tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-60754736720000959252024-02-08T00:44:10.596-05:00Speaks in Movie LinesIn which a Southern English Teacher writes about the Movies, Culture, Education, Sobriety, and Progress...Kevin Powershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04219017960488448934noreply@blogger.comBlogger399125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6075473672000095925.post-28436857624661253532023-10-16T09:13:00.002-04:002023-10-16T09:13:21.310-04:00If It Ain't Broke, Don't Fix It<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglmp87CAvKSDpW_keKlDIK7HnLyorXTxmvT6LfMEOUzUMsHHQpmid6XVRBOP-y31GqgO3Za8tjXszQJbGkHCj6s3XiGYFwcrT5b00QKRazafnC5Sqpg2mNFqz3UYJso47ZZUJD0rf79_SXvPYRVQh28BEjWiP7vMylvz2dKaLR8JzOoND0hZu-m8F5eNrR/s5312/Home%20Library.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2988" data-original-width="5312" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglmp87CAvKSDpW_keKlDIK7HnLyorXTxmvT6LfMEOUzUMsHHQpmid6XVRBOP-y31GqgO3Za8tjXszQJbGkHCj6s3XiGYFwcrT5b00QKRazafnC5Sqpg2mNFqz3UYJso47ZZUJD0rf79_SXvPYRVQh28BEjWiP7vMylvz2dKaLR8JzOoND0hZu-m8F5eNrR/w400-h225/Home%20Library.jpeg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">An Open Letter to My County Government<span><a name='more'></a></span></div><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Dear Anderson County (TN) Official: </div><p>At the October 9th, 2023 meeting of the Anderson County Commission Operations Committee, Mayor Terry Frank issued a call for some potential reforms in regard to the Anderson County Library Board. Essentially, the Mayor is asking for paperwork from each city in Anderson County with a public library in hopes to "untangle the web of governance" (her words). My wife and I fear that these reforms may end up harming our libraries. We do not see the tangled web. Our Library Board has repeatedly followed its processes well and even strengthened said processes through the controversy over a couple of books that started back in February. </p><p>We are aware that some faction of the Operations Committee and some members of the County Commission would like to exert a particular control over the public libraries in order to remove certain books based on extremely partisan, ideological (perhaps, as Commissioner Verran said, “discriminatory”) reasons. We are aware that at least one member of our Commission has even, in the past, questioned whether the county should fund libraries at all. We are aware of the presence of an extreme right-wing contingent on our Commission. We do not support extreme politics on either side.</p><p>Over the past few months, we have joined many Anderson County citizens on a mission in support of all current books staying on library shelves and for better treatment of our local Library Directors and our Library Board, who have been on the receiving end of hatefulness from members of the Anderson County Republican Party’s extreme right faction. In early August of this year, Republican Commissioner Anthony Allen of District 6 commented in agreement with a string of libelous Facebook posts by a fellow citizen in which I (Kevin) was referred to as a “pedophile,” a “groomer,” “commie trash,” and accused of “peddling porn.” My job as a teacher was directly threatened. Mr. Allen has since continued to accuse me (in direct discussion and in other closed forums on Facebook) of being unfit for my job because my family supports the LGBTQ+ community and the retention of every single challenged book.</p><p>I was raised in Clinton, graduated from Clinton High in 2002, left a few years for college in Murfreesboro, came back in 2009 and stayed. I got married to a wonderful woman, also an educator, and we have a beautiful, talented son in Kindergarten at Clinton Elementary School. I have taught English at Clinton Middle School for the past 14 school years and have dedicated my entire adult life to teaching, coaching, and mentoring Clinton and its surrounding communities’ 12-14 year old children, a most impressionable age in which, I 100% agree, PARENTS, first and foremost, must stay as involved as possible even as children this age inevitably push them away.</p><p>We teachers are merely filling in the gaps with state standards and state approved curricula. We form relationships with these young people in the classrooms and hallways and sporting facilities. We do it because we were called to it. Because we care about children. We care about the future of our community and our state and our country. We are mostly not political, and never engage in political issues or reveal our personal beliefs regarding politics or religion. We purposefully collaborate on how best to address societal issues, especially those of controversy, as they arise in the classroom. We are responsible professionals.</p><p>We balk at the inflamed rhetoric (and subsequent bills, and now laws, by people like our own Rep. John Ragan) that downgrades public schools, public school teachers, and school and public librarians. We are not villains as right-wing social and cable news media would suggest. </p><p>Librarians are not villains.</p><p>Public librarians are educated humans of the highest order of human—the well-read. They know what is valuable when they see it. They know that their professional organizations are in the business of aiding them in curating a modern, robust, and diverse collection of books and print and digital resources that will reach each person, every type of person, with any type of question about anything.</p><p>This controversy over the books in the library is not, to my view, about protecting children. If it were, then we would be talking about the rampant uptick in the use of nicotine and cannabis vaporizers among school children as young as 11. If it were, we would be talking about the often heinous adult content that children consume and post on social media. If it were, we would be trying to raise the poor out of poverty and the addict out of addiction with good jobs and affordable housing, so I can call home and talk to a parent instead of an aunt, uncle, grandmother or foster parent. If it were, we would be full force into using our libraries to open our children up to a world of understanding, empathy, and passion. If it were, we would not shy away from how books, even and especially provocative books, can offer, perhaps better than anything else, knowledge of ourselves and knowledge of the world.</p><p>This controversy is about a nation-wide extreme partisan culture war manufactured by careless politicians and social media and cable news machines. These wars are built to distract and pit citizens against each other while partisans in public offices make decisions to the citizens’ detriment and the politicians’ gain. </p><p>The extremist faction on our Commission makes outrageous, emotionally-charged claims about sexual education texts for teens being “pornography.” The word “pornography” can most recently be found in relation to those couple pages from that one book deliberately ripped from context, photocopied, and illegally littered on lawns and driveways, then posted on Facebook.</p><p>(Because these books’ opponents DON’T want children to see these pages, I suppose they decided free home delivery was the best option?? Pfft. Please quit it with the “pornography” argument. If a teenager wanted to find pornography they could do so in approximately 6.2 seconds on the $700 computer phone in their pocket.)</p><p>One of the major books in question is called “Let’s Talk About It” by Erica Moen and Matthew Nolan. It’s always the same page (posted on Facebook, mentioned in the newspaper, plastered on local television and radio by way of WYSH, and sprinkled on lawns in plastic baggies), the one page that advocates “paying for porn” viewed on the Internet, while also informing on issues of ethics and legality of viewing pornography online. In a capitalist society, wouldn’t it be better for these often exploited sex workers, mostly young women who provide a service in high demand, to at least get paid and offered more protection? That seems to be one intended inference from that page. Then, over the next couple of pages, the authors go out of their way to talk about the dangers of pornography consumption and addiction.</p><p>I have read "Let's Talk About It" cover-to-cover. At the end of the day, while provocative in its hand-drawn cartoon illustrations, it is a book about modern sexual health, wellness, and awareness and carries positive messages about identity, relationships, the toxic and the healthy, openness to discussion about wants and needs and the importance of consent and general safety. We would call that a blessing in an area of the country that does not value realistic sexual education for young adults. At least, parents and/or their teens/young adults might find something of value at their public library on these topics.</p><p>And, even now that it has been made infamous along with "Gender Queer" by Maia Kobabe (unread by me at this point), these books would be massively hard to dig out from under the tens of thousands of books in, say, the Clinton Public Library. The propaganda, the labeling of these books as “bad,” is just making them popular. The book banners will just never learn I guess. Nobody was checking these books out, according to Tommy Mariner, of the Anderson County Library Board. Now, like it or not, more people have. </p><p>This whole thing is embarrassing and unbecoming of our community. It is disrespectful to our children, who are much smarter and more worldly than we could ever imagine. It is quite clear given the overall vibe, if you will, of the Operations Committee meeting re: Library Board is that this feels like we are now trying to fix something that ain’t broke. In that regard, it is disrespectful to the taxpayers, most of whom just wish for business to be done smoothly.</p><p>The emphasis on seeking clarity vis-à-vis Mayor Frank’s request is valid, but when we consider the bigger picture, fundamental changes to the current system could begin a slippery slope towards weakening our public libraries in myriad ways involving funding, personnel, and even a design towards ideologically-driven book selection/removal, which is not currently the case.</p><p>Let’s keep it that way. So, let’s get some paperwork found or new paperwork drafted.</p><p>If we are to eventually draft some new agreement, let us keep the current system in place, one that has worked wonderfully for over 80 years.</p><p>Let us make sure that extreme partisans unsuccessful at getting books banned are not able to damage our public library system in retaliation.</p><p>Let us recognize and respect that many Anderson county citizens do not like the notion of challenging or conceivably banning any public library books.</p><p>Let us also remember that we have, on record, opponents of certain books proclaiming, as recently as last Thursday night-10/12/2023, that they will not stop until the books are removed, and that we cannot meet in the middle as long as threats of lawsuits, distribution of propaganda, hate speech, and inflammatory rhetoric are in play. To “protect Anderson County” is also to protect each of its citizens regardless of politics.</p><p>Let us stop harassing citizens and littering their driveways over this. Let us act like adults and show our kids that we can make the business of serving and empowering all Anderson County citizens our obvious number one priority.</p><p>Let us allow our Library Board to do its job. Let us adhere to its protocols, which, as a silver lining, have become more thorough and effective through this controversy.</p><p>Let’s move on.</p><p>Let’s enjoy our wins, cut our losses, and let’s live life and try to understand the world we currently live in, hopefully by letting books challenge us as opposed to the other way around. Hopefully, books obtained for free at the public library. (There’s no need to pay more than once for most books. Our taxes have them covered. This isn’t healthcare.)</p><p>Here’s my final call to action: Whatever happens on the issue of the Anderson County Library Board in the coming weeks, we implore you, Commissioners, to vote in such a way that stands behind the decisions of our Library Board thus far, vocalizes your support for our great public institutions, and makes sure every single citizen, especially the poor and most vulnerable, have access to as much information pertaining to themselves and the world as possible. And may you each work to influence your constituents to seek out more positive ways to help the community’s children, ways that do not seek to unfairly limit the means of free information to the local populace. </p><p>We do not and will never stand for any political move that seeks to weaken our public libraries.</p><p>If you wanna talk about strengthening them, getting more kids to read books, or actually help children in productive ways, let us know. My wife, Amanda, a reading and literacy specialist, is at Clinton High School serving as an Assistant Principal. I am at Clinton Middle School helping over one hundred of Clinton’s 13- and 14-year-olds learn how to write the English language, doing PA announcements at home basketball games, and coaching some baseball in the spring.</p><p>We appreciate your leadership and willingness to serve our community, especially those among you willing to stand up fervently for knowledge, empathy, and civility. </p><p>Sincerely, </p><p>Kevin and Amanda Powers</p>Kevin Powershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04219017960488448934noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6075473672000095925.post-17768406046420805342023-06-08T10:13:00.006-04:002023-10-11T19:35:40.562-04:0010 Underrated Movies <div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEj1D5aYp92xHPwJYGvC0-2dGzNGN55Z7V3fjNEPyLJCz55U21L7YzG2JvzPYMMWYpw7YwOPKpijihURqi6Vgs97YUpsUq1dwaWpRZKWFfoCsBU9i3uuVTujdaY6UX8-6Yxiy4DWgI4yKhoLf4oe2vxpIe6oC1UKXinmzdCJjRLesww4ldAzgHkAxSErzA" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" data-original-height="380" data-original-width="700" height="174" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEj1D5aYp92xHPwJYGvC0-2dGzNGN55Z7V3fjNEPyLJCz55U21L7YzG2JvzPYMMWYpw7YwOPKpijihURqi6Vgs97YUpsUq1dwaWpRZKWFfoCsBU9i3uuVTujdaY6UX8-6Yxiy4DWgI4yKhoLf4oe2vxpIe6oC1UKXinmzdCJjRLesww4ldAzgHkAxSErzA" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Matthew McConaughey in director Bill Paxton's 2001 thriller <i>Frailty</i>.</span></td></tr></tbody></table><br />A local friend of mine, a major movie buff and fellow CrossFitter, directed to me an idea for a discussion on underrated movies. He issued ten of his own and asked me for ten. This was two months ago. He ribbed me about not responding yesterday. I told him I had the list. Just needed to write it a bit up. It took me two months, but I finally came up with a list. <span><a name='more'></a></span></div><div><br /></div><div><b>The Criteria</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div>The movie could not have been nominated for an academy award for best picture, or been a great movie that underperformed at the box office but exploded on tv and video (<i>Shawshank</i>) and is rarely if ever shown on cable and has not achieved “cult” status, (<i>Spinal Tap, Monty Pythons Holy Grail</i> or weekly shown favorites like <i>Armageddon</i> or <i>War of the Worlds</i>).</div><div><br /></div><div>Think great movies that 95% of the people have never scene or even heard about! To me, all of these are masterworks that missed awards and/or nobody saw or talked about. Many of these would be my number one of their respective release years.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>The Movies</b></div><div><br /></div><div>To me, all of these are masterworks from the past 30ish years that missed awards and/or nobody saw or talked about. Many of these would be my number one of their respective release years.</div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>Metropolitan</i> (dir. Whit Stillman, 1990)</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgSct8qRVxfRyrL6oofC-pRByQdnxgPvQhl5uFItaz3Wii6QFrnu9k9NbUKuSglCKWlzqI1PMYem0MScyNiS54CyhpG8IdzW8NdosF_Grg4F_dB6cH3PMFs2ClsK-SGQwE3v08Adl3ZC08n47bIOWAXc_RSdCXo-veIV2s17uhrnD2T8T4upBXkOu8zKw" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="306" data-original-width="550" height="178" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgSct8qRVxfRyrL6oofC-pRByQdnxgPvQhl5uFItaz3Wii6QFrnu9k9NbUKuSglCKWlzqI1PMYem0MScyNiS54CyhpG8IdzW8NdosF_Grg4F_dB6cH3PMFs2ClsK-SGQwE3v08Adl3ZC08n47bIOWAXc_RSdCXo-veIV2s17uhrnD2T8T4upBXkOu8zKw" width="320" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div>I actually think this movie did get a screenplay nomination at the Oscars, and I suppose it has a cult following, but I don’t care. The story of rich Manhattanites in their late teens hanging out at Sally Fowler’s apartment talking about socialism into the wee hours after that night’s debutant ball. It is so witty and charming and loving—a warm hug of movie that I should not connect with. Only to realize that anyone who has sat in a room of lively conversation late into the night will love this.</div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>Frailty</i> (dir. Bill Paxton, 2001)</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhW48_Zg6cbG5MtZG8YQ97cuvhqtoBwUf4hp1YSbJoaPp1sZVLvWya9jbYYjEQLBYxQ2ipPNI90Wn_wdUs8onAJoMarq3WU2UeLl6n2Z-jUBcI9K_a0vSDgloni1hVzJIMZ_pzmtnU45YyXhO-Xn0FKoJf_A1Y9gJw9UHqWDyMX0l7o5n6tpw__E5pKVg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="338" data-original-width="600" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhW48_Zg6cbG5MtZG8YQ97cuvhqtoBwUf4hp1YSbJoaPp1sZVLvWya9jbYYjEQLBYxQ2ipPNI90Wn_wdUs8onAJoMarq3WU2UeLl6n2Z-jUBcI9K_a0vSDgloni1hVzJIMZ_pzmtnU45YyXhO-Xn0FKoJf_A1Y9gJw9UHqWDyMX0l7o5n6tpw__E5pKVg" width="320" /></a></div><br /></div><div>Maybe the most effective psychological thriller I have seen. The great character actor Bill Paxton’s directorial debut starred Matthew McConaughey as the adult son of a man (Paxton), who may or may not have been a serial killer, being interviewed in present day by an FBI agent (Powers Boothe), while the past plays out in flashback.</div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>Moonlight Mile</i> (dir. Brad Silberling, 2002)</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhcafDfal8ymGnCCfaIqPq7UZBk8_74IZDJZRUUHw-HHAbZ7W8ZG-2nnC_x8t9dRgKKB_5-45Cy-ocSy_MWSObkW24wCb8TExLXlt-hMJbK4_Uknlx_iTeXgwifkZmMrOAVbk-kWhPf9q7D7Wngn66IyQV1WAmaNOrXYfGZrLEPLEdtXUR4f_cCXw95sw" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1080" data-original-width="1920" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhcafDfal8ymGnCCfaIqPq7UZBk8_74IZDJZRUUHw-HHAbZ7W8ZG-2nnC_x8t9dRgKKB_5-45Cy-ocSy_MWSObkW24wCb8TExLXlt-hMJbK4_Uknlx_iTeXgwifkZmMrOAVbk-kWhPf9q7D7Wngn66IyQV1WAmaNOrXYfGZrLEPLEdtXUR4f_cCXw95sw" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div>Dustin Hoffman, Susan Sarandon, early Jake Gyllenhaal, pre-Grey’s Anatomy Ellen Pompeo, and Holly Hunter in a dramedy about a young man (Gyllenhaal) stuck with his almost in-laws (Hoffman and Sarandon) after the death of his fiancé in early 70s New England. It has some of the best needle drops ever committed to film.</div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>Bellflower</i> (dir. Evan Glodell, 2011)</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi06cF7krxIRHiovHdLU1KDG1fdf6UPCBTCReAn4-D6o208JVx2s2vi4GVjOROBdb-JnB2qqI8lQLvQ1A2CpPc7bv4ToMTtF7HSz1elntn_4LWPyTrp45h422NZQxSaqelTCx6DN7CcoWsGQ6x0KTMgSOx3NT23I6RJxUsTBv5GP0mmBsOgQ4DWHV3ugQ" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="333" data-original-width="640" height="167" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi06cF7krxIRHiovHdLU1KDG1fdf6UPCBTCReAn4-D6o208JVx2s2vi4GVjOROBdb-JnB2qqI8lQLvQ1A2CpPc7bv4ToMTtF7HSz1elntn_4LWPyTrp45h422NZQxSaqelTCx6DN7CcoWsGQ6x0KTMgSOx3NT23I6RJxUsTBv5GP0mmBsOgQ4DWHV3ugQ" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div>This movie is dark, man. A story about the most toxic levels masculinity can reach, lost boys as grown men playing with fire and getting burned. The movie is notable for being completely financed by its director and star, who also built his own camera rig and all the cars and flamethrowers and other such craziness. And it's a romance. </div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>Frances Ha</i> (dir. Noah Baumbach, 2012)</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhtBAwVYz-VD4YbiZjInlj2fa6mCmVzTQbMYrW0LZ18YpmSlRyQg_F0g8ssB2IO4qA11RacfjBavPTDEXDDbjC4gCWgIAZRqSC1x3jwOet_dSs_Tgq_fH5Nznz3TGhtLHvQtHEIt5Hh5NazElbsFDLUfIor6jQvNunWeYZD4ZZm2CxhZwCFZWh1xnDqUQ" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="539" data-original-width="1200" height="144" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhtBAwVYz-VD4YbiZjInlj2fa6mCmVzTQbMYrW0LZ18YpmSlRyQg_F0g8ssB2IO4qA11RacfjBavPTDEXDDbjC4gCWgIAZRqSC1x3jwOet_dSs_Tgq_fH5Nznz3TGhtLHvQtHEIt5Hh5NazElbsFDLUfIor6jQvNunWeYZD4ZZm2CxhZwCFZWh1xnDqUQ" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div>Before directing juggernauts like Lady Bird, Little Women, and the soon-to-be-released Barbie, Greta Gerwig was one of the most interesting actors in indie films. This is one of those. A small, hilarious, huge-hearted, and I mean hilarious, for real, comedy about a would-be Manhattan dancer, who barely gets by as part-time kids’ dance instructor. Such a gem.</div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>The Spectacular Now</i> (dir. James Ponsoldt, 2013)</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi0xVUDMAcl1yFcm00kNU0Bqx2i1rJFQqyqFA62Migclos1TTgMj9eXc1tkCsECkBnoO6YAup6CCRilO5dsMBKQY2pIunyDPuruE8s1dCPQ64a272mAlocQ2StjiIGMoh1f7wCFJXAt7g_8rQKQ1JGVd2EkUX9Y6Fl6rBbFmKhyVpDggeb3ZbHa7_TjFA" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="799" data-original-width="1420" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi0xVUDMAcl1yFcm00kNU0Bqx2i1rJFQqyqFA62Migclos1TTgMj9eXc1tkCsECkBnoO6YAup6CCRilO5dsMBKQY2pIunyDPuruE8s1dCPQ64a272mAlocQ2StjiIGMoh1f7wCFJXAt7g_8rQKQ1JGVd2EkUX9Y6Fl6rBbFmKhyVpDggeb3ZbHa7_TjFA" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div>Maybe the most honest movie about first love I have ever seen. Miles Teller and Shailene Woodley play an unlikely pair, who fall hard in love while facing the end of high school and an uncertain future. It touches on important themes like alcoholism and sex, romantic and familial relationships with such perfect understanding and such a light but powerful touch. My favorite movie of 2013 by a mile.</div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>Mississippi Grind</i> (dir. Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, 2015)</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjUwESUz1NiNYlSIg_FHVePZ46mUTFmjX0sr62-90rlSuv-GXsu6rUmkeZWYSV-2mhHBv_Jb37J_3eGrBkTRKJWl3afhBR2dL36oH2boq7Y8DbaOSV1xBwo9hM_906vsb-3O9c07pmKoEYeLW-10ib4JzZknqJtDhYspgq6RfdVYwhqaUrg4i-SXJoHLQ" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1069" data-original-width="1900" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjUwESUz1NiNYlSIg_FHVePZ46mUTFmjX0sr62-90rlSuv-GXsu6rUmkeZWYSV-2mhHBv_Jb37J_3eGrBkTRKJWl3afhBR2dL36oH2boq7Y8DbaOSV1xBwo9hM_906vsb-3O9c07pmKoEYeLW-10ib4JzZknqJtDhYspgq6RfdVYwhqaUrg4i-SXJoHLQ" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div>Ryan Reynolds plays a slick, winning gambler, who takes on a project in a down-and-out Ben Mendelsohn. The two travel the country and gamble and drink Woodford and meet people and run from the past. It’s a simple but beautiful movie about second chances and the people who, for some reason, help us along.</div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>Indignation</i> (dir. James Schamus, 2016)</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhbv0tC0jJecMFEZU5ynyLzQT3PU5n0o4h7zVD7-QOplb3kU983XQQHD5QUL5ng71Ahowry9XczLRgU-eH0BWqK7Jy2kLNUvNI2x883tsuFx8BfMZ3f7IRBkm8D12dorO-al-laHT-157UYWVbvFzLKDWoxMXZbuzfwI4S9HRWwFWrak3kjGo5uglWkAg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="607" data-original-width="1080" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhbv0tC0jJecMFEZU5ynyLzQT3PU5n0o4h7zVD7-QOplb3kU983XQQHD5QUL5ng71Ahowry9XczLRgU-eH0BWqK7Jy2kLNUvNI2x883tsuFx8BfMZ3f7IRBkm8D12dorO-al-laHT-157UYWVbvFzLKDWoxMXZbuzfwI4S9HRWwFWrak3kjGo5uglWkAg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div>Screenwriter and producer James Schamus (most well-known for being Ang Lee’s long time collaborator) made his directorial debut with an adaptation of a Philip Roth novel about a working class Jewish kid in the early 1950s, who finds a spot in a small college in the midwest and struggles to deal with his place as an outsider among the WASPs, particularly the college dean (Tracy Letts) and the blonde goddess Olivia Hutton (Sarah Gadon), who both challenge him in life-changing ways.</div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>Dark Waters</i> (dir. Todd Haynes, 2019)</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgy78vmIP6IX8-Sn_lNCTa7BdEBpwWONcKXxfdPwSANYSWKlM7Jf3DP7j0m6ZP437xR6MXptIQo1hE2Ycij6EAdDC_gFX-OoEW-vJmz2Y4Dctv-40PaglqaF9gGt4v1Drkrjv-lImJWXuvx2sEtnC0asvQeonnnShbA8YytNaVJBNbpHIMN082TJxNjlA" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="315" data-original-width="600" height="168" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgy78vmIP6IX8-Sn_lNCTa7BdEBpwWONcKXxfdPwSANYSWKlM7Jf3DP7j0m6ZP437xR6MXptIQo1hE2Ycij6EAdDC_gFX-OoEW-vJmz2Y4Dctv-40PaglqaF9gGt4v1Drkrjv-lImJWXuvx2sEtnC0asvQeonnnShbA8YytNaVJBNbpHIMN082TJxNjlA" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div>Mark Ruffalo plays a corporate attorney who takes a pro bono gig to help folks from his hometown (one played brilliantly by Bill Camp) file suit against a giant corporation for causing environmental harm and death or decades. It’s just one of those classic movies for grown-ups that should’ve easily been up for any number of Oscars.</div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>The Vast of Night </i>(dir. Andrew Patterson, 2019)</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjZYwACEFosmtAUGh9vK89AbnKh0g7VpkdIWDK5_sVTf69aJpsI1w9aXq-MYWy5SM1KEVsGvbx0eaRX3949T2UT0mtl9oZO3RnM9WUX1SfkilYNKKKVuBbRQTy0A2Lli79D0lgGeVB2FzUS-X4LRhrPbk0rbIae01fTi4VaV_hXydkQkZ-vXRFazf2A1w" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="563" data-original-width="1000" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjZYwACEFosmtAUGh9vK89AbnKh0g7VpkdIWDK5_sVTf69aJpsI1w9aXq-MYWy5SM1KEVsGvbx0eaRX3949T2UT0mtl9oZO3RnM9WUX1SfkilYNKKKVuBbRQTy0A2Lli79D0lgGeVB2FzUS-X4LRhrPbk0rbIae01fTi4VaV_hXydkQkZ-vXRFazf2A1w" width="320" /></a></div><br /></div><div>An extremely inventive low-budget sci-fi movie that simple blew me away. It’s a two-hander between two incredible young unknowns, a switchboard operator and a radio DJ, as they work together to investigate a mysterious radio frequency in 1950s New Mexico. This director and his work with the camera department evoke the best of American cinema from Spielberg to Paul Thomas Anderson and the Coen Brothers in their Barry Sonnenfeld days.</div>Kevin Powershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04219017960488448934noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6075473672000095925.post-19139394744493093542023-05-24T10:37:00.001-04:002023-05-24T10:37:07.629-04:00Google Search: The Danger of a Single Story<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCys0HAc3tG3DgzJsOwwYam-Y_avR-jgzstNPn4gQDbOlL0hAEl-Td_tOlUy6Ft8OiNzqWX5c_7cOli6XRgFdq7AYPMUOp-AVY9xbVFVCW-XyczqtAkEQvWRvDgrgI9aq1JStaPznCzAW7LggkaRNKt971XdTStX-Ifw5dcwE2sTJpEXl_3ra6eZMIpw/s1920/Books%20Banned.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1080" data-original-width="1920" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCys0HAc3tG3DgzJsOwwYam-Y_avR-jgzstNPn4gQDbOlL0hAEl-Td_tOlUy6Ft8OiNzqWX5c_7cOli6XRgFdq7AYPMUOp-AVY9xbVFVCW-XyczqtAkEQvWRvDgrgI9aq1JStaPznCzAW7LggkaRNKt971XdTStX-Ifw5dcwE2sTJpEXl_3ra6eZMIpw/w400-h225/Books%20Banned.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-size: x-small;">Commentary on the Right's Fight Against Diversity and Awareness</span></b></div><p>As a secondary English teacher, I have trouble pinpointing what exactly it is I am looking for in a “favorite student.” For real, students constantly ask me “Who is your favorite student?” or “Am I your favorite student?” I never give a straight answer. How could I? That would just be wrong, even hurtful. <span></span></p><a name='more'></a><p></p><p>I sort of like <a href="https://www.tiktok.com/@musicwithmra/video/7234368034004012334" target="_blank">what this guy said</a> on the subject. </p> <a href="about:invalid#zSoyz"></a>But I tend to point to clues as to how to get to that level: “Be passionate,” I say. “Something has to make you burn inside. What is it? I’m into the people who crave knowledge, who want to be the smartest, most worldly person in the room.” You might be surprised at how many 8th grade students I have who either do not have that or are too afraid to let it be known. <p>I suppose I will say it up front: It is hard to be passionate, if your life is limited to the same old things all the time, every day, every week, every Saturday, every Sunday, every Summer or Winter or Fall or Spring Break. Recently, we took a group of students to Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia. Some did not know how to simply BE in such a place, a living museum, a place of immersive learning that people go to on purpose…for vacation. I asked a student, “Ever been to a place like this? Does your family go on vacations?” The student replied, “We just go to the beach.” </p><p>The beach, to be clear, is wonderful. Some of my students undoubtedly have never seen the ocean, have never smelt that air, felt that breeze, the sand between your toes as the tide ebbs and flows, the sticky air blowing a dusting of sand on tanning arms and legs. But what if that is all you ever have? Year after year, break after break. What if you never even experience anything as little, or as much, as that? </p><p>I am reminded of a Ted Talk I love presented by Nigerian scholar and author Chimamanda Adichie. The speaker opens her talk with an anecdote about how, when she was young, growing up in Nigeria, all the stories she read were from England, stories of white kids, who played in the snow, ate apples, and rejoiced at the sight of a sunny day. This was not her experience, but when she herself wrote stories, these were the sort of stories she wrote. Ironic, because, in Nigeria, it never snows, they eat mangoes, and the sunny day is so commonplace that one would not need to talk of weather. </p><p>In essence, she had been trapped in a single story of youthful experience, as there simply were not children’s books written by Nigerians, published in Nigeria, for even middle class African children like her, children of university professors, business people, etc. on her continent. </p><p>Another anecdote has Adichie recalling meeting her American college roommate, who was shocked that she spoke English, listened to American pop music, and knew how to use a stove. Her roommate had been trapped in a single story of Africa, where everyone lives in tribes in the bush or desert with no modern comforts, a story of starvation and poverty and war, as seen on TV…in America. </p><p>Adichie herself admits to her own astonishment upon visiting Mexico and finding booming cities full of happy people and not a population of would-be immigrants living in abject, crime-ridden poverty. She had only a single story of Mexico. She goes on to make some interesting points about the danger of stereotypes that some cannot help but avoid. </p><p>The trap of the single story is a trap built around lack of wonder, experience, passion…and a lack of, well, reading different stories, whether due to limited access or limited willingness to read at all. You might be shocked at how hard so many of my students work to NOT even try to read even assigned readings. I don’t have the exact numbers, but it is a lot more than I am comfortable with. </p><p>The most amusing anecdote in Adichie’s talk is when she recounts a classmate, upon reading a work she wrote, proclaiming the shame it was that all the men in Nigeria are physical abusers. She clapped back that she had just read Bret Easton Ellis’ “American Psycho,” and how it was such a shame that all the young men in America are serial killers. We simply, as an American people, cannot be this simple...right? To not even try consider the depth of that which we do not fully know. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/D9Ihs241zeg" width="320" youtube-src-id="D9Ihs241zeg"></iframe></div><p>I live in a shallow place. The government of my home state of Tennessee is so very hard at work perpetuating a single story, mostly due to the stranglehold of one political party in our state and local governments, fueled by a vocal minority of people wishing to eliminate stories, facts even, that could potentially open up the world for our young people. I have another entire piece on the small groups of fascists sweeping through the small town South injecting hate into the townspeople about books that merely provide affirmation of the LBGTQ+ communities or provide advice on sexual health to teenagers. My community's local library board and appointed director have received actual threats of violence...over books that they refuse to "segregate" or remove. I have so much more on this coming soon...</p><p>Our state representative, John Ragan, recently authored a “divisive concepts” bill (originating as HB1376), now law, that is ultimately a thinly-veiled attempt to limit discussions on college campuses of the power imbalances inherent in American institutions (otherwise known as CRT…bum bum bum!!) and allow people to rat out teachers and students, who challenge certain traditional ideals. </p><p>Mr. Ragan is working from a single story he hopes is the only one told, one of white patriarchal evangelical power, the story of America that Adichie warns against, as she states in her talk: “Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans, and not with the arrival of the British, and you have an entirely different story. Start the story with the failure of the African state, and not with the colonial creation of the African state, and you have an entirely different story.”</p><p>The right in Tennessee keeps trying to “segregate books” in our libraries to, in essence, keep them out of the hands of children. We have read such in this very newspaper every week for months now. These books are largely stories confirming and affirming LGBTQ+ folks. They are doing this because they tell another story of America and its people and not the single story they want: straight, Christian, “normal.” Well, not everyone is straight and Christian and “normal,” never have been and never will be. According to the Pew Research Center, nearly 100 million Americans do NOT identify as Christian. </p><p>It is easy to fear what is not understood. Books help us understand. Nothing more. Nothing less. The thing is there is nothing to fear from reading a book other than the fact that you might learn something that changes your mind. We should all be so lucky to have that willingness: to change our minds. And we have the personal freedom to choose what we read or do not, what our children read or do not. What we do not have the freedom to choose is what people who are not us or ours read or do not read. </p><p>Public libraries are for the public. Public institutions include each and every person. </p><p>As a kid, I watched a movie with a transgender character called <i>The World According to Garp</i> and later read the novel upon which it is based. I am still straight and present myself to the world as a man. </p><p>I read <i>Romeo and Juliet</i> in high school. I never murdered my girlfriend’s cousin. </p><p>I watched Quentin Tarantino’s <i>Pulp Fiction </i>when I was way too young. I never killed anyone for hire, snorted heroin, or gambled on a boxing match. </p><p>I played <i>Grand Theft Auto: Vice City</i> on Playstation 2 for days on end in high school. I never mowed anyone down with a car or a machine gun. </p><p>I read <i>To Kill a Mockingbird </i>in 7th grade and many times since. It was confirmed. The racism I heard and saw all around me was indeed wrong. Our systems during Jim Crow were wrong. And those systems still have an effect today because they put an entire race of Americans a century behind. </p><p>I read its sequel <i>Go Set a Watchman </i>as a grad student in English. It was confirmed. Human beings are nuanced and varied and complex, even Atticus Finch. Human beings are also capable of virtue beyond a particular religious dogma, and, in fact, are better for knowing as much about this life and its people as possible, people of all faiths, sexualities, races, classes, capabilities and experiences. Without diversity, we are a people devoid of PASSION. </p><p>When we remove access to even one book, we remove worlds of possibility. We put our future in danger because America is more than one story. It is many. </p><p>Another Google Search: <i>E Pluribus Unum.</i> </p>Kevin Powershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04219017960488448934noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6075473672000095925.post-79054598249540642172021-12-24T08:48:00.007-05:002022-09-22T23:21:14.335-04:00There's a Place for Spielberg's West Side Story, Somehow, Somewhere<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgyLGszNINdQRTb-nvWG14wu9eD9Q0rJIVOvYOjbMN8BxOJ8p3GGLdfMIjxF5iENCaILmKDJHwQ3qzOmR0pZhVhVXG_diDGCa3eYK5Xv-zOXWvc03m_yFxB79hJM0w-dggfS5kKMwoH_UVSJD5mNpMlDwFvq4MbE5JxJEPLIpGhLDxi-KhWWF36-GyINQ=s1200" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="675" data-original-width="1200" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgyLGszNINdQRTb-nvWG14wu9eD9Q0rJIVOvYOjbMN8BxOJ8p3GGLdfMIjxF5iENCaILmKDJHwQ3qzOmR0pZhVhVXG_diDGCa3eYK5Xv-zOXWvc03m_yFxB79hJM0w-dggfS5kKMwoH_UVSJD5mNpMlDwFvq4MbE5JxJEPLIpGhLDxi-KhWWF36-GyINQ=w640-h360" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-size: x-small;">Encouraging All to See Spielberg's <i>West Side Story</i> in a theater before it's too late.</span></b> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit;">I first saw it when I was in 8th grade. It was in Mr. Moore's Music Appreciation class. And boy! Did I appreciate it. It made me love musicals...forever. I had seen the Disney musicals of the era. I had even seen </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">Grease</i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit;">, an okay musical, one that loses steam early and struggles to land much after "Greased Lightning." But </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">West Side Story</i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit;">...it hit different. It was for me then. I believed in the magic of love. The music of Leonard Bernstein enlivened by Stephen Sondheim's words, metaphors, daggers through the heart of a hopeful boy that would last forever. <span><a name='more'></a></span></span><p></p><p><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit;">Like many people, I shrugged at first at the idea that Steven Spielberg has chosen a remake of the 1961 Best Picture juggernaut, a <i>bona fide</i> classic of American cinema, as his next project. Why? It's so perfect as it is, or was. It had been awhile since I had watched it. Even so, a Spielberg completist, I knew there was no question I would see it and see it on the big screen, right where it surely belongs. The questions I had are not strange. Consider this exchange on my Facebook page the other day, toying with the current discourse in movie critic land, incredulous in reckoning with the fact that latest Spider-Man movie has the third largest opening weekend in American history while <i>West Side Story </i>just fails. </span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit;"><b>My Post: </b><span style="color: #050505; white-space: pre-wrap;">Did my patriotic duty and saw West Side Story in the theater. Your turn. When will you give your all for the cinema, for America?</span></span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #050505; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>First Comment: </b></span><span style="color: #050505;">How was it? I am a movie buff, and have been cautious about a remake of a classic. I wonder what the Beard would think if David Fincher remade Jaws, or Ridley Scott did Close Encounters, or Michael Bay did Indy or ET or Jurassic Park? </span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: inherit;">Did it need a remake?</span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiwwW5Xqe7n1zhKaVuZ8kN0owyL5PecJMGb1EUpfnCGKcNZqQWvlTZoSzBKGHn76iYLJ6zErvO6TWp6qP-XEMma7mAd1OWLJhAmJNXqwqyvbonAfv8Rquk_qLqBNM3jqhZQbiUrXX_1pSLpd7JOfjjN6fj2M3HyS1QTPBBmmu7k9yKNRTsHdN4e_PsKCQ=s1952" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1098" data-original-width="1952" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiwwW5Xqe7n1zhKaVuZ8kN0owyL5PecJMGb1EUpfnCGKcNZqQWvlTZoSzBKGHn76iYLJ6zErvO6TWp6qP-XEMma7mAd1OWLJhAmJNXqwqyvbonAfv8Rquk_qLqBNM3jqhZQbiUrXX_1pSLpd7JOfjjN6fj2M3HyS1QTPBBmmu7k9yKNRTsHdN4e_PsKCQ=w400-h225" width="400" /></a></div><p></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black; font-family: inherit;"><b>My Reply:</b> </span><span style="color: black; font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">It's funny. I had those same questions. Yet, I knew I would see it anyway because I am determined to be a Spielberg completist. What's really funny is this question: Why those questions? Spielberg's Jaws and Close Encounters get remade often...just by different names. Jurassic Park has been sequel-ized and literally remade and resequel-ized. West Side Story was remade last year, as a play on Broadway. Why not another film? I was skeptical myself, but the trailers and reviews got me there. I was stoked to see it. I can say without question that it is Spielberg at the height of his powers single-handedly saving the American cinema...and nobody is seeing it. It is failing at the box office and getting absolutely demolished by the 8th (actually 9th, my bad) Spider-Man movie to come out in the last 19 years. So to answer your question...How was it? It was everything, of the best movies ever made (just like the original is, just as Spielberg almost always has done). It has the music, the dancing, the vibrant colors, the best songs ever written for a musical, all of them. All the artifice of the stage show and original is there but then Spielberg adds his tricks, his flair, grit, humanity, realism. Everything this movie. And nothing. Maybe never again will we have cinematic experiences like this, if we can't even go see a Steven Spielberg movie. Spielberg. Spielberg! Cinema! Go, My Friend! And Take Everyone You Love With You!</span></span></span></span></p><p>So, here's the rest of the story we know so well: </p><p>There is Tony (Ansel Elgort), the boy trying to better himself after his path takes him to prison for a stint, even when Riff (Mike Faist) and the rest of the Jets seem bent on deploying the anger of their reality. There is Maria (absolute movie star, Rachel Zegler), the headstrong beauty trying to find her way in America, even though her brother and leader of the Sharks, Bernardo (David Alvarez) and sister-in-law, Anita (Ariana Debose) want her to keep her head down and marry a Puerto Rican guy. </p><p>It is such a simple story, the classic one, taking Shakespeare's <i>Romeo and Juliet</i> as its backbone, placing it in a 1950s slum, where rival gangs, the white Jets and the Puerto Rican Sharks, fight...for nothing. In Spielberg's vision, this nothingness is literal, a pile of rubble making way for what will become New York City's famed mecca for the arts, Lincoln Center. A smart call. </p><p>In Spielberg's vision, the Jets are actually the hoods the original would have us believe, even as they snap and twirl in the streets, vandalize Puerto Rican business, and sing their song of brotherhood. The Sharks are harder, fully aware of the blessings and curses of their experience as immigrants, the streets again, practical, realistic sets, later making the famed "America" number more breathtaking than ever. Smart calls. There is the undeniable love at first sight at the dance, the fire escape, the heart-pounding gut-punch at the rumble. It's the same in the right ways. </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjDcDoaEfn8-x7Et6tMFc5rY2lVuqyQ4E1JkGrwmMF48T1klDVXoxLmt3MsNb-M47PzhqNFu9DSa_q8IUhB0qqUPKfvB0SGFd0lv_H7sa7Tv_G27Fd3bJlQ5K-8P1LxWbo7q9cAHDyoNSc2tv92sJSClZNiQ9olfzqsXJtFjjyBRzGwIA9H9mMwN-tZkA=s960" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="960" height="209" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjDcDoaEfn8-x7Et6tMFc5rY2lVuqyQ4E1JkGrwmMF48T1klDVXoxLmt3MsNb-M47PzhqNFu9DSa_q8IUhB0qqUPKfvB0SGFd0lv_H7sa7Tv_G27Fd3bJlQ5K-8P1LxWbo7q9cAHDyoNSc2tv92sJSClZNiQ9olfzqsXJtFjjyBRzGwIA9H9mMwN-tZkA=w400-h209" width="400" /></a></div><p></p><p>In Spielberg's vision, the rich humor of numbers like "Gee, Officer Krupke" and "I Feel Pretty" remain, but are both transplanted to new settings, again offering a newness that only strengthens the themes of the originals: awareness (or lack) of America's societal failures and even simpler ones like hope for a better future. I will not spoil what Spielberg and writer Tony Kushner decide to do with "Somewhere," but I cried. So, there's also that. The tender moments of love, the duets between Tony and Maria are as classic as the original, gorgeously composed. I was smiling, crying, wholly moved throughout nearly every moment. It's different in the right ways. </p><p>Spielberg's vision is the better movie. Yes. It is because he is a master of the moving image, and it has all been building to this. Think of the smooth choreography, the musicality, of an Indiana Jones fight or boys on bicycles flying through the air to save a friend. Spielberg was a wunderkind, nailing down huge TV jobs in his twenties for knowing just how to build suspense with a perfectly placed camera. It is now fifty years later, and he has made his musical, peppering a classic with visual flair he must've been dreaming about all that time. His camera does everything this production does, except sing. </p><p>So...this is all to say that you can go and see Spider-Man 9 and should. I will too. Spielberg would want us to. But there's a place...for...this movie. Somewhere...a place...for it. (lol). Go! If we are willing to miss Spielberg on a huge screen, we are willing to miss the best that cinema can be. The Movies are in trouble. <i>West Side Story</i> isn't some elitist arthouse film. It's a spectacle made by Steven Spielberg featuring a supremely talented cast and the best, most legendary, songs ever written for a musical. Don't sell yourself short. Go, take the family, buy tickets, make a thing out of it, and, especially, take your teenage sons, so that they may know not only the visual spectacle of the cinema in total perfection but also the power of song, of dance, of pain, of joy, of love. Movies like this make people better. </p>Kevin Powershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04219017960488448934noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6075473672000095925.post-90110635834303432292020-03-26T06:00:00.000-04:002020-03-26T06:00:05.164-04:00Who Stole the American Dream? The Banking Bourgeoisie and Hell or High Water<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b>A Critical Essay on the 2016 film <i>Hell or High Water</i></b></div>
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Late summer of 2016 was, for many Americans, the darkest of times. A new wave of political discourse had emerged in the wake of a new election for President, a divide over the future of economic policy stood at the center for droves of voters on both sides. Eight years had passed since the onset of what came to be known as “The Great Recession” had demolished the lives of a people duped by poorly regulated banking system knotted together with an even more poorly regulated mortgage-lending system. Common people, millions of them, had succeeded in securing a place to call their own. They had attained the very American Dream the powers that be had been selling them their whole lives, only to watch it slip through their fingers. Homeowner after homeowner defaulted on loan after loan, loans that had become worthless to anybody but the banks who had gobbled them up, covered them with shifty accounting and insurance practices, and sold them to the highest bidder, another bank officer or hedge fund manager. This banking bourgeoisie, this controlling class of wealthy geniuses of finance and economics, cashed in its chips. Many of them walked away unscathed. The Other, members of that working class who trusted them to help fulfill their American Dream, lost nearly everything.<br />
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Phrases like “too big to fail” and “inside job” entered the cultural discourse. They became titles of movies. The discussion raged on for years through the spawning of more feature films, documentaries, podcasts, as well as the incessant punditry of cable news, talk radio, and social media. Talk of greed and deregulation created even greater divides between the powerless and the powerful as new, modern Democrat took the Presidency. Regulation became a reality in some arenas. The nation as a whole recovered. But it wasn’t enough.<br />
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Now, over a decade later, everyday Americans are still picking up the pieces. For all of President Obama’s trying and succeeding in many areas, backed by the power in his statement of assurance in the final Economic Report of his administration that “our economy has emerged as the strongest and most durable in the world. By nearly every economic measure, America is better off than when I took office,” many Americans are still simply living in fear of the hegemony that still exists in the tie between the American government and the single most important aspect of the American superstructure, its banks. This fear draws no party line, despite the divides that still exist. These are the divides that came in that dark late summer of 2016, when Donald Trump was in a heated political battle with Hillary Clinton for President of the United States, and the cultural discourse raged deeper.<br />
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According to reporting on the rise of Donald Trump from CNBC in late 2018, Trump became appealing to so many white, working-class voters due to their own “economic anxiety” and his head-on coupling of that anxiety with that of a fear of immigrants and immigration. At this moment in American history, Donald Trump rose to power on a working-class fear of “cultural displacement.” This fear was well-known across the country, even making its way into the most recent popular entertainment. Adam McKay’s film <i>The Big Short</i>, released during the Christmas season on 2015 directly called this out, that, of course, none of the bankers would be punished and Americans would “blame immigrants and poor people,” and all would continue just the same. When we consider Marxist theory, particularly that of reflection theory, which aims to consider the connection of a society’s economic base to its superstructure, and when we consider the ways in which popular media, especially the movies, directly reflect the consciousness of society, we cannot help but pay attention to the collective emotional experience of being the powerless (Bressler 171). This connection has never been more uniquely made than in the 2016 modern-day Western film, <i>Hell or High Water</i>. <br />
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The film exists in a West Texas that hearkens back visually to the Wild West. In fact, in this day and age, as the rural lifestyle of a bygone era further dwindles, much of West Texas, specifically the small desert towns seems, at least in the movies, has reverted back to a series of Ghost Towns. That's certainly the perspective of director David Mackenzie's film, penned by actor and screenwriter Taylor Sheridan. With this film, Sheridan was enjoying part two of a trilogy of produced screenplays of his (this one is situated between <i>Sicario</i>, his takedown of the American war on Mexican drug cartels, and <i>Wind River</i>, his look at violence towards women in forgotten Native American communities in the Rocky Mountains). <i>Hell or High Water</i> stands above the two in both popular and awards success. It is a story of the darkness that surrounds the working-class desire for the American dream, one of dying small towns and ways of life. This idea runs through the film in nearly every frame, every cutaway to an abandoned building or payday loan place or the barren West Texas landscape. West Texas itself becomes a melancholy sort of character.<br />
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It is the story of a family's poverty across generations and the perpetuation of that poverty by the greed of a changing landscape in a changing time, where big banks, even small banks, surpassed decency and became judge, jury, and executioner to the livelihoods of those on wrong end of the very real wealth gap America. It is riddled with sentiment for the dying small town American West. Within all that is a movie willing to take its time and reveal underlying truths we would never expect from this kind of entertainment. It is a rich character study powered by three heavyweight performances, the kind that move you with equal parts pathos and wit. In essence, it is a classically made crime drama, a modern-day Western, blended with a fairly non-traditional heist film. It rises above the usual entries in the heist genre due to Sheridan’s close attention to how that arena of American cinema, the classic story of outlaws with a cause, works right here and now. Here his screenplay is matched visually with the work of British director David Mackenzie, whose camera knows exactly what to show us and when. The performances from the film’s cast, including Chris Pine and Ben Foster as two bank robbing brothers and the Marshalls on their tail, played by an Oscar-nominated Jeff Bridges and Gil Birmingham, are each charming and devastating, tired and worn-down, desperate for answers to the complications of a marginalized society, the rural poor.<br />
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The desolate Western landscapes and sunsets Mackenzie’s camera captures and the employment of rich string music by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, who made names for themselves in the film world as composers of rich mood music for a string of modern Western’s that includes 2005’s <i>The Proposition</i> and 2007’s <i>The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford</i>, plants this film firmly as the first post-financial crisis banking industry takedown that also functions as a successful genre exercise. It has the subtlety in tone of a great, moody post-classical western with the type of satisfying payoff that even <i>Ocean’s Eleven</i> wishes it could pull off but can’t. <i>Hell or High Water</i> is a different kind of heist fantasy, one that replaces Las Vegas precision with heavy doses of West Texas grit. It has a mind to expose injustices in the American capitalist experiment. This makes it wholly unique, a piece of modern cinema that serves to bridge divides even among the closest of working-class neighbors, criminals and cops, Western fans and cinephiles. It is a movie that makes the political unconscious of the working poor, a nearly forgotten people exploited and oppressed to the point of seeing little in the way of a future, completely conscious. It is a note on the state of a rural America divided in allegiance to political parties, which are themselves divided over the path of its economic base and the future of its intermediary with the superstructure, the film’s one and only villain--the banking industry. Taylor Sheridan’s screenplay, from its smallest moments of dialogue to its driving moral dilemma, finds a thread of hope that a divided working class in America may be united by a common mistrust in its country’s banking industry. <br />
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<i>Hell or High Water</i> is the story of Toby and Tanner Howard, two brothers. Tanner, embodied by the reckless intensity of the actor Ben Foster, is the older, the black sheep of the family, a known criminal. Toby, portrayed by a somewhat against-type Chris Pine, is the younger, a father of two teenage boys in between jobs that wouldn’t pay enough to give him a place to put his boots and pay his child support anyway. They are both cowboys in a world that doesn’t need cowboys. Their mother recently passed away and left them a meager house on a meager plot of West Texas land. They call it “the ranch.” The property, we learn later, is tied up in a reverse mortgage owned by the Texas Midlands Bank. Toby and Tanner, it becomes clear, are poor and always have been. We see them in their mother’s home after the film’s opening two robberies, pulled off as clumsily as we sense they would be in real life, the presence of hospice still in the room. Tanner wonders about a will, knowing there isn’t much of one. We get a bit of backstory the next morning in a diner, as Toby alludes to his ex-wife and child support in a discussion with his brother about their stolen money. The waitress, played by Katy Mixon, is interested in Toby’s quiet cowboy look. They talk of the lack of good work and supporting their children. Toby hits right to the point of pain for the West Texas proletariat, telling her that his “last job was for a natural gas company. Nobody’s drilling for gas anymore.” The land, of course, has been stripped for decades of its valuable mineral deposits. We infer the usual story. The already rich got richer, and the ones that did the work got dumped. <br />
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This extends to a specific lack of opportunity in this time and place in the very next scene. Texas Ranger Marcus Hamilton, played by Jeff Bridges, and his partner, Alberto, played by Gil Birmingham, talk of Hamilton’s dread of retirement, which to him represents an impending loss of purpose. They come upon a ranch fire and see ranchers escorting their livestock across the highway to another field of dry, barren land. A rancher stops for a beat to answer the officer’s inquiry as they wait to pass. He is beaten: “Put me out of my misery...21st century, and I’m racing cattle to a river. It’s no wonder my kids won’t do this shit for a living.” When Alberto asks if they should help, Marcus sets down the pain of the station of this particular forgotten base. “No. These boys is on their own,” he says. This is one of several important small conversations in the film that deal with the plight of the working rural poor. <br />
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The same idea comes back once more in the film’s final conversation. Toby and Ranger Hamilton talk about what came before, the wake of violence left in the culmination of his and his brother’s crime spree. Hamilton asks him how he did it, then changes that to why? He knows that Tanner did it because it is in his nature to steal. But what was it for Toby? “This was you. This was smart,” Hamilton observes. To which Toby replies: “I’ve been poor all my life,” he tells him. “It’s like a disease that passes down from generation to generation. But not my boys. This is theirs now.” The robberies were indeed Toby’s master plan to keep his family’s land, land that, as it turns out, will now generate $50,000 a month forever from the oil that sits under their feet. He has used the bank’s money to buy back the land it took from his family, land both parties knew was now worth a fortune. It’s a satisfying pay off, a true crowd-pleaser, but Toby’s words ring out above the satisfaction of the ultimate heist. His words are a testament of truth about his place as part of the working poor proletariat, the weakened base and its collective wish to turn the table on the bankers at Texas Midlands, who planned to walk away with the Howard family’s lost oil-rich land at the cheapest rate possible. <br />
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That the Texas Ranger and the one he just couldn’t nail down end their story at such opposition from each other only serves to underscore how they are the same in a way of thinking about the American superstructure, especially in terms of the hegemony of the banking industry on defining the economic realities of its base, to which they both belong. A Texas Ranger, especially an over-the-hill one, knows the limitations of his own power in the grand scheme of things. That his retirement brings about the end of his chance to serve justice underscores their connection even more. They both end up outlaws or could. We see this in Hamilton during one of his stops at a recently robbed bank. He scours the room for the right man to question, and seeing a balding, middle-aged man in a suit, declares, “This looks like a man who could foreclose on a house.” This direct way that Sheridan’s screenplay lines up cop and criminal and then blurs that very line is even extended in the very next scene, as Hamilton canvases the very diner the brothers just left. The “feisty” waitress has no interest in talking. She will keep Toby’s large cash tip to “keep a roof over her daughter’s head” and couldn’t care in the slightest from where the cash came. The old codgers that likely while away all their mornings in a booth by the window have little to say just the same. One old man speaks up only to say the robbers were thin and “looked like cowboys” and that he had been there that morning “long enough to see a bank get robbed been robbing me for thirty years.” Hamilton’s reaction is one of resigned, but good, humor. He is right there with these people. <br />
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The seeming divisions now closing among the different demographics in the film’s setting (male, female, pre-middle age and post, cop and criminal) extend to the Native American population. How do the brothers plan to clean this stolen money? They take it to a casino, turn the stolen cash into chips, sit awhile, then cash it out in the form of a check to Texas Midlands Bank. They are Robin Hood. They are Comanche. Tanner’s conversation at the blackjack table with a Native American man gets heated when he asks, “Are you Comanche? Lord of the plains!!?” To which the man replies: “Lords of nothing now.” The deeper hegemony of a white ruling class is evident in this one simple line. The Comanche as a Southwestern tribe of the plains fiercely fought the white settlers. They ended up with institutions that inherently breed a life of gambling and alcoholism, leaving no room for real mobility in society. It has been taken. Alberto, Hamilton’s part-Native American partner, echoes this sentiment a few scenes later. Hamilton knows the brothers will hit one of two small town bank branches next, so he forces Alberto to sit with him and “enjoy this little town.” Alberto can’t fathom the sadness of such small towns, calling attention to the “old hardware store twice the price of Home Depot, the one restaurant” and talks of Cowboys and Indians of old, pointing out the fact, as he physically points to the bank at the adjacent corner, that the “grandparents of these folks took this land, and now it is being taken from them. All because of that right there.” Together, two police officers see the greed of modern banking and the swindle that unsuspecting Americans of all cultural backgrounds have been forced into for over a century, completely unaware of the unregulated government-sanctioned gambling that takes place in the big city bank offices.<br />
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To be sure, this movie is not concerned with that larger picture of the banking industry. Its characters can’t possibly fathom such an entity. What this film does concern itself with is the false consciousness of the small, rural townsfolk and the small banks that use their practices to exploit them. These are people, like Toby and Tanner, who likely don’t have much more than a high school education. Their false consciousness comes alive through self-preservation and the desire to hold onto whatever thread of the old ways they can. That preservation is often achieved through crime and violence.<br />
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The film opens cold at a branch of the Texas Midlands Bank. Two masked men, the brothers Howard, are there as the first teller arrives just before opening time. They aren’t great at it. They banter with the teller, played by Dale Dickey, who tells them in so many words how stupid they are--the bank manager hasn’t yet arrived to open the vault. They make it out with minimal collateral damage, only one pistol whip to the bank manager’s head, a country song introduces us to the opening credits, and the outlaws head to their second bank of the morning through the flat, barren side streets of a small West Texas town. As the chase heats up with the Rangers always barely a step behind, the brothers stop in another Texas Midlands Bank branch. This time though, it is for advisement on spending their “winnings.” It’s a pivotal scene that marks the transition between entertaining bank robbery movie and statement on the hegemony of the banking industry. It clarifies the brothers’ uprising against the system they know is trying to leave them behind. They deliver a casino check to pay off the reverse mortgage with a banker who seems to have helped Toby concoct the plan. He praises the brothers as he downs his bosses at the bank: “They thought they could swipe that land for $25,000. To see you boys pay them back with their own money...nothing more Texan than that.” He advises them to take it further when they eventually make their second payment to Texas Midlands, the back taxes left on the lien, and get Texas Midlands Bank to manage the trust they’ll eventually have on the deed, a deed that will be left in the name of Toby’s sons, not his own. His plan has worked, and he indeed makes good on that advice. Toby becomes the proxy by which the filmmakers wish to expose the political unconscious of the working poor.<br />
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When the film makes it to its obvious violent conclusion, it does so in such a way as to continue to make us empathetic to its heroes on both sides of the law. A final showdown of gun violence between Hamilton and Tanner, who has sacrificed himself to see his brother’s plan through, ends in a moment of simultaneous relief and heartbreak. It is over for both men. The next sequence finds Ranger Hamilton retired with no way to serve justice within the confines of the law. He and Toby have lost their partners. Hamilton asks how and why, but he already knows the answer. When your family’s legacy and livelihood is at stake, when your American Dream has been made unattainable by a corrupt system, it seems, this film would argue, there is no line, not even a thin one, between the innocent and the guilty. (The idiom of the film’s title is evidence enough of that.) Even those charged with enforcing laws must question their notions of justice. Nobody is right or wrong in this film. Everybody is both. They are united in knowing that they both have nothing left to lose and can battle it out later as two forgotten men in a forgotten place. <br />
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In closing, it's worth mentioning the signs and symbols <i>Hell or High Water</i> illuminates through the astute visual sense of David Mackenzie’s direction. It is this element of the film that lends itself to a reflectionist reading beyond that of the human characters and the revenge fantasy of the proletariat that they fulfill. This film indeed directly reflects the relationship of a mostly white, working-class base to a larger superstructure (Bressler 171). In between robberies, the brothers ride in cars they’ve planted along the way, cars they bury after each heist. On the road, they see the signs. There are signs that announce closed or closing businesses. There are signs that advertise cash advance and payday loan operations, the banks of the truly impoverished.<br />
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Modern outlaw country songs play on the soundtrack as Mackenzie’s camera deftly slides these billboards into view, interrogating us drivers-by with “In debt?” and“Debt Relief.” Two brothers drive the roads calm and determined to preserve what life they can. We hear, at one point, a brooding country song by Gillian Welch called “I’m Not Afraid to Die” as the brothers hang around the ranch at dusk. They play around, chase each other, and we sense that their crimes are freeing them. Tanner is in this for love of his brother, nothing more. Toby is in it for his boys. It is not about them. It is about them breaking down a system that will pay out in the future for Toby’s boys. Like the Comanche that Tanner meets in that casino, they are “enemies forever...of everyone.”<br />
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But it is that mentality that worked to expose the injustice of an oppressive society that has left the poor, like them, to fend for themselves, that blames them for being poor. It also exposes the larger injustice of banks and banking practices that exploit the working rural poor automatically by controlling every aspect of both personal finance and the larger economy of America. Hell or High Water ends with a song by Chris Stapleton called “Outlaw State of Mind.” Chris Stapleton himself is the kind of musician that unites people. His album Traveller crossed over to fans of both classic and modern country music. This film, in many ways, did the same thing. It became one movie in 2016 that critics and audiences could agree on. The song rings out just before the closing credits as splashes of light from the plains cross Mackenzie’s camera lens. This land is desolate and isolated. The people in this film are as well. They rise and sleep as reflections of a working-class in a dominating society that has forgotten them. <br />
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Works Cited</div>
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McKay, Adam, screenwriter and director. The Big Short, Paramount, 2015. <br />
<br />
Newberger, Emma, and Tucker Higgins. “Secretive cabals, fear of immigrants and the tea<br />
party: How the financial crisis led to the rise of Donald Trump.” <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/10/how-the-financial-crisis-led-to-the-rise-of%20donald-trump.html" target="_blank">CNBC</a>.<br />
<br />
Sheridan, Taylor, screenwriter, and David Mackenzie, director. Hell or High Water. Lionsgate, <br />
2016. <br />
<br />
United States. President (2008-2016: Obama). Economic Report of the President: Transmitted to<br />
the Congress; Together with the Annual Report of the Council of Economic Advisors.<br />
Washington, D.C.: U.S. Govt. Publishing Office, <a href="https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/ERP-2017/pdf/ERP-2017.pdf" target="_blank">Gov Info.</a><br />
<br /></div>
Kevin Powershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04219017960488448934noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6075473672000095925.post-28419816524800034712020-02-10T06:00:00.000-05:002020-02-10T06:00:00.156-05:00The Speakeasies (or The Year in Movies according to Yours Truly) 2019<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6U4YYWbTMSLKwBjskA_hY6q0MENJDeA0aZLtrWtmFXA1AMkzRoIo_0dV3LRzrlgAhS1GSU5LXA5yBKsFAlUfcSOk3tqPeX0lAQ_Yz4eU3-dI9Kh6GGkUiKUyCXFyFyJ-kuVtM5r5taVKp/s1600/once.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="459" data-original-width="700" height="261" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6U4YYWbTMSLKwBjskA_hY6q0MENJDeA0aZLtrWtmFXA1AMkzRoIo_0dV3LRzrlgAhS1GSU5LXA5yBKsFAlUfcSOk3tqPeX0lAQ_Yz4eU3-dI9Kh6GGkUiKUyCXFyFyJ-kuVtM5r5taVKp/s400/once.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<b>The best of 2019 in movies, according to yours truly.</b></div>
<a name='more'></a><br />
<br />
What follows is who I would nominate and select for the major Academy Award categories, based on the 38 (very weak for me actually) feature films I saw from the year 2019.<br />
<br />
Winners in <b>bold</b>.<br />
<br />
Here. We. Go.<br />
<br />
<b><u>Actor in a Supporting Role</u></b><br />
<br />
<img alt="Image result for brad pitt once upon a time in hollywood" height="200" src="https://img.cinemablend.com/filter:scale/quill/5/a/6/9/d/f/5a69dfaf50dfb68401b858d2111a138364aec92b.jpg?mw=600" width="400" /><br />
<br />
Matt Damon - "Ford v Ferrari"<br />
Song Kang-ho - "Parasite"<br />
Al Pacino - "The Irishman"<br />
<b>Brad Pitt - "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood"</b><br />
Paul Rudd - "Avengers: Endgame"<br />
<br />
He didn't even have to try. And his Oscar speech is going to kill. (But please also remember that Paul Rudd, in perfectly beautiful ways, spins the "Endgame" into action.)<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<b><u>Actress in a Supporting Role</u></b><br />
<br />
<img alt="Image result for florence pugh little women" height="202" src="https://d13ezvd6yrslxm.cloudfront.net/wp/wp-content/images/little-women-8-700x355.jpg" width="400" /><br />
<br />
Yeo-jong Cho - "Parasite"<br />
Laura Dern - "Marriage Story"<br />
Jennifer Lopez - "Hustlers"<br />
<b>Florence Pugh - "Little Women"</b><br />
Shuzhen Zhao - "The Farewell"<br />
<br />
She played two characters within the same character, one of whom is a 13-year-old twit. And she nails both in the best version of Amy March ever, Alcott notwithstanding. (J Lo tho.)<br />
<br />
<u><b>Cinematography</b></u><br />
<br />
<img alt="Image result for parasite filming" height="225" src="https://cdn1.thr.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/768x433/2019/11/making_of_parasite_-_publicity_-_splash_-2019.jpg" width="400" /><br />
<br />
Roger Deakins - "1917"<br />
<b>Hong Kyung-pyo - "Parasite"</b><br />
Pawel Pogorzelski - "Midsommar"<br />
Rodrigo Prieto - "The Irishman"<br />
Robert Richardson - "Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood"<br />
<br />
[Quickly flicks peach fuzz]... the look of "Parasite," the way the camera places you into the ironies of its story, its ensemble of desperate people. Chilling, fun, and beautiful. (Deakins' achievement cannot be understated. It is a big one.)<br />
<b><u><br />
</u></b><b><u>Music (Original Score)</u></b><br />
<b><u><br /></u></b>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/S2xuRebjfbk" width="560"></iframe><br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<b>Alexandre Desplat - "Little Women"</b><br />
Hildur Guðnadóttir - "Joker"<br />
Jung Jaeil - "Parasite"<br />
Nathan Johnson - "Knives Out"<br />
Randy Newman - "Marriage Story"<br />
<br />
I stated that watching Greta Gerwig's "Little Women" is like mainlining warm blankets. Desplat's score is like a third of that. (Hildur's "Joker" score slaps. Just sayin'...)<br />
<br />
<u><b>Writing (Adapted Screenplay)</b></u><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<b>Greta Gerwig - "Little Women"</b><br />
Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely - "Avengers: Endgame"<br />
Lorene Scafaria - "Hustlers"<br />
Taika Waititi - "Jojo Rabbit"<br />
Steven Zaillian - "The Irishman"<br />
<br />
One of the cleverest deconstructions of a literary classic I've ever...no...I've never seen anything like it. Just such a smart way to tell the story, especially one we all no pretty damn well. (Mad props to Markus and McFeely for crafting a story so beautifully in tune with what each of us loves about the Marvel Cinematic Universe.)<br />
<br />
<u><b>Writing (Original Screenplay)</b></u><br />
<br />
Rian Johnson - "Knives Out"<br />
<b>Bong Joon Ho and Jin Won Han - "Parasite"</b><br />
Josh and Benny Safdie - "Uncut Gems"<br />
Quentin Tarantino - "Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood"<br />
Lulu Wang - "The Farewell"<br />
<br />
It's the best story told in 2019. (Here are <a href="http://www.speaksinmovielines.com/2020/01/devouring-oscars-best-screenplay.html" target="_blank">my deep thoughts</a> on the actual Oscar category.)<br />
<br />
<b><u>Actress in a Leading Role</u></b><br />
<b><u><br /></u></b>
<img alt="Image result for ana de armas knives out" height="210" src="https://cdn2.celebritax.com/sites/default/files/styles/watermark_100/public/1575244650-ana-armas-admite-no-queria-audicionar-knives-out.jpg" width="400" /><br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br /></span>
</span><b>Ana de Armas - "Knives Out"</b><br />
Scarlett Johansson - "Marriage Story"<br />
Lupita Nyong'o - "Us"<br />
Florence Pugh - "Midsommar<br />
Charlize Theron - "Long Shot"<br />
<br />
No leading performance connected with me, moved me the way Ana de Armas' Marta did. Her comedic timing, her chemistry with Daniel Craig, her sincerity... (Honestly could say the same thing about Charlize in "Long Shot." I freakin' love that movie.)<br />
<br />
<b><u>Directing</u></b><br />
<u style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></u>
<u style="font-weight: bold;"><img alt="Image result for bong joon ho parasite" height="225" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/HaAQrGfhZkaL5Gfx55UKdp05hWI=/0x0:2732x1821/1200x675/filters:focal(1622x314:2058x750)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/65462214/fullsizephoto1069563.0.jpg" width="400" /><br />
</u><br />
<u style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></u>
Quentin Tarantino - "Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood"<br />
Martin Scorsese - "The Irishman"<br />
<b>Bong Joon Ho - "Parasite"</b><br />
Lorene Scafaria - "Hustlers"<br />
Josh and Benny Safdie - "Uncut Gems"<br />
<br />
Again, it's the greatest story told in 2019. And I can't imagine what it took to so closely tune every single gear of this thing so tightly. (Honestly could say the same thing about the Safdie Brothers and "Uncut Gems" and "Hustlers" is magnetic--credit to the choices of Lorene Scafaria.)<br />
<br />
<b><u>Actor in a Leading Role</u></b><br />
<br />
<img alt="Image result for adam sandler uncut gems" height="200" src="https://img.cinemablend.com/filter:scale/quill/1/9/6/3/f/6/1963f67596f6407f725da25da458e7e5cb6caefb.jpg?mw=600" width="400" /><br />
<br />
Leonardo DiCaprio - "Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood"<br />
Adam Driver - "Marriage Story"<br />
Robert De Niro - "The Irishman"<br />
Daniel Craig - "Knives Out"<br />
<b>Adam Sandler - "Uncut Gems"</b><br />
<br />
Consider this retribution for the Sandman. As the boys on Filmspotting read from my email, "Adam Sandler got hosed. Pre-Golden Globes I was ready to make a three-way parlay: Sandler-Globes; Sandler-SAG; Sandler-Oscar. Alas...nada." His peers either hate him or didn't see the movie. (Daniel Craig got hosed too.)<br />
<br />
<b><u>Best Picture</u></b><br />
<br />
<img alt="Image result for once upon a time in hollywood neon sign" height="225" src="https://pmcvariety.files.wordpress.com/2019/07/once-upon-a-time-in-hollywood.jpg?w=1000" width="400" /><br />
<br />
<b>"Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood"</b><br />
"Marriage Story"<br />
"Parasite"<br />
"Little Women"<br />
"The Irishman"<br />
"Avengers: Endgame"<br />
"Knives Out"<br />
"Hustlers"<br />
"Ford v Ferrari"<br />
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<br /></div>
The movie I pick as my favorite of the year is usually the one that impacts my emotions the most. There were a lot of those in 2019, so I had to default to the one that got me the most, first. That was Quentin Tarantino's fairy tale, a love letter to a Hollywood he remembers as pure and good. (Click here for <a href="http://www.speaksinmovielines.com/2020/01/devouring-oscars-once-upon-timein.html" target="_blank">my full pitch</a> for why it should've won Best Picture.)<br />
<br />
Until next year...<br />
<br />
This is a living document. It will be updated as I see more movies from 2019 in the years to come.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b><u>Every 2019 Release I've Seen on...</u></b><br />
<b><u></u></b><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<b><u><a href="https://letterboxd.com/kevinknows/list/2019-in-movies-ranked/" target="_blank"><img border="0" data-original-height="116" data-original-width="532" height="69" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFDrlZQNmOZmfVsKy_xudkHacGPfWWUaN8s6mpPfknreDOJgr4IR2s1me4mU03PDx2IQRGX-7wXAo3_0TnLvAlMPwpgG2KQeomjO6VmnVCBjDJE4PbSeydpUrAI62ADmeBcUHZiIAa5ERQ/s320/Screen+Shot+2020-02-06+at+4.50.08+PM.png" width="320" /></a></u></b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b><u>(from best to worst, based on my own gut feeling as of February 10, 2020)</u></b></div>
</div>
Kevin Powershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04219017960488448934noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6075473672000095925.post-15484255181663659052020-02-07T13:27:00.001-05:002020-02-07T13:41:07.960-05:00Oscar 2020: The Wills, the Shoulds, and the Should Have Beens<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEholRm1S2_6wKCcHfO5IKNyQ4VL8vVvRcaYDKs6RmU1Xhfio2z8TPhZqBTCTFvxdptB96Q348nueomg_LF3g7QHs6Wbf8b2z6URzT9ZfSpUATdko2ozQNgoA9x_CK92ervHPqHnoTWl73-W/s1600/adam.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="600" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEholRm1S2_6wKCcHfO5IKNyQ4VL8vVvRcaYDKs6RmU1Xhfio2z8TPhZqBTCTFvxdptB96Q348nueomg_LF3g7QHs6Wbf8b2z6URzT9ZfSpUATdko2ozQNgoA9x_CK92ervHPqHnoTWl73-W/s640/adam.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<b>In which I tell you what I think will happen on Oscar night (and what they got and will get wrong.)</b></div>
<a name='more'></a><br />
<br />
Here. We. Go.<br />
<br />
ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE<br />
<br />
Kathy Bates, "Richard Jewell"<br />
Laura Dern, "Marriage Story"<br />
Scarlett Johansson, "Jojo Rabbit"<br />
Florence Pugh, "Little Women"<br />
Margot Robbie, "Bombshell"<br />
<br />
Will Win: Laura Dern<br />
Should Win: Florence Pugh<br />
Should Have Been: Keep Margot but for "Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood" (that's right!) and replace any of them that aren't Florence Pugh with Shuzhen Zhao, the grandmother in "The Farewell."<br />
<br />
ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE<br />
Tom Hanks, "A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood"<br />
Anthony Hopkins, "The Two Popes"<br />
Al Pacino, "The Irishman"<br />
Joe Pesci, "The Irishman"<br />
Brad Pitt, "Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood"<br />
<br />
Will and Should Win: Brad Pitt<br />
Should Have Been: Replace Hopkins with Paul Rudd in "Avengers: Endgame"...I'm deadly serious.<br />
<br />
FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM<br />
South Korea, "Parasite"<br />
Spain, "Pain and Glory"<br />
France, "Les Misérables"<br />
North Macedonia, "Honeyland"<br />
Poland, "Corpus Christi"<br />
<br />
Will and Should Win: "Parasite"<br />
Should Have Been: I should have been seeing more of these movies.<br />
<br />
ADAPTED SCREENPLAY<br />
"The Irishman"<br />
"Jojo Rabbit"<br />
"Little Women"<br />
"The Two Popes"<br />
"Joker"<br />
<br />
Will Win: "Joker"<br />
Should Win: "Little Women"<br />
Should Have Been: Any screenplay that's not "Joker." That movie is great to look at, well-made and acted and is utterly stupid and painfully on the nose.<br />
<br />
ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY<br />
"Marriage Story"<br />
"Once Upon a Time in Hollywood"<br />
"Parasite"<br />
"Knives Out"<br />
"1917"<br />
<br />
Will Win: "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood"<br />
Should Win: "Parasite"<br />
Should Have Been: Any screenplay that's not "1917" (a movie that required no writing and has no story nor characters), including "The Farewell," "Midsommar," "Uncut Gems," and "Us."<br />
<br class="Apple-interchange-newline" />
PRODUCTION DESIGN<br />
<br />
"Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood"<br />
"The Irishman"<br />
"1917"<br />
"Jojo Rabbit"<br />
"Parasite"<br />
<br />
Will Win: "1917"<br />
Should Win: "Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood"<br />
Should Have Been: "Midsommar" instead of "The Irishman"...that is all.<br />
<br />
CINEMATOGRAPHY<br />
<br />
"1917"<br />
"Once Upon a Time in Hollywood"<br />
"The Irishman"<br />
"Joker"<br />
"The Lighthouse"<br />
<br />
Will Win: "1917"<br />
Should Win: "The Lighthouse"<br />
Should Have Been: The visual sharpness of "Parasite" is as strong or stronger than that of "Joker" at any point, and the cinematography is the one true highlight of "Joker" for me.<br />
<br />
ORIGINAL SCORE<br />
<br />
"1917," Thomas Newman<br />
"Joker," Hildur Guðnadóttir<br />
"Little Women," Alexandre Desplat<br />
"Marriage Story," Randy Newman<br />
"Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker," John Williams<br />
<br />
Will Win: Thomas Newman<br />
Should Win: Randy Newman<br />
Should Have Been: Nathan Johnson's score for "Knives Out" is masterful. This is honestly a great lineup that probably has it right.<br />
<br />
FILM EDITING<br />
<br />
"The Irishman"<br />
"Ford v Ferrari"<br />
"Parasite"<br />
"Joker"<br />
"Jojo Rabbit"<br />
<br />
Will Win: "Joker"<br />
Should Win: "Ford v Ferrari"<br />
Should Have Been: Did the editor's branch not watch "Marriage Story"?<br />
<br />
ACTOR IN A LEADING ROLE<br />
<br />
Antonio Banderas, "Pain and Glory"<br />
Leonardo DiCaprio, "Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood"<br />
Adam Driver, "Marriage Story"<br />
Joaquin Phoenix, "Joker"<br />
Jonathan Pryce, "The Two Popes"<br />
<br />
Will Win: Joaquin Phoenix<br />
Should Win: Adam Driver<br />
Should Have Been: I'm sure Pryce is great. Haven't seen the movie. Adam Sandler missing from this list is one of the great travesties of the awards season.<br />
<br />
ACTRESS IN A LEADING ROLE<br />
<br />
Cynthia Erivo, "Harriet"<br />
Scarlett Johansson, "Marriage Story"<br />
Saoirse Ronan, "Little Women"<br />
Renée Zellweger, "Judy"<br />
Charlize Theron, "Bombshell"<br />
<br />
Will Win: Renée Zellweger<br />
Should Win: Scarlett Johansson<br />
Should Have Been: I'm sure Zellweger is great. Haven't seen the movie (and likely won't). Lupita Nyong'o missing is one of the great travesties of the awards season. (See also: Ana de Armas in "Knives Out")<br />
<br />
DIRECTOR<br />
<br />
Martin Scorsese, "The Irishman"<br />
Quentin Tarantino, "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood"<br />
Bong Joon-ho, "Parasite"<br />
Sam Mendes, "1917"<br />
Todd Phillips, "Joker"<br />
<br />
Will Win: Sam Mendes<br />
Should Win: Bong Joon-ho<br />
Should Have Been: Honestly, they probably got this one right, though a strong case could be made for Greta Gerwig ("Little Women") and Lorene Scafaria ("Hustlers"), two women who can easily play ball with any of these dudes.<br />
<br />
BEST PICTURE<br />
<br />
"1917"<br />
"Ford v Ferrari"<br />
"The Irishman"<br />
"Jojo Rabbit"<br />
"Joker"<br />
"Little Women"<br />
"Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood"<br />
"Marriage Story"<br />
"Parasite"<br />
<br />
Will Win: "1917"<br />
Should Win: "Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood"<br />
Should Have Been: Just make it 10 with "Avengers: Endgame."<br />
<br />
<br /></div>
Kevin Powershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04219017960488448934noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6075473672000095925.post-65736360288092480762020-01-29T09:00:00.000-05:002020-01-29T09:00:20.973-05:00Devouring the Oscars -- Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood for Best Picture<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span id="docs-internal-guid-7cf8a3db-7fff-e60a-2de9-6dd8d7eab48d"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In which I make the case for Quentin Tarantino’s </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> for Best Picture.</span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
At this point, Quentin Tarantino never getting a Best Picture before his retirement is about as scary as the feeling I once had in thinking: <i>What if Peyton Manning never gets a Super Bowl ring?</i> (Thank God! He finally came through...twice.) Of course, Tarantino’s work is the kind of divisive, especially this past decade, that doesn’t really play with the preferential nature of the Oscar ballot. I suppose my point is that we should hope that a Tarantino film wins that kind of big at the Oscars. And, for me, this one feels like the one that should do it, even if it seems like it likely won’t.</div>
<br />
So, when I considered what I would do for <a href="http://www.largeassmovieblogs.com/2020/01/the-lamb-devours-the-oscars-2020-roster.html" target="_blank">The LAMB's annual Devouring the Oscars series</a> this year, I jumped right on this one. <br />
<br />
<i>Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood</i> is Tarantino’s first GREAT movie since <i>Inglourious Basterds</i>. Set over one long winter's night and day and one wild summer night, it is a movie that feels as original as anything Tarantino has made, despite its historical references. After my opening night screening at the Belcourt in Nashville (on 35mm!!!), my buddy Joshua and I both couldn't help agreeing that we'd never seen anything like it. I even said those words: "I've never seen anything like it." It moves differently than any movie I've ever seen. There's a slowness that carries most of the runtime that somehow immersed me, certainly more so than the deliberate first hour plus of <i>The Hateful Eight</i> (the one Tarantino I outright hate).<br />
<br />
The slowness works here, in part, due to the quality of a small handful of long scenes and the equity of attention paid to the two leads: Leonardo DiCaprio as Rick Dalton, a borderline washed up former action star and TV cowboy, the lead of NBC's long-running <i>Bounty Law</i> now playing the heavy in a run of TV guest spots, and Brad Pitt as Cliff Booth, his stunt double, driver, and right-hand man. Within that is the adventures of Sharon Tate (Robbie), newly married to Roman Polanski (seen but never heard) and living next door to Rick with movie hairdresser Jay Sebring (Emile Hirsch) among various fancy friends.<br />
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That long February day in 1969 finds the three stories intertwined...with Tate's breezily interjected. Scenes play out at great length and are full of brilliant levels of detail. Rick on the set of "Lancer," his new young co-star, and an Oscar-worthy breakdown and rebound. Cliff and his sordid possible past, his run-in with a hitchhiking hippie girl (Margaret Qualley) and the Manson Family, who are squatting on his old friend George Spahn's (Bruce Dern, in a hilarious short cameo) Movie Ranch and an Oscar-worthy masterclass in patience, ferocity, cool, and tenderness only Brad Pitt can deliver (complete with two beatdowns). Their respective locations and situations reflecting their roles as partners and friends: one shooting a Western, one living one. Sharon Tate breezes through with pure happiness, a symbol of Hollywood at the time, a newlywed be-bopping into a book store and stopping off at a movie house to giddily watch the actual Sharon Tate in <i>The Wrecking Crew</i>, starring Dean Martin--a brilliant Tarantino touch. Robbie's performance is magical. Her presence is much like that of Tate's: You are instantly taken with a pure positivity and that looming sadness of your own knowledge of history.<br />
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Then, the movie skips ahead and Tarantino turns everything up to eleven: the tension, the comedy, the love, that final sequence on Cielo Drive. <br />
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<i>Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood</i> is the story of what we know happened vs. what we wished had happened. It fiercely blends truth and reality (featuring a host of look-alike actors playing very real people) with Hollywood machinations and magic. It plays on our expectations and rewards us with the possibility of a time as it should have been remembered. It contains a character in Charles Manson, represented by Tex (Austin Butler), Sadie (Mikey Madison), and Katie (Madisen Beaty) as those who would brutally murder Sharon Tate and her friends, more tangibly evil by a mile than any other Tarantino character (Hitler notwithstanding). It counters that with its own over-the-top violence, yes, but it is a violence in service of a love of that time and place, Hollywood in 1969, its true main character, a time marked by a crime that would end the free-loving 60s, turn “hippies” into extremists, and place the nation in a wave of 1970s fear and anxiety. The hopeful notes that Tarantino delivers in this revision counter that violence with pure love, friendship, the nicest and most likable Tarantino protagonists since Jackie Brown and Max Cherry. <br />
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Brad Pitt's turn as Cliff Booth may be forever embedded in me. For all the huge showiness of Leo's terrific performance (complete with tics and stutters and emotional breaks) as Rick Dalton, there is the quiet, assured cool of Brad. I am forever grateful to Tarantino for introducing Cliff Booth to the world. Cliff is hard, violent, his past worth several tough questions, but he fully embodies the notion of best friend. He is the type of guy that other men are drawn to because he makes us feel powerful simply by how comfortable he is in his own skin. He supports with kindness and protects with grit. He has Rick's best interest at heart always. He makes Rick a winner. And the mixture of humor and violence he retaliates with in the film’s much-discussed finale worked like a charm in both of my theater screenings: gasps, laughs, roars, cheers. <br />
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I loved this movie. I went back to the theater twice (and have watched a few more times on that beautiful 4K Blu-ray). Tarantino brings the wild fun, the star power, and works his newfound interest in uneven narrative structure to new heights with beautifully shot (by Robert Richardson), luxuriously long scenes that play with perfect comedic pitch and/or dramatic tension. It is, above all else, a love letter from Tarantino to a time he can only remember as perfect, when he was a young boy who moved to Hollywood from rural East Tennessee. It is an experience of history, artifice, expectations, and remembrance of what was, what might've been, what has and what could be. <br />
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It has both Hollywood and Once Upon a Time... in its title.<br />
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It's a fairy tale. A worthy one. <br />
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<b><u>Best Picture Nominees (ranked)</u></b></div>
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9.<i> Jojo Rabbit </i>(not screened; going soon)<br />
8. <i>Joker</i><br />
7. <i>1917 </i>(will win)<br />
6. <i>Ford v Ferrari</i><br />
5. <i>The Irishman</i><br />
4. <i>Little Women</i><br />
3. <i>Parasite</i><br />
2. <i>Marriage Story</i><br />
1. <i>Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood </i>(should win) </div>
Kevin Powershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04219017960488448934noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6075473672000095925.post-5039356047060148632020-01-23T06:00:00.000-05:002020-01-23T06:00:03.267-05:00Devouring the Oscars -- Best Screenplay (Original)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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A mystery inside of a mystery inside of a hilarious commentary on wealth. The story of the finality of a marriage that finds us where we're at, and at who we are, and demolishes us with the highs and lows of love. A war picture that is pretty much just a picture that circles back on itself and little more. A tale of two friends in two places at the same time: one making a Western, one living one, and the young actress next door. And a mystery and then a mystery and then a few more mysteries inside a mystery inside a powerful, hilarious, and tragic commentary on wealth.<br />
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The nominees for Original Screenplay at the 92nd Academy Awards are all pros. Only two of them have been up for this category before. Only one will walk away with the trophy, the third of his career in the category.<br />
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Rian Johnson's script for <i>Knives Out</i> not only found its way to the screen as the funniest movie I saw in 2019 but also found a way to make us hear how we sound when we talk the modern political discourse. I reveled in it while I watched it unfold and rejoiced its clever nature when it was done. We are lucky to have such a purely original voice as Rian Johnson in the American cinema. He gave us Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), a character I think we're sure to see again. He gave a young actress (Ana de Armas) the chance to power an entire film. And he left no holes in any of the donuts, as far as I could suss out.<br />
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Noah Baumbach's script for <i>Marriage Story</i> seems to have bothered some people. People finding Adam Driver's delivery of one particular fight scene unrealistic. How lucky are those people! I wonder how many of us are living with fist-size holes in our walls. I wonder how many of us have begged for forgiveness on our knees, weeping. Baumbach gets it all. His writing is gentle, even when vicious. It invites us into the intimacies of a couple and their son warmly. It lets us feel and react to every turn in its central tension, a divorce between two good people. And there's a good reason this film is not called Divorce Story. It's because of Baumbach's touch as a writer. He lets us into moments of love so perfectly placed that we would just as soon forget all that just to remember that all of it is simply, well, "being alive."<br />
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Sam Mendes has never been a screenwriter, and it shows. This is his first writing credit in a career of twenty years. His writing partner, Krysty Wilson-Cairns (mostly a TV writer) is new to the big movie game as well. Weird they are nominated in this category, and weird of the Academy to only nominate four-and-a-half movies for Original Screenplay this year, am I right? Seriously, <i>1917 </i>is not a whole movie. It's missing both character and story. Thankfully, it won't win this one, while it wins everything else. I suppose I can praise it for its cleverness. It does indeed come full circle, in a way, and was planned from the start as a one-long-take film. I suppose having to write to that makes it a unique venture. But I question where Chris Nolan's screenplay nom was for <i>Dunkirk </i>a couple years ago, a work that is far and away a better narrative-bending feat of writing.<br />
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Quentin Tarantino's best film in a decade features a time and place as its stars. Its greatest success. Within that is a supporting cast of players beholden to the movement of time. Rick Dalton's (Leo) long, hungover day on set. Cliff Booth's (Brad Pitt) run-in with a hitchhiking hippie girl (Margaret Qualley) and the Manson Family on Spahn's Movie Ranch, complete with backstory and two beatdowns, an Oscar-worthy masterclass in patience, ferocity, cool, and tenderness only Brad Pitt can deliver. Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) breezing through with pure happiness, a symbol of that time and place, a newlywed be-bopping into a book store and stopping off at a movie house to giddily watch the actual Sharon Tate in <i>The Wrecking Crew</i>, starring Dean Martin--a brilliant Tarantino touch. And that looming sadness, your own knowledge of that time and place, and the dramatic irony of knowing what you know, while waiting to see what will happen. Oh! And does something happen!<br />
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Bong's <i>Parasite, </i>co-written by Han Jin Won, is the script of the year. It plays an angle on an international discourse on wealth inequality that resonates with Americans today as easily as the Korean people for whom it was written. A desperate family running tiny cons, working their fingers to the bone, making ends meet in a world with no jobs, even for the able-bodied. Then, the long-con, a building of those mysteries I mentioned at the top, the assimilation into service of a wealthy family, a return to indentured servitude, this time by choice, and the toll that takes on a new era of lost people. And it's funny...as hell, like non-stop, until it isn't anymore and it's just the messy, violent, fucked up world in which we all try to live. It's a masterclass of story construction and character, all fully realized by a cast of little known (to Americans) all-stars, who just won the big American acting prize as a team at the Screen Actors Guild Awards.<br />
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So, how will it go? Who's takes the prize? </div>
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I'll work that out here in terms of how I would rank them:<br />
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5. Sam Mendes & Krysty Wilson-Cairns, <i>1917</i> (Why are you here? Where is Lulu Wang's <i>The Farewell? </i>Where is the Safdie Brothers' <i>Uncut Gems? </i>Where is Jordan Peele's <i>Us?</i> Ari Aster's <i>Midsommar? </i>Come on!! It'll lose here, but...???)<br />
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4. Rian Johnson, <i>Knives Out </i>(Wouldn't hurt my feelings if it won. It won't.)<br />
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3. Noah Baumbach, <i>Marriage Story</i> (Again, it won't win, but it'd be cool if it did. My personal favorite of the year...until I re-watched <i>Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood.</i>)<br />
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2. Quentin Tarantino, <i>Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood</i> (The clear winner at this point, and I don't mind that at all.)<br />
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1. Bong Joon-ho & Han Jin Won, <i>Parasite</i> (Though he'll likely lose to QT, Bong and his co-writer have crafted a truly timeless wonder of a story here, and I would love to see him sneak in and take it.)<br />
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Kevin Powershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04219017960488448934noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6075473672000095925.post-56283421179633746562020-01-04T10:42:00.000-05:002020-01-04T10:42:39.548-05:00Saturday Speaks (with Little Women, Cute Michelle Pfeiffer...and Links)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b>Thoughts on Movies and Whatever Else</b></div>
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<b>December 29, 2019 to January 4, 2020</b></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b><u><br /></u></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Part 1: Speaks in Movies Lines--A Column</b></span></div>
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<b><b>Be a Man! See "Little Women"</b></b></div>
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Guys, seriously, if you're still walking around in the year 2020 dismissing movies as "Chick Flicks," then I just don't know what to do with you. Go see "Little Women," I don't know...</div>
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Speaking of "Little Women"... maybe I do have a few ideas… <br />
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On Thursday, <a href="https://twitter.com/rkylesmith" target="_blank">Kyle Smith</a> of the National Review, famed conservative magazine turned mass-scale Internet troll, wrote <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/of-course-men-arent-interested-in-little-women/" target="_blank">a short op-ed</a> titled "Of Course Men Aren't Interested in 'Little Women'."<br />
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I don't expect anything out of the National Review, but I personally don't know anyone who thinks like this anymore, and I avoid people that I think might think like that, which is wrong of me, an unwelcome by-product of life in America right now, the most divisive time in my life time. <br />
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I should be trying to bridge divides. We all should. The world is and should be those shades of gray we like to talk about. (Movies can help with this, you know!) <br />
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The worst thing about Smith's tiny little three-paragraphs of division: he thinks he can speak for all men. And he thinks this: "It’s a peculiar feature of our culture that men who behave in predictably masculine ways find themselves chastised and scolded for not being more feminine."<br />
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Pffffftttt! <br />
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First, nobody, not even the Washington Post op-ed he cites, is scolding all men. It is not harming anyone’s sacred masculinity.<br />
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The only scolded men in this case are the ones going on Twitter talking about being inconvenienced at the prospect of sitting through "Little Women" or being incredibly homophobic about having to go see "Little Women," as if a film about nice young women coming-of-age after the Civil War is going to turn them.<br />
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Second, it's not peculiar to want people to branch out, leave their comfort zone, be delighted by a delightful story of family and kindness.<br />
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Finally, I want to speak about choices. Smith does indicate, in his final paragraph, that we indeed have choices when it comes to movies. He writes, "It’s a great big country. People of all tastes can find something to their liking."<br />
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I'll admit: I avoid certain movies and TV shows because they just don't feel like me. That's fine. It's fine if someone doesn't want to see "Little Women." But making it because it’s about women is an antiquated reason to not go see a movie. Ok, Boomer? <br />
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My job as a lover of movies and someone who wishes to influence what people choose to see is to be open and honest and populist. I do believe that every movie is for everyone. We give it a chance and see how it works. I’m not perfect on this, myself. Ask my wife. <br />
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But to go to the length that Smith does to diminish an entire gender to only liking movies aligned with that gender is wrong. These notions must die. <br />
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Smith follows his line about taste and choices, ends his piece with this: “It’s not necessary for men to become women." <br />
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This is what the divisive biases of publications like the National Review do. They continue to black and white everything. They further divides between us, men and women, in this case. And that is wrong. <br />
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It is not necessary for men to become women and nobody is asking for that anyway.<br />
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It is necessary for men to understand women. And to love them as equals. And to consider enjoying the things their mothers, wives, daughters, granddaughters, sisters, nieces, etc., enjoy.<br />
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And to be honest, I don't know any man who wouldn't want to sit with Laura Dern, Saoirse Ronan, Emma Watson, and Florence Pugh for two hours. I mean… the crap is wrong with you?!<br />
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The best way to understand anybody is to be curious about what they enjoy. It is to seek out titles like "Little Women" not because someone is telling you it will make you more or less in tune with your gender or another gender but because you are a human being who likes sharing experiences with others.<br />
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"Little Women," as it happens, is a movie anyone can love. It's a movie I loved and that I felt totally comfortable loving. <br />
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My wife and I choked up at the same points, rejoiced, gasped, held hands during the show, and then talked about how delightful it all was over a big, fat Five Guys Bacon Cheeseburger.<br />
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The <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/dear-men-who-are-afraid-to-see-little-women-you-can-do-this/2019/12/31/9bab49b2-2b46-11ea-bcb3-ac6482c4a92f_story.html" target="_blank">Washington Post piece</a> Kyle Smith is responding to is <a href="https://twitter.com/MonicaHesse" target="_blank">Monica Hesse</a>'s "Dear men who are afraid to see ‘Little Women’: You can do this." In it, she does go a bit on the divisive side, going a little far with the fear aspect of a man going to "Little Women" without a female companion or in the prospect of suggesting to his drinking buddies that they go see it. <br />
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I would be down with any of those options and may even go back to see it again by myself…because it is the equivalent of mainlining warm blankets and is stunning to look at and even profound in the way that Greta Gerwig has restructured the story in order to repeatedly hit you with bursts of emotive power. <br />
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Her gorgeously designed period-perfect re-imagining also works to create nice, modern ironies for the deep-thinking types. (See? It really is for everybody.) <br />
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But let's say you identify as just another guy, a dude who just likes to go to the movies and you want to be a better man, like me say, as your 2020 New Year's Resolution...<br />
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Try this: the manliest thing you can do right now is take the women in your life, perhaps your mother, your wife or girlfriend, your daughters (of any thoughtful age), sisters, any of them, to see Greta Gerwig’s “Little Women.” <br />
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You could even gently joke that you took your Little Women to see “Little Women.” That’s a joke Father March (played in this version by Saul Goodman himself, Bob Odenkirk) would make. I mean...where does the title and the phrase “Little Women” come from, son!? <br />
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You will show them that you love them through this act. You will not be more feminine as a result. <br />
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You will, instead, be the type of masculine the world needs, the type that considers that there is more to the world than a masculinity defined, as Kyle Smith would define it, by buying a ticket for "Rambo: Last Blood.”<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">Part 2: </span></b><b style="font-size: x-large;">Watching Now...</b></div>
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<b>Head to <a href="https://letterboxd.com/kevinknows/" target="_blank">Letterboxd</a> to see my <a href="https://letterboxd.com/kevinknows/films/diary/" target="_blank">Most Recent watches</a> and current <a href="https://letterboxd.com/kevinknows/watchlist/by/release/" target="_blank">Watchlist</a>. Follow me there while you're at it!</b><br />
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<b>Current Movie-Watching Projects</b></div>
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The Decades Project</div>
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I totally dug <a href="http://www.andsoitbeginsfilms.com/2019/12/top-20-films-of-1999.html" target="_blank">Alex's throwback to 1999</a> as a way to close out 2019. It has inspired me to embark on a new thing: The Decades Project. For 2020, I'm going to close my 0-year Blind Spots. I'm starting with the year 2000 and going back every 10 years to 1930 to make a watchlist for the year. The movies will all be selected in the next week or so. I've already caught up with <a href="https://letterboxd.com/kevinknows/film/thirteen-days/" target="_blank">Thirteen Days</a> and <a href="https://letterboxd.com/kevinknows/film/chocolat/" target="_blank">Chocolat</a>, big misses from 2000.<br />
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I hope you'll support me in this endeavor by coming back for my Saturday morning Speaks in Movie Lines post each week.<br />
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Blank Check is My Favorite Movie Podcast</div>
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"Black Check is a podcast about filmographies, directors who have massive success early on in their careers and are given a series of Blank Checks to make whatever crazy passion projects they want. Sometimes those checks clear and sometimes they bounce...baby," says Griffin Newman to open each episode.<br />
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Right now, the boys are on Jonathan Demme. I caught up with <a href="https://letterboxd.com/kevinknows/film/married-to-the-mob/" target="_blank">Married to the Mob</a> (fucking Michelle Pfeiffer...she's so damn cute and charming in this thing) and <a href="https://letterboxd.com/kevinknows/film/philadelphia/" target="_blank">Philadelphia</a> (this week.<br />
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TV Binge</div>
<u style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></u>Finishing <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3526078/" target="_blank">"Schitt's Creek"</a> with my wife right now, a show that really just got too sappy and simple for its own good. Was so damn funny in it first couple seasons and maybe could've been a perfect comedy if they stopped it there. Season 2 Finale is incredible.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Part 3: The Week Past</b></span><br />
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On Monday, my wife and I went to see "Uncut Gems," and, of course, "Little Women." Back-to-back. Pretty wild double feature. Nice actually. We got so riled up on "Uncut Gems" that a brief spat made us miss dinner for having to get back to the theater. So, we ended up hitting Five Guys, and the girl who took our order was ANGRY. She, clearly a teenager herself, kept staring at this group of teenagers just loitering around the place. We came to the idea that the worker was a classmate and was pissed at having to watch these rich West Knoxville kids be jackasses while she has to work. The burgers and fries kicked ass.<br />
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On Tuesday, I bought a really nice beer and a mediocre bottle of sparkling wine and cooked up a mess of black-eyed peas and turnip greens, lots of bacon and salt pork in both, and burned the cornbread. It was delicious and I actually made it to midnight. I spent most of the night crafting <a href="https://letterboxd.com/kevinknows/list/101-best-movies-of-the-2010s/" target="_blank">this son-of-a-bitch</a>, my Top 101 of the 2010s. I hope you enjoy my pick for 101.<br />
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On Wednesday, I got the house to myself for two hours to watch a movie. It ruled.<br />
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On Thursday, Tennessee barely beat Indiana in the Gator Bowl. It ruled.<br />
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On Friday, I wrote all this.<br />
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<b>Movie Blog Stuff I've Dug This Week</b></div>
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<a href="http://www.andsoitbeginsfilms.com/2019/12/top-20-films-of-1999.html" target="_blank">Alex</a>'s Top 20 of 1999 Post, of course.<br />
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<a href="http://twodollarcinema.blogspot.com/2020/01/i-bet-youre-wondering-who-we-are-and.html" target="_blank">M. Brown</a> did Frozen II.<br />
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<a href="http://ramblingfilm.blogspot.com/2020/01/2020-golden-globe-predictions-who-will.html" target="_blank">Brittany</a> dropped her Globes predictions.<br />
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<a href="http://thefilmexperience.net/blog/2020/1/2/38-days-til-oscar-38-year-old-oscar-winners.html" target="_blank">Nathaniel R.</a> looked at 38-year-old Oscar winners.<br />
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<a href="https://cinematiccorner.blogspot.com/2020/01/423-oh-gasoline-links.html" target="_blank">Sati</a> talks Ford v Ferrari v Rush and lots of other things.<br />
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Kevin Powershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04219017960488448934noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6075473672000095925.post-27154182085166108362020-01-01T06:00:00.000-05:002020-01-01T10:17:20.058-05:00More Like a Drug<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: right;">A24</td></tr>
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<b style="text-align: center;">Review: <i>Uncut Gems </i>(dir. Josh and Benny Safdie, 2019)</b></div>
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The Safdie Brothers are not interested in why. They only care about what. What it is to be addicted. What it is to be obsessed. What it is to be 100% aware of your own flaws and stay steadfast on a path of destruction anyway. They showed us this a couple years ago in "Good Time," a story of a failed bank robbery and the ensuing chase from the perspective a grade-A horror of a man played by Robert Pattinson. I would've given them all Oscars, if I got to choose such things. And now they've... nearly... done it again.<br />
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"Uncut Gems" is the story of a gambling addict. It feels like addiction, a desire for a high once felt that may never be felt again. "Uncut Gems" is cocaine, meth, speed, whatever. At least that's my personal analog for it. And I don't use such an obvious metaphor lightly. The film is manic, sad, numb, alive, dead, repeat. It also feels like being on a speedy high. Heart racing, high, then LOW, then on the hunt. I felt physically ill during it at times. My muscles tensed. I may choose not to experience it again. I may not be so lucky. I left thinking Hell No! I don't think I can ever do it again. A day later, I couldn't stop thinking...I can't wait to watch it again.<br />
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Adam Sandler's work is stunning and perhaps the major reason I want to go back for another hit. I have no qualms in going along with pretty much everyone in saying it is top work for a career of laziness marked by some impressive gems along the way. His Howard Ratner, a horrifically compulsive gambler and jeweler who runs a bling store for the flashy, is someone to hate, but we somehow want him to succeed, to clear his debts, to score big even. Sandler plays this excitable hope underneath each moment of pressure and fear and pain and rage placed in Howard's path. Credit to Josh and Benny Safdie for their directorial work, assured and alive, painfully so, as if they want to inject us with the demented seediness of the world of their New York. They offer us the gift of enjoying ourselves while watching a life dissolve into oblivion. Their characters exist on a fringe we find fascinating because they thrive in downfall at top speed with no governor. This is their vision and they have repeatedly assaulted us with it. We keep coming back for more. We think we can help.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: right;">A24</td></tr>
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As a portrait of addiction, "Uncut Gems" may also be considered important, fresh even. So few films are willing to give us such a character and then not let him off the hook. Addicts like Howard have let go of any semblance of control, and this film drops us right into the end of a run of increasingly horrible decisions. It reminds me of the mania of needing another pill, another bump. It makes me ponder what the addicts I have known go/went through on a daily basis, navigating a depraved world at dizzying speed for something that won't help...really. In "Uncut Gems," we get to feel the rock bottom and only that and that's it. Glimmers of hope are but illusions for those of us on the other side of addicts.<br />
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The plot revolves around a rock itself, a chunk of black opal dug out of a mine in Africa, which Howard purchases thinking he can auction it off at way more than its worth. He gets Boston Celtics star Kevin Garnett (playing himself) interested in it through mutual business partner Demany (LaKeith Stanfield). But that is just the latest in a run of failed gambles that have him owing money to various bookies, including his brother-in-law, played powerfully in a rare performance from Eric Bogosian, and his goons, including the bulldog Phil (played by unknown newcomer Keith Williams Richard). Howard's wife (Idina Menzel) and kids are done with him, but he tries to show up. His mistress (Julia Fox) is as loyal as one of her kind can be, and she is one of the film's most surprising delights both in presence and importance to the film's tricky finale. Every performance is perfectly in tune with the endless frenetic energy of the Safdies, captured by cinematographer Darius Khondji's vital handheld camera. Every performance is as knowing as we are of Howard, as influenced as we are by Howard to want to hang on with him, gritting our teeth. Sandler for Oscar is fine by me.<br />
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Watching "Uncut Gems" is knowing you are watching something special. It is an experience, however, that puts me at odds with myself. I have a few issues with its screenplay. A story choice in the end left me incredibly cold, yet, it is a hard drug, after all. And those drugs will you that way too. You love it, you hate it, you're not sure you want to do it again because, now that you've tried it, of course, you know how it ends.<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: "georgia" , "utopia" , "palatino linotype" , "palatino" , serif; font-size: 15.4px; text-align: center;">★★★</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "georgia" , "utopia" , "palatino linotype" , "palatino" , serif; font-size: 15.4px; text-align: center;">★1/2</span><br />
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Screened at Regal Pinnacle in Knoxville, Tennessee. </div>
Kevin Powershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04219017960488448934noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6075473672000095925.post-11609479839621762052019-12-23T06:00:00.000-05:002020-01-01T00:24:35.627-05:00Wrenches Thrown In the Works<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: right;">20th Century Fox</td></tr>
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<b style="text-align: center;"><b style="text-align: center;"><br />Review: <i>Ford v Ferrari </i>(dir. James Mangold, 2019)</b></b></div>
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It seems impossible for any comment on James Mangold's latest crowd-pleaser <i>Ford v Ferrari</i> to not at least make one mention of Dads. And make no mistake, I couldn't help but think of how fucking much my Dad would've loved this movie. Perhaps the best part of the <i>Ford v Ferrari </i>Dad Movie discourse is that it is all in sincerity. People love it <i>because</i> of that. It is indeed a movie to love, something that feels like <i>they just don't make 'em like that anymore</i>. I cannot overstate how loud, fast, and FUN this movie is. I will watch this movie on rainy days for the rest of my life.<br />
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Its the early 1960s and Henry Ford II (Tracy Letts) and his Ford Motor Co. needs a hit. The Edsel had lamed out and the Mustang had yet to arrive. Over it Italy, says Lee Iacocca (Jon Bernthal), top marketing man at Ford, Enzo Ferrari is going under from building cars by hand, which, as a result nobody can afford to buy. But the old Italian boss can build a race car and nobody has beaten Ferrari at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in years. Iacocca and the other suits, including the suitiest of them all, Ford Motor VP Leo Beebe (Josh Lucas), fail spectacularly in a bid to buy Ferrari outright. Ford II, feeling the insult all the way over in Dearborn, sends his boys to war.<br />
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Enter Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon), one of the only Americans, at that point, to have won Le Mans. He designs custom sports cars and sells them to the nouveau riche of the early Baby Boom. He leads race teams on the side and the driver her loves/hates the most is Ken Miles (Christian Bale), a fiery Brit scraping together a living (sort of) as a mechanic. We first meet him poking at a customer, one of those types Shelby sells to, for flooding his engine. The reason: he has bought too much car. Dude can't drive. But Ken can. He's the best.<br />
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Shelby and Miles start to work, bobbing and weaving through the layers of suits as they work to build a car that can do 200 for 24 hours without killing the driver. But the heart of the story lies in the care the filmmakers have taken to flesh out Ken's story. His wife Mollie (Caitriona Balfe) and young son Peter (Noah Joop) are given so much more than most movies would give them, full arcs as important to the overall story as the two leads. The movie also pays more attention than most to the friendship between the two stars, a welcome trend of this year in movies.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: right;">20th Century Fox</td></tr>
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Though a co-lead in a clear two-hander, Bale is the true lead. The themes of humility, patience, friendship, they all hinge on his arc. He is superb as usual--thin, wiry, sarcastic and loud. But that is not to discount Damon, who revs his patented charm straight up to 7000 RPMs, as the smooth-talking Shelby, complete with a somewhat big but still natural Southern drawl. Shelby is a guy caught in the middle of the company men breathing down his neck and his racing buddy, the oil to that corporate vinegar. Within that, he finds ways to break through in scenes of zippy dialogue, sly jabs, and classic hijinks, just to find one more thing to contend with in service of the image, the bottom line. Nevertheless, the screenplay and direction (from James Mangold, a studio "get the job done" man, himself) limit Damon's Shelby to "get the job done" man for most of the movie while offering him little in the way of a true character arc, though the final few scenes of the movie are daring and wholly moving.<br />
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Ultimately, <i>Ford v Ferrari </i>is a movie about the kind of big dreaming of my father's generation. And I appreciate the earnestness of it and the reception of such earnestness by an increasingly cynical community of film critics. I suppose it rises just above "OK, Boomer" territory in the way it does indeed "Damn the Man." It makes us want to punch Josh Lucas in the face but stops short of acting on it, and there we find the movie's main lesson...the quest for humility in a world of greed, control, and competitions at blinding speed. It's about finding your own identity, keeping your own identity under the rule of bureaucracy. (Ask me about being a teacher right now...). And that kind of humility comes from friendship.<br />
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Matt Damon, Christian Bale, and the director James Mangold have teamed up to make something really special here in a year with several special films about male friendship. It exists alongside this year's major hits from Tarantino and Scorsese, creating a small universe of movies that mark the influence of men on other men in <i>positive</i> ways and highlights how difficult and special that is. These movies are exploring aggression, the toll of expectations on aging men, and the violence of it all, and how we overcome (or try to overcome) the wrenches thrown in the path of a life's work.<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: "georgia" , "utopia" , "palatino linotype" , "palatino" , serif; font-size: 15.4px; text-align: center;">★★★</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "georgia" , "utopia" , "palatino linotype" , "palatino" , serif; font-size: 15.4px; text-align: center;">★1/2</span><br />
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Screened at Regal Pinnacle in Knoxville, Tennessee. </div>
Kevin Powershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04219017960488448934noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6075473672000095925.post-1281903570601399822019-12-19T06:00:00.000-05:002019-12-19T06:00:03.605-05:00Thursday Movie Picks -- Childs Actors Venture Out<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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The movie where the gifted little kid actor takes off his/her clothes and grows up, at least in the case of my picks this week. Sometimes it plays better than others. Either way, the ones who become the best need this sort of breakthrough in order to simply make the transition to "real actor." All three of these actors have proven that they had an ability to transcend what made them famous first.<br />
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So... It's Child Actor Ventures Out of Typecasting week as part of Wandering through the Shelves' <a href="http://wanderingthroughtheshelves.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Thursday Movie Picks</a>.<br />
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Here are my picks:<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Joseph Gordon-Levitt in <i>Mysterious Skin</i> (dir. Gregg Araki, 2004)</b></span></div>
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Dark, tragic, oddly beautiful film. Stellar performance. Total breakthrough.</div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Natalie Portman in <i>Closer</i> (dir. Mike Nichols, 2004)</b></span></div>
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Silly, overly melodramatic film. Unforgettable performance. Total smoke show.</div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Shia LaBeouf in <i>Nymphomaniac</i> (dir. Lars von Trier, 2014)</b></span></div>
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Disgusting, completely irresponsible film. Gross performance. Total scum-bum.</div>
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Kevin Powershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04219017960488448934noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6075473672000095925.post-86909404436169637142019-12-15T12:45:00.000-05:002019-12-15T12:50:53.816-05:00Someone to Hold Me Too Close<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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My 18-month old boy was up from a nap and walking around making a bunch of noise as my wife and I watched the final few scenes of <i>Marriage Story </i>in our living room. Netflix had allowed us to experience this movie in pieces, a fact with which parents have to contend. And I felt so very moved because of all of that. There's just no other way to put it: Noah Baumbach's latest film is an honest, painful, lovely and loving experience. It is aptly titled. "It's what is is," to quote another recent Netflix conversation-starter and awards-contender. It is a common story, the story of most of us.<br />
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We aren't all successful theater directors like Charlie (Adam Driver), but we are obsessed with our own success and driven by our work. We aren't all married to Nicole (Scarlett Johansson), a once famous-ish young actress from a successful teen movie, but we may very well feel trapped in a life of the things we never explored. And we probably couldn't afford lawyers like Nora Fanshaw (Laura Dern) or Jay Marotta (Ray Liotta). Dern and Liotta steal one scene together that is simply a powerhouse of character acting, vicious, funny, and, like most things in this film, true.<br />
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We might need, and probably <i>should </i>hire, more of a Bert Spitz (Alan Alda), someone willing to admit the nastiness of divorce proceedings in kindness, but we are children of divorce and sadness or we may be divorced ourselves, and/or we've fought with our spouses and we know how real it feels when we're staring at the end of something so special, losing sight of it, finding it again, allowing ourselves to feel pain because the love on the other side is/was/has been so good. At one point, in the performance of the year, Driver, as Charlie, sings those lines from Sondheim's "Being Alive" (from the musical <i>Company</i>), and we are moved by the need of a song to soothe us, or to help us let it all out, or in, and that all the regret would be worth it.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQf9u0ugxScNcbn5Mo3mwUJq0RO__WVxvfDf4jPnUcS8jqk8gzpPz0pFac2zhNAnBH-Rhw1jqyk4HcyNzfpAxHXc2VVNfR9wi8T6QiOoZXw3JPv3W9PaovQsQHORck65yARLjb9OHgL8aV/s1600/being+alive.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="934" data-original-width="1600" height="232" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQf9u0ugxScNcbn5Mo3mwUJq0RO__WVxvfDf4jPnUcS8jqk8gzpPz0pFac2zhNAnBH-Rhw1jqyk4HcyNzfpAxHXc2VVNfR9wi8T6QiOoZXw3JPv3W9PaovQsQHORck65yARLjb9OHgL8aV/s400/being+alive.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
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Charlie could be a better husband and father, a certainly common story. Driver is great at simultaneously making us both love and hate him, often within the same scene. The way he spits his venom AND inspires hope in the film's now-famous fight scene. The way he gets up to sing, then sits back down, but can't stop so gets back up again, and just belts it out. The way he bandages his silly wound at the end of a visit from a court-appointed interviewer. The way the final scene just.... Four of the year's most memorable movies moments for me, all in the movie's superior final act.<br />
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Nicole is a good mother but wants the freedom to grow professionally, a certainly common story. In her performance, we see moments highlighting the divide between regret and resolve. We see the difficulty in a marriage's give-and-take and fully realize that we often feel as if we are holding back to give to our partner and vice versa. Johansson is being undersold here. She is vital to the movie's success and great with Driver. Nicole's side of the story draws us into the often unnoticed power-dynamic in marriages that favors the man (in this and most cases), as Dern's character rants: "So, you have to be perfect, and Charlie can be a fuck up and it doesn't matter. You will always be held to a different, higher standard. And it's fucked up, but that's the way it is."<br />
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Baumbach's film invites us into the intimacies of Charlie and Nicole, and their son Henry, warmly. It lets us feel and react to every turn in its central tension, a divorce between two good people. It comments certainly on what the process of divorce does to people who should be focused on being less self-involved, present, better parents (they can hardly deal with their son's struggles with reading), lovers, people. But there's a good reason this film is not called <i>Divorce Story. </i>It's because of Baumbach's touch as a writer and director, his camera solemnly observant in this case, less active and stylish than in this film's clear spiritual prequel, the 2005 "divorce story" from the child's perspective, Baumbach's "<i>The Squid and the Whale</i>. It lets us into moments of love so perfectly placed that we would just as soon forget all that just to remember that all of it is simply, well, "being alive."<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: right;">Netflix</td></tr>
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We don't have to be wealthy New York artists to know these things. We don't have to be semi-famous actresses on the way back up. Baumbach is ultimately too gentle here to allow such things to matter. Universal is what this movie seeks and what it gets. We see this film from where we are, and that makes it important. Netflix is right for this movie, for it has allowed it a huge audience that needs a slap of reality in its fiction.<br />
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There are detractors, to be sure, people finding Driver's performance and one particular fight scene unrealistic. How lucky are those people! But, still, I wonder how many of them (us) are living with fist-size holes in our walls. I wonder how many of us have begged for forgiveness on our knees, weeping. I wonder how many of us realize that the sort of love that brings us to the sort of emotional highs and lows of Charlie and Nicole is what it's all about.<br />
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In all the complication, it's simple really: <i>Marriage Story</i> is the best movie of the year.<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: "georgia" , "utopia" , "palatino linotype" , "palatino" , serif; font-size: 15.4px; text-align: center;">★★★</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "georgia" , "utopia" , "palatino linotype" , "palatino" , serif; font-size: 15.4px; text-align: center;">★</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "georgia" , "utopia" , "palatino linotype" , "palatino" , serif; font-size: 15.4px; text-align: center;">★</span></div>
Kevin Powershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04219017960488448934noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6075473672000095925.post-51451079349584865462019-12-12T06:00:00.000-05:002019-12-12T06:00:00.534-05:00Thursday Movie Picks -- Super Long Titles<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnGkg01MS4XkuV661fgfObF3CwVsgRPAEpTZVXsNmVB1Nne8J3Or3jk-VNuCtkvk_XfRgftH5fUMc2HSSyaksEXfA65gK2FZ8CxoKdHKo0bio4hrxyK2iFdGrKbMjQW3Gfh6tYaX3K8Vro/s1600/Jesse+%25281%2529.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="393" data-original-width="780" height="322" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnGkg01MS4XkuV661fgfObF3CwVsgRPAEpTZVXsNmVB1Nne8J3Or3jk-VNuCtkvk_XfRgftH5fUMc2HSSyaksEXfA65gK2FZ8CxoKdHKo0bio4hrxyK2iFdGrKbMjQW3Gfh6tYaX3K8Vro/s640/Jesse+%25281%2529.png" width="640" /></a></div>
I'm playing this week...for the first time in a long time...because I want to get back in the game. My grad school journey is winding down, and I'm ready to start talking movies with everyone again.<br />
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So...welcome back...and welcome me back! I'll be around to everyone's blogs soon, reading and commenting on your great writing.<br />
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I love a good, long movie title. And I have some gems to offer up this week as part of Wandering through the Shelves' <a href="http://wanderingthroughtheshelves.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Thursday Movie Picks</a>.<br />
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Here are my picks:<br />
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<b><i>To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar</i></b><br />
<b>dir. Beeban Kidron, 1995</b><br />
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Patrick Swayze and Wesley Snipes in drag? Sure, Mom, let's go. And she loved this movie, and so did I. It's a sweet film about three drag queens on a journey to the "Miss Drag Queen of America Contest." They get sidetracked in a hick town, and make life better for everyone there, especially the oppressed women, one of whom (played by Stockard Channing) is a victim of domestic violence. I have nothing but fond memories of this, a light comedy with a strong, progressive message in many ways ahead of its time.<br />
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<b><i>Don't Be a Menace to South Central while Drinking Your Juice in the Hood</i></b><br />
<b>dir. Paris Barclay, 1996</b><br />
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If you came of age and the '90s and didn't watch this on repeat, you're a liar. Right? Or was that just my crew? Anyway, Shawn and Marlon Wayans play two characters walking through a spoof of the various "hood" movies of the era, most notably the films of John Singleton and the Hughes Brothers. It's hilarious, bending all the tropes of the genre into near-breaking points at times, but mostly landing with a light in all the darkness of race relations at the time.<br />
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<b><i>The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford</i></b><br />
<b>dir. Andrew Dominick, 2007</b><br />
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Quite simply, it's still the most gorgeously shot film I've ever seen. It has a Nick Cave and Warren Ellis score to match. And what's more Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck (as the title characters) give career performances. Too few people saw this movie in theaters, where it really sang its tragic song of violence, celebrity, and obsession on an American frontier in flux. Its opening rhythms, Hugh Ross' voiceover narration of Ron Hansen's prose are burned in my mind, and its languid pace (the detractor for some) allows the narrative to breathe, settle, and inject you with the melancholy of being an outsider to the very world you feel destined to inhabit.<br />
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Kevin Powershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04219017960488448934noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6075473672000095925.post-46824500564782891312019-12-11T21:26:00.001-05:002019-12-11T21:26:47.365-05:00Taking What's Owed<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: right;">STXfilms</td></tr>
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<b>Review: <i>Hustlers </i>(dir. Lorene Scafaria, 2019)</b></div>
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The hype is real for me. J. Lo's performance. The movie itself. A movie that critic David Sims of <i>The Atlantic </i>rightly called "a lush, lavish joy that's difficult to forget." And that's not just because it is one of the most visually striking films of the year (and not just because J. Lo, at 50, is some sort of freak-goddess of sexual power). In its way, Lorene Scafaria's film, based on the story of NYC strippers who took control of the excess of their excessive world and got way more than a stack of singles.<br />
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Constance Wu has been downplayed in the hype. The charisma of Jennifer Lopez, the actress, has never been stronger, which places her at the front of the collective mind on this film. But Wu is the star, the main protagonist, and her performance as Destiny, a daughter of immigrants raised by her grandparents, finding a life in a seedy world under the wing of Ramona (J. Lo), the older sister or mother figure Destiny (actually Dorothy) needed, is one of my favorites of the year.<br />
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The journey of this story plays a bit like Scorsese <i>a la Goodfellas. </i>Many have tried. Few succeed. Works for me here. I love a female-powered, female-led, female-directed take on the style. The stripping scenes early on find the right balance between the giddy fun and the knowing seediness of strip clubs (you'll definitely know what I mean if you've been to one). The framing device, a reporter (Julia Stiles) interviewing Destiny after the fact, grinding the story into itself bit by bit, is a smart move by Scafaria, the screenwriter. It allows us to feel the arc of the 2008 financial crisis, moving us effortlessly from 2007 and then to the post-bubble burst, where the busted out day traders lost their ability to sling money around. Alas, the high rollers were still rolling high, so there's the next move for Ramona and Destiny and an assortment of "sisters" willing to get in on the main con, drugging these wealthy men into handing over their credit cards in the VIP room.<br />
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It's delightful watching these women take what they deserve. (One of the early capers is scored to Scott Walker's "Next" and pretty much represents why I love movies.) But it's also sad that a line of work exists for women that is purely in service of the id of men with too much money. <i>Hustlers </i>tackles that too, judgment-free. It's refreshing. Lesser movies would have a character try to convince Dorothy that stripping is bad and that she's better than that. Undereducated women, especially women of color, have few options, and they know going in it that this job ain't no picnic. But it pays...well, and even better for those willing to test its limits, or even surpass them. This movie knows that too. Again, it's this vein that Wu taps so well. Her performance is outstanding. She doesn't want to be doing what she's doing, but if she's going to do it, she's going to get hers. She needs money, and she wants it on her terms. That is a message of power. Men take what they want, and we applaud them. A woman does it, and she is [insert negative comment about women here].<br />
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<i>Hustlers</i> is about women who care for each other, look out for each other, and forge friendships that transcend wrong-doing and wouldn't even consider betrayal. J. Lo's Ramona is a woman who nurtures and supports. Even when she is doing the wrong thing, taking it one step too far, she has more than enough love to give. Destiny constantly gets mad at her for taking in the desperate cases, former stripper friends-turned-drug addicts, petty criminals landing in jail for this or that. She is always there to bail them out, and too trusting, the downfall of many a good person.<br />
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One of my favorite movies of the last few years is David Mackenzie's <i>Hell or High Water, </i>the story of ne'er-do-well brothers from West Texas who take to robbing banks to save their family's farm. They are nice, poor people, who have been given no other choice in the wake of the irresponsibility of rich White men born to make other rich White men richer. It's so fun to watch. And that's it...<i>Hustlers</i> is a slick, fun movie, also loaded with perfectly performed pathos, about good people turned outlaw because they've been given no other choice.<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: "georgia" , "utopia" , "palatino linotype" , "palatino" , serif; font-size: 15.4px; text-align: center;">★★★</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "georgia" , "utopia" , "palatino linotype" , "palatino" , serif; font-size: 15.4px; text-align: center;">★1/2</span><br />
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Screened at home on Blu-Ray from Redbox. </div>
Kevin Powershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04219017960488448934noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6075473672000095925.post-40312678899462063562019-12-11T00:19:00.001-05:002019-12-11T00:20:26.286-05:00This Gun's for Hire <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: right;">Warner Bros. Pictures</td></tr>
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<b>Review: <i>Blinded by the Light</i> (dir. Gurinder Chadha, 2019)</b></div>
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I am someone who loves. Full stop. It is hard to be a "critic" when you are that way. I have trouble being snarky or controversial. I have to actually try hard to not be nice about the movies, books, and songs I watch, read, or listen to. I love them all, and, honestly, I have the luxury of avoiding those media that I feel I might not like, so I do. With movies, I seek out what's driving the conversation of the moment and pounce, and the ones that don't feel as well-received I avoid.<br />
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I say all this because I knew I would love <i>Blinded by the Light</i> while I watched the trailer for the first time at some point last summer. English teen, from a family of Pakistani immigrants, falls in love with the words (and music) of Bruce Springsteen? Movie was made for me, I thought. And it's confirmed. It's a gem.<br />
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Javed (Viveik Kalra) is the kind of teenager I was...wanting to be cool, to get the girl, to fit in (my weight and self-esteem are what made me feel <i>outside</i>), and I found solace in song lyrics, wrote everything I wrote in adoration of the thing, and, unlike Javed, I never really found my way out of that until I was in my mid-20s (at least) and even now (at 35), I struggle to criticize even the books I don't like as such in my weekly discussion posts as part of the graduate Seminar in American Lit course I'm in this semester. It's because I love everything. I do see the good, where I don't see it other places, particularly in myself.<br />
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<i>Blinded by the Light</i> taught me something about myself, as I expected it would given my own love for 1980s pop culture and The Boss. Javed's life is not what he wants, as we expect going in...this is a story that has been told countless times in countless ways. His father Malik (Kulvinder Ghir) is that type of father who believes that success is getting a good job that puts food on the table and keeps the lights on and the only jobs that can pull that off are lawyer, banker, estate agent, etc. Malik is a recently laid-off auto worker. His wife Noor (Meera Ganatra) has to take on extra sewing and mending to help out. Javed's sisters wait to be married off. And what little work Javed can find offers an extra few bucks into the family's coffers. That Javed's suburb of Luton is experiencing a wave of white nationalistic attitudes towards immigrants like his father and family only adds a perfect here and now for today's white westerner.<br />
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Javed is lost. He wants to be a writer and has kept a journal every year of his life for a decade, now heading into his 17th year, but he knows writing is not a possibility in his future. But magic happens. A new friend Roops (Aaron Phagura), jean jacket clad, gives him the keys to the kingdom of himself, Bruce Springsteen's <i>Born in the USA </i>and <i>Darkness on the Edge of Town</i> on cassette tape. And he goes for it anyway, following the English path in his 6th Form A-Levels, behind his father's back. He impresses his English professor (the always lovely Hailey Atwell). He starts succeeding. He is living a lie. We know the rest.<br />
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But when movies do familiar things well, when they add just a little extra, we get to see why we love these tropes so much all over again. The movie pulsates with Springsteen's lyrical genius. Director Gurinda Chadha (of <i>Bend It Like Beckham </i>fame) creates space for small music video-esque set pieces where words flash around screen, fly around Javed's head, and enter our consciousness. The cheesy sequence where Javed, Roops, and Javed's new girlfriend, the liberal activist Eliza (Nell Williams) dance through the streets of Luton to "Born to Run" is the sort of thing I didn't even realized I live for. I sang along, and might've even if I'd seen this film at a theater. It's just that good, and the movie is full of these breaks to the monotony of the routine plot.<br />
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In the end, this movie is about love. Full stop. It's about doing what you love, following your dreams, finding truth, and, actually, it's not about hero worship at all. It's about taking your heroes into your life and synthesizing their words (in this case) and using them as fuel to live a life for yourself that includes everyone in your life. After all, Springsteen constantly wrote about the struggles of life in a small town (what hooks us all in the first place, including Javed), but his words say more about the simple beauty of that life than they do in encouraging one to burn bridges and leave everything behind.<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, "Palatino Linotype", Palatino, serif; font-size: 15.4px; text-align: center;">★★★</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, "Palatino Linotype", Palatino, serif; font-size: 15.4px; text-align: center;">★1/2</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, "Palatino Linotype", Palatino, serif; font-size: 15.4px; text-align: center;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, "Palatino Linotype", Palatino, serif; font-size: 15.4px; text-align: center;">Screened at home on Blu-Ray from Redbox. </span></div>
Kevin Powershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04219017960488448934noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6075473672000095925.post-62425297820730962742019-11-25T22:45:00.002-05:002019-11-25T22:45:32.935-05:00The Saddest Music Video<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b>Thoughts in retrospect on the masterful video for "Hurt" by Johnny Cash. </b></div>
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"I cried the first time I saw it. If you were moved to that kind of emotion in the course of a two-hour movie, it would be a great accomplishment. To do it in a four-minute music video is shocking.” - Rick Rubin<br />
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I’ve only cried at one music video in my entire life. (The one in the YouTube clip you hopefully just played and watched in full.) <br />
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This is coming from a ‘90s kids, who in the summer of 1994 alone watched no less than four hours of music videos a day, mostly of the CMT persuasion but we, of course, found ourselves, my little sister and I and various friends sliding through the revolving door of my Mom’s house, over at VH1 and MTV, especially as the years rolled by. By the time I entered high school in the Fall of 1998, the music video was still alive and well, though my taste had slipped to a past before the music video and eventually my love would turn to the vinyl LP, spinning the past over scratches of the dusty bin of Mom’s records gifted me along with a brand new turntable over Christmas of my 17th year. <br />
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“The needle tears a hole…<br />
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The music video persisted, as I found my way to my dorm room at Nicks Hall as a Freshman at Middle Tennessee State University. And, one morning, among the cloud of a Saturday morning bong hit, I flipped over to VH1 to find Johnny Cash, an artist I only vaguely knew at the time for older hits like “Ring of Fire,” stately and tired, the star of one final music video, a cover of a nearly forgotten Nine Inch Nails song called “Hurt.” <br />
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“The old familiar sting….<br />
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The video opens with shots of gilded relics in the home of Johnny Cash and his wife June. Cash himself is gilded as well, with light, a welcome choice by the team that made the video under the direction of Mark Romanek, a prolific music video director of the ‘90s, who found his highest praise upon the release of the video for the Nine Inch Nails hit “Closer.” The video cuts quickly between past and present, old video footage of Cash on a train, on stage, delivering a line in a Hollywood movie, and those relics of a time gone by inside his home and, most tragically, in his museum, The House of Cash, which Romanek chose as a location to highlight the frailty of the elder Cash. He would die only three months after shooting the video. His wife, June, enters towards the end of the less than four minute running time of the video, looking on at her fading husband longingly. She would die first, only three months later. <br />
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“Try to kill it all away....<br />
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Johnny Cash’s life, for those of us who have seen Walk the Line, or even having simply listened to his songs over the years, was not easy. He struggled to find success until he was a bit older than most, worked hard to achieve it, fell into a crippling drug addiction that nearly took everything from him, struggled as a husband and father, came out on the other side, and then re-emerged an old man, still plugging away at his own songs of outlaws and heartbreaks, while covering a vast array of artists, including Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus,” Soundgarden’s “Rusty Cage,” and, the one in question, “Hurt” by Nine Inch Nails, on American IV: The Man Comes Around, one of a string of albums the elder country rocker made with famed rock and hip-hop producer, Rick Rubin. <br />
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“But I remember everything... <br />
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The themes of power, voice, and choice riddle Cash’s video for “Hurt.” We see the life of a broken man unable to continue keeping his home, fallen on hard times health-wise, sitting in his own crumbling museum, reminded of what used to be whole, asking for forgiveness for whatever choices he made that still linger as he delivers his swan song, one he didn’t even write for himself. Yet, it is a song meant for him, a better version of the song, in fact. Cash used his voice here for what looked, felt, and actually was the last time. The song itself is highlighted by that intercutting between the old man singing, bathed in bronze light, and those clips of the past. But then the video takes a turn. We enter the museum and starts cutting shots of the relics of his musical past his fans once cherished, and we find the Cash now sitting at a dining table, a king on his throne, the table strewn with lobster and caviar and champagne on ice. Nobody is eating. Shots from a film illustrating the Crucifixion of Jesus interspersed. The song picks up steam. My chills have turned to tears. With shaky hands, he lifts a glass of red wine and pours it all over the table, a sign of his diminished strength but a powerful choice that signifies a letting go of his past wealth and arrogance, a hope that he has done enough to redeem himself. He closes the lid over his piano keys and bows his head. <br />
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“What have I become, my sweetest friend?...<br />
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I noticed these themes and felt them deeply that first time I watched this video. I feel them every single time I hear the song. Hell, I feel them as soon as I hear the pick of its first three notes on Cash’s guitar strings. Those same three notes opened the trailer for the film Logan a few years back. I had chills while the screen was still black. And that’s what this video does so well. By the end, its cut to black, I was so moved that I just sat there in it and wiped my eyes along with the rest of my dorm mates. We all felt it. <br />
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“Everyone I know goes away in the end…<br />
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The story of this video and the story within it have the power to reach anyone. Aging is something we all face, and I know I question the legacy I will leave behind, what future regrets lay ahead, and hope beyond hope that I will be a good man for my wife and son. This is what we do when it comes down to it: We get to the end of the road, we look back, and we hope it’s been enough. It’s something I felt when my father died. And it’s something I hope he felt in the time before he passed. I hope it for myself. Romanek’s video of a song written by Trent Reznor that became the perfect and most memorable swan song for a legendary musician and performer has lingered with me for years. It sends a message to all of us that our legacy is in the love we show to those closest to us and how that is so much more important than the possessions we collect along the way. <br />
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“And you can have it all. <br />
My empire of dirt. <br />
I will let you down. <br />
I will make you Hurt.”</div>
Kevin Powershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04219017960488448934noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6075473672000095925.post-69539289444282156472019-10-24T16:58:00.002-04:002019-10-25T06:22:39.265-04:00Postmodern Explorers, Lost Fathers<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b>Thoughts on Power, Voice, Choice, and the Manhood through an exploration of Spielberg's <i>Close Encounters of the Third Kind</i> and James Gray's <i>Ad Astra.</i></b></div>
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As I’m finding my own voice through my particular study of American Literature as a graduate English student, one in which I seek to consider where power, voice, and choice are ill-used, I consider the choices my Dad made that led to the breakup of our family and the power that has had over me. I consider also his lack of choice. My Dad has become a thread in much of the writing I’ve done lately, and I see that continuing through the rest of my grad school journey. In a personal narrative essay I wrote about my Dad’s drug addiction and the last two weeks of his life in the late Fall of 2016, I defined the word <i>Power</i> like this:</div>
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"Power is situational. It arises in moments of need. It sits in contrast to control, for it is control that makes us powerless. Power comes from letting go of the need to control, of control itself. Letting go is power, a form of it that is decidedly situational."</blockquote>
For years, I have written about film. I prefer, actually, writing about film than I do novels and poems. Films are every bit as serious and important as fictional literature. The major difference is that a film’s text is underneath the moving pictures that capture our eye. Films are more easily and necessarily revisited because they demand it more so than do books. Fiction writers peel layers back over hundreds of pages of text for us, so we can gather the themes through one solid reading and perhaps a closer skimming of choice passages on preparing to write. Only through revisiting films repeatedly can all the layers be found. You'll see that in the imbalance with which I analyze the two films in question: Steven Spielberg's <i>Close Encounters of the Third Kind</i> (1977) and James Gray's <i>Ad Astra </i>(2019).<br />
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Recently, I have been unable to write about movies as much as I like to. It’s actually a hobby of mine, so this particular piece as part of my graduate American Literature journey is surely welcome. A week ago, my wife and I went to see the new Science Fiction film <i>Ad Astra </i>on the big screen. Set in the near future, the movie stars Brad Pitt as an astronaut named Roy McBride, who is tasked with going on a mission to Mars to communicate with his father, Clifford (Tommy Lee Jones), an astronaut presumed dead for decades after a failed mission to search for life on Neptune and the outer reaches of our solar system. Contemplative, moody, and profound, it is probably the best new movie I’ve seen this year. It is also what prompted me to re-watch the classic Spielberg sci-fi family drama and adventure film <i>Close Encounters of the Third Kind</i>, a film I discuss in much detail in paragraphs to come.<br />
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What happens out in space once a man chooses to leave Earth and his family to explore the universe? This is the driving force of power behind <i>Ad Astra</i>. It reminds us of a certain form of masculinity that is borne out of the desire for control. It is also the story of a son emotionally ruined by the loss of his father. <i>Ad Astra</i> is a representation of one of the overarching motifs in science fiction: the absent father. If someone is to explore the universe, who do they leave behind and what trouble is left in the wake? It’s the same story found in last year’s <i>First Man</i>, a biopic of Neil Armstrong, the lovely MCU entry <i>Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume 2</i>, or perhaps the best movie of the decade, Christopher Nolan’s <i>Interstellar.</i><br />
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One Friday night in my early teens, likely middle school (can’t quite remember precisely), I stayed over at my Dad’s apartment. It was his weekend, one of the "every other"s issued him by the court system in his divorce settlement with my Mom about 8 years earlier. I was watching TV in the living room. Dad had gone back to his bedroom to watch TV, to catch some alone time, I suppose. I went back to see what was up, and he said “Hey Kipper! I’m watching <i>Close Encounters of the Third Kind</i>.” And he motioned for me to come sit with him and watch. I was awestruck by it and warmed by the experience of a moment between just me and him. It would be years before I watched it again. When I did, it instantly became one of my favorite movies. Over the years, I’ve watched it at least a dozen times (most recently this morning), and it has occurred to me in the last several viewings that my age has led to a rediscovery of what Steven Spielberg’s epic story of the overtaking of a man’s psyche after a close encounter with a UFO really says about manhood. <br />
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<i>Close Encounters </i>struck me, when I was younger, as a wondrous story of a man seeking something grand and finding it in benevolent visiting aliens, who want nothing more than to communicate with the humans of Earth through light and music. They want to take some of us with them, to show us something of intelligent life beyond our universe. It’s easy to become wrapped up in the fun adventurous visual spectacle that Spielberg was able to create in just his third theatrical feature as a director back in 1977. It has become a classic for nothing more than it’s most famous line, as French researcher Claude Lacombe (played by the French New Wave director François Truffaut) through his interpreter David Laughlin (an equally charming Bob Balaban) interrogates the film’s protagonist, Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss): “Have you recently had a close encounter?” A shot of Lacombe looking out a window follows, with the camera catching the iconic Devil’s Tower, Wyoming, in reflection, an image burned into the psyches of Roy and the others touched by the lights of those visiting starships. These moments are triumphant, the best qualities the film has to offer, when we see the spaceships, light and camera tricks, coloring the sky.<br />
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But what leads to these moments is cause for discussion. Because this is really a movie about divorce, the breaking apart of a family, and the psychological obsessions that lead many men astray. After the brilliant discoveries of the opening of the film in which Lacombe’s team discovers missing WWII planes that have randomly appeared in the desert, we meet Roy Neary and his family in their small home. He is in his own world, building a model train set in his living room. The place is a mess, his three kids argue, the TV blaring, toys scattered, life as a parent in a modern American society. Roy is a Lineman for the electric company in a rural town in Indiana and gets a call to check out a major power outage. A bright light beams down on his work truck. He has just had an encounter with something beyond explanation. It takes him into a mental breakdown that seemed lost on me in earlier viewings before I was married and had kids myself. And his breakdown in some ways mars the triumph of the film’s beautiful ending. Roy leaves his family to journey into space with the aliens. They have chosen him. <br />
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<i>Close Encounters</i> is famously inspired by the divorce of Steven Spielberg’s parents, something he has returned to in films throughout his career. The weight of providing for a family, it seems that Spielberg is saying, is too much for some men. Is the ending Spielberg’s wishful thinking that when his Dad left he did so to do and see the impossible? Does he believe that the family was holding his Dad back? Do families do that? In the absence of choice, however, (he didn’t choose to be touched by this encounter) Roy, like my Dad, becomes something of an addict. He likes the mania of his post-encounter life. He tries to include his family but instead alienates them and pushes them away with what, to them, is nothing more than a selfishness they can’t possibly fathom. He tells his wife, “It’s okay. I haven’t felt this good in years,” as he shovels dirt and bricks into his kitchen window, embarrassing them in front of the neighborhood, in order to continue building that nagging vision of Devil’s Tower, seen in shaving cream and mashed potatoes and mounds of dirt, the place he must find to be whole again. And it’s in the family’s living room and kitchen where the greatest flaw of this film can be found: it skips out on developing the pain Roy’s children are enduring as a result of all this, which is something Spielberg “fixed” in later edits of the film, including the Special Edition and Director’s Cut versions, which spends a few more minutes in the Neary home and few less with the aliens at the end.<br />
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The most outstanding question becomes: If Roy was chosen by the aliens, did he thus lose his own ability to choose to save his marriage and fix his family? Can obsession be overcome? Can addiction? Drug addicts, and others suffering from obsessive psychological disorders, seek to control their lives with substances, but, in reality, addiction is actually the ultimate loss of control. It seizes its moment of power and breaks families apart. Obsession, faith in something others doubt and deny, chasing a feeling of freedom or release, seeking answers, also like an addiction, carries a stigma to the point where a man must sometimes choose to leave his family. <br />
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At the top of this essay, I offered a definition of power in which power can only be attained by letting go of the need to control. When Roy McBride finally finds his father near the end of <i>Ad Astra</i>, what he finds is more complicated than what he lost. In one particular beautifully composed shot, father and son do a sort of dance, tethered together in open space under the rings of Neptune. The older begs his son to let him go, just let go. It is a powerful moment that sparked this whole line of thought about my own Dad and movies we watched together and the pain I felt when he left me back in 1989 and then left me for good in 2016. <br />
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The quest for control, that defining trait of manhood, is all over science fiction films. The astronaut is the postmodern explorer, following dreams and obsessions that others can’t understand. Our society stigmatizes these sorts of dreams as all societies have. We ask men to be grounded providers. We deny them paths that may fulfill them. I ask why my Dad chose to leave my family, and why he eventually left forever. Could my Dad not handle the pressure of being a father? Can I? Will I do better? <i>Ad Astra</i> answers these questions, and, in that way, takes over where <i>Close Encounters</i> left off, exemplifying the nature of the best science fiction, the kind that not only gets us to ask questions about what’s out there and what may come but also gets us to ask questions about our limitations as human beings in a vast world beyond our comprehension. <br />
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<b>My favorite picture of Me and Dad. Circa 2006.</b></div>
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Kevin Powershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04219017960488448934noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6075473672000095925.post-33015190369312896702019-08-12T22:39:00.000-04:002019-08-12T22:46:52.383-04:00Enjoying the Fiction of Things<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b>Thoughts on Quentin Tarantino's <i>Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood</i></b></div>
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Did you guys know that Quentin Tarantino makes fictional feature films? Excuse the obvious, heavy sarcasm, but maybe the thing I hate worst about my Film Twitter addiction is the dealing with the incessant questioning of historical fact as represented in a movie by Quentin Tarantino. I've had to actually remind people..."It's a movie..." Like...seriously. Quentin Tarantino makes heightened, stylized fictional movies.<br />
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I hear myself as Tarantino talking that TV news talk anchor down after the release of <i>Kill Bill, Vol. 1</i> when she asked him why his movies are so violent.<br />
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He goes on to remind her, when she talks about how he might not think it's so fun if a bunch of kids violently attacked him on the street, to which he says "See you're talking about real life, and I'm talking about movies."<br />
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Yes. The dude makes movies. Movies that it is okay to love, and movies it is okay not to love. I'm fine with opinions. The best filmmakers are those who lead us into debates and discussions about the art we enjoy. And, make no mistake, Tarantino is one of the best of all-time, simply for the way he has changed how we discuss movies. But what he's never stood for, and where I happen to agree most with him in terms of attitude is in the fact that, are questions of reality in his art. The <a href="https://www.indiewire.com/2019/08/quentin-tarantino-defends-bruce-lee-fight-once-upon-a-time-in-hollywood-1202165238/" target="_blank">question of Bruce Lee</a>'s personal character and integrity (he's portrayed in the film as an arrogant big mouth), makes no sense to me. "It's a movie," as I say, from the man who had a woman destroy Hitler and the Third Reich inside a movie theater.<br />
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All I'm saying is let's get into what we loved Tarantino for in the first place. He represents the fun, the pure unadulterated joy, of making cinema. And, whether it works for you or not, his movies are nothing more than cathartic exercises in spreading joy to fans of movies.<br />
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This is no more true than in <i>Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood</i>, his first GREAT movie since <i>Inglorious Basterds. </i>Set over one long winter's night and day and one wild summer night, it is a movie that feels as original as anything Tarantino has made. After the opening night screening at the Belcourt in Nashville (on 35mm!!!), my buddy Joshua and I both couldn't help agreeing that we'd never seen anything like it. I even said those words: "I've never seen anything like it." It moves differently than any movie I've ever seen. There's a slowness that carries most of the runtime that somehow immersed me, certainly more so than the deliberate first hour plus of <i>The Hateful Eight </i>(the one Tarantino I outright hate).</div>
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The slowness works here, in part, due to the quality of a small handful of long scenes and the equity of attention paid to the two leads, Leonardo DiCaprio as Rick Dalton, a borderline washed up former action star and TV cowboy, the lead of NBC's long-running <i>Bounty Law, </i>and now playing the heavy in a run of TV guest spots, and Brad Pitt as Cliff Booth, his stunt double, driver, and right-hand man. Within that is the adventures of Sharon Tate (Robbie), newly married to Roman Polanski (seen but never heard) and living next door to Rick with movie hairdresser Jay Sebring (Emile Hirsch) among various fancy friends.<br />
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A long February day in 1969 finds the three stories intertwined with Tate's breezily interjected. Scenes play out at great length and are full of brilliant levels of detail. Rick on the set of "Lancer," his new young co-star, and an Oscar-worthy breakdown and rebound. Cliff and his sordid possible past, his run-in with a hitchhiking hippie girl (Margaret Qualley) and the Manson Family, who are squatting on his old friend George Spahn's (Bruce Dern, in a hilarious short cameo) Movie Ranch and an Oscar-worthy masterclass in patience, ferocity, cool, and tenderness only Brad Pitt can deliver (complete with two beatdowns). Their respective locations and situations reflecting their roles as partners and friends. Sharon Tate breezes through with pure happiness, a symbol of Hollywood at the time, a newlywed be-bopping into a book store and stopping off at a movie house to giddily watch the actual Sharon Tate in <i>The Wrecking Crew</i>, starring Dean Martin--a brilliant Tarantino touch. Robbie's performance is magical. Her presence is much like that of Tate's: You are instantly taken with a pure positivity and that looming sadness of your own knowledge of history.<br />
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Then, the movie skips ahead and Tarantino turns everything up to eleven: the tension, the comedy, the love. I won't say more about the plot... It needs to be lived and breathed.<br />
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Watching <i>Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood</i> is the story of what's expected vs. what happens. It fiercely blends truth and reality (with a host of look-alike actors playing very real people) with Hollywood machinations and magic. It plays on our expectations and rewards us with the possibility of a time as it is remembered and should have been remembered. It contains a character in Charles Manson, represented by Tex (Austin Butler), Sadie (Mikey Madison), and Katie (Madisen Beaty) as those who would brutally murder Sharon Tate and her friends, more tangibly evil by a mile than any other Tarantino character (Hitler notwithstanding). It counters that with pure love, friendship, the nicest and most likable Tarantino protagonists since Jackie Brown and Max Cherry.<br />
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Brad Pitt's turn as Cliff Booth may be forever embedded in me. For all the huge showiness of Leo's terrific performance as Rick Dalton, there is the quiet, assured cool of Brad. I am so forever grateful to Tarantino for introducing Cliff Booth to the world. Cliff is hard, violent, his past worth several tough questions, but he fully embodies the notion of best friend. He the type of guy other men are drawn to because he makes you feel powerful simply by how comfortable he is in his own skin. He supports with kindness and protects with grit. He has Rick's best interest at heart always. He makes Rick a winner.<br />
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I loved this movie. I went back twice. I never do that. Tarantino brings the wild fun, the star power, and works his newfound interest in uneven narrative structure to new heights with beautifully shot (by Robert Richardson), luxuriously long scenes that play with such perfect comedic pitch and/or dramatic tension. It is, above all else, a love letter from Tarantino to a time he can only remember as perfect, when he was young boy who moved to Hollywood from rural East Tennessee. It is an experience of history, artifice, expectations, and remembrance of what was, what might've been, what has and what could be. It has both Hollywood and Once Upon a Time... in its title.<br />
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It's a fairy tale. </div>
Kevin Powershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04219017960488448934noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6075473672000095925.post-55783388851913522592019-07-09T06:00:00.000-04:002019-08-10T08:33:29.418-04:00American Pie at 20: Masculinity Now and Then<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b>An Essay on <i>American Pie,</i> </b></div>
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<b>written as an application of Masculinity Studies </b></div>
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<b>for my graduate course in Literary Theory.</b><br />
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The Pressure to ‘Do it’ Right: Normalized Masculinity in <i>American Pie</i></div>
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For men of a certain age, there may be no better connection to the cultural situation of his adolescence than the now legendary 1999 male-centric teen comedy <i>American Pie</i>. It is indeed a cultural artifact and today celebrates the twentieth anniversary of its release in theaters. It is the place we went, likely too young, to learn, and to be rewarded in our inherent budding masculine sensibilities, about “MILF”s, the not-that-shocking escapades of “band camp,” and which all-American baked good most resembles “what 3rd base feels like.” Loved by audiences, it was recently lauded in retrospect by popular film news website <i>Indiewire</i> as one of “The 23 Movies That Define One of the Best Film Years Ever.” Whether that assertion is valid or not, it stands to take a moment to contextualize, in terms of cultural significance, the top box office grossing teen movie (a point at which <i>Indiewire </i>contributor Zac Sharf aims most of his focus) in a year full of important additions to the genre, including <i>Election</i> and <i>10 Things I Hate About You</i>, which also made the <i>Indiewire</i> list. Sharf points out the two reasons this film stands out, that, in addition to its $235 million box-office take, it was “bolstered by its breakout cast and crude humor.” Receiving mixed critical reception, with many critics dismissing it altogether as raunchy schlock, it stands out as an important film, a decidedly hard-R-rated teen movie that spawned several popular sequels and countless straight-to-DVD spinoffs but also paved the way for smarter movies on the exact subject, like 2007’s <i>Superbad</i>.<br />
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The subject in question is the force of perceived masculinity that pressures a young man, particularly in late adolescence, to lose his virginity at any and all cost as a rite of passage--a logical climactic milestone on the road to the imagined free love experience of college, before heading out into the world of career, marriage, and family. Within this is the pervasive party culture that expects late teens to enter such a path. On the darker side, this is an element of late-high school/college life that feels reminiscent, most recently, in broader conversations around sexual consent and focused ones that surrounded the appointment of the most recent addition to the United States Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh.<br />
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But <i>American Pie</i> is not dark. Late film critic Roger Ebert, one of the few major critics to praise this film, points to its successes in terms of character, an area of focus for this particular analysis, concluding that “it’s cheerful and hard-working and funny, and here’s the important thing—it’s not mean.” The film’s creators, the screenwriter Adam Hertz and co-directors Paul and Chris Weitz, clearly worked hard to make a comedy relatable to its intended audience, placing scrutiny on all the right characters and situations (barring one big one) through humor, crude and otherwise. It uses its comedy and the niceness of its characters to create a balanced look at both the toxicity of a society’s normalization of male sexual behavior and, with one exception, the willingness of a modern adolescent male to experience the <i>Jouissance</i> of sex in both direct, and comedically inadvertent, opposition to such normalization. <br />
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To understand the ways in which different elements of masculinity studies find themselves embedded in the text of <i>American Pie</i> is to meet the five interconnected male characters (a group of four best friends, plus the guy they all put up with) almost equally represented by the filmmakers, in relation to a few specific discursive tenets of masculinity studies. In her chapter on “Men, Masculinities, and Feminist Theory,” Judith Kegan Gardiner cites feminist theorist Patricia Hill Collins in a discussion of “the interconnectedness of gender with other social hierarchies…” (42). <i>American Pie</i> is a part of this idea of intersectionality, especially in how elements of socially constructed gender identity seek to oppress those who would try to free themselves from normative gendered expectations. In this case, it is the pressure of losing one’s virginity before leaving high school and thus landing atop the social hierarchy of that great American institution.<br />
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Viewers of this film most likely think of Jim as the center-point of the film, and in many ways he is. He is also, along with Finch, a less masculine subject, more intelligent as opposed to athletic, representing the notion of gender as performance. Kevin, the one with some experience and a steady girlfriend in Vicky represents “the right way” to have sex in a male-dominated society. He expects to lose his virginity because it is that that he is owed. It is thus his natural right as an emerging man. Chris Ostreicher, or “Oz,” as it happens, becomes the feminist voice in the midst of the hypermasculinity fueled by his lacrosse teammate and resident entitled beer blast host, Steve Stifler. It is Stifler, really, who plays the role of impetus for the comedic sexual quest the filmmakers set up for the four friends. He is a representation of the “boys will be boys” attitude of the patriarchal society and a direct reflection, even if only taken seriously in various moments at varying degrees, of the late adolescent drive for first intercourse. Expectedly sexually experienced, though completely emotionally stunted and juvenile, Stifler is masculinity as peer pressure, stifling (pun intended by me and the filmmakers) elements of youth, uncertainty, and femininity through humorously over-the-top performed misogyny as all five characters journey towards Prom Night, that ultimate teen movie trope, that ultimate rite of passage. <br />
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The extent of Stifler’s most juvenile behavior is most readily available in his relationship with Finch, the least clearly masculine and thus hidden character of the film. His body movements alone suggest a sort of queer identity minus same sex attraction, a performance borne of a strong will to be different and which makes him the target of the most direct of Stifler’s performed masculine energy. Finch’s plan to get laid relies on the very nature of the high school social structure. His performance is based on two things: one physical and one discursive. At lunch, he sips mochaccinos and rolls out a putting mat in the quad to express a certain mature manliness for which no high school girl in this film would fall. But he pays his class’ most sage female advisor, Jessica, to start rumors about his sexual prowess that extrapolate through the gossip mill into stories where, among other stories, he once beat Stifler in a fight and is therefore more of a man. Much to his chagrin, Stifler can’t get a prom date as a result. All of his usual dates are holding out for Finch. Stifler, of course, retaliates by drugging Finch’s coffee with laxative, forcing the boy who won’t use the school toilets to indeed do so…in the women’s restroom. It seems Finch is an innocent bystander of Stifler’s hypermasculinity.<br />
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However, if we take a closer look, we see the negative effects of societal masculinity within Finch. Finch has been the constant butt of Stifler’s jokes, but he does encourage Jim to broadcast Nadia, the super model-<i>esque</i> foreign exchange student, over the Internet as she changes clothes before their study date. As they watch her undress, the most unabashedly toxic move this movie makes in terms of the misogynistic degradation of women, Finch calmly urges Jim to go back and make a move. “Seduce her,” are his words, breathed with pure sexual desire. That Finch would later get the true last laugh in having sex with Stifler’s Mom (what she will henceforth be known by forever), in the fashion of <i>The Graduate</i> and scored to a pop-punk cover of “Mrs. Robinson,” only cements this movie’s willingness to actually subvert the male dominant sexual experience. This is where Herz’s screenplay really pays off, nodding to a previous cultural phenomenon of late-adolescent sexual desire, allowing the less-masculine nerd to prevail over the entitled hypermasculine jock.<br />
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While Stifler’s influence is a bit lighter in his relationship to Jim, the would-be protagonist of the film, it certainly comes through in setting up the conflicting masculinities of the two more typical everyman types in the group: that of Jim, of course, and his best friend, Kevin. Early in the film, Stifler scolds the crew, telling to “remove the shrink wrap” from their penises and “fucking use them,” diminishing their place in the hierarchy of high school sexual experience and placing himself as dominant. Added to this is the notion, later that night at Stifler’s party, that Sherman, a dork on the level of a character Anthony Michael Hall might’ve portrayed for John Hughes in the 80s, indeed had sex with “that chick from Central.” He greets them in the hangover haze of the next morning with nerdy bravado: “Say goodbye to Chuck Sherman the boy and hello to Chuck Sherman the man.” This is a direct reflection of the combined pressure of boys of all types to become men simply by getting a girl to have sex with them. It inspires Kevin to initiate the pact to “get laid” that will drive the rest of the film. Taking Sherman’s supposed luck and Stifler’s scolding as inspiration, his journey starts with Vicky, his serious, Ivy League-bound girlfriend, who so desperately needs him to say “I love you” before they sleep together. How does he get her to have sex with him if he isn’t sure about the love thing?<br />
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This makes Kevin that representation of both the normalizing and naturalizing of masculinity in the film. Barring the bit where his older brother, in the form of a bizarre cameo from Casey Affleck, leads him to “The Bible,” a book hidden in the school library reserved to teach one special senior the ways to satisfy a woman, Kevin’s thread is the most boring and typical and wisely painted as such by the filmmakers. There is almost no humor or creativity in his characterization. When his sex finally does come on prom night, it is subdued and rote, devoid of any fun or zest or even love, despite those three words hovering over him and his lover. His asking for consent is to ask Vicky “How do you want to do it?” When she replies, “How do you?”, his immediate response is simply “normal style, the missionary position.” His being what he considers to be a good boyfriend to Vicky, putting up with simple make-outs and oral sex for so long, places him in a realm of naturalizing masculinity, that he is owed intercourse as reward for his good deeds. It is also quite clearly felt that he still doesn’t really mean it when he tells Vicky he loves her right before they have sex for the first time, reinforcing the incorrect notion that all young women need to associate love with sex in order to consent.<br />
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The love/sex binary can indeed be the way of a robust first consensual sexual experience, and the filmmakers work to erase the boredom of the Kevin strand of the narrative with that of Chris “Oz” Ostreicher. His relationship with Heather, the “goody-goody choir girl priss,” according to Stifler, is built on mutual and healthy discussions about life and growing up and an actual future of love and sex. There is a strong feminist thread in Oz’s journey to prom, and that isn’t only because Oz is the only character absent from the egregious Internet strip show sequence. Herz’s screenplay under the Weitz brothers’ direction is at its most wise in terms of dealing with a masculinity that can be balanced in equity with feminine sexuality. To open the film, Oz is the first character to introduce the film’s inherent hypermasculinity. After Jim’s escapade with scrambled cable porn and his Mother’s claim that “he is trying to watch some illegal channels,” it is Oz who reminds us that the only illegal channel should be “that channel for women.” His date with a “college chick,” who majors in “Postmodern Feminist Thought” and quickly sees through and wisely, calmly corrects his naturalizing, misogynistic advances that go to the length that he actually demands, in mid-conversation: “Suck me, beautiful.”<br />
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This encounter, however, sends him on his route to making good on the pact, which, stems initially from a feigned masculine view of feminine sensitivity. He joins the choir as a way into an “untapped resource” where he will “work the sensitive angle,” which is how he refers to his decision in the wake of the chorus of his Stifler-led crew of buddies chiding his manhood. But Heather and the choir, it turns out, become true sources of inspiration for Oz, helping him to navigate a true new sense of himself that seeks to find love and, ultimately, leads to a realization that his naturally masculine athletic abilities are not all he has to offer, that he, as one of the film’s more powerful lines of dialogue expresses, can “win” without feeling like he has to “score.” This is a true engagement with sensitivity and equity. When Heather confronts him about a perceived dive back into the hypermasculine, after she sees Stifler miming sex acts as she walks away, Oz’s facial expressions and body language break down to a serious vulnerability to which no other character in the film comes close. When Oz and Heather make love after the prom, it is in stark contrast to the scene between Kevin and Vicky, not in a closed room, sealed up and uncomfortable but on a beautiful lakeside dock, open and free. Natural in an equal way.<br />
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Can generations of young men encounter a positive masculinity from a movie like this? Most certainly. Yes. And they will need to do so. This is a type of movie that doesn’t get made much anymore. Last year, a major studio released a film called <i>Blockers</i>, which takes this exact prom night virginity loss premise and flips it to a crew of female characters. A feminist move, it seemed. That movie, however, became all about the parents trying to stop them from having sex. <i>American Pie</i> doesn’t get everything right, especially in its non-consensual Internet strip show, but it wisely leaves parents either aloof or in roles of true support and encouragement. In that way, it empowers its teenage characters to experience sexual awakenings despite pressures and without barriers. If it seems this analysis has missed Jim, the clear main protagonist of the film, allow for, in closing, a look at the issue of teenage sexual behavior in this way: This normalized expectation of teenage boys to perform their gender and seek heterosexual intercourse in certain ways is marred by anxiety, experimentation, and humiliation. He represents all of that for the everyday American teen.<br />
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Jim is not naturally manly in appearance, like Oz or Stifler. He is neither “interesting” nor antisocial in the way of Finch. He is not Mr. Perfect like his best friend, Kevin. He is the embodiment of teenage sexual mishaps, as evidenced in the opening scrambled porn scene. But he also has that famous Dad, who awkwardly walks him into discussions of masturbation and pornography and sex, and perhaps encourages the more normative masculine sexual behaviors a bit too much. He is mostly there to be embarrassing, making Jim sweat and us laugh. Jim's plan for the Prom Night pact is Nadia, a girl decidedly out of his league appearance-wise, but who, in all honesty, actually seems to like him. She, in fact, makes the first move in asking for a study partner. His premature ejaculation episode in front of the whole student body is fodder for the nightmares of teenage boys everywhere.<br />
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And then there’s Michelle, the “band geek,” who comes at him full steam and shocks the world with one line about her flute and where it went “one time, at band camp.” Like Finch, Jim’s loss of virginity comes from a place of pure feminine power, as Michelle is a young woman with full feminine agency and ownership of her sexuality. Jim doesn’t need to bow to the pressure. He just needs to find the kind of girl for him and to place the power in her hands. Just before the post-prom party, Jim had resigned from the pact during prom, blowing up at Kevin continual pushing of the pact. Jim reacts, answering the very question of this movie and the power of teenage masculinity, speaking to a necessary point about needing to have sex: “I’m so sick of all the bullshit pressure. It’s just not that important.” Jim’s willingness to accept that fact, that it is just not that important, that sex can come naturally and in ways unexpected and consensual when an individual is ready, is at the heart of what <i>American Pie</i> gets right, even for all it does get wrong.<br />
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<b>Works Cited</b></div>
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Ebert, Roger. “American Pie Movie Review & Film Summary (1999) | Roger Ebert.<br />
RogerEbert.com, 9 July 1999, www.rogerebert.com/reviews/american-pie-1999.<br />
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Gardiner, Judith Kegan. “Men, Masculinities, and Feminist Theory.” Handbook of Studies on<br />
Men and Masculinities. Ed. Connell, Raewyn, et al. SAGE Publications, Inc, 2005. EBSCOhost,search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=46709&site=<br />
ehost-live.<br />
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Herz, Adam, screenwriter, and Paul and Chris Weitz, directors. American Pie. Universal, 1999. <br />
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Sharf, Zack. “1999 Retrospective: The 23 Movies That Define One of the Best<br />
Film Years Ever.” IndieWire, 3 Apr. 2019, www.indiewire.com/gallery/best-1999<br />
movies-best-year-film/#!17/american-pie-1999/.<br />
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Kevin Powershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04219017960488448934noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6075473672000095925.post-71665465421386742912019-02-12T21:45:00.000-05:002019-12-15T12:22:04.485-05:00Devouring the Oscars--BlacKkKlansman for Best Picture<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b>In which I make the case for Spike Lee's <i>BlacKkKlansman</i> for Best Picture. </b></div>
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I could tell you that this movie is easily the most entertaining film of the year, and call it case closed. But this movie bears some discussion. It is so many things. It does them all to perfection. It is my favorite movie of the year by far. So, when <a href="https://movierob.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">MovieRob</a> asked me if I would do a post for <a href="http://www.largeassmovieblogs.com/2019/01/the-lamb-devours-the-oscars-2019-roster.html" target="_blank">The LAMB's annual Devouring the Oscars</a> series, I was obliged to do so when I saw this one was for the taking. </div>
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<i>BlacKkKlansman</i> opens by skewering a Best Picture winner, the Confederate flag-waving favorite of grandmothers everywhere, <i>Gone with the Wind</i>. (A movie I find more...old, as opposed to racist, though it no doubt has its moments.) From there, it slams the viewer with a viciously racist and anti-semitic propaganda film within a film, starring a master of monologue I'll save naming for those still out on this one and solidifying director Spike Lee's clear mission to demand that we hear the parallels to much of today's racially-driven, even political, rhetoric. This is a running motif throughout the movie, that the discourse, the language of hate is alive and well in this country and has hardly changed, despite the Civil War and Emancipation and The Vote and Civil Rights and Race Riots and on. </div>
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Based on "some fo' real fo' real shit," Spike Lee's best movie since <i>25th Hour</i> is largely the story of Ron Stallworth (John David Washington), the first black officer hired to work for the Colorado Springs Police Department in the early 1970s, a force occupied by white men ranging from outright racist to openly suspicious to essential to the cause. After being briefly promoted to go undercover at a black college student union meeting to get some dirt on its Black Panther Party-esque activist guest speaker, Ron finds himself at his first conflict. He is inspired by the speaker, Kwame Ture, perhaps even more inspired by the student union president, Patrice (Laura Harrier). We are inspired as well as Lee, in the first of many brilliant directorial touches reserved only for a master filmmaker, gives us black faces in the crowd, isolated in front of a stark black backdrop, beautiful and bold and close. </div>
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From there, Ron, reassigned to the intelligence desk, calls up a local chapter leader of the Ku Klux Klan and gets an immediate in. He enlists seasoned undercover Detective Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver) to play him in an operation to infiltrate the chapter, a crew of natural born ignorant gun nuts, one of whom actually garnering a plot to attack a meeting of Patrice's student group. Most of the rest of the film revolves around Ron dealing as a middle man between the KKK and his new girlfriend's student activist group, militant in their own right, at least towards the police, while Flip works at great length to hold up the charade and bring down the threat of racially-motivated violence. In the meantime, Ron makes his way into a series of delightfully, darkly hilarious, sometimes scary prank phone calls to KKK Grand Wizard, or "National Director," David Duke (Topher Grace). </div>
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<i>BlacKkKlansman </i>is a tonal experience unlike anything I've seen. It starts with a face slap of overt racism we've all been raised with and ends with a gut punch of reality that will leave you in angry tears. In between is Ron's story, perfectly acted by both Rons. Washington's performance is as bold as his character's actions. He plays up an inherent whiteness in his voice, one that sounds a great deal familiar to his father's, the great Denzel. Lee's choice to make the phone calls from and life within the police precinct fully comedic is masterful, having Washington's Ron spout racial slurs in a believable rawness, epitomizing dark comedy. Such is a powerful way to deal with racism, lightening it but still keeping it dark and painful at the same time. Ron's conversations, a series of dates, with Patrice serve to anchor the story in the reality of the black experience of the time, an early 1970s fueled by the angry conservatism of Richard Nixon's administration. It is Adam Driver's Ron that drives the real pain and pathos of the film. Another smart move on the part of Lee and the film's screenwriters, filtering Flip's white privilege through a connection to his own Judaism, which is brought to life by the purely hateful anti-semitism of his new "friends." </div>
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All at once, Spike Lee's <i>BlacKkKlansman</i> is a comedy, a police procedural, an undercover nail-biter, a satire of biting truth, a joke-laden buddy comedy, a searing drama, a workplace comedy, and something of a love story. It is also a story of the unfinished business of small ducks in a large pond. It uses its period setting to the max, featuring perfect costuming and production design, gorgeously shot, as well as several masterful needle drops. The best of this is a purely SPIKE LEE dance sequence in a bar set to "Too Late to Turn Back Now" by Cornelius Brothers and Sister Rose that will go down as one of my favorite sequences of the decade, a powerfully overt love letter to the soul of black people.<br />
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Each scene of happiness brought back down to Earth by the painfully relevant mentality of the KKK plotters and their master, the suit-wearing political face of the hate group, David Duke, spouting "America first" and touting his goal to put somebody who embodies his nationalist ideals of a segregated nation in the White House. (Not made up for this movie. He is actually on tape saying these things.) Topher Grace was bold to play such a man. Spike Lee captures him in the frame almost exclusively in Dutch angles, highlighting his twisted world view and the crooked danger his words. That the two Ron's succeed and fail at the same time is just the way of the world and the reason we are still in this conundrum now. We keep trying and failing and racism persists. </div>
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This is the Best Picture of the year. There is no other way around it. It ticks all the boxes. Important. Unique. Relevant. Powerful. Thought-provoking. Genre-defying. Old. New. Painted in bold, broad strokes, then in hard, often hilarious, detail by a master of American cinema. </div>
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Can it win Best Picture? I don't know. I'm not one to try and predict, and I haven't seen all the nominees as of now. <i>Vice </i>did not work for me really at all. <i>The Favourite</i> is sick solid gold. <i>Black Panther</i> RULES! And <i>A Star is Born</i> is a gift of a movie. Will catch <i>Roma</i> this week on Netflix (sad face) and will catch <i>Green Book</i>...at some point...(I'm sure it's delightful.). <i>Bohemian Rhapsody</i>...same. Any way it goes, no movie hit me like that one. Doubt one of those will. It was just the movie for me this year, and I can find solace in the fact that this movie is nominated this year, a year where we need to hear its message as loudly and as clearly as possible. </div>
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Kevin Powershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04219017960488448934noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6075473672000095925.post-1690031937771016982018-07-05T06:00:00.000-04:002018-09-21T20:56:37.329-04:00Long-Awaited Sequels<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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I'm generally averse to sequels. Back when I taught 7th grade, it never failed that, upon finishing reading Lois Lowry's "The Giver," a novel known for its brilliantly ambiguous ending, some kids would basically attack me with...BUT WHAT HAPPENS??? You'd think their little lives are over, and I'm all like, "Come on, guys. Not everything needs to be wrapped up nice and tight. Not every story needs to continue. We get to imagine its continuance, and that's better as far as I'm concerned."<br />
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They don't buy it. Why would they?<br />
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They have been raised in Hollywood's Rehash Age, a diabolical capitalist scheme to continue to take money from teenagers fueled by their nostalgia-riddled parents. It shows no sign of stopping, and I'm gonna be straight: I'm not as cynical about this as I seem. The nostalgia things works for me sometimes. And there are some characters I love so much that I would watch any new story their makers have to tell, even if, in one case, I didn't even know it.<br />
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It's Long-Awaited Sequels this week as part of Wandering through the Shelves' Thursday Movies Picks.<br />
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Here are mine:<br />
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<b><i>Clerks 2</i></b><br />
<b>dir. Kevin Smith, 2006</b><br />
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Released 12 years after Kevin Smith's groundbreaking Gen-X indie about a convenience store clerk and his video store clerk buddy doing more complaining and procrastinating than working, Clerks 2 is actually the funnier film, complete with callback and in-jokes to be sure but also adding a meta quality of having these great characters we literally haven't seen in 12 years realizing that time has passed, jobs change (they now work at a fast food restaurant), and that sequels always get made. Then, there are new characters, including two co-workers, the hot one played by Rosario Dawson and the naive, Christian gentlemen and his friends "Pillowpants" and "Listerfiend."<br />
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<b><i>Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull</i></b><br />
<b>dir. Steven Spielberg, 2008</b><br />
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Released 19 years after the original trilogy ended, the fourth Indy movie finds Steven Spielberg back at the helm one more time with what amounts to one of the great blockbuster blasts of my life. I never quite understood why people got so pissy at the craziness of this film, which finds our greatest movie badass hero, the greatest character Harrison Ford ever played, seeking a lost city of riches housing the "crystal skulls" of ancient alien beings alongside Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen returns!!), her son Mutt, the greaser (Shia LeBeouf), and their mentor, Harold Oxley (a hilarious John Hurt). Crazy right? Just about as crazy as Nazis' faces melting off, a scary Indian cult lord ripping a man's still-beating heart out of his chest, and actually finding the Holy Grail. Get over yourselves! This movie is easily as fun and nuts as the others and plays like one beat for beat. I put the opening sequence right up there with <i>Raiders</i>. And FYI, the CGI looks sort of bad...(Hot Take Alert!) on purpose.<br />
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<b><i>Creed</i></b><br />
<b>dir. Ryan Coogler, 2015</b><br />
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Released nearly 40 years after the original <i>Rocky</i>, it was Ryan Coogler's <i>Creed </i>that actually introduced me to the series. Yes. It was after I saw this 2015 powerhouse of a film that I finally sat down to watch the original. I had, of course, seen so many bits and pieces of all the <i>Rocky </i>films that I knew Stallone's greatest creation pretty well. But this film, one that picks up years after the events of what seemed to be the last one, <i>Rocky Balboa </i>(2006), offers the story of the long lost son of Apollo Creed, who tragically passed away in <i>Rocky IV</i>. Played by Michael B. Jordan, Adonis Creed needs to make something of himself for himself, and there is nobody better at that than Rocky Balboa, played by a Stallone we had all but forgotten. I cried many times watching this film, and I loved those tears. This is how sequels should be made always.<br />
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<b><u>Bonus! Two Long-Awaited Sequels I Can't Wait to See This Year</u></b></div>
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<b><i>Incredibles 2</i> </b><br />
<b>dir. Brad Bird, 2018</b><br />
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I've caught up with several Brad Bird re-watches lately, including his other Pixar work: <i>The Incredibles </i>and the superior <i>Ratatouille</i>. I literally can't wait to get out of the house for this one.<br />
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<i><b>Halloween</b></i><br />
<b>dir. David Gordon Green, 2018</b><br />
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David Gordon Green directing a true Halloween sequel (one that forgets all the other sequels in between) from a script co-written by Danny McBride and starring Jamie Lee Curtis. IN! </div>
Kevin Powershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04219017960488448934noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6075473672000095925.post-39299167402327790482018-07-02T06:00:00.000-04:002018-07-02T06:00:01.448-04:00What was that? <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b>A review of "Hereditary," the new horror film released by A24</b></div>
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When A24 puts a horror movie on their mega-hype train, we nerdy movie buffs go headlong into it, while the more tradition horror fans show up on opening weekend and start in on their " What was <i>that</i>? It sucked!"<br />
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Or maybe they're just the ones who believe quotes like "it's this generation's 'Exorcist'" or "this film that will be talked about for decades"?<br />
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I finally got to the new A24 horror release, "Hereditary," knowing as little as possible. I had to literally fight myself off of most reviews. I went in excited. I'm into the critically-acclaimed and always have been. When I left, I wish I hadn't even watched a trailer. Way too much in the trailer. Alas, A24's marketing style made them virtually unavoidable.<br />
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But it's a really great scary movie, an even better bleak family drama, gut-wrenchingly, horrifyingly so, and it achieves this, above all, with not only shocking visuals but sound. Only the best ones <i>really </i>go to work with the latter.<br />
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Consider a moment late in the film where the Graham family's teenaged pothead son Peter, played by Alex Wolff, is way down the tragic pit of doom into which writer/director Ari Aster's film has thrown him. He awakens from a hellish nightmare alone. He goes to investigate a noise in the dark. We await a jump scare. It comes, not with a usual musical cue but with a terrifying visual we aren't sure we even just saw.<br />
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But the real fear isn't in that visual either. It's not even in the classic Hitchcockian anticipation of it. It is this sound of whispering, a humming of some kind so faint I literally whispered to my sister, "What <i>was</i> that?", taking my eyes off the screen to discern whether this was some other patron talking to a friend or some horror emanating from the speakers surrounding the auditorium. When I finally landed on the latter, I knew I was watching a special film.<br />
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Toni Collette stars as Annie Graham, a woman who has known some tragedy in her life, has some demons. We first see her speaking at her mother's funeral service, awkwardly acknowledging a number of mourners she's never seen before. Her mother was indeed a mystery, strange it seems, guarded, manipulative. She passed in home hospice care under Annie's roof.<br />
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After the funeral, Annie tells her husband, Steve (Gabriel Byrne), that she feels like she should be more sad. Sometimes the loss of a loved one is like that.<br />
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Her 13-year-old daughter Charlie (Milly Shapiro) is an odd kid. Shapiro herself is an actress born to be a kid in a horror movie. She has the sort of facial features (amped up with makeup here) that induce the sort of curiosity a film like this demands. She loved her late grandmother. We learn they shared some special bond. Charlie makes miniature human-like figures out of found objects, including the head of a dead bird. She does this little tongue-click noise that resurfaces at random.<br />
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Tragedy befalls the Graham family again, an "unspeakable" one...as so many other reviewers have called it. Annie's mind begins to unravel along with each member of the family. Nightmares, both waking and sleeping. Fights full of bottled guilt. Her work, making detailed miniature models mainly of her own life, is going down the drain. She is late on her submission to the art gallery. She looks to group therapy and finds a support there in Joan (Ann Dowd).<br />
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But the demons haunting the Grahams are mostly within, inherited, and we are left with the downward spiral of a family. Mix in the late mother's involvement with the occult, and horror ensues.<br />
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Director Ari Aster seems mostly interested in exploring how we deal with our pasts in the wake of tragedy, gazing within ourselves. He find horror in genuine human thoughts, and how we often do not dare communicate how we really feel to those we should love the most. There is a dinner table argument and a later scene where Annie checks on her sleeping son that reach levels of domestic pain I've never seen in a movie. Do we cry? Or do we recoil? Credit to Collette for her work in this film. She is worthy of awards for these two scenes alone.<br />
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Aster does begin to answer questions from the first couple acts in the end, and he does it in shocking ways. But, above all, he clearly understands that what the mind's eye sees under a shroud of dread and memory is more terrifying than some tangible monster hiding behind the door. As viewers, when we are finally shown the light so to speak, we're never really sure if what we're seeing is actually there or not. THAT is scary in and of itself. That is an achievement.<br />
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Like most horror movies, "Hereditary" ends with a shocker that leaves us as viewers also questioning what we saw before, and, if it works for you as it did for me, you'll likely immediately want to see it again...until a couple days later when you're sitting in a dark room at night and can't shake what you saw in the last 15 minutes of this film and you start to doubt if you can handle it again.<br />
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The horror Aster pulls off for the first 100 minutes of the film are a series of gut punches sure to affect any member of any family. The horror he pulls off at the end will likely never leave my brain. I know it was sound. I know it was image. But what <i>was</i> that?<br />
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<span style="text-align: center;">★★</span><span style="text-align: center;">★★</span><span style="text-align: center;"> out of ★★★★★</span></div>
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Screened at Regal Downtown West in Knoxville, TN, on June 27th, 2018</div>
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Kevin Powershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04219017960488448934noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6075473672000095925.post-59834655902339139852018-06-30T16:21:00.000-04:002018-06-30T17:26:26.844-04:00Beatles from Birth<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b>Ramblings on the birth of my first child, a son.</b></div>
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I decided to listen to Lithium, the SiriusXM grunge station, that morning on our way to a wedding in Greeneville. It was the wedding of a student of mine from my first year. We were so excited, even if my wife, Amanda, was 38 weeks pregnant. We got all dressed up, hopped in our new ride (hence the satellite radio), and it was Nirvana, Nine Inch Nails, STP, etc. all the way there. I'd had enough of the Beatles station at that point. I mean...satellite radio, am I right?<br />
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The wedding was beautiful, an outdoor setting of direct Tennessee sun on a humid June day. Oh! But the view! Mountains and valleys across and below this hilltop wedding locale. Then, the happy couple heads into the reception. The congregation waits for one last prayer. We stand and bow our heads. Amanda's water breaks.<br />
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We say nothing, but discreetly (in a hushed panic)...clean up! Call hospital! Car! Contraction! Closer and closer they come! One hour from the hospital (and that's doing 80-90)! Oh! My! God! Phone Calls to Parents! "We're on our way to the hospital! Baby's Coming!" What?!<br />
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It's 2 PM when we leave. It's 3 PM when we arrive at the hospital. It's 3:45 when we get to Labor and Delivery Triage. It's sometime later when we get to our Labor and Delivery Room. They finally let me in from the waiting room..."FUCKING HOSPITALS!" It's on! I'm wearing a shirt and tie and uncomfortable shoes.<br />
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Our first nurse is missing veins with the IV. The other nurse is on her way out, her shift is ending. Then, we get the angels from nursing school heaven. We are with them for the next few hours. Oh! The pain! The screaming! The epidural? YES!<br />
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I suppose at some point I got enough room to breathe to change clothes. Luckily, our hospital bags were packed and with us. I don't remember much about leaving the room to get the bags other than stopping by the waiting room to check in with my mom and Amanda's parents. Mom kept asking me a bunch of questions I didn't yet know the answer to. Amanda's Dad urged me to get on back! Now! Go!<br />
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I went, and then everything got somehow equal parts terrifying and calm. We were fully in labor. And quickly. The baby was coming fast! We never found out boy or girl! Excitement meets anxiety.<br />
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At some point, one of our nurses, the one with the Nawlins drawl said we could play some music if we want. I passed. We began pushing. Breathe! Scream! Push! 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10! This repeats often, not sure how time is passing, but it is. Music would be good, I think! It would be.<br />
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"What about some Beatles? Sgt. Pepper's?" Amanda nods. And we relax. And we Push! "With a Little Help from My Friends." And we relax. And we Push! "I got to admit it's getting better, a little better all the time. It can't get no worse." And we relax. And we Push! "I'm fixing a hole where the rain gets in..." And we relax. And we Push! "Lucy in the sky-y with di-iamonds." And we relax! And we Push! (Skips "Within You Without You") And we relax! And we push! "When I get older losing my hair many years from now..." And we relax! And we push! "Lovely Rita Meter Maid, Lovely Rita Meter Maid" And we relax! And we push! "Now you know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall...I love to tu-urn you-ou o-on!" And we push! And we push! And the doctor comes in!<br />
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And <span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Behold! My BOY! He who came into this world two weeks early on a Saturday night freight train.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Christopher Thomas “Kit” Powers</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Born: June 2, 2018 at 9:21 PM</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Weight: 6 lbs. 1 oz.<span class="text_exposed_show" style="display: inline;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span class="text_exposed_show" style="display: inline;">Length: 19 3/4 inches</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span class="text_exposed_show" style="display: inline;">Hairstyle: Black Mohawk</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span class="text_exposed_show" style="display: inline;">Demeanor: Chill</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span class="text_exposed_show" style="display: inline;">Cuteness: Sky’s The Limit (Our nurses love him!)</span></span></div>
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A couple weeks pass, and I'm a Dad now! In fact, I already celebrated my first Father's Day. My son is healthy and crying and breastfeeding and pooping and not sleeping at night, and it is an absolute joy. </div>
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And then I run across a simple fact, that this past Monday, June 25th, is International Beatles Day. I see this quote on my Facebook feed from Kurt Vonnegut: </div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">"<span style="color: #454545;">I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, 'The Beatles did'."</span></span></blockquote>
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How true! Life. Appreciating it. My Boy came into this world to The Beatles, listening to one of their many masterpieces. And I sang "Got to Get You Into My Life" to him the next day, "I was alone. I took a ride. I didn't know what I would find there..." Paul McCartney's upbeat, horn-heavy ode to realizing you've found exactly what you both wanted and needed. I sang it, a softer version, to Kit as he lay in my arms. He fell asleep. I cried softly, happy tears. Everything was right.<br />
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If that is not the power of art giving life, I don't know what is. </div>
Kevin Powershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04219017960488448934noreply@blogger.com10