Making the rounds in art cinemas if not at the cineplexes of interstate interchanges is The Velvet Underground, a film unlike anything this art cinema projectionist has ever seen.
Many split-screen scenes, mostly two, at times a dozen, challenge viewers to decide where to put our eyes, much like Woodstock (1970). Unlike that concert film, much of this documentary is archival, scenes of the American 50s and 60s, from the stability of suburban neighborhoods to the volatility of protests, from the assurance of Brillo pads to the trauma of Dallas, Texas.
While Underground is as chaotic as the era, it sustains focus on the ethos of Andy Warhol from whose cameras much of the footage comes. All part of the Greenwich Village scene, Warhol invited Lou Reed, John Cale, and the band they founded into his warehouses repurposed as concert venues for avant-garde multi-media events. Trendy? Immediately, it was the place to be seen, and before long Jackie Kennedy and Walter Cronkite were among the celebrities seen there.
However, Director Todd Haynes, whose previous films include a quirky, imaginary biography of characters in Bob Dylan songs titled I’m Not There (2007) and a 1987 cult-classic that uses Barbie Dolls to chronicle the tragedy of Karen Carpenter titled Superstar, does not stop at the band’s presentation and packaging. When the film delves into the music, we learn just why it had a mesmerizing quality that would leave audiences in stunned silence at the end of a song–and then into wild applause exactly five seconds later.
We learn just how and why Nico fit in as a vocalist, and how and why she no longer did. And we learn of the increasing riff between Reed and Cale, yet another version of that between Lennon and McCartney, John Sebastian and Zal Yanovsky, Ian Anderson and Martin Barre, the Davies Brothers. No wonder the Stones keep on rolling.
For all of the odd comparisons, Underground offers a sharp contrast to Lambert & Stamp, the 2015 documentary about the two film students who set out to document London’s fledgling rock scene and wound up managing a rough-neck band that had no real following. First thing they did was change the band’s name from The High Numbers to The Who, and it was all tour de force after that.
But Kit Lambert and Christopher Stamp stayed out of sight. When the Velvet Underground was on stage in New York, Andy Warhol was main attraction just by being in the audience. What they all had in common was stage presentation and music that, to paraphrase Peter Townsend, did not market to the audience, but marketed the audience itself.
For The Who it was “Go to the Mirror, Boy.” For the Underground it was “I’ll Be Your Mirror.” Mirrors and reflections are recurring themes in the music of both. The title Who Are You has no question mark at the end of it. The Underground often performed in silouhette with backlighting aimed at the audience. Lambert and Stamp fashioned it from Townsend’s lyrics. Warhol put his stamp on it by being in that brightly lit audience.
For all of this, Underground is enlightening for sure, but some things made no sense, such as drummer Mo Tucker talking about Frank Zappa & the Mothers of Invention as if they were Herman’s Hermits. Perhaps this is what happens an avant-garde band out of NYC lands in California?
While it has run its course at the Newburyport Screening Room, you can still catch The Velvet Underground in Boston and Cambridge. Don’t count on it, but it may play the big screen awhile due to all the talk of and scenes at the Boston Tea Party in the last half hour.
And you’ll want a big screen to do all of Haynes/Warhol’s split screens justice.
Hard to imagine writing a review of Gulliver’s Travels when it first appeared 300 years ago without ruining the effect of surprise–and of comedy.
So it is with I’m Your Man, the German “What If?” film now playing in arts cinemas near you.
While Gulliver landed among larger and smaller breeds of people, archeologist Alma Felser finds–and eventually loses–herself among humanoid robots and holograms. On the surface, the comedy is as clear and pervasive as “the mountain lakes” to which Tom compares Alma’s eyes on their first date.
It’s also as deep as her first question to him: “Do you believe in God?”
Inescapable is the larger question of just how far we are willing to pursue technology that satisfies all our needs, even those needs, yes, that need. Get too caught up on that, and you’ll miss the more subtle wit and irony that recalls 2007’s Lars and the Real Girl.
Satire has always taken that risk. When Swift wrote his “Modest Proposal” to solve both the population and hunger problems in London by cooking newborn babies, many, taking him literally, were outraged. I wouldn’t be surprised if others thought it a cook book.
To be fair, writer-director Maria Schrader makes an enticing case for the side on which we would rather not be. As a result, the film is Hamlet’s question.
No way you’ll miss the message aimed at workaholics, and it is a nice touch that Alma’s obsession digs into ancient carvings and hieroglyphics that show proof of poetry and lyrics as early as 2,700 BC.
I’m Your Man leaves you talking, as happened last night among patrons on the sidewalk outside the Screening Room. Conversations charged with both amusement and alarm.
My age affords me far more amusement than alarm–until I get home, tune in a baseball game, and see a commercial for a car in which the driver can daydream to the point of waving her arms in the air and closing her eyes while technology takes her racing safely down the highway.
Not long ago, that would be the opening for a dire warning. Today, it’s a selling point. I’m Your Man asks if we still know the difference.
–30–
Playing at the Newburyport Screening Room through Thursday, Oct. 21. Check for times:
When you are a projectionist at a local cinema, as I am once again after an 18-month pandemic layoff, your friends, family, neighbors, folks on the street, in the supermarket, and at the farm-stand, including some you don’t know at all but who often saw you in the cinema’s lobby before and after shows since the 20th Century, always ask this question:
“What’s playing?”
This week, as soon as I say the title, they roll their eyes, which takes my prize for non-verbal irony.
The Eyes of Tammy Faye is worth the watch for its behind-the-obscenes revelations of the Gospel of Prosperity as preached in the Book of Reaganomics in the days of King Ronald. Based on a 2000 documentary of the same name, it details the fall of ultra-successful (and rich) televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker in the early Nineties, a scandal that rocked the nation, especially evangelical Christians.
Put another way, there is more American history in these two hours than can be gained from all the statues, still standing outdoors or shunted into warehouses, from here to Charlotte, North Carolina, where the Bakkers’ satellite television network was based–all of it relevant to the grip that fundamentalism has on the country today and how one political party has cynically pandered to it.
My use of “Book of Reaganomics” and “King Ronald” may be satirical, but “Gospel of Prosperity” is the name that fundamentalists use to justify the extreme wealth accumulated by televangelists–and that Republicans use for that of their corporate donors. By implication, it holds that poverty is the result of some moral failing–and, oh by the way, taxes only enable that failure.
This is where Eyes offers its biggest surprise: Tammy Faye, who grew up poor in International Falls, Minnesota, defied her husband and the honchos he cozied up to (Jerry Falwell, Pat Roberts) with attempts to advocate for the poor.
Want a bigger surprise? She advocated for gays stricken by AIDS in a time that Falwell and Roberts called the disease “just punishment” for the “sin of homosexuality”–all while the Reagan Administration turned a deaf ear. (Among the most persistent voices was that of a young Dr. Anthony Fauci.)
The combination of a powerful husband and an increasing reliance on medications cut her dissension short. Still, her voice was timely enough to make a difference, as her televised interview of an AIDs patient drew numerous donations for research from the nationwide audience of Praise the Lord Network.
You’ll have to withstand chapters and verse of rapturous dialogue loaded with “praise the Lord” and “God loves you” to discover all of this. And the “Betty Boop” voice of Tammy’s puppets, I must admit, is hard to take.
But if you marvel at how today’s Republicans can turn the Big Lie, election fraudits, and insurrection into successful fund raising, you may want to see how the phones light up when Jim and Tammy Bakker make their “confessions” on prime-time telethons.
At times Eyes reminded me of BlacKkKlansman and the Trial of the Chicago 7 as another in-depth look at an era in which most of my generation lived on the surface. As I recall, no one ever rolled their eyes at the mention of either of those two gems.
At the risk of sounding flip, I’ll call it Judy in a religious setting with a political backdrop. From Renée Zellweger’s “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” as Judy Garland to Jessica Chastain’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic” as Tammy Faye Bakker, the lead performances were equally riveting and intense.
So odd that the syrupy Jesus-loves-you dialogue is what makes Eyes sometimes taste like castor oil, but when you arrive at the last scene, the last lines, the last song, your grasp of recent history will be in better health.
-30-
The Eyes of Tammy Faye is playing at the Screening Room in Newburyport through Thursday, Oct. 7. Check for times each day at: https://www.newburyportmovies.com/
Probably should recuse myself from reviewing a film shot on and off the tip of Cape Ann. Every day I’m on Plum Island looking at Gloucester and Rockport over some seven miles of the Gulf of Maine. And since every review to date mentions Oscars, who needs another?
As powerful, beautiful, poignant, eye-opening (or was it ear-closing?) as they say, CODA is disarmingly funny. Quite a surprise to someone who went expecting not much more than a local treat while disadvantaged people get their due.
Tempting to call CODA‘s main plot Whiplash without the nastiness of the drum-throwing and drummer-beating teacher. But the choir director poses no physical threat. In fact, when we first see him and through much of the film, he fits a gay stereotype that the film merely hints at while knocking down stereotypes of the deaf–and by extension, of all people with disabilities.
Spoiler alert: Film reviewers like to use the word “masterstroke” for unexpected, understated gems. CODA‘s portrayal of Mr. V is a masterstroke on the backswing.
That may be purely coincidental, which would be just as much to Director Sian Heder’s credit. Uncoincidental are scenes giving the audience some sense–or denial of sense–of the deaf experience (a technique used in 2019’s Sound of Metal, an Oscar-nominee for Best Picture and winner of Best Sound). Though subtitles remain at the bottom of the screen, CODA goes silent at times, making us experience a town meeting, a rowdy barroom, a school concert as deaf people do.
In what had to be a deliberate challenge to a hearing audience, this happens in the climactic scene at the concert. Most films about music build to that scene in which the musician usually performs triumphantly. In a few cases, they fail miserably. Either way, we hear it.
Not in CODA. We hear Ruby and Miles exchange the opening lyrics of their much-anticipated duet, and then silence. Camera brings us to Ruby’s deaf parents in the middle of the audience trying to take cues from others as the camera pans people they see but cannot hear. Another film might have done it briefly, but CODA sustains the silence for the duration of the song, no sound until the booming ovation when the singers are finished.
Rather than sharing the triumph, the film shares what it is to be deaf.
The duet of Ruby and Miles brought back memories of my teaching days. Did Mr. V deliberately match the “du-et” so they would do it together? One of many word-plays–which are beyond surprising for a story about a deaf family–this had to do with rehearsing “You’re All I Need,” the classic duet popularized by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell in 1968, but it leaves us wondering if teacher was playing matchmaker. They were clearly his two favorites, and he coached both for entry into Boston’s Berklee School of Music.
Did I do it with the earnest Portuguese kid who reminded me of myself and the free-spirited Italian lass, two of my best writers who both took a liking to my antics and assignments in just my second semester teaching in 1985? I waited until the end of the semester to tell them about papers they had in common but were in conflict on one key (if contrived by me) point. Something to do with high schools requiring community service as I recall, not the idea of it but the options for it. Held them at the end of a class, as happens in CODA, and urged they read each other’s A essays and discuss it. And then I quickly left the room without awaiting their answer, just as Mr. V does.
This was in the days before emails. Finding a gig closer to home, I did not return to Bridgewater State, and so I had no idea what became of them. Again, just as with the film, we do not know if the duet did or will do it.
Which is as it should be for a film titled CODA, the musical term for a melodic afterthought, a diversion from–but still related to–the main theme and melody that usually fades out. (Think of the end of the Beatles’ “Hey Jude” or of Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s “Lucky Man,” or of Beethoven who was known for long, loud codas despite being–or maybe because he was–deaf.)
But that’s double-entendre. The D in CODA is for “Deaf,” as in “Child Of Deaf Adults.” Although the film offers a kind and generous tough-love teacher in place of the monster who taught in Whiplash, Ruby Rossi endures the ridicule of classmates for being a CODA.
Then there’s the nastiness of the fishing industry, the depleted stock, regulatory demands, underpricing that keeps those with the boats, such as the Rossi family, under heel. And the tension that compounds around the dinner table, especially for the teenage daughter who wants to sing. The plots converge when the Rossi family makes a bold move to stand on their own, a struggle which unites the deaf with the rest of the fishing fleet, though that, too, is left hanging at film’s end.
As if to make up for the silence of the duet, we do hear and see Ruby’s full–and fully original–interpretation of Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” (1966) before the credits roll. In fact, you could fairly say she does a duet, but I will neither spoil nor alert you to it by saying how or why.
-30-
To do Cape Ann justice on the big screen, it should be in theaters everywhere–including downtown Newburyport where it will play the Screening Room through next Thursday, August 26.
Now that it’s again safe to venture into downtown Newburyport and find a place to put your car within a minute’s stroll of the local cinema, you may want to catch a piece of recent American history as told in the most unlikely artistic medium:
Dance.
That Ailey begins with the last lines of our national anthem does not orient us to a documentary about the legendary choreographer’s life and work, as introductions do, but re-orients us. Yes, it is about art. But yes, it is also about the “land of the free and the home of the brave” when many were not free and too few were brave enough to do anything about it.
Alvin Ailey wore the dust of Texas where he was raised by a single mom who encouraged his creative bent. That dust and that upbringing are well-represented in the film because he put all of both into his performances. Celebrations of back culture–from its backwater, “let-it-all-hang-out” weekend parties to its migration into northern cities–mesmerized audiences on all six continents from the Sixties through the Eighties.
But Ailey was not blind to the lingering ghost of Jim Crow here at home. As one of his many dancers says of him, Ailey’s “memory was anger.”
Several dances interpret the struggle of surviving racism, but the most vivid is anything but survival as four tall men sway from side to side on tiptoe, their bodies straight, arms motionless at their sides, and their heads slumped to one side, mouth and eyes open.
This bitter reminder of Eartha Kitt’s “Strange Fruit” is followed by a message of rebirth: Men lying upright on a rehearsal floor, arms up and waving “like blades of grass,” as Ailey instructs, while women tiptoe among them, harvesting their souls with sweeping motions of one arm into an imaginary sack held by the other.
In Masekela Langage (1969), a searing piece set to the music ofHugh Masekela and prompted by the controversial death of Black Panther Fred Hampton,Ailey drew parallels between South African apartheid and the race-induced violence of 1960s Chicago. Strange to think of Masekela as a voice of protest, especially after the recent reminder of his biggest American hit, the easy-going “Grazing in the Grass,” in Summer of Soul. But, as critics noted at the time, Ailey set the trumpeter’s jazz to “a commanding choreography [that] speaks of passivity, militancy, despair and defiance anywhere, at any time.”
As Laurie Anderson might say, writing about dance is like dancing about architecture, so let me leave you with these stills of Ailey’s work and hints American history.
Alvin Ailey was claimed by AIDS in 1989, but a fifty-year-old review predicted that his work would be relevant today, and Ailey proves it–mostly with an implied question that is repeated in both dance and film:
“How do you color music?” asks one of the singers known as The Fifth Dimension.
Marilyn McCoo was responding, fifty years after the fact, to the charge of being “a Black group with a white sound.” Had she been talking about the color of costumes, of dazzling choreography, of vibrant stage presence, she’d have plenty of answers to a question that would go unasked.
So goes one of many clips of interviews between the songs we hear in Summer of Soul (or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised), a documentary and concert film of the Harlem Cultural Festival in 1969 that was left in cans and stored away until, apparently, a pandemic left some combination of Black historians, musicians, and filmmakers looking for something to unearth.
Director Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson struck solid gold. Reviews of any concert will feature highlights, but Soul is all highlights. From the Edwin Hawkins Singers’ enigmatic “Oh Happy Days” to “Backlash Blues,” an in-your-face rage against segregation in the quiet but defiant roar of Nina Simone as she bangs out exclamation points with dissonant chords on piano–followed by her sweet, reassuring “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black.”
Surprises abound. A 19-year-old Stevie Wonder plays drums, David Ruffin of The Temptations delivers a heart-stopping “Tracks of My Tears,” Hugh Masekela’s “Grazing in the Grass” accompanies archival footage of apartheid South Africa, we learn that Maxwell Coffee funded the event with ads that emphasize East Africa as the source of its beans.
Joshua L. Pearson’s editing of the concert film with archival footage and interviews of young participants grown old–from both audience and stage–should be Oscar-bound. For those too young to remember The Sixties, Soul could well serve as a text for an American history class. The festival followed the Civil Rights and Voting Acts by less than five years, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy by just one, and the Staples Singers were on stage singing about a man landing on the Moon the very moment that Neil Armstrong did exactly that. While many questioned the race to space given the economics of race on Earth, it was also the year that newspapers–at the insistence of Charlayne Hunter-Gault, a New York Times columnist who today would be called “African-American”–made the switch from “Negro” to “Black.”
As diverse as the musical styles are–from gospel to psychedelic–Questlove and Pearson have given us a tight package, a historical event that, were it held today, might likely be titled, “We Matter!”
For those of us who do recall 1969, few if any recall ever hearing about the Harlem Festival. Instead we all recall Woodstock which occurred simultaneously within a hundred miles to the north. Indeed, Soul tells us that the effort to release the concert film billed it as the “Black Woodstock,” but that distributors saw no profit in it.
For me, the film was less about race than about nostalgia. I never cared much for the sing-songy “Everyday People,” but last night I was in tears as soon as Sly and the Family Stone broke into it. And that wasn’t the only time. When the Fifth Dimension launched into “The Dawning of the Age of Aquarius,” and all through “Let the Sun Shine In,” I relived my youth.
My favorite moment comes early in the film as the Chambers Brothers bring “Uptown,” a hard-driving song about Harlem, to a close. The camera is on the four brothers lined up at their microphones and zooms in past them to the drummer in his final flourish, zooming right to his white face before silence and a fade to black.
Summer of Soul welcomes all of us.
-30-
Should be available on Hulu:
As the centerpiece of the film, Nina Simone should be and is at the center of this collage. Others, clockwise from top-left: BB King, The Fifth Dimension (Marilyn McCoo on the right), Mavis Staples & Mahalia Jackson, Sly (as in Family Stone), a stage shot, a crowd shot, Hugh Masekela, Gladys Knight & the Pips. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11422728/
We all have preferences for what’s put on our plates of music, film, dance, and drama to satisfy our entertainment tastes. Though I have fond memories of seeing The Mikado and Oklahoma on stage, I have put film musicals about where I put tofu, cauliflower, and non-alcoholic beer on my grocery list: Nowhere.
That changed last night when I saw In the Heights, as dynamic as any two-plus hours I’ve experienced from any stage. Closest comparisons I can make are to the intoxicating dance scenes in Slumdog Millionaire and BlackKklansman, as well as to the corner store scenes in another Spike Lee film, Jungle Fever. The opening title number is as immediate as that of Robert Altman’s The Company, the difference being that in place of a ballet stage it unfolds on a New York City intersection.
But those are specific scenes of films that are far from musicals–as far as Heights‘ colorful, vibrant, kaleidoscopic setting is from that of screenwriter Lin-Manuel Miranda’s previous work, Hamilton.
By now you’ve likely heard of the choreography scaled to cover blocks of tenements, city blocks, and even a public swimming pool, of the dual Dominican/Nuevo York narration and plot, of the joyous and liberating Hispanic attitude and feel of it. All of it in the belief–of people young and old, immigrant and native–in el suenito.
They all have a “little dream,” often inherited from the ancestors who brought them to America. Among them was the narrator’s father, so enthused by his arrival in New York that he named his son for the first boat he saw while entering the harbor: “Usnavy.” The matriarch of the young dreamers who carry Heights to the heights of an implied plot defines el suenito by the labor it takes to achieve it. “We clean your houses! We scrub your floors!” she sings down the vacant rail of a subway. “We show ourselves in the details,” she explains while showing her granddaughter a colorfully embroidered set of napkins.
Choreography and cinematography both match Miranda’s relentless word-play in lyrics delivered often as hip-hop, sometimes as pop, at times as romance, inevitably as lament. As much as the dancing, the word-play by itself is reason if not cause to see this film more than once. And most all of Heights‘ is sung, save for a few scenes that advance a plot of struggle not just for acceptance but for opportunity.
Leaving all evaluation for reviews you can find or friends who have seen it, I’ll emphasize one point that may be lost in all of Heights‘ joy and excitement:
The plot involves an undocumented high-schooler who, in his own words, arrived here “in Pampers.” His suenita is going to college. His struggle is the political threat posed to whom we have come to know as “Dreamers.”
When I left the theater last night, my appetite for entertainment was as satisfied as it was by The Mikado and Oklahoma years ago, and by Slumdog Millionaire and BlackKklansman in the years since. Not only that, but I hope to observe this 4th of July weekend with Miranda’s Hamilton after having so mindlessly avoided it.
However, I also left with one nagging thought: Is there anything that reveals the polarization of American politics today so vividly as the controversy raised by Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Act, better known as “DACA”? Put another way: What kind of people oppose students who arrived in America as children receiving a deferred action from deportation while in school or in military service? From becoming eligible for work permits? From having a path for citizenship?
If you think that the threat to Dreamers has passed because we now have a president very much committed to DACA, you need a reminder that an entire political party is not just opposed to it, but using it as a wedge issue to convince its base to kill it.
While the reminder of the threat is there, In the Heights is most powerful in its resolve to overcome it. Miranda’s best move was to make it a musical. What better to make the contrast between the two visions–one of hope, the other of nope–that now compete for America’s future?
No question it was the most unusual Academy Awards ceremony in the fifty years that I’ve been paying any attention. And I think I know why Frances McDormand quipped that it should have had a karaoke bar, though that is wide open to interpretation.
Overall I quite liked it, especially the stance, reconciliatory rather than angry, both stated and implied, against racism.
Still, it could have used some improvement. Namely, eight more awards:
And the Oscar for Nostalgia goes to…
Rita Moreno. She made an impression on this ten-year-old watching West Side Story back in 1961, and she still makes it in her 90th year. I like to think I’m both fan and practitioner of self-deprecating humor, but Moreno’s mention of her Best Actress award and West Side‘s “lesser award” for Best Picture were my best laughs of the night.
In retrospect, it may have established the pretext for the surprising re-ordering of the awards that put Best Picture ahead of Best Actor and Actress.
And the Oscar for Biggest Surprise goes to…
Most everyone is saying it was the Best Actor award, which would have made the aforementioned switch a good move–except that the winner wasn’t there.
Why anyone would be surprised that Anthony Hopkins would win an acting award may be a function of age, and maybe I’m giving away my age–dating myself after wishing out loud I was dating Rita Moreno these last sixty years–when I tell you that my biggest surprise last night was an ad for Steven Spielberg’s remake of West Side Story soon to be in cinemas, virtual and real, near you.
Do I seem even older when I mention that the original West Side Story is a remake of Romeo and Juliet?
OK, an adaptation, just don’t “OK Boomer” me
And the Oscar for Double-Take goes to…
Another ad was for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s soon-to-be-released film titled In the Heights. I’m still wondering if they made a mistake and showed the same clips from the new West SideStory film, or if it might be the same film with two titles.
Then again, many of us wondered that back in 1987 when Platoon and Full Metal Jacket were released within months of each other. No one could possibly make that mistake after seeing them.
And the Oscar for Too-Close-To-Home goes to…
Wish I made a note of it, but one of the nominees in an early category was identified as a former ticket-taker and concessionaire at a cinema before he worked his way into whatever category it was that qualified him for that Oscar. The host asked us to keep that in mind next time we were in a theater lobby watching a worker there making our popcorn.
Lost track of what the award was because I started wondering how many people in and around Newburyport started thinking of their local projectionist. I’m so vain, I probably thought that joke was about me.
And the Oscar for Full Circle (no pun intended) goes to…
In 2019, I thought it a crime that Glenn Close was not named Best Actress for The Wife. And that was a year in which I did see most of the films, including The Favourite, a flatulent period satire for which British stand-up comic Olivia Colman took the award. (In fact, I saw both films more than once because I showed them.)
While I admit that I enjoyed Close’s performance of a dance called “Da Butt” in this year’s ceremony, I feel oddly relieved that she wasn’t on the stage twerking an acceptance two years ago.
And the Oscar for Anti-Climax goes to…
Of the eight nominees for Best Film, I saw just two, which meant that I saw just two of the nominated performances in the four acting categories, so I have no complaint about choices.
Next day, I found myself perplexed over the charges that Chadwick Boseman “was robbed” of the Best Actor Oscar that went to Anthony Hopkins, having seen neither Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom nor The Father. Boseman was the odds-on favorite as well as the overwhelming sentimental choice having succumbed a few months ago to colon cancer at just 43. At 83, Hopkins, well-decorated with five Best Actor nominations including the Oscar for Silence of the Lambs 30 years ago, didn’t even attend.
News of controversy does explain why the Best Actor and Actress awards were presented at the end, following Best Picture and Director which usually close the show. The Academy expected to leave us with an emotional tribute to an audience favorite gone too soon.
Instead, it gave us the most abrupt ending of a show since Our American Cousin had to pull the curtain when an actor who wasn’t in it barged into a balcony box and shot Abraham Lincoln.
And the Oscar for Blunt Subtlety goes to…
As for the show itself, I still don’t know what to think. In real time, I wondered if Francis McDormand’s two speeches, one howling, could have been compared to George C. Scott in 1970 when he refused an Oscar for Patton on the grounds that he didn’t believe in competition between actors, or to Woody Allen for his refusal to attend the ceremony for much the same reason.
Turns out that the howl–in her co-acceptance of Nomadland‘s Best Picture Oscar–was a tribute to Michael “Wolf” Snyder, the film’s sound-mixer who suffered depression and committed suicide some months ago.
Still, that leaves what may be the shortest acceptance for a Best Actress Award: “I have no words: my voice is in my sword,” McDormand said, quoting from Macbeth. She then added: “We know the sword is our work, and I like work. Thank you for knowing that, and thanks for this.”
Quite a contrast to Marlon Brando sending an Oglala Sioux to accept an Oscar for his role in The Godfather and call attention to the American Indian Movement’s occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973.
Difference was that all three of those examples–Scott, Allen, Brando–stood out from rest of the ceremonies held and nationally televised at the time, while last night was threaded throughout with a strong, pointed stand against racism. Swords and then some.
At the risk of reading into it, I wonder if McDormand found herself fully in agreement with the evening’s overriding intent and sentiment, but wanted to deflate the form it had taken–all while sharpening the message, a sword indeed.
Maybe it’s just me, but I have to think that her choice of a plain, all-black, full-length gown was intended to invoke a judicial robe. Put a white collar on it, and it would have been seen as a tribute to Ruth Bader Ginsburg. With or without the collar, or the robe, McDormand held court and made a ruling.
And the Oscar for Sight Gag goes to…
Every year when writing or talking about the Oscars ceremony, I avoid the “Who are you wearing?” question.
Not because I don’t like the gowns–I do–or because the subject makes me uncomfortable–it does not–but only because so many others pay so much–too much–attention to it that there’s no reason for me to add to any debates that have no relevance to anything I care about.
However, when Laura Dern took the stage dressed as an ostrich, I lost a mouthful of Narragansett which made it all the way to the screen. Reminded me of twenty years ago when the Icelandic singer Bjork performed in an absurd eyesore called a swan dress.
Rita Moreno cracked my favorite jokes, and made my geriatric heart race, but Laura Dern was by far the best sight gag.
NEWBURYPORT, April 1 — Local historian Helen Highwater hopes to wow both City Hall and the Chamber of Commerce at today’s annual “Up Newburyport” conference with a daring, ingenious money-making plan to offset a year of COVID-19 losses.
Highwater, who founded Up Newburyport to satisfy the city’s eternal quest for “revenue generators,” will offer a deceptively simple plan called “Statues of Unlimitations.”
“Statues can be placed anywhere and made to say anything,” she offers, “and that will generate unlimited revenue.”
While talking statues have long populated theme parks around the world, Newburyport could become the world’s first “theme city” with talking memorials.
Inspiration struck Highwater a year ago when she was ejected from a Board of Health meeting for repeatedly referring to its members as “Popcorn Police” and offering to design hazmat suits for them to wear on the job.
Flung out City Hall’s front door face first onto the sidewalk, she looked up and found herself begging William Lloyd Garrison for mercy.
“I thought right then I’d pay to have him answer.”
The plan calls for the city’s existing statues to have wired speakers concealed in their mouths. They would speak when money — plastic, paper or coin — is inserted in slots installed at the statue’s base.
With brief quotes and full speeches for the Garrison and George Washington statues ready to record, Up Newburyport proposes new statues of the city’s other notable natives, residents and visitors, including:
¢ Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr. Would face each other to debate issues that challenged the new republic.
¢ Marquis de Lafayette. Would accept euros and Canadian loonies to speak French.
¢ Benedict Arnold. Would keep talking treason until paid to shut up, a dollar for five minutes, $20 an hour. (With a warning label saying: “Don’t do the math!”)
¢ Teddy Roosevelt. Wouldn’t shut up no matter what we paid, but respond instead with waving arms and jabbing fingers.
¢ John Quincy Adams, not as a lawyer’s youthful apprentice by day but as a publick house musician by night, playing flute to accompany Frank Sinatra on Oregano’s loopy outdoor broadcast. The city could then sell the CD titled, “I Did It Sideways.”
¢ And Caleb Cushing, Franklin Pierce’s attorney general and an adamant apologist for slavery, declared by local historians to be Newburyport’s “most accomplished and most colorful public figure in the municipality’s long history.”
Anticipating objections to a champion of the Fugitive Slave Act being made a prominent city symbol, Highwater dismisses “bad energy and divisive banter” by reminding us that we must “Get over it,” “Move on,” “Look forward,” “Suck it up,” and “Turn the page.”
Cushing, she says, “will attract Trumpoholics with their Confederate flags and decals on their cars and clothing — not to mention rich tourists from the Deep South still proud of their ‘tradition’ and ‘heritage.’”
As well as “money grubbers who will revel in Cushing’s attempt to get a piece of the drug trade action in India and China, which made British drug lords rich.”
Warming to her subject, Highwater insists that “Cushing makes a good case for not letting socialist ideas get in the way of an economic multiplier, which is what the slave trade was for the North as well as the South.”
She then makes a surprising comparison: “Many Americans long for Reagan’s second coming, his principled refusal to upset corporations that did business in apartheid South Africa — and to accommodate many Americans with stock in companies that have sweatshops in Third World countries.”
Many of Cushing’s recordings, claims Highwater, “can be scripted from Reagan’s veto of the 1986 Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act by just changing the word ‘apartheid’ to ‘slavery.’”
Looking forward, she suggests that churches might wire their statues at “a buck a beatitude” and synagogues might enhance Stars of David with “Oy Talk.”
Never one to miss a trick, Highwater suggests “scriptural updates for today’s real world.” For example, “Blessed are they who sell their souls, for they shall generate revenue.”
As well as product placements such as, “And Noah receiveth cut rate insurance for his ark from State Farm,” voiced over bleating goats from some sea captain’s statue placed on the waterfront.
Asked whose brand this will be, Highwater raises a glass: “Up Newburyport’s!”
-30-
Brown Square, Newburyport, Mass. Native son William Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879) faces City Hall, which is out of frame to the right. The inscription is his most frequently quoted proclamation in The Liberator (1831-1865), the abolitionist newspaper that he founded, published, edited, and wrote. In the background are the Garrison Hotel and the Central Congregational Church. Photo courtesy of the Newburyport Daily News.
When I watch the Oscars this year, my preferences will not be for any film’s acting or story, but for its nostalgia.
My last blog spelled out as many reasons as there were defendants in The Trial of the Chicago 7. For Nomadland, it is a single, sweeping reason, much like its settings in Southwest deserts, Northwest coasts, and Dakota Badlands. While I attended several antiwar demonstrations that followed Chicago in 1968, I was a vagabond–a nomad–for parts of 1976 & ’77 spending nights at a time in campgrounds, joining random travelers around campfires, playing in jam sessions, and landing in various places in the American west offering seasonal employment.
Canning peas, training hops, picking cherries, installing shelves in a brand new 3M warehouse, let’s just say that I looked far more like Abbie Hoffman than Jon Ossoff, and that I could have easily been the young hitchhiker who bums a cigarette from Fern before listening to her recite Shakespeare.
Recusal from a decision for Best Film may be an ethical obligation, but my memory reserves the right to two votes: Chicago 7, Best Screenplay; Nomadland, Best Cinematography.
Enough praise has been heaped on Nomadland, that no one needs me to elaborate on it. What hasn’t been described is what remains in place in the places Fern passes through.
Having lived in the Dakotas for most of the Ford through the Carter and into the Reagan years, I hear many of the behind-the-scenes details of what surfaces in national news about the Keystone Pipeline, the super-spreader Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, proposals to add Putin’s pawn to Mt. Rushmore, voter suppression on the reservations, and a hit-and-run driver who looks like he might get away with it because he’s a Republican attorney general.
Sounds impossible? Well, it already happened in 2003 with South Dakota’s sitting Republican US Representative, former governor and attorney general.
Thanks to social media, I hear from friends who live in the two states, some not far from the capital cities, Bismarck and Pierre (pronounced peer, don’t you know?). They don’t even need to tag me since I subscribe to their pages, the most informative of which is the Dakota Standard, co-published, co-written, and co-edited by Tom Lawrence, my co-conspirator back at The Collegian, South Dakota State University’s student paper, back in our my mischief-making days.
Aside from SD Gov. Kristi Noem, a laughable Trumpoholic and Jim Crow Republican already vying for a spot on the 2024 ticket, Dakota Territory is gaining much attention this week in the US House arguments both for and against statehood for Washington DC.
Democrats cite the sparse populations of the two states, barely more than DC, which has as much of an edge over Vermont and Wyoming. Dakota Territory, they point out, would have been admitted as one state in keeping with the way western lands were added, but Republicans, who dominated the federal government in the late 19th Century realized they could have two states instead of one–and four senators instead of two.
True, but oversimplified. It was the railroad magnates, Republican donors, who noticed that their two routes running east-west unified two lines of settlements and were far enough apart that they could draw a boundary between them for two states approximately equal in both size and population.
A straight line on a map, as a local comic once cracked, means that “no one gives a shit,” but the boundary between North and South Dakota served a purpose still being felt today: minority rule. The combined 1.65 million people of the two states have double the representation that the nearly 40 million people of California have in the US Senate.
Strangely, there is a natural boundary that divides Dakota Territory in near equal halves. Flowing from the northwest corner out of Montana, the Missouri River curves into Bismarck and then rolls just about due south all the way past Pierre before resuming its east-southeast direction and becoming part of the southern border with Nebraska.
Along the river, farmers joke that the Missouri is “too thin to plow and too thick to drink,” but east of it is rich with corn, wheat, sunflower, soy, alfalfa, and other crops. The west is arid–which is why the federal government assigned Indians reservations there–including the Badlands so stunningly portrayed in the scenes where Fern is asked what she sees:
“Rocks!”
SDSU students commonly identified themselves as “West River” or “East River” before specifying any town or county, which tells you that an east-west separation of the territory would have had some agricultural, economic, and demographic logic. Moreover, the contrived east-west line not only cut through ranch and range land, but through two Sioux reservations, doubling the confusion already created by tribal versus federal jurisdiction. Then again, that very confusion was part of the premise to suppress votes on the Standing Rock and Sisseton reservations following the election of North Dakota Democrat Heidi Heitkamp to the US Senate in 2012. By 2018, restrictions such as requiring street addresses were in place to disqualify residents of reservations that never had street names–postal carriers just knew who and where you were–and Heitkamp’s seat was retaken by a Republican.
To deny DC statehood, today’s Jim Crow Republicans haven’t cited the Dakotas by name, but at least one has insisted that having mines is a condition of statehood. The Mount Rushmore State has not only mines in its Black Hills, but the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology founded in 1885, four years before statehood, and represented with varying degrees of success on athletic fields and courts by its Hardrockers, a name that has nothing to do with music but everything to do with its degree programs.
Republicans still attempting to keep at least one foot on the surface of Planet Earth have kept mum on their fringe members’ claims regarding mines and car dealerships, instead claiming that states tend to enter the union two at a time, a la Alaska and Hawaii, Maine and Missouri. Kind of like Noah’s Ark, except that instead of male and female we would get liberal and conservative for the sake of what gullible people call “balance.”
Since DC is a city with minorities that outnumber its white population, it is certain to send two Democrats to the senate. The only other place vying for statehood right now, Puerto Rico, would do the same–bilingual, no less, which would further offend a Republican Party that is using state legislatures to transform itself into a Jim Crow Reality Show.
While it’s nice that my former home states–I lived in both, two years North, five South–are getting this inadvertent attention, it is a brand of nostalgia I’d rather see on the big screen than on the nightly news.
Then again, I can’t help but be amused at how adamantly Republicans deny that their state-by-state efforts to restrict voting is anything but a return to Jim Crow America. How painful it must be for them to know they got to hide their nostalgia away.
-30-
As it looked in 1882, seven years before dual statehood. The border is the straight line that starts right at where Montana’s last A is written on the west side. The crooked line that interrupts it is the Cannonball River, the northern boundary of the Standing Rock Reservation which is in both states. The straight line resumes at the Missouri and will be interrupted once more by the northern tip of the triangular Sisseton reservation. The Missouri and the railroad through North Dakota are clear. A long stretch of the South Dakota’s railroad can be detected in East River. Completion through West River to the Black Hills would coincide with statehood. https://www.history.nd.gov/lincoln/image39.html
Yours Unruly in 1979 very near a gratuitous state line on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation aside my ’68 Ford Falcon with the Missouri River in the background. Photo: Michael Boer, co-scrivener at the United Tribes Technical Center in Bismarck.
Mouth of the River 