Movie Reviews: Replicas

Replicas
directed by Jeffrey Nachmanoff

Replicas is a example of how even a movie that has A-list stars is still subject to story limits. Top stars paired with a great story usually means a great movie. Top stars paired with a mediocre story often means a mediocre movie. And top stars weighed down with a sh***y story usually means a sh***y movie, for example, Replicas. 

It's a mystery that the head producer and studio executives didn't watch this completed movie, pull a sap or baseball bat out of their desk drawer, yell "Come here, come here!" and chase the director and writers of this tripe around the office and through the building, trying to belt them upside the head. 

If I gave someone $30 million dollars and they turned in this crap I would do them bodily harm. I would presume they were deliberately trying to get me fired. If I were the studio head, owner or distributor and learned that an executive spent $30 million of company money on this movie I'd fire them before they left on Friday. I'd call competitors to ensure, as the hoary phrase goes, that the offending person would never work in this town again.

Some say there are only a limited number of stories. I don't know. I do know that there are some common themes which inspire or lurk behind many films or books. We need romantic/physical/sexual love. We want material success. We fear the unknown. We want to live and avoid illness and death. We want to protect our loved ones-whether they're young and naive or old and frail. Those themes are what the viewer is set up to expect will be explored in Replicas. Unfortunately they were ignored or ineptly handled.

Karachi: City of Flies

More people live in the Pakistani city of Karachi than live in the entire states of Michigan and Wisconsin combined. I would not care to reside in a place with so many people and so little space or privacy. 

I would like it even less if through poverty and poor decision making I lived in a place with poor sewage systems and the resulting infestation of flies and disease. I am amazed that Pakistan has allowed the conditions in its largest city to become this horrible. It was evidently more important to the powers that be in Pakistan to have nuclear weapons and flex muscles at their arch rival and neighbor, India, than to build clean safe cities for their citizens. And one could say the same about conditions in some Indian cities. 

That's a shame. One of the most important responsibilities of a state, society and culture is to provide clean drinking water, safe food, protections from disease and vermin and a sense of cleanliness. Without that you don't have anything as far as I am concerned.

KARACHI, Pakistan — First came the floods, as weeks of monsoon rains deluged neighborhoods across Karachi, sending sewage and trash through Pakistan’s largest city. Then came the long power outages, in some cases for 60 hours and counting.

And then it got worse: Karachi is now plagued by swarms of flies. The bugs seem to be everywhere in every neighborhood, bazaar and shop, sparing no one. They’re a bullying force on sidewalks, flying in and out of stores and cars and homes, and settling onto every available surface, from vegetables to people.

Book Reviews: Goodbye Homeboy

Goodbye Homeboy
by Steve Mariotti with Debra Devi

I am always intrigued to find that a person talented in one field is also just as skilled in another. The musician Debra Devi's new book demonstrates that Devi should be just as well known as an author as a musician. I also had a strong sense of six degrees of separation reading this book as the other author and primary subject, Steve Mariotti, is a Michigan native and University of Michigan graduate.

This book is a memoir of a white teacher who helped mostly Black and Latino impoverished students better themselves and improve their lives. Some people will immediately dismiss it on those grounds alone. That would be a mistake, I think. The story is real. This memoir is a good example of how one person can make a difference. It makes the argument that teachers need higher salaries and better social/workplace support.

As mentioned Mariotti is from Michigan and in his younger days (I have no idea of his politics now) was evidently something of a libertarian. The book features amusing stories about Mariotti's meetings--really more run-ins-- with Objectivist philosopher, author and Libertarian inspiration Ayn Rand. For my money Rand was a horrible person both on a personal level and a philosophical one. In her later days she wasn't that different from a cult leader. When Mariotti shared his ideas or activism with Rand, Rand insulted him and dismissed him from her presence. Rand went out of her way to write nasty letters to Mariotti calling him a loser and ordering him to never darken her door again.

I found this darkly amusing only because at the time of Mariotti's interaction with her, Rand was at an advanced age and was certainly not, to put it mildly, any sort of beauty. Rand was a narcissist who apparently found it important to use precious time to attempt to crush a young man's ego. Some people.

Movie Reviews: Brightburn

Brightburn
directed by David Yarovesky

Richard Donner directed Superman and The Omen. Brightburn is a low budget earnest mashup of those movies. It is produced by the people who created Guardians of the Galaxy. Brightburn imagines the origin story of an evil Superman. Evil is a loaded word. There is no such thing as evil in nature.  

The cuckoo who tricks other birds into raising its hatchling, who immediately destroys the host birds' eggs, the wolf who hunts bison to eviscerate and eat them, or (in the film's example) the wasp who lays eggs in or around other insects who either raise wasp young or become food for wasp young are all acting according to their instinct. They can't be reasoned with or trained to do otherwise. Their behavior is preprogrammed. It's who they are and what they do.

Arguably humans can deliberately ignore, short-circuit or  rewrite much of our instinctual programming. Some argue that humans don't even have instinctual programming. I don't know that I would go that far but humans certainly possess a level of free will that is apparently unparalleled for other beings. 

Brightburn depicts events when someone who looks human but isn't reaches a point where his pre-existing programming activates. The results for humans are similar to the caterpillar who discovers that its supposed stomach ache is actually a young wasp eating its way out of the caterpillar. Not good.

Movie Reviews: Greta, Creed2

Greta
directed by Neil Jordan

Greta has the very serious and greatly acclaimed French actress Isabelle Huppert playing the title role in a movie which is almost certainly far beneath her talents but at the same time fits some stereotypical assumptions about older women. 

The camera is not really a friend to Huppert here but no one stays beautiful or on top forever, which perhaps is one of the points this uneven movie was making. All the same I really could do without the constant well lit facial closeups that reveal an unfortunate serious facial hair issue. Yikes! 

Twenty or thirty years ago this sort of movie would have starred Jennifer Jason Leigh and Farrah Fawcett. The story is very familiar. What matters is not the story's lack of originality but whether the writers and actresses involved pull the viewer into the unreality bubble and keep them there. With a few huge glaring exceptions they accomplished this task for most of the film. The exceptions are what made me think the story was uneven.

Frances (Chloe Grace Moretz) is a NYC waitress who is struggling to process grief over her mother's recent death from cancer and what she sees as her father's (Colm Feore) insufficient period of mourning and rapid remarriage and immersion in work. Frances lives with a wealthy stylish roommate Erica (Maika Monroe) who is constantly after Frances to enjoy life and stop moping about. 

Michigan White Woman Calls Police On Black Man For Reckless Eyeballing

American Black men who are present where white people think they shouldn't be are in danger of either being assaulted (if the white person in question happens to be male and/or larger than you) or of being arrested by the police (if the white person in question happens to be female and/or smaller than you).

This was often called "reckless eyeballing" after the southern habit of arresting black men accused of looking at a white woman. Looking a white woman in the eyes, or with with what she thought was sexual interest, or just making her uncomfortable could and did lead to arrest, assaults, beatings, lynchings, murders and pogroms.  

Matt Ingram was among the last convicted under this framework, in a 1951 case made notorious by civil rights activists in North Carolina. A seventeen-year-old white woman named Willa Jean Boswell testified that she was scared when her neighbor Ingram looked at her from a distance of about 65 feet. Prosecutors demanded a conviction of assault with intent to rape that was reduced to assault on a female by the judge, leading to a two-year sentence.

At the appeal in Superior Court, the judge instructed the jury that Ingram was guilty if he used “intentional threats or menace of violence such as looking at a person in a leering manner, that is, in some sort of sly or threatening or suggestive manner…he causes another to reasonably apprehend imminent danger” The all-white jury again returned a conviction, leading to a six-month sentence of labor on the roads, suspended for five years.

Cases like this were why many older Black men I know avoided even transparently consensual and utterly platonic interactions with white women. They considered it imprudent or even dangerous. But times have changed have they not? Well they have and have not. Recently not far from me, this happened:

Royal Oak police have launched an internal investigation after officers stopped and questioned a black man reportedly because a white woman said he looked at her suspiciously. 

Movie Reviews: The Great Race

The Great Race
directed by Blake Edwards

I first saw this film as a child many many years ago. I watched it again recently. It's a slapstick comedy with a side order of The Battle of the Sexes. This film works the same side of the street as films like It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World or later works like Smokey and the Bandit. 

The scene that stuck in my head was when an angry feminist challenges the hero to a dueling match, snidely announcing that she was the Women's International Fencing Champion. Nonplussed the hero accepts the challenge, swiftly defeats her and coolly reminds her that he was the Men's International Fencing Champion.

You would never see a scene like that in any major film today. And if you did, it wouldn't be good natured, as this film is. Men and women can complain and snark all they want but neither is possible without each other. Although the film is humorous it's not quite the anarchic over the top style of The Three Stooges, at least not until the end. So although I enjoyed watching the film for old times' sake it was rarely laugh out loud funny. I had some smiles and a few chuckles though.

By modern standards this film is pretty tame on sex and violence. There is slapstick violence and Natalie Wood in a few (well more than a few) revealing outfits but that's it. At the beginning of the 20th century Leslie Gallant III (Tony Curtis) is a daredevil. He's always dressed in white, supremely confident, polite and protective of women, children and the downtrodden.