by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I got to see the second Lifetime rerun on last night, a film
from 2017 from The Asylum (which actually releases theatrically, though their
theatrical films tend to be quickies attempting to grab the audience for a
public-domain story or plot premise: they rushed out versions of H. G. Wells’ The
War of the Worlds and Edgar Rice Burroughs’
A Princess of Mars just before
major studios released big-budget versions, and other films on their list
include Ghosthunters and The
Fast and the Fierce) called Psycho
Brother-in-Law. An opening credit says this
was inspired by a true story, though as Charles said about the film Shine it’s obvious that if this is a true story, the
filmmakers (director/co-writer José Montesinos and his co-writer, Delondra
Williams) chose it because they could easily shoehorn it into the familiar
Hollywood clichés — in this case, the familiar Lifetime clichés. Set in
Brisbane, California (though filmed in Pacifica), Psycho
Brother-in-Law opens with a prologue in
which young Brisbane High School student Eric Campbell (Marc Herrmann) is about
to be beaten up by a blond bully when his brother David (Mitch McCoy) comes
onto the scene and starts whacking the guy with a baseball bat, and though Eric
tries to warn David off once Eric is out of danger, David continues the assault
and eventually kills the bully. Then we get a typical Lifetime title, “23 Years
Later” — a lot of Lifetime movies
begin with these sorts of prologues but the time jump is rarely as long as 23
years — and 23 years later Eric (Mike Duff) is a rising high-tech executive.
We’re really not sure what he’s doing or why he’s taking so much time doing it
(if Montesinos and Williams had made him an entrepreneur doing a start-up it
would be more believable than if he’s just an employee, even one relatively
high up in his organization), but his long absences from home and his general
exhaustion when he does show up
are getting under the skin of his wife Kay (Brittany Falardeau, top-billed) and
their teenage daughter Laura (Megan Ashley Brown), who’s inherited her dad’s
mathematics skills and is practicing for some sort of school competition in the
subject. David (Zack Gold, who for once in a movie looks enough like the actor cast as his brother that we
can believe they really are brothers), Eric’s younger brother, shows up out of
a clear blue sky one day and says he’s on vacation from a lucrative job
crab-fishing in Alaska. Eric isn’t there when David shows up but Kay
impulsively invites him to stay in their guest room until he’s ready to return
to work. Then the usual incidents of a Lifetime movie start to happen that
indicate David isn’t the charming, genuinely cute guy he seems to be.
When the
two brothers are out drinking in a singularly unconvincing bar set and a fat
guy with a beard (who looks like the director and former All in the
Family actor Rob Reiner really gone to seed) claims Eric jostled him, David
practically starts a fight then and there until Eric is able by the skin of his
teeth to call off his wild brother. When yet another work commitment — of which
there are so many Kay starts wondering if there’s a woman involved in the
“work” situation and Eric is cheating on her, though he insists there isn’t and
it’s clear that, unusually for a husband in a Lifetime movie, we’re supposed to
believe him — causes Eric to break their “date night” and David offers to go on
Kay’s date in her husband’s place, the two have a great time and Kay admits
later she’s starting to develop “feelings” for David even though she’s not
pursuing an affair. Later, however, we learn that David served a four-year term
in a psychiatric hospital for manslaughter after he killed Eric’s assailant
there and he’s been diagnosed as paranoid and potentially violent — and in a
key scene that lets us know just when, how and why he’s going to go off the
rails, Montesinos shows him unscrewing a pill bottle and then closing it again.
Obviously David’s decided to go
off his meds, and the results are predictable: he runs into the fat guy whom he
and Eric had that run-in in the bar several acts earlier and strangles him on
the street — the guy has a gun on him and tries to pull it, but David
overpowers him, gets the gun away and takes it with him after he’s killed the
guy (remember the sacred words of St. Anton Chekhov that when you establish a
pistol in act one, someone has to fire it in act three). Then, when Laura’s
boyfriend Ron (Billy Meade), a wanna-be musician who drives around in a dowdy,
once-hot Pontiac Firebird, drives her home after a date and wants to get more
physical than she does), David comes to Laura’s rescue, pulls her out of Ron’s
car and then beats Ron nearly to death — obviously this is a man who is ferocious and animalistic when
it comes to defending members of his family! Eric and David, who in the
meantime has confessed that he was fired from that crab-fishing job instead of
just taking a layoff from it, go on a male-bonding fishing trip — only David
brings along the gun (ya remember the gun?) and shoots Eric because he’s decided to eliminate his inconvenient
brother and take his place as Kay’s husband and Laura’s dad.
The finale takes
place at Eric’s and Kay’s home, when David comes, holds the two women at
gunpoint and announces that he’s killed Eric and will be taking over as head of
the family — only, natch, there’s been a deus ex machina in the form of another fisherman who was walking
through the woods with his fishing pole whistling (the shot is so much like the opening of the old Andy
Griffith Show on TV one expects him to be
with his son and whistling the TV show’s theme!) when he comes upon Eric,
realizes he’s been shot but is only wounded instead of dead, calls 911 — and
eventually Eric comes to enough to alert the police to what’s going on and tell
them his homicidal maniac brother is threatening his wife and daughter. The cops
duly arrive and tell David to put his gun down and surrender, but instead he
“commits suicide by cop” and lets the police blow him away on the home’s
staircase. Psycho Brother-in-Law
is yet another Lifetime movie whose hackneyed, clichéd situations are at least
partially redeemed by the skill of the participants: Zack Gold turns in a
nicely controlled performance in the title role, managing both the character’s
infectious charm when he’s on his meds and the dangerous craziness that
overtakes him when he isn’t. José Montesinos proves skilled at building
suspense and creating a sense of menace even in pretty ordinary suburban
settings, and overall this is one of Lifetime’s better efforts even though
there’s one major plot hole. In the prologue it looks like David is older than
Eric, but in the main story he’s younger — which led both Charles and I to
expect a plot twist in which it would turn out that way back when it was Eric who killed David’s tormentor (since in the prologue the two brothers
never addressed each other by name) and then framed David to take the blame for
it. For that matter, I also half-expected David to have the hots, not for his
sister-in-law, but for her daughter — one of Laura’s schoolmates even kids her
about being with such a hot guy, and she insists, “He’s my uncle!” — adding incest to Lolita-style injury. Psycho Brother-in-Law also fits with the usual Lifetime trope in that the
genuinely hot guy is the villain; though (as I noted above) Mike Duff and Zack
Gold look enough like each other to be believable as brothers on-screen, Gold,
playing the psycho, is clearly the sexy one!
Sunday, June 10, 2018
Saturday, June 9, 2018
Black Panther (Walt Disney Productions, Marvel Studios, 2018)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I watched one of the most overwhelming recent films we’ve seen: The Black Panther, the mega-hit from Walt Disney Productions and Marvel Studios — let’s just say that I’m not so sure anymore that the 1989 Tim Burton Batman with Jack Nicholson and Michael Keaton is my favorite film based on a comic-book superhero. The Black Panther had its origins, both on paper and on film, as part of the “Marvel Universe,” the interconnected group of comic books with superhero characters Marvel started in the 1960’s (though the company, under its initial name “Timely Comics,” had been around since 1939 and at least two of their most iconic characters, Captain America and the Human Torch, had been introduced in the 1940’s). The Black Panther first saw the light of day in a Fantastic Four comic published in June 1966 (the publicity for the film took pains to note that this was two months before the formation of the real-life Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in Oakland, though the black panther as a symbol of Black nationalism and assertive racial pride had first been used in Alabama by the Lowndes County Freedom Organization in 1965, and that’s where the Oakland Panthers got it from — and there’s an even earlier cultural reference to the “Black Panthers” in the 1950 biopic The Jackie Robinson Story, in which the Negro League team Robinson played for before he joined the Dodgers was changed from the real-life Kansas City Monarchs to the fictitious “Black Panthers”!). He got his own comic book in 1998 and made his screen debut in Captain America: Civil War as a supporting character in a “civil war” of Marvel characters in which Captain America and Iron Man ended up fighting each other. There had been sporadic attempts to put the Black Panther on screen before this, notably an attempt at Columbia in the 1990’s with Wesley Snipes in the part, but after positive audience response to the Black Panther in Captain America: Civil War the “suits” at Marvel and Disney decided to do a whole movie based on him. What they didn’t bargain for was that they would get not only a blockbuster hit but a masterpiece, thanks largely to their choice of director: Ryan Coogler, an auteur who also co-wrote the Black Panther script with Joe Robert Cole and created a movie with far deeper emotional resonances than your average comic-book shoot-’em-up (or blast-’em-up) movie. The Blu-Ray edition of the film is prefaced with a brief talk from Coogler in which he makes the predictable comment that he’d collected comic books as a young man but searched in vain for ones about people who looked like him; he also said he particularly wanted to create strong women characters instead of the usual femme fatale super-villains or bland damsels in distress most females in comics or comic-derived stories are.
The film opens with a prologue that explains that millions of years ago a meteorite landed in the middle of Africa (one imdb.com trivia poster said the location was southern Sudan, but in the animated sequence showing it it looked like the Congo to me — and if that was the intent, it was a typical bit of Coogler subtlety to link the story to a real-life African country that has been plundered again and again, by Africans as well as Europeans, for its mineral wealth) containing a super-powerful element called vibranium, which not only is an energy source but also a material for making invulnerable armor and super-weaponry. (The opening reminded me of the 1936 Universal film The Invisible Ray, directed by Lambert Hillyer and starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, which also features an animated sequence of a meteorite containing a super-powerful mineral landing in Africa.) A recent New Yorker article joked about the tendency of modern-day superhero and science-fiction movie writers to posit these incredibly powerful elements and said that, in reference of Alfred Hitchcock’s term for the object the spies are after in a thriller plot, which the characters care about but the audience doesn’t, they should call them “MacGuffinium.” Anyway, in the plot the meteorite, containing earth’s only known source of vibranium, lands in a fictitious African principality called “Wakanda” over which five tribes have been fighting a civil war. The prince ruling Wakanda uses the power of vibranium to unite four of the tribes under his rule, but the fifth, the Jabari (also known as the “gorilla people” because of their tendency to spray themselves with gray powder to look like gorillas — or at least like the legendary grey gorillas of Edgar Rice Burroughs and other racialist writers who tapped Africa for stereotypical adventure tales — and worshipers of the Hindu monkey got Hanuman, whereas the other Wakandans worship the ancient Egyptian cat goddess Bast), decide to stay outside the confederation and be the odd tribe out. (According to imdb.com, the original idea was to have the Jabari live in a rain forest, but Coogler thought that was too clichéd and moved them to a barren mountain range instead, which gave him far more interesting visual possibilities for depicting them.)
After giving us that bit of the backstory, Coogler gives us another slice in a prologue set in Oakland, California (Coogler’s home town and the setting of his first film as director, 2013’s Fruitvale Station — the title is one of the Bay Area Rapid Transit stations servicing Black Oakland) in 1992, in which we see a group of kids playing basketball in such impoverished conditions they don’t even have a proper net on their goal, just a plastic milk crate with the bottom cut out of it (recalling the peach baskets with the bottoms cut out James Naismith used when he invented basketball in 1895, and from which it got its name). One of the kids goes home to his father, who’s planning some sort of sinister-sounding enterprise with a friend, and two exotically dressed Black women with shaved heads show up at their door. One of the people says they look like Grace Jones — the legendary disco singer who shaved her head (and had a huge following among Gay and Bisexual men in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s) — and indeed shaved-headed women become a major motif in this film. The two women shoot the young boy’s father and leave the boy alone, and it’s also established that both dad and the kid are Wakandan — you can tell because when a Wakandan pulls down his or her lower lip, the inside of their mouth glows blue, signal of their exposure to vibranium. Then the credits come up, and the film reaches present-day New York, where a terrorist attack has just blown up the United Nations building and among the victims are the king of Wakanda. This means that the next in line to the throne is T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman), only he has to return home to claim rulership and he first has to undergo a ritual, strikingly similar to the Vulcan marriage rite depicted in the “Amok Time” episode of the original Star Trek series, in which any one from the royal lineage of one of the five tribes that originally coalesced to form Wakanda can challenge him to a duel, which lasts until one of the contestants either gives up or gets killed (and the duel is held in a pool on the edge of a waterfall, so if you can just throw the other guy off the waterfall you can kill him easily), and one of the Jabari challenges T’Challa but loses.
T’Challa duly takes over Wakanda after some more rituals, including drinking a decoction made with ground-up vibranium as its major ingredients that gives him the super-powers of the Black Panther (like the Phantom, the Black Panther is an hereditary superhero whose powers are passed down from father to son) and then bathing in red sand that allows him one last ghostly communication with his father, sort of like Hamlet, before dad passes on completely. Meanwhile, a white scumbag named Ulysses Klaue (Andy Serkis, for once playing a part as a normal human being without some other identity or appearance grafted onto him with CGI) organizes a robbery of the British Museum to steal a seventh century African weapon that supposedly came from Benin but was really a bit of vibranium, which somehow got lost from Wakanda and ended up in Benin. The Wakandans have maintained a strict policy of isolation from the rest of the world, mainly because their kings have realized that if the rest of the world knew they were literally sitting on top of a mountain of super-material of incalculable value, the rest of the world would attempt to seize it from them and either they’d get it or the Wakandans would have to forget their higher, more pacifistic values and get a bloodbath going to safeguard it. (Right after we finished watching the movie, Charles noted the lobby card from the 1937 film Lost Horizon on our wall and pointed out that Black Panther is essentially a remake of Lost Horizon: a super-secret outpost in the Third World that has access to an incredible technological resource but conceals it from the rest of the world because its leaders know the rest of the world would misuse it.) The Wakandans learn that Klaue is going to sell the vibranium he’s stolen in South Korea, and T’Challa and his girlfriend go to South Korea to recover it There they encounter the only other white principal character, a CIA agent named Everett Ross (Martin Freeman — since both he and Serkis had been in the Lord of the Rings movies, they joked to each other that they were the “Tolkien white cast members”) who’s on a similar mission. The big confrontation takes place in a casino right out of Josef von Sternberg’s delightfully decadent 1941 movie The Shanghai Gesture, and Klaue gets killed and delivered to Wakanda but they don’t get back the vibranium.
We also meet Erik Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan — obviously he uses his middle initial to avoid confusion with the basketball player who’s been in movies), who at first we think was merely the lookout in Klaue’s robbery of the British Museum but turns out to be the boy from Oakland who was left behind when the Wakandan kill squad took out his dad, grew up as a poor African-American street kid with all the discrimination and oppression that came with that, and now that he’s learned the secret of his own identity — that his father was the brother of the Wakandan king and therefore he’s T’Challa’s cousin and the next in line for the Wakandan throne — he’s participated in Klaue’s plot but his real agenda is to go to Wakanda, take over and export vibranium weapons to Black people all over the world so they can fight back against their oppressors, conquer their countries and form a worldwide Black-ruled confederation with Wakanda as its central authority. He shows up in Wakanda, establishes his royal lineage, challenges T’Challa to a duel and wins, throwing T’Challa off the waterfall — and once he’s in charge he starts acting like a Black version of Donald Trump, burning the garden that symbolizes Wakanda’s heritage and norms and ordering the army to load Wakanda’s flying vessels with vibranium weapons and send them to other countries to foment Black revolutions. (I can’t help but think at least part of this plot line was inspired by the Nation of Islam and its belief that Blacks had originally ruled the world and the point of their movement was to mobilize them so they could do so again.) Of course, T’Challa isn’t dead at all, and his women friends (including his sister, who seems to be the only member of the female half of Wakanda’s 1 percent who gets to have hair) sneak him over to the mountain redoubt of the Jabari tribe (ya remember the Jabari tribe?), where the Jabari king who previously challenged him agrees to give him asylum but not to commit any of his troops to invade the rest of Wakanda and restore him to his throne — though he has second thoughts about this and eventually, just as the good guys are about to lose the Wakandan civil war, the Jabari come in like the Seventh Cavalry and save the day. There’s a typical post-credits (for a Marvel movie) sequence in which T’Challa attends a session of the General Assembly at the new United Nations building, which has been relocated to Vienna, and announces that he’s decided that Killmonger was right about something: that Wakanda should export its super-technology and use it to help the oppressed peoples of the rest of the world.
Black Panther is the sort of movie I didn’t think they were making anymore, a commercial blockbuster that is also a film of real quality and complexity — the sort of thing that in the eras that produced Gone with the Wind or Lawrence of Arabia regularly swept the Academy Awards, and deservingly so — and though the featurette on the disc we watched right after the movie stressed its connections to the broader Marvel Cinematic Universe (or “MCU,” as it’s unfortunately abbreviated), it’s a film that transcends its “MCU” origins and its overall comic-book heritage as thoroughly as Citizen Kane transcended all the other movies Hollywood was making about newspapers then. It’s an extraordinary achievement in a disreputable genre, and one that uses the much-maligned comic-book superhero genre to make real statements about oppression and resistance, about family loyalties and whether a nation can remain isolated or will have to deal with the rest of the world. It also seems a far stronger anti-Trump political statement than Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, which in one of the more bizarre manifestations of the Right-wing political/media machine was accused of being deliberately anti-Trump propaganda (one of the weirdest “fake news” stories was that Rogue One had deliberately been pulled from release after the November 2016 election so its makers could write and edit in even more blatant anti-Trump propaganda); Killmonger’s attitude as soon as he takes over Wakanda (in an undemocratic but socially sanctioned process!) that he’s going to throw out all the old wisdom and do things his own way is obviously Trumpian (and profoundly anti-“conservative” if you define “conservative” in Edmund Burkean terms that there are certain patterns, institutions, beliefs and norms a society develops over time and, even if those don’t make “sense” and aren’t the way you’d design things if you were starting over de novo, they’ve acquired their own logic, people have come to rely on them, and any attempt to change them by administrative or legislative fiat will only make things worse).
And yet Killmonger isn’t your typical crazy superhero villain; he’s a man whose bitterness has been shaped by his background (and at least possibly his racial history; Black Panther doesn’t come right out and say Killmonger’s mother was white, but we get that impression subliminally if only because Michael B. Jordan is lighter-skinned than Chadwick Boseman — in some ways Black Panther reverses the iconography of the 1930’s “race movies,” in which lighter-skinned Blacks were the heroes and ingénues while darker-skinned ones were the villains or the comic relief — reflecting the weird internal racism that permeated the African-American community then; throughout Black Panther the darker-skinned characters are physically, intellectually and morally superior to the lighter-skinned ones) and whose motives are at least understandable, if not forgivable. Black Panther is also a beautiful movie to look at; early on I was worried that Coogler and cinematographer Rachel Morrison were going to go for the overall brown tonality that’s annoying in all too many movies today (and, as I commented when I watched Selma, even more annoying in a movie whose protagonists are Black because it’s simply harder to pick them out from all that brown in the background!), but the Wakandan coronation/duel ritual was appropriately colorful, the African sunsets spectacular (even though the “African” scenes were shot in Georgia — the U.S. one, not the former Soviet republic — and only background process shots were actually made in Africa) and the film overall is a visual treat.
Black Panther is a movie that evokes its cultural precedents but wears them lightly enough you don’t get the impression of a director and/or a writer using bits and pieces of other movies just because they don’t have the imagination to create something new, and it’s also blessed with a fine musical score by Coogler’s usual collaborator, Ludwig Göransson, which may seem like a weird credit to see on a movie about powerful Blacks in Africa but who did his homework and drew mostly on South African sources for his overall sound (just as the language of the Wakandans was based on KwaZulu, not any of the indigenous tongues of central Africa). The film even featured two songs by Kendrick Lamar, which I dreaded because I hated his contributions to the 2016 and 2018 Grammy Awards (I was incensed that the Pulitzer Prize committee, which never gave an award to Duke Ellington, just gave one to Kendrick Lamar), but whose two contributions here are surprisingly lyrical and free from the relentless ugliness, viciousness and meanness I’ve heard from him otherwise (and from all too many other rappers, which is one reason I basically dislike the genre). All in all, Black Panther is a groundbreaking movie, a film that transcends its comic-book superhero origins and achieves greatness, and as I wrote after the last Academy Awards ceremony (and after the Academy gave no nominations to Wonder Woman, which as a film was hardly at the level of Black Panther but did break ground with a woman protagonist and a woman director at a time when Hollywood is being forced to grapple with its long history of exploiting and discriminating against women both on and off screen), “Let’s see how many nominations all these Academy members who are prattling on about ‘inclusion’ give to Black Panther next year.”
Charles and I watched one of the most overwhelming recent films we’ve seen: The Black Panther, the mega-hit from Walt Disney Productions and Marvel Studios — let’s just say that I’m not so sure anymore that the 1989 Tim Burton Batman with Jack Nicholson and Michael Keaton is my favorite film based on a comic-book superhero. The Black Panther had its origins, both on paper and on film, as part of the “Marvel Universe,” the interconnected group of comic books with superhero characters Marvel started in the 1960’s (though the company, under its initial name “Timely Comics,” had been around since 1939 and at least two of their most iconic characters, Captain America and the Human Torch, had been introduced in the 1940’s). The Black Panther first saw the light of day in a Fantastic Four comic published in June 1966 (the publicity for the film took pains to note that this was two months before the formation of the real-life Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in Oakland, though the black panther as a symbol of Black nationalism and assertive racial pride had first been used in Alabama by the Lowndes County Freedom Organization in 1965, and that’s where the Oakland Panthers got it from — and there’s an even earlier cultural reference to the “Black Panthers” in the 1950 biopic The Jackie Robinson Story, in which the Negro League team Robinson played for before he joined the Dodgers was changed from the real-life Kansas City Monarchs to the fictitious “Black Panthers”!). He got his own comic book in 1998 and made his screen debut in Captain America: Civil War as a supporting character in a “civil war” of Marvel characters in which Captain America and Iron Man ended up fighting each other. There had been sporadic attempts to put the Black Panther on screen before this, notably an attempt at Columbia in the 1990’s with Wesley Snipes in the part, but after positive audience response to the Black Panther in Captain America: Civil War the “suits” at Marvel and Disney decided to do a whole movie based on him. What they didn’t bargain for was that they would get not only a blockbuster hit but a masterpiece, thanks largely to their choice of director: Ryan Coogler, an auteur who also co-wrote the Black Panther script with Joe Robert Cole and created a movie with far deeper emotional resonances than your average comic-book shoot-’em-up (or blast-’em-up) movie. The Blu-Ray edition of the film is prefaced with a brief talk from Coogler in which he makes the predictable comment that he’d collected comic books as a young man but searched in vain for ones about people who looked like him; he also said he particularly wanted to create strong women characters instead of the usual femme fatale super-villains or bland damsels in distress most females in comics or comic-derived stories are.
The film opens with a prologue that explains that millions of years ago a meteorite landed in the middle of Africa (one imdb.com trivia poster said the location was southern Sudan, but in the animated sequence showing it it looked like the Congo to me — and if that was the intent, it was a typical bit of Coogler subtlety to link the story to a real-life African country that has been plundered again and again, by Africans as well as Europeans, for its mineral wealth) containing a super-powerful element called vibranium, which not only is an energy source but also a material for making invulnerable armor and super-weaponry. (The opening reminded me of the 1936 Universal film The Invisible Ray, directed by Lambert Hillyer and starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, which also features an animated sequence of a meteorite containing a super-powerful mineral landing in Africa.) A recent New Yorker article joked about the tendency of modern-day superhero and science-fiction movie writers to posit these incredibly powerful elements and said that, in reference of Alfred Hitchcock’s term for the object the spies are after in a thriller plot, which the characters care about but the audience doesn’t, they should call them “MacGuffinium.” Anyway, in the plot the meteorite, containing earth’s only known source of vibranium, lands in a fictitious African principality called “Wakanda” over which five tribes have been fighting a civil war. The prince ruling Wakanda uses the power of vibranium to unite four of the tribes under his rule, but the fifth, the Jabari (also known as the “gorilla people” because of their tendency to spray themselves with gray powder to look like gorillas — or at least like the legendary grey gorillas of Edgar Rice Burroughs and other racialist writers who tapped Africa for stereotypical adventure tales — and worshipers of the Hindu monkey got Hanuman, whereas the other Wakandans worship the ancient Egyptian cat goddess Bast), decide to stay outside the confederation and be the odd tribe out. (According to imdb.com, the original idea was to have the Jabari live in a rain forest, but Coogler thought that was too clichéd and moved them to a barren mountain range instead, which gave him far more interesting visual possibilities for depicting them.)
After giving us that bit of the backstory, Coogler gives us another slice in a prologue set in Oakland, California (Coogler’s home town and the setting of his first film as director, 2013’s Fruitvale Station — the title is one of the Bay Area Rapid Transit stations servicing Black Oakland) in 1992, in which we see a group of kids playing basketball in such impoverished conditions they don’t even have a proper net on their goal, just a plastic milk crate with the bottom cut out of it (recalling the peach baskets with the bottoms cut out James Naismith used when he invented basketball in 1895, and from which it got its name). One of the kids goes home to his father, who’s planning some sort of sinister-sounding enterprise with a friend, and two exotically dressed Black women with shaved heads show up at their door. One of the people says they look like Grace Jones — the legendary disco singer who shaved her head (and had a huge following among Gay and Bisexual men in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s) — and indeed shaved-headed women become a major motif in this film. The two women shoot the young boy’s father and leave the boy alone, and it’s also established that both dad and the kid are Wakandan — you can tell because when a Wakandan pulls down his or her lower lip, the inside of their mouth glows blue, signal of their exposure to vibranium. Then the credits come up, and the film reaches present-day New York, where a terrorist attack has just blown up the United Nations building and among the victims are the king of Wakanda. This means that the next in line to the throne is T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman), only he has to return home to claim rulership and he first has to undergo a ritual, strikingly similar to the Vulcan marriage rite depicted in the “Amok Time” episode of the original Star Trek series, in which any one from the royal lineage of one of the five tribes that originally coalesced to form Wakanda can challenge him to a duel, which lasts until one of the contestants either gives up or gets killed (and the duel is held in a pool on the edge of a waterfall, so if you can just throw the other guy off the waterfall you can kill him easily), and one of the Jabari challenges T’Challa but loses.
T’Challa duly takes over Wakanda after some more rituals, including drinking a decoction made with ground-up vibranium as its major ingredients that gives him the super-powers of the Black Panther (like the Phantom, the Black Panther is an hereditary superhero whose powers are passed down from father to son) and then bathing in red sand that allows him one last ghostly communication with his father, sort of like Hamlet, before dad passes on completely. Meanwhile, a white scumbag named Ulysses Klaue (Andy Serkis, for once playing a part as a normal human being without some other identity or appearance grafted onto him with CGI) organizes a robbery of the British Museum to steal a seventh century African weapon that supposedly came from Benin but was really a bit of vibranium, which somehow got lost from Wakanda and ended up in Benin. The Wakandans have maintained a strict policy of isolation from the rest of the world, mainly because their kings have realized that if the rest of the world knew they were literally sitting on top of a mountain of super-material of incalculable value, the rest of the world would attempt to seize it from them and either they’d get it or the Wakandans would have to forget their higher, more pacifistic values and get a bloodbath going to safeguard it. (Right after we finished watching the movie, Charles noted the lobby card from the 1937 film Lost Horizon on our wall and pointed out that Black Panther is essentially a remake of Lost Horizon: a super-secret outpost in the Third World that has access to an incredible technological resource but conceals it from the rest of the world because its leaders know the rest of the world would misuse it.) The Wakandans learn that Klaue is going to sell the vibranium he’s stolen in South Korea, and T’Challa and his girlfriend go to South Korea to recover it There they encounter the only other white principal character, a CIA agent named Everett Ross (Martin Freeman — since both he and Serkis had been in the Lord of the Rings movies, they joked to each other that they were the “Tolkien white cast members”) who’s on a similar mission. The big confrontation takes place in a casino right out of Josef von Sternberg’s delightfully decadent 1941 movie The Shanghai Gesture, and Klaue gets killed and delivered to Wakanda but they don’t get back the vibranium.
We also meet Erik Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan — obviously he uses his middle initial to avoid confusion with the basketball player who’s been in movies), who at first we think was merely the lookout in Klaue’s robbery of the British Museum but turns out to be the boy from Oakland who was left behind when the Wakandan kill squad took out his dad, grew up as a poor African-American street kid with all the discrimination and oppression that came with that, and now that he’s learned the secret of his own identity — that his father was the brother of the Wakandan king and therefore he’s T’Challa’s cousin and the next in line for the Wakandan throne — he’s participated in Klaue’s plot but his real agenda is to go to Wakanda, take over and export vibranium weapons to Black people all over the world so they can fight back against their oppressors, conquer their countries and form a worldwide Black-ruled confederation with Wakanda as its central authority. He shows up in Wakanda, establishes his royal lineage, challenges T’Challa to a duel and wins, throwing T’Challa off the waterfall — and once he’s in charge he starts acting like a Black version of Donald Trump, burning the garden that symbolizes Wakanda’s heritage and norms and ordering the army to load Wakanda’s flying vessels with vibranium weapons and send them to other countries to foment Black revolutions. (I can’t help but think at least part of this plot line was inspired by the Nation of Islam and its belief that Blacks had originally ruled the world and the point of their movement was to mobilize them so they could do so again.) Of course, T’Challa isn’t dead at all, and his women friends (including his sister, who seems to be the only member of the female half of Wakanda’s 1 percent who gets to have hair) sneak him over to the mountain redoubt of the Jabari tribe (ya remember the Jabari tribe?), where the Jabari king who previously challenged him agrees to give him asylum but not to commit any of his troops to invade the rest of Wakanda and restore him to his throne — though he has second thoughts about this and eventually, just as the good guys are about to lose the Wakandan civil war, the Jabari come in like the Seventh Cavalry and save the day. There’s a typical post-credits (for a Marvel movie) sequence in which T’Challa attends a session of the General Assembly at the new United Nations building, which has been relocated to Vienna, and announces that he’s decided that Killmonger was right about something: that Wakanda should export its super-technology and use it to help the oppressed peoples of the rest of the world.
Black Panther is the sort of movie I didn’t think they were making anymore, a commercial blockbuster that is also a film of real quality and complexity — the sort of thing that in the eras that produced Gone with the Wind or Lawrence of Arabia regularly swept the Academy Awards, and deservingly so — and though the featurette on the disc we watched right after the movie stressed its connections to the broader Marvel Cinematic Universe (or “MCU,” as it’s unfortunately abbreviated), it’s a film that transcends its “MCU” origins and its overall comic-book heritage as thoroughly as Citizen Kane transcended all the other movies Hollywood was making about newspapers then. It’s an extraordinary achievement in a disreputable genre, and one that uses the much-maligned comic-book superhero genre to make real statements about oppression and resistance, about family loyalties and whether a nation can remain isolated or will have to deal with the rest of the world. It also seems a far stronger anti-Trump political statement than Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, which in one of the more bizarre manifestations of the Right-wing political/media machine was accused of being deliberately anti-Trump propaganda (one of the weirdest “fake news” stories was that Rogue One had deliberately been pulled from release after the November 2016 election so its makers could write and edit in even more blatant anti-Trump propaganda); Killmonger’s attitude as soon as he takes over Wakanda (in an undemocratic but socially sanctioned process!) that he’s going to throw out all the old wisdom and do things his own way is obviously Trumpian (and profoundly anti-“conservative” if you define “conservative” in Edmund Burkean terms that there are certain patterns, institutions, beliefs and norms a society develops over time and, even if those don’t make “sense” and aren’t the way you’d design things if you were starting over de novo, they’ve acquired their own logic, people have come to rely on them, and any attempt to change them by administrative or legislative fiat will only make things worse).
And yet Killmonger isn’t your typical crazy superhero villain; he’s a man whose bitterness has been shaped by his background (and at least possibly his racial history; Black Panther doesn’t come right out and say Killmonger’s mother was white, but we get that impression subliminally if only because Michael B. Jordan is lighter-skinned than Chadwick Boseman — in some ways Black Panther reverses the iconography of the 1930’s “race movies,” in which lighter-skinned Blacks were the heroes and ingénues while darker-skinned ones were the villains or the comic relief — reflecting the weird internal racism that permeated the African-American community then; throughout Black Panther the darker-skinned characters are physically, intellectually and morally superior to the lighter-skinned ones) and whose motives are at least understandable, if not forgivable. Black Panther is also a beautiful movie to look at; early on I was worried that Coogler and cinematographer Rachel Morrison were going to go for the overall brown tonality that’s annoying in all too many movies today (and, as I commented when I watched Selma, even more annoying in a movie whose protagonists are Black because it’s simply harder to pick them out from all that brown in the background!), but the Wakandan coronation/duel ritual was appropriately colorful, the African sunsets spectacular (even though the “African” scenes were shot in Georgia — the U.S. one, not the former Soviet republic — and only background process shots were actually made in Africa) and the film overall is a visual treat.
Black Panther is a movie that evokes its cultural precedents but wears them lightly enough you don’t get the impression of a director and/or a writer using bits and pieces of other movies just because they don’t have the imagination to create something new, and it’s also blessed with a fine musical score by Coogler’s usual collaborator, Ludwig Göransson, which may seem like a weird credit to see on a movie about powerful Blacks in Africa but who did his homework and drew mostly on South African sources for his overall sound (just as the language of the Wakandans was based on KwaZulu, not any of the indigenous tongues of central Africa). The film even featured two songs by Kendrick Lamar, which I dreaded because I hated his contributions to the 2016 and 2018 Grammy Awards (I was incensed that the Pulitzer Prize committee, which never gave an award to Duke Ellington, just gave one to Kendrick Lamar), but whose two contributions here are surprisingly lyrical and free from the relentless ugliness, viciousness and meanness I’ve heard from him otherwise (and from all too many other rappers, which is one reason I basically dislike the genre). All in all, Black Panther is a groundbreaking movie, a film that transcends its comic-book superhero origins and achieves greatness, and as I wrote after the last Academy Awards ceremony (and after the Academy gave no nominations to Wonder Woman, which as a film was hardly at the level of Black Panther but did break ground with a woman protagonist and a woman director at a time when Hollywood is being forced to grapple with its long history of exploiting and discriminating against women both on and off screen), “Let’s see how many nominations all these Academy members who are prattling on about ‘inclusion’ give to Black Panther next year.”
Tuesday, June 5, 2018
Girl in the Bunker (Cineflix Productons, Rare Fish Films, Lifetime, 2018)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Two nights ago I watched a Lifetime movie that’s one of the best things I’ve ever seen on that network: Girl in the Bunker, written and directed by Stephen Kemp and telling the true story of Elizabeth Shoaf, who at age 14 in the rural community of Lugoff, South Carolina (never heard of it? Neither had I) was kidnapped and held for 10 days in an underground bunker on private property. Her abductor, Vinson Filyaw, called himself “Benson” after the family that owned the property he was squatting on, lived in a trailer under which was a secret door connecting him to the bunker he’d dug, and lured Lizzie (her nickname, though only her parents and her brother called her that — a clue that became important in the story) into his clutches by posing as a police officer who had arrested her younger brother on marijuana charges. The promos for this movie made it seem like a titillating exploitation piece on the order of previous Lifetime excursions into stories (sometimes derived from real ones) of women being kidnapped and held as sex slaves for months or even years — Cleveland Abduction, Girl in the Box[1], etc. — but as it turned out this was considerably better than their norm. Part of the superiority is that Elizabeth Shoaf (played in the film by Julia Lalonde) was only held for 10 days — though the word “only” seems like being thankful for infinitesimally small mercies — and that, though just 14, she had the presence of mind to fight back against her attacker through strategy and guile instead of openly resisting him.
Two nights ago I watched a Lifetime movie that’s one of the best things I’ve ever seen on that network: Girl in the Bunker, written and directed by Stephen Kemp and telling the true story of Elizabeth Shoaf, who at age 14 in the rural community of Lugoff, South Carolina (never heard of it? Neither had I) was kidnapped and held for 10 days in an underground bunker on private property. Her abductor, Vinson Filyaw, called himself “Benson” after the family that owned the property he was squatting on, lived in a trailer under which was a secret door connecting him to the bunker he’d dug, and lured Lizzie (her nickname, though only her parents and her brother called her that — a clue that became important in the story) into his clutches by posing as a police officer who had arrested her younger brother on marijuana charges. The promos for this movie made it seem like a titillating exploitation piece on the order of previous Lifetime excursions into stories (sometimes derived from real ones) of women being kidnapped and held as sex slaves for months or even years — Cleveland Abduction, Girl in the Box[1], etc. — but as it turned out this was considerably better than their norm. Part of the superiority is that Elizabeth Shoaf (played in the film by Julia Lalonde) was only held for 10 days — though the word “only” seems like being thankful for infinitesimally small mercies — and that, though just 14, she had the presence of mind to fight back against her attacker through strategy and guile instead of openly resisting him.
When
Vinson first kidnaps Elizabeth he tells her he’s doing this because his wife
left him and falsely accused him of raping her (Vinson did have a police record and at the time he kidnapped
Elizabeth was a fugitive from justice, wanted for sexual assault against a
woman), but later he explains, “It’s complicated” — a phrase from Facebook
that’s become part of the language used by people who don’t want to describe
their relationship status in a way that might discourage their current lust
object from having sex with them. It turns out the woman he supposedly raped,
Katherine Heath (a nice beaten-down performance by Jessica Greco), is not only
still in contact with Vinson but is helping him by sneaking food over to him,
leaving it in the trunk of his old car (we’re not told specifically whether the
car still runs but it’s rusty and grungy-looking enough we presume it doesn’t)
and also running other supplies to him as needed, even though as he eventually
tells Elizabeth, the girl he was really in love with was not Katherine but her
12-year-old daughter. It seems like he was pursuing the Humbert Humbert
strategy of courting the mom in order to get close to the nymphet he really
lusted after, and he tells Lizzie that the reason he took her was he needed someone now that his access to the girl had been cut off. He
also tells her that he’s got the entire place booby-trapped, surrounded with
D.I.Y. land mines, and the black necklace he puts around her neck and locks
contains a bomb. Indeed, he says his whole place is wired with explosives, and
as soon as he’s satisfied he’s achieved his goal (though neither he nor we are
all too sure what that is) he’s going to pull a switch and annihilate his
property in a murder-suicide. Elizabeth, though previously protective of her
virginity (there’s a flashback scene in which she turns down her boyfriend Case
Palmerston, played by Tristan Culbert, when he wants to have sex with her in
one of the gladed meadows that abound around Lugoff, and she says she’s still
waiting for “the right moment”), realizes that if she comes on to Vinson and
makes it look like he’s interested in her sexually, maybe he’ll at least give
up the plan of blowing them both up.
Kemp maintains the suspense by cutting
back and forth between Elizabeth’s ordeal and the increasing anxiety of her
parents, Don (Stephen Park) and Madeline (Moira Kelly), and her brother Bobby
(Dimitri Komocsi), and their frantic efforts to search for her and to keep the
doofuses on the local police force interested in continuing the search. One of
the towering ironies of this story is that in this relatively tight-knit rural
community the hiding place where Vinson is keeping Elizabeth is just a short
distance from her home, and through much of the search Vinson can hear the
police patrolling the property — including flying helicopters over it — and can
lord it over Elizabeth how the authorities keep missing them. He also has a
giant piece of aluminum foil he puts over them at key moments because he
believes this will shield him from detection by the infrared lights aboard the
cops’ helicopters. Though I still think Emma Donoghue’s novel Room and the film made from it (with Donoghue writing the
script and Lenny Abrahamson directing) are the best works made about this
situation — at least partly because Donoghue was writing fiction and thereby
wasn’t trapped by the events of the actual story — Girl in the Bunker is quite a good movie, very far above the Lifetime norm and with a
writer/director skilled enough at both jobs he keeps Elizabeth’s peril front
and center in the story without exploiting it for the obvious titillation. (I did regret it when Kemp cut short the soft-core porn
scene between Julia Lalonde and Henry Thomas, even though I know why he did it:
he didn’t want to run afoul of the Thought Police that come down hard on
depictions of sex involving an underage character even if the actors actually
playing the scene are of age, and he also wanted to keep the focus on
Elizabeth’s ordeal instead of appealing to the kinkier fantasies of some of the
audience members.)
Girl in the Bunker has some faults, and one of the most annoying ones is how similar the
leading male characters look: Henry Thomas, Stephen Park (playing Elizabeth’s
dad) and Jeff Clarke (as one of the police officers involved in the search) are
all the same “type” — thin, sandy-haired, attractive without being drop-dead
gorgeous or genuinely sexy — that when Clarke appeared as one of the cops at
first I thought he was Vinson and
Elizabeth had been kidnapped by a genuine police officer who was also playing these sadistic sex games on the
side, and involving himself in the investigation to steer his colleagues away
from where she really was. Also, Lifetime’s decision to show the film in a
so-called “special edition” in which, during the commercial breaks, we got
brief interview segments from the real Elizabeth, Don and Madeline Shoaf which affirmed the basic accuracy of
the story but also let us know that, as usual, the filmmakers had cast the role
with considerably more attractive people than their real-life prototypes.
Nonetheless, Girl in the Bunker
is a well-done thriller and makes me hopeful Stephen Kemp can break free of the
TV-movie ghetto and make some theatrical features — he’s no Alfred Hitchcock
but he’s a damned sight better than a lot of the wanna-be Hitchcocks out there,
some of whom have got to make
theatrical features with “A”-list stars (can you say “Tony Gilroy”?)
Star Wars, Episode VIII: The Last Jedi (Walt Disney Pictures, Lucasfilm, Ram Bergman Productions, 2017)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I went to the movie at the San Diego Public Library and saw Star Wars, Episode VIII: The Last Jedi. I have a curious relationship to the Star Wars saga because while I saw the first movie in theatres as soon as it came out in 1977 and liked it enough I went back to see it twice more, I missed all the rest in George Lucas’s Grand Saga and never saw a Star Wars movie again until a few months ago, when I bought the DVD of Rogue One — an interstital Star Wars movie not part of the main sequence which I thought might make a convenient way back for Charles and I to re-enter the saga without having to pick up the plot threads of who’d done what to whom in episodes 2 through 7. I was more than a bit disappointed in Rogue One, despite some interesting plot threads and the presence of a good, if rather inconsistent, director, Gareth Edwards (whose other films — at least the ones I’d seen — include Monsters and the latest reboot of Godzilla), because it lacked the quirky humor of the original Star Wars and, as I realized about a third of the way through, it was just The Guns of Navarone transposed into science-fiction: the bad guys have a super-weapon and the good guys have to send in a commando team to blow it up. At least partly because I was judging it as a stand-alone movie without reference to Star Wars episodes two through seven, I quite liked The Last Jedi even though it had its limits: it was pretty much just a high-tech space opera, and its occasional bouts of philosophizing (when I saw the first Star Wars I thought the Force was a metaphor for religion in general and Christianity in particular, but this time around it seemed more like Zen) only slowed things down. It’s also a grandly depressing movie — the good guys seem to lose just about every battle they get involved in, and in a way it’s weirdly appropriate that The Last Jedi came out the same year that two movies about the evacuation of the British army from Dunkirk in 1940 were released, because that operation, too, was a military disaster but one that turned into a political success because it mobilized the Brits who were left behind to resist and ultimately win.
The Last Jedi was both written and directed by Rian Johnson, and a lot of the criticism of the film came from nit-picky Star Wars fans who resented the directions in which he took some of the fabled characters from earlier incarnations of the series — but I quite liked Johnson’s debut feature, Brick (a contemporary-set tale of high-school kids and drugs that avoided both the noble-outlaws and just-say-no sets of clichés available to people who write and/or direct drug movies), and while his later science-fiction film Looper didn’t seem as strong, it’s still a lot better than most of the big blockbusters that come out these days. Curiously, Johnson was fired from the last film in the main Star Wars sequence, which is due to be released in December 2019 (though another prequel, Solo, just came out to disappointing box-office returns, and one of the reasons cited in today’s Los Angeles Times article about the fiasco suggested it was because the Walt Disney Corporation, which bought Lucasfilm for $4 billion largely to get their hands on the Star Wars universe and characters, went to the well too soon and released another Star Wars movie just five months after The Last Jedi), and J. J. Abrams, who’s now in charge of both the Star Wars and Star Trek franchises, is apparently going to take back the directorial reins himself. The Last Jedi basically consists of three overlapping plot lines: Rey (Daisy Ridley) is determined to learn to become a Jedi fighter and seeks out the legendary Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill, appropriately cast as a grizzled old man after his spectacular debut as the beamish-boy Luke in 1977), but Luke has exiled himself to a faraway planet where he wants to burn the accumulated Jedi textbooks containing their knowledge and die because he thinks the Jedi and their bad-guy equivalents, the Sith, both need to die for the universe to be reborn under decent auspices. Meanwhile, the First Order, the ruling junta of the Star Wars universe in this incarnation, and its leader, Snoke (played by all-purpose motion-capture guy Andy Serkis, who’s enacted so many of his roles with computer-generated faces and bodies grafted on top of his own it’s a surprise to see his imdb.com head shot and realize what he really looks like), are determined to wipe out the Rebellion once and for all.
The Rebellion is led by General Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher, also playing her character from the first film as she had naturally aged; though it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the mavens at Disney and Lucasfilm have enough “wild” footage of her they can recast her in the next film even though she’s dead, if this is indeed Carrie Fisher’s last film she went out on a high level: her part is a lot longer than the reviews indicated, she’s crucial to both the opening and the closing of the film, and she turned in an excellent performance), though she gets injured and turns over the reins to her second-in-command, Vice-Admiral Holdo (Laura Dern). Both the women in control have a problem on their hands: a hot-shot male underling, Commander Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac), who’s constantly launching reckless attacks against the First Order’s giant dreadnoughts and star-destroyers that just get more and more of the rebels killed. Poe gets demoted from commander to captain, but nonetheless he still plots an attack against Snoke’s flagship. Unfortunately, the First Order’s scientists and technicians have figured out a way to track the rebel spaceships even when they do time-warp jumps and go into faster-than-light travel, so the good guys need a way to disable the bad guys’ tracking system — which means infiltrating a super-hacker with great skills to jam the First Order’s security system so they can get onto the First Order flagship and disable its tracking device so the rebel ships can make their escape to the original home planet of the rebellion before they run out of fuel. (Just how the spaceships of the Star Wars universe are propelled is never made clear — at least Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry came up with something faintly scientifically plausible — and one of the odd things to someone coming to the Star Wars universe after years of familiarity with the Star Trek universe is that no one in the Star Wars universe ever invented a teleporter — I had to keep reminding myself of that because my Star Trek-trained mind was wondering why the good guys couldn’t get out of the bad guys’ traps just by having themselves beamed up to safety.)
Finn (John Boyega), a Black crew member on a Resistance vessel, meets up with Rose Tico (Kelly Marie Tran), a surprisingly homely Asian person on the same ship, and the two team up to go to a casino planet called Canto Bight to recruit their hacker; the guy they end up with is called DJ (no periods) and is played by Benicio del Toro; he gets them on to Snoke’s ship and they disable it long enough for the Rebels to make their escape, but then he sells Finn and Rose out to the First Order. While all that is going on Rey (ya remember Rey?) has mastered the art of levitating objects that you acquire with sufficient mastery of the Force, and she’s recruited by Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), a.k.a. Ben Solo, son of Han Solo and Princess Leia from the original cycle, who like his great-uncle Anakin Skywalker, a.k.a. Darth Vader, went over to the Dark Side big-time and is now Snoke’s second-in-command — only midway through the movie he assassinates Snoke with a lightsaber and declares himself the new leader of the First Order, sort of like Kim Jong Un and his relatives. Finn and Rose ultimately escape by stealing a First Order spacecraft, and they high-tail it back to the rebel planet base — only the First Order hunt them down and arrive on the planet with a giant star-destroyer cannon ready to blast the rebel base to pieces — only, against the advice of his field commander, General Hux (whom Poe derisively refers to as “General Hugs” and who’s played by Domhnall Gleason, who proves that they didn’t make the mold that produced Peter Cushing, who played a similarly cold, matter-of-fact, bureaucratic villain in the first Star Wars), Kylo Ren gets sidetracked into a duel to the death with lightsabers either with Luke Skywalker himself or an astral projection of him, and though Skywalker dies and virtually the entire Rebellion is annihilated in the battle, enough members of it are still alive (including Leia — one imdb.com contributor noted that of the three principals in the first Star Wars, Leia is the only one left alive since they knocked off Han Solo at the end of film seven, The Force Awakens, while Carrie Fisher is the only one of the stars of the first Star Wars who’s passed on: Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford are both still among the living) that they decide to revive the Jedi cult and keep on fighting.
It’s true that some of the gimmicks are a bit wince-inducing — that new comic-relief “droid” character BB-8, who looks like a bowling ball with a pool ball sitting on top of it, is really annoying and I felt a sigh of relief when our old and genuinely charming friend R2-D2 made an all too brief reappearance — and some of Johnson’s cuts from storyline to storyline are so fast they almost induce whiplash, but overall I quite enjoyed The Last Jedi. I’m also fascinated by the fact that the Right-wingers who saw anti-Trump propaganda in Rogue One — and even started a (false) rumor that the film had been withdrawn from release and re-edited after Trump’s victory so the makers could insert more anti-Trump bits — didn’t come down on this one, since the First Order’s Snoke is pretty clearly an avatar for Trump and Kylo Ren comes off as a sort of interstellar Mike Pence, waiting for the idiot he’s serving to self-destruct so he can assume the dictatorship. (Adam Driver turns in a marvelous performer as Ren, a character who reminded me enough of Shakespeare’s Richard III I’d like to see him play that role; I’m sure he’d be a lot better at it than the overrated Benedict Cumberbatch.) The Last Jedi also deserves praise for a cast full of women as authority figures and enough people of color we don’t get the impression, as we did in the first Star Wars and virtually all science-fiction films that preceded it, that the future is going to be all-white!
Last night I went to the movie at the San Diego Public Library and saw Star Wars, Episode VIII: The Last Jedi. I have a curious relationship to the Star Wars saga because while I saw the first movie in theatres as soon as it came out in 1977 and liked it enough I went back to see it twice more, I missed all the rest in George Lucas’s Grand Saga and never saw a Star Wars movie again until a few months ago, when I bought the DVD of Rogue One — an interstital Star Wars movie not part of the main sequence which I thought might make a convenient way back for Charles and I to re-enter the saga without having to pick up the plot threads of who’d done what to whom in episodes 2 through 7. I was more than a bit disappointed in Rogue One, despite some interesting plot threads and the presence of a good, if rather inconsistent, director, Gareth Edwards (whose other films — at least the ones I’d seen — include Monsters and the latest reboot of Godzilla), because it lacked the quirky humor of the original Star Wars and, as I realized about a third of the way through, it was just The Guns of Navarone transposed into science-fiction: the bad guys have a super-weapon and the good guys have to send in a commando team to blow it up. At least partly because I was judging it as a stand-alone movie without reference to Star Wars episodes two through seven, I quite liked The Last Jedi even though it had its limits: it was pretty much just a high-tech space opera, and its occasional bouts of philosophizing (when I saw the first Star Wars I thought the Force was a metaphor for religion in general and Christianity in particular, but this time around it seemed more like Zen) only slowed things down. It’s also a grandly depressing movie — the good guys seem to lose just about every battle they get involved in, and in a way it’s weirdly appropriate that The Last Jedi came out the same year that two movies about the evacuation of the British army from Dunkirk in 1940 were released, because that operation, too, was a military disaster but one that turned into a political success because it mobilized the Brits who were left behind to resist and ultimately win.
The Last Jedi was both written and directed by Rian Johnson, and a lot of the criticism of the film came from nit-picky Star Wars fans who resented the directions in which he took some of the fabled characters from earlier incarnations of the series — but I quite liked Johnson’s debut feature, Brick (a contemporary-set tale of high-school kids and drugs that avoided both the noble-outlaws and just-say-no sets of clichés available to people who write and/or direct drug movies), and while his later science-fiction film Looper didn’t seem as strong, it’s still a lot better than most of the big blockbusters that come out these days. Curiously, Johnson was fired from the last film in the main Star Wars sequence, which is due to be released in December 2019 (though another prequel, Solo, just came out to disappointing box-office returns, and one of the reasons cited in today’s Los Angeles Times article about the fiasco suggested it was because the Walt Disney Corporation, which bought Lucasfilm for $4 billion largely to get their hands on the Star Wars universe and characters, went to the well too soon and released another Star Wars movie just five months after The Last Jedi), and J. J. Abrams, who’s now in charge of both the Star Wars and Star Trek franchises, is apparently going to take back the directorial reins himself. The Last Jedi basically consists of three overlapping plot lines: Rey (Daisy Ridley) is determined to learn to become a Jedi fighter and seeks out the legendary Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill, appropriately cast as a grizzled old man after his spectacular debut as the beamish-boy Luke in 1977), but Luke has exiled himself to a faraway planet where he wants to burn the accumulated Jedi textbooks containing their knowledge and die because he thinks the Jedi and their bad-guy equivalents, the Sith, both need to die for the universe to be reborn under decent auspices. Meanwhile, the First Order, the ruling junta of the Star Wars universe in this incarnation, and its leader, Snoke (played by all-purpose motion-capture guy Andy Serkis, who’s enacted so many of his roles with computer-generated faces and bodies grafted on top of his own it’s a surprise to see his imdb.com head shot and realize what he really looks like), are determined to wipe out the Rebellion once and for all.
The Rebellion is led by General Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher, also playing her character from the first film as she had naturally aged; though it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the mavens at Disney and Lucasfilm have enough “wild” footage of her they can recast her in the next film even though she’s dead, if this is indeed Carrie Fisher’s last film she went out on a high level: her part is a lot longer than the reviews indicated, she’s crucial to both the opening and the closing of the film, and she turned in an excellent performance), though she gets injured and turns over the reins to her second-in-command, Vice-Admiral Holdo (Laura Dern). Both the women in control have a problem on their hands: a hot-shot male underling, Commander Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac), who’s constantly launching reckless attacks against the First Order’s giant dreadnoughts and star-destroyers that just get more and more of the rebels killed. Poe gets demoted from commander to captain, but nonetheless he still plots an attack against Snoke’s flagship. Unfortunately, the First Order’s scientists and technicians have figured out a way to track the rebel spaceships even when they do time-warp jumps and go into faster-than-light travel, so the good guys need a way to disable the bad guys’ tracking system — which means infiltrating a super-hacker with great skills to jam the First Order’s security system so they can get onto the First Order flagship and disable its tracking device so the rebel ships can make their escape to the original home planet of the rebellion before they run out of fuel. (Just how the spaceships of the Star Wars universe are propelled is never made clear — at least Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry came up with something faintly scientifically plausible — and one of the odd things to someone coming to the Star Wars universe after years of familiarity with the Star Trek universe is that no one in the Star Wars universe ever invented a teleporter — I had to keep reminding myself of that because my Star Trek-trained mind was wondering why the good guys couldn’t get out of the bad guys’ traps just by having themselves beamed up to safety.)
Finn (John Boyega), a Black crew member on a Resistance vessel, meets up with Rose Tico (Kelly Marie Tran), a surprisingly homely Asian person on the same ship, and the two team up to go to a casino planet called Canto Bight to recruit their hacker; the guy they end up with is called DJ (no periods) and is played by Benicio del Toro; he gets them on to Snoke’s ship and they disable it long enough for the Rebels to make their escape, but then he sells Finn and Rose out to the First Order. While all that is going on Rey (ya remember Rey?) has mastered the art of levitating objects that you acquire with sufficient mastery of the Force, and she’s recruited by Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), a.k.a. Ben Solo, son of Han Solo and Princess Leia from the original cycle, who like his great-uncle Anakin Skywalker, a.k.a. Darth Vader, went over to the Dark Side big-time and is now Snoke’s second-in-command — only midway through the movie he assassinates Snoke with a lightsaber and declares himself the new leader of the First Order, sort of like Kim Jong Un and his relatives. Finn and Rose ultimately escape by stealing a First Order spacecraft, and they high-tail it back to the rebel planet base — only the First Order hunt them down and arrive on the planet with a giant star-destroyer cannon ready to blast the rebel base to pieces — only, against the advice of his field commander, General Hux (whom Poe derisively refers to as “General Hugs” and who’s played by Domhnall Gleason, who proves that they didn’t make the mold that produced Peter Cushing, who played a similarly cold, matter-of-fact, bureaucratic villain in the first Star Wars), Kylo Ren gets sidetracked into a duel to the death with lightsabers either with Luke Skywalker himself or an astral projection of him, and though Skywalker dies and virtually the entire Rebellion is annihilated in the battle, enough members of it are still alive (including Leia — one imdb.com contributor noted that of the three principals in the first Star Wars, Leia is the only one left alive since they knocked off Han Solo at the end of film seven, The Force Awakens, while Carrie Fisher is the only one of the stars of the first Star Wars who’s passed on: Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford are both still among the living) that they decide to revive the Jedi cult and keep on fighting.
It’s true that some of the gimmicks are a bit wince-inducing — that new comic-relief “droid” character BB-8, who looks like a bowling ball with a pool ball sitting on top of it, is really annoying and I felt a sigh of relief when our old and genuinely charming friend R2-D2 made an all too brief reappearance — and some of Johnson’s cuts from storyline to storyline are so fast they almost induce whiplash, but overall I quite enjoyed The Last Jedi. I’m also fascinated by the fact that the Right-wingers who saw anti-Trump propaganda in Rogue One — and even started a (false) rumor that the film had been withdrawn from release and re-edited after Trump’s victory so the makers could insert more anti-Trump bits — didn’t come down on this one, since the First Order’s Snoke is pretty clearly an avatar for Trump and Kylo Ren comes off as a sort of interstellar Mike Pence, waiting for the idiot he’s serving to self-destruct so he can assume the dictatorship. (Adam Driver turns in a marvelous performer as Ren, a character who reminded me enough of Shakespeare’s Richard III I’d like to see him play that role; I’m sure he’d be a lot better at it than the overrated Benedict Cumberbatch.) The Last Jedi also deserves praise for a cast full of women as authority figures and enough people of color we don’t get the impression, as we did in the first Star Wars and virtually all science-fiction films that preceded it, that the future is going to be all-white!
Sunday, June 3, 2018
Minstrel Man (PRC, 1944)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last May 29 Charles and I watched another item from the Mill Creek Entertainment box of 20 public-domain musicals: Minstrel Man, a 1944 oddball from PRC (the little studio that made a few genuinely great movies — Edgar G. Ulmer’s Bluebeard, Strange Illusion and Detour, Steve Sekely’s Lady in the Death House, Frank Wisbar’s Strangler of the Swamp) but also put out so much garbage that Hollywood wags joked that the studio’s initials, which officially stood for “Producers’ Releasing Corporation,” really meant “Pretty Rotten Crap.” Despite the intrinsic awfulness of the concept — an ode to the joy and staying power of minstrelsy — and the rather odd casting of Benny Fields as the lead minstrel (he looks the part, somehow being more attractive in blackface than he is out of makeup, but his thin, whispery voice seems odd if your concept of a minstrel is Al Jolson), Minstrel Man emerges as a pretty good film. It had an unusual level of talent both in front of and behind the camera: the director is Joseph H. Lewis, who would return to the world of minstrelsy two years later in a far more prestigious production — he directed, uncredited, the musical numbers in the biopic The Jolson Story (Alfred E. Green got sole credit but apparently did only the plot portions), and the writing committee included Martin Mooney from Detour, who co-wrote the story with Raymond L. Schrock; and Pierre Gendron from Bluebeard, who co-wrote the script with Irwin Franklin. The actors include Gladys George as Mae White, long-suffering wife of Lee “Lasses” White (Roscoe Karns), manager of minstrel man Dixie Boy Johnson (Benny Fields —his real first name, if he has one, is never used). Ironically, there was a real Lee “Lasses” White who’s also in the movie, in a minor role; Jerome Cowan also appears as Johnson’s agent, Bill Evans (reuniting him and George from the cast of the 1941 version of The Maltese Falcon); and Alan Dinehart, the marvelously slimy villain of 1930’s minor classics like A Study in Scarlet and Supernatural, turns up in a sympathetic role as Johnson’s producer, Lew Dunn (a name probably derived from the real-life Lew Dockstader, in whose minstrel company Al Jolson got his start).
The film opens in the 1920’s —though we don’t learn when we are until much later, when Johnson attempts a comeback and is told that talking pictures have killed the demand for all forms of live entertainment — with Johnson performing on opening night of his new show, Minstrel Man, singing a song called “Remember Me to Caroline” (sometimes sung as “Remember Me to Carolina”) which he supposedly wrote in honor of his wife, who’s about to have his baby. Johnson would rather be with his wife in the hospital than on stage, but it’s opening night and The Show Must Go On. Through hand signals and lip movements Mae White tells him while he’s in the middle of his song that the delivery went well and his child is a girl, but then things take a turn for the worse and the daughter lives but mom dies. Broken-hearted and traumatized by the loss of his wife on the day which should have been the happiest of their relationship, Dixie quits the show and decides to tear around the world — or at least as much of it as PRC had stock footage of — and blows all his money in casinos. Meanwhile Lee and Mae White take his baby daughter and raise her as their own, naming her Caroline after her late mom. Five years later Dixie returns home and tries to re-establish a relationship with his daughter, but the Whites say no, you abandoned her and you can’t just come smashing your way back into her life as if you never left. Dixie gets a job singing in a movie theatre as the fourth of five acts performing between showings of the film (a common practice in the 1930’s; major stars like Benny Goodman and Frank Sinatra got important career boosts from gigs like this) but decides he can’t bear to be in New York any longer.
He gets a job at a club in Havana — a location which strains the resources of PRC’s set department — but freaks out and walks off in mid-performance when the audience demands he sing his big song, “Remember Me to Caroline,” which he can’t bear to do because of the memories it brings back. Then he takes another trip to Europe and goes home on the Morro Castle, whose real-life disaster (the ship caught fire at sea and sank) was at the time this film was made probably the second most famous accident on a tourist ship, after the Titanic. Dixie Boy Johnson’s name appears on a newspaper list of the dead passengers (both Charles and I were amused when his is the only name that isn’t accompanied by an age, as if he’s maintaining his actor’s vanity to the end), but he really survives and finds whatever work he can as “Jack Carter.” A quick dissolve from Caroline’s seventh birthday cake to her 15th (which looks absolutely identical except for the change in number and the extra candles) indicates the passage of time, and Caroline has unknowingly followed in her dad’s footsteps, sneaking out of her bed at night miming to her dad’s records. At some point — the writing committee is maddeningly vague as to when — she’s learned that the legendary minstrel performer Dixie Boy Johnson is her father, and she practices for her own career by miming, singing and dancing along with his records. She’s got good enough (and the actress playing her as a teenager, Judy Clark, is good enough at both singing and acting she should have had more of a career than she did) that producer Lew Dunn decides to revive Minstrel Man in an updated version and star Caroline White as “Dixie Girl Johnson.” Bill Evans finds out and persuades Dixie Boy Johnson to quit his gig at a seedy nightclub in San Francisco, come to New York and sue for a share of the proceeds, but Dixie Boy drops any intent of suing the show when he learns his daughter is the star, and there’s a Show Boat-like reunion sequence between father and daughter at the end as she triumphs.
The big final number features Dixie Girl’s spectacular dance and a solo by a male vocalist — John Raitt, later a Broadway star (he played Billy Bigelow in the premiere production of Carousel and quite frankly did the big “Soliloquy” better than anyone since) and father of blues singer/guitarist Bonnie Raitt. Minstrel Man seems like an unimpressive movie in synopsis, and like Trocadero (the last musical Charles and I watched from this 20-film Mill Creek Entertainment box) it’s the sort of movie in which you’re a reel or two ahead of the writers as they trot out familiar cliché after familiar cliché to keep their plot moving, but it’s done surprisingly stylishly, thanks largely to Lewis’s direction. In his early days as a director in Universal’s “B” Western unit Lewis had acquired the nickname “Wagon-Wheel Joe” for bringing a set of various sizes of wagon wheels to the location and aiming his camera through them every time he had to shoot a dull dialogue scene and wanted to liven it up visually. There are plenty of examples of that trademark in Minstrel Man, including a scene in the Whites’ home in which he suddenly cuts to an outside location so he can film their conversation through a window, and another at the end of Judy Clark’s dance number in which he frames her by shooting through a gap in an ornate railing used as part of the stage set. Though Benny Fields’ singing is oddly somnolent and one misses the energy and verve Jolson could have brought to this part (but even at this low point of his career Jolson was too big a “name” for PRC to afford!), and in these more racially sensitive times it’s hard to take the assertion Lew Dunn makes in the last reel that minstrelsy’s appeal will never die, Minstrel Man is a surprisingly well-done movie with a real sense of pathos and charm … even if it does seem like we’ve seen it all before.
Last May 29 Charles and I watched another item from the Mill Creek Entertainment box of 20 public-domain musicals: Minstrel Man, a 1944 oddball from PRC (the little studio that made a few genuinely great movies — Edgar G. Ulmer’s Bluebeard, Strange Illusion and Detour, Steve Sekely’s Lady in the Death House, Frank Wisbar’s Strangler of the Swamp) but also put out so much garbage that Hollywood wags joked that the studio’s initials, which officially stood for “Producers’ Releasing Corporation,” really meant “Pretty Rotten Crap.” Despite the intrinsic awfulness of the concept — an ode to the joy and staying power of minstrelsy — and the rather odd casting of Benny Fields as the lead minstrel (he looks the part, somehow being more attractive in blackface than he is out of makeup, but his thin, whispery voice seems odd if your concept of a minstrel is Al Jolson), Minstrel Man emerges as a pretty good film. It had an unusual level of talent both in front of and behind the camera: the director is Joseph H. Lewis, who would return to the world of minstrelsy two years later in a far more prestigious production — he directed, uncredited, the musical numbers in the biopic The Jolson Story (Alfred E. Green got sole credit but apparently did only the plot portions), and the writing committee included Martin Mooney from Detour, who co-wrote the story with Raymond L. Schrock; and Pierre Gendron from Bluebeard, who co-wrote the script with Irwin Franklin. The actors include Gladys George as Mae White, long-suffering wife of Lee “Lasses” White (Roscoe Karns), manager of minstrel man Dixie Boy Johnson (Benny Fields —his real first name, if he has one, is never used). Ironically, there was a real Lee “Lasses” White who’s also in the movie, in a minor role; Jerome Cowan also appears as Johnson’s agent, Bill Evans (reuniting him and George from the cast of the 1941 version of The Maltese Falcon); and Alan Dinehart, the marvelously slimy villain of 1930’s minor classics like A Study in Scarlet and Supernatural, turns up in a sympathetic role as Johnson’s producer, Lew Dunn (a name probably derived from the real-life Lew Dockstader, in whose minstrel company Al Jolson got his start).
The film opens in the 1920’s —though we don’t learn when we are until much later, when Johnson attempts a comeback and is told that talking pictures have killed the demand for all forms of live entertainment — with Johnson performing on opening night of his new show, Minstrel Man, singing a song called “Remember Me to Caroline” (sometimes sung as “Remember Me to Carolina”) which he supposedly wrote in honor of his wife, who’s about to have his baby. Johnson would rather be with his wife in the hospital than on stage, but it’s opening night and The Show Must Go On. Through hand signals and lip movements Mae White tells him while he’s in the middle of his song that the delivery went well and his child is a girl, but then things take a turn for the worse and the daughter lives but mom dies. Broken-hearted and traumatized by the loss of his wife on the day which should have been the happiest of their relationship, Dixie quits the show and decides to tear around the world — or at least as much of it as PRC had stock footage of — and blows all his money in casinos. Meanwhile Lee and Mae White take his baby daughter and raise her as their own, naming her Caroline after her late mom. Five years later Dixie returns home and tries to re-establish a relationship with his daughter, but the Whites say no, you abandoned her and you can’t just come smashing your way back into her life as if you never left. Dixie gets a job singing in a movie theatre as the fourth of five acts performing between showings of the film (a common practice in the 1930’s; major stars like Benny Goodman and Frank Sinatra got important career boosts from gigs like this) but decides he can’t bear to be in New York any longer.
He gets a job at a club in Havana — a location which strains the resources of PRC’s set department — but freaks out and walks off in mid-performance when the audience demands he sing his big song, “Remember Me to Caroline,” which he can’t bear to do because of the memories it brings back. Then he takes another trip to Europe and goes home on the Morro Castle, whose real-life disaster (the ship caught fire at sea and sank) was at the time this film was made probably the second most famous accident on a tourist ship, after the Titanic. Dixie Boy Johnson’s name appears on a newspaper list of the dead passengers (both Charles and I were amused when his is the only name that isn’t accompanied by an age, as if he’s maintaining his actor’s vanity to the end), but he really survives and finds whatever work he can as “Jack Carter.” A quick dissolve from Caroline’s seventh birthday cake to her 15th (which looks absolutely identical except for the change in number and the extra candles) indicates the passage of time, and Caroline has unknowingly followed in her dad’s footsteps, sneaking out of her bed at night miming to her dad’s records. At some point — the writing committee is maddeningly vague as to when — she’s learned that the legendary minstrel performer Dixie Boy Johnson is her father, and she practices for her own career by miming, singing and dancing along with his records. She’s got good enough (and the actress playing her as a teenager, Judy Clark, is good enough at both singing and acting she should have had more of a career than she did) that producer Lew Dunn decides to revive Minstrel Man in an updated version and star Caroline White as “Dixie Girl Johnson.” Bill Evans finds out and persuades Dixie Boy Johnson to quit his gig at a seedy nightclub in San Francisco, come to New York and sue for a share of the proceeds, but Dixie Boy drops any intent of suing the show when he learns his daughter is the star, and there’s a Show Boat-like reunion sequence between father and daughter at the end as she triumphs.
The big final number features Dixie Girl’s spectacular dance and a solo by a male vocalist — John Raitt, later a Broadway star (he played Billy Bigelow in the premiere production of Carousel and quite frankly did the big “Soliloquy” better than anyone since) and father of blues singer/guitarist Bonnie Raitt. Minstrel Man seems like an unimpressive movie in synopsis, and like Trocadero (the last musical Charles and I watched from this 20-film Mill Creek Entertainment box) it’s the sort of movie in which you’re a reel or two ahead of the writers as they trot out familiar cliché after familiar cliché to keep their plot moving, but it’s done surprisingly stylishly, thanks largely to Lewis’s direction. In his early days as a director in Universal’s “B” Western unit Lewis had acquired the nickname “Wagon-Wheel Joe” for bringing a set of various sizes of wagon wheels to the location and aiming his camera through them every time he had to shoot a dull dialogue scene and wanted to liven it up visually. There are plenty of examples of that trademark in Minstrel Man, including a scene in the Whites’ home in which he suddenly cuts to an outside location so he can film their conversation through a window, and another at the end of Judy Clark’s dance number in which he frames her by shooting through a gap in an ornate railing used as part of the stage set. Though Benny Fields’ singing is oddly somnolent and one misses the energy and verve Jolson could have brought to this part (but even at this low point of his career Jolson was too big a “name” for PRC to afford!), and in these more racially sensitive times it’s hard to take the assertion Lew Dunn makes in the last reel that minstrelsy’s appeal will never die, Minstrel Man is a surprisingly well-done movie with a real sense of pathos and charm … even if it does seem like we’ve seen it all before.
Saturday, June 2, 2018
Live at the Belly Up: Steve Poltz, Trouble in the Wind (KPBS, 2014)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I watched two music programs on KPBS: their own production, Live at the Belly Up, and one from the PBS station in Nashville, Bluegrass Underground, in which various bands (not only bluegrass but other genres as well) descend into the depths of the earth and perform in a hollowed-out underground cave with great acoustics. (They have to bring themselves and their equipment down in the sorts of miniature trains used by coal miners.) The acts on last night’s Live at the Belly Up — named after a far more prosaic location, the legendary Belly Up Tavern in Solana Beach — and featured local songwriter Steve Poltz and a band from Carlsbad called Trouble in the Wind. To the extent Poltz has a reputation at all, it was from a song called “You Were Meant for Me” that he co-wrote with Jewel while the two were on a road trip together before she became famous. Since he wrote the song with Jewel, she had him featured in the video — he stroked her cheek in an affectionate but not especially sexual gesture — and as he joked last night, for years people looked at him on the street and recognized him as “that dude in the Jewel video.” In this Live at the Belly Up program, copyrighted 2014 (haven’t they done any since?), Poltz performed more or less alone — I say “more or less” because while all we and the Belly Up audience got to see was him standing at a mike playing an acoustic guitar and singing, there was an offstage sound person (I think Poltz said it was his cousin) adding electronic effects and in one case playing a pre-recorded Poltz guitar part — one could tell because on the last song, “The Long Haul,” he walked into the audience and left his guitar on stage, but you could still hear guitar even though no one visible was playing one.
Poltz opened with an instrumental called “Chinese Checkers” and then did a song called “I Want All My Friends to Be Happy,” which he said was inspired by the death of a long-time friend of his from cancer — and the fact that Poltz could write a song about the death of a friend from cancer and call it “I Want All My Friends to Be Happy” says volumes about his irreverence, his sense of humor and his overall good-naturedness. He’s not one of those singer-songwriters who goes up in front of a microphone and presents himself as, “I’m bearing my soul for you so you’d better take me seriously!” (At one point — the song is written in the persona of his late friend — he sings, “I want to tell cancer to go fuck itself,” which of course got bleeped, and then in a spoken aside he apologized to KPBS for forcing them to bleep him and breaking his promise not to swear on the taping. Then he got the audience to sing along, and of course KPBS bleeped them.) Then he did a sort of rap-lite number called “Kickin’ It Old Skool” [sic] that paid tribute to the fact that the show was being filmed for KPBS and which featured Poltz doing clever boom-box imitations while his offstage cousin did some mild rap-style sound effects behind him. His next song was the inevitable “You Were Meant for Me,” which isn’t as good as the 1929 Nacio Herb Brown-Arthur Freed song of the same title but still charms — Jewel’s original recording made her debt to Melanie ultra-clear but the song takes on a different affect with a man singing it — which he followed up with a song called “Spirit Hands” and one called “The Long Haul” which he presented as a tribute to his mother. I’m not a Poltz fanatic but every time I run into him or his music I find him amusing and charming, and like his music, his physical looks are quirky but appealing; he’s not a sex god but he is attractive in that sort of dorky way that no doubt Jewel wanted to showcase when she put him in her video.
The band Trouble in the Wind is from Carlsbad and now — four years after they appeared on this show — they’re about to release their first album (they’re playing a release party for it at the Sunshine Brooks Theatre in Oceanside on July 28; http://www.troubleinthewind.com/), and their featured singer, Robby Gira, described himself in one of the interstital interviews as being influenced by Roy Orbison, Billie Holiday and David Bowie. I don’t hear any of Billie in his vocals and only a little of Bowie; mostly he sounds like Lou Reed trying to do Roy Orbison, and his voice is O.K. but I found it a bit wearing after a while. They’re also described as a band rooted in surf music but I don’t hear anything of the Beach Boys in them, either, especially since Gira is the only singer — the other band members don’t even contribute backing vocals — and the only other voice we got on their Live at the Belly Up appearance was Gira’s sister Lauren, who joined him for a duet on a song called “When You Are Drunk” and whose voice sounded like a higher-lying version of her brother’s. They’re an interesting band, and the members are Robby Gira, vocals and acoustic guitar; Trevor Mulvey, bass and electric bass; Kyle Merritt, piano, accordion, electric guitar and banjo; Larry Doran, drums and percussion; and Keith Haman, electric guitar, pedal steel guitar and piano. Their Web site also credits Haman and Doran with backing vocals, but if they sang on last night’s show, I didn’t notice them. Their songs were “Can’t Help but Think,” “Cheek to Cheek” (which required a lot of, pardon the pun, cheek to rip off the title of the great song Irving Berlin wrote for Fred Astaire’s and Ginger Rogers’ big dance in Top Hat! It’s hardly at the level of Berlin’s classic but it’s a nice enough piece of material), “When You Are Drunk,” “Safe,” “Let Me Get Down,” “Pretty Please” and “Rising” (another title that’s been used by far more talented people — Bruce Springsteen and Yoko Ono). They’re a nice enough band in a pretty straightforward 1970’s rock vein, and Kyle Merritt’s banjo and accordion add a distinctive element to their sound even though they’re hardly at the level of Arcade Fire in terms of using non-rock (or not normally rock) instruments to add texture and depth, but I liked them overall and they were a good pairing for Steve Poltz.
Last night I watched two music programs on KPBS: their own production, Live at the Belly Up, and one from the PBS station in Nashville, Bluegrass Underground, in which various bands (not only bluegrass but other genres as well) descend into the depths of the earth and perform in a hollowed-out underground cave with great acoustics. (They have to bring themselves and their equipment down in the sorts of miniature trains used by coal miners.) The acts on last night’s Live at the Belly Up — named after a far more prosaic location, the legendary Belly Up Tavern in Solana Beach — and featured local songwriter Steve Poltz and a band from Carlsbad called Trouble in the Wind. To the extent Poltz has a reputation at all, it was from a song called “You Were Meant for Me” that he co-wrote with Jewel while the two were on a road trip together before she became famous. Since he wrote the song with Jewel, she had him featured in the video — he stroked her cheek in an affectionate but not especially sexual gesture — and as he joked last night, for years people looked at him on the street and recognized him as “that dude in the Jewel video.” In this Live at the Belly Up program, copyrighted 2014 (haven’t they done any since?), Poltz performed more or less alone — I say “more or less” because while all we and the Belly Up audience got to see was him standing at a mike playing an acoustic guitar and singing, there was an offstage sound person (I think Poltz said it was his cousin) adding electronic effects and in one case playing a pre-recorded Poltz guitar part — one could tell because on the last song, “The Long Haul,” he walked into the audience and left his guitar on stage, but you could still hear guitar even though no one visible was playing one.
Poltz opened with an instrumental called “Chinese Checkers” and then did a song called “I Want All My Friends to Be Happy,” which he said was inspired by the death of a long-time friend of his from cancer — and the fact that Poltz could write a song about the death of a friend from cancer and call it “I Want All My Friends to Be Happy” says volumes about his irreverence, his sense of humor and his overall good-naturedness. He’s not one of those singer-songwriters who goes up in front of a microphone and presents himself as, “I’m bearing my soul for you so you’d better take me seriously!” (At one point — the song is written in the persona of his late friend — he sings, “I want to tell cancer to go fuck itself,” which of course got bleeped, and then in a spoken aside he apologized to KPBS for forcing them to bleep him and breaking his promise not to swear on the taping. Then he got the audience to sing along, and of course KPBS bleeped them.) Then he did a sort of rap-lite number called “Kickin’ It Old Skool” [sic] that paid tribute to the fact that the show was being filmed for KPBS and which featured Poltz doing clever boom-box imitations while his offstage cousin did some mild rap-style sound effects behind him. His next song was the inevitable “You Were Meant for Me,” which isn’t as good as the 1929 Nacio Herb Brown-Arthur Freed song of the same title but still charms — Jewel’s original recording made her debt to Melanie ultra-clear but the song takes on a different affect with a man singing it — which he followed up with a song called “Spirit Hands” and one called “The Long Haul” which he presented as a tribute to his mother. I’m not a Poltz fanatic but every time I run into him or his music I find him amusing and charming, and like his music, his physical looks are quirky but appealing; he’s not a sex god but he is attractive in that sort of dorky way that no doubt Jewel wanted to showcase when she put him in her video.
The band Trouble in the Wind is from Carlsbad and now — four years after they appeared on this show — they’re about to release their first album (they’re playing a release party for it at the Sunshine Brooks Theatre in Oceanside on July 28; http://www.troubleinthewind.com/), and their featured singer, Robby Gira, described himself in one of the interstital interviews as being influenced by Roy Orbison, Billie Holiday and David Bowie. I don’t hear any of Billie in his vocals and only a little of Bowie; mostly he sounds like Lou Reed trying to do Roy Orbison, and his voice is O.K. but I found it a bit wearing after a while. They’re also described as a band rooted in surf music but I don’t hear anything of the Beach Boys in them, either, especially since Gira is the only singer — the other band members don’t even contribute backing vocals — and the only other voice we got on their Live at the Belly Up appearance was Gira’s sister Lauren, who joined him for a duet on a song called “When You Are Drunk” and whose voice sounded like a higher-lying version of her brother’s. They’re an interesting band, and the members are Robby Gira, vocals and acoustic guitar; Trevor Mulvey, bass and electric bass; Kyle Merritt, piano, accordion, electric guitar and banjo; Larry Doran, drums and percussion; and Keith Haman, electric guitar, pedal steel guitar and piano. Their Web site also credits Haman and Doran with backing vocals, but if they sang on last night’s show, I didn’t notice them. Their songs were “Can’t Help but Think,” “Cheek to Cheek” (which required a lot of, pardon the pun, cheek to rip off the title of the great song Irving Berlin wrote for Fred Astaire’s and Ginger Rogers’ big dance in Top Hat! It’s hardly at the level of Berlin’s classic but it’s a nice enough piece of material), “When You Are Drunk,” “Safe,” “Let Me Get Down,” “Pretty Please” and “Rising” (another title that’s been used by far more talented people — Bruce Springsteen and Yoko Ono). They’re a nice enough band in a pretty straightforward 1970’s rock vein, and Kyle Merritt’s banjo and accordion add a distinctive element to their sound even though they’re hardly at the level of Arcade Fire in terms of using non-rock (or not normally rock) instruments to add texture and depth, but I liked them overall and they were a good pairing for Steve Poltz.
Bluegrass Underground: Chris Robinson Brotherhood (Todd Squirrel Productions, WCTE-TV Nashville, 2017)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After the Live at the Belly Up program I watched a half-hour episode in the series Bluegrass Underground, billed as “Live from the Caverns” and whose Web site, http://www.thecaverns.com, says the show “shines a light on purveyors of musical authenticity in a space unlike any other on (or under) earth.” On another part of their Web page they write, “Bluegrass Underground emanates from the Volcano Room, a subterranean amphitheatre 333 feet below McMinnville, Tennessee at Cumberland Caverns. The acoustic properties of the Volcano Room are singular. In fact, the room only resonates at two frequencies meaning that experiencing live music there is akin to attending a concert inside a recording studio.” Alas, last night’s band, the Chris Robinson Brotherhood, wasn’t the sort of group that really challenged and showcased those awesome acoustics, though they brought a lot of electronic gizmos with them and that’s not easy to do in the Volcano Room of the Caverns because everything has to be brought in on those little trains like the ones coal miners use to take in their supplies and take out the coal. According to Wikipedia, the Chris Robinson Brotherhood is a side project of Chris Robinson, lead singer for the Black Crowes, and the personnel are Robinson, guitarist Neal Casal, keyboardist Adam MacDougall, bassist Jeff Hill, and drummer Tony Leone. Robinson is a good singer — a damned sight better than Robby Gira, but then he is the lead voice in an internationally known band instead of just a local musician in Carlsbad — though he tends to mumble, and the combination of his mumbling, the overall ellipticality of his song’s lyrics and the rather congested sound (if anything the band seemed to be fighting the natural acoustics of the Cavern instead of using them) made it difficult for me to tell what the four songs they played were called. I’ve got really spoiled by the Live at the Belly Up producers’ use of chyrons to tell us what the individual songs are called; PBS’s other shows of contemporary pop music, including the vaunted Austin City Limits as well as Live from the Artists’ Den (featuring famous, or at least semi-famous, musicians performing in oddball locations), don’t do that.
The first song seemed to be called “Keep Your Eyes On Ahead (Don’t Look Back)” and featured some unexpected synthesizer bloops and bleeps in the middle of what was otherwise pretty straight-ahead country-rock; keyboardist MacDougall had three available instruments: a grand piano (probably a fixture inside the Caverns because it’s hard to imagine the logistics of moving it in or out of there), a modern compact electronic keyboard that stood next to the piano, and a big box with a keyboard and a lot of knobs that sat on top of the piano and was responsible for all those cool 1970’s synth sounds. Their second song, of which I alternately guessed the title as “Loser Is as Loser Does” or “Can’t Help from Crying,” was by far the best of the night; it was a slow ballad, reminiscent of Bob Dylan not only in the elliptical and highly symbolic lyrics but also some of Dylan’s characteristic chords and Robinson’s singing, which took on the soulful character of Dylan’s at his best. The next two songs, the first of which I thought was called either “If the Moment Comes” or “The Sun Is Shining” (which would make it suffer from comparison with the wrenching Elmore James blues “The Sun Is Shining”) and the second was either “Rosalee” or “Bird in My Hand,” were O.K. good-time rock but didn’t have the emotional richness of the second song, which benefited also from MacDougall’s decision to play piano, not either of his electronic keyboards, throughout. I don’t think I have anything by the Black Crowes (I’m sure I’ve heard them but can’t recall them), so I can’t compare the Chris Robinson Brotherhood’s work here to what Robinson does with his main band, but the Brotherhood’s music here struck me as pleasant and on the whole well done, but quite frankly it could have benefited from a female singer — all five band members were guys, all had beards (something Robinson joked about when he said they all looked like cavemen so it was appropriate they were playing in a cavern — “We’re old-school, Neolithic old-school!”) and all had very similar voices and approaches to music, which at least made the band sound coherent even if it also made them sound rather unadventurous.
After the Live at the Belly Up program I watched a half-hour episode in the series Bluegrass Underground, billed as “Live from the Caverns” and whose Web site, http://www.thecaverns.com, says the show “shines a light on purveyors of musical authenticity in a space unlike any other on (or under) earth.” On another part of their Web page they write, “Bluegrass Underground emanates from the Volcano Room, a subterranean amphitheatre 333 feet below McMinnville, Tennessee at Cumberland Caverns. The acoustic properties of the Volcano Room are singular. In fact, the room only resonates at two frequencies meaning that experiencing live music there is akin to attending a concert inside a recording studio.” Alas, last night’s band, the Chris Robinson Brotherhood, wasn’t the sort of group that really challenged and showcased those awesome acoustics, though they brought a lot of electronic gizmos with them and that’s not easy to do in the Volcano Room of the Caverns because everything has to be brought in on those little trains like the ones coal miners use to take in their supplies and take out the coal. According to Wikipedia, the Chris Robinson Brotherhood is a side project of Chris Robinson, lead singer for the Black Crowes, and the personnel are Robinson, guitarist Neal Casal, keyboardist Adam MacDougall, bassist Jeff Hill, and drummer Tony Leone. Robinson is a good singer — a damned sight better than Robby Gira, but then he is the lead voice in an internationally known band instead of just a local musician in Carlsbad — though he tends to mumble, and the combination of his mumbling, the overall ellipticality of his song’s lyrics and the rather congested sound (if anything the band seemed to be fighting the natural acoustics of the Cavern instead of using them) made it difficult for me to tell what the four songs they played were called. I’ve got really spoiled by the Live at the Belly Up producers’ use of chyrons to tell us what the individual songs are called; PBS’s other shows of contemporary pop music, including the vaunted Austin City Limits as well as Live from the Artists’ Den (featuring famous, or at least semi-famous, musicians performing in oddball locations), don’t do that.
The first song seemed to be called “Keep Your Eyes On Ahead (Don’t Look Back)” and featured some unexpected synthesizer bloops and bleeps in the middle of what was otherwise pretty straight-ahead country-rock; keyboardist MacDougall had three available instruments: a grand piano (probably a fixture inside the Caverns because it’s hard to imagine the logistics of moving it in or out of there), a modern compact electronic keyboard that stood next to the piano, and a big box with a keyboard and a lot of knobs that sat on top of the piano and was responsible for all those cool 1970’s synth sounds. Their second song, of which I alternately guessed the title as “Loser Is as Loser Does” or “Can’t Help from Crying,” was by far the best of the night; it was a slow ballad, reminiscent of Bob Dylan not only in the elliptical and highly symbolic lyrics but also some of Dylan’s characteristic chords and Robinson’s singing, which took on the soulful character of Dylan’s at his best. The next two songs, the first of which I thought was called either “If the Moment Comes” or “The Sun Is Shining” (which would make it suffer from comparison with the wrenching Elmore James blues “The Sun Is Shining”) and the second was either “Rosalee” or “Bird in My Hand,” were O.K. good-time rock but didn’t have the emotional richness of the second song, which benefited also from MacDougall’s decision to play piano, not either of his electronic keyboards, throughout. I don’t think I have anything by the Black Crowes (I’m sure I’ve heard them but can’t recall them), so I can’t compare the Chris Robinson Brotherhood’s work here to what Robinson does with his main band, but the Brotherhood’s music here struck me as pleasant and on the whole well done, but quite frankly it could have benefited from a female singer — all five band members were guys, all had beards (something Robinson joked about when he said they all looked like cavemen so it was appropriate they were playing in a cavern — “We’re old-school, Neolithic old-school!”) and all had very similar voices and approaches to music, which at least made the band sound coherent even if it also made them sound rather unadventurous.
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