HE RIDES AGAIN! "The Lone Ranger"

Johnny Depp as Tonto and Armie Hammer as the Lone Ranger scope out Red's bordello for bad guys.

The film "The Lone Ranger," starring Johnny Depp, Armie Hammer, Tom Wilkinson, and William Fitchner, was directed by Gore Verbinski.  It features a haunting yet robust score by Hans Zimmer, with beautiful, mesmerizing, panoramic cinematography by a raft of people headed by Bojan Bozelli.  It was supposed to be the No. 1 summer hit; unfortunately, it failed miserably at the box office, bested by "Despicable Me 2".  I do not know why.  Critics were mean and cruel.  Their comments about Depp, hurtful.  Still, none of this kept me away.  I believe in Depp, having seen him in just about everything he's ever made.  I feel he disappointed critics because he didn't play Tonto as Captain Jack Sparrow's lost twin.  Depp created a totally new character in Tonto, which he does in all his films save the "Pirates" franchise.

The film begins and ends with a scene set in a display of old west dioramas at the San Francisco 1933 World's Fair.  A little boy, dressed as the Lone Ranger, checks out a diorama featuring a Native American  habitat on an arid plain, complete with teepee, baskets, tools, bow and arrow an other Indian accoutrements.  A model of an old, withered native with dry, cracked skin, stands in front of his teepee, peering out through the glass as though analyzing the weather.  Suddenly he comes alive when the boy talks to thim.  The boy (and we) learns that he is the real Tonto (Johnny Depp), the Lone Ranger's sidekick. Thus the story begins in flashback.

What binds Tonto and the Lone Ranger is that they are both outcasts.   Tonto was banished from his Comanche tribe as a child for selling out the whereabouts of the silver deposit to a shady silver speculator, Cole, played by British actor Tom Wilkinson, for a silver, engraved pocket watch.  Cole oversees iIlegal mining practices;  he's also a railroad magnate. Texas ranger John Reid (Armie Hammer with the straight, even, too-white teeth), "died" at the hands of creepy, cannibalistic gang leader Butch Cavendish (an amazing, unrecognizable William Fitchner, currently seen in ABC TV's "Crossing Lines").  Butch's gang had wasted Reid's brother, Dan (stoic James Dale) and the other rangers, including, they believed, John, who were hell bent to bring them to justice.

Tonto, with the assistance of a mystical white "spirit" horse (the soon-to-be Silver), "resurrects" John by chanting Comanche prayers over him and sprinkling him with birdseed with which he constantly feeds the dead crow (Depp's idea) perched on his headdress (Tonto's not the ranger's).  Reid certainly cannot show up in town when he's believed dead so Tonto bestows on him the moniker "Lone Ranger" and he swears to never reveal his real identity.  Hence, an outlaw.  Tonto gives him a mask he'd cut out of a dead guy's black leather vest, warning him never to remove it.  Reid somehow finds a pristine white cowboy hat near the bodies, slaps it on and voila! his LR look is complete, even to the badge his bro had given him.

This oater has everything- from inter-Indian battles; Butch's gang impersonating natives and burning villages, harassing, abusing women and children, and scalping so whites will in turn kill innocent Indians; and tribal land treaty betrayals by whites, and, of course, explosions. There's run-away trains carrying terrified, hymn-singing passengers; locomotives pulling gondola cars filled with silver nuggets plunging from burning bridges into a river.  Rebecca Reid (simpering Ruth Wilson), Dan's widow, executes some Perils of Pauline bits.  In one, she hangs off a speeding train by her fingernails, flapping like a flag in a high wind.  (She and John had history before he'd  left for California, so Dan took up the slack.) She has a prepubescent son who ends up getting the legendary silver bullet to the Lone Ranger in the nick of time!

The requisite top-of-the-train chases as it hurtles along includes one of the Lone Ranger on a galloping Silver, either running from or towards the menacing, ever-present villain: evil, scar-faced, stringy haired, determined Butch Cavendish,   Then, there's Cole's political shenanigans about the building of the railroad across the plains, connecting east and west, assisted by Union soldiers, led by Captain Jay Fuller (Barry Pepper).  "If these men represent the law, I'd rather be an outlaw," intones the Lone Ranger.

Helena Bonham Carter as Red Harrington

Helena Bonhom-Carter plays the town Madam, fittingly named Red Harrington, with a messy, out-sized bird's nest of bright red hair.  The interior scene of her ostentatiously tricked-out bordello reminded me of the one in "Gangs of New York"- bawdy, lewd, salacious and raucous.  Her role, typically, is to assist the good guys in every way possible, even employing the weapon hidden in the heel of her red boot on her ivory, artificial leg.

Political, cultural, and social activists, suspend your activism, sit back, relax, and enjoy this rollicking, yet at times, haunting, yarn.

This film could not possibly end without you know what (if you are not up on your Lone Ranger lore, I leave you to discover what that is).  To which Tonto warns sagaciously, "Do not ever say that again."

The Lone Ranger and Silver

OPPRESSION DEADENS THE SOUL: 2 Films by Pablo Larraín

Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín's most recent film is "No," starring Gael Garcia Bernal, which I have not yet seen.  It was in theatres for a week, then seemed to just disappear.  It may well be Larraín's final installment in a trilogy about the assassination of Salvador Allende and Augusto Pinochet's 17 year regime in Chile.  The first two are "Tony Manero" and "Post Mortem."  Over the past few days I watched both  and came away haunted and depressed.  All three films were made in the past five years, but look much older as though Larraín eschewed recent film-making technology.

Alfredo Castro as Tony Manero

TONY MANERO (2008)

Larraín shoots a bleak palette and uses no soundtrack save for ambient noise in around the locations, the radio, CD player, and live music.  "Tony Manero" set during the Pinochet reign,  stars Alfredo Castro (also one of the writers) as Raul Peralta, a soulless, shell of a skinny, middle-aged, impotent man who is obsessed with the John Travolta character of Tony Manero in "Saturday Night Fever".   Raul lives in a seedy neighborhood where he rents a room from an older, blowzy woman, Wilma (Elsa Poblete).  The other tenant is his girlfriend Cony (Ampuro Noguero), who has a teen-age daughter, Pauli, and an adolescent son.  Their quarters are above a cheap nightclub run by Wilma, where Raul, Cuyo, Pauli's boyfriend, and Cony perform sleazy, amateurish dances to recorded music. So obsessed is Raul with Manero that he goes to the neighborhood movie house several times to see Travolta in action.  He leans forward, eyes moist with tears, reciting every word as the characters speak them.  He goes to a casting call for a Tony Manero look alike contest to be broadcast on TV; he gets the dates mixed up and discovers it's for Chuck Norris, but finagles his way to sign up for next week's call for Manero.

Castro is very thin and wiry,with a sad sack face, droopy eyes and bags.  His hair is a lank, brownish grey.   He bears a slight resemblance to actor/activist/narrator Peter Coyote. Castro plays Raul as a totally hollow man, a cypher, an expressionless zombie.   He shows absolutely no emotion- not even when ruthlessly destroying property or committing the most shocking murders to further his Manero image.  The theatre proprietor makes the fatal mistake of switching from "Fever" to "Grease."  Same actor, Raul is told, but that's not the point.  Raul is insanely focused on becoming that character.   He has a white suit made to order and carries it around in a garment bag. He runs around, robbing and manipulating people to do his bidding, first befriending the weak and vulnerable with smarmy charm.  He comes to the aid of a woman being purse-snatched.  He sees that she gets home.  The result is that she'd have been better off dealing with the purse snatchers.   The women with whom he lives seem to adore him.  Why? Desperate people do desperate things?  Wilma wants to run away with him; Cony is all over him, even Pauli succumbs.   Throughout the the film, there are scenes of Pinochet's thugs carrying  out witch hunts, snatching people off the streets.   In one, on a piece of deserted, vacant, rubble-strewn land, the thugs leave their victim's body lying in the shrubs.  Peralta had hidden from them, watching.  When they leave, he goes through the corpse's pockets, takes its money and watch.

Things come to a head when Goyo, Pauli's boyfriend, signs up for the Manero contest, too.  He makes the mistake of modeling  his suit in front of the others.  Goyo, played by Hector Morales, looks more like John Travolta than Raul could only dream of.  The night before the contest, Raul soils Goyo's suit in the most sickening way you can imagine.  The day of the contest, Pinochet's thugs barge into their home, browbeat  Pauli, Cony, and Wilma, shove them against walls, and shout at them to "name names."  Goyo walks in on the fracas, complaining about the mess Raul made of his suit only to be ordered to shut up and sit down.  Peralta, in his pristine white suit, black shirt; hair blackened and combed a la Travolta, hides in a secret space under the stairs; he manages to sneak away to the contest, leaving the others in the hands of Pinochet's men.  Once there, he tries to jump the line, but fails.  He is second to last to compete.  Unbelievably, it's a close call.  Peralta does exude an atom of charisma and executes all the right moves, but without passion.   The film ends abruptly when he gets on the same bus as the winner and his girlfriend.  Knowing what he did to get this far, you can probably guess what's in store for this innocent, happy couple.

I feel that Larrain used this film as a symbol for what went on during the Pinochet years.  The character of Raul Peralta represents the mindless atrocities that regime wreaked on innocent people.  Pinochet, USA puppet, aided by our CIA and Henry Kissinger, had Allende assassinated and tried to to make it look like suicide, which is the subject of "Post Mortem," which follows, though looked at obliquely, as did "Tony Manero."

Alfredo Castro and Ampuro Neguero

POST MORTEM (2010)

Chile, 1973, during the last days of Salvador Allende's presidency.  Augusto Pinochet was set to become dictator and was already having people who oppose him as well as communists, sympathizers, and suspected communists "disappeared."  Alfredo Castro plays Mario Cornejo, an autopsy transcriber at a morgue's recording office.  He types up notes on a manual typewriter as the medical examiner performs autopsies and dictates the findings.  The opening scenes are quite grisly, showing none of the fresh-looking bodies one sees on popular TV police procedurals.  These, laid out on a slab, are a deathly grey.  The ME cuts them open and flaps the flesh aside, revealing greyish-brown clumps of organs.  Some of the bodies are morbidly obese.

Cornejo lives alone, across the street from a couple of women, one of whom is a burlesque dancer, Nancy Puelma (Antonio Zegers).  Cornejo's love for her is unrequited.  He hears about the arrest of her brother and father, a prominent Communist and Salvador Allende supporter.  When Nancy unaccountably disappears on Sept. 11, 1973  (Chile's 9/11), after a violent Army raid on her family's home, and others, he commiserates with her roommate, Sandra (Ampuro Neguero), and begins his fruitless search for her.  In one scene, Sandra unexpectedly visits Mario; he fixes her a simple meal of rice and an egg.  They sit in silence for a minute or so, then both begin sobbing quietly, unashamedly, which goes on for what seems like several minutes.  It is as if all the sorrow of the loved ones that Pinochet had murdered and disappeared that fateful day is contained in these two beings.

There are scenes of Mario and his morgue co-workers riding along in an open cart, picking up bodies.  There are so many, now, they slide off the cart on to the street.  The morgue is overwhelmed; they can't keep up so are reduced to just noting where the bullet entrance and exit wounds are.  It is as this point that one's loyalty is measured.  Obeying an order from an army officer, Cornejo is told, to his surprise, that he is now a member of the Chilean army.  Any one who balks is executed.  In a scene filmed in a hospital corridor, a respected doctor with whom Cornejo had worked resists a superior colleague's orders.  Shockingly, the superior pulls a gun from his lab coat and shoots his colleague point blank.

Towards the film's end, a fully, dressed, uniformed body is brought in.  The lower half of its face has been shot off, making the corpse unidentifiable.  The chief ME orders Cornejo to transcribe his notes, but his typewriter is missing.  He's told to use another.  He says he will try, but it's electric.  He's never typed on one.  The camera zeros in on the corpse's head and we see that the lower half is hamburger.  Fortunately, Larraín used the same bleak, washed out palette as in "Manero" so we are spared the color of blood and gore.   As the assistants cut away, one by one, they lay down their instruments and say, "We can't do this,"  and walk away, some in tears.   Cornejo pecks away at the keys slowly.  He's not keeping up and apologizes.  An army officer takes over, typing skillfully.  The cause of death is discussed.  The doctor concludes that the death was an assassination, made to look like a suicide.  With this we know that they are performing Allende's autopsy.

As Mario and Sandra's friendship grows, she becomes demanding.  She is hunted by Pinochet's men.  Mario agrees to hide her in a niche behind a brick wall, which he covers with a wooden wardrobe.  Cornejo takes care of her cat.  She wants this, she order, and "Mario, get me that."  Her demands becomes too much for this simple man.  The final straw is that she wants a radio.  He unplugs his own from the wall, brings it to the niche.  "I need one with batteries!" she shouts.  Cornejo pushes the wardrobe back over the niche.  What follows is mesmerizing. The camera stays on the wooden wardrobe, the  brick wall for a few seconds.  Cornejo walks into the frame carrying an empty bookcase which he shoves in front of the wardrobe.  Larraín hold the frame as Cornejo walks in and out of it, each time tossing more wooden chairs, bookcases, and tables on top of the growing pile.  Cornejo walks out of the frame one last time.  The scene freezes, the credits roll.  Again, we don't know what happens, but whatever it is, it won't be pretty.  So ends the second of Pablo Larrain's films symbolizing Augusto Pinochet's reign: that of a a ruthless, meglo-maniacal dictator, driving the oppressed to desperation.

Look for a review of "No," the final link in Larraín 's Pinochet trilogy,  soon.





  

"OBLIVION" and "THE COMPANY YOU KEEP": Briefs.

OBLIVION

Jack's Home in Space

"Oblivion" is an entertaining yet thoughtful film which has us pondering:  what will happen to humans once we kill  Earth and all living things by blanketing the precious planet with deadly CO2?  It stars Tom Cruise in yet another space, sci fi thriller, written by Karl Gajusek and Michael Arndt, directed by Joseph Kosinski.

It's the year 2077.  We find Jack (Tom Cruise) living in a glass box, with the coolest swimming pool ever suspended below. It is cantilevered  by a stainless steel leg over some asteroid orbiting a decimated, dessicated Earth.  Jack lives here with his wife (?), Victoria aka "Vicky," played by Andrea Riseborough.  Jack, a scientist/homeland security agent of sorts, is ordered by Sally (Melissa Leo), a bossy, snarky-voiced face on a screen ("Are you an effective team?"), on missions back on Earth to continue searching for any natural resources.  Vicky maps out Jack's intended location on a table top composed of screens, charts, maps, and pictures that she manipulates with a swipe of a well manicured hand. 

But Jack suffers occasional  flashbacks of images of New York circa 2013  and of a smiling dark-haired woman.  He tells Vicky; she says that can't be happening; you've undergone Memory Wipes (which sounds like something you'd find in Walgreens next to adult diapers).  Sally orders Jack back to Earth, which died due to global warming.   Jack, in a silver space suit, takes off in his shuttle.  Accompanying  him are spherical drones that resemble Chinese Demons, which scan foreign stuff and shoot anything down that doesn't compute. They're not stealthy and sneaky, like today's drones (which yah gotta admit- hate 'em, I know- they're kinda groovy lookin').   As they rise up from behind hills and over canyons, these drones make horrible, loud, grinding sounds like stripped gears on a tractor hauling eight-wheelers.  In one suspenseful scene, one even attempts to assassinate Jack. 

Angry Drones

As Jack's flashbacks recur, he begins to question his identity- who is the woman?  On one harrowing mission he discovers a tribe of humans who never left Earth led by none other than white-haired Morgan Freeman, in round shades with blinder-sides, playing a wise (what else) character named Beech.  With his pony-tailed, right-hand man, Sykes (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), they live practically underground in deep, dark caves, out of drone range.  Jack swears not to betray them.

Jack shuts off his tracking devices so neither Vicky nor Sally can find him and flies to his secret hiding place on Earth- an idyllic, Walden Pond like arrangement, unknown to anyone but Jack.  He goes there to think about stuff and to try to recreate memories of his life on Earth.  On his way back to space, he and his drones discover a crashed space ship strewn about with space pods containing humans in suspended animation.   As he peers into each pod's face plate, he sees THE WOMAN! Julia, played by Olga Kurylenko.  He checks her status and discovers she's been asleep since 2050, seventeen years.  The year everyone had to evacuate planet Earth.  He must save her!  However, the drones go into high dudgeon and blast away at the pods.  Jack blasts the drones before they can blast the woman's pod.  He manages to bring her back to his space pad, shooting his way out of canyons and valleys, downing drones every which way and it's like watching him play a video game (this happens a lot during this film).

Once home, Jack revives her.  Suddenly, the film is about relationships: Vicky is jealous.  But, hey, she is just part of his team, not a real wife, I mean, after all!  Especially after Julia helps him remember that they are married.  After a lot of suspenseful and life-threatening moments, including Sally's thwarted commands, Jack and Julia escape.  He takes her to his secret lair and leaves her.   Several years pass.  She and a toddler are tending a garden.   She senses something behind those trees.  Is she frightened?  Does she try to protect her child?  No.  Just curious.  The trees part-  there's Sykes followed by Beech.  Behind them are all these shabby humans.  I wondered: are they all going to live in that tiny area?  Can Julia's kitchen garden support them all?  And why isn't Jack with them?  Ta Da!  The humans part and who should step into view?


THE COMPANY YOU KEEP

Robert Redford and Jackie Evancho

"The Company You Keep", directed by Robert Redford, written by Lem Dobbs, based on the novel by Neil Gordon, starring Robert Redford, Susan Sarandon, Shia LaBeouf, and Terrence Howard.

I made a special effort to see this film before it left the theatres.  Despite its stellar cast, it didn't do so well at the box office.  Should you have been aware of the turmoil of the '60s and '70s with the Vietnam war protests, hippie counterculture, radical anti-war activists, Kent State shootings, and riots, this film might interest you as it did me.  It should interest others because of its historical background and as a measure of how things have changed.  It's a fictional account of a group of members of the Weather Underground, one of whom allegedly shot and killed a security guard in a bank in Michigan.  Before they could be arrested and brought to trial, they managed to disappear in plain sight for thirty years.  Yes, they were domestic terrorists who felt that the only way to stop the war, stop the shooting of innocent people here and in Vietnam, was through violent protests, since marches and the burning of draft cards, the thousands who protested at anti-war demonstrations, seemed to have no impact.  Today, the only demonstrations of any significance were those against the bombing of Afghanistan in 200l.  We are still there twelve years later.

"The Company You Keep" opens on a typical suburban scene of a husband taking his kids to school, saying goodbye to his wife doing the breakfast dishes.  Except, the look he gives her is freighted with meaning.  His wife is the shooter, Sharon Solarz (Suzanne Sarandon), a former member, who, at the time, implicated Nick Sloan (Redford).   Tired of hiding her real identity, she gives herself up to the FBI.  She can't implicate anyone else because she has no idea of where they live or who they've become.  The FBI, lead by Special Agent Cornelius (the ever wonderful, honey-voiced Terrence Howard) picks up any leads to find them.   Shia LaBeouf plays Ben Shepard, a hot shot reporter (to appeal to a younger audience?)  for the Albany Sun Times.  Shepard had seen an article in a rival paper about Solarz arrest; now nothing will stop him in his quest to be the first to get the scoop on these people. His boss, Ray Fuller (Stanley Tucci) keeps a tight rein on the budget, hampering his efforts. 

Terrence Howard as FBI Agent Cornelius.

Shaggy haired, craggy Jim Grant is an alias for Nick Sloan.   Grant is a successful attorney, a widower with a young daughter, Isabel, played by Jackie Evancho of  America's Got Talent fame.  Hearing of Solarz's arrest, he farms his daughter off to his brother, Daniel (the always watchable Chris Cooper) in a suspenseful scene involving an FBI stake out in a hotel.  Though asked to defend her, he won't fearing doing so will put his and his daughter's life in jeopardy.  Preparing to flee from the home and life he has built with his late wife, he goes in the closet and hauls out his trademark leather jacket, the one the authorities now use to track him down.   Why?  (The photos in the film are of Redford in "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.")  As the film follows Sloan, it segues into scenes with other members, such as Mimi (Julie Christie).  Mimi was Grant's lover with whom he had a daughter.  They had given her up as an infant up to a trusted friend, Henry Osborne, played by Brendan Gleeson.  All this unfolds towards the end, following Shepard's dogged investigative reporting.  Mimi's been hiding out with MacLeod (Sam Elliott) in a beautiful home on a lake.  She has an alibi for Sloan as they were together at the time of the shooting and is the only one who can clear his name.  The other members are revealed: Donal Fitzgerald (gravel-voiced Nick Nolte), who owns a business,  and Jed Lewis (Richard Jenkins), now a tenured professor.  As the film progresses, you wonder if Sloan will find Mimi, and will she have the guts to stand by him and help clear his name for his daughter's sake?

Though rather slow-paced and methodical, which is Redford's style, "Company" keeps your interest.  It's shot in his signature golden-green hues, rolling hills and leafy streets, old, well-maintained homes, rustic boatyards, and sun shimmering on lakes.  Thankfully, he kept scenes of the FBI guys racing around in their dark outfits, shades, and SUVs to a minimum.  Shia LaBeouf provides enough heightened activity.  This is a movie worth seeing.  If you can't catch it while it's still in theatres, see it on DVD or by other means.

JACKIE ROBINSON: BASEBALL LEGEND

Chadwick Boseman  as Jackie Robinson and Harrison Ford as Branch Rickey

              

“42” is a fictional film biography written and directed by Brian Helgeland, starring Chadwick Boseman, Harrison Ford, and Nicole Beharie.  It covers the years 1945 to 1947 in the life of baseball legend, Jackie Robinson, when he rose from the Kansas City Monarchs, a Negro League team, to play with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Chadwick Boseman, whom Helgeland cast as Robinson, bears an uncanny resemblance to the young athlete.  Boseman studied archival news clips, read countless sports articles about Robinson.  He spent endless hours playing baseball, capturing his unique style.

After a successful career with the Monarchs, Robinson was signed by Branch Rickey, a Bible quoting Methodist (played by Harrison Ford, now in his grumpy-old-man stage), to play on the all white Canadian Montreal Royals, the first Black on the team.  Later, Rickey moved him up to the Major League’s Brooklyn Dodgers, which he owned.

Segregation and prejudice were rife at the time of Robinson’s rise in major league baseball, issues which are still present, despite decades-old laws and the election of a Black president.  Yet Rickey knew that signing Robinson would create controversy, which meant publicity as well as bucks. Christopher Meloni (Law and Order) plays a convincing Leo Durocher, the team’s manager, who was at odds with Rickey about Robinson, as was Rickey’s right-hand man, Harold (T.R. Night of The Good Wife).  At one point in the film, Robinson and his wife, Rachael (Nicole Beharie), want to fly from Daytona Beach, Florida to Pasadena, California, where they live.  In the airport to buy tickets, Rachael says: “That’s the first time I’ve seen that,” pointing to a “Whites Only” sign on the bathroom door.  Then they’re told the flight is full as they see a white couple allowed on, so they end up taking Greyhound.

Though Robinson has experienced racism, in the majors it is relentless. Jibes, jeers, racial slurs come not only from baseball fans and players on other teams- pitchers who bean him, basemen who purposely cleat him when he reaches the bag, but from some members of his own team, who openly express their hatred. 

Many team members were from the South and thought nothing of their despicable treatment of Blacks. It was how you were raised.  Some threaten to quit if Robinson stays, especially when denied entry into hotels that once had welcomed the Dodgers.  Durocher tells them, "I do not care if the guy is yellow or black, or if he has stripes like a fuckin' zebra. I'm the manager of this team, and I say he plays. What's more, I say he can make us all rich. And if any of you cannot use the money, I will see that you are all traded."  Robinson is neither weak nor submissive.  He uses logic, tact, and smarts to assert himself when refused anything he feels he has a right to as a human being, and rarely gets physical or emotional.

Alan Tudyk, from the TV series, Firefly, plays Ben Chapman the manager of the Philadelphia Phillies.  When Robinson’s up at bat, Chapman slings a continuous verbal barrage of racial epithets at him.  Robinson seethes, but does not react until Chapman spews one so egregious, he heads for the tunnel leading to the dressing room, where out of sight he falls apart. Rickey goes to talk to him.   It is one of the most compelling moments in the film. Another is a scene in the grandstands of a white father and his young son who hears his father hurl racial slurs at Robinson; at first the boy joins him, but by the end of the game, you see that his conscience has been elevated.  Soon, Jackie’s team-mates rally around him.

 Pee Wee Reese (Lucas Black)  demonstrates his support for Robinson

Robinson’s presence on the field became polarizing not only there but also in American society. The threat of violence was palpable for him and his family, threatening letters were sent. Branch Rickey can’t protect him, but only give him pep talks and trust that Robinson will maintain his stoicism 

Sportswriter Wendell Smith (Andre Holland), covers his career in the Black newspaper, The Pittsburgh Courier. Smith travels with and suffers the same ignominies as Robinson.  Smith is banned from the Press Box where white reporters clack away on their typewriters, while Smith sits in the stands with his portable on his knees (an archaic version of a laptop).   Except for Ebony, established in 1945, print media was almost completely segregated; only a handful of African-Americans were journalists at major white newspapers.

So, How far have we really come since the 1940s, especially now, with a Black man in the White House?  Not very, considering the dozens of Blacks who were killed in race riots in Detroit and Harlem in 1943; killed in foreign countries defending their “freedom” during WWII in a segregated military.  There were laws to secure voting rights and abolish segregation on interstate transport; still, doing both in the South was risky.  The sixties saw lunch-counter sit-ins. The bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama made the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. a national figure. Huey Newton and Bobby Seale founded The Black Panther Party, in Oakland, California (which ended badly).

Jackie Robinson advocated openly for civil rights, often alongside King,and became a leader in the NAACP.  (King described Robinson as “a freedom rider before freedom rides.”)  As important a figure as Robinson was in the movement, he testified against actor Paul Robeson at the Committee for Un-American Activities, fearing not complying would jeopardize his career.  He told the Committee, in part, “Every single Negro who is worth his salt is going to resent slurs and discrimination because of his race, and he’s going to use every bit of intelligence he has to stop it. This has got absolutely nothing to do with what Communists may or may not do. Blacks were stirred up long before there was a CP and will be stirred up after unless Jim Crow has disappeared. I haven’t any comment to make except that the statement [about Blacks refusing to fight the USSR]—if Mr. Robeson actually made it—sounds very silly to me. Negroes have too much invested in America to throw it away for a siren song sung in bass.” Jamilah King, Colorlines, News for Action, April 12, 2013.

 Later in life, he founded the only Black owned bank, and became a board member of a large white-owned corporation. He served on the boards of the NAACP and the Congress for Racial Equality, led rallies at the invitation of civil rights leaders, and accepted the first vice presidency of Rev. Jesse Jackson’s PUSH Coalition. He once told a New York Times reporter in 1969 that he “wouldn’t fly the flag on the Fourth of July or any other day. When I see a car with a flag pasted on it, I figure the guy behind the wheel isn’t my friend.” JK, Colorlines.

Schools were desegregated but not without cost.  President Eisenhower dispatched more than 1,000 paratroopers to enforce a court order in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957.  Blacks and their supporters were slaughtered indiscriminately. Horrific crimes continued, with lynching the most egregious.  All across the former Confederacy, Blacks, who were suspected of crimes against whites— or even what were considered "offenses," were tortured, hanged and burned to death by the thousands.  Chicago-raised, fourteen year old Emmett Till was murdered in Mississippi, for allegedly whistling at a white woman. 

 

In the 1950 and sixties, outspoken NAACP leaders who championed voters rights, like Medgar Evers, were assassinated.  Then six years after gaining public attention in a television documentary on the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965. In a 1963 letter to Malcolm X, Robinson wrote, “America is not perfect by a long shot, but I happen to like it here and will do all I can to help make it the kind of place where my chlildren and theirs can live in dignity.”  Yet he wrote in a 1972 biography published shortly before his death: “I cannot stand and sing the [national] anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white man’s world.” Colorlines, Jan. 2013.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, causing riots resulting in many deaths in major cities.  Klansmen bombed a church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four young black girls.  More people were killed in race riots in New Jersey and Detroit.  

Despite anti-lynching laws, Blacks were still being hung, mostly in Southern States. In an essay Without Sanctuary, historian Leon F. Litwack wrote that between 1882 and 1968, at least 4,742 African Americans had been lynched.  In 1981 Michael Donald was murdered by two Ku Klux Klan members in Alabama.  It is sometimes referred to as the last recorded lynching in the United States.

Yet, prominent Black politicians and lawmen were being elected to the Senate, appointed to the Supreme Court, and elected mayor in major cities, and have run for President, including Shirley Chisolm, the first Black woman.

However:  Of the 535 voting members of the 113th Congress, 359 are white men. In other words, white men— who comprised 34 percent of voters in the 2012 election— still occupy 67 percent of the seats in Congress. (From Colorlines, by Sally Kohn.)

In 2009, Democrat Barack Obama became the first African American to successfully run for president and win, yet has done little to better the lives of Blacks compared to white Texan, President Lyndon Johnson; Texas-born, former military general, Dwight Eisenhower, a white Republican; and Harry Truman, a white Democrat from Missouri. Obama being president doesn’t make the lives of all people of color equal to those of so-called “Whites,” in education, health care, housing, employment, and probably most important- justice.

African Americans are incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of whites. One in six black men had been incarcerated as of 2001. If current trends continue, one in three black males born today can expect to spend time in prison during his lifetime. One in 100 African American women are in prison. Yes, Jackie Robinson became the first African-American Major League baseball player, but the idea that he improved himself for the benefit of whites, puts the burden of change on people of color rather than on the institutions that, historically, have made racism and discrimination law in white America.

42 ends on a feel-good note as Robinson is revered and celebrated wherever he goes, and kids- black and white- imitate him on the sand lots.  You walk away with a feeling similar to that felt by voters who elected Obama to the White House. “Obama[s] told a crowd gathered inside the State Dining Room that ‘everybody in this country needs to see this movie.’” (JK, Colorlines.)

The film is designed to make everyone happy (except white supremacists and racial bigots): All is right with the world and the sun is shining in America. 

Note: This review can be also read in an abridged format at www.socialistaction.org

"AMOUR" and "QUARTET" "Old age ain't for sissies," Bette Davis

AMOUR's Directer Michael Haneke with Riva, and Trintignant

Should Amour and Quartet ever appear on a double bill (I dare them), see Quartet last, you'll leave the theatre with hope and joy instead of depression, dread, or, in horror.  Both films had been nominated for Academy Awards in various categories so are still playing in some art houses (check the listings), or you can get them on Netflix.   They are excellent portrayals of the lives of the elderly.  Amour, a French film with English subtitles, written and directed by Michael Haneke, stars Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva.  Haneke is known for dark, disturbing flicks such as White Ribbon, set in a small village in Germany dealing with the corruption of repressed children of strict, moralistic parents. Trintignant is best known for the political film Z, and And God Created Woman (with Bridgette Bardot).  Riva's earlier and best known films (in America) are Three Colors:  Blue, a trilogy; and Hiroshima, mon Amour.  She was nominated for an Academy Award for her role as Anne in Amour, and should have won.

Amour tells the story of a talented, musical couple in their eighties, Anne (Riva) and Georges (Trintignant), who have retired and now teach music privately.  The film opens with the concierge, police, and detectives entering the couple's flat.  They search cluttered rooms- the kitchen with dirty dishes in the sink and a half-eaten meal on the table.  A detective holds his hand over his nose.  Not a good sign.  Breaking through a door that had been sealed with packing tape, they discover the cause of the bad odor- a body, fully dressed, lying on a bed.  The film then flashes back to a concert given by one of Anne's former students who's become famous.  Haneke, rather than show the pianist at work, focusses on the audience in a wide shot.  I searched  for the couple, detecting them by Trintignant's unmistakable leonine head, in the 3rd or 4th row center.  Except for a few scenes, most of the film was shot in rich brown and gold tones in the couple's spacious but modest Paris flat situated in an old neighborhood.

The first hint of what's in store takes place at breakfast where the couple, in their robes, sit at a small table in a cramped kitchen, chatting amiably.   Suddenly, Anne doesn't respond, but stares vacantly.  Alarmed, Georges touches her cheek, then gets a wet towel from the sink, leaving the water running.  He pats her face and neck.  Still no response.   He phones for help from another room and hears the water being shut off.   Back in the kitchen, Anne berates him for not turning off the water.  She remembers absolutely nothing about what just happened.

Quartet, a British film, in English with British accents (ha ha), is Dustin Hoffman's directorial debut.  It was was originally a play by Ronald Harwood, who also wrote the screenplay.  The movie is also about elderly musicians but whose lives are completely different.  They've retired to a luxurious assisted-living home set in the English countryside.   The residence is tantamount to a four-star hotel where you take your meals in a beautifully appointed dining room while maids tidy up the rooms.  In Amour, Anne and Georges have no outside help save for the concierge, who does their shopping.

Things go from bad to worse when Anne suffers a stroke that leaves her partially paralyzed; attendants wheel her home from the hospital while Georges watches men set up her hospital bed.  He pushes her from room to room until she upgrades to electric and learns to maneuver about the flat, barely fitting through narrow passageways.  She can sit in her chair, lie in bed, converse with him, and read.  Yet he must lift her from chair to bed and help her from the toilet when she calls, "I'm through!"  Frail and elderly himself, he struggles with her, breathing hard.   At times he just stands there.  "Stop peering at me!" she barks.  You sense his helplessness and her frustration.  Anne's famous student pays a visit which turns awkward.  The only  people they see are the concierge and her husband.  Another stroke leaves her bedridden and barely able to speak.  Georges hires a nurse for a few hours a day; she shows him how to change her diapers, a difficult scene to watch;  he fires one nurse for treating his wife roughly and insensitively.

The QUARTET: Connolly, Smith, Courtenay, and Collins

The title, Quartet, is based on four opera stars, Cissy Robson, Wilf Bond, Reginald Paget, and Jean Horton,  played by Pauline Collins, Billy Connolly, Tom Courtenay, and Maggie Smith, respectively, who became famous singing the quartet from Rigoletto.  A best-selling CD came out, giving them a wider audience.   Unlike Haneke, Hoffman puts distance between the unsettling, very real aspects of aging, and the audience.  If someone has a stroke, you watch with the residents through a curtained window as the victim is trundled away on a gurney to an ambulance.

Screenwriter Harwood touches on the onset of Alzheimer's in the character of Cissy Robson.  Her illness is exacerbated by bitchy ex-opera diva, Jean Horton.   There are scenes of musicians getting together to play their instruments, and divas and divos singing arias in their rooms.  Horton, who shows up about a third of the way into the film, is loathe to be relegated to the retirement home, knowing she'll have to face sniping, slights, and jealousies harbored for decades.  She has history with Paget (Tom Courtenay) to whom she was married for a few hours, decades ago.  Others know of their past and gossip deliciously. Some retirees, stuck in their by-gone glories, listen to their recordings repeatedly, longingly.  Others are happy to be alive and living with creative, vibrant elders.

The young staff is both cheeky and efficient.  We could call Wilf Bond "a dirty old man" if the female staff reacted to him as one, but they don't.  They joke about age-related infirmities, impotence, and diseases with fatalistic acceptance. When relatives come to visit, they include other residents in their conversations and encourage their children to greet them.  The equivalent of pool-boys maintain the well-manicured garden; they banter with the men, flirt with the staff, as well as female residents; some delight in the attention.

One issue I had with Amour is its depressing claustrophobic atmosphere.  Would that Haneke had included a scene or two of Georges taking Anne out for a walk in her wheelchair around the leafy neighborhood.  The only lightness occurs during her rare lucid moments when she reminisces with him about their past, or when they sing a phrase or two from a favorite song.   Thankfully, Haneke stayed away from any kind of smarmy soundtrack to clue us in on how we should feel.  In the silence, the audience hears sad, disturbing sounds: laborious breathing, uneven, shuffling footsteps, gasps, and groans.  Before Anne became bedridden, the couple sat in the living room, not talking, but reading and listening to music, surrounded by books, sculptures, and prints of well-known impressionist paintings.

Their selfish daughter, Eva, played by Isabelle Huppert, and seemingly clueless son-in-law, Geoff (William Shemill), who live abroad, come to visit when they are in Paris.   Sitting by Anne's bedside, Eva talks about her parent's property and other financial matters; Anne is flat on her back, staring up at the ceiling.  Prompted to speak, she utters a few nonsensical words, which sends Eva into the study, to complain to her father that her mother is "speaking gibberish."  On another brief visit, Eva angers Georges by suggesting solutions, questioning why Anne isn't in the hospital.   He tells her, she had made it clear she did not want to end up in one.  There are heartbreaking scenes of Georges trying to read or listen to music in the living room while Anne lies in bed, moaning in pain.

Back to Quartet:   The home needs major repairs or it will close.  To save it, the residents must raise money, so in true Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney style, they hold a concert.  Two of the singers had been bawdy pop song artists and music hall comedians.  The director, flamboyant, garrulous Cedric Livingston (Michael Gabon), swanning about in a robe and embroidered pill-box hat, cringes at this prospect feeling that their act will sully the event.  Horton balks at reprising a past success, but through a kind of reconciliation with Paget, finally agrees.  Cissy's stage fright brings on a memory lapse, but is saved by Horton's kind ministrations. The competent, young manager of the home, Dr. Lucy Cogan (Sheridan Smith), gives a thank you speech.  The evening concert goes on in front of a huge crowd.  The camera dollies back on a the exterior of the home- windows shining golden from every room- as the strains of the quartet from Rigoletto soar over the grounds and into the night air.  Quartet was based on real people and real events which are revealed during the final credits.  If this film is any indication of Hoffman's directorial skills, I hope it won't be his last.

Amour leaves a few questions unanswered.  Where was Georges in the opening scene? And where is he now?  The movie ends with Eva walking through the clean, well-ordered flat.  When and why is she there? You get nothing from her on her feelings of what had happened to her parents.  Regardless, it's an engaging, thoughtful, realistic film- an unsettling look at an unavoidable event that we all must face, but hopefully not in the way that Anne did.  Unless we die young; yet even then-

To the writers' credit, no character in either film, whether elderly or not, used the appalling phrase: "senior citizen."  Ever.

"Stand Up Guys" directed by Fisher Stevens, written by Noah Haidle.

Starring Al Pacino, Christopher Walken, and Alan Arkin.

Okay.  I saw this film on a double bill with "Side Effects."  "Stand Up Guys" was on first.  The review in the SF Chronicle had the little guy jumping out of his chair and so much as said it was a funny take on old, ex-mob guys.  I asked myself, How could it lose with the trio of Al Pacino, Christopher Walken, and Alan Arkin?  So I left the dishes in the sink, threw on some clothes, raced out of the house and got there just in time.

Ends up "Stand Up Guys" is a film for men going through a mid-life crises who feel that their life didn't turn out like they expected.  They don't like themselves and wonder what life holds for them in the future.  So they go to this film and see these old guys in their seventies or eighties re-living their former life. Valentino-who insists on being called "Val" (Al Pacino with a shock of jet-black hair and the eyes of a sick bloodhound)- has just spent 28 years in prison for killing a mob boss's son; and Doc, played by Christopher Walken.  Doc still has it and keeps his cool for the most part.  He is single, divorced, lives in a one room apartment with no view and a roll-away bed.  He spends his days hanging out in sleazy bars and greasy diners.  But he's an artist who specializes in painting sunsets (symbolic?).  Then there's Hirsch (Alan Arkin), who lives in an assisted-living facility, hooked up to an oxygen tank.   The premise is that Doc has been tagged by the mob boss with the unfortunate moniker, Claphands (played by mob-boss stereotype Mark Margolis) to kill the guy who axed his son by ten the next morning.  The guy happens to be Val, Doc's best friend back in the day and to this day swears his fealty. 

Val and Doc were once bad guys for a rival mob who had lots of women, money, and respect- the kind of respect mobsters demand from other mobsters if you value your life.  Doc, with a gun in his waistband, meets Val when he's released on parole, offers to let him crash on his daybed till he gets on his feet.  Val bad-mouths everything in Doc's place, even telling him that his prison cell had it all over Doc's "hovel" (I didn't believe it for a minute).  Once you know that Doc was sent to kill Val, you wonder why he doesn't do it then.  But the movie would've been over in less than ten minutes.  Still, that would have spared us 80 minutes of badly written dialogue, snail-like pacing, and cliché set-ups.

Christopher Walken, Alan Arkin and Al Pacino.

Val wants to "party"- get it?  Doc takes him to a brothel he once frequented, now run by the daughter of the former Madam, who looks like a school librarian.  The scene devolves into impotence, sex enhancement drugs, priapism, a visit to Emergency where the late-duty nurse is none other than Hirsch's daughter, Nina, played by- you guessed it- ER star Juliana Margulies (she must have taken the part as a favor, having better things to do such as her role as law partner on the successful TV series, "The Good Wife").  She tells Val and Doc about her father, so they sneak him out of the facility sans oxygen tank, after stealing the mob boss's honcho's souped-up car.  Seems Hirsch had been their driver.  They indulge in a bunch of bad guy hi-jinks: out-running cops, driving the wrong way down a freeway, and breaking into a pharmacy and stealing drugs (which is actually kind of funny- the drugs were for elder ills).

They hit a bar where Val tips the DJ to play something "old-school;" he sweet-talks a girl into dancing with him- a scene out of "Scent of a Woman."  Next the three caballeros visit the brothel.  Here's where one of the fantasies of the mid-life crises sufferers' in the audience comes true.  Hirsch had bragged about his sexual prowess and when he descends the staircase after having it on with two or three girls, including the former Madam's daughter, they follow him, pleading for him to come back, even offering to PAY him.  Gobbing his face and bald head with sloppy, noisy kisses.

Doc's granddaughter, Alex (Addison Timlin), works in the diner he frequents.  She doesn't know who he is. He leaves her a note, a set of keys, and his paintings.  Doc confesses to Val what he's up to.   Claphands's goons are after them.  At dawn, Val and Doc break into a haberdashery and rip off a couple of quality suits which they wear to complete their deed, looking like spiffy undertakers.  The ending is totally predictable.  Oh, yes, there is gun-play (Why is it called that?).  Lots of it.   Badly directed and written, this film cried out for Quentin Tarantino.  It couldda been a good flick.  It takes place in one night and was shot in a low-down, warehouse neighborhood.  The palette- interior and ex- is dark.  These "stand up guys" should just stand down.  Thank god "Side Effects" took the bad taste of "SUG" out of my brain.