Sue Katz: Consenting Adult

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: