Elliot’s Watching - May 2022
The HBO 8-part series Julia, with Sarah Lancashire predominant as the eponymous French Chef Julia Child, is a pleasant, enjoyable, approachable series that has lots of laughs, smiles of recognition from those who recall the original TV series, and its moments of darkness and struggle as well: mush talk about women being pushed aside in the male-dominated world of public (and I would guess commercial) TV, some sharp debate about whether Julia’s role was supportive of or harmful to progressive women of her era (the ‘60s), a few glimpses of a some of the hidden truths in Julia’s life (perhaps some repressed Lesbian sexuality?, the mystery of her husband, Paul/David Hyde Pierce, and his severance from the foreign service) - but mostly it’s a light-hearted nostalgia romp thru most of the 8 episodes before more or less sputtering and running out of gas in episode 8 as the writer, Daniel Goldfarb, casts his net wide with many possibilities for a pick-up in a 2nd season: Julia and co-author Simca in France, the book publisher’s ensuing blindness, Alice’s (BrittanyBradford) new romance, plus other strands sent aloft to see if they might fly.
Ditto for Ozark - though I was fully satisfied at the wrap-up of the 5-season series, which concluded all of the plot lines without feeling rushed, bored, or out of gas - in fact, one of the best wrap-ups of any long-running series (think of Sopranos or Mad Men, oh what a falling off was there!), emphasizing the importance family for the Byrdes - it seems almost any other series of this nature and length would somehow involve infidelity of the lead male - though 2 quibbles: what the hell was the purpose of the car crash in the final episode?; and, well, a strand of the plot was still dangling as we wonder whether there will be a series focusing on a different lead character from the next generation, and I’ll say no more on that. The 3 leads - Jason Bateman as Marty, Laura Line as Wendy, and, especially Julia Garner as Ruth - really carried the show: You can’t stop watching, and rooting for, Ruth, and thanks to Wendy I will never again hear a donor pitch from public radio in the same way. All told the series was lively, intelligently written, broad in score, and engaging: You had to think to yourself “I’m so glad that I’m not doing business with a cartel.”
Franco Russo’s film Babylon (1980) is somewhat difficult to follow as the English language will seem to American viewers doubly removed: a Jamaican v. of British English; the subtitles will help. But for the most part we don’t need to follow the nuances and details of plot; the film is about a culture little-known then and now to most Americans and probably most white Brits: the Jamaican culture of reggae music, Rastafarian religion, and a great deal of “herbs.” So imagine you’re watching not a fictive narrative but a 90 minute documentary, and the film will go down just fine: some terrific scenes of ear-blasting music at various clubs, a great confrontation between as some of the performers try to buy from a questionable producer the rights to use a couple of songs, a long visit to a Rasta religious rite, and lots of street-life in South London, probably not too different today from 40+ years ago. Beneath all the frenzy of the music and club scene is a great deal of racial hatred and intolerance; to his credit, Russo isn’t doctrinaire in his account of the racism. We feel great loathing (and fear) of the British toughs who confront the Jamaican guys, the name-calling, the taunting, and ultimately the physical violence and destruction; on the other hand, though we hate the white racists, they do have a point: the Jamaican lads are blasting away with their music at all hours, almost as if they’re seeking validation through confrontation. We’re headed for an inevitable collision of intractable forces. All parties need some counseling, it seems - but that’s not gonna happen, all of which makes for a sad portrait of social misfits with little chance for prosperity or integration, the news wave of immigrants, confined to the bottom rung of the ladder (housing, pay, tolerance, respect) - unless, and until, other ethnic groups arrive, which of course has happened.
The HBO series Winning Time (2022) has a strong cast w/ John C.Reilly as Lakers owner ca 1980 Jerry Buss and Quincy Isaiah as Magic Johnson in his rookie year and I could sum this in one sentence, which would be that you don’t have to be interested in basketball or even in sports to enjoy and appreciate this series; in the mode of Friday Nigh Lights or Last Chance U it uses spots as a vehicle through which to drive personal and family drama and build a great narrative arc as the troubled and under-rated team goes for a championship. Lots of good story lines developed, based closely on fact though it’s more free-wheeling w/ fact than the typical docudrama, at least from what I’ve heard (I had little interest in pro b-ball) - an eccentric, intellectual coach, nearly killed mid-season in a bike accident, the improbable and irascible owner, the likable Magic and the admirable and mysterious Kareem, the ex-coach West fuming in the background, and so on - the only narrative threads that wore a little thin concerned Bus and his family, in particular his relationship w/ the still-beautiful mother Sally Field. Already picked up for season 2.
And a very quick note on a series that we actually didn’t know we’d watched to the end (of season 3), the outstanding series My Brilliant Friend, which, as I may have noted in previous posts, is actually in my view better than the source novels, which were a little to flat and plot-driven, for me, rather than literary and evocative and interior, and were hard to follow as too many characters and families were just name and hard to distinguish - problems all but eliminated in the series, as we can easily keep the characters straight once we visualize them and the miniseries form is in itself more plot driven and interior - in this one “Lenu” rises to some fame through her publications and thanks to her spoiled and intolerable husband her marriage cracks at the seams - relatively little, sadly, in this season about her brilliant friend.
Yesterday’s avant garde looks befuddled and confused 30 years down the road. Yvonne Rainer’s 1990 film, Privilege, in its time must have been groundbreaking in subject matter (the film begins as a conventional documentary in which several women discuss their menopause - daring and original then but complacent now - then the narration shifts entirely into what looks like a play rehearsal for an experimental movie in which the topic is female sexuality and the presentation is confusing and pretentious - long quotes from Eldridge Cleaver for some reason) - Honestly couldn’t watch till the end of this movie, for which clearly I am not the target audience; though there’s a wide acceptance and even a commercial appeal for a film in which the protagonists discuss and debate their sexual histories, this film from today’s viewpoint can’t seem to get out of its way, as if YR was never quite sure what kind of film she wanted to make. We see the evolution of a work of art, from idea to actualization, but wouldn’t it have been better had the team stopped everything once the theme and style emerged and start again with a more clear goal and style in mind? Or maybe it’s just me.
About a year ago I posted on Min Jin Lee’s 2017 novel, Pachinko, noting that it wasn’t exactly my type of book - long, multigenerational, multicultural family saga spanning century - but suggested that it might make a really good miniseries, which it does (2022). Koganada and Justin Chon make the most of the material in the novel - diverging from the novel in many significant ways, or so I’m told - but giving us overall a great portrayal of the clash of 3 cultures: Korean, Japanese, and - for segments filmed in the present or near present the U.S. financial industries. The film looks great, and the many transitions among the several - 8 or so? - plot strands and segments are handled deftly. But there are many, many transitions - each of the 8 episodes will have pieces of several of the narrative paths - dire poverty in Korea, exile to Japan and facing deep racial prejudice, contemporaries dealing with development and overdevelopment, plus more. Those who haven’t yet seen this series now have an advantage, as it will be much easier to follow the many lines of narration through binging or watching on 8 consecutive nights. Yes, it’s still melodramatic, and, yes, there are some rough edges not really explained or worked out (note: 2nd season to come), but overall a series of high quality and high ambition, both textually and thematically and worth watching.
Wayne Wang's unusual, maybe unique, film Chan is Missing (1982) is a blend of noir detective drama and minimalist documentary as we follow a taxi driver and his nephew around and about San Francisco Chinatown, in b/w and mostly handheld camerawork so that the whole movie has a sense of immediacy and authenticity. The two guys are in search of the missing Chan who seems to have vanished after a minor car accident that he did not wish to report - and the 2 follow a series of leads to try to track down their friend and erstwhile business partner who may have in fact absconded with some shared $ and taken off for his homeland in China. Along the way we meet a # of unusual characters, notably a fast-order chef in a C-town restaurant and a # of dancing couples in a senior center for the Filipino community, police officers and detectives, an the searchers’ ebullient sister/aunt (I think) - all of which - well, I won’t disclose anything about the ending except to say that it comes about rather abruptly and the film, with all its beauty, could have used a little more plot discipline. Definitely, memorable for the look at a vista that I think today has all but succumbed to the ever-rising real-estate values in downtown SF - though maybe a stray restaurant or 2 has survived and still serves the tourists and visitors, if not the long-time residents.
I used to find W.C. Fields’s films, notably The Bank Dick (1940), to be funny thanks to his irascible character, but coming back to the film after the passing of some decades I found it, at least the 30 minutes I watched, tiresome and at times extremely disturbing (notably for its completely inexcusable portrayal of a Black man. Okay, WCF is good for a few sight-gag laughs, in particular his “smoke-blowing” tricks to amuse some kids - but the gags about his smoking and especially his drinking make for a good 4-minute sketch but not for an entire tiresome movie. Every WCF film has a few good laugh moments, but they’re stretched pretty thin in this picture, perhaps because WCF could play only himself: He had no room to grow or to change. It’s a bit of film history, but watching it today is painful.
The TV series A Very British Scandal (Season 2 - 2022) continues on the pattern of the 1st season - each a three-episode drama about a scandal that disgraced a public figure, each based (not sure how loosely but obviously including tons of dialog generated or posited for the series) on “true events,” widely published in the British press at the time. This season about a contentious divorce proceeding pitting the Duke v Duchess of Argyle, made particularly salacious by the tidbit that the Duchess kept voluminous records, including photographs, of her sexual encounters. Claire Foy takes the lead, and she’s always great with her clipped British accent - but here so different in character from her famous role of the young QE in The Crown. Yes, this short series held my interest over its duration, though I’m not proud or pleased to say so. The lead characters are to a man, or woman, repulsive and disreputable and seem very much to deserve one another. Equally guilty: the sensationalist British press and, most of all, the British public as a whole, so interested in this seamy tale that would have no interest whatsoever were it not that the husband (Ian) was a “Duke” and a “Lord” - and the title itself is at the basis of the dispute - and Foy’s “Duchess Margaret” is equally banal and evil - how or why the Brits have not for centuries risen against the monarchy and the whole system of royalty, as if these people deserve in any way our interest or attention. I cringe every time one or the other is addressed as “your Grace.” Not mine - yours.
The 1932 film Merrily We Go to Hell is a rarity, one of the few studio films of the era directed by a woman, Dorothy Arzner. Whether a man would have created a film with a different nuance, who knows? Either way, the film starts off as a conventional romance - only child of a wealthy industrialist falls for a guy older, funnier, more brash, a newspaper columnist no less!, not welcomed by the father, but Dad gives in as there’s no sense fighting true love - looks like we’re headed toward light-hearted young couple overcomes obstacles and wins the hearts of doubters - and then the film take a sharp U-turn and it becomes a film about how alcoholism wrecks marriages and lives (the less than credible ending feels tacked on to please the studio). The star of the film clearly is Sylvia Sidney as the daughter of wealth, Joan; the film also includes a bling-and-you’ve missed-it appearance by the then-unknown Cary Grant as friend of Joan’s Charlie Baxter (doubly funny to me as that’s the name of one of my friends). Obviously the film feels dated in many ways but it’s still quite straightforward and watchable if not groundbreaking and heartbreaking.
I have renewed respect for George Carlin, whom I’d mostly written off as a star who got huge laughs based on his reputation rather than on his material, having watching George Carlin’s American Dream (2022), an excellent though too-long (especially in the 2nd of 2 episodes, filled with talking heads) look at his lifetime work. We see him in his early days as a conventional night-club comic and the big shift as he decided to be himself and began his counterculture period, probably the first to talk so openly about Rx and radical politics in large venues. First of all, he delivery of material was outstanding - enough to get huge laughs from often mediocre insights - but he worked hard and matured his talent to the point where he could rightly consider himself a writer - and his routines were almost dramatic readings of pieces that could be public on their own as comedic essays. His late work, taking on all aspects of of consumer culture - with special targets being God, War, Rx, and Ecology (about this last he was way wrong, which he probably would’ve later recognized. The film also tells a lot about his troubled childhood and difficult family life - as well as by his extreme work ethic and willingness to talk openly about his various struggles. The highlights are clips of him working, esp in late career. A great talent.
It must have been huge fun to be present at Jocelyn Bioh’s Merry Wives, her adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, in Central Park in 2021, though the same cannot be said, unfortuntely, for the PBS broadcast in Great Performances. The play - word has it that S. wrote it on orders from Queen E.., in any event, the tale of cuckoldry and come-uppance, with the portly Falstaff getting his just desserts, stands as one of S’s worst, though Verdi did make a great opera of it, go figure. The fun is that this MW takes place in Harlem and the whole show has a bright and lively appearances throughout with lots of great West African music (percussion, esp.), and the characters all retain heavy West African accents and the script at times veers far from the Elizabethan. All good - and I’m a huge fan of S adaptations and re-imaginings - but watching the show on screen places it at a great remove whereas the original staging included the audience and setting as part of the milieu. I felt as if I were watching a screening of someone else’s party. For entirely there reasons, the filmed version, on HBO, of Dear Evan Hansen (2021) falls short on many counts (I have not seen the play, but assume it was better than the film), notably how odd it seemed for the characters to burst from the visual/textual realism of the setting into sudden eruptions of song and dance; sure, it works sometimes, e.g., West Side Story (the original), but here I just felt alienated and puzzled by the movie rather than drawn in - though I must say I’m always brought near tears by any depiction of lonely, picked-on, teased high-school kids. But overall, this Stephen Chbosky production just seemed dead wrong - what we should have, I think, would be a film of the staged shows, as w/, for ex., Hamilton. If you haven’t seen the play this film does not seem like the way to do so, and if you saw the play and loved it you’d be wise to poss on this version.
Andrei Tarkovsky’s first film, Ivan’s Childhood (1962) is a tight, smart, scary account, filmed in beautiful b/w giving the film a look at times of a documentary, recounts a period in the life of the eponymous Ivan, a Russian maybe 12 years old or so who, it seems, has lost his family in an attack from the Germans in midst of WWII and takes on the role of a spy for the Soviet forces, perhaps eluding detection, for a time, because he’s so young. We go with Ivan and two soldiers on a behind-the-lines scouting patrol, and the outcome isn’t great. This film is a prelude for some the great films that Tarkovsky will produce in later years (e.g Andrei Rublev, Solaris), but we can in this early episode the attention to photographic detail, the choice of setting, and the frightening struggle of the heroic individual against forces much larger than he can perceive or combat.
