FILM: Portrait of a Lady on Fire

Portrait of a Lady on Fire is a lustrously gorgeous period tale of passion between a painter and her elusive subject, the daughter of a countess on a remote island in Brittany. Héloïse (Adèle Haenel) refuses to sit for a portrait, hoping to forestall the inevitable arranged marriage it will lead to. Marianne (Noémie Merlant) is a painter summoned to pretend to be a walking companion for Héloïse, so she can study her and paint her furtively. The dialog is incisive but spare, and much is communicated with looks instead of words, which seems appropriate since one of the themes is how to capture someone in paint. While 8k film is not paint, it’s close, and director Céline Sciamma and cinematographer Claire Mathon use it exquisitely to capture the extraordinary actresses in an atmospheric and almost painterly way. It seems that what parts of the film were not filmed by candlelight were filmed at that golden hour before sunset when sunlight creates a magical glow on skin. The broody skies and dramatic island cliffs above tempestuous seas adeptly underscore the suspicion that turns to passion between these women who themselves could have stepped out of a Vermeer or Rembrandt painting. The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is an intriguing motif through the film – why did he look back? Did he make a poetic choice of memory over life? Did she ask him to turn around? And underlying that is the whole question of choice. The aristocratic daughter resents the lack of choice she has about the course of her life, while the painter seems in some ways to have more freedom, and even the servant girl has some choice about an unwanted pregnancy. (If Vermeer had ever painted a “maker of angels”, it would have looked like the stunning scene in this film.) But the most remarkable through line is the gaze between painter and model, between lover and lover. The gaze is so distinctively female in this work of art written and directed by a woman, and realized by a predominantly female cast and crew. When Héloïse asks Marianne to paint her a self-portrait to remember her by, the scene is itself an unforgettable portrait.

STAGE: What the Constitution Means to Me

Our Constitution, written over 200 years ago, is the most long-lived written constitution in history, and remains perhaps one of the few things nearly all Americans can agree on revering, even as we disagree sometimes vehemently on the specifics of its interpretation. That reverence and that tension are at the heart of the show What the Constitution Means to Me, an autobiographical memoir by Heidi Schreck, who recreates her experience as 15-year old girl delivering competitive speeches on the Constitution at VFW halls for scholarship prizes, then breaks into her present-day 45-year old self to make some more mature reflections on our founding document. Schreck performed her own play for a highly-regarded run in New York, while actress Maria Dizzia has very capably stepped into the role of “Heidi Schreck” for the touring production that we saw at the Mark Taper. In the first part, 15-year old Heidi breathlessly and enthusiastically expounds on her favorite amendments, the Ninth and the Fourteenth (admittedly some of my favorites too), and makes a personal connection (as was required by the contest rules) to her great-grandmother, a German immigrant mail-order bride. There is little to none of a “fourth wall” in this play. Heidi begins by addressing the audience, Shakespeare prologue style, asking us to engage in the re-enactment by pretending to be elderly men in a late 1980s VFW hall. While being “15-year old Heidi”, she occasionally pops out of character for a bit of commentary. This happens more and more, until at some point she drops the 15-year old altogether, and just talks to us directly as herself with 30 years more life experience. (There is some amusing playfulness with theatrical conventions around these transitions, like pointing out that she forgot to include a door in her recreation of the VFW stage, and poking fun at a secondary character who is stranded on the doorless stage when she decides, seemingly impromptu, to drop the fourth wall.) Here is where it gets more interesting as idealization of the Constitution gives way to a more mature realization of its imperfections and limitations as she confronts her own reproductive decisions, as she learns some shocking history of abuse endured by her mother, aunt, and grandmother, and as she rethinks what may really have befallen her immigrant great-grandmother who died at 36 of “melancholia”. The mature Heidi comes to question how well a 232-year old document can give women and other unprotected groups their due when the document doesn’t even mention them, and didn’t even originally envision them as included as citizens nor even as “the people”. At this point, the only logical next step is to stage a debate on the proposition to keep the Constitution or to abolish it and start over. A precocious actual 14-year old girl then comes on stage to engage in a lively debate with Heidi for the final part of the show, but not before putting the audience into the right frame of mind by dividing us with a thought-provoking show of hands. The debate is rapid-fire and compelling, and the winner, as judged by a random audience member, could be different on any given night. It certainly leaves you with something to think about. My favorite quote: "Justice Scalia said that he couldn't tell you what the Ninth Amendment meant if his life depended on it. And I guess it didn't." (The line is an early comic toss-off but with more profound meaning in the larger context of the play.)

Oh, and I forgot to mention the bonus: everyone in the audience was given a pocket Constitution to keep!

FILM: The Two Popes

I’m arguably a bit of a Catholophile, following with more-than-due interest for an atheist in what Popes have to say about things, perhaps because of how historically consequential the Catholic church has been, and how much weight it puts on reason in moral argument. Thus I watched with great interest the film The Two Popes (for which actors Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce were both justifiably nominated for Oscars), an imaginative portrayal of conversations that could have happened between Pope Benedict XVI and then-Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio (now Pope Francis). The Catholic Church, like most denominations today, is torn between traditionalists who fear change and modernists who would embrace it, and accordingly most followers of the Popes are generally either Benedict fans or Francis fans. It is not hard to guess where the filmmakers’ sympathies lie. Nonetheless, what I found most remarkable about the film is how it humanized both men. Benedict was portrayed complexly, as “God’s Rottweiler” (an earned reputation) and a gruff loner, but also as a man of real faith and concern for the future of his church, and with a capacity for humility and humanity in his own way. I liked that that came through even in small details, like Benedict’s instinct to kneel for confession, or his concern for long-waiting tourists when his presence in the Sistine Chapel threatens to delay its scheduled opening time. Bergoglio’s admirable humility was shown generously, but then he was knocked off his pedestal with an unflinching reckoning with his complicity in Argentina’s Dirty War and its desaparecidos. It is fitting and moving that a central theme in this film is confession and forgiveness, between these two, but also in one of the most moving Eucharists you may ever see. When you cut through all the theology and the debates, forgiveness is the crux of it, as it should be. Confession, better mutual understanding, forgiveness, and ultimately the forging of an unlikely but genuine friendship. I thank the film for offering me a more charitable view of Benedict, for whom I’ll confess to having a hardness in my heart. Like the late Justice Scalia, Benedict is a master of impressive scholarly arguments, but with just a few flaws and blind spots that turn out to make all the difference. How many times I dissected his edicts, finding myself in agreement with 95% of his logic, but coming to the opposite conclusion. Hopkins’ performance as Benedict was extraordinary, capturing him in nuance and complexity, and Pryce was excellent in embodying the humble but self-assured cardinal. The film was beautifully made, exploiting the grandeur of the Vatican and Castel Gandolfo, as well as many authentic locations in Argentina. The Sistine Chapel (or at least an exquisite facsimile created in Cinecitta Studios in Rome) is featured prominently and to great effect, both in long shots and cuts to close-up details. The gravity of its ancient majesty serves as foil for Bergoglio’s very different style. In an early scene, when Benedict (then Cardinal Ratzinger) and Bergoglio are both in the washroom about to go into conclave, Ratzinger asks in Latin, “what is that hymn you’re whistling?”, and Bergoglio replies, also in Latin, “Regina Chorus… per Abba” (Dancing Queen). This introduces the other major theme that runs through the film, modernity vs tradition, and on this score the film is faithful to both though partial to one. Whether these events really happened is pure speculation and imagination, though the writers maintained a fidelity to the characters, and much of their substantive dialog with each other about the place for change in the church is drawn from actual speeches and quotes, elegantly encapsulated. “If God doesn’t stay in one place, if He is moving, how can we find him?” Benedict asks. The search for God, how to know when you hear His voice, how to recognize His signs, is another running theme, beautifully discussed by both. In the end, it is gently suggested that the voice of God might just be found in a smart watch that prompts old men, for the sake of their heart health, “Beep-beep, don’t stop now! Keep moving! Keep moving!”

BOOKS: Find Me

We listened to André Aciman’s novel Find Me on a long road trip this weekend. We had both loved the film Call Me By Your Name, and I then read Aciman’s novel on which the film was based. This new novel is a sequel to the first (and there’s also buzz about a film sequel). I came to it having read some reviews, which were pointedly divergent, with some who loved it and some who found it very disappointing. In the end, I may agree with both. In this latest work, three separate sections visit Elio’s father Samuel, then Elio, then Oliver, at consequential points in their lives many years after the summer of the first novel, and, as with the first novel, there’s a coda where Elio and Oliver meet again. Time and timing is a running theme throughout, with ruminations on past roads not taken, and with romance across large age differences explored, with their inevitable “if I had met you when…”. Aciman keenly observes how certain events mark us, such that we may come back to them repeatedly, and may even observe “vigils” of certain places that we physically revisit because of their deep association with important memories. At one point, a peripheral character, a retired professor who still helps
students edit their theses, goes into a long tangent on his current project, a thesis about time. It’s an excuse to tell a series of short ironic vignettes about people who should have connected and might have connected but for the cruel tricks of time. The professor tells us that the student is really on to something, but they can’t quite figure out how to put it all together and conclude it. In retrospect, I think Aciman’s novel was even more like that thesis than he intended. There are beguiling characters here that mostly ring true, as well as lovely settings and references to classical arts and music that will delight the academically inclined. But those codas. I think with both novels, I would have loved them more perfectly if I’d have stopped short and not read the epilogs. But they just go so much against my own character, and against how I wanted his characters to be. I’m not one to dwell on roads not taken and things I can’t change, but Aciman and his characters thrive on it, it’s what animates them. I can’t deny the beautiful wistfulness of their Proustian meditations, nor can I deny that such characters can be true to life. I have known people whose early romantic experiences carved such deep grooves in them that they never recover. It’s strange that these two endings, so different from each other, both leave me with a nagging dissatisfaction. I’ve sometimes mused that perhaps an older and happier Shakespeare wrote A Winter’s Tale as a way to revisit Othello with an alternate ending. Each is satisfying and dissatisfying on different levels. Perhaps it’s the same with an older Aciman as he revisits his characters later in their lives.

FILM: 2020 Oscar-Nominated Shorts

Yesterday we enjoyed our tradition of screening the Oscar-nominated short films, both the live action and animated categories, and this year proved an enjoyable batch of nominees in both categories. On the live action front, unlike some years that have been unbearably heavy, we had a nice mix of heavy and light, thoughtful and funny. Une Soeur (A Sister) (Belgium) found us holding our collective breath as an emergency dispatch operator tries to help a woman who is being abducted. Brotherhood (Tunisia) explores the tensions in a rural family when a son who went off to fight with ISIS returns home from Syria with a pregnant and heavily-veiled bride. While the traditional family way of life is unfamiliar to most of us, the emotional dynamics of fathers, sons, mothers, and brothers are universal, as is the despair of the father when he realizes the consequences of a choice has made, in a twist worthy of O Henry. The Neighbors’ Window (USA) is funny and ultimately poignant, as a young couple in Brooklyn struggling to raise two small children find distraction in watching neighbors across the way who never bother to cover their windows. It too has its own great twists, and ultimately leaves you thinking about the “windows” of our lives that we reveal to the outside world, and how different that view can be to the life inside. (This was probably our group’s favorite.) Saria (USA) dramatizes a ripped-from-the-news story about a mass break-out from a Guatemalan orphanage and its tragic aftermath. Another dimension is added to an already serious film when closing credits inform us that all the teen actors in this film were all actual residents from a Guatemalan orphanage (though not the same one). Finally Nefta Football Club (Tunisia) follow a series of funny turns to a hilarious denouement, all beginning with a donkey sent off into the desert by itself with a load of heroin and a pair of headphones playing Tunisian music.

In the animated category, we also had a variety of funny and moving films. Hair Love (USA) was a sweet tale of a father trying to learn how to tame his daughter’s mass of nappy hair, in lovely digital animation. The project started as a wildly successful Kickstarter. Dcera (Daughter) (Czech) was an obscure story of a father and daughter struggling to find connection, with dark mottled clay figures moving through a cramped and dark world. One of us loved it, but the rest of us were just puzzled. Mémorable (France) was a poignant and beautifully animated depiction of an elderly artist and his wife, with a subjective view of the artist increasingly becoming lost to dementia. The stop-motion animation was beautiful, multi-colored, and painterly. In Sister (China) (family was a big theme this year), the son in a family of stop-action felt figures talks about growing up with his little sister, ultimately making a pointed commentary on China’s one-child policy of population control that was in effect from 1979-2015. Kitbull was a sweet story from Pixar animation about a feral kitten who befriends an abused pit bull. As usual, because the animations are shorter, we got treated to three bonus “highly regarded” films beyond the five nominees. Henrietta Bulkowski tells the story of a young woman determined to overcome her severe hunched back and fly an airplane to see the world, with her stop-motion character moving awkwardly through a dystopian steampunk world until brighter colors break through in the end. The Bird and the Whale (Ireland) had just a few brushstrokes of a storyline, but lovely and at times luminous watercolor-painted animation. Hors Piste (France) gives us a digitally illustrated adventure of two intrepid ski patrollers rescuing a stranded skier, a rescue which goes hilariously awry. Nice to wrap up the double feature laughing out loud.

Abuse of Power: Not Alan Dershowitz' Finest Hour

Today the eminent Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz argued before the Senate that “abuse of power” could never be a legitimate ground for impeachment, and that the founders only intended impeachment for serious crimes or acts “akin to crimes”. I have a few questions for the professor. According to the Dershowitz theory, it would seem that none of the following would be impeachable conduct:

• a president who doesn’t perform any of his duties, but just sleeps in, plays video games, and watches TV all day long, and collects his $400K / year
• a president who shows up obviously intoxicated, stumbling and slurring his speech, at all of his meetings and public appearances
• a president who uses the White House as a set to make You Tube videos which he heavily monetizes
• a president who actively engages in real estate investments based on his inside information of where government projects will be located
• a president who directs the IRS to audit those who criticize him on Twitter and to not audit his supporters
• a president who wantonly Tweets photos of his Oval Office desk, exposing top secret documents including names of CIA agents, locations of all our missiles, and the nuclear codes
• a president who makes $$$$ doing commercial endorsements while in office (“In the White House, we only serve Pepsi”)
• a president who directs the firing of any federal employee he catches criticizing him on social media
• a president who creates heavy tariffs and grants exemptions only for businesses he deems “loyal” to him
• a president who makes it known he’ll pardon anyone who commits any federal crimes in the service of his personal interests
• a president who takes regular joyrides on aircraft carriers and F-15s, insisting on flying himself, and occasionally crashing them.

Does the professor really not think that the founders would have intended impeachment for such egregious situations? 

Let’s look at the text. The Constitution says that impeachment applies to “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors”. The record of the Constitutional Convention shows they all agreed just listing “bribery and treason” was insufficient. They considered adding “or maladministration” but revised that to “other high crimes and misdemeanors”. What does the professor suppose the founders had in mind by “misdemeanors”? Obviously we’re not talking about jaywalking here, but misdemeanor in the sense of bad behavior. True, that’s unspecific and there’s a danger there. But it’s far-fetched to assert that the same guys who spent so much time making clear that enumerations should not be misconstrued as limiting would write “and misdemeanors” and not mean anything by it. Or does the professor think “misdemeanors” is just another constitutional inkblot?

Let’s look at what the founders said. In records from the Constitutional Convention, Madison described impeachment as a mechanism to address “incapacity, negligence, or perfidy”. In Federalist No. 65, Hamilton characterizes an impeachable offense as “those offences which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust.” I can’t see how these descriptions square at all with the way that Prof. Dershowitz would limit impeachment. The founders don’t even seem to be thinking about crime per se at all so much as bad behavior, the civil equivalent of the military’s “conduct unbecoming of an officer”.

Let’s look at what the founders did. Case in point: John Pickering, who has the dubious distinction of being the first person impeached and removed from office by the US Congress. While we tend to think of impeachment only for presidents, it applies to all federal officers. Pickering was a US District Court Judge appointed by George Washington. By 1800, he was starting to get a reputation for being inebriated on the bench and making rulings with questionable relationship to the law. In 1804, he was impeached on the charges of “drunkenness and unlawful rulings”. If Prof. Dershowitz is to be believed about the founders’ intention that impeachment be only for crimes, that seems difficult to reconcile with the fact that the Senate voted to remove Pickering for those charges, with the support of over 80% of the senators voting for removal. In looking at our history since the founding, there have been 20 impeachments, and “abuse of power” has been the most common charge.

With all due respect, I don’t think this was Dershowitz’s finest hour.

STAGE: The Last Ship

The musician Sting grew up in the shadows of the shipyards of Wallsend, near Newcastle in northeast England. His stage musical The Last Ship, now playing at the Ahmanson at the start of a national tour, draws on that heritage and experience in telling a multi-layered story of what happens to a small community whose livelihood and whole way of life is bound up with one industry, when that industry is in decline. There are some personal stories in here, about children who want to escape the town, and who chafe against stepping into their fathers’ boots and working in the shipyard like their fathers and grandfathers. And there is a romance suspended when one young man did escape. But the crux of this haunting work is about the shipyard workers and their families, and how they react when the last shipyard is closing down and the last nearly-completed ship is to be torn up for scrap rather than finished. There are some wonderful songs and strong performances in this evocative production, further bolstered by a marvelous set which, through clever use of lighting and projection, transforms from home to pub to shipyard to ship to a seawall where you can see and almost feel the spray of the waves crashing up on it. Though some complained that the show is long, we enjoyed it and found the music, story, and characters engaging. And though it’s set in a specific distant place and time (1980s England), I found it quite relevant and thought-provoking. On the surface, it is a simple union workers versus “the man” story with no pretense about where its sympathies lay. The good salt-of-the-earth union folks are distinct, fleshed-out characters that we get to know and like, while the owner/manager appears just enough to propel the plot, and the government is represented by “Baronet Tynedale”, a thinly veiled caricature of Margaret Thatcher. But the play is actually more thoughtful, giving some depth to the predicament. The workers understand their dilemma, acknowledging that they have only bad choices, and even understanding (while trying not to think about it) that the shipyard may actually come to an end. And while the baronet is cold and charmless, it’s hard to argue with the facts of economic reality that she delivers. There’s no buyer for the ship they’re building because it’s too expensive, and British shipbuilding is no longer competitive on the world market. It is no small irony that this last ship’s name is Utopia, as it is going nowhere. The climax of the show manages to be dramatically very satisfying, while also giving due to the unresolved socio-economic issues that linger. I was still thinking about them days later, even as some of the tunes still sang in my head.

Shirin Neshat at the Broad: I Will Greet The Sun Again

Shirin Neshat was born and raised in Iran, but came to the US in 1975 for college and eventually settled in New York. When she returned to Iran in 1990 to visit her family, she was shocked by the transformation of her country under the ideological rule of the ayatollahs, the changes in appearance, dress, and behavior from what she remembered. The experienced galvanized her to respond by producing a captivating array of photography and film commenting on distinctions of male and female, who can speak and who is silenced, modernity vs tradition. Three decades of her work are on display for a few more weeks at The Broad downtown, in an exhibit called Shirin Neshat: I Will Greet the Sun Again. Her series “Women of Allah” from the 1990s shows images of women in traditional garments, with lines from modernist Iranian women poets and writers superimposed on their skin. (Persian calligraphy on skin is a motif that runs through much of her life work, with the words offering ironic contrasts to the images.) In one image, hands held up in prayerful supplication face the muzzle of a gun coming out from under a black chador (full body cloak/veil). In another image, a mother fully hidden in black chador holds the hand of her young son who is naked and covered in expressive henna tattoos, a stark comment on the comparative freedoms of men vs women in Iran. These type of contrasts are drawn out in short film works where she uses two opposing screens to show contrasting images. In one work, drawing on the idea that women are forbidden from singing in public in Iran, we see on the left a man on stage singing expressively to an auditorium filled with an audience of only men, while on the right we see a fully veiled woman standing in front of a microphone in a completely empty auditorium. In a series called Soliloquy, Neshat explores her own ex-patriot sense of not feeling fully here or there in Iran or America, in images of a chador-clad woman standing in front of modernist American buildings. A photographic series called the Book of Kings features three walls of portraits divided into Patriots, Villains, and the Masses. The villains are bare-chested and tattooed with images from the Book of Kings, a famous 11th century epic poem of Persian dynastic struggles. The patriots have modernist Persian poetry boldly inscribed on their faces, while the masses have much smaller inscriptions of unidentified commentary. The masses face the villains on opposite walls and can be seen their reflections. Another powerful series of portraits from 2013, entitled “Our House Is On Fire”, was inspired by the Arab Spring uprisings. These affecting portraits are mostly of Egyptians whose children had been killed in the protests. Revolutionary poetry is inscribed on these faces in calligraphy so small that you have to get very close to even see that it is there, muting the voice of the revolution against the expressive power of these faces of the bereaved. (This reminded me of a similarly inspired collection of portraits by Colin Davidson we’d seen in Dublin, of bereaved parents who’d lost children to “The Troubles”.) These are just some of the highlights of this impressive exhibition. (See full album of my photos from this exhibition.)

Trump Tirade Against the Generals - How Is This Conservative?

‘You’re a bunch of dopes and babies’: Inside Trump’s stunning tirade against generals (Washington Post)

It’s hard to say what is most horrifying about this account of an early meeting when several of Trump’s former top advisors tried to keep him from going off the rails. The headline, highlighting Trump’s utter disrespect for basically the whole leadership of our nation’s military, is sad enough, but there are several things that should be more profoundly disturbing. First, there is Trump’s utter rejection of the premise that, as General Mattis phrased it, “the post-war international rules-based order is the greatest gift of the greatest generation.” This is not news. Trump has shown open contempt for NATO, and has managed to create real doubt about America’s commitment to allies so longstandingly staunch and solid that such doubt would have been completely unimaginable prior to 2017. What is shocking is that more Americans aren’t up in arms about this. The general peace, security, and prosperity that we have enjoyed for much of our lives is directly due to post-war institutions and alliances hard won through much blood and treasure by the greatest generation. Our grandparents are surely turning in their graves to see the damage done to their “greatest gift”. How anyone can approve of this wanton and callous erosion of institutions that have served us so well for three-quarters of a century and call themselves “conservative” is boggling. Conservatives are people who value proven institutions and who are suspicious of change. Trump foreign “policy” (if his erratic and unpredictable actions can even be dignified by that term) are not “conservative” in any normal meaning of the word, they are radical.

Second, this is an alarming example of Trump’s conviction that his gut instincts are always right, even in areas like foreign policy where he has no experience or understanding, and that none of the people who do have experience and expertise are to be trusted. He has been quoted as saying “it’s very easy, actually, to work with me. You know why it’s easy? Because I make all the decisions. They don’t have to work.” That may be one way to run a family business, but it’s no way to run a public enterprise of any scale, let alone a country. The Constitution itself provides for a cabinet of secretaries, and in the 20th century we have institutionalized a National Security Council, because no president could govern effectively without taking advice and counsel from those with expertise in specific areas. And it is an established best practice that the best leaders will create an environment where subordinates feel free to voice divergent opinions and question decisions, rather than “leading” in a completely top-down autocratic style. Trump obviously missed that day of school at Wharton. Needless to say, the erosion of trust in experience and expertise can hardly be said to be a conservative value either.

The third but possibly most alarming thing from this article was the quote from Bannon, whose attitude was presumably shared by Trump. In pushing back on why Mattis and Tillerson thought our longstanding alliances were so great, Bannon says, “All you guys talk about all these great things, they’re all our partners, I want you to name me now one country and one company that’s going to have his back.” I went cold when I read that: “his back.” Not “our back”, not “America’s back”, but “his back,” as if loyalty is owed by our allies to Trump personally. This administration seems to understand no distinction between the office of President and the man who temporarily holds the office, nor between the interests of Donald Trump and the interests of the American people, as if they were one and the same. That is how dictators talk. It is completely unfitting for a President of the United States.

FILM: A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood

In the film A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood, we are shown the extraordinary nature of Mister Rogers through a perfect foil: a cynical, hard-boiled reporter from Esquire who is sent to profile him and whose iconoclastic instincts lead him to look for a dark underbelly or some hint of dirt. Instead, he learns that the earnestness of Fred Rogers is actually earnest, as Rogers befriends the reporter and helps him heal some long-broken-and-buried parts of his own life. Tom Hanks is uncanny in his portrayal of the TV icon, and director Marielle Heller keeps the film honest, avoiding the clear pitfalls of such material that could have easily careened into maudlin Hallmark territory. When the reporter, Lloyd Vogel, finally completes his assignment, his wife’s reaction on reading it is, “this is great, although it’s more about you than about him.” Which is certainly true, and this film is more about Lloyd Vogel’s journey (note that Tom Hanks is nominated for best supporting actor), perhaps the best way to understand Mr. Rogers is in his interaction with and impact on others. We get little glimpses into the life of Fred Rogers – his daily routines of swimming and praying and playing the piano. His wife Joanne assures Lloyd that he is not a saint, he has a temper at times, and he works very hard to be the person that he is. But aside from that, he remains an enigma even at the end of the film, and he is rather saint-like. One rather telling moment in one of their early interviews, Vogel asks Rogers to make a distinction between Fred Rogers the real person and “Mister Rogers” the character, and Rogers is genuinely baffled by the concept – he is truly just being himself. And Rogers is one of those rare people for whom the most important person in the world at any given moment is the person right in front of them in that moment, a focus that creates a compelling rapport. He’s also thoughtfully slow and comfortable with uncomfortable silences, a trait that draws people out. But most of all, he was supremely compassionate and empathetic. He may not have been a saint, but he’s about as close as they come.

BOOKS: The Water Dancer

Having read his brilliant Between The World And Me, I knew that Ta-Nehisi Coates was an extraordinary writer, and in The Water Dancer, he shows that he is equally adept with fiction as with essay and memoir. This tale centers on Hiram Walker, born a slave, whose mother was sold away when he was young and whose father was the master who sold her. A young Hiram dreams of earning his father’s respect and perhaps somehow supplanting his white but far less gifted half-brother, but when the Underground Railroad gets a hold of him, his life changes in ways he could not have imagined. Coates not only creates a compelling story with true-ringing characters, but the vivid description of their lives is permeated by a depth of research into antebellum Virginia society – how Virginia estates worked and how the Virginia plantation economy eroded as they overworked the soil, what people wore and what they ate, and even how they talked. The landowning whites were “the Quality” and the slaves were “the tasked”, with the “low whites” in a miserable in-between. But what really makes this book is Coates’ ability to imagine and portray the emotional truth of people in these barely imaginable situations – the mask that is trained into the Tasked to never display their true emotions to their masters, the willful blindness that the Quality must engage in order to be masters, and the emotional scars and buried feelings that allow mothers, fathers, and children to survive when families are viciously ripped apart. Amidst the horrendous cruelty and injustice, the story is lifted by a humanity that refuses to be extinguished, along with a touch of magical realism concerning the power of our deepest memories to transport us.

FILM: Bombshell

Bombshell is itself a bombshell, done in a brisk exposé style using newsy tropes like datelines, voiceovers, and occasional graphics to quicken the pulse of an already engaging multi-character story. Disenchanted Fox talk show host Gretchen Carlson drops the bomb when she sues Fox editor-in-chief Roger Ailes for sexual harassment, while Fox superstar Megyn Kelly has questions of her own as she heads up an internal investigation, and a young climber learns the price of getting ahead at the network. The film does a great job showing the great pressure on all of these women at different points in their careers to "play the game", the serious risks of calling out harassment, and why it is not a clear or easy decision to make. It also shows the pressures of a ratings-driven network, the strange symbiotic relationship that developed between Trump and Fox, and how the rise of Trump gave them a bit of whiplash with which not everyone at Fox was equally in tune. I appreciated the complexity of motivations written into the three protagonist characters, and further complexity underscored with an intriguing supporting character played by Kate McKinnon as a closeted lesbian working for Fox, a different example of the sacrifices and choices people make to get and keep a job. Strong performances all around, but especially awesome Charlize Theron as the steely Megyn Kelly and John Lithgow as the paranoid autocratic network head. I have to say that this film gave me a renewed appreciation of the importance of corporate culture, and companies like my employer who not only do all the training but are serious about wanting to provide space and means for people to speak out if they think something's wrong. Very different from Fox, at least as portrayed here, which demanded complete near cult-like loyalty to its leader. We can see in this film how that works out (just in case we weren't already noticing it in our real-life news).

FILM: Little Women

There is a particular challenge in making a new film of a story that is well-known, well-loved, and has been done before. Greta Gerwig completely rises to that challenge with her fresh take on Little Women that suits our times. At first, I was a little rattled by some of the differences from the 1994 Winona Ryder / Susan Sarandon / Christian Bale film that was my reference point, but by the end, I was completely won over. Instead of a straightforward chronological telling of the story as in the book and most other films, Gerwig chose to portray events out of time order in a way that intentionally takes the focus off of the original romantic angles. And I think in some ways, it was a nod to the fact of doing the umpteenth adaptation and self-consciously saying “look we all know the story, and – spoiler alert – I’m going to dispense early on with the fact that Jo rejects Laurie’s proposal, because that’s not my focus.” I remember in the 1994 film, I along with all the viewers was swept up in the Jo / Laurie romance, and it was such a dramatic surprise when she turns him down. Now, even 25 years later where hopefully most of us have more evolved feminist understandings, it takes Gerwig’s telling the story in a very different way to make me rethink the traditional version and realize how much that focus on romance makes even Little Women skirt close to failing the Bechdel test. Now, despite casting heartthrob Timothée Chalamet as Laurie, the film doesn’t make us fall in love with him as Jo (and we with her) did in 1994. Rather, we get to know him at his Paris worst and learn of Jo’s rejection before we come around to seeing why that may have been a hard choice. But this film isn’t about him, it’s about her, and not about whether and whom she marries, but whether she can realize her ambition to be a successful writer. The film is framed beginning and end with scenes of Jo meeting with her publisher for the first time and Jo watching her book roll off of the 19th century printing presses (a gorgeous scene). That and Gerwig’s absolutely brilliant winking touch to portray Jo’s ultimate marriage in the context of her publisher’s demand for a “storybook” ending. It’s a shame she was overlooked for an Oscar best director nomination, and I hope she wins for best adapted screenplay. This may be the first Little Women adaptation that really honors the women. In addition to engaging us with Jo as a would-be author, we’re also drawn to respect the other sisters for their choices. Amy is particularly strong in her cold-eyed (but not cold-hearted) appraisal of how marriage means different things to men than to women in her time, and in defending her choices. Saoirse Ronan as Jo and Florence Pugh as Amy are both deserving of their Oscar nominations (though the best actress competition is tough this year!). Now 1994 seems so dated, and this is my new definitive Little Women.

FILM: Knives Out

Our Thanksgiving weekend movie was Knives Out. What a fun suspenseful whodunnit, contemporary but with the classic feel of an Agatha Christie mystery. It has all the elements: a big mansion with hidden elements and creaky stairs, the apparent suicide (or was it?) of an elderly multi-millionaire author (who made his fortune on – what else – murder mysteries), and a houseful of dysfunctional family members each with their own motive for wanting grandpa dead. Something is clearly afoot at Thrombey Manor, and only ace mystery solver Benoit Blanc (charmingly played by Daniel Craig sporting a genteel southern accent) can get to the bottom of it. Writer/director Rian Johnson skillfully spins out the mystery Rashomon style, as each family member is interrogated in turn, and we see each recollection of the events of the fateful night, colored by their biases and motives, then airbrushed and embellished as they tell it to the detectives. Jamie Lee Curtis, Don Johnson, Chris Evans, Toni Collette, and several others provide the colorful characters on this Clue board. The deceased patriarch was portrayed by Christopher Plummer as such a chess-master that his stories must have been at least this good (and how much of this one last story did he himself orchestrate?). And then there’s Marta, the nurse-companion, an immigrant from some ambiguous Latin country with the inconvenient inability to lie without throwing up. Everyone seems to love her and consider her part of the family. At least until the knives come out. This mystery has donut holes inside donut holes, and you probably won’t figure it out before Benoit Blanc does, but looking back, you’ll see that all of the clues were there. Such good fun!

Also have to give a shout out / plug to Exceptional Minds Studio, a local non-profit professional training academy and studio for visual effects artists and animators with autism. Exceptional Minds did the closing titles for this film. They provide individuals on the autism spectrum with the technical and behavioral skills required for employment in the entertainment fields of animation and post production visual effects, with the goal of breaking the vicious stereotypes resulting in low expectations that burden those in our society with special needs. I have two cousins who have graduated from this exceptional academy, and we are regular supporters. (Thanks, no doubt, to Jamie Lee Curtis for the opportunity to work on this film. She is a notable supporter of Exceptional Minds.)

Remembering Unc

From my earliest memories and throughout my life, my Unc Hal was a presence in my life that embodied what family meant. If you asked me at any point in my life who my “close family” was, after my Mom, Dad, and brother, there was no question that it was Tante Elayne and Unc Harold, and their kids, my cousins Donna and Victor. My mother and her sister were not to be separated, so when my Mom got married and settled in Los Angeles, Tante and Unc uprooted their young family and moved from New York to be close to us. Thus, when I was growing up, they were just always part of our family life. Most days, we were over at their house or they were over at ours. I know I had other aunts and uncles and cousins in Indiana and New York and Washington, and we loved them too, but more abstractly. Tante and Unc and Donna and Victor were my familiar family, the ones I just took as a given that we saw all the time, so that when you say “uncle”, I can’t help but picture Unc Hal.

When they first moved to California, Unc drove a delivery truck for Frito Lay, and as a very little kid, I have memories of Unc’s truck parked in the driveway, and sometimes being allowed to go into the truck and pick out a bag of Fritos. (In those days, the delivery trucks were not huge, more like the size of neighborhood ice cream trucks.) Among the Dads in our family and the neighborhood, I think he was the most likely to get down in the grass and wrestle and tumble with us on the front lawn. He had a growly voice, but teddy bear growly, not scary growly. He was mostly soft spoken, although he was certainly capable of raising the volume when the discussion around the family dinner table got loud, and he and Tante had no trouble shouting to each other across supermarket aisles (“ELAYNE! DO WE NEED MORE COOKIES?”). (Unc did love his cookies, and there was always a well-stocked cookie jar at their house.) At some point in my childhood, Unc quit the FritoLay truck and started his own business washing windows for shops and restaurants, a job he would work until he retired. As a kid, I only understood that he had to get up crazy early in the morning because he had to drive to far-flung locations all over the city, and that his clients preferred their windows get washed before their open business hours. I also came to understand that some of the places he went were parts of town that the rest of us might be apprehensive to go to, but Unc was unassuming and approachable, the sort of guy who could talk to pretty much anybody. And he’d sometimes come back with funny stories. I remember one time, he asked us “Did you know that ‘bad’ can mean ‘good’?” Turns out he was washing windows at a furniture store, and while he was there, a couple of black women were there on the sidewalk looking in the windows and saying “Look at all that baaad furniture!” After they’d said this a couple of times, he got curious and asked them, “did your family have a bad experience buying furniture here?”, and they laughed and gave him a lesson in Inglewood street slang. His openness to talk to anyone extended even beyond borders and language barriers. When Tante and Unc traveled to Paris with my parents, at one point when they needed directions, Unc was the one who, despite any useful French, was willing to go up to someone and ask directions. He went to ask a nearby vendor whether they spoke English, but his attempt at “Anglais?” must have come out more like “une glace”. When he returned and the others asked what he had found out, he laughed and said “I still don’t know where we are, but I got this ice cream cone.”

Our family liked our routines and little traditions: Saturday night was always “restaurant night”, and we would always meet up with my aunt, uncle, and cousins at a neighborhood restaurant for a dinner out. Usually nothing fancy, except for birthday celebrations which were diligently observed. Sunday nights were “hamburger night” when I was young, and later evolved to “family dinner night” after the kids had all grown up and left home. Sunday nights alternated between my parents and Tante & Unc’s house, with whichever “children” were not out of town expected to show up. Conversations ranged from politics to family news/gossip to just the minutiae of our lives, as you do when you see someone so regularly. Unc and my Dad also shared an interest in business and investments, and would talk about that until Mom would scream “Are you two still talking about IRAs??”. (You can’t dispute that Unc must have saved and invested prudently, as he leveraged his modest window-washing business toward paying off a house in the suburbs, raising a family comfortably, and having enough retirement savings that his children never had to worry about paying for his care.) I’ve been grateful to have these family routines as steady markers throughout my life, something I could always count on even when other things changed. Except for the few years I lived on the east coast, and until he moved to Virginia just a year and a half ago, Unc has celebrated every one of my birthdays with me, and we’ve had a meal together probably three out of every four weekends my entire life. It’s only now looking back across all those years, realizing that our last birthday or family dinner together is passed, that I fully appreciate how remarkable that is.

When Tante passed three years ago, we kept up our Sunday nights, either bringing in take-out food to Unc’s or driving him over to my folks’ house. But after a while, he was becoming less capable and more depressed, so we convinced him to move to Virginia where he could be near his daughter Donna and her three grown children. Though we missed him in California, it was a great move because he got to see Donna and his grandchildren all the time, and he got to celebrate their family events together. He lived to see his granddaughter Brenna have a baby boy, and just days before he passed, he got to meet his newborn great-granddaughter. He saw his granddaughter Rachel regularly through her pregnancy, and was eager to meet the baby, excited to be a twice great-grandfather. It seemed he was hanging on just for that, before going to his rest after a good long life (just a couple months short of 90). Thanks, Unc Hal, for showing me what an uncle is, and for the gift of your faithful presence throughout my life.

STAGE: The New One

This evening we saw The New One at the Ahmanson Theatre. I hardly stopped laughing this entire show, so I need a moment to catch my breath. If you’re a fan of This American Life, you’ve probably heard Mike Birbiglia before. With his voice and his delivery, he could read a phone book and make it funny, so when he’s really got something to say, it’s hysterical. In this show, he relates his experience of reluctantly becoming a father. Those things that all new fathers probably think at one time or another but would never dare say out loud, he says out loud. And it’s so funny because it’s so true and ultimately so humane. Birbiglia is a stand-up comic by nature, and he turns the Ahmanson into a comedy club, deftly drawing in a few low-hanging audience members into his act. The stage and show are largely devoid of props and set, just a stool, except for one point where props come in to great effect. If you have kids, or if you know people who have kids, or if you’re dead set against ever being around kids, you’ll enjoy this show tremendously.

FOOD: Guerrilla Tacos

In the dynamic culinary explosion that is LA, some of the best food is served not on white table cloths but in places where you order at the register, take a number, and seat yourself. That’s how it is at Guerrilla Tacos in the DTLA Arts District. Chef Wes Avila’s food truck had been rated one of LA’s top restaurants, but he’s now parked the truck and set up a brick-and-mortar where you can enjoy his dazzlingly creative tacos along with micheladas or cocktails if you like. The pork terrine taco takes inspiration from Vietnamese banh mi sandwiches: pork paired with julienned carrots and jicama, cilantro and mint, fresno pepper, enriched with a schmear of chicken liver mousse. Just take away the French sandwich roll and serve it on top of a blue corn tortilla (fresh from nearby Kernel of Truth Organics tortilleria in Boyle Heights). Served with the tortilla folded over the meat, with the schmear on the outside and the veggies and herbs piled on top, that’s when I realized why I was given a fork and knife. My other two tacos came open-faced, also on those blue corn tortillas. The saag curry eggplant taco features fried eggplant chunks bathed in two sauces, a rich curry and a piquant mint chutney. The fire is strong, but balanced with sweet raisins and marcona almond bits. The famous sweet potato taco (others vary seasonally but this one has been a persistent signature) covers slices of roast sweet potato with an almond chile sauce, dollops of soft fresh feta, fresh scallions, and crumbles of fried corn. It’s all a creative feast of hot, sweet, fresh, rich, soft, crunch that makes this taco stand worthy of Michelin notice (now that those Michelin folks have crawled out from under their white table cloth and learned how to appreciate LA).

FILM: Harriet

I knew little about Harriet Tubman beyond the barest synopsis of her as a leading figure in the Underground Railroad, and was thrilled to expand my understanding of this inspirational woman’s story as told in the new biopic Harriet. (As is inevitable for any biopic, some characters and details have been invented for dramatic necessity, but the film is fairly historically grounded in the broader story.) I was on the edge of my seat through most of this film as this diminutive but determined woman not only made her own solo run to freedom (when nobody thought she could do it on her own), but then made repeated daring returns back into slave territory to help others escape. It’s one thing to read in school about the Underground Railroad, the network of just-minded people who offered temporary hiding places and onward guidance. It’s quite another to have it brought to life on the screen, with all the powers of film-making harnessed to make you experience the feeling of running through the woods at night with hounds in hot pursuit. A textbook just doesn’t quicken the pulse like a film can. But much more than just a sequence of harrowing escapes is the monument of this woman’s faith and determination. I learned that, like Joan of Arc, Harriet Tubman experienced visions. Explained at least in part as seizure-like episodes resulting from a head trauma when she was young, she understood them as God showing her things, sometimes premonitions of immediate danger, sometimes prophesies of things to come later. In any case, they affirmed her faith that God was leading her, and gave her a fierce courage to do what she needed to do. This, together with her resolve to live free or die, leads her to the central purpose in her life, that she should return and help others rather than cling to safety in the North. When other leaders of the Underground try to dissuade her, telling her that an illiterate black woman would not be able to succeed, she thunders back like an Old Testament prophet, “Nobody thought I could escape on my own, but the Lord was with me. And here I am. So don’t you tell me what I can’t do.” The performance of this character by Cynthia Erivo is transcendent, inspiring awe that makes the film. She is steely fierce, but also has some very human moments. While Harriet Tubman is not an unsung hero, this film, surprisingly the first feature film to be made of her, shows me that she hasn’t been sung enough. Can’t wait for her to be on the $20 bill.

FILM: Parasite

The Korean film Parasite won the Palm d’Or at Cannes this year, and has been raved about by critics. It was definitely not what we expected, though I’m not sure what I did expect. It’s hard to even categorize. While it has a few moments of suspense and even horror, it’s not a horror suspense film. In fact most of it deals fairly lightly and deftly with some heavy social commentary about the widening chasm between rich and poor, and its thoroughly unexpected ending is a strangely beautiful alloy of hope (wistful? misplaced? persistent?) and irony. The most comparable films I can think of are last year’s Shoplifters (a beautiful Japanese film also about a sympathetic family near the bottom rung of society doing what they can to scrape by) and Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma. One could say that Parasite is like Roma, but with more plot and less brooding. (HG Wells’ The Time Machine also comes to mind, not for the science fiction but for the social critique.) In the opening scene, we meet the Kim family in their basement apartment with a transom window looking onto a gritty street, and the young adult son and daughter trying to maneuver their phones to just the right corner of the ceiling where they can get a bit of free wifi. Soon after, we meet the Park family, living in luxury behind a gate, in a house designed by a renowned architect with a light and spacious yard. When the Kims insinuate themselves into the lives of the Park family in various positions of service, it sets off a chain of very unexpected events that serve to illuminate the contrast in their social positions. These contrasts are beautifully underscored with cinematic artistry: the spaciousness and lightness of the Parks’ house emphasized with long / wide angles and tracking shots, while tight strained angles show the cramped and dingy nature of the Kims’ basement. Director Bong Joon-Ho created a very visual verticality to the social dynamic, most fulsomely brought out when some of the Kims make a dash in the rain from the Park house to their own home, and it’s all down, down, down. As their near their home, we get a high downward shot on their street, half obscured by a rat’s nest of exposed utility wires (probably half bootlegged), and the muddy rainwater gushing down the street toward their apartment, below grade at the bottom of the slope. The claustrophobia of their apartment is ratcheted way up when it is literally filling up with sewage overflow, and they struggle to grab a few key possessions before bailing out to a shelter. Meanwhile this same rainstorm that is catastrophic to the poorer part of town below is for the Parks just an inconvenience that has spoiled plans for a birthday camping trip. The Parks live their lives on a cloud of effortlessness. As mother Kim observes, their lives are full of creases and wrinkles, but when you have money like the Parks do, money is like an iron that smooths out all the creases. Mr. Park walks through his house and up his stairs, and the lights turn on as he approaches and off as he goes past. He doesn’t understand how this happens, and he doesn’t even really think about it. The Parks give no thought to a lot of things that have to happen to make their lives just work so smoothly. The structures that the great architect has designed into the foundation of their house are long forgotten and taken for granted. But like an iceberg, it’s the submerged part that you can’t see that proves the most dangerous. I came away from this film haunted by the allegory and the poetic imagery of social divides; George just said he’s going to have nightmares. While this isn’t exactly Roma, I think Roma is a good yardstick. If you’re the sort who loved Roma, then I think you’d appreciate this.

Evergreen Cemetery in East LA

The cemetery that I visited for Dia de los Muertos was an especially interesting cemetery. Evergreen Cemetery was established in 1877 and is one of LA’s oldest. Many LA scions and pioneers have prominent stones here, names you would recognize from streets and towns like Van Nuys, Lankershim, Bixby, and Hollenbeck. Joseph W. Robinson (department store founder) is here, as is George Ralphs (grocery store founder). But this cemetery represents LA in all its facets. It is notable for never having banned African-Americans from being buried here, unlike many other cemeteries of its time. I visited the grave of Biddy Mason, a remarkable woman I’ve written about before who began life as a slave and ended it as a wealthy philanthropist who co-founded the First AME Church in LA. And I visited James Banning, an aviation pioneer who was the first black pilot to fly coast-to-coast. Many Japanese are interred here, including the Garden of the Pines, a section for the Issei (first-generation immigrants), and an impressive monument to the Japanese heroes of the 442nd Regiment in World War II. Many Armenians are here, and from the dates on their stones, I could see that many were from their first generation of immigrants fleeing the WWI-era genocide in their homeland. Many generations of Mexican-American families are here. The only marginalized group were the Chinese-Americans, who were forced to use a corner of the “potter’s field”, a large area on the east end of the cemetery where indigent people were buried in mostly unmarked graves. They were allowed to build a small shrine in their corner of the potter’s field, which from 1888 is the oldest surviving structure of Chinese settlement in LA. In 2005, when the Metro Gold Line extension was being put through along 1st Street, the excavations uncovered skeletal remains of 174 people who forensic analysis determined were all Chinese. The remains were interred near the shrine, and a memorial was erected, with 174 stones containing messages in Chinese, English, and Spanish of remembrance and blessing. This whole sprawling cemetery is such a great capsule of our city’s demographic history. (See full album of photos.)