New Arrivals

 

The cold spring rain is refreshing, and the sun broke through the clouds just long enough for me to take a stroll through the back yard, where long lost friends are slowly reappearing.

These include the vinca minor, flowering here and there (see above) and the wind ginger, unfolding nearby.

The pachysandra has always looks slightly artificial among the native species, but still very nice when in bloom (or in a Japanese tea garden!)

A few trout lilies struggle to hang on way out in the woods. These were planted by the previous owners, maybe forty years ago.

And within the "garden" proper the brunnera have started to produce their tiny petals, while closer to the deck I see the jack-in-the-pulpit starting to emerge.

And then I hear a rapid, stuttering, melodious song I haven't heard for a year. It's the ruby-crowned kinglet! And I soon spot him flitting around from branch to branch on the Amur maples a few feet in front of me. Ah, now I see him.

This tiny butterball of a bird is easy to identify for that very reason; he flits around nervously like no other bird. You seldom see the ruby crown except during mating season, but he was flashing his crest wildly this morning, and, snapping a few frames with my little Canon Powershot, I got lucky.

After I lost sight of him, I could still hear his crisp, melodious chatter in the woods nearby. And several white-throated sparrows, as if to balance the mood, were singing their mournful, slightly-out-of-tune three-note descent. 

A brief but exhilarating expedition before breakfast. What will the rest of the day bring?    

Oscar Shorts

Perhaps no form of film is better suited to watching on a computer screen than a short subject. We spent three evenings engaged in that pursuit, independently ranking each entry from zero to five, and judged only a few to be less than a four. Now, two weeks later, some of them are a little hard to remember.

Among the animated shorts, both "Burrow" and "The Snail and the Whale" tell tales of animal adventure. The former probes cheerfully into the tunneling habits of several rodent and insect species by means of a colorful but blocky graphic style; the later, far longer and more sophisticated in technique, relates the adventures of a snail who, longing to see more of the world, hops a ride on—guess what?—a whale's tail. It's narrated by the late Diana Rigg, with Sally Hawkins voicing the snail. Both films are cute, both held my interest in a child-like way.

“If Anything Happens I Love You” is a mostly black-and-white piece about a couple whose daughter was involved in a school shooting, and it's highly effective, in so far as it makes you feel sad, sad, sad.

"Opera," from South Korea, was a misfire, I think. It depicts some sort of underground mining operation, but the triangular mountain that dominates the screen remains static and the characters moving back and forth are so small they lack individuality. There may have been a profound message here about tyranny or cooperation. If so, I missed it.

In my opinion, “Genius Loci” was the best of the bunch. I found the story incomprehensible and the tone sour, but the graphics were highly imaginative, almost as if they'd been made with construction paper cutouts and stop-action photography.

All of the live-action shorts were top-notch. The challenge here is to bring a little complexity to the story in a short span of time available.

 In Feeling Through a young homeless man, black, having failed to find a place to sleep among friends,  comes upon a middle-aged blind and deaf man, white, sitting on a bench in the middle of the night. The man needs some help getting on the right bus. He also needs some water. Adventures ensue, with irritation, self-interest, and compassion fighting for the upper hand at every step of the way. 

 In The Letter Room, a lowly prison guard (played by Oscar Isaac) aspires for something better and is happy to be put in charge of reading the letters that are exchanged between inmates and their contacts on the outside. Frustrated by the administration's lack of interest in his ideas for prison reform, and intrigued by the correspondence between one death-row inmate and his girlfriend,  the guard decides to do a little free lance counseling. Bad idea.  

 The Present offers a brief look at the daily challenges Palestinians face crossing back and forth from their territory into Israel proper. A simple tale involving a refrigerator, believable and well-acted.

In White Eye a young Israeli spots a bicycle parked in front of a fish warehouse that was stolen from him a few weeks earlier. He calls the cops and is told, "We can't do anything. You never filed a report." He asks a tradesman working nearby to help him cut off the lock. The man who now owns the bike, an African, arrives. He claims he bought it legally, and needs it to take his daughter to kindergarten every day. The cops show up, finally. And here comes the warehouse manager. It's getting messier all the time.   

But the best of the bunch, I think, was Two Distant Strangers, in which a sophisticated young black designer, leaving his girlfriend's New York apartment, encounters a feisty cop intent on hassling him. The encounter ends badly, like the ones we so often read about in the papers. But it was only a dream!

The man leaves the apartment again but does things differently, in the manner of Run Lola Run. Funny thing, the sequence of incidents is different but the end result is exactly the same, or worse. Ah, but it was only a dream! Once again, he leaves the apartment ...

It should come as no surprise to learn that the live action documentaries are mostly about bad things. Hunger Ward focuses on mass starvation in Yemen, though it offers not a shred of insight into the causes of the civil war or possible solutions to it. A Love Song for Latasha relates, from a mostly teenage and family perspective, the death in Los Angeles of a young black girl who was sent by her mother to but some orange juice at the local liquor store. Both are heartrending.

Collette offers a portrait of an elderly French woman who joined the resistance during WWII, and now, half a century and more later, has teamed up with a young German historian to seek out information about her brother's death in the death camps. A Concerto is a Conversation consists largely of a warm and gentle conversation between a young black Los Angeles composer and his Georgia-born grandfather about music and life, making great use of close-ups.   

But I found Do Not Split to be the most ambitious and enthralling of the five. It documents a few days of protest in Hong Kong against the encroachments of the Chinese government. Lots of chaos, tension, danger, excitement, courage, and youthful ardor.    

April Grays

 

Yes, April can be like this; here's proof.

White flecks of snow fell this morning, rectangular, widely spaced.

I began the day with a walking tour of a neighborhood in  Queens,

complete with pictures,

courtesy of a friend who sent me a link this morning.

Minor chores are done, though the jeans coming out of the dryer weren't really dry.

A few games of computer cribbage before turning to books.

Any books.

I ask myself, after studying a map in a book about Mencius,

why the Chinese named their kingdoms Chou, Chin, Ch'in, Ch'u, Ch'i, and Cheng.

They could have done better.

Then it's on to Gilbert White's Selborne County, where he describes

a remarkable spring that, during a drought, continued to produce

nine gallons of water per minute. He then calculates, for our benefit,

an output of two-hundred sixteen hogsheads per day. Well done.

Lunch consists of a sliver of onion pie—one of my specialties—

consumed cold, standing next to the fridge.

After bringing in the garbage can from the street,

I decide to make a fire, using a huge log that's been

sitting behind the yard-waste can all winter.

I know it won't burn, but by sliding kindling under it,

I create the illusion again and again.

Oscar Countdown: Four Films

Frances McDormand first showed up on my film radar in the year 2000, appearing as a character actress in two films that are still among my favorites, Wonder Boys and Almost Famous. It was not her presence that made those films great, but it didn't hurt. She had already cemented herself in the public eye three years earlier with an Oscar turn in Fargo. In time she began to take on the stature of a later-day Jack Nicholson, playing variations on her own idiosyncratic self in film after film, most of which I didn't see.

It was a major triumph for her to hold that over-the-top train wreck of a film, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, together. I liked it quite a bit.

Film-goers who have been avoiding Nomadland for fear of similar excesses can rest assured: it's a lovely, elegiac film full of nice people, gorgeous desert landscapes, and sketches of a simple but atavistically attractive way of life, all of which are anchored in the contours of McDormand's craggy face.

A few days after seeing the film, I could hardly tell you what happened. The love interest was tepid, and the most dramatic "turn" had something to do with exorbitant repairs to the minivan. The seasonal employment at Amazon almost looked attractive to me, though that may be because I spent twenty years working in a book warehouse myself; and the director, Chloé Zhao, has made life in a van look fairly appealing. Here again, my personal predilection for desert camping may have come into play. In short, Nomadland works well, like a atmospheric European film, as a haunting portrait of decent but often damaged or grieving people who have chosen a variety of alternative healing paths. Less ambitious than the vaguely similar Into the Wild, for example, it presents itself on the screen as a tone poem rather than an opera. More movies like this, please!  (Best Actress, Director, Editor, Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography) 

One Night in Miami consists largely of an extended conversation in a motel room between Cassius Clay (soon to become Muhammad Ali) and three friends—NFL running back Jim Brown, popular singer and impresario Sam Cooke, and political activist Malcolm X. It bristles with wit while digging deep into the obstacles and options facing eminent black men in those days (and also today). It's also a hell of a lot of fun to watch. (Best Supporting Actor: Leslie Odom Jr.)

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, also based on a play, is "stagier" and less inspired, like drinking a mug of dark coffee that's simply too bitter. We soon adjust to the theatrical voicing of the characters, and the basement conversations between the musicians carry a lively spark, but Ma Rainey herself is difficult to like, the studio personnel hardly emerge from cardboard cut-out status, and the racial indictments, though well-founded, lack nuance. The silver lining is that the film is hardly more than an hour long. (Viola Davis: Best Actress; Chadwick Boseman: Best Actor)

Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga. I have never seen a Will Ferrell film before, and might never see one again, but this mostly charming comedy/farce about an Icelandic duo who stumble into contention at the massive Eurovision contest is bolstered by the presence of Rachael McAdams, the silliness of its faux accents and folkloric Icelandic clichés, and lots of high-energy performances by various Euro-pop groups that I'd never heard of until I looked them up, including Lordi, Alexander Rybak, Conchita Wurst, and Netta. (Best Song)        

Oscar Countdown: Mank

Mank is a complex, busy,  peculiar, and largely unsatisfying work that once again underscores the fact that it's difficult to make a good film about a drunk. Why? Because a drunk tends to rely on the forbearance of everyone around him. They know him, perhaps they love him a little, they're willing to indulge him. But we don't know him, and we find him tiresome. "Get a grip on yourself," we say. "On what grounds do you deserve our sympathy and attention?"

One answer might be, "Because I'm in the process of writing the screenplay for the greatest film of all time." But the screenwriter himself wouldn't know that. He only knows that he's got to finish the script in sixty days, and considering his health, it might be the last one he ever writes, and it had better be good, because none of his earlier scripts were good.

 That is the basic premise of Mank. The central character, screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz, delivers bon mots that aren't witty, exudes a charm that isn't charming, and cultivates a "I could have been a contender" self-pity that means nothing to us, because we have no idea who or what he might have become, had he laid off the booze and done some real work. Howard Hawks would have done it differently.   

Meanwhile, the film abounds in technical issues. The black-and-white cinematography is meticulous and dazzling to a fault. The result is that everything looks a little too dark, or too bright, or too creamy, and all the wonderful period details distract our attention from both the characters and the story. We're being asked to look too many ways at once.

Compounding the problem, the voices seem to have been post-synched in an echo chamber. Why?

Herman Mankiewicz is best known today as the co-author, with Orson Welles, of the screenplay for Citizen Kane. Viewers who haven't seen that film—which I suspect are legion in this day and age—are likely to be even more confused than the rest of us. Citizen Kane is a thinly disguised and less than flattering biopic based on the life of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, though it also draws upon the somewhat larger-than-life braggadocio of Welles himself, who not only directed the film but also plays the lead.

Mankiewicz evidently knew Hearst well, and, to judge from flashbacks scattered throughout the film, he was invited to quite a few parties out at Hearst's palatial estate, San Simeon, on the central California coast. He also knew the ins and outs of the Hollywood studios, having written scripts for several of them. In one scene Mank introduces his brother (who later became a distinguished film director) to his brilliant writing buddies—a coterie that includes Ben Hecht and S. J. Perelman—and we're instantly wishing we could spend some time with them rather than with the boozy and existentially desperate Mank himself.

Because it lacks a sympathetic central character, Mark has a hard time getting us interested in its two central tropes. The first is that Mankiewicz, rather than Welles, ought to be given credit for the enduring appeal of Citizen Kane. Very few buy that theory today. The second is that Mank, no doubt a decent and lovable man underneath it all, inadvertently gave producer Irving Thalberg the idea for how to swing the California gubernatorial election in 1934, robbing socialist Upton Sinclair of the victory. The film even goes so far as to suggest that in his idealistic youth Hearst himself might have supported Sinclair.

Whether this is true or not, it's not the kind of thing that excites movie-goers today.

A single scene might serve to illustrate both the complexity and the vagueness of Mank. An old pal comes up to him at the studio and asks Mank for a dollar. Mank turns to the policeman standing behind him and asks him for a dollar. The policeman obliges. Mank gives the dollar to his old pal. I suppose this is supposed to suggest that people on the set are fond of Mank, and feel comfortable both asking him for things and giving him the things he asks for. But why didn't Mark give the guy a dollar from his own pocket? The scene isn't funny. What, precisely, are we supposed to make of it?

Some of the most touching scenes in the film involve conversations between Mank and Hearse's girlfriend Marion Davies. She looks glamorous but comes across as sweet and intelligent—far more appealing than the shrill character Mank wrote into Citizen Kane. Mank feels bad about this, and tries to convince his old friend, who has read the script, that her character as portrayed in the film isn't really how he thinks about her. Well then, why did he write it like that?

Even this cursory review ought to give you an idea how much thought went into the making of Mank. Too much of that thought, I'm afraid, has been devoted to incidentals--allusions to minutia of film history and California politics--and not enough about emotional ballast. In the end, the character of Mankiewicz himself hardly emerges from the realm of maudlin cliché. Long before the end of the film, some viewers may be gripped by the inexplicable desire to revisit that unparalleled cinema dynamo from three-quarters of a century ago, Citizen Kane.