Two Movie Reviews (2016Dec13)

Posted by XperDunn on December 14, 2016

Tuesday, December 13, 2016 11:30 PM

“Suicide Squad” & “Florence Foster Jenkins”

“Suicide Squad”:

There was a burst of potentially-watchable movies in my video menu this morning—all kinds of movies—must be the run-off from the summer-movie influx in theaters. It’s strange for those of us who wait for the movie to leave the theater and get onto cable—we see the summer movies in winter, and the holiday movies in summer.

I started with “Suicide Squad”. I’ve pretty much had it with comic book retro-fits—and Suicide Squad is a poor excuse for even a comic book. But I like Will Smith—and I always enjoy it when some hot young actress does a star turn as a psycho-killer, as Margo Robbie does in this. But sometimes the over-arching concept of one team of good guys against a team of bad guys can strain the bounds of credulity—even within the ‘willing suspension’ paradigm.

In this movie, a ‘transdimensional’ witch with seemingly unlimited power, both natural and supernatural, stands against a group of admittedly tough customers—but none of them equipped to face down something from beyond the limits of time and space. Well, there’s one—a reluctant pyrokinetic with supernatural powers of his own.

But the rest of them have to be kept busy fighting minions of the witch, to distract from the fact they can’t possibly fight her. It’s just senseless—and believe me, I’ve swallowed a lot of sci-fi and comic book foolishness in service of maintaining my willing suspension of disbelief—and enjoying the story—but there has to be a minimal coherence to the thing. I need to be accorded that much respect.

Anyway, for a two-hour movie full of nonsense, it went by fairly quickly and painlessly. I gave it a few hours, then I went back.

“Florence Foster Jenkins”:

I went back earlier this evening for another film, “Florence Foster Jenkins”, starring Meryl Streep, Hugh Grant, and Simon Helberg.

There was a French film on Netflix recently, “Marguerite” (2015), with a similar story—a moneyed matron of the arts is surrounded by sycophants who never tell her that she has a terrible singing voice—a secret carefully kept by a mad-cap retinue, using carefully-curated venues and selectively-bribed music critics to maintain the illusion until the catastrophe of a large, uncontrolled, public performance threatens to expose the entire charade.

Both films claim some basis in historical fact—but the French film is set at the turn of the century and the American film is set in 1940s New York. This leads me to wonder if rich woman are historically misled about their true abilities—and, if so, why? But beyond that question, there’s the tone of such a movie. In the case of “Florence Foster Jenkins”, much like “Marguerite”, there’s a contradiction between the hilarity of bad singing and the tragedy of a person being lied to by everyone around that person—supposed friends and lovers who, whether through kindness or avarice are, nonetheless, doing the poor woman no favors.

Even the surprising tenderness that Hugh Grant brings to his role as FFJ’s husband cannot render this story a happy one—or a particularly funny one, since the impending slip-on-a-banana-peel is always the looming exposure and destruction of the woman’s sense-of-self. Meryl Streep brings humor to the character, but for me, the set-up is more suitable for a psychological horror-thriller, such as ‘Gaslight’, than for any light-hearted costume-comedy.

No one could fault the technical efforts, or the performances of the cast, in this film—but I guess I’m just too squeamish to enjoy laughing at someone who insists on making music badly—perhaps it cuts a little too close to home for me. Yes, that’s probably it—I see a little too much of my own musical strivings in the story of “Florence Foster Jenkins”.

History With A Grain Of Salt (2016Dec03)

Posted by XperDunn on December 8, 2016

Saturday, December 03, 2016 1:41 PM

I’ve just watched the first five episodes of Oliver Stone’s “The Untold History of the United States” on Netflix. The thrust of his re-telling of our modern history begins with an analysis of Russia’s virtually lone struggle against Germany, transforming what we think of as the main events of World War II into relatively minor clashes—in terms of land-area fought over, scale of destruction, length of time, and number of lives lost and persons wounded—and the stats certainly make that much plain. The Western Front was smaller, shorter, and less bloody in many respects—even with the Pacific War thrown in, ‘our’ War involved about a tenth of the size and horror of the struggle between Hitler and Stalin.

As he continues to explore the question of Truman’s decision to use the bomb, he frames it as more a demonstration for the Soviets than a body-blow to Japan. Stone suggests that the end of the Nazis enabled Russia to turn and join the US, as agreed, in fighting Japan, months afterward—and that their announcement of their intent to do so—came at about the same time as the two nuclear blasts—and was a great shock to an already-battered Japan. Thus, he presents the possibility that Russia, and not our new A-bomb, was responsible for Japan’s surrender, as well as Germany’s.

His revisionism also puts America squarely in the docket, to blame for nuclear proliferation, the military-industrial complex, and the entire Cold War that followed—and we must admit that the USA, being suddenly omnipotent (and not having their country reduced to rubble by the fighting, as was the case almost everywhere else) became the prime superpower—and had all the problems and corruptions that absolute power is known to herald.

Oliver Stone does have a habit of mentioning Stalin’s atrocities in asides, often, as if afraid someone will accuse him of glossing over them (which the asides almost accomplish, ironically). But while Stone presents a new perspective and a clarification of several old false assumptions—and highlights some overlooked or hidden aspects that radically change the context of certain events—he is still dealing with the problem of ‘history as general summary’.

His review, for example, leaves out the details of China’s suffering and transformation, its revolution and great famine. The British role in the man-made starvation in India during World War II, resulting in a genocide greater than the Nazis’, was overlooked as well (see Howard Fast’s “The Pledge”). An historical review, by its nature, leaves out more than it puts in.

His view of the last seventy years may be clearer-eyed, less American-centric—but it is still an impossible task to pick and choose the stand-out events of world history over so large a span of time, without putting one’s own ‘centrism’ into the picking. Still, Stone’s gruesome view of modern American history is, unfortunately, solidly-grounded in facts and records, shorn of the ‘spin’ which events are often given in their own time, and which tend to continue to stand as fact, absent an Oliver Stone.

The show, ultimately, is a flat statement to Americans that being ‘the world’s greatest superpower’ and being ‘the good guys’ are, almost by definition, mutually exclusive concepts. He almost makes us embarrassed that we don’t see something so obvious. Our laser focus on the high-points of American History, and our brushing aside of all the many sins: the original genocide of the natives, the kidnapping and slavery of the Africans, the dehumanization of ethnic and racial minorities, the industrialism that spawned sweat shops, child labor, tenements, and all the rapacity of Capitalism—we wave these things aside and point to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Emancipation Proclamation. Don’t look over there—look here—o, pretty!

Most of history is a horror—and American history no exception. If you think about our greatest moments—the Bill of Rights, Women’s Suffrage, the Civil Rights Act, etc.—they are all merely points at which those in power finally conceded, for this specific case, for that specific group, that people should not be used and abused like farm animals. Points on the Timeline when those in authority declare, “Oh, did that hurt? I’ll stop now.” It’s almost funny that we have these tremendous struggles, usually over the question, “Why should I treat you like a human being?” It’s as if, when someone gets a little power, the rest of us have to turn as one and shout at them, “Hey, right and wrong still apply, douchebag!”

I suppose the great lesson of history is that victory is a sort of lobotomy—it convinces the victor that force is effective. And with force must come control. And with too much control comes the need for struggles anew, and a new victor, and on it goes.

In sum, I was reluctant to watch another rehash of the last seventy years of world conflict—but I was not disappointed in my hope that Oliver Stone wouldn’t have bothered to make this series without some surprising and new information—and observations that really change the context for lay-historians like myself. I love this sort of thing, because you can’t really change the accepted view of history without adding in some new data—and this series exposes many overlooked, obscured, and newly-discovered bits of information, and makes connections that seem obvious once made—making one wonder why Oliver Stone had to do it, all this time later. But I’m glad he did.

The subject guarantees that viewing will be somewhat daunting, and hardly inspiring—but looking ourselves straight in the mirror is ultimately a very healthy thing, if uncomfortable. I can’t help reflecting, however, that if Oliver Stone can take the old story and re-tell it as something almost unrecognizable—then I suppose someone else could do the same to his. When studying history, one must never neglect the grain of salt.

VOD Movie Reviews: “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” and “Kung Fu Panda 3” (2016Jun29)

Posted by XperDunn on June 29, 2016

Wednesday, June 29, 2016 1:01 AM

“Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” stars Tina Fey—I can’t think of any previous dramatic film role, unless you want to count “This Is Where I Leave You” (2014) which was a dramedy—a humorous take on a serious subject. And there is certainly humor in “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot”—though it has rare moments of comic relief rather than an overarching comedic tone. So it would be stretching things to claim that Ms. Fey has suddenly dived into dramatic roles. Still, it would be wrong to overlook her jumping decisively into this wholly dramatic role with both feet—and sticking the landing, IMHO.

Tina Fey’s performing career is just a late bloomer, I guess. She did a whole lot of writing before she became a well-known SNL cast member—I’m not an expert on her career arc, but to take on a serious movie role for the first time, a few years after winning the 2012 Mark Twain Prize for her life’s work in virtually every aspect of the comedic side of the entertainment industry—that’s taking one’s time in developing an acting career.

I don’t know much about Kim Barker, either—I haven’t even read her war-correspondent memoir “The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan”, on which the film is based. I’m both tempted to go and read it now, having seen the movie, and reluctant to go even deeper into the troubling truths being confronted in the film.

There’s the ‘big picture’ stuff, like how our military can fight and bleed in a faraway country while the citizens at home can’t even be bothered to hear about it on the news. And there’s the personal, like how a woman can find herself trapped between the opposing extremities of being an invisible desk drone—or doing stand-up reports amidst flying bullets and shrapnel. In the end I was left with the impression that the big, cold world is more pervasively evil than the discrete violence of a war zone. In spite of my penchant for happy, sappy, ever-after-type movies, I enjoyed being fed this more serious fare, with Tina Fey as the spoonful of sugar that made it go down.

Being sixty years old, I was, of course, embarrassed to watch “Kung Fu Panda 3” all by myself—this stuff was much easier to explain when the kids were small. But I loved it—sue me, I’m a sucker for a good animated film. And I was reminded that these films are serious business when the end credits listed the voice actors (most of whom spoke in all three films): Jack Black, Bryan Cranston, Dustin Hoffman, Angelina Jolie, J.K. Simmons, Jackie Chan, Seth Rogen, Lucy Liu, David Cross, Kate Hudson, James Hong, Wayne Knight, and Jean-Claude Van Damme. Try making a live-action movie with a cast like that—it’d be a hundred-million-dollar budget before you even began shooting. Angelina Jolie must have enjoyed the recording sessions the most—all of her and Brad’s kids are also voice-credited in the film.

I know that the messages in these kid films are simplistic—but I still believe in teaching kids to care, even with a silly movie. When Po sacrifices himself to save the whole village, it cuts a little close to the edge—the authors of the New Testament may have a case for plagiarism there—but he returns from the ‘world of the spirit’ (falling on his butt upon landing) so we are left with the ‘out’ of interpreting the whole thing as ‘clever strategy’, rather than a re-telling of The Messiah, so no harm done.

I think I favor the Kung Fu Panda franchise because its fantasies always have two components—the traditional threat of a big, mean bad-guy, and the search for wisdom as a means of defending against the impending evil. Po spends equal amounts of screen time worrying over the enemy’s arrival and his struggles to please his teachers and learn the lessons he’s being taught. He doesn’t go looking for a great weapon or go on a quest to destroy the one ring—he always goes looking for wisdom. I like that.

Movies With Madness (Three Reviews) (2016Apr28)

Posted by XperDunn on April 28, 2016

Thursday, April 28, 2016 4:11 PM

Movie Review: “Nina”

I watched “Nina” on VOD yesterday—a film about Nina Simone, the legendary blues singer (incredibly played (and sung!) by Zoe Saldana) at the end of her career, facing instability, alcoholism, and illness, with the help of a male nurse, Clifton Henderson (as played by David Oyelowo) and marking a triumphant return to the United States with a live free concert in Central Park. Oddly, historical records indicate that she performed at the New Jersey Performing Arts Centre in Newark upon her return to the US—and that it wasn’t ‘free’—but Nina Simone did perform in Central Park several times in her earlier career.

Other reviewers and critics take issue with lighter-skinned Ms. Saldana playing the very much darker High Priestess of Soul—but while I can understand a rejection of ‘blackface’ white performers playing black people—I think it’s going a bit far to complain of one African-American woman playing another. It makes more sense to complain that Zoe Saldana is too young and too thin—but this is a biopic, not a documentary, and her performance is often riveting, even if the historical accuracy of both her depiction and the story-line goes a bit by the boards. As with Jamie Foxx’s “Ray” (2004), “Nina” is as remarkable for the star’s vocal efforts as it is for the purported subject—though I wouldn’t have minded hearing the actual, recorded voice of the late Nina Simone sing a few bars at some point in the movie.

But you can just do what I did—go to YouTube afterwards and check out the real Nina Simone singing all the songs from the movie and more—that’s as much of a treat as the movie—and since the movie got me there, hooray for the movie. But see the movie first or you’ll never get over the very real difference in both appearance and vocals.

Movie Review: “The Lady In The Van” (2016Apr28)

I was eager to see “The Lady In The Van” because Maggie Smith gives good ‘crabby old lady’—and she certainly doesn’t disappoint in this movie that could have been written for her, if it wasn’t based on an actual woman. Still the film is based on the 1999 play—and takes place even earlier, in the seventies—so perhaps the film was only made to showcase Ms. Smith.

She plays a poor and confused woman who lives out of a van, which she parks in various places in the neighborhood until stricter parking regulations (and perhaps complaining residents) make it necessary for her to park in a driveway—that of the playwright, Allen Bennett, who forms a limited friendship with this loner who has reached the age when being a loner becomes problematic. The film is as much about the man as the lady—and both are seen by the Gloucester Crescent inhabitants as odd ducks. As with many stories about fragile, vulnerable people, the common run of humanity is portrayed as coarse and unsympathetic—from the whispering neighbors to the van-rocking toughs.

One striking element is the conflict between the personal care of Alan Bennett and the more ‘public’ care offered by the periodic appearance of a social worker—to be nice by nature is far different from being nice by the rulebook. It is especially telling when dealing with the mentally unstable, where a little patience and understanding can do so much more than the brusque attentions of a civil servant.

A few movies, like “The Lady In The Van”, are remarkable also in showing us Yankees how very different the British can be—it is so easy to assume that they are just ‘differently-American’, when they are really quite another thing altogether. This film, in showing both the similarities of such situations and their differences, informs us just how foreign England can be.

While Alex Jennings’ and Maggie Smith’s performances contain a lot of humorous touches, the overall plot is insurmountably bleak, so I wouldn’t watch it unless you’re in the mood for something good and serious.

Movie Review: Infinitely Polar Bear (2015)

I just watched “Infinitely Polar Bear” (it just showed up on cable this weekend) written and directed by Maya Forbes, starring Mark Ruffalo, Zoe Saldana, Imogene Wolodarsky, and Ashley Aufderheide. I’m a long-time fan of both principles—I could go on all day about Mark Ruffalo and Zoe Saldana—neither one has been in a movie I didn’t like. Imogene Wolodarsky and Ashley Aufderheide did a great job being directed by Imogene’s mom, Maya.

It was my favorite kind of movie—it was so engrossing that I immediately stopped being aware of watching a movie, got sucked completely into the story, and got that heartbroken/furious-combo feeling when it ended because I wanted it to keep going so badly. Mark Ruffalo plays a bi-polar father who makes you worry for his kids—in spite of his generally appearing to be a better father than most. But the best part of the movie is when it shows the madness of sanity against the relief of his specific bi-polar symptoms—his grandmother is crazy, his neighbors are crazy, the waiter in the restaurant is crazy—but all in ‘sane’ ways that society finds acceptable. At the same time, his madness makes him a better person in many ways—even while it cripples his ability to relate to the sanely-crazy.

It also shows that sometimes the only one hurt by insanity is the person himself—or herself—that being different is its own punishment in a world full of people busily trying to fit in. We tend to have more sympathy for a hero that resists peer-pressure than for a hero who isn’t aware of it—but in both cases, the reactions of others are the others’ problems, not the hero’s. The film shows the girls being educated by their father’s disability—rather uncomfortably, but in the end, to good purpose. I found it all very uplifting—maybe I relate a little too strongly to a crazy father.

VOD Movie Reviews: “Trumbo” and “Steve Jobs” (2016Feb18)

Posted by XperDunn on February 19, 2016

Thursday, February 18, 2016 3:43 PM

I watched two movies – “Trumbo” and “Steve Jobs” –both bio-pics, obviously, but truth is stranger than fiction and Hollywood has done as much with non-fiction drama as it has with plain old movies—and I use the phrase ‘plain old movies’ advisedly, since the most impressive movies of recent days have either been historical (“Selma”, “Straight Outta Compton”) or biographical (“The Imitation Game”, “Unbroken”) or both (“Jersey Boys”, “Race”) and, since the first blush of CGI’s thrill has long since worn off, block-bluster fictional movies like “Spectre” or “The Force Awakens” (or any Marvel or DC movie) just seem that much more formulaic. Movie-making embraced childhood with its abject surrender to science fiction, sword and sorcery fantasy, and especially comic books—all the things that leant themselves to the new SFX tech’s possibilities. Now that such whiz-bang-ery is a given, these themes are poised to return to the children’s entertainment from which they came.

Don’t get me wrong—good science fiction (and yes, I’ll admit it, for Tolkien’s sake—fantasy) can still be great entertainment, suitable for grown-ups—but science fiction encompasses both sweeping visions and ‘space opera’ (i.e., soap operas with spaceships in them, like the Star Wars franchise) and for every Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” there are a thousand “Transformers”. So I’m glad that science fiction has been taken out of the kiddy-corner—now all we need is a little judicious bifurcation between age-levels, and everything will be fine.

Maybe it’s my age—or maybe it’s my lifelong interest in history—that makes me lean towards the ‘based on actual events’ movies. Or maybe I just like the challenge—everyone knows that a movie is a movie first, and a historical archive last—and my favorite thing to do is watch a historically-based movie, especially one based on a serious non-fiction book, like “Unbroken” or “The Imitation Game”, and compare in my mind what I read with what I see. I have discussions with myself about why they cut this interesting fact or added that spurious made-up scene. It’s like a review quiz for those of us who read the book first. And it’s a reminder that all history, written included, has to be taken with a grain of salt—we can never know the whole story, because even the people who lived it never know the whole story—the whole idea of ‘knowing’ history is a misunderstanding of what history’s limits are.

We see it on the news—especially now, during campaign season—the call and response ritual of two people trading ‘That’s not what I said’s back and forth—illustrating that even in a single conversation, the ‘truth’ is a combination of context, syntax, attitude, and intent—all whipped together with the vagaries of language and the pitfalls of hasty assumptions. To imagine that a student of history from a century or two back would reach any more than a vague abstraction of what really happened is, well, silly.

Those abstractions, however, are dead serious—they are the paradigms of our present. Our ideals, our ideas of what our country is, of what we are—are all bound up in the history that led to this present. Thus the desire for history to be something we can nail down and dissect—but all we can ever really do is postulate—to suggest that this is the way it might have gone. To me, this is one of the great reasons for the need for pluralism—disagreement is a given, within groups as often as between groups—and so we should see groups of any kind as a superficial distinction that is always overridden by our commonalities.

But I was talking about movies. Okay, first off, I read “Johnny Get Your Gun”, Dalton Trumbo’s historic novel, when I was a teenager. Being a bookworm, I just came across it—no one warned me what it was about, or suggested it—I just opened to the first page and started reading. Oh my fucking God!—this book was meant to be an ‘anti-war’ novel—it starts with a disembodied person talking to himself, wondering why he’s blind, and deaf, and can’t move. It turns out, as you read along, that you are reading the thoughts of a wounded veteran who is lying in a hospital bed, covered in bandages and missing an appendage or two. I can’t remember specifics—just the horror of Trumbo’s description of what it’s like to be blind, deaf, helpless, and alone. The book turned my stomach—I recommend it to anyone who’s considering enlisting, just for a second opinion.

But I didn’t hate it—I was enthralled by what I was reading—disagreeable as it was, it pulled me in. And I think that is what made Dalton Trumbo both a martyr of the Blacklist, and its vanquisher—he not only wouldn’t look away from the unpleasant or the inconvenient, he was bound and determined to get you to look at it too—but in a way that made it impossible to look away.

As for the movie—it was great. I’m a big fan of Bryan Cranston and Diane Lane and Louis CK and John Goodman and Helen Mirren—jeez, if they’d made a bad movie, hell would’ve froze over. I watched the movie, then I hit the replay button on my remote and watched it again.

As for “Steve Jobs”, I vaguely remember writing a blog not too long ago where I defended Aaron Sorkin from reviewers who shrugged at his latest effort—even though I hadn’t yet seen the movie. Well, I’ve seen the movie now—and I was right. It’s fantastic—it tells so many stories in the interstices between the obvious stories—to call it multi-layered is to damn it with faint praise.

Again, big fan of Fassbender, Winslet, and Rogen—and Sorkin, of course—so I expected great things. But the ‘frame’ everyone made so much of—the movie being set in the minutes before three major product launches, separated in reality over many years of actual time, is very fitting for a historical precis—each launch was a nexus of time, pulling together all that went before and all that would follow, and the combination of personal, business, and technical conflicts in the moments before—well, it gives a lot of depth and texture without trying to nail down exactly who said what when, and that sort of thing.

I said something in yesterday’s post about my favorite artists’ biographies invariably disappointing me by revealing that they had feet of clay—Jobs is certainly in that category—but every movie needs a bad guy—even if he’s the hero.

*-*-*

Okay, here are three new improvs:

Ta Ta For Now…

Talking Movies (2016Jan27)

Posted by XperDunn on January 27, 2016

Wednesday, January 27, 2016 12:55 PM

I saw “Goosebumps” last night—I doubt I enjoyed it as much as a fan of the book series might have, but I enjoy Jack Black in anything and I enjoy any story where horror gets a light touch—the paranormal is usually treated with such darkness in films. I also saw the re-boot of “Fantastic Four”—I wondered at a re-make of such a recent film, but then I remembered the original had Chris Evans playing Johnny Storm and he’s now obliged to play Captain America in the whole tapestry of Marvel movies. The good news is that this new cast allows for a meeting of Fantastic Four and the Avengers in some future ‘free-for-all’ Marvel movie—wouldn’t that be cool?

DC Comics is making up for lost time with their new WB series “Legends of Tomorrow” and the upcoming film “Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice”. Marvel has done a great job of translating their comics library into films, but DC has made more inroads into the television-series-adaptation and the animated films (I also watched an excellent animated “Wonder Woman” yesterday)—in a way, DC is more true-to-form in that comic books are for kids, and TV series on ‘the WB’ and animated films are more kid-centric, where Marvel sticks to live-action cinematic realizations meant to cover all age demographics.

I preferred DC Comics as a kid in the sixties—but now that I’m sixty myself, I lean towards the Marvel efforts. I can see how “Legends of Tomorrow” would appeal to the young—it has as many characters as Pokemon and it plays with time-lines and time-travel, creating a wealth of niggling details that appeal to obsessed kids, but are a turn-off for grown-ups. The WB already had Green Arrow and Flash series (and Supergirl is on CBS) which provide a steady stream of villains, co-heroes, and sidekicks—meat for endless discussions over ‘who can beat who’. The ultimate ‘who can beat who’ is, of course, “Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice” But I’ve never seen the fascination—Superman is Superman—Batman could spend his life in a gym and it wouldn’t help much—besides, who wants to see to good-guys fight each other? Aren’t there any villains, for crying out loud?

Anyhow, my VOD menu is pretty empty now—I’m trying to psych myself up to watch Spike Lee’s “Chi-raq”, but I expect it’ll be fairly heavy sledding. Greek Tragedy and Inner City Violence—not a light-hearted combo—but Spike Lee is a great filmmaker, so I’m going to watch it—I just need to steel myself first.

My biggest problem is the passage of time—I’ve watched a lot of movies. As a fan of the classics, I’ve seen silent films, black and white films, the classics, the not-so-classics, and ‘the essentials’ (as TCM calls them). I’ve seen many movies in drive-ins, in old movie palaces in NYC, and in local theaters—and since my illness, I’ve had ample opportunity to watch films on TV—some of them multiple times. With the exception of a few genres, like straight horror, I’ve seen every movie there is. I’ve thought about their stories, their plotlines, the process of movie-making, the work of acting, and the possibilities and the confines of dramatic tension—if I were any more involved with movies, I’d have to get a job in Hollywood.

This is a problem because I have acquired some pretty high standards—and originality is pretty hard to come by, after a century of creative people racking their brains for new angles, unexpected twists, and engaging serendipities. It’s been said that there are only a few stories—and that all stories are variations of these few ‘wireframe’ concepts—but I don’t know about that. There are a lot of stories out there—and while many of them are ‘road trips’ or ‘buddy’ films, ‘quests’ or ‘comings of age’, there are also a lot of unique stories that have no variations or spin-offs—modern-day fairy tales, and fantasies of myth, romance, or science that are unique in both plot and setting. Still, while there may be more than a handful of basic story ideas there are still not enough of them to fill sixty years of movie-watching with unending surprise. I’m in danger of outgrowing movies entirely—though I’m sure there are those who might think I should have done so long ago.

After all, movies are meant to be diversions from real life—and when illness took away my ‘real life’, I leaned heavily on diversion as an anchor for my sanity. Unfortunately, diversions are not meant to be the whole of a person’s life—so I’ve come to ask of movies rather more than they can possibly provide.

And now for the musical portion of our presentation—two improvs from last night that I share with you now. I’ve recently begun to question whether I should bother to post my improvs—their uniqueness is questionable and while they may each be technically unique, their style and sound is deathly familiar. I’m only one person playing one piano—the same person playing the same piano—and I’ve been posting improvs for years now. That’s my excuse, but it still makes me wonder some days why I bother. By my calculations, a person could listen to my YouTube improvs for a solid week-and-a-half—that’s hundreds of two-to-six minute improvs—and even Beethoven and the Beatles would get tiring in such large doses, never mind that I’m no Beethoven.

Still, here are two more. The first one, “In The Old Town” is followed, at the end, by a rendition of “A Hot Time In The Old Town Tonight”—a song old enough to be in the public domain, so I don’t give it ‘cover’ status on YouTube, even though, officially, I should. The second improv is so weird that I had to call it “Spaghetti Fingers”. I hope you like them.

VOD Movie Reviews: ‘The Martian’, ‘A Walk in the Woods’, & ‘Irrational Man’ (2016Jan14)

Posted by XperDunn on January 14, 2016

Thursday, January 14, 2016 12:45 PM

“The Martian” is Ridley Scott’s adaptation of the Andy Weir novel—I had just read the novel a few months back, so I was very jazzed to see a big-screen imagining of same—and this movie does not disappoint. I don’t know what it would seem like to someone who expected a straight action sci-fi pic—I think the movie was just as exciting as any of them. But the book, and thankfully, Scott’s movie, are both throwbacks to the age of Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov—when the science-fiction was science first, fiction only as a palliative to help you swallow all the information. Even without the book’s realistic, exhaustive explorations of how a sole person can produce his own oxygen, water, and food—and how to turn a Mars habitat plus a Mars rover into a Mars mobile home—the movie is replete with technological and engineering problem-solving.

Mr. Ridley very ably constructs the story so that one can do what I used to do reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace—I just bleeped over all the long Russian names—and you won’t need to study hard to follow the gist of the story. But as I understand the book’s evolution, it was something of a thought experiment—and there are no evil aliens—so I’m glad the filmmakers embraced the Clarke-ian aspect of “The Martian”—a thoroughly engrossing and enjoyable movie.

Matt Damon seems genetically structured to play an astronaut—so that’s good casting. His character’s frustration with his music playlist, which the Commander had filled with only disco music, was funny in the book—it plays a far larger part in the movie—and skates the edge of letting us all feel the horror of being trapped alone on Mars with nothing to listen to but Gloria Gaynor’s greatest hits. (Not that I don’t love Gloria Gaynor—in moderation.) At nearly two and a half hours, there’s an awful lot to like (and learn) in this film. I find that much comes out of Hollywood these days, but we still have to wait a year or two for something really good to come out—especially in the sci-fi genre—and “The Martian” is one of the good ones.

“A Walk In The Woods” stars Robert Redford who, like Woody Allen, has been a big part of my cinematic life since the seventies—it also co-stars the equally familiar but more erratically-careered Nick Nolte. This movie was perfect for me in some ways—two old guys, grumbling about age, wondering what their lives had really been about, now that it’s too late to change them, and doing stupid stuff they’re too old for, because we never learn to stop liking the things we enjoyed—we just lose the ability. It’s definitely an older person’s movie—I can’t imagine a teenager sitting through it.

It made me proud in a way—the whole movie, I kept telling myself, “Hey, you’ve walked the Appalachian Trail—not all of it—but you’ve hiked alone through the cathedral of nature’s solitude.” Unfortunately, that thought was inevitably joined by the memory of how very long ago that was—and, worse yet, I couldn’t help thinking that those two geezers were still in better shape than I am—I couldn’t hike a half-mile, and don’t even ask about carrying a forty-pound pack on my back.

The cinematography was too beautiful to go unmentioned—but I hear that, since the movie, trail guides have been bitching and moaning about the sudden surge of wannabe hikers getting lost and needing rescuing on the trail. So, maybe the camera-person should’ve made it a little uglier—although, that’s a tall order. I’ve been, as I said, and despite all the rigors, the Trail is unendingly beautiful—awe-inspiring, really. Of course that poor little dirt trail is over-run after a movie like this—remember—it may be two thousand miles long, but it’s barely two feet wide in some places.

Still, “A Walk In The Woods” gave me a sudden thrill when it made me flash-back to my own time alone in Appalachian woods—I’d forgotten how magical it was. Plus, it’s always nice to see Redford on screen again—he’s pretty old now, but so am I. Great soundtrack, too.

“Irrational Man” makes me wonder what Woody Allen has against college professors—they often feature in his stories, rarely to the benefit of their image. But this movie pretty much spells it out—there’s something suspicious about people whose career involves having a kind of absolute power over the most easily-manipulated group of people in the world—college students.

The best education teaches not what to think but how to think—a familiar adage that overlooks the fact that teaching someone ‘how to think’ is not an absolute act—there is bias in human thought. We speak of machines that think—and by inference we imagine our brains as computers. It is ironic that the greatest challenge facing developers of AI software is that the human brain does not perform mechanically—indeed, no one is exactly sure how we think. We certainly don’t think in binary—we know it’s some sort of messy, organic process—we know that brains are processing feelings, senses, and emotions while they calculate, plan, and reason—but we don’t know how.

Further, in “Irrational Man”, Mr. Allen shows us how easily intellectualism can devolve into a tool for rationalizing narcissism and immorality. But it also shows, in the Emma Stone character, how core beliefs can be held without any rational underpinning. It’s pretty right-wing stuff, for a leftist Manhattanite. While the story of a man who disappears up his own ass is fairly familiar territory, Woody Allen makes it into a Greek tragedy—I could have done with a few more laughs from a director famous for comedy—but at least he’s learned to avoid awkward pretension in his serious films, replacing it with his own style of seaminess.

The inexorable nature of Greek tragedy is not my favorite entertainment—if I want disaffection, disappointment, and confusion, I can have all that without turning the TV on. However, I can’t deny that I share the auteur’s belief that watching a movie is not a waste of time—that cinema has intrinsic value—particularly for someone as unbusy as myself. And Woody Allen makes a watchable movie—I just wish he’d consult me about the subject matter. Then again, he’d probably tell me to go make my own damn movies.

VOD Movie Review: “Ant Man” (2015Dec08)

Posted by XperDunn on December 8, 2015

Tuesday, December 08, 2015 5:06 PM

Ant Man is a strange choice for a superpower—to get very tiny hardly seems like an advantage aside from crawling through key holes to get into locked rooms. But Ant Man’s power is that he retains his inertial mass—Dr. Pym, played by Michael Douglas, explains it as ‘making the space between atoms smaller’ which makes tiny Ant Man capable of punching with all the force of his full-sized self—but it is, of course, all nonsense.

Like Superman’s power of flight, which has no connection to any notion of propulsive force, Ant Man’s inertia is very convenient in its manifestation. It doesn’t make Ant Man leave behind man-sized-deep footprints or make him weigh as much—but it works when he’s punching the bad guys. But one doesn’t watch superhero movies for the logical train of physics—that just spoils the fun.

Insouciance was a favorite feature with the old-school superheroes—but it has lost cool points here in the twenty-first century. Paul Rudd, thankfully, has managed an updated, Portlandia-ish style of insouciance that is fun to watch. And the supporting cast of bumbling petty crooks tilts the movie towards farce, but not too much. As with all the Marvel movies, there was a business-like hand at the directorial helm—so the movie didn’t push any envelopes, other than casting Rudd in the first place. And there was the obligatory tie-in sequence that only die-hards get to see after all the credits have rolled.

The tie-in got me to thinking—when they’re done, these Marvel movies are going to be a ‘Sistine Chapel’ of movies—a panoply of stories, each with their own features, but each a part of a whole—I can imagine 24-hour viewings of chronologically ordered Marvel movies—just an immersive group-journey into the mind of Marvel. Only the Star Wars series and the Tolkien movie series can match it for single-themed sequential run-time. Actually, the Tolkien movies top out at six and the Star Wars, while (I assume) unfinished, is only at episode seven—while the Marvel movies—well, let’s see: there’s the Iron Mans (are there three or four?—I can’t remember.) there’s the Hulk movie (take your pick) two Captain Americas, two Thors—they’ve already exceeded both franchises and they’re just getting started over there, it seems to me. Comic books have been selling for decades—why should they ever stop making movies of them?

DC Comics, you say? Sorry—yes, there are plenty of movies of DC heroes, but they’re not themed—they’re not centrally coordinated by a far-sighted team that treats them as a single brand, as Marvel does. Don’t ask me why. Then again, if we look at the younger graphic novel scene—there are far more movies based on Dark Horse comics and the like than even Marvel can match, so it’s not as if they’ve cornered any market but their own—still, they’ve done a better job than DC. And I appreciate the glimmer of grandeur they give their whole enterprise (not an easy thing for me to say, since I’ve always preferred DC, as far as comic books go) by tying together all their movies, giving it the resonance of a cinematic tapestry. It counterbalances the simplicity of the stories themselves because let’s face it superhero movies have a pretty narrow scope for story-telling, by the time you’ve gotten past the origin story, the intro of the villain, and all the frippery of human-interest plot-points.

Ant Man is a case in point—the storyline is packed with exposition and development—there’s hardly time for the big action sequence at the end. Paul Rudd and buddies (played by Michael Peña, David Dastmalchian, and T.I.) add all the humor they can fit into the script—but the rest of the cast are straight-faced enough to more than balance it out. It’s hard to say whether a longer movie might have allowed some more breathing room into this story—or whether that would have destroyed that balance. I enjoyed it—but you can’t go by me—I have the critical faculties of a ten-year-old. All I can say is, they promise a sequel and I’m looking forward to it.

On VOD, Reviewed: Three Films (2015Nov05)

Posted by XperDunn on November 5, 2015

Tuesday, November 03, 2015 12:40 PM

Pre-Reviews (2015Nov03)

Okay, I’m an old fuddy-duddy—I added these movies to my “Cart” from the “Just In” menu of my Cable VOD listings: “Best Of Enemies”, a documentary about the 1968 debates between William F. Buckley Jr. and Gore Vidal, the then-champion intellectuals of America’s political right- and left-wings, respectively; “The End Of The Tour”, a re-enactment of Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky’s road-trip/interview with the late novelist David Foster Wallace during his 1996 book tour promoting his masterpiece, “Infinite Jest”; and “Inside Out”, the animated Disney feature about the inside of a young lady’s head, populated by characters that represent emotions—Joy, Anger, Fear, etc.—as she experiences the trials of childhood.

As a twelve–year-old, I remember finding the Buckley/Vidal debates excruciatingly boring—they talked of issues I knew nothing about, using words I couldn’t understand—I hope, forty-seven years later, I can understand them a bit better. I’m actually looking forward to watching “Best Of Enemies”—even though my memories of those talks are vague, I still miss their obvious insistence on clarity and correctness—something so absent from the politics of our new millennium. Ironically, it was most likely the entertainment value of their last exchanges, which devolved into anger and name-calling, which brought forth the kind of nonsense we see in modern debates.

I’m not sure whether I’ll enjoy watching “The End of The Tour”. David Foster Wallace’s writing is a beautiful stream-of-consciousness cornucopia of vocabulary and images unmatched by other living writers—but his subject matter was unfailingly dark, disgusting, and full of despair. Add to that the unpleasant highlights of his blurb-biography—and the fact that he committed suicide in 2008—and I’m left with the suspicion that I won’t have much fun watching the film, no matter how well-made. Having plowed through “The Broom Of The System” and “Infinite Jest”, and having read the first few stories of “Oblivion: Stories”, I’m afraid to read any more of his stuff, especially now that he’s killed himself—I have my own struggles with depression and I don’t need my leisure pursuits to reinforce my worst impulses. I think I want to watch the movie just to get close to his beautiful mind again, without having to actually join him there by reading his works.

“Inside Out” should be fun for me—as a kid, I used to run cross-country—and I’d pretend my body was a mechanism, and I was a controller sitting inside my brain, behind my eyes, ‘flying’ myself around the track, or through the paths in the woods behind our school. Besides, I don’t think I’ll ever outgrow Disney animated films—they’re the best—and if the reviews and box-office are anything to go by, this is one of their better efforts.

Wednesday, November 04, 2015 9:51 AM

Post Review (2015Nov04)

“Best Of Enemies” is an enjoyable documentary and I found it especially so because it gives impressions of the two-party mind-set just as that paradigm was coming to the surface. Prior to World War II, social friction was between Rich and Poor—easy-peasy, simple as that. During that War, America put on its best overalls and pretended we were ‘all in this together’. Immediately post-war we busied ourselves fighting against ‘Red propaganda’, touting liberty, democracy, freedom of speech, and freedom of religion. Having gone from competing armies to competing ideologies, America’s entitled found themselves in a quandary—many of the free world’s ‘good features’ were populist and inclusive. Unions were acceptable, racial integration had begun in the military, and women were fresh from the workforce—pushed out by returning servicemen and the closing of war factories, but still cognizant of what they had achieved during those years spent in so-called ‘men’s jobs’.

To me, religion is the most elusive aspect of those times—we were claiming that religious freedom was a touchstone of modern civilization, but there were many Americans who assumed that Protestant Christianity was the default American faith. This allowed the establishment (an old term for the rich and powerful) to take exception to some freedoms as ‘sinful’—particularly when talking about women’s roles and rights. As we had seen during the war, women were legally accepted as equal—able to work in factories, offices—even serve in the military as ‘support’—but the Bible gave chauvinists the ammunition to reverse that acceptance. The invention of the Pill brought birth control into the equation—and we were off to the races. Women’s equality saw such a backlash that it would be the 1970s before any pushback from women was heard. Still, theocratic mores had permanently embedded themselves into the toolkit of the rich and powerful.

Law and order was another meme adopted by the establishment—but it was used as code for white supremacy. Any public outcry or demonstration in favor of racial justice was characterized as lawlessness—urban rioting was blamed on the rioters, not on the issues that got them rioting. This double-talk would appear legitimate until the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act were adopted—afterward it became increasingly difficult to characterize social progress as ‘troublemaking’. And to this day, police brutality is rationalized by the rich and powerful as ‘maintaining the peace’.

Our half-century of ‘war on drugs’ was also a thinly-veiled attempt to persecute African-Americans. The criminalization of marijuana as a Schedule I drug, the CIA’s involvement in flooding American cities with crack cocaine, our present-day swollen prison population—mostly non-violent drug offenders—are all examples of how drugs (which are a legal, billion-dollar industry) are still being used to persecute minorities. The establishment remains rabidly anti-drug, in spite of evidence that the War on Drugs created an underworld market—a subculture that makes it easier for their own children to get ensnared by addictive drugs than if they were legally sold over the counter, like cigarettes or booze.

Post-war Americans retained many wartime attitudes—‘get it done, no matter what’ was a common phrase while fighting to save the world from Fascism—but after the war, we still felt that a good person would just ‘get it done’. Those who couldn’t ‘get it done’ were useless, rather than helpless—they deserved our derision, not our sympathy. The old, the sick, the poor, the unemployed—these people were useless—they didn’t deserve help—that was the establishment line. Buckley habitually described the poor as ‘lazy’—as if poverty was a choice.

So we see the kernel of modern conservatism in Buckley’s battle of wits with Gore Vidal—biblical fundamentalism, thinly-disguised racism and sexism, and blaming the victims in lieu of social support programs. Buckley’s early work in stymying social progress and maintaining white male supremacy can seem silly to us today—but his fatuous reasonings were acceptable to the staid, close-minded majority of Americans of his time. Today’s conservatism has become far more sophisticated—it has had to, since the majority of Americans today see things more from Vidal’s point of view. We are, by and large, far more open-minded and inclusive about race, sex, and sexuality—and we have documentation proving that social support programs help the whole society, not just those who need them. Yet the philosophical battle rages on—proof, to my mind, that it is what it has always been—rich versus poor, those in power versus those without a voice.

Thursday, November 05, 2015 7:39 AM

Post-Review (2015Nov05)

“The End of The Tour” is well-acted, beautifully photographed, mysterious, engrossing—a surprisingly powerful movie, given the scope of the action—and most importantly, it is not a documentary. We aren’t led through a delving into the details of David Foster Wallace’s life and work—in fact, much of the dialogue displays Wallace’s fear of being detailed and analyzed.

David Lipsky, author and journalist, had just published his own novel when Wallace’s “Infinite Jest” exploded onto the cultural scene—and we see that he is appalled by the rave reviews for Wallace, and then more appalled by reading “Infinite Jest”. I can attest to the impression made by that experience—Wallace’s writing is unbelievably good and can’t help but evince a touch of despair in anyone with pretensions of writing. Rather than being repulsed by such overbearing competition, Lipsky becomes fascinated and cajoles his Rolling Stone editor into letting him interview Wallace as he completes his book tour.

Thus begins a short road trip, an awkward bro-mance between two equally neurotic intellectuals who couldn’t be more different. Lipsky is torn between admiration and envy. Wallace is torn by his sudden celebrity, which represents a sort of pinnacle of all the failings of American culture so deftly deconstructed and demonized in his writing. Few films make such an open-and-shut case for the theory that all great art is the product of suffering—or the irony that subsequent success only adds to the suffering.

Adapted from David Lipsky’s “Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself : A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace”, a book which expands on the original magazine article, this film has a quiet beauty that belies the ugly struggle of creative expression and its practical side-effects. It has a camaraderie that belies the intense rivalry endemic to artists—and it has a peacefulness that belies the internal struggles of extreme, self-conscious intellectualism. For a film that is the opposite of an ‘action’ movie, it is a terribly exciting adventure.

Thursday, November 05, 2015 2:29 PM

Post-Review (2015Nov05)

“Inside Out” is excellent family fare, as we’ve come to expect from Disney/Pixar. It is packed with humor yet isn’t a comedy—a special formula that had served Disney well for decades. Drama, with all the fear and confusion that is the subtext of childhood, is what elevates their product above the pabulum Hollywood often offers to children. I’m reminded of my own childhood reaction to Mary Poppins—which, for the 1960s, was pretty mature fare for a family film—there is no greater satisfaction for a kid than to be entertained without being condescended to.

The story has complexities that one usually associates with adult drama—there is an interior story—the characters inside the girl, Riley’s, mind—and an exterior story—Riley’s family moves to California. The interior story involves anthropomorphized emotions and other details of the mind’s inner workings that are simplified, but correct, as evidenced by the credit roll’s expression of gratitude to the Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute of Columbia University. One learns through the course of the film some fascinating elements of brain function and memory.

As a story, the most telling effects are the back and forth between the inner emotions of Riley and her exterior words and actions—the two stories are not overwhelming in themselves, but the interplay of the two brings a richness to the vicarious environment. There are also hints at the same ‘committee of feelings’ inside the mind of Riley’s mother—and indeed, by the movie’s end, we get a peek inside all the characters’ minds.

As a story-telling ‘frame’ it is a rich vein of original situations that bodes well for an ongoing franchise of ‘Inside Out’ sequels. However, this first movie’s central theme—the necessity, in maturing children, for their joy to accommodate their sadness—will be hard to replace with an equally stout tent-pole in subsequent stories. Still, this cleverly wrought mechanism of interior dialogues will add spice to any tale—and I’ll probably watch as many sequels as they can produce.

If the movie has a valuable message for young viewers, I’d say it was the distinction made between disaffection, or the loss of joy—and sadness, a necessary emotion in life. One hopes that children will see this film and have a better sense of their own emotional states—and be better able to withstand the pot-holes of bad days and rough times. Let’s hope so.

Well, that’s it—three films in three days cost me $16, over and above our monthly cable fee—so don’t expect regular installments of movie reviews—I ain’t got that kinda cash. I admit, though, that if next week’s New Listings on VOD has three equally attractive titles, I’ll probably do it again—it’s not like I’m a Zen-master of self-control or anything.

Improv – Two Etudes (2015Oct29)

Posted by XperDunn on October 29, 2015

Thursday, October 29, 2015 3:38 PM

When I listen to other music, I am open-minded and forgiving—if something doesn’t catch my ear at once, I’m willing to give it a chance. When I am feeling very hard-headed and down-to-earth, I can’t enjoy music as much as I otherwise do—engaging one’s critical faculties too completely puts one in the position of ‘finding fault’—and no creative impulse can survive such a negative onslaught.

It only now occurs to me that I always turn my criticism on ‘high’ whenever I judge my own efforts—and in doing so I’m being less fair to myself than I would be to a long-dead stranger—so today I’m having a moratorium on self-doubt and self-criticism. I enjoyed playing this improv on my piano and that’s all there is to that.

Speaking of being open-minded and forgiving—I just watched Chris Columbus’s “Pixels” on VOD. Liberals doses of ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ are required (and a little THC doesn’t hurt either) but if, like me, you are a fan of Adam Sandler, Kevin James, Josh Gad, Peter Dinklage, and video arcade games—then “Pixels” is funny, and a lot of fun.

First of all—I love movies where the characters start as children and then, through the magic of “30 Years Later…”, we begin the real story of the characters in the present day. It’s a great way to give a story depth, especially something as goofy as “Pixels”. Secondly, I love a movie where no one is inherently evil—childishly stupid, yes—misguided, greedy, not thinking things through, … whatever—yes—and I think this is closer to real life. Reality never seems to have a positive villain—for every issue there are just a lot of sides, a lot of needs, and a lot of pigheadedness—but rarely pure evil.

The good guys win and the guy gets the girl—other features I’m always in favor of. No lengthy wrong-turns into gloom and despair—another plus. Factoid hunters on IMDb point out that many game characters used were derived from post-1982 video games, which belies the film’s premise—but if that was the most unbelievable part of this movie, the world would be a very strange place.

What I enjoyed noticing was all the kid actors’ credits—many of the smaller roles were played by children with last names like Sandler, James, and Covert (one of the producers of the film) and I can only assume that the film’s set was very much a family affair. And if you look closely, you’ll catch a glimpse of the actual Professor Toru Iwatani, inventor of Pac-Man, doing a cameo as a game repairman in an early scene, at the Electric Dream Factory arcade. Good times.

In my walk earlier, I felt a strong regret that I hadn’t brought my camera, so I shot a few snaps out the window to use for today’s video:

No News Is Good News (2015Sep29)

Posted by XperDunn on September 29, 2015

Tuesday, September 29, 2015 12:19 PM

I’m exhausted—and no wonder. The pope, the speaker, the UN, refugees, drought in California, water on Mars, a super blood moon, the new Daily Show once again precedes the Colbert show… is it just me or is the world turning twice as fast these days? Have you noticed a lot of news shows start their segments with, “Well, there’s a lot to cover tonight…”? That used to signify a ‘busy’ news day—now it’s just what they always say.

My personal life, away from the TV, isn’t quite as busy. But I did just post a big Brahms performance I’ve been working on for months—and I just found out today is my son’s 27^th birthday! (I wish Claire had told me before I said to him, “Good Morning”—like it was any other day…) We had our daughter and her husband here for a visit from California last week. Claire just passed her big OT qualification test—a culmination of years of study for her OT Master’s Degree—and a sign that she will soon be job-hunting. But first she has to do jury duty in NYC—we were relieved she was only called downtown last week for Thursday morning—commuting right through the pope’s visit to ground zero—that would have been a hassle. I’ve got a road-test next week that will re-instate my driver license, if I pass it—Spencer just passed his a few weeks ago. So, okay, maybe I am busy.

As they say, it beats the alternative. I’m sitting here at my keyboard, on watch to tip the delivery man when he gets here with birthday lunch Chinese take-out. Tuesday is new movies day On Demand—Melissa McCarthy in “Spy”—so there’s even a good movie in my ‘cart’. Time to catch my breath, I think.

Patton was right—“Americans love to fight”—but I think he oversimplified it, thinking in bellicose terms. Our Revolutionary War was a declaration of our willingness to fight when we encountered unfairness. “Live Free or Die” seems overly familiar and trite to us today but it was a formula for suicide in the centuries before the Declaration—when the greatest prior advance in social justice had been the allowance that a person owned their own soul at death—“Free Doom”. Somewhat less ambitious, wouldn’t you say?

And after the revolution, when Texas was willing to enter the Union rather than submit to Spanish imperialism, we fought for them. Then the majority of Americans decided to fight against slavery—give or take a week-long Civil War historians conference on the ‘root causes’. It was unfair—and we were willing to fight over it. In both World Wars, we entered on the losing side—fighting unfairness. The internal struggles over racial equality, gender equality, and the rights of the sick, disabled, LGBT—all fights over unfairness. You show me an injustice and I’m ready to start swinging—why? Because I’m American, that’s why. I really would rather die than live in unfairness.

There are always those who don’t get the central premise—as early as Hamilton’s arguments with Jefferson over Federalist versus Republican, there were those who sought out the ‘easy win’—people who felt that leaving the mother country was simply a chance to be an England of our own, with a monarchy and all that implies. They wanted Washington to be “President for Life” and be addressed as ‘your majesty’—but Washington said ‘no’, like an American. Hence he is known as the Father of our Country not just because he fought the war, but also kept the peace as an American would and always will.

Today we have many people who don’t get the central premise—they think America’s greatness resides in its wealth and power—its shock and awe. Nonsense—childish nonsense. The unbelievable success of our country comes not from any material richness or military prowess—it comes from our ambition to fight for the truth. Yankee ingenuity has been finding new shortcuts towards a better future since the founding. Freedom of speech has made our democracy into the strongest of ties between a government and its people of any country on Earth. Open minds and open commerce have exploded into a global community of digital thinking, space exploration, genetic manipulation, super-sonic travel, and on and on.

Our greatest threat is the explosive variety of our success—the ‘easy wins’ float around like fish in a crowded barrel—the opportunities to exploit our success by working either in lieu of the American spirit (through hyper-capitalism) or in direct opposition to it (through extremist bible-thumping and xenophobic exclusion) are more numerous, and get better media coverage, than the real goals of true Americans.

The enemies of America seek to reinstate unfairness through new pathways—income inequality, religious division, jingoism, and denying the existence of intractable racial injustice—and all their arguments are based on fear and hatred, with a big dollop of laziness and greed to top it off. They make me tired—traitors in our own land. Fight the power!

There—I had to get that off my chest. I always get self-righteous after watching a documentary. I just watched “Standing In the Shadows of Motown—The Funk Brothers”—about all the great studio musicians whose uncredited artistry was behind hundreds of number one hits—hits that I remember from my childhood as the ‘product’ of the lead singers and groups whose names are so familiar to us all today. A handful of men in a Chicago basement would be responsible for over a decade of a multi-million-dollar music industry, without so much as a credit on the dustjacket. That kind of unfairness burns my chaps and it always will. Why? ‘Cause I’m a ‘Murican, that’s why.

VOD Movie Review: “Love And Mercy”

Posted by XperDunn on September 13, 2015

Saturday, September 12, 2015 10:47 AM

I just watched “Love and Mercy” (Director: Bill Pohlad, 2014) a Brian Wilson biopic, starring Paul Dano as his ‘past self’ and John Cusack as his ‘future self’. It was beautifully made—not just the photography, which was stunning—but Atticus Ross’s musical collages, made for the soundtrack using samples from the Beach Boys’ oeuvre, had a way of (very appropriately) making Brian Wilson’s inner nightmare sound like a cyclone of Beach Boys tunes. And John’s sister, Joan, isn’t fooling anyone with her uncredited cameo as one of the back-up dancers in the scene that recreates the “Fun, Fun, Fun” televised performance—she’s only in the background for an instant, but there’s no mistaking that toothy grin.

The Beach Boys were a guilty pleasure of my youth—much like Anthony Edwards’ character in “Downtown” (Director: Richard Benjamin, 1990) who meets with disgust from Forest Whitaker’s character when he claims the Beach Boys as his ‘jam’. (It gave me inordinate pleasure to see Whitaker’s character’s ‘family’ become Beach Boys fans by the end of the film.) While the politics and social agendas of other song-writers’ lyrics of the time made many dismiss the Beach Boys as insubstantial party music, Brian Wilson’s musical genius shone through for people like me who cared more for the sound than the ‘meaning’.

Also, there is great yearning and loneliness in songs like “In My Room” and “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” that was audible to those of us who shared Wilson’s suffering under draconian parenting or his isolation from less-sensitive, less-artistic family and friends. So often, people condescend to Beach Boys music as fluff—while overlooking Wilson’s subtle but profound reflections of domestic abuse and teen angst—perhaps it takes a ‘fellow traveler’ to hear that subtext.

“Love and Mercy”, like other Beach Boys biopics, made my skin crawl with the depiction of his horrendous father—and then added an even creepier note to Wilson’s life by depicting his twisted therapist. Both nightmare scenarios resonate strongly for me—too strongly to enjoy the story, in spite of the incredible cinematic skill brought to this effort. But I gloried in the deconstruction of their classic hits as we are shown recreations of the production process Brian Wilson goes through, experimenting and fine-tuning every instrument, every beat—to create the overall sound that we find so familiar. I especially enjoyed the evolution of the passage that combined Theremin and cello within “Good Vibrations”—so hard core, yet so outside the box of ‘rock’—an ineluctable sound if there ever was one.

I also wanted to cheer when Melinda Ledbetter (played by Elizabeth Banks) throws open her office door to confront the monster therapist (played with Oscar-worthy monstrosity by Paul Giamatti)—what a moment! Though difficult for me to bear, the movie was overall a tremendous experience—a true masterwork of film in many ways—and a welcome further examination of the life behind some of the twentieth century’s finest music.

Here’s a YouTube playlist that shows my ongoing struggle to mind-meld with Brian Wilson:

Reviews In Review (2015Jun09)

Posted by XperDunn on June 10, 2015

Tuesday, June 09, 2015 5:10 PM

I’ve just finished reading:

“The Three-Body Problem” by Cixin Liu, (Ken Liu -Translator)

“(R)evolution” by PJ Manney (‘Phoenix Horizon’ Book 1)

“The Water Knife” by Paolo Bacigalupi

And watching:

“Jupiter Ascending” (2015) – Written and Directed by The Wachowskis and Starring: Channing Tatum, Mila Kunis, and Eddie Redmayne

“Kingsman: The Secret Service” (2014) – Directed by Matthew Vaughn and Starring: Colin Firth, Taron Egerton, and Samuel L. Jackson

[Note: the following three book reviews were published on Amazon.com yesterday]

In “The Three-Body Problem” by Cixin Liu, I was treated to some rare Chinese historical fiction, as the story involves both alien invaders and their contact on Earth—and, in a fresh take, someone on Earth other than an American establishes First Contact. The protagonist’s story begins with her childhood during the most horrific times of the many Reform movements that swept China early in the second half of the twentieth century. Starting that far back, we are given a small primer in modern China’s history and culture by the time the story’s climax reaches the present day.

But there’s more. There’s science too—radio astronomy, virtual-reality gaming, extra-dimensional manipulation, near-FTL travel, and a planet with an unusual orbit, to say the least, are only some of the highlights. Things get technical enough that I glimpsed one reviewer in passing, complaining that this book ‘read like a tech manual’—but I found it refreshingly reminiscent of Clarke and Asimov. This is still a nerd’s genre—if you can’t take the heat, you’re not going to enjoy the story.

The characters and relationships are, however, as fully fleshed-out as one could wish—this is no space opera—and the plot is so clever that I hesitate to give even the slightest of spoilers. You should discover this book for yourself. And—good news—it is the first in a series—so there’s even more to come!

In “(R)evolution” by PJ Manney, I found an entertaining and involving thriller based on the idea of nanotechnology used to facilitate the brain/electronic interface. While there is little new in the scientist who experiments on himself, or in super-secret societies that control our businesses and governments from the shadows of limitless wealth and power, there’s still a freshness to the storytelling that kept me turning pages until late into the night. Good writing, if not especially great science fiction.

“The Water Knife” by the reliable Paolo Bacigalupi is a story of a near-future America suffering through the destruction of the American Southwest due to water shortages. The draining of the aquifers, combined with the lack of snow-melt from the Rockies, leaves California, Nevada, Arizona, and displaced Texans all struggling in a world where rivers are covered to prevent excess evaporation. Water rights become life or death matters for cities Las Vegas, LA, and Phoenix, AZ—where most of the action takes place.

The ‘water knife’ is a euphemism for an enforcer of water rights and a hunter of anyone trying to access water without legal authority. Angel is one of the best, in the employ of the sharp female administrator of Las Vegas’s Water Authority, Catherine Case. He becomes involved with a hunt for a water-rights treaty granted to Native Americans—a priceless document so old that it would take precedence over all existing agreements—and in the process, becomes involved with a female reporter who’s gone from being an observer to being in the thick of the life and death struggle of everyone in Phoenix as the water runs out and the dangers only grow more unbeatable.

However, the most frightening thing about this novel is its basis in fact—much of the disastrous environment described has been warned of in a non-fiction book, “Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water” by Marc Reisner. That book was published in 1987, and much of what he warned about is starting to manifest itself—such as the present severe drought conditions in California.

Like most doomsday-scenario stories, “The Water Knife” describes people on the edge, people in trouble, and twisted people who take advantage of chaos to create their own little fiefdoms of violence and tyranny. I never read such stories purely for the goth-like rush of people being cruel and dark—but in cases where I feel the story will give insight into something real, I put up with it—especially from a writer as good as Bacigalupi. And this is an exciting, engrossing tale of intrigue, passion, and ‘history as a hammer’, for all its darkness.

[Here ends the text from my Amazon.com reviews]

Having just finished “The Water Knife”, right on the heels of “(R)Evolution”, I’ve had my fill of dystopian cynicism and game-theory-based ethics—or lack thereof, rather. “The Three-Body Problem” was the worst, however—a Chinese woman endures such a horrible childhood under the Red Revolution’s Reform Era that she wishes for aliens to take over the Earth—how’s that for misanthropic?

Science Fiction at its best can be wildly hopeful and uplifting but let’s face it—the vast majority of it deals with rather dark subject matter. I can only hope that my next read will have a little leavening of the stainless-steel truth in it. At heart, I’m a Disneyfied, happy-ending kind of guy.

In between, I watched a few movies. The latest include “Jupiter Ascending” and “Kingsman: The Secret Service”. Talk about dark!

“Jupiter Ascending” is a science-fiction movie based on the premise that Earth—that is, all the inhabitants of Earth—are just a crop being grown only to ‘harvest’. Our unknown alien overlords are just about to harvest (i.e. slaughter) the Earth’s population for the purpose of creating the ‘rejuvenation juice’ that makes them immortal.

Our only chance is a young lady who is surprised to learn that she is the genetic double of Earth’s former ‘owner’, a wealthy noblewoman of the alien master-race whose death left her planetary holdings to her evil son, including the fabulously overpopulated Earth. The evil son is none too pleased to learn that a mere Earth girl is capable of confiscating his prize planet—and the hunt is on. Helping the girl evade the evil son and realize her destiny is a grizzled veteran of the alien military special-forces who’s been unfairly drummed out of his squad.

Some romance between the two slips between the non-stop CGI laser-beams and space destroyers, but even with a happy ending, it’s hard to get past that nightmarish premise.

“Kingsman: The Secret Service”, being a more straight-forward action movie, might lead you to expect a lighter tone. But this Cinderella/James Bond story has several scenes of wholesale slaughter in hand-to-hand combat. Poor old Colin Firth ends up killing an entire congregation of a church—and while their preacher prefaces the scene with rankly bigoted ravings beforehand, it’s still not very enjoyable to see them all slaughtered for their ignorance.

The fight scenes (though in this context, I’m tempted to call them ‘slaughter scenes’) are so busy that the film has to freeze into slo-mo for each death-blow (or death-stab, or head-squish, etc., etc.) just so the naked eye can follow all the mayhem. This is one of the bloodiest films since ‘Reservoir Dogs”, but it has all the trappings of an arch re-mix of James Bond meets Agent Cody Banks.

The director seemed to have trouble fixing on a genre. Samuel L. Jackson is a chipper, lisping arch-villain; Colin Firth is a chipper, upper-class Brit in the style of Patrick Macnee in ‘The Avengers’ TV series; and Taron Egerton gives us a well-meaning but troubled English lad thrust into an unusual situation. But all the set dressing, style, and verve is drowned in a sea of blood that leaves little room for those delicious bits of comic relief that leaven the best action thrillers.

Having said all that, I must admit that as far as quality goes, these were two exceptional movies compared to the dreck that comes out of Hollywood most of the time. Had “Jupiter Ascending” had a gravitas more in keeping with its somber theme, or had “Kingsman” relied a little less heavily on squibs, they might have been great movies. As it is, they were merely good.

Guilty Of Surviving (2015Jun07)

Posted by XperDunn on June 8, 2015

Sunday, June 07, 2015 11:53 PM

Guilty Of Surviving

I condemn you, berate you, accuse you!

No I don’t—I’m just stretching

My dramatic muscles—

Getting ready.

I’m gonna write my life-story

As a Broadway musical

Starring everyone I know—

With the nicest people

As villains.

I’ll post it on YouTube—

An instant classic with no class—

Featuring myself as the Ass.

We open on a cozy log cabin

In a Long Island maternity ward

Where I am born to only parents

With four other children.

I am a child of the sixties,

Seventies, eighties, nineties—

I’m immature—who’re we kidding?

Then I die

Ten years ago

But forget

To stop breathing.

I’m doing it wrong.

How can I write a life-story

After it’s over

When it’s still unfinished?

Instead of rhyming June and Moon

I’ll couple Jew with Moo.

If you had died ten years ago

You’d be confus-ed too.

The tunes I’ll pluck from

Out the ether

Somber songs, but none so

Sweether.

What to call this mess-terpiece, huh? Anyhow, I’ve been watching movies on TV. I saw “Larry Gaye—Renegade Male Flight Attendant” starring the guy from ‘Royal Pains’. I also saw “The Spongebob Movie: Sponge Out Of Water”. They are both extremely silly movies—which means two thumbs up in my book. “Larry Gaye” seems like someone who loved “Airplane!” decided to write an updated script for the new millennium—it’s always just a hair’s breadth from a real movie, but always veers into nonsense before it quite gets there.

“Sponge Out Of Water” tries real hard and Antonio Banderas is just as engaged in silliness as he was in “Puss in Boots”—but I’m afraid nothing in the sequel compares to the scene in the original Spongebob Squarepants movie where David Hasselhoff transforms into a jet-propelled hydroplane. Nothing could follow that.

After the movie, I was inspired by the calypso-style music played over the end-credits scroll. I played the following improv, but I never actually got any Caribbean rhythm into it. Still, it came out okay.

A Taste For The Real (2015Mar30)

Posted by XperDunn on March 31, 2015

Monday, March 30, 2015 6:49 PM

I watched TV all day. I got caught up in “Muhammed Ali’s Greatest Fight” (2013) about the Supreme Court justices, and their clerks, at work on the decision whether to uphold Ali’s conviction for draft evasion—a conviction they ultimately reversed in a dramatic series of events (if we take the movie at face value). I felt it to be a stirring illustration of a point in time when reasonable men were confronted by their own prejudices and confused by the tug-of-war between the ‘traditions’ of racism and its incompatibility with even-handed protection of constitutional rights.

Then I saw a PBS documentary about the author/illustrator of “Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel” (1939), “Virginia Lee Burton: A Sense of Place”. This tells the story of the life and art of a “Renaissance woman”, innovative children’s book author/illustrator, textile designer, painter, and sculptor in granite, marble and wood. The film goes to places on Cape Ann that inspired ‘Jinnee’, including her home and studio, Folly Cove, Gloucester Harbor and the shores of the Atlantic Ocean.

Her designs of her children’s books reflected her efforts to compete with her sons’ fascination with comic books—one of the film’s commentators remarked that her books were the first examples of the graphic novel. She also founded Folly Cove Designs, a textile collective prominent during the Craft Art Revival era, employing many locals who went on to become accomplished craftspeople in their own right—the collective’s works were retailed in major stores and exhibited by several museums. When Virginia Lee Burton died in 1968, the remaining members of Folly Cove Designs decided to shut its doors.

Then I watched “The Valiant Hours” (1960), an American docudrama about William F. Halsey, Jr., and his efforts in fighting against Admiral Yamamoto and his Japanese Navy in the Guadalcanal campaign of World War II. This film was the sole product of James Cagney’s production company, and Cagney gives a great performance as Halsey. The story is a nail-biting bit of head-to-head between the US and the Japanese in the Pacific, with Guadalcanal becoming the high-water mark for Japanese conquest and the beginning of the turning of the tide of that war. Told from the point of view of an admiral who spends most of the battles sitting at his desk drinking coffee, the film is careful to annotate the fates of those regular marines with whom Halsey meets during his personal visit to the island.

That visit impacted the morale of the tired, struggling soldiers who felt on their last legs before Halsey even took over for poor Woolsey (whose only mistake, says Halsey in one scene, was in ‘getting there first’). Japanese intelligence even credited the strengthening of resistance among American forces to that visit. Moreover, it was in an attempt to bolster his own troops in the same way that Yamamoto was later shot down by American flyers in transit. The film is a wonderful tough-guy cameo of both the Admiral and of the War in the Pacific.

It occurred to me during all of this that I had, in some sense, outgrown fiction. Earlier in life, I’d been puzzled by people who never read novels or watched movies or TV, preferring to read only non-fiction. It seemed a draconian approach to information-gathering, since much of fictional art has a lot to say, both about the people and times of the story, and about the story-teller.

And I don’t think that my recent change in taste is a concession to that point of view—but the information to be gathered from fiction has reached a point of diminishing returns for me—I’m familiar with the rough outlines of social, economic, and military history, with the cultural oddities to be found in Dicken’s London, Cervantes’ Spain, Michener’s America, and Clancy’s Cold-War, with the habits and jargon of Berkeley’s Broadway, Ford’s Old West, and an endless list of other times, places, and peoples.

Further, while this information source dries up for me, the settings, plotlines, conflicts, and dramatic devices become ever more familiar. I find that large swathes of popular culture are not only intended for the young, but are utterly predictable and unsurprising to an older audience. More importantly, the vicarious experience becomes problematical when the characters are concerned with something as jejune as first love or first career-step or becoming new parents. I can’t place myself in the action when the action concerns a teenager, or a twenty-something, or even a thirty-something.

The ultimate effect of most new movies that appear on my VOD menu is to make me depressed about how old I am, when I’m not in full critic mode, questioning the decisions made by the directors, the writers, or the actors. So I find myself, after the end of an interesting, fact-based program, desperate to find something of equal interest—something that treats with real life, rather than a diversion meant to make me laugh, feel desire, or dream of the future.

But there is a silver lining. The occasional excellent movie will be appreciated that much more—they do still make them, though they’re few and far between. Meanwhile, my health has improved to the point where I can read almost as much as I used to—and books have much better ‘pickings’ than cable TV when it comes to jaded, over-experienced audience-members like myself.

Review: “All Is by My Side” (2015Jan15)

Posted by XperDunn on January 13, 2015

20150113XD-Jimi_AllIsByMySide

(Just out on VOD:)

“Jimi: All Is By My Side” (2013) [originally “All Is By My Side”] 118 mins.

(A drama based on Hendrix’s life as he left New York City for London, where his career took off.)

Director, Screenplay: John Ridley

Starring: André Benjamin, Hayley Atwell, Imogen Poots

This bio-pic was fittingly obtuse in some ways, hard to follow—not unlike its subject. I’ve never been quick on the uptake—much of my favorite music is music I disliked on first hearing—and Hendrix certainly falls into that category. But the funny thing is that I appreciate and enjoy Hendrix more with age—and having seen this movie (and allowing for its being a cinematic work rather than a reference work, but nonetheless) I think Hendrix was too prolix and light-heartedly free in his music for the age of the super-serious, socially-conscious music stars such as The Beatles and Bob Dylan. That was certainly my youthful problem with him—so maybe I’m just projecting.

But being unlimited in what he could do with a guitar, his penchant for musical playfulness, flights of fancy, and unabashed abrogation of anyone and everyone else’s songs, styles, and techniques was to be expected. He was a virtuoso in a time after the recognition of virtuosity. His newer age had ‘discovered’ that emotional depth and spirit outdid pure expertise every time, but we (I was a way-too-serious ten-year-old on Long Island during Hendrix’s year in London) may have overlooked the fact that some virtuosi, such as Mozart or Chopin, were expert musicians as a side-effect of their unbounded talent and artistry—as was (is?) the case with Hendrix.

My confusion with tenses needs explaining—it’s just that musicians may die, but in our time, music lives forever; and it’s hard to separate the person and their music. If, when listening to Hendrix’s recording of Dylan’s “All Along The Watchtower”, I lose myself inside Hendrix’s performance, is he not alive? But, that’s my issue—so I leave it here.

In my youth, there was a compulsion among some of my peers to analyze the lives of their musical heroes—as if the biographical data, no matter how trivial, always gave greater insight into the music they so revered. I was never reverential about anything—I was raised to ‘show respect’, which I quickly learned meant speaking and acting in such a way as to avoid getting beat up or killed, so I reserve my true respect for very few things, and even fewer people. I suppose those music-obsessive friends of mine bothered me because they were the exact opposite—too quick to give their respect, unthinkingly and completely.

But in this movie, which covers a pivotal, but single year in the life and career of Jimi Hendrix, I was shown that biography can indeed be a powerful way of granting insight into, if not the music, certainly the musician. How effective it is for those who only know the sixties second-hand, I can’t say—but that is neither the filmmakers’ nor my problem. I didn’t require the big-picture, historical back-fill—and I was tickled by all the little details, drenched with significance by their connection to his more broad-cast iconography.

André Benjamin does a great job, although I was given pause by one aspect of his performance. He depicts Jimi Hendrix as a thoughtful, gentle, infinitely peaceful dude—but then, in one scene (and I assume it’s historically accurate) his character, in a sudden rage, repeatedly smashes his girlfriend’s face with one of those old pay-phone phone-receivers—she ends up hospitalized. Now, either Mr. Benjamin, or Mr. Ridley, or someone—did a little image-buffing here, or there was a far more physical side to Jimi Hendrix than we see in the course of this film, outside of that one scene.

And it is remarkable that Hendrix’s past is well-indicated, that his childhood was not an easy one, nor his father quick to give approval (or able to) while also depicting his on-screen self, the product of that environment, as very self-contained, almost demurring. He is shown to be unusually sensitive, it’s true, and unstable in some ways, but extreme sensitivity, raised in a harsh environment, rarely produces the o-so-civil young adult portrayed through most of the film. But now I’m just spouting—is it the film, the history, or my own assumptions that raise the issue? Anyway, it just stuck out as a question, to me, plus I was shocked by the sudden savagery—which distracted me from the film. Is that too critical?

All in all, I was swept up by the experience (if you’ll pardon the pun). I won’t say I enjoyed it, because the story of Jimi Hendrix is not a happy story with a happy ending—and I do love happy endings. Based-on-fact films, however, are not famous for predictable, tied-in-a-bow endings—and I watch them for engagement and education, more than mere enjoyment. And “All Is By My Side” certainly succeeds in that sense.

Xper Dunn Is Here

Aspera Ad Astra

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