by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night CBS-TV aired a three-hour presentation of the 73rd
annual Tony Awards, hosted by James Corden — one of the blandest and least
interesting personalities in modern entertainment. When he stopped in the
middle of the show to do a number from a restroom — the gag being that hosting
the Tonys is such an arduous gig that whoever does it spends literally the next
year hiding out in a restroom stall — the lyrics he was “singing” (if, to
appropriate Dwight MacDonald’s description of Haya Harareet’s “acting” in the
1959 Ben-Hur, “I may use the term for
courtesy”) contained references to all the tweets he gets saying he has no
discernible talent at all, to which I replied, “I agree!” Corden started the
show with an opening “song” about the glories of live theatre and in particular
the thrill of being in the same room, in real time, as the people who are entertaining
you, as well as the demand that you have to be there on a certain date at a
certain hour and you can’t just “stream” it later.
The big winner last night
was the musical Hadestown, which
judging from the number presented in the show (the main reason I watch the Tony
Awards is for these snippets of performances that are as close as those of us
who don’t have the money to travel to New York and score tickets for these
shows will come to seeing them — the Tony Awards have also preserved snippets
of performances otherwise lost, including Julie Andrews in My Fair
Lady and Katharine Hepburn in Coco) is a recasting of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth in
which Orpheus is white (and, this being the 21st century, plays an
electric guitar — actually guitars are pretty recherché by now but he could hardly be expected to trundle a
synthesizer or a DJ’s turntables and mixing board with him into Hades!),
Eurydice is racially ambiguous but the waitstaff of Hades seems to be Black
(and their song, which seemed to be a mashup of two numbers called “Wait for
Me” and “Who Are You?,” was yet another knockoff of African-American gospel). Hadestown won for Best Musical, Best Score (Anaïs Mitchell)
and Best Director of a Musical — and the winning director, Rachel Chavkin,
mentioned in her acceptance speech that she was the only woman nominee in that category and turned it into a
heartfelt plea for greater diversity and more women and people of color on both
sides of the Broadway stage. “There are so many women who are ready to go, there
are so many artists of color who are ready to go,” she said. “It is a failure
of imagination by a field whose job it is to imagine how the world could be.”
Right on, Rachel Chavkin! Though Chavkin was essentially calling theatre in
general and Broadway in particular for being far more committed to equality in
rhetoric than in real life, it was clear from the political references in the
show (the Donald’s name was never mentioned, but it didn’t have to be) about
breaking down barriers and showing the commonality of people from different
racial and cultural backgrounds that in the hyper-partisan America of today,
the people who make theatre and hand out Tony Awards are in the anti-Trump
party of cosmopolitanism and inclusiveness, the side Trump’s supporters believe
has virtually destroyed America and needs to be pushed back into its “place” in
order to “make America great again.”
The Best Play winner was The
Ferryman, which I might have thought was
also a reference to the Hades myth but it’s actually about the second “Time of
Troubles” in Northern Ireland (the war between the Roman Catholic Irish
Republican Army and the Protestant Ulster Unionists between 1969 and the
1990’s, when Irish-American U.S. Senator George Mitchell brokered a peace deal
— the first “Time of Troubles” occurred between 1916 and 1922 in what is now
the Republic of Ireland and was between people who were content with a
so-called “Free State” in which Ireland could essentially govern themselves but
acknowledge Britain as being under ultimate control, and those who rejected the
“Free State” and sought full-out independence). The Best Revival of a Play
award went to a new production of Mart Crowley’s pioneering 1970 drama about
Gay men, The Boys in the Band —
and to my astonishment Crowley himself was alive and well enough to accept the
award personally even though a number of the original members of his cast were
among the earliest victims of the AIDS epidemic. Though one would think The
Boys in the Band would seem so horrendously
dated now the only way to do it
would be as a pre-Gay Liberation period piece, reviving it now in an age in
which the vice-president of the United States is on record as wanting to
eliminate all government
protections for Queer people and supporting so-called “conversion therapy”
aimed at turning Queer people straight (at best it turns people totally asexual
and at worst it produces more sexually and psychologically screwed-up Gay and
Lesbian people) is almost as radical as it was to produce it in the first
place.
The Best Revival of a Musical award had only two nominees, Oklahoma! (actually the official title of the production is Rodgers’
and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, presumably to
avoid confusion with the Oklahoma!
George Gershwin started writing in 1937 and Kurt Weill finished after
Gershwin’s death — memo to my readers: I made that up) and Kiss Me,
Kate, and it went to Oklahoma! even though I’d rather have seen it go to Kate, if only because Kate was done as a straight (an unfortunate word choice
given that its composer/lyricist Cole Porter was Gay!) revival without any
rewrites or reconceptualizations to make it more “relevant” to today’s
audiences. Oklahoma! was done
with the original book intact but with an on-stage “audience” as well as the
real audience, but I liked the fact that the winner for Best Featured Actress
in a Musical was the Ado Annie in Oklahoma!, Ali Stroker. When the cast of the Oklahoma! revival was brought on for the song “I Cain’t Say
No,” a problem I have myself, Stroker was in a wheelchair and I assumed she was
using it onstage to create a character. When she won her award and came out to
accept it in her wheelchair, I realized she needs it in real life — and I was
delighted with the decision to cast a disabled woman as the town slut. (Needless
to say, Stroker’s acceptance speech contained a plea to producers to cast more
actors and personnel with disabilities as a part of the overall goal to make
theatre more inclusive.)
The Best Book of a Musical award went to Robert Horn
for Tootsie, a stage adaptation
of the 1982 movie in which struggling actor Dustin Hoffman suddenly finds
success when he dons drag and auditions for a female character part in a soap
opera. One Los Angeles Times
article said that the musical Tootsie was more “Jewish” than the film — which seemed strange considering
that the leading actor in the movie was Jewish and his part was played onstage
by non-Jew Santino Fontana (who won the Best Actor in a Musical award and said
in his speech that he was one of those people who lay awake in bed at age 2 or
thereabouts and already dreamed of stage stardom). All too many of the shows
being honored by the Tonys were rehashes of hit movies from long ago (Bryan
Cranston won for playing Peter Finch’s old role in a stage adaptation of Paddy
Chayevsky’s and Sidney Lumet’s film Network, and in his speech he warned of the dangers of
demagogues — ironic since he’d won the award for playing a demagogue!), and
frankly instead of just doing Tootsie the way it was on screen in 1982 I would have rather seen a remix of
the original plot in which the experience of “playing” a woman leads the
leading man to realize he’s always been Transgender and “really” a woman in his
inner being.
The one thing that really annoyed me about this year’s Tony Awards
is that, while they continued the traditional practice of having the actors
from the musical casts perform numbers from their shows, they did not include featured scenes from the nominated
non-musical plays. Instead, they simply had the playwrights come out and give
short speeches about their works — and for a play called Choir Boy, which got nominated in the “Play” rather than the
“Musical” category even though music is integral to it, they had the playwright
(Tarell Alvin McCraney, who also wrote the script for the Academy Award-winning
film Moonlight — also a tale
about a young Black man coming out as Gay) give a speech and then performed a
scene from the play. Choir Boy
seemed to me the most interesting of all the shows nominated and the one I’d
most like to see; it’s about a boarding school for young Black men that has a
music program that trains people to sing spirituals and gospel music as part of
the school’s choir — only the male lead is a closeted Gay man who tries to
negotiate the contradiction between the school’s idea of ethics (and the
religious tradition whose music he is being trained to sing) and his own inner
life. I give McCraney a lot of points for his speech, especially his use of
“Queer” as an inclusive term for our community instead of that preposterous
series of letters we got stuck with (one woman, announcing the winner of the
humanitarian award, praised the honoree’s work on behalf of the “LGBTQ+”
community — the sentiment is nice but the ugliness of the designation still
appalls me). Charles would have liked his speech less than I did because, while
the first time he said “often” he kept the “t” silent, the second time he
pronounced it.
Overall the 73rd annual Tony Awards was worth
watching — in terms of Queer inclusion I should also mention that one of the
nominated musicals was The Prom,
in which four over-the-hill actresses descend on a small town that has decided
to cancel the high-school prom altogether rather than follow a court order that
a Lesbian student be allowed to attend it with a female date (the other
nominees were Tootsie, Beetlejuice — another
rehash of a 1980’s movie with a leading actor considerably larger and less
entertaining than Michael Keaton — and The Cher Show, which made me groan if only because it threatens
the depressing prospect that Cher’s endless cycle of “retirements” and
“comebacks” will continue even after she’s dead, since they’ll just get other
people to “play” her — apparently Cher is played by three different people in
this show, reflecting her at different ages, and I wonder whether Sonny Bono
appears as a character or not), along with Ain’t Too Proud, a biomusical about the Temptations (though the
number that showcased it featured a James Brown-style soul screamer and I don’t
think anyone actually in the Temptations
ever sang like that). It was fun
watching the numbers and getting a feel for the current state of Broadway
theatre, at least the musical end of it, as well as watching a bunch of people
on TV who think inclusivity and cosmopolitanism are virtues while our country
is governed by people who think they’re vices!
Monday, June 10, 2019
Sunday, June 9, 2019
Pola X (Arena Films, Canal+, Degeto Films, Pathé, 1999)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I ran Charles and I our “feature” movie for the evening, Pola X, a 1999 French film (fortunately it was already set up with the English subtitles turned on so I didn’t have to go back to the main menu and hunt for them) more or less based on an 1852 novel by Herman Melville called Pierre: Or, The Ambiguities. Melville’s Pierre was the immediate follow-up to Moby Dick and completed the destruction of Melville’s commercial career Moby Dick had begun; before Moby Dick Melville’s reputation was as a writer of South Seas-set potboiler romances like Typee, but the book that is now considered Melville’s masterpiece was a disaster in the marketplace and, though Melville was able to continue publishing until virtually the end of his life, he never again enjoyed the sales figures he’d been used to in his first decade as a novelist. So Melville made his next book a fictionalized autobiography about the travails of a writer, Pierre Glendinning, whose well-to-do father had just died, forcing him to return to the family’s ancestral estate while the will is sorted out. Pierre is engaged to a woman named Lucy Tartan, but this marriage is less his own idea than that of his domineering mother, since Lucy is also from a well-to-do family and mom wants to secure Pierre’s future by uniting the two fortunes. But Pierre’s affections are sidetracked by a mystery woman named Isabel Banford, who may or may not be his half-sister, and Pierre starts an affair with her while Lucy ends up with his cousin, Glendinning Stanley — only at the end of the book Pierre shoots his cousin and both he and Lucy then commit suicide, in an ending that seems more like the finale of a Verdi opera than a mid-19th century American novel.
I was interested in watching Pola X — indeed, his involvement was why I had bought the DVD in the first place — because the soundtrack music was composed by Scott Walker, the eccentric American boy-band star from the 1960’s who, reversing the trajectory of the “British Invasion” bands, emigrated to England and spent the rest of his life there. His first solo album was aimed squarely at the cabaret market and featured big orchestral arrangements by Wally Stott (who later underwent gender reassignment and became Angela Morley), indicating that had Walker wanted to he could have become his generation’s Frank Sinatra. Only he didn’t want to: during the early 1970’s his music became more experimental and his lyrics more political, and he later largely abandoned conventional song forms and started doing far-out combinations of classical and rock. Walker was a major influence on a number of British rock musicians, notably David Bowie; though Bowie only covered one Walker song, “Night Flight,” he performed live two of the three Jacques Brel songs, “My Death” and “Amsterdam,” Walker had recorded on his first solo album.
Filming Pola X was the brainchild of director Leos Carax, who co-wrote the script with Jean-Pol Fargeau and Lauren Sedofsky and directed the film solo (he had enough of a reputation in France he got the possessory credit, “A Leos Carax Film”), and he transplanted the story from 1850’s New York to 1990’s France. Carax cast Guillaume Depardieu, son of French superstar Gérard Depardieu (who was in so many French films, especially at his peak in the 1980’s, I used to joke that the French legislature had passed a law stipulating that Gérard Depardieu must be in every film made there), as Pierre (and in a macabre case of life imitating art, Depardieu fils had a motorcycle accident — we see a lot of him riding a motorcycle in the film — and during his hospital treatment contracted an antibiotic-resistant infection that gave him two years of ill health, forced the amputation of his leg, and finally killed him in 2008 at age 37). He also put Catherine Deneuve, older than we remember her from her 1960’s films but still in great shape physically and acting with magisterial authority, in the part of Pierre’s mother Marie. Pierre in this version is the son of a well-to-do diplomat — the family has an estate in the south of France — who has just died; he had a reputation as a humanitarian who saved a lot of people’s lives in the 1970’s but a tell-all book that trashes him is about to come out, though Pierre has no idea about that until close to the end of the film. Pierre, his best friend Thibault (Laurent Lucas) and his cousin/girlfriend Lucie (Delphine Chuillot) were a tight-knit trio as they grew up, but their bonds have been considerably weakened because Lucie is going to marry Pierre.
On a couple of night trips on his motorcycle — which Pierre inherited from his late father and which his mom insists he treat like a relic (every time he crashes it and some damage is done we worry mom is going to have a royal freak-out over it) — Pierre spots a mysterious woman with long dark hair (she reminded me of how Yoko Ono looked on the cover of her 1972 album Approximately Infinite Universe, one of the great unsung masterpieces of women’s rock — no kidding!) who when he runs into her and she spots him always seems to be carrying grocery bags which she drops running away from him. When he finally catches up to her, she turns out to be Isabelle (Yekaterina Golubeva), who on the film’s imdb.com page is listed as Pierre’s half-sister but whose relationship to him, such as it is, is carefully unspecified and kept ambiguous in the actual film. (In fact, a lot of things are carefully unspecified and kept ambiguous in the actual film. This is the sort of movie in which the director and writers are deliberately keeping you in the dark for much of the running time as to who is who and how they relate to each other.) Isabelle looks so spectral in her initial appearances both Charles and I at first thought she was a ghost. Pierre has written a sensationally successful novel called To the Light that has been hailed as the voice of France’s late-1990’s youth, but he published it under a pseudonym and the enigma around who he is has become a major selling point of the book. While he’s staying at his mom’s estate we see him using a computer to write his second novel, but what we see of the prose indicates it’s awful and clichéd. (We get it: he’s blocked.)
When Pierre meets Isabelle he starts a sexual affair with her, which launches him on a downward spiral that takes up most of the film’s plot. He bails on Lucie, leaves his mom’s estate, moves to Paris and ends up staying in a converted warehouse whose ground floor is the rehearsal studio for an avant-garde music ensemble, heavy on oil drums and other improvised percussive devices. He moves in with Isabelle and the two enact one of the oddest sex scenes in movie history, which Carax shoots mostly in close-ups of body parts so it’s not all that clear who’s doing what to whom — it seems that before they actually fuck they do a 69 on each other and Pierre brings Isabelle to orgasm through cunnilingus — and when Lucie finally traces them to Paris she gets her own room in the converted warehouse and the two women, being French, apparently avoid the jealousy and bitterness one might expect from an American film about a jilted fiancée confronting her ex and his new fuck buddy. At one point, in a scene apparently copied from Melville’s book, Pierre visits his old friend Thibault to take him up on his offer of hospitality, only Thibault is hosting a risqué party and angrily denounces Pierre, saying he doesn’t know him and he’s only an impostor pretending to be his old friend. Pierre is also trying to continue as a writer, but in his straitened circumstances he can only write in longhand, and for some symbolic reason he’s using red ink — which ties in to a later dream Pierre has in which he and Isabelle are literally drowning in a river of blood. As the thing rolls on one wonders how on earth Carax and his collaborators are going to end it — they have Pierre kill Thibault but then, instead of committing suicide, he’s merely arrested and the final shot of him is in the police van being taken to prison.
Pola X is the sort of movie Charles and I used to watch a lot more often than we do now — back when Ralph DeLauro was still running the Monday night film screenings at the San Diego Public Library (though, as Charles pointed out, even he probably wouldn’t have run a film with so explicit a sex scene) and we were also going to the Media Arts Center showings in their old home in Golden Hill (oddly we’ve been there a lot less often even though their current home in North Park is walking distance from ours!) — not only is it a foreign film (though it’s not very dialogue-driven and it’s easy enough to absorb the subtitles; it’s the overall plotting and situations that make it obscure) but it’s done very “artistically,” with an extraordinary visual flair and a rather airy attitude towards plot construction. One thing I noticed during the movie is that Pierre’s appearance, especially his face, changes quite radically during the film: in some scenes he’s relatively kempt, wearing clean clothes, his hair combed and his cheeks clean-shaven; in other scenes his hair is tousled and he has scraggle on his face that by the end of the movie has become a pretty obvious moustache and beard. In another sort of film you might read these facial changes as indicating flashbacks, but one tool of avant-garde cinema Carax and his co-writers don’t seem to be using here is time displacement. Just before Pierre — or the Pierre we’ve seen through most of the movie, the one who went into a heavy-duty downward spiral once he met Isabelle — shoots Thibault, another Pierre, or at least someone who looks like him, walks up to Thibault on the street and greets him — making me wonder if we were supposed to believe the disheveled Pierre really was an impostor, which would explain the switchbacks in his facial appearance and the apparent drop in his talents as a writer (he submits three chapters of his new book to a publisher and gets back a rejection that says it’s “formless” and “reeks of plagiarism”), but then again if the Pierre we’ve seen through most of the movie is an impostor, surely his mom and Lucie would have caught on.
I was struck by the irony that for the second Saturday in a row I was watching a movie that was a modern-day transformation of a 19th century novel — last week’s was Pride and Prejudice Atlanta, writer Tracy McMillan’s and director Rhonda Baraka’s artful transposition of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice into a story about modern-day Black 1 percenters in Atlanta for the Lifetime channel — and while watching Pride and Prejudice Atlanta made me want to read Pride and Prejudice (which I’m doing now) to see what McMillan and Baraka were working from and how they altered Austen’s story to fit it into modern times, Pola X has made me want to read Melville’s Pierre in hopes it would explain the film to me!
Last night I ran Charles and I our “feature” movie for the evening, Pola X, a 1999 French film (fortunately it was already set up with the English subtitles turned on so I didn’t have to go back to the main menu and hunt for them) more or less based on an 1852 novel by Herman Melville called Pierre: Or, The Ambiguities. Melville’s Pierre was the immediate follow-up to Moby Dick and completed the destruction of Melville’s commercial career Moby Dick had begun; before Moby Dick Melville’s reputation was as a writer of South Seas-set potboiler romances like Typee, but the book that is now considered Melville’s masterpiece was a disaster in the marketplace and, though Melville was able to continue publishing until virtually the end of his life, he never again enjoyed the sales figures he’d been used to in his first decade as a novelist. So Melville made his next book a fictionalized autobiography about the travails of a writer, Pierre Glendinning, whose well-to-do father had just died, forcing him to return to the family’s ancestral estate while the will is sorted out. Pierre is engaged to a woman named Lucy Tartan, but this marriage is less his own idea than that of his domineering mother, since Lucy is also from a well-to-do family and mom wants to secure Pierre’s future by uniting the two fortunes. But Pierre’s affections are sidetracked by a mystery woman named Isabel Banford, who may or may not be his half-sister, and Pierre starts an affair with her while Lucy ends up with his cousin, Glendinning Stanley — only at the end of the book Pierre shoots his cousin and both he and Lucy then commit suicide, in an ending that seems more like the finale of a Verdi opera than a mid-19th century American novel.
I was interested in watching Pola X — indeed, his involvement was why I had bought the DVD in the first place — because the soundtrack music was composed by Scott Walker, the eccentric American boy-band star from the 1960’s who, reversing the trajectory of the “British Invasion” bands, emigrated to England and spent the rest of his life there. His first solo album was aimed squarely at the cabaret market and featured big orchestral arrangements by Wally Stott (who later underwent gender reassignment and became Angela Morley), indicating that had Walker wanted to he could have become his generation’s Frank Sinatra. Only he didn’t want to: during the early 1970’s his music became more experimental and his lyrics more political, and he later largely abandoned conventional song forms and started doing far-out combinations of classical and rock. Walker was a major influence on a number of British rock musicians, notably David Bowie; though Bowie only covered one Walker song, “Night Flight,” he performed live two of the three Jacques Brel songs, “My Death” and “Amsterdam,” Walker had recorded on his first solo album.
Filming Pola X was the brainchild of director Leos Carax, who co-wrote the script with Jean-Pol Fargeau and Lauren Sedofsky and directed the film solo (he had enough of a reputation in France he got the possessory credit, “A Leos Carax Film”), and he transplanted the story from 1850’s New York to 1990’s France. Carax cast Guillaume Depardieu, son of French superstar Gérard Depardieu (who was in so many French films, especially at his peak in the 1980’s, I used to joke that the French legislature had passed a law stipulating that Gérard Depardieu must be in every film made there), as Pierre (and in a macabre case of life imitating art, Depardieu fils had a motorcycle accident — we see a lot of him riding a motorcycle in the film — and during his hospital treatment contracted an antibiotic-resistant infection that gave him two years of ill health, forced the amputation of his leg, and finally killed him in 2008 at age 37). He also put Catherine Deneuve, older than we remember her from her 1960’s films but still in great shape physically and acting with magisterial authority, in the part of Pierre’s mother Marie. Pierre in this version is the son of a well-to-do diplomat — the family has an estate in the south of France — who has just died; he had a reputation as a humanitarian who saved a lot of people’s lives in the 1970’s but a tell-all book that trashes him is about to come out, though Pierre has no idea about that until close to the end of the film. Pierre, his best friend Thibault (Laurent Lucas) and his cousin/girlfriend Lucie (Delphine Chuillot) were a tight-knit trio as they grew up, but their bonds have been considerably weakened because Lucie is going to marry Pierre.
On a couple of night trips on his motorcycle — which Pierre inherited from his late father and which his mom insists he treat like a relic (every time he crashes it and some damage is done we worry mom is going to have a royal freak-out over it) — Pierre spots a mysterious woman with long dark hair (she reminded me of how Yoko Ono looked on the cover of her 1972 album Approximately Infinite Universe, one of the great unsung masterpieces of women’s rock — no kidding!) who when he runs into her and she spots him always seems to be carrying grocery bags which she drops running away from him. When he finally catches up to her, she turns out to be Isabelle (Yekaterina Golubeva), who on the film’s imdb.com page is listed as Pierre’s half-sister but whose relationship to him, such as it is, is carefully unspecified and kept ambiguous in the actual film. (In fact, a lot of things are carefully unspecified and kept ambiguous in the actual film. This is the sort of movie in which the director and writers are deliberately keeping you in the dark for much of the running time as to who is who and how they relate to each other.) Isabelle looks so spectral in her initial appearances both Charles and I at first thought she was a ghost. Pierre has written a sensationally successful novel called To the Light that has been hailed as the voice of France’s late-1990’s youth, but he published it under a pseudonym and the enigma around who he is has become a major selling point of the book. While he’s staying at his mom’s estate we see him using a computer to write his second novel, but what we see of the prose indicates it’s awful and clichéd. (We get it: he’s blocked.)
When Pierre meets Isabelle he starts a sexual affair with her, which launches him on a downward spiral that takes up most of the film’s plot. He bails on Lucie, leaves his mom’s estate, moves to Paris and ends up staying in a converted warehouse whose ground floor is the rehearsal studio for an avant-garde music ensemble, heavy on oil drums and other improvised percussive devices. He moves in with Isabelle and the two enact one of the oddest sex scenes in movie history, which Carax shoots mostly in close-ups of body parts so it’s not all that clear who’s doing what to whom — it seems that before they actually fuck they do a 69 on each other and Pierre brings Isabelle to orgasm through cunnilingus — and when Lucie finally traces them to Paris she gets her own room in the converted warehouse and the two women, being French, apparently avoid the jealousy and bitterness one might expect from an American film about a jilted fiancée confronting her ex and his new fuck buddy. At one point, in a scene apparently copied from Melville’s book, Pierre visits his old friend Thibault to take him up on his offer of hospitality, only Thibault is hosting a risqué party and angrily denounces Pierre, saying he doesn’t know him and he’s only an impostor pretending to be his old friend. Pierre is also trying to continue as a writer, but in his straitened circumstances he can only write in longhand, and for some symbolic reason he’s using red ink — which ties in to a later dream Pierre has in which he and Isabelle are literally drowning in a river of blood. As the thing rolls on one wonders how on earth Carax and his collaborators are going to end it — they have Pierre kill Thibault but then, instead of committing suicide, he’s merely arrested and the final shot of him is in the police van being taken to prison.
Pola X is the sort of movie Charles and I used to watch a lot more often than we do now — back when Ralph DeLauro was still running the Monday night film screenings at the San Diego Public Library (though, as Charles pointed out, even he probably wouldn’t have run a film with so explicit a sex scene) and we were also going to the Media Arts Center showings in their old home in Golden Hill (oddly we’ve been there a lot less often even though their current home in North Park is walking distance from ours!) — not only is it a foreign film (though it’s not very dialogue-driven and it’s easy enough to absorb the subtitles; it’s the overall plotting and situations that make it obscure) but it’s done very “artistically,” with an extraordinary visual flair and a rather airy attitude towards plot construction. One thing I noticed during the movie is that Pierre’s appearance, especially his face, changes quite radically during the film: in some scenes he’s relatively kempt, wearing clean clothes, his hair combed and his cheeks clean-shaven; in other scenes his hair is tousled and he has scraggle on his face that by the end of the movie has become a pretty obvious moustache and beard. In another sort of film you might read these facial changes as indicating flashbacks, but one tool of avant-garde cinema Carax and his co-writers don’t seem to be using here is time displacement. Just before Pierre — or the Pierre we’ve seen through most of the movie, the one who went into a heavy-duty downward spiral once he met Isabelle — shoots Thibault, another Pierre, or at least someone who looks like him, walks up to Thibault on the street and greets him — making me wonder if we were supposed to believe the disheveled Pierre really was an impostor, which would explain the switchbacks in his facial appearance and the apparent drop in his talents as a writer (he submits three chapters of his new book to a publisher and gets back a rejection that says it’s “formless” and “reeks of plagiarism”), but then again if the Pierre we’ve seen through most of the movie is an impostor, surely his mom and Lucie would have caught on.
I was struck by the irony that for the second Saturday in a row I was watching a movie that was a modern-day transformation of a 19th century novel — last week’s was Pride and Prejudice Atlanta, writer Tracy McMillan’s and director Rhonda Baraka’s artful transposition of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice into a story about modern-day Black 1 percenters in Atlanta for the Lifetime channel — and while watching Pride and Prejudice Atlanta made me want to read Pride and Prejudice (which I’m doing now) to see what McMillan and Baraka were working from and how they altered Austen’s story to fit it into modern times, Pola X has made me want to read Melville’s Pierre in hopes it would explain the film to me!
Wednesday, June 5, 2019
Game of Thrones: “Winter Is Coming” and “The Kingsroad” (Television 360, Grok! Studio, Generator Entertainment, HBO, 2011)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s “feature” was the first two episodes of Game of Thrones, which being at least on the fringes of San Diego’s science-fiction/fantasy community Charles and I had heard a lot about from those sources as well as the mainstream ones who have been hyping the recent end of the TV series based on George R. R. Martin’s medieval fantasy cycle. (The most recent episode was heavily promoted as the series closer, but with Martin having made outlines for at least two more novels in the cycle, I have a feeling it will get revived.) The series — or at least the first six of its eight seasons — recently became available as DVD or Blu-Ray boxed sets, marked down in price for a limited period to coordinate with the end of season eight on the HBO premium cable channel, and so I grabbed the full cycle while I had the chance and last night we screened the first two one-hour (more or less) episodes from season one, “Winter Is Coming” and “The Kingsroad.” I’ll give credit to the series’ writers, David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, for being relatively clear-cut with their exposition and not throwing out the confused jumble of oddball names of humans, animals, plants, humanoid races, places and legends that puts off a lot of newbies to J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. (I remember starting to read Tolkien’s cycle in the late 1960’s and giving up about a third of the way through the first book, The Fellowship of the Ring, because I feared I would never be able to keep up with who was who, where was where, and which side everyone was on.)
At least as far as I could tell judging from the first two episodes, Game of Thrones centers around four families: the Starks (inevitably I joked that centuries later one of their descendants would become Iron Man!), the Baratheons, the Targaryens and the Lannisters. The Starks include five legitimate children and one bastard — the word actually used in the dialogue — who goes by the name Jon Snow (Kit Harington) and signs up for the order of the Night Watch (which I assumed while watching the film was actually Knight Watch), whose job it is to maintain and guard the wall that protects the Seven Kingdoms, where the story takes place, from attack from outside. (The moment we got a long shot of the sheer expanse of stone that makes up the Wall, I thought, “Donald Trump would love this movie.”) Actually, since the wall does a pretty good job of protecting the Seven Kingdoms on its own, the Night Watch have little to do but drink, carouse and screw — though the opening of the series shows a Night Watch member named Will (who speaks with a Cockney accent, as do all the lower-class characters, while the rulers and the members of their families speak with higher-class English accents — and though the locale is supposed to be fictitious, the map we get illustrating it under the opening credits looks an awful lot like the British Isles) being executed because he ran away from a gruesome display of apparently dead people arranged in a symbolic pattern on the ground — only the “dead” people got up and turned out to be members of a supernatural menace called the White Walkers (they were just “The Others” in Martin’s novels). The Stark clan’s father, Ned (Sean Bean, top-billed) makes his 10-year-old son Bran (Isaac Hempstead Wright) watch the execution as a lesson to him in his own warlike pursuits. The Lannisters are represented by two brothers, normal-sized hunk Jaime (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and little person (“dwarf,” he’s called in the dialogue) Tyrion (Peter Dinklage, the only actor in the cast I’d heard of elsewhere), who despite his diminutive size doesn’t seem to have any trouble attracting hot young normal-sized women as his bed partners. One of the central intrigues in the plot is the ongoing affair between Jaime Lannister and the queen, wife of King Robert Baratheon (Mark Addy), and the cool, matter-of-fact way Jaime pushes Bran out of the window, presumably to his death, when Bran climbs the outside wall of the tower where they’re making love and catches them. (This is how the first episode ends; in episode two we learn that Bran didn’t die after all, though he’s in a coma.)
In fact, the whole show has a refreshing frankness about sex that’s the main difference between it and a similar story as it would have been told in 1930’s Hollywood (and was in movies like the Errol Flynn vehicle The Adventures of Robin Hood) — not only do F-bombs get dropped a lot and there are lines like “[King] Robert will choose a new hand of the kingdom to do his job while he’s out fucking boars and hunting whores … or is it the other way around?,” but there’s a remarkable scene in which the slave girl Doreah (Roxanne McKee), who worked in a whorehouse (she was bought by them at 9 but not “turned out” until the relatively advanced age of 12) before being acquired by her current mistress, Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke), gets into bed with Daenerys and they have a hot Lesbian sex scene by way of Doreah teaching Daenerys how to teach her husband-to-be, Khal Drogo (Jason Momoa, who played Aquaman in Warner Bros.’ recent reboot of that hero and looked a lot more interesting than the antiseptically handsome figure of the Aquaman comics — even though, from what I heard of the film, it seems as if the writers thought, “Hey! Let’s do Black Panther with white people under water!”), to be submissive to her in bed. The marriage between Drogo and Daenerys has been arranged by her incredibly queeny brother Viserys (Harry Lloyd) because he was exiled from his righteous kingdom to the land across the sea (Ireland?) and wants a brother-in-law with an army that can invade and put him back on his throne. Lloyd plays the character as such a flaming Gay stereotype one half-expects him to tell his reluctant sister, “And if you won’t marry Drago — I will!” There’s also a creature called a “direwolf” which seems to have been born from a fictitious cross between a deer and an elk, but when the direwolves grow up they look like Alaskan Inuit dogs (which were exactly what played them — the original plan was to use real wolves but the British government has made it illegal for private citizens to keep wolves, and Inuit dogs were the closest the producers could come) who have a mystical bond with their owners (like the dragons in Anne McCaffrey’s Pern books or the bears in Bill Pullman’s His Dark Materials cycle) and protect them when necessary: in one scene a direwolf protected the comatose Bran Stark from assassination by attacking the killer and gripping his arm with his jaws the way modern-day police dogs are trained to do.
Charles said his one disappointment with Game of Thrones was he expected more supernatural elements à la The Lord of the Rings; I can see his point, but one of the things I like about the film is its attempt at a relatively accurate portrayal of what the Middle Ages were probably like, with everyone and everything covered in a layer of dirt since these were people with very few opportunities to wash themselves or their surroundings (one remembers the opening line in the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail identifying John Cleese as a king because “he hasn’t got shit all over him”). This is one project in which the seemingly inbred bias of modern-day cinematographers towards shooting everything in dirty greens and browns actually works: the overall grunginess of the environment and the people (even the royals!) in Game of Thrones is no doubt a lot closer to what medieval England actually looked like than the bright, glowing Technicolor vistas of The Adventures of Robin Hood. I also liked the fact that there’s at least a bit more character depth than usual in medievalist fantasy stories; the people have both good and not-so-good qualities and don’t fall into convenient “hero” or “villain” categories. Though Game of Thrones hardly ranks as the best thing Charles or I have ever seen — even within its sword-and-sorcery genre (though, as I noted above, Charles wanted more sorcery mixed in with the swords) — I can see why it became so incredibly popular and he and I are looking forward to working through the boxed sets of the series.
Last night’s “feature” was the first two episodes of Game of Thrones, which being at least on the fringes of San Diego’s science-fiction/fantasy community Charles and I had heard a lot about from those sources as well as the mainstream ones who have been hyping the recent end of the TV series based on George R. R. Martin’s medieval fantasy cycle. (The most recent episode was heavily promoted as the series closer, but with Martin having made outlines for at least two more novels in the cycle, I have a feeling it will get revived.) The series — or at least the first six of its eight seasons — recently became available as DVD or Blu-Ray boxed sets, marked down in price for a limited period to coordinate with the end of season eight on the HBO premium cable channel, and so I grabbed the full cycle while I had the chance and last night we screened the first two one-hour (more or less) episodes from season one, “Winter Is Coming” and “The Kingsroad.” I’ll give credit to the series’ writers, David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, for being relatively clear-cut with their exposition and not throwing out the confused jumble of oddball names of humans, animals, plants, humanoid races, places and legends that puts off a lot of newbies to J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. (I remember starting to read Tolkien’s cycle in the late 1960’s and giving up about a third of the way through the first book, The Fellowship of the Ring, because I feared I would never be able to keep up with who was who, where was where, and which side everyone was on.)
At least as far as I could tell judging from the first two episodes, Game of Thrones centers around four families: the Starks (inevitably I joked that centuries later one of their descendants would become Iron Man!), the Baratheons, the Targaryens and the Lannisters. The Starks include five legitimate children and one bastard — the word actually used in the dialogue — who goes by the name Jon Snow (Kit Harington) and signs up for the order of the Night Watch (which I assumed while watching the film was actually Knight Watch), whose job it is to maintain and guard the wall that protects the Seven Kingdoms, where the story takes place, from attack from outside. (The moment we got a long shot of the sheer expanse of stone that makes up the Wall, I thought, “Donald Trump would love this movie.”) Actually, since the wall does a pretty good job of protecting the Seven Kingdoms on its own, the Night Watch have little to do but drink, carouse and screw — though the opening of the series shows a Night Watch member named Will (who speaks with a Cockney accent, as do all the lower-class characters, while the rulers and the members of their families speak with higher-class English accents — and though the locale is supposed to be fictitious, the map we get illustrating it under the opening credits looks an awful lot like the British Isles) being executed because he ran away from a gruesome display of apparently dead people arranged in a symbolic pattern on the ground — only the “dead” people got up and turned out to be members of a supernatural menace called the White Walkers (they were just “The Others” in Martin’s novels). The Stark clan’s father, Ned (Sean Bean, top-billed) makes his 10-year-old son Bran (Isaac Hempstead Wright) watch the execution as a lesson to him in his own warlike pursuits. The Lannisters are represented by two brothers, normal-sized hunk Jaime (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and little person (“dwarf,” he’s called in the dialogue) Tyrion (Peter Dinklage, the only actor in the cast I’d heard of elsewhere), who despite his diminutive size doesn’t seem to have any trouble attracting hot young normal-sized women as his bed partners. One of the central intrigues in the plot is the ongoing affair between Jaime Lannister and the queen, wife of King Robert Baratheon (Mark Addy), and the cool, matter-of-fact way Jaime pushes Bran out of the window, presumably to his death, when Bran climbs the outside wall of the tower where they’re making love and catches them. (This is how the first episode ends; in episode two we learn that Bran didn’t die after all, though he’s in a coma.)
In fact, the whole show has a refreshing frankness about sex that’s the main difference between it and a similar story as it would have been told in 1930’s Hollywood (and was in movies like the Errol Flynn vehicle The Adventures of Robin Hood) — not only do F-bombs get dropped a lot and there are lines like “[King] Robert will choose a new hand of the kingdom to do his job while he’s out fucking boars and hunting whores … or is it the other way around?,” but there’s a remarkable scene in which the slave girl Doreah (Roxanne McKee), who worked in a whorehouse (she was bought by them at 9 but not “turned out” until the relatively advanced age of 12) before being acquired by her current mistress, Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke), gets into bed with Daenerys and they have a hot Lesbian sex scene by way of Doreah teaching Daenerys how to teach her husband-to-be, Khal Drogo (Jason Momoa, who played Aquaman in Warner Bros.’ recent reboot of that hero and looked a lot more interesting than the antiseptically handsome figure of the Aquaman comics — even though, from what I heard of the film, it seems as if the writers thought, “Hey! Let’s do Black Panther with white people under water!”), to be submissive to her in bed. The marriage between Drogo and Daenerys has been arranged by her incredibly queeny brother Viserys (Harry Lloyd) because he was exiled from his righteous kingdom to the land across the sea (Ireland?) and wants a brother-in-law with an army that can invade and put him back on his throne. Lloyd plays the character as such a flaming Gay stereotype one half-expects him to tell his reluctant sister, “And if you won’t marry Drago — I will!” There’s also a creature called a “direwolf” which seems to have been born from a fictitious cross between a deer and an elk, but when the direwolves grow up they look like Alaskan Inuit dogs (which were exactly what played them — the original plan was to use real wolves but the British government has made it illegal for private citizens to keep wolves, and Inuit dogs were the closest the producers could come) who have a mystical bond with their owners (like the dragons in Anne McCaffrey’s Pern books or the bears in Bill Pullman’s His Dark Materials cycle) and protect them when necessary: in one scene a direwolf protected the comatose Bran Stark from assassination by attacking the killer and gripping his arm with his jaws the way modern-day police dogs are trained to do.
Charles said his one disappointment with Game of Thrones was he expected more supernatural elements à la The Lord of the Rings; I can see his point, but one of the things I like about the film is its attempt at a relatively accurate portrayal of what the Middle Ages were probably like, with everyone and everything covered in a layer of dirt since these were people with very few opportunities to wash themselves or their surroundings (one remembers the opening line in the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail identifying John Cleese as a king because “he hasn’t got shit all over him”). This is one project in which the seemingly inbred bias of modern-day cinematographers towards shooting everything in dirty greens and browns actually works: the overall grunginess of the environment and the people (even the royals!) in Game of Thrones is no doubt a lot closer to what medieval England actually looked like than the bright, glowing Technicolor vistas of The Adventures of Robin Hood. I also liked the fact that there’s at least a bit more character depth than usual in medievalist fantasy stories; the people have both good and not-so-good qualities and don’t fall into convenient “hero” or “villain” categories. Though Game of Thrones hardly ranks as the best thing Charles or I have ever seen — even within its sword-and-sorcery genre (though, as I noted above, Charles wanted more sorcery mixed in with the swords) — I can see why it became so incredibly popular and he and I are looking forward to working through the boxed sets of the series.
Monday, June 3, 2019
American Princess, episodes 1 and 2 (A+E Studios, IM Global Television, 2019)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copryight © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
At 9 p.m. last night I turned on what I thought would be a two-hour Lifetime movie but which turned out to be the first two episodes of a 10-hour TV miniseries, American Princess — I realized this only when the first hour ended and was immediately followed by a recap of the events we’d just seen in it. American Princess is basically a modern-day knock-off of the 1930 movie Monte Carlo, an acknowledged classic directed by Ernst Lubitsch, written by Ernest Vajda and Vincent Lawrence from a German play called The Blue Coast by Hans Müller, and starring Jeanette MacDonald as a woman who runs away from a mismatched marriage her status- and money-conscious mom has arranged for her and, with nothing but a wedding dress and a handbag, tears off from the fictitious German principality of Flausenthurm to Monte Carlo, where she gambles and meets (and ultimately pairs with) a nobleman posing as a hairdresser (Jack Buchanan). To transform this plot premise into a 2019 TV series the heroine became Amanda Klein (Georgia Flood), who’s about to get married in a wedding arranged by a status- and money-conscious mother to a man named Brett Weinbaum (Max Ehrich) — only just an hour before the wedding she walks on him getting a blow job from a woman with long dark hair. We’re obviously supposed to think she’s a hooker — Brett’s excuse is she’s “a bit of unfinished business from last night” — and Amanda, who claims later on to be able to give blow jobs as good as anyone else (“A Gay guy taught me,” she explains), is understandably miffed and runs off wearing nothing but her wedding dress and, crucially, leaving her cell phone behind. Since she doesn’t remember any of her family members’ or friends’ phone numbers (who remembers phone numbers anymore? I myself have had people I’ve known for years ask me for my phone number because either they lost their phone or its hard drive crashed, and therefore they no longer had my number), she has no way to contact them even if she wanted to, which she doesn’t.
She stumbles upon what she thinks at first is a “theme wedding” with all the people dressed in the garb of Elizabethan (the first one) England, but which is actually a Renaissance Festival with both the staff and the attendees cosplaying in period garb and assuming the personae of the era. The fair is “ruled” by a woman portraying Queen Elizabeth, who expects everyone else to stop whatever they’re doing and bow whenever she passes. Amanda ends up in the audience at one of the festival’s performances, in which William Shakespeare is supposedly reading his latest works to the Queen. Amanda, who majored in English in college, knows that Shakespeare never actually was part of Queen Elizabeth’s court (though he may have been an acquaintance of her successor, James I — after Elizabeth’s death the name of Shakespeare’s theatre company changed from the Lord Chamberlain’s Men to the King’s Men) and also calls the re-enactor playing Shakespeare for misattributing a quote from Richard II to Richard III. She also gets roaring drunk on mead (a concoction made from fermenting honey, often with fruits and hops thrown in, that was one of the big alcoholic beverages in Renaissance Europe) and ends up spending the night — platonically, he assures us — with the Shakespeare guy, David Poland (Lucas Neff), which when he’s not performing turns out to be an absolutely drop-dead gorgeous hunk with a hairy, muscular chest (he goes topless a lot, which was just fine by me!), a ring in his left nipple (until he loses it accidentally) and a reputation for sleeping his way through every comely (and some not-so-comely) female in the troupe. Indeed, the 20 minutes of episode two I watched (until a family emergency came up) made the Renaissance Festival seem like an open-air bathhouse for straight cosplayers, as the Elizabeth re-enactor hastily breaks off her fuck-buddy relationship with one of the gardeners and another woman introduces Amanda both to her husband and her lover. (She’s white, her husband is Black and her lover is white, which gives an interesting “spin” of racial politics on the situation.)
Amanda’s mother and cousin trace her to the festival and confront her, saying that the guy she dumped is so rich and such a good “catch” she should overlook minor little details like him having sex with someone else on their wedding day, and when Amanda refuses her mom disinherits her, forcing her to beg for work from the fair’s owner (about the only one associated with it who dresses in normal 21st century clothes). Having worked as a waitress through college, she figures she could do food service, but her first time as such she ruins a whole pan of baked pork when the cheap foil pan they’re using (a pity they weren’t going with a more authentic, and more stable, piece of cookware for the period — but then undoubtedly no one wanted to stoke a wood-burning stove either!) tears open and dumps it all over the ground. They end up assigning her to be one of the “monkeys” who pushes the festival rides (remember that the merry-go-round was invented in medieval times as a way for knights to practice jousting; the horses were real and the idea was to spear the brass ring with your lance so you’d be able to aim better when actually fighting). American Princess might have been a sheer delight as a two-hour movie but I’m wondering, based on the hour and 20 minutes I saw of it, how they’re going to “spin” what’s basically a one-joke fish-out-of-water premise into a whole 10-hour (less commercials, so it’s basically about seven hours of actual show) TV series.
At 9 p.m. last night I turned on what I thought would be a two-hour Lifetime movie but which turned out to be the first two episodes of a 10-hour TV miniseries, American Princess — I realized this only when the first hour ended and was immediately followed by a recap of the events we’d just seen in it. American Princess is basically a modern-day knock-off of the 1930 movie Monte Carlo, an acknowledged classic directed by Ernst Lubitsch, written by Ernest Vajda and Vincent Lawrence from a German play called The Blue Coast by Hans Müller, and starring Jeanette MacDonald as a woman who runs away from a mismatched marriage her status- and money-conscious mom has arranged for her and, with nothing but a wedding dress and a handbag, tears off from the fictitious German principality of Flausenthurm to Monte Carlo, where she gambles and meets (and ultimately pairs with) a nobleman posing as a hairdresser (Jack Buchanan). To transform this plot premise into a 2019 TV series the heroine became Amanda Klein (Georgia Flood), who’s about to get married in a wedding arranged by a status- and money-conscious mother to a man named Brett Weinbaum (Max Ehrich) — only just an hour before the wedding she walks on him getting a blow job from a woman with long dark hair. We’re obviously supposed to think she’s a hooker — Brett’s excuse is she’s “a bit of unfinished business from last night” — and Amanda, who claims later on to be able to give blow jobs as good as anyone else (“A Gay guy taught me,” she explains), is understandably miffed and runs off wearing nothing but her wedding dress and, crucially, leaving her cell phone behind. Since she doesn’t remember any of her family members’ or friends’ phone numbers (who remembers phone numbers anymore? I myself have had people I’ve known for years ask me for my phone number because either they lost their phone or its hard drive crashed, and therefore they no longer had my number), she has no way to contact them even if she wanted to, which she doesn’t.
She stumbles upon what she thinks at first is a “theme wedding” with all the people dressed in the garb of Elizabethan (the first one) England, but which is actually a Renaissance Festival with both the staff and the attendees cosplaying in period garb and assuming the personae of the era. The fair is “ruled” by a woman portraying Queen Elizabeth, who expects everyone else to stop whatever they’re doing and bow whenever she passes. Amanda ends up in the audience at one of the festival’s performances, in which William Shakespeare is supposedly reading his latest works to the Queen. Amanda, who majored in English in college, knows that Shakespeare never actually was part of Queen Elizabeth’s court (though he may have been an acquaintance of her successor, James I — after Elizabeth’s death the name of Shakespeare’s theatre company changed from the Lord Chamberlain’s Men to the King’s Men) and also calls the re-enactor playing Shakespeare for misattributing a quote from Richard II to Richard III. She also gets roaring drunk on mead (a concoction made from fermenting honey, often with fruits and hops thrown in, that was one of the big alcoholic beverages in Renaissance Europe) and ends up spending the night — platonically, he assures us — with the Shakespeare guy, David Poland (Lucas Neff), which when he’s not performing turns out to be an absolutely drop-dead gorgeous hunk with a hairy, muscular chest (he goes topless a lot, which was just fine by me!), a ring in his left nipple (until he loses it accidentally) and a reputation for sleeping his way through every comely (and some not-so-comely) female in the troupe. Indeed, the 20 minutes of episode two I watched (until a family emergency came up) made the Renaissance Festival seem like an open-air bathhouse for straight cosplayers, as the Elizabeth re-enactor hastily breaks off her fuck-buddy relationship with one of the gardeners and another woman introduces Amanda both to her husband and her lover. (She’s white, her husband is Black and her lover is white, which gives an interesting “spin” of racial politics on the situation.)
Amanda’s mother and cousin trace her to the festival and confront her, saying that the guy she dumped is so rich and such a good “catch” she should overlook minor little details like him having sex with someone else on their wedding day, and when Amanda refuses her mom disinherits her, forcing her to beg for work from the fair’s owner (about the only one associated with it who dresses in normal 21st century clothes). Having worked as a waitress through college, she figures she could do food service, but her first time as such she ruins a whole pan of baked pork when the cheap foil pan they’re using (a pity they weren’t going with a more authentic, and more stable, piece of cookware for the period — but then undoubtedly no one wanted to stoke a wood-burning stove either!) tears open and dumps it all over the ground. They end up assigning her to be one of the “monkeys” who pushes the festival rides (remember that the merry-go-round was invented in medieval times as a way for knights to practice jousting; the horses were real and the idea was to spear the brass ring with your lance so you’d be able to aim better when actually fighting). American Princess might have been a sheer delight as a two-hour movie but I’m wondering, based on the hour and 20 minutes I saw of it, how they’re going to “spin” what’s basically a one-joke fish-out-of-water premise into a whole 10-hour (less commercials, so it’s basically about seven hours of actual show) TV series.
Sunday, June 2, 2019
Pride and Prejudice Atlanta (Big Dreams Entertainment, Swirl Films, Lifetime, 2019)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Lifetime “premiere” was something called Pride and Prejudice Atlanta (the imdb.com site spells the title Pride and Prejudice: Atlanta, but the colon doesn’t appear on the actual opening credit), which began a series they’re doing over the next two months called Book to Screen, with the hype “Best-sellers make the best movies.” I had seen the promos for Pride and Prejudice Atlanta, which given that all the participants were Black indicated that this was a transposition of Jane Austen’s classic story of early 19th Century Britain into contemporary African-American Atlanta — though I wasn’t sure whether the screenwriter, Tracy McMillan (any relation to the much better-known African-American romance writer Terry McMillan? Her imdb.com page doesn’t say) worked directly from Austen or there was an intervening novel that did the transposition of Austen’s white British characters into modern-day African-Americans. Be that as it may, Pride and Prejudice Atlanta deals with basically the same situation as Austen’s original: a middle-aged couple, Rev. Bennet (Reginald BelJohnson) and his wife, Mrs. Bennet (Jackée Harry) — we’re never given first names for either of them at any time in the film — have five daughters of marriageable age.
Their oldest, Lizzie Bennet (Tiffany Hines), is a community activist who can’t stand rich people in general and one rich person in particular, Mr. Bingley (Brad James), a Black real-estate developer who wants to tear down a town square and an old movie theatre and build a shopping mall and high-end housing in their place. He’s got the support of the powerful Darcy family, including Will Darcy (Juan Antonio) in particular. Will is a drop-dead gorgeous and fabulously wealthy young Black man who after a stint in business in New York has moved back to Atlanta and is running for Congress in a Black-dominated district. He’s also got two brothers, one natural and one adopted, who are as physically hot as he is — the adopted one is George Wickham (Phillip Mullings, Jr.), who was the son of the Darcys’ maid and whom they took in and raised following his mom’s death (and who gets to have hair while the natural-born Darcy males shave their heads). The moment the camera first panned down the lineup of the five Darcy daughters it occurred to me, and not for the first time in a Lifetime movie with African-American principals, that the casting directors (on this film they were Fern Champion and Simon Chasin Lieblein) were so determined to disprove, once and for all, the racist stereotype that “all Black people look alike” that they cast dramatically different-looking people even though we expect five sisters to look at least somewhat alike. It turns out the real power in the Darcy family is Will’s aunt Caroline (Victoria Rowell), an imperious woman who lives in what looks like a former plantation house (though writer McMillan didn’t do this, I would have wanted her to have a line to the effect that once upon a time Black people were the property of people who owned mansions like that, and now they — or at least some of them — can own mansions like that) and who has masterminded the rise of her family to a leading position within the African-American 1 percent. (The fact that there is an African-American 1 percent will probably surprise a lot of people watching this film; I got the impression that, just as the Lifetime movie With This Ring seemed to be a “message” film telling middle-class Black women that they don’t have to date white men because middle-class Black men exist, this one seemed to be aimed at telling middle-class Black women that upper-class Black men exist.)
One of the Bennet sisters is taken horseback-riding by one of the Darcy men, falls off and breaks her ankle — a symbol of the cluelessness with which the decently off Bennets approach the world of the super-rich Darcys (the wittiest line in the film is one in which Aunt Caroline, who wants the next generation of Darcys to marry Black debutantes, asks Lizzie, “Did you come out?,” and Lizzie responds, “No, I’m straight”) — and the course of true love between Lizzie Bennet and Will Darcy runs through a bunch of bumpy stretches, mainly due to the political deal he made with Lizzie’s sworn enemy, the developer Bingley, to get money for his campaign in exchange for using his influence to get Bingley’s project approved. At two points during the movie Lizzie overhears Bingley and Will colluding on the project, but in the end, though she loses the struggle to save the town square, Lizzie keeps the Strand Theatre alive when Will double-crosses Bingley by buying it himself. In the end, Will Darcy marries Lizzie Bennet and his brother marries one of Lizzie’s sisters in a double wedding ceremony which, thankfully, Papa Bennet brings in another Black minister to perform instead of insisting on doing it himself. There’s also a subplot in that Lizzie’s mother wrote a best-selling book on how to find good husbands for your daughters but hasn’t been able to manage that herself — even though the opening line of her book is simply a more colloquial version of the opening line in Austen’s novel: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
I’ve never been that big a fan of Jane Austen — the only novel of hers I’ve read is Emma, and that only because I took a junior-college English class in which it was taught — but watching Pride and Prejudice Atlanta has made me want to read the source novel even though my quarrel with Austen has always been that she invariably has the dullest, most boring man in her story marry the dullest, most boring woman and she tells us she regards that as the triumph of morality and good sense over romantic idiocy. Austen lived just as the Romantic era was getting underway, but she made no secret of the fact that she hated it; her stories generally feature one young man who spouts all the Romantic clichés just as they were becoming clichés and makes an ass of himself while pursuing the woman Austen destined for the sober, reliable, sensible but also rather dull guy in her story. (In Pride and Prejudice Atlanta this character is a young boor who’s just come back to Atlanta, is wearing mousse in his hair and is determined to take over the ministry of Rev. Bennet’s church as soon as Rev. Bennet retires … or dies.) Pride and Prejudice Atlanta was slow going at times, but for the most part it was an engaging romantic comedy which occasionally featured white people (mostly as silent guests and, presumably, campaign donors at the reception Aunt Caroline throws for Will Darcy’s Congressional bid) but mostly was set in a world so hermetically sealed off from multi-racial reality it reminded me of the 1930’s and 1940’s “race movies.” If this film has a hero(ine), it’s the director, Rhonda Baraka, who made a film in 2008 called Pastor Brown that was apparently a recasting of the prodigal-son story into modern African-American terms (though imdb.com lists Baraka as only writer, not director, of that film). Given the movie industry’s prejudice against women directors in general and Black women directors in particular, it’s not surprising her career has got stuck in the TV ghetto even though she deserves considerably better than that. Her direction of Pride and Prejudice Atlanta is fast-paced, moving and steers clear of the traps in the material (particularly the difficulty of transforming an 1813 novel about the British upper classes into a story about contemporary Black America), and she also gets excellent performances from her actors, particularly the women (especially star Tiffany Hines, whom I also hope to see a lot more of) who get to play fiery, salty and independent!
Last night’s Lifetime “premiere” was something called Pride and Prejudice Atlanta (the imdb.com site spells the title Pride and Prejudice: Atlanta, but the colon doesn’t appear on the actual opening credit), which began a series they’re doing over the next two months called Book to Screen, with the hype “Best-sellers make the best movies.” I had seen the promos for Pride and Prejudice Atlanta, which given that all the participants were Black indicated that this was a transposition of Jane Austen’s classic story of early 19th Century Britain into contemporary African-American Atlanta — though I wasn’t sure whether the screenwriter, Tracy McMillan (any relation to the much better-known African-American romance writer Terry McMillan? Her imdb.com page doesn’t say) worked directly from Austen or there was an intervening novel that did the transposition of Austen’s white British characters into modern-day African-Americans. Be that as it may, Pride and Prejudice Atlanta deals with basically the same situation as Austen’s original: a middle-aged couple, Rev. Bennet (Reginald BelJohnson) and his wife, Mrs. Bennet (Jackée Harry) — we’re never given first names for either of them at any time in the film — have five daughters of marriageable age.
Their oldest, Lizzie Bennet (Tiffany Hines), is a community activist who can’t stand rich people in general and one rich person in particular, Mr. Bingley (Brad James), a Black real-estate developer who wants to tear down a town square and an old movie theatre and build a shopping mall and high-end housing in their place. He’s got the support of the powerful Darcy family, including Will Darcy (Juan Antonio) in particular. Will is a drop-dead gorgeous and fabulously wealthy young Black man who after a stint in business in New York has moved back to Atlanta and is running for Congress in a Black-dominated district. He’s also got two brothers, one natural and one adopted, who are as physically hot as he is — the adopted one is George Wickham (Phillip Mullings, Jr.), who was the son of the Darcys’ maid and whom they took in and raised following his mom’s death (and who gets to have hair while the natural-born Darcy males shave their heads). The moment the camera first panned down the lineup of the five Darcy daughters it occurred to me, and not for the first time in a Lifetime movie with African-American principals, that the casting directors (on this film they were Fern Champion and Simon Chasin Lieblein) were so determined to disprove, once and for all, the racist stereotype that “all Black people look alike” that they cast dramatically different-looking people even though we expect five sisters to look at least somewhat alike. It turns out the real power in the Darcy family is Will’s aunt Caroline (Victoria Rowell), an imperious woman who lives in what looks like a former plantation house (though writer McMillan didn’t do this, I would have wanted her to have a line to the effect that once upon a time Black people were the property of people who owned mansions like that, and now they — or at least some of them — can own mansions like that) and who has masterminded the rise of her family to a leading position within the African-American 1 percent. (The fact that there is an African-American 1 percent will probably surprise a lot of people watching this film; I got the impression that, just as the Lifetime movie With This Ring seemed to be a “message” film telling middle-class Black women that they don’t have to date white men because middle-class Black men exist, this one seemed to be aimed at telling middle-class Black women that upper-class Black men exist.)
One of the Bennet sisters is taken horseback-riding by one of the Darcy men, falls off and breaks her ankle — a symbol of the cluelessness with which the decently off Bennets approach the world of the super-rich Darcys (the wittiest line in the film is one in which Aunt Caroline, who wants the next generation of Darcys to marry Black debutantes, asks Lizzie, “Did you come out?,” and Lizzie responds, “No, I’m straight”) — and the course of true love between Lizzie Bennet and Will Darcy runs through a bunch of bumpy stretches, mainly due to the political deal he made with Lizzie’s sworn enemy, the developer Bingley, to get money for his campaign in exchange for using his influence to get Bingley’s project approved. At two points during the movie Lizzie overhears Bingley and Will colluding on the project, but in the end, though she loses the struggle to save the town square, Lizzie keeps the Strand Theatre alive when Will double-crosses Bingley by buying it himself. In the end, Will Darcy marries Lizzie Bennet and his brother marries one of Lizzie’s sisters in a double wedding ceremony which, thankfully, Papa Bennet brings in another Black minister to perform instead of insisting on doing it himself. There’s also a subplot in that Lizzie’s mother wrote a best-selling book on how to find good husbands for your daughters but hasn’t been able to manage that herself — even though the opening line of her book is simply a more colloquial version of the opening line in Austen’s novel: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
I’ve never been that big a fan of Jane Austen — the only novel of hers I’ve read is Emma, and that only because I took a junior-college English class in which it was taught — but watching Pride and Prejudice Atlanta has made me want to read the source novel even though my quarrel with Austen has always been that she invariably has the dullest, most boring man in her story marry the dullest, most boring woman and she tells us she regards that as the triumph of morality and good sense over romantic idiocy. Austen lived just as the Romantic era was getting underway, but she made no secret of the fact that she hated it; her stories generally feature one young man who spouts all the Romantic clichés just as they were becoming clichés and makes an ass of himself while pursuing the woman Austen destined for the sober, reliable, sensible but also rather dull guy in her story. (In Pride and Prejudice Atlanta this character is a young boor who’s just come back to Atlanta, is wearing mousse in his hair and is determined to take over the ministry of Rev. Bennet’s church as soon as Rev. Bennet retires … or dies.) Pride and Prejudice Atlanta was slow going at times, but for the most part it was an engaging romantic comedy which occasionally featured white people (mostly as silent guests and, presumably, campaign donors at the reception Aunt Caroline throws for Will Darcy’s Congressional bid) but mostly was set in a world so hermetically sealed off from multi-racial reality it reminded me of the 1930’s and 1940’s “race movies.” If this film has a hero(ine), it’s the director, Rhonda Baraka, who made a film in 2008 called Pastor Brown that was apparently a recasting of the prodigal-son story into modern African-American terms (though imdb.com lists Baraka as only writer, not director, of that film). Given the movie industry’s prejudice against women directors in general and Black women directors in particular, it’s not surprising her career has got stuck in the TV ghetto even though she deserves considerably better than that. Her direction of Pride and Prejudice Atlanta is fast-paced, moving and steers clear of the traps in the material (particularly the difficulty of transforming an 1813 novel about the British upper classes into a story about contemporary Black America), and she also gets excellent performances from her actors, particularly the women (especially star Tiffany Hines, whom I also hope to see a lot more of) who get to play fiery, salty and independent!
Twist of Faith (Lighthouse Pictures, 2013)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After Pride and Prejudice Atlanta Lifetime showed something even better: Twist of Faith, which I had seen on their schedule and assumed from the title would be about a corrupt minister who ends up in a murder plot. In fact, it was considerably deeper and richer than just another formula Lifetime thriller — indeed, it wasn’t a thriller at all but a romantic drama centered around the unlikely match-up of a man and a woman from almost totally different backgrounds. The woman is Nina Jones (Toni Braxton, whom I’ve never been that big a fan of as a singer but who’s turned out here and in her other Lifetime credit, Faith Under Fire — in which she played a real-life heroine who managed to talk a shooter out of massacring students and staff at the school where she worked — to be a very powerful and insightful actress), native of a small town in Alabama where she’s raising a 10-year-old son, Asher (Nathaniel James Porvin), as a single parent. She has the help of her uncle Moe (Mykelti Williamson), whom she lives with and who’s sort of an éminence noir in her life. It’s not clear how the three make their living, though Nina and Moe both seem to be employed by the local Black church, and at one point we see Moe shoot a rabbit and turn it into that night’s family dinner. Nina is also the star of her church’s gospel choir (well, she is being played by Toni Braxton!), and in the opening we see the choir rehearsing for an upcoming contest among church singing groups against their better-heeled and hated rivals in the next town over, who’ve taken the contest from them five years in a row. (The film opens with the choir singing “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” and the song is mixed the way Elvis Presley wanted his religious album, How Great Thou Art, to be — Braxton’s is only the lead voice in an ensemble, just as Elvis had wanted How Great Thou Art to present him as the lead singer in a gospel quartette and instead it got remixed to put his voice front and center, just like all his secular albums, and he was upset about it but decided there was nothing he could do about it.)
The man is a white Jew from Brooklyn, Jacob Fischer (David Julian Hirsch), and though he has a day job he’s a volunteer cantor and music teacher at the local synagogue (so well before they meet each other writers Joyce Gittlin, Janet Fattal and Stephen Tolkin have established that though they’re from different religions, both central characters are involved with church music). He’s about to send his wife and two daughters off on a bus trip to see relatives while he remains behind with his son — only when they get on the bus, so does a twitchy young guy who first offers one of the Fischer girls some candy and then, when the wife says no, pulls out a gun and shoots Mrs. Fischer. Director Paul A. Kaufman rather confusingly cuts away here but we later learn that the young killer knocked off not only Mrs. Fischer but all three of the kids as well — a plot premise unexpectedly timely in the wake of the Virginia Beach killings a few days ago and the whole normalization of mass shootings in public places, to the point where schoolchildren and government workers are routinely trained in how to keep themselves alive in case an active shooter shows up at their premises. (I couldn’t help but think of the possibility that one of these maniacs might show up at Charles’s workplace and widow me.) The blow renders Jacob virtually catatonic; he buys a bus ticket to wherever the next bus will take him, and by authorial fiat it dumps him in that little Alabama small town where, starving and totally exhausted, he collapses on the church grounds and falls asleep. The three Smiths find him and Asher immediately wants to take him in. So does Uncle Moe — he even quotes Matthew 25 (the “For I was hungry, and you fed me … ” verse) — but Nina is scared of having this strange man around her son and wants him thrown off the property. Later she relents and allows him to stay in the caretaker’s room at the church, but only for one night. When he wakes up he cleans the place — which had previously been the dumping ground for everything the church members wanted to get rid of but couldn’t decide whether to throw away completely — and that seems to impress Nina enough that she relents and lets him keep on staying there.
Eventually the Smiths wear down his alienation enough that when Uncle Moe presents him with some old clothes the church had collected for a rummage sale, he says, “Thank you” — the first words any of the Smiths have heard him say, and indeed the first words any of us have heard him say since his family was massacred. At first he tells them his name is “Sam” but eventually he lets slip his real one. He regains his composure long enough that, after being assured by the local postal carrier that the postmark can’t be traced back to the small town — he’s told the mail goes to a central sorting center in Birmingham — Jacob writes a letter to his mother Hava (Paula Shaw) that reads, simply, “I’m alright [sic]. Don’t try to find me.” Meanwhile, Nina, her son and her uncle have been trying to figure out the identity of their houseguest from the odd array of skills he possesses, including woodworking and songwriting; at one point Nina sees him at their piano channeling his grief (though they don’t know what caused it) by working on a song called “This Very Moment” (actually written by Toni Braxton with her collaborators Keri Lewis and Davy Nathan). Nina joins him at the piano and they sing it together, and naturally she declares it the “killer song” they need to win the gospel-choir contest. They do — though the competition is pretty formidable (the other church’s choir is led by a woman who both looks and sounds like Aretha Franklin tearing through an infectious, rocking version of “I Shall Not Be Moved”) — with Jacob on stage with them, looking as out of place as you’d expect for a white Jewish guy in a Black Christian (Methodist, the script tells us, which raised Charles’s eyebrows since he doesn’t think of Methodism as a Black denomination) church. There’s also a scene in which Uncle Moe takes Jacob rabbit-hunting — only, for reasons Moe can’t fathom but we understand, Jacob flinches at the mere thought of holding a gun, let alone shooting anything.
This turns out to be a premonition of a scene later in the film in which, flush with success in the big singing contest, Jacob is resting inside the church — and two white racists break into the church intent on vandalizing it and possibly burning it down. Jacob grabs the gun and, just as the racists ex machina are not only threatening to rape Nina (who’s heard the commotion and come in to investigate) but taunting him and telling him he’s too much of a coward to shoot, he does so and wounds one of them in the arm. They flee, the police arrive and declare his actions legitimate self-defense, but the crisis makes Jacob realize that he’s fallen genuinely in love with Nina. Nina seems O.K. with this and her son Asher is definitely into having a new dad (his birth father left when Asher was 2, and it turns out it was because Nina went to a bar with her girlfriends and ended up being picked up by another man) even though he’s white and Jewish. But Jacob’s growing attration to Nina and his guilt over being interested in another woman so soon after the murders of his wife and children convince him that it’s time to return to Brooklyn and reunite with his mother and what’s left of his family. He’s shown putting memorial stones on their grave markers, but his mom convinces him that he belongs in whatever place — and with whatever person — makes him happy, and there’s the expected reunion at the end. Though Twist of Faith could have been even better than it was — I wish the writers had done more with the obvious conflicts, religious even more than racial, between the leads (how would a committed Jew like Jacob feel about being in a church environment surrounded by all the people affirming their belief in Jesus Christ as Messiah, Savior and Son of God?) — but it was one of the most profoundly beautiful and moving things I’ve seen in quite some time, on Lifetime or anywhere else, and I wonder how I missed it six years ago. I probably saw it on Lifetime’s schedule but assumed it would be a manipulative tear-jerker; though there are some clichéd elements, for the most part it’s a surprisingly sophisticated story, alive to the strangeness of its premise and quite a bit more than the usual fish-out-of-water tale I’d have expected if I’d known what I would be watching in advance.
After Pride and Prejudice Atlanta Lifetime showed something even better: Twist of Faith, which I had seen on their schedule and assumed from the title would be about a corrupt minister who ends up in a murder plot. In fact, it was considerably deeper and richer than just another formula Lifetime thriller — indeed, it wasn’t a thriller at all but a romantic drama centered around the unlikely match-up of a man and a woman from almost totally different backgrounds. The woman is Nina Jones (Toni Braxton, whom I’ve never been that big a fan of as a singer but who’s turned out here and in her other Lifetime credit, Faith Under Fire — in which she played a real-life heroine who managed to talk a shooter out of massacring students and staff at the school where she worked — to be a very powerful and insightful actress), native of a small town in Alabama where she’s raising a 10-year-old son, Asher (Nathaniel James Porvin), as a single parent. She has the help of her uncle Moe (Mykelti Williamson), whom she lives with and who’s sort of an éminence noir in her life. It’s not clear how the three make their living, though Nina and Moe both seem to be employed by the local Black church, and at one point we see Moe shoot a rabbit and turn it into that night’s family dinner. Nina is also the star of her church’s gospel choir (well, she is being played by Toni Braxton!), and in the opening we see the choir rehearsing for an upcoming contest among church singing groups against their better-heeled and hated rivals in the next town over, who’ve taken the contest from them five years in a row. (The film opens with the choir singing “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” and the song is mixed the way Elvis Presley wanted his religious album, How Great Thou Art, to be — Braxton’s is only the lead voice in an ensemble, just as Elvis had wanted How Great Thou Art to present him as the lead singer in a gospel quartette and instead it got remixed to put his voice front and center, just like all his secular albums, and he was upset about it but decided there was nothing he could do about it.)
The man is a white Jew from Brooklyn, Jacob Fischer (David Julian Hirsch), and though he has a day job he’s a volunteer cantor and music teacher at the local synagogue (so well before they meet each other writers Joyce Gittlin, Janet Fattal and Stephen Tolkin have established that though they’re from different religions, both central characters are involved with church music). He’s about to send his wife and two daughters off on a bus trip to see relatives while he remains behind with his son — only when they get on the bus, so does a twitchy young guy who first offers one of the Fischer girls some candy and then, when the wife says no, pulls out a gun and shoots Mrs. Fischer. Director Paul A. Kaufman rather confusingly cuts away here but we later learn that the young killer knocked off not only Mrs. Fischer but all three of the kids as well — a plot premise unexpectedly timely in the wake of the Virginia Beach killings a few days ago and the whole normalization of mass shootings in public places, to the point where schoolchildren and government workers are routinely trained in how to keep themselves alive in case an active shooter shows up at their premises. (I couldn’t help but think of the possibility that one of these maniacs might show up at Charles’s workplace and widow me.) The blow renders Jacob virtually catatonic; he buys a bus ticket to wherever the next bus will take him, and by authorial fiat it dumps him in that little Alabama small town where, starving and totally exhausted, he collapses on the church grounds and falls asleep. The three Smiths find him and Asher immediately wants to take him in. So does Uncle Moe — he even quotes Matthew 25 (the “For I was hungry, and you fed me … ” verse) — but Nina is scared of having this strange man around her son and wants him thrown off the property. Later she relents and allows him to stay in the caretaker’s room at the church, but only for one night. When he wakes up he cleans the place — which had previously been the dumping ground for everything the church members wanted to get rid of but couldn’t decide whether to throw away completely — and that seems to impress Nina enough that she relents and lets him keep on staying there.
Eventually the Smiths wear down his alienation enough that when Uncle Moe presents him with some old clothes the church had collected for a rummage sale, he says, “Thank you” — the first words any of the Smiths have heard him say, and indeed the first words any of us have heard him say since his family was massacred. At first he tells them his name is “Sam” but eventually he lets slip his real one. He regains his composure long enough that, after being assured by the local postal carrier that the postmark can’t be traced back to the small town — he’s told the mail goes to a central sorting center in Birmingham — Jacob writes a letter to his mother Hava (Paula Shaw) that reads, simply, “I’m alright [sic]. Don’t try to find me.” Meanwhile, Nina, her son and her uncle have been trying to figure out the identity of their houseguest from the odd array of skills he possesses, including woodworking and songwriting; at one point Nina sees him at their piano channeling his grief (though they don’t know what caused it) by working on a song called “This Very Moment” (actually written by Toni Braxton with her collaborators Keri Lewis and Davy Nathan). Nina joins him at the piano and they sing it together, and naturally she declares it the “killer song” they need to win the gospel-choir contest. They do — though the competition is pretty formidable (the other church’s choir is led by a woman who both looks and sounds like Aretha Franklin tearing through an infectious, rocking version of “I Shall Not Be Moved”) — with Jacob on stage with them, looking as out of place as you’d expect for a white Jewish guy in a Black Christian (Methodist, the script tells us, which raised Charles’s eyebrows since he doesn’t think of Methodism as a Black denomination) church. There’s also a scene in which Uncle Moe takes Jacob rabbit-hunting — only, for reasons Moe can’t fathom but we understand, Jacob flinches at the mere thought of holding a gun, let alone shooting anything.
This turns out to be a premonition of a scene later in the film in which, flush with success in the big singing contest, Jacob is resting inside the church — and two white racists break into the church intent on vandalizing it and possibly burning it down. Jacob grabs the gun and, just as the racists ex machina are not only threatening to rape Nina (who’s heard the commotion and come in to investigate) but taunting him and telling him he’s too much of a coward to shoot, he does so and wounds one of them in the arm. They flee, the police arrive and declare his actions legitimate self-defense, but the crisis makes Jacob realize that he’s fallen genuinely in love with Nina. Nina seems O.K. with this and her son Asher is definitely into having a new dad (his birth father left when Asher was 2, and it turns out it was because Nina went to a bar with her girlfriends and ended up being picked up by another man) even though he’s white and Jewish. But Jacob’s growing attration to Nina and his guilt over being interested in another woman so soon after the murders of his wife and children convince him that it’s time to return to Brooklyn and reunite with his mother and what’s left of his family. He’s shown putting memorial stones on their grave markers, but his mom convinces him that he belongs in whatever place — and with whatever person — makes him happy, and there’s the expected reunion at the end. Though Twist of Faith could have been even better than it was — I wish the writers had done more with the obvious conflicts, religious even more than racial, between the leads (how would a committed Jew like Jacob feel about being in a church environment surrounded by all the people affirming their belief in Jesus Christ as Messiah, Savior and Son of God?) — but it was one of the most profoundly beautiful and moving things I’ve seen in quite some time, on Lifetime or anywhere else, and I wonder how I missed it six years ago. I probably saw it on Lifetime’s schedule but assumed it would be a manipulative tear-jerker; though there are some clichéd elements, for the most part it’s a surprisingly sophisticated story, alive to the strangeness of its premise and quite a bit more than the usual fish-out-of-water tale I’d have expected if I’d known what I would be watching in advance.
Saturday, June 1, 2019
Live at the Belly Up: Yonder Mountain String Band (KPBS)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I took advantage of Stephen Colbert’s show (my usual fare in the last half-hour of a weekday) being in reruns to watch a Live at the Belly Up program on KPBS featuring a quite remarkable group called the Yonder Mountain String Band. They describe themselves as “progressive bluegrass,” which means they use traditional bluegrass instrumentation: mandolin (Jake Joliff), banjo (Dave Johnston), violin (Allie Kral, the group’s one female member), guitar (Adam Aijala), and upright bass (Ben Kaufmann) — actually a modern-day version of a stand-up bass which has a long fretboard and stands up but is skinny because it depends on electric amplification rather than its own soundbox to be heard. They don’t have a drummer (though the plucked strings supply a strong enough rhythm drums aren’t missed) and their instruments are amplified through plug-in units inside them without having the electromagnetic pickups of a standard electric guitar. What sets them apart from a traditional bluegrass group is their range of material — their set included covers of the Buzzcocks’ “Ever Fallen in Love” and the Talking Heads’ “Girlfriend Is Better” — and also the sheer speed and velocity with which they play.
When I heard their opener, “Troubled Mind,” the three pickers took solos of incredible intensity and virtuosity, and I was impressed. When they took the same hell-bent-for-leather approach to song after song — “Black Sheep” (the title track of their latest album), “Travelin’ Prayer” (not a religious song, despite the title), “Casualty,” “Landfall,” “Drawing a Melody,” “Love Before You Can’t,” “Ever Fallen in Love,” “On the Run,” “Girlfriend Is Better,” “Down the River Road” — it started to get annoying. It was also interesting that while the male band members were dressed in Southern California casual (mandolinist Joliff was particularly striking-looking, with his hair in one of those faux-samurai topknots that’s become fashionable now, and wearing red pants instead of the jeans the other men in the band had on), violinist Kral wore a short but voluminous printed dress one could readily have imagined a woman performer on the Grand Ole Opry in the 1950’s wearing. She also had by far the best and most distinctive voice of any of the band members — all of whom sang, by the way — and, like Lady Antebellum, the Yonder Mountain String Band sounded better when their woman member fronted. The show was a lot of fun and the band members’ virtuosity was astounding; about the only fault I could find was I wish they had done songs in more of a variety of tempi (the closest they got to anything slow was the mid-tempo funk of “Girlfriend Is Better,” which they actually took slower than the Talking Heads’ version) and they had done some religious songs. I’ve always found bluegrass pioneer (he might not have invented the form but he was the first to become a prominent star by recording it) Bill Monroe more beautiful and moving in his sacred records than his secular ones, and a nod or two to the church roots of bluegrass would have made the Yonder Mountain String Band’s performance considerably more interesting.
Last night I took advantage of Stephen Colbert’s show (my usual fare in the last half-hour of a weekday) being in reruns to watch a Live at the Belly Up program on KPBS featuring a quite remarkable group called the Yonder Mountain String Band. They describe themselves as “progressive bluegrass,” which means they use traditional bluegrass instrumentation: mandolin (Jake Joliff), banjo (Dave Johnston), violin (Allie Kral, the group’s one female member), guitar (Adam Aijala), and upright bass (Ben Kaufmann) — actually a modern-day version of a stand-up bass which has a long fretboard and stands up but is skinny because it depends on electric amplification rather than its own soundbox to be heard. They don’t have a drummer (though the plucked strings supply a strong enough rhythm drums aren’t missed) and their instruments are amplified through plug-in units inside them without having the electromagnetic pickups of a standard electric guitar. What sets them apart from a traditional bluegrass group is their range of material — their set included covers of the Buzzcocks’ “Ever Fallen in Love” and the Talking Heads’ “Girlfriend Is Better” — and also the sheer speed and velocity with which they play.
When I heard their opener, “Troubled Mind,” the three pickers took solos of incredible intensity and virtuosity, and I was impressed. When they took the same hell-bent-for-leather approach to song after song — “Black Sheep” (the title track of their latest album), “Travelin’ Prayer” (not a religious song, despite the title), “Casualty,” “Landfall,” “Drawing a Melody,” “Love Before You Can’t,” “Ever Fallen in Love,” “On the Run,” “Girlfriend Is Better,” “Down the River Road” — it started to get annoying. It was also interesting that while the male band members were dressed in Southern California casual (mandolinist Joliff was particularly striking-looking, with his hair in one of those faux-samurai topknots that’s become fashionable now, and wearing red pants instead of the jeans the other men in the band had on), violinist Kral wore a short but voluminous printed dress one could readily have imagined a woman performer on the Grand Ole Opry in the 1950’s wearing. She also had by far the best and most distinctive voice of any of the band members — all of whom sang, by the way — and, like Lady Antebellum, the Yonder Mountain String Band sounded better when their woman member fronted. The show was a lot of fun and the band members’ virtuosity was astounding; about the only fault I could find was I wish they had done songs in more of a variety of tempi (the closest they got to anything slow was the mid-tempo funk of “Girlfriend Is Better,” which they actually took slower than the Talking Heads’ version) and they had done some religious songs. I’ve always found bluegrass pioneer (he might not have invented the form but he was the first to become a prominent star by recording it) Bill Monroe more beautiful and moving in his sacred records than his secular ones, and a nod or two to the church roots of bluegrass would have made the Yonder Mountain String Band’s performance considerably more interesting.
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