Remembering

Somewhere

Both singers are dubbed and both are singularly limited as movie actors. (Yet who else could go from playing Tony in West Side Story (1961) to playing -- 30 years later -- Benjamin Horne[!] in Twin Peaks?) And yes Natalie Wood and Richard Beymer hated each other on set, since Wood wanted then-husband -- and future-murderer -- Robert Wagner as Tony. Plus the movie is not light and funny, nor a showcase for star performers in their best routines. Still. . .

Where did all this go? What happened to it? This quiet and warmth. This full-bodied belief in transcendence, heartbreak, longing. This sense of doom coming not from covens of corporate vampires creating a world frozen in dread, cynicism, and corruption; rather, a tragic forboding arising from the nature of things, as if one is never in so much danger as when happy and/or alive -- that is when the devils seem to have their day, and hawks steal something living from the gambol on the field. . .

West Side Story can now be seen, 60 years on, as a bleeding-heart opera of the Kennedy Years, filled with a faith in endless possibility and joy, undercut by distant drums -- a movie with a vanished New York City of movement, color, good humor, fellowship, and a loathing of pretension and power at the center of its tender heart.

Let it bleed.

104

"His imperfections flowed from the contagion of the times; his virtues were his own." -- Gibbon

Happy Birthday to the last American President. . .

                                                          * * * * * *

Yes, it is a cold war document. Yes it was written and directed (and scored!) by right-wing loon Bruce Herschensohn (borrowing from Leni Riefenstahl). And yes we have to listen to Gregory Peck's voice. . .

But it is a great documentary (ignore the part about Dallas): earnest, transcendent, and -- like the man himself -- honorable and very moving. He left behind a more compassionate country (and world). What more can one do?

The Issue

A 2002 documentary by the great John Pilger.

The Mouths of Babes

Babes

Free Gaza!

Two brave documentaries on the Zionist goal of exterminating all Palestinians.

Max Blumenthal's Killing Gaza (2014):

 

Abby Martin's Gaza Fights for Freedom (2019):

 

Intifada!

Gangster State

Unholy Land

Killers R' Us

And that's okay, especially if you're a dumpy cisgender (whatever the hell that is) Hispanic "female."

A true female explains:

Ship of Fools

 

Chris Hedges:

Don’t be fooled by Joe Biden. He knows his infrastructure and education bills have as much chance at becoming law as the $15-dollar minimum wage or the $2,000 stimulus checks he promised us as a candidate. He knows his American Jobs Plan will never create “millions of good paying jobs – jobs Americans can raise their families on” any more than NAFTA, which he supported, would, as was also promised, create millions of good paying jobs. His mantra of “buy American” is worthless. He knows the vast majority of our consumer electronics, apparel, furniture and industrial supplies are made in China by workers who earn an average of one or two dollars an hour and lack unions and basic labor rights. He knows his call to lower deductibles and prescription drug costs in the Affordable Care Act will never be permitted by the corporations that profit from health care. He knows the corporate donors that fund the Democratic Party will ensure their lobbyists will continue to write the laws that guarantee they pay little or no taxes. He knows the corporate subsidies and tax incentives he proposes as a solution to the climate crisis will do nothing to halt oil and gas fracking, shut down coal-fired plants or halt the construction of new pipelines for gas-fired power plants.  His promises of reform have no more weight than those peddled by Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, who Biden slavishly served and who also promised social equality while betraying working men and women.

Biden is the epitome of the empty, amoral creature produced by our system of legalized bribery. His long political career in Congress was defined by representing the interests of big business, especially the credit card companies based in Delaware. He was nicknamed Senator Credit Card. He has always glibly told the public what it wants to hear and then sold them out. He was a prominent promoter and architect of a generation of federal “tough on crime” laws that helped militarize the nation’s police and more than doubled the population of the world’s largest prison system with harsh mandatory sentencing guidelines and laws that put people in prison for life for nonviolent drug crimes, even as his son struggled with addiction. He was a principal author of the Patriot Act, which began the stripping away of our most basic civil liberties. And there has never been a weapons system, or a war, he did not support.

Nothing substantial will change under Biden, despite the hyperventilating about him being the next FDR. Biden’s request for $715 billion for the Defense Department in fiscal year 2022, a $11.3 billion (1.6 percent) increase over 2021, will support the disastrous military provocations with China and Russia he embraces, the endless wars in the Middle East and the bloated defense industry. Wholesale government surveillance will not be curbed. Julian Assange will remain a target. The industries that were shipped overseas and the well-paying unionized jobs will not return. The grinding machinery of predatory capitalism, and the sadism that defines it, will poison the society as mercilessly under Biden as it did when Donald Trump was conducting his Twitter presidency.

Sadism now defines nearly every cultural, social and political experience in the United States. It is expressed in the greed of an oligarchic elite that has seen its wealth increase during the pandemic by $1.1 trillion while the country has suffered the sharpest rise in its poverty rate in more than 50 years.  It is expressed in extra-judicial killings by police in cities such as Minneapolis. It is expressed in our complicity in Israel’s wholesale killing of unarmed Palestinians, the humanitarian crisis engendered by the war in Yemen and our reigns of terror in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. It is expressed in the torture in our prisons and black sites. It is expressed in the separation of children from their undocumented parents, where they are held as if they were dogs in a kennel.

The historian Johan Huizinga, writing about the twilight of the middle ages, argued that as things fall apart sadism is embraced as a way to cope with the hostility of an indifferent universe. No longer bound to a common purpose, a ruptured society retreats into the cult of the self. It celebrates, as do corporations on Wall Street or mass culture through reality television shows, the classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance; a need for constant stimulation; a penchant for lying, deception and manipulation; and the incapacity for remorse or guilt. Get what you can, as fast as you can, before someone else gets it. This is the state of nature, the “war of all against all,” Thomas Hobbes saw as the consequence of social collapse, a world in which life becomes “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” And this sadism, as Friedrich Nietzsche understood, fuels a perverted, sadistic pleasure.

The only way out for most Americans is to serve, as Biden does, the sadistic machine. The impoverishment of the working class has conditioned tens of millions of Americans to accept being recruited into the service of the militarized police that function as lethal armies of internal occupation; a military that carries out reigns of terror in foreign occupations; intelligence agencies that torture in global black sites; the government’s vast network of spying on the citizenry; the theft of personal information by credit agencies and digital media; the largest prison system in the world; an immigration service that hunts down people who have never committed a crime and separates children from their parents to pack them in warehouses; a court system that condemns the poor to decades of incarceration, often for nonviolent crimes, and denies them a jury trial; companies that carry out the dirty work of evictions, shutting off utilities, including water, collecting usurious debts that force people into bankruptcy and denying health services to those that cannot pay; banks and payday lenders that burden the destitute with predatory, high-interest loans; and a financial system designed to keep most of the country locked in a crippling debt peonage as the wealth of the oligarchic elite swells to levels unseen in American history.

These are some of the few jobs that are well compensated. They bring with them feelings of omnipotence, for the victims are largely powerless. In service to the state or corporations, employees can abuse, humiliate and even kill with impunity, as the near daily murder of unarmed civilians by the police illustrates. This service to monolithic centers of power absolves people of moral choice. It imparts a God-like omnipotence.

We know what this sadism looks like. It looks like Derek Chauvin nonchalantly choking to death George Floyd as his police colleagues watch impassively. It looks like Andrew Brown Jr. shot five times by police in North Carolina, including once in the back of the head. It looks like Abner Louima, who had a broomstick pushed up his rectum by police in a bathroom at the 70th Precinct station house in Brooklyn, requiring three major operations to repair the internal injuries. It looks like Navy Seal Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher randomly shooting to death unarmed civilians and using a hunting knife to repeatedly stab to death an injured, sedated 17-year-old Iraqi prisoner and then photographing himself with the corpse. It looks like Iraqi civilians, few of whom had anything to do with the insurgency, naked, bound, beaten and sexually humiliated and raped, and at times murdered, by army guards and private contractors in Abu Ghraib. Prisoners in Abu Ghraib were routinely dragged across the prison floor by a rope tied to their penises and chemical lights were used to sodomize them or snapped open so the phosphoric liquid could be poured over their naked bodies. It looks like women who are tortured, beaten, degraded and sexually violated, often by numerous men, in porn films, who are then discarded after a few weeks or months with severe trauma, along with sexually transmitted diseases and vaginal and anal tears that must be repaired surgically.

The rest.

 

Good Man

Happy 60th Birthday to one of 21st-century Hollywood's very few good guys. [In spite of his continuing support for the criminal organization known as the Democratic Party.]

In this nauseating MarvelComix movie era (going on 40 years now), to experience a classical liberal film is a bracing and uplifting experience. Works such as Good Night, and Good Luck (2005) were pretty much standard fair and what socially-sensitive filmgoers of the late-50s and early-60s would expect from Hollywood: Seven Days in May, Fail Safe, A Child is Waiting, Lilies of the Field, Anatomy of a Murder, Americanization of Emily, Manchurian Candidate, The Miracle Worker, Advise and Consent, Days of Wine and Roses -- but has been a genre so long ignored that it's heartbreaking to see it once more. People can, and should, treat each other decently -- that's the theme of the work. How revolutionary it now seems, when the face of U.S. power and culture appeals to the worst and assumes the very worst about humanity.

A chamber piece that believes its audience (probably a mistake) knows enough about the McCarthy Era to move right into the human element of the time, Good Night embodies the dream of good people working together doing good things; and it works so well because that's what director Clooney achieved on his set. All the actors are quiet, devoid of the usual ET narcissism, and one comes away aching for a group of co-workers doing serious things, treating each other with respect, and feeling safe about it all. (Another dream stolen from us by the corporate totalitarians.)

The picture has its flaws. Perhaps a brief prelude of what was going on in the early 1950s may have helped people jump into the human aspects more readily. (Stone did a great job of that with the Charlie Sheen-narrated prelude to JFK.) The subplot with the secretly-married Robert Downey, Jr (who's particularly good here, as usual) and Patricia Clarkson (who's not, as usual) should've been dumped. And replaced with much more background on the monstrous William Paley (Frank Langella). The director hints at where he could have gone, in the scene where Paley tells Ed Murrow: "I gave you that house of yours. I put your kids through school. I've given you everything you have." It is, of course, entirely the other way around. The Paleys of that world -- and especially in our own -- have what they have because of the blood of people like Murrow, Fred Friendly, Don Hollenbeck, and George Clooney. Paley's bellowing is exactly the way the vampire class always feels about itself. Which is why it must be destroyed. But now I'm arguing for a different kind of film. . .

A generous-hearted actor and director, what Clooney gives us remains special, with an opening as lovely as one of his aunt's songs.

Awakenings

In my movie lifetime, just about every young-girl-awakens-to-romance moment has gone something like this.



Point: be (or long for) a male model who drives a red Porsche 944.

*

Japan's first movie-kiss occurred on screens in late 1946, in Yasushi Sasaki's Twenty-Year-Old Youth (Hatachi no seishun). Post-surrender reforms imposed on Japan by Douglas MacArthur's "Supreme Commander of Allied Powers" (SCAP) were less economic and systemic in effect, than they were stylistic and emotional. Real power remained basically where it'd been before the Japanese military went insane. (An insanity ignited by the 1930s economic war waged on Japan by white Western forces.) SCAP instead went after the underpinnings of culture both popular and traditional, and blew them, after a period of time, apart: zaibatsu still ran the country; everything else changed. Most dramatically, the role of women. A gradual shift from a culture of tradition to one of youth. Dress. What was acceptable in fiction, journalism, and music. Popular dancing. Ideas of romance and marriage. And sex.

Not long after the release of Twenty-Year-Old Youth, Mikio Naruse became the first prestigious movie director to show the (attempted) physical act of love on screen, and it is a moment of terror. From the point-of-view of 2021 and a world of general human and cultural decomposition, the corporate devouring of myth and consequence ~ and Rin Sakuragi ~ Naruse's Spring Awakens (Haru no mezame) is very hard to believe. Did this world really exist? Watching the movie feels like touching the pre-historic. This isn't Imperial Rome or Renaissance France. My daughter's grandparents lived this world when they were Saya-chan's age. . .

Three pretty high school students genuinely (and believably) know nothing about sex, or how babies are born. (In a movie filled with many small miracles of gesture and nuance, this is the large one.) Two years after the destruction of the country, where is the Year Zero barbarism? (See Mizoguchi's Women of the Night.) Three boys are their friends: an artist, a writer, and a doctor's son. The boys and girls are surrounded by their own confusions: the maid in Kumiko's household must be dismissed for having a black-marketeer boyfriend; Koji's adored older sister is getting married; a "dirty picture" is found in one schoolgirl's desk, causing the ransacking of all the girls' desks. And Akiko must leave school because of a pregnancy, a pregnancy we are are led to believe will soon be terminated.

The boys and girls (and we) are also faced with intense and continuing sensuality: the explosion of spring and summer, as if nature is holding the small town as one holds a bee between the palms of the hands, when it is benumbed; Kyoko and Kumiko lying close together on the hillgrass, one girl in kimono, the other in western clothes; Kumiko thinking about where babies come from and Naruse fading on her upturned swinging bare feet; the physical at the girls' school; the boys-and-girls Sunday picnic; Hanae and Kyoko hiking up their skirts -- again one girl in kimomo, the other not -- in the river as they play with a family of ducks and as they try to avoid rocks playfully tossed at them by the boys.

The scene where Noshiro (the artist) forcefully kisses Kumiko, because it came from such a famous director, instantly became legend. Yet the following sequence, during a lightning-and-thunder storm, is the film's greatest. Kyoko and her friend Hanae's older brother are in love. She is terrified of thunder, the sound of falling bombs. Has any other movie sequence better captured a young girl's sexual torment and longing? What would've happened if Hanae had not returned home? And Hanae -- who also loves Koji, who only has eyes for Kumiko -- senses what she may have interrupted. . .



Five-thousand miles away that same year, another great director had a similar idea, sort of.



(Is there any doubt from these two sequences who "won" the war?)

Yet the sadness of the film. (The relationships between Kumiko and her little sister, and Koji and his older sister, are especially moving.) My favorite moment: Kumiko and the doctor's son have loved each other since childhood. At one point Koji's soon-to-be-married sister gives him a memory album for him to keep. One photo is of herself, and Kumiko and Koji as children.

Later, on the morning of the sister's wedding, Koji and Kumiko walk together, discussing nothing in particular, and at the end of their walk, as both feel the other's growing attachment, Koji kicks a stone ahead. Watch the cut.



Another spring, another wedding, two years later. Another shot embodying the love for a girl-as-she-was, this time from a father about to lose her.



The same deep sadness from Ozu and Naruse (and many other places), as if the pain of what has happened and what was happening to Japan was too overwhelming to be numbed by even the most beautiful and most human of dreams.

Naruse's Spring Awakens (1947).