Love Liza (2002)

Written by Gordy Hoffman
Directed by Todd Louiso

Have a fancy for addiction genre movies? They are a fascinating genre that goes back to the very earliest movies. D W Griffith made an addiction movie, maybe more than one. Of course, A Star is Born (X4), Lost Weekend, classics. Or, Hatful of Rain, Days of Wine and Roses, Come Back Little Sheba, Panic in Needle Park. There are many more recent: Permanent Midnight, Rush, Requiem for Dream. Lots of meth movies.
There is an unlimited supply of them. Like the unlimited supply of easily available things to become addicted to. They are mostly relentless tragedies, or horror movies where the monsters are within the victims themselves. A sort of demonic possession in need of an exorcism by the church of AA.   
The best ones are continual spirels downhill without the redemption that saves the day and holds the monster at bay, at least for now because we are told that the monster can never be killed. Do we ever really want the monster to be killed at the end and everyone living happily ever after? What fun is that? Once an addict, always one. The horror always looming creeping up on those not constantly vigilant or who think are in control of themselves and the monster within.

This one starring Philip Seymour Hoffman is certainly an interesting addition to the long list of addiction movies. It has the strangest of addictions, not the usual substances like alcohol or heroin, or meth. In that way it is unique and maybe even more disturbing than some of the others.

It all begins with a suicide. The wife of Wilson Joel (Philip Seymour Hoffman) has killed herself apparently right before we enter into the story.
Wilson is distraught and remains so though the entire movie. This is not a cheerful movie.
There is the implication that the addiction is a reaction to the grief. But this cannot be known. We don’t know why Liza has killed herself. She leaves Wison a letter in an envelope, but he carries it around not wanting to open it and read it
.
What was the quality and the nature of their relationship before her death? Had he been involved with addicting substance before her death? Was her role to hold him back from the brink, the long suffering wife keeping him together so he could keep his job and a life that appeared, on the surface, to be normal, middle class and functional. At the beginning he has a good job as a software or web developer, something with computers. He is good at it and respected by his coworkers.     
We don’t know her reasons and how he factored into her ultimate decision. We only see his grief, his disconnection, his inability to reach out for whatever help there might have been in his affluent community. It seems that something was not quite right with Wilson to begin with. His  substance of choice is obliterating and more self-destructive that others might have been. Since he is intelligent it seems as though he would know how bad it is. 
He could have had a long history with this substance of choice and the absence of Liza was the excuse for the self destructive descent.  
There is no questioning of it, or trying to stop and the movie just keeps on.
Kathy Bates plays Liza’s mom. She tries to help or at least is around going “WTF”. But somehow she seems a bit off herself even though she is grieving.
Wilson is a kind of one dimensional character. He is very low key and even lower when whacked out. In that way it is hard to really get to know him and hope that he pulls through. So we just look on at his messed up life, somewhat impassively.

The movie was written by Gordy Hoffman, the older brother of Philip Seymour Hoffman. The great star died 12 years after this movie was made. His biography material says that he was a heavy drug and alcohol user during his NYU years and went into rehab in 1989 saying sober for 23 years. In the end dying with a syringe in his arm and a number of drugs in his system.
He had his own addiction story going on, as many of us do and he only made it to 46 years old. One of the greatest stars of his generation.
His monster didn’t die, but stalked him even through fame and fortune, consuming him in the end.

Nobody Left by Mr. Fish

 This is subtitled on the cover:

“Conversations with famous radicals, progressives, and cultural icons about the end of dissent, revolution, and liberalism in America”

This book was discovered by accident in a local library in a town in Nassau County of Long Island, New York. It was in among the new graphic novels and comics. It’s large format 10” by 7” so supposedly that was why it was shelved where it was. It is also a good place for it. It’s the kind of thing that it would be nice for some suburban kid to accidentally come upon and then discover a new world. Actually the kid would be discovering an old world since Mr. Fish has set about talking to aged people who meant something to him and to the culture of the USA at one time.There are a lot of illustrations, the artwork of Mr. Fish. Some of them are a bit lurid and shocking which could also be a draw to a young person.  

This is a book from a left perspective. Not what the Trumpers and Republican Party call “far left”. That label is only a way to smear Democratic Party centrist liberals with Red Baiting because they might entertain leaving Social Security around for a bit longer, as long as it doesn’t take money away from the military budget.

The “left” referred to in this book is the old “New Left '' of the mid-20th Cemtury. That which reached its peak among post WWII Baby Boomers in the late 1960s. This left is the left that considers Clinton, and Obama, centerest sellouts who did more harm than good. The Democratic presidents who prepared the way for a Trump.

The book becomes a sort of memorial to that type of New Left politics since they have to a substantial degree disappeared from being a significant factor in mainstream politics. It could be argued that they never were much of a factor, but they certainly were more of a presence in the mainstream, even the old Big Three network mainstream of the 1950s and 60s.
High points of the book are interviews with greats Mort Sahl and (the late) Paul Krassner both of whom go back to the 1950s. But there are many others
And Mr Fish does talk about getting to people before they die off and missing that opportunity for some.

For those of us who miss that end of the dialog and adhere to that type of politics this is kind of a sad book. It’s about something that is dying off with a generation or a couple of generations that were a part of it. Mr Fish does not supply a path of hope forward. Most of the conversations are about what happened and why. 

The book was in print before the last great people’s movement appeared with the worldwide Black Lives Matter demonstrations and its movement.
That and the Bernie Sanders for President movements presented the old spirit. It is a spirit of rebellion and righteous anger at inequity that can inspire mass participating in demanding real change.

It is a spirit that has to be revived. There are millions waiting for it after being fooled by centrist Democrats that fail to deliver much other than, inadvertently, power to the rebellious tone of Right Wing populism which we have just seen in the Trump people and the January 6th storming of the Capitol Building. If a left movement does not come in, speak to these people and their needs and build a real socialist democracy, the fascist are going to rule the day and once they rule the day, that day can go on for decades.   
  

All in the Family at 50

 Archie, get the fuck out of my living room!

All in the Family premiered on TV 50 years ago.
It was launched by liberal producer Norman Lear starring liberal actor Carroll O'Connor as the “loveable” right wing racist.

The USA TV viewers apparently liked to hang around with Archie. They would invite him into their living rooms week after week and let him shout of his racist, right wing garbage. His show was top rated for the first 4 years.
The intention of Lear and company was to ridicule the right winger, the program intended as a satire, a send up of beliefs and values that the producers did not share, and presumable, that none of their friends shared.
‘As Lear recalled later that year to Variety, “There was no advance publicity, no promo, as a nervous network didn’t quite know what to do with a show in which the hero is a bigot. The web expected an avalanche of protests and hired extra operators to handle them. There was an avalanche, but 99% of the callers liked the show.”’
So the network was nervous about a bigot hero but once it sold and was a hit everyone was happy.

You can’t center a show around a bigot and sell me on the idea that you are doing something good for the culture. Presenting Archie every week normalized his type and just part of the family “All in the Family” and therefore welcome. The whole idea was backward and Lear would have known it would backfire and I’m suggesting it did.
If Archie Bunker was part of my family I wouldn’t be welcoming him into my living room week after week for 12 years. If he did have to come around I would tell him to “shut the fuck up and watch the football game or get out, I don’t want to hear your shit.” Yet Norman Lear, and CBS dumped his shit into millions of homes week after week.
What was the result of this? Was it an incredible swing to the left and the marginalization of bigotry? The original run of All in the Family went from 1971 until 1979 and guess what? Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980 sending the nation into a dive into right wing power. Ronny was lovable too as he was telling us how the government was our enemy while taking power away from union workers and giving it to the corporations.
Reagan was a slicker Archie Bunker character elevated to the presidency.

But these things cannot possibly be connected can they? After all everyone knows that TV is just harmless entertainment and has no impact on real life. That is probably why corporations dumped billions of advertising dollars into it. But maybe they studied the effects of TV and advertising and its power to persuade.

On the heels of Archie and Reagan’s destruction of the Fairness Doctrine which regulated that broadcasters had to present both sides of an argument came Fox News in 1996.
Then in 2004 NBC launched The Apprentice, a phony reality competition program with Donald Trump as the great wise billionaire genius.
This ran for 15 years. Trump’s TV run was even longer than Archie’s.

In 2016 Trump was elected president. And millions of TV Fox News viewers still think he’s a genius who won by a landslide even though he lost a close race for reelection.

Yeah, bring Archie’s Ronnie’s and Donny’s right wing hate and corporate wealth loving mindset into our living rooms. It has no effect at all.

Daisies (1966)

Written and Directed by Věra Chytilová

This is a wild romp of a movie. Not much plot, but bubbling over with the silly joyous adolescent anti-authoritarian playful naughtiness.

The movie opens with shots taken from an aircraft during a military attack or a few different attacks, this is just the title sequence.

Then we go to a couple of young women (Jitka Cerhová and Ivana Karbanová) in two-piece bathing suits sitting side by side. These two are the main characters in the movie. We follow them on their adventures and hang out with them in their apartment as they talk.

They go to fancy restaurants, to dinners with old men. Or one is on a date with an old man and the other comes in and crashes the date. They order and consume lots of food, presumably at the old man’s expense. The old men appear well healed so there is not a feeling that they are cheating others in need. The implication is that they are rich horny old men taking a hot too-young date out in hopes of action later. And who has sympathy for men like that? At any rate the girls say, “We are late for the train.” and run off with him to the station. Then one gets on with him and jumps off before the train is out of the station with the old man, dumped and riding away, while the girls giggle. This sort of thing is repeated a couple more times with other distinguished looking older men. 

The movie is non-linear and avant-garde. The visual style goes from B&W to color, to filtered colors, and into moments that can only be called psychedelic.
This is not at all surprising because Czechoslovakia was a major center of manufacture and research on the clinical use of LSD during which many in the artistic community were given LSD. Further reading on that is here:
https://przekroj.pl/en/society/a-communist-lsd-trip-aleksander-kaczorowski?fbclid=IwAR0IA5io0YuC0-9BbyIuniAzn4ou71yR_7WE4zMkHBlzuFANY8EAL14XpiA
The young women end up in a large elegant banquet room which is all set up with a food table as if a large wedding party is about to enter at any moment. They have their destructively naughty glutinous fun in this setting.

This is a really interesting and fun short feature. A high point in 1960 film culture easily rivaling anything produced during the same period in the USA avant-garde in that era.

Yet this was so long ago. Something so lovely and immediate is now the work of the dead. Věra Chytilová died in 2014, and what has become of these girls 55 years later? They are old women presumably transformed by life into whatever they became after this crazy movie on their youth.
Moving image is so strange. It has captured time and sent it back to us. It was one thing in the 1950s when the cinema of 30 years before was a different thing, sometimes crude and technologically rudimentary, at best a wondrous world of pantomime, yet remote and definitely “then”.  But now in the 21st Century we can see much of the previous century 50, 60, even 75 years ago, looking brand new, not all that distinguishable technologically from the moving images produced today.
The dead regularly perform for us. This is different from reading the words of the dead, these people are really alive talking and moving.
This has never occurred before, this is totally new to the human experience. What does it mean? How does it affect us?

The young women in the film are unquestionably alive, giggling and vital in every way. They are relics of 55 years ago, yet fresh as, well, fresh as Daisies.  

   

Death of a Salesman (1951)

 Death of a Salesman (1951)

Written by Arthur Miller
Adapted screenplay by Stanley Roberts
Directed by Laslo Benedek

This is the first movie adaptation of Arthur Miller’s hit American tragedy  play.
It was released in late 1951 two years after the original Broadway production. Mildred Dunnock, Linda Loman from the original production, recreates her performance in the film as well as Cameron Mitchell the original Broadway Happy Loman.

The movie has a terrific central performance with Fredric March as Willy Loman the salesman. He was a terrific film actor and his expressiveness in this powerful role in the great play is a brilliant combination of elements.
Willy is all of us in our competitive commercial market reality. He stands up straight briefly talking proudly about how he was liked and respected which was ultimately what he had to sell, himself. Then he collapses again at the reality of the situation as a victim of the system.

The film has some beautiful transitions from current time to Willy’s dreams of the past. Alex North who did the music for the Broadway production contributes a powerful and appropriate score.

Kevin McCarthy plays Biff. The core of the drama is the conflict between Willy and his drifter son Biff. It is also one of McCarthy’s strongest performances.
We can really only judge actors based on what they are given to do. And here they have the best possible material to work with in this adaptation of Miller’s great American play.

What’s the deal with traveling salesmen in mid-20th Century tragic drama? Hickey, another traveling salesman, is the central character in Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh. Part of the downfall of both Willy and Hickey is the guilt of infidelity on the road.  

"Did you hear the one about the traveling salesman?"  

No

"Well, it ain't funny."  
 

Ladders of Fire by Anais Nin

 This short novel is collected in a volume with four others, the collection entitled Cities of the Interior. This first one is brief, 128 pages.

This first one introduced four characters.

This is not a plot heavy, hero’s or heroine’s journey through conflict story. This is not the aim of this type of work. The bohemian characters float in and out of one another’s lives in the organic way of reality without the artifice of dramatic events to build a story around.
Life is not made of dramatic events. In this way the novel is deeply realistic as it drifts through the dream-like interior world of the characters, the women characters.

It centers on three of them Lillian, Djuna, and Sabina. We look inside them. They react to exterior male characters Gerard and Jay. we don’t go inside Gerard and Jay. He hear about what they do, what the women think and feel about their behavior but not of their thoughts or feelings. This is not a flaw in the book, but it is a fact of its style and approach. This is a woman’s novel and boldly so.

Lillian is married to Gerard in the beginning and she, they, have children.
Nin presents possible plot drama in the relationship of Lillian and Gerard, but instead of bringing us directly into the dramatic story of their relationship and breakup, we overhear Lillian telling Djuna that they split because she expressed her feelings, what was inside her, and it is left at that. Gerard and the children are forgotten, dropped away, with a sort of bohemian ruthlessness that we might only expect men of that time or any time to selfishly manifest.

Next we meet Jay, he is a painter. Lillian is a pianist. Jay is presented as a wild spirited artist. He consumes the world and those in it with a type of infection exuberance. Soon Lillian and Jay seem to be cohabitating.

Jay being wild brings Sabina into the situation.
Sabina is another bohemian, with disregard for even how she dresses, presents herself. This is indicative of her wild free spirit. Sebina is a match for Jay as a bold assertive lover, one who goes after what she wants and drops them when she is satiated.
Sabina and Lillian have a scene together. What really goes on there we are partly left to imagine.

It all ends in a party scene.
This is an interesting read for people who want uniquely approached character studies in their social settings.

Small Axe (2020)

Small Axe (2020)
Directed by Steve McQueen

This is a series of five films set within London’s West Indian community from the late 1960s to the early 1980s.
It is a wholesome series that trough true stories demonstrates how progressive change is really achieved.
“Freedom is a Constant Struggle” was a slogan on a political button from the 1960s.
This is the truth. Real change is not going to come from electing a new president, that might help, but it is not the revolution, not the force behind real change.

Change comes from people banding together, organizing, and finding a way through for themselves while at the same time putting pressure on the local and national power structures.
The New Deal didn’t come out of FDR and thin air. It was the manifestation of decades of struggle of union organizers and socialist activists. This is how change is made.

This very fine cycle of films shows how people struggle and make change, one story at a time.
(And we get to go to a really cool party too!)

================


Mangrove 

Directed by Steve McQueen

Written by Alastair Siddons & Steve McQueen

In 1970, in the Notting Hill section of London, Frank(Shaun Parke) opened a restaurant called Mangrove. He only wants to have a nice restaurant but from the start he is faced with
harassment, raids by racist cops.
The community rallies and holds a demonstration that is attacked by a police riot.
There is a trial and the people learn how to defend themselves.
Powerful courtroom drama at the end.

Lovers Rock
Directed by Steve McQueen
Written by Steve MCQueen and Courttia Newland

This is an 1980s house party. We see the audio-DJ equipment being moved into the house. The women cook. The rug is rolled up, all the preparations for a house party.
The movie is like being in a party in the past that you were not really invited to but can attend invisibly, a fly on the wall and flying through the party room. People hook up some successfully, some not, just like real life.
Groovy 80s reggae/dub music soundtrack.

++++++++++++



Red, White, and Blue
Directed by Steve McQueen
Written by Steve MCQueen and Courttia Newland

This one brings up a lot of questions. It is based on a true story of Leroy Logan (played by John Boyega) . A young black man with another career who becomes a policeman. He has seen his father abused by cops when he was younger. He intends to change the institution of the police force from within. His father doesn’t want him to become a cop. He hates them for a good reason. The son, Leroy Logan, excels during training.
But he is the object of racism within the force. Can a black man change this institutional racism from within?
The story ends before the question is answered.

(This is being written a week for the Righwing, racist, Pro-Trump assult of the Capatol building. It is coming out that many of those participating are involved with law enforcement, cops from out of town who traveled to DC for this event. Fascist elements are embedded into the police and the military. This is a serious problem.)

+++++++++++++++

Alex Wheatle
Directed by Steve McQueen

Written by Alastair Siddons & Steve McQueen

Sheyi Cole plays Alex Wheatle. Alex is an orphan or abandoned child who is abused, hit, misunderstood,  by the big white orphan home momma. He keeps running into trouble. Looking for something, a parent, a leader, he drifts into a bad crowd.
He discovers music, black struggle and poetic expression. But he’s lucky because trouble leads him to a wise mentor that shows him just what he needs.  

+++++++++++++++

Education

Directed by Steve McQueen

Written by Alastair Siddons & Steve McQueen

Kingsley (played by Kenyah Sandy) is a 12 year old school boy who is having trouble in school. There is a scene early on of the children taking turns reading aloud in class and Kingsley not being able to do so. (This writer knows personally how horrible an experience like that is in a grade school classroom.)
Kingsley is given standardized intelligence tests by the school system and it is determined that he is to be transferred to a “special needs school” which is really a school where they warehouse children unwanted by the system.

But these are movies of struggle that lead to solutions, at least for the particular problem if not to a grand ultimate revolution to make everything magically better. There are community groups of West Indian organizers who want to do something about the racist seperation, the giving up on finding a way to educate, that is only the path to a low wage menial labor, and dead end life.

=============

These films are partly financed and presented in the USA on Amazon Prime. There is a sort of irony in this ruthless, powerful, and exploitative corporation bringing us this type of motion picture material that we need, if we need any at all.
This is another institution that will have to be forced to change from the bottom, the warehouse workers, up.
Moving picture production is a very expensive art form and the money comes from money which is very often saturated with the blood and sweat of those who brought it to the investors.
Freedom IS a Constant Struggle.