FILM / Jonah Raskin : Reviewing 'Fruitvale' and Remembering the Panthers

Reviewing Coogler's Fruitvale Station
and reflecting on the Black Panthers

Fruitvale Station shows how far we’ve traveled since the days of the Panthers, and how little we’ve traveled.

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / August 12, 2013

The only Oakland, California, African-Americans I’ve ever known belonged to the Black Panther Party founded by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland in 1966. In my mind, Oakland and the Panthers are as one. I can’t think of the city -- its streets, churches, and parks -- without thinking of Panthers. And I can’t think of the Panthers without also thinking of the city.

Of course, I know that Oakland’s history includes much more than the Panther past. I know, too, that Oakland has continued to be a place of rebellion and defiance without the Panthers. The Occupy Movement rocked the city and the city rocked the movement. Violence has long stalked the city and its residents.

Not surprisingly, no Panthers appear in Ryan Coogler’s 85-minute feature film, Fruitvale Station, which recounts the life and the death of Oscar Grant III, the 22-year-old Oakland African-American who was shot and killed by an Oakland police officer on January 1, 2009.

The slaying of Grant would not have surprised Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver, who are, of course, dead and who were well aware of police brutality in their own time, and saw the police as an occupying army in black neighborhoods. I doubt that Bobby Seale and Dave Hilliard, two living Panthers, would be surprised, either, by the murder of Oscar Grant.

The avant-garde American writer, Gertrude Stein, noted apropos Oakland, “There is no there there.” Unfortunately, there is a there there, and, now as in the past, it’s the there of violence and death.

The release of Coogler’s movie, Fruitvale Station, coincided with the verdict in the Trayvon Martin case in Florida. George Zimmerman was acquitted of second-degree murder and manslaughter charges on July 13, 2013. The movie was released July 28, 2013.

News about the trial and the verdict gave the film a boost at the box office and reminded audiences that white officers of the law have been murdering young black men for years and have gotten away with murder, too.

Oscar Grant III might have joined the Panthers had he been alive in 1967 or 1968. Newton and Seale might have tried to recruit him. After all, he’d been to prison -- he served time at San Quentin -- and he had street smarts. The film depicts him as a well-meaning young man who tries and fails to get his life together.

He’s a fuck-up but he’s not evil. Unable to keep a job, or to tell the truth consistently to friends and family members, he’d like to do the right thing and doesn’t. In the film, he deals marijuana, lies to the mother of his daughter, drives around Oakland in an old car, and hangs out with the boys in the ‘hood.

He doesn’t set his sights much further than tomorrow and he doesn’t look much further than the street around the next corner. His worldview is limited; he doesn’t seem to know his own personal history, the history of Oakland, its African-Americans, or the Black Panther Party.

His family members and his friends care about him and try to help him. They rally around him. They’d like to save his life and bring him back to life after he’s shot and killed.

The film offers a steady stream of images in which Grant and his friends hug one another, high-five one another, and talk the rhetoric of togetherness. They don’t have much tangible togetherness beneath the surface. They don’t go to church together, don’t have a clubhouse, don’t have anything at all that resembles the Black Panther Party, and don’t know a single older person who embodies the legacy of the Panthers.

Bobby Seale, left, and Huey Newton at Black Panther headquarters in Oakland. Image from Babylon Falling.

I didn’t take my eyes off the screen in the theater where I saw the film, but I found Oscar and his friends sad and even pathetic. I don’t doubt that the film accurately reflects Grant’s life. Ryan Coogler had the cooperation of the lawyer for Grant’s family. What I don’t know for sure is how typical or representative a figure Grant was and is.

I suspect that he is rather typical and that a great many young African-American men in Oakland share his sweetness and his anger, his desire to be something better than he is, and who, like him, lack the ability to get out of the traps in which they find themselves.

There’s something fatalist about the film. From the start, you know that he’ll be shot and killed on January 1, 2009; the film begins with documentary footage of his murder. You watch and you know that nothing will prevent that act from taking place.

The movie moves depressingly through Grant’s last day, and, because it’s depressing I can’t really recommend it. At the same time, I wouldn’t say stay away. If you want to see a movie made by a living African-American filmmaker about a dead African-American then by all means see the picture.

The director hasn’t aimed to make a big statement or to offer a plea for change. That speaks well for him. He mostly lets the story tell itself. But he hasn’t lifted his sights as a filmmaker beyond Grant’s individual life and beyond the lives of those in his immediate circle. That struck me as a lapse in filmmaking. It left me with a sense of disappointment.

I didn’t want slogans or sloganeering. I didn’t want Panthers to suddenly appear in the movie and to analyze and explain the situation. That would have been unreal. But I would have liked some acknowledgement that once upon a time in the West the Panthers made a difference.

Fruitvale Station shows how far we’ve traveled since the days of the Panthers, and how little we’ve traveled. It does seem to reflect the feelings of young people in Oakland today: their sense of injustice and powerlessness, too. The world is fucked up and there isn’t much to be done about it now, except go to movies like Fruitvale Station and go about one’s life.

The same week that I saw the film, I also saw at exhibit at Mills College in Oakland that focused on the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. Part of the space was allocated to the posters of Emory Douglas, which had many of the slogans from the heyday of the Panthers such as, “All power to the people” and “We shall survive without a doubt.”

I thought that I could hear those slogans echoing in the distance, and I knew that I would never hear them again in my own lifetime.

[Jonah Raskin, a regular contributor to The Rag Blog, is a professor emiritus at Sonoma State University. Raskin is the author of For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman and American Scream: Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" and the Making of the Beat Generation. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

FILM / Michael Simmons : How Bob Fass Revolutionized Late-Night Radio

Bob Fass in the WBAI studios in New York. Photo by, yes, Bob Fass. Photos courtesy Radio Unnameable.

Radio Unnameable:
Bob Fass revolutionized late-night radio

Fass and 'Cabal' changed history and deserve the credit and Lovelace and Wolfson have provided the first in-depth cinematic look. It resonates like an epic tale with the hero emerging as a long-shot survivor.

By Michael Simmons / The Rag Blog / May 2, 2013

Radio legend Bob Fass and filmmaker Paul Lovelace will be Thorne Dreyer's guests on Rag Radio this Friday, May 3, from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, and streamed live to the world. The show will be rebroadcast by WFTE-FM in Mt. Cobb and Scranton, PA, Sunday morning, May 5, at 10 a.m. (EDT), and the podcast of this interview can be listened to or downloaded at the Internet Archive.

[Paul Lovelace and Jessica Wolfson's remarkable film, Radio Unnameable, about free-form radio pioneer Bob Fass, is currently being featured at screenings around the country and the DVD will be released later this year. When the film was screened by the Austin Film Society last December, famed singer-songwriter Jerry Jeff Walker -- who first performed "Mr. Bojangles" on Fass' radio show -- introduced the film to the Austin audience.]

“I wanna be a neuron -- I don’t wanna be the brain,” said all-night radio host Bob Fass in the 1960s to his audience. “We’re all the brain.”

Bob Fass began his show Radio Unnameable at non-commercial, listener-sponsored WBAI-FM in New York City in 1963. By 1966 when I began listening as a fledgling nonconformist, Fass was on the air Monday through Friday from midnight to 5 or 6 a.m. Radio Unnameable was completely free-form and improvisational -- radio jazz, as opposed to jazz radio.

Bob would play two or more records simultaneously of eclectic music and spoken word. Musicians would show up unexpectedly and perform. His friends came and shpritzed free-associative comedy routines or rapped about politics du jour or cultural happenings in the underground that were being created in real time. Friends included Bob Dylan, Abbie Hoffman, Paul Krassner, and Wavy Gravy. These characters were in cahoots with Fass’ audience whom he called “Cabal” -- a handle that connoted subversion and conspiracy.

Bob Fass. In back, on left, is Abbie Hoffman.
Photo by Robert Altman.

An actor in his youth, Fass knew how to underplay. His voice was like a muted baritone saxophone -- calm and reassuring, but at moments -- always the right ones -- he was capable of removing the mute and that bari would modulate, rising in excited exhortation. He entertained, comforted, educated, organized, raised consciousness, and inspired.

I was 11-years old in 1966 and I too wanted to be a neuron. A child of Top 40 radio (“W-A-Beatle-C!”), I was one of those kids with transistor radio and earplugs under the sheets when I was supposed to be asleep. One day while futzing with the dial at 2 a.m., I landed on WBAI and heard Phil Ochs sing “Draft Dodger Rag,” an absurdist satire about the serious subject of avoiding the military draft and thus the human meat-grinder that was The War In/On Vietnam. The combination of Ochs’ idealism and irony was irresistible and I was hooked on Fass at 99.5 on my FM dial.

Every night with Bob was different. There was no playlist, no formula, no commercials. Fass took phone calls and a techie had rigged a system that enabled 10 callers to yap at once -- a pre-internet chat room. At times the show was indecipherable chaos, but mostly it was compelling for a restless and skeptical nipper like myself who’d been raised on rules and unquestioning respect for the authority of parents and so-called teachers and leaders.

Bob’s willingness to screw up in pursuit of the sublime -- the audacity of failure, to quote filmmaker Jennifer Montgomery -- was a lesson in the creative process -- being unafraid to fall on one’s tuchus so that the practice of obliterating limits could reveal higher levels of artistry and consciousness. Ultimately we Cabalists discovered that the medium of radio alone could not only get one high, but get many high simultaneously.

Being a Fass listener in those days was to witness an emerging counterculture, watching it form on a molecular level in real time through experimentation and connection. One night in early ’67, Bob announced a Fly-In at a JFK Airport terminal and a thousand young people showed up to give flowers to passengers arriving from Hong Kong or Barcelona, giving birth to Flower Power. The Sweep-In followed and young ‘uns armed with brooms and mops helped clean up the untended ghetto of East Village streets.

These events led to the founding of the Youth International Party -- the Yippies -- and were all aired on Radio Unnameable. Even though I was initially too young to participate, the energetic positivity -- the desire to change the human dynamic for the better -- was infectious. I got bit and so did tens of thousands -- eventually millions -- of others. Within a year of my first listen, I was in the streets, at the barricades, on the front lines.

Fass c. 1969. Photo by Jim Demetropoulis.

Plenty more happened to Fass -- both good and bad -- but 40-sumpin’ years later, Bob is still on WBAI, Thursday night/Friday morning from midnight to 3 a.m. For the rest of the Bob Fass story, check out the extraordinary documentary Radio Unnameable by filmmakers Paul Lovelace and Jessica Wolfson. Fass and "Cabal" changed history and deserve the credit and Lovelace and Wolfson have provided the first in-depth cinematic look. It resonates like an epic tale with the hero emerging as a long-shot survivor.

Like so many young people in any era, I had a difficult adolescence. Mainstream adults with their arbitrary expectations and -- worse -- greed and slaughter were all transparently fucked up. At the age of 58 I still view most of conventional society with horror. But Bob Fass has helped keep me sane in an insane world for a half-century.

Radio Unnameable is a roadmap for rebels, those who believe -- as the saying goes -- that another world is possible. Fass and Lovelace and Wolfson show that political and cultural transformation are often generated in the wee small hours of the morning -- that perfect time when the moon shines, the squares sleep, and dreamers share dreams while wide awake.

[As leader of the band Slewfoot, Michael Simmons was dubbed "The Father Of Country Punk" by Creem magazine in the 1970s. He was an editor at the National Lampoon in the '80s where he wrote the popular column "Drinking Tips And Other War Stories." He won a Los Angeles Press Club Award in the '90s for investigative journalism and has written for MOJO, LA Weekly, Rolling Stone, Penthouse, High Times, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, CounterPunch, and The Progressive. Currently wrapping a solo album, Michael can be reached at guydebord@sbcglobal.net.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

FILM / Jonah Raskin : Robert Redford 'Keeps Company' with the Sixties Underground

'The Company You Keep':
Robert Redford's overambitious
take on the Sixties underground

He clearly wanted to make an epic about then and now, about Sixties radicals and their kids, and he couldn’t pull it off.

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / May 1, 2013

The Company You Keep, released in December 2012, was directed by Robert Redford with a screenplay by Lem Dobbs based on the novel of the same name by Neil Gordon.

Robert Redford’s new movie, The Company You Keep, boasts a huge cast of characters that includes cops, reporters, FBI agents, and former members of an organization of 1960s/1970s radicals that resembles the Weather Underground. A few of the characters are on the run and the target of a manhunt, while others have crept back into the halls of respectability and want nothing to do with their former comrades.

Redford himself certainly remembers that era of seemingly unending protest, resistance, and an invincible underground as well as anyone else in the movie industry today, except perhaps the director and screenwriter Haskell Wexler (best known for Medium Cool, 1969).

Indeed, Redford was near the height of his movie career when fugitives in the Weather Underground set off bombs in federal, state, and local government buildings to protest the war machine, the criminal justice system, along with imperialism, capitalism, colonialism, sexism, racism, and more.

Redford is, of course, also familiar with Sam Green’s 2002 documentary, The Weather Underground, which tends to romanticize the fugitives and their clandestine organization. The picture was nominated for an Oscar after it made the rounds at Redford’s Sundance Film Festival.

Neil Gordon, the author of the novel that inspired the movie, had the cooperation of former members of the Weather Underground. Like Sam Green, Gordon also romanticizes the characters he portrays. He once told me he thought of the Weather Underground as the American equivalent of the African National Conference (ANC), the organization that helped end apartheid in South Africa. Like others before him, Gordon fell prey to myth.

There’s something about fugitives that makes them endearing, even when they’re desperados such as Duke Mantee, the gangster on the run played by Humphrey Bogart in the 1936 classic, The Petrified Forest. But perhaps that endearing quality has vanished in the era of terrorists and terrorism when whole neighborhoods are locked down.

I know the pitfalls of writing about fugitives, though I often found the actualities of fugitive life mundane. I remember an occasion more than 30 years ago when the FBI launched a massive hunt for the Weathermen and Weatherwomen. Curiously, they didn’t panic. Instead, they calmly and deliberately destroyed everything in their possession that might have led to their capture.

And they spent days wearing rubber gloves, wiping every surface perfectly clean in an apartment to eradicate fingerprints. That took dedication, but it certainly wasn’t glamorous. From the actualities of fugitives cleaning an apartment with Ajax you can’t really make a dramatic picture.

Mimi, the most fetching of the fugitives in Redford’s picture -- played to perfection by Julie Christie -- makes a speech in which she says that everything she once protested against is as insidious as ever before, and perhaps even more so. She’s eloquent and so is the character that Redford plays.

He’s an ex-radical who has reinvented himself as a liberal lawyer. His past catches up with him and so he goes in search of his own past to clear his name. The hunter is hunted. Mimi is the only person who can help him. By the end of the movie, he finds her and convinces her to come out of hiding and rescue him.

The character Redford plays is also a widower with a young daughter who doesn’t know who he really is or what he’s done in the past. Between the two of them, there’s a huge generation gap. Redford also has a beautiful older daughter -- his love child -- who was born underground, then adopted and raised by a police officer and his wife. (That part of the story doesn’t make any sense. When the picture tries to tie-up loose ends it only makes more of a mess.)

Both daughters are in the dark. Like the younger daughter, the older daughter doesn’t know that her real father was a Sixties radical who went on the lam. Nor does she know that she has a half-sister. The two sisters don’t ever meet. Family secrets flourish until the FBI flushes them out. Moreover, the older sister never meets her biological mother, Mimi, who has survived underground as a drug smuggler.

All the pieces in this big jigsaw puzzle of a picture don’t fit together.

Redford was overly ambitious. He clearly wanted to make an epic about then and now, about Sixties radicals and their kids, and he couldn’t pull it off. His ending is anti-climactic, though it also avoids a great many Hollywood clichés. There are no bombings and nothing is blown up -- a real virtue in a picture about bombers and bombers.

There’s a long chase by car, train and on foot. Indeed, Redford’s character is on the run most of the time, though he’s long past his prime running days. Even his designer running shoes don’t help him. An old, ex-radical trying to run from the FBI presents a rather comic figure. Old fugitives can’t run. That much is clear, though it’s also clear that the acting is stellar. Redford elicited stunning performances from his team.

Along with Julie Christie, there’s Nick Nolte, Susan Sarandon, Richard Jenkins, Sam Elliott, and Chris Cooper. It’s almost as if Redford called all of his old Hollywood pals and asked them to join with him and to make a picture that would pay homage to the Sixties and bury ideological hatchets.

It’s a kinder, gentler America that Redford would like -- along with integrity in journalism and fresh organic food from local farms. But nothing bigger or bolder. Even Mimi, the most revolutionary of the characters, hasn’t any hope for revolution.

The personal is more important than the political for Redford and for the character he plays. In The Company You Keep, family and friends carry more weight than ideology, and in that sense the picture does seem to accurately reflect the lives of former Weather Underground members who have almost all married, embraced monogamy, become moms and dads, raised families, become lawyers and doctors, joined the middle class and remained loyal to one another.

But has no one really become a moral monster? Or poor? Or serve a life sentence in prison? The picture gives the impression that all the old New Leftists became solidly middle class with cars, toys, and gadgets. Perhaps so, though Dave Gilbert and Judy Clark, two Weather Undergrounders, are both behind bars.

Watching the picture, I found myself caring about the characters. I kept waiting to see whether Redford would be captured by the cops -- or if he’d remain at large. Still, there’s something musty and outdated about the picture that prevented me from getting emotionally caught up in the dramatic conflicts. The news got in the way.

Think about the recent bombings in Boston and the manhunt for the two brothers suspected of planting the explosives, and then think of Redford’s movie, and it’s clear that we’re in another era with a whole other set of rules. The Company You Keep is mostly an exercise in nostalgia.

The bombers of today bear little if any resemblance to the Weather Underground bombers of yesterday who were white, middle class, college educated, well-read in Marx and Mao, atheists or agnostics, and not motivated by religion or ethnicity.

I never once met a single member of the Weather Underground who knew a thing about Chechnya or about Islam. Geopolitics have changed, and the power of law enforcement has grown exponentially. If today’s tactics had been applied to the Weather Undergrounders they wouldn’t have remained at-large for a decade.

It’s too bad Redford didn’t make his picture in, say, 1980. It would have seemed a lot more relevant then. Now, it’s a curiosity, though it’s also a reminder that older actors such as Nick Nolte, Julie Christie, and Susan Sarandon can still give strong performances. The young Shia LaBeouf does a credible job as an idealistic, fledgling reporter carrying on the tradition of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

You remember those guys don’t you? Redford starred in the picture, All the President’s Men, as Bob Woodward of The Washington Post and Watergate fame who helped bring down President Nixon. And surely you remember Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), another movie about outlaws and fugitives that stars Redford and Paul Newman and that inspired the Weather Undergrounders. All the guys wanted to be Butch or Sundance and to go out in a blaze of glory.

What hasn’t changed, of course, after all all these years, is the chemistry of the company you keep. The title of Redford’s movie about fugitives on the run seems to suggest that one ought to be careful about choosing one’s associates. Guilt by association goes a long way.

In the era of Homeland Security, the company one keeps can be as harmful to one’s health, as it was during the Salem witch trials more than 300 years ago or during the McCarthyism of the 1950s. So, if you’re going to conspire, make sure you conspire with the ones you really love.

[Jonah Raskin, a long-time journalist and activist and a regular contributor to The Rag Blog, was involved with the Yippies and, tangentially, with the Weather Underground. He is the author of For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

FILM / Dave Zirin : '42' is Jackie Robinson's Bitter Pill

 

A Review of '42':
Jackie Robinson's bitter pill

This was a man tortured by the fact that his own experience was used as a cudgel against building a public, fighting movement against racial injustice.

By Dave Zirin / The Rag Blog / April 17, 2013

See "Dave Zirin Writes from the Busy Intersection of Sports and Politics" by Thorne Dreyer at Truthout, and listen to Dreyer's March 22, 2013, interview with Zirin on Rag Radio.

This week in Major League Baseball was Jackie Robinson Day. This is when Commissioner Bud Selig honors the man who broke the color line in 1947 and pats MLB on the back for being “a leader in the Civil Rights Movement.” It’s possible to appreciate that Selig honors one of the 20th Century’s great anti-racist heroes. It’s also possible, out of respect for Jackie Robinson, to resent the hell out of it.

Ignored on Jackie Robinson Day are baseball’s decades of racism before Jackie broke the color line. Ignored are Robinson’s own critiques of baseball’s bigoted front office hiring policies. Ignored is the continuance of the racism that surrounds the game in 2013. Ignored is the fact that today in Arizona, Latino players live in fear of being stopped by police for not having their papers in order.

The recent film 42 about Jackie Robinson’s entry into the Major Leagues shares this contradiction. I can certainly understand why many people I respect love this film. I can understand why a teacher I know thinks it’s a great primer for young people who don’t know Jackie’s story. I understand why, given the high production values and loving depictions, Jackie Robinson’s family has been outspoken in their appreciation.

But I didn’t like it, and with all respect, I want to make the case that I don’t believe Jackie Robinson would have liked it either.

Early in the film, Jackie Robinson, played by newcomer Chadwick Boseman, says, "I don't think it matters what I believe. Only what I do." Unfortunately that quote is like a guiding compass for all that follows. The filmmakers don't seem to care what Robinson -- a deeply political human being -- thought either. Instead 42 rests on the classical Hollywood formula of “Heroic individual sees obstacle. Obstacle is overcome. The End.”

That works for Die Hard or American Pie. It doesn’t work for a story about an individual deeply immersed and affected by the grand social movements and events of his time. Jackie Robinson's experience was shaped by the Dixiecrats who ruled his Georgia birthplace, the mass struggles of the 1930s, World War II, the anti-communist witch-hunts, and later the Civil Rights and Black Freedom struggles. To tell his tale as one of individual triumph through his singular greatness is to not tell the story at all.

This is particularly ironic since Jackie Robinson spent the last years of his life in a grueling fight against his own mythos. He hated that his tribulations from the 1940s were used to sell a story about an individualistic, Booker T. Washington approach to fighting racism.

As he said in a speech,

All these guys who were saying that we've got it made through athletics, it's just not so. You as an individual can make it, but I think we've got to concern ourselves with the masses of the people -- not by what happens as an individual, so I merely tell these youngsters when I go out: certainly I've had opportunities that they haven't had, but because I've had these opportunities doesn't mean that I've forgotten.

This was a man tortured by the fact that his own experience was used as a cudgel against building a public, fighting movement against racial injustice.He wanted to shift the discussion of his own narrative from one of individual achievement to the stubborn continuance of institutionalized racism in the United States. The film however is a celebration of the individual and if you know how that pained Mr. Robinson, that is indeed a bitter pill.

The film's original sin was to set the action entirely in 1946 and 1947. Imagine if Spike Lee had chosen to tell the story of Malcolm X by only focusing on 1959-1960 when he was a leader in the Nation of Islam, with no mention of his troubled past or the way his own politics changed later in life. Malcolm X without an “arc” isn’t Malcolm X. Jackie Robinson without an “arc” is just Frodo Baggins in a baseball uniform.

The absence of an arc, means we don’t get the labor marches in the 1930s to integrate baseball. We don’t get his court martial while in the army (alluded to in the film without detail). We don’t get Jackie Robinson’s testimony in 1949 at the House Un-American Activities Committee against Paul Robeson. We don’t get his later anguish over what he did to Robeson. We don’t get his involvement in the Civil Rights Movement when he was a barnstorming speaker across the south.

We don’t get his public feud with Malcolm X, where Malcolm derided him as a “White man’s hero” and he gave it right back saying, "Malcolm is very militant on Harlem street corners where militancy is not that dangerous. I don't see him in Birmingham.” We don’t get his daring, loving obituary to Malcolm after his 1965 assassination at a time when the press -- black and white -- was throwing dirt on his grave.

We don’t get his support of the 1968 Olympic boycotters. We don’t get the way his wife Rachel became an educated political figure who cared deeply about Africa, as well as racial and gender justice in America. We don’t get the Jackie Robinson who died at 52, looking 20 years older, broken by the weight of his own myth. We don’t get Raging Bull. We get Rocky III.

But if the focus of 42 is only going to be on 1946 and 1947, then there is still a lot to cover: namely Brooklyn Dodgers owner Branch Rickey, Jackie Robinson, and their relationship to the Negro Leagues. Rickey -- with Robinson’s support -- established a pattern followed by other owners (with the notable exception of Bill Veeck), of refusing to compensate them for their players.

On the day Robinson signed with the Dodgers, Rickey said, "There is no Negro League as such as far as I'm concerned. [They] are not leagues and have no right to expect organized baseball to respect them." This led to the destruction of the largest national black-owned business in the United States.

You would never know this from 42. Instead the film chooses to affix a halo to Branch Rickey’s head. Instead, under a prosthetic mask, Harrison Ford plays Rickey as a great white savior, and not even Han Solo can make that go down smoothly.

Fairing better than Ford is the terrific performance of Chadwick Boseman as Robinson. Jackie Robinson could be sensitive about his voice, which was clipped and somewhat high-pitched. Boseman’s voice is so smoky it could cure a ham and his eyes and manner give hints of an internal life the film otherwise ignores.

There is no doubt in my mind that Jackie Robinson, if alive, would call on Bud Selig and Major League Baseball to stop using his history as an excuse to do nothing about the racial issues that currently plague the game. But there is also no doubt in my mind that Jackie Robinson, ever the pragmatist, also would support this film publicly.

He was an honorable person who would have been humbled by the effort made to make him look like a hero. He would have seen the value in being a role model of pride and perseverance for the young. But at home, alone, he would have thought about it. And he would have seethed.

This article was also posted at The Nation blog.

[Dave Zirin is sports editor at The Nation and the author of the new book, Game Over: How Politics Has Turned the Sports World Upside Down (The New Press). Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com. Read more articles by Dave Zirin on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

FILM / David McReynolds : 'How to Survive a Plague' Is the Remarkable Story of ACT UP's Battle Against AIDS

How to Survive a Plague:
The remarkable story of ACT UP

Panic spread slowly. Rock Hudson's death gave the disease a public face, but took us no closer to the cause.

By David McReynolds / The Rag Blog / April 10, 2013

[David France's critically-acclaimed and award-winning documentary film, How to Survive a Plague, saw limited release in the United States in 2012.]

Clancy Sigal's advice to me is to keep it short -- a skill he has mastered and I've not. This is a quick review of David France's film (now on DVD), How To Survive a Plague, largely the story of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) and TAG (Treatment Activist Group), the nonprofit organization that grew out of ACT UP.

As films go, this feels almost like a "rough draft" of a documentary, but how could it be otherwise? The technical limitations of this short documentary are overwhelmed by a remarkable story, one that makes the film worth watching by anyone concerned with social change. The producers had to hunt for bits and pieces of film over a period of years -- this was not a film which had been assigned a staff photographer to follow events.

I've said to friends that if I were 10 years younger I'd have been dead long ago -- but when AIDS was given a name, in 1982, I was already 53. It wasn't just a "gay disease" -- it was almost entirely a disease of the youth. It's first name was GRID -- Gay-Related Immune Deficiency -- and even when it was given a name a year later, no one had any idea what caused it. Panic spread slowly. Rock Hudson's death gave the disease a public face, but took us no closer to the cause.

My local bar -- once probably the best gay bar in New York, right on my corner, at Fourth Street and Second Avenue -- slowly emptied out. Bob, the sweet young bartender, fell ill, and then fell dead. Bar traffic slowed, as if perhaps breathing the same air would transmit the disease.

By 1987 ACT UP was formed. It had the enormous energy of youth. Watching this film reminded me, again, of why the young are almost always the cutting edge of social change. They are not always right -- ACT UP made more than its share of errors, suffered the almost inevitable splits -- but to watch this film is to see young men and women, frightened by the death which was marching straight towards them, organize and act. And to act with imagination and love -- in things such as the moving "quilt" project.

They provided the people-power for major political demonstrations, but they did much more than that -- they studied the disease, they examined alternative treatments, and methods for running trials that would speed up the information on what might work. In the end they cooperated with the scientists in finding the answer.

And that answer was not easy to find. The AIDS virus is remarkably tricky and defeating it has been an incredibly complex task. It was, for the men and women in ACT UP, a race against time.

Watching the film I felt a sense of guilt that I had not been more involved. AIDS, even though we didn't know its cause, was around me. A neighbor who lived a floor above me came down with it, and while I was able to visit him at first, simply walking into his room (he had Kaposi's Syndrome), when he was taken to the hospital his room was guarded as if a particle of the disease might escape. One had to put on gloves, mask, a gown before going in, and they were taken off and destroyed when you left his room.

All of us have sins of omission; I won't belabor mine. I write this brief review because the beautiful young men and women in this film, so vital, so very young, so fierce in their struggle, and most of them now dead, succeeded in pushing until the labs delivered the drugs which have made it possible to defeat AIDS.

It isn't, of course, defeated, not here (where unsafe sex is sometimes seen as exciting), much less in Africa. But because of ACT UP we have the means. The film, made in 2012, is one hour and 49 minutes. You can get it from Netflix.

[David McReynolds was for nearly 40 years a member of the staff of the War Resisters League, and was twice the Socialist Party's candidate for president. He and the late Barbara Deming are the subjects of a dual biography, A Saving Remnant, by historian Martin Duberman. David retired in 1999, and lives on the Lower East Side of Manhattan with his two cats. He posts at Edge Left.org and can be reached at davidmcreynolds7@gmail.com. Read more articles by David McReynolds on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Alan Waldman : ‘Gregory’s Girl’ Is a Simply Wonderful 1981 Scottish Film

 
Waldman's film and TV
treasures you may have missed:

Bill Forsyth’s look at teenage awkwardness and high school romance is original, moving, surprising, and hilarious.

By Alan Waldman / The Rag Blog / March 5, 2013

[In his weekly column, Alan Waldman reviews some of his favorite films and TV series that readers may have missed, including TV dramas, mysteries, and comedies from Canada, England, Ireland, and Scotland. Most are available on DVD and/or Netflix, and some episodes are on YouTube.]

Bill Forsyth’s 1981 Scottish masterpiece, the coming-of-age comedy-romance Gregory's Girl, is one of my very, very favorite movies ever, and if you can find 91 free minutes you should watch it, either on DVD, Netflix or here on Netflix Instant.

It won the 1982 Best Screenplay BAFTA for Forsyth and nominations for him as Best Director, Best Film, and Most Outstanding Newcomer for star John Gordon Sinclair. It also won the London Critics Circle Special Achievement Award for Forsyth, as well as the Variety Club’s Actress of the Year honor for female lead Dee Hepburn. Fully 92% of the critics polled at rottentomatoes.com liked it, as did more than 87.7% of viewers rating it at imdb.com. A clip from the film was featured in the opening ceremonies of the 2012 London Summer Olympics.

Critic Roger Ebert wrote, “Gregory’s Girl, a charming, innocent, very funny little movie about a weird kid... contains much wisdom about being alive and teenage and vulnerable.”

The film has a marvelously goofy tone which is also found in Forsyth’s films That Sinking Feeling, Comfort and Joy, and the widely beloved Local Hero. Set in a small Scottish town’s secondary school, it features Sinclair as Gregory, a lanky, awkward student who is replaced on the school’s soccer team by beautiful Dorothy (Hepburn), on whom he immediately develops a mad crush. She agrees to go out with him and that launches one of the most delightful sequences I have ever seen on the big screen. (I will not give it away.)

Gregory seeks the dating advice of his two clueless male pals (very funny!) and is eventually counseled by his 10-year-old sister. The dialogue is highly amusing, and there are many surprising elements, such as a child in a penguin suit who wanders through scenes for no apparent reason. Sinclair is terrific in the lead role, and several other performers are excellent too.

[Oregon writer and Houston native Alan Waldman holds a B.A. in theater arts from Brandeis University and has worked as an editor at The Hollywood Reporter and Honolulu magazine. Read more of Alan Waldman's articles on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Alan Waldman : ‘The Barbarian Invasions’ is a Moving, Funny, Smart, Superb Canadian Film

Waldman's film and TV
treasures you may have missed:

Denys Arcand’s French-Canadian gem won Oscar and 40 other international honors.

By Alan Waldman / The Rag Blog / February 20, 2013

[In his weekly column, Alan Waldman reviews some of his favorite films and TV series that readers may have missed, including TV dramas, mysteries, and comedies from Canada, England, Ireland, and Scotland. Most are available on DVD and/or Netflix, and some episodes are on YouTube.]

The great 2003 movie The Barbarian Invasions justifiably won the Best Foreign Film Oscar and was nominated for 66 other awards (including Best Screenplay Oscar) from 33 bodies in 14 countries. Writer-director Denys Arcand was nominated for or won 32 Best Picture awards, six Best Director honors and five Best Screenplay statuettes. The outstanding cast was showered with awards, with five noms or wins going to Marie-Josée Croze, three to Rémy Girard, two to Stéphane Rousseau, and one each to Pierre Curzi and Dorothée Berryman.

This is a fine sequel to Arcand’s 1986 art-house hit The Decline of the American Empire, returning much of the first film’s cast. In Invasions a Montreal college professor is dying of cancer. His wealthy son, from whom he is semi-estranged, flies to Montreal from London to find his father bitter and lonely in an overcrowded hospital room. He pulls strings to buck red tape and get papa a large empty room and then persuades several of his old pals to come and be with him. When pain becomes intense, he arranges for the junkie daughter of an ex-mistress to get him heroin for relief.

This is a wonderful movie: intelligent, rich in character, witty, moving, and beautifully shot -- particularly at a lakeside house where he goes to die, surrounded by those he loves. The script is constantly surprising and never maudlin. The changing relationship between father and son is terrific.

More than 92.3% of the 18,999 viewers rating it at imbd.com gave it thumbs-up. Peter Travers of Rolling Stone called it “a feast of smart, sexy, glorious talk.”

I loved this film when I first saw it in 2003 and when I watched it again via Netflix this week. Once more I marveled, I laughed, I cried, and I crawled on my belly like a reptile.

[Oregon writer and Houston native Alan Waldman holds a B.A. in theater arts from Brandeis University and has worked as an editor at The Hollywood Reporter and Honolulu magazine. Read more of Alan Waldman's articles on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

FILM / Jonah Raskin : 'Django Unchained' is Quentin Tarantino in Blackface

Django Unchained:
Quentin Tarantino in Blackface

At times, the movie seems like an advertisement for integration on the bounty hunting circuit, and for friendship between a black and a white man who both kill without compunction.

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / February 7, 2013

The director, Quentin Tarantino, appears on screen near the end of his new movie, Django Unchained, that has been nominated for several Oscars including best picture, best original screenplay, and best cinematography. In Django Unchained, Tarantino plays the kind of low-life character that he also plays in his classic, Pulp Fiction, which starred Samuel Jackson and John Travolta as a couple of hipster hit men.

Jackson appears in Django Unchained as an old, white-haired servant (yes, an African-American) on a sinister plantation in Mississippi before the American Civil War. He’s as sinister as the white master himself and he dies an agonizing death, as do almost all of the other characters in this retro shoot-‘em-up.

Tarantino makes his actors suffer so, or at least makes them sound as though they’re suffering. They scream and shout and wail as though they’re in extreme pain as they wriggle about bloodstained floors and bloodstained soil. You might think the director was sadistic.

Alas, John Travolta doesn’t make an appearance in this new film, though the two main characters in Django Unchained are hit men as they are in Pulp Fiction. One of them -- Dr. King Schultz -- is German-born; the other -- Django himself -- is a black slave, or rather an ex-slave. Schultz liberates him. He’s the Great Liberator.

For a time, the two men team up to kill outlaws who have prices on their heads and then collect the hefty financial rewards. It’s a good living, though they don’t ever spend it or have the opportunity to enjoy it. At times, the movie seems like an advertisement for integration on the bounty hunting circuit, and for friendship between a black and a white man who kill without compunction.

The bounty hunting life wears thin after a season and the two vicious, albeit virtuous, hit men travel into the belly of the beast of slavery to liberate Django’s slave wife who has a beautiful face, and, on her black back, another kind of beauty, if you can call the scars of a brutal beating beautiful.

Quentin Tarantino’s latest movie is his first set in the American South and it’s the first to have a large cast of African-American actors playing the roles of mostly subservient African-American slaves. Still, in many ways Django Unchained is like many of his previous movies, including Pulp Fiction. Django Unchained offers more pulp fiction -- this time with an historical setting and historical costumes. The dresses are very lovely.

From nearly the first scene to nearly the last, there’s violence on the screen and almost uninterrupted violence all the way through. In that sense, Django Unchained duplicates Pulp Fiction. There are no chase scenes, but there’s a barrage of bullets, buckets of blood, and plenty of unpatriotic gore.

At the end, there’s a big explosion. Django blows up the plantation mansion with its stately white columns and rides off into the night -- not the sunset -- with his wife, whom he has liberated and who speaks German as well as English, but doesn’t seem to have any kind of street smarts.

All on their own, the two carpetbagger gunslingers bring a civil war of their own making to what would soon become the Confederate States of America.

Django’s pal, Dr. Schultz, dies fighting the good fight against the nasty slave owners and for the downtrodden slaves, who don’t lift a black finger to free themselves in this comic melodrama. No, sir, there is no black slave revolt in this picture. The back masses don’t seem to know what freedom is or where to find it. Dr. Schultz has to tell them to follow the North Star to freedom after he gives a group of black men the opportunity to escape bondage.

Here, as in the Westerns of old, it’s the lone gunman who makes a difference, and, though Django’s skin is black, he’s not much different, if at all, from lone white gunmen. He wears a cowboy hat and a holster, rides a horse, carries a gun, and, as one of the characters says of him, he’s “the fastest gun in the South.”

Jamie Foxx plays Django as Samuel Jackson might have played him if he were still a young man. Christoph Waltz plays a wry Dr. Schultz and Leonardo DiCaprio inhabits the role of the white plantation owner, Calvin Candie, a sadistic, sexually perverted Southern Calvinist.

Kerry Washington doesn’t speak much. But she does an admirable job as Broomhilda, Django’s long-suffering wife. Beaten, bound, gagged, and sold down the river, she’s freed by her husband who slays the dragon of slavery -- on one plantation -- and rescues her. She’s the archetypal black maiden; he’s the knight without shining armor but with the virtues of a Christian warrior.

Tarantino offers something for film students, something for lovers of Westerns, and something for his own cult followers. I suppose students and scholars of American history will find scenes to analyze and interpret. The best parts of the movie are pure comedy, as in the very last scene in which one of the characters looks at Django as he rides off, and asks, “Who is that black man?” Those who watched the Lone Ranger on TV will get the reference. Those who love old Westerns will also notice allusions to High Noon.

I found the whole film largely predictable. I knew that Django would rescue his wife and that they would live happily ever after. Surprisingly, I found the torture scenes more graphic and more realistic than the torture scene in Zero Ground Thirty which tracks 10 years or so in the life of the war on terrorism.

Tarantino always was effective depicting both psychological and physical torture. In Django Unchained he shows that he hasn’t lost his touch. Once again, he’s a master, and for all his gestures toward freedom and tolerance, his latest picture feels like yet another exercise in black-faced comedy.

There are no white characters who darken their faces to play black men. But the whole film feels like master Tarantino in blackface, making fun of Hollywood Westerns, Southern crackers, and the kind of Uncle Toms who first appeared in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. How many clichés did I count in Django? There were so many I lost count.

[Jonah Raskin is a professor emeritus at Sonoma State University, a frequent contributor to The Rag Blog, and the author of For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman, and the editor of The Radical Jack London: Writings on War and Revolution. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

James McEnteer : The Pirates of Ecuador

Image from Nuke the Fridge.
Straight to video:
That movie’s too expensive! Knock it off!

By James McEnteer / The Rag Blog / January 29, 2013

“I’d like to thank the members of the Academy. Or at least, one of them…”

QUITO, Ecuador -- You won’t hear that speech at the upcoming Oscar ceremonies. But movie fans in Ecuador, where I live, and in many other so-called “developing” countries, have reason to be grateful to certain members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences: the pirates among them.

Those of us residing off the reservation read about and see clips from the latest Hollywood -- and some international -- features and documentaries on the Internet. But few of these films ever make it to local cinemas here in Quito. As in many U.S. cities, Quito theaters are mostly clustered in malls, where action blockbusters and animated confections tend to crowd out more provocative fare.

There are occasional exceptions. We were able to see Scorsese’s aesthetically splendid Hugo and Spielberg’s breathless Adventures of Tin-Tin here in 3-D last year. The Life of Pi is playing right now with the options of 3-D or cheaper 2-D, subtitled or dubbed. I managed to catch Argo as it sped through town. But I was the only human in the theater.

It’s frustrating to read about interesting films in The New York Times or Salon or The Guardian or other online venues, knowing that most of them will never get to our portion of the planet. Unless of course they are nominated for one or more Academy Awards.

DVDs of nominated films are sent to the several thousand members of the Academy for their voting consideration. One or more of those members apparently markets his or her copies to pirates. And almost overnight, Quito video stores leap quantumly from their usual offerings of old or second-rate stuff to Oscar-level fare.

Several dozen films -- all nominated for best picture, best director, best actor, etc. -- have suddenly appeared in handsome cases with the highest quality cinematic reproduction. The only drawback, negligible really, is that occasionally throughout the course of the movie, a phrase such as “For Your Consideration” appears to remind Academy voters why they got their free copy.

Of course these movies are not free to us. We have to buy them. But the prices seem fair: two dollars each, three for five dollars or seven for10. We’ve been buying fistfuls of films lately to sate our movie lust after many months of cinematic austerity. My son always enjoys the moment when the FBI anti-piracy warning appears on the screen since all our videos are pirated, from pirate stores.

Does this make us criminals? Copyright thieves? Video vampires? The USA makes a fetish of protecting intellectual property rights. Partly because entertainment is among the few products our country manufactures anymore. And partly because our government tends to represent corporate interests over those of individuals. Do they go too far? Ask the parents of Aaron Swartz.

Before Harvey Weinstein importunes some National Security types to come knocking on our door or to close down the pirate video stores of Quito (and many other cities worldwide), let’s talk money. The median income of Ecuadorian citizens is about 10 percent that of USA residents. By law, the minimum wage here is $300 a month.

Should actors and producers be compensated for what they do? Absolutely. But how much? I’ll guess that Mr. Weinstein earns something beyond a decent living doing what he does. I don’t begrudge him a penny of it. I’m grateful for his production and dissemination of movies. But I’m not worried about his financial well-being. He’s living among the stars, not on the edge of an economic abyss.

Would Brad Pitt prefer more fame or more money? That’s the choice. I recently saw and enjoyed his performance in Killing Them Softly. He’s a terrific actor. Of course he did not earn any royalties from the copy I bought in Quito. But many of his films do not play local theaters. (Tree of Life? No way.) And most movie fans here would be unwilling or unable to pay non-pirated rates for a DVD.

Netflix streams to Latin America now. We tried them out for a free sample month. But their online selection to our zone is a fraction of what they offer in the USA. You’d almost think they were afraid someone might pirate their output.

I am willing and able to spend five or six dollars for a theater ticket here to watch a movie. But stimulating films at the mall are few and far between. Were it not for the pirate video stores -- the only Blockbuster there is -- I would not be able to indulge my pleasure in wonderful movies like Moonrise Kingdom or Beasts of the Southern Wild. A real Blockbuster would fail here, as many of their outlets are failing across the United States.

So I would like to thank the member or members of the Academy who are making extra cash by breaking the rules and letting many more millions of film fans around the world enjoy the current Oscar contenders.

May the force, but not the police force, be with you.

[James McEnteer is the author of Shooting the Truth: the Rise of American Political Documentaries (Praeger). He lives in Quito, Ecuador. Read more of James McEnteer's articles on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Alan Waldman : 'Croupier' is an Excellent, Moody English Thriller

Waldman's film and TV
treasures you may have missed:

The best film of 2000 introduced super-talented Clive Owen to America.

By Alan Waldman / The Rag Blog / January 22, 2013

[In his weekly column, Alan Waldman reviews some of his favorite films and TV series that readers may have missed, including TV dramas, mysteries, and comedies from Canada, England, Ireland, and Scotland. Most are available on DVD and/or Netflix, and some episodes are on YouTube.]

Croupier, starring Clive Owen, was a 2000 neo-noir art film that had an excellent run and many critical kudos. In some art houses it lasted six months. Fully 98% of the critics evaluating it at rottentomatoes.com praised it, and recently more than 91.3% of the 11,306 viewers rating it at imdb.com gave it thumbs up.

Peter Travers of Rolling Stone declared, “Croupier is taut, tense and enthralling, as smart and surprising as its protagonist.”

Owen plays a novelist and reformed gambler who gets a job as a blackjack dealer and roulette croupier in a London casino. A sensual, mysterious South African woman (Alex Kingston) persuades him to be the “inside man” in a late-night casino robbery. The film is full of fascinating, somewhat off-beat characters, and the rich, detailed casino atmosphere is very involving.

Screenwriter Paul Mayersberg was nominated for the “Best Motion Picture” Edgar award, and the National Board of Review selected it one of the top 10 films of 2000. One of the many reasons I like it so much -- I just watched it again on Netflix Instant streaming -- is that Mayersberg intentionally and successfully broke the five major rules of screenwriting dogma.

I have interviewed hundreds of screenwriters and TV writers for publications of The Writers’ Guild, and my talk with Mayersberg is my favorite. After you see the film -- but not before, as it contains too many spoilers -- you may well enjoy that insightful interview explaining how he wrote it “upside down.”

The film is well directed by Mike Hodges, who helmed the 1971 Michael Caine classic Get Carter and the not-so-classic Morons From Outer Space.

[Oregon writer and Houston native Alan Waldman holds a B.A. in theater arts from Brandeis University and has worked as an editor at The Hollywood Reporter and Honolulu magazine. Read more of Alan Waldman's articles on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Alan Waldman : My Favorite Films (and TV Shows) of 2012

Les Misérables was Alan's top pick.
My 13 favorite films
(and 43 TV shows) of 2012

'Les Miz' was #1 and 'I Am' was #2.

By Alan Waldman / The Rag Blog / January 10, 2013

1. Les Misérables (U.K.) is a magnificent movie! I consider the stage version to be the greatest musical ever (followed by Phantom of the Opera, Miss Saigon, and Sweeney Todd). Despite the bland singing of Russell Crowe, the film of Les Miz features moving, amusing, rousing, and achingly beautiful songs, nicely sung by Hugh Jackman, Anne Hathaway, Amanda Seyfried, Samantha Barks, Eddie Redmayne, Helena Bonham Carter, Sacha Baron Cohen, Colm Wilkinson (the original 1985 Jean Valjean) and young Isabelle Allen and Daniel Huttlestone. The direction, by 2011’s Oscar-winner Tom Hooper (The King’s Speech), is masterful. The acting is fine, many of the visuals are stunning and the timeless Victor Hugo story of a convict chased for 17 years by a vengeful flic drives us through the full range of moviegoer emotions.
2. I Am, winner of this year’s Humanitas prize, is a rich documentary in which Tom Shadyac, the director of many silly comedies (Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, The Nutty Professor), talks to intellectual and spiritual leaders about what’s wrong with the world and how we can improve it and the way we live in it. This is a smart, insightful, revealing study, with many fascinating and surprising facts and observations. More than 88% of those rating it at imdb.com gave it thumbs-up, and 36.3% consider it a perfect 10. I believe many people -- particularly veterans of the 1960s -- will love this film.


3. The Flowers of War (China) is a lush, dramatic, moving film set during the 1937 Japanese occupation of Nanking. It is yet another masterpiece from China’s greatest director, Zhang Yimou (Raise the Red Lantern, Ju Dou). It stars Christian Bale and an outstanding Chinese cast (many in their first roles ever). Bale is an undertaker seeking refuge in a church with 13 young convent students and a group of refugee prostitutes. The visuals are astonishing, and the many DVD extras on how the film was made are fascinating. A gem.


4. The Island President is an outstanding documentary about President Mohamed Nasheed’s dramatic quest to persuade world leaders at a Copenhagen international environmental conference to institute the carbon emissions regulations needed to save his country, The Maldives (the lowest-lying nation in the world), from being permanently extinguished when the Indian Ocean rises another three feet. This film is compelling, surprising, and highly informative. More than 89.2%viewers rating it at imdb.com gave it thumbs-up, and more than 50% give it 10 out of 10.


5. My Afternoons with Margueritte (France) stars Europe’s greatest actor, Gérard Depardieu, as an illiterate, lonely peasant who befriends and is taught to read by a cultured little old lady (the wonderful Gisele Casadesus). The unlikely friendship that develops between teacher and student is life-affirming. The French cast is fine, the characters are compelling, and the cinematography is lovely. This won Best Foreign Film at the 2011 Newport Beach Film Festival. More than 90.3% of those rating it at imdb.com liked it, as did 84% of the 57 critics polled at rottentomatoes.com.


6. Lincoln deals with President Abraham Lincoln’s 1865 struggle to persuade Congress to emancipate the slaves. It is extremely well directed by Steven Spielberg, and Daniel Day Lewis is exceptionally good in the title role. Both of them and the film itself should be shoo-ins for Oscars. Well written by Tony Kushner (winner of six top awards so far for Munich, Lincoln, and Angels in America), it is rich in character, drama and period detail. The stellar cast includes Tommy Lee Jones, Sally Field, David Strathairn, Tim Blake Nelson, Hal Holbrook, and James Spader.


7. The Women of the 6th Floor (France) is a very enjoyable film about a wealthy couple who live in a large building whose top floor is occupied by a group of Spanish housemaids. Fabrice Luchini is excellent as the bored, dull stockbroker who falls in love with his maid and everything Spanish. The maids are very diverse and entertaining. Among them is the great Carmen Maura, who added France’s highest Best Actress Award (the Cesar) for this performance to her 33 other major international honors.


8. Oranges and Sunshine (U.K.) is a provocative, well-crafted documentary about a Nottingham, England, social worker who accidentally discovered that poor English children -- 150,000 of them! -- had been forcibly separated from their parents and deported to Australia, New Zealand, and Rhodesia, where they were told their parents had died. The film deals with hundreds of them who were sent to Australia, where many were physically and sexually abused by a Roman Catholic Christian Brothers group. The British and Australian governments hushed this up for decades. Emily Watson and Hugo Weaving head a strong cast.





9. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (U.K.) has a dream cast of seven of Britain’s finest actors (Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Bill Nighy, Penelope Wilton, Tom Wilkinson, Celia Imrie, and Ronald Pickup), plus Dev Patel who was nominated for 26 awards (winning 10 so far) for this and for Slumdog Millionaire. They all do a terrific job, and the Indian locations are very absorbing. This is a charming, funny, marvelously detailed film about a group of British retirees who go to a supposedly refurbished hotel in India and get into all kinds of enjoyable or dramatic interrelations. So far this film has 12 major award nominations (for director John Madden, writer Ol Parker and the eight lead actors). Madden, who was Oscar-nominated for Shakespeare in Love, is at the top of his game here.       [Insert second photo here.]


10. Salmon Fishing in the Yeman (U.K.) is a fun, quirky romantic comedy-drama from Norwegian master director Lasse Hallstrom (My Life as a Dog, Chocolat, The Cider House Rules, and Once Around) and Oscar-winning scribe Simon Beaufoy (Slumdog Millionaire). Ewan McGregor plays a British fisheries expert who is hired by an eccentric Yemeni sheik to introduce fly fishing to his desert land. His budding romance with Emily Blunt is sweet and charming.


11. To Rome with Love is a very cute Woody Allen comedy which follows the predicaments, romances and adventures of various Romans and tourists played by Roberto Benigni, Judy Davis, Alec Baldwin, Penelope Cruz, Ornella Muti and a passel of Italians. Fun stuff.


12. Argo is the exciting, dramatized true story of a CIA agent (played by director Ben Affleck) who rescues six Americans hiding in the Canadian Ambassador’s residence in revolutionary 1979 Tehran by pretending to use them as the crew of a Star Wars-type movie he wants to shoot there. Excellent comic relief is provided by Alan Arkin and John Goodman, who, however, can’t stop repeating “Argo fuckyourself.”


13. The Dictator is an amazingly funny comedy written by and starring Sacha Baron Cohen as Middle Eastern despot Hafez Aladeen of Wadiya, who unexpectedly finds himself working behind the counter of a Manhattan bakery. Although there is much crude, sexist, racist, and stereotypic humor in it, this is actually the most accessible of Baron Cohen’s films. Unlike Borat and Bruno, which consist entirely of crazy pranks he plays on unsuspecting dupes (like Pamela Anderson and Ron Paul), this movie is completely scripted, so the comedy is less outrageous and mean-spirited.

As was the case in each of the past 31 years, much of the year’s best writing was on television, rather than in the movies. The 21 American series I liked most were (more or less in order of preference): The Newsroom, Boardwalk Empire, Dexter, Homeland, House, Suits, White Collar, Tremé, House of Lies, Flight of the Conchords, Justified, Law & Order SVU, C.S.I., Elementary, Blue Bloods, Covert Affairs, Vegas, Burn Notice, Californication, Tilt, and Playmakers.

Here are the 22 non-American series I enjoyed most in 2012. Some of them are older, but I watched them last year because my local library offers lots of British DVDs. Unless indicated otherwise, all are British: Little Dorrit (miniseries), MI-5, Inspector Morse, A Touch of Frost, Luther, The Hour, Corner Gas (Can.), Midsomer Murders, Inspector Lynley Mysteries, Dalziel & Pascoe, Downton Abbey, Whitechapel, George Gently, Rebus, The Border (Can.), DNA, Murphy’s Law, Kavanagh Q.C., Lilyhammer (Nor.), Spiral (Fra.), The Eagle (Den.), Judge John Deed, and Vera.

[Houston native Alan Waldman is a former editor at Honolulu Magazine and The Hollywood Reporter. Read more of Alan Waldman's articles on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

FILM / Jonah Raskin : 'Searching for Sugar Man'

Searching for Sugar Man:
The Sixties surface, again

Rodriquez is himself a Sixties survivor. His songs capture the mood of the late 1960s and the early 1970s. They reflect the anger, the aspirations, and the despair of the era.

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / December 6, 2012

When the musician known simply as Rodriguez appeared on the David Letterman Show in August 2012, dressed in a black hat, black shirt, and dark glasses, he sang just one of his poignant songs, “Crucify Your Mind.” The only words he spoke were, “Thank you.”

Viewers might well have wondered who he was, though Letterman explained that Rodriguez was the subject of a film by Malik Bendjelloul, Searching for Sugar Man, the sleeper documentary of the year distributed by Sony Pictures.

Increasingly, audiences around the world know who he is, especially if they’ve seen the movie about him and have listened to his CD that offers 14 songs he originally recorded more than 40 years ago and that never reached the bottom let alone the top of any music chart.

Sixto Rodriguez is one of the strangest singer/songwriters in the annals of twentieth-century American music, as the film about him makes abundantly clear.

He even talks in the movie and says more than “thank you,” though the images of him, such as one in which he walks alone through the snow, say as much about him as any words he utters. His story is unique; indeed, there’s no one remotely like him. At the same time, his story, which touches on the fickleness of fame, success, and failure, appeals to a wide audience and not only to survivors of the Sixties, a time when Rodriguez first appeared out of nowhere on the music scene.

Rodriquez himself is a Sixties survivor. His songs capture the mood of the late 1960s and the early 1970s. They reflect the anger, the aspirations, and the despair of the era. To listen to the soundtrack (Searching for Sugar Man 2012, the original motion picture soundtrack with songs by Rodriguez, published on the Sony Legacy label), is to be transported back to that time and place, especially on songs such as “Inner City Blues,” and “This is Not a Song, It’s an Outburst: Or, the Establishment Blues.”

Part bluesman, part rock ‘n’ roller, and part folk musician, Rodriguez recorded two albums in 1970 and 1971 when he was 28 and 29 years old and living in Detroit. While the albums went nowhere in the States, they became big hits among anti-apartheid whites in South Africa and it’s easy to understand why. The lyrics are clear and concise; they’re anti-establishment -- any and every establishment -- and they’re also playful and even humorous. Moreover, the music, which has a lyrical beat, is an open invitation to get up and dance.

Still, the lyrics alone would not make Rodriguez a memorable artist worth knowing about 40 years after the beginning and nearly simultaneous end of his own abortive career. It’s the story of his life that matters: how he never became bitter or resentful and just kept on keeping on.

Rodriquez would never have appeared on the Letterman Show and he’d be as unknown today as ever if it were not for Craig Bartholomew-Strydom, a South African rock journalist turned detective, who tracked him down, in part by using the lyrics to his songs.

Sixties survivor Rodriguez.

The movie, Searching for Sugar Man, tells the fascinating story of Bartholomew-Strydom’s relentless search that led him from Johannesburg to Detroit where he found Rodriguez and his two daughters -- who explain that they were raised without wealth and material goods, but with a rich appreciation for culture.

Rodriguez comes across as a good father, a humble workingman, and a countercultural icon. His CD is a time capsule of hippie culture circa 1970. Looking for sad love songs? They’re here. Want visionary and prophetic lyrics? You’ll find them here. Eager to hear political invective? It’s also here.

Rodriquez is a very sharp observer of human fakery, foibles, and flaws. Perhaps to satirize fakery, as Rodriguez does, you have to understand it from the inside out and even indulge in it. There’s a fine line between the real and the parody and Rodriquez adheres to it. He’s all heart and sentiment and at the same time he can be ironical and a kind of put-on artist.

On the first track, “Sugar Man,” he longs for the arrival of the “Silver majik ships” that carry “Jumpers, coke, sweet Mary Jane.” On the second, “Crucify Your Mind,” he tells an unnamed other, “I've seen your self-pity showing/And the tears rolled down your cheeks.” On the third track, “Cause,” he’s full of self-pity and then on the fourth track, “I Wonder,” he’s sassy, irreverent, and timeless. “I wonder how many times you had sex,” he sings. “I wonder do you know who’ll be next.”

“Can’t Get Away” -- number seven -- is about the longing to escape and the impossibility of really escaping. “Inner City Blues” takes on the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. “King died/ Drinking from a Judas cup,” Rodriguez sings. The same song addresses the gap between the generations. “Papa don't allow no new ideas here,” he wails.

n the ironical “Sandrevan Lullaby,” he addresses the nation itself:  “America gains another pound/ Only time will bring some people around.” The third song from the end, “I’ll Slip Away,” is perhaps the most personal. “You can keep your symbols of success,” he sings. “I'll pursue my own happiness/
And you can keep your clocks and routines.”


Rodriquez did exactly what he said he’d do. By the early 1970s, he was done with the world and perhaps sick of the world. “For too long I just put you on,” he sings in “I’ll Slip Away.” He adds, “Now I'm tired of lying and I'm sick of trying.”

But the world was not done with him or sick of him. In the movie and on the CD Searching for Sugar Man, he’s back bigger than ever before, and the Sixties are back, too, with poetry and with whimsy.

[Jonah Raskin is the author of American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation, and For The Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman. A regular contributor to The Rag Blo, he’s a professor emeritus at Sonoma State University. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Gregg Barrios : Cantinflas 101 in San Antonio

Dia de los Muertos altar honors the memory of Cantinflas at San Antonio retrospective. Photo by Gregg Barrios / The Rag Blog.
Catinflas 101:
Don Mario's silent empire

Known for his 'little tramp' outfit of patched, baggy pants, rope belt, tattered vest, straw hat, and a slim mustache, Cantinflas personified the Mexican 'peladito,' an everyman.

By Gregg Barrios / The Rag Blog / November 5, 2012

SAN ANTONIO -- On a recent afternoon in San Antonio’s Market Square, a German tourist asked one of the vendors for a uniquely Mexican souvenir. After pointing to a plethora of Aztec calendars and rebozos, the vendor produced a ceramic Cantinflas.

“Es muy mexicano, es único,” she said. Behind her, a display shelf held dozens of Cantinflas figures depicting roles that had made the actor famous. A short legend was inscribed below the figure of Cantinflas as a doctor: “I’ll cure you of whatever ails you.” The tone in español is almost picaresque.

The tourist asked if the shopkeeper had statues of other national heroes.

“Solamente Benito Juárez y la virgen de Guadalupe,” she replied.

The German took the Cantinflas.

This year marks the 101st anniversary of the beloved comic’s birth, and appropriately the San Antonio Public Library, KLRN and the San Antonio Public Library Foundation celebrated Latino Heritage Month with a long overdue Cantinflas retrospective. In addition to an exhibit of film posters and photos that span his life and times, local library branches screened the lion’s share of his 50-plus films.

Known for his “little tramp” outfit of patched, baggy pants, rope belt, tattered vest, straw hat, and a slim mustache, Cantinflas personified the Mexican “peladito,” an everyman. His use of convoluted, hilarious wordplay was later aped by Abbott and Costello in their “Who’s on First?” routine, and on TV by Professor Erwin Corey, an Anglo legacy that hints at the impact this Mexican comic genius had on Spanish-speaking audiences around the world.

Film purists still insist that Hollywood’s golden age of comedy ended with the talkies. And although Spanish-speaking audiences enjoyed the slapstick comics of Hollywood, their interest waned as movies began to speak in English. That’s when the Mexican film industry took off.

Its most successful star was Mario Moreno, aka Cantinflas. His slight build was perfect for the screen, and fame came quickly, starting with Está es mi tierra (This is My Country) in 1937. His most famous films dealt with the everyday life of a penniless vagabond, el peladito -- not unlike Chaplin’s Little Tramp-- who wore his pants lower than even today's hip-hop standards might allow.

Both comics had worked in the circus and vaudeville and began their film careers in one-reel comedies. After a Los Angeles screening of Cantinflas’ Ni sangre ni arena (Neither Blood Nor Sand), Chaplin called Cantinflas the best living comic in the world. That film’s daring and hilarious bullfighting sequences are especially impressive because Moreno, an amateur bullfighter, did his own stunts.

But Cantinflas was so much more than a physical comedian. There was a method to the madness of his Spanish-language double entendres and verbal nonsense. He befuddled and jabbed at politicians, diplomats, lawmen, and the wealthy in his films. His brand of humor spread like wildfire, so much so that the Real Academia Española added the verb cantinflear -- to speak in a nonsensical manner -- to the dictionary.

The golden age of Mexican cinema began in 1936 and lasted more than 30 years. Latino families made weekly treks to el cine and a new Cantinflas film was often the reason. San Antonians of a certain age still remember when the small comic occasionally appeared at the Alameda theater along with such stars as Jorge Negrete, María Félix, Gloria Marín, Pedro Infante, Dolores Del Río, Pedro Armendáriz, and Tito Guízar.

By the 1950s the era of great Hollywood comics had faded, but Hollywood came courting the populist and popular Cantinflas. His role as Passepartout, David Niven’s valet in Around the World in 80 Days, remains the one high point in the 1956 Best Picture Oscar-winner. Cantinflas also won a Golden Globe for best motion picture actor in a comedy/musical for his role -- beating out Yul Brynner and Marlon Brando.

But when Hollywood attempted to cash in on Moreno’s newfound fame by casting him in as the lead in 1960‘s Pepe, the film bombed. Jorge Camara, vice president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which sponsors the Golden Globes, says the reason for its failure is simple.

“In Around the World in 80 Days, Cantinflas was able to use his physical comedy, something he didn't do in his followup film, Pepe,” Camara said by email. “His genius and one of his greatest talents was the comic way he used (or misused) the Spanish language to fit his character and his situations. That ability, unfortunately, did not translate into English.”

When I moved to Los Angeles in 1980, many downtown movie palaces were programming Spanish-language films to meet the demand of recently arrived immigrants. The new waves of immigrants from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua had one thing in common: Cantinflas. Most had grown up watching his comedies. He not only was a first-class film star, but also a cultural hero to his countless fans, especially the working class who identified with el peladito.

Cantinflas lookalike at San Antonio retrospective. Photo by Gregg Barrios / The Rag Blog.
But the end was near. The Mexican film industry was beginning to churn out substandard films filled with gratuitous nudity and blue humor.

Writer Sandra Cisneros has kept a ceramic figure of el peladito in her bathroom for nearly 20 years. “Isn’t it from the street that all fashion and pop culture ultimately comes from?” Cisneros asked.

Every time I see someone walking down the street with their pants falling off, I think, mira, hay va Cantinflas. El peladito was ahead of his time for showing his calzones and dragging his pants down to his hips like hip-hop kids do.

Cantinflas is a cultural icon like la virgen de Guadalupe. You have to have an image of the Virgen and Cantinflas whether or not you’re Catholic or have seen his films. They are omnipresent in Chicano culture and in some ways the antithesis of themselves because each one in a sense is god: the Guadalupe is the compassionate face of god, while Cantinflas is a symbol just like the Virgen of the oppressed. For a few moments, he makes you laugh, and if that isn’t God I don’t know what is

For a mural at the Teatro de los Insurgentes in Mexico City, Diego Rivera painted Cantinflas as a Christ figure with an image of the Virgin on his clothing -- a latterday Juan Diego. The mural drew outrage and was later modified and the Guadalupe removed. Today it depicts Cantinflas taking money from the rich and redistributing it to the poor. In real life, Moreno was a co-founder and president of the Mexican actor’s union, ANDA, and funded La Casa del Actor, a haven for needy film industry workers.

Herbert Siguenza, a founding member of the Chicano performance troupe Culture Clash, considers Cantinflas a muse and a hero. Siguenza wrote a one-man show that pays tribute to Moreno, commissioned by Houston’s Alley Theater. Part biography, part comic sketches, his Cantinflas! illustrates el peladito’s influence on comedy today and introduces the character to a new generation that perhaps only knows the him from the animated children’s Cantinflas Show on Spanish-language TV.

“There is a new generation, a second generation of young Latinos growing up, and these kids don’t know who Cantinflas is,” Siguenza said in a recent phone interview. “They know who Will Smith and Jim Carrey are, but I wanted to show them that we also have a comic hero; we have someone who was as big as Charlie Chaplin. And we should remember that. He was one of the first crossover stars that we had.” Still, Siguenza admits it's a hard sell to English-only audiences. “The verbal antics aren’t transferable. It’s like trying to translate Groucho in Chinese.”

In 1983, on assignment for the Los Angeles Times, I interviewed Don Mario in Mexico City two years after what was to be his final film, El Barrendero (The Street Sweeper), which at the time had made more money at the box office than any other Mexican film. He was still upbeat about his art, and expressed a desire to have el peladito cross the border into California to join César Chávez’s farmworkers and perform with Luis Valdez’s Teatro Campesino.

He spoke of his screen counterpart in the third person:

Cantinflas has changed because he is part of the world, part of the people. We all change. The little guy isn’t the same one from 30 or 40 years ago. He has the same ingenuity, but he is better prepared than he was before to deal with life. He may see the same problems of years ago occur again today, but he sees them from a different perspective. Cantinflas has changed but he still carries the essence of being part of the common people. The clothes he wore before aren’t worn anymore, so he doesn’t wear them, but he’s the same guy underneath. That won’t ever change.

Later, watching his penultimate film, El Patrullero 777 (Patrolman 777), I saw what he meant. His comic style of cantinfleando had morphed into the everyday doublespeak of politicians everywhere. In the film, Moreno portrays a patrolman, but he still sports his signature bigotito, his thin mustache. When his commanding officer asks why he no longer wears his pants low, he retorts: "Todo a subido” (“Everything’s gone up”).

Yet the old Cantinflas, more the social reformer than the social satirist, makes an appearance at the end of the film. In a speech that contains little of el peladito’s double talk, he laments the loss of trust and dignity in public officials in a speech in front of a building named for former Mexican president Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, under whose orders hundreds of university students were killed during the 1968 protests in Mexico City.

Cantinflas then lifts his gloved hand, echoing a moment during the 1968 Summer Olympics -- also held in Mexico City -- when African-American medalists raised clenched fists in a human-rights salute. By that time, I was in tears.

This article was published at Plaza de Armas and was crossposted to The Rag Blog.

[Gregg Barrios is a journalist, playwright, and poet living in San Antonio. Gregg, who wrote for The Rag in Sixties Austin, is on the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle. Contact Gregg at gregg.barrios@gmail.com. Read more articles by Gregg Barrios on The Rag Blog.]

• A clip from Cantinflas’ 1940 film Ahí está el detalle (There’s the Rub) with English subtitles, can be seen here.

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...