The Two Popes

A Luso World Cinema Blogathon é um evento dedicado a filmes e cineastas em língua portuguesa de todo o mundo, organizado por Critica Retro e Spellbound by Movies. Para uma lista completa dos blogueiros participantes, visite os links nos sites de hospedagem.

The Two Popes

Netflix viewing 

One of the brightest lights in recent Brazilian cinema has been director Fernando Meirelles. The São Paulo native discovered film through his father, who made 8mm parodies with his family and friends. In college he studied architecture, but also sustained his interest in filmmaking. He entered indie TV and experimental film after graduation, which led to advertising. He co-founded the ad firm O2 Films.

In 2002, he co-directed, with Katia Lund, the movie City of God, a crime picture based in a suburb of Rio de Janeiro, based on a novel inspired by actual events. O2 Films was one of the production companies. The film was an international sensation, and was nominated for four Oscars, including Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay.

In subsequent years, Meirelles made the Oscar-winner The Constant Gardener, as well as the films Blindness and 360 and the HBO series Joint Venture. When the Summer Olympics came to Rio in 2016, he directed the opening ceremonies. In 2019, Meirelles adapted the play The Two Popes for Netflix.

Popes loosely tells the story of the relationship between Pope Benedict XVI and the future Pope Francis, back when he was still Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, in the wake of the 2012 scandal over corruption within the Vatican. Anthony Hopkins plays the former and Jonathan Pryce plays the latter.

Meirelles recreated the Sistine Chapel in the famous Cinecitta studio in Rome. This podcast explains how he did it. St. Peter’s Square was computer-generated. Additional filming was shot in and around Rome as well as Argentina.

Pryce and Hopkins were both Oscar-nominated, for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor, respectively. Pryce spoke some Spanish and Hopkins spoke some Italian and a little Latin. They both came across very convincingly.

I can’t say the story moved me that much, not being Catholic, but the contrast between the two holy men and their differing visions for the future of the faith was presented well. The reality behind the popes and their connection to each other is different, but this is, after all, a dramatization. The adapted screenplay by Anthony McCarten was also Oscar-nominated.

Popes is an ambitious production depicting a crucial turning point in religious history, told on a small, almost intimate scale.

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Previously:

Manoel de Oliveira 

Left Behind (2014)

The 2020 So Bad It’s Good Blogathon is an event devoted to films commonly perceived as bad, yet enjoyable, hosted by Taking Up Room. For a complete list of participating bloggers, visit the link at the host site.

Left Behind (2014)
YouTube viewing

In 1996, following a career of edgy, left-of-center work in mainstream and independent films such as Wild at Heart, Moonstruck, Raising Arizona and Red Rock West, Nicolas Cage won the Best Actor Oscar for his role in Leaving Las Vegas. It’s fair to say, though, that success went to his head, and after spending his money on some pretty wild things, he got in trouble with the IRS. To pay off his debts, he has had to take parts in some... questionable films.

Links of prey

I don’t have a whole lot to say this month for once—except, of course, to remind you the Butlers & Maids Blogathon is later this month and there’s still time to join Paddy and me for it if you want. Leave a comment here or tweet me at @ratzo318 and you’ll be set.

Let’s get straight to this month’s links:

Ivan on the supernatural soap opera Dark Shadows.

Virginie visits an Audrey Hepburn exhibit in Amsterdam.

Aurora collects a bagful of Cary Grant appearances on the radio.

Ruth tells of how Edgar Rice Burroughs called out Hollywood in a novel.

Hollywood’s Walk of Fame may become more pedestrian-friendly.

More about the Parasite mini-series for HBO.

A Jewish critic on Jojo Rabbit.

Adam Sandler and the Safdie Brothers reunite for this short film set in Times Square.

Jojo Rabbit versus Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not To Be.

Leonard Maltin will be feted at this year’s TCM Film Festival.

Comedy is dealt another mortal wound as Hank Azaria caves in to the PC Police and gives up voicing the character Apu on The Simpsons.

When the city of Hollywood hooked up with Los Angeles.

What is the most expensive horror movie prop of all time?

Ad Astra

Ad Astra
seen @ Cinemart Fiveplex, Forest Hills, Queens NY

I hope this doesn’t spoil the movie for you, but don’t expect aliens to appear in Ad Astra. This shouldn’t be a spoiler because director James Grey has alluded to this point in interviews, for one, and it’s important to know because it’s easy to imagine this as the kind of movie that might have aliens, coming as it does after Interstellar, The Arrival, Contact, The Abyss, and similar movies where their presence fills the protagonist(s) with awe and we don’t know what to expect from them because they’re so far advanced from us. Ad Astra seems like it’s in that vein—but it’s not.

That said, I wasn’t as blown away by it as I had hoped I would’ve been—at first. Brad Pitt’s an astronaut in “the near future,” the son of Tommy Lee Jones, who was a legendary astronaut in his day. Jones went on a deep space mission years ago, vanished, and was presumed dead. Now there’s evidence he may be alive and stirring up big trouble, so Pitt is sent to investigate.

It’s Pitt’s movie from start to finish, and he gives a wonderful performance, reminiscent of Ryan Gosling in First Man but much more reflective. In the pursuit of his goal, Pitt does some surprising things which seem justifiable at the time, but then you look back and think, hey wait, he really did that, didn’t he? His character is so invested in keeping his shit together, though, and not wigging out, you don’t think of him as crazy—and this is a vital point, because the nature of his profession requires him to maintain an even keel, and the strong possibility that Jones might have lost his marbles permeates throughout the film. Pitt does not want to be like Jones, who was absent for much of his life on account of his job, but Pitt can’t help but admire Jones for the things he has accomplished. Actually, working it out like that just now has made me get a better grip on the movie.

Right up until the movie’s climax, I expected some deus ex machina appearance by aliens. Jones’ mission was to detect the presence of extraterrestrials, and he’s pretty convinced they’re out there, despite the lack of concrete evidence. Some of us are like that, aren’t we? I’ve talked about that before. The possibility that humanity really is all alone in the cosmos—or at the least, that aliens are so far away they’ll never detect us—is scary; it goes against a lot of notions we’ve cultivated about ourselves and our place in the universe, many of them built up through our popular fiction. I don’t want to believe it, even now—and a definitive answer will likely not come within my lifetime.

I was going to say that Ad Astra was befuddling, but now that I’ve written about it, it seems less so. Don’t know if I’ll get a chance to see it again this year, but I hope I do. I would say more, but each person needs to interpret a movie like this for themselves.

And if I do see it again, I hope it’s with a better audience. The screening I attended had a mother with a teenage kid who might have had some mental issues, to put it kindly. He giggled intermittently and audibly throughout the movie, which had little that could truly be considered funny. All things considered, he could’ve acted much worse, but he was a distraction. He wasn’t in control of himself, though, so what could I do?

Don’t get me wrong; I’m sympathetic to parents of children with “special needs” and they should get to unwind like everyone else, but if they can’t get someone to look after their kid while they go see an adult film (not that kind of adult film), perhaps they should reconsider their plans. Ad Astra wasn’t ruined for me, but I couldn’t give myself over to it as completely as I would’ve liked—so know your kids before you take them to a grownup film... and if you think they can’t hack it, or will act inappropriately, do us all a favor and stay home.

Amazing Grace

Amazing Grace
seen @ AMC Lincoln Square 13, New York NY

Aretha Franklin is gone, but her music will always be with us. There have been many 20th century vocalists of raw talent and uncanny skill, but Aretha was in a class by herself, fusing her gospel roots to rhythm and blues to create a pop sound unlike anything that came before, one that paved the way for Whitney and Mariah and Beyoncé and Adele and just about every pop diva of the last forty years.

In 1972, Aretha returned to gospel to record a collection of spirituals with a choir and a band at an LA Baptist church. The result was Amazing Grace, an album that became the biggest-selling gospel record of all time. There should have been an accompanying film, but it didn’t happen right away, for a number of reasons, until now.

This one wasn’t on my short list, although I had heard of it. I saw it with Ann, whom I’ve mentioned here before —Virginia’s friend who has since become mine, too. Ann’s original companion had to cancel unexpectedly, so she asked me along instead. Like Virginia, she’s a singer of classical music, or “early music,” as they call it — and watching this movie with her made me very conscious of the recent exposure I’ve gotten to religious music.

Over the past year-plus, I’ve watched Virginia perform in a number of choirs, in churches all over New York, singing hymns (as well as secular tunes) from the 17th and 18th centuries, and beyond. I remember thinking initially that this kind of music, stirring as it is, can’t compare to contemporary gospel. I was not raised Baptist, but I’ve certainly seen and heard enough to be familiar with how a typical black choir sounds: raucous, emotionally charged, electric. Both performers and audience are connected and the result is a physical, tangible thing.

The hymns found in early music, by contrast, are typically sung by a chorus that stands perfectly still, sheet music held under their noses, amidst the Gothic architecture of a church with high ceilings and gravid crucifixes (and watching them while sitting in uncomfortable pews!), all meant to impose the solemnity of the occasion and the Deep Meaning of Jesus Christ’s life and death and resurrection (if you believe in that stuff). I mean, seriously, you can’t even applaud after every song. I never know when I’m allowed to and when I’m not and that always bugs me.

Now some people might disagree with that simplification, and the truth is, I have enjoyed the services I’ve seen Virginia in — sometimes I imagine I can even pick her out amidst the chorus, and that always pleases me — but then I watch something like Aretha’s performance in this movie and the difference is like night and day. How can early music compare?

I asked Ann this question after the movie, and her answer was simple: she’s listened to early music long enough to recognize the beauty within it as a separate thing from contemporary gospel. She’s never sung gospel, knows she wouldn’t be able to, and while she recognizes how good it is, it doesn’t take away from her appreciation of the kind of music she prefers. That makes sense — I can listen to, Nine Inch Nails without it taking away from my appreciation of, say, Dusty Springfield — but I haven’t quite reached that point yet in this particular case.

You’d find it tough to disagree after seeing Grace. The 1972 footage, shot over two nights by Sidney Pollack, presents us with an Aretha quite different from the one we’re used to seeing. Decked out in white on the first night, walking down the aisle of the church not unlike an angel, she defers to the MC, the Reverend Doctor James Cleveland, who conducts the service with a combination of solemnity and showbiz hucksterism. On the second night, Aretha’s own preacher father, the Reverend C.L. Franklin, speaks from the pulpit for a moment. At another point, during the performance, he takes a rag and pats his daughter’s face as she plays the piano and sings, which struck me as quite tender.

Aretha is one with the music. I don’t think you have to be a believer to sense the connection, though I wasn’t as moved as, say, Rev. Cleveland was during one point in the film where he has to sit down, his head in his hands, overwhelmed with emotion at hearing Aretha’s voice. The choir, which Ann said she was particularly thrilled with, not only supported Aretha but urged her onward during her best solo moments. Basically, every black choir cliche can be found here — the sweaty singers, the gesticulating conductor, the audience members going nuts — except it’s all real. And damn, Aretha was only 29 when she did this! Is it any wonder she was revered as a legend in her own time?

Solo links

Bill Cosby's downfall is complete at last. I had talked to my mother about this; she's convinced the whole thing was a case of entrapment that he was dumb enough to fall for in his youth. Maybe. I'm not here to debate it one way or another, though; I want to hold a candle up for him one last time, for all the good he achieved as an entertainer and as a pioneer for black people in television. Like it or not, he's part of the official record and always will be; he was part of my childhood; and he helped bring positive change to the image of blacks on television, and the culture at large. Though we may condemn him for what he did when the cameras stopped rolling, we cannot and must not dismiss him.

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I finally decided, after almost four years within my writing group, to part company with them last month. I've found an online group months ago that I think can help me better, particularly now that I'm in the revision stage; plus, I was getting kinda tired of running things.

What I wasn't prepared for, though, was how hard it would be to say goodbye. The group roster had changed completely from when I had first joined, and many of the people in the group now signed on within the last year, but I still felt a connection with them — and they with me. I truly didn't realize how much of an impact I had made on them. They were disappointed to see me go. Some of them friended me on social media. They pretty much insisted I come back to visit, which I will.

They were a great bunch, both the current membership and the ones from the past, minus the occasional oddball or two. I've talked about Jen here before, who I still think was the best writer we had in my time in the group, and will get published for sure.

I'm glad to have been part of them. My Sundays won't be the same.

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I've been devoting more time to the novel revision, which is why I haven't been around much (that and I just needed a break), but I did see movies. I saw Isle of Dogs and liked it. I think it's Wes Anderson's most ambitious film, not just because of the stop-motion animation (which was smoother and slicker than in Fantastic Mr. Fox), but because of its political overtones. The film is set in Japan, and while most of the human characters spoke Japanese, there were no subtitles; either someone was on hand to translate or the meaning was clear through context. I thought that was quite clever on Anderson's part.

I also watched Black Panther again, this time with Sandi, and once again, she noticed something I didn't the first time around: apparently the deities invoked by characters in the film are not native to Central Africa, where Wakanda resides. She's an expert on mythology, so if she says it, I believe it, though I'm sure Ryan Coogler has some manner of justification.

The Ready Player One post is coming. Promise.

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I'll keep things up here, but it probably won't be as frequent as in the past. I saw Avengers: Infinity War and I'll write about that, of course; I've got one blogathon post coming this week and I may take part in another; not sure. Sorry for the light schedule, but the novel has to take priority.

Your links:

Raquel and Danny, among others, have coverage of this year's TCM Film Festival.

Jacqueline writes about an adaptation of a book that was never filmed — but totally should have been.

Le checks out a compilation of rare Chaplin flicks.

Ivan has the skinny on the first Shirley Temple film in which she gets kissed.

Flash Gordon himself, Sam Jones, came to Jennifer's hometown.

The long and convoluted tale of ailing comics legend Stan Lee and his battles with his daughter.

Is Quentin Tarantino writing a script for the next Star Trek movie?

Tommy Wiseau wants to be the Joker.

The radical, sci-fi-flavored philosophy of musician Sun Ra was once turned into a movie.

A bunch of Broadway stars held a secular Passover seder, performing non-traditional tunes.

What makes a movie bad?

MOMA has restored a Swedish short about life in Manhattan from over a century ago. Note how slowly the cars travel.

Menashe

Menashe
seen @ Lincoln Plaza Cinema, New York NY

Hang around Brooklyn long enough and you'll see some Hasidic Jews. Granted, they don't stray far from their pocket neighborhoods, but you can run into a few in public places like parks, beaches or the subway. The L train goes through their part of town, for example.

How isolated are they from the rest of New York City? When the city wanted to install a bike lane through South Williamsburg several years ago, the locals opposed it, in part, because they objected to the sight of women in shorts and tank tops biking through their neighborhood. (Hasidic women tend to dress very conservatively.) Later, when the city's bike share program expanded throughout North Brooklyn, there was a hole in the network the size of South Williamsburg.

Now, some people might notice the inconsistency in a neighborhood that relies on the same basic utilities - gas, electricity, water, etc. - as the rest of the five boroughs, yet is allowed to dictate how the city can use its streets that run through their neck of the woods, streets built, cleaned and maintained by the city... but those people don't work for the Mayor's Office or the Department of Transportation.

Still, the Hasidim are not so different from the rest of us in the ways that count. Menashe is a film about a single father fighting for custody of his young son. (In that respect, it reminded me a lot of Kramer vs. Kramer.) Is he a drunkard or a junkie? Nope. Is he irresponsible? The man works as a store clerk and hustles to get to work on time and to get his son ready for school. Is he abusive? He adores his son; he reads the Torah with him, takes him to the park and gets him a baby chick to raise at home. So why can't he keep his son?

Simple. He's a widower, and his religion says he has to remarry. Raising a child at home is not supposed to be his responsibility.

Director Joshua Weinstein, who also did the taxi documentary Drivers Wanted, recruited his cast from within the Hasidic community. He shot some exteriors on the down low; not everyone in the neighborhood was thrilled to see a movie being made about their lives. Menashe Lustig is quite good as the father. He is a bit of a misfit within his world, yet he is still a product of it. He never challenges the doctrine that says he has to remarry; he knows the rules, but his love for his son is actually an impediment to following them. Oh, and did I mention this entire movie is in Yiddish, bubbeleh?

I saw this with Vija and Lynn. This was Lynn's suggestion; as soon as I read a review of it, I had a feeling it might be worth seeing. Also with us was Joan, a woman I met not long before I left NYC, back when Vija tried to put together a support group for artists. As I recall, Joan made collages. I remember I used to enjoy giving her a hard time because she claimed to not like the Beatles. (She's old enough to have been around for them.) She's no square, though; she's actually quite kind and pleasant. This was the first time I could recall her seeing a movie with us. I think she liked the film.

Total Recall (1990)

Total Recall (1990)
IFC viewing

The work of Philip K. Dick has been a Hollywood go-to source for decades, even today. The current Amazon series The Man in the High Castle is based on Dick's 1962 Hugo-winning novel. This fall, a sequel to the hit movie Blade Runner - based, of course, on the short story "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" - will be released. 

I've never read any of his work, so I can't speak to how much (or how little) Hollywood has changed his material. I imagine there's a substantial difference. Prose sci-fi, especially from the mid-20th century, is fairly dense. Sci-fi movies tend to go more for broad strokes, though that's slowly changing.

Dick was born in Chicago. He went to high school in California with future SF peer Ursula LeGuin. His literary career began in the 50s. Though he wrote SF, he aspired to do more mainstream stuff. He married five times and tried to kill himself once. He was a heavy user of amphetamines.

He had some pretty wacky ideas throughout his life: he thought he had lived a past life in ancient Rome; he believed he was possessed by the spirit of a Biblical prophet; he subscribed to "panentheism," which basically means God is everywhere and in everything. You can read more about his beliefs here.

"We Can Remember It For You Wholesale," the 1966 short story that was the basis for the film Total Recall (both versions), is emblematic of the kind of stories Dick favored, in which what we think of as "reality" is ephemeral and highly subjective. In Paul Verhoeven's adaptation, we never know for certain if everything that happens to Arnie is real or simply implanted memories. I like that aspect; it seems important for this kind of story.

Verhoeven movies are always a trip because of their over-the-top nature. He'll have his characters do the craziest things, often out of nowhere: a gentle, friendly lady scientist violently slaps her milquetoast young assistant to keep him from freaking out; a little old lady tries to steal Arnie's briefcase and curses him when she fails. Scenes like these, campy and funny as they are, don't seem completely out of place.

Can I get some love for Ronny Cox? Scenery chewer par excellence, he made for some memorable and scummy bad guys, both here and also in Verhoeven's RoboCop. In both films, he's paired with a henchman: the stern Michael Ironside in Recall and the slick Kurtwood Smith in Robo. Cox has more of a relationship with Smith, though. Ironside just takes orders from him. Cox is better when he has someone equally smarmy to play off of, like Smith and Miguel Ferrer. It's always good to see Cox being bad!

Is reality subjective, like Recall and Dick's writings, would have you believe? Maybe, but if so, I think we still gotta go on living as if it wasn't - because how else can we relate to each other? There are way too many stupid things we hairless apes fight over to begin with, like skin color, or whose invisible sky fairy is the best. If one group suddenly decides grass is blue and another says it's green, we'd be in even worse shape. Some things we simply have to accept as givens until proven otherwise.

Silence

Silence
seen @ AMC Loews Lincoln Square 13, New York NY

The day I left my apartment to go see Silence, a woman got on the elevator with me. I had never seen her before. It was a cold day, and we were both bundled up pretty good. For no reason I can think of, she said, "It can't be too bad out there." I shook my head, agreeing with her, not wanting to get into an idle chat about the weather. Then she said something like, "Jesus never gives us more than we can handle," which led to a few more statements about how Jesus is great and so forth.

She looked at me as if expecting me to agree, but of course I would do no such thing. I said nothing. Too many times in the past, I had let myself get drawn into theological debates with Jesus freaks. They always end up the same way; at an impasse. The worst part is, I didn't say or do anything that would prompt her to start proselytizing. Then again, people like her rarely need a reason.

Near the subway, there were more like her. Most of the time, the religious types I see in this part of town fall into one of three categories: the loud, militant black Jews; the quieter, yet ubiquitous Jehovah's Witnesses; and the solitary, fire-and-brimstone Bible-thumpers. This fourth group appears every now and then. They set up booths called "prayer stations," they dress in bright red vests, and almost without exception, they're white. The sight of them in a black neighborhood gives off an impression not unlike that of 19th-century missionaries in Africa, saving the heathen darkies for Jesus while bringing malaria and other brand new diseases.

I realize these people see it as their duty, their holy calling, to spread the word of God. In a fair world, they would realize not everyone is interested in what they have to say; that some people would not only prefer to be left alone by them, but their very presence is resented. As long as these people believe they're "right" and everyone else is "wrong," however, they're not likely to change.

It was in such a frame of mind that I saw Martin Scorsese's new movie, which I went into completely ignorant of what it was about. I had decided I'd pick one movie this season which I'd see with no advance knowledge. I chose Silence. All I knew was Scorsese had made it, which is certainly enough of an enticement on its own. Whatever he makes is almost always worth a look.

So imagine my surprise when I realized the film continued the thematic path I seemed to be on that day. Andrew Garfield is a 17th-century Portuguese priest. He and fellow priest Adam Driver travel to Japan to search for their missing mentor, Liam Neeson, who has appeared to have turned on the faith. They encounter a number of converted natives, but they also get heavy resistance to Catholicism, and they suffer persecution for their faith.

It was difficult for me to sympathize with Garfield's character. I probably wouldn't have in other circumstances, but because of the woman in the elevator, I was even more predisposed to not care too much whether or not Garfield found other Catholics in Japan. Nothing justifies the violence inflicted on him and others like him, but I found myself understanding, at least, why it happened. Indeed, Garfield struck me as incredibly naïve to the reality of his surroundings. Neeson sets Garfield straight once they meet, and soon he's faced with the same choice Neeson faced.

Absolution is a recurring theme in the movie. One character sees the act as a kind of Get Out of Jail Free Card: yes, he did this bad thing, but if Garfield forgives him, he figures, everything will be okay. Then he does the bad thing again and restarts the cycle. If the concept of sin hadn't been introduced to his culture to begin with - something they never asked for - chances are he might not have suffered as much as he does throughout the movie, but no one brings that up.

I still found Silence thought-provoking. I could see why the director of The Last Temptation of Christ and Kundun would be drawn to this material, based on a novel Scorsese had been wanting to adapt ever since he made Temptation.

If I had known all about Silence beforehand, would I have gone to see it when I did? Eh... maybe not. I might have taken my time, gone to see other movies first, maybe even waited to see if it got any Oscar love (it probably will). Scorsese's name alone was enough to get me to see this movie. That's a powerful thing. It shouldn't be taken for granted.

The Birth of a Nation (2016)

The Birth of a Nation (2016)
seen @ Kew Gardens Cinemas, Kew Gardens, Queens NY

Kyle Baker is a cartoonist and illustrator who has worked for both Marvel and DC, as well as other comics publishers, creating a wide variety of comics and graphic novels. Why am I bringing him up here, in a post about the new movie The Birth of a Nation? Simple. Among Baker's body of work includes a graphic novel about Nat Turner and a graphic novel called Birth of a Nation. I can't talk about this new movie without mentioning him.

Nation came out first, in 2004. He illustrated the story co-written by Boondocks creator Aaron McGruder and film director Reginald Hudlin. It's a comedy about a predominantly black town that secedes from the United States to form their own independent nation. 

A few highlights: their national anthem is a parody of the theme from Good Times; there's a spirited debate over whether Biggie Smalls or Tupac Shakur belong on their currency; and there's a running joke about picking up chicks at Planned Parenthood. There are serious moments as well, including talk about black disenfranchisement and the meaning of patriotism. It's full of the same socio-political humor that made McGruder's Boondocks a successful comic strip and animated series. Baker's color art is organic and lively, with appealing shapes and sensuous, dynamic line work, rendered in lush, bright colors.

Nat Turner came out in single-issue form beginning in 2007, before the collected edition was released a year later. If you know Baker's art, you're bound to recognize Turner as his, but the style is a marked contrast to Nation. The black and white art is sketchier, starker, like the fever dream of a dying man. Even within the raw images, you can detect Baker's fine, trained hand, his eye for fluidity of form and his ability to communicate with pictures. This is key...

...because Turner contains almost no dialogue from Baker. The only text comes from the memoir The Confessions of Nat Turner, written while the 19th century slave rebel was in prison, after his brief insurrection was put down. Baker uses his art to build a narrative from the bare bones of Turner's text, covering the man's life. It includes the depiction of Africans caught by white hunters, their middle passage by sea to America, and their sale as slaves. Reading the book is not unlike watching a silent movie.

Baker initially self-published Turner despite having no experience. As a former comics self-publisher, I can testify to the extreme difficulty involved in getting your book noticed by a marketplace that perpetually glorifies 50-70-year-old juvenile power fantasies featuring steroid cases in long underwear created by white men. Baker was part of the corporate machine that grinds out those comics week after week for a long time. In the afterword to the collected edition of Turner, he says he had to learn how to self-publish, to start and sustain a business, on his own, something many would-be Stan Lees almost never take the time to do beforehand. I didn't!

It's this DIY spirit (and absolutely NOTHING ELSE) that links Baker, I believe, to Nate Parker, the producer-writer-director-star of Nation the movie. Parker was an established Hollywood actor who had been in some stuff (including Red Hook Summer and Beyond the Lights). He put up $100,000 out of his own pocket to fund this film, which conquered Sundance and looked like as sure a Best Picture Oscar contender as I've ever seen... but. (I'll return to that "but" in a moment.)

In Parker's Nation, we see alleged child of destiny Turner (played as an adult by Parker), a slave, educated by a white woman through the Bible. He becomes a Christian preacher. His owner pimps Turner out to other slave owners so Turner can use God's word to keep other slaves - his own people - submissive. When he has his my-god-what-have-I-done moment, however, he chooses to employ that same Bible to justify his bloody revolt.

It's this sort of thing that once again, makes me believe religion is far more trouble than it's worth. If God exists and the Bible is his inspiration, it was still written by mortal men. Throughout the centuries, far too many people took from it only what they chose and used it for their own ends. One group of people used the Bible to enslave another group and to keep them on their knees. The enslaved used it to throw off their chains and reclaim their lives. In both cases, the result is persecution and murder. In God's name.

They can't both be right. Can they?

So here is the aforementioned "but": it would seem Parker has gotten himself into some serious trouble, to say the least. I saw Nation unaware of the scandal. I found out about it the day after seeing the film, and I like to think I wrote about it objectively. I, however, am not an Academy voter.

I hope the allegations are untrue, for the sake of the women involved, and also for the sake of everyone else who participated in making Nation. Parker may or may not be guilty. His cast and crew, however, should not suffer for his sins. This is an important film. I hope the Academy will judge it fairly.

Cecil B. DeMille

Did you know The Ten Commandments has aired on TV every year since 1973? That's almost my entire lifetime! My family and I would watch it when I was a kid, but as a grown-up, and a film blogger, I can look at it with an appreciation I didn't have then, now that I know who Anne Baxter and Edward G. Robinson and Yvonne DeCarlo and Judith Anderson and Vincent Price and Woody Strode are, along with Chuck Heston and Yul Brynner. I imagine that most people tuning in to ABC to watch aren't film nerds, though. I've talked about how nice it would be if network television would air other holiday-appropriate classic films, but I think for now, it's this, It's a Wonderful Life every Christmas, and that's it. 

Still, the latter is a sentimental tearjerker, while Commandments is anything but - so what keeps this sixty-year old movie on the air every year? Well, I doubt the reasons go much further than the religious aspect, but aside from that, Commandments is an entertaining movie, an epic in the truest sense and a shining example of Old Hollywood at its most lavish - and credit for that has to go to its producer-director, Cecil B. DeMille.

The very name is evocative of classic Hollywood. He was an original gangsta, one of the first notable directors, along with guys like Griffith, Chaplin and Sennett, to shape the industry and provide it with the images that would influence generations to come. A Massachusetts native, he was the son of playwrights, raised in the Episcopal faith, which explains his love of not only Biblical epics, but the moral dramas that characterized much of his silent-era work.

He and his brother William went to acting school, which led to acting, producing and writing work on Broadway with their father's friend, the playwright David Belasco. When the theater didn't pan out financially, DeMille moved west to try his hand in film, throwing his lot in with Jesse Lasky and Samuel Goldwyn to form the Lasky Company, a predecessor for what would eventually become Paramount Pictures.

Ever see the silent Ten Commandments, from 1923? Apparently it was made as the result of a contest in which the fans could pick DeMille's next movie. Somebody suggested doing the Exodus story and that's what DeMille did. I watched a little bit of it for this post - the escape from Egypt and the parting of the Red Sea. The visual effects can't help but look inferior today, but seeing all the Israelite and Egyptian extras, their costumes and props, the legions of animals, and the sets, is still a breathtaking sight, given how long ago it was made. And then there's the whole story of how the sets were buried in the California desert...

DeMille's cinematic relationship with Gloria Swanson is common knowledge. He always put her in glamorous films where she's somebody's wife, with an incredible wardrobe, in a luxurious house. The public ate these films up, but as I said when I wrote about Swanson earlier this year, she had just as great a gift for comedy as for drama, and under DeMille, it was stifled. I can't say I blame her for leaving him. They would reunite years later, of course, in the film Sunset Boulevard, with DeMille playing himself and Swanson portraying an exaggerated, alternate version of herself. Seeing them together and knowing their real-life history gives their scene a veracity, a legitimacy that would be missing from two different actors.

For all of his paternal kindness towards Swanson in Sunset, however, most of the time DeMille made James Cameron look like an introvert: yelling at his cast, demanding they do outrageous things for his movies like wrestle lions and whatnot, and when it came to his Biblical movies, he was on another level altogether, as this Telegraph article describes:

...Every morning DeMille would lead the actors and crew [of The King of Kings] in a solemn recital of the Lord’s Prayer. As far as possible, The King of Kings stuck to the story as it appeared in the New Testament – with one exception. DeMille refused to show Jesus entering Jerusalem on a donkey. That, he felt, was an unacceptable form of transport for the Son of God. 

Along with the rest of the cast, the man playing Jesus – HB Warner – had to sign a contract prohibiting him from doing “anything unbiblical”, not only for the duration of the shoot, but for the next five years. This included playing ball games, or cards, or frequenting night clubs. In fact, Warner, an inveterate skirt-chaser as well as a heavy boozer, had an affair with one of the extras during shooting.

...DeMille’s own behaviour was far more unbiblical than any of his cast's. Married to Constance, a long-suffering bluestocking who refused to let him sleep with her after the birth of their only child – DeMille always referred to her as “Mrs DeMille” – he had a raft of affairs, often running concurrently, with various actresses. It wasn’t until his dotage, he proudly recorded, that he ever spent a Saturday night at home.

Honestly, he sounds more than a little like a religious fanatic. It's not like I had a firm opinion on him before, but reading about him now, he seemed like he had way too much in common with dudes like Fred Phelps and Pat Robertson: judgmental, narrow-minded, secure in their certainty of how they believe the world works. I mean, the man put stone tablets of the literal ten commandments outside government buildings to promote his film. How arrogant is that?

But DeMille was one of the pioneers of American cinema. The history of film would be incomplete without him and his contributions. So once again, you just have to find a way to look past his personal ideology when examining his films - although in DeMille's case, his ideology informed the kind of films he made, so perhaps it's a bit harder to turn a blind eye to his beliefs. I dunno. Regardless, the mark DeMille left on the industry is deep and wide, and not easily forgotten.

Next: Louis B. Mayer

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Previously:
Jack Lemmon   Jean Arthur   Edward G. Robinson
Rita Moreno   Frank Capra   Bernard Herrmann

Joan Blondell   James Dean   Ethel Waters
William Powell   Tod Browning   Edith Head
Joel McCrea   Thelma Ritter   Douglas Fairbanks
Gloria Swanson   Robert Wise   Saul Bass
Ruby Dee   Vincent Price   Shelley Winters

Fred Astaire

'Preacher' and John Wayne

The TCM Summer Under the Stars Blogathon is a month-long event corresponding with the Turner Classic Movies annual presentation, in which each day in August is devoted to the films of a different classic film star. The blogathon is hosted by Journeys in Classic Film. For a complete list of participating blogs, visit the host site.

Preacher was one of the greatest comic book series of the 1990s, acclaimed by a wide variety of pop culture critics and one of the titles that firmly established the fledgling DC Comics imprint Vertigo - home of Sandman, Hellblazer, and many other edgy genre books - into an industry powerhouse that is to comics what HBO is to television. With the recent news that AMC will adapt Preacher into a TV series, it's poised to capture a similar audience as AMC's other series adapted from a comic book, The Walking Dead.

Classic film fans have a reason to be aware of this book as well: John Wayne, the legendary hero of many cinematic Westerns over a career that spanned half a century, plays a prominent role as a character within the comic. I talked about this once before, when I wrote about the movie The Searchers, but now I want to go into a little more detail about how the Duke figures into the book. 

First, though, I feel I should issue a disclaimer: Preacher is absolutely not for everyone. Given the success of recent TV shows such as Mad Men, Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones, which feature morally questionable lead characters (to say the least) and much more adult themes, perhaps mass audiences are ready for a Preacher TV show. We'll find out soon enough - but even so, Preacher really pushes the boundaries. It casts a harsh and sharply critical eye on organized religion in general, and Christianity in particular, and it does not pull any punches. In addition, there are copious amounts of sex and violence and severely twisted imagery. It's not for the squeamish or the faint of heart. Still, if you approach it with an open mind, a willingness to re-examine certain beliefs long held up as truisms, and most importantly of all, a sense of humor, you'll be rewarded with a breathtaking adventure story unlike anything since the likes of Watchmen.

I will attempt to avoid too many spoilers, but it won't always be possible, so if you think you may want to read this someday (maybe before the series airs), consider yourself warned: some key plot points will be brought up here.

Life With Father

Life With Father
TCM viewing

There's a saying that there are no atheists in foxholes. It means that when the stakes are life and death, people are more likely to turn to God for comfort. That might have been true once, back when humans knew little about the world and their place in it, but times have changed, and besides, not everybody worships God in the same way - or at all.

William Powell's character in Life With Father isn't an atheist, but he might be the closest thing to one I've ever seen in a studio-era, Old Hollywood movie which, strictly speaking, isn't that close. It puts him in the ballpark, but he's in the last row of the upper deck in the left field seats. Still, it's surprising how sympathetically he's portrayed.

Powell plays a Teddy Roosevelt-esque patriarch of a turn-of-the-century New York family. Irene Dunne is his devout Episcopalian wife. Powell's character, Clarence Sr., explicitly states that his parents were "freethinkers" (a label often used interchangeably with "atheist") and that they let him decide whether to choose a religious faith or not. He identifies as a Christian, and for the sake of his wife Vinnie (? I guess that's short for something), he attends weekly services with the rest of the family, but he makes it clear that he wishes to worship in his own way, without any undue impositions - such as kneeling.

One of the plot threads in this ensemble comedy involves Vinnie attempting to get her husband baptized so he'll be ensured a seat in heaven. She gets sick at one point, and Clarence, desperate to see his wife get better, entreats God for help, promising he'll get baptized if Vinnie recuperates. (The way he does it is both funny and poignant, bossing God around with his brand of bluster, as if He were one of the many maids Clarence goes through in the story - one more employee not living up to his exacting demands.) She does recover, and he is forced to make good on his promise, though not before a lot of kicking and screaming.

I've never been in a relationship in which this type of incompatibility was a problem, but I think what we should take away from this situation is not anything along the lines of "The Lord worked through Clarence and changed his heart," because at the movie's end, when he's on his way to get baptized, he's still as cantankerous about keeping his promise as he was before, and there's no indication that he has or will become as devout as Vinnie. Rather, I think this speaks more to Clarence's love for his wife - a love that is able to overcome their religious differences.

Clarence and Vinnie seem like a happy couple, despite their occasional bickering, but locked as they are within their societal gender roles, they don't appear to have a great deal in common. The great joke that runs throughout the movie is that he struts and preens around like he's the lord and master of the house, but he's really wrapped around Vinnie's finger, which is consistent with the change of heart he has about getting baptized. 

We don't get a strong sense, however, of where their love for each other comes from. What would make a man like Clarence fall in love with a woman like Vinnie, and make the compromises he has made in his life to accommodate her, such as raising their children within her faith? (We see one of the younger sons practice reciting a catechism, but of course, there's no indication that he understands the deeper, underlying meaning behind the words, nor is any required. I wonder how Clarence feels about that, given his upbringing.) He says something about how lonely he gets without her around, but I suspect there's more to it than that, and I would've like to have seen this explored a little deeper.

So guess who recommended this one? Father is based on a true story, written as a memoir by Clarence Sr.'s son, Clarence Day Jr., which was adapted as a play. Powell earned his third Oscar nomination, and the film led to a short-lived TV show as well. Maybe it was because it was filmed in Technicolor, but the movie reminded me of Meet Me in St. Louis, another color film about a turn-of-the-century family with a red-headed lead character. Indeed, there were lots of moments where I anticipated the characters about to break into song!

The film begins in a unique way, with what looks like a primitive View-Master (anyone else remember those? I used to love playing with them growing up - and they still make them!) showing "slides" of 19th-century New York. No one in the film actually uses this thingamagig, but as a method of easing us into the world of the Day family, it's quite an original touch on director Michael Curtiz' part.

I also loved the way Powell's character is set up. We begin with seeing people on the street talking about Clarence Sr.; we follow the latest in a series of new maids as she's initiated into the Day household, eager to make a good impression on the boss; then we see the family, one at a time, beginning with Dunne's Vinnie. At one point we hear Powell but all we see of him is his shadow at the top of the stairway - very clever! Once all the other family members have taken the "stage," then we finally see Powell.

This may be based on a true story, but I find it hard to believe that the entire Day family were redheads. The maid makes this peculiar hand gesture each time she sees the Day children, redheaded boys all, as if warding off evil spirits. I can only assume that this must have been an aspect of some old-fashioned prejudice. It's never explained. I've known only a few (natural) redheads in my life. The one that sticks out in my mind most is this friend named Michelle that I knew in junior high. Her red hair was short and thick, as I recall. She was very funny, and fairly popular. I have a memory of her singing silly songs from the back of the bus during a school trip. I still think about her every once in awhile.