Sue Katz: Consenting Adult

Reviews: Oscar-Nominated Documentary Shorts

Watching the four documentary shorts in one program is a pretty intense experience, because at least the first three are difficult subjects with problematic treatments. Here are my quickie reviews:

 

1. Incident at New Baghdad
Ethan McCord managed to repress his memories of his time as a US Army soldier in Iraq. Until, that is, he turned on the TV one day to see himself in footage of an atrocity that had been released by Wikileaks. He is now a public speaker about the war and about PTSD. We meet him with his kids and he describes himself as an “almost single dad.” He has his closest Army buddy’s dog tags tattooed on his arm after that friend is killed by an IED and he has a lot of guilt to discharge. The film is full of horrible images – stills and video – of that gruesome incident in which innocent people were blown away followed by more innocent people who came in a van to help the first victims. Bring a very strong stomach with you to see this one.

2. Saving Face
In Pakistan, hundreds of husbands each year burn their wives faces off by throwing battery acid at them, sometimes dousing them in gasoline to add flames to the torture. Even women who turn down a marriage proposal have found their faces burned off by rejected suitors. The acid eats the bones from their noses and the eyeballs from their skulls. This film follows several such women, the organizations they have formed to fight for a law to punish these brutal men, and the Pakistani-born American plastic surgeon who decides to “give back” by working on some of their faces. The man is almost a caricature of the arrogant American surgeon, high-fiving his patients, but baffled by these crimes. He has no analysis of the gendered nature of this violence and of the general place of women in society. I wanted to scream at the screen.

3. The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom
This film opens with a lengthy clip taken by survivors of the Japanese tsunami from the top of a hill where they watch the water approach from very far away up to, virtually, their feet. Their horror is recorded, not the least as they scream to people running toward their hill to hurry. Some descend to try to help and are swept away along with the fleeing figures. The contents of the human world below – their houses and cars and papers and tools – are churned up and deposited miles away. We meet a number of them just a month later and their state of shock is palpable. Suddenly the film switches to an ode to the cherry blossom and a demonstration of its symbolic importance as the Japanese calendar’s highest moment of hope and beauty. We visit a 1,000 year-old cherry blossom tree and the caretakers point to the lowered numbers of visitors because of the aftermath of the tragedy. In the end there is an attempted reconciliation of these two aspects of the film, not fully successful, but quite interesting.

4. The Barber of Birmingham
The most likable of the documentary shorts is the story of Mr. Armstrong, 85 years old, the subtitled “Foot Soldier of the Civil Rights Movement.” A famous barber, he has even cut Martin Luther King Jr’s hair several times and tells us that the crowds at his windows then were just as big as the crowds that assembled when he barbered his first white clients. Having been arrested several times during the civil rights movement, having put his children out front during the school integration struggles, and having fought for the vote for Black people, the election of Barack Obama was truly a dream come true. It is a major set-back for him when he falls ill the day before he is to take a bus with his friends to DC for the inauguration. He is well-loved in the community and his children and grand-children follow his example. This selection has my vote to be the Oscar winner.

Film Review: Moneyball

So the Oakland Athletics baseball general manager named Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) loses big at the beginning of this decade. What does he do? He finds a young white college grad named Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) who is more into numbers and stats than he is into baseball and immediately trusts every single word the kid says. In the process, he poops all over his long-time team of scouts, managers and trainers, explains nothing to nobody, and completely re-builds his team by eliminating all human or emotional elements from the choice. And then he eventually gains a record winning streak.

This process is not a pretty sight. While Brad Pitt looks more and more like an aging Robert Redford’s physical clone, he is a study in the absence of nuance. He is not convincing as a baseball figure. In contrast, Phillip Seymour Hoffman hits it out of the ballpark (you anticipated that, right?) as the field manager  who is forced against everything he’s been taught to go with Beane’s decisions, not the least because if he puts someone into the lineup that Beane hasn’t specified, Beane trades the player on the spot. Brand is a bewildered geek at first, but quickly gets into the ways of power and agrees to inform veteran players that they’ve been dropped without notice – reminding me of that college experiment in the 60s in which college students, in the context of a supposed science research project, gave electric shocks amounting to torture to subjects writhing before them – just because some teacher told them to.

I found no one to love in this film. I found the film’s time frame – just a few years ago –about actual people a bit discombobulating. And I missed the feeling, like we had back in 1960, with Roberto Clemente, Bill Mazeroski and Smokey Burgess, when the Pittsburgh Pirates won the World Series and we all danced in the streets. The gains of this team came out of rudeness and arrogance and it was hard to give a damn.

Trailer
 

BBC America is a Pile of Boring Testicles

Hey, nothing personal, but I pay a lot of money in order to get the set of channels that includes BBC America so that I can have BBC news in the morning. And hopefully other superior BBC programming. But what do I now get? Let’s look at this evening (written Jan 23). From 6:00pm to 2:00am there is an unrelieved series of “Top Gear” repeats. I’ve never watched one through, but it seems to be about a white man of a certain age (plus two more such buddies) and his obsessive attraction to motorized vehicles. Nuf said. So what breaks that boring stream of male combustion? At 2:00am we are offered James May's Road Trip. Not one, but three of them squished into an hour, before it is time to return to Top Gear at 4:00am.

Okay, so what about tomorrow? We’ve got the morning news from 5:00am for a few hours and then a couple of other loud white men and their shows – such as The Graham Norton show -  before settling in to a day-time of Chef Gordon Ramsay having abusive temper tantrums – from noon till 4:00pm and then again from 7:00pm till the following morning’s 5:00 newscast. To be clear – Ramsay is interrupted a couple of times for some-white-man-or-other’s road trip, but only for one segment.

And so it is as the days pass. Big swatches of time split between “Top Gear” and various incarnations of Ramsay, with the occasional interruption of lesser pale males.

So I want to know: Who is programming this cacophony of sameness? And who is watching this shite? And can I get my money back?

P.S. A BBC World News channel has lately begun broadcasting.

The Traveler Restaurant: Food and Books

Anyone who’s driven on I-84 by Union, Connecticut has seen a tempting sign hovering right off the highway that says “Food and Books.” This week I finally stopped to have a meal. But not only a meal…

Founded in 1970, the restaurant adds to dining two other goals: to encourage people to read and to recycle extra books. When you have a meal – and the food is basic hearty American grub – you get to choose three free books from the shelves lining the dining room.

So why did they start doing a book give-away? In 1983, the owner wanted to thin out his personal collection, so he lugged a couple of boxes to the restaurant and passed them out to his customers. They now handle about 100,000 books (or 50 tons they say) per year. The books come from libraries getting rid of their surplus, from flea markets, and from donations. I picked up books by Anthony Trollope and Anita Brookner as well a short story collection from a writer I don’t know named Joy Williams. My companion got the original scripts from the movies Pulp Fiction and The Matrix.

The waitress called me away from the stacks when my food was served, but no one rushed me afterwards as I continued to browse. There is also a store downstairs called the Book Cellar that features, its leaflet says, all sorts of “reasonably priced” and “unique and hard to find titles.” I didn’t go downstairs, but it certainly looked intriguing.

It is such a winning combination – food and books – one many people experience in their own homes, that it is doubtful that I will ever drive I-84 again without stopping in and have a bite and a browse.

Photos courtesy of Barry Hock

NYTimes Criticizes Israeli Gender Apartheid by Practicing It

This morning the New York Times highlights their article of on the shocking increase of Israeli religious fundamentalism and the segregation of women. They report, for example, on the pediatrics professor who wins a government Health Ministry-sponsored award. She dresses herself up in "modest" garb to receive her prize. She and her husband can't sit together at the ceremony - the sexes are segregated - where she is told that in any event a man must accept the award for her since women aren't permitted on the stage.

The Times gives a number of other examples of how bad things are - from "ultra-Orthodox men spit on an 8-year-old girl whom they deemed immodestly dressed" to "the chief rabbi of the air force resigned his post because the army declined to excuse ultra-Orthodox soldiers from attending events where female singers perform" to women's faces being blacked out on Jerusalem billboards.

However, the New York Times quotes six men in the article and just one woman - the leader of the Israeli Labour Party. And her quote is taken from another article - she does not appear to have been interviewed for this one. So in terms of direct source material, a shocked NY Times piece about the exclusion of women itself excludes women.

I've got three things to say about this.

One, this reminds me of the Americans who righteously criticize Israel for its brutal Occupation of Palestine, without a word of recognition of the role of wretched American foreign policy and extravagent military aid to Israel in propping up the country and maintaining the Occupation.

Two, the NYT says: "Public discourse in Israel is suddenly dominated by a new, high-toned Hebrew phrase, “hadarat nashim,” or the exclusion of women." They do not mention that Israeli women have been organizing for their rights since the 70s and that they have been demonstrating vigorously on many levels in many ways about the increasing gender apartheid. It is women, they neglect to recognize, who have insisted that the society grapple with this. Here's a photo of naked Tel Aviv women in a November 2011 protest.

Finally, since the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, many Israeli women have made the connection between the Occupation of Palestine and the racism against Arabs in Israel with internal social divisions. Israeli women have organized many of the lasting, broad anti-Occupation groups in the country. Progressive Israeli women know, as the NYT apparently does not, that discrimination and exclusion are contagious.

And to wrap-up, may I repeat myself as I have done for decades, that all religious fundamentalisms have, at the heart of their agendas, the control of reproduction and of women's bodies and lives.

Film Review: Pariah

Pariah is a very special film. I saw it with my movie maven friend Stan who said it was the best film he’s seen all year. And I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen. While the concept – a coming (out)-of-age story – is classic, the family and friendship circle are ones we rarely get to pierce at our local movie houses. For how often does an actual commercial cinema show a film written and directed by a woman of color about African American lesbians? This wasn’t a specialized film festival. Nor a group DVD viewing. But a place that sells popcorn.

No, mostly crap white boy productions get the marquee. Shooting and raping and politicking and drinking and blowing up things – fantasies that reflect little that I understand in my kishkes, as my dad would’ve said, in my guts. Pariah is showing at only one theater in the whole Boston area. It has enjoyed little paid publicity or flashy marketing. Sundance supported it, as did many individuals who contributed some pennies to its Kickstarter campaign.

Alike (Adepero Oduye), a high school junior in Brooklyn, uses poetry to try to sort her identity, her sexuality, and her sense of truth. She knows that she is attracted to women, although she hasn’t yet stepped out with a girl. Her best friend Laura (Pernell Walker - photo at left) is openly gay, and as a result has been thrown out by her own parents. Alike doesn’t want to be alienated from her family, but struggles with the tension of changing her clothes (butching up on the way out, returning to girl’s clothes on the way home) on buses and in bathrooms. Her mother (Kim Wayans - photo at left) is a realistic combo of cold and loving, and wants only to mold her sullen daughter into a church-going lady she can dress up in skirts. Lacking any control in her own relationship with her husband, the mother would prefer to pretend the world is as she would wish it, than to cope with reality. The mother feels disconcertingly familiar.

Alike’s father (Charles Parnell) is rarely home, busy cheating on his wife and working a job he resents. Alike is his favorite and he thinks he is defending her by denying the obvious. Although at the end of the film he is seen to be the good guy, for me he remains a handsome cad, whose charm does not disguise that he is an absentee father and an unfeeling husband who practices his own sense of delusion. He fails to defend Alike at a crucial moment in their unpleasant family dynamic.

Young love can be such a mixed bag and Alike’s first romantic touch is fraught with betrayal and confusion. The line between friendship and desire is a hard one to navigate in those hormone-fueled years. A generalized air of danger and threat out on the streets is palpable. In the end, Alike’s literary commitment pulls her through these rough times, a lifeline writers and artists of every age can imagine.

There is an authenticity to this film that is so superior to the glossy, 3D, hyper-edited jerky work that passes as blockbusters. It’s important to remember how many excellent directors are failing to get their amazing films made. And even when they are made, how few are making it past the festivals and into our newspaper listings.

As funding for the arts gets sliced to bits, the voices of those who are not white men with connections are left unamplified. As it grapples with the secrets and lies of characters I care about and can identify with, Pariah affects me much more profoundly than mainstream fluff.  Kudos to writer-director-producer Dee Rees (photo at left): the efforts just to get this film funded were probably more exhausting than the actual creation and execution of this fine film itself. But ultimately it is a beautifully acted coming-of-age story that is both sweet and bittersweet.

Here’s the trailer:
 

Thank You for Saving 2011

A man performed a random act of generosity for me today, saving this putrid year from going out in an unmitigated stink. It was a simple experience, but it is this kind of rare moment that allows me to breathe in a life that is too often pressing down on me. I am usually thinking about the state of the economy in general – and in particular how nastily it is impacting on my own peeps; about the pandemic of cancer among women while those in power wage a war on women and our bodies; about the difficulty in distinguishing between Democrats and Repuglicans. I’ll stop there.

Today I went out grocery shopping. I parked in Davis Square (Somerville, MA) to pick up some meat at McKinnons. I keep a roll of quarters in my car for the meters and I took out two. Somehow, though, I clutched the quarters in my hand as I started to cross the street to the grocery shop.

Behind me I heard someone say “She forgot to put money in the meter,” and I stopped in the middle of the street and turned around. There’s a guy who occupies a bench on that street pretty regularly. He is homeless and he quietly holds out an empty paper cup in case anyone wants to help him out. He had jumped up and I watched him dig a quarter out of his cup and start to put it in my meter.

I rushed back and tossed both of my quarters in, instead, thanking him almost inarticulately for his bigheartedness. As I set out again for the store, he said, “Look, they come around constantly, so I try to keep my eye on these two meters here, ‘cause I sit right here and I can help. If the meter runs out while you’re shopping, I’ll take care of it. ”

When I returned to my car with my bag, I pressed a couple of bills in his hand and wished him a warm and safe New Year. He didn’t have to make a sweet gesture to a stranger, but it is my experience in life that those who don’t have share, and those that do have try to get some more. In my mind he (and the Occupy movement, of course) has single-handedly rescued the reputation of 2011.

FILM REVIEWS: “The Artist” (yay!) and “The Debt” (boo!) on xmas eve

We decided to break tradition for Jewish xmas eve and instead of going to an early Chinese meal, we went to the movies. “The Artist” had, at last, arrived in the area and was playing at Dedham Community Theater, in a middle class suburb of Boston. The last showing was at 4:45 and we assumed that we’d have a more or less empty theater to stretch out in. After a fabulous hot chocolate at the Mocha Java cafe next door, we entered the movie in time to watch it fill up – with other Jews. I even ran into a couple of my senior fitness students.

(David Moss poster via Lucinda Marshall)

“The Artist” is a black and white silent film, a Belgium/France production, about Hollywood’s transition to talkies and a romance that weathers the change. In fact, there is a lot of loyalty in this film – between the leading man George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) who refuses to adapt to talkies and the ascending young Peppy Miller (Berenice Bejo, wife of the director) he discovered; between Valentin and his life-saving doggie; between Valentin and his driver Clifton (James Cromwell); and, even on a gruff level, the producer Al Zimmer (John Goodman) and his stars.

The original music by Ludovic Bource is tone perfect – building the plot but never intrusive, and allowing for powerful silences. The actors are just over-expressive enough not to flounder without dialogue, but never over-hysterical. Berenice Bejo’s confident star turn is so full of irrepressible energy and joyful smiles that you would think the film was conceived to melt the winter chill.

The shimmery photography, the superb acting, the magical score, and the bow to a long-past form of artistry makes this just the flick to see when you want an upbeat, visually handsome experience.

The Artist trailer:
 

We came home, still in the movie mood, and decided to catch up on things we missed this season, by browsing the On Demand availables. “The Debt” was something I avoided, since I’m never keen on inviting the Mossad into my home. But like so many, my interest in Helen Mirren – the nominal star – ultimately became a consideration, despite my repugnance for security forces.

I will be brief. The film sounds like one in which every actor was told to do an accent, any accent, and pretend it was a Hebrew accent. What a load of goofy –sounding dialogue, almost comical in the range of manglings permitted, if not encouraged. The multiple timelines felt more like a function of very bad writing and directing than of sophisticated depth. We were constantly saying, “Wait. When is this? Where are we?”

The “moral dilemmas” were a bit silly and self-serving. The only intensity was in awful scenes of women being abused that I looked away from. And the idea that kidnappers would sit around listening to the manipulations of their hostage, a disgusting war criminal, beggars belief.

Mirren doesn’t do much of anything except sport a scar and look despairing. Jessica Chastain who plays the youthful version of the Mirren character and has much more facetime in this movie is stuck in a kind of innocent depression that eventually gets on the nerves. In fact, there is not a single light moment in this gray and annoying “thriller.”

The one piece of praise that I can give with conviction and some personal expertise is that the fight scenes are beautifully choreographed and very convincingly executed. I would bet that Chastain is a real-life martial artist – or else they brought in a skilled stuntwoman.

The Debt trailer

 

Occupy Boston Moves: Eviction Eve

The Occupy Boston camp is gone, replaced very quickly with a little used park in the middle of the financial district. The old neighborhood had been blown away by skyscrapers years ago. Occupy Boston was the liveliest thing to ever happen in this drab glass and concrete home of Boston’s 1%.

The creativity! The imagination! The practical achievements! The mind boggles at how much was accomplished in two-plus months. There were the inventions: The pedal-powered generator (see pic) used to charge cell phones and laptops was exported to other Occupy camps, including Occupy Wall Street. The battery-operated grey-water sink (pic) specially created by some MIT engineers to meet city standards whose installation was prevented by city police. The human services – from medical to literary – that were an oasis to many and kept the camp a humane, livable community.

But it is now gone. On Thursday morning December 8th, a judge lifted her injunction which Occupy Boston had requested to prevent their expulsion. The Mayor right away announced that they would be evicted that night at midnight. A camp that has been running – and quite brilliantly so – since September has to be dismantled in a matter of hours. Barry receives a call for help from one of the key activists, Rita, who has been his main contact in his work as a member of our National Writers Union and as Massachusetts UAW’s liaison to Occupy Boston. Rita was, incidentally, also my contact when I organized a demonstration entitled “Occupy Boston, Not Palestine” a month ago or so (see pic).

At first Barry suggests that the National Writers Union offer to take responsibility for dismantling and storing the Library. Who can forget the way the NY police ravaged Occupy Wall Street’s beloved Library (see pic)? We had been in the OWS Library just days before Occupy Wall Street was trampled, and the aftermath photos of the books torn and wet and violated still stick in our minds.

But there isn’t time on our side to organize trucks, storage and folks. And besides, the Occupy Boston people have long had their plans in place. By the evening the main tents housing the core services – food, medical, library, media, spiritual – have already been taken down and transported to the garage of a volunteer.

Occupy Boston asks people to come to the camp Thursday night as the midnight deadline approaches. We are there from around 10:00pm to 2:00am, together with about 2,000 others. I am surprised at how few people I run into that I know – just three or four from the Middle East justice movement, a few Union sisters (see pic) and brother, and one of my niece Oona’s best friends, Jenn, who organizes around economic justice.

Many of the smaller, individual – shall we say, residential tents - are still up in the camp at midnight. People have intelligence that a great force of riot police is staged nearby but out of sight in Chinatown, while the friendly, community-oriented older cops are at Occupy Boston itself. The joyful and angry energy is intense and I am sorry that the idea of a massive dance party had been “blocked” in the GA (General Assembly) earlier that evening.

Luckily Cambridge’s Second Line Social Aid and Pleasure Society Brass Band (see pic) turns up with their powerful mix of New Orleans and New Left and people sing and dance along. It is freezing as we stand on both sides of Atlantic Avenue chanting, although I am bundled up in countless layers and winter accessories in a way that is very rare for me, being an “indoors” kind of girl. At a certain point people pour into the street and close it down. Someone later describes to me how the cops had to back out the cars and trucks that were caught by the sudden change from a major road to a dance floor.

The chants and the profoundly democratic “mic checks!” go on way past midnight, past 1:00am, as we wait for the arrival of the cops to clear us out. Anyone who feels like it can yell “mic check!” and instantly have dozens of surrounding demonstrators repeating anything she wants to say so that dozens more are able to hear her message. Many young people express their love (see pic) for Occupy Boston, taking turns, until they are too hoarse. I’m flagging, my feet hurt, and I’m shivering, but it’s good to be here.

Around 2:00am a TV reporter tells us that there will be no bust tonight. Immediately the different media teams pack up to take their equipment back to the trucks, and the supporters of Occupy Boston stream towards their homes in different directions. My feet are frozen dead as we limp to the parking lot many blocks away, but I’m glad I didn’t miss it.

Barry’s phone rings at 5:49am two mornings later. It is Rita. A few dozen people have stayed these last 48 hours and the eviction is now taking place. It is all very “civilized” – probably because so many of the Boston occupiers are students and suburbanites and because of the respect that has developed between the occupiers and police who were thrown together in daily contact these many weeks. Mayor Menino was heavily criticized a few years ago after his police killed a student while quelling a sports riot. White middle class folks are not supposed to get hurt around here. He is more cautious about the targets of police actions ever since. People who wanted to leave were free to do so. Those who wanted to be arrested were also accommodated. It was all so collaborative that when three women who insisted on being arrested changed their minds once they were seated in the police van for awhile– or so the rumor goes – the police let them get out.

I miss the Occupy Boston camp already, perhaps because I was only an occasional visitor. I wouldn’t wish a Boston winter inside a tent in the windy financial district near the sea on anyone. But the clever signs, the good will, the innocence and the sophistication, the mixing of people in their 20s and Boomers (those appeared to be the two main groups), the spawning of a new language and an invented set of rituals (mic check!) – all of these will continue as the Occupy movement searches out its new forms.

All photos (except "Mic Check") from Barry Hock

Film Review: “Hugo” by Martin Scorsese

I’m so sorry to once again have a minority view of a popular film, but I found “Hugo” by Martin Scorsese boring and sentimental. It is slow-moving and enamored of itself. The Salon.com reviewer, among many other salivating fans of Scorsese, just about had a case of the vapors over the 3-D. “I have seen the future of 3-D moviemaking, and it belongs to Martin Scorsese,” he trembled, crowning it “the best movie anyone will make in the current post-“Avatar” 3-D wave.”  I guess if you loved “Avatar” you may find this the next step up. Not me. I concede that the 3-D was an interesting gimmick, here and there – especially in the exciting chase scenes, done from a kid’s-eye-view waist-high, but mostly the “cute” Scorsese-style black-framed 3-D glasses were heavy on the nose and a strain to the eyes. I trust that those children who are able to stay awake during this ponderous brilliant-orphan-sticks-to-his-guns saga enjoy the effect.

I’m sorry too to observe that Asa Butterfield (who plays the lead orphan Hugo Cabret ) lacks the chops to hold up a film in which he appears in virtually every shot. He has the wide-eyed startled deer-in-the-headlights look down pat, but little else. Thankfully, his childhood partner, Isabelle (played by Chloe Moretz), is charming and sympathetic as she garners her first real life “adventure” by assisting poor little Hugo. Branded a thief - he really only takes what he needs: food and tools – until he gets caught going for the mechanical mouse from the stall of Georges Méliès (Ben Kingsley), Isabelle’s godfather.

 
When a film is made by someone called Scorsese, one expects that a few celebrities will drop into the production. Sacha Baron Cohen plays the evil station inspector; the lovely Helen McCrory plays Isabelle’s godmother; and Jude Law is Hugo’s prematurely-dead dad. Johnny Depp, a producer of the film, is a well-oiled band leader who turns up fleetingly in disconnected flashes.

One also expects Scorsese to weave in a plethora of artistic references and he doesn’t disappoint. In fact, he seems to have won over the film reviewers to such an astounding degree that the collective score by the two dozen reviewers (of them, one is a woman) blurbed on Rotten Tomatoes is a stratospheric 97%.  I find this profoundly puzzling for a sappy film that takes place in a Paris train station where the characters have French names and English accents and where the emotions run from trying-to-be-poignant all the way to still-trying-to-be-poignant. The film is crying out for an editor willing to slice the flab from what is, under the razzle-dazzle, a very thin work.

Waiting in line outside the Harvard Square theater with the rest of the excited crowd before we could be seated, one matriarch told her family about an interview Jon Stewart conducted with Martin Scorsese in which the director explained that he wanted to make one film that his 12-year-old daughter could see. It is a modest goal and I congratulate him for reaching it.

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