richard-1787 Reviews

The Color of Victory: Heroes of WW2: Dunkirk (2024) Season 1, Episode 3

Evidently the story at the origin of this miniserie

[7/10 · 12 June 2024]

In the introduction to each of the four episodes in this miniseries, narrator Idris Elba explains that his discovery that one of his ancestors had played a role in World War II, a role about which he had known nothing, inspired him to develop this project. His parents were from two former British African colonies, Sierra Leone and Ghana. He himself was born in England. The third installment in this miniseries, mistakenly entitled Dunkirk, deals with four soldiers from the former British colony of India, and is the only non-United States-centered episode of the four. So maybe the miniseries started with this episode, which is something of an outlier.

First, let's get rid of the title. Another part of the general introduction at the start of each episode says that the series centers on four of the great battles of the War. Dunkirk was certainly an important World War II battle. But less than 5 minutes of this episode takes place at Dunkirk. As explained above, it recounts the stories of four Indian soldiers who, along with their Indian troops, are ordered to make for Dunkirk, on the English Channel, so they can be shipped back to England once the British realize that the Germans are about to overrun France. (There is NO MENTION of the over 100,000 French troops on the beach at Dunkirk who were left there by the British as they evacuated their own troops. The French troops where therefore captured by the Germans and spent at least four years in German POW camps.) For various reasons, those four Indian soldiers and their Indian fellows can't make it to Dunkirk as ordered. Two head south to Switzerland and never see Dunkirk. The other two, after playing a lot of hide and seek with the Germans across Northern France, do finally get there. But they are there for only a very few minutes of this film before they are shipped off to England.

So Dunkirk is a completely misleading title for this episode. If you want to learn about that battle, there are lots of good books you can read. And, of course, there is Christopher Nolan's film.

What we learn about those four Indian soldiers, through their own writings and the recollections of their families, is indeed interesting. Whether it was unknown in England and/or India as this episode asserts I have no way of knowing, because I don't study the British involvement in the war. The fact that the narration says so doesn't mean anything to me. The narration also said that Dorie Miller's heroic contributions during the attack on Pearl Harbor were unknown until discovered by the producers of this series, and that is hogwash, as I explained in my review of the Pearl Harbor episode.

So, this episode can be of interest to American viewers. But whether it is any more revelatory than the two previous episodes I have no way of telling, and no reason to believe.

I'm looking forward to the last installment, The Battle of the Bulge, which I assume will take us back to American contributions to the war and the role of African Americans.

The Jolson Story (1946)

Yes, the blackface is reprehensible, and yes, it's far from accurate, but...

[8/10 · 11 June 2024]

Many of the previous 60 reviewers have gone over the obvious pluses and minuses of this highly problematic but very enjoyable movie.

On the plus side, hearing Jolson sing his greatest hits is thrilling; Larry Parks is a wonder at making Jolson come alive visually. (He was a lot better looking than Jolson himself, but who cares? This is fantasy, folks.) On the negative, there are a lot of songs done in blackface. No, they aren't caricatural, as many were. But they're still in blackface. I'm not going to try to whitewash that. (Yes, I see the bad pun.) The movie also strays far from the reality of Jolson's actual life.

But it's the issue of race and racial discrimination, which is always just offstage and never mentioned, that makes this picture interesting.

Jolson spends much of the first half of the movie introducing some of the theatrical innovations that would change theater: turning up the lights so that the performer can see the audience, etc. One of them is that Jolson starts to ask to sing his own songs, songs that let him express himself. When he finally gets that chance, at the Wintergarden theater, he goes looking for new material. While he's in New Orleans, he wanders through the Black section of the city and becomes part of a jazz jam session. Back at the theater, he tells the director that he wants to adapt what he heard in that speakeasy into songs that he could sing for audiences there (read: white audiences). The first number we see him sing in his jazz era is the most caricatural of his blackface numbers, Mammy. But there it is, for neither the first nor the last time in American cinema: a clear statement that the most important part of American popular music has its inspiration in Black culture.

This scene had appeared in various movies, from the first talkie Showboat (1936), with Irene Dunne, Paul Robeson, and Hattie McDaniel, to the recent Elvis (2022), with Austin Butler and Kelvin Harrison as B. B. King, Yola as Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Alton Mason as Little Richard, and Shonka Dukureh as Big Mama Thornton. What's interesting, at least to me, is how each of these movies presents the subject.

In The Jolson Story, race and racism is never mentioned. It isn't mentioned when we see Jolson's childhood, though of course the Jolsons would have experienced it in then very Jim Crow Washington D. C., or when Jolson meets and marries "Julie Benson," the stand-in role for Ruby Keelor, the real Jolson's real first, gentile wife. And it isn't mentioned when Jolson wants to introduce Black music, at least in a modified form, into American popular music. Almost 80 years later, in Elvis, it still isn't discussed much, though more than in The Jolson Story, that's for sure.

And racism isn't discussed as this movie presents Jolson as the Great American Entertainer. In this, it very much followed in the footsteps of a very similar movie, Rhapsody in Blue, which Warner Brothers had brought out just the year before and which TJS resembles in many ways. (No surprise. The main script writer for both was the same, Harry Chandlee.) After presenting James M. Cohan as the essence of the American spirit in the runaway success Yankee Doodle Dandy in 1942, Jack Warner had decided to give the Jewish Gershwin the same treatment in 1945, thereby arguing that a Jewish artist could be as much the voice of America as an Irish one. (Jack Warner, the head of Warner Brothers, was of course Jewish himself.) It should not be surprising, then, that Harry Cohn, the head of Columbia, which made The Jolson Story, should decide to do something of the same thing the next year with another major Jewish artist, Jolson. Though he does not really attempt to portray him as the expression of the American soul.

So I recommend this movie for Jolson's songs and Larry Parks' impersonation of him singing them. You'll have to deal with the discomfort of the blackface as best you can.

The Color of Victory: Heroes of WW2: D-Day (2024) Season 1, Episode 2

Better than Episode One

[7/10 · 7 June 2024]

This second episode, D-Day, still had some of the negatives I pointed out in Episode One, but more things that I liked.

The negatives, quickly: money spent/wasted on having re-enactors act out several of the scenes. This was a real waste here, because we have photos and even film of the D-Day and subsequent landings on the five Normandy beaches. It's also aggravating, because in an attempt to make the re-enactments look real, they leave the audience wondering, sometimes, what was actually filmed in 1944 and what is "just acting." That's important here, because much is made of the very real fact that the Army didn't want the efforts of our Black soldiers filmed or photoed for reproduction in the American press and newsreels. It's confusing to hear that, and then to see what appears to be film footage of Black GIs on the Normandy beaches. There is also no coverage of how the Black press here in this country reacted to being almost shut out of covering the war in Europe. That's all been documented in readily available books that someone should have read. See for example Patrick Washburn's A Question of Sedition: The Federal Government's Investigation of the Black Press During World War II

Also negative: again, though not as much in the Pearl Harbor episode, too much time is spent recounting the general history of the war at that point, whereas specifics having to do with the few Black soldiers there are not followed up on. For example: at one point, the family of one of the three Black GIs covered in this episode-all members of the 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion-says something about his ancestor's "photos from France." What photos? From where? What do they depict? When, as the episode rightly announces, we have so little visual reporting of the contributions of Black GIs to the Normandy invasion, the producers should have spent time tracking down whatever little might exist. Less acting, less re-enactment of scenes we already know well. More time devoted to the specifics of Black GIs there in Normandy in 1944.

There is, for example, Alice Mills's wonderful "Black GIs: Normandy 1944," which focuses specifically on meetings between Black GIs and French civilians in Normandy at that time period. NO MENTION of that crucial book here, much less interview footage with her. She's quite alive, and speaks fine English. I just interviewed her myself a few weeks ago for a forthcoming documentary. Ägain, lots of money for CGI, but nothing for good research.

And so on.

But there are real positives here as well, moreso than in the first episode. Because this episode limits itself-more or less-to the Black presence on that one day, June 6th, it does a better job of focusing on its three cases, three Black GIs who came over as part of the 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion. It has first-person recollections from at least two of them. It is very moving to hear them speak. Again, as in the first episode, more time should have been devoted to that. They are an essential link to the Black experience there that day, and radically more important than the unsubstantiated generalizations of the purple-dressed journalist who is given far too much screen time instead.

But screen time is also given to two very qualified historians. Matthew Delmont, whose Half-American is the best book I have read on the Black experience, both for our fighting men and for those here on the home front, gets real screen time here, and never wastes a moment of it with generalizations. Ditto for Linda Herveux (sp?), whose Forgotten is THE book on the 320th. I believe that such documentaries should center on witnesses' recollections. But if you want academic commentary as well, they both do a highly qualified job.

As do the descendants of the three soldiers under study here. They're intelligent, and they have some very pointed remarks to make. They are another real plus this time.

But I wouldn't want to forget one of the more striking moments in this documentary: while the Black GIs are in England waiting to be shipped to France, the English do take pictures and even films of them. (On their time in England, see Graham Smith's When Jim Crow Met John Bull: Black American Soldiers in World War II Britain.) At one moment, we get to see a unit of Black GIs march through the streets of a small time. These men do not just march. They parade. And it is a performance not to be missed!

Finally, I would say that the script writers, since they filled this with unnecessary filler anyway, should instead have gone beyond D-Day in France to cover Black GIs in France at least through the end of August. This mini-series' focus on certain days is not a good framework, and I imagine they will have to abandon it anyway when they get to the Battle of the Bulge. There were other Black GIs in Normandy who arrived in the days that followed, and they played important roles. It's all well and good to honor the 320th, but it shouldn't be at the expense of those Black soldiers who arrived in the days immediately following D-Day.

The Color of Victory: Heroes of WW2 (2024– )

Disappointing

[6/10 · 6 June 2024]

After viewing the first of the four episodes, Pearl Harbor, my reactions are mixed.

First, you know there's a problem when you can't find the names of the author/s of the historical narration that Idris Elba reads in his wonderful voice. It certainly wasn't written by the few historians we see in Episode One: they all know better than to have written some of the most egregious passages, such as the repeated affirmations that only now are the stories of these three Black sailors being brought to light. As we see briefly at the end of the episode, the Black press, in particular the Pittsburgh Courier, began to fight for recognition for one of them, Doris Miller, within weeks after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The Navy most certainly dragged their feet, but the Courrier, backed by former presidential candidate Wendell L. Willkie, kept pushing, until Secretary of War Stimson finally released his name. (The Courier had to go to Miller's mother to get a picture of him.) In the years that followed, the Navy did finally name a ship after him, there was a postage stamp, etc. In 2018 a biography was published about him, Dante Brizill's Dorie Miller : greatness under fire. Miller is even played, briefly, by Cuba Gooding Jr. In Pearl Harbor, which should have been sunk before it was released.

So, in short, this first episode, far from telling these men's story "for the first time" after years of neglect, really doesn't tell anyone with an interest in World War II history anything we don't already know.

I had other problems with it as well. We do have surviving recollections of the Pearl Harbor attack by the other two Navy men covered here. We are only given small bits and pieces of it however. I would have liked to have heard a LOT more from them, the only real first-person witnesses involved.

I would have liked to see a lot LESS of the actors who were assigned to play these historical figures, however. Dorie Miller was a heavyweight boxing champion. From the few pictures we have, we see that he had a very powerful build. The young actor assigned to play him in the boxing scenes had no such figure, and made no impression. He also conveys his fear, when the ship is hit, with big bug eyes that are perilously close to the sort of thing Stepin Fetchit and Willie Best are now derided for.

Nor did we get to see Miller during his bond-drive speaking tour back in the States. That could have been interesting.

Instead, we spend a lot of time listening to descendants of these three sailors, many of whom never even met them. (Miller evidently has no direct descendants.) Their emotion was certainly very real, but too far removed from the subjects, at least for me.

In short, the research element seems to have been shortchanged, and the money put into CGI technology for an umpteenth "recreation" of the Pearl Harbor attack. We never hear what Miller's father thought of all this, for example, perhaps because the script writers never found Brizill's book.

If you want to learn about life for Black servicemen in the Navy in World War II read Matthew Delmont's highly readable Half-American. If you want feel-good narration - albeit beautifully read - and second-rate reconstructions of the Pearl Harbor attack, watch this.

And be prepared for some very jarring commercial breaks for Live Nation's upcoming tour by some girls' group, which do everything possible to undercut the seriousness of the subject at hand.

The Kid from Left Field (1953)

A wonderful movie

[7/10 · 4 June 2024]

No, this is not a masterpiece of cinematic art. And, if you have no interest in an knowledge of baseball, it's probably slow. (Which is nt to say that the real subject of the movie is baseball. Not at all. It's about a father overcoming his shortcomings so that his son can be proud of him. One of the great universal themes.)

But it is, nevertheless, a movie you can watch over and over for all sorts of reasons.

Tonight, when I watched it, I marveled at the fact that it never talks down to its presumably baseball-savvy audience. When the nine year old boy manages the Bisons in their pennant-winning game, the strategy gets fairly complicated and is explained - by a nine year old to two other nine year olds - in all its glorious detail. I find it impossible to believe that today a major studio would be willing to make a movie for such a very specific audience.

In all fairness, though, I suspect that the number of Americans with that sort of detailed interest in and knowledge of baseball has shrunk considerably.

The twelve previous reviewers seem to buy the argument that Billy gets all his insight into getting the best out of players from his father. Yet it is very clear, over and over, that he comes up with much of his advice when he is nowhere near his father. He is just one very perceptive young boy. Maybe with a little help from the same angels who made the contemporaneous movie *Angels in the Outfield* such a joy. Baseball fans obviously believe in magic, or they would not go on rooting for losing teams year after year. (See: *Damn Yankees*)

If you like baseball in the summer, you'll probably like this movie. If you don't, you probably won't.

Sayonara (1957)

There's a lot of very good in this movie

[8/10 · 10 May 2024]

Yes, 67 years after it was released, it's easy to take all sorts of pc pot-shots at this movie. But it's a product of a James Michener book, like South Pacific, and it does really try - and sometimes succeed - in doing good things.

Mostly about condemning American - and in particular the American army's - racist views of the era. Brando's character, a war hero, moves from being terribly anti-Japanese to being able to see past all that. And the script is written in a way that he takes us on that journey, so that we arrive at the same conclusion.

Which it accomplishes largely by developing Hanna Ogi's character well past that of an Asian stereotype. That's somethi8ng that even South Pacific never did.

What I also found interesting here was the music. It is co clearly inspired by Puccini's opera Madama Butterfly, particularly in its use of strings and humming choruses.

I strongly recommend this movie.

Civil War (2024)

A very different sort of road movie

[7/10 · 13 April 2024]

Trailers notwithstanding, this is much less a movie about a civil war than a road trip movie in which we watch four not well developed characters come to terms with various difficult situations along their journey.

There is good and bad.

The best thing about this movie, to me, was the often striking cinematography. Contrasts between clear close focus and blurry distant objects that movie into the clear closer focus range abound, often very effectively. The music is also very effective at times.

The worst thing about this movie, other than an occasionally cliched line of dialogue, was the fact that we spend almost the entire movie with four characters but never learn much of anything about them. They remain largely stereotypes, some sympathetic, others annoying. (The young, self-centered woman really aggravated me.)

Warning: this is not at all the movie you might imagine it to be. It is very definitely not - at least to any extent - a parable about some battle between a Trumpian far-right anti-democracy crowd and a "good" pro-democracy crowd. That is made clear from the very start when we learn that the forces attacking the central government come primarily from Texas (conservative, Trump red) and California (liberal). We never find out why/how the president managed a third term.

Instead, this movie is about four war photo-journalists and their efforts to get to D. C. to cover the last moments of that president's power.

In the process, a LOT of photos are taken. But we never once see where these photos and others taken by photojournalists covering the war appear. Where is Reuters publishing them? Online? Are there still newspapers in this dystopia?

The movie runs less than two hours, and almost always held my attention. I'd recommend viewing it - but leave your political presuppositions at home. That's not what this movie is about.

Origin (2023)

If you can separate Wilkerson's thesis from the quality of this film...

[8/10 · 16 March 2024]

Reviewing - which, let's be honest, means passing judgment on - this film is particularly difficult. It tells the story of how Isabel Wilkerson developed her controversial thesis that what we see as racism at the base of some white Americans' hatred of Blacks is not, in fact, a result of racism at all but rather yet another version of a willfully developed caste system, similar to what the Nazis developed in their vilification of the Jews. I find holes in parts of that argument, myself, but I don't think the validity of Wilkerson's thesis should deter anyone from seeing this movie, or appreciating the very real talent of its director, Ava Du Vernay.

If you've seen her movie Selma, you don't need me to convince you that she is a first-rate director. This movie has scene after scene that show us once again how very gifted she is. And it is because there are so many such scenes that I ranked this movie as highly as I did.

As is evident by now - March 15, 2024 - the movie had no box office appeal. I can understand that. It's almost two and a half hours long, with no "action," almost no love story, and a lot of dialogue that sounds like a well-written sociology lecture. This would be a difficult sit for most people in a movie theater, where you can't take a break without missing part of it. And there really are no "throw-away scenes." You have to pay attention to everything that is said. I just watched it at home on Amazon Prime, where I could take a few breaks, and I think that made it - at least for me - a more comfortable experience.

If, of course, you can call a movie that deals with some of the true horrors in the history of mankind's mistreatment of members of mankind anything like comfortable. There are, indeed, very difficult scenes in this movie. But they also include some of the most remarkable in the movie. The lynching that we initially see as a family picnic in the countryside on a nice day is, in its way and without a word being said to that effect, a brilliant way of showing how "the banality of evil" operated - and, let's be honest, sometimes continues to operate - in Jim Crow America.

And though the movie is already long, and certainly not fast-paced, there is one element that I wish could have been developed just a little bit more: the thoughts of the plumber who eventually decides to get to the origin of and fix the flooding of Wilkerson's mother's basement. I'm sure images of his crew going to work on that basement at the end of the movie are not given that prominence by chance. But maybe just a word or two from him later that day when he goes home to his wife and children, and takes off his MAGA cap. Maybe.

Yes, I know it's long. Yes, I know it takes its time getting to the main subject of Wilkerson's work. But it's definitely worth watching, even if only in segments. There's a lot of great filmmaking here, being used to tackle a subject that certainly did not lend itself to being turned into a film. That deserves to be seen.

All the King's Men (1949)

A very well made movie

[9/10 · 7 March 2024]

I decided to watch the opening of this tonight, thinking I would halt it to go to bed early. I couldn't. It was so well made - until the last five minutes - that I could not stop watching it.

Everything is done well. The script. The acting. The direction that holds our attention once the story gets going without letting up. (Yes, the first part of the movie, before we meet Willie Stark, could have been shortened. The narrator, Jack Burden, a reporter, is never really of any interest himself, so his problems never held me. He reminded me of the narrator in The Great Gatsby.)

The last few minutes, the death scenes, seemed cliched and unworthy of the great writing that had come before.

Now, of course, in the era of Trump, it's hard not to see Stark as a populist predecessor.

I strongly recommend this movie, There are shades of Citizen Kane and Keeper of the Flame, certainly, but this movie stands on its own as a great motion picture, produced by Hollywood moguls, most of them Jewish refugees, who were intent on warning American audiences that what they had fled in Germany, Italy, and elsewhere could happen here as well.

As indeed it can.

A Double Life (1947)

Coleman sometimes good, sometimes a disappointment

[7/10 · 5 March 2024]

I first discovered Ronald Colman - or rather, more specifically, his voice and the wonderful ways that he used it - some six decades ago when I saw him as Sidney Carton in *A Tale of Two Cities*. Since then, I have enjoyed him - if not necessarily the movies he appeared in - often. (*Kismet*, for example, is a real disappointment, though he in it is not.)

So, I was eager to see him in this, his Academy Award-winning role. And to see how he would play scenes from *Othello*.

Better I should have gone to bed early.

Setting completely aside the issue of a white actor playing Othello in blackface - which I can do easily because I'm not Black - I confess that I was mostly disappointed in his performance on stage as Othello. The voice didn't have the force and presence I wanted, it was not commanding where Othello needs to be great.

This was especially true, for me, in the long excerpt from Act V that we see early in the movie, part of the opening night performance.

Later, sometimes, I found more of what I wanted.

The TCM host, Ben Mankiewiecz, said that the scenes from the play were filmed not in the order they appear in the movie, but rather in the order they appear in the play. That may be, but I hope it's not true, because I consoled myself with the idea that Colman - and no doubt the director, George Cukor - wanted to show a progression in Johns' acting as he did the play over and over through the production's 300+ nights. I found the last time we see Othello's death scene to be more powerful than the first time, much earlier in the picture.

As for the rest of the picture, I found it average at best. Its depiction of mental illness, though perhaps up to date for its time, was out of date and rather aggravating in 2024. I found NO chemistry between Colman and his leading lady, making it hard to believe the two characters still loved each other.

So I would pass on this movie, and see no reason to watch it again in the future.

The Great Caruso (1951)

My objections concern Dorothy KIrsten

[7/10 · 1 March 2024]

The previous 30 reviews focus on Lanza's singing - glorious to my ears - and the historical inaccuracy of the script - yes, it's pure hokum, full of clichés that were old even in 1951.

Yes, Lanza is sometimes sloppy in the operatic arias. But even there - especially there, actually - his diction is crystal clear, and he clearly knew what he was singing about. In the popular songs - Because, Mattinata, etc. - he's a unadulterated joy to listen to. A big, full voice, with warmth and life.

My major problem with this movie - and I've seen it several times now, over the years - is the casting of Dorothy Kirsten in what is, despite the billing, the real female lead. She was an ok, by-the-books singer, but her voice sounds so pale next to Lanza's. And her acting is certainly nothing to write home about.

I wish, instead, that MGM had found another singer for that role. She really flattens every scene she appears in.

I understand MGM would have wanted someone with clear English. She should also have had something of Lanza's life and fire, totally lacking in Kirsten. Ideal but unavailable would have been someone like Rosa Ponselle, who had retired 15 years before, or Grace Moore, who had been killed in a plane crash just a few years before. Roberta Peters, lively and vivacious, might have worked, though some of the numbers would have to have been changed for her. No Aida, for example. Or perhaps Patrice Munsel, with the same caveat. Perhaps even an older American soprano who took a motherly interest in Caruso, since there is not supposed to be any romantic connection. Then perhaps Ponselle could have been coaxed out of retirement. She was only 54 in 1951.

But someone other than Kirsten.

The Holdovers (2023)

Enjoyable, but of course you know where it will end up from the begining

[9/10 · 21 February 2024]

This is in many ways a traditional movie. No, not like *Goodbye Mr. Chips*, but still fairly traditional. From early on, when we see that the teacher, the cafeteria head, and the troubled student will be stuck together for Christmas break, we can guess that the rest of the movie will be about how each of them helps the other two deal with their personal problems.

And that's what happens for the remainder of the movie.

There are certainly unexpected twists and character reveals that are nicely done and not forced. That is what holds our attention with the two main characters. So it is a shame we don't learn more about the woman.

The movie suggests, for awhile, the modern idea that families don't have to be biological, but can be constructed. I would have liked to have seen more of that.

Otherwise, the dialogue was good and the acting fine to very fine.

I'd certainly recommend seeing it, but I can't imagine seeing it a second time. It leaves me with no questions, and nothing to talk about, unlike, say, Oppenheimer or American Fiction.

The Zone of Interest (2023)

More the banality of indifference than of evil

[8/10 · 20 February 2024]

I can't imagine going to any movie without knowing in advance what it was about. Movie tickets are too expensive, and there are too many types of movies I don't care for, for me to go at random. A fair number of the really negative previous reviews, however, seem to have been the result of people going and expecting something very different, or going without knowing what this movie does. I can understand that those people might have been disappointed, but the movie was not meant for them, and they did choose to go in ignorance.

As various previous reviewers have explained, this movie is a view of what life near a death camp might have been like for Germans who were indifferent to what was happening to the Jews (and other persecuted minorities) during the War. They simply went about their lives, trying as best they could to make something good of them despite growing shortages, occasional Allied bombings, etc. (This movie evidently takes place in 1942 or 43, so before the Allied bombings and the shortages really became severe.) The wife of the camp commander is so indifferent to what is starting to go on in the camp she can see just the other side of her garden wall that when her husband is transferred, she chooses to remain in their nice house, with its garden, rather than take advantage of that chance to leave. Her choice is not evil - it hurts no one, unlike the daily actions of her husband the camp commandant - but it is certainly a stellar example of indifference to human suffering.

There is never any discussion of the moral issues at hand. Near the end, Höss appears to vomit after leaving a meeting where the Final Solution is discussed, but we don't know why.

I didn't care for the end - which I will not recount so as not to spoil it - and would rather the movie had ended before the switch to modern times. Previous reviewers have discussed what that switch might have been intended to suggest, but to me it broke the effect of what had come before to no valid purpose.

As I thought about the movie during dinner after seeing it, I too, like some of the previous reviewers here, came to the conclusion that it had made its point fairly early on. After awhile I didn't see that it was adding anything as we continued to follow the family though their pleasant but uninteresting lives in the shadow of the death camp.

I also found the younger children's indifference to what was going on literally next door to be hard to accept. Not that everything else in this movie is realistic.

So, for me, an interesting idea that wore out its welcome before the movie had ended.

Cornbread, Earl and Me (1975)

Parts are painful to watch, but it's a very fine movie

[8/10 · 5 February 2024]

I'm not going to summarize the story of this movie; you can find that above.

Rather, I'll just leave my comments on the experience of watching it.

The ;movie is well acted throughout. And that can, at times, make it difficult to watch. When one of the characters is killed, it is difficult to watch his mother's at first unbelieving reaction to the tragedy. You feel something of her grief just in watching the contorsions of her face and body. It's not easy to watch.

Later, watching the police dept intimidate witnesses to avoid a wrongful homicide verdict is also difficult to watch, but in a different sense. You see how powerless the people in this poor neighborhood are to fight back against such administrative corruption. (I also suppose it doesn't make a lot of sense. I would imagine, though I don't know this as a fact, that even in 1975 police depts would have been insured against such expenses.)

It's refreshing that it is a Black lawyer who wins this suit, and not some Great White Savior.

But at the end, you have no assurance that the same thing won't happen again. And again. And again. The shooting of the young Black man was not directly an act of racism - one of the policemen who shot at him was Black himself, and they had been told the rapist they were pursuing was Black. His death is, rather, the result of sloppy procedure and very bad coincidence.

But the intimidation of the potential witnesses by police dept reps suggests that the people in this neighborhood and other poor ones like it have little access to real justice.

Hold Your Man (1933)

Skip through the first part and go to the last 20 minutes or so.

[6/10 · 2 February 2024]

Harlow and Gable made six movies together, all but the first as the leads. This is certainly not the best known, or the best, of them. The first part is them sparring as two hardened characters, something they would do better in subsequent films.

But I found the last part interesting, when the other women in Harlow's room at the reform school work together to help her marry Gable-and thereby make her yet-to-be-born child legitimate. (That may not be a big deal today, when movie and sports stars have children "out of wedlock," as they used to say, all the time, but back in 1933 it was indeed a big deal. The characters usually stop in mid-sentence rather than mention that Harlow's character is pregnant.) The several women are allowed to become individuals, not just prison-hardened clichés, and individuals with courage and a willingness to sacrifice what little they have for someone else's benefit.

In the same respect, the treatment of the Black preacher, which could have been played for comedy, gives him a certain dignity and likability, even though he had been presented earlier as very moralistic.

All this from a director, Sam Wood, who would later be known for his right-wing politics-but also some very good movies (Good-bye Mr. Chips, King's Row, For Whom the Bell Tolls, etc.)

These things don't make this a great movie. But they made the last part of it very interesting, at least for me.

American Fiction (2023)

Already very good. Thoughts about how it might be developed next time it's filmed

[8/10 · 31 January 2024]

I went to see this movie for a second time today. In part because I enjoyed it so much the first time, in part because I had questions about it that required a second viewing.

Overall, I really think it's a wonderful movie, well-acted throughout.

But, as some previous viewers have remarked, it is almost two separate movies: the story of the Ellison family going through emotionally hard times, and Monk's decision to take on the "serious" fiction publishing establishment to show just how superficial they are when it comes to their publication of novels by and about Blacks.

There is a connection, yes: Monk convinces himself to publish a trash Blacksploitation novel in part by saying that he needs the money to take care of his mother, who is entering into dementia. But lots of great writers have written "easy" potboilers for money when their serious fiction wasn't making any. It would have been easy to assuage his conscience on that issue - as Sintara Golden evidently has - without developing the extensive family issues. Monk's agonizing about "selling out" is one of the least convincing parts of the movie, at least to me.

Those family issues are well developed, and often beautifully acted and filmed. But that does not mean they are really essential to what sets this movie apart as different and particularly interesting, at least as I see it.

So I would have cut back significantly on the family issues --perhaps even to the point of eliminating the sister Lisa's character, though she is well played by Tracee Ellis Ross -- so as to be able to develop the other aspect of the movie in two hours.

And there is lots that could be developed there. For example:

Where does Monk get a knowledge of urban Black English -- or at least what middle-class Americans imagine to be such -- if he grew up in an upper-middle-class family with a beautiful home and attended Harvard? We get an inkling of what might have been when we see him in bed watching a Blacksploitation movie for a minute or two, but this could have been developed into a significant, and funny, part of the movie. How would an upper-middle-class Black academic with an upper-middle-class upbringing go about learning "the lingo" well enough to fake out not just over-educated middle-class white readers, but also intelligent Black readers like Coraline? There could even have been talk of his trying to find his "roots," which urban ghetto life was not, tied in with the the fact that Leslie Uggams had starred in that series.

I would also like to have seen Sintara Golden's character developed further. She's obviously an intelligent woman, and in her scene with Monk during the Literary Prize committee lunch break we see her admit that she wrote her "ghetto" work to appeal to liberal white readers. But was that compromise easy for her? She says she did a lot of research. What sort of research?

She also catches Monk off-guard when he talks to her about "the potential" of Black people, which she says shows that he doesn't really believe that they have achieved anything of true value yet. This could be tied into the sort of fiction he has been writing so far. There isn't much to go on there, but his agent refers to his most recent novel as "the Persians" and Coraline says she has read his book "The Frogs." Has he been adapting Classical models to tell modern stories, like Eugene O'Neill? (We learn from the novel *Erasure* that that was indeed the case.) Does part of his feeling of insufficiency stem from interiorized anti-Black racism? There's little to go on in the movie as it now stands, but that might be a theme to develop. Sintara is intelligent and attractive; he could be attracted to her for all sorts of reasons, see in her both someone he dislikes because she is willing to sell out -- but why is that such a bad thing, as his agent asks him with the Johnny Walker bottles? -- and someone who is more comfortable being Black -- whatever that means to her -- despite her elite education.

And then there is the issue of the movie script Monk finally gives to the superficial movie producer, Valdespino. Why was the latter willing to abandon Monk's trash novel, which was evidently about life in the ghetto, for a story that ends with a tuxedoed man receiving a literary award? Valdespino's choice of endings is deeply cynical, and not stupid. But why did he make the switch, and what to? (In *Erasure* this switch doesn't take place. But in fact the movie deal is much less important in the novel, and does not lead to the end of the story, one of the particularly brilliant innovations created by the movie screenwriters for *American Fiction*.)

There are also hints at potentially interesting things that are introduced but then abandoned. When Monk starts to write his trash novel, he is sitting in a room surrounded by prints of Gauguin paintings. The young thug he creates, with the eye patch and the dew rag, is named Van Go. Why all those references to late 19th century French post-impressionist art?

When Monk first returns to Boston and visits the family home, the house-keeper, Lorena, tells him that he's not overweight, and that "back in Arkansas he'd be a beauty queen." A strange thing to say about an apparently straight man. But then, when Cliff arrives near the end of the film with two young boyfriends, we see that Lorena is not bothered by homosexuality at all. What does Lorena know, or think she knows, about Monk's past?

Again, this is a very good movie just as it is, and well worth watching. I guess it's a tribute to it that it kept me thinking long after I left the theater, considering how the already very good in it could have been developed even further.

-------------------------------------------------------

I was sufficiently intrigued by this film to go out and read the novel, *Erasure*, on which it is based. I was convinced that the novel would focus more on the critique of racism in the American publishing establishment, and that the family drama that several reviewers found less interesting would be much less important.

I was very wrong. If anything, the movie develops the critique of the publishing world, and often very cleverly. The three-part ending of the movie is completely new with the film. So is what development we see of Sintara Gooden's character. We never really meet her in the novel, and there is no discussion at all between her and Ellison. She is not on the five-person literary award panel of judges. Putting her on it, and thereby giving us even what little discussion there is between her and Ellison, was another great script writer innovation.

There are many other major differences as well, which probably explains why the film was titled American Fiction and not Erasure.

So, if this movie can make so many changes in riffing off the novel original, I will hope that a short tv series -- with the same actors, who are uniformly good -- will pick up from here and go on to explore some of the issues raised by the book and the movie.

Biography of a Bachelor Girl (1935)

A movie that seems to change point of view halfway through

[5/10 · 30 January 2024]

This for me very unsatisfying movie seemed to change viewpoints half-way through. Most of it is just tepid fluff, but on occasion in the first part the magazine editor, played by Montgomery, makes a few short speeches about bringing down vapid politicians like the would-be one played by E E Horton, and big money, like Horton's soon-to-be father-in-law, Kennicutt. In that sense he sounds like a humorless version of Clark Gable's newspaper reporter in "It Happened One Night", which had been released just the year before. Most Americans were suffering through the Depression by 1935, when this picture came out, so there was a ready market for criticism of the wealthy, who continued to enjoy life while the rest struggled to keep their heads above water.

But as the picture goes on, Montgomery's character sounds angrier and angrier about this. And our way of viewing his anger is changed by Harding's character, who tells him that, while she originally saw him as a crusader, she now sees him as wanting to persecute the wealthy.

From that point on, Montgomery's character is presented as some sort of closet Communist because his father was killed by strike-breakers during a coal miners' labor unrest. And Harding's character, who has lived among the wealthy, does not want anything to do with that. The very ambiguous final scene leaves us up in the air on whether she will accept him as she has grown to see him - and told us to see him.

But how many in the audience would care? There is absolutely NO chemistry between Harding and Montgomery, none whatsoever. It does not help that she is made up to look much older than he, whereas in fact Harding only had two years on her costar.

In the same respect, she comes off as so understated in this movie that we cannot believe she had torrid affairs with many famous men. She really seems almost sexless.

There are minor faults as well, such as the Tennessee accents. The leads, except for Montgomery, are all supposed to be from the Volunteer State, and on occasion each attempts a slight Southern accent. But then it vanishes completely.

I got nothing out of this movie other than the occasional pleasure of Harding's voice when she spoke softly. That was really very beautiful.

The rest just became aggravating.

Heavenly Music (1943)

Look at the date, folks. Look at the date.

[7/10 · 28 January 2024]

None of the previous reviewers seem to have put this short in historical context. It was produced and shown in 1943, when things were still going badly for us in the war. Europe was still occupied by the Fascists. The Europe of almost every composer on those risers: Beethoven, Wagner - Hitler's favorite -, Brahms, Paganini, Schubert, LIzst, etc.

And yet their place as the great masters of music is never called into question.

There is more to this short than meets the eye. MGM bothered to hire musicians who could compose versions of the American's song that are really in the styles of the various composers mentioned. A lot more work was done here than for the average short. So yes, this short didn't win that Oscar just by chance.

This is propaganda in the good sense, and that would not have been lost on moviegoers of the time.

Freud's Last Session (2023)

Think about it for a second: for whom was this movie made?

[7/10 · 21 January 2024]

I saw this movie this afternoon - Saturday afternoon - and there were only three people in the hall. I was not surprised.

Freud's Last Session is part of a cottage movie genre, almost always taken from a Broadway play, where two-man shows are relatively common. The author puts two historical figures together in a room and lets them debate various important issues for close to two hours. Nixon/Frost is the one I remember offhand, but there have been others as well. In the theater - a small theater - I can see this working well. I'm not sure how it works as a movie, or more to the point: for whom it works. Movies, even modest ones like this, cost a LOT more to produce than plays. Can something like this recoup the investment?

Yes, the two actors give very fine performances. People go to see Shakespeare plays not to see what will happen to Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet. They already know before they enter the theater. They go to see how the actors will deliver the lines.

But here, unlike in Shakespeare, the lines are not particularly striking. Hopkins in particular did a great job of creating the character Freud, but he didn't have Shakespeare's words - or even, say, those of the playwright who wrote The Lion in Winter - to work with.

So I'm left with my initial question: how many people are going to pay to see Hopkins and Goode deliver their uninspired lines? And will that make enough ticket sales to at least break even on this movie?

I enjoyed it, yes, but I found that it was too much of the same thing for too long, and would have been happier if it had been shorter.

The Book of Clarence (2023)

A very strange mixture of comedy and drama

[6/10 · 12 January 2024]

This movie is not at all what I imagined from the trailer , which suggests a satire of the Bible's story of Jesus' last days. There is some of that here , but not much, and it's very uneven in quality. I was impressed by the parody of da Vinci's depiction of the Last Summer but left cold by much of the rest. The cleansing of Jesus, where a dirty beggar is transformed into the very white and scrawny Christ we know from endless depictions was interesting but needed development.

Then we get to Good Friday and an altered presentation of the Crucifixion on the Mount. Things very quickly become serious and remain so until the end of the movie. Clarence's crucifixion is presented in realistic detail, as is his suffering He has a discussion with the white Jesus on another cross, and it's very serious.

And then he dies

And is brought back to life on Sunday, but not by the pale white Jesus

Don't look for laughs in any of that.

I'll have to watch this a second time to see what I think it is trying to say.

Migration (I) (2023)

What are we to make of the "Black" accents of the pigeons?

[5/10 · 7 January 2024]

I went to see MIgration this evening because I had been stuck in the house for several days with a bad head cold and wanted to get out. I had seen the big hits at the local cinemaplex, so I was left with a few horror films that didn't tempt me at all and this, Migration.

I found most of it pleasant but uninteresting. I was mildly aggravated by the dad character who had no sense of imagination, at least to begin with. I was surprised there wasn't a scene where he refused to ask for directions and got them all lost.

The one episode that mildly bothered me was the one with the pigeons in New York City. Dad starts by calling them dirty vermin. (He learns later to have respect for at least one of them.) They speak with what sounds like an urban, i.e. Urban Black accent. Why?

I have no idea.

But I didn't care for that element of that episode.

The Iron Claw (2023)

A dysfunctional family - plus some wrestling

[5/10 · 29 December 2023]

As a previous reviewer observed, this movie is more about the dynamics of a particular family than wrestling. Which was fine with me, as I have no interest in what is called "professional" i.e., scripted wrestling, which is more spectacle than sport.

How the matches are sketched out in advance is not the subject of this movie. We see one brief example of this, but nothing more.

Rather, this is the story of the von Erich family. The father had a mildly successful career in professional wrestling. When his day is over, he convinces all four of his sons to follow in his footsteps, even though some of them would rather do other things. Dad keeps pushing them until they fall apart, in one way or the other.

I have no idea how close to the historical reality this movie is, and don't care. For the facts, I would turn to documentaries or books, neither of which this pretends to be.

I had hoped that it would be a good drama. For me, it was not. I found the characters to be emotionally flat. And there are many unanswered questions, that might have made the four boys' faithful devotion to their emotionless and manipulative dad easier to understand.

The fact that none of these four healthy young men had any real interest in women - or men - seemed strange.

One point left me particularly puzzled. Near the end of the movie, when Kevin is in bed with his wife one morning, their two largely androgenous young children run in and hop in bed with them . The mother calls them "girls." Later, when they are playing football with Kevin, he refers to them as boys. They both have long blond hair and could be either. What gives? What was the director up to?

If you're a wrestling fan, you'll probably be bothered by the lack of fidelity to the historical facts. If you're not, I don't know why this would interest you, as the characters aren't that interesting.

Unless you want to spend two hours looking at muscular guys in their briefs.

The Color Purple (2023)

Imagination and creativity to the max

[10/10 · 25 December 2023]

I can't believe that I get to write the first IMDB review of this stupendous movie.

Everything, but everything, is good when not downright great here.

The script is always interesting.

The realization of that script is good and sometimes just downright astounding. The staging of some of the musical numbers is pure genious: imaginative, fast-paced, colorful. But there is plenty of variety. The end of the movie starts off simply enough, but grows and swells to become very, very powerful.

The acting by the leads is all first-rate. How they convinced the men to play those often despicable roles I don't know, but you surely cheer when their women finally stand up to them. Some of those moments got applause from the audience where I saw it. (Note: I was almost the only man in the sold-out theater.)

It isn't a short movie, but, as with the only other movie this year that rises to its level, Oppenheimer, I was not bored for one minute.

Go see this movie. Order your tickets in advance, because this is going to sell a LOT of tickets. But go. It will take you through a wild emotional roller coaster. There are moments that are very hard to watch. (This is not a movie for little children.) But everything here is well done, and often superbly done. It will restore your faith in movie making.

Good Sam (1948)

I could not believe Leo McCarey could make a movie this dull

[3/10 · 24 December 2023]

This movie is less than two hours long. I would have sworn it was almost three. It drags something awful. How could the same director who had just previously made "Going My Way" and the less inspired but still enjoyable "Bells of St. Mary's" have allowed his actors to deliver such leaden performances?

And who approved this script??? There isn't an ounce of humor in it. Gary Cooper's character is not nice so much as just plain dull and stupid. It's as if he wears a sign that says "Kick me" on his back and really means it.

Ann Sheridan's character, who should be the center of reason here, is presented as materialistic, more interested in shoes and dresses than her family. It makes it harder for us to sympathize with her.

Everything here falls flat. What previous reviewers who found this funny found to laugh at I honestly cannot guess.

If you want to watch a Leo McCarey films, there are some great ones to pick from. But avoid this. And if you do start it, don't tell yourself "It has to get better." It never does.

Maestro (I) (2023)

A disappointment

[4/10 · 21 December 2023]

Like for many of my generation - I was born in the early 1950s - Leonard Bernstein was known as the handsome, dynamic young American who tried to make classical music accessible to children of all backgrounds across the nation with his televised version of the New York Philharmonic's *Young People's Concerts*. (Walter Damrosch had done the same thing on radio a generation before for my mother's generation, but that were very different. Damrosch was European with a German accent. Bernstein, though the son of Russian immigrants, was all American - even if, as the movie suggests in one fast sentence, Bernstein started with such an accent himself and then worked to divest himself of it.) The man we saw on tv, and the imagine built up around him, is not to be found in this movie about a flamboyant, insecure, and self-centered individual who is too often weak to others' detriment as well as to his own. If you are looking for the Bernstein of your childhood, don't expect to find him here.

Nor, from what I understand, should you look for the facts of his life here. This isn't a documentary, and doesn't pretend to be one. So I don't understand previous negative reviewers who fault the movie for not being historically faithful. Evidently it is not.

But then, what is this movie about? As presented here, it's the story of a gay artist who, for reasons never made clear, allows himself to become married to a young and not particularly tolerant actress, and then has to spend the years of his marriage hiding his gay life not only from the public at large - which was the case for most gay artists of his generation and before - but also from his own children. This movie never explores why he did this.

Nor does it consider contemporary cases of the same thing. The most obvious would be Dimitri Mitropoulos, the conductor of the New York Philharmonic just before Bernstein, who was also gay but who never married. It's strange that Bernstein never for a moment in this movie refers to him as a possible model in that respect.

Nor does it really consider why actress Felicia Montalegri would have convinced him to marry her. She has a line about the smell of Bernstein reminding her of the smell of her father's coat, and that she associated that smell with security. But we don't know why she felt insecure without him - if she did - nor why she would enter into such a mariage, which was unlikely to provide emotional security.

In short, the two main characters' motives for marrying are never really explored.

At one point, near the end of the movie, there is an extended scene between the two in which, among other things, she blames him for not being honest with himself and developing his gifs, which she evidently saw to be his composing. But then, shortly afterward, when he talks about telling his teenage daughter that he is gay, she tells him he can't do that. So he should be free of what others do to limit him, but not free from what she does to limit him? The script, the character development, is often similarly muddled.

I didn't expect to learn anything new about Bernstein's artistic life from this movie. That's now how it's being presented. But I didn't learn anything about why he allowed himself to have such a complicated personal life, either. And that is what the movie would seem to exist to present to us.

So, what did I get out of this movie? Not much, to be honest.

Would this movie be of interest to those not already familiar with Bernstein's musical career? Probably not. Especially in the early, black and white part, there is a LOT of name-dropping of people in the New York arts scene in the 40s and 50s. Aaron Copland, Jerome Robbins, Serge Koussevitzky, Bruno Walter, etc. That would shut such viewers out altogether.

If Bradley Cooper made this to discuss the life of a gay man trapped in a homophobic straight world, he would have been better of doing what the producers of Tár did: create a fictional conductor who resembled Bernstein in some ways but not others, and then created his situations and characters accordingly. Pegging this situation to one recent musician whom so many potential audience members feel they knew just created openings for distracting criticism and limited - but not too much - what he could do with his material.

As it stands, I don't understand what he wanted us to get out of it, and don't see how it will attract many viewers that stick with it to the end.