by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
At 8 p.m. I watched another
Lifetime movie — Tempted by Danger, one they’d been giving a really intense hype to but which really
turned out to be the traditional Lifetime formula, just with Black people. The
star is Gabrielle Graham, playing Nicole Brooks, a rising young attorney at a
law firm who’s about to make partner because of her skill at pressuring
swindlers to give up at least part of their ill-gotten gains to avoid serious
criminal prosecution. She works closely with a white attorney at the firm, Kyle
Miller (Dan Mousseau, not drop-dead gorgeous but nice and easy on the eyes) —
so closely that she describes him as her “work husband” even though there isn’t
even the hint of anything sexual between
them. They do spend a lot of late
evenings together, but only to go over the firm’s pending cases, and in any
cases he’s already got a non-work marriage to a white woman and it appears to be happy. Only
Nicole’s sister, Angela Brooks Beaty (Keshia Knight Pulliam, who’s shorter and
a lot more heavy-set than
Gabrielle Graham), is determined to find Nicole a boyfriend. Angela already has
a (Black) husband, has had two kids with him and is expecting a third, and
she’s convinced all work and no play is making Nicole a dull girl indeed.
Angela works at an advertising agency and one day she meets a man named Michael
Langdon (Michael Xavier) who’s just hired on there as a creative advisor.
Angela immediately thinks of Michael as a suitable match for Nicole — He’s
young, Black, sexy and seemingly intelligent and professional. Michael’s first
attempt to take Nicole out to a super-exclusive restaurant called The Beast (do
they serve the famous “roast beast” from How the Grinch Stole Christmas?) runs afoul of her work schedule — her law firm
is angling for a new client, a company whose managers are impressed by the
dedication and purposefulness with which she prepared for her firm’s
presentation one of them offers her a job.
Thanks to the authorial fiat of
writer Laura Balson Carter, the first time Nicole and Michael do go out together it’s to a shooting range, where
it’s established that Nicole is a great shot and Michael a mediocre one who can
barely hit the target (one wonders if Carter had seen the first, 1934, version
of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, in which the wife of the kidnapped child — Edna
Best, Mrs. Herbert Marshall, in the role Doris Day played in the remake — was
established in the opening sequence as a crack shot so it would be believable
that at the end of the movie she’s able to take a sniper-style shot and kill
the villain who’s holding her child hostage without hurting the child) — though
eventually they spend an entire weekend together and we get the distinct
impression they spent most of that time in bed with Michael giving Nicole by
far the greatest sex she’s ever had in her life. (It’s entirely possible that
we’re supposed to “read” Nicole’s character as previously a virgin until her
hot weekend with Michael — just as we were supposed to “read” the central
character in 2001’s Passion and Prejudice, a prim white college professor who finds the Black ex-con who’s just
hired on as her gardener, lubriciously irresistible even though she had previously never had sex.) Gabrielle Graham
isn’t much of an actress to suggest either the work-driven or the lust-driven
aspects of her character, though that doesn’t much matter since we’re shown her
in surprisingly scanty clothing (especially for a lawyer!) so straight Black
guys (or straight white guys with a “thing” for Black women) can find both her
and this movie appealing. Anyway, as the film progresses Michael gets more and
more possessive, determined to eliminate anyone else Nicole is at all involved with and also
consumed with jealousy that her relationship with Josh may extend beyond the
office and the long weekends they spend together doing homework. Writer Carter
and director Annie Bradley (who gets some nicely atmospheric shots and
suspenseful scenes; in general, she does the best she can with what she was
given, which wasn’t much) make it clear to us that Josh has zero interest in Nicole “that way”
(he’s not-bad looking but he’s more of a teddy bear than a stud, and so in the
Lifetime iconography that the best-looking and sexiest man in one of their movies
is almost invariably the villain we can trust him and it’s Michael both Nicole and the audience should be worrying
about).
Michael’s plot, whatever it is, starts to unravel when Nicole starts
getting creeped out at how much he knows about the rest of her life — though,
alas, her suspicions (as opposed to other parts of her) don’t start getting
aroused until after she’s already given Michael the key to her home (and one of
the things that starts getting her suspicious of him is he never invites her to
his place — it turns out
because he’s merely renting a garage and that would totally blow his
Black-professional image). We start getting even more suspicious about Michael
when he turns in his BMW to a local garage run by a skuzzy white guy and
obtains a loaner car —especially when he flips through multiple driver’s
licenses before handing the garage owner the one with “Willie” as his name (we
don’t see it but we hear the garage owner call him “Willie”) — which he uses to
run down Josh outside the law firm’s offices after spraying the security camera
with paint so it won’t record what he’s doing. It seemed as if Carter was
setting up Josh to be the best friend who discovers the villain’s plot but gets
killed for his pain — it would have been a nice reversal of Lifetime’s usual
formulae to have a Black “pussy in peril” have a white friend who discovers the villain’s plot but gets
killed for his or her pains. But Josh is merely hospitalized, not killed, and
since he and Nicole were supposed to start a big trial the following Monday and
he’s not going to recover in time — nor is the judge going to be willing to
delay it until Josh is ready to work again — Nicole gets the assignment to lead
the trial team. Only first she has to spend one last weekend at work preparing
the opening brief, which contains confidential information obtained from the
other side via discovery, and of course — and in total violation of every basic rule of how real offices work in 2020 (or at least used to until
the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic closed almost all of them!), nobody bothers to back the
whole thing up. There are bits and pieces of it on Josh’s computer but the
confidential files can’t be re-created, and according to the rules of court if
the brief disappears before trial the other side has to be tipped off that
their confidential information has been compromised and the result could be
either a directed verdict for the other side or a mistrial.
So Michael, upset
that Nicole has finally seen through his act and broken up with him — aided when
Angela learns, and tells her sister, that Michael never actually worked for the
ad agency: he just showed up one morning and pretended to work there to get a contact with someone close
to Nicole, whom he’d seen from afar at a Bar Association event and immediately
decided was The Woman for him, even though, using the
name Todd Langdon, he’d pulled this
stunt once before and the woman he targeted then had to get a restraining order
against him — of course he steals the all-important brief. (Memo to Lauren Balson
Carter: how did Michael know the brief was so damned important?) The loss of the brief leads the
middle-aged guy who owns the law firm (and whom we’ve never seen before) to
fire Nicole at once, which suits Michael just fine because he figures that if Nicole
is unemployed she’ll be willing to flee the country with him on however much
money he’s able to accumulate for them to live on. To make that happen, he
kidnaps Angela (ya remember Angela?) and threatens to kill her if Nicole doesn’t run off with him, and when Nicole goes after them
she discovers that Michael has also stolen her gun, but in the final
confrontation in Michael’s garage she manages to get the gun away from him and,
when he threatens to kill Angela, she drills him with a perfect shot (ya remember
that she’s a crack shot?) that
blows him away. Six months later Nicole has a new job with the former client
who wanted to hire her away from her law firm in the first place — Josh is
discontented that they won’t be able to work together any longer but he’s happy
Nicole has landed on her feet — and she seems to be on track to an O.K. life
again even though I was hoping writer Carter would come up with a new and sane
romantic interest for her. In fact I had a specific person in mind I wanted
Carter to pair her off with: Rod (Manuel Rodriguez-Saenz), the dreadlocked
neighbor of Nicole’s whom she’s had a good and easy-going friendship but it
would have been nice if it would
have developed into something more.
Tempted by Danger — I guess all the good Lifetime titles were taken — is an O.K. movie with
a few nice touches, like the way not only Michael’s demeanor but even his
physical appearance changes when he’s revealed as the villain: by the end of
the movie he’s doffed the three-piece suits he wore in ad-man guise (it turns
out he never really worked at the agency: he just pretended to work there to get close to Angela so he could
in turn get close to her sister Nicole) and is dressing like a gangbanger,
complete with ball cap and dark casual clothes. But it’s mostly just the
modern-day “race movie” version of the usual Lifetime clichés, and without any
of the surprising artistry with which writer Tracy McMillan transformed Jane
Austen’s classic 19th century British novel Pride and Prejudice into Pride and Prejudice: Atlanta, a story among Atlanta’s Black 1-percenters (and
the idea that Atlanta or any other major U.S. city has Black 1-percenters —enough of them to form a
definable community — was no doubt itself a surprise for a lot of viewers).
There’s a worse-than-average performance from Gabrielle Graham as Nicole and a
better-than-average one from Michael Xavier as the psycho (though I’ve seen
better versions of the cute, sexy psycho before — including the granddaddy of
them all, Anthony Perkins’ performance as the disarming Norman Bates in 1960’s Psycho), but for the most part Tempted by Danger is just another Lifetime movie, distinguished only
by giving African-American actors equal access to these stultifying
white-people’s clichés
Sunday, April 19, 2020
Friday, April 17, 2020
Beethoven: Missa Solemnis (Soli Dei Gloria, Idéale Audience, 2010)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night at 8 p.m. Charles and I watched the other Soli Dei Gloria DVD I had ordered a while back from arkivmusic.com as part of a close-out sale including a lot of interesting items, like an eight-DVD boxed set of Walter Felsenstein’s productions at the Deutsche Oper in what was then East Berlin (all in German even though only one of the operas, Beethoven’s Fidelio, was actually in German). This was a 2010 performance of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis at the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon — and it helped that it was in a real concert hall, not a cramped old church in The Netherlands like the Soli Dei Gloria (the name means “Only for the Glory of God”) production of Haydn’s The Creation we watched on Good Friday. The blurbs on the DVD box include a comment from critic Ian Swafford that the Missa Solemnis, “which Beethoven considered the crown of his music, may be the greatest piece most listeners never hear,” though I remember Carter Harman saying of it in his sketchy one-volume history of classical music that the Missa “has a certain uncompromising cragginess about it” that makes it “definitely a connoisseur’s work.” I had trouble staying awake during the performance and I suspect it’s partly the fact that I was exhausted after a rough day at work, partly because of the performance by conductor John Nelson — particularly his use of a chamber orchestra for a piece which I suspect Beethoven intended for large forces — and partly the work itself.
The Missa Solemnis is a product of Beethoven’s last decade — also the period of the Ninth Symphony, the last five piano sonatas and the last string quartets — that remarkable late flowering of his genius no one would have ever guessed he’d had in him if he’d died 10 years before he actually did. The problem is that it’s a glorious piece of music in some respects but it’s just a little bit of this and a little bit of that, a series of settings of the traditional Mass text in Latin (our DVD was subtitled but even if it hadn’t been it’s not that hard to keep track) that offers some top-drawer Beethoven but not the developmental “through-line” of the Ninth Symphony or some other liturgical or quasi-liturgical works by other composers (Bach’s St. Matthew and St. John Passions, Handel’s The Messiah and the Berlioz and Verdi Requiems). It’s the sort of work that needs a lot of help from its performers, and my favorite recording of the Missa is a left-field choice, partly because it’s incomplete (it contains only the first 47 minutes (a little over half the total length — damn the time limitations of American radio broadcasting!), and partly because it was recorded in 1937 (and sounds it). It was a radio broadcast from Cincinnati on May 5, 1937 with Eugene Goossens (a Belgian-born conductor who lasted into the 1960’s and spent most of his career in Britain) conducting and a fabulous quartet of soloists: Kirsten Flagstad (at her prime), Kathryn Meisle, Frederick Jagel and Ezio Pinza. I love this recording (even over complete ones of similar vintage by Arturo Toscanini and others) partly because of the sheer dramatic power and force Goossens brings to the piece, and partly because Flagstad is incomparable as the soprano soloist.
The soprano on John Nelson’s DVD is Tamara Wilson, who’s hardly in Flagstad’s league but is a heavy-set blonde woman with long, straight hair and a quite lovely voice — though it’s not clear whether she could have been heard over a full orchestra instead of Nelson’s chamber group. The other soloists are alto Elizabeth DeShong, tenor Nikolai Schukoff (whose voice had a nice “ring” but got a bit monotonous after a while) and bass Brindley Sherratt, and special kudos are in order for the lovely tone and phrasing of the orchestra’s first violinist, Marieke Blankestijn (her name makes her seem like Nelson brought over at least one musician from the Dutch group with which he filmed The Creation), who really shone in the surprisingly frequent solo violin passages with which Beethoven studded the later sections of the work. Overall the Nelson performance of the Missa Solemnis was beautiful and moving but also a bit on the dull side — I missed the sheer energy Goossens brought to this score 83 years ago — though the use of a chamber orchestra did make the score more transparent and one heard bits of detail in the scoring that obviously influenced Wagner (who regarded Bach, Mozart and Beethoven as a sort of holy trinity of German music) — and as lovely as much of the Missa is, one can hear why it’s become a sort of step-child among Beethoven’s late works, more admired than loved and sufficiently “off the radar” that even many fans of classical music in general and Beethoven in particular either haven’t heard it or can’t remember it if they have.
Last night at 8 p.m. Charles and I watched the other Soli Dei Gloria DVD I had ordered a while back from arkivmusic.com as part of a close-out sale including a lot of interesting items, like an eight-DVD boxed set of Walter Felsenstein’s productions at the Deutsche Oper in what was then East Berlin (all in German even though only one of the operas, Beethoven’s Fidelio, was actually in German). This was a 2010 performance of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis at the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon — and it helped that it was in a real concert hall, not a cramped old church in The Netherlands like the Soli Dei Gloria (the name means “Only for the Glory of God”) production of Haydn’s The Creation we watched on Good Friday. The blurbs on the DVD box include a comment from critic Ian Swafford that the Missa Solemnis, “which Beethoven considered the crown of his music, may be the greatest piece most listeners never hear,” though I remember Carter Harman saying of it in his sketchy one-volume history of classical music that the Missa “has a certain uncompromising cragginess about it” that makes it “definitely a connoisseur’s work.” I had trouble staying awake during the performance and I suspect it’s partly the fact that I was exhausted after a rough day at work, partly because of the performance by conductor John Nelson — particularly his use of a chamber orchestra for a piece which I suspect Beethoven intended for large forces — and partly the work itself.
The Missa Solemnis is a product of Beethoven’s last decade — also the period of the Ninth Symphony, the last five piano sonatas and the last string quartets — that remarkable late flowering of his genius no one would have ever guessed he’d had in him if he’d died 10 years before he actually did. The problem is that it’s a glorious piece of music in some respects but it’s just a little bit of this and a little bit of that, a series of settings of the traditional Mass text in Latin (our DVD was subtitled but even if it hadn’t been it’s not that hard to keep track) that offers some top-drawer Beethoven but not the developmental “through-line” of the Ninth Symphony or some other liturgical or quasi-liturgical works by other composers (Bach’s St. Matthew and St. John Passions, Handel’s The Messiah and the Berlioz and Verdi Requiems). It’s the sort of work that needs a lot of help from its performers, and my favorite recording of the Missa is a left-field choice, partly because it’s incomplete (it contains only the first 47 minutes (a little over half the total length — damn the time limitations of American radio broadcasting!), and partly because it was recorded in 1937 (and sounds it). It was a radio broadcast from Cincinnati on May 5, 1937 with Eugene Goossens (a Belgian-born conductor who lasted into the 1960’s and spent most of his career in Britain) conducting and a fabulous quartet of soloists: Kirsten Flagstad (at her prime), Kathryn Meisle, Frederick Jagel and Ezio Pinza. I love this recording (even over complete ones of similar vintage by Arturo Toscanini and others) partly because of the sheer dramatic power and force Goossens brings to the piece, and partly because Flagstad is incomparable as the soprano soloist.
The soprano on John Nelson’s DVD is Tamara Wilson, who’s hardly in Flagstad’s league but is a heavy-set blonde woman with long, straight hair and a quite lovely voice — though it’s not clear whether she could have been heard over a full orchestra instead of Nelson’s chamber group. The other soloists are alto Elizabeth DeShong, tenor Nikolai Schukoff (whose voice had a nice “ring” but got a bit monotonous after a while) and bass Brindley Sherratt, and special kudos are in order for the lovely tone and phrasing of the orchestra’s first violinist, Marieke Blankestijn (her name makes her seem like Nelson brought over at least one musician from the Dutch group with which he filmed The Creation), who really shone in the surprisingly frequent solo violin passages with which Beethoven studded the later sections of the work. Overall the Nelson performance of the Missa Solemnis was beautiful and moving but also a bit on the dull side — I missed the sheer energy Goossens brought to this score 83 years ago — though the use of a chamber orchestra did make the score more transparent and one heard bits of detail in the scoring that obviously influenced Wagner (who regarded Bach, Mozart and Beethoven as a sort of holy trinity of German music) — and as lovely as much of the Missa is, one can hear why it’s become a sort of step-child among Beethoven’s late works, more admired than loved and sufficiently “off the radar” that even many fans of classical music in general and Beethoven in particular either haven’t heard it or can’t remember it if they have.
Monday, April 13, 2020
Miracles from Heaven (Columbia Pictures, Affirm Films, Roth Films, 2016)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Lifetime celebrated Easter by re-running a lot of their previous faith-based movies — quite a few of them with Black protagonists — as well as at least two films that were originally made for theatrical release (remember movie theatres?) but were aimed at what the movie studios have euphemistically called the “faith audience.” These are moviegoers who are not only strongly religious themselves but want stories about characters who make God a presence in their lives almost every moment — as a non-“faith” person, I wonder if there are really people who talk about God and His plans for them as incessantly as the characters in these movies do. I watched all but about the first 15 minutes of Miracles from Heaven, an odd and sometimes lumbering movie (I missed the first 15 minutes because Lifetime slotted it for 2 ½ hours instead of just two) based on a true story of the Beam family of Burleson, Texas. As my husband Charles said when the two of us saw the movie Shine, there are certain true stories that get filmed because the real-life events fit so neatly into movie clichés, and this was one of them: father Kevin Beam (Martin Henderson, a much sexier actor than the types that usually play sympathetic husbands in Lifetime movies!) is a veterinarian; mother Christy Beam (Jennifer Garner, top-billed) seems to be a stay-at-home housewife whose main function is to get her three kids to church on Sunday; and the kids themselves, in age order, are Abbie (Brighton Sharbino), Anna [short for “Annabelle”] (Kylie Rogers) and Adelynn (Courtney Fansler).
One wonders what possessed the Beam parents to give all their daughters names beginning with “A,” but we’re not allowed to think about that much because Anna, the middle daughter and the focus of the story, gets a life-threatening stomach disease so rare it’s hard to piece together from the various references to it in the dialogue exactly what it is. What we do get is that her body has basically forgotten how to digest food and absorb its nutrients, and there may be some other things wrong with her as well. The local doctors in Texas inform the Beams that there’s only one doctor in the entire world who can treat their daughter’s condition, and he’s Dr. Nurko (Eugenio Derber) of the Children’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. The problems facing the Beams include not only the expense of traveling back and forth between Burleson and Boston but the nine-month waiting list for the super-doc’s services (nine months Anna simply doesn’t have!) and the rather grim reality that slots on Dr. Burko’s waiting list typically open up not because his patients get better but because they die. When her attempts to phone the good doc fall flat, Christy Beam decides to fly across the country with Anna “on spec,” hoping that if she shows up on Dr. Burko’s doorstep he and his office staff will take pity on her and admit her daughter for treatment. She appeals to Dr. Burko’s receptionist and gets the usual put-downs until she appeals to the woman’s sensitivity, asking her point-blank the question that usually penetrates the cold, cold hearts of movie bureaucrats: “Don’t you have children of your own?” Christy and Anna Beam make one good friend in Boston, a Black cabdriver and overall good person named Angela (Queen Latifah, the only person in this movie besides Garner whom I’d heard of before — and, as usual, she steals the movie right out from under all the white people in it!), who offers to take them around Boston and show them the sights. (Actually, the whole movie was filmed in Georgia, and “goofs” writers on imdb.com have noted that the aquarium Angela takes Christy and Anna to is the one in Atlanta, not the one in Boston.) Dr. Nurko finally accepts Anna as a patient — a slot has opened in his schedule and neither Christy nor we want to know why — only the treatments are arduous and require Anna to make frequent trips to Boston for in-person follow-ups.
While I found myself wondering why Christy and Anna didn’t just move to Boston for the duration — I would presume Christy could have found a home and a job there instead of racking up huge plane fares flying back and forth — there’s a fascinating scene in which just as Anna is on the point of giving up, saying that in her bed at Children’s Hospital she’s been dreaming of heaven and wondering why she can’t just go there already instead of enduring the pain and suffering of her disease, Kevin, Abbie and Adalynn show up after a suspenseful scene in which they try to pay for their plane fare, they’ve maxed out all but one of their credit cards and when the ticket clerk at the airport is trying the last one, his computer suddenly crashes and he agrees to write them their tickets by hand. While all this has been going on Christy has withdrawn from the local church because too many of her fellow congregants have asked her what she, her husband or their daughter may have done to deserve this punishment from God. Christy reacts exactly as you’d expect her to — she gets insulted, especially at the slam that Anna is somehow responsible for her own condition, and she refuses to go to church again. Eventually Dr. Nurko patches up Anna as best she can — she’s still not well but she’s active enough that she’s able to return home and play with her sisters in their ample backyard. The three Beam girls climb up a hollowed-out tree, only Anna slips, falls down the entire length of the tree (in a sequence that briefly looked like she was on her way to Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland) and lands head-first on the ground. The Beams call 911 and both police and firefighters respond; the firefighters quickly realize that they can’t do the most obvious thing — cut down the tree — because it’s so weak it would fall apart and Anna would be buried under the debris. Instead they have to send a firefighter down on a rope and have him pull her out manually. He does, but she’s suffered a concussion and she has to go to the hospital again — though when she recovers from the concussion and other injuries from the fall, she also seems cleared of that bizarre stomach disease that got her into all this trouble in the first place.
Miracles from Heaven was based on a memoir by Christy Beam herself, adapted into a screenplay by Randy Brown and directed effectively by Patricia Riggen, and though there were some clunky moments on the way to the expected happy ending, for the most part this was a quite entertaining and even moving film. I especially liked the fact that Brown’s script confronted the “theodicy” problem — why, if God is love and loves us and wants us to be happy, does He allow bad things to happen to us? — and I loved the worm-turning scene in which Christy finally comes back to her church and gets assailed by fellow congregants who question whether Anna was really as sick as she claimed — and they get told off by the father of Haley (Hannah Allgood), a 10-year-old cancer patient from Boston who was Anna’s roommate at Children’s Hospital, and dad showed up in Texas to thank Christy and Anna for inspiring his daughter and making her happy even though Haley did not survive her disease. According to an imdb.com “trivia” commentator, making this film was such a powerful experience for Jennifer Garner that she found God and converted — and while that one is a bit difficult to believe, one can easily see why: she was enacting a woman full of emotional turmoil in a story deliberately structured by the writers (including Christy Beam herself in her memoir) to attribute every good thing that happened to Anna to direct intervention by God in the form of a miracle, symbolized on screen by the appearance of a butterfly in every scene supposedly representing God making something happen that would allow Anna to recover fully. Within the conventions and purposes of a “faith” movie, Miracles from Heaven is actually quite a good and powerful work, and even though I’ve never been able to bring myself to believe in God (though I’m far less intense about it than I was 30 or 40 years ago!), I could accept it as good, valid human drama about people who didn’t deserve the bad things that happened to them but weren’t impossible-to-believe-in goody-goods either.
Last night Lifetime celebrated Easter by re-running a lot of their previous faith-based movies — quite a few of them with Black protagonists — as well as at least two films that were originally made for theatrical release (remember movie theatres?) but were aimed at what the movie studios have euphemistically called the “faith audience.” These are moviegoers who are not only strongly religious themselves but want stories about characters who make God a presence in their lives almost every moment — as a non-“faith” person, I wonder if there are really people who talk about God and His plans for them as incessantly as the characters in these movies do. I watched all but about the first 15 minutes of Miracles from Heaven, an odd and sometimes lumbering movie (I missed the first 15 minutes because Lifetime slotted it for 2 ½ hours instead of just two) based on a true story of the Beam family of Burleson, Texas. As my husband Charles said when the two of us saw the movie Shine, there are certain true stories that get filmed because the real-life events fit so neatly into movie clichés, and this was one of them: father Kevin Beam (Martin Henderson, a much sexier actor than the types that usually play sympathetic husbands in Lifetime movies!) is a veterinarian; mother Christy Beam (Jennifer Garner, top-billed) seems to be a stay-at-home housewife whose main function is to get her three kids to church on Sunday; and the kids themselves, in age order, are Abbie (Brighton Sharbino), Anna [short for “Annabelle”] (Kylie Rogers) and Adelynn (Courtney Fansler).
One wonders what possessed the Beam parents to give all their daughters names beginning with “A,” but we’re not allowed to think about that much because Anna, the middle daughter and the focus of the story, gets a life-threatening stomach disease so rare it’s hard to piece together from the various references to it in the dialogue exactly what it is. What we do get is that her body has basically forgotten how to digest food and absorb its nutrients, and there may be some other things wrong with her as well. The local doctors in Texas inform the Beams that there’s only one doctor in the entire world who can treat their daughter’s condition, and he’s Dr. Nurko (Eugenio Derber) of the Children’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. The problems facing the Beams include not only the expense of traveling back and forth between Burleson and Boston but the nine-month waiting list for the super-doc’s services (nine months Anna simply doesn’t have!) and the rather grim reality that slots on Dr. Burko’s waiting list typically open up not because his patients get better but because they die. When her attempts to phone the good doc fall flat, Christy Beam decides to fly across the country with Anna “on spec,” hoping that if she shows up on Dr. Burko’s doorstep he and his office staff will take pity on her and admit her daughter for treatment. She appeals to Dr. Burko’s receptionist and gets the usual put-downs until she appeals to the woman’s sensitivity, asking her point-blank the question that usually penetrates the cold, cold hearts of movie bureaucrats: “Don’t you have children of your own?” Christy and Anna Beam make one good friend in Boston, a Black cabdriver and overall good person named Angela (Queen Latifah, the only person in this movie besides Garner whom I’d heard of before — and, as usual, she steals the movie right out from under all the white people in it!), who offers to take them around Boston and show them the sights. (Actually, the whole movie was filmed in Georgia, and “goofs” writers on imdb.com have noted that the aquarium Angela takes Christy and Anna to is the one in Atlanta, not the one in Boston.) Dr. Nurko finally accepts Anna as a patient — a slot has opened in his schedule and neither Christy nor we want to know why — only the treatments are arduous and require Anna to make frequent trips to Boston for in-person follow-ups.
While I found myself wondering why Christy and Anna didn’t just move to Boston for the duration — I would presume Christy could have found a home and a job there instead of racking up huge plane fares flying back and forth — there’s a fascinating scene in which just as Anna is on the point of giving up, saying that in her bed at Children’s Hospital she’s been dreaming of heaven and wondering why she can’t just go there already instead of enduring the pain and suffering of her disease, Kevin, Abbie and Adalynn show up after a suspenseful scene in which they try to pay for their plane fare, they’ve maxed out all but one of their credit cards and when the ticket clerk at the airport is trying the last one, his computer suddenly crashes and he agrees to write them their tickets by hand. While all this has been going on Christy has withdrawn from the local church because too many of her fellow congregants have asked her what she, her husband or their daughter may have done to deserve this punishment from God. Christy reacts exactly as you’d expect her to — she gets insulted, especially at the slam that Anna is somehow responsible for her own condition, and she refuses to go to church again. Eventually Dr. Nurko patches up Anna as best she can — she’s still not well but she’s active enough that she’s able to return home and play with her sisters in their ample backyard. The three Beam girls climb up a hollowed-out tree, only Anna slips, falls down the entire length of the tree (in a sequence that briefly looked like she was on her way to Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland) and lands head-first on the ground. The Beams call 911 and both police and firefighters respond; the firefighters quickly realize that they can’t do the most obvious thing — cut down the tree — because it’s so weak it would fall apart and Anna would be buried under the debris. Instead they have to send a firefighter down on a rope and have him pull her out manually. He does, but she’s suffered a concussion and she has to go to the hospital again — though when she recovers from the concussion and other injuries from the fall, she also seems cleared of that bizarre stomach disease that got her into all this trouble in the first place.
Miracles from Heaven was based on a memoir by Christy Beam herself, adapted into a screenplay by Randy Brown and directed effectively by Patricia Riggen, and though there were some clunky moments on the way to the expected happy ending, for the most part this was a quite entertaining and even moving film. I especially liked the fact that Brown’s script confronted the “theodicy” problem — why, if God is love and loves us and wants us to be happy, does He allow bad things to happen to us? — and I loved the worm-turning scene in which Christy finally comes back to her church and gets assailed by fellow congregants who question whether Anna was really as sick as she claimed — and they get told off by the father of Haley (Hannah Allgood), a 10-year-old cancer patient from Boston who was Anna’s roommate at Children’s Hospital, and dad showed up in Texas to thank Christy and Anna for inspiring his daughter and making her happy even though Haley did not survive her disease. According to an imdb.com “trivia” commentator, making this film was such a powerful experience for Jennifer Garner that she found God and converted — and while that one is a bit difficult to believe, one can easily see why: she was enacting a woman full of emotional turmoil in a story deliberately structured by the writers (including Christy Beam herself in her memoir) to attribute every good thing that happened to Anna to direct intervention by God in the form of a miracle, symbolized on screen by the appearance of a butterfly in every scene supposedly representing God making something happen that would allow Anna to recover fully. Within the conventions and purposes of a “faith” movie, Miracles from Heaven is actually quite a good and powerful work, and even though I’ve never been able to bring myself to believe in God (though I’m far less intense about it than I was 30 or 40 years ago!), I could accept it as good, valid human drama about people who didn’t deserve the bad things that happened to them but weren’t impossible-to-believe-in goody-goods either.
A Question of Faith (Silver Lining Entertainment, 2017)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Alas, Lifetime followed Miracles from Heaven with another movie, A Question of Faith, which did not have the integrity of being based on a true story. Instead, it was based on so preposterous a set of coincidences writer Ty Manns and director Kevin Otto should have been ashamed of themselves! The story centers around three families, one Black, one Latina and one white. The Black family are David Newman (Richard T. Jones), assistant pastor to his father Farnsworth Newman (Gregory Alan Williams) in what looks like a Black mega-church, who’s being groomed to take over as pastor when dad retires; his wife Theresa (Kim Fields) and their sons Junior (James Hooper) and Eric (Caleb Thomas). Dad has just put David in charge of a major construction project to remodel and expand the church, only the church board has appointed a woman to be a middle-person between him and the board, and because he has to meet with her he can’t pick up his son Eric from an important basketball game. Neither, it turns out (but for less clear reasons) can Theresa, so Eric is left to walk home alone. The Latinas (I’m using the feminine form because both are women) are restaurant owner Kate Hernandez (Jaci Velasquez) and her daughter Maria (Karen Valero), who’s responsible for doing deliveries for the eatery (a plot point that’s become unexpectedly timely now!) even though she’s got a penchant for texting while driving and mom has already warned her against this. The white family are the Danielsons: dad is contractor John (C. Thomas Howell, one of those frustrating actors who’s better than most of the movies he’s been in), who’s overextended and dealing with a bank who’s about to foreclose on him; mom is Mary (Renée O’Connor) and their daughter is Michelle (Amber Thompson), who has a fabulous voice and is about to audition for a record label, which leads John to hope that she’ll get a big enough advance to pay off his debts and allow him to keep his business (which he inherited from his dad) from going under — only while singing in a white church the day before her audition she collapses, and it turns out she has severe heart disease and will die unless she gets a transplant within five days.
Given the above information you could probably write it yourself: while he’s walking home from his basketball game Eric is run down by Marie while she’s texting and driving on a delivery. He ends up in the hospital, alive but brain-dead, and David agrees to have the plug pulled on his son and also to allow his organs to be donated for transplants. And guess who receives Eric’s heart? That’s right, Michelle Danielson. And guess who gets the big contract to do the remodel on the Newmans’ church? That’s right, John Danielson, who now has enough work (including a major advance that allows him to hire a crew and get started so he can ultimately pay off his loans) he doesn’t have to worry about solvency anymore. Along the way there are a few crises of conscience, including a few stabs at dealing with the theodicy problem in ways far less meaningful and interesting than the ones in Miracles from Heaven — one gets the impression from both these movies, especially watching them back-to-back, that God has the Mother of All Münchhausen’s Syndromes, making bad things happen to good people just so he can get his kicks by making good things happen that will allow us to get over them and still believe that, all in all, God is Love. There are a few bits of conflict writer Manns and director Otto throw into the mix — including one in which Farnsworth Newman withdraws his retirement because he senses his son David’s bitterness over the pointless loss of his son has made him too bitter to be a pastor, especially if he has to deal with congregants facing similar losses — but for the most part A Question of Faith has all the blatant manipulativeness of Miracles from Heaven and virtually none of the integrity Miracles from Heaven got from being a true story and therefore having to comport at least to some extent with the normal rules of human behaviors and emotions.
Alas, Lifetime followed Miracles from Heaven with another movie, A Question of Faith, which did not have the integrity of being based on a true story. Instead, it was based on so preposterous a set of coincidences writer Ty Manns and director Kevin Otto should have been ashamed of themselves! The story centers around three families, one Black, one Latina and one white. The Black family are David Newman (Richard T. Jones), assistant pastor to his father Farnsworth Newman (Gregory Alan Williams) in what looks like a Black mega-church, who’s being groomed to take over as pastor when dad retires; his wife Theresa (Kim Fields) and their sons Junior (James Hooper) and Eric (Caleb Thomas). Dad has just put David in charge of a major construction project to remodel and expand the church, only the church board has appointed a woman to be a middle-person between him and the board, and because he has to meet with her he can’t pick up his son Eric from an important basketball game. Neither, it turns out (but for less clear reasons) can Theresa, so Eric is left to walk home alone. The Latinas (I’m using the feminine form because both are women) are restaurant owner Kate Hernandez (Jaci Velasquez) and her daughter Maria (Karen Valero), who’s responsible for doing deliveries for the eatery (a plot point that’s become unexpectedly timely now!) even though she’s got a penchant for texting while driving and mom has already warned her against this. The white family are the Danielsons: dad is contractor John (C. Thomas Howell, one of those frustrating actors who’s better than most of the movies he’s been in), who’s overextended and dealing with a bank who’s about to foreclose on him; mom is Mary (Renée O’Connor) and their daughter is Michelle (Amber Thompson), who has a fabulous voice and is about to audition for a record label, which leads John to hope that she’ll get a big enough advance to pay off his debts and allow him to keep his business (which he inherited from his dad) from going under — only while singing in a white church the day before her audition she collapses, and it turns out she has severe heart disease and will die unless she gets a transplant within five days.
Given the above information you could probably write it yourself: while he’s walking home from his basketball game Eric is run down by Marie while she’s texting and driving on a delivery. He ends up in the hospital, alive but brain-dead, and David agrees to have the plug pulled on his son and also to allow his organs to be donated for transplants. And guess who receives Eric’s heart? That’s right, Michelle Danielson. And guess who gets the big contract to do the remodel on the Newmans’ church? That’s right, John Danielson, who now has enough work (including a major advance that allows him to hire a crew and get started so he can ultimately pay off his loans) he doesn’t have to worry about solvency anymore. Along the way there are a few crises of conscience, including a few stabs at dealing with the theodicy problem in ways far less meaningful and interesting than the ones in Miracles from Heaven — one gets the impression from both these movies, especially watching them back-to-back, that God has the Mother of All Münchhausen’s Syndromes, making bad things happen to good people just so he can get his kicks by making good things happen that will allow us to get over them and still believe that, all in all, God is Love. There are a few bits of conflict writer Manns and director Otto throw into the mix — including one in which Farnsworth Newman withdraws his retirement because he senses his son David’s bitterness over the pointless loss of his son has made him too bitter to be a pastor, especially if he has to deal with congregants facing similar losses — but for the most part A Question of Faith has all the blatant manipulativeness of Miracles from Heaven and virtually none of the integrity Miracles from Heaven got from being a true story and therefore having to comport at least to some extent with the normal rules of human behaviors and emotions.
Sunday, April 12, 2020
The Clark Sisters: The First Ladies of Gospel (Lifetime, 2020)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night at 8 p.m. I put on the much-hyped Lifetime movie The Clark Sisters: The First Ladies of Gospel, about the Clark Sisters, a Black gospel group from Detroit who made their first album in 1973 for a small label owned by their uncle, Bill Moss, in their home town, Detroit. They achieved national success in 1981 with a single called “You Brought the Sunshine” and recorded for a subsidiary of Word Records, the leading white church music label. I hadn’t heard of the Clark Sisters before the promos for this movie about them started appearing on Lifetime, complete with encomia to them by Queen Latifah, Missy Elliott and Mary J. Blige, all of whom were listed as “executive producers” on the promos even though Queen Latifah was the only one listed on imdb.com’s credits. There are the predictable bits of “first-itis” — my name for the tendency of biographers to claim that the person or people they’re biographing were the first to do a particular thing when there were examples — often plenty of examples — of people doing it before them. The Wikipedia page on the Clark Sisters claims, “The Clark Sisters are renowned for their vocal stylings, dubbed as ‘the Clark Sound.’ They incorporate high and fast melismas, acrobatic trills and riffs, and deep, soulful growls, or ‘squalls’.” Sorry, but those are basic musical devices used by all Black gospel singers — at least all the ones we have on records.
Judging from the snippets of the Clarks’ songs heard in this film, what they did differently from other gospel singers and groups was singing in very close harmonies (in the softer parts of their songs, I found myself thinking, ‘This is what the Beach Boys would have sounded like if they’d been women, they’d been Black and they’d have grown up in church”) and pushing the melismas and trills harder than most of their predecessors. There’s a surprisingly strong line in the Black community between gospel music and rhythm-and-blues or soul music — which screenwriter Camille Tucker makes a dramatic issue in the film. Even though to outside listeners (especially white ones like me) they may seem to rely on the same musical and dramatic devices — the melismas (the effect of “sliding” from one note to another, often doing long runs up and down the scale on a single syllable of lyric, which in turn requires a degree of breath control comparable to what you need to sing coloratura parts in opera), the dramatic delivery, the emotional commitment and passion — Black listeners, especially churchgoing ones, regard R&B and soul as perversions of gospel and its singers as people who have almost literally sold their souls to the devil for worldly success. There are plenty of stories about the clash between gospel and soul — Ray Charles acknowledged in his autobiography that he took his style from gospel but sang about “sweet baby” instead of “sweet Jesus” (i.e., about sex instead of salvation); a month before his death Sam Cooke was booed off the stage when he joined his old gospel group, the Soul Stirrers, for an impromptu reunion and got catcalls like, “Get that blues singer off the stage! This is a Christian program!” In the complete reissue of Aretha Franklin’s Amazing Grace there’s an interview with Rev. C. L. Franklin, Aretha’s father and the pastor of the largest and most influential Black church in Detroit, in which he says, “People are always coming up to me and asking me, ‘When is Aretha going to go back to the church?’ I say, “Haven’t you heard the way she sings? Aretha never done left the church!”
Indeed, I found myself thinking of Aretha Franklin quite often while watching The Clark Sisters because it seemed to me that they were grabbing Aretha’s no-holds-barred soul style and bringing it back to its roots in the Black church — at times the Clark Sisters sounded like five Aretha Franklins in one group, each trying to outdo each other on how long they could hold a note, how long they could sustain a melisma or a trill, how much power and force they could bring to their music. The real heroine and central character of The Clark Sisters: The First Ladies of Gospel isn’t any of the sisters but their formidable mother, Dr. Mattie Moss Clark (Aunjanue Ellis, giving a scorching performance that holds this film together), who was the international choir director for the Church of God in Christ and also the wife of a pastor named Elbert Clark. The actor playing Elbert Clark is not listed on imdb.com’s page for the film but he manages to make an indelible impression even though he departs the story after the first act: he screams at Mattie that she’s “useless” to him because instead of being a good little pastor’s wife, appearing with him at church functions and hanging on his arm, she’s pursuing her own career and raising their daughters to sing as a group in the church. The tensions between Elbert and Mattie reach a climax one night when Elbert not only declares that Mattie is “useless” to him, he throws her oldest daughter Jacky (Angela Birchett) out of their home because Jacky isn’t his kid but the product of Mattie’s earlier marriage — and he slaps Jacky with such force he knocks her over. Mattie divorces Elbert and keeps the kids in the same house with her earnings as the Church of God in Christ music director and the money Jacky is earning as a hospital nurse (Jacky seems to be the only one who has a career outside of music), and she puts together the Clark Sisters vocal group and rehearses them intensely to the point where she considers them ready to perform in public.
They gradually work themselves up through the circuit of theatres in major cities’ Black community and break through to a secular audience even though Mattie insists that no matter what the temptations, they stay away from the “devil’s music” and devote themselves and their voices to the greater glory of God. At the same time the sisters themselves — Jackie, Twinkie (Christina Bell), Denice (Raven Goodwin), Dorinda (Shelea Frazier) and Karen (Kierra “Kiki” Sheard, daughter of the real Karen Clark) — start getting restless over their mother’s control of both their musical and personal lives. They attract the predictable young Black men as suitors — one of the would-be Clark husbands is himself a church pastor, and we groan, “Oh, no,” as we recall what Mattie’s pastor husband did to her. Twinkie, the organist for the group (the only one who plays an instrument) and their principal songwriter, signs a bad contract giving away the publishing rights to all the group’s songs to a white entrepreneur in exchange for a small advance she uses to buy a Lincoln Continental (given how tightly their mom scheduled them, one wonders when Twinkie even found the time to learn to drive!), and later marries a scapegrace guy who drags her off to North Carolina with vague promises that he can find a job there even though we can tell he’s just a gold-digger and we wish she’d leave him frantically ringing her doorbell in the ran the way Olivia de Havilland did to Montgomery Clift at the end of The Heiress. Denice has a succession of pregnancies and ends up with seven sons and a rather devil-may-care attitude about who their fathers are and whether or not they’re willing or able to marry her — though she finally does get married and withdraws from the group to pursue a position as a minister in the church despite the cultural conservatism of the denomination and the difficulty of a woman getting ordained in it.
The Clark Sisters have their biggest hit in 1981 with a song called “You Brought the Sunshine” — which the script admits was largely “borrowed” from Stevie Wonder (writer Tucker wants us to believe mother Mattie is so narrowly focused on church music and oblivious to the world of Black pop she has little or no idea who Stevie Wonder is and doesn’t recognize her daughters’ borrowing his sound). Their Wikipedia page cites this and other songs by the Clark Sisters that made the secular as well as gospel charts in saying, “They are credited for helping to bring gospel music to the mainstream and are considered as pioneers of contemporary gospel.” That last sentence may be true (though it depends on how you define “contemporary gospel” and how you think it differs from “traditional gospel”) but that bit about them being pioneers in bringing gospel music to the mainstream is “first-itis” with a vengeance. With my usual snottiness about such matters, I found myself wanting to ask Camille Tucker, “Does the name ‘Sister Rosetta Tharpe’ mean anything to you?” In case the name “Sister Rosetta Tharpe” doesn’t mean anything to you, she was a Black gospel singer and guitarist who started recording for Decca in 1937 and joined Lucky Millinder’s Black big band in 1941. That year, she recorded a song called “Shout, Sister, Shout” that was the first hit record to blend gospel and pop (13 years before Ray Charles recorded “I Got a Woman,” often named as the first gospel-pop record to make the charts), and she followed it up with “That’s All,” a song she’d earlier recorded on her own with just her voice and acoustic guitar, but which she rocked up with Millinder, played electric guitar and seemed to have beamed in from 20 years later. (Among other things, Tharpe was almost certainly the first guitar player to shred.) You can check these songs out on YouTube — “Shout, Sister, Shout” in a Soundies music video from 1941 at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oFrMR71ehE and “That’s All” in a dub of the Decca record at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4Lx3qvwikY — and hear not only the beginnings of rock ’n’ roll but also the roots of the gospel music of the 1940’s and 1950’s that shaped the Clark Sisters’ sound.
The biopic The Clark Sisters: The First Ladies of Gospel is at its most powerful when it deals with Mattie the ultimate stage mother and her attempts to keep her kids together and in the service of God and steer them away from the temptations of Mammon (particularly the offers the Clark sisters got from white businessmen who wanted to pull them out of the group and steer them into solo careers in R&B) as well as all these guys who wanted to get into their ample pants and get their hooks into the fortunes they thought (erroneously) the Clark Sisters were making. Eventually the Clark sisters all did get married, and I wish writer Tucker and director Christine Swanson had got more into the sheer difficulty of maintaining a group while the members are being pulled apart by the pressures of marriage, children and at least some attempt to maintain family lives of their own. Where the film is strongest is in the clashes between the Clark daughters’ attempts to live their own lives and mama’s insistence on controlling them — Mattie is such a powerful presence at times this seems like what the musical Gypsy would have been if Gypsy Rose Lee had had four sisters instead of just one, they’d been Black and been torn between secular entertainment and their values from the church — and also the clash between the entertainment world and the church. In one of the film’s most powerful scenes, Mattie is fired from her job as church music director by the church’s elders just after her triumphant appearance with her daughters at the Grammy Awards — a show she had been willing to be on the sidelines for, but her daughters had dragged her out — and the grim elders tell her that she’s suffering from the sins of pride and ambition and should just practice “obedience.” Of course the parallel with Jesus Christ taking on the elders of his religion couldn’t help but occur to me; I wanted to yell at the screen, “If Jesus had followed your advice and been ‘obedient’ to the Temple elders, your religion wouldn’t even exist!”
The climax occurs when mom dies (like some of my home-care clients, she ignores the advice of the health professionals around her — including Jacky, who as a nurse knows something about health care! — and finally dies of a treatable ulcer on her leg) and the others end up in a huge argument at her funeral before finally getting back together (all except Denise, who quit the group just after their big success) for a major reunion concert and CD. The Clark Sisters: The First Ladies of Gospel is a total success on almost every level — about my only quibble, aside from the bits of “first-itis” in the script, is the relentlessly past-is-brown cinematography of Jason Tan, a modern-day affectation that bothers me generally and is even worse in a film where the principal characters are Black since their brown skins tend to fade into the overall brown murk. Director Swanson (another triumph in Lifetime’s giving opportunities to women directors!) stages the action vividly and gets strongly etched performances from her cast, and the acting is uniformly excellent even though Aunjanue Ellis as Mattie almost inevitably stands out and the men are generally pretty blank (but then this is a woman’s story!). The Clark Sisters: The First Ladies of Gospel is at once a celebration of the music and the religious spirit underlying it and a tight, moving drama about the price of fame and the need at some point in your life to let go of your parents’ dreams and pursue your own.
Last night at 8 p.m. I put on the much-hyped Lifetime movie The Clark Sisters: The First Ladies of Gospel, about the Clark Sisters, a Black gospel group from Detroit who made their first album in 1973 for a small label owned by their uncle, Bill Moss, in their home town, Detroit. They achieved national success in 1981 with a single called “You Brought the Sunshine” and recorded for a subsidiary of Word Records, the leading white church music label. I hadn’t heard of the Clark Sisters before the promos for this movie about them started appearing on Lifetime, complete with encomia to them by Queen Latifah, Missy Elliott and Mary J. Blige, all of whom were listed as “executive producers” on the promos even though Queen Latifah was the only one listed on imdb.com’s credits. There are the predictable bits of “first-itis” — my name for the tendency of biographers to claim that the person or people they’re biographing were the first to do a particular thing when there were examples — often plenty of examples — of people doing it before them. The Wikipedia page on the Clark Sisters claims, “The Clark Sisters are renowned for their vocal stylings, dubbed as ‘the Clark Sound.’ They incorporate high and fast melismas, acrobatic trills and riffs, and deep, soulful growls, or ‘squalls’.” Sorry, but those are basic musical devices used by all Black gospel singers — at least all the ones we have on records.
Judging from the snippets of the Clarks’ songs heard in this film, what they did differently from other gospel singers and groups was singing in very close harmonies (in the softer parts of their songs, I found myself thinking, ‘This is what the Beach Boys would have sounded like if they’d been women, they’d been Black and they’d have grown up in church”) and pushing the melismas and trills harder than most of their predecessors. There’s a surprisingly strong line in the Black community between gospel music and rhythm-and-blues or soul music — which screenwriter Camille Tucker makes a dramatic issue in the film. Even though to outside listeners (especially white ones like me) they may seem to rely on the same musical and dramatic devices — the melismas (the effect of “sliding” from one note to another, often doing long runs up and down the scale on a single syllable of lyric, which in turn requires a degree of breath control comparable to what you need to sing coloratura parts in opera), the dramatic delivery, the emotional commitment and passion — Black listeners, especially churchgoing ones, regard R&B and soul as perversions of gospel and its singers as people who have almost literally sold their souls to the devil for worldly success. There are plenty of stories about the clash between gospel and soul — Ray Charles acknowledged in his autobiography that he took his style from gospel but sang about “sweet baby” instead of “sweet Jesus” (i.e., about sex instead of salvation); a month before his death Sam Cooke was booed off the stage when he joined his old gospel group, the Soul Stirrers, for an impromptu reunion and got catcalls like, “Get that blues singer off the stage! This is a Christian program!” In the complete reissue of Aretha Franklin’s Amazing Grace there’s an interview with Rev. C. L. Franklin, Aretha’s father and the pastor of the largest and most influential Black church in Detroit, in which he says, “People are always coming up to me and asking me, ‘When is Aretha going to go back to the church?’ I say, “Haven’t you heard the way she sings? Aretha never done left the church!”
Indeed, I found myself thinking of Aretha Franklin quite often while watching The Clark Sisters because it seemed to me that they were grabbing Aretha’s no-holds-barred soul style and bringing it back to its roots in the Black church — at times the Clark Sisters sounded like five Aretha Franklins in one group, each trying to outdo each other on how long they could hold a note, how long they could sustain a melisma or a trill, how much power and force they could bring to their music. The real heroine and central character of The Clark Sisters: The First Ladies of Gospel isn’t any of the sisters but their formidable mother, Dr. Mattie Moss Clark (Aunjanue Ellis, giving a scorching performance that holds this film together), who was the international choir director for the Church of God in Christ and also the wife of a pastor named Elbert Clark. The actor playing Elbert Clark is not listed on imdb.com’s page for the film but he manages to make an indelible impression even though he departs the story after the first act: he screams at Mattie that she’s “useless” to him because instead of being a good little pastor’s wife, appearing with him at church functions and hanging on his arm, she’s pursuing her own career and raising their daughters to sing as a group in the church. The tensions between Elbert and Mattie reach a climax one night when Elbert not only declares that Mattie is “useless” to him, he throws her oldest daughter Jacky (Angela Birchett) out of their home because Jacky isn’t his kid but the product of Mattie’s earlier marriage — and he slaps Jacky with such force he knocks her over. Mattie divorces Elbert and keeps the kids in the same house with her earnings as the Church of God in Christ music director and the money Jacky is earning as a hospital nurse (Jacky seems to be the only one who has a career outside of music), and she puts together the Clark Sisters vocal group and rehearses them intensely to the point where she considers them ready to perform in public.
They gradually work themselves up through the circuit of theatres in major cities’ Black community and break through to a secular audience even though Mattie insists that no matter what the temptations, they stay away from the “devil’s music” and devote themselves and their voices to the greater glory of God. At the same time the sisters themselves — Jackie, Twinkie (Christina Bell), Denice (Raven Goodwin), Dorinda (Shelea Frazier) and Karen (Kierra “Kiki” Sheard, daughter of the real Karen Clark) — start getting restless over their mother’s control of both their musical and personal lives. They attract the predictable young Black men as suitors — one of the would-be Clark husbands is himself a church pastor, and we groan, “Oh, no,” as we recall what Mattie’s pastor husband did to her. Twinkie, the organist for the group (the only one who plays an instrument) and their principal songwriter, signs a bad contract giving away the publishing rights to all the group’s songs to a white entrepreneur in exchange for a small advance she uses to buy a Lincoln Continental (given how tightly their mom scheduled them, one wonders when Twinkie even found the time to learn to drive!), and later marries a scapegrace guy who drags her off to North Carolina with vague promises that he can find a job there even though we can tell he’s just a gold-digger and we wish she’d leave him frantically ringing her doorbell in the ran the way Olivia de Havilland did to Montgomery Clift at the end of The Heiress. Denice has a succession of pregnancies and ends up with seven sons and a rather devil-may-care attitude about who their fathers are and whether or not they’re willing or able to marry her — though she finally does get married and withdraws from the group to pursue a position as a minister in the church despite the cultural conservatism of the denomination and the difficulty of a woman getting ordained in it.
The Clark Sisters have their biggest hit in 1981 with a song called “You Brought the Sunshine” — which the script admits was largely “borrowed” from Stevie Wonder (writer Tucker wants us to believe mother Mattie is so narrowly focused on church music and oblivious to the world of Black pop she has little or no idea who Stevie Wonder is and doesn’t recognize her daughters’ borrowing his sound). Their Wikipedia page cites this and other songs by the Clark Sisters that made the secular as well as gospel charts in saying, “They are credited for helping to bring gospel music to the mainstream and are considered as pioneers of contemporary gospel.” That last sentence may be true (though it depends on how you define “contemporary gospel” and how you think it differs from “traditional gospel”) but that bit about them being pioneers in bringing gospel music to the mainstream is “first-itis” with a vengeance. With my usual snottiness about such matters, I found myself wanting to ask Camille Tucker, “Does the name ‘Sister Rosetta Tharpe’ mean anything to you?” In case the name “Sister Rosetta Tharpe” doesn’t mean anything to you, she was a Black gospel singer and guitarist who started recording for Decca in 1937 and joined Lucky Millinder’s Black big band in 1941. That year, she recorded a song called “Shout, Sister, Shout” that was the first hit record to blend gospel and pop (13 years before Ray Charles recorded “I Got a Woman,” often named as the first gospel-pop record to make the charts), and she followed it up with “That’s All,” a song she’d earlier recorded on her own with just her voice and acoustic guitar, but which she rocked up with Millinder, played electric guitar and seemed to have beamed in from 20 years later. (Among other things, Tharpe was almost certainly the first guitar player to shred.) You can check these songs out on YouTube — “Shout, Sister, Shout” in a Soundies music video from 1941 at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oFrMR71ehE and “That’s All” in a dub of the Decca record at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4Lx3qvwikY — and hear not only the beginnings of rock ’n’ roll but also the roots of the gospel music of the 1940’s and 1950’s that shaped the Clark Sisters’ sound.
The biopic The Clark Sisters: The First Ladies of Gospel is at its most powerful when it deals with Mattie the ultimate stage mother and her attempts to keep her kids together and in the service of God and steer them away from the temptations of Mammon (particularly the offers the Clark sisters got from white businessmen who wanted to pull them out of the group and steer them into solo careers in R&B) as well as all these guys who wanted to get into their ample pants and get their hooks into the fortunes they thought (erroneously) the Clark Sisters were making. Eventually the Clark sisters all did get married, and I wish writer Tucker and director Christine Swanson had got more into the sheer difficulty of maintaining a group while the members are being pulled apart by the pressures of marriage, children and at least some attempt to maintain family lives of their own. Where the film is strongest is in the clashes between the Clark daughters’ attempts to live their own lives and mama’s insistence on controlling them — Mattie is such a powerful presence at times this seems like what the musical Gypsy would have been if Gypsy Rose Lee had had four sisters instead of just one, they’d been Black and been torn between secular entertainment and their values from the church — and also the clash between the entertainment world and the church. In one of the film’s most powerful scenes, Mattie is fired from her job as church music director by the church’s elders just after her triumphant appearance with her daughters at the Grammy Awards — a show she had been willing to be on the sidelines for, but her daughters had dragged her out — and the grim elders tell her that she’s suffering from the sins of pride and ambition and should just practice “obedience.” Of course the parallel with Jesus Christ taking on the elders of his religion couldn’t help but occur to me; I wanted to yell at the screen, “If Jesus had followed your advice and been ‘obedient’ to the Temple elders, your religion wouldn’t even exist!”
The climax occurs when mom dies (like some of my home-care clients, she ignores the advice of the health professionals around her — including Jacky, who as a nurse knows something about health care! — and finally dies of a treatable ulcer on her leg) and the others end up in a huge argument at her funeral before finally getting back together (all except Denise, who quit the group just after their big success) for a major reunion concert and CD. The Clark Sisters: The First Ladies of Gospel is a total success on almost every level — about my only quibble, aside from the bits of “first-itis” in the script, is the relentlessly past-is-brown cinematography of Jason Tan, a modern-day affectation that bothers me generally and is even worse in a film where the principal characters are Black since their brown skins tend to fade into the overall brown murk. Director Swanson (another triumph in Lifetime’s giving opportunities to women directors!) stages the action vividly and gets strongly etched performances from her cast, and the acting is uniformly excellent even though Aunjanue Ellis as Mattie almost inevitably stands out and the men are generally pretty blank (but then this is a woman’s story!). The Clark Sisters: The First Ladies of Gospel is at once a celebration of the music and the religious spirit underlying it and a tight, moving drama about the price of fame and the need at some point in your life to let go of your parents’ dreams and pursue your own.
Superman Returns (Warner Bros., Legendary Pictures, Peters Entertainment, 2006)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last Thursday night Charles and I watched the 2006 film Superman Returns, of which I’d bought a DVD two months ago at the Mission Hills library sale (remember library sales? Remember libraries?), only it wouldn’t play and I ended up getting curious enough about this movie that I bought a three-disc Blu-Ray package also containing the 1978 Superman: The Movie (directed by Richard Donner and starring Christopher Reeve) and a reconstruction of the 1980 Superman II directed by Donner and featuring additional footage for Marlon Brando, who played Superman’s father Jor-El in the original film and shot enough material to continue the part in the sequel — only he ended up squabbling with producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind over his percentage deal and refused to allow his footage to be used in Superman II (he was replaced by additional footage with the actress playing Superman’s mother — according to this version of the Superman mythos, both his parents continued to nag him even from beyond the grave, and during Superman II I joked to Charles, “He’s probably thinking, ‘I wonder if Thor had to put up with this from Odin’”). Warner Bros., which distributed the first Superman feature, later bought the rights both to the film series and to Superman the character by acquiring his comic-book publisher, D.C., and they continued the series through two more films with Reeve before laying it to rest after the disappointing grosses of Superman IV: The Quest for Peace. In 2006 Warners decided to reboot the Superman franchise and hired director Bryan Singer away from the X-Men series at Marvel to direct the new film and co-write it with Michael Dougherty and Dan Harris. It seems a little odd to be watching this film now that both Singer and Kevin Spacey, who appears in it as Lex Luthor, have fallen afoul of the #MeToo sex police (they’re both Gay men who have been accused of doing physically abusive things to young men, including underage boys, and in line with the witch-hunt the #MeToo movement has become their careers have been trashed and they’ve almost literally been “unpersonned” in Hollywood — they do not exist, they never existed — even though the allegations against them are just that, unproven allegations, in a neo-McCarthyite climate of fear in which rumor and innuendo can be enough to destroy a career) — but that’s not the problem with Superman Returns. The real problem is that it’s boring.
Last Thursday night Charles and I watched the 2006 film Superman Returns, of which I’d bought a DVD two months ago at the Mission Hills library sale (remember library sales? Remember libraries?), only it wouldn’t play and I ended up getting curious enough about this movie that I bought a three-disc Blu-Ray package also containing the 1978 Superman: The Movie (directed by Richard Donner and starring Christopher Reeve) and a reconstruction of the 1980 Superman II directed by Donner and featuring additional footage for Marlon Brando, who played Superman’s father Jor-El in the original film and shot enough material to continue the part in the sequel — only he ended up squabbling with producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind over his percentage deal and refused to allow his footage to be used in Superman II (he was replaced by additional footage with the actress playing Superman’s mother — according to this version of the Superman mythos, both his parents continued to nag him even from beyond the grave, and during Superman II I joked to Charles, “He’s probably thinking, ‘I wonder if Thor had to put up with this from Odin’”). Warner Bros., which distributed the first Superman feature, later bought the rights both to the film series and to Superman the character by acquiring his comic-book publisher, D.C., and they continued the series through two more films with Reeve before laying it to rest after the disappointing grosses of Superman IV: The Quest for Peace. In 2006 Warners decided to reboot the Superman franchise and hired director Bryan Singer away from the X-Men series at Marvel to direct the new film and co-write it with Michael Dougherty and Dan Harris. It seems a little odd to be watching this film now that both Singer and Kevin Spacey, who appears in it as Lex Luthor, have fallen afoul of the #MeToo sex police (they’re both Gay men who have been accused of doing physically abusive things to young men, including underage boys, and in line with the witch-hunt the #MeToo movement has become their careers have been trashed and they’ve almost literally been “unpersonned” in Hollywood — they do not exist, they never existed — even though the allegations against them are just that, unproven allegations, in a neo-McCarthyite climate of fear in which rumor and innuendo can be enough to destroy a career) — but that’s not the problem with Superman Returns. The real problem is that it’s boring.
Superman
Returns was pretty clearly a sequel to the
first two Superman movies in the
four-film sequence with Christopher Reeve, but the writers and actors simply
aren’t as good. The first two Reeve Superman films were ostensibly based on a story by Mario
Puzo, whose name was big box-office following the success of his book The
Godfather and the first two films based on
it, and though reportedly virtually nothing Puzo wrote ended up in the finished
film, the script that finally got shot was the work of David Newman, who with
his writing partner Robert Benton had come up with the superb fusion of comedy
and crime drama of the 1967 Bonnie and Clyde. Newman and Benton both got credit for the first
Reeve Superman, along with
Newman’s wife Leslie, whom he brought on board because he felt he needed a
woman to write for Lois Lane. For Superman II the only credited writers were Puzo and both Newmans,
but they were still a damned sight better at evoking the feeling of a 1930’s
screwball comedy centered around a newspaper mixed with a superhero mythos that was, after all, first created in 1938, when the
screwball comedies were at their most popular. Messrs. Singer, Dougherty and
Harris tried to evoke a similar
mood, but they weren’t as good writers as the Newmans and Benton, and they
didn’t have a terribly compelling cast either. After Keanu Reeves (who would
have been physically wrong for the part just as the current Superman, Henry
Cavill, is, and for the same reasons: he’s too small and wiry to match the
tall, robust figure in the comics Jerry Siegel wrote and Joe Shuster drew)
bailed on the role — he never said why, though the rumor at the time was that
he’d noted the tragic fates of his near-namesakes who’d previously played the
Superpart (George Reeves dead in 1959 in an apparent suicide, though his story
is sufficiently mysterious he was the subject of a fascinating biopic, Hollywoodland, directed by Allen Coulter and starring Ben Affleck
in one of his very best performances as Reeves — and Christopher Reeve
permanently crippled in a horseback-riding accident and forced to spend the
last decade of his life in a wheelchair) — the producers got Brandon Routh.
One
gets the impression they discovered Routh in a Christopher Reeve look-alike
contest, and as Clark Kent he’s got the doofus part right but he doesn’t quite
catch Reeve’s humanity — the contrast between the beautifully written, acted
and staged sequence in which Reeve took Margot Kidder as Lois for a joyride in
the first Superman movie and the
dull, inept rehash of the same sequence in Superman Returns says all you need to know about the contrast between
the films and why the 1978 Superman
remains a joy while Superman Returns
is a dreary bore. It also doesn’t help that Kate Bosworth, a talented actress
in the right part (like Beyond the Sea, the Bobby Darin biopic directed by and starring Kevin Spacey), just
doesn’t sparkle like Kidder did as Lois Lane (and as Noel Neill[1],
who played her in the first live-action Superman films — the Columbia serials from 1948 and 1951 —
and again in all but the first two seasons of the George Reeves TV series, did
before her). And while I admire Kevin Spacey for being willing to shave his
head to resemble the famously bald Lex Luthor in the comics, he’s simply not as
good an actor as Gene Hackman, whose Luthor in the first two Reeve films
commanded the screen even though Hackman refused to shave his head and therefore
the costume and makeup departments had to redo his hair to make it look like he
was wearing an ill-fitting wig. (I still think, though, that the best Lex Luthor on screen was Lyle Talbot, who
played him in the 1951 Columbia serial Atom-Man vs. Superman, with Kirk Alyn as the best-ever Superman.) Likewise
Parker Posey as Luthor’s dumb girlfriend (this time called “Kitty Kowalski”
instead of “Eve Teschmacher”) is O.K. but hardly in the same league as Valerie
Perrine, who was able to bring some
depths into this silly stereotype of a character.
Frank Langella is largely
wasted as the Daily Planet’s
irascible editor, Perry White (what’s a nice bad guy who played Dracula doing
in a place like this?) and James Marsden is a walking, talking cliché as
Richard White, Perry’s nephew, head of the Daily Planet’s international bureau and Superman’s rival for
Lois’s affections. We’re supposed to believe that Richard White and Lois Lane
have been “living together” for seven years and have even had a child together,
but so far they’ve declined to get married — and if there was any attempt by
David and Leslie Newman to set up a His Girl Friday-style conflict with Lois torn between the exciting
superhero and the dull normal guy who could give her an ordinary life, they
don’t bother to do more than hint at it. (If Lois’s alternate boyfriend had
come from outside journalism and had wanted her to retire and be a stay-at-home
wife and mother, the parallel would have been closer and more entertaining.)
What’s more, when Luthor kidnaps both Lois and her son Jason (Tristan Lake
Leabu, making his movie debut) and he exposes Jason to Kryptonite, just when
we’re thinking, “Oh, no, they’re
not going to have Jason be Superman’s child,” he gets faint from being around
Kryptonite and therefore it’s established that he is Superman’s child, presumably conceived in that hot
night Superman gave Lois her Superfuck in the Fortress of Solitude in Superman
II. We’re also told that Superman was
absent from Earth for five years visiting the remains of Krypton after Earth
astronomers had finally discovered them, but we never see the ruins of Krypton or find out how Superman got
there and back (compare to the next Superman reboot, Man of Steel from 2013, where the filmmakers got so fascinated by
Krypton’s history, technology and culture the film was over an hour old before
they finally destroyed Krypton
and sent Superman home to earth) and I guess depicting the wreckage of Krypton
was beyond even the major budget Warner Bros. had allocated to this film.
And
the movie ends with the much-hyped “Death of Superman” plot line that had
already been a success in the comic books (the issue featuring the titular
“Death” was the best-selling Superman comic ever published, and possibly the best-selling comic book ever),
it means we get a ponderous exposition sequence at the end of a movie that has already had way
too many ponderous exposition sequences that drops us the hint that Superman is
alive after all and we can always expect a sequel. No sequel arrived, though, because
while at least on paper this film turned a modest profit ($391,096,082 on an
estimated production budget of $270,000,000), the combination of publicity
costs and other expenses for releasing the film probably kept its balances low
and made it a money-loser … so much so that when Warners decided to re-reboot the Superman franchise in 2013 they picked a whole new cast
(including Henry Cavill, all wrong physically for Superman — too short, too
wiry, not taller and more robust than most humans the way he was drawn in the
comics). In Superman Returns the
best performance was turned in by, of all people, Eva Marie Saint, playing
Clark Kent’s foster mother Martha (and ironically reuniting her with Marlon
Brando from On the Waterfront 52
years earlier!), one of those
move-aside-young-whippersnappers-and-let-an-old-pro-show-you-how-it’s-done performances much the way Ellen
Burstyn did in the Lifetime adaptation of V. C. Andrews’ Flowers in
the Attic and Noel Neill, the original Lois
Lane, did in a cameo appearance early on in Superman Returns, which otherwise remains a ponderous bore, with a
director who was obviously more at home in the angst-ridden realms of the Marvel Cinematic Universe
(especially the X-Men wing of it,
probably the most angst-ridden
part of it!) than the relatively innocent
you-know-who-the-good-guys-are-and-you-know-who-the-bad-guys-are realm of D.C.
— 4/10/20 and 4/12/20
[1] — And who makes a cameo appearance in the opening
scene of Superman Returns as
Gertrude Vanderworth, a super-rich woman who disinherits her whole family on
her deathbed and leaves her entire fortune to Lex Luthor.
Saturday, April 11, 2020
Haydn: The Creation (Soli Dei Gloria, Idéale Audience, 2010)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I looked for an appropriate video to show on Good Friday and found it in a box of clearance items I had bought a while back from ArkivMusic.com, including two DVD’s from a troupe called “Soli Dei Gloria” performing massive religious works. The one we watched last night was a 2010 performance of Haydn’s The Creation — though actually they performed it in the German version, Die Schöpfung (it seems a little less “immediate” that way — the original publication gave the text in both German and English and, though the first performance was given in Vienna in 1800 and was therefore presumably in German, Haydn’s inspiration was the oratorios of Handel, which were composed for a British audience and were therefore in English) — in a performance led by American-born conductor John Nelson in the Grote Kerk of Naarden, The Netherlands. The orchestra was the Netherlands Radio Chamber Philharmonic (containing a really cute violinist both Charles and I irreverently fell in lust with immediately!) — indicating that this was going to be a reading at least nodding towards historically informed performance (The Creation is one of those works that will work with small forces, but the sheer audacity and magnitude of the conception seems to demand more players and choral singers than Nelson had at his disposal). John Nelson is known primarily as a Berlioz conductor (his recordings include Roméo et Juliette, The Damnation of Faust, Béatrice et Bénédict and Les Troyens, the work on which Nelson “made his bones” at the Met) but he adapted well enough to Haydn’s idiom.
We watched both the main performance and the 25 minutes’ worth of rehearsal excerpts tacked on as a bonus item — and ironically the rehearsal hall had a more “open” acoustic than the church and made it easier to hear the internal dissonances in what is superficially a well-behaved “classical” work than it was in the rather cramped acoustics of the not-so-“Grote” Grote Kerk. I remember when I first heard The Creation (in an English-language telecast on PBS) I was astonished by the sheer imagination of the opening — Haydn really does evoke the idea of a universe “without form, and void” — though I felt Nelson was overstating the case when he said in an interview during the rehearsal segment that “nothing in Bach, Handel, Mozart or Beethoven” comes close to Haydn’s imagination here. (To me, the openings of Bach’s St. John Passion and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony have a surprisingly similar feeling to the opening of Haydn’s The Creation.) The Creation was written for orchestra, chorus and an oddly assorted set of five vocal soloists: the first two parts of the oratorio feature soloists delivering narration derived from the Book of Genesis and the third part ends with an extended duet for two other singers, cast as Adam and Eve. telling of the joys of life in the Garden of Eden with only few hints of the considerably darker turn (to say the least) the story takes just after Haydn and his librettist, Gottfried van Swieten, cut it off. (I found myself wishing that they’d gone ahead and done a sequel, Der Fall, but instead Haydn’s next — and last major — work was a secular oratorio called The Seasons.) The soloists in parts one and two have character names representing angels — Lisa Milne (identified as a soprano but she sounds more like a mezzo to me) as Gabriel, tenor Werner Güra as Uriel, and bass-baritone Matthew Rose as Raphaël — and though Haydn’s score allows the baritone and soprano to return for part three as Adam and Eve, Nelson cast different singers in these roles: Jonathan Beyer as Adam and Lucy Crowe as Eve.
Milne performed in an odd outfit that showed off more of her breasts than I would have wanted to see (and she probably wouldn’t have wanted the audience to see as much of her — especially given how close director Rhodri Huw got the cameras to her chest!) — in the rehearsal scenes, while just about everyone else was in casual clothes, Milne had a less revealing but equally impressive tunic and matching skirt that wouldn’t have seemed out of place in the actual performance. I remember when I first heard The Creation the first two parts — part one deals with the first four days and the creation of the inanimate world and universe; part two deals with the creation of animals on day five and humans on day six — seemed more powerful and moving than the sometimes impressive and sometimes just silly duet for Adam and Eve in part three (when they referenced “savory fruit,” I wondered where those had come from), though Nelson made the piece sound like a better integrated work and made the third part seem worthy of the first two. The Creation is a remarkable piece that occupied much of Haydn’s attention in the 1790’s after he had left the job of leader of the court’s musicians to Prince Nicolaus Esterházy in Hungary (a position Nelson described with withering scorn as being something of a prison since Haydn couldn’t travel freely and accept opportunities in other locations — though most composers of the time would have considered it a great gig and would have done virtually anything to get a job like that: Mozart tried again and again, without success, to suck up to the various aristocrats of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to get a job like Haydn’s!), and it’s a remarkable piece for how forward-looking it is, how much dissonance and musical complexity he crowds into a piece while remaining at least ostensibly loyal to the Classical-era musical conventions. It was a lovely and suitably reverent piece to be hearing on Good Friday, and I’m hoping Charles and I will soon get to watch the other Soli Dei Gloria DVD I got in the same order, Nelson and company performing Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis.
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