At least eleven more movies

[Four sentences each. No spoilers. One entry that may not meet the definition of a movie.]

Little Sister (dir. Zach Clark, 2016). An ex-goth novice nun and her family: war-damaged brother, foundering father, druggie mom (Ally Sheedy). “Are you monsters?” “Yeah, we’re monsters.” The family that’s dysfunctional together, stays together.

*

The Gods of Times Square (dir. Richard Sandler, 1999). A documentary visit to Times Square before it became a theme park, focusing on the varieties of religious experience found there. You know how you see people on the street with posters and tracts and wonder what it would be like to talk to them? Richard Sandler found out. Dig the enigmas.

*

The Intern (dir. Nancy Meyers, 2015). Robert De Niro plays a widowed executive who joins Anne Hathaway’s company as a senior intern and changes lives. (Guys: carry a handkerchief, and tuck in your damn shirt.) With lesser talents this film would be unbearable. But I was happy to discover it to be sweet, gentle, Nora Ephron-like fun.

*

Citizen Jane: Battle for the City (dir. Matt Tyrnauer, 2016). A documentary about Jane Jacobs, the Greenwich Village activist who challenged New York City’s master destroyer Robert Moses — and won. It is astonishing to take in the heartlessness and stupidity with which “urban renewal” proceeded, as if people had no attachment to a neighborhood because they rented. Jacobs believed in neighborhoods and streets (not highways). My favorite line: “I have very little faith in even the kind of person who prefers to take a large overall view of things.”

*

I Am Not Your Negro (dir. Raoul Peck, 2017). The premise: an envisioning of James Baldwin’s Remember This House, a projected memoir of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. But the film is far more wideranging, or diffuse, a kaleidoscope of archival film clips and photographs, over which Samuel L. Jackson speaks passages from Baldwin’s prose. (The Ken Burns Effect.) The best moments are those when we see and hear Baldwin at the Cambridge Union Society and on The Dick Cavett Show: quick, cutting, and preternaturally eloquent.

*

Get Me Roger Stone (dir. Dylan Bank, Daniel DiMauro, Morgan Pehme, 2017). Yes, that Roger Stone. A friend of Roy Cohn and Donald Trump. A cartoon-villain and dandy, with hair plugs and a Richard Nixon tattoo. A major figure in the transformation of American democracy into professional wrestling.

*

The Keepers (dir. Ryan White, 2017). In 1969 Catherine Cesnik, Sister Cathy, a twenty-six-year-old Baltimore nun, was murdered. Decades later, two alumnae of the high school for girls where she taught try to solve the crime. What develops is a story of rampant abuses of power and the failure of religious and civil authorities to protect the vulnerable and pursue justice. Like The Jinx and Making a Murderer, this documentary series trusts that we will be patient enough to watch a narrative slowly take shape, even if its basic facts can be had online in just seconds.

*

The Dark Past (dir. Raoul Maté, 1948). Al Walker (William Holden), an escaped killer, his moll (Nina Foch), and his henchmen take shelter in the lakeside retreat of Andrew Collins (Lee J. Cobb), a psychiatrist and college professor weekending with family and friends. In the course of a long wait for a getaway car, Walker recounts a dream that‘s tormented him since childhood, and Collins decodes its symbols. Mystery solved, and Walker will never need to kill again — though he will be going back to prison. I took perverse glee in this film’s depiction of the professorly life: a shotgun in the office (to take to the lake), an Eames-like second house with two servants.

*

The Chase (dir. Arthur Ripley, 1946). A Horatio Alger story gone wrong: an unemployed veteran (Robert Cummings) returns a lost wallet, gets hired as a driver, and becomes involved with his employer’s wife (Michèle Morgan). The employer (Steve Cochran) is a smooth criminal, and Peter Lorre is his henchman. Genuine suspense, tricky dreams, and exoticism by way of Cuba. Another YouTube find.

*

Big Fish (dir. Tim Burton, 2003). A father and fabulist (younger, Ewan McGregor; older, Albert Finney), and a son (Ewan McGregor) who’s tired of hearing his father’s same old impossible tales. A lovely film about the power of one man’s imagination to create a life story. How wonderful when father and son are able to have meet on that ground, or in that water. Dad’s a big fish.

*

Dominguinhos+ (dir. Felipe Briso, 2014). Not a film, really, but an Internet supplement to a documentary film about the Brazilian accordionist, singer, and composer Dominguinhos (1941–2013). Maya Andrade, Yamanda Costa, Hamilton de Holanda, João Donato, Djavan, Gilberto Gil, Jazz Sinfônica, Elba Ramalho, and other musicians perform for and with Dominguihos. According to a Facebook page for the documentary, these performances are Dominguinhos’s last appearances in a recording studio. Available at YouTube.

*

Yamandu + Dominguinhos (dir. Maurício Valim, 2007). Yamandu Costa (seven-string guitar) and Dominguinhos (accordion), recorded in concert. I love hearing great players play in twos: I don’t think there’s a better way to see musical empathy in action. This performance offers one highlight after another, with endless virtuosity, wit, and joy. Out of print (I think) but available at YouTube.

Related reading
All OCA film posts (Pinboard)
Fourteen films : Thirteen more : Twelve more : Another thirteen more : Another dozen : Yet another dozen : Another twelve : And another twelve : Still another twelve : Oh wait, twelve more : Twelve or thirteen more : Nine, ten, eleven — and that makes twelve : Another twelve : And twelve more : Is there no end? No, there’s another twelve : Wait, there’s another twelve : And twelve more

Dirt Sounds

Jeff Hassay’s Beach Boys House: Dirt Sounds is “a hand-made record containing soil from the house where Brian Wilson grew up in Hawthorne, California.” What’s on the record: an eighteen-minute field recording of Hassay’s visit to the site of the Wilson house (3701 W. 119th Street). The house was demolished in the 1980s during construction of Interstate 105. The recording will be released tomorrow, 100 copies, $100 each.

Related reading
All OCA Beach Boys and Brian Wilson posts (Pinboard)

From the Saturday Stumper

A wonderful clue from today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, 17-Across, six letters: “Poached, but not scrambled.” No spoilers: the answer is in the comments.

Today’s puzzle is by “Anna Stiga”: the name is a not-so-secret pseudonym of Stan Newman, Newsday’s crossword editor. Full explanation here.

Some rocks, some clouds

[Nancy, June 3, 1950.]

“Some rocks” is an abiding preoccupation of these pages.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)
Some more “some rocks”

Overheard

[At our favorite Thai restaurant. Tiny House Hunters was on the TV.]

“Where is the shower?”

We didn’t find out if the hunters found one.

Related reading
All OCA “overheard” posts (Pinboard)
The tiny-house reach (Small, but not that small)

Pinboard buys Delicious

The social bookmarking service Pinboard has purchased its predecessor Delicious. The story is here, at the Pinboard blog. Pinboard is the work of Maciej Cegłowski. Delicious was formerly owned by Yahoo. How the mighty have fallen.

I have been a happy Pinboard user since December 2010, when the service required a one-time payment of $7.01 (the price rose by small amounts as more people signed up). Pinboard now costs a reasonable $11 a year. I have two accounts, one to bookmark pages for later use, and one that serves as an index of sorts to Orange Crate Art.

A related post
Goodbye, Delicious

"Always standing around everywhere and butting in”

Mr. Wiscott, a medium, attempts to speak with a brewery owner:


Alfred Döblin, “Traffic with the Beyond.” 1948. Bright Magic: Stories, trans. Damion Searls (New York: New York Review Books, 2016).

Also from this book
“He knows that he is a thinker”

Goodbye to Paris

Bill McKibben, writing in The New York Times:

It’s a stupid and reckless decision — our nation’s dumbest act since launching the war in Iraq. But it’s not stupid and reckless in the normal way. Instead, it amounts to a thorough repudiation of two of the civilizing forces on our planet: diplomacy and science. It undercuts our civilization’s chances of surviving global warming, but it also undercuts our civilization itself, since that civilization rests in large measure on those two forces. . . .

And so we will resist. As the federal government reneges on its commitments, the rest of us will double down on ours. Already cities and states are committing to 100 percent renewable energy. Atlanta was the latest to take the step. We will make sure that every leader who hesitates and waffles on climate will be seen as another Donald Trump, and we will make sure that history will judge that name with the contempt it deserves. Not just because he didn’t take climate change seriously, but also because he didn’t take civilization seriously.

Junk mail

A piece of junk mail arrived in the box this morning, from a sender “Named a World’s Most Ethical Company® by the Ethisphere Institute.” The who? So I did a little reading.

“Don’t fucking kill yourself”

Fresca wrote about a YouTube video about not killing yourself. The video’s title: “Using a safety plan to not kill yourself when the world is a shitshow!” Here’s Fresca’s post, with Carey Callahan’s video embedded. Callahan’s message, which comes with many practical suggestions: “Take care of yourself. Don’t fucking kill yourself.”

The post and the video reminded me of a passage from Tad Friend’s 2003 New Yorker article “Jumpers,” about suicide and the Golden Gate Bridge:

Survivors often regret their decision in midair, if not before. Ken Baldwin and Kevin Hines both say they hurdled over the railing, afraid that if they stood on the chord [a thirty-two-inch-wide beam] they might lose their courage. Baldwin was twenty-eight and severely depressed on the August day in 1985 when he told his wife not to expect him home till late. “I wanted to disappear,” he said. “So the Golden Gate was the spot. I’d heard that the water just sweeps you under.” On the bridge, Baldwin counted to ten and stayed frozen. He counted to ten again, then vaulted over. “I still see my hands coming off the railing,” he said. As he crossed the chord in flight, Baldwin recalls, “I instantly realized that everything in my life that I’d thought was unfixable was totally fixable — except for having just jumped.”

Kevin Hines was eighteen when he took a municipal bus to the bridge one day in September, 2000. After treating himself to a last meal of Starbursts and Skittles, he paced back and forth and sobbed on the bridge walkway for half an hour. No one asked him what was wrong. A beautiful German tourist approached, handed him her camera, and asked him to take her picture, which he did. “I was like, ‘Fuck this, nobody cares,’ “ he told me. “So I jumped.” But after he crossed the chord, he recalls, “My first thought was What the hell did I just do? I don’t want to die.”

[No thoughts of suicide here, or at Fresca’s blog. But one never knows what might be helpful to someone else, or when.]