ockiemilkwood Reviews

Maestro (2023)

Just like the movie "Elvis," overproduced hype

[1/10 · 24 December 2023]

Despite the relentless hype of this expensive Netflix movie, Bernstein was no great shakes either as a conductor or, even more so, as a composer.

He conducted when classical music was still alive and vibrant, which it is not today. He conducted in a time of Reiner and the Chicago Symphony and Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic, by comparison to which he was OK, but no more. His Mahler ain't bad, if you take Mahler seriously, which I do not, compared to Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, etc. You can judge a composer by his keyboard works, by which criterion, Mahler was nothing. The keyboard lays musical invention bare, with no hiding place. It's all musical ideas, e.g., Well-Tempered Clavier, Beethoven and Schubert piano sonatas, etc.

Like all Netflix crap, this movie descends to the lowest common denominator, politically-correct sex. And it drowns in words. Reed Hastings, owner of Netflix, has done more to hurt visual narrative (movies & TV) than any other human being on earth. He has no concept of telling a story visually, like, say, John Ford (My Darling Clementine), Kubrick (2001), Sergei Parajanov (Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors), or Antonioni (Red Desert, L'Eclisse, L'Avventura). Visually this movie is one noisy, overdressed cliché after another.

There is no stillness at the center of all this.

Bernstein's compositions, imo, verge on pop, as do those of his supposed lover, Copeland. He was a flamboyant, good-looking, vain man who could not stay away from the media and the mirror.

That Scorsese and Spielberg are the executive producers marks this movie for what it is: big-money blitz, sound and fury signifying nothing. (As a footnote, Scorsese has shown over and over that he knows nothing about and has no feel for music, e.g., Vinyl, Echo in the Canyon, Once Were Brothers, his overuse of source music, his PBS documentary on blues, ad nauseam.)

Rosa Peral's Tapes (2023)

Movie casts a shadow of a doubt on Rosa's guilt

[7/10 · 22 November 2023]

The prosecutor of the case talks forever, on and on, damning Rosa. But he's a fast-talking con man. He even admits at the onset that all he had was circumstantial evidence. My gut feeling about this guy is not good. He just isn't reasonable, convincing, or credible. He drowns the jury with a flood of rushed verbiage, a blur of so-called "facts," so that they can't consider the facts one by one, carefully. Con men have been doing this for centuries.

The prosecutor makes a big deal that Rosa and Albert talked by cell phone 50 times before the murder. He claims they were conspiring to commit the murder during those calls. First, this is false. The defense attorney points out that 19 of those calls were missed calls and that Albert and Rosa talked for a total of only 28 minutes during those 31 calls. That's only 0.9 minutes a call, less than one minute per call. Second, he has no proof of what they talked about. His claim that they were conspiring to commit murder is purely speculative and is, frankly, inadmissible. He has no transcript or recording of those calls. His claim is flimsy, to say the least.

Rosa, her 2 daughters, and her mom and dad spent a warm, close, loving day together the day before the murder. They even took many cell-phone pictures of themselves, hugging and loving each other. The prosecutor, without a shred of evidence, maliciously claims this was just a fraud intended to throw the cops off the cold-blooded Rosa, who was in fact planning to kill Pedro the next day. Again, the prosecutor has no evidence or proof, just damning suspicions and speculation.

Seeing things from Rosa's point of view casts a shadow of doubt on her guilt. She explains she obeyed and cooperated with Albert because she was afraid of him, especially afraid that he would harm her children, which, she says, he threatened to do. In America a person cannot be convicted of a crime unless there is no shadow of a doubt. There is certainly one here.

The movie. Burning Body, portrays Rosa as an ultra-promiscuous, very sexy, beautiful, young, ruthless, hungry black widow, which sensationalizes the film. Sex is everywhere. This is cheap sexploitation.

The media, which covered the crime, did exactly the same thing.

In America a jury of 12 men and woman must reach a unanimous verdict. In Spain they not only have just 9 jurors, but they accept a guilty verdict from just 7 or 8 of the jurors.

Because of a shadow of a doubt, I would not have convicted Rosa Peral.

The Pledge (I) (2001)

Police cannot use a child as bait without parental consent

[2/10 · 19 June 2023]

Another implausible, typically arrogant bit of nonsense from Penn.

Police can't even interview a child without parental consent. Using a little girl as bait is disgusting, irresponsible and dangerous. Would you allow the cops to use your kid?

Movie wanders aimlessly. Starts out as a cop's dogged pursuit of a gruesome child killer, then wanders, with the cop literally going fishing out in the country.

Coincidences pile up incredibly. Clues reveal themselves one after another, without the retired cop so much as lifting a finger.

Details are sloppy: Killer is supposed to drive a big, black SUV, according to the victim's drawing. But we first see him driving a medium-sized Ford station wagon and then, later, a Volvo station wagon. The cars aren't even the same. So much for continuity.

Movie lacks the tight focus and suspense of, say, Hitchcock. But comparing Penn to Hitch is, of course, ludicrous.

Deadwind (2018–2021)

TV show is one long Porsche Taycan 4S commercial

[5/10 · 25 February 2023]

What's a Finnish cop, Nurmi, doing driving a $108,000 Porsche? Is he on the take?

As if is that's not bad enough, the movie lovingly dwells on the bada**, black-on-black, politically correct, all-electric car. It features the fast car in shot after shot, closely micking its deep exhaust note. This is nothing but crass product placement. How much did Porsche pay the producers?

And, of course, there's the obligatory Apple laptops everywhere.

As for the show:

It drowns in words, telling not showing. This makes reading the subtitles tedious, especially as the characters spit out words like bullets, acting real tough.

It's a formulaic male-female buddy-cop picture. It uses children as cute props and for formulaic suspense.

Morbid body mutilation is exploited for dark, cheap thrills. The bodies mount up. It's a challenge to keep track of all the corpses.

Plot manipulation is shameless. The plot flips and flops like a fish out of water. Plot twists abound. At some time, I just gave up, saying, "Who cares?"

PS. This review is for season 3.

Into the Wild (2007)

Jonathan Livingston Seagull with a Backpack

[1/10 · 19 August 2022]

There are two components to experiencing a movie, one in the watching, the other in its aftermath. In the first, this movie succeeds, in the second, it fails.

In the watching, this movie holds you, gives you things to think about, to feel and imagine: individual vs. Society; romantic man vs. Classical man; materialism and ambition vs. The lightness of owning nothing, accepting subservience to no man. Fundamentally, it asks what is life, what makes it worth living? Old questions.

In its aftermath, upon reflection, you are disappointed. That enchanted illusory journey full of light and shadow, colors and emotions, pretty pictures and pretty people, turns out to be only so much sound and fury, signifying nothing. Sadly, the lesson it offers can be distilled to mundane greeting-card homily. Without the slightest irony, in all sincerity, the movie tells us, "Happiness is real only if shared"; "Forgiveness opens the heart to love" and; "You can have it all if you grab what you really want." This is yet another "Jonathan Livingston Seagull," another "The Prophet," that sugar-coated pill of pseudowisdom which passes through the bowels of American pop culture with predictable regularity.

For most, the vast majority, the watching will be all. But I write for the few who ask, "Is that all there is?"

Story: Upon graduating from college, a young man jettisons all social props and sets out into the world alone, to meet it unencumbered, on its own terms. If this were a picaresque novel by Voltaire, Fielding, Swift, or Rabelais, this naïf would soon hit the brick wall of reality, would directly run into death, pestilence, natural disaster, social chaos, indifferent nature, and human corruption, or, failing those, at the very least, the vast monotony of American culture. But no such intelligence or honesty resides in this commercial Californian bonbon. No, this is the handiwork of one Sean Penn. Isn't it more than a bit incongruous, even disingenuous, that this coddled prince, born into the lap of Hollywood wealth and privilege, this playboy who drives a ridiculously expensive car with a revolver in the glove compartment, should preach to us about eschewing worldly possessions, purport to tell us a tale of ascetic spiritual quest? Have I missed something, is Sean Penn Jack Kerouac? Or is he a Buddhist monk in disguise?

I write this not to spoil anybody's day, but from the fact that had I read a review such as this, I would not have wasted 2 hours and 20 minutes of my life on movie such as this.

PS. A documentary about Chris McCandless, entitled "Call of the Wild," by Ron Lamothe, being shown as part the 6th San Francisco Documentary Film Fest, holds that McCandless did not destroy all his ID's and money as depicted in "Into the Wild." Rather, his ID's and $300 cash were discovered in his wallet after his death. Also, McCandless's forensic report states he died of simple starvation, not food poisoning. In other words, he died of folly and incompetence.

Another thought: if the lad was so brainy, so capable, an "A" student, as we are repeatedly reminded in the film, why couldn't he read a simple botanical guide? Maybe if he had taken biology or organic chemistry courses, instead of gut PC courses about African racism, he might have developed his mind a bit better.

Finally, I bounced about a bit, too, after college, when McCandless's age, running into an assortment of characters straddling the social spectrum, ex-cons to spiritual seekers. There is nothing original about McCandless. There were dozens of disaffected youth, looking to affirm life after a devastating life-negating upbringing, myself included.

What strikes me most about this character is his insularity, arrogance, vanity and narcissism, his disregard for his fellow man. "Happiness doesn't lie in social relations," he states in the film. In this lies his basic flaw. Family and work are the main pillars of happiness in life, and both are "social relations." Gazing into sunsets and river rafting just doesn't cut it.

Too bad so many people so easily and so uncritically identify with this empty young man. Perhaps they are as empty as he was.

Horn from the Heart: The Paul Butterfield Story (2017)

The blues, the mother lode of American music, is the poor cousin no one wants to let in.

[9/10 · 23 July 2022]

Ah ... Butterfield Blues Band ... where to start?

First, the blues: There are those like myself who loved the blues all our lives. I loved the blues as far back as I can remember, even when I was 5, "before I knew to call her name." It was so hard to find. It was hidden, like a treasure. Instead, we were drowned in schlock, a flood of schlock: Sinatra, Elvis, Tony Bennett, Perry Como, Pat Boone, Beatles, ad nauseam. You had to hunt. You had to hope. I found the LP Best of Slim Harpo (Excello) where? In Dublin.

When Butter's first album came out, it shook my world. I saw them at Town Hall, mid-town Manhattan, fall 1966. I sat in the front row, right in front of Bloomfield's Bassman speaker cabinet. He played an old, gold Les Paul. Butter blew into a bullet mike. Bishop played a red 335. His face was so red, you thought he'd bust a blood vessel.

They were real. All music, just music. No light show, no costumes, no dancing girls. They came on stage, plugged in and played -- no talk, no BS. After an hour, they walked off. They came back and did an encore. And they were better, much better, then the record - which was a killer - the mark of true musicians.

This was just before East-West was released. Of course, they did East-West, the song.

Saw them shortly thereafter in '67 in the Village, in one of those tourist traps, the Café A Go Go. Again, they took no prisoners. Hard, pure, sexy blues. (Richie Havens opened and sucked.)

As a kid, I'd ride my bike down to Brook's Record Shop (Plainfield, NJ) and stare at album covers of records I could not afford: Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Thelonius Monk, Moms Mabely, Little Richard. Mr. Brooks had a mail order service, where, as it turned out, Butter bought blues and soul 45s. Mr. Brooks turned me on to the Swan Silvertones.

This movie is invaluable for explaining many facts about Butter I never knew, such as his educated, middle-class origins in Hyde Park, Chicago. It gives you a rough, though incomplete, idea of who he was as a person. Like so many accounts of pop music, it strays from essentials to the hyperbole of marginal, but famous pop people, like Maria Muldaur, Bonnie Raitt, Happy Traum and Jim Kweskin.

Elvin Bishop, who came from dire poverty in Oklahoma to the University of Chicago on a National Merit Scholarship, hung around black cafeteria workers, who took him to blues clubs on the Southside.

These clubs, like the Southside itself, were dangerous and violent, not a safe haven for white, middle class, wannabe hippies. I knew the Southside because my brother did a residency at UC. I also went to med school in Chicago.

You have to read Michael Bloomfield: If You Love These Blues, An Oral History (Wolkin and Keenom), not only for the Butterfield Blues Band, but for insight into '60-'70s music, like Dylan, Janis, Mother Earth, etc. Where Bloomfield was key. To get to the blues, he had to rebel against an oppressive, affluent father in Glencoe, Il., which I also knew. That my have been his undoing. I saw him at the Lion's Share, a club in San Anselmo, Marin Co., CA in '72. To quote Hank Williams, his body was "just a shell." He couldn't hit a note.

Both Butter and Bloomfield destroyed themselves with drugs. Woodstock, for all its idyllic beauty, was a hellhole. The festival there descended into chaos (I was there). See the movie Once Were Brothers about the Band, who also destroyed themselves with drugs in Woodstock. It's a cliché to say that the flowers of Flower Power died on the dung heap of heroin, speed, alcohol and coke. Easy money and fame led to an early grave for many.

Mary Lou Williams: The Lady Who Swings the Band (2015)

Mary Lou Williams is to be admired, not pitied.

[1/10 · 8 June 2022]

This movie is terrible. It doesn't cover even half of Ms. Williams's wealth of accomplishments, her concerts and performances, her recordings, her contributions to jazz, her foundation, her innovations, etc. See the Encyclopedia of Jazz, including the 60s & 70s editions, for facts. See also the Penguin Guide to Jazz, for facts, including a history of Williams's discography.

Ms. Williams was not the victim portrayed in this politically-correct, narrow-minded, mean film. She was not persecuted or victimized because she was a dark-skinned black or a woman. She, instead, rose up over adversity.

Carol Nash, the director, a black woman, knows nothing about music. As is the trend these days, she exploits racial divisions. She divides, not unites. Instead of facts, we get ideology. Her film has an axe to grind. Her film is imprisoned by a straightjacket of ideological preconceptions and prejudices. It is biased. Nash does a disservice to the life of a wonderful woman, who happened to be black.

Ms. Williams's spirit, intelligence, talent and character enabled her to have a rich and rewarding life. Her contribution to music cannot be diminished by this small, petty film.

It seems to me that Ms. Williams's major talent may have not been performing and improvising, but composing and arranging, like Quincy Jones and Billy Strayhorn. Strayhorn's major accomplishment was in working with Ellington, as arranger and composer. Jones produced Michael Jackson, giving Jackson that million dollar sound - and Jones paid the price for working under such stressful, though lucrative, conditions: he had a quintuple bypass. This may explain why Williams may have found it difficult to get recording contracts on her own, to have a lucrative "hit" of her own. The movie even shows that she wrote down her solos before her first recording. By contrast, Thelonious Monk never did this - he wanted his recordings to be first takes, completely spontaneous. (See the excellent documentary Thelonius Monk: Straight, No Chaser by Charlotte Zwerin.)

Of course, Ms. Williams suffered setbacks and failures. Don't we all?

Her Zodiac Suite received negative reviews. So what? The Penguin Guide states that its use of an orchestra is bland, like soundtrack music. I, for one, think Charley Parker's use of strings was also schlock.

Williams wasn't the only jazz musician who had to struggle. In order to stay together and pay the musicians, Ellington's band played in a high-school gymnasium in Hershey, PA. (The recording of this is marvelous.) It was difficult for both Ellington and Basie to keep a large band together, but they did it for decades. They made compromises. Basie even recorded with Sinatra, who, IMO, is the king of schlock.

Ben Webster, a giant of the tenor sax, who's also mentioned in this movie, couldn't make a living in the US in his later years. He ended up living alone and isolated in Denmark, doing small gigs with second-rate Danish combos.

If you want to make money, you have to sell. Mediocrity sells. Money lies in the lowest common denominator. Nash holds up Lena Horne as an example of the financial success denied to Ms. Williams because of her dark skin. But Horne was not an artist, not a jazz musician. She was merely a pop entertainer. Beyoncé, also a pop entertainer, makes tens of millions of dollars by pandering to the lowest common denominator. That's how she won 100 Grammy's. Williams had more talent in her little finger than Beyoncé in her whole body.

Mary Lou Williams is to be admired, not pitied.

Ozark (2017–2022)

Ending ...

[1/10 · 13 May 2022]

Killing Ruth (Julia Garner) kills the show. She was the only sympathetic character in the lot. Further episodes will be junk without her.

If they pull a reversal, an incredible resurrection of Ruth, it would not only be a cheap trick, but also disrespect the viewer, stretching credulity beyond the breaking point. (After all, they show a bullet enter her heart in slo mo.)

Without Ruth the show has no moral center or spark. Linney is intolerable, ugly inside and out. Bateman is an endlessly vacillating, bland nobody. The rest of the cast is stock and stereotype, almost without exception (Damian Young as Rattlesdorf, however, captures a certain slimy decadence).

What a cynical, moralizing ending. This is typical pop hypocrisy: it exploits cheap evil, only to condemn it.

The Many Saints of Newark (2021)

This ain't it

[3/10 · 4 April 2022]

Love the Sopranos. Best TV show ever, 10 out of 10 stars. What kept me coming back wasn't the buckets of blood or silicon t*ts, but the wit and intelligence, the gallows humor and satire. Nothing was sacred. It was always fresh.

This ain't it. Not even close.

Chase said it himself in a DVD extra to his movie Not Fade Away, which wasn't very good. He said the work conditions of making movies, 18-hour days of controlled chaos, weren't for him. He's used to the predictable, calm, regular workday schedule of TV production.

Chase doesn't get the over-arching curve of movie storytelling. He doesn't know how to sustain the intensity and complexity of a movie. His métier is the contained, hour-long, TV serial.

Instead of the tightly woven, parallel plots of the Sopranos, this movie rambles and loses its way. Half an hour into it, I was asking myself, "What's this about?"

The only person who pops in this movie is Michela de Rossi (Guiseppena), as a hot-blooded, outrageously sexy, earthy Sicilian. She owns the screen when she's on it. The rest are zombies.

James Gandolfini's son, Michael, as a young Tony Soprano, is a blubbering slob.

The cast's mugging of working-class, Newark Pisanos gets old, just like the recycled clichés of The Irishman.

The flashbacks in the Sopranos to Tony's childhood in Newark are so much better than this tired period piece. Even Susan Jacob's period source music misses the mark, unlike her unerring taste in the Sopranos.

David Chase should go away and count his money.

This movie entirely misses the tragic doom of Mafia violence.

The Place Without Limits (1978)

This flm most definitely has limits

[3/10 · 30 March 2022]

Unbelievably shoddy. Slow: Tells, not shows, with endless dialogue, much of it plot exposition of the past. Characters are caricatures, flat and two-dimensional. A flashback comes unannounced, indistinguishable from the present. The murder, when it arrives, has been broadcast from the beginning, robbing it of all suspense.

Director Ripstein tries too hard to be "transgressive," a bad boy. Film revels in grit and grime for the sake of grit and grime - it's too cult. His comparison to Marlowe's Faustus, made in the inscription at the beginning, is a stretch and pretentious, to say the least. The title derives from this.

Belfast (2021)

A Big Fat Lie

[1/10 · 10 March 2022]

This is a stupid, feel-good whitewash of "The Troubles." This is Disneyland.

Branagh is a lying opportunist, out for an Oscar and box-office receipts.

This is just more suffocating political correctness and identity politics, like Dune, Nomadland, The Strength a Dog, Last Black Man in San Francisco, If Beale Street Could Talk, 3 Billboards, Roma, ad nauseam.

There were few to none happy, integrated Protestant-Catholic neighborhoods. Long-standing, bitter, scarred walls separated Catholics and Protestants.

Catholics were shunned and excluded from the respectable, prosperous society of Protestants for centuries.

The Protestant-Catholic conflict was a class war. The Protestants were the haves, with the blessing of England, while the Catholics were the have-nots, with the curse of England. The Protestant English have a long history of bigotry, persecution and hate against the Catholic Irish.

The conflict goes back centuries, back to 1609. Irish ground is soaked with blood from it.

It wasn't Protestant vigilantes who persecuted Catholics as much as the UK itself, especially its army and government.

The Catholics were no angels. The IRA and Sinn Fein were terrorists, trained, for example, by Muammar Gaddafi, the leader of Libya, who blew up a plane full of passengers over Lockerbie, Scotland. The IRA blew up civilians in Britain, as well as in Ireland. They were assassins.

All the more is the miracle of present-day Ireland, peaceful and extremely prosperous. This didn't happen because of the lying, self-serving, mush-minded media elite, like Branagh, but because of the hard work, dedication, long struggles, sacrifices and faith of the Irish themselves.

Cadillac Records (2008)

Lies About Jews

[1/10 · 20 January 2022]

Cadillac Records, directed by a black (Darnell Martin), lies about Jews. In this movie, a record label, Chess, doesn't pay royalties to a blues artist, but instead gives him a much less expensive Cadillac convertible -- thus the title of the movie. This didn't happen at Jewish-owned Chess, which paid all its artists every dime they were owed, but at Vee-Jay, a black-owned label half a block north on S. Michigan Ave, Chicago. The artist was Jimmy Reed, who was the first blues musician to cross over to a white audience and earn huge royalties.

Adrien Brody, who has a big Jewish shnoz, plays Leonard Chess, the driving force behind Chess records and a lover of the blues. Leonard Chess did not look Jewish.

And Leonard Chess did not have an affair with black blues belter Etta James. He was faithful to his Jewish wife.

PS. Incidentally I cannot recommend highly enough the 6-CD box, Jimmy Reed: The Vee-Jay Years (Charly).

Homicide (1991)

Not "Zionist"

[3/10 · 30 December 2021]

The IMDb plot summary for this movie is: "A Jewish homicide detective investigates a seemingly minor murder and falls in with a Zionist group as a result."

The group was not "Zionist." They were terrorists. They blew up a neo-Nazi, model-train store, an act of terrorism.

The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1993) defines "Zionism" as "the reestablishment of a Jewish nationhood in Palestine, and (since 1948) the development of the State of Israel." The group which blew up the model-train store had nothing to do with these activities or goals. Rather, they were a radical, violent, vigilante group.

These days "Zionism" is a dirty word on the Left. The use of this word here reflects this implicit anti-Israel anti-Semitism, an irony given the fact that this movie is about anti-Semitism..

Dave Chappelle: The Closer (2021 TV Special)

Chappelle is a Coward

[1/10 · 25 November 2021]

Chappelle makes fun of tiny minorities, Jews and transgender people, NOT himself.

The best comedians, like Richard Prior and Rodney Dangerfield, made fun of themselves. That takes humility and guts.

Chappelle makes liberal us of the "n" word. The "n" word in this context is segregationist. Chappelle can use it, but whites better not. This is not the world Martin Luther King Jr. Envisioned. He envisioned a world which includes everyone.

Chappelle cynically steps on toes for ratings, for money. He appeals to the lowest common denominator, not the best in us. He is an opportunist.

Plenty of cowardice to go around, Mr. Chappelle.

A Wilderness of Error (2020)

No mystery. Evidence in second episode proves he's guilty.

[2/10 · 3 October 2020]

Rest of series, episodes 3 & 4 are mere, useless padding, only there to make money by stretching out the series. Episodes 3 & 4 are full of red herrings, e.g., woman in floppy hat.

Morris is more than a little annoying with his BS about "narratives," a worn cliche that. He adds little.

He sure has declined from his former glory, e.g., Fog of War, Vernon Florida, etc.

Once Were Brothers (2019)

Boomers digesting themselves

[3/10 · 4 August 2020]

And what comes out ain't the truth. It's self-adulatory hype. For example, see Echo in the Canyon.

Robertson was no great shakes as a guitar player. To claim otherwise is a lie.

Ronnie Hawkins is merely a footnote in the history of roots pop.

The Band's creative process was collaborative. Robertson stole the publishing rights. See Levon Helm's movie, Ain't In It For My Health. This movie is a whitewash, totally biased in favor of Robertson.

You never see Robertson handing out sheet music of his songs to the other musicians for them to follow, to adhere to. Instead, the Band members fleshed out his very basic ideas. His writing was just the starting point.

By contrast, Duke Ellington -- a musical giant compared to these cretins -- gave his trombone player, Juan Tizol, cowriting credits for Caravan, an American standard.

And, yes, I like some of the Band's songs, but I also know them for what they are, that the back-to-the-country, folksie neotraditionalism was just marketing hype, cretins playing simple music because, er, they were cretins.

And the same applies to Bob Dylan, whose sole notable talent is as a lyricist, not a musician or musical composer (or "poet"). See Scorsese's endless, 2 hour-22 minute documentary about Dylan's tours, Rolling Thunder Revue, which is just more boomers digesting themselves. Dylan plays the same tired chords over and over and over, for years. His rhythms and melodies are just as trite. It's only his lyrics which occasionally stand out, e.g., Hard Rain, It's Alright Ma & Just Like Tom Thumb Blues.

Both the Band and Dylan follow a familiar pop rut. They play music derivative of the blues, but cannot play the blues, which is the mother lode of American music. Their mutual musical mediocrity fits each other perfectly (and makes them extremely marketable).

And this applies in spades to Eric Clapton, who parasitized American talent, e.g., Delaney & Bonnie, Duane Allman & Freddie King, for lack of his own. In fact, Freddie King once said, after returning from England, where he worked for Clapton, "Clapton don't know s*** about the blues" (to Leon Russell, as documented in the film "A Poem is a Naked Person" by Les Blanc).

Keep in mind what Miles Davis wrote in his autobiography, "Miles": "If you can't play blues, you can't play s***."

To dispel the oppressive, musical numbness of this movie, I watched 2 hours of the 1960s Julian Cannonball Adderly Sextet on YouTube (Yusef Lateef, Nat Adderly, Joe Zawinul, Louis Hayes & Sam Jones). Now, these guys COULD play the blues.

Richard Jewell (2019)

About today as much as yesterday

[10/10 · 27 July 2020]

A sly commentary on current events, in which individual liberty is being eroded by government and media. Depiction of government and media here is actually kind. By contrast, just look at the destructive lies and incompetence of government and media in relation to COVID and the race riots, where truth has been the first casualty.

Sam Rockwell and Paul Walter Hauser are a delight.

Motherless Brooklyn (2019)

Vilifies Robert Moses

[1/10 · 12 July 2020]

Vilifies Robt Moses (Alec Baldwin), without whom New York City would not be the same. Too bad the movie adopts the Left's point of view in toto, unquestioned. This happens too often in today's media. A balanced point of view, allowing both sides, is neigh well impossible to find.

And the unsuspecting public accepts this as "the truth."

These are just some of Robert Moses's projects (from Wikipedia): Verrazano Narrows Bridge, Battery Tunnel, Midtown Tunnel, Whitestone Bridge, Whitestone Expressway, Brooklyn Queens Expressway, Triborough Bridge, Marine Parkway Bridge, Cross Bay Parkway Bridge, Cross Bay Drive, Grand Central Parkway, Troggs Neck Bridge, Henry Hudson Bridge, Seaside Blvd, Bruckner Expressway, Shore Front Parkway, Staten Island Expressway, Cross Bronx Expressway, Shea Stadium, Lincoln Center and NY Coliseum.

Hundreds of thousands of people travel on his bridges, roads and tunnels every day.

The Invisible Man (I) (2020)

Big hole in the plot

[4/10 · 30 May 2020]

The supposedly "invisible" man could easily have been seen with thermal imaging. For $2000-3000 max, an amount Cecilia could easily have afforded, she could have bought a thermal scope -- they're available online. The basic premise of the movie is thus bogus.

And, btw, this movie, as well as the 1933 movie, have almost nothing to do with H.G. Wells' fine book, which was about so much more than just being invisible. It was about disinhibition of man's primal urges, including the bloodlust urge to kill, which become irresistible when a man is no longer restrained by being visible to his fellow men, to human society.

Yella (2007)

Carnival of Souls: Answer to the Riddle

[8/10 · 1 February 2020]

Like Mary Henry, the protagonist of Carnival of Souls (1962), Yella's car drives off a bridge into water. Like Mary Henry, she emerges, apparently alive, but really only a ghost. Like Mary Henry, Yella is ultimately reclaimed by death.

On more than one occasion, Yella is pulled out of normal life: when there's tinnitus in her ears and she goes partially deaf, when she hears the caw of an unseen raven (the angel of death) and when wind rustles the leaves of a tree (the unseen hand). Twice, as she's standing by water, Phillip doesn't even see her. These are cues that the other side of the grave is calling her, that she is not really among the living, but merely an otherwordly stranger here.

Water and, by implication, death by water is a ubiquitous theme, starting with the opening credits.

Whether director Petzold ever saw Carnival of Souls, I don't know. But I immediately thought of it the first time Yella experienced the otherworldly.

Why would he do this? Because in venture capitalism, his theme, the living are not really alive. They are all corrupted and forced into crime. They are not themselves. One even drowns himself. Yella and her estranged husband Ben are just metaphorical extremes of this, being actual ghosts.

Dogman (2018)

Classc Tragedy, Timeless Tale

[8/10 · 7 September 2019]

Classic tragedy. Character determines fate. Inevitability: things could not have turned out differently.

Timeless struggle of good vs. evil, the weak vs. the strong, respectively. Though probably unintended, story suggests larger historical drama of overpowering dictator vs. powerless humanity: Mussolini, Stalin, Hugo Chavez, etc.

Plot is relentless. Nothing extraneous. Could not alter a single detail without altering the whole.

Story is compelling. Protagonists are archetypes: Marcello, who is "dopey" (police inspector's term) and frail, is entirely sympathetic (e.g., his unconditional love for his daughter and how he goes back to get the small dog out of the freezer). In contrast, Simone is pure villain. His new, loud, red motorcycle is a perfect expression of his trampling ego and bloodlust.

The ending is powerful, perfect. Ends at just the right place. Irreconcilables unreconciled, irresolvable conflicts unresolved. Societal reaction unimportant. Marcello, all alone, realizing the magnitude of his act, is all there is. Left me reeling, thinking about the film for some time, a troubling echo.

Marcello's failed, "dopey" attempt to share the murder with his social circle, who rejected him, and thus make things right with them, is a surprise. Movie is full of such telling surprises.

Story occurs at the bottom of society, where society unravels.

Could be argued that the murder was self-defense, an accident. Marcello puts Simone in a dog cage (where he, a dog man, belongs) only because he wants an apology. When Simone breaks out from the cage and shouts he's going to kill Marcello, Marcello has no choice but to knock him on the head. Marcello is trying to put things right, sewing up Simon's scalp, when the latter puts him in a deadly vice grip. The table going down slow, slowly choking Simone, is deliciously wicked.

Production, locations, costumes, etc. very fine, recalling the poetic bleakness of director Matteo Garrone's Gomorrah ('08). Is this also set in (or around) Napoli?

Double meaning to title. Of course, Marcello, the dog groomer, is the "Dogman," but so, too, is Simone, a dog man, like the vicious pit bull which opens the film. Doubt this was intentional. The latter recalls Sam Fuller's White Dog, though also doubt this was intentional.

Nice shots: 1) Marcello and daughter rising up in the pure blue water, hand in hand, into the light. Underwater dive reprised later, but the peace has been broken and an agitated Marcello has to rise to the surface by himself. Harmony is impossible. He must do something about the injustice that's been done to him, foreshadowing his revenge. The serene love for his daughter, the center of his life, is no longer enough. 2) Back seat shot showing the huge Simone dwarfing the small Marcello, sitting next to him.

Modesty Blaise (1966)

They Can't Debase This Goddess

[8/10 · 3 November 2018]

Monica Vitti, Antonioni's Greco-Roman, preternatural goddess of modern alienation, a tabula rasa of modern despair, here making a few bucks on the side with her timeless beauty, in a nervous flick by stulted Brit director Joseph Losey. The movie is cheesy '60's, with insufferable music, loud wallpaper, orange clothes and slurry dialogue, a blur of nonsense crowded in every frame, a testament to the shameless, desperate greed of film. I don't care. They can't debase this goddess. I am under her spell in every shot, through every one of her innumerable costume changes, through every twist and turn of meaningless plot and fatuous posturing. See L'Eclisse, Red Desert and L'Avventura.

November (2017)

Nice pictures, little else

[2/10 · 20 October 2018]

7 stars for cinematography/images. 0 stars for story. Art for art's sake. Form without much content. Low, dumb humor. Eastern European nihilism (yawn). Contrast this empty, film-fest exercise to the wonderful Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, also based on Russian peasant folklore.

Chappaquiddick (2017)

Everybody Knew That a Drunken Kennedy Killed Mary Jo Kopechne

[10/10 · 16 October 2018]

This movie would never have been made had Ted Kennedy still been alive. Such is the ironclad censorship and bias of the media.

I lived thru this. It was the summer of Woodstock and the Apollo moonwalk -- Woodstock, not Apollo, overshadowed everything else (I was there). It was no secret: Everyone knew Kennedy killed Kopechne and could/should have saved her, but didn't. Instead he left her to die and saved his own skin. We also knew that a drunken Kennedy, a married man, should not have been with Kopechne in the first place. The movie stops short of stating, but merely implies, what we all knew, namely, that there was inappropriate sexual contact between the two.

I was on a flight from Boston's Logan airport that summer. We all had to wait and wait until the pig Ted Kennedy boarded. Such is the privilege of the rich and powerful.

Things haven't changed. There is separate set of laws for the elite. Remember FBI Comey's "No criminal intent" dismissal of Hillary Clinton's crimes ...

Night Comes On (2018)

Shabby

[1/10 · 4 October 2018]

Characters are entirely unsympathetic, even unlikable. Every other word out of the 10 year-old's mouth is an obscenity. Her older sister has dead eyes and an expressionless, flabby face.

Plot is thin and predictable. Movie rambles aimlessly. Characters are stereotypes. Music, production, cinematography, etc. are all 4th rate.

Movie panders to politically correct identity politics. Its unoriginal, cowardly conformity fails.

This is the directorial debut for pretty, blonde, film-school actress Spiro.

What a flop.