Catching Up!

As many of you know, my secret identity is that of a mild-mannered community college instructor. A full semester load for me is 5 classes in each of the fall and spring semesters, plus two in the abbreviated summer session. That's a lot of teaching, reading, and grading and things get odd around midterm week and finals week. All of that is to explain my recent state of radio silence. I should be more active now that spring is over and summer is ready to launch, but be kind - the Babylon 5 book project has a summer deadline for the complete manuscript to get to our intrepid editor, so the summer is not exactly a time of restful ease.

Not complaining, mind you - just trying to explain How Things Are at the moment.

So let me first catch you up on the Babylon 5 progress. We got a slight extension of Season 4 due to my extreme exam insanity, and that should be in within the next ten days. And wow - do I LOVE Season 4! So much comes full circle. And Susan Ivanova is my spirit animal for this - I think she's been waiting a very long time to say this . . .

On a much quieter note, I recently watched two Academy Award-nominated films that I had missed. (Living in a small town, many don't quite make it here.) Both Carol and Brooklyn are set in the 1950s, but in very different worlds. Carol is taken from The Price of Salt, which is a Patricia Highsmith novel (she of the "Mr. Ripley" series). It deals with a relationship that is wildly out of balance, yet we cheer for things to somehow work out. Amazing performances from Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara, with strong support from Sarah Paulson, taking a break from wowing audiences on Tim Minear's American Horror Story. It's a slow-building movie so you must permit it to take its time, but it's certainly worth the ride.

Brooklyn is, quite simply, lovely. Saoirse Ronan is a young Irish girl who leaves home behind to come to America in the 1950s. At that time, Brooklyn was predominantly Irish but it's still an intimidating city for a young country lass. Eilis is all alone, although she has a decent rooming house (all girls, dinner on the table at six, and certainly no shenanigans!) and a job in a fancy department store. As she becomes more comfortable in this world, her wardrobe changes to brighter, more confident colors. She falls in love with a Nice Boy (with a hysterical little brother!), but is torn between her old life and her new one. Truly a wonderful movie and one I'll watch again.

And, of course, there's Captain America: Civil War. So much has been written about this already, and I'm so late to the party that I'll just say this - great popcorn fun. There are some mighty big plot holes in this and I'm still convinced that Tony Stark's genius is not excuse for him behaving like a jackass so much of the time, but the Russo Bros. did a fine job here. It's basically the Avengers movie I wish Age of Ultron had been. So yes, it's more Avengers than Cap, but hey - Hawkeye gets some good lines. Go. Enjoy.

Oscar Contenders

The Oscar nominations have been made and I'm not ready to make my picks just yet.  See, one of the boundaries we put on Meet Me at the Movies is that we try to limit ourselves to films that are playing locally.  One of the downsides of that is that our local Carmike, although it has ten screens (which isn't bad at all for a town of 21,000), limits itself to movies that will pack 'em in and often, those aren't the Best Picture nominees.  It's a smart business decision - despite rising ticket prices, theaters make their money on concessions, not tickets.  Remember that they have to pay to get the movies to show, so it makes an odd sort of sense that A Madea Christmas has been playing for weeks, but we haven't gotten most of the picks for Best Picture.

Let me put it another way.  Hollywood worships money and money often comes from big, loud, bangbangbang movies.  (See Exhibit 1 - Michael Bay.)  Yet Hollywood wants to think that it spends its time Making Art, so studios have offshoot production companies that make and market the smaller, more thoughtful or quirky "prestige pictures" that crop up during awards season and cause many Americans to say, "Huh?  Never even heard of that one."  In my case, it's often, "I heard of that one, but I haven't had a chance to see it unless I want to drive an hour."  It'd be nice if companies like Carmike would throw me a bone and run the nominees on even a single screen in a marathon weekend session, but, to be fair, that's gonna cost them money, so I'm not holding my breath.  And Meet Me at the Movies isn't a large enough show to bring us to the attention of the studios, so we're not getting advance screening copies.  Yet.

So I left town.

Johnson City, TN, where Ensley is finishing graduate school, is large enough that most prestige pictures get at least a short run here.  Now that the Oscar nominations are out, a few are on their second pass through.  So we mapped things out and, over two days, we hit three of the Best Picture contenders that we hadn't seen.  I still haven't seen them all, so I'm not ready yet to make my picks, but I'm closer than I was a week ago.  (Not that the Academy always gets it right.  I'm looking at you, Shakespeare in Love, who inexplicably won Best Picture over Saving Private Ryan.)

First up was Dallas Buyers Club.  This movie took years - like 20 of them - to see the light of day.  Based on true events (I'm always suspicious of that, and you can fact-check a few things for yourself), Buyers Club uses the real-life character of Ron Woodroof (played by Matthew McConaughey) to remind us of just how scary things were at the start of the AIDS epidemic which was only 30 years ago.  From Modern Family on TV to laws viewing gay marriage as, well, marriage, the tide is turning, despite the last gasp of the hidebound and frightened among us, and it's easy to forget the raw fear and loathing that came with the first reports of AIDS.  Hatred and vitriol spewed forth and a medical condition was seen as irrefutable proof of God's Holy Wrath.  Kept out of clinical trials for AZT, one of the first drugs to show promise in treating AIDS, Woodroof used the skills he'd developed as a small-time scammer to get drugs to sick people.  Buyers Club says some powerful things about Big Pharma, regulations v. common sense, and, at its heart, the film delivers a knock-you-down message of compassion.  Woodroof is looking out for himself, sure - but he also finds himself connected to other people for the first time in just about forever. Matthew McConaughey uses the swagger and bluster that he's often utilized in roles to a deeper effect here, and Jared Leto as "Rayon" well deserves his Oscar nod as well.  A great film, well worth the watching - but it can wait for DVD, as it might be a little hard to find.

Next was the Spike Jonze slightly sci-fi effort Her.  I liked this movie, but didn't quite love it, and that puts me on the outside of most critics.  That's okay.  I want to stress - Her is a wonderful effort and Joaquin Phoenix richly deserves his nomination, since he spends much of the movie acting against nothing.  Her explores questions about relationships and it does that very, very well.  Theodore is at the end of his divorce from his wife and lives very much alone.  He upgrades his computer operating system to a system that is marketed to be specifically designed just for him and one thing leads to another until he is deeply involved with this OS, who names herself Samantha.  I think the problem for me was that Phoenix's character Theodore shows so much awareness of the subtle signals people give off, as well as spending his life communicating for people who can't communicate for themselves that I didn't quite buy (almost, but not quite) his block-headedness regarding his own relationships.  Maybe it's a case of "physician, heal thyself" but I never quite got over that.  Also, there's a nasty power imbalance here - Theo can access Samantha whenever he wants; Samantha does not have that same freedom.  That also means that, at any time, Theo could simply turn Samantha off with no consequences - she's just a machine.  Or is she?  Her asks some very interesting questions and it's worth watching, but I'm one of the few who will tell you to wait for the DVD.

Last was the Steve McQueen (British, not the "King of Cool" who died in 1980) directed 12 Years a Slave.  Oh, my dear and holy God.  Run - do not walk - to see this movie!  Starring Chiwetel Ejiofor (learn the name; you'll hear it Oscar night) as Solomon Northup, who was a free black man living in New York and making a fine living as a musician until he was tricked into traveling to Washington, where he was drugged and sold into slavery.  America has never been comfortable with this part of our history and 12 Years will make you squirm.  Good.  Slavery is a despicable system and much of the South's economy was built upon it.  12 Years points out that the economy didn't just rely on field labor, but also on the production and selling of human flesh.  When you permit people to be treated as property, nothing good is going to happen.  It degrades the slave, of course, but it also degrades the owner, who cannot - under any circumstances - be permitted to consider slaves as human beings deserving of human treatment.  To maintain the institution, slaves must be considered non-human.  The film does not flinch away from showing the dozens of ways this manifests - humans stripped naked to be displayed for sale in elegant salons, ripping screaming children away from desperate mothers, vicious beatings as punishment for not making harvest quotas (or for simply desiring soap to stay clean after working in the unrelenting sun of the Deep South), people averting their eyes from hangings, too fearful to interfere, wives turning sadistic to punish the unfortunate women who have caught the eye of their husbands  . . . it's all in here.  It will make many viewers angry and vaguely ashamed.  And it deserves to be seen.  Ejiofor has such power in his slightest glance that, while I'm still open to changing my mind, honestly - I haven't seen a better, more powerful, and truthful film this year.  If you don't see this on the big screen, promise me that you won't pause the playback when you do see it.  Don't turn away.  Watch.  Northup, along with countless others whose names we do not know, deserve at least that.

Visiting the Past

Truth, we are often reminded, is stranger than fiction.  Well, that's only true sometimes, but boy howdy! - when it's true, it's really true.  There are some things that most of us just couldn't make up if we tried for days, even if we were fueled by an unending supply of caffeine, sugar, and less reputable substances.

So what about this?  Here's the pitch - in 1979, six political hostages escape and find temporary refuge in the private residence of an American ally.  The only way to get them out is to have a CIA spook go in with the cover story that everyone is (ready?) part of a film crew who's in this catastrophically-screwy country to scout locations for a low-budget science fiction adventure movie designed to cash in on the global success of Star Wars.

Truth really is stranger than fiction, because it happened.  Details were declassified in 1997 by President Clinton and the resulting movie, Argo, tells a tale that is hard to believe, yet mostly true.  (Not entirely.  A few things aren't historically accurate, such as the run-down Hollywood sign, which was actually cleaned up in 1978.  Also, the Canadian government was more deeply involved than Argo lets on, but it's a feature film, not a documentary, so let's not nitpick overmuch.)

One aspect of Argo that I quite liked is that it doesn't take the jingoistic route.  While no sane person would approve of the actions of the hostage-takers, it has to be admitted that some of this situation was chickens coming home to roost.  Consider the hard facts leading up to the American embassy being overrun by armed and angry dissident students, screaming for USA blood.  First, the USA financed a coup to overthrow the freely-elected leader of the country and place "our guy" on the Peacock Throne as the head of the puppet government. (How appropriate that it wasn't really the real Peacock Throne.  The whole thing was a sham.)  Oil, don't you know.  Then we ignored decades of human rights abuses as "our guy" treats the country like his personal piggy bank.  Oh, and he's quite willing to turn a blind eye to widespread corruption and torture of political opponents, by the way.  Lastly, when the citizens of the country overthrow "our guy" after decades of this mistreatment, we offer him asylum.

If your brother had been hung upside down to be beaten and shocked with cattle prods, I bet you'd be a bit miffed as well.

Ben Affleck directs Argo with a deft hand and a slyly comic touch (John Goodman and Alan Arkin are absolute gold during their time on screen as the Hollywood contacts in the underlying scheme) that never loses sight of the fact that this was a dangerous, desperate plan that had absolutely no guarantee of working. You also have several instances where you realize that a single frustrated, "This isn't going to work!" from one of the tightly-wound not-quite-hostages could have spelled death by firing squad for the whole bunch.  Also, Bryan Cranston (playing the CIA boss back home) shows again what amazing range he has an an actor - the casting of this picture is just aces.  Be sure to stay through the credits - President Carter wants to talk with you!

In short, Argo is a thriller for the sort of movie viewer who's willing to wait for the payoff, rather than demanding 3.2 car chases per hour.  For this, Affleck can finally put Gigli behind him.  (Come on, like you don't have a few snapshots you hope never see the light of day.)  Argo is Oscar-worthy - see it now rather than waiting for the nominations to come out.