Roger O Green

Movie review: Leave No Trace

Leave No Trace will receive Oscar consideration.

Leave No Trace, which I saw by myself at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany, is Debra Granik and Anne Rosellini’s screen adaptation of Peter Rock’s novel My Abandonment, directed by Granik, and produced by Rosellini.

Will (Ben Foster) and his teenage daughter Tom (Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie) live in the forests near Portland, OR. They are extremely resourceful, collecting rainwater to drink, using tools efficiently, and hiding away their presence when necessary. Chess is their game of preference.

When their life choice is crushed, they are put into social services system separately. Eventually, they are reunited and put into their new surroundings, but it is a challenge. Fitting into this iteration of the world seems beyond reach.

Leave No Trace is a beautiful, poignant American film. It is, I am told, quite different from Winter’s Bone (2010), Jennifer Lawrence’s breakout role in another Granik/ Rosellini collaboration. Thomasin McKenzie, who is being compared to Lawrence by critics, is an 18-year-old from an acting family in Wellington, New Zealand. Her real voice is very Kiwi, but there’s no evidence of that accent in the performance.

There is very good use of music in this movie, most notably Michael Hurley and Marisa Anderson singing O My Stars. And animals, at pivotal points in the story. Nothing in this seems extraneous. Every choice, including the lack of dialogue early on, seem deliberate methods of advancing the plot.

The film may lead the viewer to questions the nature of society and where the line is between the rights of the individual and the presumed common good. This is largely a gentle, non-violent, yet heartbreaking film which should be experienced, preferably in a theater rather than on a small screen.

Odd, but this is the second father-and-daughter saga I’ve seen this summer, after Hearts Go Loud, and I’m looking forward to yet another one very soon, Eighth Grade, the trailer for which I almost know by heart.

Music throwback: 1-2-3 by Len Barry

We battled with them for two years and had a ton of legal bills,

1-2-3 Len Barry was born Leonard Borisoff in Philadelphia on 12 June 1942. He was the lead singer of a group called the Dovells in the early 1960s, which had a couple Top 5 hits, before he went out on his own.

1-2-3 was Barry’s biggest solo hit, co-written by John Madara and David White, who helped pen songs such as You Don’t Own Me and At the Hop. It got to #2 on the November 20, 1965 Billboard pop charts, kept out of the #1 slot by I Hear a Symphony by the Supremes.

Speaking of whom, as Madera explains:

“In 1965… we were sued by Motown during the period when Berry Gordy was suing anyone whose records sounded like a Motown record… [he was] saying that ‘1-2-3’ was taken from a B-Side of a Supremes record called ‘Ask Any Girl.’ The only similarity between the two songs are the first three notes where the Supremes sang ‘Ask Any Girl’ and Lenny sang ‘1-2-3’…

“Motown kept us in court, tying up all of our writers’ royalties, production royalties, and publishing royalties, and threatened to sue us on the follow-up to ‘1-2-3,’ which was ‘Like A Baby.’ So after battling with them for two years and having a ton of legal bills, we made a settlement with Motown, giving them 15% of the writers’ and publishers’ share.

“We never heard ‘Ask Any Girl.’ The only influence for making ‘1-2-3’ was to make a ballad with a beat. And the sound of ‘1-2-3’ was definitely the sound of the era. Listen to ‘The In-Crowd’ – that’s not the Motown Sound, that’s the sound of the era – and ‘1-2-3′ definitely had a beat!”

I’ve heard both those songs for decades and still don’t hear the connection, except for those first three notes, used in Till There Was You and countless other songs.

I was a sucker for numbers songs, so I used to replace the subsequent lyrics of 1-2-3 with even MORE numbers, up to 21; it DOES work:

1-2-3 (1-2-3)
Oh, how elementary (4-5-6-7-8-9)
it’s gonna be (10-11-12)
C’mon, let’s fall in love, (13-14-15)
it’s easy (16)
(It’s so easy)(17-18)
Like takin’ candy (19-20)
from a baby (21)

Listen to :

Bristol Stomp– the Dovells (#2 pop for two weeks, #7 soul in 1961)
You Can’t Sit Down – the Dovells (#3 pop, #10 soul in 1963)

Ask Any Girl – the Supremes (B-side of Baby Love in 1964)

1-2-3 – Len Barry (#2 pop, despite Madera’s recollection, #11 soul, in 1965)
Like A Baby – Len Barry (#27 in 1966)

This post is the fault of Dustbury.

Movie review: Three Identical Strangers

Sometimes they could complete each other’s sentences.

The documentary Three Identical Strangers starts off with a fun re-enactment. In 1980, on Bobby Shafran’s first day at Sullivan County (NY) Community College, about 110 miles from Long Island, he’s being high-fived and hugged by people who are total strangers. This leads to the discovery that he has a twin brother, Eddy Galland.

David Kellman sees the news, recognizes himself in the pair, and soon there is a wonderful reunion 19 years later of the three boys born July 12, 1961. This is a story so unlikely that, if it were a piece of fiction, it might well have been rejected as absurd. The brothers already had many of the same affectations; they all smoked Marlboro cigarettes, wrestled in high school, and claimed similar tastes in the kind of women they were attracted to.

As they started dressing alike, their infectious personalities and toothy grins made them talk show fodder. (I’m fairly sure I saw them on NBC’s TODAY show at the time). These boys instantly loved one another. Sometimes they could complete each other’s sentences. They enjoyed their modicum of fame. They even appeared in a cameo with Madonna in the movie Suddenly Seeking Susan.

Once the initial exhilaration passed, the adoptive parents started asking questions. To say more here would be giving away too much. I will say that the movie addresses the ethics of adoptions and asks, though not fully addresses – because it can’t really be answered – the question of nature versus nurture in childhood development.

Tim Wardle is a well-regarded British documentary director. He had a tough time negotiating through the sometimes raw emotions, not only the boys and their adoptive parents, but some of the more peripheral characters.

Of course, I needed to know how frequently one will find identical siblings. “Only about one in 250 births is identical twins, according to a 2003 study in the Journal of Biosocial Science. Identical triplets are even less common, occurring about 20 to 30 times per 1 million birth.”

The movie Three Identical Strangers would be well worth your while.

Lydster: Hammering aluminum foil balls shiny?

It explains the how of the phenomenon, if not the why.

This spring, the Daughter was in the kitchen, took some aluminum foil, crumpled it up into a ball, and started hammering it until it became shiny.

For some of you “with it” folks, you would have understood what she was doing. My wife and I, on the other hand, were totally puzzled. Now the Daughter EXPECTED her mother NOT to know about what trendy things that going on in the world.

She was surprised and disappointed, though, that her father had no idea why she was pounding a foil ball. Because I was busy/tired, I didn’t even try to find out for well over a month.

One day while I was watching one of those four-minute vlogbrothers videos, there was, on the sidebar, a 2015 TEDx Indianapolis video Paper towns and why learning is awesome by vlogbrother/author John Green.

“Some of us learn best in the classroom and some of us … well, we don’t. But we still love to learn, to find out new things about the world and challenge our minds. We just need to find the right place to do it, and the right community to learn with.”

Somehow, it finally occurred to me that I could – [shock] – search “aluminum ball polishing” on YouTube. There are 17,300 videos, some with hundreds of thousands, or even millions of hits.

Mirror-Polished Japanese Foil Ball Challenge Crushed in a Hydraulic Press-What’s Inside? has over 18 million views. The article People in Japan Are Polishing Ordinary Aluminum Foil Balls Into Shiny Orbs explains the how of the phenomenon, if not the why. Still, I have learned something else new from my daughter. I’m not sure of its applicability.

Except that there’s something to be said for web searching. I don’t do it much without a specific purpose. Also, now that I DO know why the Daughter was hammering aluminum, I’m tentatively back in her good graces on the “cool dad” meter. It could change tomorrow, though, and it probably will.

Movie review: Sorry To Bother You

Steve Bissette described Sorry To Bother You as a “brilliant, ramshackle dystopian sf-comedy”

I’ve been trying, and failing, to figure out how to describe Sorry To Bother You, written and directed by Boots Riley in his feature film debut. When I was telling a colleague about it, I made the the sign and sound of my head exploding.

In a hyperbolic version of Oakland, CA, black telemarketer Cassius “Cash” Green (Lakeith Stanfield) is working the phones. He and his girlfriend Detroit (Tessa Thompson), a performance artist, are living in the garage of his uncle Sergio (Terry Crews), who is in serious arrears on the mortgage.

Thanks to advice from co-worker Langston (Danny Glover), Cash discovers the key to professional success and enters the secret world of “powercalling” that means big bucks. But where will he stand when his friends and co-workers such as Salvador (Jermaine Fowler), Squeeze (Steven Yeun), and Cassius’ girlfriend Detroit organize in protest of corporate oppression?

Sorry To Bother You also stars Armie Hammer and Omari Hardwick as guys behind that golden elevator, and Rosario Dawson, Patton Oswalt and David Cross, whom you only hear.

My friend Steve Bissette, who thought it was one of the best films of the year, described it as a “brilliant, ramshackle dystopian sf-comedy” that is “inventive, raucous, antic, and candidly bleak.” It was at times LOL funny. Yet it also felt like only a somewhat exaggerated state of the downside of American capitalism.

Critic Michael Phillips calls it “a provocative, serious, ridiculous, screwy concoction about whiteface, cultural code-switching, African-American identities and twisted new forms of wage slavery, beyond previously known ethical limits.” A couple other critics mentioned Mel Brooks, and I can relate to that sensibility here as well.

Ultimately, there is no way to explain this film further without massive spoilers. Sorry To Bother You is rated R for “pervasive language, some strong sexual content, graphic nudity, and drug use,” most of which made sense in the arc of story line. I liked it a great deal.

A bit of trivia: “The movie was filmed in Oakland, California during the summer of 2017 concurrently with Blindspotting (2018).”