A Lazy Weekend Morning

May 9, 2020 – The Way Back (2020) Amazon Prime Rental

This is a recent film starring Ben Affleck as a depressed and alcoholic former basketball star who becomes the new coach of a Catholic High School’s undersized but scrappy basketball team. If you guessed what happens next, you would be right. But even though predictable, The Way Back is understated and well made. Affleck gives a powerful performance, the soundtrack is moving and not too sentimental, and the teens in the movie are actually believable as teens. While this movie won’t show up on my ten-best list, it was an enjoyable way to spend a lazy weekend morning.

Taking me Back to Bill Kennedy at the Movies

May 9, 2020 – The Host (2006) Hulu

I love this movie. Bong Joon Ho is a great director, as we saw in his Oscar-winning movie Parasite. The Host is Bong’s take on the classic monster movie. It reminds me of watching Godzilla vs. Mothra and other monster movies after school on the 4:30 Movie or Bill Kennedy at the Movies, growing up in the Detroit suburbs. Bong takes all that is good about the monster movie, subtracts the stiff acting, poor special effects, and overall silliness, and adds his trademark visual flair, commentary on social class, and dark humor. Of course, the villain in The Host is the United States – our negligent attitudes toward toxic waste create the monster, and our efforts to kill it through the use of “Agent Yellow” harm the people in the movie’s coastal city while leaving the monster unscathed.

I must also say a good word for Song Kang-ho, who has been in all of Bong’s films that I have seen – he is the dad/driver in Parasite. Song is always amazing; he brings charm and goofiness that lighten what would otherwise be dark and violent films. In The Host, Song plays the sleepy, slow-witted son and father, who is so damaged already that nothing the monster, the Korean police, evil scientists or the U.S. government do can really hurt him.

Wendey came in to watch the last hour of the film with me, and she loved it too. We both recommend it highly if this is your kind of thing.

Unclear Leftwing Politics

May 3, 2020 – Reds (1981) Kanopy

It was nice to show Henry this classic film. Reds’ power is undiminished 29 years later. The movie is still a compelling love story of true-life radical journalists/activists John Reed and Louise Bryant, set against the backdrop of radical politics in the U.S. and the Russian revolution. It is a long movie – over 3 hours – but it holds your interest the whole time (though we did watch it over two nights). The cast is great, including the leads Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton and the supporting cast Jack Nicholson (Eugene O’Neil), Maureen Stapleton (Emma Goldman), Jerzy Kosinski (Russian bureaucrat Grigory Zinoviev), and many more. This was a movie that all three of us liked a lot.

I was most interested this time in watching how Reds talked about radical politics. The film name-checks a lot of true-life figures and events, without much explanation of what they mean. I wanted to know more: what was the trajectory of the Socialist Party in the U.S. that lead them to support WWI; how did the two different U.S. communist parties created in the movie feed into the U.S. Communist Party led by Gus Hall in the 1980s; what was the relationship between the International Workers of the World (IWW) and the U.S. Socialist and Communist parties? If you know nothing about the history of left-wing politics in the United States before you watch Reds, you won’t come away knowing much more afterwards.

The politics of the movie itself are unclear. While Reed and Bryan, and to a lesser degree Emma Goldman, are sympathetic figures in the movie, their support for the Soviet Union and their larger politics come off as misguided. The movie does not clearly show that after the promise of the Russian Revolution was betrayed, left activism continued because it was always based on something more than what was happening in the Soviet Union. A fervent right-winger watching Reds may be uncomfortable with the idolization of Reed and Bryant, but they will come out satisfied with the message in the end that left-wingers are power-hungry, unprincipled, petty, or naive (or all four) and left-wing politics are doomed to end in failure and totalitarianism.

Don’t Fence Me In

May 6, 2020 – Take Me Back to the Range: Selections from Western Jubilee Recording Company(2020) Smithsonian Folkways Recordings

I find myself listening to more cowboy music than I have ever listened to before. I find it so comforting. Cowboy music retains some of the authenticity of bluegrass or honky-tonk or other kinds of hard country music that I love but without the edge that those musics have. Cowboy music just kind of rolls along. It evokes wide-open spaces that are unavailable to us as we shelter in our houses. Who isn’t longing for the lonesome prairie? Who doesn’t relate to the sentiment “Don’t Fence Me In”? My new infatuation with cowboy music started with this great new collection and continued with cowboy songs from Michael Martin Murphy, who appears on that collection.

So come join me, riding on the range, with nothing but a horse, the big sky, and those li’l dogies for company.

Restless

May 2, 2020 – The Correspondents by Tim Murphy (2019) Grove Press

I was restless today. I must have started four or five different excellent movies and gave up on each of them within the first 15 minutes. Some days I get tired of it all: the quarantine, working too much, the threat of illness, not being able to keep up with everything and not being able to escape. I did finally escape though, into the novel The Correspondents by Tim Murphy (2019). It is the story of two families in Massachusetts’ Merrimack Valley – one an Irish Catholic family and the other a Lebanese-American family – and the half Irish, half-Lebanese foreign correspondent descended from these two families. The characters in The Correspondents are well-drawn and charming – you want to spend time with them. My only gripe with the novel is when it switches between characters, and sometimes between decades and continents. I don’t want to leave any of the characters to switch to other ones. I am only a quarter of the way through the book, but I can already recommend it. Thanks to Brett Benner for recommending it to me.

Return to an Old Favorite

May 1, 2020 – His Girl Friday (1940) Criterion Channel

I wanted a movie that was light and fun, something that would make me laugh. I turned to this old favorite, which I haven’t seen in a million years. Has there ever been a movie so funny and delightful as His Girl Friday? Cary Grant is brilliant as the narcissistic newspaper editor who will do anything to get a story. Rosalind Russell is brilliant too as the ace reporter who wants to get away from the heartless newspaper business – or does she? If you have never seen this movie – which is available streaming from many sources – do so as soon as possible. And if you haven’t seen it in a long time, go back and watch it now. His Girl Friday is even better than you remember.

Hard Lessons for My Head and My Heart

April 29 2020 – Just Mercy (2019) Screener

Sometimes you are the mood for a Hollywood movie. I have been watching many excellent but sprawling movies from the past and from other countries, and sometimes I want a movie with more narrative drive. Just Mercy is a biopic – usually one of my least favorite kinds of movies – with narrative drive. It tells the linear story of how lawyer Bryan Stevenson manages to free an innocent man from death row in Alabama. Though you know exactly where this story is going the whole time, even if you haven’t read Stephenson’s book, the film is really well done, especially when compared to something like Remember The Titans. Michael B. Jordan gives a restrained performance as Stevenson. The supportive performances are excellent too, particularly Jamie Fox as the man on death row and Tim Blake Nelson as the key witness. The soundtrack too is restrained, not telling us what to feel at every moment. And best of all, the movie manages to balance the uplift you feel when an innocent man is released while also not letting a racist inhuman justice system off the hook.

I had the privilege of meeting the real Bryan Stephenson this past November on a trip I took with my synagogue IKAR to Montgomery Alabama. As a community organizer, I have read and thought a lot about racism in the United States. I didn’t anticipate how profoundly I would be affected by the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. The Legacy Museum tells the story of racism in this country, from slavery to Jim Crow to mass incarceration. The Memorial commemorates the thousands of African-Americans who were lynched in the twelve southern states.

I have read The New Jim Crow and seen the documentary 13th. I knew the basic story of racism in America. But knowing it intellectually was different then seeing it all laid out so devastatingly in the museum in pictures and the words of those who lived through it. I knew about lynching, of course, but I always thought of it as something done by a few bad racist people. I didn’t realize what lynching really was until I saw the story the Museum tells and the names carved in stone in the Memorial. I didn’t realize that lynching was systematic terrorism, designed to maintain the political status quo of Jim Crow. I always thought that most people stood idly by while lynching occurred. I didn’t realize that lynchings were advertised in the newspaper, that tens of thousands of people came out to watch and celebrate, that white people took photos next to the lynched black bodies hanging from a tree or bridge, and that people bought postcards of the lynching to remember that festive day.

I was emotionally overwhelmed by my visit to the museum and memorial that Bryan Stephenson’s organization started. I mourned the loss of life, the loss of freedom and the loss of dignity by so many people for so long. I was outraged at the devaluing of African American lives to benefit the white majority. I despaired to see how racism has morphed and evolved over the last 400 years to maintain the power and privilege of whites in America even in the face of big victories won by the abolitionist movement and the civil rights movement and in the face of the efforts by so many of us today to dismantle mass incarceration. These were hard lessons for my head and my heart.

I also took some solace in a clearer understanding of the problem. We can’t cure the disease of racism unless we have an accurate diagnosis of the illness. I feel like I understand the illness better now.

Meeting Bryan Stephenson and hearing him talk was inspiring too. Stephenson is not content to rest on his victories. He is always looking at what else must be done to achieve justice. He told us that even if he kept winning cases and saving people from death row that his legal victories would not stop racism and oppression from increasing in America. Stephenson said he realized that if Thurgood Marshall brought Brown vs. Board of Education to the Supreme Court today, he would lose the case. Stephenson said we need to hold up a new narrative about race our country that challenges the dominant narrative of white privilege and African-American inferiority that still holds reign in the United States. So Stephenson and his organization Equal Justice started their narrative work, resulting in the museum, the memorial, and the book and movie Just Mercy.

When our world returns to normal and travel is again possible, I highly recommend a trip to Montgomery, Alabama. It will the most profound, the most moving, and the most memorable trip you have ever taken.

Finding Her Voice and Sense of Self

April 26, 2020 – Unorthodox (2020) Netflix

I am late to the party on this one – most everyone I know has already watched this limited Netflix series about a young woman who decides to leave behind her Brooklyn community of Chassidic Jews to flee to Berlin. I wasn’t eager to watch Unorthodox. The subject didn’t interest me, and I didn’t have the heart to watch Chassidic characters depicted as two-dimensional bad guys. I thought I knew what I was going to see in this show. But so many of my friends love this show, I decided I would give it a chance.

The show is much more subtle and moving then I expected. Unorthodox is about more than leaving a Chassidic community. It is about a young woman finding her voice and sense of self. Shira Haas, the actor who portrays Esty, the young woman who flees to Berlin, is just amazing. She is vulnerable and completely compelling. The whole cast is good, and the Chasidic Jewish characters are three-dimensional people, not cardboard villains. You feel real sadness for the husband Esty flees, who wanted to have a real and respectful relationship with his wife but didn’t have a clue how to do that and was misguided by bad advice from his community. But mostly you feel bittersweet: exhilaration as Esty begins to find herself and sadness at the cost to her in doing so.

Unorthodox is gripping and genuinely moving. I highly recommend it.

Yearning for the Stylish, Obscure, and Deep

April 24, 2020 – The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) Criterion Channel

What a disappointment this movie was. I have wanted to see The Man Who Fell to Earth for as long as I can remember. I always imagined that this movie was stylish, slightly obscure, and very deep. Could anything be more stylish than a movie starring David Bowie as an alien trying to make his way forward on Earth? Yes, it turns out: many things can be more stylish. Perhaps this movie was stylish in 1976, but viewed today it just looks amateurish. Perhaps this movie was deep in 1976, but watched now it seems shallow and obvious. If you want heady and stylish, watch instead Ex Machina or Devs, both directed by Alex Garland.

Charming But Slight

April 23, 2020 – Paris Blues (1961) Criterion Channel

Paris Blues is the story of two American Jazz musicians, Paul Newman and Sidney Poitier, and the two visiting American tourists, Joanne Woodward and Diahann Carroll, who they fall in love with. It is a charming but slight movie. The most memorable part of Paris Blues is the music, composed and performed (off-camera) by Duke Ellington with a guest appearance (in the soundtrack and on-camera) by Louis Armstrong. This is the third movie about jazz (also: A Song is Born and Chico and Rita) and the second movie directed by Martin Ritt (also: The Spy Who Came In From The Cold) I have watched since the pandemic started.

I would write more, but I have to shed my identity as Lee Winkelman, mild-mannered community organizer and blogger, and take up my secret identity as Sisyphus the dishwasher.