, Turturro’s role was targeted for James Gandolfini and, after his premature death, Robert De Niro—that how central it is—but it is hard to imagine anyone but Turturro playing it. He embodies John Stone through his lineage of past movie characters on, off, and just off the spectrum, making a beaten-down lawyer so vivid that it’s difficult not to keep seeing him as a real person who stumbled into a fictional film. Turturro’s Stone, a low-level ambulance chaser, finds Naz only by chance, drawn too by his aura of innocence. He is destined to represent him and make a hail-mary closing argument that deadlocks half a previously doomed jury.

First he is replaced by Alison Crowe (Glenne Headley), a high-level corporate attorney who is taking Naz’s case pro bono for the publicity and exposure. Assuming he has to be guilty, she hopes to win a showy plea bargain (she does, but Naz is unable to admit official guilt to something he didn’t do; it doesn’t fit his Muslim purity and idealism). After the failed plea bargain, Crowe is replaced by her own assistant, Chandra Kapoor (Amara Karan), an East Indian woman newly out of law school. She teams with Stone of necessity; she may be an elite rookie, but he has been around all the blocks. She is technically the lead attorney, but he trains her through trial and kōans while both of them do detective work to track down leads to other possible suspects, a mirror of the Rashomon-like aspects of Lush Life.

Supporting the continuous re-framing of the story, The Night of continuously re-shows scenes from “the night of” in surveillance videos and Naz’s drug- and trauma-distorted memory, altering the range and perspective so that a larger picture begins to dawn on us as well as the characters.

Stone is plagued by acute eczema throughout the series, leading to a subplot of doctors of varying degrees of knowledge and incompetence failing to cure his ailment, which is worst on his feet so that he ends up with cellophane bags around them in sandals as he appears in court. I came away not knowing whether Price meant to valorize Chinese herbs (for their temporary success) or throw them into the same heap of medical quackery as everything else. This is a significant mini-drama, as is Stone’s adoption of victim Andrea’s orange cat found wandering around the murder scene hungry, an ambivalent sequence in which Stone is trapped between his allergies (in addition to eczema) and the so-called humane society in which the cat is almost euthanized at least twice. Stone can no more abandon the animal than he can Naz despite what it costs him.

The significance of the cat is highlighted by the fact that his feline patrol of Stone’s apartment is what Price chooses to close ten hours of story-telling. Till then, we don’t know he it is alive or dead, probably not a reference by Price to Schrodinger’s cat (but who knows?), though clearly a reference to the narrow margins of innocence and guilt, life and death, freedom and incarceration in the dioceses of lush life. Everyone in the series makes it or doesn’t by a slight twist or turn that could have gone either way.

            Stone gets to make the closing argument because Kapoor has been removed from the lead for kissing Naz in his cell, either an expression of real affection or part of her failed attempt to force a mistrial. She loses her job, an opening to her role in a possible sequel.

The State’s district attorney, Helen Weiss, is played by the experienced Jeannie Berlin quite as competently as Turturro’s Stone, but without his range, humanity, and Chaplinesque foibles. Berlin portrays a rigid, seasoned prosecutor determined to win at all costs and going lockjaw when counter-evidence starts to appear. She does change her tune by the end, another opening for a sequel. Price’s lines for her are so great that I think per cue that I’ll remember them all. But I only remember one. When she is talking to an expert witness about the chemicals in Naz’s system, she asks whether he could commit murder under them. The expert replies with something like, he could either fly a plane through five time zones or not be able to stand up straight, which do you want? Weiss replies, “The aviator.” Bravo, Price.

Detective Dennis Box (Bill Camp), another major figure, is on the point of retirement (like so many cinema detectives),and is determined to nail this last case like a bluecoat Mozart, and it seems a no-brainer—the murderer bringing the murder weapon to the station. Like Weiss, he is undeterrable. Yet it is Box who flips most effectually at the end. He doesn’t leave as expected after his retirement party. For he has noted Andrea looking over her shoulder before getting into Naz’s cab and finds another camera that shows who is pursuing her. The killer in place of Naz is neither the evangelical hearse driver who conflates Andrea at a gas stop with the biblical Delilah and Naz as her victim, nor the drug dealer who, with his street buddy, confronts and hazes Naz and Andrea going into her apartment building (the dealer is named Duane Reade, the same as the drugstore chain, leading to an arc of signature Price ironies and double-plus entendres), nor is it the young gigolo personal-coach husband of Andrea’s late mother (who is deep in debt and now stands to inherit everything). I’ll leave that detail “unspoilered,” except to point out that Box and Weiss decide after the trial and Stone’s brilliant closing argument freeing Naz,“Let’s go get him,” the real murderer. A number of camera views from around New York City remind us that the camera-wired city is the director of superset movie, The Night of Every Night, most of which never gets mades. The Night of is Price’s camera on that, and he gets a cast of fine character actors, current and coming stars, and talented West Asian Americans to pull it off.

Sing Street, written and directed by John Carney (2016). One evening in 2023, Lindy were and I looking for a movie to watch on Netflix streaming and started four (4!) from the current top 10 in the country. None lasted more than three minutes for us. They were really bad—a combination of overwrought, ugly, silly, violent. Then we found Sing Street, available only through the end of the month. It is upbeat, funny, inspiring, full of heart and spirit, in fact one of the most inspiring, good-natured, joyful films I have ever seen. It has an indomitable way of turning every major and minor despair into hope and redemption, every obstacle into a magical opportunity, and every enemy into a collaborator and friend. It is a game plan for living life well, no matter who you are and how stacked the odds are against you. It is also a blend of original music; smart, funny kids; dating philosophy; family therapy; and raw ontology. It is also set in Dublin, Ireland, with wonderful brogue limning an ’80s Irish version of pop America.

I am not that interested in movies about the formation of a band (of which there are many—former garage-band musicians and wannabe garage-band musicians love making them—for reasons that Sing Street overrides, especially in the way the development of the music follows the development of the plot. The somewhat unpromising events at Sing Street’s opening—a deteriorating family, aimless kids, harsh 1980s Catholic school with bullies, and zero sophistication and organizational experience—match the wannabe band members inability to make music and the unlikelihood that anything promising could come out of their desultory, wishful band.

Carney obviously needed musicians to play his characters, and they did a credible job of being bad at the beginning, then an equally credibly job in developing their lyrics, music, and performance videos, so that you are brought along and get to follow their path and appreciate them. In a parable-like way, you are watching the birth and rebirth of rock ’n’ roll. It could be McCartney, Lennon, Harrison, and friends; you don’t know because the story is only beginning at its end. The entire movie is a prequel to revelation and myth—or not. It doesn’t matter because by then, the closing boat ride from Dublin to London in the wake of a massive channel-crossing ferry, it doesn’t matter. You just hope, while the credits are showing, that the waves don’t sink our young lovers, the would-be Bowie and his would-be supermodel.

            The writing is first-rate, not Roddy Doyle or Ken Loach, but in their ballpark. It grows with the music and gets more and more crisp, eloquent, and poignant through the film without losing its authenticity and street character. The story is a bit on the fantastic side, a fairy tale as much as an uncanny confluence of events. The fact that the rock-video genre was relatively new in the eighties era being portrayed by Carney allows a bit of beginner’s leeway so that the film segues, often magically, between the kids’ making of an amateur rock video with a second-hand camera and the surprisingly polished finished video. Carney’s cuts are seamless and enchanting.

In one dramatic instance Sing Street swings from the making of a video to a fantasy that I thought at first was the apotheosis of the film’s rock videos before it returns to the disappointing reality that launched the fantasy. While you’re watching it, you think it’s real; at least I did. It becom,es a wild utopian culmination and resolution of all the conflicts in the film cast in a group dance, a bit like a cast chorus line, bit like Broadway choreograpy, a bit like a dream. The scene—the video—never happened except in the lead character’s mind, but in another sense it did because Sing Street is about how art is not literal or linear but imagination realized. The film itself uses art and faith in music and words to arrive at its own more realistic romantic resolution.

            The plot features Conor (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) as  fifteen-year-old tossed into a Christian Brothers’ school because of his family’s dwindling finances and impending divorce; his capacity to reclaim joy and art is the driving force of Sing Street gathers everyone into his human wake. Conar will not allow anyone, especially himself, to become a victim. Jack Reynor plays his six-years-older brother Brendan, who is his school-of-rock teacher, but also his school-of-life-and-love-and-girls teacher. Brendan will not allow his kid bro to sink into derivativeness, mediocrity, or a mere cover band. He wants him to create the future.

Conor comes to call himself a futurist. He invents the future of music against a background of eighties groups highlighted by Duran Duran. Whether or not it is really the future, it is for Sing Street and the landscape of the film.

Lucy Boynton is Raphina, Conor’s sixteen-year-old dream girl whom he spots on a stoop across the street from Christian Brothers. He has to start a band because that is the only way he can offer her a starring role in a music video, which is what he approaches her with. She presents herself as a model, and she has an adult boyfriend with a car who plans to take her to London to make a name for herself—a blatant fib to win her company. Conor’s simultaneous courtship of her and discovery of her as his star is aided by her quiet, often tragic wisdom. She teaches him the stuff of life that Brendan can’t. She makes him a man as she lets him make her a better woman than she was going to become. Her subtle ways at breaking into his celebrations, self-sabotages, and hesitant kisses with teachings turns him into who she wants him to be, but also turns the music, the band, the rock videos, and the story into “Sing Street” and lets them escape finally into a real future. She makes every band video dopey, fantastic, cover girl, or mermaid.

            Each of the band members brings his own wit, goofiness, and musical or other talent and individuality to the group as it comes together, performs, and improvises while writing songs and making videos. Mark McKenna as Eamon is Conor’s John Lennon. Ben Carolan as Darren, the band’s business manager, videographer, and proud nerd, adds a Little Rascals touch. After all, the Irish future has a retro Amercan feel. 

            Again, the music is not great but plenty good. The story makes up for its flaws with its energy and hope. The goal, in the words of Connor, is turning “manic-depressive” into happy-sad, into lyrics, into romance, into reclamation, even of the grunge all around them. Dublin and all of Ireland would follow. Raphina as the queen of happy-sad jumps right in.

My cameo for this film would be Ziggy Stardust in 1985 Dublin, Ireland, saying, “We’re Sing Street, Hello Dublin”—and that’s irresistible. I also find a touch of The Graduate (Conor and Raphina), a touch of Ken Loach’s Looking for Eric (conversion by everyone wearing the same mask, in this case during Sing Street’s last performance at the Christian Brothers school during which Connor tosses out faces of sadistic Brother Baxter, and everyone in the band and audience puts them on),and a tinge of Lukas Moodysson light (the thin line separating underclass from pop royalty).       

The Edge of Seventeen, written and directed by Kelly Fremon Craig (2016). By chance, this film followedThe Fabelmans, Steven Spielberg’s fictionalized memoir of his childhood and youth, in our Netflix queue. Anything directed by Spielberg is special—smart, entertaining, and creative—plus The Fabelmans was cowritten with versatile playwright Tony Kushner. Yet I am reviewing The Edge of Seventeen and not The Fabelmans. Why?

            I knew that I wasn’t going to write about The Fabelmans almost immediately while watching it—too predictable and derivative of other Spielberg movies. The Edge of Seventeen reified and clarified that view. The Fabelmans is a general cinematic backdrop against which of The Edge of Seventeen presents a new voice. I read online that Fremon Craig was influenced by spoken-word poetry, music videos, and sketch comedy, all of which are called on in her script and shoot. The Fabelmans is more traditionally Holywood (typo intentional).

Both films track childhood to adolescence, although their historical frames are located decades apart. They offset in other ways The Edge of Seventeen is gendered girltalk and post-ethnic, while the Fabelmans is boytalk and Jewish. They both depict teen rebellion and reconciliation inside a broken family. Yet while The Fabelmans feels like skillful affectations coasting on the prodigious skills and adroitness of its makers, The Edge of Seventeen is rough and dirty, which fits its teen characters’ phases and traumatic upheavals.

This is not a dismissal of The Fabelmans; Spielberg, Kushner, and their actors, notably Michelle Williams as the Sammy’s mother, achieved what they set out at. The film is excellent: compassionate, probing, insightful. By contrast, The Edge of Seventeen is so uneven that, approaching the halfway point, I hadn’t the slightest notion I would want to review it. It seemed silly and overwrought and had trouble keeping its parts in the same key.

The death of Fremon Craig’s Franklin family’s father in a car accident opens The Edge of Seventeen in a mix of dark comedy and magic realism, a poor choice to my taste. Likewise, the initial meeting around a dark brown caterpillar of the two principles Nadine and Krista as grade-schoolers I found precious, over-cute, and unlikely. The killing of the caterpillar and flushing of it down the toilet was a play for laughs forfeiting the tenderness of the larger story. Yet overall, excluding a few scenes, The Edge of Seventeen was well paced and evolved, and its various teen emotions came out of believable eddies. Fremon Craig and her actors captured a mix of nuances bridging shyness, dark humor, cool-ness versus nerd-ness, acting out, sibling rivalry, parental projections, peer pressure, bullying, and boys and girls pretending to be more sophisticated and daring than they are. For the most part, Spielberg and Kushner skipped over this terrain, opting for sweeping pictures while showing the evolution of a filmmaker from a tot’s terror at a train wreck in his first movie experience, The Greatest Show in Earth, to meeting a campy version of John Ford in his college years.        

            As many reviewers and Netflix posters about The Edge of Seventeen noted, Hailee Steinfeld as Nadine is show-stopping. She hovers between a little girl and an adolescent, pacing Fremon Craig’s funny, hip, often taboo language and a fluctuating boundary between her inner thoughts and outer designs as skillfully as a standup comic. The more hilarious and outrageous she becomes the subtler and more existential she becomes. Nadine and Fremon Craig converge, as well they should. I mean, Steinfeld could write her own movie and Fremon Craig could play her.

Steinfeld is supported by Hollywood pros Woody Harrelson and Kyra Sedgwick as her history teacher and mother, respectively, and also by the cast’s ensemble of young actors, male and female. Steinfeld’s Nadine portrays ambiguity, ambivalence, and bouts of epic embarrassment and shame alternating with startling feistiness. As someone who wrote my own thoughts at sixteen and then rewrote them into a book (New Moon), I appreciate how hard it is to catch coming-of-age moods—like holding snowflakes. What Fremon Craig and Steinfeld did in collaboration isn’t easy: encompassing erratically moving adolescent cyclones and other out-of-control weather systems with sunlight, downpours, gentleness, compassion, and an emergent philosophy of life, in this case girls. Nadine has no patience for affectation of any sort, but she also has to discover where unchecked outspokenness leads, and the other characters have to discover it with her. She is the film’s driver, so the awareness of everyone around her deepens because of her.

Her domain includes her critical, punitive, depressed mom Mona (Sedgewick); her hated handsome rival brother Darian; her life-long girlfriend Krista (who dates Darian to her outrange and horror); her acerbic history teacher Mr. Bruner (Harrelson) who sets boundaries for a hoyden girl with his wry teasing minimalism; the shy Korean boy Erwin Kim who has a crush on her and plays off her boldness with yin ironies and feints; and the Elvis-Presley-like boy in the pet shop on whom she has a crush and to whom she texts far too much of her fantasy, leading to a major sexual misunderstanding out of which she has to extricate herself. If you tell a boy you want to fuck, even if you didn’t mean to hit send, even if he hasn’t noticed you before, he’ll notice all right, and take you at your word.

That disquieted landscape more or settles into a dynamic disequilibrium, as Nadine recognizes where she overshot her own heart truth. She shifts course and damps her habitual rages, infatuations, and amok-runnings to a nascent middle ground. First, she goes to Mr. Bruner for rescue and elucidation.

            The Fabelmans was already too long already for that level of nuance, and Spielberg handled it sufficiently in his other films, but sprees are what make The Edge of Seventeen worth reviewing and The Fabelmans something more of a landmark to revere. The Edge of Seventeen, Fremon Craig’s debut, is her American Graffiti, a bittersweet journey through the transition between high school and the rest. For me, the momentum building at the end of was daffy (a bit of Keystone Cops), cathartic, transformative, and energizing. Though I knew the characters were make-believe, I crossed from suspension of disbelief to actively participating in their wake-up. It was good medicine as well as spellbinding entertainment.  

Blue Jay, directed by Alex Lehman (2016), written by Mark Duplass. Duplass and Sarah Pauley star as Jim Henderson and Amanda (last name apparently not given). They not only star, they are the only actors in the entire film except for a cameo appearance by a shopkeeper. In that sense, Blue Jay mirrors Richard Linklater’s  Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and Before Midnight in which Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy play a couple at stages of an ongoing state of quantum uncertainty. While there are some strong indirect parallels between the stories, it would take multiple Möbius transformations and space-time reversals to turn one into the other. Linklater may have influenced Duplass and Lehman, but they had their own vision, so I will stick with Blue Jay here.

            The film is substantially improvised (according to articles online). The actors had the basic outline of the story but made up the dialogue in interaction with each other. That could mean a number of different things, though. They couldn’t have made up many key elements of the plot because the scenery required props, and they also had to respond to a recording they made of themselves play-acting twenty-two years earlier on a reel-to-reel machine. They couldn’t have improvised the recording while improvising their response to it same time without being at two places, times, and selves simultaneously. They could, however, have improvised the recording pre-shoot in more youthful voices and then improvised their response to it during the shooting.

            The setting is the small town of Blue Jay in the California Sierras, though the movie is mostly filmed in adjacent towns. The two have run into each other in supermarket. Amanda is back in town because her sister is having a baby, while Jim has returned from Tucson after his mother’s death and is renovating and planning to sell her house, his childhood home. He is a dry-wall contractor. The house gives them a setting to reenact their past because its is where their high-school romance took place, and it also holds many artifacts of the time, including Jim’s diaries (filled with his love paeans to Amanda), his letters from her, his records, old photos, his high-school clothes (his mother was a hoarder) including shirts Amanda remembers borrowing and wearing and puts on again. It has his high-school copy of Wuthering Heights, her favorite romantic novel from which she reads aloud love declarations of Catherine and Heathcliff that she adapted in high school for herself and Jim, orating them again as they laugh and reminisce. From the opening dialogue in the grocery aisle through much of the film, they behave as if they are delighted with their amorous past but so unattached to each other now that they can flirt and goof off without emotion or risk. She is married and has raised her husband’s two children (boys I think) all the way from toddler stage to college, a measure of the years passed. He has never married. 

            Blue Jay is shot entirely in black and white, giving it a moody, nostalgic ambiance that matches the bittersweet quality of the story. Jim and Amanda’s opening dialogue in the supermarket is particlarly awkward, hesitant, bashful— filled with ticks, flutters, and parasitic motions on both their parts, including a repetitious dialogue in which they recycle their hellos and how-are-you’s?, while granting each other leeway to sound stupid and less than candorous, which they are.

To many reviewers on Netflix, this was indicative of an inept, poorly scripted, poorly acted film, and some stopped watching after ten minutes or a half hour. But the opening dialogues are more truly indicative of Pauley and Duplass figuring out their characters as well as the “characters” feeling out each other. The combination produces a slight echo, an oddity making the early tone difficult to get. Jim and Amanda seem paradoxically reticent and exuberant about re-meeting—at that point we don’t know that it’s been twenty-plus years and that they were high-school lovers. If it wasn’t a movie, you’d expect them to drift off from the awkward encounter and not reconnect. They might think about the meeting later but not have it totally occupy the rest of their day and night, as it gradually did.

            The film is also about play-acting, which adds to the echo. In high school they enjoyed play-acting their future, pretending to be, among other things, a married couple celebrating their twentieth wedding anniversary (the recording rediscovered). Play-acting is a favorite recreation. On the reel they refer to each as Mr. Henderson and Mrs. Henderson, as they ham it up, reenacting a make-believe workday and eventually extolling “Mrs. Henderson” as an all-star rapper who has just learned that she is going to open for Public Enemy (I forget if that’s the actual rapper named in the film).

Later, the liquor-store proprietor, the only other character, gets enlisted in the play-acting when he recognizes the two love birds from twenty-plus years ago and wonders if they are still together. They tell him that they are celebrating their twentieth anniversary when of course they have just met again by chance after those same two decades. He falls for it, apparently assuming that he just hasn’t run into them for a decade or two.

            Pauley and Duplass are a remarkable, indescribable duo as they improvise improvising, dance, flirt, sing, scrap playfully, give each other head massages, and finally kiss, but they don’t go any further toward love-making, at least in the film, only in memory, recalling their first “going all the way” in the back of his truck—at that moment they are lying in the back Jim’s truck, perhaps the same one. Their creative language is what makes the film delightful, suspenseful, and titillating, as they recall the lovebirds they were and mock how seriously uncool they were once and, at the same time, long for their lost selves, the innocence and possibility. When they are about to make love finally after a night of wooing (while the ice cream Amanda has bought for her sister melts into soup), she pulls away, reminding him that she is married now and belongs to someone else.

            This is when his character breaks with template. To that point, she has been the more creative and wittier improviser, and he has been her straight man. Now he takes over and changes the mood from factitiously light to dead serious as he accuses, “It’s play-acting for you, but it’s not for me. This is real.” The feelings are real. While they are pretending, they are also pretending not to feel.

            By then he knows that her husband is twenty-six years older than she is and that she married him as much for his children as for him—now she faces empty nest with him alone. She is on anti-depressants and hasn’t cried for at least five years. They have both confessed that sex and love were never the same with other people. That got them to the kiss.

            They must confront—and the viewers are finally let in on—the reason they broke up: her pregnancy and abortion. Neither could handle it skillfully. The event had accelerated them into a crisis beyond their years and maturity. They were terrified in different ways and no longer able to play Mr. and Mrs. Henderson or be each other’s supports, pretend or real. She got the abortion without his participation after he sent her a letter and balloons revealing how clueless and unequipped he was to handle the situation.

Now they both admit their mistakes. The play-acting is done.

            An unopened letter addressed to her, clearly never sent, drops on the floor, and he pounces on it. She saw it in his room and has smuggled it into her coat pocket, hoping to read it privately the next day (and twenty years later), but it falls out in her attempt take off his shirt and sweater she has put on during the evening, reclaim her own clothes, and flee. They fight over whose property it is. It is his because it was never sent and hers because it has her name on it.

A turning-point unsent letter has many forerunners in cinema and literature. In Blue Jay, it reactivates their failed abortion debate as adults. They acknowledge what they lost by their respective behaviors, a huge thing, their long-planned life together. Jim’s crying proves contagious. Amanda starts to weep, breaking her five-year crying fast. She can’t stop and says she may never stop. That’s all we see at the end except for a black-and-white Sierra night and stars reflected in water, but I will add a piece of psychic philosopher and channeler John Friedlander’s “big picture” as a Blue Jay epigraph:

“At any moment, you are whole and complete, and something is missing and unobserved. You may not have had your present realization back then, but you were aware of other things that you have forgotten. You underwent a gradual change in perspective. It is not that you are suddenly ‘better’ and ‘wiser’ and must regret how you were. You are always whole and complete, and each moment is whole and complete and needs nothing.”

The Choice, directed by Ross Katz (2016). There is no excuse for reviewing this movie except that we watched it right after Blue Jay, and one other thing, Nicholas Sparks’ quirky metaphysics. That’s why it’s worth watching, though it isn’t very good. The early parts are on the level of Beach Party with Annette and Frankie, and the women are from the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue; the guys are all hunks. Then it changes to General Hospital with the heroine’s coma What is redeeming is that author and producer Nicholas Sparks has the knack for capturing what is spiritual and transformative when romance takes place, even under the soppiest, most superficial circumstances. He turns Travis (Benjamin Walker) and Gabby (Teresa Palmer), despite all theirs quips, teasing jokes, stock pick-up and putdown lines, and sexy primping, into lovers out of Petrarch or E. M. Forster. That’s his gift and why he’s so successful. It can’t be imitated: the mix of raw sexuality and devotion to a Christian God. He says you can’t wreck love or life no matter how hard you try:

            Night with Carolina moon. Travis: “This view we’ve got here is just beautiful.”

            Gabby (laughing with light sarcasm). “Yes. The view.”

            Travis: “Mm-hmm. [Pause] I really can’t get enough of it.”

            Gabby (nodding with a curious smile): “Yeah. It . . . is . . . really something. [Pause] It makes you wonder where it all comes from, doesn’t it?”

            Travis (a bit concerned): “Not really.”

            Gabby (with a full laugh and a turn of her head to show surprise and a bit of outage): “Not really?”

            Travis (more worried, but emphatic): “No!”

            Gabby: “Okay.” (A rotation and a look that indicates a change of tone and agenda): “So you don’t believe in God?”

            Travis: “Oh boy.”

            Gabby: “Oh boy!” (As if to say, ‘Oh boy too for me!’)

            Travis (shaking his head and looking sad): “This was going so good.”

            Gabby (still somewhat flirting): “Oh boy? Don’t ‘oh boy’ me. An honest question deserves an honest answer.”

            Travis: “All right. I apologize.”

            Gabby: “Okay. So?”

            Travis: “You want to know what I believe in?”

            Gabby: “Yeah.”

            Travis calls to his dog: “Moby, come here.”

            Gabby, “Oh, he has an opinion on this, does he?”

            Travis shows how when he pushes on Moby’s head, Moby pushes back in a certain way just for him. “I know it sounds stupid, but it’s love. Your friends, your family, yourself. That’s all you can count on in this world. And that’s what I believe. [Long pause]. What do you believe?”

            Gabby (deep breath and sigh): “I believe . . .  in . . . the moon, the stars. It’s that feeling that I’m a part of something . . .  so much bigger than myself . . . that I will never, ever begin to understand. And it’s something I cannot control no matter how hard I try. So, if you can tell me where that comes from and why it is so . . . damn . . . beautiful . . . then I will stop saying my prayers before bedtime.”

            Travis (nodding): “Okay.”

            Gabby: “Okay.”

            Travis: “Well, that was lovely.”

            Gabby: “It was, wasn’t it?”

            Travis: “We just had a God conversation, and it wasn’t bad at all.”

            Gabby: “It didn’t come out bad.

            Together: “Uh oh. I don’t know.”

            This is the axis on which the story will turn, and it leads them to a steamy, passionate love affair, defying their partners. It will open years later to the Choice, which is a series of choices one after another, marking Aquinas’ first and second freedoms.

Sparks also knows how to deepen and sanctify through sorrow. And he gives new depth to the word “bother” as a “calque” of “irritate,” “intrigue,” “tantalize,” and “bewitch” (as in “You bother me”). Not a bad or trivial power.   

Rectify, created by Roy McKinnon and starring Aden Young as Daniel Holden, with 17 different directors (2013-2016). Four seasons of varying length, 30 episodes in all, Rectify centers around Holden as a young man released on DNA evidence after nearly 20 years in prison (ages 18-38) for a murder to which he confessed under confusion and pressure but didn’t commit. To survive his ordeal, Holden read, meditated, and studied, and changed the nature of time to inhabit the space between seconds. He brings that perspective, a form of beginner’s mind and open-field awareness, into the civilian world and, as he imposes it on the reality he encounters in the free world, everything (and everyone) is changed by contact with him.

The guiding themes are Holden’s reintegration into society, the unfolding search for the actual killer, and the complicated lives of Holden’s family, friends, and foils, each a universe of crime, punishment, and rectification, in him- and herself.

Holden is the catalyst activating the other lives, but you get to see each of them in its own terms and gradually recognize how “good” and “bad,” “innocent” and “guilty” are relative. Crimes (before, during, and after) are fluctuating constructs, made up of multiple factors and realities. There may be one crime at the center of the plot, but all the lives in Rectify involve degrees of insincerity and deception and small crimes against each other. Each character (about a dozen major ones) achieves a measure of self-discovery and redemption through Holden.

The Florida Project, directed by Sean Baker (2017). The Florida Project has shades of Larry Clark in its documentary feeling and “real” people actors. Most have never acted before. It’s set in the sleazy, squalid suburbs and shadow of Orlando’s Disneyworld at the Magic Castle Motel next door to the Futureland Motel where six-year-old Moonee (Brooklynn Prince) befriends Jancey (Valeria Cotto). They and other motel children frolic and get into constant mischief, though also humor and joy (inspired by Our Gang films, says director Baker). Moonee’s mother Halley (Bria Vinaite) is also in constant trouble for exotic dancing and then prostitution, as motel owner Bobby (Willem Dafoe) tries to maintain order and protect the children from nonparental adults.

Despite their poverty and lackluster toys, many of them broken or discarded props, the children create a Magical Kingdom far more luminous and enchanting than the bloated, capitalist mega-structures next door to them. Disneyworld is part of the empire that has subjugated them and broken the lives of the adults around them. It is also the illusion of a fairy tale, while they manufacture a real fairy tale out of its debris and blowback.

At the end, when threatened by the Florida Department of Children and Families (DCF) and foster care, Moonee and Yancey run away together to the Magic Kingdom theme park. It is the first time they have seen it from within, and it holds the promise of an ultimate escape to a Fairyland. It is so different from their playworld, completely assembled, yet unreal. The escape can’t last, but the movie ends there, with metaphor indicting its own false reality and the surrounding slums and degradation it has generated—recreational capitalism’s collateral damage.

The same mirage is created by mega-theme parks outside Jerusalem in the occupied territories of Palestine.

Molly’s Game, directed by Aaron Sorkin (2017). I occasionally review films I don’t like that much because I have something to say about them. That makes this book imbalanced because I forget too much detail from far better, classic films of my youth, but I can’t review them unless I see them again. I remarkably don’t remember a single full scene from Bergman, Godard, Fellini, or Truffaut. I would have plenty to say if I did.

So that brings me to Molly’s Game. Did I like it? Yes and no. I was swept along by the quick witty dialogue that came from a mix of Molly Bloom’s memoir and Aaron Sorkin’s script. It is a hip, smart itinerary of skier Molly Bloom’s life before and mainly after a spectacular career-ending topple and injury during a 2002 Olympic trial at around age twenty.

Adult Molly is played edgily by Jessica Chastain who, in a transcendent performance, captures an elusive, rare mix of intelligence, sexiness, defiance, power, scrupulous morality, and pain. Through layers of scheming and philosophizing about how to live a proxy of the life she planned after her lost Olympic dream, she perversely postpones law school for cocktail waitressing and fun in LaLa land. Through flukes as adventitious as the branch in snow that snapped her attachment to her skis, she ends up running the world’s most exclusive high-stakes poker game in Los Angeles and then New York. She becomes entangled with the Russian mafia, is beaten up and robbed by an Italian mob enforcer, is arrested by a team of FBI agents. She goes to trial with Charlie Jaffey (played by Idris Elba) as her attorney.

            The dialogues and repartees between Chastain’s Molly and other figures in the film—Jaffey, her demanding psychotherapist father Larry (played immaculately by Kevin Costner), the various famous and wealthy players in her games—entail clever comebacks and bing-bing-bing exchanges elucidating the underlying themes of the film: competition, victory, power over men, domination. It is not easy to have a ready comeback line on a second and third exchange in a volley, but Molly Bloom does, right to the end, and none of them are clichés. This is a hilarious as well as a tragic swift-moving current.

            What I don’t like is the film’s home milieu of wealth, decadence, greed, and gambling addiction, but the high-lying roles and language are also why I was drawn to watch it for almost two and a half hours. While I found myself shying away from the story in my heart—it is disgustingly elitist in its valorization of wealth, fame, and creative treachery—I was also embracing its intellectual virtuosity with my mind. That’s a more uncomfortable, guilty split than I usually acknowledge.

I know nothing about poker, so every poker movie I have to guess at what’s happening. For instance, is the “river” the undealt deck? What determines value relationships between cards of the same number or royalty beyond Kings over Queens, Queens over Jacks, etc.? It doesn’t take away from the enjoyment, but I miss the nuances, especially since Sorkin puts the hands and scorecard on top of the videos of the games like Roger Rabbit.

            Molly has no lovers in the film, though most of the players fall in love with her or at least profess their love. She is clean—no sex—in that she is interested only in power and money, winning, and doing things right. “Of course, they all think they love me. I’m the anti-wife. I encourage their gambling. I serve them drinks. I surround them with beautiful girls.” That’s an approximate quote.

Why I finally reviewed Molly’s Game after wavering is: (1) the presentation of gambling addictions so intense, graphic, and profound that it awakened that aspect of me. I have never gambled, but I recognize and feel the addiction nonetheless. You don’t have to gamble formally to play subtle games like Molly’s all day.  (2) Molly’s reconciliation with her hard-driving father played by Costner is a  moving if facile therapy repartee during which he offers her three years of therapy in three minutes on a NYC Central Park bench.  When he says that he going to go after the hitman who beat her up because no one touches his daughter that way, he finally establishes transference with the household brat who fought and shamed him as his child. (3) This is a vivid rendition of poker as a circles in Dante’s hell. It is a game of the damned. (4) Molly’s liberation comes through her interaction with Jaffey and the compassionate clarity of the judge. (5) The timeline of Molly’s Game creatively sets her past, present, and future flowing around each other at all points, so that things recalled are then illustrated, and the poker diagrams and other graphs and runes drawn on the film itself make it a bit like an avant-garde abacus. 

The Only Living Boy in New York, directed by Marc Webb (2017). Many surprises here. Surprised I could have missed this film when it came out in 2017. I never even heard of it even by name (taken from a Simon & Garfunkel song). Surprised that it is so literary: William Butler Yeats, Lou Reed, and Ezra Pound are all referenced and quoted by name, and the frame for the film is The New Yorker (including an animated cartoon-like video map opening and setting the story’scontext at a time of urban Manhattan’s demise, recounted in New Yorker style of both line art and wry, sarcastic commentary). Also the setting is the New York publishing industry, probably around the late nineties or 2000 because Allan Loeb’s witty script took a long time to get optioned, developed, and shot. Surprised that The Only Living Boy in New York was panned, mocked, and belittled by most reviewers, the dialogue called “tin-eared” (I thought it was clever, sensitive, and emotionally intelligent). Surprised that the back story came so close to my own life, as I will explain.

W. F. Gerald (Jeff Bridges) is a reclusive novelist writing under a pseudonym, so he can introduce himself without giving away his identity. He moves into the same Lower East Side apartment building as the film’s main character, Thomas Webb, “the only living boy” (played Callum Turner), though his real literary base and apartment are in Brooklyn. The Lower East Side is a temporary hangout where he wants to write a book. He doesn’t tell Thomas anything defining about himself, and certainly not that he is a writer, but he befriends him and becomes his mentor, sounding board, and literary advisor.

Thomas is serectly an aspiring writer too. His father Ethan (Pierce Brosnan) is head of a publishing company but has disparaged his son’s writing, calling it only “serviceable.” However, Ethan is infertile and, in the bohemian lifestyle of the era in New York, abjured in vitro and got his friend (W. F.) to inseminate his wife, Judith (Cynthia Nixon). That friend happens to be her true love, so she sits on a park bench where she reads his novels on warm days. Because of the nom de plume, viewers don’t recognize the connection. Judith also happens to be Gerald’s true love whom he foregoes in favor of his friend.

Thomas’ helpful neighbor is actually his real father.

            If my birth father, Bernard (Bingo) Brandt, had been a mensch rather than—to quote a book about 42^nd Street of the era, The Ghastly One: The Sex-Gore Netherworld of Filmmaker Andy Milligan by Jimmy McDonough—“a pinky-ringed piranha,” then he might have taken me under his wing on some basis, even secretly, the way Gerald did Thomas, though not literarily obviously—there are other paternal options. As it was, I only heard about Bingo at age thirty after my mother’s suicide, and he refused to see or acknowledge me for the rest of his life, another ten years or so. It was my grandmother, my legal father’s mother (not my father), who apparently told my mother to get pregnant with someone else. Bingo was not his best friend but a regular guest at his hotel. My mother was also a depressive like Judith, and Bingo may or may not have been her true love—she didn’t live to tell me, or tell me about him or her reasoning and motive.

            My own initial writing thread, begun at age sixteen, was to tell the story of my family, though I didn’t know about a third father (I was raised Richard Towers by my mother and her second husband, Bob Towers—formerly Reuben Turetsky— until my name was changed at age twelve). This was also Thomas’ secret goal—to write—but he was discouraged by his legal father. I did write about Bingo in Out of Babylon. He was a lawyer, not a writer. W. F. Gerald was authorial, and in his temp apartment upstairs from Thomas he is writing The Only Living Boy in New York,” as he interviews his biological son and takes down his story while advising. He is “writing” a novel in which both appear. A story about the relationship between a narrator and the main character mirrors both paternity itself and the screenplay for the movie we are watching.

            There are some other semi-parallels and more non-parallels to Bingo and me, but (all told) I don’t know another tale of intentional insemination that mirrors mine in its New Yorker context.

            Otherwise, this is a story about Thomas and two women. The first is his girlfriend Mimi (Kiersey Clemons) with whom he is dining when he sees his father cuddling and smooching with another woman who turns out to be his mistress Johanna (Kate Beckinsale), named after a Bob Dylan song that will serve as her theme in the way that the Simon & Garfunkel song serves as Thomas’ theme. Ostensibly to protect his mother he follows Johanna and ultimately confronts her and demands that she stop the affair. She knows that he has been following her and is attracted to her too. When he points out to her, “You can have any man,” (meaning why stick with my father?) she replies, “Can I have you?” Initially he blows that off, but after discussing the matter with advisor W. F., he decides he is attracted to her, and he pursues his interest. Here the dialogue between the two (Thomas and Johanna) is both dazzling and literary, including Thomas’ Hamlet-like soliloquy to her in the hallway of a friend’s wedding where no one else can see or hear them. It is followed by their first kiss. He later says, “God made a mistake when he made you so beautiful.”

            Their relationship ends his wooing of Mimi. After she finally breaks up with her musician boyfriend, his fantasy through their early almost-romantic scenes together, and invites him to join him in Zagreb, Croatia, where she is headed for at least the next year, he confesses, dashing her view of him as the only innocent boy in New York.

            Later Thomas discovers the first 113 pages of The Only Living Boy in New York on W. F.’s desk. He searches the flat only after Johanna has shown him a news photo of himself in a high-school tennis tournament with W. F. in the stands while dropping a hint about his real father. Obviously she has been told the family secret. Thomas suddenly puts the pieces together. In fact, his birth father isn’t just a recent neighbor but has been following him for years in the way he has been following Johanna for a week. He breaks into the apartment and finds the pages of the manuscript on W. F.’s desk. The film is constructed to continually circle in on itself in that manner.

            I had a similar revelation to Thomas’ when my half-brother, released from a mental hospital after our mother’s suicide, comes to tell me that neither his father nor Paul Grossinger is my father, something she had confided to him but made him promise not to tell me. Now that she was dead, he figured he doesn’t have to keep the promise.

            In summary, The Only Living Boy in New York is The New Yorker without the zeitgeist that limits The New Yorker to fashionable nihilism, smug irony, and Manhattan chic. In fact, I caught passing references in The Only Living Boy to two phrases favored by psychic teachers of mine: “Avoid ‘shoulds,’ ‘have to’s,’ and ‘oughts’ (one of John Friedlander’s maxims) and “There is no way around this, only through it” (Salicrow). These are clichés, of course, but at least they are present in Loeb’s universe. He shoots for happiness over despair and scripts a joyfully madcap ouroboros wrapped around itself.

            The Only Living Boy in New York is as much about New York as it is about the characters. Many of the cinematographer’s shots of Manhattan could be in a photo album of the city. They are epitome, essential New York and, as such, they are poignant and nostalgic for all of us born and raised New Yorkers. They bring back where our own childhood and ancestral dramas took place.

            The Only Living Boy in New York is (by the admission of Loeb) homage to Mike Nichols and Woody Allen. But it is The Graduate without the corny humor and schlock and with a better “Benjamin” than Dustin Hoffman. It is Woody Allen’s oeuvre without the continuous weird overtones, undertones, innuendos, and incipient pedophilia that make Alley so irritating.

            It also has great raconteurs: briefly Wallace Shawn as Judith’s erudite dinner friend Dave, and at such great length that it carries over into the following scenes, Bill Camp as Uncle Buster going on much longer than decency would condone at the Jewish wedding. The speech is simultaneously inappropriate and the key to the movie’s milieu. Uncle Buster can speak for Loeb and while also parodying the whole passion play and bravura.

The Shape of Water, directed by Guillermo del Toro (2017). I am surprised that I am reviewing The Shape of Water for the first time rather than adding to my first review after watching the film a second time. In fact, there was no first review except in my mind. What inspired me to watch it a second time (in 2022) was how fully in stayed in my memory, like a waking dream. I had an ongoing relationship to del Toro’s story and images enhanced by the opening scene of The Sandman in which Dream of the Endless is imprisoned in a magical circle by a corrupt, blasphemous therion trying to trap death (not Dream)—a magical mistaken identity. In The Shape of Water, an anomalous, one-of-a-kind mythical creature, an Amphibian Man, is captured and taken from a South American river where he dwells happily and is worshipped by the locals as a god and brought to a facility in Baltimore where he is kept in chains and tortured with an electric prod as part of an effort to gain militarily usable secrets from him as part of Cold War competition with the Soviets. The conceit is vaguely UFO  crash at Roswell.

The Amphibian Man’s captor, Colonel Richard Strickland, is played with comic-book malevolence by Michael Shannon in a performance reminiscent of unhinged Air Force general Jack D. Ripper in Stanley Kubrick’s actual Cold War era fable Dr. Strangelove. Strickland jokes condescendingly that this “thing” in the tank is worshipped by the locals as a god—of course, in Strickland’s world, there are no gods and he is the best remaining thing. In the facility, the Amphibian Man is considered only an exploitable “asset” like a Navy-trained dolphin or split hydrogen atom; in Stickland’s approximate words Amphibian Man is “the most important asset ever brought to this facility.” It is never clear precisely what features make him an asset rather than a curiosity or lottery jackpot except something about survival in outer space for an edge in the Space Race and maybe exportable superpowers. This minor plot flaw actually contributes to the mood because it adds to the ridiculousness and cruelty of the effort to glean secrets from Amphibian Man—that there are no convertible secrets means that there is no rational or credible strategy for exploiting the asset, only the sort of self-entitled, quasi-biblical punishment dealt to indigenous cultures and animals in the way of human expansion and supremacy granted by God. Think Avatar and Pandora or Andrew Jackson and the Cherokee Nation.

Writer/director del Toro’s intention, confirmed by his own words in the Special Features, was to make a fairy tale: The Shape of Water is a vivid modern fairy tale. It is also a steampunk science-fiction fable about monsters and machines à la Dr. Frankenstein, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and fifties science fiction, Forbidden Planet et al. Actor Doug Jones, a mime and contortionist known for portraying nonhuman creatures in costumes and prosthetics, brings the Amphibian Man to life as complexly primitive yet wise being with different superpowers than those with which he is attributed. In that sense and others, the creature resembles Spielberg’s E.T. Each creature, extra- or intra-terrestrial, after being given up for dead (and starting to dissicate) revives to new meta-human if not superhuman capacity.

Del Toro describes how long and meticulously he worked with various associates and companies to create Amphibian Man. Everything about him—his massive enfolding costume, his seemingly animate gills and eyes, his blue-green color and phosphorescent displays, his fleshiness and visceral movements and expressions of emotion accorded by Jones—add up to not just a movie creature but a new species of being like an intelligent cephalopod or coelacanth from a mythical yet geographical river in a South American continent still holding jungle mysteries within ayahuasca ceremonies. The Amphibian Man is a dream being, a DMT-like dimension crosser, a manifest river god, a visitor from Europa or Titan, a vestigial survivor of a lost lineage like a sasquatch. His attempts to respond to his captivity, communicate, and find delight and pleasure are equally divine and childlike. He is legitimately charismatic and sexy in a “hunk” sense. In The Shape of Water he has sex with a human woman. He responds to music. He heals, empowers, and grants immunities like Stephen King’s imprisoned idiot giant in The Green Mile.

The Amphibian Man’s (and Strickland’s) foil is Elisa Esposito, a hearing mute found abandoned as an infant beside a river with marks indicating that her muteness was the result of abuse, perhaps a failed abortion. She is a cleaning woman at the facility where the “asset” is brought and housed. With her co-worker Zelda (Octavia Spencer), she mops floors and disinfects bathrooms, the lowest of the employees in a building in which Strickland rules. By the nature of the situation, they must also clean up the gore left by encounters with the creature, including Strickland’s own severed fingers—shades of Ahab and Melville’s white whale.

Esposito is played by Sally Hawkins whose performance must match and meet the Amphibian Man in order to frame a “Beauty and the Beast” love story culminating in her escapade to free the captive. Her dance-like mimes give a balletic feel to the encounters. At the same time, they are like little Marcelle Marceau performance pieces, as in her giving the Amphibian Man hardboiled eggs, bringing a victrola and playing jazz for him, teaching him her own sign language, and ultimately seducing and having sex with him after a funky street version of a Mission Impossible! scheme that involves her neighbor/room-mate and ambivalent co-conspirator, Giles, an un-out gay advertising illustrator played by Richard Jenkins. The plot works only by its coinciding with a simultaneous Russian scheme to either kill or steal the asset, carried out by a Soviet spy in the facility who turns out to be enough of a humanitarian to aid in the venture in order to prevent Stickland’s frustrated decision to kill and vivisect his treasure. Esposito is operating under the same urgency to get him out before Stickland can act. One subplot involves Giles’ dwindling career and job prospects and ensuing loneliness, leaving Elisa his only friend in the world. In another, the Russians bungle in keystone-cops anti-American enjoyment of capitalist pleasures made possible by their U.S. assignment/ Elisa and Zelda’s interaction and part-mime scenes at work are followed by Zelda’s Amos and Andy throwback interaction with her husband at home, who appears in person only near the end of the film as everyone gets drawn into the whirlwind of the theft and Strickland’s attempt to get the Amphibian Man back under severe reckoning from his superiors.

In the Special Features, del Toro describes something that I feel throughout the movie but couldn’t put into words without his help. Meticulous care has gone into not only the creation of a romantic and magical Amphibian Man but the landscape of the early sixties at the time of the Cuban Crisis. Del Toro is scrupulous about the bland colors—tans, browns, grays, blacks—and where a bright red, green, or blue enters thematically. He recreates the era accurately in terms of props, costumes, and landscapes but also in terms of temper and ambiance. The drab bureaucratic, militaristic themes of the time as well as its gray-flannel upwardly mobile aspirations, fetishized gender and sex, and automobile eroticism are embodied by Strickland and his family life away from the facility. From such meticulousness, the film has a sense of time travel, dislocation, and dream. Add that to the fairy tale of a love affair between a mute woman found next a river and a river god stolen from its habitat, and the result is the magic of The Shape of Water.

The film’s big epiphanies are near its end. After Elisa and Giles have gotten the Amphibian Man back to the apartment building, their guest undergoes an initiation into the culture and television set, again resembling the education of Spielberg’s E.T. with his child teachers. In a magical realist but real sequence, Elisa somehow manages to stop up the crack under the bathroom door and fill not just the bathtub but the whole room with water so that she and the Amphibian Man can make love while swimming. He has no trouble understanding and fulfilling her summons. He is also mute in his way, though he chitters. And he is in love with her too—it is a fairy tale. This dance eventually leads into an actual canal running through Baltimore in an ultimate escape and redemption when the Amphibian Man not only revives Elisa after she has been shot, ostensibly murdered, by Strickland but takes her underwater and perhaps turns her body amphibious too. We don’t entirely know their outcome, nor does Giles/Jenkins who narrates the fairy-tale from beginning to end as a teller but not resolver of tales.

The epiphany is, for me, the key moment of the plot and of the underlying trope behind the movie: the ultimate triumph of a sacred and natural Earth over the mechanical and martial transhumanism of the Cold War and presaging our current genetically modified world. It is the withheld confrontation between Strickland and the Amphibian Man by the canal. Strickland’s gun proves inadequate to killing anyone finally and, as the towering Amphibian Man approaches him in his last moments before slashing his throat with a quick swipe, the military man admits, “You are a god.”  Del Toro’s favorite moment too.     

The Big Sick, directed by Michael Showalter (2017). The premise replicates one of my all-time favorite films, Ken Loach’s A Fond Kiss. It’s a Pakistani guy and an Anglo girl. The Pakistani guy is expected to accept an arranged marriage by his family and is more or less going along with the routine when he falls in love with a girl outside the system. Kamil Nanjiani (I believe) plays himself as a Pakistani comedian doing stand-up at clubs in Chicago. Zoe Kazan play Emily, his would-be wife. They meet when she mildly heckles him during his routine. After his set, he comes and sits with her and her friend, as they continue their debate. After that, they start going out together and sleeping over, while pretending that this isn’t really a romance. He is also an Uber driver, so can ferry her back and forth.

Both actors are fine comedians, and the characters they play are droll and funny.

Meanwhile Kamil is having to hide this romance from his family members who keep presenting him with eligible females off the local circuit, as the movie shows a somewhat hyperbolic presentation of a Pakistani custom, as Kamil fills a cigar box with “presentation” photos of these “eligible” women. The scenes with Kamil and his family, especially the dialogues with father and mother, are filled with professional one-liners, Nanjiani doing the writing.

            The family pressure on Kamil and its impact on Emily lead them to break up. Kamil falls into a state of confusion and dismay about what he really wants and is trying to figure out how not to lose either her or his family. He tries to want finality, but she is firm about commitment.

Then comes the “big sick.” Emily contracts a serious autoimmune condition, Still’s disease, though it takes a long time for her to be propertly diagnosed. She is, first, just at the hospital while Kamil sits by her side. Then she is put in a medical coma. Enter her parents, played by two more fine comedians, Ray Romano and Holly Hunter. They portray contrasting, arguing members of a couple. Romano (Terry) is, of course, a provincial New Yorker, while Hunter (Beth) is a military-family southerner who doesn’t want to acknowledge Kamil’s existence. She also knows every detail of the affair with her daughter and its demise.

Through the remainder of the film, these dynamics play out, as Beth and Terry reconcile under crisis and both bond with Kamil (all in Emily’s “absence”). In probably the best and funniest Zen exchange of the movie, Terry comes to stay with Kamil for a night where he confesses that he has been unfaithful to Beth and is plagued with guilt. In a display of TMI (too much information), at least for Kamil, he describes the whole event and his failings, while Kamil suggests just going to sleep. At one point in this sequence, Romano dispenses a father-in-law to-be’s advice, explaining to Kamil that love is really difficult, concluding, “I mean, that’s why they call it love.” He thinks about what he has said and, lying there, wonders if he has said anything at all. Of course, he has. Romano’s genius, not everyone’s taste, is a deadpan New York delivery—earnest, childlike, guileless, inadvertently street smart.

            The rest of the movie is full of good will, reconciliation and, of course humor, as Emily comes out of her coma, though she still quite sick and also determined not to reengage romantically with Kamil. It doesn’t matter that he stood watch the entire time she was unconscious and her parents now love him. Meanwhile, Kamil has been disowned by his own family, though he protests the eviction and puts up strong resistance, with placards and lawyerly arguments that his mother expertly parries. You get a sense of stubborn Pakistani logic.

Kamil moves to New York with two of his Chicago comedy colleagues, a guy and a girl. In a parting scene, his mother brings him his favorite dish but refuses to look at him or say goodbye.

Kamil is doing a solo show in New York when a woman heckles from the audience. He and Emily repeat the opening scene before the audience. The movie goes to credits, as we see photos of the real Kamil and Emily and their wedding.

Lucky, directed by John Carroll Lynch (2017). On the surface, this is a chance for ninety-year-old Harry Dean Stanton to play himself, or a medley of his cinema characters, reprised at ninety. But it is a lot more too. It is an Arizona desert clone of Waiting for Godot with crisp, minimal, dialogue of which I think Samuel Beckett would have approved—it is probably not an accident that the central character is named Lucky like the Godot character. Lynch’s film is a meditation on age and the body-mind, a skillful piece of writing that cuts action to the minimum in face of eternity and the void (as the writers put it in the “special features”: an attempt to go beyond words, words, words in scripts, and capture the precise weight of gesture and talk when every remaining breath takes energy from the universe and its molecules and is precious).

Here also is a regular old dude dancing with his own mortality, as experience, as hope, as fear, so that even Buddhism gets its moment without shifting from a bar-and-cafeteria set to a temple or zendo. In the montage of a tortoise and Harry Dean Stanton, the meaning of mortality and the relativity of longevity and habitation come across without extra visual or metaphysical baggage.

Lucky is lush and uncompromising in its humanity, whether Harry is singing at a Spanish birthday party with a mariachi band or freeing crickets from the pet store or finding a meeting ground with a distrusted lawyer or with an old Marine. Each of these set pieces is a little gems of its own. Any one of them is worth more than all of current cinema’s special effects, superheroes, chases and noise.

This movie should be paired with the documentary Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction; overlaps almost make them essentally one film, with the line between story and celeb biography fluctuating. When Harry as Harry in “Partly Fiction” plays the harmonica and sings “Danny Boy” or “Blue Eyes Crying in The Rain” or does a duet with Kris Kristofferson, it might as well be Lucky.

Thank You for Your Service, directed by Jason Hall (2017). When I rented this film, I thought it was a documentary. Not so. It is a well-done Hurt Locker/American Sniper genre movie about three soldiers returning from Iraq with different forms and degrees of PTSD as well as separate recognitions and understandings of their condition and its seriousness. They each try to re-enter American life without realizing the innate challenges. Some of it is the changing culture and the dynamics of relationships in general, but a lot of it is the stuff they witnessed and can’t get out of their minds, the flashbacks especially in the context of the irrelevance of domestic and commercial culture after the life-and-death urgency and profound meanings experienced in war. Their bonding with each other transcends any prior relationships to which they return, even with wives or girlfriends, who have a long way to catch up. That’s been done many times, but this is a particularly thoughtful and psychologicalic astute rendition.

The women played by Haley Bennett and Kaisha Castle-Hughes are smart and quicker to grasp the scope of the crisis than their men,. As Bennett’s character, Saskia Schumann says, a woman is tougher than a man because she brings her intrinsic strength plus love. Miles Teller and Samoan Beulah Koala play leads Adam Schumann and Samoan Tausolo Aieti, it is worth noting, after extensive interaction with the men they are portraying. We learn in the documentary Bonus Features that all the main actors, in fact, spent time querying and hanging out with the former soldiers they were depicting. 

A third G.I., Billy Waller, played by Joe Cole, executes himself in a bank standing before the station of the girlfriend who abandoned him. She tells him to go away. “Where?” he asks, then pulls out a gun from between his waist and his belt.

Scott Haze plays Michael Emory, a platoon mate whose life Adam Schumann saved at the price of brain damage and debilitating wounds. The fact that Emery doesn’t have PTSD and is happy to be alive every day he wakes, even though unable to walk or dress, speaks to a main theme of the movie as well as the ghostly nature of PTSD. If the dragon has already consumed you, you can’t be haunted by it anymore and also don’t suffer survivor’s guilt. In the Bonus features, the real Schumann speaks about the invisible wound in the mind that you can’t get away from. The soldiers missing limbs are thanked for their service, but the ones with invisible wounds get no equivalent acknowledgment and are viewed as less courageous or flawed in some fashion.,

            The movie captures the many layers, back loops, nuances, double binds, and internal arguments of PTSD, especially among alpha males who are trained in and have practiced leadership and think of themselves as fighters and ass-kickers. As they struggle to encompass, tame, and demolish their attacker, they are driven deeper into its self-generating hell realms, redemption coming only when they start to realize the scope and significance of a very different sort enemy.

            Thank You for Your Service also captures the metastasis of the military health bureaucracy such that it is near impossible for the men to get treatment in a timely fashion or at all—another irony of the film’s title. They have to freelance finding a facility with knowledge or even availability: slots for them. The Army officials are clueless. Their military’s patriotic mindset is captured by an officer who tells Adam that he can order steaks right now and have them delivered to his house and the terrorists can’t, and that’s why they are going to lose.

Beast, directed by Michael Pearce (2017). Jessie Buckley plays Moll, a young tour guide on the Channel Island of Jersey who also cares for her father with dementia and baby-sits for her niece. After escaping her wealthy parents, she is pulled into a relationship with Pascal (Johnny Flynn), a drifter/poacher who rescues her from a would-be rapist by showing up with a hunting rifle.

            But Pascal is another form of rapist. In fact, it turns out, he is a serial killer, though the film conceals that in his shape-shifting character whereby it is difficult to tell actual homicide from fantasy, posturing, and neurotic hyperbole. Moll seemingly throws in with Flynn, for the excitement, the rebellion, the lure and danger of the unknown. Even when it appears that he is a wanted murderer, she accepts him, openly, for whoever he is. But then, through a metamorphosis and transference, she becomes the beast, strangling him in the final sequence.

            Buckley and Flynn’s acting saves the film because the story is artificial and not emotionally credible. It has the reality of a rock video, distorted for overkill and shock value. I added this film to my review list in respect of the changeling quality of its characters and its quasi-psychiatric inquiry into the tag “beast.”

My Friend Dahmer, directed by Marc Meyers (2017). Starring Ross Lynch as the high-school version of serial killer and American cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer, Meyers’ adaptation of a graphic novel by John “Derf” Backderf, a close Dahmer buddy (played by Alex Wolff in the film), is a masterpiece of understatement, psychoanalytic precision, and emergent murderous insanity. Meyers never exaggerates for effect; he lets the characters’ stories speak for themselves. Furthermore, he presents Dahmer, despite his extreme and disturbing behavior, as a sympathetic teen not all that different from numerous other weirdos at that age or from responses of anyone to the pressures of bullying, a traumatic family life, and the need to find an identity and belong to something. Meyers’ Dahmer is lonely, obsessive compulsive, and desperate for any affiliation or clarity. His wish to dismember animals and find what’s inside them is presented but not explained in the film. Peter Levine, a friend and well-known author of books on trauma, investigated further on his own and believes that a botched gall-bladder surgery when he was young led Dahmer to try to understand the damage by repeating the surgery in proxy forms that became increasingly desperate and deranged. In any case, Dahmer doesn’t understand it or condone his own acts. Unlike other serial killers who denied, evaded, and charmed as long as they could, he confesses willingly and offers himself as a subject for study in order to find out what went wrong in his mind. Like the film-maker, like the graphic novelist, he is a witness.

None of that is in the film. It ends with a young Dahmer, just graduated from high school, picking up the first of his seventeen victims, a hitchhiker leaving a rock show. Except for the information at the start of the credits that this guy is never heard from or seen again, Dahmer closes the film with a clean slate: sad, haunted, isolated, angry, abandoned but not a killer, let alone a serial one. Both his parents have abandoned him, taking his brother away and leaving him alone in the house. He is terrified by the vastness and emptiness and doesn’t know what to do. As he picks up the hitchhiker, he must fill the void with something. That’s the only hint of a whirlwind going forward.

            The highlight of the film is Dahmer’s spazz-outs. His klatch of friends sees them as incredible pranks to play on others, encourages them, and rewards him for them. Lynch’s performance is highlighted by his representation of these creative seizures—basically throwing oneself on the floor and rolling around, then getting up and disrupting or breaking anything in sight, in the school hallway, in a grocery shop, and at the mall. When Dahmer spazzes, anything goes. He reels around look for tables to overthrow, food to spill, scenes to disrupt. Yet it is mild mayhem, in good fun, and his friends truly try to understand him, legitimize his personality, and even coronate him as king of the stunts, a community asset. They form an actual Jeffrey Dahmer Fan Club because the guy is just so spontaneously bizarre. They also make him a sort of Forest Gump who is everywhere, photographed as a a member of every school organization and club in the yearbook (before the school authorities catch on and intercede).

No one understands how serious or consequential this behavior is; it is reduced to high prankishness, disobedience, or rebellion, and functions as that throughout the body of the film so that it might as well be Clueless or American Graffiti. Meyers does a pretty good job of it.

Yet the dark Dahmer lurks in other scenes and at the edges, and though everyone wonders what the fuck—buddies, teachers, his parents—no one really looks long enough or asks the hard questions. Dahmer is left to answer them on his own. He does—that’s the uncomfortable, somber cloud overhanging the film as well as the unseen film, the unwritten, unwritable script after Dahmer began acting on his necrophiliac impulses. Everyone saw that something was wrong, tried to find a way to keep it within social boundaries and familiar interpretations, and tried to make a place for Jeff, but no one knew what they were up against. No one understood how important it was to intercede: this is how a serial killer is created. That is the unscripted film that drives the harbinger sccripted.

Hannah Arendt named it: the banality of evil. Not just banality but horseplay and hijinks incubating irrevocable fantasies. 

The Bonus Feature interviews on the DVD are really special. From the director to the actors, everyone is thoughtful about the erratic elements of the Dahmer story, how important it is to keep play and laughter going, to make this a movie about Dahmer in high school, not the serial killer he became. They get to shoot in the actual Dahmer house when he was still dude Dahmer, not the one and only Jeffrey Dahmer. The house is Ohio normal and casts its vibes on the characters and the scenes. It does matter that it’s the real house and not a substitute or a stage set because that makes the film a real as well as a metaphorical ceremony.

Lynch, whose laid-back personality and charismatic alpha-male joy are close to opposite his character, remarks on how he had to absorb young Dahmer, then do a shower meditation to consciously wash him off each time. He talks about how he and the other actors created their own version of the story in the movie, accurate to the script and graphic novel, yet based on their interactions with one another as young people, as if they were not portraying Dahmer’s high-school years but their own, thereby making it even more authentic in some ways than the graphic novel, though the graphic novel does a similar thing. In that sense, the movie brings out the oddness of the acting profession, playing other people, playing very different other people, and in this case foreshadowing without foreshadowing a hell realm. Lynch remarks, “This is going to be my identity for the next ten years–‘Hey, there, Dahmer!'”

The Hero, directed by Brett Haley (2017).  I didn’t expect much from this film, thinking that it got ordered by accident. It value lies in catching the nuances of a cowboy actor Lee Hayden (played by Sam Elliott) who is simultaneously facing his own death, the meaning of the characters he played in his career, his regrets, and the difficulty yet power of hope and love when it has to be drawn from a source was long ago closed off, seemingly forever.

That Elliott’s Hayden is able to find a new girlfriend while dying and also mend fences with his grown daughter during his final days gives this initially drear story a vitality and unexpected surge of wonder and magic.

Patti Cake$, directed by Geremy Jasper (2017). “Hot” identity topics—race, gender, age, class, weight (body-shaming), art versus kitsch, morality versus a- or im-morality—get jumbled and centrifuged together in a poignant tale of a daydreaming, overweight Jersey girl who raps with the superstars in her dreams and in drugstore, strip joints, and random everyday venues in everyday life.

Patricia Dombowski (aka Killer P), Danielle Macdonald, not a real Jersey girl even but an Australian rapper who had to be trained in both Jersey dialect and hip-hop, is joined by buddy rapper Siddharth Dhanajay, a fully Americanized Bangalore Indian, and Mammadou Athie, a nonmusical Jimi-Hendrix-like self-proclaimed Anti-Christ (but a very gentle one) to create a transformative subculture, rising from downscale, million-miles-from-Manhattan-yet-just-across-the-bridge land, to launch a mythic world that is already making itself out of faith in its own bricolage, spare parts, and desperate, loving energy.

Great art is no longer made by just artists or Reality stars or even everyone and anyone and his or her buddies but fissions out of the debris of broken systems, ruined dreams, and what heartfulness and inspiration remain. That there is nothing to work with means that anything can be used—and is—in a sometimes-ridiculous flood of rhythm and rhyme.

The movie opens in chaos and closes in compassion and jubilation, as even Patti’s failed blues-singer mom (Bridget Everett) gets to belt out some of her own notes (and her mom, Patti’s grandmother, adds some call letters to the PBNJ wrap before dying of a stroke). It’s absurd without being absurd, redeeming without any overt redemption.

One repartee between Patti and her mom, not all that notable within the whole pastiche, made me laugh. I may not have it exactly right, but it went something like: “Act your age!” rejoined by “Act your race!”

Director Geremy Jasper wrote all the original lyrics.

Indian Horse, directed by Stephen S. Campanelli (2017) I did not realize while watching this film that Clint Eastwood produced it. I don’t agree with all his politics, but on some things he is better than any Democratic pol, like try this movie regarding First Nations. It goes right to the wound at Turtle Island’s heart: an exposé of the kidnapping of Canadian indigenous children by the Government constabulary into Catholic-run residential schools (in this movies in the 1970s). (Eastwood is just as right-on with his Cherokees and Comanches in Outlaw Josey Wales and his Hmong in Gran Torino.)

Otherwise, the film is flat-out good, a mix of Windwalker, Charles Dickens (Oliver Twist and David Copperfield) as written by Sherman Alexie (in fact by Ojibwa novelist Richard Wagamese), and Hoosiers, but also its own thing. An Ojibwa boy’s dark life is told in vision-quest terms—ice hockey provides Saul Indian Horse with a way to use his innate ability to “see” form and trajectory—the puck and the other players—in rink chaos and find his path through the White Man’s world (and the defense) after his capture in the wilderness. Beautiful actors play Saul Indian Horse in all his phases, from the dear little boy to the tender teen to the wounded young adult.

Windwalker is told entirely in Crow and Cheyenne with subtitles, both a parable and a myth set in a kind of Dreamtime. Indian Horse starts in a Nunavut-like Canadian wilderness where Saul’s parents vanish and his grandmother dies in a snowbank beside him, and he is picked up by the authorities and placed in a Catholic school for orphans, and works its way through small First Nations Métis towns to Toronto, so it is in English and Ojibwa (with subtitles). The indigenous language serves as a kind of background music, periodically mixed with peyote songs and a Canadian Country and Western soundtrack.

I have been a follower and a bit of a player of ice hockey, and I believe this is the signature movie for the game, much as Hoosiers was for basketball and Eastwood’s Trouble with the Curve was for baseball. All phrases of the sphere provide focal points for sacred energy and initiation. I write about this at length in Dark Pool of Light, Volume 3, pp. 191-193—here is a sentence: “The shape, size, mass, and texture of each gameball (like each psychically created rose) devises and sets an attunement: the players’ relation to their own energy fields and each other’s.” In hockey, the puck sets the matrix for the game’s various vision quests.

In Indian Horse Saul Indian Horse, a young boy taken from everything he knows and loves, uses this conic section of a spheroid on the ice and a sacred dance on skates to lead himself home. Look at the trailer and weep: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02cyFlnvA4s

The last third was really dark. No hockey, just substance abuse, wandering, and getting “old,” before Saul finally returns to the Moose, the last First Peoples team on which he played.

There is a shocking moment when we see, through old Saul’s memory of young Saul, that the seemingly empathic and loving priest, the only person in the residential school with any heart and wisdom as well as the one who initiated and sponsored his playing hockey, loved him in the wrong way. The segue/montage of frozen turds as hockey pucks and sexual abuse behind the stable is understatedly horrific, as the word “glory” is dragged across multiple meanings: divine, sexual, revelatory, diabolic.

This implanted trauma drags Saul down as no opposing wings or defenseman can. He devolves from showtime with the Maple Leafs to back alleys and trances. His magical powers are gone; yet he is still planted in his history and people.  

The title trope (how the family name got to be Indian Horse) is an iconic image, almost like a painting or indigenous “shield”: Saul’s great-grandfather with the first horse anyone in the tribe ever saw, a giant black beast and him beside it in full regalia. Then he lays down the track of the story, that the horse has a teaching, and the teaching is change and survival.

Interesting footnote from the “Special Features” interview: one of the producers called the movie the “Once Were Warriors” of Canada. The films are totally different, but they share one thing: people who once were warriors and still have spiritual warriorship in cultural heritage, maybe even their DNA, so they find ways to be warriors again in diaspora.

Wind River, written and directed by Taylor Sheridan (2017). At first, it looked like a run-of-the mill murder story. I picked it as diversion wasn’t watching it as art. I was mainly wondering how many twists the writer and director might think of to rise above standard fare. Then it became Wyoming noir. Then it also became a neo-Western set in semi-industrial, post-colonial Wyoming, except instead of “Cowboys and Indians” it was something like “Arapaho and Government Agents.” Then it became an existential tracker film with a philosophy of life from a Somatic-Experiencing group or Buddhist retreat. The dialogue gradually became as interesting as Annie Proulx’s own “Wyoming Stories” in Close Range—less stark, macabre, and lyrically metered and more sentimental and heart-felt like her Shipping News.

            All the key principles are there: First Nations elders and Reservation Police; a tragedy-ridden Fish and Game tracker guru; a naïve young female FBI agent dispatched to a landscape and layers of nuance over her head; a backwoods pathologist leaving his sardonic critique on the autopsy (Eric Lange as Dr. Whitehurst); rowdy, randy, bored oil-and-gas field hands (the bad guys); Red Power anarchist drug-addict Arapahos; once-were-warriors elders struggling with the unjust equivalences of modernity, colonialism, and materialism; wild animals like hawks and lions going about their own hunting rituals and sealing their fates; domestic flocks protected by indigenous ranchers and government agents.

            The marquee stars are Jeremy Renner as Corey Lambert, fish-and-game wildlife officer, and Elizabeth Olsen as FBI agent Jane Banner. Lambert is the lead voice for the author’s insights, beliefs, and tracking much in the way William Faulkner or Arthur Miller chose a character to speak for them. He is less a vested government agent than a white guy gone native, a consummate hunter and tracker who is caught between cultures with an Arapaho ex-wife and in-laws and a half-Arapaho daughter and son. The daughter doesn’t appear in the movie because she was found dead in the snow six years earlier much like the murder victim in the story. Lambert reminds his much younger son early on in a lesson about leading a horse and making friends with him, that he isn’t, as he imagines, “being a cowboy, he is being an Arapaho.” Lambert is the film’s tracker because its focus follows him, in a sense tracks him for his story much as he tracks animals, weather, and people for their stories.

Jane Banner was sent to investigate a death on the Wind River reservation only because she was the closest employee of the Bureau. She is not fit out for it at the level of her training or her attire and state of disarray. The bureaucracy doesn’t care because it’s just BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs stuff). She is at a weapons training in Riverton, having flown there from Las Vegas and is using a rental car rather than an Agency vehicle. Commuting from Vegas, she would have been unprepared enough for the deep Wyoming cold, but she is dressed more like where she turns out to have originated, Fort Lauderdale, and she have to learn fast how to learn not to die. She gets a real “weapons training” as well as an initiation into cold and tracking. Her growing awareness of her own naïveté and gradual awakening is a bit like being thrown into an ocean and realizing she is able to swim.

Sheridan has other voices for his own message woven into the movie as characters, most notably part-Comanche actor Gil Birmingham as Martin Hanson, Arapaho father of the murdered girl Natalie. Hanson voices the suffering, weariness, despair, and sacred obligation of hope of a people from whom most has been taken, by drugs and disease as well as by soldiers, settlers, and bounty hunters. I can’t give you all the great lines in the film, for one because I don’t remember them verbatim, but I can roughly quote Hanson’s response to Banner’s lame attempt to interrogate him about why he didn’t know where his eighteen-year-old daughter was spending the night, “Why is it when you people come to help us you always start by insulting us?”

Hanson and Lambert engage in the film’s most gestalt dialogue qua psychospiritual transference when Lambert tells his friend what he learned at a grief training: you have to let yourself feel the pain; otherwise, you’ll lose the memories and her reality too. It’s a good news/bad news sermon. The bad news is pretty much everything at the start, but at the end it is the only good news. That’s why I says that the speech is transformative for the viewer. It is healing because both men are suffering, and the actors playing them know how to make it real from their own wells of grief because who doesn’t have these?

Tribal police chief Ben Shoyo (Graham Greene) also speaks for Sheridan, particularly in educating Jane while serves as a colleague and foil for Corey in the unsettled mix of Government (BIA), tribal (Arapaho), and corporate authority on the Wind River reservation.

Other substantial indigenous voices include Corey’s in-laws, Dan Crowheart played by Menominee tribal chairman and activist Apesanahkwat (in keeping with the movie’s authenticity in casting) and Alice Crowheart played by Cree/Métis actress Tantoo Cardinal. They are bleak, wry, candid, and darkly funny in the vintage style of Sherman Alexie. Dan Crowheart engages in an early dialogue with Corey about Jackson Hole. The Arapaho elder remarks that it’s only for the millionaires now. Corey says, no, the millionaires are all gone; the billionaires have driven them out. Crowheart says they’ll be gone too and their houses will go for a dime on the dollar once the wolves start eating their golden retrievers.

Corey’s ex-wife Wilma is played by Julia Jones who claims Chicksaw and Choctaw descent. I mention this because a number of the second- and third-tier characters in Wind River are played by actors with at least some Native American genes, including Kelsey Asbille Chow as Natalie, the murder victim. She is part Chinese, and her claim of Cherokee heritage is disputed by tribal officials. These issues play into the underlying themes of the film. Sheridan saves one over-theme for the credits—the number of Native American women who go missing and whose disappearances or deaths are unsolved. That alone would be a worthwhile basis for the film, but the film transcends any political message in the way that great arts transcends its own messages and moralities. Wind River can be dedicated to lost First Nations women, but it is a universal tale with limitless applications.

Natalie, though “dead” for most of the film, does get to speak for herself, partly in the sound of the wind and words blended into Nick Cave’s haunting soundtrack of melodies, natural noises, and half-whispered verses—it is one of the most unusual, powerful, and yet subtle soundtracks I have heard in any movie (you could probably play it as its own symphony without the visuals)—and partly in a stunning flashback whereby agent Banner knocks on the door of a trailer in daytime surrounded by oil-and-gas guards and local tribal officers, and we go inside the trailer to a man answering, assuming that he is the one who will confront Banner, but the frame has changed: it is now night and several days earlier, and the man answering is Matt, Natalie’s lover and much gentler oil-and-gas guy from New York. When the view turns, the knocker is not Banner but Natalie. The scene that follows is one of endearment, romance, and planning for a future away from this place. They discuss New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Ojai, thinking like in West Side Story, “There’s a place for us. . . .” Then other oil-and-gas guys burst in drunk, and the murder scene plays out in full, answering every question and mystery while leaving Matt dead and Natalie fleeing six miles across snow to where she will collapse in a lyrical sound-over death lament in the prologue to the film. Then Banner is answered days later, but only a few seconds later—by a fusillade of bullets. The montages are perfect: day to night, then night back to day; tenderness and love to gunfire, all smoothly segueing so that you never know who or “when” is on the other side of the door.

If Wind River is a somewhat trite murder mystery and Wyoming noir, that is merely its candy coating, to get at another film without a plot or commercialized drama; it is a film about all hunters and hunted, the Earths elements, its weather, its human-like animals, its bestial humans, its colonized and colonizers. They perform a visual, musical dance in which Sheridan paints every scene to a T, so that you never feel the scenery or any part of the background is irrelevant or happenstance. Entering the Wind River reservation with Lambert, the camera shows trailers, abject poverty, and what goes by fast in the background is the American flag not at half-staff but upside-down. When you, Lambert, Banner, and Shoyo later enter the house inhabited by the Littlefeather boys played (I believe) by Tokala Black Elk and Tokala Clifford and Natalie’s brother Chip (part Alaskan indigene Martin Sensmeier), the camera moves too fast to catch every mix of graffiti, decadence, punk, Red Power, anti-Americanism, addiction, violence, decadence, chaos, and despair, but the series of pans, later following Banner with her gun after she has been maced and partly blinded, a moving painting that you can track back over as many times as you want to view it. THere is no filler or white space. Every pixel is filled with what might or should be there.

Addict Chip Hanson (Sensmeier playing a combination of madness, rage, outrage, and disbelief) is a remarkable, unprecedented movie character. His father Martin has already given him up. “Drugs are his family now,” he tells Corey. Chip and the Littlefeather boys play their roles like aliens dropped in from another universe—Sam with his Martian grin while ending all his sentences with a spiteful “Bro,” then Chip with his disbelieving screams that become part of the soundtrack as they resound over the mountains. Initially picks up on Jane’s indiscreet use of “was” when describing his sister. He doesn’t yet know she is dead, and he asks why the FBI agen is using “was.” Then “was!” and “what!” take over, reverberating forever in space-time. Later Chip engages in a fierce, existential dialogue with Corey about how he is not the person we wanted to be. He is adamant about the matter, challenging Corey’s claim that he had better options. He is great at repeating lines with slightly different diction like, “Is this who you think I want to be?” Sensmeier makes each elliptical line each fresh every time and thus conveys his character’s sheer anguish.

            At a certain level, there are oddly no bad guys, only the weak and the strong, the dead and the alive. The land and sky are so powerful and overwhelming, the cold so deep, unforgiving, and overwhelming, the settlement patterns so crisscrossed and hexed, the creatures of the wild from a hawk feeding on Matt’s body to a lion pride stalking the Crowhearts’ cattle almost astrologically fixed in their courses, playing out a drama written into their fates by where they have ended up like human tribes, cultures, and nations.

Just as hawks, lions, and livestock battle for survival, the different authorities on the Wind River reservation vie for primacy. At one point, everyone is drawing guns on each other (right before the trailer entry). The oil-and-gas guards claim authority over the corporate property, the tribal police over the reservation. Then agent Banner steps in like a player in a card game and says, “FBI. I have authority over all of you.” Then she puts away her gun and expects them to holster theirs.

Corey the tracker is watching from a hillside through his binoculars. The tempers and territorialities quiet for a moment from a distance, but before the sequence plays out, most of them will be shot, dead or (Banner) wounded, and Corey has to hurry down in his snowmobile and resolve matters with his own home-made bullets. We assume that while all this action was playing on by the oil-and-gas trailer, he just eliminated the offending lions in their den, though not without empathy. They can’t help what he can’t help. They are players in the greater symphony.

The main theme of the movie is: you have two choices—live it, feel it, suffer, and find power and hope in your own courage, survival, and capacity to feel, or drug it, fight it, flee it, rape it, kill it, and end up numb and strung out or, as Corey puts it to Martin about the last standing oil-and-gas guard, Natalie’s murderer (Pete Mickens played to fucked-up perfection by James Jordan), to die in a whimper. In real time Corey gave Pete a fair chance, to crawl through the snow six miles to his freedom—“the same chance,” he tells her, “you gave her.” Mickens offers a full insanity defense: this place is crazy, you go crazy here, there’s nothing to do. He has the same rough excuse as the lion and her cubs, if presented with far more semantic and far less dignity. Corey understands. The tracker is the ultimate judge and jury even if he is judged too and given his own harsh verdict.

Breath, directed by Simon Baker (2017). This is one sleeper of a powerful coming-of-age tale. I couldn’t believe that a movie that, on the surface, is a surfing initiation story with stunning surfing footage, could be so heartful, moody, emotionally daring and risky, and continually skirt familiar edges of darkness while coming out in light—skirt the edge of suffocation while coming out in breath.

The landscape of the Western Australian coast is vast and haunting: insular and intimate village-ward and cosmic ocean-ward—ocean-floor out. Each of the four main characters—Sando, the older surfer dude from the U.S. (played by Baker himself), Pikelet, the thirteen-year old narrator recalling his youth (played by Samson Coulter, his adult voice by Tim Winton, the novelist on whose book the film was based), Loonie, his slightly older tow-haired best friend and surfing buddy (played by Ben Spence), and Eva, Sando’s Utahan wife lamed from a skiing accident (local Kiwi Elizabeth Debicki)—has a complex character to portray with his or her gravity and inner unspoken truth. All four are struggling with existential issues as devious and rugged as the shoals that make up the colorfully named surfing zones (Nautilus and Smokey are the ones I remember).

            Through the early and middle scenes I found the movie quite good but not special, scenic and evocative in a conventional way. There were some shadows and glances, but I didn’t think the writer and director would go there. They did. What I come away with is the story’s uncanny ability to fuse three things that should be fused more often than they are: fear, love, and initiation. Courage, sex, and vulnerability is the more common version of the same basic triptych. Here Sando’s initiation of the boys into his big-time surfing world, full of dares, dangers, and finally surrender meets the ocean itself, as the boys are initiated together. Then comes the break when Pikelet is afraid to surf a particular wave while Loonie goes wild with glee, braggadocio, and hallucinogenic ecstasy. Pikelet’s fate finally not to be initiated by Sando but by mysterious, eternally piqued Eva, who is hiding behind her own waves and shoals, pretending not to be there. Sando abruptly takes Loonie away into a death-defying ride through Southeast Asia, meaning that Loonie has won the surfing sweepstakes over his friend, but that allows Pikelet to find his difference from his friend and accept the importance and sacredness of pure fear. Loonie is without fear, so he finally can’t live in a world like this because the surfable surface runs out. He is dead soon after they return. Meanwhile Eva, damaged and grounded by her fearlessness and mid-air somersaults, still won’t stop pushing the edge. An X-sports cover girl, even as Sando is an X-sports cover boy (something the boys discovered in the forbidden magazine storehouse), she was toppling in the sky, the last moment that she remembers being happy before the hard landing. But she won’t back down or give up the drive to be both afraid and exhilarated by fear.

            I am coming at the plot directly, but in the movie it comes in layers. Events are broken off sharply while moving into the next without you knowing exactly what happened. You think that they won’t show it because it is too dangerous or sexually transgressive, but they do, in waves of memory spliced into the life they return to after surfing the edge. We see Pikelet on the school bus and in class, while the montages show that he is already a man. He can’t be a schoolboy or anyone’s prom date anymore, let alone the schoolgirl courting him.

            The riding-the-waves-edge photography, as noted, is almost supernatural, also elegant, aesthetic, and entheogenic. The language of the movie stands out, a mix of teens’ rural Australian jive and the hipster, hippie bravado, but it is also a mixture of confrontation and compassion. Dares and darkness are underwritten by love and light. This is how it is scripted. It comes to fruition with Eva and Loonie, two characters who barely interact. It is Loonie’s lack of limits and willingness to drive Pikelet and eventually Sando away and Eva’s pissed-off, moody truth-serum kōans that wake Pikelet up to his own nature. He can’t be any of them, so he grows into who he is.
            The lessons wouldn’t work if all four of these people didn’t guide one another stumbling through the darkness and waves and bodies and regrets with soul-deep recognition of their commonality and dependence, their mutual authentic-movement-like discovery. This movie is “Summer of ’42,” “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” and a taste of shamanic dreamtime. The resilience of broken hearts that will not be broken wins the day, and everything is finally a gift from each one to each other, gift after gift, grace after grace, though the gifts are fierce, which is what makes them true.

            The love scenes limn a kind of powerful porn closing in on female-male pedophilia. The San Fernando valley could not come up with a more alluring or titillating seduction. It is perfectly paced between fantasy and reality, something the porn industry doesn’t do as well with its rush to blatancy. It is the uncovered that makes this renegade courtship so romantic, compelling, and transformative and balances the surfing.

I smile when Netflix viewers wanting a surfing flick complain that this turns into The Graduate or “Mrs. Robinson 2.” Pikelet is no Benjamin or Dustin anything; he is West Australian smart. Eva is no Mrs. Robinson or Anne Bancroft scraping a stain off her skirt as she disrobes while seducing Benjamin. She is an X-athlete with a knife’s edge sexuality, and she leads Pikelet into an initiatory self-knowing, even as she informs him that he is not in love with her but with being fucked. It is those “thrill shoals” again. She creates the narrator who then brings her to life.  

The Yellow Birds, directed by Alexandre Moors (2017). For me, this isn’t a great film, but it was important in viewing the second Iraq War, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney’s senseless invasion of a fractured and aggrieved ring of tribal duchies (a nation by nominal only) as a real event, carried out by real men and women.

The young men at the center of this film, new friends Brandon Bartle and Daniel Murphy (portrayed by Alden Ehrenreich and Tye Sheridan), are in no way prepared for the reality of Iraq, and Murph dies because of it. He dies because he sees things that are beyond comprehension or explanation, and he goes rogue, no longer choosing to live in such a reality. That’s seeing Medusa in spades.

Or it’s maybe, how do you live in such a world pretending that it holds together and makes its own sense when it doesn’t? Not when people are blown up in front of you, bodies and identities strewn. Then who are you?

What stands out are the simplicity of the actions, the spareness and sincerity of the dialogue, including words spoken and unspoken by the film’s chorus: mothers, girlfriends, and fellow soldiers, and the language and sound of brutality and bestial mutilation in the everyday activity and rhythms of Iraq’s streets.

The movie also plays with time in such a way that the recounting of events—a mostly Stateside narrative—precedes the events themselves. You always know, bad as the Iraq arc is, that even worse is coming because you have heard from the one witness who survived.

Finally, the film is a dirge and elegy, as the corpse of the “hero” floats down-river into oblivion. It’s not part of the film, but what resonates beyond the anonymous water burial is what will follow, what can only follow such a cruelly unnecessary ceremony: displacement on a global scale, genocide, Daesh, the Syrian war, the crumbling of an ancient land that was never whole. The Yellow Birds implies that that’s future America as much as Iraq or Syria or Kurdistan. As there, so here. As here, so there. Baghdad or Aleppo today, Chicago or Charleston tomorrow.

The Shack, directed by Stuart Hazeldine (2017): As gratuitously voyeuristic as an episode of Forensic Files and cloyingly evangelical Christian (centered around a pedophiliac murder of a young girl), yet at the same time it presented a breathtaking, epiphanic image of how angels and God view the vast living world— as a field of brightening and dimming luminosities—and a revelatory interpretation of the Trinity as a Pentecostal, multi-gender, vaudeville hip-hop act.

Unrest, directed by Jennifer Brea (2017) This deep dive into chronic fatigue syndrome by a documentary filmmaker and young female sufferer under duress is an elegant mapping of the enigmatic disease onto the sort of digital track that has replaced old-fashioned Kodak and Agfa dyes and diseases. Brea doesn’t compromise or pretty the situation. The camera lingers where she must, motionless or collapsed, in a stupor, or struggling for any movement or impetus and her own survival. It unsparingly exposes the struggles of her marriage and the complex role of her husband (Omar Wasow).

At film’s beginning, Jennifer is a super athletic, internationally adventuring Harvard graduate student with an adoring husband who courted her extravagantly. Chronic fatigue turns her into a semi-alive zombie for whom life flows by, turning hours into years while keeping her out of her own journey in a body through world enough and time. 

She records Skype testimony of other chronic-fatigue sufferers in the U.S., U.K., and Denmark, while showing that how this serious medical condition has been misunderstood, gratuitously dismissed, demoted, and even punished by the medical community and public at large. We see an almost unbelievable Danish sequence of people, including children, rounded up and taken from their homes and parents, placed in the government-sanctioned clinic of a particular psycho-babble psychiatrist who has convinced the authorities that the ailment is a psychosomatic reaction to parental abuse. 

In fact, chronic fatigue is myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), as debilitating an anemia as sickle-cell. However caused—a virus, fungus, or lapsed DNA code­—it affects the mitochondrial guardian of cells’ metabolism, degrading their capacity to sustain and support metabolism. Though all diseases have psychological (psychosomatic) and spiritual (etheric) aspects, myalgic encephalomyelitis shares a platform with multiple sclerosis, polio, and Lou Gehrig’s disease. It lands hard on the physical plane.

Brea documents the evolving status of ME in the microbiological world, as medically oriented researchers try to pin down the mechanism and arrive at temporary remediations.

What makes Brea’s documentary a work of art, a guided visualization, and a vehicle of heart, spirit, and healing is her ability—determination—to stick to myalgic encephalomyelitis and its biorhythms, lessons, and messages. While capturing the fragility, resilience, and courage of life among the living, she lets the ailment be her teacher, sensei, producer, and personal coach. She makes her movie its imprint on her life, a real-time chronic-fatigue hologram and ME community anthem. Insofar as we are human, we will prevail and make art if not life.

Falling, directed by Marina Stepanska (2017). Falling is an almost perfectly composed short story in which the actions of four or five individuals radiate from and reflect a larger social, cultural, and political landscape. The movie script, in effect, replaces the unwritten short story. That it has literary value even in translation to English means it must be Salinger-level bordering at times on Tostoy-level in Ukrainian.

Falling is set in Ukraine after the Maidan, the 96-day street uprising and ceremony that marked Ukraine’s break with Eastern Russian orthodoxy and declaration of itself as a Western European nation. The Maidan began in November 2013 and ended with Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych’s flight to Moscow by helicopter in 2014. But it didn’t end; it led to a guerrilla war between Kyiv and Moscow in Ukraine’s eastern provinces that finally erupted into an all-out war with the Russian invasiion nine years later in 2023. The present clash is so heavily foreshadowed in Falling that one feels it is happening already during a film was made only two years after the Maidan. See my Ukraine chapter in The Return of the Tower of Babel on Jovian Bricolage substack for more details.

            Falling is so meticulously put together that plot descriptions online are unrepresentative. They highlight events from the last twenty or so minutes of a film more than a hundred minutes long. That is because viewers don’t get to learn the key back stories of the two main characters until the director has taken us through a series of poignant and painful experiences in their current lives. This yardstick applies far more to Anton (Andriy Seletskiy) than to Katya (Daria Plakhti) mainly because the greater short story is centered around him not her. But her back story is just as important, perhaps more so, in expressing the underlying themes and spirit of the Maidan and a possible Ukrainian future—the future for a poetic Slavic people squeezed between the Holy Russian dictatorship and the corrupt.

            The bulk of the film involves Anton’s interaction with his fierce, gruff grandfather (Oleg Mosiichuk). Grandpa (unnamed) is a war veteran, in fact a war hero, and he makes the rules around his house and his immediate environment, owning an unlicensed rifle and cutting trees in a protected forest. He orders Anton around while teaching him his own code of courage, privilege, and indomitability. Anton complies more or less, that not without moments of rebellion, Kyiv wandering, and continual cigarette breaks and street bummings, because he has given up on his own life. He spells out his incurable suicidal drive and nihilism to Katya in a stunning soliloquy about two-thirds of the way through the film, explaining to her that she will try to rescue him over and over and will fail because he will trick her into believing she is succeeding in order to dash her hopes more totally. He says that he is trying to drive her away for her own good. Yet when he does driver her away he goes looking for her until he tracks her down and presents himself to be rescued. Only then does their brief, anything but nihilistic love affair take place, revealing the remaining innocence of Ukraine and its desperate desire to survive despite everything.

            The two lovers meet the first by chance outside a disco, and from there all of their dialogue, the heart of the film, is brilliantly indirect, a constantly evolving, more sophisticated version of game of “Truth or Dare.” Each of them tells partial truths while daring the other to take a step more. The courtship develops slowly, seeming more like “two for tea” than the torrid romance it becomes at the very end. Much of their interaction takes place with Grandpa present, so part of the game is to include him in the interplay but keep a tiny bit of lovers’ code secret from not only him but the audience who have not read the online plot summary.

            Katya’s back story involves her affair with Johann (Christian Borys), a German photojournalist who took a famous picture of her serving tea to protestors at the Maidan. He is leaving to go back to Berlin and wants her to accompany him, to flee Ukraine and start a new life together. He has capture not not only her image but now her because she is beautiful. He wants to rescue her from her Ukrainian fate (and by implication) rescue himself from his German fate with a Ukrainian partner. Since he doesn’t speak Ukrainian and she doesn’t speak German, they talk in English, almost the only English in the film.

But Johann is thoroughly Western; he can’t engage Katya’s speech of riddles which Anton does so well because they are both imbued with the Ukrainian mood of dark irony and tragedy. Johann tries to Westernize her instantly by the simple superiority of open-ended opportunity, freedom, direct speech—a fuller professional, personal, and material life. He light-heartedly assumes that nothing more is required to win her heart; he thinks she will seize the chance he is giving her to skip out on her tragedy. He assumes his own desirability because he has a low average ordinary bar for life and life. For instance, he says that he can’t entertain her subtleties until he has had some morning coffee, as he gets up abruptly from their shared bed and a serious conversation, at least on her end.  But he won’t entertain these subtleties even with coffee. She argues with him and Anton (later) that she has no skills, a line meant to elicit actual intimacy. With Anton, that leads to him teaching her how to ride a bicycle off which she constantly falls. This lesson follows her declaration that she can’t cook but is learning how to ride a bike, a process she has given up. He insists that you don’t learn by giving up, you learn by falling.

Though not the only “falling” in the film, the bike lesson is the most extended and graphic. Anton’s falling off a ladder, mistakenly shot by his grandfather as an intruder, ends the film except for a flashback in which he finally tells Katya his fuller back story. That is why the plot summary only begins when the story itself is over. Anton is a failed musician and composer whose compulsion to create in Ukraine led him to alcohol, drugs, and a mental hospital from which he has just returned to Grandpa’s. We are not sure if this is true or part of his fabrication. We already know about the addiction and the hospital. We don’t learn about the music till after he is dead and the film is about to end. I assume the back story is true within the context of the film, but we will never know for sure. The script finally keeps as many secrets as the characters.

            While Katya and Johann are bantering in English in their only couples scene, she gets to make the memorable statement that although she has no talents to bring to the West or offer him, “I have a nice body; am I not fuckable?” She throws this out in an offhand, understated way that goes right past him. He has no sense of dare or irony. He ignores it because he knows they both know he has already concluded so; it is superfluous. He doesn’t consider that she is saying it even though she knows it is superfluous, thus is communicating something else about who she is and her reticence to move to Berlin with him. She is seeing if he will take the bait and deepen their connection. He can’t; he’s still mainly a photojournalist. With Anton she doesn’t need to say anything so blatant. Her most leading comment is that he smells good—tasty. Then tea, a bicycle lesson, and a series of creative fabulisms are enough for them to woo each other.

            In a sequence reminiscent but not imitative of Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset, Anton reminds Katya that she needs to get on the train back into Kyiv because Berlin is calling. She says abruptly, “I am not going to Berlin.” Till then, unless we read the plot online from Film Movement Plus, we assume that she is about leave Anton for good. She will Westernize.

She will not, even so, have him as a partner for more than a couple of days. He has been drafted into the army. We have already learned that his missing father is serving—his mother has no idea where, or when or if he will return. Anton is now about to go into the same fog of war. He could but will not accept Katya’s offer to escape to Poland; the mental hospital and his addictions are too close to him for adventure or more entanglement. He will hide out with Katya in her apartment, and maybe the military police won’t find him for a while.

Without explanation he returns to Grandpa’s house, perhaps to get his clothes to move in with Katya, perhaps to check on Grandpa who is bedridden after a stroke. Grandpa’s collapse and hospitalization take place during the movie and cover a large chunk of the time during which Anton, Katya, and Grandpa interact together around not only tea but a fire in the backyard, his medical situation, the hospital, and then teasing, truths and dares, and breakfast.

It is only after Grandpa’s stroke and temporary removal from the household that Anton and Katya have their quintessential evasive dialogue game as they pirouette and perch around the kitchen like the actors in a well-written short story that they are.

In Anton’s late return, Grandpa faces the window with a rifle; he has locked the front door. Anton wants to get in to tend to him and/or to retrieve his belongings. He sets the ladder against the house and climbs toward the window.

It is a story about a broken family; it is a story about a family that never gets to happen; it is a story about unplayed music, incomplete passion, dark forces closing in; it is an exquisitely indirect parable about Ukraine itself.

The Radical Story of Patty Hearst, directed by Pat Kondelis (2018). This six-part series, documentary and docu-drama, is more painful to watch than it should be, and it should be. I think that’s because of the radically changing players and politics since the 1974 kidnapping. Nobody is who they were, initially seemed to be, or stayed who they were for long. I shouldn’t say “nobody”—Donald DeFreeze, leader of the Symbionese Liberation Army, remained an unyielding ex-con revolutionary to his death by the LAPD, and other members of the group perished likewise. By contrast, Bill Harris, the most articulate analyst and spokesman for the various phases of the Symbionese movement, was able to describe what they believed and acted out back in 1974 and what he sees now after many decades and a jail sentence. He has remade himself as a different man in a different life.

            So has Ms. Hearst, the ultimate changeling and driver of both the historic event and the myth. She starts out as a wealthy, entitled college co-ed at Cal Berkeley in a Bay Area bubble with a semi-random, marginally hippie boyfriend (Stephen Weed), turns into a committed revolutionary and bank-robber who fires a weapon to free her comrades at Mel’s Sporting Goods, then after her capture and exoneration marries her bodyguard and ends up a fancy dog breeder in much the milieu in which she began.

            In the documentary, many people play themselves but are also played in their younger versions by actors in roles that attempt to deconstruct the colliding fronts of the early 1970s. In another sense, these are impenetrable in the way in which conflicting belief systems and lifestyles can be contained in single chrysalises and troop across an era chimerically unaffected by their own internal contradictions.

            The Symbionese Liberation zeitgeist is not that far removed from the Black Panthers and Black Lives Matter but simultaneously not that far removed from the Manson family. That’s not a judgment, just a statement of how archetypal forces subsume ideologies. Both DeFreeze and Manson got out of prison with bees in their bonnets. The violence they unleashed transcended “ordinary” mayhem shootings with their devotions to maudlin Dionysian metadramas.

            Hearst herself is as malleable as the psyche of the time. She isn’t a scammer or fake. She is capable of all her presentations, and she carries them each out with heart and spirit, anger and sopor, desire and doubt as required by the roles. The documentary/docudrama is disturbing because we lack its passion in the face of far more serious challenges that have developed from its nascent cells. The series compels those of us who lived through the times to ask what we believed and thought was happening then and how it become “now.” Because it was something else entirely, and even the most literal interpretation goes haywire. The Symbionese kidnapped exactly who they thought they were kidnapping as well as their own shadow and mirror, and she briefly and whole-heartedly joined them, and that act instantly transformed them into more of an Eleusinian rite and myth than a movement.

Hot Summer Nights, directed by Elijah Bynum (2018). By my own standards this film doesn’t come close to qualifying for my list. It is spiritually regressive, emotionally cartoon-like, and full of drug violence, murder, and unnecessary cruelty. Yet I consider it a brilliant, creative, open-ended first film by a young first-time director. Using shape-changing Timothée Chalamet as the actor portraying his lead character, Bynum is able to capture the coming-of-age tension between a hapless, nerd-like chubby teen and the recklessly courageous and transformational young man he manages to become. While Chalamet’s “Daniel” is neither compassionate nor moral, his humanity and empathy radiate.

The same dialectic is true of sassy McKayla Strawberry (Maika Monroe in an ersatz “Marilyn M” role), Daniel’s unexpected girlfriend from boy’s heaven, and her ass-kicking, drug-dealing brother Hunter Strawberry (Alex Roe, adroit at turning his English accent into Cape Cod dialect). Daniel elevates Hunter from a dime-bag hood to a big-time doomed dealer, showing that an awkward, dippy kid can be wilder and more dangerous than the town tough.

The landscape and locale are early nineties Cape Cod in the build-up to an epic hurricane. The mix is David Lynch Blue Velvet noir, George Lucas American Graffiti nostalgiaand longing, and Stephen King South Shore horror and haunting.

Bynum brilliantly mixes his own script, the actors’ improvs on it, cartoons, old t.v. shows, news clips, home-footage-like interludes, and live meteorology (starring cyclonic, lightning-bearing clouds) to produce a magical ceremony reminiscent of Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising. What is felt in the film is deeply felt and shines through ragged, shattered lives to the degree that each holds its own heart truth.

The Extras on the DVD are as worth watching as the film itself, for Bynum reenacts his own beginner’s-mind, DIY filmmaking and explains the genesis of the story and the roles of the various actors, including a scintillating description of how Emory Cohen as super-dealer Dex raised all of the others’ games despite a relatively brief visit to the set.

Bynum is recreating the story of two guys he knew in college who got in trouble and then disappeared. Never once does he mention, nor need he mention in a post-racial world, that he is a jive African American making a film in which there isn’t a single black character or actor of note.

Django, directed by Etienne Comar (2018). This film is highlighted by French-Algerian actor Reda Kateb’s moody, nuanced portrayal of Gypsy musician Django Reinhardt through the year or so (1943) of Reinhardt’s marginalization and struggle during the Nazi occupation of France; the story features his own disloyal lover, his music, and the direct threats to it by Aryan racist pathologization of jazz. Much of the film takes place either in a concert or in scenes segueing out of concerts so that the dynamic of ‘threatened music” and “threatened life” generates the storyline.

Kateb appears in other films I have reviewed—see particularly Far From Men. He is versatile enough to be Django, or a virginal martyr charged with a crime of conscience (FFM), or a Somali jihadist (Wim Wenders’ Submergence). In Django, Kateb captures spates of fear, defiance, arrogance, compassion, and inspired artistry. Whether it is the “real” Django or a theatrical myth, Kateb and Comer have filled him out completely.

For all the hundreds of World War II movies about Nazi war crimes and occupations, Comar’s Django captures the mood of day-to-day events and war ruptures, transcending World War II tropes better than most. The Nazi are not just monsters or occupiers; they are blundering bullies walking the streets.

On Chesil Beach, directed by Dominic Cooke (2018). This truly sad film epitomizes the lines of poet John Greenleaf Whittier: “For all sad words of tongue and pen, / The saddest are these, ‘It might have been.’” I shy from reviewing most films based on novels, but in this case the novelist, Ian McEwan, wrote the screenplay and, though I haven’t read the novel for comparison, I felt as though he packed in a full novelistic experience with Thomas-Hardy-like and Laurentian subtleties. It may not be the novel On Chesil Beach, but it is a comparable work of art.

The film is framed around the 1962 wedding night of Florence Ponting (Saoirse Ronan, whose family’s own Harlem-Dublin-Harlem journey could be a movie in itself) and Edward Mayhew (Billy Howle). While detailing the growing awkwardness of the virginal couple confronting their first full sexual encounter, On Chesil Beach goes both backward to track their meeting and courtship (and Florence’s molestation by her arrogant, dominating father), and then forward, first 13 years (when her young daughter Chloe enters Edward’s record shop and wants to buy a Chuck Berry record as a birthday present for her mother, and he guesses right, for “Chloe” is what Florence told him she would name their daughter, and he knows her birth date and recognizes Chloe’s last name as that of a member of Florence’s classical quartet—so he gives Chloe a “Greatest Hits” album for her mother for free)—and then 45 years after their doomed wedding night, to sit in the third row of her classical quartet’s final performance (which includes her husband as a member) and shout, “Bravo!,” as he had promised he would during their courtship. As the film ends, close-ups show her recognizing him in the audience (though the make-up crew has done a fine job of aging them both), and then tears streaming down each of their faces.

Their aborted wedding-night encounter closes with her fleeing their hotel room and walking a mile or two on Chesil Beach where he finally catches up to her. They exchange accusations and other unpleasantries. His are based in disappointment and anger; hers in guilt and shame. She declares that she still loves him and offers a marriage of good friends in which he is free to have sex with other women, but he calls her “a bitch” and “frigid.” When he turns and walks away, he doesn’t see her again until the movie’s closing scene. It is not just the sexual fiasco that drives him away. Her father wants to dominate him too, to put him to work for one of his business where Edward sees only a trap—a closet of an office without a desk and a father-in-law who will suffocate him. He projects all that onto Florence, who is in fact a victim of the same suffocation. They lose their rapport.

Lindy and I watched On Chesil Beach over two nights, and I misread it the first night. I thought that McEwan’s point was to show two young people at the time of the Cuban Crisis, university students in London who meet at an anti-war political event that she (Florence) is docenting, who want to be in love and pretend to themselves, to each other, to their families and to each other’s families, that they are in love, covering every lapse with affirmation of their love. They only want to be in love and each other’s soul mates, so they continually reinterpret their misses and anomalies. Edward was not even attending her anti-war event as such; he just wanted to tell someone that he got a “First” in history, and his own family was uninterested. Florence, a stranger then, is interested and will always be interested in what he has to say. She is a sheltered rich girl whose father owns estates and factories; Edward is the son of a headmaster, not of their class (as her father quickly discerns). While she is an accomplished musician, he is knowledgeable about stars, rocks, birds, and plants. His taxonomy of the natural world dazzles her. She is a perfect receptacle for his enthusiasm, and is beautiful as well, so he is a dutiful admirer and romantic until sex fails them on their wedding night.

After watching the second half, I found that the film came closer to Lindy and me and our courtship. We met as young people around the same time as Edward and Florence (1963, nineteen years old) and became close friends for quite a while first before even trying out the language of love. Then sex also got in the way. But, as McEwan emphasizes (in the DVD’s bonus features), it was also the time and culture, and the fact that people didn’t have ways to talk about or work through difficulties with physical contact. The terms weren’t available. Lindy and I chose to stick with it and search. Edward and Florence couldn’t and didn’t.

We broke up three times in college before deciding to marry. Edward and Florence married for about eight hours; the formality of wedding was dissolved as unconsummated. They didn’t talk or write to each other after that. Lindy and I were also romantics, and the language of love held us until other parts caught up. Not only were there were hurdles besides sex, but sex itself wasn’t only one thing; it was different things, each of which needed to be resolved on its own terms. I hope to publish a 900-page book next year called Episodes in Disguise of a Marriage. I began writing it in 1975 and expect to finish in early 2024. The length speaks to how complex the matter of coupling is. I summarize some of these in the chapter “Marital Dialectics.”

McEwan is more spare, by a lot, but he alludes successfully and satisfyingly to many things that I spell out in full narrative. Edward and Florence are in fact in love. Their awkwardness is not from faking love; it is from not internalizing love’s full emergent spectrum of feelings and acts. They match and support each other well, but they dance around sex. What they overlook they have had regular exuberant light sexual encounters: dances and epiphanies that would have led to easier amors if they hadn’t had to adjust too quickly to social pressures and the formalities of a wedding to deal with: a wedding meal attended by officious waiters in a private suite and the later, loaded wedding night.

They each jump to the wrong conclusions about the other’s failings during the excruciatingly out-of-sync seduction scene. They both want it to happen but are trying to dive into a consummation without foreplay or emotional courtship, and the result is that both are wounded emotionally and even to a degree physically. With that mishap, everything else—all their other rapports, connections, and becoming part of each other’s families—are tossed aside and elided. Florence had become a full member of his own family, beloved by his painter mom, slightly demented after having been hit while standing too close to a train—an odd touch (I might add)—and two younger sisters adore her). Florence’s father, while condescending and oppressive, means to hire Edward and give the young couple a stipend.

Florence goes on to have a decent career and life as a violinist, mother, and grandmother; Edward flounders and record-shop owner (this odd parallels John Cusack’s romantic and occupational career in the movie High Fidelity, which we watched right before On Chesil Beach—it felt briefly as though we had looped back into the 2000 film about lost romances and regrets). The 2007 segment of Chesil Beach shows, in Edward’s conversation with friends about a fictional couple that is really him and Florence, that he has come to recognize his error, but he does nothing to address it.

McEwan uses music to capture what is missing in sex. While Edward is Florence’s secret fiancé, she is being courted by the lone man in her quartet. She doesn’t love him the way she does Edward, and she avoids him outside of practices (because she doesn’t want to be chased or have the quartet’s separate communion risked through romance); that changes obvious after the disaster at Chesil Beach. We don’t learn until Florence’s daughter shows up at the record store that her accompanist is who she has married. He may not have loved her in the way Edward did, but they were able to court each other with string instruments, using the language of Mozart and Bach, leading each other with just the right pacing while picking up each other themes. Florence is able to instruct him how to play and to take the lead, and he follows. That is the wooing and probably the sex.

 Conversely, her theme with Edward is Chuck Berry, the only rock music she grows to like, as young Chloe tells Edward in her visit to his shop. Chuck Berry expresses Florence’s exuberant, romantic side with him.

The two themes play back and forth in the soundtrack, Mozart and Berry, representing the sexual tensions of the sixties and the opposite motifs underlying its rituals of romance.

Submergence, directed by Wim Wenders (2018). Two peripheral points upfront. One, I would have included Wenders’ Alice in the Cities and Wings of Desire in my larger list if I remembered them well enough to review, especially Alice, which is a hallmark film for my son-in-law Mike Mills who acknowledges it through much of his directing work. Wings of Desire is also a hallmark film for my psychic teacher, John Friedlander, who considers it a remarkable enactment of how angels inhabit our realm unseen, metempsychotically moving in and out of being human (and why). The theme of wandering between worlds among conflicting meanings, options, and moral imperatives limns all Wenders’ work, Submergence in particular.

Two, I am struck by how many people reviewing Submergence on Netflix absolutely hated it and self-righteously spoke of its lacks as if only the most stupid, undiscriminating people would overlook the gaping flaws. The reviews made me realize how far removed I am from general public perception. Most of the aspects that Netflix subscribers panned were the ones that made this film special and wonderful for me: a chronologically fragmented narrative and pacing, sharply contrasting story lines that wouldn’t ordinarily belong in the same film, an unconventional love affair with quirky, subtle dialogue and awakening passions of unexpected depth and correlation, and an inconclusive ending like road ending before a cliff or just more road.

Submergence’s contrasting story lines pair (1) a portrayal of the origin of life in a nonphotosynthetic setting around hydrothermal, chemicosynthetic vents at the bottom of the ocean and an existential probe of lifeforms in general with an emphasis on microscopic jungles, forests, and the legendary autogene, the first living cell, with (2) a deep inquiry into the politico-psychology of jihad in Islamic Somalia. To put these antipodes and hypertexts together in a credible movie is the work of a master with artistic experience, emotional intelligence, literary intelligence, and curiosity about the universe and what makes cells as well as people do the things they do. Wenders’ common theme is that of unprobed darkness: of nature, of human nature, of creation, of the will to survive. But it is also the mystery of why cells and organisms do what they do. If it’s all metabolism at base, it’s also all psyche and symbol.

            The lovers played by Alicia Vikander (deep-sea biologist Danielle) and James McAvoy (British spy James) are so real that their relationship sticks in my mind as hauntingly as those of people I know. Wenders leads each actor to create a nuanced, self-witnessing character from his or her own actual depths; he finds the idiosyncratic flash points of Vikander and McAvoy and weaves them into a story. They are such fine actors that they fully incarnate the script. I would say the same of the bit actors too: the other scientists in Danielle’s deep-submersible crew and the religious fanatics who hold James captive in Somalia. No character fills a flat spot in the plot; each goes as deeply into his—almost all are men—or her search for identity and meaning.

The merger of two vastly different plots follows a love affair that began when the two characters meet by chance while on vacation in Normandy. The affair was so unlikely and intense that it became almost like a past-life memory that deepened as it was recalled later.

The same fragile romanticism encompasses the modern world—how life can be so resourceful, fragile, fractal, vulnerable, robust, and optimistic (for instance, in a dark zone beneath the sun line of the planet’s oceans) and yet so violent, cruel, superstitious, wasteful, destructive, and insensible from the same DNA (as in Somalia). The two plots not only match, together they convey the full scope of the modern crisis, which is simultaneously ecological and politico-economic, ontological and spiritual.

            I have watched Alicia Vikander before, but she has never jumped out like in this film. Wenders translates her own mixed ancestry (Australian, Swedish, and English) into a woman of shifting faces and constellations, which is what/who James McAvoy’s James courts—he affectionately calls her a mongrel. At the same time, Danielle’s inner battle between hope and joy and her innate nihilism and tendency toward depression and compulsive doom-saying are captured so exquisitely by Vikander that I am led to believe it mirrors many of her own questions and crises. Put the two together, and you have a woman it is impossible to stop watching; she is a willful child, a sophisticated poet and philosopher, a Lynn-Margulis-echelon scientist, a Loren Eiseley visionary naturalist, and a lover whose range incorporates all the versions of herself and their joys and doubts in her courting her new man. James gradually excavates her depth by discovering and permitting these same fears and doubts and possibilities for passion in himself. His aggressive placing of his own darkness—the dark of terrorism and human enslavement—before her matches the abyssal dark of the Hades-like kingdom of the ocean floor. It is the way he grabs her attention, interest, and capacity for ardor and devotion, which she then turns back on him in both darkness and light. Their professions defy and reflect each other—biologist and spy—but the defiance sharpens the mystery and memory of their affair as they both sink back into shadows of later fantasy worlds, ontologies, identity crises, and missions.

            Self-anointed reviewers missed the point. Despite the outrage on Netflix that the film didn’t have a happy ending (or any ending), it ended in the only way it could have. A happy ending would have trivialized samsara and its suffering. A tragic ending would have erased the deepening thread of memory and sense of love and growing knowledge of each lover after their physical continuity has been broken, perhaps for good.

Erased (Izbrisana), written by Miha Mazzini and directed by Miha Mazzini and Dusan Joksimovic (2018). A friend and guide during Lindy’s and my 2006 trip to Slovenia, Miha sent me an advance festival copy.

The film is about the plight of people being “erased” in the current fast-shifting political matrix of nations changing boundaries and ruling parties. It dispossesses citizens who know no other home and have no alternate place to go. I have understood this phenomenon in terms of refugees from Africa, the Middle East, and Central and South America forced to leave their homelands because of climate, failed governments, and warlords, I did not know about the phenomenon with European populations and in particular in the former Yugoslavia. A Yugoslavian Serb living almost her whole life in Slovenia, Ana, the heroine and central figure of the movie (Judita Franković), failed to re-register by a deadline she was not aware of. She “loses” her now-nonexistent Yugoslavian citizenship but does not automatically get a replacement Slovenian one. Instead, she is “erased.”

Her plight comes to her attention when she arrives at a hospital to give birth. Everything proves in order—she is healthy, her baby is healthy—but neither has a clear (if any) nationality or citizenship. She is not allowed to leave the hospital (as a non-person), and then she is not allowed to have her baby (she can sneak in and nurse her with the aid of a young nurse who used to be a neighbor). To further complicate matters, the father is married governmental official and her lover. To protect his reputation and marriage, she listed no one as father on the hospital entry form, an option that adds to the degree of erasure. Her unnamed lover (played by Sebastian Cavazza) is only able to give minimal help, ultimately leading to a talk-show appearance which itself becomes an act of disobedience and leads to further marginizalization. 

            Nationalist geography plays its own role such that Croatia has become essentially an uncrossable enemy moat between Slovenia and Serbia during the Balkan conflict for Serbs living in Slovenia. Bosnians in Slovenia faced a similar dilemma as personified by another character Senad (Jernej Kogovsek) in Erased. He has to float through situations such that he is never asked to show his identity card, but his complaint about an overly noisy restaurant patron who turns out to be part of the constabulary leads to his being asked for it. We don’t see what happens next—he is erased from the film.

I recognized some of Mazzini’s familiar themes (partly familiar from a novel of his I republished in translation in 2008, Guarding Hanna): the Kafkaesque nature of reality, the bureaucratic manipulation and erasure of identities, the “painless” ease of that elision much like Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil, and the sinister juxtapositions of good cop/bad cop, carrot & stick.

There was one transcendent scene for me: with heroine outside her preschool putting on a performance for her former students. Her highly idiosyncratic sequence of moves and kindergarten mudras is recognized and mirrored by them as they do their dance—in that moment she is not erased. But they are separated by glass as well as legality. Her joy in them and her own quirky performance is the foreground for a vast, drab institutionalized background.          

Manifest, three seasons (with thoughts about the fourth), multiple directors (2018-2021). In this 2018-through-COVID-19 t.v. serial, fictional Montego Air flight 828 with 191 passengers on board takes off from Jamaica on April 7, 2013 and, after passing through brief but extreme turbulence, lands, to the astonishment of the world (which assumed it had been lost and everyone was dead) on November 4, 2018, in New York. Because of the extraordinary circumstances, it was diverted to a military runway in Newburgh. After being debriefed by the security agencies, the passengers were released and tried to pick up their interrupted lives. Only hours have passed for them, but everyone else in the world has traveled five-and-a-half years. Since they were presumed dead, several have lost spouses or fiancés to other partners.

Many of the passengers, including sister and brother Michaela and Ben Stone, and Ben’s son Cal (played, respectively, by Melissa Roxburgh, Josh Dallas, and Jack Messina who was replaced by Ty Doran when Cal time-hopped to his teens) experience “callings,” sudden entheogen-like breaks, often with occult or mythological imagery—peacocks, angels, Egyptian hieroglyphs, oracle cards as well as lucid returns to alternate, catastrophic versions of flight 828, with seeping blood and even more extreme turbulence followed by crash scenes. In revisitations of the flight as well as other callings, they are enveloped in clouds, smoke, lightning, storms, and supernatural phenomena during which their own voice or that of a fellow passenger prompts them to carry out some assignment without telling them exactly what it is or how to solve the kōan.

Most of the callings are collective riddles, involving several returned passengers meant to carry out a mission together: they need to rescue someone in grave danger or solve a particular riddle about the flight or the altered DNA and destiny of the passengers who passed through turbulence. The callings and their consummations knit together like clues in a Gaia-scale geocaching with passengers’ lives and those of other people at stake.  

Time dilation, genome mutations, and a profusion of sapphire-ingredient chemistry in residues combine in alien-abduction-like impositions. Selected non-passengers also return from “deaths” (by freezing or drowning) and experience similar time loops, callings, and death dates measured by “missing” time. There are JOTTS: mysteriously disappearing, reappearing, and relocating objects, in some cases time-transiting. I’m glad there’s an acronym for this. I don’t like the originating initialism “Just One of Those Things.” I’d call them “Juxtaposed Objects and Temporal (or Time-Loop) Travelers.” Manifest’s central JOTT is the tail fin of the plane with its sapphire-based electromagnetic-like field that can transmit callings, displace people in time, and reconstruct or clone the entire plane elsewhere.

While people in the series try to pretend that these are ordinary circumstances, they mark a change in the planet as dramatic as that from primates to humans or Newtonian physics to quantum physics. Calling after calling, continual displaced objects, and casual crimes disclosed by riddles are telling them otherwise. Despite the clunkily scripted representations of visions and voices—central-casting Basement of the Occult fare followed by kitsch dramas and police actions—the “callings” are bellwethers of our time—the show developed a cult following for a reason. When NBC cancelled it after three seasons, Netflix picked it up (June 2021), and it topped the viewing charts, leading the streaming service to undertake a fourth and probably conclusive season.

So, an airplane on a routine flight passes through a double slit, plunging passengers into doppelgängers with evolutionary implications. What is the collective Earth field telling us about itself and us? Perhaps we have passed through a COVID-19 wormhole and larger vibration-shift together and are being asked to interrogate new coordinates and a different meaning of space and time. Our plot is changing, parallel to the paradigm shift of fictional Flight 828, and the security and fate of our planet are likewise at stake. We have all passed through a wormhole and vibration-shift and are being asked to explore new coordinates and meanings.

At a crossroads of cargo cults, conspiracy theories, falsified facts, and a spooked civilization, Manifest speaks for the collective. We all have missions with deadlines, the security and fate of our planet at stake. That real callings, coincidences, and the many daily synchronicities are less symphonic or glitzy than those in Manifest, lacking their hoopla or overt tips, is not an indication of their less revelatory status. It is how the universe works and has always worked by synchronicities and revelations. Manifest speaks to our innate “passenger” status. Its callings may be banal and primitive by comparison to callings in the cinema of Jean Cocteau, Alfred Hitchcock, George Lucas, or Alejandro González Iñárritu, but they have a funky downhome quality that greater artistry usually bypasses. Their displays function as parables or placeholders—aggrandizements of the messages everyone on earth is receiving at some level, pellets of psychic homeopathy. Viewers might cut themselves some slack, let themselves recognize their own callings, and watch the world’s unfolding dramas as a participant rather than a passive couch potato. A sentient field is telling us, flagrantly and amateurishly, that real gateway cards are being dealt. That is is the point and popularity of the show.

Fictional Flight 828 of Montego Air also passed through a “tempest” like the transhistorical one overtaking Shakespeare’s vessel bearing King Alonso of Naples with his entourage, its shipwreck modelled on the 1609 loss of the Sea Venture off Bermuda. Two vessels land in magic, karmic lands, and a magician’s daughter speaks for either when she cries out, “If by your art, my dearest father, you have / Put the wild waters in this roar, allay them.”

Ours is a huge flight: three billion plus years, moving at more than a thousand miles per hour with other planets, solar systems, and galaxies. Oh, brave new world, allay!

            The flaws of the series make the fourth season superfluous and over commercialized, tedious and boring to watch. Unimaginative screen writers make little attempt to creatively convert the time-traveling vessel into something concomitant. They take the easy way out, assuming a captive audience, so why put in any effort (yes, I stubbornly watched it through while hating what was being done to the story)? They try to put over the notion of 828-ers, coining a term that likely won’t jump into pop culture as a name for JOTT trouble-makers and witch-like hexers of humanity because they passed through a hermetic turbulence.

The callings become ever more artificial and kitsch. Love affairs and sentimental romances descend into soap-opera miasmas, practically demolishing the word “love” by overuse. Little imagination is given to how to advance the plot. In fact, the series is stuck in an essential discontinuity: the story of the plane losing five-plus years in the Bermuda Triangle while emerging unscathed needs a Close Encounters of the Third Kind metamorphosis to turn it something truly mysterious and significant; instead, we are given a clunky series of cops-and-robbers and Military Industrial Complex melodramas and hyperboles. The flight of 828 is diverted again in an attempt to turn it into a combination Da Vinci Code and Lost Ark.

The characters are forced to repeat overworked themes and hyped crises with only the most minor variations, and the actors portraying them have to pull continual earnest make-believe out of a weary theatrical palette ad nauseam.The fourth season is so self-consciously derivative that it even works its plagiarisms into the story such that when rogue police break through concrete to where passengers are being held by the security state, the script has them call it “very Shawshank Redemption.”

Finally they have to draw on the only film that solves their riddle, Cocteau’s Orpheus. Whether they know it or not—probably not—its solution has permeated pop culture. When you have created holes in time with time travel and left all your characters in precarious situations, your only choice is to unwind the film back to the beginning. Cocteau does it literally in Orpheus, and very well with the limited technology of the time. He runs the film backwards, so that time is reversed and the characters are returned to their initial state. Most of the dead not on the flight are now alive. Those who met during the stretch of time between the plane’s first and second landings must be met again for equivalent romances and marriages to happen, in a different way this time. Eleven passengers were vaporized as judgment—the ones who committed “evil”; they don’t return, opening a possible sequel that shouldn’t get made. The first time Flight 828 landed, the passengers had lost five and a half years. The second time it landed, everyone not on the flight lost five and a half other years in an alternate probability. Nothing will square the two in an ordinary universe, but then this isn’t an ordinary universe, which is why humans make stories like these.

Mystery Road, two seasons, directed by Rachel Perkins (season 1) and Warwick Thornton & Wayne Blair (season 2) (2018). In the special features Thornton calls the series “Outback Noir,” and I think that that’s the best meme for the twelve episodes. Neo-noir and Oz Western too. Note that in Australia, the “blackfellows” play both First Nations (indigenes and aborigines parallel to Native Americans) and Mixed Nations (mulattos, quadroons, octoroons parallel to African Americans). The racial terminology in the series rubs me the wrong way because we are all mestizo something, but it is the most convenient lingo for the majority of players—actors and characters—in this series. They are all mixed-race Oz-Euro like Nets basketball player, Patty Mills, the only Australian Aborigine in the NBA.

            The primary feature of this series is its landscapes: one video postcard after another, many of them at dusk or in the night with lights and neon moving in a black frame. The Northwestern Australian scenery, natural and artifactual, is stark, mysterious, unforgiving, and beautiful: a gallery of a barrens, deserts, oases, water stations, red cliffs, 400-million year-old stones, sunsets as if on Mars, truck stops, bars, trailer-like homes, rundown motels, frontier police stations and, of course, hell realms: human litter, meth labs, sea-planes, dead kangaroos.

            The language, characters, music, and direction fit the landscape, especially in the series’ second year with its directors born and raised in small outback towns. They know the geography and culture.

The music matches. I don’t know the genre; it may not even be Australian, but it feels as though it comes from out of the landscape, a country & western bluesy rock with hard-driving, nihilistically sophisticated punkish lyrics. The soundtrack bands have names like “Stranger Things,” “Top of the Lake,” “The Disappearance,” “Safe,” “River,” “Save Me,” “Missing,” “The Cry,” “Gone,” “Blood Ties,” “Chasing Ghosts,” “Til’ the Sky Turns Black,” “The Waterhole,” “The Truth,” “Constable James Arrives,” “Back from the Fire,” “If I Was the Devil,” “Feather and Knife,” “Don’t Call Me,” “Golden Boy,” “Catch Me If You Can.’ That’s a plot summary too.

            The characters are complex and well realized, their language crisp and alert. The plots are dispensable, revolving entirely around meth labs, affiliated “pearl farms,” and the treatment or mistreatment of indigenes by Euros and one another. A subplot involves an archaeological dig for 7,000-year-old outback bread-baking origins, stirring up a clash between a long-dead but purist pre-contact culture and an adulterated but living culture of folks tied to the same land and the ancestors. The living don’t want to be superseded or upstaged by the dead. The movie invites both voices, ancestors as history and ancestors as spirit presences.

            The characters, as I said, are substantial and memorable. Aaron Pederson as Jay Swan, a part Aborigine (meaning Aborigine) detective in both seasons, is the Australian Clint Eastwood, meaning he is not at all like Clint Eastwood. But he is a man of few words, deep feeling, and a supernatural sense of morality and justice, which he applies at continual risk to his own life. He is maybe the Australian Clint.

            Jada Alberts as young police officer Fran Davis in the second season, also Aborigine, balances the moral weight of Swan’s male swagger, bringing a different sense of justice and deep heartfulness.

            Tasma Walton as Jay’s ex- or separated wife Mary grows in self-recognition, strength, intentional, and courage through the twelve episodes. The script, as noted, is composed by a team of writers. One line that lingers with me and speaks to the heart of the story is spoken by Mary to Jay: “You can’t live with the living,” meaning he walks with the dead and what is already a ghost.

            Many of the Aborigines playing characters out of indigenous culture project the ambiguity of two conflicting worlds. No one is a total traditionalist or ideologue, but their variations from tradition run from demonizing the Dreaming to trying to negotiate between the ancestors and Euro law. Plus, there is always the meth problem and, with it, missing children.

            The other character who stays with me is Simon, a white former cop played by Callan Mulvey. He’s the classic villain who initially comes off as a good guy. Simon poses a range of conceits and moral dilemmas. He falls in love with Mary and must mellow to hang with her. He hates meth but assumes no one gives a shit so why shouldn’t he grab his share of the dough? He saves lives and ends lives. He reminds me of the old American Western The Man from Laramie in which Jimmy Stewart travels a thousand miles to kill a man he doesn’t know (because he is indirectly responsible for the death of his brother by selling guns to the First Nations). Simon is responsible for everything that Swan is against or is trying to stop, but it’s like trying to debate Hegel or Heidegger; Simon will blow you away with existential arguments that are cleverly baited or irresistible; from those he’ll raise a counter-moral order.

In The Power of the Dog, Benedict Cumberbatch pulled off a similar mix of the terror generated when vulnerability and invulnerability clash, but Mulvey covers more ground at the same high wire.

Despite all the elaborate chases in a variety of vehicles and brush showdowns, the denouement is simple. Yes, and then no. No is about as happey an ending as you can get.

The Looming Tower (10-episode series), based on a book by Lawrence Wright and created by Wright, Dan Futterman, and Alex Gibney (2018). When I talked about watching and liking this series, my conspiracist friends, especially the 9/11 gang who have had decades to become set in their convictions by now, balked mightily. That’s because The Looming Tower depicts no 9/11 inside job, no subtexts or conspiracy, just a series of arrogant, stupid and myopic moves over a couple of decades, culminating in the already legendary Jihadist airplane attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

Combining documentary footage and docudrama, the series begins in the Afghan-Soviet War and works its way through events in Egypt, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Malaysia, Sudan, and, of course, New York and D.C., as actions weave, trigger each other, and cascade into a definitive strike against America, globalization, capitalism, and Christianized atheism.

            The series centers around competition between the CIA’s Alec Station in D.C. and the FBI’s Counterterrorism Center, called I-49, in New York City. Jeff Daniels plays John O’Neill, the actual larger-than-life chief of I-49, scripted in full glory with his mistresses, wife, and pastors. O’Neill died in the 9/11 attacks after taking a job at the World Trade Center after his forced retirement from the FBI. His mistresses as well as his wife attended the real-life funeral. Daniels internalized enough of O’Neill’s folio to enact an impeccable character study. He became O’Neill.

            Tahar Rahim, the top Arab-speaking star available these days no matter the topic or nation—a Mauritanian in Guantánamo, an Armenian in Ottoman Turkey—portrays Ali Soufan, a real-life Muslim Lebanese American FBI agent. Soufan joined the agency on a dare and then became the snake’s head of its hunt for Al Qaeda right up to 9/11, the one agent who foresees what is afoot and but is unable to do anything about it or sound the alarm so it will be heard. He becomes the first source naming Osama bin Laden as 9/11’s architect. As credible a cloak-and-dagger figure as Rahim is, he is heartfully and dashingly matched with an elusive, candid girlfriend Heather (Ella Rae Peck), who meets his changeling character and mysterious missions and romanticism more than halfway. She doesn’t have to know to know.

            The CIA foes, the ones who hid information and prevented the FBI from tracking the 9/11 bombers after they entered the U.S., were Martin Schmidt, played by villain-savvy Peter Sarsgaard, and Diane Marsh, played by Wrenn Schmidt. These are based on real composite CIA officers who decided not to share their intelligence with domestic counterterrorism units. The documentary captures their mindset, world view, and animosity toward O’Neill and the FBI. It is no exaggeration to say that they considered him more their enemy than Osama.

            Whether there was a conspiracy behind 9/11 or not, this film is a brilliant blanket portrait and critique of American dunderheadedness, selfishness, and pettiness. As it shows the on-site evolution of all of that, it takes your breath away to imagine casting so many different scenes, venues, and intrigues with their extras.

Even if there was a higher scheme behind 9/11, The Looming Tower is still an authentic parable for the great American illusion, about itself and the rest of the world. It is also probably the truth (my two cents). These guys and their dupes, high and low, from mindless ambitious underlings to Clinton, Condoleezza and W., had all it took to make 9/11 inevitable.

One telling subplot traces a boy who survives a CIA bombing of a settlement in Afghanistan that kills all his soccer-playing friends and his parents, then sends him wandering into an al-Qaeda training group and ending up part of the crew that motors a suicide bomb into the U.S.S. Cole 3500 miles away in Aden Harbor, Yemen.

In another cameo, a Taliban fanatic—he intentionally scarred women who didn’t follow sharia—says to a CIA official after the Soviets were successfully dispatched with U.S. anti-aircraft missiles, something like, “Now you come after me!”

The response was something like “I’m not coming after you. Yet.”    

Woman Walks Ahead, directed by Susanna White (2018) This loosely biographical, fictionalized film imagines the interaction between Sioux Chief Sitting Bull (played with Sherman-Alexie-like wit, dignity, and depth by Michael Greyeyes) and Brooklyn painter Catherine Weldon (played by Jessica Chastain with pre-feminist feminist bravery and bravado) who comes West on a train to paint his portrait in 1890 between Little Big Horn and Wounded Knee.

Near nothing is known about the historical occasion, though it was recorded that Sitting Bull proposed to her afterwards. That fact is used to create a mostly unexplored romance between them. What is not unexplored is their profound spiritual affair and the way in which it transforms each of them.

Greyeyes’ Big Eagle has enough of Castaneda’s Don Juan Matus and Clint Eastwood’s Ten Bears (from Outlaw Josey Wales) and wry Lone Watie (played by wry Chief Dan George also opposite Josey) to join the lineage of great Native American cinema warriors and spirit journeyers. Sitting Bull’s account of his astral travel as an eagle is tipped into the narrative with a credible touch.

Throughout the film, the interactions among unfriendly soldiers and townspeople, Lakotas, and the two main characters are carefully etched into the cinematic field and, even when transgressive and violent, multidimensionally realized. The film also includes a reenacted ghost dance powerful enough to move many of the indigenous actors to tears.

Minding the Gap, directed by Bing Liu (2018) I’d give this film a more regionally and thematically correct title. Minding the Gap suggests a subway in London, whereas Skateboarders, Rockford, Illinois (my suggestion) tells you what film is. It both is and is not a skateboarding movie. It is in the sense that it is made by skateboarders in the context of skateboarding, though less and less are skateboards a frame of reference as they age past adolescence into their twenties. Iphones allowed them to chronicle their lives along the way—the film was being made well before its time.

It starts out as three boys: Keire Johnson, Bing Liu, and Zach Mulligan. Keire is African-American, Bing Chinese-American, and Zach your regular jerk-off white dude. He gives voice to the fact that poor working-class guys like him don’t actually have the so-called white privilege. Keire backs him by citing a reverse sort of a “black” privilege in having only to beat low expectations while getting to regularly prove people wrong.

            What turns an archive personal cell-phone videos by kids skateboarding into a full-blown film is Bing’s life-long ambition to be a documentary filmmaker. A grant allows him to move forward editing and rearanging his childhood videos, and he interviews his friends anew while editing archival footage of their childhoods and youths into the mix.

            Rockford is the poorest, most underemployed, crime-ridden city in Illinois. People are departing in droves, and it is a dead end for most who stay. Yet the film is full of gentility, compassion, spirit, and quotable wisdom from these three somewhat random youths in the middle of a random working-class neighborhood. These guys (and their girls) are wise because life is wise. Everyone has knowledge and insight because everyone is doing and witnessing and querying it. You could probably make a decent film with any three approximate stand-ins, but this one got made. Once painted, it could hang in the Louvre or the film festival.

All principles in the film are involved in domestic abuse, so deconstructing household violence is a central theme. It is particularly candorous in the case of Zach and his wife Nina. Their conflicts, uncontrolled and occasionally clumsily physical, are exposed with the cell-phone participation and permission of both. Bing tracks the pair all the way through courtship, the birth of their son, child-care classes, breakup, and new partners.

Nina, Zach’s half-Korean-American wife, grows into an equal role in the documentary. She is just as candid and forthcoming as the boys—really one of the boys. She clerks in a movie theater, while Zach is a roofer. In her world, he is the abuser, though she admits she is reactive and provocative. In discussing what happened during his own childhood, Zach confides drolly, “Nowadays they call it child abuse.” The film is about the difference between a hip “nowadays” when it can be made and a darker era where it would have been beyond taboo. A lot of debate, nuance, and Lacanian-like discourage form around a cell-phone recording of Nina threatening to kill Zach—what’s there and what’s been “erased” and what’s unspoken given that so much vitriol fills the space.

            Bing gets to interview his mother about his own abuse by his stepfather, a man who followed her home one night—she was his waitress in a restaurant—and then married her. The exchange, like all others in the film, stays strictly on topic. When there is no answer or explanation for stuff that should never have happened, it is left that way, no pat wrap-up, no pop psychology or sociology.

            Keire proves one of the most good-natured, endearing figures in contemporary cinema and, like his pals, he is playing himself. In his case, he is dealing with the harsh punishments of his late father (“Yes, I cried. Wouldn’t you?”). Yet he frames the “abuse” in the context of his love for the man and the culture that made them both the way they were. Through the film, he is a dishwasher, then a waiter, who finally leaves his family and Rockford for Denver, a mournful parting.

            Again, what stands out is the wisdom delivered by regular folks who speak from their hearts and souls and have come to recognize that there is more to be gained from transparency than poses. Keire talks about seeing his father dead and realizing that, “wow, I guess that’s like dead.” Zach talks about how do you address a newborn baby like a person. Bing admits to the others that he is making the film in order to see his own reflection. Nina talks about finding the gumption to stand up for herself. No scriptwriter could come up with this stuff; it is perfect language. Minding the Gap shows that life is what writes scripts. Think of how many great conversations you have overheard and forgotten, that sparked, then fizzled in time and the wind like a Zen gong.

            The extra features on the disk allow you to see the grand outcome of Bing’s playing around with an iPhone and camera while skateboarding as a kid. Minding the Gap garnered international fame for all four major players, as they get to attend film festivals, pose in dress suits before photographers, and answer questions about their so-called lives. They have scripted a prize-winning story, one beloved throughout the world, merely by living honestly and having a nascent filmmaker in their klatch in a hell hole like Rockford, Illinois. All films are slices of greater realities—lame slices, even the best of them. This documentary is among the very best.

Sollers Point, directed by Matthew Porterfield (2018). This crisp, down-to-earth movie hits race, class, gender and being a young white male in trouble in redneck urban America. It skirts a familiar line in current culture where street culture ricochets through urban mass, disarray, race and gender (and gender mixed with race), and a blatantly rigged economic deck in which there are no winning cards nor could there be nor does anyone expect them. Yet there are breaks in the clouds and metaphysical transmissions from nowhere (where the fascist right wing and underclass left wing fuse productively and peremptorily, especially as alliances within the Prison Industrial Complex).

Star McCaul Lombardi, cast because he is both tough and vulnerable, fights his way through countless gauntlets but keeps reopening scars of his own tenderness and depth. Porterfield’s prior films aren’t as crisp or well-paced but are just as real and smart. The interviews with him on Special Features show an engaged guy who knows philosophy, film history, and can parse political shadings.

Skate Kitchen, directed by Crystal Moselle (2018). Real-life skateboarders, with a focus on teen women but not without a crew of raggedy-assed boys, all get dropped into a script much like a Larry Clark movie. Reviewers differ as to whether the film’s language is “valid” (to use one of the favorite words of the skaters) or bogus. I don’t care because, if it isn’t how these kids would have really talked or what they would have said about themselves talking, it is a hip-hop-like derivation and musical and literary enough in its flow through the skateboard action, adolescent intrigues, and an edgy background track to make for a grand symphony or extended rock video.

I am reminded of Clark’s Wassup Rockers and Marfa Girl and an older cinema odyssey, The Warriors. Skate Kitchen is held together by less of a plot because times have changed, and those worlds have lost many of their narratives. Wassup Rockers, which is about Ramones-loving Salvadoran and Guatemalan skateboarders in LA invading Beverly Hills, still echoes Homer’s Odyssey, while The Warriors is based on Xenophon’s Anabasis. But in an era of smartphones, compulsory texting, and YouTube, there’s no bardic chronicling because the natural flow of life is interrupted digitally to the degree that it becomes digital and is lived in its own aliases. Street kids growing up in a personal-device-dominated culture assume that their lives naturally fission into transmitted images, jive, and fragments of lived experiences.

That the skateboarding scenes are scripted is overridden by the implicit scripting of life itself, so they wouldn’t implicitly scripted even if they weren’t. The tension between reality and acting is fluid.

Let’s go back to the language, which I found especially compelling. I didn’t need a dictionary to guess most of it, but it is clearly a different English, rhythmically modified and re-choreographed to speak to a patois of social gestures operating at their own speed, candor and privacy (. Many films poke into this language, but this one speaks it throughout like a rap opera or sound dance except when adults intrude with their drone-speak.

Mid90s, directed by Jonah Hill (2018). I don’t think of Hill’s directorial debut as a movie as much as another combination lyric, rock opera, and live painting. It’s yet another skateboarding film, this one a coming-of-age saga about a boy Stevie, maybe thirteen or fourteen, played brilliantly by Sunny Suljic, who hangs with an older group—Ray, Fourth Grade, Fuckshit, etc., around a skateboard shop, where he learns about race, sex, addiction, life, death, and skateboarding. It’s also an initiation film that reminds me of an indigenous Australian Aborigine ceremony, in which the boy (Stevie) has to go through a few ritual deaths to be re-made as a human. When the director explicates on these matters in the “special features,” he’s a wonderful guy and all, but nothing he says about the film he made cues one to the sophistication, intelligence, and elegance of his own movie.

The soundtrack is brilliant in the way it switches from Philip Glass to hip-hop, rap, electronic, and an original score by Trent Teznor and Atticus Ross. The song cuts are sharply contrasting and import a shifting mood.

My favorite scene is Ray (Na-kel Smith, a fount of nasty but gentle wisdom) giving Stevie a lecture about why life is hard and so his own situation can’t really be all that bad. Then they go skating together, down the center of the highway, through the day, silently into night, through the park with its lamps like lunar globes, to the courthouse. Their transformative ride lays the central labyrinth and apotheosis of the movie.

Stevie’s introduction to sex by a girl at a party is exquisitely seductive, guileless, filled with heart, and yet dark and salacious too in the milieu. The older girl savors Stevie’s innocent curiosity;he hasn’t turned into an asshole boy yet, maybe he never will. He’s cute and a male object. She is a goddess vision descended from the great adult dance party.

In an early exchange at the skateshop, before Stevie emerges as an initiate, the guys are testing racial boundaries and trying to goad each other. The question of whether blackmen can get sunburned makes the circuit before it lands on Stevie. He has no answer for a really long time and finally is forced to say something. He looks confused as he asks, “What’s a blackman?” That’s race blindness for you—he didn’t even know that they are black and he is white. That sort of core non-racist phenomenology guides the film and the world it comes out of. From then on Stevie’s nickname is Sunburn.

Call it a long rock video or a stand-up comedy ensemble or SoCal street myth.

Capernaum, directed by Nadine Labaki (2018). It’s not comfortable to watch, at times slow-moving and ethnographic, almost pedantic in its attention to details of poverty and deprivation. Though there is nothing wrong or misguided in that, I want to be clear that is not remotely like Slumdog Millionaire or other works in its genre especially at the moments it superficially is. The power of Capernaum is under its surface. The wave gathers everything bleakly cut into life in a surge of momentum and delivers it up to the closing cuts. The film is never as powerful or haunting or divinely witnessing in each of its parts—though many of them are beautiful and stark—as it is in the final apocalyptic, redemptive whole.

I need to start over. This is a complicated cinematic event. On the one hand, it is a fiercely unsparing look at a lifestyle, or absence of lifestyle or home, that is contagiously crossing our planet under the shadow of regional war, high-tech weapons, warlord regency, and climate change. People are displaced, lose their identities to the Hobbesian underbelly as well as the Orwellian State. They are corralled in vast amorphous slums in which they behave as cruelly to other have-nots lower in herring-gull-like pecking orders as the smug and terrified haves surrounding them treat them.

Labaki uses a lot of her cinema time to document the demise on the ground in Lebanon, from aerial shots of the maze in which the refugees and displaced dwell, to ethnographic slices of markets, streets, and neighborhoods, which are more like homeless encampments with houses made of scrap metal and wood. These “urbs” are not real streets or Googleable locales.

We learn that Labaki turned twelve hours of documentary into 126 minutes of quasi-narrative feature, bending the actual landscape into her story while enlisting some of its characters to tell a loosely hung proverb of abandonment, betrayal, and children without childhoods.

As in many films these days in which documentary alternates with cinema, actors play close to their own real-life roles; they even help to reconstruct them dramatically. The plot is real to them, even if it is not their precise story, and they can use the filming to alter their condition. Art and life converge and spill into each other to create a new medium.

Several key cast members were deported from Lebanon right after the shooting, suffering fates they barely escaped in the story. That speaks to Reality TV as politics (in Italy, Brazil, the U.S., Russia, etc., too), how the authorities closely monitor the ground from which art arises, as it tries to attain a greater truth by being ever quicker on the heels of a diminished world it whirs through its own electronic devices. The film can’t escape being a portal into the Philip -K.-Dick-like hell realm from which it arises. Like an “Adopt an Orphan” or “Save the Children” ad it is closer to the real Reality than the alt-world of gates and guarded communities around it or the audience voyeuristically watching it in the leisure of their Netflix-served households.

At the same time, Capernaum is a slightly surreal drama in which time is distorted and rearranged sans Hollywood fades and flashbacks. Instead, quick splicing and unexplained breaks render cause and effect almost irrelevant to the sequences in which they occur because it is a vicious cycle in which every outcome is overdetermined by countless causes, and even the most optimistic proposition is a hopelessly twisted maze or a brazen scam that will lead to the same dead end.

The characters, especially twelve-year-old star Zain and his parents, occasionally speak lines at a more sophisticated pitch of philosophy than the narrative in which they are imbedded, almost as if they step out of roles to become Greek choruses for the misery around them. They turn possible blame and accusation into statements worthy of Hamlet.

In one surreal instance, Zain sues his parents for giving birth to him. In another he goes on national t.v. to deliver a screed against the entire society, a video which is viewed by his jail cellmates in a large chained enclosure. He proclaims things like, “All the insults, all the beatings, all the kicking. The chain, the hose, or the belt? Life is dogshit. Dirtier than the shoes on my feet. I’m living in hell. The nicest word I hear is fuck off, you sonofabitch. Piss off you, fucker!”

Yet even more powerful is the speech that Zain’s otherwise brutal and irresponsible mother delivers to the judge, in effect saying, “Fucker, you have no idea what my reality is like or how honorably I have behaved under unendurable circumstances. I live and work like a dog for you to stand here and judge me? Not in your worst nightmare will you ever live my life. In my position you would have already hanged yourself. So don’t tell me who I am.“

From the film’s beginning to end, Zain is able to be its moral voice, the moral voice of a planetary diaspora. He has no idea of what that is because he is only twelve and truly thinks (as  bothcharacter and actor) that the world is shit and life is already useless, so why accept any kudos or honors or even a gentrified starring role? Yet he intervenes multiple times at personal risk, for instance, to protect his sister from being sold as a bride at eleven (an event that will take place anyway and proves fatal for her because of a brutal husband). He refuses his parents their moral relativism, then runs away from home and ends up in street fracases which would have challenged the ethics of a monk. Young as he is, he responds to them with compassion, selflessness, and clarity, always at his own expense. In particular, his caring for infant Yonas, building a wagon for him of spare parts, carting him and feeding him like a mother, is merciful and meticulous, while belying that it is what his own parents failed at.

The actor Zain and Zain are not that different; it is the movie that turns the former into the latter while using the shared role to redeem him. As the hero of Capernaum, he become, barely, the hero, or not, of his own world.

The film rises to an apotheosis when a religious qua circus-like minstrel crew comes to entertain the prisoners, a locked-up census that includes Zain at this point for his knife attack on his sister’s so-called husband after her death. The minstrels are playing and dancing in a way that triggers an inappropriately gay soundtrack, intended to bring cheer to the prisoners but is actually a morbid counterpoint to the demise of the societies for which they are playing—a nigredo of Gaza, Oaxaca, Managua, Libya, Damascus, Mumbai, Cairo, Tegucigalpa (Honduras), Bangladesh, the favelas of Brazil, West Virginia—count them! As the camera pans, I think of superpower wars, Israeli fascism (sorry, but my plaint is avowedly not anti-Semitic), drugs, crime (recreational and economic), reptile-brain violence, and a justice system that accomplishes little more than walling off the wealthy from the damage they and their enablers create—but then the music is replaced, as the scene continues, with a theme from the Underworld, a slow dirge that matches the trapped and imprisoned in what Claude Lévi-Strauss once called, without realizing how quickly it would become prophetic and pandemic, a “world on the wane.”

Where we go from here if anywhere, beyond the copacetic home screen, is revelation by art and a celebration of what love remains.

The Hate U Give, directed by George Tillman, Jr. (2018). The Hate U Give is as slick and watchable as, say, a vintage episode of a t.v. series like Mad Men or Mission Impossible!, yet intelligent, risk-taking, and innovative so that it sneaks up on you because it is so deceptively pleasant and absorbing to watch. The language is simple, clear, and direct, and the film deals with emotionally complex topics without simplifying or polarizing for political correctness for cheap dramatic effect.

The movie orbits adroitly around a Black Lives Matter situation—police stop black motorist without cause, police end up shooting innocent black man because of profiling and miscalculation. More specifically, the story centers around about a sixteen-year-old black girl, Starr who, while a passenger in her childhood friend’s car (he had a crush on her once), watches the troubled but unarmed young dude get shot by a white police officer at an unnecessary traffic stop, and then has to deal with the consequences —of the event and of being its only living witness other than the officer—in multiple communities while seeking her own truth, including the nature of her blackness and her overall humanity and how they are not the same thing but have to be made over so that they are.

The film is titled and wrapped around a lyric from Tupac Shakur, a reverse acronym: THUG. The full line goes: “The hate u give little infants fucks everybody.” or THUGLIFE. This is as facile and evasive, encrypted and rapper-coded for direct transmission, especially when you add the fallout of Shakur’s short life.

The Hate U Give takes deep dives into (1) code-switching (Starr attends an almost all-white prep school where she has to damp her personality so as not to appear too “ghetto”); (2) black on black crime (especially in gang-ruled black neighborhoods—Starr’s father is a former gang member who did time); (3) white people politically over-engaged in black racial causes and internalizing black culture while being covertly racist (they don’t like black people nearly as much as they pretend to or like repackaged black culture); and (4) stray insights like “a black man can never be unarmed [in the eyes of a white policeman] because the color of his skin is a weapon.“

The characters are individually inspiring and on fire like in Spike Lee films; the scenes are morally thrilling. Though the politics are unabashedly liberal, the movie shows the other side too: the police rescue Starr and her family on at least two occasions from a local black gang. That’s the gift of coasting in sitcom delight. It’s a fable, and fables charm, even if (along the way) people die. Here the fable is about polarity: how to love under the force of hate, how to be courageous without being fake macho and foolhardy, how to have pride and self-respect without risking your life (or, for that matter, your popularity, which can be near the same in high school).

The Hate U Give is based on a young-adult novel (author Angie Thomas is one of its producers), so the landscape is young, latter-day “high-school confidential,” but that’s also the point. Those fifties and sixties arenas have long vanished and been replaced by something thornier and more ambiguous around both race and gender, even while classes and proms and coming-of-age initiations proceed through their retro masquerades.

Everything by Tillman, Jr. is good, but I think that Notorious, the 2009 biopic of Notorious B.I.G. is the cream of the others. It brings rap, street culture, and corporate corruption into one pot. It declares, basically, that if you are going to fully imagine and ceremonialize gangsta, you are going to become gangsta without being aware of crossing a line, and you are going to die gansta. Tillman makes the point without forfeiting the individuality and nuanced depth of his gansta characters.

Soul Food (1997) the movie, not the series based on it, has the richness of A Raisin in the Sun and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

Men of Honor (2000) is a signature account of Navy racism, a biopic of Carl Bashear (Cuba Gooding, Jr. plays the part), the diver whose perseverance overcame pernicious obstacles. Robert de Niro plays racist officer Billy Sunday to villain perfection, then becomes Bashear’s patron saint.

Faster (2010) is a bizarre monomaniacal fable in which a man newly out of jail (Dwayne Johnson, the driver) intends to kill everyone who sent him there in a spree that begins immediately on his release and ends with a biblically framed revelation and resurrection. It’s Jean Cocteau meets Steven Seagal, and both are saved.

Ben is Back, directed by Peter Hedges (2018). If the opioid crisis needed its own movie, Ben is Back is it. Tightly tiered, as deviously truth-telling and candorously deceiving as drugs, addictions, and their languages, it takes you all the way in, and further, and further yet, and then maybe out.

Every major character grows in the film, evolving from simple yea and nay to confronting what these drugs actually are and do—their human meanings and implications. Every character sheds his or her pasted-on hyper-vigilant, hyper-reassuring, hyper-12-Step, trying-too-hard-to-be-this-or-that (or not-be this-or-that) identity and finds a spirit and fearlessness at the heart of the crisis and its demons. Layer by layer, the movie undresses veneer and acting out along with the usual symptomatic responses to what is happening behind the poisons, deceptions, and fake cures. Because you can’t cure addiction until you cure the society and the worldview it comes from.

The opiates are more horrible than anything that they are called or known by, and that’s already as bad as it gets. Yet they are frosted over in Ben Is Back with the icing of a suburban American Christmas, its sparkles and ornamental panaceas and stopgaps and consumer props and hymns, which make the matter all the more ghastly and horrific, a pharmaceutical-mafia scam being played upon a dying MAGA nation praying for snow, literal, metaphorical, and antipodal.

The setting is suburban New York City, probably Yonkers, but this could be any Midwestern or Southern or Western or New England or Idaho town.

What is happening in MAGA country, underlying the opioid pox, is a skeleton of Wall Street pseudo-prosperity with figments of false desires and panaceas, gangs, militias, narco-lords, warlords, and the line at your local pharmacy, fed by big Pharma and Mr. D. J. Trump himself, raking it in and pretending—no, not even pretending anymore, to be slapping on a fix while in 100% collusion with the pushers and pimps.

Not all of this plays explicitly in the movie, but it is etched in the acts and suffering, and in the last-ditch heroism of the characters. The only way you fight these demons, or confront them, is to take off your own mask and face your terror when you go into their world. That’s what the characters do, and that’s what makes it a liberation and the opioid crisis’ movie.

Ben (Lucas Hedges) comes home for Christmas from his rehab facility. He’s not supposed to, but he does anyway and doesn’t tell his family the truth. Once back for Christmas, he can’t evade the tinselly myopia and lame affirmations or the allure, and the gangs and outlaws and narco-substate behind the perpetration. They find him as certainly a police dog sniffs out the drug caches.

Julia Roberts as Ben’s mom Holly Burns makes a transition through the film from the brittle, neurotic, defensive Mary Tyler Moore mom of Ordinary People to a Great Mother capable of finally seeing her son in his own terms, also sacrificing for him on real terms. She is going to find him one more time before it is too late.

Lucas Hedges, son of the director (and Roberts’ movie son) portrays all the nuances of addiction: hope, surrender, guilt, honesty, dishonesty, charm, dismissal, voltage, play-acting, confession from the heart that can never go deep enough to get it all because that lies behind the heart in a space that has probably been forfeit since the White guys took the land over from the Warriors. He finally achieves the grit and integrity and courage that the world of the drugs has given him—the cure that is lodged in every disease. He becomes a last-ditch warrior.

At the film’s beginning, we see a tragic, lost boy, trying too hard to prove that he has recovered. He knows he hasn’t, but he hasn’t told himself yet, so he thinks he can fool everyone, at least long enough to get his boots on the ground. By the end, he has renounced all pretenses, lies, and poses. While he has nearly od-ed, he has hit on an essence that will allow him, or some part of him, to survive at last, something that rehab couldn’t provide because rehab just put a bandaid on the real disease. That makes Ben different from the ones who are dead or wandering the streets or hanging on to shreds of hope in 12-Step groups pleading for help from their sponsors.

As for Roberts’ Holly, it does seem as if the mother of Ordinary People got transposed to the present day with a second marriage and second generation of children. But the present crisis is beyond the mere happenstance of boating accidents—none of it is happenstance anymore—it is a criminal enterprise, white collar to blue to street lord and runners. It includes the dufus, demented doctor who put him on opioids for a childhood injury whom she confronts in a restaurant with the stark ungarnished truth, saying essentially, ‘You fucked up, and you fucked him and me up too for all you care.” He doesn’t even know what she is talking about because he still doesn’t know that he was a drug runner. Eventually she hits total bottom, finds terms for her mission, and rescues her boy (though we don’t get to know this for sure).

Another thing that this “re-casting” of the “Ordinary People” milieu does is spell out the enormous wealth disparity in the current world and the dreary inevitable fates of the addicted and homeless. Without her cinema second husband and his wealth, Holly and her children—she finally puts this openly to Ben—wouldn’t have a shot at recovery. They’d be on the street or in jail, or, in other circumstances, in some migrant detention center. Instead, she gets to tail him to and through the Underworld, confront its archons, including the wasted and anointed corpses of his childhood friends, excuse and bless their pain, and then confront and defy their ruthless contagion and the narco-mafia hierarchy and killing machine.

The opioid crisis’ movie is as apocalyptic as a concentration camp on the Mexican border because it is part of the same spreading shadow.

White Boy Rick, directed by Yann Demange (2018). In eighties Detroit’s automobile-apocalypse, coke-disco, crack-epidemic world, Rick Wershe, Jr. was a black-identified white boy. He is constantly in the wrong place at the wrong time through the many schemes he can’t escape, the pieces of sky that come crumbling or crash down on him with the debris of Detroit, all the cons within cons he gets involved in that lead to his not knowing if he is a spy or counterspy. He ends up paying for all this ambiguity by spending most of his life behind bars—the real Rick Wershe, Jr. does.

In this version Matt McConaughey as Rick Wershe, Sr., co-stars with Bruce Dern, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Brian Tyree Henry, and Piper Laurie, etc., but they plucked White Boy Rick, fifteen-year-old Richie Merritt, out of real-time detention in a Baltimore high school and, with no previous acting experience or even knowing beforehand who his co-actors would be. He carried the film. He visited the real Rick in jail, got the story and style from the horse’s mouth, and mimicked it perfectly because it was close to his own vibe.

Demange wanted street, someone who exuded white-boy “street” in black culture, and he nailed it with Merritt.

Boy Erased, directed by Joel Edgerton and based on Gerard Conley’s 2016 memoir of the same title (2018). Lucas Hedges again. This film is as low-key and intense as its main character, Jared Eamons, played by Hedges who has mastered a wide range of edgy late-teen contrarian roles. In Ben is Back, he did opium addiction (above), and appears also in Mid90s and, as a younger teen, in Manchester by the Sea. Here he plays the coming-out-gay son of minister/car dealer Marshall Eamons (Russell Crowe)–he is a new car dealer, otherwise, you’d need Harry Dean Stanton. His mom this time, Nancy Eamons, is played by Nicole Kidman.

Boy Erased is an ironically liminal title for the situation because he, the “boy,” isn’t what is being erased, what is is his sexual identity. Based on a true story, the narrative thread is located almost entirely in conversion therapy, one of those pseudo-Christian residential camps—boot camps—that try to un-gay gay youths and convert them into “normal” macho young dudes. This one is located in Memphis, Tennessee, where chief therapist Victor Sykes (Joel Edgerton) explains that the boys (mostly) have a choice and have only been misled by bad parenting and pop culture. They can still become real men.  

Flashbacks into Jared’s earlier life are gentle and poignant, so Hedges has to “cover” a range of emotions from nascent desire and attraction to repulsion and terror over what who he is means about his possibilities for intimacy and partnership, with a spectrum of ambivalences and sharp seesaws in between. In that sense, it is not a black-and-white (gay-and-straight) story because Jared has to interpret his own experiences, come to moral as well as erotic judgments, and make complex decisions about right actions through the meandering course of events. His words (from memory, not necessarily a direct quote) near film’s end speak his decision and do so with moral clarity, reflecting the real lesson of a grueling conversion camp, “I’m gay and I’m your son, and neither of those things is going to change.” Guess what, this is what “straight camp” did for me!

The film’s texture is two-fold. Its broader sweep, as noted, takes us through the conversion therapy. We as viewers (at least most of us) may react with horror to the techniques, dishonesty, and illegitimacy of the camp’s regimen, religious philosophy, and fake “counselors.” However, Jared and the other consignees have to arrive at that truth, each on their own. I mean, this is no slam-dunk “gay pride” parade of rebellion. It proceeds step by step and follow the moral struggles of each kid and the trainers too.

Edgerton makes meaningful investments in several other boys’ (and one girl’s) lives as a way of exposing the pathos, darkness, and madness within gender fluctuation that gets excavated by enforced cultural frames—well beyond sexual orientation. Identity itself is rigorously deconstructed in an attempt to make immaculate clones of the repressed desires and rigid actions of the adults, to turn them into GI Joes and Barbies, robots capable of acts but not lives. The film’s one suicide echoes Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket; the physical resemblance of that boy (Cameron played by Britton Sear) to Vince D’Onofrio’s Private Pyle in Vietnam-era basic training may or may not be accidental.

The other erased-unerased landscape is that of younger and then older Jared as he goes from seemingly well-adjusted high-school cis dating and sports to college gay flirtation, seduction, sexual violence and, ultimately (four years later in an addendum), acceptance and gay male maturity.

Tender scenes between him and his first gay confidante and lover, Xavier (Théodore Pellerin), begin at an art-gallery meeting; then, as they evolve, carry the weight of a moral universe antithetical to the one portrayed during the conversion therapy. God is present in that art gallery and the bedroom too—Xavier makes sure of that—but it is a different God from the deity of the conversion therapists, not a judging and uncompromising avenger but one willing to explore eros and desire and conduct a dialogue with his flock. Of course, the identity of God always rests on who is speaking for Him. The film is finally as much about spiritual evolution as it is about sexual desires for, where cultural, religious, and erotic tropes and taboos come together, God vanishes under a procession of biblical and anti-biblical mirages.

Searching, directed by Aneesh Chaganty (2018). I am not going to discuss this rather ordinary detective story about a widower father searching for his missing sixteen-year-old girl (played by Korean Americans John Cho and Michelle La). The plot is fueled and counterpointed by a backdrop of police incompetence and cover-up. I am reviewing it to point out that the story takes places solely on devices, in a removed virtual reality in which many of us spend a good deal of our lives these days. There are no indoors or outdoors, no real life, no actual landscape or weather, just images on devices. They are from iPhones, drones, news ’copters, TV news shows, street surveillance cameras, mini-dv cams, webcams, etc.

Chaganty’s iPhone was the main camera. It is like writing a whole novel without the letter “e.” Not as difficult but of a similar  genre.

What started out as a short gimmick by Chaganty, a twenty-five-year-old former Google employee who knew the ins and outs of the virtual realm, its navigational tricks and shortcuts, turns into an entire Arthur Conan Doyle mystery story. The father solves the crime and recovers his daughter in the nick of time before she perishes because he uses the Internet and her own devices to search for her outside the protocols and operations of real world. It’s the real world where she has been deceived and gotten lost. The real world is too corrupted and myopic to know where or how to look. He must find her virtually before he can find her physically. The world where she got lost is virtual, and there is no other maze in which to follow clues.

In the film, the police detective who volunteered for the case, Sergeant Rosemary Vick, is actually the villain, having rigged the attempt to solve the crime so as actually to cover it and turn it into the perfect crime. Online records override her and leave an electron trail. She was acting on behalf of her son Robert (Steve Michael Eich) who accidentally pushed Margot Kim off a cliff during an argument. Vick assumes that she died there, but she survived five days without food or water before David Kim sloves her location online.  

Talk about geo-cache riddles superseding real life. But that’s the point: by watching the entire film, the entanglement and its untangling, without a real landscape, and gradually accepting the device and going down its rabbit hole, you are shown just how much you yourself (and just about everyone else) have bought in to this artificial world, and how hard it is going to be for any of us to extract ourselves, even if our lives depend on it.

We have been kidnapped too, without realizing it, and have bought an AI substitute landscape so deeply that it will take all our resources to extricate ourselves. That solution of the film’s crime is the precursor to getting ourselves out of the same maze.

The Current War, directed by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon (2019). A totally ordinary, competent telling of the competition between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse to become the tycoon of the new miracle energy, electricity, The Current War is saved by visitation of the mysterious otherworldly purveyor of a different, still prophetic current, Nikolai Tesla, and a Discovery Channel quality lesson on the nature and use of different forms of electricity.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, directed by Quentin Tarantino (2019). I don’t like the film as much as I like the genre: a bit science-fiction; a bit alternate-history time travel; a bit docudrama; a bit Forest Gump pseudo-history; a bit Raymond Chandler noir; a bit like Quentin Tarantino—meaning a bricolage of Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill, Reservoir Dogs, and Oliver Stone. I expect Lee Harvey Oswald and Vladimir Putin to walk in (and out) hand in hand. Bruce Lee and Steve McQueen do, but not as Bruce Lee or Steve McQueen.

           Ever creatively weird and perversely novel,Tarantino re-casts the Manson killings of Sharon Tate and the LaBiancas so that they don’t actually happen. Instead, they are interrupted and turned into the Keystone Kops burlesque they might have become, should have become, did become in many alternate realities and botched attempts by other Mansons and victims. In this alternate reality, two anti-hero drop-in heroes played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt (playing Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta playing Vincent and Jules in Pulp Fiction too). That’s the “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” factor—to do a variant “once upon a time” on ritual-magic murders, and by way of Hollywood, which is the only alternate dream palace where it can take place. You might even find yourself as an extra somewhere in this movie.

            I think that what is happening, other than entertainment and a blend of alternate histories, time travels, and pop noir is interchangeable life and art and an increasingly comic-strip-like reality. By imposing the genre on a somewhat earlier era that took itself, rightfully, more seriously, Tarantino is showing us where we have ended up by showing that neither he nor we know where that actually is or how we got here.

Mindhunter, directed by David Fincher (2017-2019). David didn’t direct every episode individually, but he is the guiding force behind all nineteen, and his influence is always felt in his sensitivity to detail and his capturing the subtle ramifications of events that most directors miss. For instance, this serial about the FBI’s founding of a criminal profile unit in the late 1970s into the early 1980s covers the impacts of the criminals profiled on the lives of the FBI personnel. Other crime shows may touch on the interrelationship between the investigators and the criminals they investigate, but Mindhunter captures the ways in which they evolve from the same obsessions and predispositions and thus track along the converging trajectories into a shared understanding. The fact that Mindhunter deals with mostly with criminals already incarcerated and an analysis of their motives and behavioral drivers allows a fuller convergence than normal, and the fact that Fincher’s sensibility leaves its mark on the convergence makes it even subtler and more convergent.

For a sense of this sensibility, note the discontinued 2007 show John From Cincinnati, which never really got off the ground; it brought together astral projection, resurrection of a dead bird (a canary), masturbation, the Monad, LSD, surf noir, JC or JFC  (Jesus Christ or Jesus Fucking Christ), and magical realism. Where magical realism meets astral projection and resurrection, there is an overlap in which it is possible to leave the meaning of events unresolved. Likewise, in Mindhunter, there is an overlap between the fantasies of the killers and the fantasies of the police.

            Here I have made an error, confusing David Milch (John From Cincinnati) with David Fincher (Mindhunter), I could just delete the whole discussion of John From Cincinnati, but I will leave it because it is relevant to the overall vortex I am writing about.

            Mindhunter is a serial about serial killers, a pun to be noted upfront so that it can be set aside, allowing me to discuss either without additional confusion about which I mean. Serials are difficult to review because they are many times the length of a regular movie, in this case roughly nineteen times, so I will have to confine my remarks to high points and generalities.

            Mindhunter is based on a 1995 book of the same title with the subtitle Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit by John E. Douglas and Mark Olshaker; thus, there are three time points: 1977-1982 when the events take place, 1994-1995 when they are documented, and 2016-2020 when they are made into a T.V. show created and mostly written by English-Australian screenwriter and playwright Joe Penhall and directed by Fincher. Mindhunter is further divided into two seasons of nineteen episodes, season 1 (2017, ten episodes corresponding to events taking place from 1977 to 1979) and season 2 (2018, nine episodes corresponding to events taking place in 1980 and 1981)

Mindhunter stars Jonathan Groff as Holden Ford, arguably the main character, a special agent in the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit. Only loosely based on FBI agent John E. Douglas in the book, Ford is an intuitive risk-taker, always ahead of his FBI partner Bill Tench (Holt McCallany); yet he is also most permeable agent to the convicts they interview and the most susceptible to the crimes they undertake. He knows how to mind-meld into psychopathic space, hence is somewhat of a psychopath himself.

He ultimately has a panic attack during a follow-up visit with serial killer Ed Kemper (played brilliantly by Cameron Britton). Kemper had just attempted suicide—or faked suicide to draw Ford back to him. Ford can help but come. In the process, he loses a sense of his own identity and when Kemper embraces him, psychopath and psychopathic behavior analyst merge; Ford disintegrates (see the script below).

            Bill Tench, Ford’s watchdog as well as his partner, is based somewhat less loosely on FBI agent Robert K. Ressler. He has to accompany Ford and is subject to his singlemindedness and subjective leaps as well as his crime-solving and behavior-diagnosing brilliance. Tench is permeable too, permeable to Ford but also permeable to serial killers in a different, more repressed way than Ford, permeable to his wife and her dilemmas arising from his work, and permeable to his adopted six-year-old son who is mainly mute.

Tench and Ford are as inseparable as Laurel and Hardy, Abbot and Costello, and Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson without our having to know which is which. In Mindhunter, their destinies, professional and emotional, are interlocked. Tench is the one who flies to California and brings Ford back from the hospital after his panic attack.

Hannah Gross plays Debbie Mitford, a graduate student in Sociology at the University of Virginia and an aficionado of Émile Durkheim. I am about to present their opening dialogue from Episode 1 in the script. It is long, but it gives the tone of the series and sets up Ford’s character. Debbie doesn’t carry over to Season 2. It is Holden’s breaking up with her two and a half years after meeting her that helps precipitate his panic attack. He has so merged with the killers he is studying that he is unable to have a normal romance or sex life, an epidemic problem in today’s world of internet porn and AI. A November edition of Sixty Minutes shows bright, young Kenyan men who are paid a pittance ($2.00 per hour) to tag online pornography, sodomy, and sexual mutilation having lost their ability to make love with their partners. Here is my clean-up of the script. Holden is at a bar because he was having a drink with a colleague:

Holden notices a girl walk in with her friend, wearing a short blue jumpsuit and ankle boots.

Debbie comes to the bar to order, standing right beside Holden. He looks her up and down and she notices, untroubled.

DEBBIE.

Hey.

HOLDEN.

Hey. . .

DEBBIE.

What are you looking at?

HOLDEN.

I just like your outfit. What is that, a jumpsuit? What do you call that?

DEBBIE.

This? I call it “a jumpsuit.”

HOLDEN.

Stylish.

DEBBIE.

What do you call that? (indicates his suit) You look like a Mormon. You look like my dad.

HOLDEN.

Is he a Mormon?

DEBBIE.

No but he looks like one.

HOLDEN.

So does mine. He bought me this suit, as a matter of fact.

DEBBIE.

Did he buy you those nice shiny shoes?

HOLDEN (nods).

I have one brown pair and one black pair. I also have sneakers but I had to buy those myself.

DEBBIE.

What kind of adult lets their parents choose their clothes for them?

He looks at her, doesn’t have an answer She turns to wait for bar service.

HOLDEN (ambiguously).

Are you coming onto me?

DEBBIE (less ambiguously)

Sure, that’s my technique: the emasculating approach.

They smile a little awkwardly, neither sure where to go from here. Holden takes a drink from his glass; Debbie doesn’t make eye contact. Her friend is now busy talking to other students.    

HOLDEN.

Having a good time?

DEBBIE.

It’s my birthday today.

HOLDEN.

Happy birthday. How old are you?

DEBBIE.

Twenty-four.

HOLDEN.

You don’t look old enough to be in here.

DEBBIE (looking him up and down).

What are you a narc?

HOLDEN.

FBI actually. Special Agent Holden. Can you tell?

DEBBIE.

Everybody can tell. You got a gun?

HOLDEN.

I have one, but I’m not going to show it to you.

DEBBIE.

Oh nuts.

HOLDEN. I’m more of a teacher. Right up the road at Quantico.

DEBBIE.

What do you teach?

HOLDEN.

Hostage Negotiation, such as it is.

DEBBIE.

Holy cow.

HOLDEN.

You really think I look like a narc?  (He looks at himself in the mirror behind the bar, shrugs.)

DEBBIE.

Are you kidding?

HOLDEN.

I don’t see it. What?

DEBBIE.

You stick out like a sore thumb.

HOLDEN focuses on a group of tough-looking African-American guys playing pool; they aer dressed like car mechanics.

HOLDEN.

What do you expect me to do, infiltrate the Black Panthers?

DEBBIE. Those guys are not Black Panthers. They’re engineering students. Go talk to them. Get some black dudes in the FBI.

HOLDEN.

We have a black dude. In Maryland.

DEBBIE.

Just the one, huh?

He drinks and tries to mind his own business for a minute. He notices Debbie’s friend joining two other friends, staring at him curiously.

HOLDEN.

You’ve got the wrong idea about me.

DEBBIE.

Are you going to “book me?”

HOLDEN.

If you want.

DEBBIE.

Handcuffs?

He smiles uncertainly’ she smirks; they drink. A band is sitting up on a low stage under a brick archway on the other side of the room. She gets out a softpack of Kent cigarettes and lights one.

DEBBIE.

I’m here to see this really cool band from Detroit. You ever been to Detroit?

HOLDEN.

I was a street agent there.

DEBBIE.

I can’t believe they’re here. Used to play PJs in Corktown. You know Corktown?

HOLDEN.

PJ’s?

DEBBIE,

Used to be a furniture store.

HOLDEN.

No, they always sold liquor. That whole furniture thing was just a front that started during prohibition.

DEBBIE.

Where are you really from?

HOLDEN.

Everywhere.

DEBBIE.

The Midwest, right?

HOLDEN.

I grew up in the Midwest, but I was born in Brooklyn.

DEBBIE.

You don’t come across like a guy from New York.

HOLDEN.

You don’t go over like a girl from Corktown. Buy you a drink?

She shrugs. He signals the bartender who immediately drops what he’s

doing and fixes them a drink.

HOLDEN.

So you’re a co-ed?

DEBBIE.

Post-grad.

HOLDEN.

What’s your thing?

DEBBIE.

I’m writing my thesis on Durkheim’s Labelling Theory on Deviancy.

HOLDEN.

Wow!

DEBBIE.

You know who Durkheim is?

HOLDEN.

No. But I know what deviancy is.

DEBBIE.

You do, huh?

HOLDEN.

It’s an occupational hazard.

DEBBIE.

Well.  . . Durkheim says “all forms of deviancy are simply a challenge to the normalized repressiveness of the state.”

HOLDEN.

So he was an anarchist, right?

DEBBIE.

No. He was the first person to tell us that if there’s something wrong with our society, then criminality is a response to that.

HOLDEN.

Well, maybe one of the things wrong with society is, y’know, all the criminality.

DEBBIE.

I’m talking from a sociological perspective. Whereas you’re talking from the perspective of a Fed.

HOLDEN.

I get that.

DEBBIE.

If you really are a teacher you might need to think about that. What is your educational perspective? Is it purely pedagogic or purely Fed?

HOLDEN.

Boy, you’re hard work. That outfit. . . (the jumpsuit) doesn’t indicate the half of it.

DEBBIE.

You thought I looked easy, right?

HOLDEN.

Easier than this.

DEBBIE.

You don’t like women disagreeing with you? That’s unusual for a guy in law enforcement.

He looks around a little helplessly, not sure whether he’s

enjoying this or not.

DEBBIE.

My point is you teach about criminality but you never heard of Durkheim?

HOLDEN.

Why don’t you give me a reading list?

DEBBIE.

Come on. . .

She leads him off to dance. They stand watching the band, drinking, getting into the music, which is heavy, fun, Stooges-like garage rock. They dance a little—she assuredly, he awkwardly.

DEBBIE. (deadpan)

Have I seen you on “Soul Train?”

HOLDEN.

You know, I used to go undercover. Vice rings. Drug gangs. The counterculture. . .

DEBBIE. You went “undercover” in “the counterculture?” Did you infiltrate the Manson Family?

HOLDEN.

Would you just stop with this? You’re relentless.

Anna Torv plays Wendy Carr, a psychology professor in Boston University. She is working toward tenure there and has a girlfriend in Boston. Nonetheless, she leaves her and BU and moves to Quantico to join the Behavioral Science Unit. She is a fictional character with no counterpart in the book. She wants to quantify their findings scientifically and has a problem with Ford’s freelancing. Yet her view is, it get results in a way that nothing else can—a killer of a twelve-year-old majorette in Altoona, Pennsylvania, about to be set loose by the police after passing a lie-detector test, is drawn into confession by Ford’s playing him and finally checkmating him with a fake baton and the shock effect of the actual murder weapon, a rock.

            Carr is a mysterious character, forced to hide her sexuality, which she does so successfully that when she uses it during a prison exchange with an inmate to re-set the dialogue and bail out her fellow agent, everyone back at the office assumes it is a ploy. She is both very reserved and very forthright, coy and candid, stylish and style-less, a blend of opposites that fits her series role: an academic as an FBI agent, an office-based analyst who performs brilliantly in the field just when the audience thinks she is going to be paralyzed by the action. She holds her fire till the last possible moment.

As noted, Cameron Britton plays Ed Kemper, a serial killer and the first of those interviewed by Ford and Tench. They include (among many others) Monte Rissell (played by Sam Strike), Jerry Brudus, a killer with a female shoe fetish that becomes Ford’s inroad to him as he brings an oversize heel to their second meeting (Brudus is played by Happy Anderson), Richard Speck (played by Jack Erdie—Ford provokes him to talk by describing his victims as “eight ripe cunts,” which gets him in trouble with Behavior Science Unit even as it makes the interview work), Charles Manson (played by Damon Herriman), and David Berkowitz, Son of Sam (played by Oliver Cooper). All are made up to look as much like the killer as themselves playing him—really halfway in between—and all are scripted with artistry and irony in mind more than verisimilitude.

On entering the prison to see Kemper the first time, Holden has to sign a disclaimer that states in the event of his death, or if he’s taken hostage, attacked, assaulted, or otherwise abused within the correctional facility, the United States government forswears any and all liability. My transcript may not have all the lines matched up right, but it captures the general idea:
HOLDEN.

Oh. Okay.
KEMPER.

Kiss my ass! Hey, boy, bring that shit over here! 

OFFICER.

Bitch!
HOLDEN.

Can we unlock the— (meaning the handcuffs)
OFFICER.

No, those stay on. They’re regulation.
HOLDEN.
I think that’s gonna be a little awkward.
OFFICER.
You’re FBI. (Unlocks the handcuffs) Okay. You’re all set.

HOLDEN.
Thanks, Jim.
OFFICER.

I’ll see ya later.

HOLDEN.
Later.
The ensuing exchange between Ford and Kemper typifies Mindhunters:
KEMPER.

Holden, right?
HOLDEN.
Edward.
KEMPER.

Edmund.
HOLDEN.
Oh, I’m sorry. I assumed that it was
KEMPER.

Are you tired?
HOLDEN.

How could you tell? It’s a beautiful drive, but it’s long.

KEMPER.

Edmund was my mom’s idea, so you can call me Ed.
HOLDEN.
Sure thing.
KEMPER.
So how can I help?
HOLDEN. Okay. Um. . . I’m an instructor working out of the Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico, and I had this idea—
KEMPER.

Have you had breakfast? Can I get you something? You want a sandwich?
HOLDEN.
No, I’m okay.
KEMPER.

What kind of sandwich you like?
HOLDEN.
Um. . . I’m good.
KEMPER. You want an egg salad sandwich?
HOLDEN.

I’m fine. Really.
KEMPER. I’ll get us an egg salad sandwich. I can get almost anything you want from the canteen.
HOLDEN.

Okay. Do you have tuna?
KEMPER. Oh, the egg salad’s better. Hey, Jim?
OFFICER. Yeah, Ed?
KEMPER. Have you seen Mitch this morning? You think you can find him for me?
(Egg salad sandwich is brought for Holden.)
KEMPER.

Good, huh?
HOLDEN.

Mmm!
KEMPER.

These guys are great. I’ve been here five years. We just clicked right off the bat.
HOLDEN.
You like the guards?
KEMPER.
Well, they like me. I’m polite.
HOLDEN.
You know, I heard that you used to drink at the Jury Room.
KEMPER.
You mean in Santa Cruz? Yeah, those are good guys. I applied to California Highway Patrol. My mom spoke to the cops to get my psychiatric record expunged. Turns out my record didn’t bother them at all, I was just too tall.
HOLDEN.
Too tall? I’ve heard of being too short, but. . .
KEMPER.

What?

HOLDEN.
Nothing. It just seems. . .
KEMPER. You think they lied to me?
HOLDEN.
No.
KEMPER
Well, cops like me because they can talk to me. . . . More than they can talk to their own wives, some of them.
HOLDEN
Really? What do you talk about?
KEMPER
You know, books, movies. I watch all the cop shows on TV. Do you know, uh. Joseph Wambaugh, Police Story? You ever watch that? Huge fan.
HOLDEN. Oh.
KEMPER.

I got a lot of my insights right there.
HOLDEN.
Really? What kind of insights?
KEMPER.
Well, so, for example, with cops, I would not allow myself to walk into a trap because I knew exactly how their minds worked from watching Wambaugh.
HOLDEN.
What kind of trap are you talking about?
KEMPER.
The classic is talking too much about the crimes. Over-interest. You have to remain casual. They tried everything to trick me. I’m too savvy. I don’t fucking talk, period.
HOLDEN
Really? That’s interesting.
KEMPER.
So. . . you had this idea?
HOLDEN.
Yes. Uh, yes. It’s kind of, uh. . .Well, it’s more of a research thing.

KEMPER.
Research?
HOLDEN
Just a series of interviews, chatting with. . .
individuals not unlike yourself.
KEMPER.
We’re just talking? I don’t get to go someplace, do a bunch of tests?
HOLDEN.
No. Yeah, no tests. Just right here.
KEMPER
Why?
HOLDEN.
Well, because I believe
it could be useful.
KEMPER.
Talking about what?
HOLDEN
Well, I don’t know. Your. . .behavior, I guess. If you want to, that is. We don’t have to talk about anything at all if you don’t want to.
KEMPER.
Why are you so tense?
HOLDEN.
Hmm?
KEMPER.
You’re tense, right now.
HOLDEN.
No, I’m not tense.
KEMPER.
Well, I’ll be honest, I don’t get many visitors. When I do, you think they want to talk about this shit? Fuck no. It’s like if you worked at a slaughterhouse with livestock, real conversation stops.
HOLDEN.
Did you?
KEMPER
No, I’m just saying. . . People who hunt other people for a vocation, all we want to talk about is what it’s like. The shit that went down. The entire fucked-upness of it.
HOLDEN.
Right, sure.
KEMPER.
It’s not easy. Butchering people is hard work. Physically and mentally. I don’t think people realize. You need to vent. What are you writing down?
HOLDEN.
Oh, I just think it’s an interesting choice of words, “vocation.”
KEMPER.
Well, what would you call it? A hobby? I’d say it’s more than that. Look at the consequences. The stakes are very high. Is this helping? Are you getting what you came for?
HOLDEN.
I think.
KEMPER.

Good.
HOLDEN.
Can I—Could I just ask you something? Do you believe that prison can help you?
KEMPER.
Are you kidding?
HOLDEN
You think you shouldn’t be in prison?
KEMPER
I think it’s shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted, somewhat.
HOLDEN
What do you think the state should do with you instead?
KEMPER
Well, Holden, a lobotomy’s not out of the question.
HOLDEN.
Lobotomy?
KEMPER
Like Frances Farmer. You remember Frances Farmer?
HOLDEN.

No.
KEMPER.
I loved Frances Farmer. She was an actress. They lobotomized her in the ’50s. She was very smart and intense. . .  very misunderstood. She was a lot like me.
HOLDEN.

You don’t think you could benefit from psychiatry?
KEMPER.
I already did all that in the institution. It didn’t take. For me, I think surgery
might give me the best chance.

HOLDEN.

And if surgery doesn’t… take, in this modern society, what do we do
with the Ed Kempers of the world?
KEMPER.
Well, isn’t that your department?
HOLDEN. From your perspective.
KEMPER
Death by torture?
HOLDEN.
So what are you not telling me?
KEMPER.
Why do you keep looking at me like that?
HOLDEN.
Like what?
KEMPER. Funny. You keep looking at me like I’m a specimen.
HOLDEN..
Well, to be honest. . .It’s just you seem like a nice, ordinary. . . It’s difficult for me to square you with what you’re in prison for.
KEMPER. Oh. Well, sure. I was a regular guy most of my life, with a nice home, nice suburb. I had pets, I went to a good school. I was a thoughtful, educated,
well brought up young person. There’s no question about it. But. . .at the same time. . . I was living a vile, depraved entirely parallel other life filled with debased violence and mayhem and fear, and death.
HOLDEN.
Well. . .it certainly seems to me like you had your own unusual. . .

KEMPER.
An unusual MO. Oh, sure. Well, I was gonna say. . .signature. An oeuvre , if you will. You could study it. You can spell oeuvre, can’t you, Holden? You know, there’s a lot more like me.
HOLDEN.
Do you think so? People that kill in sequence like you did?
KEMPER.
Sequence?
HOLDEN.

One right after another. At regular intervals. I’ve just been calling them. . ..”sequence killers”. . . if you will. How many would you say?
KEMPER. Well. . .it would be a guess, but I’d say right now. . .North America, more than thirty-five.
HOLDEN
Thirty-five?
KEMPER
But you’re never gonna find them if they don’t want you to. Not even close.
HOLDEN.

That can’t be right.
KEMPER.
Well, Holden, I’m not an expert. I’m not an authority. I’m just an extremely accomplished murderer who spent my adult life successfully evading capture. . .
until I gave myself up because I despaired of ever being caught. So take it or leave it. What do you want from me?
HOLDEN.
I have no idea.

Earlier Holden was told:

“He made a severed head perform fellatio on him. His third victim was a 15-year-old child, Holden. Yet he comes off as educated, polite, thoughtful about his own acts.”

When Holden visits Kemper after the suicide attempt, they have the following exchange, leading to Holden’s panic attack:

KEMPER.

You came.
HOLDEN.
You made it hard not to.
KEMPER.
Well, I tried less dramatic methods. Did you get my cards?
HOLDEN.

Yes.
KEMPER.

Maybe it’s not surprising you respond to showmanship.
HOLDEN.
Why do you want to see me, Ed?
KEMPER.
I read an article about you. About us, I should say.
HOLDEN
The Atlanta Constitution?
KEMPER.
The story was picked up by the AP.
HOLDEN.
Oh.

KEMPER.
You said we were friends.
HOLDEN.
Yes.
Are we friends, Holden?
HOLDEN
In the context of our work together, sure.
KEMPER
Our work together. That’s a nice way of putting it. I’d categorize it the same way. And yet, our work is unfinished.
HOLDEN.

Okay.
KEMPER.

As I indicated in my letters.
HOLDEN
You have more. . . insights?
KEMPER.
I do. Well, I’m not going to trot them out like some kind of show pony, especially when you’ve been talking about me in my absence, using what I tell you to legitimize yourself.
HOLDEN.
That story was not. . . I. . .had had a bit to drink.
KEMPER.
What’s this behavioral profiling you’re touting?
HOLDEN.
Well. . . it’s a way to determine a criminal’s psychology based on crime scenes and personal characteristics.
KEMPER.
I love that. What’s my psychology?
HOLDEN.
I can’t really tell you that.
KEMPER.
You can’t or you won’t?
HOLDEN.
It’s shoptalk, Ed.

KEMPER.
My favorite.
HOLDEN.
We’re at an early point in the research.
KEMPER.
Not so early that you can’t babble about it in the press. And you pretty much admit that I started you down this path. So. .  I believe you owe me an explanation, Holden.
HOLDEN.
You’re what we’d call an organized killer.
KEMPER.
Mm-hmm.
HOLDEN.
Because of the extreme planning that went into your crimes. You practiced picking up women several times before selecting your first victim. You used your own vehicle both in the kidnapping and disposing of the bodies. You followed your crimes in the media, which shows evidence of continued fantasy.
KEMPER.
Mm-hmm.
HOLDEN.
That’s the gist.
KEMPER

You think you can boil me down to a single adjective?
HOLDEN.
Of course not. It’s merely a way to sort characteristics.
KEMPER.
You’re an expert now.
HOLDEN.

No.
KEMPER.
Sounds like it.
HOLDEN.

I am not an expert.

KEMPER.
But you want to be, don’t you?
HOLDEN.
Yes.
KEMPER (taking the bandage off and showing the wound on his wrist.
Human blood is very hot. On a cold, humid morning you can see it steam.
HOLDEN.
What are you doing, Ed?
KEMPER.
Someone left a ballpoint pen on my court file. I used the metal casing. Is this what you wanted to see?
HOLDEN.
Why would I want to see that?
KEMPER.

Take a closer look.
HOLDEN.
That’s okay. Really.
KEMPER.
You know, women were initially indifferent to me. They weren’t interested in sharing. My whole life, no one wanted to interact with me. Not even our cats when I was a kid. The only way I could have those girls was to kill them, and it worked. They became my spirit wives. They’re still with me. (He looks at the guard station; they are switching guards and it is temporarily unoccupied.) Funny thing in the ICU there’s no system to alert the guards. It’s short-sighted, seeing what kind of people come through. (He jumps up from the bed and, though still chained at the feet, is blocking Holden’s only line of escape. Holden is now trapped for real, without a fallback.)
KEMPER.
I could kill you now, pretty easily. Do some interesting things before anyone showed up? Then you’d be with me in spirit too. (Kemper towers over Holden.) I invited you many times to visit, but even with this, I never thought you’d actually come. Why are you here, Holden?
HOLDEN.
I don’t know.

Kemper embraces him more like a mother hugging a child or a husband his wife than a killer preparing his victim for slaughter. Now the fuzzy line between the two is clear to Holden. He has a direct experience of it. He is in its literal embrace. His work has come full circle. He understands the spirit basis of ritual murder. He is enveloped in Kemper’s field. He has a panic attack—goes running down the hall, collapsing, screaming that he can’t breathe and is dying.

For Oliver Cooper’s portrayal of David Berkowitz, Son of Sam, Fincher and Penhall chose to make Berkowitz’s claim of a dog and a spirit inside a wall directing his killings into a fabricated cover story. The psycho-sexual, sociopathic aspect of the murders is maintained, but Berkowitz is portrayed as a con artist trying to hide his sexual compulsions in elaborate psychic mythologies. I would have taken him in the opposite direction as someone who actually heard voices, internal or external. I wouldn’t want to forfeit the demonology aspect as they have. M. Scott Peck’s diagnosis of real demons needing exorcism in his book People of the Lie is more compelling than Fincher and Penhall’s dismissal of demons as attempts to imitate fictional exorcism tales. Berkowitz becomes a second-rate Regan MacNeil from The Exorcist.

            When William “Junior” Pierce (played by Mike Filipowich) is interviewed by Ford and black FBI agent Jim Barney (Albert Jones) in an Atlanta prison, he proves to be a racist, malaprop-laden fabulist who claims to speak seven languages (including German, Libyan, and Apache), but they are on the level of single words per language and of the approximate nature of seven versions of Pig Latin. This gives Ford a different view of how childhood damage, lack of emotional development and, in Pierce’s case, a concussion from an industrial accident can lead to deviant behavior, a sense of superiority, and a bizarre inflation of his linguistic abilities.

            In all these cases, the men from the BSU are drawn into their own crises by the crises of the serial killers. This was evident in the case of Ford and Kemper, and it shows up again when Tench and Ford interview Charles Manson together—Ford later interviews Manson Family member Tex Watson on his own. Just before the Manson interview, the Tenchs’ adopted six-year-old Brian participated in the murder of another much younger child (twenty months old I believe). A different child suffocated the baby, but Brian had him put on a cross in hopes of a resurrection. This has turned Bill and Nancy (Stacey Roca) Tench’s world upside-down.

            At the interview Manson shows the brilliance with which he hypnotized his young acolytes into murdering by demonstrating the same brilliance in throwing Bill Tench’s failings with his own child back on him. In effect, he implies that Tex Watson, Linda Kasabian, Susan “Sadie” Atkins, Leslie Van Houten, and the others were just like Brian Tench, betrayed by their parents, cut loose. Of course, he doesn’t know about Brian, but he knows how to read Tench, and he accurately captures the lost adult who doesn’t know who he is any longer. Tench completely loses his cool and storms out of the room, blowing the rest of the interview:

TENCH.

I’m Special Agent Tench. This is Special Agent Ford. This isn’t an interrogation, Mr. Manson. We know that you didn’t commit the TatE or LaBianca murders. What we’re interested in is your relationship with your Family. And what bearing that relationship had on the crimes. Please. We’d like to hear from you, in your own words, about what happened. Do you mind if we record this? Over the years, some members have blamed you for the murders, then changed their story. Others, quite famously, have protected you. You seem to have a hold on them even from prison. But no matter what they say, you maintain the same story.
MANSON.

Because my truth is simple. And your truth’s complicated.

TENCH.

Complicated how?
MANSON.

Well, you don’t see it, but the only truth is now. Now is the only thing that’s real.
TENCH.
Well, we’re mainly interested in then. How you met, influenced, and indoctrinated the people who followed you.

MANSON.
Indoctrinated? Come on, man.
TENCH.
How did the Family begin? Did you start with the girls?
MANSON.
These people you call the “Family,” they’re just children that you didn’t want. You threw ’em out like trash. So I picked them up off the side of the road, and I said this: in love, there is no wrong.
TENCH.
Love? That’s what you taught your Family?
MANSON.
You’re a family man, Agent Tench?
TENCH.
Yeah.
MANSON.

 Yeah? Yeah (pointing the guard) he’s a family man, too, with his keys and his gun. He’s teaching his children right now. They’re learning his beliefs, and they’ll be living ’em. And you, you’re teaching your children. Look at yourself, judge the lies you live in. These children that come at you with knives, they’re your children.
TENCH.
They were your followers, Charlie. You gave them the knife. You taught ’em!
MANSON.

I didn’t teach ’em. I just tried to help ’em stand up.
TENCH.

And they stood up, went out, and killed seven innocent people.
MANSON.
Oh, so now it’s my fault? It’s my fault that your children do what they do? Your own children who you are neglecting?
TENCH.
We know that no one in the Family acted
without your approval, Charlie.
MANSON.
Well, if you know, you know. You don’t need to talk to me. It’s yourself you need to talk to.
TENCH.
Let’s talk about August 9th, 1969.
MANSON,
That is gone in the past. And when it is gone, it is gone, brother.
TENCH.
That summer, you told the Family, “Now is the time for Helter Skelter.” That they needed to start a race war by murdering wealthy white people. . .
MANSON. That’s the district attorney’s fantasy. That’s his fears. That’s a reflection of his fears.
TENCH.
So you’re saying that this never happened?
MANSON
Sure, I’m saying that never happened! Bugliosi is a genius, man! He got everything a prosecutor would want, except one thing: a case. He doesn’t have a case! So he puts Linda Kasabian on the stand, and she tells a sad story about how she has lied,
 and cheated, and. . . and done every dishonest thing that she can think of. Oh, but it’s okay, she’s telling the truth now. She wouldn’t have any ulterior motive, like immunity for seven counts of murder.
TENCH.
You’re saying she lied? All the witnesses lied?
MANSON.
Each witness got up and testified only what was best for them.They didn’t testify what was best for me. Do you believe this Helter Skelter bullshit? “Death to Pigs.” “Political Piggy.”
TENCH.
Got to admit, it sounds like a vision.
MANSON.

There’s no vision. I might have had an opinion about blacks and whites and the hassles they were havin’. But I don’t recall saying anything about starting a race war.
TENCH.
So how did that become the story?

MANSON.
It was Sadie who started hearing messages in the White Album. She gave the media the material for any perversion they cared print. The DA grabbed Sadie’s version, ran all the way through the courtroom with it: “Charles Manson:
the most dangerous man alive.” “Hippie cult leader who programmed people to kill.” In that book, he’s got me so powerful, a look from me stopped his watch! I’d lay there in my cell wondering, “Wow, am I really all they say?” I was halfway believing that shit myself. But I’ve been staring at every clock I see. And you know what? As hard as I stare, the clock never stops.
TENCH.
You had a group of teenagers isolated in the desert. You gave ’em drugs, you convinced ’em you were God, and you sent ’em out to kill.
MANSON.
Listen man, Bobby Beausoleil was sittingin jail for murder, you dig? Tex and Sadie came to me and said, “Let’s do some copycat killings to get him off.”
TENCH.
You’re saying the murders, everything, was just to get Bobby Beausoleil out of prison?
MANSON.
Those kids were looking at me with hard eyes.
TENCH.
Yeah, your kids.
MANSON.
Tex Watson, the all-American boy? The pride of Copeville, Texas? I have better sense than to disagree with him. So I said this: “You do what your love tells you to do. I’ll do what my love tells me.” Now whatever he did, that’s up to him. He’ll have to explain it to you.
TENCH. Just to be clear, this was their plan? You weren’t responsible. . .
MANSON.
You got a circle that a man lives inside of. He’s responsible for his circle and his circle only. Now, I don’t recall saying anything about, “Go get a knife and kill anyone” or anything.
TENCH.
Bullshit.
MANSON
If I wanted, I could kill you with your mic cord. With your pencil. But I wanna love myself, so I’m not going to do that.
TENCH.
No, you’re gonna put it in someone else’s circle.

…………………………………………………skipped dialogue…………………………………..
See, he (Tex) went outside. He made his own circle. And, what, now he wants to go back to “Jesus loves me”? Blood of the lamb, the right/wrong games we played for 2,000 years?
TENCH.
Right and wrong is a game?
MANSON.
There are no rights and wrongs, only ises. Whatever life is, it is. Right and wrong got nothing to do with it.
TENCH.
So the murder of seven people just “is”?
MANSON.
Well, it is, isn’t it? No one ever dies, no one ever lives. Those are two words in a leftover game.
TENCH.
People did die, Charlie. You made sure of it.
MANSON.
Everything is love, man. There’s nothing that isn’t love.
TENCH.
Really? Nothin’?
MANSON.
How much more of this shit do you wanna listen to? You need to walk on a different street, guy. Put your clothes on backwards and let everyone laugh at you.
TENCH.
You’re a coward, Charlie. A coward who takes no responsibility for his actions.
MANSON.
Yeah, you eat meat with your teeth, you kill things that are better than you, and then you say your children are killers.

TENCH.
No, I’m saying you’re a killer.
MANSON.

I have killed no one. . .

TENCH.
You ordered them to go to that house  and slaughter everyone there

MANSON

And I wanted no one to be killed. I did not direct anyone to do anything other than what they wanted to do.
TENCH.
You didn’t stop them either.
MANSON.
I always let children go. If he falls, that is how he learns. You become strong by fallin’.

TENCH.
You’re not supposed to let children fall. You’re supposed to guide them.
MANSON.
Guide them into what? Guide them into what you’ve guided them into?
TENCH (completely losing it)
You fucking midget!
HOLDEN FORD.

Bill!
MANSON.
This anger that you’re feeling, Agent Tench, this is just the anger that you have got for you. Find someone else to put yourself on. I’m tired of being your goat. I’m tired of being your reflection.

Ford later interviews Tex Watson by himself as Tench flies home to deal with the consequences of Brian’s act. Watson confirms Manson to a point, accepting responsibility for the murders he committed, but he also explained how Manson so numbed him with drugs and slogans that he lost track of who he was.

Beyond the Visible—Hilma af Klimt, directed by Halina Dyrschka (2019). I am reviewing more the subject of the film than the film itself. Hilma af Klimt did not just paint giant occult diagrams and geomantic maps, she showed herself capable, early in her career, of rendering Dürer-like rabbits, squirrels, insects, wildflowers, and human portraitures. That alone would have established her in her time, or any time, as an accomplished artist. The later paintings with their unique color schemes and topologies opened an entire metaphysical system, but they were sourced in a classic formal lineage.

            Hillma’s occultism was as channeled as Jane Roberts’ teachings from the interdimensional multipersonhood Seth, but in a visual form. Her paintings represented the source and destiny of human beings and their trans-galactic reality—its own sacred geometry and Creation code. Like Gauguin, she wa alsos about who we are, where we come from, and where we are headed, but not in a Polynesian mirror of evolution and primitivism, more as a heraldic neo-alchemy transcending culture, race, history, and time. Her system has still not been deciphered, so it stands as absolutely enigmatic as the Egyptian Sphinx or Easter Island statues with its floating scraps of alphabet and numerical code and references to sacred geometries it is consecrating differently.

The scale and scope of Hilma’s occult download defy measure. If I remember right, there are more than three thousand extant canvasses, and she instructed that the boxes not be opened until twenty years after her death, to give humanity a brief head start on a multidimensional transmission, presuming that it was transmitting to the Earth plane otherwise as a whole.

            Few knew of the paintings’ existence and Hilma did not get credit in her lifetime or even later because (1) women didn’t paint professionally and certainly not in the great canon of Da Vinci and Breughel in the mid-nineteenth-century; (2) though she preceded Kandinsky, Klee, and all abstract expressionists, she was never logged in—NYMOMA never collected her, so they had to declare her bogus and irrelevant in order to preserve the value of their own collection as well as the stature of linear academic art historians; (3) her work was occult—abstract expressionism was incidental to her purpose. In a certain sense, even the abstract expressionists were occult, but they were not systematic like Hilma af Klimt. These days when Sweden tries to herald and eulogize every Swedish artist, scientist, goalie, and skier, it ignores af Klimt because it has declared itself an avowedly secular nation. It is separating itself from Strindberg and Swedenborg too, though the stature they accumulated in their lifetimes are allowed some antiquarian points.

No one will allow Hilma af Klimt into the art-history club ex post facto, but that didn’t stop the audiences who flocked to NYC’s Guggenheim and other museums around the world in 2018 to look at a small fraction of the posthumous collection. The power of the art was such that many were moved to tears. I take that to be higher chakras flowing out of the colored canvases: Etheric, Astral, Causal, Atmic, and Monadic fields. Viewers could not help but respond to another intelligence, even as we might stand in awe and weep before E. T.s departing a saucer or leaving a statue as a gift.

Hilma af Klimt’s paintings finally look like nothing else. The film declares and then demonstrates that. She is as bold and attuned as Rudolf Steiner, who ultimately abandoned her in search of his own museum, but she had a different third eye and skill set for the Sources.

Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom, directed by Pawo Choyning Dorji (2019). As a Bhutanese-made film with a Buddhist sensibility, A Yak in the Classroom uses rhythms, aesthetics, and the “film” genre itself in non-Western ways, though it is mostly Western. On the one hand, it is a documentary about the most remote school in Bhutan and how the families there live, coexist with their environment, and fulfill their part of the Bhutanese motto of “Gross National Happiness” instead of “GNP.” Sherab Dorji (as Ugyen Dorji) carries the story as a young teacher who doesn’t want to teach and certainly not in the distant mountains. After his long bus ride to the pickup point, two villagers with horses meet him. It is a six-hour journey from there, much of it uphill, to Lunana. Along the way his guides conduct Buddhist rituals that connect to the land and its spirits, deities, and creatures. They pass towns with populations of 2 or 8.

            Ugyen struggles and resists what is indisputably happening, keeping his headset on, but along the way he is being taught and tempered. The hike is itself a Buddhist ceremony. Then initially upon arriving and seeing the primitive state of the school, he wants to quit at once and go back. The two guides gallantly agree to take him after the horses rest, but during the two-week hiatus, he throws himself into teaching and is deeply moved by his young students, their sincerity, enthusiasm, and respect, all of which are missing from the urban area in which he partied with friends and pursued a second career as a pop singer. He arrived mainly wanting to move to Australia and to participate in hip modernity there.

            Yaks are a key. They provide dung, invaluable for starting and maintaining fires—paper is too valuable to burn, as precious as money would be. Eventually the classroom is deeded a yak that Ugyen must care for. Occasionally a few other yaks must be designated for food, a sad ceremony leading to ballads of grief.

            Ugyen is especially taken with the village’s traditional singing—in essence, yak songs—especially of Saldon (Kelden Lamo Gurung), who performs a particular lament daily as an offering to the village. At Ugyen’s request, she teaches him it. If romance blooms between them, we will never know because it is well outside the sensibility of the film, plus Ugyen ostensibly left a girlfriend back in the city.

When it is time for the transhumant village to move with their animals to lower ground, Ugyen must close the schoolhouse for the winter. By then he has received an invitation to Australia and will not return the following year to the village’s and students’ sorrow. Yet they send him off with prayers and gifts. Though he does not hug Saldon, their parting is intensely bittersweet.

            The film segues. In Sydney, Ugyen stops in the middle of playing pop to a noisy bar crowd. After the owner says she is paying him to entertain and insists he go on, he thinks about it, sets down his guitar, and sings the yak song. As he does, Lunana and its schoolroom return. The sensibility of the film will not let us know if he does too ever in person. He does or he doesn’t. As karma, it will come out the same either way.

The Sound of Metal, directed by Darius Marder (2019). This wasn’t an easy film for Lindy or me to watch. All of the states depicted, primarily by lead actor Riz Ahmed (Ruben), are so embodied and woven into the fabric (the real celluloid on which it was shot) and the unembellished soundtrack that it is often irritating, discordant, and uncomfortable. These include depression, actual loss of hearing, amplified clatter from implants in the brain, melancholy, addiction, regret.

Primarily, though, The Sound of Metal is a film about addiction: addiction not only to heroin but to hearing and to things going as you want—to normality and to expected or scripted behavior from others. Ruben’s loss of hearing while playing drums in the heaviest and most metallic imaginable of heavy-metal bands with his girlfriend Lou exposes the deeper addictions that his frantic lifestyle camouflages. When he loses hearing, he fights, demands, intends to get it back at once, which leads to tantrums, denial, destructive behavior, and desperate attempts to impose a medical solution. He can’t believe or allow that deafness is the new normal.

            The brilliance of the film is its transfer of each of these realities to the viewer such that they resonate with the part of oneself that matches them—no cinematic escape here. The interview with the director on the DVD shows the lengths to which he went to achieve this result. The soundtrack is jangly and ragged, the music itself too loud and thrashy, especially in the opening sequence of the band playing (I almost quit the DVD then). After Ruben’s cochlear implant, you hear the world piped directly onto the auditory cortex by a machine on his head (like a punk radio) without it being filtered through ears; it is unsorted, tinsel, screeching, full of clatter and edges without a sense of individual vibrations’ distance or source. It has no landscape or dimensionality; it is a pipe of raw sound without context or pleasure.  

Ahmed took extensive lessons in drumming and sign language to play the part and was fitted with actual loss-of-hearing and cochlear-like devices so that he was legitimately a bit disoriented and frantic. He knew what it felt like not to hear his own voice.

A curious feature of the DVD’s interview is that initially I thought the interviewer (I forget his name) was the director because he had previously attempted to do the same basic movie using an actual heavy-metal couple to play fictional versions of themselves. It didn’t work because, as themselves, they refused to cross certain lines in order to be someone they weren’t. Marder succeeded by writing a much more elaborate script than he filmed, telling Ahmed and Olivia Cooke (as Lou) the biography and back stories of their characters. They play bigger and more entwined than their vignettes in the script, and it is spacious than in a way the precursor film wasn’t.

Paul Raci as Joe, director of a deaf commune and learning center at which Ruben ends up without Lou for the extensive mid section of the film, delivers most of the teaching and messages. Director Marder explains that he resisted the pressure to get a name actor for the role in order to sell the film, opting for the authenticity of someone who had been there, in the Vietnam war and unable to hear. He calls Raci/Joe the “Yoda” of The Sound of Metal, as Joe gives Ruben zazen-like exercises to find his own stillness. He tries to teach him that the issue is up here (pointing to his forehead), not here (pointing to his ears). He is crisp but patient, unbudgeable but compassionate. He explains to Ruben that he was an addict long before heavy metal, before heroin and before going deaf, and is still an addict despite four years off drugs.

Some Netflix reviewers complained that the movie ends in the middle of nowhere without a resolution. I didn’t see it that way. The movie ends when Ruben realizes that Lou is an addiction too and a very unstable, amped one at that. He disconnects the implants and there is silence. He is alone.

When You See Us, a four-part series directed by Ava DuVernay (2019). She could have made a docu-drama about the Central Park Five, the Harlem teens falsely arrested and convicted for the rape and brutal beating of a female jogger in 1989, but this is a beautiful, rich, detailed novelistic, cinematic unfolding, filled with déjà vu flashbacks, surreal dreams that are not overly surreal or documentarily intrusive, and complex editing that mixes time frames and sequences to continuouslky clarifying effect. She achieves a bit of the genre of Norman Mailer’s Executioner’s Song.

DuVernay traces five tragic journeys of lost innocence and stolen youth, for instance, Asante Black as young Kevin Richardson closing the second episode by playing his trumpet alone in the street after his character has received a guilty verdict and been sentenced, or Jharrel Jerome as young Korey Wise in a scene dreamed by his character twelve or thirteen years later, dancing around Coney Island with his girlfriend (the same actor plays both versions of Wise, the only case where there is not a re-casting because Wise, the oldest, was sixteen, and went to adult prison). DuVernay provides, in excruciating detail, protocols of the police enticing or pummeling confessions out of the five targeted victims, uninformed kids, for crimes they didn’t commit. She portrays in just as much detail the gang law and violence of prison life—that is one of the intentions of this film; she made it to wake us up to start challenging this sort of horrific legalied stuff. She excoriates the so-called criminal-justice system and its stooge Prison Industrial Complex, showing that they are not mistakes or gaps but function as they were intended, to protect privilege and power.

She plays Donald Trump on target for his Citizen Kane role in the rush to judgment, neither overdoing thejuicy trope nor losing the significance of its later continuity in his mendacious character and political career. At the time of the Central Park Five, he took out full-page ads, piling onto the assumed guilt of the boys and recommending the death penalty, an opinion their eventual innocence apparently did not budge in 2019 when he was President of the U.S., revealing who the real ogres and criminals were then and later.

DuVernay dramatizes the late disclosure of the actual perpetrator skillfully, segueing between his back story and confession, their impact on each of the five, the DNA proof, and the perverse self-serving recalcitrance of the police and prosecutor, sticking to their original renditions even after exposures of how they manipulated the situation to yield confessions and convictions in the absence of evidence. A line that stays with me was spoken by the prosecutor to one of the defense lawyers in response to his asking her, “What about justice?” “This isn’t about justice,” she said, in effect. “This is about politics.” It was how police work was done then, not establish guilt or innocence but to feed political narratives.

So it was, so it is, and so it will be until enough of us find a way to bend back the axle and Lady Justice’s scales. As of now—when the movie was made—it is only getting worse. Jail is a dumping ground for have-nots, in proxy and by example, in a dystopian society racing to outrace its own apocalyptic decline.

The five or so other hours of the series show just how high a price some people pay for other people’s use of them as political pawns. Happily, or somewhat happily, the five were each rewarded with payouts by the State of New York (its largest punitive payment ever) to set them up in careers after their convictions were reversed. Those who got out earlier (six years was the least time served; Korey Wise served the most: fourteen of hard time in adult hell) couldn’t find suitable work initially because of having been felons and sex offenders. Yet after the reversal of verdict and settlement they got to open up businesses and create nonprofits to help others.

If you have access to it, watch the hour-long Oprah show (archived on Netflix with the series) that includes all of the key actors (and some minor ones), plus DuVernay and others involved with making the film, and the actual five men at this moment (the Exonerated Five, as Oprah and DuVernay re-tag them). The guys themselves are amazing, all of them.

Yusuf Salaam is an articulate, philosophical, insightful philosopher; he will later be elected to city council. Antron McCray is candid, unrelenting, broken, aware that he is broken and unhealable. Korey Wise stands out as an indescribable mix of poet, a ghost, and oracle, almost Christlike as if taken down from the Cross before death and set loose with a prophecy and witnessing. He hugs Oprah like a child with his mother. Korey wasn’t even picked up by the cops; he went to the police station wikllingly to support his friend Yusuf and was available to the police to grill and weave into their malign fiction.

The story itself—the news story, the real story—was mythical from the moment it began. “Boys wilding” was a subtext for so much more, including, yes, “boys wilding” and what wilding was then—hardly the bestial criminality the papers turned it into. The myth of violent Harlem kids was used to cover a deadlier myth, and real crimes of violence, hidden from attention—downtown White Collar crimes. The myth of the Central Park Five camouflaged the actions of Donald Trump, Jeffrey Epstein, Harvey Weinstein, Bernie Madoff, far more overtly bestial than anything that “wilding kids” did or could have done, as well as the decadence of the Prison Industrial Complex; it camouflaged them from the falsely innocent gaze of the neo-liberal elite.

The series also encompassed From Here to Eternity and Schindler’s List (and every other WWII and holocaust film) in microcosm because we tend to forget, in the technological and economic renaissance that followed the forties, nothing got any more than superficially better. It wasn’t racism, though its systemic aspect played a role, it was the culture looking for scapegoats so the bad guys could keep on being the good guys.

Woman at War, directed by Benedikt Erlinsson (2019). There is a way in which this movie is ordinary, even dull and pedestrian like a not-particularly-well-done t.v. crime show with amateur special effects and rogue actions with too many ridiculous moving parts to seem real. The cinematography is rote, though the Icelandic scenery is anything but, from lava to boiling scrying pools to glaciers. Everything else about the film is incredible, some of it original and unique.

Start with the trios of musicians, choirs, and pianist who accompany many of the scenes like a Greek chorus, playing in lava fields, various rooms, the airport, on the bus. They are meant to be invisible to everyone except the main character, Hella, and they are mostly invisible to her too. They are part of the film, thus visible to the viewers like symbols in tarot cards. The music they play is elegant and haunting. I assume that some of it is Ukrainian because of the sub-theme of adopting a four-year-old Ukrainian girl who lost both parents in a war (likely Russian military intervention). Other portions remind me of Serbian bands with their melancholy upbeat of base, sousaphone, and drums (I just checked; the music is actually Icelandic, hence proto-Germanic rather than Slavic). Sometimes it is single notes of the piano or clicks of a stick, always providing mood, overtone, and foreshadowing, and giving voice to what Hella can’t or won’t speak—can’t because her fallback mode is direct action. The music makes the film seem like a holy rite, an ancient Greek or Japanese ritual more than a movie.

In a brilliantly understated way, Woman at War highlights the clash of the fate of the whole planet against the fate of a single woman and a little girl. It goes from there the power of prayer and meditation against the power of direct political action and sabotage—eco-terrorism. Framing that is the motion of daily life on Earth against a backdrop of an eroding atmosphere with floods, droughts, radiation, and an expansionist, out-of-control technology that feeds and feed on it. The bands and chorus are subsumed in this landscape, forced to walk through flood waters, dwarfed by power plants and transmission lines (as well as the Icelandic rock and vastness). They are outside the narrative but, despite their supernatural role, they cannot escape the natural forces engulfing the planet and cinematographer’s lens, so they are drenched and dislocated, as they play to the myth of Hella while sheattempts both to adopt the Ukrainian girl and, as a one-woman warrior and wrecking crew, vandalize and cripple an aluminum plant, a joint Icelandic-Chinese venture. She pulls down lines and towers, lassos drones with arrows, and escapes the high-technology search for her by hiding in a dead sheep and exploiting the propinquity of a young Spanish tourist on a bike, who keeps getting arrested in her place. He constitutes a further myth-like trope more than a believable effect of collateral action and suspense. The tourist, in a sense, becomes part of the film’s inevasible chorus too.

The blending of prophecy and narrative, timelessness and time, reality and magic realism, myth and thriller, Icelandic mythohistory and Icelandic modernity, is flawlessly underplayed. The surprise ending is from the master, Charles Dickens of A Tale of Two Cities. Well, not the film’s very end but the turning of its plot, a switching of women. The very end is pure rain, from a child’s painted clouds to a relentless downpour and its flooded rooms and streets: Earth ca. 2075.

Giant Little Ones, directed by Keith Behrman (2019). Everything about the set-up in this film is “teenage confidential” triteness: the overamped homophobic high-school boys, the “losing virginity” grail, the mature and candid peer girl, a sports backdrop (in this case, the swim team), the bullying and hazing, the pranks, the inroads of adult violence, the “7-Eleven” convenience store, the single mom with rowdy teens, the late-onset gay dad, the “girl interrupted,” the girl struggling with transgender or to find a gender, the ambiguities of other emerging gender identities, the boy sliming of anything that hints at gayness.

What makes Giant Little Ones special is that it takes all of those (and other tangential) tropes and runs them on a raw, transparent reel that brings out hidden and lost aspects, especially overall sexual ambivalence in the context of aggressive peer cheerleading, subconscious or unacknowledged bisexuality (particlary among the most homophobic boys), plus the blind terror and violence that can be ignited byt narcissistic homophobic fear, the maiden inklings of human values and empathies transcending then young polarities, and then a resolution that proves that there isn’t a resolution. The most that finally can be said is ’kay, and ’kay back (“okay”/ “okay”) a minimum-concession password. Yes, it’s a fable as well as a glaring cliché nest but a sweet one.

Yesterday, directed by Danny Boyle (2019). This film doesn’t belong on my list for its cinematic, literary, or aesthetic value. It is a ragtag processiov of over- and under-acting, caricatures, sentimentally simplified and romanticized relationships, and pure doggerel. But it is worth watching for a few unique characteristics: a rare depiction of probabilistic futures (though the inaugurating device is flimsy to the point of nonsensical), a depressing satire of how the Beatles’ songs might be received and over-commercialized if released today, a reimagination of the Beatles’ opus as sung by a slacker East Indian Brit (Himesh Patel), and a vision of an alternate-reality John Lennon, who never wrote songs or performed but lived to peaceful old age. That irony of dueling successes—public and personal—is at the heart of the story.

In the movie, Patel’s Jack Malik passes into a reality where the Beatles, Harry Potter, Coca-Cola, and cigarettes never existed (the latter trio for unnecessary gag lines), but only three people in the revisionist universe of the film “remember” them and their songs. Patel has to reconstruct the Beatles in order to become them. In the process, of course, he reinvents himself, and his romance and, finally, gives the mystery archive gratis to the world. If you buy into the premise, it still leaves you with basic questions about the nature of reality, identity, and the one-way flow time, which need more basic queries even under better circumstances. What if the Beatles existed only in a time-delayed warp carried by a person who was not at all Beatle-like and given to the world as if from him? Has this happened with other remarkable gifts—for instance, Bobby Zimmerman delivering the oeuvre of Bob Dylan, Paul Auster the novels of “Paul Auster”?

Negative Review Warning, a film so bad and wrong-headed it needs a call-out and caution. Art of Self-Defense, directed by Riley Stearns under the cover of black comedy and fake martial arts, starring the otherwise admirable Jesse Eisenberg (2019). This is a front-to -back, bad-spirited, spiritless film that was more admired by critics in an era of chic nihilism and droll violence than most of the films on my list. I saw “The Art of Self-Defense” on the day that Trump announced the killing of Abū Bakr al-Baghdadi. Though of an ostensibly opposite politics, the film matched the energy of Trump, the MAGA vortex that gave rise to him. It is a conflation of the maudlin and morbid with a subsidiary disingenuous alliance between the macho and the anti-macho. The film is gratuitously and gorily violent to the point of morgue-like, monstropedic, and disgusting idiotic bits. It fails as dark comedy because it isn’t funny: Life is cheap is the main joke. Ha ha ha! Fashionable Nihilism 101.

The film’s deadpan sensei routine was similarly one-note—the same joke over and over with a creepy-creepier-creepiest spectrum. When you paraphrase Steve Seagal as if Basho, you know that something is wrong, because a parody of a parody is not a parody. Yet another layer of film’s merde was its mockery of the actual honor, grace, and warriorship of karate. A corollary to that was the presumption that if you are making martial-arts jokes, you can get away with murder, torture, near dismemberment, recreational cremation, and transgression because, ha ha ha again, it’s only martial arts—and that’s the joke. Get it? But at that level it’s not unlike making a dark comedy of the Crucifixion because you’re saying that it’s all right to turn anything into a joke as long as you say so. If you believe in nothing and nothing is sacred, the sacred and ethical is the juiciest whipping boy of all, like Trump’s definition of a loser—anyone who sacrifices to a code of honor. Add to this the fact that the film’s not believable at any level of plotting. In fact, there is no plot, just devices borrowed from elsewhere like a remake of It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World without Jimmy Durante, Phil Silvers, Edie Adams, Sid Caeser, Milton Berle, and Buddy Hackett. Events are tied together by one-liners. Oh, and there’s also the venal exaltation of guns over martial skills as if “bang, you’re dead” is intrinsically better than a Pa Kua circle or t’ai-chi discharge—but you could say, “That’s part of the satire. It actually means the opposite.” You could say that, but then Jessie Eisenberg’s nerd character does become a black-belt sensei primarily through the secret use of a gun, and turns the irony back on itself by uttering warrior lines in defense of the weapon—e.g., the only rule is there are no rules. So what’s being satirized except the fact that the people who made this vapid disaster think they are hip.

It is an Age of Vulgarity, from its football fields to its fentanyl supply chains to its politics of self-righteous display to its wars without rules or rationale. It is the Age of Context without Core, which is why influencers and artificial intelligence soar over imagination and truth mystery.

There may be worse movies, but there is not more dishonest, cruel, blasphemous, smug, or disenchanting shit. I put this up with Donald Trump’s description of his assassination of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. You can get away with this chutzpah not because you’ve earned it but because you can get away with it. And that’s, finally, the joke.

Judy, directed by Rupert Goold (2019)

It deepens everything. It’s horrible, but it deepens everything. And what won’t deepen, it shows that it won’t deepen, and that’s a depth too, perhaps an even greater depth because the façade is suddenly gone.

I put this on Facebook last night (March 22, 2020, COVID time). I had been posting about coronavirus for the last few days, sharing observations, responding to others’ posts. The above insight came to me ready-made in one piece at an unlikely time (while watching Judy), which showed not only the constant unconscious layering in each of us and the world itself but how you get at deeper truths sideways, by not trying to get at them or anything. Intuition comes at an oblique angle out of the sheer mystery of existence.

            This particular flash arose spontaneously from the last scene in Judy. Renée Zellweger put an inspired touch on Judy Garland, but most of the movie was too depressing and “fifties kitsch” for me, as well as too familiar, literally. My mother identified with Judy Garland, so the resemblance of the Zellweger character to her—her own madness and suffering before her suicide—was painful to watch. The script’s language, a sort of Hollywood cosmopolitan, sarcastic mafia banter, was as repellant now as it was then, even more so from the horror of having once thought it normal, the water I swam in fish-like.

Three scenes, however, were special to me. The opening sequence is an imaginal Oz-like tribute to Citizen Kane—a parable enacted on a fairy-tale set gone wrong. The second is an extended scene in which “Judy” accepts the invitation of two gay guys, her fans in London, to come to dinner with them. Especially engaging is the interaction over making the meal (she ends up having to scramble the eggs) and then hanging out among Garland memorabilia in mutual admiration in their apartment. The sequence captures the resonance and ricochet between adulation and love, both ways.

In the film’s finale, the scene of my flash corona insight, Judy has come onstage unexpectedly and without permission before a shocked audience. She was removed from what turned out to be her final tour in England. Her drunken performances, public tantrums, and inability to fulfill the minimum requirement of standing on stage and singing Judy Garland songs had led to her replacement in her own advertised venue by skiffle artist Lonnie Donegan (of “Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavor on the Bedpost Overnight” fame). Prior to her rogue appearance, she had been booed and pelted with food.

            Let’s go back a scene. Roslyn, Garland’s chaperone/assistant throughout the gig, played with light charisma by a Jessie Buckley who could not not be charismatic, has kindly taken her to a restaurant with the show’s bandleader for a send-off “celebration,” a paltry slice of cake. After Judy finishes eating and overpraising the dessert and talking herself back to a semblance of sanity, she pleads to be allowed to see the show.

Roslyn does everything in her wits to discourage her. After all, Judy had previously expressed nothing but rage at Donegan for usurping her, a narcissistic possessiveness that is trying to regain her status as the star. It would be sabotage for Roslyn to let her loose in that club, but she relents and brings her backstage.

            Meanwhile at the ticket office, the two gay fans are outraged by the Donegan substitution and want a refund. One of them says something like, “These tickets are expensive, and we saved to buy them.”

            As this is happening, Judy is trying to convince Donegan, as he is about to answer the stage call, guitar in hand, to let her sing one last song. His eyes finally soften, his mien droops, and he gestures for her to go out in his place, even as he was about to go out in her place in some sort of Italo Calvino loop. As you might guess, she hits a home run, delivers a tour de force, I think “Come Rain or Come Shine.” The gay guys hear it, say ‘forget the refund,’ grab their tickets, and run in. Zellweger is pulling out every Garland stop in her repertoire, pacing, savoring the lyrics, whirling, dancing, flirting with the band, wild, exuberant, under control. You think that’s going to be it, but the audience wants more, an encore, and you know what’s coming next because we haven’t heard it yet, we know even before the first bars.

            As “Judy” sings “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” almost a cappella, I find myself—and I never do this during movies—singing along, not even singing, just saying the words like a poem, half a beat ahead of her, so that she and I are in a kind of doo-wop, and I know I am doing this because of the virus and its viral awakening. I am remembering my stepfather telling me how these seemingly Irish and Oz ballads were written by “rabbis” a generation or two removed from the shtetl. They were chanting for the lost temple, which is not Jerusalem, Kansas, or anywhere on Earth. It’s a Buddhist/Zohar plaint for the entire diaspora, world-age, and kalpa. Plus, I have the memory of my mother, dead by suicide forty-five years ago, reignited by Zellweger’s Judy.

            She can’t finish the song. She stops on a dime between “bluebirds” and “fly” because there’s too much emotion to bear, too much regret and happiness, too beautiful and deep a universe to fail (for her to fail, for it to fail her). She says, “I’m sorry. I can’t.”

Then one of the gay guys stands in the audience and starts over from the beginning, “Somewhere . . . over the rainbow . . . .” One by one, the whole audience stands and joins in until the entire room, echoing every audience for her whole life, is singing her signature song back to her, me too, as she bows and says, “Thank you.”

          And then I wrote: “It deepens everything. It’s horrible, but it deepens everything. And what won’t deepen, it shows that it won’t deepen, and that’s a depth too, perhaps an even greater depth because the façade is suddenly gone.”

Honey Boy, directed by Alma Har’el (2019). The scripting and casting are a bit of identity-swapping theater. Shia LaBeouf plays his own drunken, erratic father to a perfection that only a true son could carry off (the boy is called Otis not Shia in the film). The child-become-adult actor is portrayed, when young, by the most consummate young actor on the set these days, fourteen-year-old Noah Jupe, whose nuanced range can be recognized by comparing his character in Honey Boy to his performance a year or so later in the murder-mystery serial The Undoing in which his parents are upscale Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant avatars. To make the swing from the SoCal motel-dwelling Otis to the Manhattan preppie violin-playing Henry Fraser takes an astute young actor’s mastery of two very different milieus.

Twenty-two-year-old Otis is played by Lucas Hedges whose transformative roles are described elsewhere among my reviews (Ben is Back, Boy Erased, Waves). Both Jupe and Hedges play off LaBeouf’s portrayal of his dad at different ages—a rogue hustler with a boy and then a (brief) sad clown with a young man. The Jupe of Honey Boy and The Undoing roughly aligns with the Hedges of Manchester By the Sea.

            What is striking about LaBeouf’s reconstruction of his own father’s persona, and this for me is the heart, soul, and raison of the film, is his ability to portray abusive and loving elements simultaneously and capture the way the man could turn from a sadist and abuser to a hipster, saint, martyr, and crazy-wisdom mage on a proverbial dime—LaBeouf would know. He doesn’t give an inch on the man’s brutality—down to his infantile outbreaks, slaps and punches, narcissistic grandiosity and privilege. Yet he also shows how wounded, vulnerable, and caring he was at the same time.

LaBeouf likely wrote the script to get to play his own dad opposite two remarkable actors playing himself—a grand public forum of gestalt therapy with bonus transference from the audience. The storyline otherwise is insubstantial to the point of disheveled—a coming-of-age young man in the custody of a maniac; then an inquisitive, intellectually demanding young man in court-assigned therapy, reliving, reinterpreting, and transmuting his childhood. The most evocative other interactions for me were the mime between Jupe as young Otis and Shy Girl (played by FKA Twigs)—a larval erotic dance and mother-child shadow play—and the therapeutic inquisition conducted by Dr. Moreno (Laura San Giacomo) and adult Otis, a blend of a “critique of therapy” deconstruction and counterintuitive transference—it is always counterintuitive when it works. The real therapy, again, was the film itself.

Waves, directed by Trey Edward Shults (2019). Wow! Not an easy movie to characterize or watch, the first half especially. But brilliant, beautiful, unlike any film I’ve ever seen. Just the colors—pretty much every shade of yellow, orange, purple, green, mauve, magenta, lavender, red, indigo, and with enough span and texture to absorb and know and relish them like a perfect paintbox or every Crayola hue ever made, every scene tinted or illuminated or pierced by lightning or neon or strobe or MRI or snatches and cracks of radiance plus dozens of other ways to rainbow photons: literal fireworks, sparklers, boat lights, colored spots, halos, candles as well as lens-induced distortions, clones, reflections, and the many forms of artificial light permeating an industrialized night.

A film like this transcends genre; it’s a tour de force, like a Da Vinci or Rembrandt or Sistine Chapel—a genre in itself, crafted frame by frame by frame, the only one of its kind. Why had I never heard of it? Why even—who really cares?—no awards for this. I rented it mainly for Lucas Hedges.

The first half is horrific: driving, pounding, unable to distinguish inside from outside, full of the vulgarity and mantra and cybernetic horror and alienation of our culture, a mixture of a rock video, computer game, hip-hop opera, panic attack—about as lost and vulgar and bardo-like as the world gets. It’s an accelerating race to an abyss that you know is coming; all you can do is watch it build till the events are not even events but robotic, opioid reflex movements, ecstatic death dances. The only parallel I can think of is Kenneth Anger’s shorter ritual dance of a different era: Scorpio Rising.

The first half is also George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin, Harvey Weinstein, Jeff Epstein, Donald Trump, Call Me Al DeSantis’ devolving Florida under an Atlantean, Ahrimanian heat wave, gangsta rap, misogyny, not literally, not consciously, but absolutely and sometimes with the poles and meanings of characters’ self-righteous languaging reversing on them because no one who talks the talk walks the walk, certainly not when it’s mostly texting and not in person.

The horror is that a father driving a child, a favored son to perfection actually drives him to obliteration, oblivion, and incarceration. The model boy crosses an invisible line into murder/suicide, killing not his body but his reason, psyche, and heart. He is only trying to be a warrior, hero, and knight, but he succumbs to a sublimated hit-and-run rage. And that’s it. It’s over. He destroys everything he loves, and only when he realizes that he can’t bring it back does his binge of fury, jealousy, and displaced misogyny end. It’s a snapshot of post-Trumpian American culture when opposite poles commit irredeemable acts while thinking they are doing, knowing they are doing, something else. See January 6^th, the Ides of MAGA, doesn’t need another date. See the Hunter Biden, Black Lives Matter, and the permanent pandemic state. Black is white, white is black. Hate is love, love is hate. Everyone is righter than right. Everyone is deader than dead wrong.

The movie is so extreme and radical and overkill-driven in the first half that there are no emotions, just astral fire and the smash-death of an innocent girl by a teen who adores her but has been driven by athletic and drug madness to mania; yet it finds words and chords of suffering and grief and love (and denial) in the second half, generating an emotional intelligence of the whole.

The second half is La La Land without the affect, primping, and theatricality, just exquisitely and guilelessly heart-chakra sentimental. It is as sweet and innocent as everything forfeited in the first half wasn’t, by not just the movie characters but all the kids growing up now in a social-media zone. It is a wave of pure compassion.

Each half is a biracial high-school love story.  The first half is black boy, white girl; the second half: white boy, black girl. What connects them is the family (first half, teen guy; second half, his younger sister).

Sterling K. Brown as the father and Kelvin Harrison, Jr. as his son are uncompromising engines driving the initial narrative’s arc. Harrison, Jr. is the anti-Hamlet of the first half and Brown is Hamlet slowly awaking from a midsummer night’s nightmare through the film. His transformation from cruel task-master and hard-knocks tyrant to empathic healing elder serves as pivot of shamanic transference for the others.

What also connects the halves is the ambient coloring, cosmic-ray sound, and an almost transplutonian energy—a Kuiper-belt astrological range. By the second half, you realize that the film is laser-painted and every scene is culled for color and shape. You see and hear how reality gets unmachined and flows back into s tenderness at the heart of existence. It’s not easy to make a film out of this, but then it’s almost impossible to paint it onto the film at the same time

Is there a single scene in either half that isn’t filtered or moist with shifting color and focus like a super-impressionism to the point of formless rainbows and actual paint palettes and ionized spectra?

The sound is strangely beautiful and varied and spooky and meticulously out of sync into another kind of sync, an endless transposition of sound waves altered—whale-song-like or John Cage-like—into a single New World John Adams Death of Klinghoffer Night Chorus. It includes Sting’s “Love Is the Seventh Wave,” Boz Oz “New Wave Man” plus re-synthesized soundtracks from Jurassic Park, Mission: Impossible, Schindler’s List, Rocky, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, etc. A lot of it is experimentally musicalized surf and ocean and jet skis and sounds like those taken off the solar wind and electromagnetic fields of Neptune, Mercury, Jupiter, Ceres. The second half throws in fifties love ballads (“What a Difference a Day Makes”), setting a lost era in the foreground.

There are also words as sound in a kind of Laurie Anderson composition so that “I love you,” “I love you too” becomes track noise, hearkening to my daughter Miranda July’s first film Me and You and Everyone We Know. In fact, I am near certain they are referencing her, or referencing someone who is referencing her, which is an additional hit for me.

Throughout Waves, words are behind or ahead of or counterpointing scenes with a kind of spirit-guide intelligence and foreshadowing, a Crowleyite soul messaging, such that a dreamlikeness and etheric/astral-plane view prevails over an ordinary Florida landscape. The first half is its nightmare and polarity, the second half redemption, innocence, rebirth, other pole. Forgiveness connects them because something needs to forgive what happened (and is happening everywhere since) what was allowed to happen because no one could wake themselves up from the bubble. The film doesn’t come by it easily, but it lets at least some of the participants earn their way to forgiving themselves too.

What stays with me in particular from the dark part is the way in which the wrestling coach shoots a guided Sufi-like visualization into his boys’ cores and souls to turn them into killing machines; then the father, without realizing what he is doing, affirms the mechanized meditation.

Lucas Hedges plays the guy in the second half)—everything he is in is not just good but at the cutting edge of our time: the opioid crisis, gay conversion therapy, the cosmic skate-boarder, even the hockey-playing suburban Boston kid. Here he has to bring innate grace to a wasted, impoverished landscape, at home and on a road trip.

After watching the Special Features on the DVD, I would add these thoughts:

•The way the director and actors describe their trajectory and art is cogent and inspired, but it focuses on very different aspects than my own description (above). I am attributing things to the film that are subliminal and synergistic rather than overtly scripted or played.

•The cast members, crew members, and tiers of directors, etc., come off as a close-knit family in the Special Features’ “Making of.” This group showed gestalt engagement and trans-racial transparency. The film worked not even (or only) because of the facets I described but because its makers were engaged in a real, even dangerous process together, and magic came. When they’re doing commentary, they seem like a bunch of kids having a good old time, goofing off, laughing, teasing each other, using a cell to call Taylor Russell (the angelic sweetie of the second half) during the commentary, telling her, “Hey, Tay, we’re doing the commentary, talking about you,” and then letting her recover composure and shout out to them and the audience on her own cell from wherever she was. What still comes across, even outside the plot, is a meticulous attention to detail—technical detail, pacing detail, performance detail.

•This is much more of an improvised film than I realized. Schults set the players up and let them invent and imagine the story. It was apparently shot out of order so that the actors had little idea of the whole they were in and were quite astonished that all these separate elements and subplots came together into a cohesive, gathering drama. It’s as if the film was created as separate fields of energy that were activated into a narrative that made itself independent of the script or the motives behind any one scene.

•This turns out to have been a much bigger film than the 144 minutes of the edited version I saw. It was an expandable, contractable epic. The public has its abridged form only. The deleted scenes are not cuts of flab or distension as in many films’ elided material. They are living parts of the ceremony, different frequencies and holographs. They are each as aesthetically finished as the rest and could slide back in without diluting or distorting the whole. They are short stories equal to the novel they fly out of.

And apparently, they’re the least of what’s missing because they ended up cutting the opening series of sequences from sixteen to eight minutes in order to get the audience into the film more authetically. Schults and his cast lament the lost minutes as among the best in the film. I believe them.

He says that once you’ve seen and gotten the film, the whole version would be the best version—the entire director’s cut—but if you haven’t seen it, like most viewers, the whole would have been too much and too confusing (and too long) for today’s audiences. I’d love to see Waves stitched back together. That might be the Sistine Chapel.

•The last two deleted scenes (“Rap” and “Teacher”) are especially lucid tiny short stories, self-contained and original, weird and quirky in their own way.

•Waves is also filled with subtle references to dozens of other films, contemporary and classic, some of the allusions no longer than four seconds. There are many fractal films here, not quite a series like The Sopranos, more like a scalar phenomenon that continues to reflect at different spins and values. It’s only an incidental exaggeration to say that it is at once a regular old film, a history of cinema, and a futuristic time loop.

Crash Landing on You (16-episode series), directed by Lee Jung-hyo (2019-2020). This was one of the most fulfilling extended “movies” I have ever seen. It is classified online alternately (or simultaneously) as a romantic drama, romantic comedy, sitcom, and spy drama. I find it to be all those and also a musical; an opera, without song and dance; a superhero fable with magical-realist and manga elements; and a series of parable-like skits and comedy routines. The genre ranges from The Phil Silver’s Show, Gomer Pyle, and McHale’s Navy to Dallas, The Sound of Music, and The Pajama Game, with touches of West Side Story, the collected Nicholas Sparks miracles, and John Le Carré’s Little Drummer Girl. That Crash Landing on You is so all over the board is its strength and its weakness. It is magical and not close to entirely realistic. It is also made for South Korean TV and, wonderfully, not repackaged or gentrified for audiences outside the Korean sensibility, so we get to participate directly in the broadcasts with their teaser pre-finale finales as openers and their series cheerleading crawlers often in Korean. The approach is nonlinear in a Western sense, but it is not necessarily nonlinear otherwise. Like rules for which side of the car and road to drive on, the choice is not necessarily inherent but ethnic or national. In any case, I enjoy the Korean oddities, though sometimes I don’t follow what’s happening, and other times I am surprised that something that I thought had already happened is happening again. It’s because it was an opening teaser, not the real event. I am reminded that every movie is not a movie but a reality to some of its stars: the babies and animals. No bird, dog, or horse is acting even if everyone around them is acting. They are being fed and moved and contextualized for real, or as real as samsara gets.

The premise of Crash Landing on You is that a young woman, Yoon Se-Ri (played exquisitely by Son Ye Jin), paragliding in a stiff wind from a hill outside Seoul, South Korea, is blown into the North Korean sector of the DMZ, lands in a tree, is found there by alerted North Korean soldiers of the Korean’s People’s Army under the command of Ri Jeong-Hyeok (played just as exquisitely by Hyun Bin) on whom she literally falls—hence the title—when ordered down from her branch and, for mostly plot-contrived reasons, is hidden from the North Korean government by the soldiers while they try to return her surreptitiously to South Korea. The interchange between Se-Ri and the troops continually borders on slapstick like a parody of Bridge Over the River Kwai prison camp.

More than thirty hours of viewing is centered around escapades to elude the communist authorities while using different subterfuges to disguise or explain this strange woman’s presence among the troops to the local villagers. She is presented by the men as both Jeong-Hyeok’s fiancé and a special-services North Korean spy operating mostly in South Korea (explaining her dialect). This is played for comedy, romance, and high spy drama in a blatant conflation of genres.

This basic scenario branches into maybe ten major subplots and dozens of mini-dramas over sixteen episodes, encompassing internal politics and social maneuvering in both Koreas as well as the radically different lifestyles of each country, though both are endemically Korean—Korean mad authoritarian and Korean mad capitalist—more or less centered around ruthless campaigns by foes to undermine Se-Ri and Jeong-Hyeok and both their families, to kill the heroes and knock their parents from their social and economic standings, again in either Korea by the very different rulebooks and terms.

The heart and soul of the series is a budding, mostly ascetic, bashful, long-unenacted and denied romance between the heroine and hero with flashbacks to an unlikely meeting between the two many years earlier in Switzerland where Jeong-Hyeok studied piano with ambition to bypass his military-political obligations and become a musician, a caper brought to an end by the murder of his brother, compelling him to return to North Korea and assume his family leadership, and where Se-Ri went on vacation to try to overcome a siege of suicidal depression. Synchronicities are so built into the series that their ultra-absurdities are of little concern. The murderers turn their attention to Jeong-Hyeok, adding one of many political and military layers of intrigue and misdirection to the hiding of a South Korean woman.

            There is also a second “couple” in Crash Landing: Seo Dan (played by Seo Ji Hye), a member of the Pyongyang political elite and daughter of the owner of the city’s swishest department store, and Goo Seung Jun (Kim Jung Hyun), a Western-oriented South Korean conman, crook, and playboy bounder hiding out in North Korea from his enemies and rivals under a luxurious paid protection plan offered by a corrupt North Korean underground.

What ties two couples together is that a member of each was the other’s fiancé at some point (presently in the case of Ri Leong-Hyeok and Seo Dan). Seo Dan is his long-time betrothed, though they barely knew each other before becoming engaged—she admired him from a distance as a schoolgirl—and have not seen each other in (I think) ten years during which Dan mostly studied in Russia. Jun is Se-Ri’s former “intended” in the South where his schemes involved intrigue and infighting within her family and getting himself married strategically to gain within it. Thus the web of synchronicity and one degree of separation binds the subplots to each other in terms of memory, romance, and change through individuation. Se-Ri and Leong-Hyeok turn into a different version of themselves as they recognize each other.   

All four leading characters also play comedically in a light sitcom genre, though Dan and Jun are more Chalineseque and slapstick. Both couples go through denial, transformation, and bursts of impulsive love and commitment with their new potential paramour. In the case of Se-Ri and Leong-Hyeok, it is a deep, soulful, almost karmic recognition at the highest echelons of their respective Koreas. Dan and Seung Jun are more like rogue lovers, villains and tricksters, agents of destruction Neither is an attractive character at the beginning of the series. They are variously spoiled, sulky, greedy, narcissistic, and vain, often played to humorous effect; yet once Seung Jun falls in love with Dan, the relationship radicalizes them, not just their lives but the meaning of their respective pasts. Both reemerge as heroic and selfless. The tragic ending to their love story is a counterweight to Jeong-Hyeok and Se-Ri’s happy ending, a dose of mafia police-state reality as well as an awakening of another kind. They don’t get much time together romantically, a few seconds. But Dan is liberated to abandon her prior path of wealth and power, to simplify, and live a more grounded life.

              The more extended Jeong-Hyeok/Se Ri romance frames the 16-part series. Se-Ri is a “chaebol,” an heiress (the South Korean term indicates elite ancestry and standing), founder of her own successful cosmetics and fashion company and selected to succeed her father at the helm of his own South Korean corporation, picked over her ambitious brothers who have unprincipled ambitious wives happy when Se-Ri vanishes into the sky and the North. The younger brother is cutthroat with an even more cutthroat wife who colludes with Seung Jun and the North Korean renegades. The older brother is hapless and tied to a daffily unhinged wife.

Se-Ri shines in her corporate role, displaying entrepreneurial genius and Machiavellian savvy, but she is also sad, lost, and lonely. She paraglides into a high wind in an attempt to change her mood and cure her melancholy.

Jeong-Hyeok is the son of a major politburo figure in the North Korean regime. Having replaced his murdered brother in the hierarchy, he is expected to carry out clan, party, and military obligations while, at the same time, he receives the privileges, permissions, and foreign passports of his own North Korean elite circle. He is the opposite of a chaebol as well as its North Korean male mirror.

            The romance between the two is protracted, very stylized, and old-fashioned, tea-ceremony subtle by their traditional cultures’ standards, resisted culturally and emotionally by both parties, forbidden by their societies. Its push-pull aspects give rise to the Broadway-musical mood of Crash Landing on You. Son Yi Jin and Hyun Bin are equally brilliant in their roles. Their chemistry is of Ingrid Bergman/Humphrey Bogart, Katherine Hepburn/Spencer Tracy, Marilyn Monroe/Cary Grant caliber as well as jocular and quietly fierce. My spiritual-activist friend Andrew Harvey consider them one of the penultimate couples of literature and cinema, which is saying a lot.

Initially the pampered Se-Ri cannot understand or relate to the deprivation of the North Korean barracks and village in which she had been hidden, leading to delightful sitcom moments (no doubt even more appreciated by South Korean audiences that recognize the characters’ different dialects, terminologies, double-entendres, and extended tropes). For instance, Se-Ri not only wants hot water for her bath and a candle but a scented candle.

In a subsequent episode after she has become more integrated in the village itself, she goes on an evening outing with the local women to a market. There they become separated, and she wanders past stalls forlorn and lost. Jeong-Hyeok learns from the returning women that she is in the stalls alone and, revealing only incidental interest and a strategic military concern, goes rushing off to find her. We next see Se-Ri wandering mournfully through the market and, in the distance, is a candle held aloft by tall Jeong-Hyeok in his People’s Army uniform. In the darkness she orients toward it. As they meet, they don’t hug or exude, but feeling is bursting through poses of rule and etiquette, as he tells her that this time he has brought a scented candle and asks her if that is right. On the point of tears, she nods.

            As Se-Ri and Jeong-Hyeok enact scene after scene putting her pseudo-sophisticated chaebol personality against his tough, gentle, naïve, bashful male diffidence, we see—and I assume South Korean viewers deeply felt—the longing for national reunification. As individual and rich as the characters are, the depth of their longing is a representation of the aspirations of a nation and people to be made whole again. The line drawn across Korea was an artificial imposition of the colonial West and has no deep local roots or meaning. It’s just that a crime family took over the North and a military class rose to its own privilege and status around the totalitarian monarchy.

            The series attempts to portray the virtues and vices of both societies fully and fairly. The generous, compassionate soldiers of Jeong-Hyeok’s platoon, a chorus with its own routines of comedy and courage throughout sixteen episodes, generate their own legitimacy and value when shown against the decadent opulence of the South. Yet the open-ness, freedom, and inventiveness of South Korean society, which the men of Jeong-Hyeok’s company get to see firsthand in a mission to bring their leader back to North Korea in the closing episodes, stands against the handcuffs, prison camps, and militarism of the North.

The village council of middle-aged North Koran women (“ahjummas”) hero-worship and are moon-struck over Jeong-Hyeok and initially reject Se-Ri; then they adopt her adoringly. They are a model of hard work, fellowship, mutual support, patriotic purity, and, yes, absolute kim chi. They similarly perform as a chorus throughout the series, enacting their own comedy, pathos, and aspirations.

Likewise, the murderous North Korean military hierarchy and outliers who work against Jeong-Hyeok and his family and try to assassinate him like his brother match the dog-eat-dog viciousness of Se-Ri’s spoiled South Korean siblings and sisters-in-law who just as ardently want her dead and out of the way. The series is kept in a kind of dynamic symmetry by these parallel counterbalancing themes.

            In an early episode (number three) in which Jeong-Hyeok is sure that he has arranged a machination to smuggle Se-Ri back to the South by boat exchange at sea, she decides to bid farewell to the men with an awards ceremony, singling three individuals out for (1) kind treatment of her, (2) secret devotion to South Korean soap operas, and (3) handsomeness. As she begins, they are surprised to learn that she is giving them not only written certificates of merit but prizes. As she explains, what’s a certificate of merit without a prize? Here Son Ye Jin is at her most brilliant as a comedienne. Each prize comes with a choice, do you want yours after reunification or now? This accentuates the significance of reunification while allowing hilarious antitheses.

After reunification, the kindness award brings a fantastically high number of won (currency), like two million. If desired now, though, it brings eight ears of corn from the company stock. After reunification, the sitcom award brings a lunch with South Korea’s leading soap actress. If now, it brings the t.v. in Jeong-Hyeok’s quarters.

Fifth Company Master Sergeant Pyo Chi Su (Yang Kyun Won), the most strident and ideological of the platoon members, objects that Se-Ri can’t give away objects that belong either to the collective or their commander. She ignores him as if he hasn’t spoken. The ongoing repartee between these two is scripted for caricature and sociopolitical parody; for instance, he thinks initially they should just kill and bury her and be done with the matter, and he is outspoken about it, leading to her outraged chaebol responses.

This underlies a gradual transformation in Pyo, who is, in truth, deep-feeling but overly propagandized and a North Korean automaton. As he comes to terms, stage by stage, with the decidedly un-harsh reality of South Korea later, an education accelerated during his time with the platoon there, cognitive dissonance achieves farce as he tries to spin every luxury, convenience, freedom, and warmth from a North Korean agitprop perspective. Throughout his platoon’s undercover stint, he struggles to conceal the transformation so many in the South long to transmit northward, in balloons and flash drives, including of copies this very series, which is apparently a crime to watch there.

Meanwhile, for her third certificate, the handsomeness one, Se-Ri intentionally teases Jeong-Hyeok by choosing a different soldier. He likewise tries to hide his embarrassment, disappointment, and interest in her by an officious rejection of the whole production which, at the same time, is amusing and turning him against his character’s stiff façade. This is a bit of awkward, even incompatible scripting, as a different persona of Jeong-Hyeok has already spent time in Switzerland as a pianist, so he shouldn’t be that naïve. The writers should have communicated better about how to meld different experiences into one character.

I am struck by the notion that the series is itself an act of reunification and, though it would be as naïve as Donald Trump bromancing of Kim Jong-un to think that members of the North Korean hierarchy would view Crash Landing on You and change their hearts and minds, those butterfly wings in Seoul do flap and you don’t know what currents they stir in Pyongyang.

            There are other flaws to the series. The constant genre shifts, while reassuringly magical and upbeat, turn a legitimate romance and spy drama into magical realism and burlesque. Jeong-Hyeok’s martial-arts feats are absurd; though a pianist, he is a combination of Jackie Chan, Bruce Lee, and Superman. His cartoon-like dispatches of whole gangs at one time undercut the emotional verity that grows between him and Se-Ri, as she nurses him through the convalescences that follow his combats. It is difficult to portray real wounds caused by magical-realism escapades.

The ending of the series is sappily utopian and faciliely idealized given the labyrinthine, dialectical infrastructure leading up to it. I make my peace by thinking of the whole as a musical, which allows intermittent magical realism, absurdity, absurd synchronicities, and one-in-a-billion outcomes to dust-ups of major mayhem.

The fine orchestra playing behind this twenty-three-hour comedy of errors and tragedy of kings is as scene-responsive and tuneful as “Peter and the Wolf” or “The Nutcracker” painting scenes with scores of Sergei Prokofiev and Pyotr Tchaikovsky. The ahjummas and platoon each have their own Nino-Rota-like jaunty themes that begin when the story cuts to their actions. The romance has many melodic, dreamy themes—“Moments We Walked Together,” “The Hill of Yearning,” “Here I Am Again.” The most powerful and nostalgic is, oddly, not available from iTunes, the motif of North Korean street urchins, a boy stealing food to keep his baby sister alive, which then becomes the theme for the times when Jeong-Hyeok and Se-Ri recognize each other and when reunification is hinted at: “The Song You and I Used to Sing Together.”

This theme of musical composition hearkens to one of the most magical realist moments of the series: Jeong-Hyeok composing and then playing a song for his dead brother on a conveniently appearing piano about to be shipped, so it is virtually afloat in a Swiss lake, while Se-Ri, who has yet to paraglide into the DMZ, hears and is haunted by the tune as she passes in a boat, initiating the most far-fetched super-synchronicity of the lot.

No one paraglides into the DMZ for real without landing dead, so the script writers had to brew up a “Dorothy in Kansas” “Truman Show” super-cartoon tornado that turns off the electricity in the DMZ while gently depositing our heroine in a tree: Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Tempest, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”

But that is why this series is bingeworthy.

Wild Mountain Thyme, written and directed by John Patrick Shanley (2020). After admiring this film, I checked out Netflix customer reviews to see why it averaged only three stars—it was a masterpiece. The main grievances were that the continually delayed romantic interaction between the two main characters (Anthony Reilly played by Jamie Dornan and Rosemary Muldoon played by Emily Blount) made no sense—why did he resist her for so long?—and also that the ending was tipped off from the beginning. I gave it five stars despite the fact that, in afterthought, I agree that the plot is flawed. Ongoing comedic slapstick is also slightly irritating (as if both life and myths are innately a bit comical and absurd), but this guy previously directed Moonstruck, and he is not so much moonstruck as moonstruck with the trope of moonstruckness. Yet that is minor in the scope of the whole.

       As for the obviousness, I find that irrelevant because the story’s frame is an otherworldly tale told by a storyteller after his death (Reilly’s father played by Christopher Walken). Any story worth returning from the afterlife to tell has to be mythic and archetypal as well as full of hope for the living. The tale is told because it is obvious. Then it shows how the obvious can transcend the obvious.

        As for the inscrutable behavior of Dornan’s Reilly, it may meld into the fantastic, but that’s the point of the story: both of these would-be lovers are touched by a different vibe of “faery,” a natural vibration in the Irish landscape. Reilly is “crazier” than Muldoon and less able and willing to explain himself or express his feelings, partly because he is a man, a “man” man. The myth that his father Tony has returned to tell is the journey of the “touched” to a liberating. revelation. It is because young Reilly must find himself through finding Rosemary and the so-called manifest world that she inhabits requires that emerald-isle energy is translated into incarnate life.

Emily Blount is larger than life as red-haired Rosemary Muldoon. She is played as both a goddess (like Athena or Flidais) and an earth woman suffering bouts of depressions. She has a mythic wild horse, and she doubles as a swan (also a flower). Anthony, the child and then the man, doubles as a bee.

            Blount masters the character, the brogue, and the wit of Shanley’s script. I suspected during the film that I was watching an adapted play; some of the best movies have been adapted from plays because the language is crisp and literary. This film could have been written by a modern Thomas Hardy or an Irish Eric Bogosian, but I don’t think that it originates onstage—too rambling, wild, and spacious. I once saw a play at a radical Maine theater (The Barn) in which the characters left the stage, the playhouse, and the property, and sailed off in a boat moored for that purpose; it was part of the play, so they kept staying the lines and true to the sccript. Wild Mountain Thyme would have to had horses and living clover to feel real.

It is near impossible to transpose Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake music from a ballet to a film score; it comes off as schmaltzy, a mismatch, or melodramatic overreach. In Wild Mountain Thyme, it’s perfect theme music for the various meeting grounds of Rosemary’s inner and outer selves from her girlhood (played by Abigail Coburn) to an Irish female farmer who flies to New York City for one day to see the ballet and have a brief flirtation with Anthony’s American cousin Adam (played by John Hamm) who comes courting to Irealnd. I am reminded of Yip Harburg’s magical score for the 1947 Broadway musical Finian’s Rainbow. Songs like “Old Devil Moon,” “How Are Things in Glocca Morra?,” and “Look to the Rainbow” better fit the mood of Shanley’s movie than they did a didactic faux-magical, leprechaun-deus-ex-machina, Civil-Rights-fable play. Harburg’s “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” also suits Rosemary’s Ireland better than Dorothy’s Kansas, though the film has its own theme song, which gets sung first by Anthony’s mother, then by Rosemary at the pub, then by Anthony at the pub, then by Rosemary and Anthony together at the pub, then by the entire lead cast, living and dead, at the pub. That’s certainly faery.

The lyric and image of “Wild Mountain Thyme” tie song and film together (“Will ye go, lassie, go?). Online I see that the song was adapted from the nineteenth-century poem and music, “The Braes of Balquhither,” popularized in the 1960s by Judy Collins and Joan Baez.

            In a more secular precis of the plot, Anthony and Rosemary grew up on neighboring farms as best friends, destined to become lovers and partners, but something stands in their way. The situation is complicated in a somewhat contrived twist of plot (pun accidental) regarding the succession of each of them to their family farms and a small piece of gateway property that got deeded from the Reilly to the Muldoon farm to raise money to buy a ring (since lost), a “plot” that father Tony is trying to reclaim before his death while Anthony searches for the ring. The Walken character also intended to sell the farm to nephew Adam rather than deed it to his son for much of the film, a mark against Anthony’s daftness and his Kelly lineage on his mother’s side (the Kellys are not considered true farmers). It’s a stretch, but the story is a myth not an existential drama.

            The real player is Ireland, its gods, goddesses, and elementals. They claim half of both Anthony and Rosemary’s souls, and they play out an eternally recurring Celtic romance. The film’s landscape of the film is jade, luminous, lonely, intimate, and periodically supernatural and “touched.” The dead and living mingle, as noted, in the pub to join the transformed lovers in reprising the theme song. In fact, everyone from the film, present or elsewhere, living or dead, ancestral or yet-to-be and precognitive, gathers for the finale, reifying transcendent ancestral Eire. It’s a rare post-modern film that can recapture the dawn time yet stay grounded enough to be cinema verité as well.

Let Him Go, directed by Thomas Bezucha (2020), starring vintage older Diane Lane and vintage older Kevin Costner as 1950s Montana grandparents. A feminist Western, a classic revenge film (capped by an all-consuming fire), a road trip, a vision quest, an exploration of the unexplored Montana/North Dakota border, an eternal return, a plunge into primal misogyny, and a darkness over the Midland meet in this late look at the outlaw West. The role characters made for spooky noir; think Peter Lorre and Lana Turner. In Let Him Go, Lesley Manville, Kayli Carter, Jeffrey Donovan, and crew are straight out of Raymond Chandler and Edgar Allen Poe. Manville’s Blanche Weboy is a cold-blooded Cruella, sadistic enough to make the Weboy clan as terrifying as an eagle to a gaggle of gulls or a wolf circling sheep. She is hell on wheels, more bloodthirsty than a serial killer or fisher cat.

The highlight of this film for me, however, is Booboo Stewart as Peter Dragswolf, an eight-year-old First Nations child dragged off to Missionary school, returning as a homeless, placeless, lost-in-translation lost boy with a lost horse who provides the chi necessary to turn a frozen gear. It’s not without sacrifice, but no true ceremony is.  

Swallow, directed by Carlo Mirabella-Davis (2020). Not every movie I review here was the most brilliant and enjoyable to watch. Often a film is enjoyable but trivial. I found Swallow light and sitcom-like in many ways, but that was also its strength, creating a surface of trenchant banality and self-congratulatory sarcasm. That’s the world into which Haley Bennett’s Hunter Conrad has married. Her handsome, wealthy, superficially erudite husband rescued her from a career of retail sales in bath products. He saw her one day, thought she looked presentable and hot, and figured she was available because he was as good as she could get. He didn’t try to figure out who she was or if they were a good match. He needed a house doll for his career and lineage preservation. She would incubate pretty children.

That’s how Richie Conrad (Austin Stowell) plays it; he treats Hunter with imperial condescension­—all the earmarks of considerateness, empathy, and undying support but no substance. it’s all air. His parents treat her a bit like a collectible moppet or family rescue project, though Hunter’s mother-in-law eventually tries to claw beneath her cheerful, disembodied surface. The landscape is suburban Hudson River, rural and isolated too. Then Hunter gets pregnant and starts preparing a child’s room the way a cyborg would.

            The break in the platitudinous surface of Hunter’s daytimes in the kingdom into which she has been wed is pica, a rare eating disorder in which a person has a compulsion to put inedible objects in his or her mouth and then swallow them. It starts with a marble that Hunter later fishes out of her poop and cleans. Why not? It is special. It has been through her and is no longer just a marble. It is part of her. A bulletin-board tack follows, painfully, then a battery and numerous other metal objects. As she explains, she likes the feel of them in her mouth. Ultimately a whole menagerie is fished out of her at the hospital and her condition is diagnosed. This is especially disturbing to Conrads because she is pregnant with their baby.

            There is a huge gap between Hunter’s husband’s and in-laws’ capacity to understand complex symbolic behavior or the logic of neurosis and her own desperate, unconscious attempts to represent the untenable and inextricable situation in which she has gotten herself. What looks like paradise is pure torture. She can’t admit it to herself, so she behaves as if the opposite were true, with faux cheerfulness and exaggerated devotion to her husband. Even Hunter doesn’t believe in her own placid presentation, so she is left with a single singular pleasure of eating the inedible. That’s a somatic and culinary metaphor for her life. Her entire pleasure principle and representation of her own desire and plight are pica. The only way out of a false world and self is to break with not only every meaning the family comprehends but her own fabricated persona.

            As the situation deteriorates further, her in-laws come to regard her only a a breeding vessel for their grandchild. They decide to incarcerate her in a psychiatric hospital for the next nine months under the pretense of therapy but to commoditize their investment in her fertilized egg.

            Prior to her deterioration, she was already in therapy, a set-up that her in-laws provided and tried to control. Yet the therapist, a relatively astute woman, draws out a crucial detail, that Hunter, who has numerous half-siblings, was conceived during a stranger’s home invasion and rape of her mother. The rapist went to jail, and Hunter carries around an old photograph of him from the newspaper account of his trial.

Her therapy is doomed because her husband and in-laws consider the therapist their employee whose loyalty is to them. They don’t want an inconvenient truth of hers to come out. They don’t want her to have a personality. They are satisfied with a pica doll.

The situation is further complicated when her husband and in-laws hire an unlikely Syrian, a combination steward, chef, and nursemaid, to watch over her day and night and keep her womb healthy. She resists and foils him as well as she can, but their evolving dialogue is elucidating and enlarges the film’s frame. She discovers that he is in the States because of war, while he thinks that her condition would be impossible in Syria because not only wouldn’t warfare allow it but because war already is pica, eating the inedible. As he intuits the similarity in their plights, he develops sympathy for her, and aids in her ultimate escape. She proves to him and us that she isn’t entirely hick and provincial or a mute manikin; she can even say, “No shit, Sherlock,” showing that she gets it all.

Hunter’s unlikely escape brings her to a motel where she hungrily scoops up the garden dirt and consumes it in her room, making an utter mess of the bed. A phone conversation with her husband starts out with him on his best behavior, trying to lure her back into the relationship as her only option beyond living on the street. His coaxing is convincing to her at first, and the Conrad lifestyle was attractive once to a salesgirl, but she is elusive; she wants to hear more conviction on his part. He has neither the patience nor the capacity and emotional intelligence. He ends up calling her “an ungrateful cunt.” That ends that mouse trip.

Her first option in the morning is to go back to her mother’s house in an upstate farming community that she comes from but, on her arrival, her mother ebbs from marginal sympathy to saying it’s not a good time to visit because the house is too full—another, more favored daughter (not from a rape) is already visiting with a grandchild.

             There is only one place left. She takes a cab or maybe it is an Uber. Gradually we realize that her destination is her birth father, a man she never met, now out of prison and raising a biracial family with his black wife. He has reformed, and the appearance of his daughter-by-rape at a birthday party for his legitimate daughter puts his rehabilitated life at risk. Yet in a powerful scene, the two manage to contrive a few moments together in which he convinces her, a bit like Robin Williams’ rendition of a psychiatrist in Good Will Hunting, that her plight isn’t her fault. He redeems himself, his transgressive act, and her. She knows what to do next. We see her in a public bathroom, probably a shopping mall like where she once worked. She has the necessary pills and she aborts the fetus in the toilet and leaves.

The ending was disappointing to many Netflix viewers, but I found it perfect like Alain Tanner’s closing of Mesidor: the digital realm or viewing plane just outside the film. Hunter leaves Swallow’s frame, and we watch other random female patrons of the rest room come and go, enter stalls, wash themselves, and leave, as the credits run and the background music is Alana Yorke’s daffy song “Anthem”: “We’ll just try and we’ll try and we’ll try and we’ll try and again / We’ll just keep on singing.” Singing is what it feels like: the wild elation of escape from herself, her half-body, and incarcerated life, inside it and outside it as well as inside and outside her own transgressive syzygy, almost parasitism, in her mother.

The point is, she doesn’t need the story or the film anymore, and the film doesn’t need her. She has re-entered the world as a normal passenger: no identityless salesgirl waiting to be swooped up by a plundering patron, no faux fancy mother decorating someone else’s plush room, no disembodied womb, no eater of inedible objects, no prisoner of anyone or any thing. She is free, just another person like all the others in that rest room and the universe.

My Octopus Teacher, directed by Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed (2020). My Octopus Teacher has touched viewers in the way a flash drive from a trip to the Saturnian system, planet or moons, might: a visit with aliens whom we never knew (but with whom we share a solar system). Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed’s documentary transcends prior cartoons, tropes, and sushi. Diver Craig Foster befriends a female Octopus vulgaris in his local South African kelp forest. For the better part of a year, they swim together, do contact improv, and even kiss arms (octopus says hello, sucker by sucker, alien to hominid, E. T. to Elliott). They dance and play hide-and-seek with schools of fish. This makes sushi menus cannibalistic.

With its suckers, each tentacle-full bearing a rudimentary mind, mother octopus swiftly gathers a hundred or so shells around herself as shark protection and sits on ocean bottom like a lady’s fancy hat. As that hat, she rides the shark, the safest perch for a rodeo queen. She is a shell-covered changeling clown, as she masters her vertebrate predator. In a hypothetical Walt Disney version, hungry shark says, “W-w-w-here did that p-p-p-pesky oyster go.”

“Look on your back, bub!”

Foster remarks that his “friend” is more fundamentally intelligent than he is, for she is a giant underwater ganglion sprouting over hundreds of millions of years.

When a shark bites off one of her arms, she convalesces for a while, deep in her small shell-and-kelp stone cave, foreshadowing Steven Spielberg’s E. T. There she grows a miniature arm that becomes a full-fledged tentacle. She jets about reborn.

            Octopuses have very short lives, proving that time, wisdom, and experience are nonlinear. Foster mourns the death of his young friend, who is old to herself, as she transfers her tidal lease and vital essence to her babes. (This review is taken from my book Dreamtimes and Thoughtforms: From the Big Bang to Octopus and Crow Intelligence to UFOS.)

Nomadland, directed by Chloe Zhao (2020) I believe that Frances McDormand is the only true “actor” in this film. This is a documentary with one fictional character as narrator. The other “characters” play themselves. They are the habitants of Nomadland, a discontinuous nation within the Western United States, made up of mostly older dropouts and societal defectors who live in trailers, cars, campers, or improvised motorhomes, and travel from site to site. This “roadmap,” Nomadland’s meta-geography, includes parts of Nevada, Arizona, Nebraska, South Dakota, and California, where its citizens seek new experiences and occasional get-by jobs. Hangar-like warehouses thrown up quonset-like by Amazon are the most common available oases for breaking into rural sequestration. In that larger sense, Nomadland is like Last Nations on the land of the First Nations. It is also landscape-topical in providing neutral looks into the vast merchandizing fungal cities of Amazonland with their own laws, sutras, citizens, customs, and justice. Amazon.com is essential to Nomadland, its vast para-corporate spectrum from adversary to ally, while Nomandland supports Amazon’s primacy and fungibility. The giant, metastasizing kraken is as weird finally as the Nomadlanders.

Other seasonal jobs include camp host, sugar-beet processing plant, and the indescribably feral Wall Drugs of South Dakota.

Nomadland’s citizens prosper by cultivating each other’s company, amoeboid community, and spare parts for their vehicles. They conduct general bricolage and rummage from the land and its waste products. They seek death without being institutionalized or packaged for expiration and disposal.

Chinese director Zhao’s objective view of the American continent—accordant with the Chinese Communist Party’s jaded view of Western capitalism—is realized brilliantly without affirming or aligning with its politics (she sees beauty in the freedom to drift in a nomadland that would be impossible in her China). She both reifies and trashes the CCP without jeopardizing herself, in fact becoming a national hero for succeeding in the land of the enemy. She represents Chinese ingenuity and brilliance, yet gets away with ethnic and racial apostasy. McDormand’s low-key, agile shapeshifting disclose a different, more “real” America behind the beautiful people and professional influencers who make up most Hollywood and even indy films as well as her own professional career. Nomadland is beyond news stories too; its beauty to its habitants is its immunity and camouflage. The demographic subtext of a missing working-class black hole yields a world of ghosts more real than the people they once were.

Nomadland deserves its own senators, Congresspeople, electoral votes, plebiscites, and codicils, not that there’s a chance in hell. Puerto Rico, D.C., and Guam will become states first.

            The film has the feel of a bardo journey and, in that sense, is deeply spiritual without spiritual trappings or overlay. It deals only with basic rubrics: mortality, the road of life and death, and spiritual freedom over other constitutional freedoms.

I was surprised to see that some viewers on Netflix gave this film the lowest available rating, as they carped about its slow-moving, plot-lessness, the “losers” who parade across the screen, and the depressing narrative as if that weren’t Zhao’s whole point. Losers maybe by MAGA or Instagram standards but winners of the game show called Reality.

By contrast, I find the fake action, contrived suspense, and pat plots of most entertainment films slower moving and more depressing than Nomadland, even the best of them. They move like Martian rovers over false gems. A downhome view of the “other” people who dwell and die outside authorized assignments and sentences is closer to “intelligent life in the universe.” Earth’s “Martians” have no real spiritual or politically freedom, so all their fast-moving action is karmically and psychotropically sluggish. Nomadland by contrast moves with the swiftness of terrestrial biology, in time with tortoises, lizards, and bears.

Plenty of weirdos and lost souls orate, preach, sing, dance, and travel through the unconsolidated territory and cinema-time of Nomadland, but these folks are far from boring or depressing. They are uplifting in their willingness to tolerate, even invite poverty, disease, mortality, alienation, exile, aging bodies and countenances, dying, and each other—body and soul. Weirdness and repulsion are not stigmas or agents of disgust, but truths of existence from which make-up, condos, retirement communities, and mid-range domesticity are unsuccessful evasions and temporary fugues. The citizens of Nomadland crave the de-commoditization of their lives, the loss and lack of conveniences of modernity (except for keeping their engines running), and the freedom of being able to experience nature, animals in raw epiphany moments, wilderness, desert, and sunsets, with a fuck-you to society and the capitalist dream. They prefer to end as roadkill like a dead bird or coyote, to decay with the seasons, rather than in a hospital or hospice. They may not count in regular censuses, but they individuate, mature, rust, and make their truths plain and primordial.

            Well into Zhao’s floating nomadery, a brief stop at an R.V. convention with its humungous modern homes-on-wheels including washers, driers, entertainment centers, air-conditioning, etc., show the nomads what they are missing and not missing, as McDormand’s Fern pretends to drive to Hawaii while at the wheel of one of them, letting their brief pontoon make-believe match the absurdity of any of them owning one of these rigs. They wouldn’t mind it, but the price of ownership is too great in every regard.

            Bob Wells, proprietor of Bob Wells “cheap r.v. living,” is the priest and State salesman of Nomadland, helping to organize and underwrite a Quartzite, Arizona community, its full-fledged lifestyle and vans. He delivers its ultimate epigraph and trope: “no one ever leaves Nomadland, they just move on down the road.”

Never Rarely Sometimes Always, directed by Eliza Hittman (2020). The title refers to the range of possible answers to questions about sexual and physical abuse read to young women being processed at an abortion clinic in New York City. The lead character Autumn Callahan (played by Sidney Flanigan) travels there on a bus from rural Pennsylvania with her cousin Skylar (Talia Ryder) to abort a second-trimester fetus. The girls are seventeen. They stole money for the trip from the supermarket where they both work as cashiers. They will probably be charged with a crime when they return. That, like many “key” details (who fathered the unborn child, a teen peer or a man), we never find out. Autumn is so inarticulate and inexpressive that she can barely navigate the transportation corridor and urban jungle, but she does; grit and desperation carry her. Skylar is a necessary companion, more flexible, creative, decisive, and able to flow with boundaries.

They must not only handle the bus but three days in New York City without a place to stay and not near enough money. That becomes the secondary story: how dysfunctional, hapless, and predatory our whole society has become. If you don’t have, in the words of Woody Guthrie, the“dough re mi,” sophistication, and a look-the-other-way mindset, it is near impossible to surf above the shoals and schools of sharks.

            The movie’s landscape is drab, dark, and documentary, with minimal music or façade. Though some viewers considered Flanigan and Ryder poor actors, quite amateur, I thought them remarkable in how well they played girls who were themselves amateurs at the bigness of life in a fucked-up world. They capture the various moods, diffidences, and sparks of spirit, as their characters skirt the edge of danger, homelessness, depression, and getting lost. They end up on subways, in arcades, at a bowling alley, playing tic-tac-toe with a chicken pecking a terminal behind glass (“Chicken Wins!”), singing karaoke, eating Chinese cakes and buns as the cheapest alternative to starving, and in Skylar’s case, trading kisses with a boy for the fare home while Autumn hides around a pillar holding her hand. The boy, who tried to flirt with them on the bus to New York and then texted Skylar, is nearly as lost, innocent, and lonely as them. All through this unsought adventure greater risks like ones causing unintended pregnancy surround them. To play sheep among wolves without overplaying them is a cinema triumph.

            The film is not, as some reviewers seem to think, pro-abortion. It is more about the shoddiness of the world and how rigged its options, especially for a provincial teen for whom piercing her nose with a stove-heated safety pin and putting in a bead is the height of fashion. The themes are pro-choice only insofar as Autumn must find her own way—choose. It is painfully lucid about the death of the unborn fetus. While it shows both sides of the mainstream debate, it assigns the dilemma itself to vulgarity, recreational and evangelical politics, a money-money-money mentality, and materialism well beyond the moralities, belief systems, and antitheses of either pro-life or pro-choice.

            One of the strongest aspects of the film is that, without dominating soundtrack music, Hittman can allow the idiotic symphony of modernity to play as full orchestra, from the sounds of a supermarket with its cash registers to the street din and animal-like screams of midtown Manhattan. Those, not Jesus versus Darwin, are keys to the abortion dilemma.

Caliphate, an eight-part series created by Wilhelm Behrman and Niklas Rockström for Swedish t.v. (2020). What is most powerful about this palindromically sequential drama is that it captures the myriad aspects of the Islamic State, ISIS or Daesh, as they affected young Muslim girls raised in Western countries. About the time that this film originally came out I read an incisive book by Iranian journalist Azadeh Moaveni called Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS. Moaveni captures the way in which teenage girls arrive at deciding to go to Syria and join the Islamic State with deadly consequences for them—the title speaks the moral. Islam functioned as a reaction against overly Westernized parents and, at the same time, a culture that discriminated against them culturally and theologically. Elsewhere I wrote:

ISIS, the post-modern caliphate in Iraq and Syria, formed as Sunni blowback from the U.S. invasion of Mesopotamia and Babylon. It was packaged to look like a hip-hop version of Arab spring. Young Muslim women—Egyptian and Palestinian; Detroit, Frankfurt, and East London girls—secreted themselves onto commercial jets, crowded into SUVs, snaked through Tunisia and Turkey into Syria in the same spirit that young people once crossed Arizona and Utah singing, “Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.” They also thought, “You’re gonna meet / some gentle people there.” Maybe not gentle—after all, they were conducting jihad—but respectful, pious men.

Instead, they were sacrificially raped and widowed many times over.

They had joined the Caliphate not to explode idols or eradicate kafirs, nor to impose sharia, and certainly not to kidnap and abet the rape of heathen sisters. They sought the kingdom of love as devoutly as those pilgrims caravanning to Haight-Ashbury. Like them, they encountered laws of karma and the limitations and lesions of their own practice.

The Islamic State wasn’t any worse than what they were fleeing in Syria, Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and the exurbs of Istanbul, Tunis, Stockholm, Manchester, or Hamburg: institutionalized poverty, spiritual exile, erotic sadism, drugs, and de facto slavery.

 ISIS is turned into a new kingdom or caliphate of Muslim hunks and rock stars. While showing what these girls were contending with in their European (and North American) countries, Moaveni makes plain the hypocrisy:

            “The whiff of exorcism and devilry made ISIS a popular intellectual

fetish in American journalistic circles, one that overlooked the contributions of American policies and wars to the group’s origin. . . . Everyone had blood on their hands. . . . Did putting it on YouTube make it that much worse?”

            Put it on YouTube they did. Daesh snuff films became rock videos for rebelling young girls. Caliphate shows the various phases of this grooming process in Seden: slick, sexy, sympathetic ISIS spies, orthodox conversion (brainwashing), recruitment, transport to Turkey by way of Germany, immediate subterfuge passage into Syria, initiation of the prospective young widows, attempts of some to escape their unintended fate, resignation of some and active rebellion of others.

To encompass this, the series has multiple subplots that revolve around the efforts of Swedish Muslims who have joined ISIS and live in new Raqqa to orchestrate a three-part terrorist suicide attack in Sweden using converted skinhead brothers there and a confederate on a plane bound for London. Layers of embattlement, spying, and counterspying within the Swedish security services lead to a joining of the two plots, as one young woman, having discovered she was duped and desperate to get out of Raqqa, tries to get evidence to a Muslim policewoman who has fallen out of favor with her own department. The levels of “tinker, tailor, soldier, spy” would do John Le Carré proud. The rescue cannot come without high tension, brinkmanship, loss, shame, and hair-raising last-minute turnabouts, all of which enhance the ISIS riddle—how? who? why? and at what price?

            The narrative is gripping, but suspense is not what makes this worth reviewing. It is the bringing of Moaveni’s world into action much like dramas about World War II or Vietnam. ISIS has gone pretty much unprobed as a real war zone deserving of its own visual literature. 

Sorry We Missed You, directed by Ken Loach (2020). It’s Ken Loach’s body of work as a whole that I think about about when watching his films. Everything he does is cohesive with everything else, so what you get is a thousand-hour-long working-class history of the British Isles (if we include his BBC historical series). He also covers Scotland and Ireland, the Republic and the North.

In this thematic (but not character- or content-based) sequel to I, Daniel Blake, Loach follows a brief stretch in the life of a family: the working parents, a boy (Seb) 15, and a girl (Liza Jane) 11. Each is undergoing a crisis, partly of adolescence but mainly because of the claws of a capitalist society with its exploitative mirages and mazes. Rickey, the father, a former building-trades worker, has just taken a job that is ostensibly building equity by his having a self-employment franchise for a UPS-like delivery service (PDS). But as Loach points out (in the DVD commentary), the terms have been designed in lawyerly fashion to have none of the benefits of ownership and all of its drawbacks and pitfalls. The price of a lost scanner alone will wipe out several weeks’ earnings.

Rickey’s wife Abbey has a similar franchise; she is paid to provide breakfast, dinner, company, clean-up, and nightly tuck-in for older people who are housebound and younger folks who are medically or mentally incapacitated. She does this with inexhaustible patience and saintlike love. But elder homes like delivery services are international-capital, hedge-fund ruses.

Meanwhile, Rickey tries to carry out his delivery job in a way that will earn enough money to afford a house down payment, but he confronts the countless hassles of a delivery van in traffic: first, a relentless AI-imposed schedule via his scanner; second, recalcitrant and eccentric customers; and third, thieves (wankers) who beat him up and steal his packages.

Seb is a budding artist expressing himself through graffiti, but he is in continual Banksy-like trouble with the law and his school, assuring his parents of crises with jobs that have no leisure time to help him. Sister Liza Jane tries to hold her family together with upbeat contributions as its youngest and most innocent member.

What distinguishes the film is what distinguishes all of Loach’s work: he handles his sociopolitical critiques with meticulous muckraking clarity and grace while capturing the deep humanity of every single character who appears on his screen, but especially the quartet at the Sorry We Missed You’s center.

Among memorable scenes are Rickey taking Liza Jane on an afternoon of deliveries (a creative father-daughter excursion), Rickey’s interaction with Mahoney, his dispatcher and boss who is defined to himself by his on-time record while his men’s worlds are falling apart I”Do I look like a counselor to you?,” is Mahoney’s response to Rickey’s mournful plaint), and Abbey’s breakdown in a massively overcrowded hospital waiting room as they wait for Rickey’s X-rays after he is beaten by the truck robbers and Mahoney calls to tell him how much he owes in penalties and lost deposits. Amy takes the phone and screams at him, asking how is Rickey his own employee when he works for you all day and overtime six days a week, and now we’re worried about broken ribs and you’re calling to tell him how much he owes. Fuck off! Put your scanner up your arse? That’s what Loach would like to say to the whole bourgeois world.

In pan of the waiting room during this diatribe—paralleling shots throughout this film and others—Loach uses real people as actors; he hates the term “non-actors.” In the commentary he says that this waiting-room sequence brought a standing ovation from the crowd at a union showing. And Amy, by the way, is not a paid actress but a physical therapist.

Small Axe, directed by Steve McQueen (2020). McQueen is literarily and cinematically impeccable. He takes you on journeys while attuning  at each moment culturally, politically, psychospiritually, and emotionally. There is virtually nothing that could pass as surplus or distraction, though many of his detours seem so at the time. Most films, even great classics, meander stylistically as well as well as narratively with the flow of celluloid through a gate with a bulb (or as data through a digital scanner). This rhythm is built into the medium, and filmmakers respond with stylized temporality and flow. McQueen sets his own timer.

He is very quiet. That doesn’t mean his films aren’t full of life, activity, and chaos, but his gaze is quite still. Orbital meander—diversions, interludes, and discontinuities—is in fact, his forte, but these are arranged off a main axis, making the work simultaneously vast and spare like a tree. The camera lingers on a landscape like a painting, finding an extra detail, usually off to the side: a color, a bit of street chatter, a blip of passing energy.

That was certainly the case in his 2008 IRA epic Hunger about Bobby Sands’ slow meditational suicide in prison, as he turned his death into both a weapon and a spiritual migration. In Small Axe McQueen proves that this was not just a one-up technique to capture the logic of a hunger strike; it is a way of marking the world’s pulse.

Small Axe is not a movie but a series (in the contemporary genre of “series” as oeuvres themselves). But it is not five films in a linear narrative as much as an anthology of five different stories. The name is taken from the title of a Bob Marley song: “So if you are the big tree / We are the small axe / Ready to cut you down.” Five strokes to take down British colonial mask on Afro-Caribbean culture in London’s West Indian community.

If I were reviewing them as five separate films, I would treat each as self-complete. Here I respect the presentation as a single work of art, for all the movies historicize a span from the mid-1960s into the 1980s. As a whole, they provide a sense of progression through time, particularly in regard to shifting racial and cultural awareness, but also as an evolution of consciousness and culture. They are in the spirit of Robert Penn Warren’s ending to All The King’s Men: “. . . out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time.” “The Awful Responsibility of Time” as an alternate title would have worked for me.

The films are true stories—artful biopics like Hunger— so they serve as a cultural heirloom and time capsule; a memorial to key figures and events in West Indies London culture. You don’t need to tear down statues or valorize 1619 Projects to achieve critical race theory on the ground. Small Axe is critical race theory presented with joy, art, and atonement, as it plunges into the post-racial culture it annotates within a signature imperial biome—the United British Kingdom.

Mangrove, the opening “axe,” describes the ground-laying and preparation for the opening of the Mangrove Restaurant as if backstage at a play. That segues into its debut as a community dining, partying, gaming, dancing, and Rasta venue. Mangrove comes alive as a collective organism.

Intentional harassment and provocation by the police follow, as they intend to drive this alien beast out of the neighborhood. Their racism is so jolly, recreational, and casually entitled that it transcends even McQueen’s ideological critique, as he captures the bobbies’ basic humanity and rabblerousing for entertainment too—they are having fun and celebrating their own flag and totems, racism be damned. McQueen makes their kinked belief system credible, if perverse under circumstances of knowing the harm they are causing. Their search warrants are more like vandalism warrants, as they are collectively inspired and challenged to close the place down, an amusement for themselves and a gauntlet and initiation rite for new young cops.

In the course of the story’s development, we are given vignettes of the main players, mostly on the neighborhood side but also in the bobbies’ work life. Each character on either side is nuanced and intimate with the collective force and individuality of a Charles Dickens cast, a touch of Arthur Conan Doyle too. McQueen’s Greater London meets theirs somewhere in its space-time continuum.

            The demolition of the Mangrove provokes a protest march to the police station that becomes agitated, wild, and Rasta-like with shades of Les MIserables. The blowback leads to mass arrests and a trial.

More than half of the film is the courtroom drama, a script as adroitly dialogued as Tennessee Williams and as socratically argued by the group’s  improvisationally woke attorney and the Mangrove-march members who decide to represent themselves in a proceeding as memorable as the one depicted in Inherit the Wind. 

Mangrove joins the all-time roster of courtroom dramas, with a charming reggae twist. The elder owner of the Mangrove and a young woman spreading Black Power out of Africa provide vivid back stories in the context of their own legal presentations. Key actors include Gary Beadle, Naomi Ackie, and Neal Barrie.

Lovers Rock, film number two, is a long, unannotated painting in motion that could be hung in the Victoria & Albert. It’s a moving paintbox, as a 1980 Notting Hill house party becomes a dance hall in which West Indies and African immigrants, excluded from British nightclubs, create their own indigenous version. Again, McQueen’s lingering eye and astute blending of s reggae rhythms with the shifting emotional of partiers and dancers in their finery makes for the painting-like flow as if a latter-day urban Breughel.

Very little is said. There’s no narrative drive; it’s like a long, intricate reggae music video, though it has a bit more narrative structure than most music videos. You watch the movements, the clothing—especially the women adorning and, later, dancing—the DJs, the baits and nips of romance and romantic expectation: flirtation, irritation, tension, clash, reconciliation, love. You watch but aren’t let in. There is no common way into the stories and no outcomes other than dispersal and morning. The privacy is implicit; you want to be a viewer in a gallery, not a peeping tom—in most movies, the peeping comes with the price of admission. Here the story is making the music, which makes the story.

A funny mistake: I kept thinking that the party was about to get raided by the police until I realized that police sirens were part of the DJ’s performance along with his backspinning of disks. This wasn’t going to turn into a crime-and-punishment drama; it was a drama of no-drama, the daily drama of being, dressing, preparing, courting, congregating, powering down for the night..

In small snatches, I was reminded (particularly during the dressing overture) of Kenneth Anger’s motorcyclists putting on their garb in the 1960s motorcycle ritual of Scorpio Rising (reprised in Anger’s Invocation of My Demon Brother a few years later with more explicit shades of Aleister Crowley and starring Mick Jagger). It also suggests Romeo and Juliet, West Side Story, and Walter Hill’s subway walkabout The Warriors (see 1979 above) in its early-evening-to-next-morning noctambulation.

In Red, White, and Blue (depicting the events from the early eighties), a Jamaican forensic scientist quits his career in the lab in order to become a beat officer after his father is attacked by racist bobbies in a viciously aggressive arrest for a fake parking violation.

We get to follow the historical Leroy Logan, portrayed by John Boyega, from his explaining and negotiating a downwardly mobile decision with his wife and family through his training (and hazing) in the academy, then his maintenance of decorum and dignity despite continual harassment,  andhis triumph as a high-level recruit. His uses and misuses by peer police and the constabulary hierarchy lead to struggles on the beat—as much with fellow officers and citizens of the ‘hood (to many of whom he is a traitor) as with actual criminals. Yet all are, per usual, lovingly portrayed, good guys and bad. Logan’s Pakistani buddy on the force struggles with the Empire from a different cultural perspective while portraying a parallel application of colonialism among the police.

In Education, set in the 1970s, Kingsley, a smart, intergalactically daydreaming twelve-year-old, is marginalized out of the mainline school system into a laughably incompetent “special school” designed (or intended) to process West Indian children into underclass careers and lives. My highlight of the school was the girl who responded to all queries with a barnyard repertoire of somewhat authentic animal sounds performed with diffident illiteracy and incipient psychosis. There were plenty of other ribald hijinks and class mayhem (in both meanings of class).

Kingsley’s mom, a proud, hardworking immigrant, is disbelieving that her son’s special school is such a horrid place. She is convinced by a cadre of gracious, educated West Indian women who infiltrate the so-called special schools to expose them as well as to recruit students for their own Saturday classes. These inspiring educational meetings transform Kingsley and other supposed “morons” and incorrigibles into Steve McQueens—this axe is an autobiographical novella.

In Alex Wheatle, the early life of an acclaimed British author of novels like Island Songs, Cane Warriors, Kerb Stain Boys, Home Boys, and East of Acre Lane is presented in a Gulliver’s Travels / Stranger in a Strange Land journey and initiation from his orphanhood to literary apprenticeship. He’s also a Connecticut (Surrey) Yankee in King Arthur’s Rasta Court. 

A sophisticated, peaceful, guileless boy and young man from the countryside (in a stunning mimetic performance by Sheyi Cole) experiences condescension, contempt, thumping, bullying, and scapegoating, as his imagination, creativity, and intelligence are put, with his body and person, in their supposedly deserved servile, dumbass place. Rough knockdowns are carried out just as fervidly by Africans and Jamaicans who don’t understand that Wheatle is a hip English lad from Surrey (as well as one of them) as they are by avidly sadistic teachers, police, cops, and prison officials who view him as a mentally ill or disruptive Caribbean. All along, he is trying to figure out a world gone mad.

Initially, Wheatle has to learn—recover—his own culture from his new Jamaican friends and then a black cellmate (played by dreadlocked, Jah-imbued Robbie Gee) who takes it on himself to mentor him like a father.

Hilarious malaprops, Abbot and Costello dialogues, Zen cross-language, lost-in-translation exchanges, and acts of discovery, grace, and love follow Wheatle from foster families to a white group home to a Jamaican hostel to the Jah jail cell in one after another culture-transitioning, lost-in-translation mis-step, raising the Small Axe quintet from “just great” to inspired and redemptive.

Writing on Bathroom Walls, directed by Thor Freudenthal (2020). Charlie Plummer is Adam—a schizophrenic teen discovering who he is, what schizophrenia is, and no this isn’t normal. Adam is the movie, with professionally crafted assistance from Molly Parker as his conflicted, resilient mom, Taylor Russell as his changeling, multi-faceted, street-sly girlfriend, Andy Garcia as a Catholic school priest playing a Zen master in a confession box, and Walton Goggins as a math-nerd stepfather who cultivates high emotional intelligence on the fly. Again, Plummer steals the show, capturing the range of Adam’s winsome charm and adolescent mind: possession, enchantment, whimsy, rage, irony, humor, stubbornness, martyrdom—the many phases of self-sabotage, petulant masochism, and existential awakening to his own muddled identity. On the surface, the story is a patchwork of kitsch and clichés—the bullied teen, the beleaguered single mom, the boyfriend who didn’t bargain on a scary stepson, the myopically rigid school marm, the drug-pushing docs, the wise girlfriend, the social pressures of psychopathology—but it transcends its sitcom legacy with its transparency and an unabashed appeal to the world either to speak out or to hear or say as in twelve-step groups, “This is who I am, no more hiding and covering up,” top stop trying to erase, cure, and punish madness.

            The attempt to portray schizophrenia by having three quite different imaginary figures come into being simultaneously to represent the warring aspects of Adam’s mind is daring and, at times, interesting, but, to my sensibility a miss—too offhandedly comedic or melodramatic. The brute swinging a weaponized baseball bat is particularly out-of-tune. The New Age fairy angel is more appealing, but not as a fair representative of schizophrenia, more as a kind of walking “course in miracles.” The other guy, an unforged ego buffered between competing ids, is too adult. I wouldn’t depict schizophrenia as a play of figures who dissolve on the spot at the introduction of a new drug only to return after the side-effects threaten to wipe them out as well as Adam’s life; I would show the muddied landscapes of real people—more Hitchcock and less Sesame Street noir. But it was a good try. I like that the film made integration of these figures the trajectory of healing, though I didn’t buy the post-modern view of schizophrenia as a chemical mutation that can’t be cured. That may be true in some cases, but Adam doesn’t have that sort of schizophrenia. He has the psychocultural, traumatic source and, in fact, by the end of the film has taken the first steps of full integration. Of course, it can’t be cured, but only because life can’t, samsara can’t.   

            I love the self-referential aspect, how the story acknowledges its own cinematic, literary reality within the history of cinema and pop culture, as for instance when Adam asks, “Where is my ‘Good Will Hunting’ Moment?” Or “this is not working out like ‘Good Will Hunting.’” These are not exact quotes, just how I remember the film spoofing the brilliant but facile eureka catharsis played by Robin Williams and Matt Damon. Adam gets to stand up before the entire Catholic school from which he was expelled and tell them how it all happened and what schizophrenia is. Andy Garcia’s priest plays a role reminiscent of the doctor at the defining moment of Carl Dreyer’s Ordet—he stops the fundamentalist Christians (epitomized by the principle) from interfering in a miracle and allows Adam’s first true confession.

Corpus Christi, directed by Jan Komasa (2020). Bartosz Bielenia stars as Daniel, a twenty-year-old kid just out of years of juvie detention in Warsaw, Poland, remanded there for violent crimes (including murder), then sent to a remote sawmill as part of his parole. He becomes the town priest by an offhand joke that leads to a mistaken identity, and he proves a remarkable replacement for the village vicar who has to leave for medical and psychiatric treatment.

There is more to the loading of the plot. Daniel experienced a spiritual conversion in detention and wants to go to a real seminary officially to become a priest but can’t because the severity of his crimes permanently disqualifies him. Instead, he gets a priest’s costume and collar and plays “priest” in prison, then in halfway-house culture.

He is also a wild boy with visions, ecstatic dances, and sacred voices construed more from marginal pop culture than the usual divine. He is able to be a startling, radical, transformational priest even before he is tempted to play his extended impromptu joke. He steps into the role in full blasphemous celebration, except that it is not blasphemous to a boy who has genuine visions, a moral compass, and a sense of what is needed in the congregation. He brings moral reckoning, greater ease of existence, and deeper fulfillment. He is the perfect priest.

            With his pale eyes and visionary gaze, Bielenia is riveting in the role. He dominates just about every scene, as he preaches, sings, gospels, dances, fights, jokes, makes unpriestly love, and brings a street sense of right and wrong to the sawmill community. Almost everyone accepts him as vicar. The young women particularly love him; he is a rock-star priest.

            At the core of the village zeitgeist is an automobile accident that killed six town teens and the driver of the other car, an older man who was not well liked. The town has decided to demonize him and exile his widow and at the same time glorify and all but consecrate the young victims. After interrogating the accident, Daniel seeks burial of the disparaged man’s urn of ashes in the church graveyard during the Corpus Christi ceremony. Yet his past is catching up to him and he is about to be extricated from his position, returned to juvie, and replaced by an ordinary vicar. These two dramas complete the story, but they are not the film’s senior track.

            The main aspect that imbues Corpus Christi from the moment Daniel is officially accepted as a priest is that everything he does from then on is sacred and takes on meanings it wouldn’t have otherwise. His dances take on evangelical as well as ecstatic and pop implications. His somewhat discombobulated sayings at services and in preaching become surrogate apocrypha, little “sermons on the mount.” Giving advice during confession and hanging out with other young folks, his peers—he converts everyday life into a moral inquiry and sacred process.

In the special features, Komasa says that his point to show that real spirituality and growth cannot take place in a moralized environment filled with religiosity and Christ-speak. It happens in ordinary reality where difficult relationships and challenging conversations are on the line. For instance, priest Daniel confronts the owner of the sawmill over his greed and the working conditions at his factory in a way that a bottom-feeding parolee could not have. He also brings the issues around the accident to a truer judgment and justice, not allowing the townspeople to get away with their faux godly exile of the widow, as they bombard her with unsigned hate mail.

What really stands out, though, is Daniel’s “Christ passion.” The figure of naked Jesus on the Cross is ever present in Komasa’s landscape, and naked or shirtless Daniel covered with tattoos radiates Christ’s joy and suffering. It is a cliché of such films to hypostatize Jesus in various proxies, but Komasa and Bielenia’s version is nonliterary and nonsymbolic. It is flesh as flesh, incarnation as incarnation, desire as desire, pain as pain, juvie is juvie. A priest escaped from juvie is a priest and apostate both.

Eliza Rycembel as Marta has a much smaller role than Bielenia, but she serves as his perfect foil. Though she is not part of the Magdalene archetype, a certain portion of the madonna mission is unavoidable once Daniel becomes a proxy Christ. She becomes as elusive as her biblical alter ego. Yet she was the one who, in a sense, turned Daniel into a priest by her comeback one liner: “I’m a priest.” “Well, then I’m a nun.” She serves as liaison of Daniel’s coming in a way that no one thinks to second-guess or examine it.

Daniel falls in love with her, as much as he can while trying to avoid temptation and stay a priest. Their love-making scene is very much a passion of Christ, as Marta is briefly the bride of Christ. That makes the scene much more powerful and poignant than it would be between a guy from the sawmill and a local girl. She is seducing and making love to the moral order and the representative of the son of God.

Just as powerful is Daniel’s required fight with Bonus (Mateusz Czwartosz) back in Juvie. Bonus wants to kill him and no one will care if he does. As Daniel is being ritually crucified by the bigger and stronger Bonus’ murderous blows and continuous smashing of his head against stone, he rises, resurrected, and head-butts Bonus into unconsciousness, then is pulled off before he kills him.

Again, he is a surrogate Christ, and he is anything but Christ, more like a mixed-martial-arts fighter. He turns and charges away from the juvie spectators and unconscious Bonus, his bloody face filling the lens as the movie ends. You’d like to see him and Marte together under milder circumstances and him accepted into the clergy and brought back to the village in some religious role, but that’s a different movie.

One other thing: Bielenia remarks in the Special Features (like the film, Polish subtitled in English) that he is playing a character nothing like him or anyone in his world, so he is having to double-perform since Daniel is also playing a character nothing like him or anyone in his world. Oh, and Komasa turns to be ass young and thoughtful as Bielenia. 

Negative Review Warning. Behind Her Eyes, a six-part series created by Steve Lightfoot (2021), is an exploitative horror tale initiated by an exploitatively sexy biracial affair. I am writing about it because it uses an often-overlooked psychic phenomenon, even if uses it for buzz rather than seriously exploring it.

A Scottish psychiatrist, David, played by Tom Bateman, has an affair with his office-assistant-to-be, Louise (Simona Brown) whom he meets over a spilled drink in a bar. Their dialogue is witty, funny, and charming, and it would kick off a fine romantic drama that they didn’t choose to make. Instead, they went horror-film Dracula noir.

David’s wife, played by Eve Hewson (Adele), gets wind of the affair and befriends Louise so that she soon becomes emotionally close to both of them. There is a fourth party, Rob, a Scottish lower-class ruffian played by Robert Aramayo. He and Adele were goofy, irreverent buddies in the mental institute in which they were both recuperating from drug addiction. Rob’s role in the matter seems incidental, part of a bygone flashback, until he becomes the story’s key. That’s because he is really a multiple walk-in.

            Astral projection is used banally as well as inaccurately to provide Rob’s device for hostile walk-ins: soul-body takeover. Adele teaches the method to Rob in the facility, and after they both get out, Rob visits her in her family castle, notes her wealth, her fiancé (David), and life situation, and gets her to participate in a joint phowa-like projection during which he takes over her body and refuses to give it back.

So, David ends up marrying Rob, not Adele because Rob has injected the real Adele with a drug overdose and dumped her (in his body) into a deep well. Rob as Adele then uses so-called astral projection again to spy on Louise and David’s affair, befriends Louise, and teaches her the method; then, while she is in a trance, he takes over her body, gives himself as Adele this time an overdose, and marries David again, this time as Louise. If that’s too complicated to sort, it’s meant to be. The script-writer and director are enjoying their gig, though if you see elements from Heaven Can Wait and Prelude to a Kiss, that’s probably because they went full “potpourri” in loading on devices.

David, an overtrained, pharma-enthusiast psychiatrist, misses the whole spirit train. He assumes that he is treating mental illness in his wives when in fact he is dealing with possession and a walk-in. Adele is gone early, Rob takes her place.

Malgré the device, we are looking at a woman who has three different personalities or selves, two of them a man. The actors have to change genre as well as character.As they transition out of each other, Hewson must play Adele as Adele and Rob as Adele, and then Brown has to play Rob as Louise.

If, as I believe, people carry past identities in their souls, as well multiple genders and predispositions, this type of radical personality shift doesn’t need phony astral projection. It is happening all the time beneath the surface of daily personae. The creepiness of the soul-body transfer in the film is the creepiness of parasitic entities in all people’s personalities during a lifetime because we don’t, in fact, have demonstrable instances of slam-bam walk-ins. Rob is kinky, perverse, and repugnant enough as a man that no man would want to make love, let alone be married to him, even when he is an attractive woman. But how many women carry “Robs” within their Eves?   

They Say That Nothing Stays the Same, directed by Joe Odigaro (2021). This film set in Meiji-era—late nineteenth-century—Japan is about a boatman on a small but turbulent river. Toichi (Akira Emoto), takes people back and forth to the village on the other side and has for his whole life, but a simple bridge is being built to replace him. He has grown old rowing and poling his boat, and he has suffered insults, regrets, and disrespect, but also praise, honor, and joy. Like the cab drivers in Taxicab Confessions, he has spied on many astonishing conversations and untoward events in process.

They Say Nothing Stays the Same is almost an incredible film—at moments it is—as ghosts, spirits, dreams, apparitions, splendidly exotic wraiths, mummers, moth women, spirit vampires, and souls departing and returning converge and overlap, each needing at some point to cross the film’s river in its boatsman’s boat.

Odagri has been criticized for painting canvasses more than scripting a movie, which has some validity. His “perfect days” are made of perfect shots of rain, wind, water, waves, light, fireflies, snow, and Alfred-Stieglitz-quality portraits as (apparently) just about every prominent Japanese actor of the time enters for at least a bit role.

Ririka Kawashima plays a spirit inhabiting the body of a young woman whom Toichi finds floating in the river and pulls out. The woman is dead and is meant to cross and then reincarnate, but Toichi has disrupted the process by rescuing her before she does. She does not belong in this world, being dead, but she comes to live with Toichi (she has nowhere else to go), and she shows her supernatural power by swimming underwater longer than any human could. She is also a banshee, a hungry ghost, a vampire, and a devouring demon. She seems gossamer and paltry, in need of Toichi’s protection, but her powers are supernatural, for she cannot be harmed—ghosts are not physically suspectable to human violence. Her dybbuk ferociously murders the men who try to rape her, leaving a gruesomely bloody scene in Toichi’s hut. Then she ends the movie by telekinetically setting it aflame with a hermeneutic fire.
            Toichi also helps the son of a hunter take his father’s body across the river in the pouring night rain to leave for the animals to eat, to give something back for the lives he has taken.         

            In a sense, this is a surreal film about the relationship between the boatman over the Styx (Toichi) and the bar-do realm itself, the bridge between, which severs Toichi from his boatman job but catapults the village out of “perfect days” into noisy modernity.

World War II in Color: Road to Victory (Netflix Documentary) 2021. Netflix has been putting similar footage into multiple documentaries, so I’m not sure which one I am reviewing. It begins with Dunkirk and has episodes on the German blitzkrieg, D-Day, Battle of the Bulge, Liberation of Paris, Pearl Harbor, Midway, Hiroshima, and the Allies’ discovery of the concentration camps. I got a very thorough dose of World War II in high school, and I have read about it and watched many movies since, plus I listened to stories from my mother’s three brothers, all of whom participated and remarkably survived. Yet I feel as though I didn’t understand all the elements until I saw this documentary. For instance, I didn’t understand how Hitler almost achieved a first-round knockout and checkmate before the British rescue of their troops at Dunkirk using small motorboats and ferries. I was so swayed by poet Ed Dorn’s withering critique of Churchill that I didn’t give him his due in rallying the West to stand up against the Third Reich. It may have been decadent royalist rhetoric, but it was still stirring.

            For the first time, I understood the full strategic import of the landing in Normandy. The troops hit the beach there rather than where the Germans expected them, turning the tide. I also saw the challenge in breaking Hitler’s land encirclement of Europe and its closing ring. I learned how long-standing American racism and xenophobia about “Japs” helped provoke, motivate, and embolden the attack on Pearl Harbor. My high-school history teacher, curiously named William Clinton, certainly didn’t touch on that. I also didn’t realize how extensive the Japanese aircraft were—I tended to picture a handful of planes—and how they had to secretly cross the Pacific on carriers because you couldn’t fly from Japan to Hawaii then. An entire air force, wave upon wave of planes, saturation-bombed Pearl Harbor and vicinity.

            I picked up the many nuances of the Battle of Midway and how many flukes and unlikely twists of fate were involved in its successful outcome, almost as if Athena and Hera were battling each other on high on Olympus and shifting the course back and forth. If it hadn’t been for an obscure cryptographer not only breaking the Japanese code but interpreting its coordinates and getting through to Roosevelt’s circle despite the disdain of his military superiors, the U.S. would have been as ambushed as at Pearl Harbor. I also learned how Roosevelt’s exclusion of his vice-president Harry Truman played a motivating role in the eventual use of nuclear weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Roosevelt didn’t prepare Truman for nuancing.

I remember a shouting argument I had with my mother when I was in high school and had just seen The Night of the Auk—Arch Oboler’s blank-verse play about nuclear holocaust. She defended the bombing of Hiroshima, while I denounced it. She has been dead for almost fifty years, but if we were to talk today, I would understand what she meant when she said, “You didn’t have brothers in the Pacific, wondering if they’d come home alive.” I’d be more empathic.

            In college I witnessed the debate about whether events could be driven by single individuals (Alexander, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Hitler) or were always cultural (anthropology). I became an anthropologist rather than a historian like my mother’s youngest brother Lionel Rothkrug (who survived Corregidor and went to college on the G. I. Bill), but I was impressed by how much Hitler’s madness and daily cocaine and opium cocktail pretty much solo drove the useless Battle of the Bulge and its extra million deaths. He believed, with Trump-like fantasia, that another blitzkrieg with his remaining divisions could reach Antwerp and break the Allies supply lines. The weather fed his fabulism until its cloud cover broke and allowed aerial bombing of his tanks.

Those tanks rolled out of the Battle of the Bulge onto the roads of Ukraine, skipping nearly eighty years during which the world otherwise molted and was colorized. In Belgium 1945, they were Nazi tanks; in Ukraine 2022 they were suburban utility vehicles of a successor fascist regime against a comparatively democratic country, reprising the joke that French take the bus locally but drive their Peugeots to visit other countries, whereas the Russians visit Europe in tanks. The Third Reich laid the template. In that sense, they were still Nazi tanks, and it was the aggressor that needed to be de-nazified. It also wasn’t the first time that Russia’s military rolled over Ukraine, committing scorched earth, tactical starvation, and genocide, more like the thirteenth, the twelfth being Stalin’s (see my book The Return of the Tower of Babel elsewhere on substack’s Jovian Bricolage/Opera Jupiter).

            Whatever combination of episodes they watch will cause most people to change their view of the most deconstructed war in history because it is infinitely deconstructable. So many different vectors had to collide to create the perfect storm, again and again, foreshadowing the phrase “clusterfuck.” With its multiple theaters like some sort of satanic world fair, World War II was Clusterfuck II.   

Seaspiracy, directed by Ali Tabrizi (2021). This is about as disturbing an exposé as one could imagine, and these are generally disturbing times.  What makes the crime so much more disturbing is that it is as big as the ocean and as intimate as every form of life from the mineralized aqueous three-quarters of the planet with which we share the ecosphere or which we consume. Tabrizi brings together, in effect, climate change, human trafficking and slavery, eco-destruction, cruelty to animals, neo-colonialism, rampant government-supported crime, and future pandemics, all at sea and at many times the scale circulated through the media, even—especially—the liberal media.

Did you know that half of the Pacific Garbage Gyre is discarded fishing nets not household or industrial garbage? Did you know that marine devastation has many times the ecological impact and geographic scope of rain-forest devastation? Did you know that the dolphin-safe tuna and other such labels are no such thing and that their imprimaturs are merely purchased by unscrupulous companies—they are moneymakers for organizations like Earth Island Institute> Did you know that by-catch far outweighs targeted species, and nets full of thriving life forms are discarded as junk? Did you know that traditional whale and dolphin hunts are carried out from Japan to the Faroe Islands with casual cruelty that turns the waters red? Did you know that the ocean is being dragged dry and that the phenomenon flows inland from its coastal starvation, leading to human incursions into jungles that spawn crossover mutations and pandemics? Did you know that piracy, impressed servitude, and mutiny on vessels aer not only as common as in Joseph Conrad’s or Herman Melville’s days, but that murder and tossing overboard of anyone resisting a cabal’s or captain’s authority is as routine as mafia hits. If sea life is trafficked, human life gets no better a deal. Sleeping with the fishes is both a metaphor and an ethic.

Tabrizi presents all this as an ingenuous “hey, dude, this is what I did on my way to the ocean to try to make a film about sea creatures” tone. His guilelessness only adds to the documentary’s power. The young English guy who grew up wanting to be Jacques Cousteau ended up nearly getting killed by vandals, crooks, and gangs, all working the world’s seas for loot and grift. This is not inadvertent destruction or correctable damage, as Cousteau thought. It is how the system works, which he probably suspected by the time Tabrizi took up the trident.

The Mauritanian, directed by Kevin MacDonald (2021). This is a rigorously authentic bordering on holy account of the madness that followed 9/11, in particular the rounding up of semi-random Muslims across the world and transferring them to Guantánamo, a place intended to be Nowhere Land, legally and morally. See also Camp X-Ray.  

If synchronicity has a malign opposite (hexing), Guantánamo was it for the majority of detainees. The Mauritanian ended up there because of (1) a phone call from a cousin using Bin Laden’s cell to get help for a sick relative, (2) his overnight hospitality for a stranger, a visiting countryman in Berlin, and (3) the American-supported Afghan freedom fighters re-slotted overnight as terrorists.

Tahir Rahim, a French Algerian multilingual actor, is the first choice for a range of Christlike and quasi-jihadist and trans-Arab characters. He proves his pedigree here, performing with a range of dignity, spirituality, terror, humor, rage, wit, faith, and compassion that brings to life Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian student who won a scholarship to Germany and became a victim of American madness. (Slahi himself appears in person at the end of the film and in the Special Features).

For the rest of the time, Rahim is Slahi, or the mythic version. Jodie Foster (playing Nancy Hollander) and Teri Duncan (Shailene Woodley) become Slahi’s pro bono attorney and legal assistant, respectively (with an accuracy and attention to detail that surprised the people they’re playing, as they noted in Special Features).

Benedict Cumberbatch plays Stuart Couch, the military prosecutor who finally refused to use tainted evidence obtained from Slahi to gain relief from unrelenting torture.

Interspersing flashbacks with interviews and memories, the film is a living tablet of its time. It incorporates the sort of ritual enactments that a Bert Hellinger “family constellation” does. Spirits possess the actors to reenact a trauma in which they did not personally participate. In that sense, The Mauritanian is less a movie than a ceremony.

            Rahim’s performance of Slahi’s presentation before a military court is the epitome of a “warrior” honoring his moral code, no matter what is done to him. Revenge is not part of Slahi’s makeup, so he rises to his own annunciation. I have seen many false-imprisonment stories, and the best ones, like this, end with a forgiveness that transcends the most brutal and callous deeds. Moments of truth and reconciliation provide healing for the “villains” too, even when they don’t know it.

The torture reenactments in this film are as graphic and extensive as any I have seen, including waterboarding from a motorboat and a Halloween-like sexual theater. The W. Bush interrogators presumed that they get away with just about anything. These flash by quickly enough that viewers are not drawn into titillating narrative or masochistic melodrama, only the sigil-like features of black magic.

MacDonald also captures the current cultural polarization whereby your friend and hero one moment is your enemy and traitor the next. He reminds us, in the demonization of the various lawyers who embody the truth, that this sort of knee-jerk scapegoating preceded Donald Trump and made him possible. 9/11 was the first phase of: “fuck justice, someone’s gotta pay.” Witness the gratuitous demolition of Iraq. While the trial of Mohamedou Slahi was going on, there was only a snippet of old-time American justice in the hearts of angry people. Although it wasn’t necessarily MacDonald’s aim, he exposes how much further down we have slid since.

Jodie Foster carries her own symbolic history from Taxi Driver’s black hole of enantiodromia from John Hinckley’s projection onto her. The Mauritanian frees her of some of that unasked-for projection, I couldn’t watch the film without celebrating her liberation too.

            Although it is not in itself an intrinsic part of the movie, the fact, shown in the crawlers at the end, that Barack Obama’s administration kept Slahi in Guantánamo an additional seven years after he was exonerated, for solely gratuitous political considerations and a dehumanization that went with the same admnistration’s ritual drone murder put the movie in the context in which the movie puts the post-9/11 world. We’re nowhere near out of this, and the more worms we take out of the can, the fuller it seems to get. Bin Laden reaped far more than he knew, but he did know that the field was ripe for sowing; he was West-wise enough to see through the duplicitous stars and stripes and hear the mantras behind virtue-signaling freedom songs.

West Side Story, directed by Steven Spielberg (2021). Yes, the 1961 version is vintage and unsurpassable, a masterpiece of elegance and dignity, repurposing Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet as Italians and Puerto Ricans in the streets of New York City, reclaiming an archetype and retelling a myth, but the 2021 version is brilliant in its own way, reimagining the settings and capturing political and social nuances that were buried fifty years earlier. It is a bit overproduced and glitzed, but that serves the energy of rechoreographed dances and a time-corrected plot. Spielberg feels a need to make the story less magical realist, and that has advantages as well as disadvantages. The whole thing is a bit shmaltzy anyway, but it is a play, a musical, and musicals are fairy tales set to light opera. It is still tragic, uplifting, and revelatory, the eternal return of Romeo and Juliet.

Blue Bayou, written and directed by Justin Chon (2021).  I saw this movie when Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ was using Venezuelan refugees in a political stunt, flying them from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard under false pretenses and with false hope, in order to appear a hardass and make a point about illegal immigration. The border is complicated, but so is the planet and all its others borders; we are a multi-membraned, leaky cell, and getting leakier with warlordism and climate change.

Before watching Blue Bayou, I read hundreds of online cavils about the film commenting in different ways that illegal refugees “get what they deserve.” I would have countered, “Being born American is nothing you earned. Not only is the basic human condition difficult for most people on earth, but those folks are fleeing conditions, in case you don’t know, your government created on your behalf.” After watching Blue Bayou, I would make it required watching for anti-immigrant ideologues, though it doesn’t totally match. It’s Korean and Vietnamese, not Central or South American. It’s about adoptees who weren’t registered properly before 2000 by their adopting parents. But it’s catches the same underlying issue of race entitlement and government deportation via ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement). Plus, Justin Chon and Swedish-English actress Alicia Vikander are great to watch together—Chon wrote and directed as well as starred in the movie. To my view, Vikander as complexly interesting an actress as there is now—see Wim Wenders’ Submergence.

             Even Blue Bayou isn’t without controversy as members of the community Chon is trying to support claim that he appropriated others’ stories, though the film is presented as fiction.

                Chon writes and plays LeBlanc with balanced nuance. With his tattoos, Louisiana accent, and pure Southern “good ol’ boy” behavior, he is an absolute American in a Korean body. After his birth mother tries to drown her baby in Korea and then finds she can’t go through with it in a scene repeated mistily and then more clearly throughout the film (and in LeBlanc’s memory), he is sent to the U.S. where is grows up north of Baton Rouge. It is all he knows. He is a man of decency, honor, and morals as well as a motorcycle thief. He is estranged from his adoptive parents because his father beat him and his mother, and he fled. We find out that the father died ten years or so ago, while the mother has become a mute, overweight couch potato when he goes to see her to try to get her to testify at his hearing.

                Chon explores LeBlanc fully. He is a tattoo artist, would like to repair motorcycles but can’t get a job (because he has a record stealing them and doesn’t look American), hence fences stolen knock-off shoes, watches, and other goods. He is a loving, thoughtful father to Kathy’s daughter Jessie (well played by child actor Sydney Kowalske), respects the rights of Jessie’s father, local police officer Ace (Mark O’Brien), and has empathy for and Pan-Asian interest in a Vietnamese woman with terminal cancer (Parker Nguyen played by Linh-Dan Pham) he meets in the hospital while there for his wife’s baby ultrasound. Chon notes cogently in the “Making of” feature that Pham is an ethereal presence who doesn’t seem fully of earth. She shaved her head for the role.

After Pham and LeBlanc meet a second time accidentally, she comes to Antonio for a tattoo in hopes of supporting him and, when he won’t accept payment, invites him, Kathy, and Jessie to a family gathering. This allows Chon to explore the difference between an Asian refugee who knows her own culture (a family of Vietnamese boat people) and an Asian refugee with no Asian culture. The dialogue, translations, and interactions show the richness of Asian immersion in the American south.

              The party also allows Chon to have Vikander sing the entire title song for the mixed group, “Blue Bayou,” which she does beautifully—her cinema characters all have depth, sensitivity, spirit, morality, pluck, and vulnerability, as does the performance. In the “Making of” feature, she admits nervousness at having to sing. In fact, her moment on stage is an operatic centerpiece around which the entire film orbits, and it gives it an old-fashioned Doris Day qua Diana Ross quality.

              The tension in the plot comes from Ace’s racist police partner Denny (Emory Cohen) who in a pretense of supporting his buddy continually confronts and beats up LeBlanc, forcing him to miss his hearing. Yet Chon tries to have there be as many good guys in the film as possible, even good “bad” guys including an ICE buddy of LeBlanc’s who stands up for him and makes his deportation more humane, Ace himself who ultimately puts the handcuffs on his apostate partner, Antonio’s mother who does finally drag herself off the couch to the hearing, Antonio’s articulate African-American attorney (Vondie Curtis-Hall) who is spokesperson for the political legalities behind the story, and Antonio’s many local friends and fellow motorcycle thieves, the most vivid of which is Q (Altonio Jackson whose most memorable scene is in the “deleted’s,” as he and Antonio discuss what America actually is). Antonio likes to say, “Is that a blue truth or a true truth?” meaning are you speaking with your heart or your head. Chon is speaking with both.

The closing airport scene in which Chon’s character Antonio LeBlanc is pulled away from his partner Kathy (Vikander) and newborn daughter and pleading stepdaughter by ICE officers would be my answer to DeSantis and his fans. It is followed by photographs of adoptees deported with a Korean musical soundtrack, then the credits.

Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, directed by Radu Jude (2021) is a tedious throwback Eastern European—see WR: Mysteries of the Organism, a 1971 forerunner directed by Dušan Makavajev—pornographic soap opera with a hardcore, erect-penis dominated opening sequence and an endless post-Marxian debate about whether or not to expel a schoolteacher for being in the pre-TikTok TikTok and uploading it, But it has a Warhol-like tour of Bucharest as realistically circumstantial as an actual flight by Tarom Air to street traffic, window-shopping, and pedestrian bantering, and a middle-section brilliant dictionary, rebus, and totemology, pulling out all the stops of Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, Hannah Arendt, and probably loads of modernists I don’t catch.  

Nine Days, directed by Edson Oda (2021). This is a bizarre digital-era fable or electronic fairy tale about the passage of people back and forth between life and the after-world in a bureaucratic office of the dead and unborn who monitor them on vast banks of old-fashioned t.v.s, and quiz them for appropriateness for receiving new lives. Nine Days is pedantic, sentimentally silly, disjointed but quirky enough to be irresistible and also emotionally true. It has a blocky surreal quality that falls somewhere among Elmer Rice, Jean Cocteau, and Wim Wenders plus the unforgettable characters dwelling in purgatory are played by Winston Duke (the lonely boss of lives), Zazie Betz (the avant-garde truth-dancer), and Benedict Wong (the faithful unborn referee).   

Spencer, directed by Pablo Larrain (2021). The movie didn’t capture my imagination, but the meticulous presentation of the steps of madness of Diana Spencer during a holiday weekend with the royal family as enacted by Kristen Stewart (who looks nothing like her) does. This was later confirmed by sacred activist Andrew Harvey, a long-ago confidante to the Spencer sisters. Plus any Timothy Spall character, in this case the butler and chief of protocol Alistair Gregory, takes on Dickensian historicity.

The Eyes of Tammy Faye, directed by Michael Showalter (2021). Jessica Chastain capturing the many moods of an evolving and then aging Tammy Faye Bakker makes the film worth watching, but it is the contrast of Tammy Faye’s celebratory, ecstatic, evangelical acceptance of Christ energy to Jim Bakker’s and Jerry Falwell’s repressive commercializing punishing sexist and racist evangelical energy in the name of Christ that leads me to mention it. You wouldn’t use the word rigpa, but that’s what she’s exuding, even in depression. Bakker and Falwell are exuding MAGA.

Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song, directed by Daniel Geller and Dayna Goldfine (2021) and Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love, directed by Nick Broomfield(2019).  Broomfieldplaces a very different emphasis on Cohen’s life and work than Geller and Goldfine do.  Norwegian Marianne Ihlen, Cohen’s life-long beloved and muse, doesn’t even appear in Hallelujah; yet she is at the center of Words of Love. The earlier film is darker, more critical of its subject, and more psychologically and spiritually diagnostic. Broomfield’s Cohen is an acute depressive who, like Mozart, makes music and song out of his miasm. He also suffers from severe satyriasis, the male version of nymphomania, and is unable to achieve real intimacy with or be faithful to women he loves. He has sex with partners numbering in the hundreds.  In one memorable Broomfield scene, we see Cohen trying to pick up a woman at an event and he shoos the cameraman away, saying something like, “Can’t you leave me alone when I’m scoring ass!” Bloomfield’s Cohen is finally a tragic figure who reaches out to Marianne on her death bed with deep regrets for abandoning her and then dies into the nihilism of his own depression. Geller and Goldfine’s Cohen closes by saying deftly and wryly, like an eternal sognster, “I’m out of the game.”

            Marianne & Leonard also highlights Cohen’s time in the Greek isles, only lightly touched on in Hallelujah, which deals more with him as a struggling artist stumbling into an uncanny career. Geller and Goldfine emphasize his genius and inevitability. Both films capture the fact that Cohen began as a poet and novelist, which he gradually converted to music with lyrics. initially he didn’t even realize that he could sing his own songs or be a successful recording artist. He had to be convinced by Judy Collins.

            Hallelujah is more inventive and ambitious, a Rolling-Stone-based cross-section of a meteoric career. It has a twin aspect, for it goes back and forth between the song “Hallelujah” (with its own trajectory) and Cohen’s evolution as an artist. “Hallelujah” was recorded by countless artists, and its discography is a widely branching tree. We learn that Cohen wrote his lyrics—all his lyrics—incrementally in notebooks and that it took him many years to bring “Hallelujah” to closure, though it wasn’t closure in any final sense. There are perhaps a hundred or more viable verses to the song, including those used in different popular versions, some of which were expurgated in other versions to make the song less sexually explicit. This is notable in the version that reached the largest audience, “Hallelujah” sung by a cartoon character in the cartoon Shrek, showing also the versatility and magnetism of the song. Rufus Wainwright sings for Shrek, but John Cale sings a different version in the credits. The most noted singer was Jeff Buckley. His version was so popular that many people think he wrote it. “Hallelujah” Buckley was the son of noted guitarist and singer Tim Buckley. He drowned at the age of thirty, and his father died at twenty-eight, contributing to the haunting history around the song.

            The head of Cohen’s then record company, Columbia, thought so little of the overall album on which “Hallelujah” was cut that he didn’t have it distributed in the U.S., a slight that Cohen remembered ardently decades later.

            “Hallelujah” and Cohen meet around a central theme in Cohen’s life and work, perhaps his central theme: the relationship between sexuality and spirituality. Cohen was a true spiritual seeker who did not differentiate—could not differentiate—his mystical quest from his quest for women. He sought the Shekhinah, but he also sought sex indiscriminately, probably as a food and antidote for his depression.

He was also, we learn in Hallelujah, a serious practitioner of esoteric Judaism. In the documentary, his rabbi in Montreal speaks to the close relationship of Cohen’s religion to his art, a meld shown in his appearance in Israel in his final tour when he speaks in Hebrew to the audience, daring to mention the tragedy of the Palestinian diaspora and his hopes for reconciliation.

            The two films finally complement each other. Cohen’s depression barely scratches Hallelujah, but we can gloss it on from Marianne & Leonard, likewise his promiscuity and ambitious careerism. Both films touch on Cohen’s serious Zen practice. Hallelujah is a more complete work in that it captures a greater biographical and psychospiritual picture and frames the man an archetypal artist as opposed to an existential anti-hero. But Hallelujah is also as much about the song as it is about the singer, implying that the verses are almost channeled and and infinite, making up multiple songs, ballads, variations and prayers, like epics sung by ancient bards.

            One idiosyncratic sidelight of Hallelujah for me was the way in which I saw Cohen, like Bob Dylan (Bobby Zimmerman), starting out as somewhat disaffected youth in a wealthy, mercantile Jewish family and then writing and singing radical, politically astute songs about a damaged world—Cohen’s “crack in everything, but that’s how the light gets it.” Both live down their privileged upbringing; yet both encompass a bit of the glitz they are running from. As they age, they look more and more like their commercial fathers, less like rock-scene rebels. As a Jewish writer myself, I see he lost rabbi of the lost temple, the world of our fathers recycled in ever new forms, making for vernacular davening in the diaspora. “Hallelujah” is finally Canaanite as well as a Judaeo-Christian hymn.

The Sandman (Season One), created by Neil Gaiman, David S. Goyer, and Alan Heinberg (2021). This eleven-part series is based on Gaiman’s 1989-1996 DC Comics character with whom I was unfamiliar, though many of my friends knew and loved him and his adventures. The Sandman, in fact, presents more as a series of comic books than as a typical streaming series. The episodes are loosely connected, and some plots run more than one episode or are picked up indirectly in later episodes. In every other sense, seeing an episode is like picking up a Superman or Little Lulu comic book in the 1950s. You know what to expect in terms of character, behavior, back story, and general territory, but the story line is independent and autonomous.

In the Netflix streaming series, this diversity is particularly notable, as episodes read variously as horror films, surrealistic paintings, dreams, murder mysteries, period pieces, fantasies, The Twilight Zone, The Booth at the End, Alice in Wonderland, and Piers Anthony’s novel the Macroscope (its battle of creative visualizations in hell between the Sandman (Tom Sturridge) and Lucifer Morningstar (Gwendoline Christie), a female-presenting villain.

A talking raven and other articulate animals add a comic-book touch, but then it is all comix. The first half of Episode Eleven is even a cartoon narrative and parable acted solely by cats. The second half recalls The Shape of Water with its captive muse Calliope. The range is astonishing, and the visuals, especially the dreams, are spectacular, even though some of the stories languish in intentional imitation kitsch parodying mainline t.v. plot staples of the twentieth century as they range from crime to sitcom to noir, blending the genres creatively and sometimes uncomfortably—but remember, it’s a comic book.

            A few key points:

• Tom Sturridge is a revelation as The Sandman or Dream, the perfect actor to capture the oneiric range. He doesn’t look like David Bowie, but he brings Spiders-from-Mars energy. He also has a bit of Percy Bysshe Shelley and the princes of England. He exudes the naivete and power of the tarot Fool. He is alternately vulnerable and almighty, able to be caught in a trap and yet evanescent, a deity like Hermes-Thoth and a child learning who he is. You keep wanting him to reappear and drive scenes. It helps that his lines are biblical, pre-Socratic, and Zen. He exudes transhuman wisdom in comic-book form.
• Dream is literally the Dreaming. He can’t exist without humans dreaming him, but their world can’t exist without him dreaming it. He has the power of the gods on Olympus or in Valhalla, but he is also subject to diminutions of overt divinity in modernity cited by Carl Jung and countless others. He has to participate in the world as it is, reduced to his scale in it. Because of the seminal force and the necessity of sleep and dreams, he is able to travel in and out of the human milieu and challenge it, improve it, and force it to face its shadows, literal nightmares that he creates in his kingdom. Note that Dream can manifest as a cat or a storm too.
• Dream and his sibling gods including Death, Desire, and Death are conventional overlord deities, but they are also archetypes and instincts. They act independently in the spirit of the Odyssey and Iliad. Like those figures, they transmit jealousy, treachery, lust, love, vengeance, and compassion. Dream’s stories are generally about mortals and their mortality, their relation to time, their greed, their idealisms, and their gullibility.
• The Sandman script is marginally Miltonic and Dantean with language that is at times more Shakespearean than contemporary. Dream is a Platonic figure too: Morpheus and Oneiros are aspects of him.
• In Episode 4, The Sandman searching for and reclaiming his lost implements (bag of sand, helmet, ruby) stolen during his hundred-year confinement in a sorcerer’s circle comes to Hell for his helmet currently in the possession of a demon. To regain it, he must do battle with an old enemy and colleague, Lucifer Morningstar, his freedom again at risk, in fact eternally. Their weapons are throughtforms. In turn, Lucifer becomes a wolf, a snake, a planet, a galaxy, a universe, and Dream must adopt a superior pose or thoughtform to envelop her. After she seems to win by obliterating the whole creation with anti-life, he triumphs with hope, which is the theme of the whole series and an indirect reference to Pandora’s mythical jar (which the frightened goddess closed on hope). Creation itself is an engine of hope, so it will restore itself even from anti-life. In principle, Dream could not lose, for even Lucifer must dream.
• The series is not for viewers who prefer to avoid violence, depredation, and ugliness. One of the nightmares who escaped during Dream’s imprisonment, the Corinthian (Boyd Holbrook), becomes a serial killer in the world of people and launches a “serial killer” cult that includes torture, butchery, sodomy, etc. He was created by Dream to get humanity to face its shadows, but once his avatar got loose on its own, it turned into a living nightmare. Dream is finally forced to confront him, punish him, and return him to the sand of which all things are made—the sand of dream, the sand of the sandman, and the grains of molecular matter. Other villains suffer different fates, cast into eternal dreamtimes or afflicted with bottomless wells of visions.
• People, forces, and landscapes are interchangeable. The Sandman is a personified Dream wave. Fiddler’s Green is a beautiful meadow in Dream’s kingdom that decides to travel to the world of people during Dream’s absence and become a scholarly hermit, Gilbert, who then plays a heroic role. Rose Walker becomes a literal vortex, a lesion between the world of dream and the world of reality that threatens their separation, hence the existence of both, because her great grandmother was born in a dream by Desire’s tryst with a mortal dreamer. She is made of the Sandman’s sand, though she looks like any other person. The stuff of dreams is the stuff of comix.
• One of the show’s strengths is its ability to show supernaturally transforming landscapes, dream logic, ritual magic, sigils at work, and demons, all without hyperbole, corniness, or optic clichés. The images are original, meaning that they are both inspirational and fairly frightening. 

Keep Breathing, (six episodes, the first three directed by Maggie Kiley, the last three by Rebecca Rodriguez, created by Martin Gero and Brendan Gall, 2022). Partway, even seventy percent, through this serial, I didn’t remotely think of reviewing it. I watched it for diversion and out of curiosity about the outcome. Also, I have long been interested in Canada’s Northwest Territories and the principalities of Inuvik, a giant hidden nation which itself could hide a city of sasquatches and a fleet of UFOs in its vast forests.

            Keep Breathing is a story about the crash of small plane and one woman’s survival in a wilderness of woods, mountains, lakes, cascading rivers, waterfalls, bears, poison berries, and distances effectively beyond human scale as crossing all of Alaska would be for a fox. Mexican actress Melissa Barrera plays Liv, a powerhouse, workaholic New York securities attorney who has left a big case to take a sequence of planes to a small Canadian airport from where she expects to fly to Inuvik in search of her mother, an Argentina-born painter and marginally schizophrenic guerrilla artist and goofy, irresponsible ecstatic (Florecia Lozano) who abandoned her and her intelligent but short-fused Colombian father (Juan Pablo Espinosa). I won’t go into the web of details setting up the plot, as they are incidental to what happens, and the adventure needs some basis to make Liv’s plight believable. When her flight North is cancelled, she hitches a ride with two men who she believes are a National Geographic photographer and his pilot ordinaire—that’s what they tell her.They are actually Oxycontin smugglers and mules for a mafia syndicate, charming guys with hip lines.

            The plane flounders, then crashes through trees into a lake. The pilot dies quickly. Sam the droll smuggler (Austin Stowell) dies more slowly and then becomes a ghost who talks to Liv, teasing and challenging her to survive while telling her, “No way.”

            From the beginning, the series mixes Reality-show “survival” struggles, successes, and setbacks with flashbacks to Liv’s childhood and career, with an emphasis on her budding romance with Danny (Israeli actor Jeff Wilbusch), a playful former philosophy student and star lawyer with the firm.

Well into the fourth episode, we see Liv battle and negotiate with the environment and her memories and various selves. It is cliché-ridden, made for the scenery and Cast-Away-style survival feats rooted historically in The Swiss Family Robinson. Her underwater dives back to the plane are unrealistically productive, and her personality is too facilely defined by how many times she’s says, “Fuck” (Rebecca Rodriguez was the more profound director or had a better script).

Liv’s flashback law-firm self is a stereotype of a woman who works overtime to avoid any risk of intimacy and is full of scenes of sit-com dating. Liv’s childhood recollections are concomitantly ornate, overdone, and filled with kitsch melodrama of a crazy mother abandoning her father and daughter. Liv’s little girl self is still mysterious and compelling.

None of “castaway”/ “swept away” drama and back story seems as though it will yield anything other than a rescue and return to New York and romance. And, oh by the way, Liv is pregnant with Danny’s and her daughter, but she hasn’t told Danny. Nor does anyone at the firm or in the world have any idea where she is because she flew on a subterfuge plane. The notion that National Geographic will immediately come looking for their employees is dashed by the realization that they have nothing to do with the company—it was only their cover.

            As Liv trudges toward a possible village much too far away to reach and tries to shout to planes and hallucinates a river as a highway and a caterpillar on her hand as Danny’s hand, one tries to guess how the writers will resolve this—what sort of tour de force will get her out—perhaps a chance sighting from the air, perhaps a hidden First Nations village.

            But it takes a different course. She chases after a plane without looking down and falls through rocks into crevasse where she gets pinned. Flashbacks begin to merge with her dire situations in a flow of surreal landscapes, images, and mirages segueing with realities (either in her memory or the immediate natural world). The sequences may be excessive, cinematically indulgent, and uncontrolled as Liv’s mother’s splashes on canvass in manic phases, but they are an authentic mix of dream states, Remedios Varo surrealism, and psychological processing of deep trauma in retraumatizing circumstances.

            By the last episode, the ghost of Liv’s father has replaced smuggler Sam as her alter ego, and he guides her with his wisdom about survival, faith, and the greater cosmos. She begins to blend with the forest and her near own certain death. She likely has a broken leg and is supported by a crutch; she has no more cleaned-out Oxycontin jars of water or sources of standing water or berries she can trust. The coaching of her gynecologist and personal trainers starts to echo and meld with other insights, so that her father’s ghost’s lessons and her practiced conscious-breathing exercises overlap, hence the series’ title. She comes to her own breathing in a way that is powerful, convincing, and instructive enough that it changed my breathing and sense of myself. When the highway turns out to be an uncrossable raging river out of a great waterfall, her father’s ghost tells her to give herself to it and it will take her wherever she is meant to be. Her quest to walk to a distant light, which may only be the aurora borealis, changes to a submission to her own exhaustion and sense that she has done enough and it’s over—everything.

            In a long sequence, she enters the river clinging to part of a log. The waters become rougher and choppier as the camera moves away. She becomes smaller and smaller against the wilderness and the Earth. She separates from the log. She begins to sink. You realize that her rescue will be death itself and her merger with nature. After the dream sequences, the movie has the feeling of a bardo passage that the viewers share with her: keep breathing and cross the rainbow bridge.

The end is sudden and encompasses a whole other movie in a matter of seconds. Her body is found floating by workers, as her flashbacks become a flash-forward to giving birth to her baby with Danny beside her. If she has become a spirit like Sam and her father, the this is the spirit’s fantasy. But she is revived from the bardo of death. As she awakes from coma-like darkness with a start, the story ends.

Though rough and sloppy, Keep Breath is powerful and transformative, and Melissa Barrera proves herself capable of carrying its whole individuating range.  

To Leslie, directed by Michael Morris (2022). I didn’t realize until after watching this film that this was an Old Vic Shakespearean crew performing Central and West Texas (Abilene, Amarillo country) stuff, led by director Michael Morris and star Andrea Riseborough. Riseborough is in every scene and masters the Texas drawl, slurring it when necessary for her character’s alcoholism. Negative capability triumphs. It is often easier to embody characters far removed from one’s familiar realm because there is an uncluttered angle for studying and refining their characteristics. And the human heart doesn’t change. Nothing about this movie is Shakespearean, but it could be not be more Shakespearean in its deep humanity.

            I didn’t like the first half hour too much, and Lindy and I almost stopped watching a couple of times. Don’t. Once it picks up momentum and gets in its groove, every nuance is meaningful and builds into the next as the film ascends into a powerful emotional wave. What I didn’t like at the beginning was too much Texas Country and Western music with still images leading to a scene of Leslie (Riseborough) celebrating winning the lottery. Shown too many times through the movie, it is perhaps its least nuanced sequence: hysterical overkill. Too bad that it is the plot driver and lynchpin, though the real driver is the alcohol addiction that Leslie’s influx of cash underwrites. By the time we meet her, she is in disastrous shape, the money all gone and having abandoned her now-young-adult son as a young teen. She is coming to find him after her unseemly eviction from a grungy motel room, rendering her homeless. She has no other place to go.

Those scenes are stock and overwrought, too crammed together to instill verisimilitude or suspension of disbelief. The movie really begins when son James, an honest, hardworking young citizen trying to get his own life together, can’t keep his mom from stealing and drinking, so gives up and puts her on a bus to their hometown, meaning that she had to confront the origins of her mess—the addictions, bad choices, and wrecked relationships. What follows reminds me of one of my favorite passages that I transcribed from John Friedlander’s workshops in putting together his book Recentering Seth: Teachings from a Multidimensional Entity on Living Gracefully and Skillfully in a World You Create But Do Not Control:

“The universe is always listening to you; it never goes unconscious. I might gather wool for a minute or two, but the universe never does that. This world is so cool that everybody, through their Causal soul and the interplay between themselves and other beings, has an individualized dharma, depending on what’s up for them. And moment by moment, your individualized dharma changes. No matter what decision you make and no matter how horrible a decision you make, at that moment the universe immediately reconstructs itself to optimize your chance of developing spiritual freedom or spiritual meaningfulness. The ground of manifestation is biased in your favor.  I’m not saying it makes it easier because you may have made enough bad decisions that it’s really pretty hard, but given the context you have created, the universe always changes every aspect of itself to optimize your ability to make meaning in that moment. If you make great decisions, the universe immediately recalculates and is available in the next moment. All experience is sacred and eternal, and nothing is ever lost.”

            Nothing comes easy for Leslie. She is mocked, evicted again, and left to wander homeless. She finally leaves her suitcase on a motel property from which she has been driven away as a squatter. Her situation would seem about to deteriorate further (if possible) but doesn’t. The guy who collects her belongings as potential trash for the dumpster turns into her savior. Sweeney is played by comedian Marc Maron. From seeming initially to be an incidental character callously disposing of her last property, he becomes a central figure and elicits delicacy, tenderness, compassion, and sage transference as the lone employee and go-fer of a motel inherited by Royal (Andre Royo). Leslie becomes their third employee and, gradually, despite both their flawed and unpromising pasts, she and Sweeney partner and, in the end, open a diner-like restaurant together with Royal on the motel property.

In between Leslie’s first hapless appearance on the grounds and the sacred rehabilitation of an ice-cream shack into a diner, there is recrimination, awkward courtship, rage and disdain from townsfolk, and periodic descents into misery. Yet people are people, and everyone in this film, even the nastiest and most punishing, are capable of heart and forgiveness, and that includes Nancy (Allison Janney) who has it most in for Leslie and tries to sabotage her attempts to get her life together. She hates a woman who would abandon her son for drink. It is Nancy who finally brings James to the opening of the restaurant.

What Leslie needed was goofiness and support. Winning the lottery was finally far too serious, too much responsibility, as well as alienating and isolating within the town. Sweeney is a master at never criticizing her, always making her think she is doing at least something right when she is the initially bumbling hotel maid and wants to quit. By imagining herself employable, she becomes not just employable but a success, and even marriageable. She and Sweeney perform a Japanese tea ceremony.

Royal, a bit of a blippie (black hippie) brings lunar goofiness. He bays like a hound and runs around naked in the field at night. The motel becomes a stage of performance art where people also happen to stay (we never see them), as Leslie is gradually brought from improv maid to something resembling a real housekeeper and also induced to sobriety. The motel is a dojo and kiva.

In one of the best scenes in many a movie, Sweeney decides to play whatever is on Royal’s machine. “Let Royal be our deejay,” he announce. It’s not what you expect from Royal, but it is in a way because Royal is cosmic, weird, and unpredictable (a blippie too). The “song” is “Hare Krishna, Hare Rama. Krishna, Krishna. Rama Rama,” which keeps playing in her memory and on the soundtrack as she goes through the painful stages of sobriety. It’s an exquisitely abrupt change in tone and scrim from both Texas and the bottle.

            Another song, a very early Willie Nelson band from Crazy: The Demo Sessions plays pretty much in full—not usual in a movie—as she sits at a bar at the beginning of revelation and resurrection: “Look around you / Look down the bar from you / The lonely faces that you see / Are you sure that this is where you want to be? / These are your friends / But are they real friends? /Do they love you as much as me? / Are you sure that this is where you want to be?” Leaving space for her to act silently by movements and facial expressions as the song plays lets the lens tracks her transformation and marks a shift in the trajectory of the film. Willie Nelson and “Hare Rama” are an unbeatable combination!

            In general, In Leslie shows how elusive, idiosyncratic, and simple love and forgiveness are. Per the DVD’s special features, the director and cast wanted to make a film about how real people deal with addiction, love, anger, shame, and despair. It would seem that there would be lots of such films—and there are—but this one puts its own unique spin on the subject, paced at the tempo of an awakening heart. Shakespeare and his gallery of groundlings would have applauded, for this is a groundling masterpiece.

Emily the Criminal, directed by John Patton Ford (2022). I did not realize until after watching this film that star Aubrey Plaza is a prolific actress and that she was one of the film’s producers. Films have long lists of producers these days, so that’s not in itself important. However, it felt the movie feel after the fact more like a vehicle for her as an action star like Liam Neeson or even the Kill Billi version of Uma Thurman or. Still, it is a wonderfully scripted and paced journey through the lower-class working world and bureaucracy, detailing Emily’s journey from being an East Coast artist relocated in L.A. with too much student debt to pay off, to being a player in a shopping “game” that allows stealing of merchandise from stores based on the printing of phony credit cards and IDs that take just enough time to verify before the thief is away with the loot.

Emily was working at a fast-foods joint when a fellow worker gave her an introduction to Lebanese émigré Yusef (Theo Rossi), though it was a bit like sending someone a chain letter. Yusef teaches a group of people the “scheme,” which they are told can leave at any point at which they don’t feel comfortable. Emily stays and decides to use it try to earn enough to pay off her debt. The game starts small, big-screen t.v.’s, and moves up to expensive cars. The foils of the “stings” also become increasingly more dangerous, but Emily continues to work her way up the feeding chain, changing from a somewhat sheltered, pushed-around lady underling to an action star (as mentioned). Every trick or turn that gets played on her, she masters quickly and turns back on her potential target or victimizer. She starts to kick ass as well as steal merchandise.

Yusef’s relationship to her concomitantly changes from manager to mentor to empathic friend to admirer to lover, though Emily is neither sentimental nor romantic. She keeps their relationship in balance and perspective, as she learns and grows from his teaching. She comes to observe and understand Yusef’s larger world and family. When his colleagues turn on him, in part because of his relationship with her, and steal his money, it is Emily who figures out how to get revenge and also the money back.

By the end of the film—a vintage revenge genre—she is the boss of everything, leaving the so-called “real” criminals in disarray, dead or injured—a Bruce Lee clone now. Yusef is not up to her game; he proves finally too sentimental, afraid, and weak. He is not an action star. Emily has to leave him too. By the end of the film, she is wealthy and teaching the shopping scam to a group of recruits, using Yusef’s exact language and tone from when she was a newbie.

I was reminded, in reverse, of Brad Cooper’s character’s role in Guillermo del Toro’s remake of Nightmare Alley (2021) At the beginning of the film, he observes a circus geek performing, eating a live chicken as if a captured wild animal, and wonders how anyone could allow themselves to end up in that position. He has big ambitions, too big. By the end of the film, he is the geek in the circus.

Emily has small ambitions, but by the end of the film she is running the show, not just “the criminal,” but a master criminal.

Tár, written and directed by Todd Field (2022). Tár is anomalously many things. In fact, breaking with expectation after expectation is the film. That is true right from the start when a brief iPhone view of something unexplained segues into a long sequence of detailed music and location credits. In other words, what is usually the end of the list of credits is at the beginning here as a sort of prelude or overture like the orchestra warming up before a musical begins, with a quick sampling of themes that the audience will hear (but no complete songs). This sequencing is so confusing that I clicked “Menu” and started over on Scene 1 to make sure DVD wasn’t malfunctioning. Periodically, I looked at the number on the DVD player to see if it had skipped ahead. The overall sequencing is that bewilderingly disjunctive. The film is like a series of notes, footnotes, and subplots for its own partly undisclosed plot.

            Tár goes on not to track that plot, instead showing addenda, dreams, meetings, and side moments. These sometimes come in the form of interviews with the main character, Lydia Tár, a fictional director of major symphony orchestras as well as a “legendary” conductor played by Cate Blanchett. Field said that he wrote the script for Blanchett and would not have made the movie if she had declined the role. She is certainly a match for its range—if she could credibly play Bob Dylan (as she did in another film), she could handle Lydia Tár.

The fictional Tár is so legendary, in fact, that after watching the opening onstage New Yorker Festival interview with Blanchett playing Tár with Adam Gopnik as the interviewer (after the “out of place” credits), I went my computer to check if the character was someone famous I hadn’t heard of—I am not versed in the classical-music world.

The interview was so realistic—promoting her forthcoming book and live recording of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony (called Mahler 5 throughout along with parallel music-world numerology for other famous symphonies)—that it seemed possible that Blanchett was replicating an actual historical interview. Lydia Tár was characterized so fully and respectfully during Gopnik’s interview that we learn in great detail how meteoric her career has been and also how idiosyncratic for the classical-music world: she spent five years studying the structure and musicology of Andean icaros for her academic thesis. Field is parodying the entire elite intellectualism of The New Yorker and Lexington Avenue Y.

            Lydia Tár next meets with an investment banker and amateur conductor who cofounded the fictional Accordion Foundation with her to support aspiring female conductors. Many such meetings, individually and with corporate or symphony boards, in office buildings and at restaurants (sometimes with emphasos on the menu) replace the usual focus on main threads of a plot. As viewer, you know that there is a dark story evolving behind Tár’s brilliance, articulation, and mastery, but you have to put it together from discontinuous pieces and hints.

In this regard, the film resembles My Dinner with André, a film I don’t remember in any detail but which I found supercilious, pretentious, and shallow at a time when it was being widely praised as just the opposite. The long personal dialogues in Tár are, by contrast, engaging, subtle, intellectually rich, and truly suspenseful, as you wonder what will be said next by either party, especially the dashing, brilliant Lydia Tár.  

            The masterclass that Tár teaches at Julliard afterwards is just as eloquent and realistic. She engages in a complex combative dialogue with a non-cis, multicultural young male student in which she challenges him to drop his distaste for Johann Sebastian Bach and other white male heterosexual composers and listen instead to the music and what it is trying to say. This long, intense episode is one of the most satisfying philosophical, aesthetic, political discussions I have seen in a movie, as Tár demonstrates on a piano with the student beside her Bach’s use of music to speak his own deep, ambiguous emotions and emergent ideas, including gender. The interplay between the two—teacher and student—is edgy and exquisitely nuanced and choreographed as their positions in the audience’s seats, on the stage, and in relation to the other students continue to change. It is as interesting and dangerous as Michel Foucault or Jacques Derrida. It is also initially healthy, addressing current gender issues in art. Yet Tár is so taken with her own mastery and brilliance that she crosses a boundary, poisoning both the exchange and the masterclass by humiliating the student, deftly turning the gender tropes he would be most uncomfortable with on him, so that he finally calls her a “bitch” and storms out of the room. Later in the film we see a YouTube version of other parts of the exchange, shot on a student’s iPhone, and we realize that her “defeat” of the student was harsher and more physical and sexually violent that the “edited” version in the earlier part of the film.

            This play of light, Tár’s brilliance, and shadow, her entitled acts of violation and transgression, is the plot, and shadow wins out. Tár is finally about the emotional and mental deterioration of a bullying, authoritarian, self-centered genius, a lesbian predator of young female musicians (apparently leading one of them to suicide), a master manipulator of everyone around her as she flies through venues giving orders and arranging people like props and comedic stooges, even children like her young daughter and her daughter’s grade-school enemy. She uses her wit, forcefulness, intellect and fiery personality to halt criticism or blowback before it can begin. But no one can pull this off forever, and she is gradually overwhelmed and then swamped by her own lies, machinations, and unethical maneuvers.

A film that is enjoyable to watch when Blanchett’s character is in her glory becomes painful and unpleasant as she deteriorates and we see the degrees of incurable madness. Blanchett is great, but it’s too much Blanchett. She goes from the well-dressed conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic to a crazy woman in haphazard dress, pounding a punching bag, running through abandoned buildings, falling and smashing her face, physically attacking and pummeling her replacement conductor on stage, vomiting in the street, finally taking her disgrace to the Philippines and Thailand where she still has stature, and in a last scene that sent me back to the computer (I couldn’t follow it), conducting the score for a videogame series called Monster Hunter with the same grandiosity and extravagance with which she conducted Mahler 5 in Berlin. You don’t know this until you see the audience dressed elaborately as manga/anime characters like something out of Alice in Wonderland. Since neither Lindy nor I had heard of cosplaying, we had to look it up. Otherwise, it seemed as though she was conducting her own dream or that the film’s genre had changed suddenly to sci fi. She had an audience of animals and aliens. She was now the fallen diva.

            What I come away with more than anything I have said so far in this review is the musical and aesthetic nature of the film itself. Although it is an exaggeration to say that the whole movie is like a John Cage sound symphony, parts of it are. The sound of wind or rain or tires, a ringing doorbell, a siren, a metronome are converted, either by Blachett’s Tár or Field as director, into music. Tár answers a doorbell by imitating it on the piano and then enlarging its theme.

            The shifts from one scene to another—the segues, Eisensteinian juxtapositions and montages—are as sudden, rapid, violent, and startling as those in any movie I can think of. Field interrupts scenes by going into another scene, breaking off before the viewer is ready, changing perspective, scale, and sound in such a way as to momentarily disorient and also make a point about how the mind deals with reality in general and modernity with its noisy paradoxes in particular. You are sitting on a plane; you are driving in a tunnel. You are marking a score; you are in the middle of a symphony.

In this regard, the movie is an exploration of sound and incident, the subplots of ordinary life. The big plot is dwarfed by the minutiae of everyday existence. Tár’s incipient, growing, and full-blown phases of madness are revealed first by her gestures, compulsions, superstitions, habits, eminences, mild rigidities, affronts, royal indications of offense, and other idiosyncrasies of personal style. Field doesn’t elevate them; he lets them build their own momentum. Blanchett is a perfect palette his finely tuned portrayal.

            At the same time the world and society have their own gestures, compulsions, habits, demands, and outrageous requirements. These circumstances and personal and private stages are what Werner Herzog calls “deranged landscapes.” The tension between outer and inner derangement is reflected in the world’s overt and covert insanities and enforced hierarchies, but these are all submitted to sound itself in a greater symphony. An image on a computer or iPhone has just as much primacy as a real tunnel or street traffic or an orchestra rehearsing.

The scene in which these anomalies came together for me was a late one in which the disintegrating Tár answers the door to the landlords of the somewhat secret apartment she rents apart from her lesbian partner and daughter in Berlin. Her neighbors across the hall, the landlords’ relatives, have either just died or been put in a home (we have seen their gradual debilitation too through Tár’s interactions with them). I can’t remember if the landlords want to sell the building or re-rent the apartment, but they are asking when Tár rehearses so that they can avoid showing it at those times. What seems to her initially like the flattery and deference she expects turns into the opposite (they can’t stand the noise) to her outrage. She doesn’t answer them. Instead, she parades around the apartment playing an accordion and singing out the sins and disgraces of the landlords, focusing on their lack of compassion for their own family members.

When I said that the entire film is like a symphony, I actually missed an early clue. The film is an icaro, a dark witch’s icaro.

Elvis, directed by Baz Luhrman (2022). Just bringing Elvis Presley to life through the entire roller-coaster of his career was a tour de force for actor Austin Butler. He embodied Elvis from the provincial, wide-eyed daydreaming boy to the gospel-music initiate at Sun Records, from a mother’s boy to an RCA prodigy provoking outrage and racism for blending black music with white rock, to the soldier in Germany falling in love (Olivia DeJonge is perfectly cast as Priscilla and matches Butler’s range as Elvis), to the rebellious celebrity trying to breathe above the tsunami of his own fame and avatar, to the reborn political troubadour of “If I Can Dream,” to the angry, confused superstar, to the defeated, drugged, drained performer refusing to give up until he has no fight left in him. In the process, Butler made Elvis more real and human, more touching and likable, and more charismatic than, in many ways, Elvis was himself. I know that that sounds ridiculous, even blasphemous, but with almost half a century of hindsight, Elvis’ public life and body of work have become clearer, even more discrete and special than they were at the time, and more emblematic of a phase of melting-pot America that has been all but lost. With perspective on his persona, Luhrman and Butler pull it out of latency so that their portrayal of the Elvis Presley archetype is, in effect, purer and more transparent, or transparent in a different way, than Elvis’ portrayal of the same archetype.

That Butler can handle the whole spectrum while staying in character means that the loving child is never far from the corrupted homeboy or jaded music ikon. Luhrman’s script and Butler’s acting together capture the African-American roots of Elvis’ music and stage persona and the unresolved tension between God’s electrifying presence in a church and a singer’s sex appeal on stage as well as the way that that enigma confounded and misled Elvis from the get-go. In Luhrman’s version Elvis never loses the innocence, unintended seductiveness, and non-transgressive, even non-sexual, nature of his public sexuality. Butler brings Presley’s private and public conundrums together with tenderness and sympathy.

            Tom Hanks plays an almost equal supporting role as Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis’ longtime manager who launched him to fame and then swindled him out of much of his earnings. Hanks’ Parker is also the film’s narrator, so the story is his confessional and apology, as well as a plea for respect and redemption. Seeking admiration for his accomplishment, he argues that, without him, there would be no Elvis. “You’re me and I’m you,” he tells his client near the end. Elvis can’t shake him. The Colonel is his surrogate father and guide.

            Hanks does such a good job capturing Parker’s smarmy, paternally seductive persona and consummate con job that his hyped narration becomes uncomfortable. Parker was actually born Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk in the Netherlands before entering the U.S. illegally at age 20 and adopting a pseudonym while serving in the Army (Tom Parker was the officer enlisting him). He progressed from a diverse carny background in the South to becoming a marginally successful country-and-western music promoter before signing Elvis and fusing their fates and careers. The relationship allowed the Colonel to feed a self-destructive gambling addiction that indirectly controlled Presley’s career through Vegas venues designed to help pay off Parker’s debts.

Since Parker’s first language was Dutch, yet he was pretending to be born and raised in America, Hanks must affect a carefully spoken diction that tries to hide its accent behind an intentional affection. The “Colonel” is a double disguise to camouflage of his origin, allowing Cornelis to parade his deceit in plain sight like a good carny. The “snow business” that Parker adopts as a conspiratorial fusion of the circus and the music circuit is an ESL simulation.   

Hanks’ Parker is a borderline character: psychotic, bipolar, brilliantly manipulative, irrepressibly optimistic and apocalyptically gloomy, a riddle Presley never solves until maybe the very end. In fact, the two men are riddles bound by enterprise, forever trying to solve each other.

            Luhrman and team develop a bunch of techniques, devices, and hypertexts which give the movie multiple dimensions beyond a biopic or even most indy art films. Among these are the use of a double and triple and even sextuple split screen to show events at different times and at different sites, mixing Elvis’ memories (in earlier shots from the movie), contemporary U.S. history (the murders of Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, and Sharon Tate, the mayhem at the Rolling Stones concert at Altamont, etc.), parallel musical acts from B.B. King and Mahalia Jackson to the Beatles and Rolling Stones), and an actual dream-like circus and funhouse of mirrors. Music that is out of the time frame of the movie (such as rap and Eminem) are spliced into a mixed soundtrack in which others as well as Elvis sing his well-known songs, providing a fresh framing for Elvis’s renditions and showing their uniqueness. Luhrman’s newsreel documentary at other times feels like a Greek tragedy written by a latter-day Euripides with a series of mourning choruses. At yet other times Elvis is a blend of surrealism and experimental cinema per the Film Culture era that parallels not only Elvis’s career but Kenneth Anger’s and Andy Warhol’s. A flow of Elvis runes, sigils, murtis (sacred death icons), and brand markers tend toward Hollywood gold and suggest ritual magic, voodoo, and possession, making Elvis a sort of unintentional shaman.

            Luhrman also sets scenes in symbolic places with magical-realist events, creating an imaginal visit by Elvis as a child to an African-American evangelical church where he is carried away by the vibratory entrance of the divine presence instilling his own stage wriggle, and then later a meeting with contemporary promoters trying to lure Elvis away from the Colonel set behind the Hollywood sign in L.A. such that they step out from the sign and its runes transfer into the next scene. There are many such shifts of scale from glyph and trope to entire landscape and then back.

Luhrman, Butler, and Hanks also play with elusive themes and threads of songs behind Elvis’ life, brief snatches of “I Can’t Help Falling in Love with You,” “Caught in a Trap” (the trap of the Colonel as well as the trap of his own stage persona that won’t let him keep the “trap” of his perfect family with Priscilla and Lisa Marie), and the hauntingly ironical “Here Comes Santa Claus,” which is used at various pitches and tempos to signify Parker’s continual attempt to mainstream Elvis in a way that his own kitsch self understands and can sell.

Yet the ever malleable Colonel, protecting his secrets and alias, speaks simultaneously out of both sides of his mouth because he is used to having to protect a source scam. With all this happening, the film continually shifts references, at time a biopic, at times a rock video, at times a reverential reference to Citizen Kane but also to endless variations of Alice in Wonderland. This medley of interacting montages, splices, and fugues imposes the history of film on Elvis and raises his stature to the stature of cinema itself. Elvis earned a twelve-minute standing ovation at Cannes, but not an American Oscar. The man had become such a deep-seated trope that most Americans could no longer see through him or his true dimensionality, only his epic ascent and tragic, bloated demise.

Everything Everywhere All at Once, directed by Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan (2022). To the degree that my “Guide to Cinema” is made up of the best films I’ve seen, ones I think highly of, Everything Everywhere All at Once doesn’t come close to qualifying; it is not even one of the better films I’ve seen. I want to review it in order to talk about a few things. On the positive side, the Two Daniels (as they are referred to by the producers and cast in the Special Features) ambitiously attempted to characterize a multiverse of probability-based universes in which each is giving rise simultaneously to others. Each event everywhere splits into what happens and what doesn’t happen but happens elsewhere in a parallel probability. That’s admirable, and it legitimizes the possibility that we might be living in such a multiverse by giving it artistic verisimilitude. Everything Everywhere All at Once is a literal description of what reality might look like if probabilities began flowing into one another, and different versions of the same person, from different outcomes, started replacing each other in “alphaverse” jumps triggered by both intentional and unconscious behavioral cues. This is a principle of Sethian thought, and the Daniels do a great job of lodging it in a viable plot, albeit fanciful and unrealistic.

Michelle Yeoh as Evelyn Wong is an ideal shape-changer at the center of swirling superposed universes through which she jumps into her other interdimensional selves (and they into her). Her anchor identity runs a Simi Valley laundromat with tax and daughter problems, and her other identities range from movie stars to kung-fu masters and a lookalike in a universe in which people have hot dogs for fingers. These keep interceding in each other’s worlds in a story about Evelyn’s attempt to stop an evil demiurge named Jobu Topaki (doubling as her daughter Joy) from destroying all universes simultaneously through a bagel-shaped black hole that is also a bagel. EEAAO is a slapstick semi-sci-fi comedy.

The mechanism of parallel probability-connected universes is not a facile one, and the Daniels’ mastery of it is instructive, hilarious, savory, and often Jack-in-the-Box startling with its costume and landscape shifts and instantaneous revisions of color and texture palettes. The film has many laugh-worthy metaphysical one-liners and New Age jokes. It imbeds the microcosm of a mother-daughter relationship in a macrocosm of vast and latent reincarnational karma and salvation, and it explores the lost-in-translation Chinese-American experience in conversations of mixed English, Cantonese, and Mandarin. 

            The downsides are legion: There is virtually no—I would say no—emotional texture or depth to any of the characters or storylines. A lot happens, but who cares finally? It’s like watching a high-tech cartoon at double-speed: a superset of “melo-traumas” that will not get resolved in any lifetime. The script’s view of interlocking universes is almost exclusively one of violence and apocalypse, meaning lots of guns, swords, martial-arts fights, explosions, threats, anger, and general body bashing—pure Loony Tunes with “love” thrown in so gratuitously that it is trite and superfluous. EEAAO is rich in detail and ontological riddles but vapid in events, brilliant in quantum amplituhedronal geometry and dumb in humanity and meaning.

The action is repetitious and slaphappy. As can be confirmed in the DVD Special Features, it is an almost solely technological feat by hip amused costume, make-up, and special-effects artists having a good time. Some of it is truly dazzling, but the aesthetics and pacing are on the level of 1963’s It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, nothing to be proud of. Both films turn puns into visual effects; for instance, a dying person kicking an actual bucket in 1963, and a mispronunciation of ratatouille leading to racocoonie and a persistent overdone puppet raccoon on the head of a chef. A bagel is a bagel is a torus.

Aspirations to The Matrix fall short because you never get inside the device in any believable way. I was reminded of 1999’s silly Galaxy Quest parody of Star Trek in which movie characters are recruited to play themselves in a real space war by aliens who mistake their roles for actual combat prowess.

            I am also led finally to question the notion that devices can ever replace art, creative imagination, and catharsis. Stan Brakhage’s 1960s Dog Star Man is effectively “Everything Everywhere All at Once” with a sixteen-millimeter camera, no crew or actors other than a dog and himself, double exposures, and careful splicing and Eisensteinian montage. It is human, visceral, and Ulyssean. Bruce Conner’s A Movie is somewhat dated, but it took a while to date. Painter and visual artist Connor used discarded black-and-white film clips from a cutting-room floor to make a found-footage college of human depth and probability, and his super-low-budget song is a symphony. Connors, like the Daniels, comes to The End multiple times, then starts over, but Connor’s version is so musical it has the feeling of Mahler and Respighi (the latter is its sound track), and it ends in true mystery, tragedy, and awe with a budget of less than $1000 in today’s money. Everything Everywhere All at Once is discordant and will date as quickly as the next technology or an AI copy transcends its gimmicks.

Perfect Days, directed by Wim Wenders, written by Wim Wenders and Takuma Takasaki, starring Kōji Yakusho as Hirayama (2023). Wim Wenders has written and directed so many complex and varied films, most of them with conventional plots, even if (as in his angel films Wings of Desire and Faraway So Close), the conventions are metaphysical. Perfect Days is different. It captures the flow of time itself and the meaning of existence. It is Zen-like in style, a peephole into a life—a life ritual—being well lived.

That the hero, Hirayama, is a public bathroom cleaner for Tokyo Toilet makes clear that neither status nor financial reward makes a day or a life perfect. It is the act of experiencing the world in terms of its joys, beauties, wonder, and sorrows that creates a sustaining texture deeper than either happiness or comfort, while honoring them too. In keeping with this theme, Hirayama’s toilet is an upscale, colorful set of stalls in a wealthy ward across town from his own modest apartment.

            Perfect Days is almost unreviewable, especially in temporal terms (as you will see) because everything is of equal importance and only loosely tied together. The movie covers seventeen days in Hirayama’s life and, in particular, his unorthodox interactions with various individuals who are relatively close to him. Because instead of a plot there are seventeen days in which events are hung on each other improvisationally, and people mostly take advantage of Hirayama’s generosity, good nature, and lack of material self-interest, it is difficult to give a plot summary or say exactly what happened. The events don’t make ordinary, logical sense. The film’s lack of a plot means that its true aesthetic and value are the quality of time and the creation of perfect—meaning imperfect—days.

Apparently, the film was shot in seventeen days to match cinematic and story time frames to each other. In other words, you have to experience it; there is no way to grasp its sense from a review.

Hirayama’s assistant at Tokyo Toilet, Takashi (Tokio Emoto), is central to his workdays there. Takashi’s girlfriend Aya (Aoi Yamada) holds a number of subplots together. She is actually just a woman with a blonde-dyed Western look whom Takashi follows from the toilet and asks out. But his motorbike won’t work, so he asks to use Hirayama’s van. Hirayama then drives them to the playing of a Patti Smith cassette (for “cassettes,” see below). Takashi is also broke, so he wants Hirayama to get the cassettes appraised. When the three go to a specialty shop, the old analog reels turn out to be worth hundreds of dollars. Takashi wants them sold at once so that he can have money to take Aya out and hopefully even stay with her. Hirayama grabs them back from him but loans Takashi almost all the money from his wallet. Meanwhile Aya steals a Patti Smith cassette that she will later return to Hirayama with a kiss on the cheek. Takashi will not only never repay the debt, but he will quit without warning around day sixteen, leaving Hirayama to work all his stalls as well as his own until Tokyo Toilet can assign a replacement.

Other characters include Hirayama’s niece Niko (Arisa Nakano); her mother, Hirayama’s wealthy estranged sister who is driven in a chauffeured car in contrast to her brother’s lifestyle; people in the restaurant and laundry Hirayama regularly visits; and his various “customers,” one of whom he plays tic-tac-toe with by sliding a piece a paper through a slot between stalls.

         Nonhuman “characters” incldes Hirayama’s cassette player and cassettes from mostly the 1970s and 1980s, his old-fashioned camera, trees has befriended and takes pictures of, his books [including William Faulkner’s Wild Palms (with the elegiac line “… between grief and nothing I will take grief.”); Patricia Highsmith’s short stores, and essays of Japanese author Aya Kōda)], one of which he reads every night before going to sleep on a mat, and his dreams (seventeen day-ending dreams, see below).

A bit past the midway point niece Niko runs away from home, or at least decides to hide from her mother at Hirayama’s place. She likes it better there than home for a time. She reads (and later borrows) a book and, like Takashi, is fascinated with the cassettes in Hirayama’s car, which he plays every day. When she wonders if she can hear them on Spotify, Hirayama thinks she is referring to a store.

Hirayama’s camera shoots in black-and-white on film that must be developed and printed—he comes to get his pictures when they are ready. He dreams in black-and-white. His dreams may have a cinematic origin in Alfred Hitchcock’s characters’ dreams, but they are so much more complex with images, memories, and people flowing through complex layers representing the way they do in actual dreams.

Perfect Days celebrates the life texture that has been lost in the last forty or fifty years. The songs on the cassettes make a soundtrack of the era consonant with the technology of the player. Wenders and Takasaki are careful to pick music that expresses moods and landscapes that have been lost: The Animals – ‘The House of the Rising Sun’ (which also gets sung in Japanese by Maki Asakawa who provides the singing voice for the female proprietor of Hirayama’s favorite restaurant, The Velvet Underground – ‘Pale Blue Eyes’, Otis Redding – ‘(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay’, Patti Smith – ‘Redondo Beach’, The Rolling Stones – ‘(Walkin’ Thru The) Sleepy City’, Lou Reed – ‘Perfect Day’, The Kinks – ‘Sunny Afternoon’, Van Morrison – ‘Brown Eyed Girl’, Nina Simone – ‘Feeling Good’, and Patrick Wilson – ‘Perfect Day’.

In keeping with my atemporal filmography, Perfect Days closes at night with Hirayama and the female restauranteur’s fatally ill spouse playing “shadow hopscotch” by the water, a game I don’t understand in which they dance and skip over each other’s shadows while laughing, a game also out of keeping with the somber mood of the moment, but that sort of joy is what makes a perfect day. Until I read a version of the “plot” online, I drew the wrong conclusion that the fatally ill man was Hirayama’s former brother-in-law and that the woman he wanted Hirayama to take care of was his niece Niko rather than the man’s wife. Errors like this don’t mar “perfect days”; they are what make the film an accurate through-a-glass-darkly view of something that transcends its own premise.

The Lincoln Lawyer, created by Ted Humphrey and David E. Kelley (multiple directors from 2022 to 2024). I won’t belabor my review of this series. It is based on stories by Michael Connelly, a master of crime fiction, so the plots are complex, suspenseful, with multiple twists, and lend themselves to binge-watching. Defense lawyer Mickey Haller (Manuel Garica-Rufo) is the Lincoln lawyer because for a time his Lincoln car was his law office and its trunk was where he stored his files.

In the Haller case that dominates Season Two, the Lincoln Lawyer gets his client off a rap for murdering a developer with a hammer through meticulous sleuthing with the aid of Cisco (my favorite character, superbly portrayed by Angus Sampson), but realizes that she is guilty of the prior murder of her husband by a mixture of intuition and some follow-up sleuthing that ties the two cases together. His client is a foodie restauranteur and briefly his lover before he took her case and couldn’t risk a conflict of interest. The foodie’s victim is a developer destroying the neighborhood her restaurant relies on. She set herself up for being framed by harassing him to such a degree that he had to get a restraining order against her. Haller has to unravel all this at the same time that he realizes something is still off—her behavior doesn’t match the situation unless her husband is buried underneath the restaurant’s herb garden. His breakthrough comes while looking at old photographs and realizing that the guy he met as her husband while trying to get his help vis à vis the tool kit from which the hammer was removed to be the murder weapon in case 1 (her exposure to going to jail for first-degree murder of the developer) is an actor, a former employee of her restaurant, which sets up case 2.

Plot summaries beyond that would make my review of The Lincoln Lawyer way too long. This case alone took ten hours to watch.

I like that Haller is Hispanic and mixes Spanish and English throughout the series. I like that Izzy Letts (Jazz Raycole) who plays the female black district attorney against whom Haller is constantly pitted, is as sharp as he is, leading to monumental battles which show that guilt or innocence becomes secondary to the competitive vying of the attorneys as well as the frustrating literality of law codes—also that she becomes Haller’s girlfriend in Season Three. That probably was the idea of a new scriptwriter; I doubt that it was planned from the beginning, but Raycole was so good she deserved more airtime. I like that Cisco is funny, clever, resourceful, and an invaluable researcher and scout, and is is also a former member of a motorcycle gang with leftover business. I like that Haller’s two ex-wives (Wife 1 and Wife 2) on his cell are still part of his world. Wife 2, Lorna (Becki Newton) works in his office and is engaged to and then marries Cisco. To my mind, those are the four leading characters, but they are not the only ones. There is Haller’s first wife Maggie McPherson (Neve Campbell), a prosecutor in the L.A. County D.A.’s office who moves to a better job in San Diego, and his daughter Hayley (Krista Warner) who provides fresh insights into and strong reactions to his cases and their sometimes fatal consequences. What I also like is that all these characters are agreeable, pleasant to watch, as opposed to, say, Virgin River (which doesn’t have nearly as suspenseful and labyrinthine stories and in which most of the main characters, even the ones we are supposed to have sympathy for, are unappealing).

American Fiction, directed by Cord Jefferson (2023). I haven’t read the novel on which the movie is based (Erasure by Percival Everett), so my comments are confined solely to the film. The main character, Thelonius “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright), is author of literary fiction and professor of literature in Los Angeles. The point is, he is not a conventionally marketable “black” author; his books are fine literature, so they are praised but sell poorly because, as a black man, he is supposed to write “black” books. He is frustrated because Sinatra Golden (Issa Rae) has written a very popular current book called We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, a parody in the context of the movie, but ultimately a self-parody as we find out when Everett writes one too under a pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh (an uncredited reference to Cecil Brown’s folk history Stagolee Shot Billy, published by Harvard University Press in 2004).

            Everett tries to flee the success of his book, starting with the $750,000 advance offered, though he needs the money because of his mother’s Agnes’s developing Alzheimer’s and his doctor sister’s sudden untimely death. Agnes is played by a much older Leslie Uggams who (as a seventeen-year-old sang at my half-brother’s bar mitzvah for her first paid gig because her manager was a friend of my stepfather’s; the rabbi at the Park Avenue Synagogue objected—I mention this because the racial issues in this film are so imbedded in the society that there is no way to avoid running into repeated synchronicities).

Their brother, a plastic surgeon in Arizona, plays a supporting role as a gay man newly coming out of the closet. Much of the story takes place in their native Boston where Ellison has repaired after being advised to take a break from teaching after he stirred up controversy in has classes with his argumentative, unorthodox racial views. Back in Massachusetts, Monk also begins a relationship with Coraline (Erika Alexander), a public defender who lives across the street from his mother’s beach house.

In the meantime, Monk has written his satirical novel imitating the sorts of books that sell in large numbers. He calls it My Pafology, and to his shock it draws the offer of a large advance. In an attempt to sabotage the project, he insists that the novel’s name be changed to Fuck and he adopts his Stagg R. Leigh persona, ostensibly a convict on the run from the law. When invited to help judge the New England Book Association’s Literary Award, he discovers that Sinatra, a fellow judge shares many of his views. When Fuck is optioned for a film, Monk—now self-corrupted— participates in trying to come up with a commercial ending. That ends up with Stagg R. Leigh, AKA Thelonius Monk, being shot and “killed at the literary-award ceremony for which he is a judge and tries unsuccessfully to undermine his book. The lines between the fictional Stagg R. Leigh (who is now dead), the pseudonymous Stagg R. Leigh (who is rich and has betrayed Thelonius Ellison’s causes), and Thelonius Ellison are blurred irreconcilably.

I won’t write further about the second half of the film, and it is more than just half. It constitutes a terrible film, not worth reviewing. The first half is really interesting—tight, well-placed, authentically motivated, and expresses the ironies of black authors not being encouraged to write good books that fall out of their percial stereotype. You can add Percival Everett to the list of blurred identities along with his Thelonius Ellison alias (Ralph Ellison is his second pseudo-synchronistic reference).

The realistic film holds up through the writing and advance offered for Pafology. Once Ellison turns down the advance and tries to sabotage the book, then the film loses direction and any authenticity or veracity. The author and/or the director try to cram in every bit of racial shtick they can, playing for laughs and melodrama like most other contemporary commercial films. Ellison’s sister’s death, his mother’s Alzheimer’s, and his brother’s grief are all played for effect without concomitant emotional intelligence. Ellison’s breakup with Coraline and his lack of candor with her are merely convenient, to allow further hyperbole and vaudeville. The film ultimately betrays its own mission, but then it is impossible to know if its mission is what is betrayed or if the film itself is an innate betrayal. It becomes shockingly racist in a way that, if it author and director/scriptwriter intended it, shows a startlingly simplistic view of race. It is a wonder that the first half of the movie can be so on target and convincing and yet yield the second half.

All of Us Strangers, directed by Andrew Haigh (2023). This is a remarkably complex film, really two films imposed intricately on each other. The first and initially the most accessible is an initiation into the world of gay men. Andrew Haigh is a gay male director referencing his own life. He clearly knows what’s already been done in the matter of gay courtship and sex—a lot—and where former gaps and misses are, and he is careful to let the relationship develop slowly enough for him to catch its nuances: the meeting, the hesitancies, the exchange of relevant information and permission, the seduction, its aftermath. In the dialogue that follows, I will only identify the speaker when it makes a difference:

            “I’m just checking. You are queer, right?”

            “Yeah, Yeah.” [Both chuckling]

            “That’s good.”

            “Or gay.”

            “Or gay. I can’t get used to calling myself queer. It was always such an insult.”

            “Hmm!”

            “It’s probably why we hate ‘gay’ so much now.”

            “It was always like [chuckles] um, ‘your haircut’s gay’ or ‘this sofa’s gay.’”

            “‘Your trainer’s gay’. ‘Your schoolbag’s gay.’”

            “Yeah.”

            “Queer does feel polite somehow, though, you know.”

            “It’s like, um . . . it’d like all the dick sucking’s been taken out.”

            [Both chuckling] [Pause]

            “I’m assuming you’re not with anyone. I never see you with anyone.”

            “No. You?

            “No, but not for want of trying.”

            [They exchange some weed and begin smoking]

            Harry: “How about I kiss you?”

            Adam: “Well, all right.

They spend maybe ten seconds angling for position while the lighting darkens so that we can’t see much. He won’t let the men’s affair turn into gay pornography. We do see that Harry strokes or touches Adam’s penis while they kiss. Both are moaning now

            Adam: “I haven’t done this for a while. I have to remember to breathe.”

The second kiss is much longer and deeper. They begin undressing each other with more fondling. The scene continues to grow darker; the film cuts are quicker. There appears to be a blow job, and then they’re in bed together.

A memorable line is spoken by Adam afterward as he sees an unexpected value in a usually unwelcome condition: “When you’re a fat kid, no one asks why you don’t have a girlfriend.”

Then they discuss their parents. Harry talks about being cut off from his family pretty much, no common interests, then asks Adam, “Do you see your Dad much?”

Adam replies, “No, they died just before I was 12.”

This opens most first-time viewers to confusion and self-doubt as to whether they are following the story.

Adam continues: “Yeah, yeah. Car crash.” He goes on to say that it was a long time ago and nothing special.

Harry says that time doesn’t matter with such a thing, then “I’d like to see you again.”

“Well, okay.”

There is a certain nonchalance to their exchanges, a backing into something that is intimate and direct. (I may not have all the dialogue and exchanges quite right, but I am aiming for the gist and trying to watch and enjoy the film too.

The second film is far more elusive and difficult to describe. It takes two viewings even to see its lineaments. I was so confused during the first viewing that I went to the internet to check the plot. I wrote to a friend: “The film will make no sense unless you read the plot summary on Wikipedia. Most of the characters are ghosts and meeting in the afterlife: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_of_Us_Strangers.”

Even this Wikipedia description is misleading in some regards that I will try to remedy. That is not because its Wiki author didn’t make a thorough, honest effort to recount it but because the plot of the second film in nonlinear in a way that eludes ordinary description. What is missing in the Wikipedia plot summary is the fact that two characters play as four.

First, there is Adam (Andrew Scott, who plays the alter ego of director Andrew Haigh)—and there is Harry (Paul Mescal), Adam’s gay lover. They meet in an apartment building in suburban London, ostensibly in current real time (2023). They don’t know each other and begin their affair as strangers.

Then there are Adam (2) and Harry (2), the same characters played by the same actors; They are also old childhood friends who re-meet in the present, except that they don’t re-meet in the present. Adam (1) and Harry (1) have their affair in present time without full real-time cognizance of Adam (2) and Harry (2); they are just meeting in the first film but ghosts familiar with each other in the second. An underlying ontology ties the two films and identities together, but it is a poltergeist ontology, a shared crossing over of the living and the dead.

No description is as good as actually watching All of Us Strangers twice because the subtleties are imbedded in the characters and the acting, not in the literal summary. This goes as well for the other central characters, notably Adam’s parents (Adam 1 and Adam 2 have the same parents). In film 1, the parents died in a car accident when Adam was approaching twelve; he has been an orphan since. In film 2, they remain as ghosts that Adam can visit with Harry 2, though they must do so while overlapping with the affair between Adam 1 and Harry 1, who don’t know about their alter egos, so they must treat the dead parents not as ghosts or thoughtforms but as dreams and drug visions following smoking weed (initially) and later while taking ketamine. I am reminded of the space-time, life-death orientation of the 2010 film Biutiful, directed by Alejándro González Iñárratu and starring Javier Bardem (see my review). Life, death, the afterlife, and their thoughtforms are arranged in a similar fashion.

I am going to continue my review in sequential fashion, following in particular the early part of the film, roughly a bit past the first half . To do this with the whole film in this manner would be tedious and repetitive, and I am trying to review it, not write Cliff Notes for it.

All of Us Strangers opens in darkness with light dawning over London as seen from immediate suburbia. Sunrise glinting off a window appears as a yellow speck on the screen. The blue behind it is a beautiful dark shade that slowly becomes lighter. Always watch the sky in this movie; it is a tipoff to the caliber of reality. If the sky is present, the scene is mostly real—no scene is entirely real. The other marker to watch is trains. Trains represent a change from one dimension of time to another. I am not certain if trains going to the left are returning viewers to the past and trains grounding to the right are bringing them back to the present but, either way, trains mark transitions. After a while, past and present overlap, and the two Adams and Harrys are interwoven without fully recognizing it. They can ride trains with impunity.

I believe that the high rise in which Adam 1 and Harry 1 meet each other and begin their affair is mostly real (per the scene depicted above and presence of sky in it) but also part of the ghost world because during a building fire alarm and drill they are the only two occupants of these enormous high rises to appear on the street, and we never see any other occupants. Also in trance-like manner they accept this state of affairs while hoping for other occupants to move in. We do, however, see other people in the market where Adam and Harry meet again and Harry buys, if I remember right, liquor to help himself/them through the evening, though they will later settle on weed. That assures us that Adam 1 and Harry 1 are having a real-time gay affair.

The ghost story, film 2, begins at about the twenty-minute mark, interweaving the stories early on. Though Adam 1 will not officially go looking for his family after their death in the automobile accident when he was approaching age 12, he nonetheless drops in on them, thereby turning into Adam 2. He is accompanied by Harry 2, who knows them because they were second parents to him and a part of their shared childhood. Harry 2 brings Adam 1 to Adam 2’s parents, thereby turning him into Adam 2. At this point, the line between Adam 1 and Adam 2 is nonexistent, and the only way we as viewers can rationalize the anomaly is to consider the ways in which we all shift semi-consciously and subconsciously between different identities and realities. We accept the impossible because we don’t want to stop time and have to deal with the consequences.

Adam 2’s Mum (Claire Foy) and Dad (Jamie Bell) greet them quite conventionally. Yet how could they be meeting Adam’s parents as adults, first-time viewers wonder, when they died when Adam was 12. Mum seems particularly unperturbed, wanting to know what happened to her son (meaning after her death in the accident as he passed 12). She wants to know who he went to live with and is disappointed that it’s her mother because his paternal grandmother was in too deep mourning to take him in. “What about my mother?” she wonders.

“Wasn’t she mourning me?”

“Of course,” says Adam.

When she learns that Adam has become a writer, she is delighted. She always knew he was creative. She has also always liked writers, especially Stephen King (an ideal choice for a ghost story!), but Adam explains that he’s not that sort of a writer, he’s a script writer (he’s playing Andrew Haigh within his own film).

At this point, day and night are becoming conflated, perhaps because paranormal time is being mixed with nocturnal-diurnal time.

We don’t stay with Mum and Dad for long. A seemingly gay-oriented song on the soundtrack operates as a transition back to the present. It’s called “Built” and performed by a group called Housemartins. Here I was confused, or almost confused, after researching the song and group. The Housemartins were a 1980s indie band with busking roots and a Christian rock orientation; yet they are used here to segue into gay sex. My most likely explanation is that Haigh found a song that could be construed as either 2023 gay or 1980s eco-socialism. See if that interpretation works for you:

            “Clambering men in big bad boots

            Dug up my den, dug up my roots

            Treated us like plasticine town

            They built us up and knocked us down.”

            Here there is a gap in the song on the soundtrack of the film before it goes forward.

            “From Meccano to Legoland

            Here they come with a brick in that hand

            Men with heads filled up with sand

            Le-eh-eh-ts build

Let’s build a house—”

            It cuts off abruptly.

After his first seduction and love-making with Harry, Adam goes to his childhood address alone. He is fully Adam 1 but in the context of Adam 2. He walks about his room, reexamines vinyl records, children’s books. We have to assume these are thoughtforms rather than real objects, though they are cinematic artifacts in either case.

Mum (Claire Foye) appears. She has many questions. She last saw Adam when he was approach 12. She had thought his chest would be hairier, like his father’s. Instead he looks like her father. (I wonder if the age, just shy of 12 rather than the more script-convenient 12, and Adam’s resemblance to his grandfather rather than his father represent carryovers from director/screenwriter’s Haigh’s life.) Adam was just out in the rain, 2023’s rain I assume, so he is wet, and she wants to wash and dries his clothes (in 2003 transposed). The rain is also a thoughtform; it has to be under the circumstance of ghosts. When an element is shared between the waking world and the ghost world, the ghostlier common denominator wins.

Adam is slightly awkward at undressing in front of his mother because he doesn’t know her as more than a twelve-year-old, but does, giving her a chance to examine him.

Mum: “You were just a boy. Now you’re not.”

[Pause]

“You haven’t got a wedding ring. I’m presuming you’re not married.” She imagines his girlfriend: “I’m picturing her with brown hair, skinny, smart obviously. Well?”

“Well, what? I don’t have a girlfriend.”

“That’s a shame.” [Mum pours tea]

            “I’m not into girls, into women.”

            “What do you mean?”

            “I mean . . . I’m gay.”

            “As in homosexual?”

            “As in that, yeah?” Mum’s ghost is talking from twenty years prior while Adam is talking from a present she never experience as a real-life adult and explaining what has changed over twenty years. AIDS is not a big deal anymore. Gay marriage is an option. Gay men having children is possible. There is no stigma to either gay marriage or gay parent-hood. The ghost story is an ideal set-up to contrast the two.

“Since when?”

“Since a long time.”

“How long?”

“Forever.”

She now has to contemplate that Adam means twelve-year-old Adam before the accident. He had secrets as the child she and Dad orphaned.

“You don’t look gay.”

“I’m not sure what that means. Everyone knows, everyone can marry.”

            “Marry, to each other? It’s like eating your cake and having it too.”

            “Everything’s different.”

            She thinks it must be a lonely life.

            “If I’m lonely, it’s not because I’m gay.”

Later Harry mirrors this line while speaking to Andrew, “Coming out puts a name to that difference that’s always been there.”

In the latter part of the film, the two Adams and Harrys and the past and present merge. At one point Adam asks his Mum, “Is this real?”

            “Does it feel real?”

            “Yeah.”

            “There you go then.”

            “For how long, though.”

            “I can’t say.”

            “I suppose we don’t get to decide.”

Thoughtforms and lowest common denominators again. People accept what’s happening even when it makes no sense because the alternative makes even less sense and is less practical. Try applying that to your life right now and asking if it’s a thoughtform too.

As the film comes to an end, Adam 1 and Harry 1, Adam 2 and Harry 2, and Adam 1 and Harry 2 are drawn closer and closer together till they overlap entirely. Adam is both an adult and a child. For a Christmas photograph Dads father sets the camera on a timer, then rushes back before the flash bulb and shutter go off. The three people in the photograph are a trio adults, but the “old” Polaroid image of them shows Mum and Dad with a child.

Mum also wants to understand whether she and Dad suffered much in the accident. Adam lies, saying no, which is true for Dad but not for her. She lost an eye and thus is periodically blind in their ghost meetings, also twenty years earlier in briefly waking up before dying. Adam realizes that she must have been so confused. He tells Harry he went back to the road to look for the eye, half-expecting to see it staring up at him. He doesn’t find it, but he finds a piece of broken glass from their car. He doesn’t think that finding her eye will help either of them, but it is a form of emotional compensation and also privacy, a key concept in a film which is otherwise far from private and in which identities and secrets seep out all over.

Mum and Dad eventually take leave of Adam so that he can live his life. He resists the inevitable second separation, but Mum makes clear that neither of them have a choice. Adam is left with Harry in present time as Adam 1 and Harry 1. They are hugging in bed as the camera rises above them in a direct vertical pan that I don’t remember seeing in another movie, or maybe with landscapes but not with background-less people. As the camera goes higher and higher, Adam and Harry become less discernible. The vista darkens as at the beginning of the time until the two men are just a glint like the one off a building that opens the film and gradually turns to sunlight of a new day. The closing glint is nocturnal and turns into a burst of light, a star that subsumes the men in a timeless epiphany. Adam 1 and Harry 1 no longer need Adam 2 and Harry 2 because they have already absorbed them, but they had already already absorbed them, making the movie and love affair possible. Ghost world and gay world converge, and each elucidates the other.

Unknown: Cave of Bones, directed by Mark Mannucci (2023). A lot of this documentary, and others in Netflix’s “Unknown” documentary series, is tedious: technical palaeo-archaeology (or, in other instances, astronomy or computer science), featuring either in-person or reconstructed “Reality” digs—we excavate, you watch.

Cave of Bones depicts the recovery of bones and a few artifacts from Rising Star Cave in South Africa. The documentation is thorough and instructive; the archaeologists and primatologists are thoughtful and personable, though there is always a stale feeling somewhere between a seminar room and a professional forum. Either seems rigged and staged.

            Cave of Bones, nonetheless, has some stunning sequences. Its gist is that Homo naledi (the species is named after the word for “star” in indigenous Sotho) developed the beginnings of culture around 260,000 years ago despite the fact that Naledi wasn’t human (sapiens), didn’t have nearly the brain capacity physical anthropologists necessary for language and tool-making, and precedes the assigned origin of tools, art, and mortuary practices by at least 100,000 years. This means that culture is not limited to or defined by science’s prior parameters.

            Some moments in the documentary are inspiring as well as chilling. One of these is the animated reconstruction of a tribe of Homo naledi walking through savanna and forests. It’s not Industrial Light and Magic, but it is based on real bones and artifacts rather than free-range software. This might actually be them: the sasquatches, the Martians, the missing link.

The closing fifteen-or-so minutes soar, as we are initiated into the signifier of a single tool in a skeleton’s hands along with markings on a nearby wall made by a “pen” like the one buried there, if not that very implement. Much effort was expended on showing how the entire chunk of earth containing skeleton and tool had to be extracted, excavated, and gotten out of the cave intact and flown to France for advanced X-ray technology in order to reveal the exact three-dimensional contour and edging of the stone. We circle it like teeth in a dental office.

            From there, the closing goes on to show how the deep chambers of the Rising Star Cave system look like a cathedral from below. Naledi was praying, was reaching to something beyond himself. What follows this pan is a procession of other cathedrals and ceremonies across the taxonomy of later human habitation—a full Mondo Cane/Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious revival in an archaeological context.

Human culture and religion—and self-aware consciousness—are assumed to have arisen in creatures like Naledi. They would not have conducted burials, scratched runes (art) on the wall, or conceived of an afterlife or the need for a death ritual unless they could think and communicate. Though there is controversy around the interpretation of the fossils, that takes nothing away from the imaginal power of the conceits. Cave of Bones falls, at worst, into the same genre as reconstructions of Martian culture from the putative Face and Monuments on Mars, though far more likely to be confirmed scientifically.

            As someone who went to graduate school got a Ph.D. and in anthropology after majoring in English, I was enchanted by returning to my early 1966 moments of discovering what defined my new field, questions like, ‘What does it mean to be human? What is culture? What were the first language and symbol? When did hominids first cross into numinosity? How did religion originate and what questions and hopes did it encompass then?’ Cave of Bones brings all that back with freshness and without overkill. Though the dialogues and peers in on scientific discussions seemed staged, the excitement and sense of revelation are real. When the documentary closes with respect and reverence for Homo naledi, a stranger we really don’t know, the honor seems authentic and ingenuous.    

A Thousand and One, directed by A. V. Rockwell (2023). This is a far better film than the sum of its parts, most of which are strong but ordinary street vignettes. Their musically paced dialogues capture the mores, language, and predicaments of Harlem in the mid-nineties. As periodic voiceovers in the soundtrack, Rudy Giuliani’s voice droning on about crime and his glorious agendas sets the terms for local life.

The film centers around three characters, Rikers-Island-released thief and hairdresser Inez de la Paz (Teyana Taylor, the unquestioned star), Terry, her ostensible son (played with credible continuity as a child by Aaron Kingsley Adetola, as a young teen by Aven Courtney, and as a young adult of seventeen by Josiah Cross), and Lucky (Will Catlett), Inez’s common-law and then wedded husband, also just out of prison, and Terry’s stepdad. The three have plenty of crises on and around the neighborhood, and in their own relationships (including Lucky’s disappearances and marital infidelities), and in Terry’s uncertain status. Yet the bonds among them overcome the times and tribulations, though not without anger, frustrations, and dashed hopes. Flashbacks to Inez’s courtship by Lucky as a shopgirl on the street and his telling her she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen salvage their later struggles—they are doing pretty well given what they come from. Whether Inez is actually “beautiful” is its uncertainty state because her appearance morphs over the film from being so made up and plastic that her face looks like an alien from another movie to a mature and lovely woman, a powerful mother and partner.

The secret is that Terry is not only not Lucky’s son (from before he went to prison) but not Inez’s either. She found him abandoned on the street and then stole him out of foster care when she got out of prison. These acts produce dilemmas with no solution, especially as Lucky is dying of cancer and they are getting evicted from their long-time apartment. Many reviewers complained that there is no real ending, nothing is resolved, but that is the only way the film could have ended, with Inez getting into a cab and not knowing where to tell the driver she wants to go—THE END. She doesn’t want to leave Terry, but she is on the run from the law again. There is no solution.

The film reminded me of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and A Raisin in the Sun, adjusted for the changing era (David Dinkins’s voice eventually replaces Giuliani’s). To compare A Thousand and One to A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 classic about life in Harlem, as I do unabashedly, is high praise. But I mean it. I am assigning Rudy Dee / Sidney Poitier territory to Taylor and Catlett. In his poem “Harlem,” Langston Hughes wrote—and Lorraine Hansberry turned it into an full-length drama—“What happens to a dream deferred? / Does it dry up / like a raisin in the sun?” She nailed it in 1959 for her times, and Rockwell mailed it again for the 1990s in his own 2020s.

Avatar: The Way of Water, directed by James Cameron (2023). What I most like about Cameron’s “Avatars” is the notion of an inhabited world around our nearest neighbor star, although astronomers have all but disproven the possibility of an Earth-like exoplanet in the Centauri system. What I dislike is mechanistic violence and techno-punk. You can’t blow up that many objects without blowing up the story too. That much fireworks and special effects are an indication of weak story-telling. The Way of Water is filled with magnificent imaginal landscapes, especially underwater and in the overstory of trees: exotic, crystalline life forms resembling both trees and marine animals, waves of intelligence flowing noospherically and mycellially among them. Cameron is a staunch defender of Earth, its indigenous peoples and biomes, and these epic films are a strange rebuke to Homo sapiens’ trashing of its own world and, by inference, the Pandora and its peoples.

However, because Cameron has an ecological perspective without a spiritual one, the double films’ spirituality is hack and derivative even as sci-fi. The “avatar” concept is compellingly represented—the passage of minds into other beings and as virtual intelligence—but it is borrowed from Dune, Stranger in a Strange Land, and countless works by Philip José Farmer, Robert Silverberg, Piers Anthony, Robert Sheckley, Theodore Sturgeon, Olaf Stapledon and their derivatives, as well as transhumanism, consciousness singularity, and AI. Enlightenment ends up looking a lot like hell, and no one really dies anyway. 

The Diplomat (season one), eight episodes created by Debora Cahn (2023). It stars Keri Russell as newly-appointed U.S. Ambassador to the U.K. I won’t review this series in depth, since much is it is pro forma for the genre. A few things stand out:

•The characters are well cast and played, not deep but memorable and convincing, Russell most evocatively of all. She creates and sustains a high-level female diplomat, a mix of forcefulness, wit, vulnerability, deviousness, and the sort of strategic skill that a person needs to rise in her profession. She is covertly being groomed for the vice-presidency after the secretly planned resignation of the current VP to avert an administration scandal. She is someone who can do the VP job with aplomb and, of course, diplomacy, though she is ostensibly not diplomatic enough to win an election, the perfect combination for her party’s current needs and a statement on the idiocy of present-day politics vis à vis who can actually run and win—not someone competent.

•The series shows in exquisite detail how complex a dance actual diplomacy and war games among nations is, how carefully as well as indirectly one must speak and couch and hide messages to both friend and foe as well as interpret messages being sent. In this serial, the issue is figuring out who propelled a small boat with explosives into a British aircraft carrier, killing forty-one sailors and making a giant hole in the vessel—a provocation made to look Iranian—and then how to retaliate without setting off a wider war. I think that they are point to a false flag in the second season.

•The language—the script—is fast-moving, wry, funny, and weighty as if a modern Shakespearean drama of Kings and personified nations. It is also lyrically tasty with repetitive phrasing and quick interplay, giving it a Gilbert & Sullivan pop-operatic flavor. We also get to see nations personified in individuals such that a given diplomat or minister is England, the U.S., France, Russia personified—the royal or national We.

•The series shows the degree to which emotional and political needs converge around the uses of power. Power is a drug, an aphrodisiac, and an addiction. This we know, but The Diplomat brings its characters to life through their simultaneous emotional, romantic, political, and statecraft needs, goals, tactics, and libido.

•The Diplomat is current, often uncannily so, as if it were made overnight. It has Russia in Ukraine, Iran, nuclear brinkmanship, Brexit, the Kremlin, Syria, Libya, the Wagner Group of mercenaries (renamed), and British colonial history arranged at points of tension resembling those actually in play. It uses aspects and perils of the Biden-Harris presidency as the basis for President William Rayburn.

•Rory Kinnear portrays British Prime Minster Nicol Trowbridge in such a way that a seeming caricature of a power-hungry, boastful warmonger turns into a character of such depth that he displays the interlocking dynamics of power, personality, and self-expression through politics.

•I find Rufus Sewell as Kate Wyler’s husband (or “political wife”) irritating, if skillfully played, a bit too David Niven and Roger Moore. He is a Shakespearean clown or romance-besotted fool playing to a peanut gallery and bawdy rabble.

•The most difficult thing to nail is that the story uses two key black actors to portray white men and, at the same time, those same characters as if the roles were actually filled by black men. The actors, England-born Ghanaian David Gyasi as Austin Dennison, foreign secretary of the United Kingdom, and New-York-born Ghanaian Ato Essilfi Bracato Essandoh as Stuart Heyford, deputy chief of the U.S. Embassy in London, lend a slightly surreal dignity to the masque, as if (forgive me) women playing men or men playing women, in part because they are more eloquently and elegantly African than stock Western in upbringing, appearance, and voice, and make an unscripted—unspoken—statement about a utopian version of our current reality in which they might actually be playing those roles, a story almost as engaging as the main themes. In case this is even more obscure than it needs to be, I was thinking of Italo Calvino writing about, Shakespeare’s Viola in Twelfth Night in which a boy played a girl pretending to be a boy.

Forgotten Love, directed by Michal Gazda (2023). I was surprised to learn after watching this film that it is the third adaptation (following ones in 1937 and 1981) of a novel in Polish by Tadeusz Dołęga-Mostowicz. I am guessing that neither of the previous adaptations had the grand scenery, extensive costuming, sensitive casting, and literary scripting of the current one. Forgotten Love is a remarkable fairy tale with aspects of Sleeping Beauty and assorted cross-cultural tales of lost children, lost memories, and lost identities. Set after World War I, it captures a moment when science is establishing its own authority but is still a novelty. Automobiles, surgery, and cinema are in pre-modern phases. The reign of quantity has begun but not set in.

            Leszek Lichota plays Rafal Wilczur, the leading surgeon at the time in Poland. A generous, forward-thinking man, he is able to blend science with compassion. We see him in action, attending to a boy hit near=fatally by a horse-drawn wagon. He saves his life and follows up on his despite his family’s lack of resources to pay for the treatment.

Then in a stunning series of developments, Wilczur’s wife leaves him, taking their daughter with her, and joins her lover in the woodlands of another region of the country. Wilczur is then mugged and presumed dead, though his body is never found. At this point the film is not particularly compelling—a bunch of clichés and unintegrated scenes promising little—but then it skips ahead seventeen years.

            The characters have been displaced far and wide. Wilczur is now a mendicant, wandering with no memory of who he is because of a blow to his head. His estranged wife has died, and his daughter Maria, played with riveting heartfulness and self-possessed gumption by Maria Kowalska, has come to a small village to work as a waitress and earn enough money to attend college. Wilczur, using a pseudonym he picked up along the way, meanwhile aids a man injured in a wagon accident and shows unusual medical ability. He explains that he doesn’t know who he is or why he is able to do this. He is invited by the woman accompanying the injured man—I assume his daughter (Zoska) played by Anna Szymanczyk—to come live with them and work at their mill. She then becomes his lover. This places father and daughter in the same town, though of course neither knows who each other is. But a magic wheel has been set in motion. Fate and synchronicity have set the stage for their reunion and the recovery of his identity, but much has to happen first to undo the knot and finish the fairy dust.

            The story is strongly driven by Maria’s intelligence, charm, folk dancing, and unwillingness to be wed to any of her avid courters.  These include Count Leszek Czynski played by Ignacy Liss, who is willing to take on the many obstacles: his parents, their different social classes, her withering rejections.

The story is also driven by Rafal’s miracle cures. He has a receiving line daily of people seeking treatment, having been failed by the medical establishment. He accepts no payment and is working against Polish laws forbidding quackery. He is the top surgeon in the land, not a quack, but he doesn’t know it. Inevitably (with fairy-tale clockwork) Maria is injured near fatally, as the motorcycle on which she is riding with the Count crashes over a hillside. It was tampered with by one of her infuriated rejected suitors. Her father must now save her life, illegally performing a craniotomy with stolen surgery tools. He stands trial for his quackery, but he actually confesses and seeks the trial.

            The Count meanwhile believes that his beloved Maria is dead—his snobbish mother wants him to believe that, for she seeks women from higher social classes for her son—but once he learns she is alive he tracks her down and, in the course of finding her, solves the mystery of lost identities, hers and her father’s. They rush to the trial to bring this information: the folk doctor is not a quack; he is an eminent surgeon. The fairy dust is consummated.

            My review doesn’t capture the mood or magic of this film. It is lodged in small gestures, acts of grace, compassion, and love and also their antithesis in jealousy, betrayal, and sabotage. Recovery of lost identity and redemption are archetypal themes. When embodied by characters as appealing as Rafal and Maria, they become Tibetan namthars—tales of liberation. 

The Burial, directed by Maggie Betts (2023). Courtroom/legal dramas are their own genre with their own high Inherit-the-Wind bar. They are about vindication, redemption winning against tough to near-impossible odds, and usually feature Shakespeare-like soliloquies as closing arguments. The Burial, an adaptation of a true story from the mid-1990s about Mississippi funeral director Jeremiah O’Keefe’s lawsuit against the Loewen Funeral Group, a British Columbia company trying to monopolize the “death” market, fits the genre with refreshing variations. In fact, we never hear Willie E. Gary’s closing argument because everything that needs to be said has already been said and he is not wanting to mess it up with overkill.

            The fact that white Southerner O’Keefe hires a black preacher-like, bible-thumping Florida personal injury lawyer to represent him puts race at the center of a case that is ultimately about greed and betrayal but settled on a playing field of race because that’s where the Loewen Group is weakest, especially in the neo-American South. O’Keefe’s goal is not just to win back his losses from being bled by Ray Loewen but to put Loewen Group out of business with a jury win plus damages, which he does/did to the tune of hundreds of millions of 1995 dollars. But the film is called The Burial, not Payback or Goodbye Loewen because the underlying theme on which the argument is subliminally built is that of the unmarked graveyards of slaves deposited in the earth by layers, an image that closes the film—a giant mound with trees.

            What makes The Burial work—because a movie about funeral homes is not an immediate draw—is the hip, racially adjusted dialogue of the characters with crossover when necessary (for instance, O’Keefe talking a bit of black jive or singing “Feel Good” before being joined by Gary), and the acting starting with a dream pair: Tommie Lee Jones as Jeremiah O’Keefe and Jamie Foxx as Willie Gary. The echoes of No Country for Old Men and Ray (Ray Charles) plus dozens of other films and roles underpin The Burial along with the ever-present avatar of non-present Johnny Cochran because the trial and Gary’s style parallel those from the O. J. trial in its same era.

Their performances are backed up by the so-dubbed Python, Jurnee Smollet as Mame Downes, the Harvard-educated lead black attorney of the African-American all-star team put together by the Loewen Group as they try to “out-woman” as well as out-black the O’Keefe team in 70% black Hinds County (Smollet and Foxx—Mame and and Willie—do a literally foxy duet, complementing and finally complimenting each other in words, gestures, dares, threats, and admiration taps); Mamoudou Athie as Hal Dockins, the young attorney friend of one of O’Keefe’s grandchildren who recommends hiring Gary, a litigation lawyer for a contracts case, and who finds the flaw in Loewen’s argument (a deal with the Mississippi Baptists) when all seems lost (Athie’s Dockins is the calmest, most pleasant post-racial black savant you could ask for); Amanda Warren as Gloria Gary, Willie’s wife, dance partner, foil, and inspiration; and Bill Camp slightly overplaying a villainous Ray Loewen as if an exasperated Elmer Fudd and Rumpelstiltskin.

Reviews of Flawed Films Viewed in 2023 Which Have Interesting Aspects to Write About

All the Light We Cannot See, directed by Shawn Levy, is the number one show on Netflix at the moment (November 2023) and is beloved by many whose views I share and respect. I watched it faithfully and with interest, but I didn’t entirely like it. The dialogue seemed intentionally over-literary as if novelizing more conversation (either by the novelist, Anthony Doerr, or the screenwriter, Steven Wright). In fact, I didn’t believe these words could have been spoken in most circumstances by actual people. It felt a bit like Shakespeare in modern costume. At times it also seemed that the script was saying, “Because the main character is blind, the language must be especially grandiose and ornate.”

The story like the lines was overwrought and too heavily predetermined. One often knew pretty much what was going to happen. The All the Light We Cannot See rubric made its own trope (blindness, consciousness, and the hope cast by the philosophical mind) more like a fable than a real story.

            I am not sure about using a World War II short-wave radio band as a kind of magical frequency during the horrific conflict. In itself, it’s a fairly interesting device, but then the philosopher and his philosophy are so trite that they don’t play the role they could have if they had been more like the words of Sartre or Camus during the march of the Third Reich. He spoke in pop philosophical tautologies.

            I didn’t like the trope of the hexed stone, the Sea of Diamonds, at all. In addition, the story and visuals gave no images to support the conceit. And the film was wishy-washy as to whether the diamond actually hexed those who touched it, using it more for melodrama than an inquiry into synchronicity, fate, and magic. We are led to believe both that Marie is blind because her father touched the stone and that that explanation is superstitious hogwash. Likewise the death of the villain beside the stone he sought—true telekinesis and synchronicity but existential irony.

            All that said, I did think that the story was touching. I liked the trope of the miniature village as geographic braille for the blind girl, and I thought that the subtle romance between her and the German soldier who listened to her broadcast under the layers of conflict and intrigue rang true in very a lovely way. The trajectory by which they came to meet was, for me, the strongest gradient in the film.

Moonage Daydream, directed by Brett Morgen (2022) is an overwhelmingly rich montage of David Bowie’s images, songs (mostly later ones), interviews, and hordes of the director’s own Brakhage-like and Harry-Smith-like experimental abstractions. The latter are way too indulgent, and shorted out the film for both Lindy and me. Imagine two-plus hours of non-stop imitation Harry Smith without Harry Smith; e.g., any point. The conventional interviews are a relief, though they are fractured in a way that makes them hard to follow. Random cut-up becomes the guiding aesthetic.

            There were some very useful aspects to the film. I have often wondered why I love Bowie’s early music and lyrics up through “Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars,” and have no interest in his later song. I have also wondered what Bowie actually looks like outside of drag. Even without costumes and face paint, he has so many aliases and looks. The film showed him to be an utter, unrepentant changeling. As a raw working-class guy from England, he resembled his parents and peers, but he also so transformed that look with garments, masks, paints, and other accessories and roles that he magically changed his literal phenotype. He got to the cellular level.

I still don’t know what Bowie looks like, but I know what he looked like at different times, and I recognize some of his many affable and delightful looks, both in and outside of drag. I also understand why I stopped like the songs. Bowie was a changeling in every sense. The older songs are absolutely brilliant: “Starman,” “Cygnus Committee,” “Memory of a Free Festival” (up to the chorus anyway), “Rock’n’ Roll Suicide,” and so on. But he got bored writing them, so he moved on to painting and experimental musical compositions much like the film itself, except his were genre-breaking whereas the film is surficial imitation, a moonage daydream of a moonage daydream. I don’t like the later Bowie songs because the lyrics and even the melodies are incidental and often banal. They are pretexts for him to dance and perform.

            My main Bowie takeaway is a convergence of Buddhist and chaos magic around the notion of a magical, changing universe that he lives out and described in the early song “Changes”:

“Ch-ch-changes, don’t want to be a richer man / Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes (Turn and face the strange) / Ch-ch-changes, just gonna have to be a different man.” That much he accomplished before his premature death.

Salt of This Sea, directed by Annemarie Jacir (2008), streamed on Neflix in 2023. This is not a great or perhaps even a good film, but it is an essential one, which makes it more important, by my standards, than many more pleasant or artistic movies. The film itself—the story and its actions—is disjointed. It feels forced, created solely to make political points, identity-politics driven, pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel. But it is far more than that. Jacir never strays from the tragedy of the human condition so whereas on one level the film is based on (and literally dedicated to) to victims of the Naqba, the Jewish takeover of Palestinian lands in 1948, the cinematic presentation is of human, Palestinian, Israeli, and others, trapped in grids and dead ends by others belief systems and bureaucracies. The landscape of Salt of the Sea is a human ant-hill and shows Israel-Palestine to be claustrophobic in its size and militarized pressure-cooker, keeping everyone in place.

Jacir’s visual depiction of Ramallah and the West Bank is invaluable. With the skill of a consummate cinematographer, she captured the mood and rhythms of the place, giving the viewer a strong sense of being there. I can’t imagine any travelogue coming close to her visual dance and symphony—the streets, the shops, the traffic, the barren hills, the restaurants, the advertisements, the cartoons, the tastes, the smells, the noise and beat, the background radio or t.v. always discussing Israeli raids, killings, and destruction of so-called illegal Palestinian dwellings.

At this moment in particular, it is meaningful to go there and experience the place albeit in 2008. It isn’t Gaza—that has its own story and landscape—but it is part of the same tale of exile, dispossession, and betrayal in the context ancient customs and spirit. The film’s dialogue is also remarkable and poignant; it captures aspects of the local sense of loss, defiance, and resignation. The general message is, “The Israelis won, we lost, but we are still here and unbowed, though we follow their rules, obey their soldiers, pay in Shekels, and look longingly toward Tel Aviv and the sea.”

Jacir lodges all this in Palestinian-American poet Suheir Hammad playing Soraya, an American-born, Brooklyn-dwelling Palestinian woman, who comes to Israel and Palestine, initially on a two-week visa, but covertly on a quest to reclaim her family’s home and money that were taken during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. That is not only unlikely but like a one-woman intifada overthrowing a Likkud regime—she actually has two male accomplices, both met by the same act chance, one of whom (Emad, played by Saleh Baktri) becomes her boyfriend and play-acting partner, the other of whom is a cinematographer mirroring Jacir.  Though Soraya is stubbornly naïve and militantly idealistic, her character allows the director to articulate the absurdity of money suddenly being declared not money even though its bankers, Palestinian too, re-open the same bank in Ramallah and sign on to Israeli rules without blinking an eye—they come out ahead like bandits.

The second part of Salt of the Sea is a mixture of an elaborate fairy tale, a parable, an alternate reality, and an improvisation street opera and ballet. Soraya and her partners rob the Bank of Palestine, not of gross sum but the exact amount her grandfather had in it when it was declared void. They then disguise themselves as Israelis, enter Israel, and attempt to reclaim her grandfather’s house in Jaffa. It’s his craftmanship, artistry, and architecture, but it now belongs to a very young, single Israeli woman. She is a pro-Palestinian Israeli, and she is sympathetic and welcoming, but when it comes down to who owns the house—Soraya intentionally forces the issue to expose her disingenuous rapport and benevolence—she says that she is sorry for the history, but she cannot undo it. When Soraya offers to buy the house, she says that even if she tried to sell it, the authorities would not allow it. When Soraya says that it is her house and that the present owner should ask her permission, it ultimately leads to a smashed vase and a call to the police. It is somewhat how it would be if a Native American came to a site in Wyoming, the Carolinas, or California and said, “You’re in my house,” except that most American First Nations didn’t view land that way and were migratory.

Soraya and Emad next go to Emad’s ancestral home. The town has been renamed, and the approximate site is within an Israeli state park. They buy furniture at a local store next to Office Depot and pretend to occupy a small, demarcated spot as if their real home, as if they were married. They talk through the fantasy, imagining having a child and which passport he or she would have. It is like the emperor’s new clothes. As long as they pretend, there are make believe walls, a make-believe kitchen and bedroom. They are quickly evicted by a professor leading a history tour.

We don’t know exactly how the film ends. Soraya has over-stayed her visa, and Emad isn’t carrying identity papers. We don’t see the outcome after they are stopped by police and taken into custody, though we do see that they continue to play-act, with Soraya claiming that her United States passport is actually her Palestinian passport and that she was born and raised in Jaffa rather than Brooklyn. The Israeli official asks if this is a joke.

The only indication of Soraya’s fate is a brief shot of Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv. She is probably being deported, though she doesn’t appear. The sense is not so much of expatriation as transition and dislocation. Nobody belongs or is really safe anywhere.

I value Salt of the Sea for its creation of new images for Palestinians. Though it is fifteen years old, overly argumentative, and uncomfortably surreal (“like a dream,” Emad says, as they enter Israel and reach the sea where Soraya’s grandfather swam), it uses all its devices to effectively re-frame the landscape of Israel-Palestine and show how entwined the two nations are. Both belong there, neither belong there, and the people are so closely related they are interchangeable. Either can say, “There but for fortune go I.” 

Jacir also made the short film Twenty Impossibles in 2003. In this strange combination performance piece, meta-text, and creative act of political defiance, a film crew made up of a Palestinian from Ramallah, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, an American (Jacir playing a fictional version of herself making the film) attempt to bypass an IDF checkpoint by going through the hills and instead run into an Israeli army unit that detains them, fines the Palestinian citizen of Israel 2000 shekels, and almost comes to bloodshed as the crew refuses to stop making their film of the event. I don’t even know if the Israeli soldiers were actors playing Israeli soldiers, let alone whether, if they were real they were aware they were part of a performance piece or aware and extra irritated by that. If they were actors playing Israeli soldiers, the same dichotomy holds, only as a script rather than a reality. Am I even supposed to know? Does it make a difference cinema-wise? Yes, it does. When I watched it, I thought it was real and that the soldiers were trying to erase all Palestinian identities: Israeli, West Bank, and Brooklyn American.

The Idea of You, directed by Michael Showalter (2024). Anne Hathaway plays Solène Marchand, an approaching-forty divorced mother and Echo Park Los Angeles gallery manager who falls in love with, or more accurate to the timeline, is fallen in love with, by Hayes Campbell (Nicholas Galitzine), a twenty-four-year-old rock star, the singer in a band called August Moon, once beloved of Solène’s teen daughter, Izzy. Izzy’s original worship of Hayes and August Moon leads to the affair between her mother and her idol.

Solène is not even supposed to be at the rock festival in Coachella, California; her ex-husband Daniel was going to take Izzy and her friends, having arranged for them to meet the members of August Moon, which the girls now have outgrown and consider “so seventh-grade.” The film is constructed on spirals of backward ironies and semi-synchronicities.

While Daniel is pleased as punch with his new wife, unaware that she is about to leave him, Solène is disillusioned with suitors her age. She is also reluctant to attend the festival but goes anyway.

Early in the film Hathaway models herself to her character, letting her hair fall closer to her eyes than normal, a cuteish look that will catch Campbell’s eye (my daughter Miranda says that Hathaway reads The Wizard of Oz on an audio, mastering the voices of all the characters, an indication of her range and talent).

Solène initially meets Hayes when she mistakes his walk-in trailer for a public bathroom and goes into its latrine. As she exits the toilet, they catch each other’s eye and are immediately attracted to each other. This doesn’t bother Campbell, a British-born self-made celebrity lacking belief in his stature or role. Solène is ready-made for him and, after a while, she accepts that he is perfect for her, but she remains uncomfortable with their age gap. When she is with him and his bandmates and their girlfriends, the line between women (her) and girls (them) is evident. She is a woman, they are girls. In becoming her lover, Hayes has become an adult as evidenced by the following dialogue:

Bandmate Ollie (Raymond Cham Jr.): “Now that you’re with Solène, you’re like a middle-aged man. You know [to Cèline] before you showed up, he behaved like an actual pop star.”

Hayes [proving Oliver’s claim]: “Do you just say every fucking thing that pops in your head?”

The gist of the movie is Hayes and Cèline’s love affair, which is candid, subtle, and strained, which just about any sustainable lover affair must be. It includes awkward interactions between them that he must prove he can override until she capitulates and accompanies him on tour. The onus is always on him to affirm his love because younger-man, older-woman romances are uncommon.

His being overwhelmed by Solène’s girlish sexuality when her daughter was once a huge fan of his conflates the sexuality of the two women in a way that would be considered exploitative if the genders were reversed—Solène’s character converted into an older man and Hayes into a younger woman. To me, Anne Hathaway invested so much of her own latent nubile sexuality in Solène that she confirmed her status as an actress with depth. She was also one of the film’s producers, so her own investment was financial as well as artistic.

Since it is a romantic comedy, at one point early on, Hayes visits Solène’s gallery and, item by item buys the pottery and sculptural pieces, and then, because there is very little left, he buys everything altogether and arranges for it to be shipped to his apartment in London, leaving her ostensibly no galley to manage.

Once she relents, allowing herself to fall in love. They are both ecstatically happy for a while—the love affair is intense but graceful thanks to the acting by Hathaway and Galitzine. But the disparity in their ages continues to trouble her, and when paparazzi catch them necking in Paris, Solène becomes a celebrity idol, admired for her allure and courage and disdained as a cougar by jealous women under the variously voiced conceit “Everyone hates happy women.” For her, this is an embarrassing and unwanted sharing of Hayes’ fame.

Typical of their lovemaking is this exchange during a mutual seduction:

Solène: “I’m too old for you.”

Hayes [breathing heavily]: “No, you’re not.”

Solène grunts: “Okay. [exhales] I could be your mother.”

Hayes: “You’re not.”

Solène: “But I could be.”

Hayes: “But you’re not.”

Solène [sighs:] “No. Can I take you back to your hotel?”

Hayes: “Uh, no, it’s fine. Desmond [his driver] is outside.

[Both panting softly]

Hayes: “So when can I see you again?”

Solène: “I can’t do this.”

Hayes: “Why’s that?”

Solène: “Because you’re you and I’m me, and we just don’t fit.”

Hayes: “We’ll see.”

Solène: “Mm.”

The script provides strong, accurate language for a complicated affair with fluctuating intimacy and engagement, but Hathaway and Galitzine have to bring the script to life. They do, and that’s the difference between The Idea of You and most of what passes on Netflix and Amazon for romantic sitcoms. Their pacing and pathways to intimacy are too rapid, staccato, and unrealistic. It’s a simple thing to execute, but the Idea of You actors and director are unusual in getting it right in the 2020s.

I missed a lot of subtexts, some of which are not even in the film. Until I read about it online, I did not know that the movie was written by a black scriptwriter for black actors and changed to white by Amazon out of fear that it wouldn’t attract a sufficient audience for the investment they had to make in it. I definitely missed (in the film) that Hayes lost his virginity to statutory rape and that its perpetrator is still in his life.

Despite that background, their interactions and dialogues are well balanced and represent the ambivalent aspects of love, its states of uncertainty and breakups. How many breakups and rebounds are necessary before the lovers know for sure? Since these are fictional characters, we can’t know, nor do we have to. Solène will (one) resist the relationship, (two) break up at the peak of mutual romantic acceptance and adoration, briefly try again, then (three) break up again. Five years later, the closed captioning tells us (something many viewers will foresee as the only way out of the bind the film creates)—(four) getting back together after she sees him perform and get interviewed on a T. V. talk show. He mentions his plans to be back in L. A. Why?  Because he wants to see a certain person. Then he shows up at her gallery. They end the film and our peephole into their fictional lives on a high note.

Each time they break up, Hayes leaves his expensive watch behind as a token for her to return to him. She follows through, at one point flying from L. A. to his hotel room in New York to do so, the reference to a pocket watch in the 1920 Christopher Reeves/Jane Seymour movie Somewhere in Time probably unintentional.

I am struck by the fact that when they re-meet five years later Solène looks more the way Anne Hathaway normally looks, hair pulled back from her eyes, and Hayes has darkened and matured into a man.

A warning: like in all movies about make-believe rock bands [except Sing Street (2016) reviewed elsewhere on this list], the songs are terrible, but the characters pretend they’re wonderful. They have to. It’s one of the suspensions of disbelief necessary to make this sort of movie, but it’s an inherent flaw because it doesn’t come close to verisimilitude.