Life in Difficult Times + writings on community organizing
April 1. 2020 – Talking instead of watching
Wendey (reading from the internet): “It says they have canceled all sales of liquor in California.”
Lee (thinking to himself): Panic! I don’t think I can survive this pandemic without alcohol.
Wendey (reading further): “Oh, never mind. It was an April Fool’s joke.”
Lee (thinking to himself): I need a drink.
March 29, 2020 – Chico & Rita (2010) Kanopy
I love this animated love story about a piano player and singer in Cuba in the 1940s who travel to the U.S. to seek fame and fortune. The animation is great – lively and sexy (the movie has brief nudity and sex – this film is not for children) – and the film’s music is amazing. Bebo Valdes plays the piano and wrote the original songs, and Idaina Valdes sings for Rita. If you like Jazz and Cuban music, I highly recommend this movie. The soundtrack has been in steady rotation on our sound system.
March 29, 2020 – Local Hero (1983) Criterion Channel
This was a favorite back in the day, I am pleased to say that it still holds up. This is a charming, meandering tale of a Houston businessman who comes to make his fortune in a small Scottish town but instead finds a meaningful life. Directed by Bill Forsyth (Gregory’s Girl and the great underrated Comfort and Joy) and starring Peter Reigert, Burt Lancaster and a ton of great, unknown Scottish actors. This was a very pleasant way to spend a quarantined Sunday afternoon.
March 27, 2020 – The Monterrey Pop Outtakes (1968) Criterion Channel
I recently watched the Monterrey Pop, the film of the famous concert, directed by D.A. Pennebaker, one of the better concert films I have seen. The Criterion Channel has a bunch of outtakes from this movie, featuring performances of songs that didn’t make it into the movie. Today, I watched Otis Redding’s entire set, backed by Booker T and the MGs. It was one of the last sets he performed before he died, and it was amazing throughout. I also watched songs sung by Buffalo Springfield (with David Crosby replacing Neil Young), The Byrds, Simon and Garfunkel, The Who, and the sadly underrated Laura Nyro, who reached The-Fugitive-Kind-levels of intensity.
March 27, 2020 – The Fugitive Kind (1960) The Criterion Chanel
This Gothic drama is the kind of intense, dated movie that I both love and hate at the same time. It was directed by Sidney Lumet from a Tennessee Williams play and starred Marlon Brando, Joanne Woodward, Anna Magnani, and many others acting their hearts out. There is more acting per square inch in this movie than in a hundred movies at your nearby multiplex. I found the movie fascinating for a while – the performances are so over-the-top as to be transfixing – but I eventually grew tired of the movie and abandoned it halfway through.
March 24, 2020 – A Song is Born (1948) The Criterion Channel
This was a fun movie, perfect to escape from our pandemic woes. A Song is Born is Howard Hawks’ musical remake of the great screwball comedy Great Balls of Fire, about a group of linguists whose lives and work on an encyclopedia of slang are disrupted a fast-talking floozy played. In the remake, it is a group of ethno-musicologists who are doing an encyclopedia of music. The encyclopedia’s field research (and the movie’s soundtrack) features appearances by Louie Armstrong, Lionel Hampton, and many other jazz greats of the age. The movie loses steam in the last third when it is less music and more plot. But the first half to two-thirds of the movie are so good, you barely notice.
March 24, 2020 – Day of the Locust (1975) The Criterion Channel
I have had enough of mediocre movies! While Netflix and Prime have some very good TV shows and movies, too often I find myself watching something mediocre just because it is there. In an effort to avoid mediocrity, I signed up for the two-week free trial of the Criterion Chanel, home to foreign, cult and classic movies. Today, I watched this 1972 big-budget spectacular based on the Nathaniel West novel that I read way back in High School. It follows several characters through a soul-sucking Hollywood of the 1930s. It has an amazing cast: Donald Sutherland, Karen Black, Burges Meredith, among others. It is panoramic in scope and beautifully shot. How fun to see what my home city looked like back in the day. This was a very satisfying movie experience – no mediocrity here. I feel like I already got my money worth from free trial of The Criterion Channel.
March 22, 2020 – Kodachrome (2017) Netflix
I fear my Shelter-In-Place Streaming Film Festival is going astray. Here again the desire for comforting, escapist entertainment led us to watch another mediocre film. It sounded good on paper. A father (Ed Harris), his nurse (Elizabeth Olson) and his estranged son (Jason Sudekis) set out on a cross-country journey to the last place in the country that develops Kodachrome film days before it is going to close. The cast is good, and the script is by Jonathan Tropper, writer of several novels I have loved and showrunner of the great Cinemax show Banshee. Yet somehow it all went wrong. I didn’t care a bit about any of the characters, and the long road trip leads nowhere, at least nowhere I didn’t predict way in advance. Henry wisely skipped this one to watch Christopher Nolen’s Inception online with friends. You should skip this movie too. Maybe listen to the Paul Simon song instead.
March 21, 2020 – Spenser Confidential (2020) Netflix
The first three-movie day of our festival, at least for me — Wendey was not with me for this film. This amiable thriller/action movie is not a world cinema classic, but it is good escapist entertainment. It doesn’t bear much resemblance to the Robert Parker books it is allegedly based on. Mark Wahlberg is likable as the Boston ex-cop who can’t help himself from doing the right thing, even when it is not in his self-interest. Director Peter Berg keeps things moving along briskly. This was an entertaining way to spend a couple of hours of my quarantine
March 21, 2020 – They Came Together (2014) HBO
We wanted to watch a comedy to escape from our painful new reality. It turns out there aren’t many comedies that we haven’t seen that are worth seeing. We settled on this very silly take-off on romantic comedies, directed by David Wain and featuring Paul Rudd, Amy Poehler, and a ton of great actors. Wain’s very silly sense of humor is an acquired taste. I liked this movie better than Wendey, but neither of us loved it. It is hard to believe The Came Together and Force Majeure — two movies of such varying intention and quality — came out the same year (the first time these two movies have ever been mentioned in the same sentence).