At the Movies

If you are tired of the news cycle and this never ending winter.  If you have had it with Syria, Michael Cohen, Paul Ryan’s retirement, Stormy Daniels, James Comey sanctimony and living with the anxiety that we could wake up and find we are engaged in WWIII, you might try a little escape and there are a few noteworthy films are in theaters at the moment that are very much worth seeing.   I highly recommend A Quiet Place and Chappaquiddick, along with The Death of Stalin (with some reservations).   Obviously, Chappaquiddick doesn’t quite take you away from the political overload but it is nonetheless a good reminder of what Deep State looked like before it metastasized into its present form.  While spring baseball and golf are being held in abeyance by this awful spring weather, fortunately there are some good films to drag you away from current events.

A QUIET PLACE

I have been hungry for a new and interesting sci-fi film for some time.  Terminator and Alien are classics but those franchises have run out of gas, with Alien Covenant falling to new depths in this series that should have ended in 1986 with Aliens.  Likewise, Star Wars and Star Trek have also petered out, in my view and I even snoozed a bit during the last Star Trek film.  The remakes of Bladerunner and Planet of the Apes were mediocre.  Interstellar didn’t wow me, and neither did Arrival.  Frankly, Annihilation should have been annihilated. 

But A Quiet Place is a cut above.   It represents a fresh concept, and doesn’t try to overwhelm you with special effects.   A Quiet Place follows a post-apocalyptic family redoubting in a farm house in upstate New York.   Disconnected from whatever remains of civilization, the countryside is populated  by predatory creatures that have superlative hearing and use it to hunt down their human prey.   A snap of a twig could alert them to your presence and have them descend upon you.  The family has figured out how to survive by using sign language, nods and gestures, but the the extreme quiet and isolation of the family keep stress levels high.  The awful cliché ridden, stilted dialogue that sinks most sci-fi movies is completely absent by design in this film.  In fact, the actress that stands out is young (14 or 15) deaf actress Millicent Simmonds, who already gets my nod as best supporting actress.  The film is able to keep a high level of tension throughout.

To be sure, there are a few minor weaknesses.   The creatures borrow heavily from Alien and Predator and are kind of a hybrid of the two.  There is one short scene that appears to be plagiarized from Jurassic Park.  But overall, the acting is quite good, and its novel approach—making you aware of subtle sounds and noises—is refreshing, especially in an industry that most often tries to overload us with special effects.  I only recommend that you see this film on a sparsely attended Sunday or Monday night so that you won’t be distracted by people munching on popcorn and sipping on soda.

A Quiet Place is the best sci-fi/horror movie of the last couple of decades.  Even its title is unusual and subdued for a film of its genre, giving no clue as to what the film is about.  I have often held that sci-fi horror movies are often allegorical and reflect the fear and anxiety that pervades society at the time.  The Godzilla films in Japan and the B movies in the U.S. of the 50’s (Them, Attack of the Giant Spiders) echoed the fear of nuclear war.   Terminator reflected the fear that robots would annihilate humanity and, of course, the classic 2001: A Space Odyssey of 50 years ago was ahead of its time, predicting the hazards of AI (“Open the pod bay doors, Hal.” “I’m sorry, Dave.  I’m afraid I can’t do that”).  A Quiet Place melds our independent frontier past with a post-apocalyptic dystopian future—our lives have become an endless stream of cacophony inputs, bombarding us from sun up to sun down.  Our phones beep and buzz at us.  Films blare at us.  Urban life assaults our auditory systems every day.  A Quiet Place flips it.   The family is forced to be perfectly still, turn off all techno things that beep, ring, or chime or face immediate death.   A Quiet Place may earn a spot as one of the best sci-fi films of the decade.

CHAPPAQUIDDICK

Chappaquiddick is also noteworthy for not being overacted.  Jason Clark was excellent as young Ted Kennedy.  It was a role that would have been easy to overdo, and while Clark looks remarkably like Kennedy, he did not overreach with the Boston accent.   As we all know by now, Chappaquiddick recounts that fateful evening when Ted Kennedy left a party with Mary Jo Kopechne, then 28.  The exact details of what happened that night remain murky, and were intended to remain so.  Kennedy (who likely was drinking) drove off of a bridge and flipped the car and while he escaped, Mary Jo remained trapped inside.   Kennedy waited a full 10 hours to report the accident, claiming he was suffering from physical and emotional shock.  But Joe Gargan and Paul Markham didn’t report it either, and left the matter to Kennedy to report, even though they returned to try to get Mary Jo out of the car after Kennedy walked back to the cabin where the family had been partying with a group of female staffers.  

Kennedy pled guilty to leaving the scene of an accident and received a suspended sentence.  The DA, who tried to reopen the case was stymied when Mary Jo’s parents denied him the ability to exhume her body and perform an autopsy.   The diver that retrieved her body reported that there was an air bubble in the car that would have permitted her to live for up to three hours.  Kopechne likely would have lived if Kennedy had responded quickly.   The accident and the delay in reporting prompted charges of a cover up, and even during the Watergate investigation, comments such as, “At least no one drowned at Watergate.”

As we all know, Kennedy went on to become know as the Lion of the Senate, and was a chief architect of our hyper divisive politics, derailing the nomination of Bork to the Supreme Court (despite the fact that Bork was highly qualified and had no skeletons in his closet)—a tactic that became known as Borking).   He led the charge against Clarence Thomas and was a supporter of chain migration.   While he never got to be president (he lost a primary challenge to Jimmy Carter in 1980, which may have cost Carter the election to Reagan, so perhaps we should be grateful).

Chappaquiddick does for the  Kennedy family what Spotlight did for the Boston Archdiocese.   Those films show us the measures that will be taken to protect the inner circle of powerful institutions, even when those institutions commit heinous acts.   The organization and those around it will close ranks, and so will the press, unless it has individuals courageous enough to risk their careers as they did at the Boston Globe with the Boston Archdiocese sex abuse scandal.   We can see the same forces at work today with Peter Strzok, Robert Mueller, Andrew McCabe, and Jim Comey as they whitewash Hillary Clinton’s email and money laundering scandals.   Chappaquiddick, like Spotlight, highlights just how a person can be sheltered from accountability for horrendous behavior if you have enough friends in the right places.  I ordinarily reject the concept of “white privilege” in its entirety, but the Kennedy clan breathes substance into the term.

THE DEATH OF STALIN

I vacillated greatly on recommending this film.   The Death of Stalin is a farce around the death of Joseph Stalin and the subsequent power struggle in the Soviet Union.  The film has a lot going for it.  Its Monty Pythonesque silliness and one-liners are sometimes very good.   It is laden with some excellent acting talent.   Steve Buscemi does a masterful job as Nikita Khrushchev.   Jason Isaacs turns in a solid performance as Georgy Zhukov.  And Monty Python veteran Michael Palin kills it with his portrayal of Vyacheslav Molotov.  As a fan of dark comedy, there were times that this film was uproariously funny.  The writing and acting talent combined to make this film—like A Quiet Place—a truly interesting and different work.   But it is difficult to make a farce involving the Stalin terror work.   I remember some controversy around the T.V. show Hogan’s Heroes at the time.  It was a little too close to the end of WWII and the brutality of Nazi POW camps for comfort (1965).  I felt a bit the same about The Death of Stalin.  As someone that grew up with Eastern Europeans and Ukrainians that escaped the Stalin terror, I have at least second-hand knowledge of the repressiveness of the Soviet regime.   A dark comedy about the Holocaust would certainly draw criticism in the press and the Stalin’s Soviet Union was not far behind Hitler’s Nazi Germany in the scale and scope of its terror, and if you go by body count, it exceeded it.   Still, it is a film worth seeing if you have a hankering for off-beat dark comedy.

ITZHAK

I saved perhaps the best for last.  A few years ago, I began to be drawn to the documentary film genre.   If it is well done, a documentary film can provide an insight into a person or a situation in a way that even a well written and well documented book cannot.  And on my blog, I have reviewed several outstanding documentaries such as Jane (Jane Goodall), Austerlitz, and Finding Vivian Maier.   The 2011 and 2012 Oscar winners, Undefeated and Searching for Sugar Man were two outstanding and moving films.

Music lovers especially will love Itzhak, a refreshingly complete and fulfilling documentary on this gift to humanity – Itzhak Perlman.  I am at a disadvantage because I am musically illiterate, but Itzhak is a moving portrayal of this extraordinarily gifted musician.  Like his scientific counterpart, Stephen Hawking, Perlman had to overcome a crippling disability (polio) to become one of the finest violinists of our lifetime.   Harkening from modest beginnings, Itzhak struggled against his affliction, transcended his very modest beginnings and overbearing teachers to become a master of his realm.  And unlike so many top performers in so many fields, Perlman did not fall prey to drug or alcohol abuse, philandering, or idiosyncratic quirks that would make him unlikeable.  Indeed, he stayed married to the same woman during the course of his life.  His slight cantankerousness is in line with almost every aging man on the planet.

This wonderful film brings together snippets from his youth and middle age, with his national launch at age 13 on the Ed Sullivan Show.  It neatly weaves in his day to day existence, overcoming snow and ice in his electric wheelchair and the impediments to such mundane tasks as boarding an airplane or going to the bathroom.  This film is at its best when it shows this extraordinary man in ordinary moments.  He is at his best in the film in candid moments with his wife, drinking wine with friend Alan Alda and sprinkling Jewish humor throughout.

This is a man that LIVES.  His passion for all things—his music, people, and the sensory pleasures of life—above all music, but also baseball, food and wine.

An important part of the film is his relationship with his wife, Toby, who is also a classically trained musician.  Part of the film’s charm is exploring Toby’s big personality and her importance to his success.  The strength and durability of their long and mutually respectful marriage is something to be admired.

Of course, the film would not be complete without a full complement of snippets of his performances, but the filmmakers are careful not to overdo things and provide us instead with shortened samples.  Appropriately, the most moving and most complete is his performance of the theme from Schindler’s List, a score which is nearly impossible not to come away from misty eyed.

I recommend any one of these fine films, and hope you see all of them, but if you want to have your faith in humanity restored and only have time to see one, see Itzhak.   This man, his music, his marriage, his life is one to be admired.