Les Misérables and Zero Dark Thirty Can Be Deleted from the Rental Queue

-->

Trust Your Instincts with Questionable Movies

Film critic Roger Ebert (R.I.P.) once gave a refreshingly honest answer to the question of whether he thought reviews made any difference. Ebert opined that most films are “review-proof”–including summer blockbusters and those with “hot” stars–in that people will go to see them no matter how bad critics say there are. The critic’s difference comes, Ebert speculated, in films that aren’t hyped or widely distributed. With these, critical praise or damnation can be the difference between a film being seen by a wide audience, or one that won’t even show up on HBO after midnight.

Ebert is right, though I’d amend his remarks to say that reviews also make a difference for films that seem to be aimed at a specific audience and whose hype may or may not match reality. Such films generally open “big,” but the reviews determine if they have staying power. My rule is to trust your instincts with films of that nature. It’s always good to stretch yourself now and then, but there’s no need to sit through something you just don’t care about. (I dodged Kill Bill for the reason that I’ve never seen a film involving martial arts that I like.)

I recently rented two films that made me wish I paid attention to the instinct that made me stay away when they were in the theater. The two are quite different: Les Misérables and Zero Dark Thirty. Of the two, the second is much better, but neither comes close to matching their pre-release hype.

I’m always skeptical of musicals, a genre I tend to either hate (Phantom of the Opera, Sweeney Todd, Momma Mia, Annie) or be astonished by (All That Jazz, Chicago, Moulin Rouge, The Singing Detective). I really didn’t want to see Les Misérables and I was right. It’s not the show’s fault. I saw it in London and was mesmerized by it. Moreover, Victor Hugo’s novel is one of the greatest stories in Western history. (It has inspired adaptations ranging from I am a Fugitive from the Chain Gang to The Fugitive.) Alas, Director Tom Hooper’s 2012 film is as flat as a flounder and as dull as CNN. One problem is that Hooper filled the screen with big names (Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe, Anne Hathaway, and Helena Bonham Carter) rather than singers. The best that can be said is that a few of them didn’t suck, which is more than can be said for Sacha Baron Cohen. (My instincts say never see a film in which he appears.)

Mainly the film doesn’t work because the score is terrible, instant death for a musical. All of the “dialogue” is sung, but in the way you might invent a tune to sing your grocery list. What’s left with is a “big” production–big sets, pull-out feature songs, loads of extras, and dramatic effects. In London, the famed sewer chase was nothing more than swirling spots that evoked light pouring through street grates. In the film, nothing is left to the imagination, but it’s a spectacle that fails to be spectacular. The film made money, but critics were unmoved. They were right, Call Les Mis a swing and a miss.

I was also nervous about Zero Dark Thirty because I thought it might be inflammatory and because I’m sick of the American cult of the warrior. I was wrong on the first score, but dead on the money on the second. It’s the story of a CIA analyst played by Jessica Chastain who has to cut through skepticism and sexism to get leaders ranging from her bureau chief to President Obama to believe that she knows where Osama bin Laden is hiding. She was correct and American troops took him out. Chastain was praised to the hilt and was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar, but there’s nothing special about her performance.

Director Kathryn Bigelow must live a charmed life, though, as she got away with eliding history far more recklessly than much-maligned Michael Moore ever did. She rockets between the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and explosions in Khobar, London, Bagram, and Times Square with such dizzying speed that it’s nearly impossible to establish a credible time line. That’s weird, because the film is needlessly long (157 minutes) and contains many places where she could have sped the pace without sacrificing clarity. I give Bigelow credit for showing that the U.S. does torture its enemies, but for me the key moments were those in which we see Chastain gazing with longing and admiration at troops before and after their mission into Pakistan. Bigelow depicts their mission as a cross between a video game and Black Hawk Down. It’s hard not to see Chastain as Bigelow’s alter ego. Most of what she’s done, including The Hurt Locker (2010), involves macho men (cops, troops, sailors, cyberpunks, FBI agents) and I’m beginning to wonder if she longs to be one of the warriors or simply bed them all. The film’s tone changes to celebratory at the end, thereby negating the torture she critiqued earlier. It’s as if all the terrible things are justified because they helped the US hit its man. In the end, Zero Dark Thirty plays like a teenaged boy’s video fantasy of getting the bad guys. This film made some money, but not a lot. Those who loved it think it failed to spark because Americans are fatigued by the war on terror. Maybe they are, but I think it’s because it’s merely an average film, not a great one. --Rob Weir

The Deep Blue Sea an Underappreciated Gem

-->

THE DEEP BLUE SEA (2011/US release 2012)

Directed by Terence Davis

Film4, 98 minutes, R (brief nudity)

* * * *

Lloyd Sellus, who lives in London, tells me that the prosperous city we see today was nothing like that of his youth. London was repeatedly shelled during World War II and, well into the 1960s, the city was marred by bombed-out neighborhoods and dire slums. The Deep Blue Sea is set in that London. It’s 1950, a time in which scorched ruins stand cheek by jowl with intact buildings and city services are so rudimentary that a bit of heat means bundling up several feet from the “electric fire” into which one feds coins for precious moments of (barely) radiating warmth. If that sounds uncomfortable, the heating was light years ahead of feminism. Women had few options and most British women stoically accepted that. But what if you can’t?

How does a young woman with ambition and strong views, but little money, negotiate such a world? There’s another common British trope–one found in dozens of traditional songs–that of a young lass marrying an older man. That’s the set-up for The Deep Blue Sea, a film based on a 1952 Terence Rattigan play. Hester Collyer (Rachel Weisz) is the young woman in question and she has married very well. She’s actually Lady Collyer, as her husband, Sir William (Simon Russell Beale), is a high court judge. He’s also decades older than she and, as one old folk song puts it, he has no “courage in him” (a pun on a British beer name and a metaphor for lack of virility). William may be a judge, but he’s a milquetoast dominated by an imperious, snooty mother whom Hester finds as pretentious as a queen and as dull as ditchwater. The film unfolds in various flashback sequences, but you could predict what happens when Hester meets young blade Freddie Page (Tom Hiddleston). She spends a lot of time wearing (and shedding) a red dress in the film and her name tips us off. She’s essentially Hawthorne’s Hester Pyrne (The Scarlett Letter) several centuries later and several thousand miles removed.

The movie is a love triad/tragedy and, like Hawthorne’s Hester, Lady Collyer is full of desire but devoid of options other than those that male-dominated society deigns to grant. The Deep Blue Sea is also decidedly a play set to film and will not be everybody’s cup of tea. (Indeed, Netflix audiences rank it low.) Much of it is painterly in tone, the palette being more somber Rembrandt than sunny Monet. It’s also akin to a silent film in places, including the first 7 ½ minutes in which there is no dialogue. For all of that, Weisz won the New York Film Critics’ 2012 Best Actress award and I’d call it well chosen. One should not confuse lack of dialogue with silence, and Weisz is stunning in the manner in which she conveys Hester’s desperation without histrionic speeches. We see her pain etched upon her face and in the languid ways in which she moves. Beale is every bit her equal. He doesn’t need to tell us about the unrequited love burning in his bosom–we can practically see the flames shooting from it. Hiddleston’s Freddie is also done well. All, even the smitten Hester, can see that he is a man-child whose exterior as a former RAF fighter pilot is shopworn veneer that scarcely covers the shallowness beyond the shell. 

The film’s title is drawn from the expression “between the devil and the deep blue sea,” a metaphor for being trapped by two unappealing options. If you were Hester, how would you choose? And what would you do if, suddenly, you couldn’t even opt for one over the other? This is a bleak film, but if you like ones filled with interior angst and have the patience for it, it’s a very good one. Few of us Yanks saw it. More’s the pity.

Rob Weir

Tony McManus New Release Classic in Good and Not-so-Good Ways

TONY McMANUS

Mysterious Boundaries

Compass 7-4612-2

* * *

If you’ve ever heard Tony McManus add a delicate bridge to a fiery Alaisdair Fraser reel, lay it down double time with Quebeçois musicians, or marvel over his jazzy interpretations of Charles Mingus compositions, you already know that there’s not much he can’t do on the guitar. If you need any further proof, check out the artistry on Mysterious Boundaries. This time he puts his stamp on longhair stuff–the classics, not the hippies. This project that grew out of mandolin artist Mike Marshall’s challenge to McManus to learn Bach’s E major “Prelude.” That one’s on the new album, along with two others by Bach for good measure (“Allemande” and “Chaconne”). Among other things, you’ll also hear two from Baroque composer François Couperine, Claudio Monteverdi’s “Nigra Sum,” and “Gnossienne # 1” from avant-garde classical composer Erik Satie. As you can probably anticipate, McManus is technically flawless–his precise fingering of crisp melody notes in perfect resonance with resonating bass. I’d rank Mysterious Boundaries among the year’s top classical releases.

So why three stars instead of five? Call it purely a matter of preference–although I appreciate its complexity, I really don’t like classical music very much. What’s missing from McManus’s new album is what I find lacking in a lot classical music: passion and fire. Or, to be more precise, the way we define passion and fire in our age rather than the Baroque or some other past period. John Renbourn once called Tony McManus the “greatest Celtic guitarist in the world.” I agree, and I’d rather hear McManus raking barred chords up and down the neck, or adding crystalline contrast to pipes, fiddles, and accordions. McManus, of course, has more than earned the right to play whatever pleases him, just as we choose what makes its way into our listening rotations. If you’re a fan of classical music, Mysterious Boundaries will no doubt startle you, but I look forward to a future McManus release with more spit and less polish. --Rob Weir

From Lawrence to Bangladesh to China to ?

-->

Lawrence, MA: 1860. All that has changed as where industrial accidents are most likely to occur. 

On April 24, 2013, a garment factory in the Savar suburb of Dhaka, Bangladesh collapsed. By the time searchers called off rescue efforts on May 13, the body count stood at 1,127, and the exact toll may never be known as bodies have decomposed and no one is certain exactly how many people were in the 8-storey building.

In U.S. media sources, the Dhaka disaster was often compared to the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire in which 146 people died. That analogy is useful in reminding Americans that such horrors are not something confined to “developing nations,” though a much accurate comparison would be to the January 10, 1860 disaster at the Pemberton Mill in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in which 145 workers were crushed and another 600 were trapped until pulled from the rubble. Like the Dhaka incident, the 5-storey Pemberton Mill “pancaked,” meaning that its upper floors fell as slabs, causing the floors below them to stack. In both cases, most of the survivors were trapped in debris pockets that allowed enough space and air to cheat death.

The Triangle disaster occurred due to an overt action–factory supervisors had locked escape doors to prevent theft and perceived malingering; passive negligence was the culprit in Lawrence and Dhaka. Pemberton was just four years old when it fell, the original building having been sold at a loss to George Howe and David Nevins, Sr. when an economic panic drove John Lowell and J. Pickering Putnam to offload it. Howe and Nevins sought to profit from their enterprise by cramming more machinery into the Pemberton. The result was not unlike what happens to a child adding one too many blocks to his tower. The Dhaka collapse was blamed on a crack in the foundation, no doubt occasioned by building four additional floors on an inadequate foundation (without permit or inspection). It didn’t help that the Sana Plaza, where the factory was located, was owned by a local politician, or that American retailers such as Wal-Mart, J. C. Penney, and other had been dawdling for several years over whether to require safety inspections of its suppliers.

Pemberton reminds us that American workers of 153 years ago were akin to those today in places such as Bangladesh; that is, they were disposable. Incidents such as the Triangle fire or the 1913 Ludlow Massacre–in which company guards brutally murdered two dozen Colorado workers–evoke outrage because of their sheer arrogance, but passive negligence has always killed more workers. And perhaps we speak of the passive incidents less because they disturb the very logic of capitalism. Do we, for instance, ask why American clothing is made in Bangladesh? Do we pause to consider that the term “sweatshop” was coined in the United States? Although the practice of sweat-inducing labor is ancient, the idea of subcontracting labor to foul factories in inappropriate dwellings is collateral damage of the Industrial Revolution and the temptation to cut costs by cutting corners is but a mild deviation of capitalist logic.

The price we pay for goods is more than “what the market will bear,” just as “profit” is more complex than what investors reap once they pay costs and wages. These things are said to be constrained by the “invisible hand” of supply and demand within self-regulating free markets. (One should note that modern applications of these principles often depart from Adam Smith’s explanation of how they are supposed to work.) It’s more complicated than this. Numerous wage and price bargains take place long before a product hits retail shelves. Within free markets, all wages and prices must be negotiated. (Socialist command economies do not necessarily have better worker safety records than capitalism, but they do experience fewer wage and price pressures.) Let’s return to the garments made in Lawrence and Dhaka.

A manufacturer making shirts must pay his workers. Wages are among the few things over which he exercises much control. “Price” is more than what consumers pay; manufacturers also face price pressures. Unless the company is a rare vertical integration that owns most of the components necessary for its product, a garment manufacturer must purchase the cloth or raw materials necessary to make fabric. He has minimal control over how much machines cost, the energy rates to power them, or the cost of parts to repair them. He may be able to negotiate transportation and handling costs, but only within a range determined by others. Wholesalers (or the retailer in the case of large firms such as Wal-Mart) tell the manufacturer what they will pay for shirts–take it, or leave it. And so on.

The bottom line is the bottom line. A manufacturer seeking profit looks to cut costs however he can, most often by constraining labor costs and capital investments. Today’s garment worker in Bangladesh was once a Mexican, who was once a South Carolinian, who once worked in Lawrence. In each case, moving production from a higher-waged to a lower-waged setting reduced labor costs. New England’s textile and garment factories began fleeing to the non-unionized South en masse in the 1920s and were pretty much wiped out by the late 1960s. Count on the fact that if labor costs rise in Bangladesh, tomorrow’s garment workers will be located elsewhere.

Manufacturers seek to cut capital costs where they can. The maquiladora phenomenon so common in the early days of the North American Free Trade Agreement was motivated as much by Mexico’s loose environmental standards as its low-wage structure. Numerous profitable American firms found they could increase profit by locating just across the border, where they wouldn’t need expensive air scrubbers or have to worry about what they dumped into landfills and streams. Even consumer safety laws could be avoided. Volkswagen, for instance, continued making the original Beetle in Mexico long after it disappeared from the U.S. market. It made money by eliminating some of the steel in side door panels, frames, and bumpers required under U.S. safety codes. Or maybe you just do as was done first in Lawrence and more recently in Bangladesh–take advantage of lax inspection codes and ignore things such weight capacity and human density. Maybe you slap up the cheapest possible building and hope for the best.

Consumers routinely fail to see what documentary film director Robert Greenwald dubs “the high cost of low price.” It is a price literally paid in blood and, in an age of declining labor unions, globalism, and greed-driven investment, seldom has it been so easy to exact that price. The global business community continually insists that regulation destroys competitiveness and that free trade benefits workers. One need not convert to command-economy socialism to refute this–simply look at the track record of laissez-faire and let the record speak for itself. That past is why societies that place quality of life above either profit or tyranny have “mixed” economies in which both private and public enterprises thrive, and in which sensible regulation is seen as the handmaiden of opportunity. Without such standards the only unknown is who will be tomorrow’s Lawrence or Dhaka.

By the way, on June 2 the real analogy to Triangle occurred when 119 Chinese workers died in a poultry plant. There was just one exit from the building and owners had locked it!

   

Wulu Wulu is Bongos Ikwue's Smooth Triumph

BONGOS IKWUE AND DOUBLE X

Wulu Wulu

Bik 001

* * * *

Nigeria’s Bongos Ikwue isn’t a household name in North America, but if his U.S. debut gets half the airplay it deserves, he will be. His baritone is as soothing as it is smooth, and as a stylist he’s a veritable chameleon. He opens with “Kongo Soldier,” a jaunty Afrobeat celebration of Nigerian peacekeepers returning home from the Congo. It’s one of several sung in the Idoma language of his Nigerian kin. But Ikwue and band Double X don’t dwell in any one place for long; “Kongo Soldier” also evokes reggae and funk. Forget Pan-African; Ikwue is pan-everything. “Agango” is a taste of high-life, the title track is an English-Idoma duet sung with his daughter as if it was South African Township jive, and selections such as “How Long” and “Tell My Girl” are like sexy Barry White soul with substance. He even dons a social worker-meets-folklorist on “Ouno,” the tragic tale of a girl who dies from a snakebite while gathering wood. There are fourteen tracks in all, every one a winner—even one that was Nigerian soap opera theme song (“Cock Crow at Dawn”). At times Ikwue sngs like the very voice of Nigeria; at others he could be a New Yorker working the R & B charts. This is an album that’s joyful, even when the content is sad, and one that’s as musically solid as it is diverse. You name it–blues, light jazz, gospel, country, Caribbean, Afropop–and Ikwue integrates it into his music. That he does so successfully is impressive; that he does so seamlessly is a miracle. Above all there’s Bongos Ikwue’s buttery voice–one whose tones will linger no matter what language he chooses.—Rob Weir

Turntables on Las Ramblas a Generic Bore

NICKODEMUS (Compiler)

Turntables on Las Ramblas

Wonderwheel Recordings

*

False advertising! The title of the new compilation from DJ Nickodemus suggests he’s going to show us how the Catalonians party. Instead it’s just a mix tape of stuff he played on a recent trip to Barcelona, only the last of which actually comes from local artists. The opening track, “Palenque Barcelona” is actually from Colombia’s Los Chicos Altos, whose sweaty, bright brass rhythm section is easily the best thing on the album. Track two, a remix from DJ Vadim of “Flyaway/Mariella” is also catchy, but the rest is as generic as no-name paper products. If this is the future of Hip Hop, House, and Dub, label those genres “days of future past.” Even if I were inclined to drop some Ecstasy and crank up the suds-making machine it would be a hard to get excited about this collection. I’m not and was bored to distraction.

–Rob Weir

Richard Ford's Canada a Quiet Masterpiece

-->

CANADA (2012)

By Richard Ford

Ecco 97800611692048

* * * *

In chaos theory, the “butterfly effect” is a series of nonlinear occurrences set off by an initial action that would be, by most measures, benign and inconsequential, as in the flapping of a butterfly’s wings that begins a chain of events that end with a devastating hurricane. Richard Ford’s latest novel, Canada is such a book. It takes one decision made by one person and looks at the cyclonic and haphazard consequences that occur in three other lives.

Official history holds that the 1950s were an American golden age in which economic opportunities abounded for World War II vets and the families they started. That story is equal parts true and mythic, though Beverly Parsons buys into the PR behind the American Dream hook, line, and sinker. He’s a man’s man, despite his feminine name–an undereducated lad whose wartime fighter pilot heroism was destined to be his only brush with greatness. He’s a likable lout whom everyone likes, though they quickly tire of him once they see there isn’t much lurking beneath the surface. His charm, though, was good enough to woe and wed the birdlike Neeva, a smart, artistic, and sensitive woman. Let’s just call it an unlikely match on all levels, including the fact that she’s under 5 feet and Bev is a hulk, she’s Jewish and he’s not, and Neeva is temperamentally unsuited for motherhood, though she births twins Dell and Berner shortly after Bev is demobilized.

The butterfly effect begins in 1956, when Dell impulsively chucks his Air Force career to prospect for some of that 1950s economic gold. Four years later the Parsons family is eking out a precarious living in Great Falls, Montana, and most of the family income comes from that oldest of Old West activities: cattle rustling. When Bev gets in over his head, he just as impulsively ropes Neeva into a scheme that’s just as bad as his previous ones. What do a pair of barely adolescents do when their parents are in jail? Unleash the butterfly effect. Dell’s sister, Berner, runs away to avoid falling into the clutches of juvenile authorities and we know about the social upheaval looming on the 1960s horizon. Dell, however, stays behind awaiting instructions from a woman his mother told him to trust.

Canada is Dell’s story and he is our 60-year-old omniscient narrator telling his tale from back to front and back again. As the book’s title suggests, Dell makes his way to Canada, but a part so remote that it makes Great Falls seem like New York City. He ends up under the laissez-faire care of Arthur Reminger in the middle of the big sky wheat belt some 500 miles north of Winnipeg. Reminger is also an ex-pat Yank–think a dust-covered Jay Gatsby. Reminger is a dandy who quotes philosophers, but says nothing of himself. He runs a seedy hotel, a whorehouse, and a hunting business; he also harbors a secret or two (or three). Dell’s only constant companion is a Métis man who might or might not be a cross-dresser. That’s unclear, because this and the mystery Dell reveals are related in the non-judgmental voice of the immature boy he was at the time. Dell also takes us forward in time to discuss the varying paths of his and Berner’s lives–all events of which were set in motion by Bev’s decisions. These too are told in a laconic matter-of-fact way.

Ford, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1995 novel Independence Day, has established himself as a major force in American literature. He has done it through a decidedly old-fashioned way: with language. Things happen in Canada, but it is not a plot-driven book. Dell’s voice is mostly descriptive and detached, dialogue is sparse, and the things Dell dwells upon are often small details rather than cataclysmic events. Dell, in fact, is something of a fatalist–he longs for things to work out well, but he is more of a leaf on the stream than an engineer seeking to reroute the water’s course. Canada and the lives therein are expansive in the same way that the Saskatchewan wheat fields are expansive. There is a surface sameness, but how well the endless fields of grain and those who live among ripen depends on outside forces–sometimes sunny, sometimes stormy. And, like the butterfly effect, it is often the smallest of things that precipitate the most dramatic results. Canada is a poignant story masterfully told with words that whisper across the pages. --Rob Weir