Putting the ‘Ace’ in Space

As a projectionist in a small arts-cinema with but a single screen, I’ve considered myself lucky all these years that I haven’t had to show or overhear or be in any way exposed to blockbuster films heavy with special FX.

That, of course, rules out most any film set in space, though I have always looked forward to documentaries regarding the Moon or Mars on PBS, some of them written and directed by Newburyport’s own Mark Davis.

As for the explosions, the high-speed chases, the hell-fire and deafening noise, I have no more appetite for them than I have for tofu and sushi. Do the cineplexes hand out barf-bags when they sell you a ticket?

Now comes Project Hail Mary, free of violence and minimal with blasts and booms, but necessarily loaded with FX necessary for a film set in space. For over a week I held to my own rule, but I also heard no end of patrons praise it as they left. Two words I kept hearing: “hilarious” and “heartbreaking.” That’s a combination I find impossible to resist.

Project Hail Mary begins mid-story. Ryland Grace regains consciousness well on his way to a destination from which he is to learn something that will save the world from a virus that will kill us all in 30 years. The two astronauts flying the craft are both dead. If that’s not enough of a problem, he has the immediate obstacle to overcome: He has never been on a spacecraft, and he was put on this one against his will, already unconscious.

As he will later recall yelling at the commander back on Earth who put him on the flight, “I put the ‘not’ in ‘astronaut’.”

No, Ryan Gossling (following his stellar Ken in Barbie) plays a high school science teacher who caught the attention of an international space agency due to a paper he wrote for journal that contained too many inconvenient truths for his own country to leave unpunished. But he’s an easy-going, carefree guy who mines the vein of entertainment in the classrooms of Grover Cleveland Middle School.

As he has to teach himself how to fly the craft already “Neptunish” away, he recalls bits and pieces of how he got there in flashbacks. Before too long in what is a long but fast-paced film, he finds himself aside another spacecraft that is launching objects about the size and shape of car mufflers at him. Gossling’s wondering aloud about whether he’s about to receive an intergalactic gift or a bomb was Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be” cast as comedy and set to science fiction.

My expectation was that Project Hail Mary would harken back to 2001, but there are few hints of any Hal vs. Dave conflict. Instead, Capt. Grace meets Rocky, a creature about the size of a young goat who appears to be a cross between a crab and a monkey, or maybe a giant turtle with extra legs. Turns out, Rocky is also an advanced, sought-after scientist sent from another direction from Eridia, a planet also threatened by the same virus. Rocky and Grace soon figure out how to communicate and form a team.

More than an update of 2001, this film is the hopeful counterpoint to Don’t Look Up‘s sardonic doom and gloom. Rather than a very few people knowing the threat outnumbered by a world that wants to ignore them, Project Hail Mary is all about answering the call–which necessitates the ultimate sacrifice.

Subject matter here is quite serious–especially in a time when government agencies deny and defy science on behalf moneyed interests than will not hear any mention of inconvenient truth. But the film is flush with laugh lines, including a few sight gags, such as Capt. Grace appearing in one scene in a t-shirt reading, “I Had Potential.”

Also, this is yet another vibrant, often hilarious performance by Ryan Gossling with a solid, at times heart-breaking turn from Sandra Huller (following her Best Actress Oscar nomination for Anatomy of a Fall). And then there’s Rocky, an alien with a humane spirit as infectious as a Beatles’ song, specifically, “Two of Us”:

…wearing raincoats,
Standing solo in the sun.
You and me chasing paper,
Getting nowhere, on our way back home.

We’re on our way home
We’re on our way home

We’re going home...

Do Rocky and Grace make it home? Near the end of the film when Rocky asks if he has “a mate,” Grace sighs: “I had one, but she said I had my head in the clouds, that I live in another world.”

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Mr. Oscar for Mr. Nobody

When the director of Mr. Nobody Against Putin accepted the Oscar for Best Documentary last night, I expected a condemnation of Russian aggression and a call for the USA to confirm its now dubious support for Ukraine.

Instead, David Borenstein immediately spelled out the film’s lesson, and without naming any countries, it was clear that his target was close to home:

Mr. Nobody Against Putin is about how you lose your country. And what we saw when working with this footage, it’s that you lose it through countless small little acts of complicity. When we act complicit, when a government murders people on the streets of our major cities, when we don’t say anything, when oligarchs take over the media and control how we can produce it and consume, we all face a moral choice. But luckily, even a “nobody” is more powerful than you think.

After it was over, Borenstein did name names while speaking with reporters:

One interesting thing about working with a team of Russians throughout this process has been my desire as an American to constantly compare the situation in America to Russia. But a lot of my Russian colleagues and friends always said, “No, no, it’s not the same situation. It’s actually happening quicker in America than it’s been happening in Russia.” Trump is moving a lot quicker than Putin in his early years.

The film itself, much of it assembled videos smuggled out of Russia by a young “videographer and events coordinator” opposed to his country’s war on Ukraine, focuses on the Kremlin’s efforts to control children’s perception of that war with revised history texts and “patriotic displays.” Echoes of calls for “patriotic education” by Republican officials in DC and in state capitols across the USA are hard to miss.

Also hard to miss are the confused and frightened looks of children and their parents who are receiving contradictory news from relatives and neighbors who have been sent to the front, and where many of them themselves may be dispatched. Some teachers are glad to go along and win citations for their enthusiasm, while most go through the motions, and silently pray for change–a listlessness not lost on their students.

Screening Room patrons leaving the film call it both heartwarming and heartbreaking, no doubt due to Pavel Talankin, the videographer dubbed “Mr. Nobody” at the center of the film. He does all he can to keep students engaged and hopeful until he senses a tightening noose and defects. He, too, has an Oscar, but, like Vladimir Zelenskyy telling the world, “I don’t need a ride, I need ammunition,” Talankin didn’t come here seeking any award. He came here for the students of his country seeking a much stronger ally.

Overall, I’m satisfied with the Oscar choices. Can’t really pontificate on them because, unlike most years, I missed half the films nominated. Wish I had seen Sinners, nominated for a record-breaking 16 awards, but taking just four. Problem was that it was billed as a horror film, a genre for which I have no more interest than I have in roller skating.

The top awards for One Battle After Another–Best Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay–surprised me even as I cheered each time. Surprising because it was satire that many people took literally, and because it was as incisive and relevant to the ICED-America in which we now find ourselves. That artistic sin led several critics to dismiss the film as “liberal fantasy.”

But the second highlight of the night goes to Norwegian Director Joachim Trier. Accepting the Best International Picture Oscar for Sentimental Value, he concluded by paraphrasing James Baldwin’s observation that all adults are responsible for all children.

Would never have thought of it before the event, but that was a common theme for all of last night’s winners.

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History Pulled Taut

Among the first films I saw at the Screening Room where I now show them was 1984’s playfully pointed The Brother from Another Planet, one of the earliest written and directed by John Sayles, by then already acclaimed in art-house cinema circles for Return of the Secaucus Seven.

I had missed that 1979 gem, but when I got caught up in the Boomer hoopla of 1983’s The Big Chill, Screening Room faithful let me know in no uncertain terms that it was a sanitized version of Secaucus Seven. They were right.

Sayles would continue riding high in the world of independent film with film after film of compelling stories, irresistible characters, and dialogue at once natural and purposeful. The list is surprisingly long even to a Sayles fan, so many more than the best known: Matewan (1987), Eight Men Out (1988), The Secret of Roan Inish (1994), and Lone Star (1996).

There’s a reason why these and every other film of his are beyond entertaining and informative. As a projectionist I was able to see them several times. (Not only do I not pay to see films, I get paid to see them.) Every viewing was always just as satisfying, and on one busman’s holiday, it was doubly so. That was during a cross-country trip with my daughter, then 16. We stayed a night in Lawrence, Kansas, for dinner and a movie at the Free State Cinema & Brew Pub. If that combo wasn’t luck enough, Roan Inish was on the screen. Next day we were talking about it half way to Colorado.

Can’t just be us. In 1997, the West Newton Cinema, an art-house with six screens including one with perhaps 35 seats, played Men with Guns for at least six months. At the end of the run, their entry in the Boston Globe‘s schedule announced that it would be the final week. I had monitored that weekly page for 15 years and cannot recall any other film gaining such a notice.

Two years later, Limbo would nearly match it. Some irony here. Limbo ends not with a fade to black, but to white. As the one-word title suggests, there is no certain outcome. When viewers left the theater, they stopped at the base of the projection booth, asking if I knew what happened next. A former projectionist at Upstate Films in Rhinebeck, N.Y., now co-owner of the Screening Room, tells me that people left angry when it played there.

That may have turned the tide on Sayles’ films, although it’s far more likely that “market forces”–a euphemism for greed that seeks the lowest common denominator–caused funding for independent films, particularly those made by writers and directors committed to honest exposes of history, to shrink. A brief succession of films–Sunshine State (2002), Casa de los Babys (2003), and Silver City (2004)–continued to do well in art-house cinemas such as ours, but as Sayles recently said in a public appearance, at least on of his screenplays is still on the shelf.

All along, Sayles was also writing novels. He appeared at Newburyport’s Jabberwocky Bookshop last month to read from and talk about his latest of nine novels, Crucible. The event was billed as “a conversation” with local author, Andre Dubus III, who noted that, for all Sayles’ attention to people who have been slighted and wronged by the twists and turns of American history, he is “never didactic.” Quite a compliment for a novel that might pass as a fictionalized chapter of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.

As cinematic as his films, Crucible is an epic spanning nearly 500 pages, 16 years, a couple dozen characters, and six settings from Michigan to Brazil. To unify all of that is the Ford Motor Company, ads for which divide the novel’s seven sections while denoting the passage of time–from the Crash of 1929, through the last years of Prohibition, into the New Deal, up against one of the most consequential strikes of America’s Labor Movement, accompanied by race riots, past a mural by Diego Rivera, into labor unions, and headlong toward World War II, churning out tanks where once they made cars.

The characters are distinct and as recognizable as those we see today: a Polish family, a Jewish family, a Black family, an AFL, a CIO, members of the Detroit press, Henry Ford himself with his gun-happy henchman and his affable son Edsel, as ill-fated as the car that would bear his name. You can see the crowded neighborhoods, feel the humidity of the rainforest, hear the drills in the factory; touch the steering wheel of a Model T, smell the golabki in the kitchen.

There’s also a family named Rogan who would be dispatched from the pine forests on Michigan’s lily-white Upper Peninsula into the Amazon Jungle to grow rubber trees when the “Sage of Dearborn,” tired of paying Goodyear and Firestone for tires, thought he could make his own. In his talk, Sayles estimated that “Fordlandia” was about the size of Connecticut, but in the book he gives far more space to Kerry Rogan who we watch grow up in Brazil with her puppy-love, Flavio, each of them teaching the other their native language.

May sound like too much, but the pages may be three-fourths dialogue. The result is as fast-paced as Hemingway, though the casual, witty narrator, the jokes, the historical content, and the innovative format make Hemingway’s friend, John Dos Passos, a closer comparison. While Dos Passos employed a “Camera’s Eye” between chapters of Manhattan Transfer and his USA trilogy, Sayles’ narrator is a camera. Here’s an exchange between a young Jewish woman [Rosa] and a Polish couple [Kaz and Molly] who rescue her from a riot after her boyfriend shoved her into their car because he wanted to join the fight. Unable to drive safely into her neighborhood, they take her home for the night:

“Your father won’t be worried?” she asks.

“Not really,” says Rosa, amazed at how much cooler this house is compared to their apartment in Hastings. “I told him I’d be staying with Rick overnight.”

“And Rick is–?”

“The soldier you saw me have a fight with.”

“Ah.”

Rosa forgets, sometimes, that she is in the minority in many ways, social mores being one of them. Kaz looks amused, but Molly–

“Do you have a date set?”

“Ah—-? Oh, no marriage plans.”

Molly tucks a sheet under the sofa cushions, pulling it taut.

Crucible weaves the stories of these and over a dozen other characters into a final section that, without dictating just what their future holds, gives us the direction they are heading. Rosa will be rid of Rick. Kaz and Molly’s handicapped daughter, Sonia, will have a productive life. Mavis is far less fortunate at the morgue looking for her 14-year-old son. Flavio is a rare teenager who can speak fluent English in a third-world country. Norma wants to be a nurse whether she gets paid or not. And her daughter Kerry is on a flight back to Michigan to attend a teacher’s college:

“You are going home now?” asks the nice Brazilian lady beside her.

Kerry’s answer to that question would make a Ford owner’s manual worth slogging through. Thankfully, Sayles put it at the end of a novel rich with such moments. Much like his films.

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https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000626/

Rich with Peculiarities

If you love music, if you love art, if you crave a story of a community that unites in the face of adversity, you’ll want to see The Choral, a very British film set in a small mill town during World War I.

This prime time, end-of-year release stars Ralph Fiennes, the only recognizable name (to an American) in the cast. That may be one reason it had little chance of gaining any notice much less nominations for an Oscar. Instead of riding the wave of holiday attention, it was drowned out by other prime time releases with more well-known names, including another from the English countryside called Hamnet.

Fiennes plays a choral master brought to town when the one who held the job for years signs up to join the Army. He brings with him “peculiarities,” including having lived in Germany, which makes him suspect. As he has the choral preparing the St. Matthew Passion, a brick shatters the window. On it, a remark about “the Hun,” which the mill owner tries to reassure the conductor is not about him, but about Bach who wrote the piece.

Fiennes’ conductor laughs it off, “Given the quality of our singing, it could well be from a music critic.”

Before long, they drop Bach and turn to Sir Edward Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius. Good news when Elgar approves, but when they find they do not have the number of musicians required for the grandiose production, they downsize, and a string orchestra becomes a string trio. Ingeniously, they also adapt, and the old Gerontius becomes a wounded soldier, and an angel is recast as a nurse. And then Elgar shows up to see how things are going…

The film is rich with intrigue that only begins with German vs. English and Protestant vs. Catholic. With hints of what today is called post-traumatic-stress-disorder, it’s a test of what separation does to relationships. As one young man flippantly quips to his friend, a young postal carrier who at times brings bad news to young women, “One’s grief can be another’s opportunity.”

Rich also with subplots that are developed almost without dialogue, almost just as movement in the background, such as the grief-stricken wife of the mill owner who sees his role as to keep the town’s morale up. The Choral at times veers into mystery, dropping random clues, as when we overhear a singer tell another that the conductor is in the library daily, looking at the latest issue of the paper, always turning to the “Wartime Naval News.”

For comparison, The Choral is as spirited and rewarding and satisfying as so many Brit flicks that deliver both comedy and tragedy, reminding me of The Phanthom of the Open, Living, The Miracle Club, See How They Run, The Duke. And that’s just in the past five years.

Safe to say that, the characters we meet in all of these films have populated England for centuries. Otherwise, there would be no Hamnet or Hamlet.

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“The Hun,” followed home and pelted by pebbles from the hands of kids no doubt overhearing their parents’ gripes.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt31851518/

Possible Oscars & a Docujoke

Quite a delightful surprise to see Kate Hudson nominated for the Best Actress Oscar.

I’ve seen very few of her films, but I am relieved to see Song Sung Blue gain at least one nod. The Academy tends to dismiss feel-good features when awarding its statues, and what could be more feel-good than “Sweet Caroline”? But there’s a lot more to Song Sung Blue than Neil Diamond. Listen to the lesser known songs–some tracked for the film’s most intimate scenes–and you’ll find there’s a lot more to Neil Diamond than “Neil Diamond.” Moreover, put Neil Diamond aside, and the film has a lot to say about musicians trying to make a living–in this case two who combined to form a tribute band and a few who joined it.

That may be a second reason I should recuse myself from making picks. I haven’t seen Sinners with its 16 nominations, most ever in the history of the awards. Nor have I seen four others nominated for best film, which makes for half the field of ten. Of the five I have seen, I could make a strong case for both Hamnet and Sentimental Value. Marty Supreme not so much, and Bugonia not at all.

Of the five, One Battle After Another is the one most relevant to 2026, the one with the most urgent message. A comedy so dark and undeniably real that it dares you to laugh, it’s the one I’m most inclined to favor. I would certainly like to hear acceptance speeches from those who made it, but for all I know, the others may be just as willing to speak against America’s current War against the Arts as Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn. Those two and Benicio del Toro all have nominations–DiCaprio and Penn were funny, but del Toro was beyond hilarious.

As for Kate Hudson’s chances, she’s contending with Jessie Buckley in Hamnet and Renata Reinsva in Sentimental Value. I could make strong cases for all three. Buckley has the advantage of being at the center of Hamnet‘s finale, which might make the Academy consider adding an Oscar for Best Single Scene. However, I haven’t seen If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, and since I found Bugonia about as watchable as Fox “News,” I’ll neither pick nor predict a winner.

Speaking of the unwatchable, I wonder if it is mere coincidence that the so-called documentary, Melania, is released the very week that Oscar nominations are announced. Reviews make it sound like a worthy rival to Blair Witch Project for the most vacuous, pointless slop ever put on a screen, most all of them as brutal as Karoline Leavitt’s treatment of the White House press corps. Which reminds me that my next project will be a spoof of a Neil Diamond song I’ll rename: “Sour Karoline.” (…Lie! Lie! Lie! Lying never felt so good! So good! So good! So good!)

The predictions of failure at the box office, however, proved wrong, as the MAGA faithful packed cinemas, buying up tickets as willingly as they purchase $400 Trump sneakers, $200 Trump bibles, $99 Trump trading cards, and on and on. Can the MAGA crowd sustain these grosses for a film that the Hollywood Reporter calls “an unabashed, fly-on-the-gilded-wall fawn job”?

From what I’ve gleaned, the Epstein “associate”-turned-First Lady comes off about as warm and charming as her “I don’t care do U?” jacket and her Boris & Natasha hat. Even more damning are the memes proclaiming, “If syphilis was a movie…” or the mock–but very truthful–advertisements proclaiming: “She’s in the pedo-files!” Not only is she in the Epstein files, so too is a photo of Melania director Brett Ratner cozying up with one of Epstein’s trafficked girls. Bet you didn’t know that MAGA prefers movies over government files.

Not to worry, all may not be lost. My friend Kurt Kaletka in his history-rich and linguistically playful blog, “Truth or Better,” proposes that Melania might “have some worth” in the years ahead:

I can see Rocky Horror-type screenings of it, where the boys come dressed in suits and super-long red ties, blond wigs and orange makeup plastered almost entirely on their faces. The girls can show up with makeup and prosthetics to recreate the Mar-a-Lago Face phenomenon. You can go with other Trump White House characters, too! Use ghastly white face paint to copy Stephen Miller’s cadaverous look! Dress up like a Kristi Noem-style buckarette! Or copy the style of your favorite January 6 rioter!*

Kaletka obviously does not work in a cinema. Nor did I when Rocky Horror was released in 1975. But from the time I was hired in 1998, I did hear the Screening Room’s owners still bemoaning the mess they had to clean up every night of its run. After 23 years, they could laugh a bit, but the anger was still there.**

Let my friend make his appeal to the cineplexes with their high-powered cleaning machines. I’d rather watch Kate Hudson. Come to think of it, back in 2000 when still a new face, she had a moment in Dr. T and the Women that is as memorable as any I’ve ever seen. When her ringtone sounds during an exercise class, the annoyed instructor motions for her to leave the room. Hudson’s character holds up phone and announces, “It’s an emergency.” Far from any urgency, she says it as if talking about a napkin falling to the floor.

Yes, a three-word line, but at that moment I realized that cellphones had already turned “emergency” into the biggest one-word joke in the history of language. The Academy may also want to consider adding an Oscar for Best Single Word.

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*For Kurt Kaletka’s entire case for Melania Horror Picture Show, go to:

https://trueorbetter.blogspot.com/

**True story: About 2/3rds into a showing of Rocky Horror in Portland, Maine, some fifty years ago, a projectionist stopped the film to ask the audience to stop throwing things at the screen. Screens are delicate, easily stained, torturous to clean, and quite expensive to replace. He turned up the lights, but before he could get down from the booth and into the hall, the audience simply thought that the film was over. They were getting up, smiling, laughing, and ready to hit the nearby bars. He held his tongue and let them leave, which is exactly what I’d have done.

Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson as “Lightning & Thunder” in *Song Sung Blue*:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt30343021/

If Only a Scene in a Film

A Rhode Island friend reports that Showcase Cinemas Seekonk is no more.

Her photos show it already torn down, piles of rubble behind a ten-foot-high chain-link fence. She pays tribute:

A depressing scene….that’s all that is left. If only it were just a scene in a film…but this time it’s real. My heart sunk. Goodbye forever Showcase Seekonk! I have many memories of a multitude of incredible films I once viewed up on your big screens.

Any mention of rubble inevitably invites comparisons to the photographs we see of war-torn places. While no one would ever put the decline of an industry on the same plane as the destruction of war, there is a destruction that goes beyond buildings and entertainment. There is something happening here that is exactly clear if we see it in the context of how we live, what we value, what we honestly want.

It is the battle of private vs. public interest.

True, cinemas are privately owned, but they do provide a public life. People gather and sometimes talk with each other about what they have come to see. Far more often, they will talk on the way out about what they have just seen.

As a projectionist at The Screening Room, a small arts cinema in Newburyport, Mass., I have often seen patrons outside our door after a film agree to stop in The Port Tavern next door to share thoughts and reactions. I’ll never forget the woman who, following Spike Lee’s BlackKlansman, blurted out, “I’m going to The Grog to defrag!” Several patrons still stepping out the door volunteered to join her. That may be an extreme example, but just the look on other viewers’ faces and the tones of their overheard voices gives us a sense of public participation.

Always nice to have family or friends at home with you to share reactions. But you have them with you many, perhaps most other times. Compared to the public life of a cinema, this is a self-imposed privatization. Not a privatization of a business, of a building, of a choice of entertainment, but of ourselves.

As for all of the privately-owned cinemas that I am calling vital to our public life, I can tell you that all of us view other cinemas far more as allies than as competitors. Far from the cut-throat world of streaming services, the better any of us do, the better we all do.

Any cinemas’ success means that more people are going out, that more of us have a public life away from privatized confinement. The closing of Seekonk, like that of many cinemas large and small across the country in recent years, is a trend. As a trend, it is subject to change. And it stands to reason, that an increasingly isolated public will eventually grow hungry for a public life.

Any cinema’s closing is bad news, but here’s hoping that Seekonk’s patrons keep going to cinemas nearby, keeping them strong until the trend changes.

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Two for the Holiday Show

If you’re considering films to see this holiday season, there are two I’m tempted to recommend with just one word each: WOW! and WOW!

Neither Sentimental Value nor Hamnet will ever be called celebrations or described as feel-good, but they leave audiences feeling good and celebrating those who persevere. What recommends both for the season can be stated in one word: Redemption.

Stories–the settings and the time as much as the plot–are so different that it’s hard to believe they have so much in common. You may, for example, wonder if they share the same screenwriter and editors. I’ll refrain from hinting at anything else for fear of spoilers, but I can name similarities that have nothing to do with plot:

Both lead actresses, Norwegian Renata Reinsve (Worst Person in the World 2021) and Irish Jessie Buckley (Wicked Little Letters 2023) deliver performances as convincing and with as much range of emotion as any I’ve ever seen.

Worth noting here that Sentimental Value Director Joachim Trier earned two Oscar nominations for Worst Person, and that Hamnet Director Chloe Zhao won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2020 for Nomadland.

Also in common: Screening Room audiences have been very slow to get out of their seats when Sentimental Value and Hamnet are over, and they let us know why on their way out. Their words, their tones, and their facial expressions are very much the same.

It is the sound and the look of redemption.

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Renata Reinsve in *Sentimental Value:* https://www.imdb.com/title/tt27714581/

Jessie Buckley in the center of the Globe Theater in *Hamnet:* https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14905854/

Windows Turned Mirrors

We think of history as a window to the past, but at times find ourselves looking into a mirror of the present.

This month, as if to prove that point, cinemas are showing the riveting two-and-one-half hour Nuremberg and PBS offers The American Revolution, a six-episode series equally compelling. Both offer details never hinted at, much less mentioned in school texts, and which would imperil teachers in many states if they assigned them for classroom viewing.

Whoa, you may say, what does an international tribunal 80 years ago, or a war for independence 250 years ago have to do with America today?

See for yourself. Watch Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe) explain the appeal of Adolph Hitler by saying, “He made us proud to be German again,” or listen to the psychiatrist (Rami Malek) dissect him as a narcissist who “cares only about himself.” See what runs through your mind. In the Screening Room, the collective recognition was palpable for each scene.

If that’s not enough, notice the archival footage of newspapers, with sub-heads quoting Nazi leaders claiming, among other warped things, that all liberal concerns for humanity are a weakness. Compare that to Elon Musk’s “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” Musk was a fluke, you say, now he’s gone. Well, then compare it to several Republican senators who opposed the nomination of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court in 2010 for her crime of being “empathetic.” Many of those senators are still in office.

Rather than its echoes in the present, The American Revolution is more notable for what it reveals about the past. The late and controversial historian Howard Zinn–he of A People’s History of the United States–told us that the distortions of history in our schools is done not so much with lies as with emphasis and omission. Ken Burns’ latest documentary for PBS fills in omissions, often with surprise and shock.

This is especially true of the last two episodes which cover the complicated and nuanced reasons why many Native tribes sided with the loyalists and as many sided with the patriots. To some extent this was also true of both enslaved and free African-Americans, but the kaleidoscopic alliances of tribes from New England and the Carolinas all the way to the Mississippi reveal a war–or two theaters of war, the Great Lakes and the South–that most of us never hear of. And who knew that Spain joined our cause?

Most sobering was hearing of tribes across New York State that had villages of two story homes with hearths and glass windows, and with well-tended orchards and gardens. Weren’t they supposed to be nomadic, living in tents? Wasn’t their lack of settlements and unwillingness to “develop” land the justification for Manifest Destiny?

The documentary doesn’t waste time with the rhetorical question and the obvious point it makes. Instead, it just tells us that George Washington ordered it all destroyed on suspicion of those tribes’ alliance with the British. Even when it was over, while the historians concur that the terms of The Treaty of Paris in 1783 were agreeable for both the USA & England, one lets us know: “Biggest loser was the Indian tribes.”

For all of its revelations of the past, the present is not to be denied, most of it delivered in the last episode. That’s when the historians analyze what went into the Constitution with reverential praise for what the founders anticipated, especially internal attempts to undermine a federal government for individual gain.

We hear of Hamilton’s “man unprincipled in private life… known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty” who will

… mount the hobby horse of popularity—to join in the cry of danger to liberty—to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion—to flatter and fall in with all the nonsense of the zealots of the day—… to throw things into confusion that he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.’

More than windows that show the past, Nuremberg and The American Revolution mirror the present. Give such mirrors an honest look, and we may start finding doors to the future.

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https://www.pinterest.com/pin/folk-art-first-thanksgiving-at-plymouth–306807793361667073/

In Dubious Battles

If you’ve been to any of the No Kings or Hands Off rallies this year and heard any of us Boomers say we “can’t believe we’re still doing this,” the title of this film is for you.

As is the film. Though the promos offer scenes from an action-packed thriller, One Battle After Another is impossible to categorize–which makes it worth all of its two-and-a-half-plus hours.

My endorsement comes right away because the opening scenes had me wondering if I should sit so long through something that seemed so outdated and misleading. A subtitle at the start telling us that we are 17 years in the past would have helped. Instead, we get one identifying an immigration detention center, which reinforces the misconception of being in the present. In retrospect, that may have been intentional.

Despite that, the clashing political and sexual intrigue in every breath of revolutionary Perfidia (Tenyana Taylor) kept me in the thrall of what-happens-next. About then, we get the subtitle, “17 years later,” and it all falls into place–especially for those of us who placed ourselves at Anti-War and Civil Rights rallies 50 and 60 years ago, only to reprise our roles in 2025.

Falls into place not just as a story of its own, but as the latest bid for inclusion into the catalog of films that capture a national era. With police raids of a workplace and a school looking so much like the ICE raids described daily on TV and radio, One Battle‘s place should be as secure. Yes, we are inescapably in the present.

For comparison to others fitting that description, One Battle is as incisive as Wall Street (1987) and at times as zany as Network (1976). Sean Penn’s Col. Stephen Lockjaw, as weird as his name, loudly echos Dr. Strangelove. Characters played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Benicio del Toro could have been drawn out of an early Woody Allen movie; their scenes together more like the stylized sight-gags of director Wes Anderson than of Director Paul Thomas Anderson who is best known for Boogie Nights (1997) and the film that One Battle most closely resembles, There Will Be Blood (2007).

The women are more seriously drawn, even if one has a name that, like “Perfidia” and “Lockjaw,” sounds like it’s from an R-rated version of Rocky and Bullwinkle. Deandra (Regina Hall) does all she can to protect the young while devoted to the revolution. And it is her charge, Willa (Chastity Infiniti), conceived and born in those explosive first twelve minutes, who emerges as the film’s center and soul until she answers the call of a ham radio and drives off to Oakland for yet another dubious battle.

While car chase scenes fill movies I tend to avoid, Anderson puts brakes on one that screams up and down rolling hills with cameras that put us in the car. But there are no brakes in the father-daughter relationship. This is DiCaprio at his best–as pliable as he was in Don’t Look Up and yet as scheming as in Flowers of the Flower Moon–in scenes with Infiniti whose performance may well earn her an Oscar nomination.

For that, you can add “Character Study” to “Action Epic,” “Political Thriller,” and “Dark Comedy” as yet another tag. But if I had to settle on just one category, I’d propose a new one:

One Battle After Another is a national portrait.

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https://rpp.pe/cine/internacional/leonardo-dicaprio-regresa-a-los-cines-este-2025-con-one-battle-after-another-de-paul-thomas-anderson-noticia-1623273
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt30144839/

Eleanor in Disguise

With the effortlessly hilarious June Squibb channeling a squinting Queen Elizabeth on the poster, you might think Eleanor the Great is a feel-good comedy and no more.

Oh, there’s more, much more to Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut despite all the laughs from the opening credits to when Eleanor Morgenstein (Squibb) turns out the night-light.

Before long you might squirm with laughter at references to the Holocaust, but memories of it steer the plot when we learn that Eleanor had been an inseparable companion to a Holocaust survivor who passed away before the film begins.

All the comedy serves as disguise; Eleanor the Great is about how we deal with grief.

To tell you what Eleanor does would be to spoil most, if not all, of Johansson’s deft surprises. To avoid that, I’ll say only that it catches the attention of a novice journalist, Nina, played by Erin Kellyman, which, in turn, catches the attention of veteran journalist Roger, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor.

Roger hosts one of NYC’s most popular TV news-shows, New York Fabric, and is about to make Eleanor famous much to the dismay of Erin who has learned something after the fact. Their story becomes as central to the film as Eleanor’s when we consider that they are father and daughter, both dealing with a heavy, recent loss of their own. The humane professionalism of both offsets the antics of what most critics call “the witty, proudly troublesome” Eleanor.

Most critics–and many Screening Room patrons this week– have called the film surprising. As surprised as anyone, I tried to think of a film to which it might be compared–a film about which you could say, “If you liked Eleanor, you might also like ________.”

Of course, if you’re a fan of the nonagenarian June Squibb, there’s her breakout hit. As an octogenarian, she stole the opening scenes of the show with a supporting role in the little-noticed but superbly crafted indy film, Nebraska (2013). And she could have been auditioning for the role of Mr. Magoo’s soulmate in the title role of the wild and wacky Thelma (2024).

As for the tone and feel of the film, however, the only comparison my memory offers to Eleanor the Great is Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont (2005) in which an aging Joan Plowright, also in the title role, also tells a story that may be called wrong, but is her way of making things right.

Like Eleanor, and like Roger and Erin, Mrs. Palfrey was also dealing with grief.

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https://www.imdb.com/title/tt30268321/