An unwelcome visitor lay on my lawn this
morning: a red leaf. Summer lasts officially until the equinox (September 23
this year) and unofficially (in the US) until Labor Day (September 2 this
year). Either way August is solidly summer, the temperature today outside my
door is a tad over 80 (that’s 27 by the scale everyone else in the world uses),
and red leaves have no place on my lawn. Yet, 18-year-olds already have left
for their overpriced colleges while Halloween candy is already appearing on
supermarket shelves. The Fall Field Crickets (which look and sound the same as
Spring Field Crickets but are different species nonetheless) are chirping
loudly. The sun spends less time in the sky each day.
Incidentally, it is a curiosity that red leaves,
whether they arrive too early or on time, are more common in the northern
states of the US and in Canada than in northern Europe despite similar
climates. The natural breakdown of chlorophyll at the end of summer is enough
to change leaf hues to yellow or orange (colors that dominate in Europe in the
autumn), but turning a leaf red requires the active synthesizing of
anthocyanins. Why would a plant bother making the extra effort? One suggestion
(by Yev-Ladun, S. and J.K. Holopainen in New
Phytologist 2009) is that there is a different mix of aphids and other
pests on each continent due to their different geological and evolutionary
histories. Red warns off more of the particular pests in North America in the
same way that bright colors on insects, amphibians, and reptiles often warn predators
that they are poisonous. It’s an evolutionary adaptation.
As that may be, I’m not ready yet to see those
reds. Some people talk to their plants. (Do they find it harder to be
vegetarians?) Perhaps I should give my trees a stern talk on the need to stay
green at least until September 23. I doubt it would help but I suppose it wouldn’t
hurt either.
Another harbinger of autumn is relatively recent
– in fact, it’s the reverse of when I was a schoolboy. Kids reappear. Back in
the ancient days of my youth unattended school-age kids were everywhere during
the summer vacation months: on bicycles, in yards, in the shopping center, in
the parks, on sidewalks…everywhere. I was one of them. Nowadays they vanish for
the summer. They have to be somewhere. I suppose they are either inside or at
organized activities (on soccer fields, for instance) that as a non-parent I
simply don’t see. In early September, however, they appear at the curbside in
the mornings waiting for school buses and again in the afternoons when they
return. On my neighborhood cul-de-sac street there appear to be about 30. In
August, however, they are nowhere to be seen. For much the same reasons, I’m in no more hurry to see them at
the curbside than red leaves in trees.
So, I’ll laze in late summer while I can. (There
is a metaphor about stage of life in there somewhere.) The jack-o-lanterns can
wait.
Every war is horrific. That’s part of the definition. The
cost is calculated first and foremost by the casualties. Yet that is not the
sole cost – primary, but never sole. Societies are affected very differently by
different conflicts: thriving after some (e.g. the US after WW2) and sickening
after others (e.g. the Weimar Republic after WW1). Nor is there always an
obvious correlation between the affect (yes, the spelling with an “a” is
intended) and the size of the conflict or its battlefield outcome. Italy was on the
winning side of WW1, for example, but had a bad aftermath. The Vietnam War was
deeply unwholesome in its affects and effects in the United States in a way
that Korea, for example, was not. The US was not so very different a place in
1953 than in 1950. The US was a vastly different place in 1973 (for that matter
by 1968) than in 1965, and the war had much to do with it. Vietnam broke
something in the American body politic and the US never really recovered from
it – the military did but not the US as a whole. The deep divisions which ail us
so much today have their roots in the era: among them wholesale (all too often justified) distrust both
of officialdom and the press (the “credibility gap”) and a polarization of the
public that led to more extremism and violence than we tend to remember.
It is anyone’s guess what would have followed had the
Johnson Administration opted not to introduce large ground force units into
Vietnam – or opted not intervene further at all. (It should be remembered that
JFK already had upped the number of “advisers” there by 16,000 in 1963 and their
numbers climbed to 23,000 by 1965, but they weren’t officially combat troops and Johnson could have ordered them
withdrawn without overmuch fanfare.) What if the war went ahead but had gone
differently? We only can speculate, but Lewis Sorley makes the case that it
could have gone very differently with a single change at the top in his book Westmoreland: The General Who Lost Vietnam.
Whenever I see a title like that about some military figure
I check the author’s credentials before checking out the book. If it contains the
judgments of a purely armchair strategist…well… consider the source. It’s hard
to find credentials much better than Sorley’s however. A West Point graduate
with a PhD from Johns Hopkins, he led the 1st Tank Battalion, 69th Armor, US
Army in Vietnam in 1966 and 1967. He retired from the army as a Lt. Colonel in
1975 but then moved on to the CIA as Chief of the Policy and Plans Division. He
is also a well-regarded historian. That’s plenty of credibility, but for an
alternate view I nonetheless paired Sorley’s book with a re-read of General
William Westmoreland’s A Soldier Reports,
a memoir I first read more than 40 years ago.
Prior to his time in Vietnam Westmoreland
had a solid and soldierly military record. He graduated in the middle of his
class at West Point, led the 34th Field Artillery Battalion in
Tunisia and Sicily in 1943, and commanded the 187th Airborne in
Korea in 1952. At the end of his time in Korea he was promoted to Brigadier and
sent to the Pentagon where he worked as a staff officer on everything from
personnel to budget matters. He was fully capable in those roles and accordingly
added stars. His competence won him the confidence of his superiors,
particularly General Taylor and General Wheeler who in 1964 tagged him for
Commander MACV (Military Assistance Command Vietnam) in overall charge of US
operations there.
Yet, his previous experience in war
zones was, though high level, subordinate; one gets the feeling that he was
excellent at being second in command. Nothing in his career indicated
imaginative or flexible thinking in tactical or strategic matters. This alarmed
some of his fellow officers when they heard of his selection. Brigadier General
Amos Jordan actually went directly to Secretary of the Army Cyrus Vance to
thwart the appointment, saying that “it would be a grave mistake to appoint
him. He is spit and polish two up and one back. This is a counterinsurgency and
he would have no idea how to deal with it.” Vance heard Jordan out, but told
him the appointment had been made. Also concerned was Major General Yarborough
commanding the US Army Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg. Yarborough sent
Westmoreland an unsolicited 8-page letter arguing against conventional warfare
using American troops: “Under no circumstances that I can foresee should US
strategy be twisted into a ‘requirement’ for placing US combat divisions into
the Vietnamese conflict…The key to the beginning of the solution to Viet-Nam’s
travail lies in a rising scale of population and resource control.”
Westmoreland disagreed. He opted for
a conventional big unit strategy using American and allied troops to seek out and
engage enemy formations, leaving the more difficult task of territorial control
to the ill-equipped ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam). The Johnson Administration
accepted his recommendations and kept delivering on his repeated requests for
more troops until finally denying the last one for 206,000 more in 1968, at which
time 525,000 already were in country. In his own memoirs Westmoreland
complains, “In lamenting what came to be known, however erroneously, as ‘the
big-unit war,’ critics presumably saw some alternative…Yet to my knowledge no
one ever advanced a viable alternative that conformed to the American policy of
confining the war within South Vietnam.” But they did. General Abrams, who
really was an imaginative thinker, had different ideas, though by the time he
succeeded Westmoreland, he was prevented from starting from scratch by the need
to unwind and rework the force structure already in place amid “Vietnamization”
and by vanishing support for the war at home. During Westmoreland’s tenure an
attrition war inflicted huge losses on the enemy, but they were losses they
were prepared to accept and replace. The effect has been described as fighting
the birthrate of North Vietnam. Americans, on the other hand, were not prepared
to accept steady losses just because they were fewer.
The alternative always had been
properly equipping and supporting ARVN to defend
its own country. Ironically the large scale introduction of US troops prevented
this for years since naturally US troops had first call on those supplies. To
take one example, the Vietcong with their AK47s consistently outgunned the
ARVN, who used WW2 vintage M1 rifles. (Quite aside from its lesser firepower,
the M1 is an 11.6 pound [5.3kg] weapon more than 3.5 feet [1100mm] long; the
average ARVN soldier was 5 feet [151cm] and 90 pounds [41kg]). Not until 1969 were
M16s supplied to the South Vietnamese in large numbers. The two books take very
different perspectives on Tet and Khe Sahn, both of which were serious tactical
defeats for the VC and North Vietnamese but which succeeded in further turning
American public opinion against the conflict.
Both books conclude that the war
could have ended far differently. “Sadly, it could have been otherwise,” said
Westmoreland in his memoirs, but “otherwise” meant having followed through on progress
he firmly believed to have been made by 1968, which sounds a lot like more of
the same. Sorley laments the “waste” of 5 years prior when public support for helping
South Vietnam was robust and an alternative strategy had a chance. Perhaps he
is right that with a different commander during those years there wouldn’t be
that wall in DC today, and, less importantly but still notably, we might be a
less broken polity.
Country Joe and the Fish - I Feel Like I'm Fixin' To Die Rag
My DVD re-watch/discard project (see
July 25 blogpost) for thinning out my DVD library continues. This time the
thin-out portion of it was more successful. Once again, the plan was to pick a
disc randomly from each shelf (out of a total of 16 shelves) with the intention
of rating each pick as 1) re-watch and keep,
2) re-watch and discard, or 3) discard at once. Last time I re-watched
and kept every one of the picks from the first 8 shelves. The results from
shelves 9-16 are below. I modified the plan slightly when my first pick was a
“discard at once.” When that happened I picked again from the same shelf until
I found one I was willing to re-watch. No shelf required more than two picks.
It has not escaped my attention that it was easier to find “discards” among the
films made since 1980 than among those of older vintage. That 6 of the 8
re-watches had murder central to the plot is a coincidence; that’s a much
higher proportion than in the shelf contents in toto.
Angel(1984). Unapologetic trash. (The movie has no connection whatsoever
to the TV series Angel.) A 15-y.o.
prep school girl moonlights as a hooker and befriends the oddball street people
on Hollywood Blvd. A psycho killer is prowling the streets and
killing prostitutes. After the murder of a friend at his hands, Angel grabs her
landlady’s gun and goes after the killer herself. I previouslyhad deemed this un-shelfworthy but through sheer
neglect didn’t remove it. Though undeniably it has guilty pleasure elements, it’s still
a Discard.
**** ****
Psychos in Love (1987): Two psycho-killers find each other in this cult movie filmed
for $75,000. Not only do both love to kill but they discover that they both
detest grapes. True love ensues. This is definitely not for everyone, but if
your silly streak extends far enough into the dark side, you might chuckle at
this. A close call, but a Discard.
**** ****
The
Doom Generation (1995): In the 90s there was a bumper
crop of mainstream ultraviolent films: Goodfellas,
Natural Born Killers, Pulp Fiction, and more. Most of them were not just
gore-fests but had something to say. I suspect director Gregg Araki found what
they had to say pretentious. His very Gen-X film The Doom Generation is simply
nihilistic. The meaning of its violence is that it is without meaning. The
three main characters (two young men and a young woman) are fazed very little
by the brutality they encounter. As for their personal affections, none takes
sex seriously enough to demonstrate a twinge of jealousy in their intimate
bisexual triangle. Their lives are hell – whenever they buy something the price
is $6.66 – but they don’t seem to care. Johnathon Schaech (Xavier Red) and
James Duval (Jordan White) play their roles well enough but Rose McGowan (Amy
Blue) steals every scene. (Yes, the nominal color scheme is a bit
heavy-handed.) I’d recommend this movie only to those with a particular kind of
off-beat world view and a tolerance for graphic cinematic violence. Another close
call, but Keep.
**** ****
House of 1000 Corpses (2003):Discard
at once without rewatch. This Rob Zombie film is not bad for its type, but I
don’t care much for its type.
**** ****
He Was a Quiet Man (2007): The title comes from the comments we hear all too often from
neighbors and co-workers about some multiple murderer. You know them: “He was a
quiet man…Very polite… He seemed so nice… He always said ‘good morning’ to me...
He was a loner.” Bob Maconel (Christian Slater) is an office worker with a
dreary job and horrible co-workers. He is schizophrenic and has two-way conversations
with his goldfish. Day after day he loads and unloads his gun at his cubicle, trying
to work up the temerity to kill all his co-workers except for one named Venessa
who has a nice smile. On a day full of particularly degrading treatment, he
seems ready finally to do it, but he drops a bullet while loading his gun. As he
reaches down for it, shots ring out and bodies drop to the floor: another worker
has gone postal first. Venessa is among the victims but is still alive. Bob
kills the shooter before he can finish off Venessa. Instead of being a villain as he intended, Bob is a
hero due purely to timing and butterfingers. He visits Venessa in the hospital
and finds that she has been left quadriplegic. She asks him to end her life.
Bob has to decide how to handle her request. This is not a bad movie, but I
don’t think I’ll ever want to watch it again. So, Discard.
**** ****
Forgetting Sarah Marshall
(2008): There is a type of
raunchy broad comedy that doesn’t really appeal to me. The reason has nothing
to do with high standards, which I don’t profess to have. I object neither to
graphic sex nor low humor in film or anywhere else. There is just a peculiar
blend of the two that leaves me waiting impatiently for a scene to end while
much of the audience around me guffaws loudly: for example, the scene in Forgetting
Sarah Marshall in which couples in neighboring hotel rooms try to
outdo each other in noisy sex in order to make each other jealous. I’m not in
the least offended by it. It just doesn’t make me laugh.
Sarah Marshall (Kristen Bell) is a TV sitcom
star who dumps her boyfriend Peter (Jason Segel), the music composer for the TV
show. The depressed Peter tries to get over Sarah with a series of one-night
stands. These don’t help, so he vacations in Hawaii to clear his head. In a
coincidence of the kind that happens in movies and nowhere else, Sarah books
into the same hotel with her new boyfriend, pop singer Aldous Snow (Russell
Brand). The hotel clerk Rachel (Mila Kunis) feels sorry for Peter and tries to
help.
By the standards of
its genre the movie is pretty good even though Peter is not nearly as
sympathetic a character as he is intended to be. It’s just not my kind of
movie. Discard.
**** ****
Killers (2010) with Ashton Kutcher and Katherine Heigl. Discard at once without rewatch. Uninteresting
and unexciting spy/comedy movie.
**** ****
Home
Sweet Hell (2015):This is another Katherine Heigl vehicle. I like Heigl as an
actress, but her films since 2000 (even though a few were commercially
successful) have ranged from mediocre to dreadful. Home Sweet Hell is mediocre. In this self-styled comedy Mona
(Heigl) has specific goals that she pastes in a scrapbook. She schedules
everything including sex (six times per year) with her husband Don. Don cheats
with a young woman named Dusty (Jordana Brewster) who then blackmails him. Don
decides the least bad option is to come clean with Mona. Mona coolly decides to
kill Dusty so she and Don can stay on track toward her goals. Are you feeling
the humor yet? Me neither. Discard.
**** ****
Nerve (2016): Discard at once without rewatch. It’s about a
hardcore online version of Truth or Dare. OK, but not worth a re-watch.
**** ****
How to Be Single(2016) Some *Spoilers*
follow. There are several overlapping plots, but the central story is that of
Alice (Dakota Johnson) who feels she never has experienced being truly single.
She always has been in some relationship. So, she tells her boyfriend Josh they
should take a break from each other. That way, if they do end up back together,
they won’t blame each other for having missed out on life. Alice moves to
Manhattan where her sister Meg is a single-by-choice OB/GYN. Alice meets Robin
(Rebel Wilson) at the law firm where she gets a job as a paralegal. It doesn’t
take much freewheeling casual sex for Alice to decide the experiment is over;
she contacts Josh to resume their relationship but discovers he has moved on
and plans to marry someone else. There are side plots with other young women.
Tying the plots together is Tom the bartender who offers string-free sex and
bartender-style philosophy. Alice’s epiphany (the reason for the spoiler alert)
comes when she realizes that she has not been learning how to be single because
she has kept trying to become part of a couple. The final scene has Alice
watching and savoring the sunrise alone in the Grand Canyon, something one can
do at a whim when single, but far less spontaneously when not. Being truly single
can be a pretty cool thing at any time, but especially in one’s 20s. Close
call, but Keep.
**** ****
Ouija: Origin of Evil(2016)Discard at once without rewatch.
Snooze.
**** ****
Ingrid
Goes West (2017) The smartphone co-stars in
the film with Aubrey Plaza. Ingrid (Aubrey) is a mentally troubled young woman
with a horrible self-image and difficulties making real friendships. Retreating
to her phone, she becomes a follower of Instagram star Taylor Sloan (Elizabeth
Olsen) who posts about her fabulous California lifestyle of sun, fun, fashion,
and joy. When Ingrid inherits money from her mom, she uses it to move west and
become part of Taylor’s life, which she does by secretly stealing her dog and
then returning the “found” animal. Ingrid values her own life entirely by the
likes and shares on her own Instagram account and by her inclusion in Taylor’s
social media. The consequences are bleak and credible. A timely movie: Keep.
**** ****
Well, that’s a better result than last time: 9
discards. The project started to seem like work rather than whimsy however.
I’ll take a breather before considering starting at the top shelf again for a Dusty
Shelves Revisited, Part 3.
The DVD project I mentioned a couple blogs ago is still in
progress, but doesn’t fill every quiet moment, especially in bed at night waiting
for sleep to show up. An old fashioned book in hand still is preferable then.
Four recent reads:
Seriously Curious
is a collection of essays from The
Economist expanding on numerous facts and factoids. A few examples of
topics: How to measure the black market for cigarettes, why board games are so
popular in Nigeria, why there is a French argument over a new punctuation mark,
and why Swedes overpay their taxes. (The reason for the last one is negative
interest rates in Sweden, so it makes sense to overpay and get the overpayment
back later as a refund: in effect, a charge-free deposit.) The book is good for
the occasional distraction when there isn’t time to invest in something more
demanding.
**** ****
Washington in New York,
written by a local
historian who was kind enough to autograph a copy for me, covers
the busy first 1½ years (1789-90) of Washington’s Administration when New York
was the capital. (It had been the capital under the Articles of Confederation since
1785.) As part of a compromise over Hamilton’s financial plan, at the end of 1790 the capital was shifted temporarily to Philadelphia and then permanently to its current
site on the Potomac. I’ve read quite a lot of history of the Early Republic,
but I usually learn something new (or relearn something long since forgotten) from
every competent author who turns a hand to it, and that is the case here, too. For
example, Nisley notes the oft-overlooked importance of French economic
policy-maker Jacques Necker to Alexander Hamilton who was deeply influenced by
Necker’s memoirs. Regarding a less weighty matter, I once knew but had
forgotten (I had one of those “oh, yeah” moments) that Thanksgiving, which is
such a major holiday in the US today, was first declared a national holiday by
George Washington, though initially as a one-off event. It was re-declared
intermittently until Lincoln established it as an annual holiday. The New York
era was notable not only for what Congress and the President accomplished but
for what they failed to accomplish: to end slavery or at least chart a path
toward the end. Those interested in these key years of the Republic should
enjoy the book
**** ****
I posted about roboticist Daniel Wilson's clever tongue-in-cheek
How to Survive a Robot Uprising a
while back. Much of his advice was put to use in his subsequent novel Robopocalypse.
The upcoming robot uprising is well-trodden ground in scifi. It was the plot of
R.U.R. (1920) by Karel Čapek, who put
the word “robot” in the dictionary in the first place. That is OK. It is, after
all, the rare scifi novel with a premise that is altogether original. The
quality of the writing is what matters. Regrettably, that isn’t so much on
display in this work. Part of the problem is that the novel is written as a history
of the war against the sentient AI Archos (aka Rob), so we know from the outset
that the war was successful. The history is written as a series of vignettes of
participants in the war: British hackers, a Japanese engineer with an AI love
doll, Osage militia, etc. This would be OK, too, if we cared about any of these
people enough to wonder if they survived the conflict, but we don’t. Archos
decides humanity’s fate in much the same way as Skynet in
you-know-what-franchise, but withholds the nukes, which at least is sensible. Unleashing
nuclear weapons always seemed to me to be a bit hard on the infrastructure even
from Skynet's point of view; with robots and AIs (including self-driving cars,
cleaning robots, and even thermostats) in sufficient numbers, the humans are easily
targeted without them. The best hope for the humans’ survival is assistance
from friendly AIs – a direction Terminator:
The Sarah Connor Chronicles was plainly going when it was abruptly canceled
in its second season.
The novel is not terrible by any means; it’s just not
especially good. It is well-structured for cinematic adaptation, however, and
unsurprisingly it is in development for that with Chris Hemsworth cast in a
major role. Promisingly, the director is Drew Goddard (The Cabin in the Woods, Bad Times at the El Royale), so it might be
better on the screen than on the page.
**** ****
Victor Gischler writes rollicking good adventure tales and
fills them with humor and likable (or at least relatable) characters. His
preferred genres are crime (e.g. Gun
Monkeys) and science fiction (Go-Go
Girls of the Apocalypse). No Good Deed is closer to the
former, but is really in yet another category: a thriller delivered in his
characteristically witty prose. Francis, an ordinary and unimpressive guy with
a cubicle job in New York, has a bad start to his day when his girlfriend
leaves him. The day gets worse when he sees a suitcase in an alleyway. He picks
it up and emails a message to the address he found on a card inside the case saying that he has it – just
a minor good deed. At his job, where he is immediately dressed down by his boss
for being late, Emma, the owner of the case, shows up in green hair and combat
boots. Goons show up, too, and both Francis and Emma are in their crosshairs.
Francis is suddenly over his head in a cross-country adventure chased by the
NSA and by gun-wielding thugs working for Emma’s estranged husband, a brilliant
but neurotic tech billionaire in California who already has arranged for the
deaths of former employees with too much information. It’s all about a very
special AI algorithm, and Emma has a copy. Well-written and fun. Thumbs Up.
Mindi Abair
and the Boneshakers – No Good Deed Goes
Unpunished
It is not only possible to be nostalgic for a time one never
experienced, it is commonplace. I’ve mentioned my own nostalgia for certain
aspects of 1940s
pop culture, though of course not for the decade’s brutal
conflict. The culturally pivotal 1960s have great power to stir nostalgia not
only from those who remember the decade but from members of the majority who
don’t. For example, writer/director Drew Goddard, born in 1975, evokes 1969
with uncanny precision in his 2018 movie Bad
Times at the El Royale. Quentin Tarantino, born 1963, also chose 1969 for
his Once upon a Time in Hollywood,
currently in theaters. I caught it last Friday. I turned 17 in 1969, by the
way, which no doubt gives me a different perspective on the era than younger
folk – Drew Goddard included.
As the title suggests, Quentin Tarantino has directed a
fairy tale of sorts in Once upon a Time
in Hollywood, albeit of the bloody Grimm variety rather than a sanitized Disneyesque
version. He has lovingly and humorously portrayed 1960s Hollywood and its
denizens in a way that someone who didn’t see them first-hand might regard as
parody. It really isn’t. Brief portrayals of Steve McQueen, Bruce Lee, Joey
Heatherton (unnamed, but that is who it has to be), and others intersperse the
movie. However, when the ‘60s were good they were very
very good, but when they were bad they were horrid. (Longfellow’s poem is
better known slightly misquoted for some reason, so I’ll stick with the pattern
of the misquote.) The horrid aspect remains very much a part of the American
psyche and mythology, and it is central to the movie. It is a
Tarantino movie after all.
Leonardo DiCaprio plays Rick Dalton, a former TV Western
lead who now mostly plays one-off parts as the heavy in TV shows such as Mannix and Bonanza. Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) is his stunt double and best
friend, who, as Booth narrates, is “more than a brother and a little less than
a wife.” Dalton is so concerned about being past his prime that after playing a
scene (as the heavy) in a movie Western, he is sincerely and deeply moved by validation
from an 8-year-old girl (an “actor” not an “actress,” she tells us) who praises
his acting. He mulls an offer to star in spaghetti Westerns. Dalton’s house is located
on Cielo Drive neighboring one rented by Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate. (A 50th
anniversary is coming up next week on August 8.) There is a truly menacing
scene as Booth gives a teenage girl a ride back to the Spahn Ranch where Charlie
Manson and his followers have taken up residence. A well-cast Margot Robbie plays
Sharon Tate, who is on her way up the hill that Dalton has crested. She is
still excited enough to see her own name on a marquee that she spontaneously
walks into a movie theater to watch herself in a showing of The Wrecking Crew; she enjoys laughs
from the audience at her comic turns on screen.
It might be hard to imagine calling anything with these
elements a comedy, but to a large degree it is. The soundtrack is a well-selected
mix of ‘60s numbers. There is a remarkable cast in minor roles including Al
Pacino, Bruce Dern, and Dakota Fanning. The movie is as un-PC as the decade
itself.
This is the 9th Tarantino movie. Hardly anyone is
likely to score it in the top three. Yet, it is fun and definitely
re-watchable. This is no Pulp Fiction,
but thumbs solidly up.
I grew up when our only tools were rocks and bones. Our only
visual entertainment medium was a pond surface where we watched the ripples
caused by throwing one of those rocks in it. Actually the tools were IBM 360s
and punch cards while the entertainment was broadcast TV, but those might seem
like only modest improvements to someone not old enough to remember a time
before smart tablets. Among the many limitations of television entertainment
back then, the leading one was viewer choice. In the US the three networks
dominated new programming while the independent channels played a lot of
syndicated reruns and old movies. (Even New York had only seven VHF channels; most
markets had fewer.) They aired what they aired. If there was a particular favorite
movie you wanted to re-watch, you just had to wait until it turned up again on some
local station’s lineup, which could take months or even years. It might not
happen at all.
I remember watching King
Kong on my 12-inch portable in my college dorm and thinking how cool it
would be to not rely on station programmers to watch it again. One of the
tropes of depictions of the ultra-rich in movies and TV shows at the time was a
home theater with reel projectors for movies-on-demand. By the late ‘70s VHS
cassette players had made a less fancy version of this affordable to almost
everyone. The tapes themselves were fairly expensive and bulky, however, so
most of us opted to rent them from video stores rather than buy them. Prices of
videos dropped over time. When much easier to store DVDs came along, home video
libraries became more common and more full. Nowadays, discs, too, are a
senescent technology (even the Blu-rays) as Netflix and other on-demand options
make them largely superfluous. Nonetheless, they aren’t vanishing entirely.
Even the most dedicated Hulu and Netflix fan is still likely to buy (or be
given) DVDs here and there. Over the years they add up and start to overflow
shelves.
One of my DVD cases
A curious feature of DVD home libraries – which would have
surprised my younger King Kong-watching
self – is the extent of their disuse. There is something about having a movie
at one’s fingertips that makes it easy to put off watching it. Most of us have
had the experience of being caught up in a movie airing on TCM that has sat on
our shelf unwatched for years. In the past couple of decades I accumulated 16
shelves of DVDs in three cases. That is a smaller stash than it might seem –
the shelves are modest in size – but it is still large enough: too large,
really. Every now and then I make a point of randomly selecting a DVD from my
collection and playing it – or, if the thought of playing it is truly
off-putting, discarding it. Starting a week ago I once again picked a disc
randomly from each shelf with the plan of rating each as 1) watch and keep, 2)
watch and discard, or 3) discard at once. (“Discard” can mean giving it away.)
So far I’m eight shelves in. The results are below.
I’ve reviewed some of these movies before (sometimes years
ago), but our tastes and opinions (and, with luck, our insight) evolve over
time, so I’ll note any changes in those, too. Lest this post becomes too
unwieldy, I’ll try to keep the re-reviews as brief as possible.
From shelf #1 was Wings (1927) starring Clara Bow in
the first film ever to win an Academy Award for Best Picture. Mary (Clara Bow)
loves Jack who loves Sylvia who loves David (Jack’s friend and rival). When
Jack and David become pilots on the Western Front in World War 1, Clara joins
the Women’s Motor Corps so she can be closer to Jack. There is remarkable
aerial footage, melodramatic romance, and tragedy involving friendly fire.
Extreme naivety in the script alternates with unexpected sophistication. Gung-ho
early-20th century patriotism is balanced by a recognition of the
cost of war. My views on this film are the same as when I first saw it long ago
and enjoyed it. The DVD is still a Keeper.
Claudette Colbert & Don Ameche
From the next shelf was Midnight(1939), which I already knew was a Keeper but watched again anyway because
the whole idea was to make random picks. Putting a first pick back on the shelf
no longer would be random. Eve (Claudette Colbert) arrives in Paris broke. For
openly financial reasons she goes along with the scheme of the very wealthy
Georges (John Barrymore) to pose as a Baroness and draw away to herself the
romantic attention of the lover of Georges’ wife. Meantime, taxi driver Tibor
(Don Ameche) has his own interest in Eve. It’s a thoroughly pleasant comedy
with an attitude in the dialogue and (despite the contrived plot) a naturalness
in the human interactions that I miss in movies (and life) today. I’m more
cognizant of the historical context of the movie than when I first saw it, but otherwise
regard it much the same way.
Cat Women of the Moon (1953). All one need say about this film’s budget is that the
acceleration couches in the rocket are lawn chairs. Several obtuse male
astronauts plus a female navigator named Helen fly to the moon. Helen is in
telepathic contact with Alpha, leader of the moon-dwelling cat women. Despite
this connection Helen helps to kill the cat women because they are bad, bad,
bad. The movie was remade in 1958 as Missile
to the Moon which had enough of a budget for color film but was even sillier.
By all rights this should be “Not a Keeper,” but it is the very definition of
“so bad it’s good.” So, I’m reluctant to part with it. My reasons for enjoying
this movie have changed completely since I was a kid (when I accepted it simply
as adventuresome scifi), but it is still a Keeper.
World without End (1956): In this surprisingly good science fiction tale an accident
with velocity and time dilation sends astronauts into a post-apocalyptic future
where they find effete but technically capable humans hiding underground while
the surface is dominated by dangerous primitive mutants. I loved this movie as
a kid. Nowadays, the many 1950s cultural presuppositions in the movie are
highly visible, but everything is a product of its time – even (maybe especially)
the “timeless” movies. This is still a Keeper.
Daisies (1966), directed by Věra Chytilová: Two nihilistic young women,
both named Marie, decide that in an absurd and corrupt world one might as well revel
in absurdity and corruption. (This Czech film was banned in it its own country
until 1975; Marxism and nihilism don’t mix.) They indulge their appetites, play
pranks (especially, but not exclusively, on older well-connected men), and destroy
a room where an elegant feast is laid out. The young ladies’ philosophy seems
sounder to me than in the days of hippie-dom when I first saw the film.
Nonetheless, there are consequences to the characters’ behavior, as there
would be in real life. This surreal and playful movie is definitely a Keeper.
If… (1968): This movie almost never plays on broadcast or cable TV in
the US. Commercial broadcasters’ disinclination to put it on the schedule no
doubt derives from the (correct) assumption that many or most viewers would be
offended. Boys from the privileged class in an English boarding school are
indoctrinated with a code of conduct, not to be confused with a code of ethics.
Graduates presumably emerge ready to take on Kipling’s burden. I’d want to go
conquer someone after suffering through that school, too. Mick Travis (Malcolm
McDowell) and a few of his friends are unhappy students. At first they rebel through
fantasy, alcohol, and sex (hetero- and homosexual), but ultimately they opt for
submachine guns. I first saw If… in
the theater in 1968 at age 15. Back then I didn’t care for it: some elements of
the film confused me while others annoyed me. I like it better now despite (or
because of) its anarchist streak. Total Film rates it the 16th
greatest British movie of all time, which I think is way too high, but it does
have merit. Keeper.
Pamela Franklin & Maggie Smith
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie(1969): Once
again I was tempted to put this pick back on the shelf, close my eyes, and
reach for another because I already knew it was a Keeper. Nonetheless I stuck with the rules (even though they were my rules) and spun up the DVD. Miss Jean
Brodie, played by Maggie Smith, is a teacher at a girls school in 1930s Edinburgh,
Scotland. She is a romantic in the broader sense and is an inspirational
teacher, but … well ... she’s a fascist. Literally. Nowadays that term gets
tossed around carelessly, but she is the real thing. The film’s portrayal of Jean
Brodie helps to explain the seductive revolutionary appeal of fascism to so
many people. It’s hard not to admire Brodie’s defiance of the prudish,
repressive Victorian values she encounters at every turn, especially from the
school’s headmistress, but she truly is objectionable in ways the headmistress
doesn’t really comprehend. (*SPOILER* ALERT.) Brodie’s most trusted student and
“special girl” Sandy eventually turns against her for these reasons and allies
herself with the conservative headmistress, who is Wrong in oh-so-many-ways but
ultimately less dangerously Wrong than Brodie. Sandy tells Brodie, “You are
dangerous and unwholesome, and children should not be exposed to you!” Yet,
even in rebellion, Sandy owes her independence of mind about moral choices in
large part to Miss Brodie’s influence. Sandy is perfectly played by a young
Pamela Franklin on whom I had an instant schoolboy crush when I saw the movie
in the theater in 1969. (Is that really 50 years ago?) My opinion of the film
is more philosophical than in ‘69, but I liked it then and like it now.
A Boy and His Dog (1975): The intro to the movie tells us “World War IV lasted five
days. Politicians had finally solved the problem of urban blight.” In a
post-apocalyptic world Vic (a young Don Johnson) travels the wasteland with his
trusty companion, a sentient dog who communicates with him telepathically. They
meet a woman who tells about an advanced underground society that needs healthy
genetic input from the surface. It sounds too good to be true to Vic, and so it
turns out to be. Based on a Harlan Ellison novella, this cult film is sardonic
and funny. Dog lovers will appreciate Vic’s choices. Keeper.
Well, if my goal was to thin out the
shelves of overstock, so far I’m not making much progress toward it. There
wasn’t a single Not a Keeper in the first eight. Maybe Round 2 will be
different.
Appending 8
trailers would be excessive (and the reader can find them easily enough anyway),
so I’ll opt for just one: Daisies
The word “evil”
makes secularists uncomfortable due the word’s association with sin. “Sin”
connotes a cosmic origin, a notion they don’t accept. Friedrich Nietzsche specifically
rejected the term “evil” on these grounds in Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (Jenseits von Gut und Böse: Vorspiel einer
Philosophie der Zukunft), a book I found illuminating in my youth. He
was perfectly OK with “good and bad,” which connote an entirely human origin:
in his view the only origin a system of ethics can have. Freudian psychology
and 20th century existentialist philosophy reinforced this view
among intellectuals and academics. They still recognized various behaviors as
socially unacceptable or even horrifying, but regarded judgments about them to
be subjective, relative, and situational. After all, normally kind and
honorable people can be capable of the most appalling acts in the context of
war (especially civil war) or mob excitement. This relativistic view faced challenges
as the century wore on.
In the 1960s the
crime rate in the West – and particularly the United States – spiked and
continued to rise for decades. Although the violent crime rate in the US
actually has dropped back substantially in the past 20 years, it is still well above
what it was in 1959; furthermore, crimes of particularly callous natures are
far more common than 60 years ago. Accordingly, the term evil began to make a
comeback in the 1990s when it became clear that no other term applies to some
people. They commit heinous acts (in peacetime and without mob incitement) entirely
of their own accord because they choose to. Because they like to. The term re-emerged
not only in professional circles but in the popular culture; the 1993 movie Kalifornia, for example, brings a moral
relativist (David Duchovny) face to face with a homicidal psychopath (Brad Pitt).
In the 2000s criminal psychologist and medical doctor Michael H. Stone devised
a 22-level Scale
of Evil. The reader might have encountered the TV series Most Evil, hosted by Stone who employed the
scale in various accounts of crimes and criminals.
Michael H. Stone collaborated
with Gary Brucato, PhD, for their 2019 book The
New Evil. In the introduction they
write, “By ‘evil’ we are not referring to spiritually sinful or societally
forbidden acts, per se...Rather, we refer to the types of actions that
virtually anyone, regardless of faith, time, or place, would find unspeakably
horrible and utterly depraved.” Such acts, they say, “are generally preceded by
malice aforethought or premeditation,
inflict wildly excessive degrees of suffering, and would be considered
altogether incomprehensible to the average individual.” Most of the book
consists of mind-numbing accounts of abduction, torture, dismemberment,
cannibalism and more. There are accounts of serial killers motivated by
material gain, perverse pleasure, or deep-seated anger.
All this is very
depressing, but what is “new” about it? In absolute terms, not much. Most of
the crimes have precedent in historical literature. However, the frequency is
new. Stone and Brucato believe that the culture reached a tipping point around
1965; societal forces that previously restrained narcissistic psychopaths fell
away. They detail many of
the changes (more fatherless males, for example) that correlate with crime. Further, they note that there are some categories of crime today that scarcely existed before.
School shootings, for example, simply didn’t happen before 1965. To be sure,
there were murders at school, but they weren’t random and the location scarcely
mattered; they were one-on-one affairs motivated by jealousy, or humiliation,
or revenge that might have happened anywhere. There were no random killings.
That’s a modern phenomenon.
Stone and Brucato
don’t really offer a solution. Indeed, it would be surprising if they had one.
In their less than satisfying final chapter, they do, however, note the
importance of recognizing “the danger of a culture that is gradually becoming
more coarse, uninhibited, amoral, and selfish.” They also re-emphasize personal
will, choice, and self-control: “This growing tendency to blame outside forces
is, in fact, a hallmark of narcissism, now encountered on a sweeping societal
scale.” They express hope that after “a period of terrible growing pains”
Western culture, without giving up the social gains of the past half century,
can evolve past the “new evil.”
The New Evil is worth a read, though be aware that the
litany of gruesome and perverse crimes filling nearly 500 pages can be truly
stomach-churning. Some of us have learned the hard way that there are people in
the world who think so differently from the rest of us that it is hard for
normal people to comprehend it. This applies not just to the sadistic torturers
who occupy so much of this book, but to non-lethal but still callous con
artists who bankrupt “friends” without hesitation or twinge. The New Evil tells us they are out
there. It is good to be forewarned.
