My birthday is this week, and my wife is taking me out to dinner. We’re meeting with our financial advisor. I’m seeing my cardiologist. We’re picking up our daughter from college and returning her a week later. I’m getting my teeth cleaned. We’re going to see a play. Plus the usual – choir rehearsal, church, ZOOM with my sisters, book reviews, and blogging.
2. Did you ever have or go to sleepovers as a kid?
Not that I can specifically recall. It’s possible.
3. Which books would you pick for a book binge?
Any number of the ones I’ve purchased but have not read. We Who Believe in Freedom- Alice Green. Caste – Isabel Wilkerson. The Mask Is Off – Dr. Mildred Smoth-Chang. I’ve got tons of them.
4. What features do you love most about your home?
The built-in bookcases in the room I am presently sitting in.
5. Favorite songs from tv, movies, and video games
I like story songs for TV themes, from The Beverly Hillbillies to Cheers. Mike Post created a lot of instrumental themes for shows I watched, such as The Rockford Files, Hill Street Blues, and Law and Order. I also liked the Earle Hagen themes such as The Dick Van Dyke Show and the Andy Griffith Show.
I have over 100 soundtracks, some from movies I’ve never seen. Often a song’s power comes from where it happens in the film; the first that came to mind was the title song from the movie Philadelphia by Neil Young, which plays near the end.
9. Do you prefer to relax or go on adventures during vacation?
I like to sightsee.
10. How do you prevent burnout?
Turn off my phone.
11. Which colors look best on you?
I look marvelous in everything, dahlink. Actually, I have no idea, but my wife often says, “That shirt looks nice on you,” and it can be a variety of shades.
12. Do you like brunch?
What’s not to like?
13. Trends you showed up late for
Just about everything. I am a late adapter to virtually every technological innovation. My first iPhone I got in 2020 or 2021. I seldom watch streaming services. My landline still exists.
14. What’s your favorite drink order?
My first drink was a Tom Collins. In general, I drink white wine if I’m consuming alcohol.
15. Which clothes or accessories make you feel most confident?
A hat keeps me warm in the winter and protects me from sunstroke the rest of the year.
The movie Women Talking should get a truth-in-advertising seal. It really is about women talking. It’s what they are talking about that’s noteworthy.
The narrative is based on Miriam Toews’s 2018 novel of the same name. In turn, it was “based on a true story of vicious serial rapes in an insular, ultraconservative Mennonite community in Bolivia.” The geography in the movie is not stated, but there is a specific reference to the 2010 Census, which suggests rural locale in the United States, though the speech pattern suggests Canada, where it was filmed.
In the real-life Bolivian community, “from 2005 to 2009, nine men in the Manitoba Colony, using livestock tranquilizers, drugged female victims ranging in age from three to sixty and violently raped them at night. When the girls and women awoke bruised and covered in blood, the men of the colony dismissed their reports as ‘wild female imagination’–even when they became pregnant from the assaults–or punishments from God or by demons for their supposed sins.”
Some of this narrative is incorporated in the movie, briefly shown in flashback. The men in the community are in town, but they are returning in 48 hours. What should the women do? They vote to choose among three options: stay and do nothing, stay and fight, or leave the colony. And since none of them can read or write,the tally sheet required pictures to insure that the women knew their choices.
The latter two options tied for the lead, so three families of women are appointed to meet in a barn and decide for the collective. And in doing so, figure out, e.g., what “stay and fight” would mean.
More than rhetoric
I know Women Talking could be perceived as another #MeToo movie, and I have seen reviews that suggest just that, which I think is a bit surfacy. Here’s a piece of one review: “WOMEN TALKING is a movie for people who think ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ is too subtle an allegory about women being suppressed by the patriarchy.” No; just no.
What intrigued me was how the conversation was framed by their faith in God. Should the men be forgiven? What kind of God is there that would have the women do so? Another review summary I hated: “For all talk of a new order, Women Talking is eager to reassure us of its lack of interest in really rocking the boat, even outright including the phrase ‘not all men.'” These women are are doing a Brand New Thing, and they’re figuring it out, not coming out the gate with the proper framework.
The cast is stellar. It includes Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, Frances McDormand, Judith Ivey, and Ben Whishaw. Sarah Polley, the director and writer of the screenplay, made a deliberate choice of the not-quite-black-and-white motif, perhaps to echo the ambivalence of their choices and the consequences of same.
Incidentally, I really liked Polley’s 2013 documentary Stories We Tell.
My wife and I saw Women Talking at a Saturday matinee in mid-February. There were about a dozen and half people in the theater; there was at least one other male in the audience.
Pictured: Sydney Joyner, Caitie Grady, Rebecca Jade, Joy Yandell, Janaya Jones & Angela Chatelain Avila.
Manufactured outrage: phneh and giving a horse an apple and Super Bowl edition
How Poland, Long Leery of Foreigners, Opened Up to Ukrainians
SCOTUS will consider whether tech giants can be sued for allegedly aiding ISIS terrorism. You need to know about Section 230, the most important law for online speech.
MTG’s dream of a “national divorce” deserves a serious response
Masks Revisited. Despite common misreporting, a recent Cochrane review, limited in scope and problematic methodology, does NOT show that masks do not work. Check out this
Now I Know: The Crows Didn’t Mind Dick Cheney, Though and When Bees Get Too Buzzed and The Worst House Money Can’t Buy and The Secret Writer’s Secret and The TV News Program’s Key Mistake and Why This Reindeer Looks Like It Has a Lightsaber Hat
Culcha
BAFTA Awards. Two days after the awards came out, someone told me several of their friends posted online that the Oscars had taken place. Nah, it was lost in translation; probably, the friends missed that it was the so-called “British Oscars”
The book “Side by Side in Eternity:” by James Robert McNeil and J. Eric Smith is now available. I have my copy. There’s a chapter about Apollo 1, one defining event growing up.
The six-year making of the Wait But Why book What’s Our Problem: a self-help book for societies
Ana de Armas Thinks Social Media Has Ruined the “Concept of a Movie Star.” “For the most part, we’ve done that to ourselves — nobody’s keeping anything from anyone anymore.” This has been self-evident for a long while.
Milestones
60 of 23 and Michael Jordan donates $10M to Make-A-Wish for 60th birthday
Rebecca Jade, the first niece, was nominated for FIVE San Diego Music Awards, which will be taking place on April 25. You can VOTE EVERY DAY. Vote in category 20, Best R&B, Funk, or Soul Song for Show Me; category 21, Best R&B, Funk, or Soul Album, for A Shade of Jade (available for $9); category 25, Artist of the Year; category 26, Song of the Year; and category 27, Album of the Year. You could also vote in category 4, Best Jazz or Blues Album, for Peter Sprague Plays the Beatles – Day Tripper, featuring vocals by Rebecca Jade, which one can download for $10.
Rebecca ALSO appears in a musical called RESPECT about the great music of the female singers of the 1960s at Lamb’s Player Theater in San Diego through April 9. (Picture above.)
The current iteration of the film All Quiet On The Western Front is the third World War I film I’ve seen in the last four years. I watched 1917 in January 2020, and the documentary footage of They Shall Not Grow Old a year earlier.
There’s a bit of surface similarity between Grow Old and All Quiet. In each case, the potential recruits, from Britain and Germany, respectively, are led to believe that going off to war will be an adventure. They’re so cheerful marching off to battle. But they soon discover they’re mired in a slog of trench warfare.
All Quiet is a remake of the 1930 film of the same name, which I have never seen. The original won the Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director, Lewis Milestone, and was nominated in two other categories. The new film is up for nine Oscars, including Best Picture.
The characters even share the same names. Felix Kammerer plays Paul, the Lew Ayres role. Albrecht Schuch is Kat, played initially by Louis Wolheim. I did not know there was also a 1979 TV movie with Richard Thomas and Ernest Borgnine.
At some level, the charge by the soldiers, which happens thrice, looks almost exactly the same in the new film. Perhaps it’s to show what is explained in the epilogue, that tens of thousands of soldiers were killed to gain or lose only a few hundred meters of territory. This caused me slight confusion for a time.
Recycled
Even in the “quiet” moments, one sees the horrors. The uniforms are stripped from the dead soldiers and shipped to a factory where women sew up the holes created by bullets and bayonets. Often, the names of the previous wearer have not been removed until after the recruit notices the old nametag.
Still, nothing showed the utter pointless insanity of war more than a segment near the end.
The new All Quiet On The Western Front is an excellent movie worthy of its BAFTA win. But it inevitably has lots of wartime violence, some of it up close. Occasionally, the participants consider their actions’ emotional and moral consequences. Then there’s the next skirmish, and a soldier has no time to think.
The eyes. The image that will linger in my mind is often the blue eyes of the living and the dead on faces caked with mud.
When I went to see The Whale at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany with my wife in late January, I was concerned.
Would the film be fatphobic? I don’t believe it was. This is a man named Charlie (Brendan Fraser) who is in pain, and food is his drug of choice. At some level, I understand that. So the reviewers that complain that his eating disorder wasn’t adequately explained confound me.
Yes, the movie was claustrophobic. Long before reading the end credits, I knew the piece had to have been based on a play that Samuel D. Hunter wrote. For me, this works in its favor.
Charlie has closed himself off. He teaches an online English class, but his video on the laptop “doesn’t work.” His only friend, Liz (Hong Chau) is alternatingly irritated with him and understanding. She’s linked to him in another way.
He misses his daughter, who he had left along with his wife when the girl was just eight. The now-seventeen-year-old Ellie (Sadie Sink) unexpectedly shows up at his house against the express wishes of her mother. She plays mind games with both Charlie and the young evangelist Thomas (Ty Simkins), who keeps showing up at Charlie’s place.
Much has been made of Fraser’s Oscar-nominated performance, and for a good reason. Even those who don’t like the film praise the actor. Chau is also nominated. The performance of Samatha Morton as Mary, Charlie’s ex and Ellie’s mom, really jumped out for me..
Action
Director Darren Aronofsky is the source of much of mixed feelings about the movie. One critic said The Whale didn’t need the director’s “heavy darkness to be effective.” I thought it was appropriate.
Another said the adaptation was “empathetic and soulful,” which I agree with. A third: the “questions about its purpose – why is this difficult movie about a very difficult man even made – unanswered.” I don’t understand that observation.
Aronofsky directed one of the best performances I’ve ever seen. In Requiem for a Dream (2000), Ellen Burstyn was nominated for Best Actress. She should have won but lost out to Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich, who was fine in that picture.
While I saw The Whale at a cinema, I think it could survive being streamed more than, say, the current Avatar film.
The Sunday Stealing prompt this week is Penpals, Part 1, which, for some reason, reminded me of Reasons To Be Cheerful, Part 3 by Ian Dury and The Blockheads. 
The 
The current iteration of the 
When I went to see The Whale at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany with my wife in late January, I was concerned.