Purple Tigress

Movie Review: Polanski Unauthorized Is Uninspired

2009-02-13T12:38:00.000-08:00

You know how people say a movie is dream-like? Polanski Unauthorized is dream-like in the sense that it is a disjointed sequence of events, jumping from decade to decade. You might come out of it with nothing more than a general feeling: that the infamous director and sometime actor Roman Polanski is a oily creature, slimier than a salamander and more distasteful than a mouthful of caster oil.

You can make some sense of it if you know something of his history--something more than he is a fugitive from the U.S. legal system. He was found guilty of having sexual relations with a minor--a 13-year-old girl whom he supplied with alcohol before having sexual relations with her. He was in his forties.

Sounds like something out of American Beauty, but his excuse, in this movie, is that she was not a virgin. If you recall, the character played by Kevin Spacey recoiled from accomplishing the seduction of the young girl because she was inexperienced.

How does one measure the ick factor here? After all, Woodie Allen had a young girl in bed in his Manhattan. Is genius an excuse?

Yet I digress and that's easy to do. This film was directed by its star, Damian Chapa. Chapa doesn't look like Roman Polanski. He is physically doughy where Polanski seems thin. He does project a discomforting sort of playboy charm, one cultivated by men in search of women willing to take the casting couch route to fame.

The fractured segments touch on the Nazis in Poland, his mother's death in a concentration camp, his meeting with Sharon Tate, her tragic and horrific death and his filming of Rosemary's Baby. If you aren't familiar with the details of Polanski's story, you might be easily confused although long before the middle of the film, you'll be too bored to care.

Polanski Unauthorized is an uninspired impressionistic docudrama that is more vanity production than anything else.

MOVIE REVIEW: Fate Brings The Betrayal

2009-02-01T12:28:00.000-08:00

Looking for a Laotian tutor, Ellen Kuras found a friend and an epic story, one that she could not have planned. That story, the documentary The Betrayal (Nerakhoon), must have been hard to make sense of at first, not knowing how it would unfold over the decades, but Kuras has made it a cohesive bittersweet tale.

This is not the the 1983 Jeremy Irons movie, Betrayal, based on the late Harold Pinter's play about Pinter's real life love affair. This documentary is a more devastating and universal tale about immigration.

The Laotian tutor was Thavisouk Phrasavath, the eldest son of a family whose American dream turned out to be a nightmare of sorts, one that stretches out over two decades.

"A time will come when the universe will break, piece by piece and the world will change beyond what we know," is a Laotian saying. In the beginning, Thavi's father, a former officer in the Laotian army, is recruited by the CIA during the Vietnam War and became part of the United States covert operations in Laos. When the American forces evacuated from Laos and Vietnam, Thavi's father, like many former allies, became the enemy. With his father sent to a communist re-education camp, the 12-year-old Thavi was harassed and arrested because of his father's political status. Fearing for his life, Thavi escaped by swimming across the Mekong River to a refugee camp in Thailand.

Two years later, his mother and siblings follow. Then in 1981, with no word from his father, Thavi, his mother and siblings, immigrate to the United States. Yet there, they find their sponsors leave them in a Brooklyn slum next to a crack house.

Four years later, in 1985, Thavi meets Kuras and she soon begins filming this story about hope, hardship and betrayal, when cultural values clash and a happy ending seems unimaginable, even when the unimaginable comes true.

As one would expect from a cinematographer, Kuras supplies beautiful imagery--pastoral scenes from Asia and grittier scenes in the U.S., in some ways transforming our ideas of the war-torn country of Laos with the land of plenty America.

Sometimes we fall into important things when we are looking for something else. In the case of Kuras, one is sure she had no idea how the story would develop or end 23 years ago, but this story, slow in developing and followed up through friendship and cultural respect is one worth telling.

In English and Laotian, this documentary is nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary and was nominated for the grand jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival.

Book Review: A New and Native Beauty: The Art and Craft of Greene & Greene

2009-01-16T12:43:00.000-08:00

I love books, especially art books and reviewing the book A New and Native Beauty: The art and Craft of Greene & Greene is both a pleasure and a disappointment. The book is almost too lovely.

The book accompanies the Huntington Library's exhibit of the same title that closed on 26 January 2009 in Pasadena to travel on to the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery in Washington, D.C. (March 13– June 7, 2009), and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (July 14–Oct. 18, 2009).

The Huntington Library exhibit was one of several that helped commemorate the centennial of the Gamble House, a work of Charles and Henry Greene that is one of the jewels of Pasadena's crown. Most of the other exhibits closed on 4 January 2009. All showed different aspects of the Gamble House and led me to finally visit this National Historic Landmark.

I wish I had read the many essays collected in this book before I had seen any of them. Living in Pasadena, I'll have the opportunity to visit the Gamble House again as well as the permanent exhibit at the Huntington Library in its Dorothy Collins Brown Wing of the Virginia Steele Scott Galleries of American Art. For those who aren't lucky enough to live in Pasadena, the books many photographs will give you an idea of how beautiful the Gamble House is and the exhibit will leave you wistfully wishing we hadn't allowed the Bandini House to be destroyed, like many architectural treasures.

The title of the book and the exhibit comes from the 1952 citation the Greenes were given by the American Institute of Architects although they had ceased being partners by that time. The Greenes were honored as "formulators of a new and native architecture" and Greene & Greene, who were based in Pasadena, strongly influenced California's architectural heritage and the American Arts and Crafts movement.

Edited by Edward R. Bosley, James N. Gamble Director of the Gamble House (University of Southern California, School of Architecture) and Anne E. Mallek, curator of the Gamble House, this book includes a brief forward by Frank Gehry and 11 essays.

The Greenes were influenced by the Morris Movement ("The Beauty of a House: Charles Greene, the Morris Movement and James Culbertson" by Mallek), Japonism (The Spell of Japan: Japonism and the Metalwork of Greene and Greene" by Nina Gray) even though neither ever traveled to Japan, and the very sunny nature that attracted winter birds to Pasadena ("Sunlight and Elsewhere: Finding California in the Work of Greene and Greene" by Bruce Smith.

Charles was married to an English woman and the influence of England can also be seen in their work ("Charles Greene and Englishness" by Alan Crawford). The Morris Movement was named for the Englishman William Morris but by the time of the Gamble House's construction the English Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society was only two years away from being declared dead. Morris' successor in England, Robert Ashbee watched his own business enterprise die in 1907 yet on the West Coast of America, the Arts and Crafts Movement was still viable. Yet the concept or public perception of the English house was also a part of Greene & Greene's work.

The English manor house required servants and the English aristocracy had cultivated a culture of its own. None of the women who commissioned the Greenes were from an aristocratic background. According to Ann Scheid in her essay "Independent Women, Widows and Heiresses: Greene and Greene's Women Clients," they are often better educated than their fathers and even their husbands. What happens when a woman makes decisions in the making of a house? They make life easier for themselves.

Unlike many architects, the Greenes offered a full package. They designed the furniture by working with furniture makers ("An International Studio: The Furniture Collaborations of the Greens and the Halls" by Edward S. Cooke, Jr.) and they designed stained glass windows ("A Glimmer of Vivid Light: The Stained Glass of Greene and Greene" by Julie L. Sloan." One of the Japanese influences was the appreciation of natural wood and the book includes an essay on this including "Out of the Woods" by Edward R. Bosley. The Gamble House docent who gave the tour I was on said Pasadena received the Gamble House as a gift after the owners heard the prospective buyers wanted to cover all the lovely wood with paint! Sometimes bad taste is a good thing.

If you missed the Greene & Greene exhibits in Pasadena, get this book for an idea of what you missed and make an appointment to see the Gamble House. If you live in Boton or Washington, D.C., get this book before you see the exhibit and you won't be disappointed although you might wish you had known about the centennial celebration. I wish I had read this book before instead of after seeing all the exhibit and even between seeing each one.

Movie: One Day You'll Understand

2008-12-17T21:23:00.000-08:00

Sometimes you need distance, in time or emotion, to really understand things, and even then, we may not be able to bridge the gap of generation and era.

Can we ever understand what it's like to be at war, if we haven't gone there? Can we ever understand what it's like to have one's whole country turn against one or one's religion? These are the questions asked by the French language, Plus Tard, Tu Comprendras or One Day You'll Understand.

We're not immediately clear on the connection between the Nazi war criminal, Klaus Barbie, and Victor (Hippolyte Girardot), a well-to-do businessman. Barbie's trial plays in the background; he was the head of the Gestapo in Lyon and as such, oversaw the deportation of thousands of French Jews to the death camps.

Then we meet Rivka, Victor's mother (Jeanne Moreau), now widowed and unable to speak about the past beyond Victor's birth. She is comfortable with her life, a quiet, comfortable world of grandchildren and memories in an elegant apartment filled with keepsakes. She has the life many women dream hope for when they grow old.

Victor is not comfortable with his life. He was born after the war. As with most children, even adult ones, not knowing and being refused answers only makes Victor want to know more.

Victor begins to research his past and his desire to learn about his father and grandparents begins to worry his wife, Françoise (Emmanuelle Devos), but this doesn't stop Victor. Victor's father signed a document attesting to his Aryan identity and turning away from his Jewish roots. He and his sister were raised Catholic.

Amos Gitai's 2008 movie is based on Jérôme Clément's novel, Plus Tard, Tu Comprendras. The movie has no great revelations or sense of tragedy. It is not as poignant as the Louis Malle 1987 Au Revoir Les Enfants.

Theater Review: Spring Awakening

2008-12-04T16:55:00.000-08:00

Disney’s High School Musical series has proven that the musical isn’t dead and it isn’t a genre that just attracts the middle-aged. Likewise, when Spring Awakening hit Broadway, winning Best Musical for 2007 and seven other Tony awards, it brought in a new wave of young theater goers.

With lyrics and book by Steven Sater and music by Duncan Sheik, this musical combines modern alternative music sensibilities with teenage angst and rebellion against adult authority. The topic isn’t new. Like the 1996 Rent! which was based on Giacomo Puccini’s 1896 La Bohéme, Spring Awakening is based on an 1891 German play of the same title, written by Frank Wedekind. If the topics of masturbation, abortion, rape and teen suicide are slightly controversial now, imagine what a uproar a play with those topics caused over a century ago.

Christine Jones’ set design is a brick wall with paintings, some that light up during the show. There’s a sense of the fantastical like the oversized half of a butterfly. A small raised stage area is where the action is centered. On both sides, cast and audience members mingle in school type bleachers. The musicians are on stage right.

The play begins with Wendla (Christy Altomare) asking her mother about sex in the sweetly melodic “Mama Who Bore Me” and her mother (Angela Reed who plays all the adult woman roles), too mortified to explicitly explain the dirty details, tells her she must simply love her husband with all her heart. The other girls seem similarly naïve, but the boys are a different matter.

The boys are seen dressed in uniforms at school under the watchful eye of their Latin teacher (Henry Stram who plays all the adult male roles). Yet their hairstyles easily identify them. The ill-fated Moritz (Blake Bashoff), seen clutching an old-fashioned mike in the publicity photos, has a frightful tumbleweed of expressive hair. His best friend, Melchior (Kyle Riabko), is a leader, but also a thinker. And what are the boys thinking about? What any teenage boy is thinking about: sex. Moritz’s sexual fantasies keep him from getting a good night’s sleep, resulting in his dismal performance at school (“The Bitch of Living”). Other boys are similarly preoccupied, including Georg (Matt Shingledecker) who is obsessed about his piano teacher’s breasts (“My Junk”) and Hanschen (Andy Mientus) who masturbates.

The first act ends with Moritz expelled from school despite passing his exams and Melchior and Wendla consummating their relationship in an infamous scene that includes partial male and female nudity. The second act begins with Wendla and Melchior considering the change in their relationship, but they are not fated for a happy ending due to the interference of parents and adult authority figures. Consider Melchior song “Totally Fucked.”

Riabko, a Canadian pop singer, played Melchior on Broadway before joining the touring show. Bashoff had a recurring role on the mysterious, convoluted Lostuntil he was killed off before assuming the role of Moritz on Broadway. Both are engaging with dynamic stage presence. Altomare’s Wendla is poignantly drawn as a girl in love who will never be a woman. The music is angry and yet, at times, hauntingly tender and the dance choreography by Bill T. Jones controlled chaos delivered with precision by this touring company.

This energetic, lively musical is well-worth seeing as a new development in musical theater and a way of recalling or, for the younger crowd, reveling in teenage angst. If your mind says yes, but your wallet says no, don’t despair. The Ahmanson has its own entertainment stimulus package of $20 tickets available for each performance.

Spring Awakening continues until Dec. 7 at the Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave., Downtown Los Angeles. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2 p.m.; Sundays, 1 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. For more information call (213) 628 2772.

THEATER REVIEW - "The Lady with All the Answers"

2008-11-21T11:49:00.000-08:00

A decade ago, everyone knew who Ann Landers was, but today, I'm not so sure everyone would know who "The Lady with all the Answers" was. David Rambo's 2005 one-woman show, which premiered at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego, is now at the Pasadena Playhouse.

At two hours, the show runs a bit long for a one-person production, particularly when there is no dramatic action and the action doesn't span a long time period. Gary Wissmann's set gives us a well-appointed apartment, beautifully furnished and stylish but not flashy. As dressed by Holly Poe Durbin, Mimi Kennedy's Ann Landers, known in real life as Esther "Eppie" Pauline Friedman Lederer, is well-turned out--not a trendsetter, not sexy, but someone that anyone would feel comfortable with.

Set in June 1975 in the study of a fourteen-room high-rise apartment on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago, this lady has to write a column, one that must be typed out on a real typewriter and not a word processor. She must meet a certain number of column inches and she must count the words instead of expecting her software to do it for her.

During the night, she gets a call from her identical twin sister and rival Pauline Esther Friedman Phillips, the woman who wrote Dear Abby (from 1956-1995 and now written by her daughter Jeanne Phillips), as well as her daughter, Margo Howard, who would eventually write the advice columns Dear Prudence (1998-2006) and Dear Margo (2006 to the present).

Rambo's script, written with the cooperation of Howard, is warm and funny and finds this lady pondering over how to make an announcement that would seem to contradict a column she had written several years earlier. She had ventured to make a glowing commentary on her marriage, but now must reveal to her readers that her husband was divorcing her to be with a younger woman--one younger than their only child. Rambo's script doesn't dig particularly deep. We don't feel her despair, grief or remorse. Kennedy's Ann Landers doesn't get angry of display inner angst.

The bath she supposedly takes when the audience is at intermission resolves her writer's block and she will carry on. Rambo's script doesn't give us any answers about this lady who doled out answers to millions of readers daily. Under the direction of Brendon Fox, the pace seems a bit leisurely--not like a frantic reporter or columnist on deadline. There are no chips in the polish of a woman who's hair was, most likely with the help of substantial amounts of hair spray, perfectly in place--even, as she admits in the play, in the muggy heat in Vietnam when she visited soldiers and comforted the wounded.

Ann Landers did have some good advice to give and verbally whipped herself with a wet noodle when she admittedly gave out some questionable guidance. Rambo's play gives us the lady as she presented herself to the world and Kennedy fills the role with grace and the kind of warmth one expects from a favorite aunt. This production is entertaining without being enlightening.

"The Lady with all the Answers" continues until Nov. 23 at the Pasadena Playhouse, 39 S. El Molino Ave., Pasadena. Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 4 p.m.; Sundays 2 and 7 p.m. Dark Nov. 5 and 12 evenings with special matinee performances instead. $25-$65. For more info, call (626) 356-PLAY or go to www.PasadenaPlayhouse.org.

Movie Review: The Universe of Keith Haring

2008-11-02T13:23:00.000-08:00

Director Christina Clausen's 90-minute 2008 documentary, The Universe of Keith Haring is a work filled with love but not enough objectivity. There are things we didn't really need to know to understand who and what Haring was. There are things we might want to know, but aren't really given enough information.

Haring's not as famous as some of the people he rubbed shoulders with, most notably Madonna, or Andy Warhol, but despite his brief life, he left a legacy worldwide. You've probably seen some of his colorful cartoons--in posters and murals. Like Warhol's silkscreens, Haring's work has become a style, an imitation of an imitation--from graffiti to art.

While his work has a certain exuberant and simplistic quality, his lifestyle seemed to similarly have had a short-sighted hedonism. The NY art scene is portrayed as one of non-committal sexual couplings, one that celebrated life with the sheer callow joy of a dog. Before his 1990 death at age 31 from complications of AIDS, he was part of a group that included Jean-Michel Basquiat and part of a scene that included sex, drugs, performance art and pop music.

Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, Haring studied graphic design at The Ivy School of Professional Art in Pittsburgh, but he is best known for being a part of the New York street scene. In New York, he studied at the School of Visual Arts and was inspired by graffiti. His chalk drawings in the subways of New York City drew attention in the 1980s.

Madonna became a friend and his art was used during her Sticky and Sweet tour when she sang "Into the Groove." In the movie, a clip of Madonna performing at his birthday party. Other archival footage includes Grace Jones (if you remember her), Basquiat, Fab 5 Freddy, Haring, Yoko Ono, Warhol, Kenny Scharf and Junior Vasquez.

Haring was openly gay and he was also a social activist. Yet this movie does not take a critical approach of either the NY art or gay scene or even of his work. Instead, we have a collection of interviews of family and members of the Keith Haring Foundation.

Certainly we don't want to know only the highs (his association with Madonna) but do we really need to know some of the lows or just mundane? Do we need to know about his small-town life? Perhaps what we really need to know is how his art, popular during his lifetime, making him one of the few art-stars and the anti-thesis of the starving artist, is now viewed historically. Then we could decide what are the important points of this documentary and we could answer the question: Why is this documentary being made and why is this person more important than any other?

Haring's universe touched many people internationally, but we need to know how the world he no longer lives in evaluates the signs he left behind in ours.

MOVIE REVIEW: Breakfast with Scot

2008-10-29T10:33:00.000-07:00

Breakfast with Scot is a delightful 2007 Canadian movie. The Scot (Noah Bernett) in question is a young boy whose great misfortune is his mother was a drug addict and raised him as if he was a girl.

His mother, whom we never meet, is finally successful in finding eternal bliss, but the social workers tell him she died in an auto accident instead of as a result of a drug overdose. She has left Scot to live with her former boyfriend, Billy--apparently never having gotten around to updating her posthumous wishes. Scot hasn't seen the old boyfriend for several years and he is living in Brazil.

Until his guardian can return to the U.S., Scot is fostered by the old boyfriend's more stable and responsible brother, Sam (Ben Shenkman), a sports lawyer whose life partner is Eric McNally (Tom Cavanagh), a gay retired hockey player (Toronto Maple Leafs) who currently works as a sportscaster. He's not totally out although everyone seems to know he is gay.

In most cases, the movie would deal with the brother in Brazil first loathing and then finally loving his new parenthood or his brother would be forced to bring his wayward brother and change him into a more responsible person. Yet the movie isn't really about the two brothers who are the legal links to guardianships.

The story centers on the unwilling partner being dragged into foster fatherhood. Eric is only semi-out-of-the-closet and Scot's presence forces him to deal with his own half-acceptance of his homosexuality. Hockey is the means although Scot's ice skating ability first manifests itself with some graceful artistic figure skating moves at the local rink. Ed seems more afraid of his softer, feminine side than Sam and Scot's flamboyance (wearing make-up and feather boas, love of Christmas carols and hugging and kissing other boys) is a greater problem for him than for Sam who considers it as Scot's attempt to keep part of his mother with him.

In a post-Will and Grace world, nothing here is too shocking and even the couple's relationship is underplayed--there's not open affections expressing coupledom. I also wondered about Brian Orser, winner of two Olympic figure skating silver medals (1984, 1988) who seemed to be openly supported by Canadians and was later outed as being gay in a palimony suit. Is ice skating perceived differently in Canada or do people still feel that male figure skaters are most likely gay?

Based on a book by Tufts University professor Michael Downing, this 2007 comedy goes for true feelings. Downing cast Sam as a chiropractor and Ed as an editor for a chic Italian magazine.

As directed by Laurie Lynd, the screenplay adaptation by Sean Reycraft glows with good-natured humor and shows how homophobia can infect and poison friendships. Of course, this has a warm and happy ending--the kind that goes with pancakes and syrup shared around the table when the chef is a young child eagerly waiting for approval.

Some might think this film belongs on TV and perhaps it does, but this movie has the distinction of being the first gay-themed film to get the approval from a major league sports franchise. The Toronto Maple Leafs approved the usage of their logo and name in 2006.

MOVIE REVIEW: 8th Hungarian Film Festival (Los Angeles)

2008-10-24T15:03:00.000-07:00

Although this is the 8th Hungarian Film Festival, I had never thought much about Hungarian films. This is partially because the festival is on the other side of town, at the Laemmle Sunset 5 in West Hollywood and the Fine Arts Theater in Beverly Hills, but only partially. We definitely have to move beyond the Gabor sisters because Hungary is producing some wonderful movies well-worth seeing. In Hungarian with English subtitles.

Eszter's Inheritance (Eszter Hagyatéka): written and directed by József Sipos, this 2008 movie begins with a woman in despair. This is in a golden distant past, before ballpoint pens. We know she has loved the wrong man and he has brought about a catastrophe, but we aren't sure at first what. She, Eszter (Eszter Nagy-Kálózy), is determined to write down how her one and only love returned after twenty years to totally ruin her. Lajos (Gyorgy Cserhalmi) courted Eszter, but married her sister. Now widowed, he will return with his two children, one of whom needs money and believes that Eszter somehow owes her. Based on a 1939 novel by Hungarian writer Sándor Mírai, this movie is beautifully filmed and the cast move us into a tragic world where a middle-aged woman makes a romantic sacrifice in the name of a love that was and one that was not, during a time when a well-to-do woman had few choices except fate.

Opium (Egy Elmebeteg No Naplója): Like Eszter's Inheritance--also known as Esther's Inheritance, Opium is based on a book, but not a novel...an autobiographical book about a lothario who used his doctor's license to procure both women and drugs, in this case morphine. Directed by Janos Szasz, the long title is Opium: Diary of a Madwoman. The movie begins with a view of the startlingly pale Gizella (Kirsti Stubo). Her platinum blonde white hair is cut short, almost mannish. She is underwater. Alive? Dead? It isn't clear at first. This is psychiatric treatment of a less enlightened age, where lobotomies are commonly practiced and this water therapy attempts to calm the prolific writing of Gizella and her hypersexuality. This 2007 movie, written from Géza Csáth's diaries with András Szekér writing the screenplay, won actor Stubo a best actress award at the 2007 Moscow International Film Festival. Csáth was the pen name of József Brenner (1887-1919) who was a medical doctor from 1909 and did supposedly suffer from writer's block in 1912 when he was a doctor at a Slovakian health spa. There he had sexual intercourse with many women, not all of them apparently consensual. He was a cad, misogynistic and without a conscience. He did eventually commit suicide. This movie is an absorbing account the cruel practices of another era and of how the doctor cured his writer's block while supposedly curing a patient.

Eighth Day of the Week: This is not the 1958 German movie. Reminds one that once the glory of one's youth is gone, one still must live. After her husband dies, Hanna, a former prima ballerina, finds out about her husband's infidelity and her son's indifference to his heritage and her future. She is cheated out of her home and ends up homeless--a fear that many women in many different countries are haunted by. Yet this 2006 movie isn't so dreary and is a gentle fable and how when one really looks at the nobility in all people, one can find a life worth living and, yes, even love late in life. Under the direction of Judi Elek.

Girls (Lányok): Directed by Anna Faur, the 2007 movie begins with a standard declaration that the characters are fictional. Instead of claiming this movie was inspired by a real incident (which it was--in 1997 a taxi driver was murdered for no apparent reason by teenage girls), Faur brings us dirty, bleak realism in a fictional tale about young teens wandering through life without a cause, direction or care. The girls in question are Dini (Fulvia Collongues) and Anita (Hélène François), who, if they lived in the U.S. would be little more than mall rats. They loiter in shopping malls and offer sexual services to taxi drivers in exchange for money or driving lessons. They seem always a little greasy, more than a little cheap and their mouths are caught in a pout accented by cheap, smeared lipstick. Dini is the dominant of the two and seems without any real feeling--except when she is called a whore and takes offense. Anita lives with her mother and her mother's lover who seems to have an interest in both girls. While Anita doesn't involve herself in Anita's sex for sale, she will become involved in the murder. The taxi drivers are no less repellent. Dini's regular customers, Ernő (Sándor Zsótér),is constantly looking for ways to make fast money but he's trapped in a loveless marriage. With teenagers calling out "stupid, cocksucking faggot" or having parties where sex (masturbation and groping) are nothing more than means of passing the time and adults in equally meaningless relationships, director Faur illustrates a culture more dead than alive and without hope. The murder becomes just little monsters being monstrous to a bigger monster.

My Yahoo Years: Part 5 Branding Faux Pas or Branded as Moral Pygmies

2008-10-24T14:45:00.000-07:00

Yahoo! was created by Jerry Yang and David Filo while they were studying at Stanford University and began as “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web.” In the spring of 1994, it was renamed Yahoo!, and by 1995, it was incorporated.

According to Wikipedia, they selected the name because it came from Jonathan Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels” and meant rude, unsophisticated and uncouth. This hardly sounds like a good choice for a consumer product.

As a brand name, what does Yahoo! stand for? Unlike Google, Yahoo! has a landing page that offers news, weather and other things like information on movies. While the landing page for other countries is similar, the offerings are not the same. Yahoo! for America and Japan have extensive information on their movie Web sites. Go to France or Mexico and you’ll see a marked difference.

On the Yahoo! landing page for France if you look up Maurice Chevalier, you’ll find a brief paragraph:

Chanteur, "Valentine" (1928)... "Prosper" (1935)... "Ma pomme" (1936)... "Ah ! si vous connaissiez ma poule" (1938)... Si le cinéma français l'a beaucoup boudé, les producteurs américains ont élus le gars de Ménilmuche "The French Lover"...

If you try the U.S. version, you’ll find much more in the way of a biography. Besides that, there is information about awards.

Yahoo! in Mexico and Argentina do not currently have a movie sections where you can look up information. They do have an entertainment section with a movie subsection.

Yahoo! Mexico has an English entry for Carlos Saura’s Goya in Bordeau and oddly, it is in English.

Set in the early 1800s, a tale told in flashbacks by an 82-year-old Spanish artist Francisco Goya, living in exile with the last of his lovers, Leocadia Zorilla de Weiss, and reconstructs the main events of his life for this daughter Rosario. One by one the mysteries surrounding the artist's life are unraveled to unveil the dreams and demons that drove him into exile and are so passionately displayed in his life works.

There is no searchable movie database for the Yahoo! Argentina Web site.

Yahoo!’s U.S. movie Web site has the following on the Goya movie:

Set in the early 1800s, a tale told in flashbacks by an 82-year-old Spanish artist Francisco Goya, living in exile with the last of his lovers, Leocadia Zorilla de Weiss, and reconstructs the main events of his life for this daughter Rosario. One by one the mysteries surrounding the artist's life are unraveled to unveil the dreams and demons that drove him into exile and are so passionately displayed in his life works.

How odd that a Spanish Web site should have the very same paragraph as the U.S. Web site and both in English. The American Web site, however, has a long biography of the Spanish director.

The question becomes one of what does Yahoo! as a brand stand for? How is it serving its customers? Carlos Saura’s 1998 movie Tango was nominated for a foreign film Academy Award. It featured Julio Bocca and Juan Carlos Copes, both well-known Argentine dancers and choreographers. Yet this Spanish film and its director, also known for this flamenco trilogy, is given more space in English on the U.S. site than on the Spanish sites, including the one starring two famous luminaries of Argentina on the Argentine Web site?

While Yahoo! continues to buy new services and properties, it doesn’t seem to care about the quality of the things it already has such as the movie Web sites.

As a news portal, Yahoo! has done much worse.

Yahoo! assisted the Chinese government by giving information that helped identify Wang Xiaoning, an engineer and dissident who had been posting anonymous writings to an Internet mailing list. Wang was arrested in September of 2002. Yahoo! did not immediately come clean and was soundly criticized by a congressional panel, the House Foreign Relations Committee. According to Wired, other writers such as Shi Tao, Li Zhi and Jiang Lijun were imprisoned because of Yahoo! turning over sensitive information.

According to a San Francisco paper, Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft were questioned about their actions in China.

In February 2006, the Republican-controlled House held a seven-hour hearing in which executives from Google, Microsoft, Cisco Systems and Yahoo! were grilled about their compliance with censorship laws in China and elsewhere. At the time, Callahan testified that when Yahoo! turned over information about Shi to Chinese authorities, "We had no information about the nature of the investigation."

The statement turned out to be false. Documents unearthed by the San Francisco-based Dui Hua Foundation showed that Yahoo! China officials had received a subpoena-like document on April 22, 2004, from the Beijing State Security Bureau that stated, "Your office is in possession of items relating to a case of suspected illegal provision of state secrets to foreign entities." China has often cracked down on dissidents by accusing them of leaking state secrets.

Yahoo! protested that the mistake after the fact, admitting that its failure was not to contact Congress to correct the error. Yet lawmakers were angry not only because they weren’t notified, but also because no one at Yahoo! has been fired or demoted for its handling of the case.

"You think that sends the right message to your employees?" Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Huntington Beach (Orange County), asked sarcastically.

Rohrabacher might be furious if he read Jerry Yang’s account given on the Yahoo! employee intranet.

In his defense, Yang, who was born in Taiwan and came to the U.S. as a child said,

"We continue to believe in engagement in markets like China," Yang said. "Why? Today, despite broad limitations on sensitive political subjects, Chinese citizens know more than ever before about local public health issues, environmental causes, politics, corruption, consumer choice, job opportunities and even some foreign affairs."

Unfortunately, this is not how members of Congress saw it:

But most lawmakers complained that Yahoo! appeared more focused on making money in China - with more than 150 million Internet users - than boosting the freedoms of its people. Smith compared Yahoo! to companies who helped the Nazis accelerate their campaign to exterminate Jews in Europe.

Also in November 2007, Yahoo! settled a lawsuit brought by the two Chinese journalists who had been jailed, but the terms of the deal were not disclosed.

In the Associated Press article, “The company has denied any responsibility and maintained it had been complying with Chinese law when it turned over the e-mail.”

Some good did come of this hearing. In April, Republican congressman Chris Smith of New Jersey brought the Global Online Freedom bill before Congress.

The bill was supported by Reporters Without Borders and Amnesty International and has been criticized by Electronic Frontier Foundation. This bill attempts to prevent American Internet companies from participating in the censorship schemes of foreign countries.

Smith stated, "The gross mistake of allowing China to host the Olympics in light of its horrific human rights record will be significantly compounded if we do not speak up and call attention to the human rights heroes who languish in Chinese jails."

According to Forbes, Yahoo! was one of the lobbyists for this bill.

Is this an about face? Not according to the San Francisco paper’s article.

In 2005, Yahoo! sold its interest in Yahoo! China to the Chinese Internet giant, Alibaba. But Yahoo! still has a 40 percent stake in Alibaba and Yang holds one of four seats on the parent company's board. Critics say the arrangement allows Yahoo! to wash its hands of responsibility when China cracks down on Internet users. Yang acknowledged he has little say in enforcement issues.

In the autumn of 2007, the San Francisco Gate article wrote the following: "While technologically and financially you are giants, morally you are pygmies," House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Lantos, D-San Mateo, said at the end of the three-hour hearing.

In 2008, I wonder: Has anything really changed?

Has Yahoo! lived up to the image of rude, uncouth and unsophisticated? Far worse, Yahoo! has been compared to Nazi Germany and been called moral pygmies and no one took umbrage.

MOVIE REVIEW: The Tree of Life

2008-10-15T11:33:00.000-07:00

This 2008 documentary, The Tree of Life, has the misfortune of sharing the same title as a yet-to-be-released 2009 film with Sean Penn and Brad Pitt.

Written by David Donihue and Hava Volterra, this is a film about one woman's search for her roots, one's she had wished to explore with her father but didn't move quick enough.

Volterra grew up in Israel, but had moved to Los Angeles where she worked an engineer. The movie begins with a shot of an MRI machine--white, cold and cavernous. In a voiceover, she recalls how one day, speaking to her father over the phone, she thought he sounded old. The 'urgently wanted him to go and visit Italy." She wants to send her father and mother to Italy, but fate intervenes. Her father, a scientist, had left Italy for Israel when he was in his twenties and never looked back. He never spoke to his children about the family he had left or the life he had left in Italy although his daughter felt he was so Italian in his very essence.

Soon after that phone call, her father learns he has a large tumor in his brain and 30 days later, he is dead, having never returned to the land of his birth.

Recalling her father, Volterra feels he lived his life very quietly. He didn't "promote himself" and that he felt himself a failure for not having won a Nobel Prize. Her uncle, his brother, was very interested in the family heritage and shaking the family tree reveals bankers in Florence, a prime minister, a heretic and an American politician.

Volterra takes the trip back to Italy that her father was unable to take.

As one who once journeyed back to the land of my grandparents and reclaimed my ancestral heritage--for better or worse--this documentary is an encouraging reminder that there is value in the past if only to redefine the present. Yet not everyone's family tree will reveal people of such influence and high stature as is the case with Volterra.

Beyond the sometimes amateurish production values (shaky camera) which is somewhat offset by the quaint animation segments, one wonders what is the real worth of this documentary outside of a personal record of one family's tree?

The tree of life is a concept found in many cultures, uniting the heaven and earth, and is mentioned in the Bible. According to Wikipedia, it is a common term used in Judaism to refer to the Torah itself and, at times, to yeshivas (a rabbinical school) and synagogues as well as to rabbinic literary works.

My Yahoo Years: Part 3 OSHA and Ergonomics

2008-10-11T12:20:00.001-07:00

When I started working at Overture, I was one of many contingency workers. I was hired after taking a typing at the temp agency and then an editing exercise on site.

Like many companies that started as an idea and an agreement between friends, it was suffering growing pains. I have not applied originally because I noticed that as GoTo it was always hiring and that used to be a warning sign of high turnover.

In GoTo’s case, it was that and growth. There never seemed, for a time, to be enough desks and I recall that some of the desks were just boards put across two file cabinets. There were some feel-good things: the free popcorn, free soda, free designer coffee, beer Fridays, instant pay. What do I mean by instant pay? You estimated when you would work, then turned in those hours a few days before payday and then were paid for those hours instead of waiting until next pay period. If you estimated wrong, you got to do historical edits. There would be, from time to time, more free food. When all the computers were down, we once went to have ice cream in Old Pasadena.

Yet, back to those makeshift desk—having planks on cabinets as a desk is acceptable for college students and newlyweds, but for a multimillion dollar business it is actually not up to OSHA standards of safety.

I don’t know exactly who or how this came to the attention of the management, but eventually we were given real desks. Eventually, the instant pay schedule also went away although the free popcorn, free soda and free coffee remained.

We originally were working on a software designed for general usage and then built up by our own software engineers to suit the growing business needs. As we became part of Yahoo! that seemed to be something we also needed to leave behind.

As Yahoo! Search Marketing, it seemed silly to use what was meant for other businesses and as Yahoo! we were competing againt Google. To be competitive, we needed to have our own unique software, apparently, and that would be Panama.

According to Wikipedia, Panama, a new online advertising platform created by Yahoo! was an effort to close the “wide gap with Google in the race for search advertising dollars, a fast-growing and incredibly lucrative business that Google dominates. The platform provides advertisers with a dashboard on which they can manage their marketing campaigns and includes tools that can suggest how advertisters budget their money. It uses a quality index by which advertisers can see how the system will rank an ad and understand how effective their campaign is. This replaced the simplistic Overture algorithm that ranked text ads according to how much advertisers bid for keyword searches by users and this attempts to give higher ranking based on click through rates as well as bids like Google. I paraphrase Wikipedia to ensure that I am not giving away company secrets.

The failure of Panama seems to be apparent when you hear that Yahoo! is now considering having Google do its search marketing.

If you’ve followed my blog, you’ll notice that I wrote up a freeware last year. Called Autohotkey, this freeware is used to program your numeric pad to do repetitive functions based on specific points graphed out on an x and y axis points on your monitor. So if you typed 0, you could double click on something. That saves you two clicks. You would also have it click something on the right side of your screen and then automatically move to the left side of your screen to click something else.

I learned about Autohotkey as a result of the new software used for Panama—not one, but two. A supervisor recommended it and I programmed part of it myself. By that time, I had already filed a workers comp claim due to extensive mousing.

Later, a specific script would be provided to all listings editors. Freeware is not a Yahoo company secret. I believe the provider can tell that it is being downloaded. I wondered how many people downloaded it during March of 2007 in Burbank. Perhaps that’s a secret, but I wonder how many other companies use this software?

The question becomes why should a large company, based on Internet and thus computer usage required another software to make their custom-built software to be usable? Why weren’t standards of ergonomics and human interface considered? If Yahoo! couldn’t consider it for its own people, how much more aware is Yahoo! of its customers and their needs?

Yahoo! is also a source of information, including health information. According to an article listed on Yahoo! Health computer usage can be harzardous to your health.

You can prevent RSI in its early stages by following these suggestions:

* Stop using the computer whenever you start to notice pain or fatigue.
* Watch your posture. Don't hunch your head and neck forward. Keep your back straight, your feet flat on the floor, and your arms parallel to the floor.
∑ Take regular breaks. One option is to install software that reminds you to take breaks.

Yahoo! actually allows its full-time permanent workers to order a software that will time breaks, RSI Guard. When, on the advice of my physician, in 2005, I requested it, I was discouraged from using it. I was told that I would never go advance because I doodled during meetings and I did my “yoga.”

Later, when another co-worker finally got it, she told me a supervisor discouraged her from using it, explaining that if she wanted to remain at Yahoo! she would stop complaining about her repetitive motion pain.

In my case, I was admonished for my low productivity on the day I reported the workers comp industry and the next day back when it became obvious that the wrist braces were too big. I was also suspiciously moved in December 2007 to a position that would be eliminated in February 2008. My HR representative would neglect to tell me that I could refuse such work as it went against my physician’s restrictions and even a month after I had complained about the pain it was causing, my HR person was not able to move me back to a position that my physician had cleared me to work full-time.

This is not to say these were all problems inherent to Yahoo! Overture also had problems listening to the workers and most of the managers I worked under had been there during the Overture days. Training in the Overture guidelines was confusing and if it was confusing for college graduates, most of whom, like myself held higher degrees, how much more confusing was it for people who had trouble comprehending what a superlative was?

If you’ve noticed, now as Yahoo! Search Marketing, the move has been to make the guidelines easier to understand and more like Google. Although search marketing should be essentially a service-oriented business, there was a lack of concern for the customers as compared to more traditional service jobs that I had worked at such as retail sales or food service. Which is why later Yahoo! would make a move to be more “customer-centric.”

Yet Panama also showed how some of that arrogance that came from forging a new type of service and business remained. How long do you think the managers were ideating over what to call the ads—things we once called ad titles and descriptions? They came up with the label: creatives (among other things). That didn’t last long. What customer service person or marketing person wants to waste time explaining to a customer what a creative is and why you’re calling an advertisement a creative?

Kevin Lee of ClickZ Network looked at Panama in September of 2006.

Phase one of Panama is an updated DTC that allows for a more flexible Ad Group structure, permitting a single creative (or group of creative units) to be shared by a basket of keywords. Yahoo even goes as far as to expand the targeting definition beyond keywords to reflect that the DTC (like Google and MSN) is evolving beyond search. Yahoo calls the keywords "targets" in one presentation, but in the DTC they're still called "keywords" within the publicly shared tabs, so there's no need to start freaking out yet. When one thinks about marketing, much non-search marketing is really about reaching a target market: home buyers, music enthusiasts, in-market auto buyers, new moms, and so forth.

If you look at the current information about Yahoo! Search Marketing such as their introduction and their guidelines, words like targets for keywords and creatives for ads or ad creatives are no longer used.

By March 2007, some bloggers had a list of complaints including StraightUpSearch.com had a post with a wish list that included dayparting, ad position reporting by time frame, time of day and time zone specification and the ability to choose which sites you want your ad to appear on and which ones you do not.

The post concluded: “Think like your customers and give them what they really want - transparency and control..”

TechCrunch also had a pertinent question: Why can’t Yahoo Search Marketing block fraudulent transactions. According to Duncan Riley in a December 17, 2007 post, a leading affiliate of Yahoo Search marketing’s program was earning five figure monthly returns until he received an email from Yahoo! saying that 65 percent of his traffic was signing up for YSM with stolen credit cards and so Yahoo canceled his account.

Riley didn’t think it made sense to cancel the affiliate’s account.

I have to admit that I applied for Yahoo Search Marketing for one of my blogs but was rejected. Google, however, accepted my blog for its free Adsense ads.

I notice that for pay-per-click (PPC) ads you can also be shown on Google Maps, something that doesn’t seem to be available on Yahoo. Yahoo maps like Google can give you live or real time traffic, but this isn’t has good as SigAlert.com. Google took their maps and improved them with features such as terrain and street view. The street view is great for someone who’s going to a new place and wants to know what landmarks to look out for.

Why didn’t Yahoo! think like map users?

Why didn’t Yahoo! think like map users? Why didn't Yahoo! think to make software easier to understand and easier to use, not only for its customers, but also for its workforce? Too busy ideating?

While busy ideating, Yahoo failed to consider simple things like ergonomics in its new software design. If Yahoo! can't think of their own employees, can Yahoo! really know what people need or want?

My Yahoo Years: Part 2 Health Insurance and Workers Rights

2008-10-10T11:26:00.000-07:00

You might ask why I stayed so long. For a while, it was that I believed in Yahoo as a brand and as a company and then later, I just needed to have health insurance. Health insurance was later used as a bargaining chip during the layoffs. In this respect, Yahoo! wasn’t unusual, but it does point out how national health insurance would improve the status and treatment of America’s workers.

This also goes beyond just a matter of workers rights, but also the rights guaranteed most citizens of the US, those guaranteed by the Bill of Rights, such as the First Amendment.

What price can one place on freedom of speech? Yahoo put a price on the First Amendment—one month's salary and two months worth of COBRA health insurance for each and every one of the people who were recently laid off.

The news came on 12 February. People were called at home, called on vacation or escorted individually into a conference room before being escorted off the campus. I was called on my way to my doctor's appointment for a workers comp re-injury—a re-injury that could have been avoided if Yahoo had paid attention to my doctor's orders and my own complaints of pain. This is to say that although I complained to the HR representative on the last day of December and requested to be returned to the job I had been cleared to work full-time at by my physician, yet as of the last few days of January, I was still waiting.

California requires 60-day notice or at least 60 days worth of pay and benefits. In addition to those, Yahoo was willing to help those laid off find work through a referral service as well as that extra one month of pay and two months worth of COBRA health insurance if and only if individual employees were willing to sign a severance agreement which included signing off on all claims—known and unknown—of discrimination and signing a non-disparagement agreement.

Non-disparagement agreements are becoming widespread it seems. What is the harm of that? Plenty if the company is violating state or federal labor laws. The Yahoo non-disparagement clause is as follows:

You agree not to disparage Yahoo! Or its officers, directors, employees, shareholders or agents, in any manager likely to be harmful to them or their business, business reputation or personal reputation; provided however that statements which are complete and made in good faith in response to any question, inquiry or request for information required by legal process shall not violate this paragraph.

This means that I could not work as an Internet services analyst and be critical of Yahoo's services in comparison with MSN or Google for the rest of my life. The agreement isn't reciprocal. If there was a subpoena, however, I could respond to specific questions.

While I immediately, as per their instructions, inquired about my future ability to analyze search marketing services and they assured me I would receive a response to my questions, I never did until after the first deadline when I reminded them that their response hadn't come soon enough. The best they could do was allow me to speak freely as required by my employer (but not supervisor in the case of a non-paid work or educational treatise).

They also couldn't help me get around another part of the separation agreement where I would have to swear that I have "not suffered any discrimination, harassment, retaliation, or wrongful treatment by any released party." Unfortunately, as of 2 February 2008, I had filed another complaint to Human Resources about wrongful treatment.

I had asked for arbitration as Yahoo was unwilling to follow my doctor's instructions, leading to re-injury and even when informed I was in pain, I wasn't allowed to return to work that I could do—the work that my doctor had cleared me to work full-time at in October 31, 2007.

Yahoo was funny like that.

Yahoo, like other companies and private individuals, is protected from liable, slander and defamation of character. You can't yell fire in a crowded public place as per Schenck v. United States - a case that actually was about the distribution of anti-draft fliers during the World War I. Yahoo is protected by regular contract agreements from having employees steal ideas they came up with while under contract and working at Yahoo on Yahoo projects.

Yahoo is also a news portal and one would think supportive of journalists—unless they are in China being investigated by the Chinese government.

Dan Fost wrote in the San Francisco Post that non-disparagement agreements were surprisingly effective, but also problematic for reporters—and somewhat questionable when it was media outlets requiring non-disparagement clauses signed for severance.

He reported,

The issue first reared its ugly head in February when Amazon.com -- not even a media company -- tried to make the clause part of a severance package for 1,300 laid-off workers. Workers who refused to sign it would get only two weeks' severance, compared with the more generous 12-week packages awarded to those willing to keep their mouths shut. But in the resulting hue and cry, Amazon backed down.

Non-disparagement clauses kept workers from Inside.com, BabyCenter.com, Healtheon/WebMD, Health magazine, Cnet Networks, according to Fost.

It's just standard business in the tech world, Cnet spokeswoman Blaise Simpson told me. "That's part of our standard agreement when they become an employee here," Simpson said. "The First Amendment does not prevent private parties from voluntarily entering into a contract to keep information confidential."

She added, "In a situation like this, it's not to anyone's benefit to disparage anyone."

Yes, but I thought the truth would set one free?

If I live 20 more years, Yahoo would be paying me about 50 cents per day for that free speech. If I lived 40 more years, it would be less than 30 cents per day.

Bennett Hall of the Corvallis Gazette Times wrote about HP's 2005 layoff of 570 employees.

Most of the five-page document is boilerplate stuff — standard promises not to give away company secrets, take home office equipment or make copies of confidential customer lists.

But right smack in the middle of the 17 numbered paragraphs comes Article 9, which begins: “Employee agrees that he/she will not make or publish, either orally or in writing, any disparaging statement regarding HP.”

In the article, the possibility that whistleblowers might be afraid to report a former employer's misdeeds after signing such a clause was considered. The agreements are legal because you are allowing an organization to compensate you for your silence. You're losing your job. Can you afford to turn away from money?

“Most people are not in a financial position to walk away from it,” Hunt noted, “so it’s not as freely entered into as one would like.”

Hall spoke with social ethicist Courtney Campbell who commented:

“Even though it has legal standing, it’s really a form of moral blackmail,” said Campbell, who chairs the philosophy department at Oregon State University. “It’s a form of intimidation of the employee to keep silent, to place a muzzle on them, which I think is contrary to the values of a free society.”

Having been through two major injuries in the last five years, I cannot actually afford to give up that money, however, I also think I cannot lie.

After speaking with a person at Industrial Relations, I was encouraged to go to Fair Employment and consult a lawyer because there were several "red flags." Yahoo's actions astounded or confounded insurance adjusters and my own doctor. One of the first questions I was asked during my Fair Employment interview was had I signed the severance agreement.

What's wrong with Yahoo? Their managers do not seem to know state and federal labor laws and instead of recognizing their errors and the possible repercussions those discriminatory actions might have on employees, they gloss over those problems and carry on as if nothing was wrong.

Why haven't these practices been stopped? In my opinion, formers Yahoos are too afraid to talk for fear of losing their severance pay and current Yahoos are afraid of losing their job so they won't talk and they won't stand as witnesses. This probably isn't peculiar to Yahoo.

From what I heard in the group severance explanation meeting in February, perhaps the cause for greatest concern was health insurance. Aren't Americans all just one major injury away from poverty? That's probably why, without making any sort of limitation, Yahoo was willing to offer two months worth of COBRA for meeting their deadlines.

I know that I was willing to tolerate certain things because I desperately wanted to keep my health insurance. I'm sure the desperation at Yahoo is much worse now, particularly since one person they kept on, took a manager's advice and didn't initially report her on-the-job injury. She mentioned she had even been told by a supervisor to quit complaining. Last I heard, she was paying for her own physical therapy.

Were there other red flags? Will we ever hear about them? Does Yahoo have a reason to stop? Why should they when they can intimidate or buy off people so easily?

I wonder how it works in countries like Japan, Canada or Great Britain where there is socialized medicine or national health care systems. I don't know what kind of carrots they use when health care is guaranteed.

So in some ways, the lack of a national health insurance does influence free speech. Fear of losing health insurance, even for a month or two months puts a chill on free speech. Companies like Yahoo take advantage of that in their non-disparagement agreements.

My Yahoo Years: Part 1 Managers and Mismanagement in Pasadena and Burbank

2008-10-10T11:17:00.000-07:00

Ever work at a place where a supervisor called you at home and told you you were driving your mini van to the next county? He hadn’t cleared you for time off with pay. He hadn’t even cleared pay for your gas. He just needed you to empty your car that night. Even the next morning, the managers weren’t sure about either the time or the gas.

When I complained, my manager defended that supervisor’s professionalism.

That’s what it was like, working for Yahoo! Search Marketing. As it turned out, I was told after the fact that I’d be using a vacation day—as if there weren’t better ways to use a vacation than driving a load of donated goods to firefighters to make Jerry Yang look good.

I only found out later when I complained that although we worked next to Burbank airport, the supervisor thought it was too much trouble to rent a van. Why have someone else clean the car, pay to lease a car, pay for insurance and drive when you can have an employee do it on their off hours and vacation time?

The week after that incident, as a reward, for that sleepless night spent cleaning and washing my car, I was told I could never volunteer for any charity-related activity again. Up until then I had been the co-chair of the Yahoo volunteer committee. My co-chair was the supervisor who made the decision to take my mini van on a trip that I hadn’t expected to go on. I was also one of the thousands laid off a few months later in mid-February.

What do you expect? This is the same place where a manager prevented me from changing my Tuesday-Saturday schedule to my preferred Sunday-Thursday for two years. Employees couldn’t turn in a form for a schedule change request; they asked their managers. My manager just decided that my interest in taking business classes on Saturdays wasn’t important enough and never turned in my name—for two years or eight quarterly review sessions. Was that manager punished? Of course not.

When I finally was granted permission to have a schedule change, her manager demanded that I never, ever ask for Sunday off.

The reason for this? I had taken too many Saturdays off the previous year. I pointed out it wasn’t written down anywhere (like our contracts) that we had a limited number of weekend days we could take off. He replied that managers would take aside an employee when they had reached their limit. My manager never did and managers have to sign off on each vacation day request. So you might ask, if I got permission, why was I being restricted for doing what my manager had given me permission to do?

The person I was trading schedules with wasn’t under the same restriction. No one in my department was. This wasn’t a secret. Other managers knew and instead of stepping in and objecting, in my opinion, they took advantage of the situation.

When my aunt died and I asked to take a Tuesday off, I was told I was too late by my immediate manager even though it was a Saturday. I persisted. She relented. When the software designed to measure our productivity had obvious problems—showing one thing to the manager and another to the employee, I was held to the score I could not see and put on probation. A request to have the equation used for each value so I could make an Excel spreadsheet was ignored.

Even when I could show that the score might change—going up or down for the same day in less than 24 hours, it didn’t matter. I found that other people had noticed the problem and just worked around it. I had been there before, working during lunch and overtime without pay in order to make my quotas. The first time, I had thought I was at fault. The second time, I wasn’t sure any more. The third time, I knew that the problem was in the methodology used to determine the metrics. I wasn’t willing to work any more overtime without pay.

When I challenged that manager in question about the no-Sundays off policy, he sent me an email. I responded with legal questions and cc’d his supervisors and HR in Sunnyvale. I got a month of silence and then the no-Sundays policy was rescinded without an apology or admission of wrongdoing. Instead, I was given a bonus and told that I talked too much on the phone among other things—things that were subjective.

I went home and cried, basically having a nervous breakdown. What I should have done was complain to Fair Employment. What I did instead is try to go through the bureaucracy of Yahoo’s HR department and workers comp.

Yahoo! Search Marketing was founded in Pasadena. One of several ideas that came out of Idealab, it was the first company to over pay-for-placement services on Internet search terms. Y!SM wasn’t always under the purple flag. Beginning as GoTo in 1998, it was renamed Overture in 2001. In 2003, it became part of Yahoo! and eventually its name was changed eventually to Yahoo! Search Marketing in 2005. I was there through the launch of a project called Panama and laid off in 2008 while on workers comp sick leave, having asked for arbitration as was required by my contract. My lay off was the first response given by Yahoo to that request.

According to Wikipedia, Panama, a new online advertising platform created by Yahoo! was an effort to close the wide gap with Google in the race for search advertising dollars, a fast-growing and incredibly lucrative business that Google dominates. The platform provides advertisers with a dashboard on which they can manage their marketing campaigns and includes tools that can suggest how advertisers budget their money. It uses a quality index by which advertisers can see how the system will rank an ad and understand how effective their campaign is. This replaced the simplistic Overture algorithm that ranked text ads according to how much advertisers bid for keyword searches by users and this attempts to give higher ranking based on click through rates as well as bids like Google. I paraphrase Wikipedia to ensure that I am not giving away company secrets.

If you’ve listened to the financial news, you know that Panama has not been successful and Yahoo is under threat by Microsoft and has turned to Google for help.

Clearly Yahoo! is having some problems, but the problems are not just in its failed business models, but also in its failure to understand the laws that govern industrial relations in the state of California as well as some basic, old business rules.

Theater Review: Inside Privates Lives for a Slightly Catty Characterizations of 20th Century Newsmakers

2008-10-07T13:32:00.000-07:00

You’ll be asked to turn off your cell phones, but for the Sunday evening performances of “Inside Private Lives” at the Fremont Centre Theatre, you don’t have to zip your lips. Backtalk is heavily encouraged.

After all, the six people who will make up the bill are from a cast of 16 newsmakers who often sought attention.

The cast of characters are all from the 20th century and changes from night to night. While they break the fourth wall and speak, touch and even dance with audience members, they do not interact with each other. One character at a time, tells his or her story. The night I attended, Kristin Stone opened the evening as Christine Jorgensen, the first transgender personality. During her heyday in the 1950s the joke was: "Christine Jorgensen went abroad, and came back a broad." Jorgensen is disappointed to find that Playboy magazine isn’t interested in having her as a centerfold and chides the audience members as Hugh Hefner and other Playboy related people for their lack of interest. Stone is charming and polished, the model of the June Cleaver-type of woman who was just naughty enough to become a nightclub act (Jorgensen died in 1989)

Adam LeBow was a sincere, young Elia Kazan, who is meeting with his friends who had been in the Communist cell with him. He’s been recalled before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee where he will names names, an act that will save him from being blacklisted but would follow him for decades.

While Kazan and Jorgensen are polite, Leonora Gershman’s Julia Phillips is a foul-mouthed bitter woman on cocaine, railing at the executives who are firing her even though she won an Academy Award in 1973 for producing “The Sting” (an honor shared with Tony Bill and her then-husband Michael Phillips). She also was one of the producers of the 1977 “Taxi Driver” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and would, in 1991, write “You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again,” a book that topped the New York Times bestseller list but named high profile names in Hollywood.

For those who don’t remember, former president Jimmy Carter had a younger brother, Billy (Bryan Safi), who was best known for swilling beer and behaving badly. With his brother running for re-election, Billy has just been told he won’t be allowed to speak at the Democratic National Convention and proceeds to get drunk.

David Shofner as David Koresh isn’t mesmerizing, yet does have the kind of confidence one would expect from a man who was accused of taking young girls as his wives and concubines and made Waco, Texas a fiery inferno in 1993. Shofner’s Koresh has just announced the abolishment of all marital bonds and his intention to become the husband of all the faithful women.

Mary MacDonald as Marge Schott has come before a committee hoping to be cleared to adopt a child. The infamous foul-mouthed former owner of the Cincinnati Reds was well-known for her love of her St. Bernard, her racist slurs and her praise of Hitler who began good, but just went too far. MacDonald’s Schott is a tough woman, who wants to be one of the boys and is utterly oblivious to the effect of her cringe-worthy sentiments.

Phillips died in 2002. Kazan in 2003. Carter in 1988. Schott, in 2004. None of the characters are living.

Other characters who might appear would be King Edward VIII (Freddy Douglas), Ann Landers (Diana Morrison), evangelist Aimee Semple MacPherson (Molly Hagan), Channeler of the spirit “Seth” Jane Roberts, (Maddisen Krown), Tupperware Home Sales innovator Brownie Wise (Eileen O'Connell), IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands (Paul Thomas Ryan), and the woman Edward gave up his throne for, Wallis Simpson (Shelia Wolf).

Under the direction of Lee Michael Cohn, the segments are funny and generally flow although with audience participation some of the pacing is unpredictable. Yet on the night I attended, the performers handled the questions and minor heckling with grace and in character.

Originally opening in Los Angeles in October 2006, this production was performed in New York City and was part of the 2007 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Inside Private Lives continues until sometime in November at the Fremont Centre Theatre, 1000 Fremont Ave., South Pasadena. Sundays, 7 p.m. General admission, $25; seniors and students $20. Call (866) 811-4111.

Movie Review: The Fly and Spawn

2008-09-11T20:01:00.000-07:00

This week in Los Angeles, a new opera premiered based on, of all things, the 1986 science fiction movie, The Fly.

With the libretto by David Henry Hwang and music by Howard Shore, this opera has brought renewed attention to the 1986 movie upon which it was based.

The original movie was actually based on a short story from Nouvelles de l"Anti-Monde by George Langelaan.

The Fly

You might think this 1958 movie takes place in France because of the characters' names, but actually it is set in Canada. There's been a murder in a factory. A man's head has been crushed. The culprit is his beautiful wife, Helene (Patricia Owens). When she tells her story to her brother-in-law Francois (Vincent Price), see the story in flashbacks. A scientist, Andre Delambre (David Hedison) has invented a disintegrater-integrater. He shows it to his wife, but things don't work exactly right--some of the particles are scrambled. He experiments on a cat and it doesn't quite work, but finally, he decides to try it on himself. Unfortunately, a fly has entered the chamber with him and the integrator scrambles the man and the fly so that parts have been switched. He hides himself from his wife and son until he must bring his wife into his confidence. This is a classic and well done with a happy ending for the wife, but not for the fly.

The movie was directed and produced by Kurt Neumann with a screenplay by James Clavell before he wrote that Japanese drivel called "Shogun."

Return of the Fly

When you have a hit, what do you do? Just what 20th Century-Fox did. You make a sequel. There's a different director (Edward Bernds who also wrote the screenplay) and producer (Bernard Glasser) and the only character who returns besides the fly is Vincent Price. Helene has died and this 1959 black and white movie opens with her funeral. There her son, now a young man, asking about his father's mysterious death. After 15 years, all the equipment remains. Philippe (Brett Halsey) figures out how to duplicate his father's experiments, but his treacherous friend betrays him and puts him in the teleporter with...of course, a fly. The one has a happy ending for both the fly and the fly boy. The acting isn't great but if you like bad science fiction this is good in a bad way.

Curse of the Fly

You think by the third generation, people would have learned their lesson, like kill all flies or make a fly-proof room before you experiment. Andre's son, Henri (Brian Donlevy) and two grandsons can't keep away from that damn transporter machine. As a subplot, we have an escapee from an insane asylum, Patricia (Carole Gray) who meets and married Henri's eldest son, Martin (George Baker). Now they are teleporting people between Quebec and England. A few botched experiments later, the bride is missing and the police are looking for her. And there was actually a first wife who wasn't dead or divorce. This is available on DVD. Directed by Don Sharp with a script written by Harry Spalding, this is bad, real bad.

The Fly

This 1986 movie changed a lot of the details. We are no longer in Canada. The people aren't French Canadian. There is no family, just a lonely offbeat scientist, Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) and an ambitious journalist, Veronica (Geena Davis). They meet at a party and he immediately takes her home to show her his new toys. She thinks they are designer phone booths; they are, of course, teleporting pods. Directed by David Cronenberg who co-wrote the script with Charles Edward Pogue. They seem to have been a bit confused about what exactly they wanted to do. Veronica's boss is seen as slimy, but then almost heroic. Their happy ending with Veronica and her boss married didn't screen well so they changed their epilogue. The DVD shows all these possibilities. I have to say that now, the nightmare scene where Veronica dreams she has given birth to a larvae-like baby now seems embarrassingly phallic. There's a lot more gore in this flick and some black humor on the part of Brundle as he becomes Brundlefly.

The Fly II

This movie in another era would have been called "Son of the Fly." Yes the offspring of Veronica and Seth is born, Martin Brundle (Eric Stoltz). Veronica (Saffron Henderson) conveniently dies and because Seth and Veronica had no relatives (I guess) the child is left to Anton Bartok (Lee Richardson), the owner of Bartok Industries for whom Seth worked.

Martin, having mutant fly genes, experiences an accelerated growth rate. In three year, he's ten. The teleporters still exist, but they don't work well. The test animals usually end up deformed, including a dog that Martin befriends. Martin begins working on the teleporters and befriends Beth Logan (Daphne Zuniga). Martin discovers that he is mutating into a fly and contacts his father's rival Stathis Borans (John Getz) and attempts to find away to prevent his metamorphosis into a fly.

Directed by Chris Walas and written by committee (Mick Garris, Jim Wheat, Ken Wheat and Frank Darabont), this movie had a clearcut villian--corporate America as embodied by Richardson's Anton Bartok. Not as psychologically deep or darkly humorous, but a more focused story with a predictable happy ending, well, except for Bartok.

Movie Review: "Alice Neel" or When Motherhood Takes the Backseat to Artistic Expression

2008-08-31T08:08:00.000-07:00

What is the price of pursuing one's dream? What is the real price of art?

This documentary on portrait painter Alice Neel attempts to answer those questions. From the very beginning, Alice Neel's role as both artist and mother are brought sharply into focus.

We see her son, Hartley, and he tells the camera, "People want stability; that's human nature." He then asks a very basic question. "Why does somebody create an image of anything. Why?"

His half-brother, Richard, then states, "I don't like bohemian culture. I consider that a lot of people were hurt by it. I was hurt by it."

Before we know much about the artist, we know this: her children suffered. Richard explains, "We always had this dream that she'd be recognized and we'd able to get some money by her work. It really didn't work out that way when we were children."

An artist friend of mine once made a series about why there weren't more women artist, at least more well known women artists. They were too often caught up in the drudgery of motherhood and wifely activities--cooking, cleaning and mending clothes and wounded bodies and souls. Yet not all women allowed their motherhood to get in the way of art.

Alice Neel (1900-1984) was not so well known in her younger years when she was on welfare, having children by different men and painting in an impressionistic style that was not fashionable. It was a time for abstract expressionism and pop art. Yet later in life, the Whitney Museum of American Art held a retrospective, a vindication of a messy life and neglecting motherhood.

The documentary was written and directed by her grandson, Andrew Neel, and fortunately isn't always flattering but also doesn't quite have the distance that might give a more balanced objective view. Neel includes interviews with her two surviving sons. They, Richard Neel and Hartley Neel, are middle-aged and do not give entirely glowing accounts of their childhoods although not all of it is negative. There is a heated moment between father (Hartley) and son (Andrew) that could have been avoided if a third-party had been involved.

Alice Neel also lost two children--one to an early death and another was taken from her care. From this she drew inspiration or perhaps a better word is she became obsessed with certain subject matter and yet she did have children in her care.

Alice did appear in a film, Allen Ginsberg's Beatnik movie, Pull My Daisy, and in this documentary we see her in archival black and white footage. She is a solid gray-hair woman by then and not the impetuous woman who threw herself into destructive affairs, marriage and political involvements.

Her work uses line, color and form expressively. The background seems to be a second thought. Yet the result is the figures pop out, alive, vibrant with personality.

Of course, if you're not up on history, art and otherwise, or old enough to remember, there was a movement in the 1960s and 1970s that questioned where were all the women artists. In the 1980s, there were the Guerrilla Girls who questions "Do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum?" There was also a "weenie" count--naked men versus naked women. Americans are still a bit hesitant to show full-frontal male nudity although female nudity is more widespread than ever. Hollywood and Los Angeles being where Hugh Hefner has his Playboy mansion and where Larry Flynt publishes.

These acts of feminist protest aren't part of the documentary, but it is clearly stated that had Alice Neel been everything people thought women should be, she would not have been able to create her art. There is some question about her painting nudes of children, if it were proper, if she took into consideration how the child might feel later in life and Alice Neel is not the only example of this gray area between art, pornography and exploitation.

The feminist movement is credited by some in causing art historians to cast Alice Neel's work in a better light, when someone realized that women could be artists as well as muses.

One might consider it a bit sexist to question the Alice Neel's neglect of her children in favor of her art. I remember being shocked to learn, outside of my art history class, that Paul Gauguin has deserted his wife and five children. In that respect, questions about childhood seem out of place in this documentary, but perhaps the problem is rather that we need to take better account of how male artists dealt with fatherhood.

This documentary is a fascinating look at one woman artist who put art before motherhood. It has a cluttered feeling--too much left in, too much left unsaid, too many buried feelings not adequately expressed. What is the real price of art? And should we evaluate both male and female artist in the same manner?

Movie Review: Save Me Gives a Sensitive Look at a Timely Issue

2008-08-31T06:36:00.000-07:00

For those that haven't heard the battle for gay rights is heating up in sunny California over gay marriage. There are those who can't live and let live and many of these are from the religious right.

Robert Desiderio has written a screenplay from a story by Craig Chester and Alan Hines. Under the direction of Robert Cary is has become a 2007 movie, elevated only slightly over a movie of the week, if TV allowed for less sap and more evenhanded portrayals.

The story is about a gay man, Mark (Chad Allen), who is troubled in many ways. He is addicted to drugs and perhaps to sex. His family won't take him in after his latest suicide attempt, but he finds refuge in a Christian-run ministry run by a husband (Stephen Lang) and wife (Judith Light with a mousy brown dyed hair), Ted and Gayle.

This ministry, Genesis House, is about changing broken men and helping them recover from being gay through a 12-step program of faith.

Mark attract special attention from Gayle whose son by her first marriage committed suicide, but he also develops that friendship with another resident, Scott (Robert Gant). Predictably, this friendship deepens into a romantic love, very different from the casual encounters we know Mark had originally indulged in.

The question of if Gayle is wrong or if the gay men are misguided is not tilted either way and Gayle is neither a rigid zealot nor enlightened at the end.

Produced by the gay-focused production company Mythgarden, there is no doubt of a bias toward gay rights, however, this movie gives a sympathetic portrayal to both sides. Religious faith isn't seen as necessarily a bad thing and some of the damning biblical quotations against homosexuality are aired as well as ones that we'd rather ignore. If faith has guided Mark to give up drugs and lust for love, then how could religion be all bad, too?

Of course, here in Pasadena, CA, there is a church that has taken up gay rights and does have a liberal ministry with a long history of defending many socio-political issues. This kind of movie fits well with this church's more open-minded stance and reminds us that religion can have a place in the movement to defend the rights of minorities.

Movie Review: A Troubling Tale about Beauty in Trouble

2008-08-31T06:07:00.000-07:00

Beauty can, at least temporarily, overcome the boundaries of class and economics and in this case, the beauty in question in the 2006 Czech film, Beauty in Trouble (Kráska v nesnázích) is Marcela (Anna Geislerová).

She is married to Jarda (Roman Luknár) and her troubles began long ago, but the current problem are the economic woes resulting from the 2002 flood in Prague. Her house is ruined and Jarda is now reduced to working for a chop shop. They still have a healthy and passionate sex life and in their current tight quarters, her children can hear their lovemaking. Jarda is arrested for car theft and Marcela meets a much older richer man, Evzen Benes (Josef Abrham) at the police station. It is his car that Jarda stole.

Alone and with only her income, she finds herself back with her mother (Jana Brejchová) and her stepfather, Uncle Richie (Jirí Schmitzer).

Evzen had immigrated to Italy and become a vintner and has returned now that the post-communist government recognizes his claim to the family house. He begins to court Marcela and offers her a place to stay.

Uncle Richie is more than a little creepy, offering to expose himself to Marcela's oldest child, Lucina (Michaela Mrvikova). He's more tolerable to the asthmatic Kuba (Adam Misik) but neither really like him. Yet eventually, Marcela moves in with Evzen although it is she that finally decides to begin a sexual relationship with him.

The title comes from a Robert Graves poem that was later adapted into a Czech song and in this movie is performed by a folk singer, Raduza. The line is "Beauty in trouble flees to the good angel/On whom she can rely."

This film by director Jan Hrebejk and writer Petr Jarchovsky has some creepy, unresolved aspects. We learn that Marcela's oldest child is not Jarda's. He took her in when she left home, young, jobless and pregnant. There's a suggestion that Uncle Richie might even be the father. With her children to think of, Marcela makes an economic decision, one that is easier because Evzen as portrayed by Abrham is essentially a good and patient man. If Marcela doesn't still love Jarda, we know that she lusts for him, but who wouldn't want a better life--not only for oneself, but for one's children.

Perhaps, given time, a widowed Marcela will be re-united with Jarda. Still the creepier aspects of Uncle Richie are ignored, dropped after Marcela flees her mother's apartment.

Well-acted, this movie reminds us of the realities of flooded cities and as New Orleans and other places are evacuated or declared disaster areas, that Americans have more in common with other places than perhaps we realize.

Life and Crime in Poland - Retrieval (Z Odzysku)

2008-08-30T23:24:00.000-07:00

This 2006 movie written by Slawomir Fabicki, Denijal Hasanovic and Marek Pruchniewski and directed by Fabicki is a dark and depressing tale about 19-year-old Wojtek's (Antoni Pawlicki) attempt to rise out of poverty in a small Polish town. Working in a dangerous cement pit, Wojtek also boxes to earn extra money. The boss of a local disco (Jacek Braciak) offers him a safer job: working as a bouncer at his disco, but his boss also runs a loan shark business and his bouncers provide the muscle.

In love with an older woman, an illegal Ukrainian immigrant Katja (Natalya Vdovina) who has a son Andryi (Dimitri Melnichuk), Wojtek want to find a bigger better apartment. He does find a nice place, but slowly sheds his charm as he's forced to make hard decisions and hurt people in his new line of business. One way his boss teaches him heartlessness is a target practice exercise involving dogs. As Wojtek becomes increasingly alienated from his conscience and numbed to violence, his behavior changes. Eventually, Katja leaves him and finds refuge with Wojtek's family who also reject him.

This isn't, of course, a new story. Fabicki doesn't have the big budget of a Hollywood movie and his film isn't as slick or well filmed. The indoor lighting has a yellow or greenish cast at times and it doesn't seem intentional. Yet this is a reminder that poverty and desperation aren't an American problem nor is it a problem of the past. Here race isn't an issue with Latino or African American gangs and drug dealers.

Yet this movie portrays the gangster culture as not culturally entrenched as cool. Andryi becomes the target of derision and gets in a fight with when other neighborhood kids tell him Wojtek is a gangster. Perhaps America was there, once upon a time when gangsta-style wasn't fashionable or glamorous.

Movie Review: A Man Named Pearl Makes a Difference

2008-07-30T20:15:00.000-07:00

When I first heard the title, thought of Daniel Pearl, the journalist who was killed in Pakistan in 2002. Yet this documentary, A Man Named Pearl, has more in common with Johnny Cash's "A Boy Named Sue."

The man, Pearl Fryar, is an African American man in his sixties. The son of a sharecropper, he grew up poor in North Carolina and moved with his wife to a small town in South Carolina: Bishopville. There, when he sought to buy a house in a white neighborhood, he was discouraged and someone said it was because African Americans didn't keep their yards tidy.

Pearl bought a house among black neighbors and filled his yard with plants that had been discarded by the city nursery. He would and still does pick through the dump pile. From these he created a wonderland, something you'd imagine would abound with Dr. Seuss' characters. Abstract, whimsical topiaries and a gorgeously green lawn became his answer to prejudice. He turned an instant of discrimination into a positive thing that now attracts visitors--of all races, first locally, then throughout the county, then the state, finally nationwide and then internationally.

This 2006 documentary by directors/producers Scott Galloway and Brent Pierson and edited by Greg Grzeszczak deserves a greater audience. Fryar is a shining example of how faith, hard work and perseverance can have positive results on a neighborhood and even a whole community.

The film opens with a simple but jolting sight. A man climbs up a ladder leaned against a tall topiary. He wears old jeans, sturdy, worn leather work boots, and a t-shirt. He carries a frightening gas hedge trimmer. People in the audience gasp as he stops on the very top steps of the ladder, in a manner that would make most of our parents frown and OSHA have a heart attack. Much later, we learn he is in his sixties and his wife worries when it's quiet and warns him when she goes out to stay on the ground.

Starting when he worked four 10-hour days at a can factory, Fryar would come home and work until late at night. Yet the results are a garden so detailed and wondrous that he now teaches art classes and gives lectures about topiaries--something he has not formal training in.

Galloway and Pierson interviewed visitors, neighbors, a local journalist, the visitor bureau, the mayor, art historians, artists, his wife, his son and his preacher as well as the man himself. Fryar is humble and inspiring.

If ever there were a great story about going green and recycling, making something out of nothing, it is this film. Pearl does comment about his name, how he once disliked it but now he views it as an asset. Who wouldn't remember a black man named Pearl?

A Man Named Pearl is a small gem of a movie that should not, particularly in these dark economic times, be missed.

MOVIE REVIEW: Brideshead Revisited, Waugh's Panegyric Preached over an Empty Coffin

2008-07-29T08:49:00.000-07:00

In 1959 Evelyn Waugh reflected on his 1945 Brideshead Revisited in the preface to the re-issue. There were, he admitted, "many small additions and some substantial cuts" and it had been written during "a bleak period of present privation and threatening disaster--the period of soya beans and Basic English--and in consequence, the book is infused with a kind of gluttony, for food and wine, for the splendours of the recent past, and for rhetorical and ornamental language, which now with a full stomach I find distasteful."

He had written an elegy for both the English country home that he considered, "our chief national artistic achievement" which he believed "were doomed to decay and spoilation like the monasteries in the sixteenth century." It did not seem then, in 1945, that the English aristocracy would survive. Yet by 1959, the "cult of the English country house" had resulted in the opening of these homes to trippers. He imagined Brideshead as one of these now with "treasures rearranged by expert hands and the fabric better maintained than it was by Lord Marchmain."

He ended the preface by saying that "it would be impossible to bring it [the novel] up to date without totally destroying it" and much of the book was a "panegyric preached over an empty coffin."

Panegyric is one of those words you'd expect to find on a college entrance exam; it means a formal public speech that highly praises a person or thing. It is an elaborate eulogy without criticism.

I cannot, however, give high praise to director Julian Jarrold's film, Brideshead Revisited, with screenplay by Jeremy Brock.

The book's actual title isBrideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder. From the beginning, the topic is love and the title introduces the concept of the sacred and religious.

In the prologue, Ryder comments, "When I reached 'C' Company lines, which were at the top of the hill, I paused and looked back at the camp, just coming into full view below me through the grey mist of early morning...I reflected now that it had no single happy memory for me. Here love had died between me and the army."

We soon learn that he is 39 and he "began to be old." He has lost something and seems to have no friends or family. Instead he "felt stiff and weary in the evenings and reluctant to go out of camp" and "went to bed immediately after the nine o'clock news."

Taken to an unknown destination, Ryder is surprised to find he is at an old country estate called Brideshead and recalls how he had been brought there 20 years earlier by Sebastian when both were students at Oxford.

Ryder's affection for Sebastian is a forerunner to his love for Sebastian's sister Julia. He meets Julia when he meets their mother, a formidable woman who has held the family together when her husband fled to Italy to live with his mistress. They are both, after all, Catholic. Even the mistress, Cara, is Catholic. But what kind of Catholic doesn't seek an annulment under such circumstances except one who is utterly devoted to keeping up appearances, clinging to religion for salvation and sanity and dignity.

Her devotion reminds one of Katherine of Aragon, who remained faithful to her husband, King Henry VIII. It was Henry VIII desire to divorce Katherine that threatened Catholicism in England and challenged all Catholics in England to decide between faith and loyalty. In the book Brideshead Revisited, catholicism serves as a limitation of the aristocracy. No Catholic can rise to the highest status of all in society, queen consort as Katherine of Aragon had been, or king.

Yet Ryder doesn't marry Julia. She marries a more ambitious man, one with a socially well-placed widow as a mistress, one that he, Rex, doesn't give up. The marriage ceremony itself is an embarrassment to both Julia and her mother and in the end, neither really likes the ambitious Rex. Ryder married Celia who, it turns out, is also unfaithful. When Julia and Ryder meet on a ship bound for England (from America), they begin an affair. Sebastian has already gone off in an alcoholic haze to Morocco and their mother, has died. One senses that Ryder as much if not more in love with the Brideshead estate as to Julia and Sebastian. Yet their way of life was leading to financial ruin.

In the movie, the beginning is choppy, switching between a reserved captain in World War II, an artist crossing the ocean and a young man in his college years. Instead of the fateful meeting on the ship coming in the middle of Ryder's flashback into the past, Brock places it at the beginning before reverting to Sebastian and Ryder's Oxford days and continuing in chronological order. The scenes on the ship are then repeated, and fitted back into chronological order.

As Charles Ryder, our narrator and guide into the lives of Catholic aristocracy, Matthew Goode is no more than a reflection of the characters around him. He seems to float through life without any direction. Can one really believe that such a man would venture into the jungles and paint vibrant, wild scenes that would take at least the English art world by storm? I didn't. His passivity makes one wonder why Sebastian (Ben Whishaw) and later, his sister Julia (Hayley Atwell) would be attracted to him.

We also miss the change in the novel between the poignantly lonely man returning to the magical place of his youth, to a young man infatuated with a way of life beyond his means and birth to the young, successful artist living in sin.

Brock's script also takes a few more shortcuts. Rex is such a cad that he willingly converts to catholicism while in the book his conversion is the subject of much consternation for the Father Mowbray and Julia's mother. Rex was already divorced and when he finally marries Julia it is with a Protestant ceremony. None of the mother's family attended and only a few of the father's. In the book, Julia explains to Ryder, "poor Rex found he'd married an outcast, which was exactly the opposite of all he'd wanted." In the movie, Rex simply converted and seems to chide Ryder for not having thought of doing so himself.

Emma Thompson dominates the screen with only Ben Whishaw able to muster enough charisma to equal her performance. Yet we don't sense, in Brock's script, Sebastian's redemption, to be remembered fondly as a brother who often would fail but return to the fold and be well-loved in his self-imposed exile in Morocco. The tragedy of Sebastian, as a Catholic "sodomite" who must deal contradiction between his own sexual preferences and his beliefs about sin and damnation, is more explicit in the movie than the book.

Waugh was a Catholic by conversion and not birth so the book is not a critical attack on catholicism and faith. In the book, Ryder begins as an atheist or agnostic and ends as one who would enter the chapel and say "a prayer, an ancient, newly-learned form of words." The movie is less definite about the character's conversion. So while the movie fails in addressing Ryder's spiritual transformation, it does succeed in delineating his love affair with a lifestyle and a country manor.

Both the TV series and the film used Castle Howard as a location. If interest in Castle Howard was waning as the memory of the 1981 TV series has faded, then this should boost tourism again. In this respect, Waugh's novel has been a great asset to the cult of the English country house and perhaps even saved Castle Howard and the surrounding city. Perhaps the coffin wasn't so empty after all.

Movie Review: Romance of the French Countryside - Le Fils de l'épicier

2008-07-23T21:28:00.000-07:00

This gentle romance, Le Fils de l'Épicier (The Grocer's Son), came out in my town on the same weekend as The Dark Knight, so I'm afraid that it might be easily overlooked. It doesn't have the backstage drama of an ill-fated, young star becoming immortal by dying young nor does it have an international incident involving any of its stars.

There is nothing deep or brooding about it and no special effects or CGI were used. If this was re-made in a few years, it would have too much gloss and glamor to seem like a story about real people.

This 2007 movie, directed by Eric Guirado and written by Guirado and Florence Vignon, was released in the U.S. in June of this year. The lead actor, Nicolas Cazalé, was nominated for a César for his role as a prodigal son, returning from a self-imposed exile in the city to find his place in the world as the grocer's son.

Cazalé plays Antoine, a shy, 30-year-old man who has been drifting through life in the big city, going from job to job, unhappy and a bit surly. His latest job is as a waiter and he feels the impersonal nature of urban life. He is smitten with his neighbor, Claire (Clotilde Hesme), who is divorced, a bit impoverished and studying to enter college--something she gave up when she married so young.

Antoine's father (Daniel Duval) collapses and his mother (Jeanne Goupil) is left alone to tend their mom-and-pop store that includes a van. Antoine borrows money for Claire and agrees to work until his father gets well. Antoine's older brother, François (Stéphan Guérin-Tillié), has remained in the village and is married, the only technically married--something he hides from his parents. It is up to Antoine to drive the route and sell merchandise, but his prickly personality turns his father's customers away. Claire comes along one day and charms his customers, most of them elderly and some increasingly suffering from the debilitating ravages of old age. From this we see that part of Antoine's gruffness is due to his introversion. With Claire, we see his inner sweetness slowly peek out.

His father, also a grouch by nature, had a softness under his rough exterior. Yet when his father comes home from the hospital, old grievances--between Antoine and his father, between his father and François and François and Antoine--flare up.

While Antoine and Claire make tentative steps toward a relationship, the real romance here is with the French countryside of Provence--and yet the economic woes of a small business against larger businesses and the problems of old age, are not glossed over. Loose strings are left untied. If you're looking for closure or some climatic realization, Guirado and Vignon have not provided it.

Instead, we have what seem to be real people, living real lives and speaking or not speaking. The dialog isn't witty or snappy or clever. Yet as the relationship between the principals evolve, gradually, we do see hope and a kind of happiness, the kind that can really come to real lives in a way that seems more real than reality TV.

Does Yahoo! Really Need another Re-org?

2008-07-07T16:51:00.001-07:00

The House of Purple is undergoing yet another reorganization. The neighborhood's on fire, time to rearrange the furniture. That will save your major investment. You're marriage is heading for a divorce, time to rearrange your closet. That will fix everything.

Isn't that essentially Yahoo!'s philosophy? You don't notice the fire so much when you're tripping over the furniture and admiring the odd new view.

As long as you can find your favorite outfit, it doesn't matter that your husband, lover, best friends are leaving you.

From the Yahoo! viewpoint, it's like shuffling a deck of cards when you've had a bad run at blackjack. Perhaps from the dealer's point of view, this is good, if the dealer is Google. It keeps the people you're playing with from counting cards and making statistical calculations. Business, however, isn't about luck. It is about calculations and statistics. Yahoo!'s stats do not look good.

As a matter of full disclosure, at one time, I worked for Yahoo!. At my request, a state government agency is investigating their employment practices.

I've experienced a few reorganizations. When I left the company, I couldn't remember the name of the department nor the team that I worked for because the department and team names had been changed so often, that even some managers had a hard time identifying department names. Apparently, Yahoo!'s board hasn't read much Shakespeare, where even the 13-year-old Juliet knew names really do not matter.

I came on as an Associate Editor; I left as a Search Enhancement Associate. What is a Search Enhancement Associate? That's just another obfuscation. It looks nice because several different categories of workers in the same pay bracket can be classified by this phrase and yet, let's face it, on a resume it means nothing. I wonder how much time was spent thinking up that job label.

New names, same faces and unfortunately, too often, same dumb strategies. Well, not all the same faces. According to PC World, in the reorganization announced on 26 June 2008, obviously some old faces weren't going to be around with this latest re-org including:

Jess Weiner, Executive Vice President of Yahoo!'s Network Division
Vish Makhijani, Senior Vice President of Search
Qi Lu, Executive Vice President for Search and Advertising Technology
Usama Fayyah, Executive Vice President
Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake who helped create Flickr
Brad Garlinghouse, Senior Vice President for Communications and Communities

Garlinghouse wrote the infamous peanut butter manifesto.

Is this re-org caused by the defection of these people or is it just a matter of habit? If you haven't been keeping track, Yahoo! also had a major reorganization at the beginning of December 2006. Terry Semel was still chairman and chief executive officer at that time. The press release claimed four main objectives:

* Expand customer-centric culture and capabilities -- Yahoo! will develop rich experiences for each audience segment and deliver solutions to meet the needs of all advertisers and publishers worldwide. Yahoo! will organize its services around audience segments and advertising customers, rather than around products.

* Create leading social media environments -- Yahoo! will leverage its strong positions in community, communications, search, as well as media content across its global network to create leading social media environments, which will encourage every user on the Yahoo! network to participate in the consumption and publishing of information, and knowledge through tagging, reviewing, sharing of images and audio, and other social media activities.

* Lead in next-generation advertising platforms -- Yahoo! will extend its industry-leading breadth of offerings to give the most diverse array of advertisers, from large brand marketers to local merchants, every opportunity to connect with audiences on and off Yahoo!.

* Drive organizational effectiveness and scale -- Yahoo! will recruit and retain the best industry talent and focus its resources on high-impact, network-wide platforms to help capture the most significant long-term growth opportunities.

Somehow they don't seem to be able to recruit and retain the best talent. Granted, Semel did get Tom Cruise to Sunnyvale in January 2006, which was after his May 2005 couch-jumping but before Katie Holmes became an unwed mother in April 2006. Despite the coup which was meant, I suppose, to help Yahoo!'s newly launched Answers, I think more Answers about Tom Cruise can be found on Gawker.com although, to be fair, the Scientology video was posted in February of this year, 2008.

In June 2007, Yahoo! unloaded chairman and CEO Terry Semel, who, after five years, had earned $500 million and had stock options worth $70 million according to Wikipedia. That touched off a reorg that brought Jerry Yang, Chief Yahoo and Yahoo! co-founder, to the CEO position. In February 2008, Yahoo's re-org included downsizing, unloading about a thousand people. Under Jerry Yang and Sue Decker these people weren't offered the Golden Parachute that Yahoo! had been negotiating for its other full-time employees with Microsoft as reported by CNET on 19 February 2008.

The golden parachute was not for those employees who had been laid off on 12 February 2008 such as myself. It was for those remaining employee should they lose their jobs in a Microsoft buyout.

Maybe Yahoo! should be less concerned with retaining the employees they have, particularly since some are leaping from what looks like a sinking ship, and checking into what those employees are doing and have been doing wrong.

According to the PC World article:

Reporting to President Sue Decker will be three new teams:

-- the Audience Products Division, which will oversee product strategy and product management and will be led by Ash Patel, former manager of Yahoo's Platforms & Infrastructure group;

-- the U.S. region, which will be led by Hilary Schneider, previously chief of the company's Global Partner Solutions group; and

-- Insights Strategy, which is in charge of centralizing and executing "a common strategy for the use of data and analysis across Yahoo," and the chief of which will be named later.

The new organizational structure will improve Yahoo's products and speed up decisions, the company said.

Apparently the customer-centric policies of June 2007 weren't so effective. I and every employee of Yahoo! did receive a purple card to remind us of our purpose in the house of purple. One one side it reads:

Our Purpose (in orange)
Yahoo! powers and delights our communities of users, advertisers and publishers--all of us united in creating indispensable experiences, and fueled by trust.
YAHOO!

The other side reads:

OUR VALUES
Excellence, Innovation, Customer Fixation, Teamwork, Community, Fun
OUR BEHAVIORS
Delight, Decide, Deliver,
Act as One Yahoo!

I wonder how much time and money was spent on those little "Our Purpose" cards, made to fit on our lanyards along with our ID cards. Looking at this all now, it reminds me of that IBM commercial about "ideating."

MOVIE REVIEW: Holding Trevor Doesn't Hold Interest

2008-06-29T21:40:00.000-07:00

Director Rosser Goodman's Holding Trevor is a gay love story written by Brent Gorski. As much as I've found some charming and witty examples of gay plays such as the infamous Naked Boys Singing when I was a theater reviewer for the LA Weekly and, later, for the LA Times, I find little in this independent film to hold my interest.

Trevor (Gorski) is a man who, at the beginning of the movie, is breaking up with his undependable, drug-addicted boyfriend, Darrell (Christopher Wyllie). He meets an attractive new man, Emphram (Eli Kranski) but hesitates to become involved though his friends Jake (Jay Brannan) and Andie (Melissa Searing). There is, of course, an HIV scare and some bitchy dialog, but the wit and snap isn't there. Gorski's dialog isn't funny and mostly falls flat and this is unfortunately capitalized by Goodman's indulgent direction.

If you're hoping for full-frontal nudity, there's none of that although there is male nudity (Joseph Roslan as Naked Guy) and tastefully simulated sex.

While I have to admire Goodman and Gorski for getting their movie made and distributed, I do not admire this work. Perhaps in the future, they'll use their industrious abilities to create a better film that will make me laugh or cry. This movie did neither.

MOVIE REVIEW: Hannari A Travel Guide to the Real Geisha

2008-06-27T12:49:00.000-07:00

Hannari: Geisha Modern is a documentary that I truly wanted to like. After all, it was both the production of the 2005 Memoirs of a Geisha and the 2002 The Last Samurai that inspired first-time documentary filmmaker Miyuki Sohara to make this film.

Sohara who had a small part in the Tom Cruise flick as a geisha, was, according to the production notes for this documentary, "disappointed to learn that the producers of Memoirs of a Geisha had no interest in faithfully reproducing the artistic elements of the geisha culture, such as their dance."

Like her, I was disappointed with the Cruise flick which I saw and the snippets of Memoirs of a Geisha which I have not seen. I had read the book and that was quite enough. The trailers for Memoirs of a Geisha inspired me to write an open letter to Steven Spielberg.

For those who don't know, originally the studio people responsible for the opening party of The Last Samuraisent an infamous email to a local college asking for young, attractive Asian women to dress up and be party favors or eye candy. No pay involved as well as no Asian men required. That email made the rounds nationwide and the studio quickly backtracked.

Later, when Memoirs of a Geisha came out as a movie, the book and the movie seemed to indicate how little Asian and Asian women had really progressed, even after the successful Joy Luck Club--both 1989 book and 1993 movie.

Golden's novel followed a woman and her experiences prior to World War II, an explosive period in both Japanese history and the history of the United States in terms of societal change and racism and sexism. Golden, like Sohara, focuses on Kyoto geisha, but Sohara's documentary concentrates on modern geisha as the title implies.

Beginning in 2005, Sohara, a TV announcer and radio DJ and sometime actor, spent three months interviewing and filming geisha in the Gion district. This was, notably, after Mineko Iwasaki had filed a lawsuit against Arthur Golden regarding his 1997 novel Memoirs of a Geisha in 2001. Iwasaki, who does not read English, did read the Japanese edition.

Sohara doesn't answer any questions that The Last Samurai and both the book and the film of Memoirs of a Geisha broached. Instead, Hannari: Geisha Modern occupies a curious space beyond and apart from recent history, insulating itself from both Sohara's original catalyst and the world at large, both Japan insiders and the people who are willing to believe in the geisha fantasy.

Some of the cinematography shows her inexperience. The lighting is wrong and the colors are off--typical of photography or filming inside where the lighting is too yellow and goes uncorrected by film or filters.

Sohara had access to the geisha community that hasn't been granted before, but the vital missing ingredient is the critical eye and view. We are told why a dance instructor believes that many women do not make it to the apprentice maiko stage but we don't hear from those that quit.

We learn that where geiko (as geisha prefer to be called) used number in the thousands and now only 300 currently work in Kyoto. Originally, most of the geiko came from the Kyoto area, but now many come from outside and other areas of Japan. We don't hear why Kyoto women reject that lifestyle, we only hear why women have decided to train. We don't hear how the families of these women consider this choice. What do their parents think? What do their siblings, particularly other sisters think?

Moreover, we never hear from Mineko Iwasaki, the woman who sued Arthur Golden and his publisher and went on to write her own book, Geisha: A Life, in 2002. We also do not hear what those interviewed think about Golden, Iwasaki or either book. Iwasaki reported quit early in her career because of her frustration with the traditional system.

If Hollywood's damningly mistaken portrayal of the geiko was the impetus for this documentary, then it is equally odd that we never hear what anyone thinks about big budget Hollywood portrayals, even though two of the women interviewed were in the 1957 movie Sayonara. All we have are these two women recalling they sat near a young and virile Marlon Brando and wondering if Miyoshi Umeki won an Oscar for her role as the ill-fated wife of an American airman played by Red Buttons.

For the record, that movie won Buttons and Umeki supporting actors Oscars. Brando was nominated for Best Actor despite his odd Southern accent. Also notable is Ricardo Montablan playing a Japanese named Nakamura. What did the Japanese think of that?

Brando had played a Japanese Okinawan in the 1956 movie The Teahouse of the August Moon. Surely if everyone is a critic a few critics of that performance could be found in Japan.

These connections aren't followed up by Sohara, making the resulting conversations trite. Big names are dropped but related hard issues are not picked up. One of the more famous geiko of yesteryear is also brought up, Yuki Kato Morgan (1881-1963), but the social issues surrounding her are not.

Supposedly, both the Morgan family and the Kato family disapproved of the match between the young geiko and George Morgan, nephew of J.P. Morgan. Yuki and George Morgan were not welcomed in the United States despite the Morgan family money. They settled in France. Morgan died 10 years later in 1914. Yuki returned to Japan in 1938.

According to a December 1947 article from the Time magazine archives, while most English news sources called her a famous geiko, in a fictionalized account of her life and romance run in 260 installments in three Japanese newspapers, she was depicted as a second-class geiko who accepted Morgan's proposal only after her Japanese lover married someone else. Morgan bought her from the teahouse for what amounted to $20,000 at that time.

Yuki refused to see the book's author and did not read the accounts. Surely, since Sohara had access to the Kato family, there was some issues--social prejudice in Japan and the U.S. and sensationalization of geiko on both sides--that could have been explored but were not.

Because of this non-critical feel-good supportive stance of the movie, it feels more like a travel guide than a documentary. As the former, Sohara succeeds. As the later, one can only sigh and consider so many missed opportunities.

In Japanese with English narration and subtitles.

MOVIE REVIEW: Between Love and Survival is Live and Become

2008-06-27T11:26:00.000-07:00

What would you do to survive? Some men have pragmatically resorted to cannibalism and others have betrayed their humanity in desperation. Somewhere there exists a twilight, a gray area where lies and theft can be deemed justified. In this murky territory lofty intellectual questions of belief and personal identity can be raised. More often the question has been: Is it OK to pretend to be Christian rather than Jewish, Catholic or whatever, in order to live an easier life? Here the question is: Is it acceptable to pretend one is Jewish to survive?

In director Radu Mihaileanu's 2005 provocative though sentimental movie Va, Vis et Deviens, an Ethiopian Christian mother (Meskie Shibru Sivan) orders her son to pretend he is Jewish in order to be rescued by a covert Israeli-sponsored mission called Operation Moses. They are in a Sudanese refugee camp in 1984, surrounded by death and dust. They had to walk miles to get there, leaving everything behind. He is replacing a boy who has just died, adopted by the grief-stricken Jewish mother, Hana (Mimi Abonesh Kebede).

Called Live and Become in English, this movie deals with the gray areas personal integrity--of personal identity and love. The boy who becomes Shlomo (played by Moshe Agazai, Moshe Abebe and lastly by Sirak M. Sabahat) is taught his new history and told to forget his own. He's too young to fathom why his real mother ordered him to leave and too soon, his adoptive mother also dies. Losing two mothers, he becomes a problem child.

Yet he's not the only orphan and eventually, he's adopted by a socially responsible French Israeli couple, Yael (Yael Abecassis) and Yoram (Roschdy Zem), who already have two children.

Being Jewish in Israel shouldn't be a problem yet Shlomo is very black. His color and the color of real Falasha, Ethiopian Jews, becomes a social issue and one that his adoptive mother and father bravely confront while he more passively endures.

Secretly, he finds a way to send letters to his real mother, asking an Ethiopian rabbi Qes Amhra (Yitzhak Edgar) to write letters in Amharic, his native language.

As a teenager, he falls in love with Sarah (Roni Hadar) whose father disapproves of the match so much that no one in Sarah's family attends the wedding. Shlomo's fear of being discovered and his desire to reveal the truth and yet keep this new family and this safety guaranteed by his false heritage provide the suspense and moral core of this movie.

Written by Mihaileanu with Alain-Michel Blanc, this imperfect movie tries to be both a formulaic movie fairy tale with a happy ending and a social message movie. It doesn't always work, but the characters are so engaging and the themes so universal you want it to work. Who hasn't been tempted to pretend one is something one is not to get though an uneasy situation?

Remy Chevin's cinematography doesn't always light the darker face of the actor playing Shlomo when juxtaposed to a lighter face and this aspect doesn't seem to have a message there. Moreover, almost too much territory is covered in Shlomo's adult life, making for a choppiness that is at odds with the more solemn pace of the first half.

Hadar glows with a rush of enthusiasm and boundless energy in contrast to Sabahat's portrayal of the adult Shlomo as an outsider, often watching and observing himself because his secret is so great it threatens to destroy everything in his world.

The ending is, perhaps, too sentimental, but forgivable. This movie has touched the hearts of many. It won Cesar Awards in 2006 for Best Original Screenplay, an Audience Award at the 1005 Vancouver International Film Festival, a 2006 World Audience Award at the Lumiere Awards in France and 2005 Label Europa Cinemas, Panorama Audience Award and Prise of the Ecumenical Jury Award at the Berlin International Film Festival.

Sometimes one does go to a movie to see a fate happier than reality and yet when a movie can do that and make you care about its characters while learning about a bit of history and social injustice, isn't it a little gem, no matter how rough, that should be considered precious?

In Amharic, Hebrew and French.

MOVIE COMMENTARY - Dear Mr. Spielberg: Why Update an Outdated Stereotype? (Reprint)

2008-06-27T10:58:00.000-07:00

Dear Mr. Steven Spielberg:

What can one say to one of the most powerful men in Los Angeles when he continues to show what seems to be a biased sense of social responsibility?

You've received awards and accolades for taking on social issues. You produced and directed the 1992 Schindler's List, giving a new phrase to the modern world. Anyone who saved people's lives during the Holocaust became a Schindler instead of a Raoul Wallenberg. For that, you got an Oscar for best picture and best director and Bundesverdienstkreuz mit Stern for a responsible representation of German history. If only there were an award for irresponsible misrepresentation of Asian or Oriental history.

As a director and a producer, you brought a bit of American history to light with your 1997 Amistad, increasing our awareness about the public debate and socio-political aspects of slavery and racism in the mid-1800s. You had earlier shown a sensitivity toward black Americans in the 1985 The Color Purple. So you showed concern for the politically powerful black American. Kudos to you.

You've shown us the savagery of war in both the overt sense in your 1998 Saving Private Ryan and the 2001 mini-series that you produced, Band of Brothers. You've shown the ability to see the brutality of war when it is covert in your current controversial film, Munich.

You've shown a sense of social responsibility toward our World War II veterans, the Jewish victims of the Nazi Germany and black Americans under the oppression of racism and slavery, yet what you haven't shown is a sensitivity toward Asians and Asian Americans.

You chose to produce (and almost directed), Memoirs of a Geisha. Was this just because it was a popular book? Couldn't a man as powerful as you have found a vehicle that enlightened the American public about heroic Japanese men or women?

Since the turn of last century, Japanese women have been haunted by the Western man's fantasy of the geisha. During the height of their popularity, the women involved in geisha were only a little over 1/1000 of the total population (roughly 80,000 geisha in the 1920s compared to the total population of 54,000,000 in 1920). Samurai only made up about 8 percent of the population of Japan.

Yet Americans and Europeans are still fascinated by both the samurai and the geisha. And at a time when the history of Japan and the Japanese culture is more readily available to Americans, we still get more about geisha instead of the extraordinary women who made history or advocated change.

Americans, like you, seem to prefer Akira Kurosawa to Juzo Itami or Yoji Yamada or Kon Ichikawa.

There were certainly noteworthy women, women who do not fit the stereotype of the passive, demure Japanese butterfly. What about Masako Hojo? What about Tomoe Gozen? What about Hangaku Gozen? What about Noe Ito? What about Suga Kanno? What about Waka Yamada? What about Raicho Hiratsuka?

I have not seen the movie, Memoirs of a Geisha, yet from the trailers I know that authenticity was not an important aspect of the production. The hairstyles and the dance were far from authentic.

I wasn't the only one who thought so. My suspicions were confirmed when I read a review by a woman who had spent part of her childhood in the geisha district. The Japan Times critic, Kaori Shoji, wrote:

Marshall and his crew (and let's not forget that Steven Spielberg is the executive producer) never pause for breath as they bombard us with pathos, intrigue, fury, sex and passion. The capper is a geisha dance scene that's straight out of Broadway. Never mind that no young geisha in the prewar period would wear glitter eye-shadow and dance solo, on a stage with artsy blue lighting, her hair flowing hip and loose and her limbs contorting to snazzy, modern ballet movements.

Further, the casting of ethnic Chinese actresses not only seemed to signal a disinterest in authenticity, but also an insensitivity to the socio-political conditions of Asia. Japan, unlike America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, is not dominated by a population made up of the descendants of immigrants from Europe. Japan was a country that had, like Korea, been closed up for hundreds of years, opening up by force in the mid-1800s. Japanese, like many East Asians feel they can tell nationality.

Keeping the war movies produced in the 1940s in mind, it would seem hardly surprising to see Chinese playing Japanese. World War II was a time of booming business for Chinese American actors in Hollywood. Oddly enough, there had been a concerted effort at the beginning of hostilities to distinguish our enemies (the Japanese) from our allies (the Chinese). Life magazine had an article called, "How to Tell Japs from the Chinese," in December of 1941.

The reality is that one can't always tell. Some Japanese can pass as Chinese. Some Chinese can pass as Japanese. Some Japanese have a hard time passing as Japanese. Yet this shouldn't be a surprise. Tony Curtis and Kirk Douglas are both Jewish, but can pass for other ethnicities.

Yet, the casting of three Chinese actresses in the lead roles seems to support this concept that all Asian look alike as far as Hollywood is concerned. Do these women have the typical Japanese look? Not really. One wonders why such a powerful people as you, Spielberg, weren't willing to take the same chances that the people behind the Harry Potter series took where all the leads were British. One of the movies that is beating Memoirs of a Geisha features British lead actors who are unknowns - Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe.

To say that perhaps Japanese actresses weren't comfortable auditioning for an American movie because of their English is a bit of Hollywood amnesia. Universal's 1999 Snow Falling on Cedars had no problem finding a brave Japanese actress (Youki Kudoh) to portray an American of Japanese descent. She spoke accented English, perhaps in keeping with a stereotype that Americans of Japanese descent weren't quite American. You can see her in Memoirs of a Geisha playing the role of Pumpkin.

I'm not the only person who somewhat disbelieves the PR line being fed the media that the choice was based on international recognition and acting ability. As one writer, Philip Brasor, who based in Japan wrote for the Japan Times:

Three of the four geisha characters in "Sayuri" are played by Chinese or ethnic Chinese actresses. The producers could have found capable Japanese had they really put their minds to it, but I have yet to hear a Japanese media person say as much. It's a Hollywood project, which means it has little to do with Japan. Anyone who watches the final product can see that for themselves.

Because Japanese film critics are professionally beholden to local distributors, they aren't going to complain about it in their reviews. Even the occasionally caustic TV talent-cum-movie-critic Osugi called "Sayuri" a "gorgeous fantasy" in his ready-made blurb, thus telling readers they shouldn't expect anything remotely authentic. The producers were selling this same line back in January at the first Japanese news conference for the movie, when director Rob Marshall called it a "fable" in an effort to pre-empt possible criticism that he wouldn't know a geisha if she hit him in the face with her shamisen.

Despite what Marshall claims, Brasor has another salient point:

Zhang Ziyi and Michelle Yeoh may have been cast because they were in "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," the biggest Asian box-office success on U.S. soil, but the vast majority of moviegoers don't know them. Apparently, their names weren't even mentioned in the American trailers for "Sayuri."

Sayuri is the title used in Japan for Memoirs of a Geisha. I guess the PR people have found that for American audiences Asian women all do look alike or their names are just too hard to pronounce and remember.

Brasor apparently attended the press conference and wasn't impressed by Rob Marshall's explanations. As for authenticity, you didn't have live in the geisha districts or be a Japanese culture scholar to discern authenticity in the movie. Brasor assesses it in this way:

"The challenge for me as a Westerner," Marshall elaborated, "was to bring this world to life. . . . It was really an artistic impression of that world." In other words, a personal fantasy.

As the Japan Times critic Shoji points out, Marshall met the challenge by making a Kyoto in California that "reeks of a souvenir shop extravaganza." You don't have to be an Asian woman or even an Asian American woman to see that point either.

Perhaps you, Mr. Spielberg, feel somewhat vindicated because the Japanese press hasn't been so critical if you cared what the Japanese press said at all. However, Brasor points out:

The mainstream Japanese press isn't as opinionated in its coverage. For that you'd have to go to the blogs or the online magazines, like Ryu Murakami's Japan Mail Media, whose New Jersey-based correspondent, Akihiko Reisen, wrote a dense article on the movie. Interestingly, he mentioned the use of English dialog as being one of its main drawbacks, but not for the obvious reasons. Having everyone speak English turned the story into a "flat-sounding play," he wrote, as if it were being put on by a high-school troupe.

Reisen's main complaint, however, was that the movie reinforces Japanese "gender stereotypes," especially the male characters "who speak very little, but still control all the females." It's difficult to know what he means by this — if anything defines a geisha's position it's her subservient relationship to the men she's entertaining — but it may be a reaction to Ken Watanabe's "Chairman," a character that Marshall referred to as "mythic," but in cinematic terms is a big bore. Reisen found Watanabe an embarrassment. He didn't assert himself as an actor the way he did in "The Last Samurai." In contrast, Reisen thought the Chinese actresses tried hard to make the material their own, even if they were doing it wrong. Gong Li and Zhang Ziyi, he said, "dominate their scenes."

The Japan Times critic, Kaori Shoji, wasn't deterred by the studios apparently. Her review was savage.

There are just so many things wrong with the whole package, which is plastered with kitschy oriental cliches. We're talking about a Chinese actress speaking in that stilted Hollywood Asian-English (immortalized by Mr. Yuniyoshi in "Breakfast at Tiffany's") in the role of a Japanese geisha during the Sino-Japanese conflict of the 1930s. It's hard to know how to handle this: go ballistic, start apologizing, giggle nervously or what?

For those that don't know or remember, Yuniyoshi was played by Mickey Rooney.

I would further suggest that perhaps many Japanese actresses weren't auditioning because they knew that there had been a defamation suit against the author of the book and the publisher in both Japan and the US. The lawsuit was settled out of court and the person in question, Mineko Iwasaki, has written her own story. The author of the book publicly used a real person's name when exploiting the titillation factor to sex up his book signings--he mentioned her name when talking about the bidding wars to buy her virginity. This would have been considered inappropriate behavior for an American about an American woman so how are we to consider the author who would do so? The defamation suit also makes it clear that the author also displays a very implicit misunderstanding of the Japanese culture.

As was reported in the Japan Times:

Mineko filed suit last Wednesday [The article was printed on 1 May 2001] in a New York court, claiming Golden's use of her name constituted breach of contract and wrongly linked her with episodes in the book that she calls inaccurate and defamatory.

She first raised objections to the mention of her name, and that of her husband, shortly after receiving galley proofs of the book in English, a language she does not read.

"I complained and asked him what he thought he was doing," she recalled. "I demanded that he take my name out. But he said that he felt personally obliged to acknowledge me. 'I've made you famous,' he told me. I told him that it didn't matter how he felt, I was bothered."

According to Mineko, photos she supplied Golden of her kimonos and other private possessions began appearing in promotional articles for the book without her consent. She was mentioned prominently in interviews Golden gave to the media in which he said Mineko had been sold by her parents to a geisha house and her virginity had been auctioned off for the sum of 100 million yen, things she said are patently false. But in the public's mind, the link between the book's main character and her had been established.

It wasn't until the 1999 publication of the Japanese translation, titled Sayuri, that she began to consider legal recourse. What most readers perceived to be an informed and sensitive portrayal of a world she had known from the age of 6 appeared to her a lurid depiction of geisha as scheming prostitutes. She also found many inaccuracies.

"Everything is wrong," she said. "In the book, a geisha was beaten with a hanger and crippled. There is a very strict rule that 'maiko' (apprentice geisha) and geisha should never be beaten. We are precious goods and the livelihood of the 'okiya' (geisha houses) depends on us."

Golden comes off as a cad and a man who either didn't care about his so-called friend, the famous geisha, or truly didn't understand Japan and the geisha culture. Why else would he subject a friend to public humiliation and calls for ritual suicide? Even in America, a friend wouldn't reveal another friend's intimate secrets just to sell his book or sex-up his book signings. Even America, such a man would be called a cad.

Was this then, a really good choice for a major movie about a specific subculture in another culture? Will this elicit a greater understanding between Americans and Japanese or Americans and other Asians?

This movie, as did the book, renewed interest in the geisha in a way that is oddly nostalgic - looking back at a time when the only way, the only world where women had control of their lives and the possibility of financial independence was by humoring and entertaining wealthy men.

As another writer, Roger Pulvers, for the Japan Times writes:

As its Web site tells us, the movie is "set in a mysterious and exotic world" of geisha houses before, during and immediately after World War II. It is a fairytale take on what was at best a demeaning and soul-destroying institution. Yet among the many popular misrepresentations of Japanese reality since the country came out of its international isolation 150 years ago — from "Madame Butterfly" to "The Last Samurai" - this is one of the most blatantly pernicious.

Mr. Spielberg, I've seen your 1987 Empire of the Sun, but I wonder if your concept of Asia--and what used to constitute the so-called Orient--isn't stuck in the 1930s-1940s. I am sure Egyptians and Arabs weren't thrilled with Young Sherlock Holmes which seemed to hark back to the 1939 Gunga Din as did your feast of chilled monkey brains at the Pankot Palace in the 1984 Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

I spoke with a man who recalled being questioned by his classmates about eating monkey's brains. Like the TV series Kung Fu, that has become a part of the American cultural view of Asia to a certain extent. I have read some reviews of people who feel that Memoirs of a Geisha is an authentic rendering of the Japanese culture and have no idea about the lawsuit and the social implications it might also engender. Roger Ebert prefaces his review with: "I suspect that the more you know about Japan and movies, the less you will enjoy Memoirs of a Geisha." Ebert was also troubled by the nostalgia evoked for a past system that emphasized how oppressed women really were in a society. Would the 1978 movie Pretty Baby ever be remade with a sense of loss that such a world - where 12-year-olds had their virginity auctioned off - had passed?

Why, in this day and age, make a movie that works best when the viewer knows nothing about the culture? Why make a movie that laments the passing of the geisha system as represented (or misrepresented according to Iwasaki) by Golden?

Another question that I longed to ask was also put forth to the man who produced Amistad by Pulvers:

Imagine a story set in United States in the pre-Civil War South in which the slaves are portrayed as locked in internecine in-fighting as one of them, the most innocent, longs to be rescued by a Prince Charming in the guise of a noble white plantation owner. Would there be anything mysterious and exotic about the everyday life of the slaves? This is analogous to what Memoirs of a Geisha, transposed to 20th-century Japan, is doing.

Would you, Mr. Spielberg make such a movie and suggest a sense of loss? Mr. Spielberg, you have brought the realities of the European war and American slavery to the screen and yet, Pulvers wonders, much like myself, why chose fantasy over reality in the case of Japan?

Pulvers suggests there are some explanations:

In the Meiji Era (1868-1912), the West, for the most part, wanted to keep Japan quaint, picturesque - and on its knees. Virtually all Westerners allied themselves with the most reactionary social institutions and their propagators, seeing that as a sure way to arrest Japan's entry into the West's exclusive club of the Great Powers.

But what obliges film producers like Steven Spielberg to spin a sick little tale like "Memoirs of a Geisha" now that Japan is in many respects a full-fledged member of the Western club? Spielberg, who in his movies generally deals with bizarre fantasies and heroic historical figures, seems to have inadvertently mixed the two together in this film.

As an Asian American woman, I wonder how far-reaching this movie's imagery will be and how long Asian and Asian American women will be haunted by the West's nostalgic view of geisha.

There is more to Japan than the geisha and the samurai. I guess someone else, some other producer will have to bring that to the screen some day.

Reprinted from 1 January 2006. Originally published on the blog magazine Blog Critics and my old now-defunct blog.

OPINION: Death and the Sport of Kings

2008-06-15T11:48:00.000-07:00

As a child, as the daughter of two people who adored horses but did not own them, I loved horses and I knew about Man O'War, War Admiral, Seabiscuit (before the recent movie) and Tom Fool.

I knew what the Triple Crown was and each year I followed the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness and the Belmont. I read books that were romantic sports fantasies about racing, the nobility of the horse and the will to win.

Yet eventually, the numbers caught up with me. First, I worked for a man who went to the races, knew nothing about horses, belittled the jockeys as athletes and didn't particularly like horses. Horse racing was no different to him than gambling in Vegas. Living at home and not paying rent (he was in this thirties at the time), he could easily drop a few hundred.

The other numbers would be how many horses does a stable need to have to race each year and turn a profit and if the prime racing years are 3-5 and horses live into their twenties what happens to the has-beens and never were? I already knew what happened to the greyhounds that didn't make the grade at the track in Tijuana. If rescue organizations couldn't save and finds homes for all of the dogs raced in Mexico and the U.S., why would one think we could save all the horses who had been bred to race and never ran; ran but didn't place; placed but couldn't bring stud fees; or raced and were no longer wanted?

There was also that questionable decision to race Majestic Prince who had won the first two legs of the Triple Crown in 1969. He was initially withdrawn due to injury and then despite the objections of his trainer, Johnny Longden, he was re-entered. He never raced again although he finished second.

He retired to a stud farm.

A recent New York Times article noted that in the past five years, 3,035 racing horses haved died at racing facilities. This isn't limited to thoroughbreds, but also includes standardbreds and quarter horses.

The statistics, part of a hearing about "Breeding, Drugs and Breakdowns: The State of Thoroughbred Racine and the Welfare of the Thoroughbred Racehorse" given before the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection, are not complete.

An Associated Press report noted the figures they used were drawn from open records inquiries sent to organizations governing the sport in 29 states.

According to the article, Arkansas, Michigan and Nebraska didn't keep records at all. Only one of Florida's three main tracks provided information.

Another concern is that despite advances in medical science, the numbers aren't dropping.

Larry Bramlage, the on-call veterinarian at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Ky., who made the grim announcement that Eight Belles had been euthanized after the Derby, said fatality numbers don't seem to be dropping, despite major medical advancements. To Bramlage, that suggests racing injuries are becoming more frequent because vets are already pulling the most injury-prone horses before post time.

"We're able to pick them up better, with digital X-rays, bone scans and MRIs, which give us the information we need to take those horses out of training," Bramlage said. "In spite of that fact, we're not denting the total number of deaths."

After the televised injuries of Kentucky Derby winner Barbaro in 2006 at the Preakness and the breakdown of Eight Bells at the Kentucky Derby this year, the sport has come under scrutiny. Previously, concern had been so low that some tracks didn't keep records at all.

New Mexico has no records prior to 2007. Others do not track morning training deaths or differentiate between breeds and cause of death.

What these studies do not yet touch on is quality of life after the race is over. The 1986 Kentucky Derby winner Ferdinand was named the 1987 Horse of the Year (Eclipse Award). In 2002, he was sent to a slaughter house.

Less famous horses are often given to charities such as the Thoroughbred Retirement Foundations, ReRun Inc., , California Equine Retirement Foundation, Inc. among many others.

Perhaps racing was called the sport of kings because racehorses, like the foot soldiers, the peasants and the knights were expendable as long as the king won. Unlike dogs or cats or rabbits, horses cannot in today's world be easily disposed of, but the public has turned a blind eye to this, even when the numbers didn't add up.

I no longer think of horse racing or dog racing as a sport. Instead it seems an excuse to gamble and exploit animals as if they weren't sentient beings with a purpose and use beyond winning a bet in a few minute rush to a wire.

MOVIE REVIEW: The Reality of Spies Shown in Poisoned By Polonium

2008-06-13T19:51:00.000-07:00

If you think being a spy is glamorous locales, sexy women and men, sleek cars and gadgets, you'll be disappointed. Sometimes reality is like that. In Andrei Nekrasov's Poisoned by Polonium: The Litvinenko Files the real world of spies and revenge is ugly.

You might not remember the name Alexander Litvinenko, but surely you remember the story or, worse, the images. Litvinenko was a former Russian agent who died in a London hospital. If he had been shot or beaten, it would have been easy to consider it random urban violence even though shootings are rarer in the UK than in America. Yet, that was not how Litvinenko died and his death left no doubt he was poisoned.

One can't just pop over to the local hardware store and buy some like rat poison. Polonium is hard to acquire, must be handled carefully in order to avoid radioactive contamination and was administered during a lunch. Litvinenko wasn't the only person who ended up dead. So did journalist Anna Politkovskaya in October 2006.

Litvinenko, whom Nekrasov calls Sasha, was a KBG officer and eventually worked with the KGB's successor, the FSB. Yet in 1998, he went public and accused his superiors of ordering an assassination of a Russian tycoon. He eventually fled to the UK, asking for asylum. Not satisfied with escaping with his life and his wife Marina, he wrote two books, Blowing up Russia: Terror from Within and Lubyanka Criminal Group.

Lubyanka Square is in downtown Moscow and where the headquarters of the FSB is located. As you can guess, Litvinenko made accusations in this book about the exact nature of FSB activities. He accused the FSB of staging apartment bombings and other terrorist acts that would be credited to Chechnya and help bring Vladimir Putin to power.

After his death, photos surfaced of Russian special forces using a photo of Litvinenko as a target in 2002. Nekrasov does film an interview with the man accused by the UK of Litvinenko's murder, Andrei Lugovoi. One senses that both Litvinenko and Nekrasov were driven by something to make them risk so much--all sense of security on a worldwide scale.

Directed by Nekrasov who didn't originally know Litvinenko but worked to locate him as we see in filmed footage, this documentary is more a personal rumination and a precautionary tale. One wonders if Nekrasov might not also end up dead or, if perhaps, this film will be some insurance that he will survive.

After Litvinenko's death, his widow, Marina, co-wrote a book, Death of a Dissident: The Poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko and the Return of the KGB.

This documentary is intelligent and driven by an obsessive need or plea for justice. It doesn't pander to spy movie expectations or pop culture sensibilities and in that respect it is a bit dry and monotonous.

The movie might feed conspiracy theorists, but one sense Nekrasov was careful to avoid sounding an alarm of paranoia. At the very least, it will remind us that a man stood up to a regime and he died a terrible death and his name was Litvinenko.

MOVIE REVIEW: What to Do When the World Goes Kabluey

2008-06-11T14:38:00.000-07:00

If ever a home needed a Super Nanny intervention, it's this household. Leslie's kids are two little blond screaming and destructive horrors--the kind for whom kiddie leashes were made.

Over the phone, her mother-in-law suggests calling in her terminally unemployable brother-in-law, Salman. She needs a caretaker for the kids so she can escape to work to keep her health benefits and, one suspects, her sanity. Her husband has been deployed to Iraq.

"Is he like working?" Leslie (Lisa Kudrow successfully shedding all of her Phoebe-ness to play the straight man here) doubtfully asks about her brother-in-law whom she hasn't seen since the wedding.

In this wonderfully quirky movie, Kabluey, director/writer Scott Prendergast plays Salman whom we first see when he becomes so fascinated by a laminating machine that while working at a down-scale Kinko-like photocopy place, he laminates everything--resumes, photos and even a belt for himself. This leads to his firing and he does land at Leslie's house, sleeping in the spare room.

Salman is a failure at kid control, but Leslie finds Salman a job, the kind of job that entails nothing more than standing on a lonely road in a blue costume of the mascot of the dot-com that now verging on dot-goneness.

This is a gentle comedy, with sight gags and thoughtful pauses. The slapstick is more in the manner of Buster Keaton, than in the Bugs Bunny cartoon variety or the frenetic quality of many big-budget comedies.

Filmed in and around Austin, Texas, there's a sense of the surreal in a blue man lost on the plains in this universe that is firmly placed in reality, a reality that has been slightly tweaked. There's a sense in desolation and a slightly bitter stab at the dot-com era.

Kabluey is a delightful little gem that glows with warmth and doesn't fall into the morass of formulaic film making. Prendergast is the same person who wrote, acted and starred in the short film, The Delicious, and one hopes that Prendergast will continue with his deliciously idiosyncratic visions.

P.S. Don't forget to stay for the credits.

MOVIE REVIEW: A Better Life Without the King

2008-06-11T12:17:00.000-07:00

They have Coca Cola. They have great palaces. They have a rapping princess. They have a great tradition that they have reclaimed once they gained independence from Great Britain.

The king has been visited by Nelson Mandela, Prince Charles and Michael Jackson--great honors for a landlocked country about the size of New Jersey, located in Southern Africa.

A largely Christian nation (40 percent Zionist--a combination between Christianity and native beliefs--and 20 percent Catholic according to the CIA Factbook), Swaziland is also plagued by deep poverty and HIV/AIDS. The estimated life expectancy is 31.7 for men and 32 for women. It has the world's highest HIV/AIDS rate in the world, resulting in high infant mortality rates and low life expectancy.

The world's last absolute monarch, King Mswati III, is the king of the title of Michael Skolnik's grainy but thought-provoking 2007 documentary, Without the King. There are no princes in this film although we know that his eldest daughter, Sikhanyiso, has a brother.

We are introduced to Mswati III on his coronation day. He is 18, handsome and shy. The year is 1986. He was the second of 67 sons; his father had 70 wives at the time of his death in 1982. Mswati III was educated in England at the Sherborne School. From 1983 until his coronation, two of his late father's wives served as regent.

In comparison to his late father, he has a modest number of wives: 13. His first two have sons but none of them, according to tradition, can become king.

Sikhanyiso is the eldest daughter of his third wife who married Mswati when she was 16. She is a college student in California and although we see her in the movie, we do not see her elder half brothers or her brother. It is unlikely that she would replace Mswati III as some reviewers have projected.

She is seen as a rebel princess, a title that she also mentions in the documentary. Tradition requires that a special counsel choose a wife and the crown prince. How will she be able to serve her country under another half-sibling's rule? We don't know.

Footage of Sikhanyiso, her mother and Mswati III are intercut with scenes of poverty, and angry protesters who say they will prevail against tear gas and bullets.

She does mention the king's solution to the HIV/AIDS crisis--a five year ban on sex for women under the age of 21. The ban was ended a year early and did nothing to stop the rate of HIV/AIDS infection. During that time, the king took another wife under the age of 21.

As a woman comments, it's hard to contain HIV/AIDS when "they look at him...why does the king continue...taking more wives" and feel that they can take more wives.

The documentary touches on the discomfort of a daughter whose father marries a woman younger than her but we do not see this new bride. The documentary doesn't mention how two of Mswati's wives have left him. That would have made interesting commentary.

The documentary does touch on accusations of forcing young girls to marry him and Sikhanyiso comments,"...a lot of the girls want to be there anyways."

Of course they do. Poverty and HIV/AIDS on one side and extravagant luxury on the other side? What kind of choice is the culture giving women?

Both Sikhanyiso and her mother touch on the paranoia that exists, accusations of murder attempts and threats, in a world where there is little future and prosperity outside of the royal family and who becomes the next king will have a great deal of control. One wonders if the many children--cousins and half-brothers and sisters of the current king also live in luxury or have fallen on hard times.

While the documentary ends with Sikhanyiso lamenting how the government has money but has deserted a small village, saying that her country will "turn around" in "her time" is hopeful and somewhat misleading.

She is 18. Her father is in his forties. She has brothers and uncles to contend with. Her father, once a bashful youth making his first public speech has grown soft and self-indulgent--a quality that Sikhanyiso seems to share in her view of a king and his responsibilities. At least she doesn't say something like let them eat cake.

In the end, this documentary glosses over some issues to emphasize the HIV/AIDS crisis and poverty, but stands as strong commentary against monarchy and polygamy.

MOVIE REVIEW: Five Times in Turkey Shows Teen Angst

2008-06-08T17:17:00.000-07:00

The wind. The sound of leaves. A boy sitting outside a window whom we first see from the back. The minaret. Trees.

If you're looking for harems, terrorists, drugs, belly dancing or people speaking in exotic accents and acting like bimbos or buffoons, this isn't the movie. If you want to see how three young teens deal with their life and hardships in a small town, this is a beautiful, subtle movie worth seeking out.

The 2006 Turkish movie, Bes Vakit, meaning Times Five or Five Times, won a best film award at the Istanbul International Film Festival as well as a Firpresci prize for director/writer Reha Erdem.

Called Times and Winds in English and shown with subtitles, the movie shows the unhappy lives of three young teens in a small, impoverished Turkish village. Omer (Ozkan Ozen) is the son of an iman. The iman is the man looking out the window at Omer. He is sick and sends his son off to get his brother to do the nightly call to prayer. Omer's father favors Omer's younger brother and Omer dreams of killing his father, but not his brother.

His friend Yakup (Ali Bey Kayali) has a secret crush on the young school teacher.He learns that he is not the only one who admire her beauty. Yildiz (Elit Iscan) tries to balance her schoolwork and caring for her infant brother. She adores her father, in a manner that is bound to disappoint.

There is nothing remotely close to what we could call closure. There is no climax or resolution. Like life, loose strings remain untied. Like many disaffected teens, their faces are mostly expressionless. Arvo Part's score provides an emotional guide.

Erdem shows us the beauty of the high rocky mountains that overlook the sea. We see the beautiful trees, hear the rustling of the winds. The skies are blue and all this might seem gorgeous, but in the foreground we see poverty, the cruelty of a man's indifference to his eldest son's feelings--not only with Omer, but with another set of brothers as well. The villagers show charity toward an old woman, toward the young teacher (Selma Ergec) and toward an orphan (Tarik Sonmez).

The boys laugh when they see animals copulating, but there's something wrong when they realize Yildiz also sees the animals and drive her away.

Five times refers to the number of times, the Muslim faithful are called to prayer, but five also resonates in other ways in Muslim life. A true believer follows the so-called five pillars of Muslim life: faith, daily prayers, concern for the needy, self-purification through fasting and a pilgrimage.

Erdem divides the movie into five parts, beginning in reverse order, evening until we end in morning. The trees and the wind seem to be characters in this scenic, lyrical movie as does the minaret which is sometimes framed in the background. The romance of the country, including the exotic foreign country, has been pared down to a spare portrayal of children caught between their desires and the tyranny of their parents. Yet their parents aren't evil; they are casually cruel, as easily as people from any other place and in any other culture.

Times and Winds reminds us of how lucky we are as Americans and yet, how very much similar we are to people in a small Turkish village, even if they are Muslim.

OPINION - The Writing Was on the Wall...

2008-06-07T23:56:00.000-07:00

The writing was on the wall, but GM couldn't read it.

It has nothing to do with the lack of technology. Between 1996-1999, GM produced over 1,000 units of the GM EV1. This was an electric car available in California and Arizona for lease only. This was based on a design created by AeroVironment called the GM Impact.

Based in Monrovia, California--just outside of Los Angeles but within Los Angeles County, AeroVironment Inc. was founded in 1971 and is known for developing human-powered and solar-powered vehicles.

Not far away, in San Dimas, California, is AC Propulsion, the company that developed the tzero--a prototype yellow EV sports car. Only three exist and all three still run. From this came the Tesla limited edition electric sports car which uses the AC Propulsion technology.

The GM EV1 was taken away from the people who had leased them. GM refused to sell them and instead destroyed all but a few that were taken to museums. Why didn't GM have the foresight to continue development of the electric vehicle, even if they knew about the Smart car, a neighborhood electric vehicles?

Why didn't they allow people to buy a car they were going to crush. This is essentially the question that Chris Paine asked in his 2006 movie, Who Killed the Electric Car? Paine had owned and loved his EV1, but like Mel Gibson, was forced to give his up.

When the news came out that GM was
closing four truck and SUV plants in the U.S., Canada and Mexico and cutting jobs, I emailed Paine to ask for his reaction.

His response was quick.

In short two old cliches come to mind.
the writing was on the...
the chickens have come home to...

American car makers ignored early warning signs about peak oil and kept betting almost everything on their big profit margin SUVS and trucks. The fact that they willfully destroyed their own electric cars programs in the 1990s in spite of objections from their own board members and so many enthusiasts, makes them especially culpable.

We'll see if they can scramble fast enough to meet the realities of the changing world. Its a fascinating story with many players - which is how our first film came to life. And the story continues...

GM came out with an EV for the U.S. marketplace before Toyota came out with the Prius.

Now with the Prius out and plans for a consumer-ready plug-in Prius projected for 2010, GM is trying to catch up. That will come too late for the estimated 10,000 workers who will lose their jobs.

According to the AP article,

CEO Rick Wagoner said Tuesday before the automaker's annual meeting in Delaware the plants to be idled are in Oshawa, Ontario; Moraine, Ohio; Janesville, Wis.; and Toluca, Mexico. He also said the iconic Hummer brand will be reviewed and potentially sold or revamped.

Paine's movie noted that although there were financial incentives for buying an EV, the incentives were greater for the Hummer. That kind of planning is what got us where we are--dependent upon gas vehicles when we knew that fossil fuels would eventually run out. The promise of solar energy which can be converted into electricity has been always something for the future.

Recently, one plant was shut down due to a worker protest. Perhaps this protest comes too late. We should have been protesting, demanding better mileage and cars that looked toward a future without oil or gas, a time when fossil fuels would be gone and/or pollution would be destroying the world.

The writing was on the wall of the future, GM couldn't read it. Neither could most Americans. We knew this would happen in the future, but Americans weren't building bullet trains for better public transportation. We weren't demanding a move toward a less oil dependent future. We've been distracted by the promise of hydrogen when we had the technology for EVs. We can't wait 30 years for hydrogen technology to develop. The future is now and EV technology is ready if we are willing, as consumers and as voters, to demand a change.

If you haven't seen this movie, it's available on DVD. Learn more about plug-ins and EV technology at Plug In America.

MOVIE REVIEW: Hollywood Chinese: The Chinese in American Feature Films

2008-06-03T21:00:00.000-07:00

Ten years in the making, Arthur Dong's Hollywood Chinese: In American Feature Films is an entertaining documentary full of surprises.

First, it's a bit shocking to see Nancy Kwan. Why you might ask? Isn't she Chinese? Well, as another actors comments, she is at least part Chinese. For a time, Kwan was everyone's favorite Asian woman--even if she was clearly Eurasian.

Dong doesn't shy away from that question, nor questions about her infamous portrayal of the Hong Kong prostitute, Susie Wong, (although she wasn't in the original Broadway cast--you might be surprised to see who was), nor her infomercials.

At least Kwan looked like she could be Asian. The usual practice was yellow face — Luise Rainer did that to much acclaim. Rainer played O-Lan in the 1937 movie, The Good Earth, dashing Anna May Wong's hopes. Dong touches on this and a report of Wong's screen test, but not on the Hays Code of anti-miscegenation which some resources consider a major determining factor once Paul Muni was cast. Rainer won an Academy Award for that role and defends her casting. Some of the Chinese actors compliment her portrayal and still there is that unsettling question about yellow face.

Yellow face was a difficult process, according to Christopher Lee. In the 1960s, Lee brought Fu Manchu to the silver screen. Dong cuts to some memorable and mostly amusing moments of yellow face — from Katherine Hepburn to John Wayne.

Hepburn starred in the 1944 Dragon Seed, also based on a Pearl Buck novel as was The Good Earth. Turhan Bey notes that Hollywood at the time was full of ridiculous situations. Born in Vienna, Bey's father was Turkish and his mother Czech. He was supposed to be related to Hepburn, yet that Tan family had a wide variety of accents. No wonder people thought Asians were inscrutable.

Dong does include a real Chinese American Tan, Amy Tan. Tan recalls how after her 1989 novel The Joy Luck Club became popular and people wanted to adapt it into a movie, how cautious she was until Wayne Wang became attached to the project. Hong Kong-born Wang wrote (with Isaac Cronin) and directed the 1982 Chan Is Missing, a work selected for the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 1995 for its realistic portrayal of Chinese Americans. After the 1993 The Joy Luck Club, which followed Smoke, Wang did more mainstream movies like Maid In Manhattan and Because of Winn-Dixie.

At the time, the 1961 Flower Drum Song was also considered progressive with Kwan starring beside a Japanese national (Miyoshi Umeki) and a Japanese American (James Shigeta)--something ironic after spending World War II emphasizing the differences between Chinese and Japanese--an issue that Japanese Americans have also noted in the past. The Chinese could even be played by an African American--Juanita Hall. There was something laughable about ABCs (American-born Chinese) dancing to a song celebrating chop suey--an American dish.

Playwright David Henry Hwang whose M. Butterfly won a Tony, and original Broadway cast member B.D. Wong also appear, but the cantankerous Frank Chin (who criticized Hwang and Tan among others in his essay, "Come All Ye Asian American Writers of the Real and the Fake" in 1991 anthology The Big Aiiieeeee!)does not. This certainly keeps the documentary more focused, but it's a notable omission when the documentary does include a historian and Dong is based in Los Angeles like Chin and Hwang. Chin, who was the subject of a 2005 documentary What's Wrong with Frank Chin, has his own blog and his latest entry (26 May 2008) mentions Tan, Shigeta, Wang and Hepburn.

Chin was interviewed by Jeff Adachi for the 2006 documentary Slanted Screen about the imagery of Asian and Asian American men.

The Asian American community has also been critical of Joan Chen for her portrayal of what was essentially an updated version of Susie Wong in the 1986 Tai-Pan. The Shanghai-born Chen continued to play exotic women, but found that with age, the quality of the movies decreased and unlike Kwan, moved on to directing. She was also in the much acclaimed The Last Emperor in 1987, but this movie was also criticized as being more a figment of the director's imagination by Lisa Lu, who was in this movie and Tai-Pan

There's also a Sundance moment, when someone criticizes Justin Lin's 2002 Better Luck Tomorrow which an audience member criticized for being made at all--even though it was nominated for a Grand Jury Prize award at Sundance. The audience member seemed to feel it was irresponsible to give such a negative and amoral portrayal of Asian Americans. Was this a case of someone wanting to preserve the good minority stereotype despite the very brutal 1992 incident that inspired this movie?

There are some surprising historical clips--not the archival portrayals of old China nor the ones of an imagined China--but old movies made for American-born Chinese produced and starring ABCs. The question remains today about why aren't ABCs doing as well as Asian-born actors and directors such as Ang Lee (who also appears), Chow Yun-Fat, Jet Li, Zhang Ziji, and Jackie Chan?

Unsettling questions about being American, desexualization of Asian American men (Long Duk Dong who was played by a Japanese American in the movie Sixteen Candles is cited), the exoticism of the women, the martial arts stereotype are raised as they were a decade ago.

Dong hopes that if this movie was ever part of a school curriculum it would find its way into the history department. Even-handed, avoiding some of the divisive arguments within the ABC community, this thoughtful movie does provide an informative look at American-born Chinese history which is undoubtedly an important part of Asian American history and the history of all Americans in this country.

INTERVIEW: "Up the Yangtze" Is A Slow Boat to China

2008-05-26T14:04:00.000-07:00

What happens when a government decides a great river must be harnessed to provide electricity for a fast-growing nation? The short answer is: People must move and life must change. The long answer would fill volumes, telling the story of the millions affected by this government project--how the rich and the poor fair differently.

Yung Chang's Up the Yangtze attempts to encapsulate these stories by following two employees on a pleasure cruise. The so-called farewell cruise itself is part sentimental journey, part modern anthropological study and part culture clash. There are privileged foreigners coming to see a curiousity, observe people they don't understand while disappointed that the old China no longer exists. These foreign tourists have come to say farewell to a life they never knew and are served by locals whose families must say good-bye to a life they've known for centuries. Yet for many, their opportunity to be in the tourist industry is based on their pending displacement.

In 2002, Chang joined his parents and his grandfather on one of the farewell cruises. A Canadian of Chinese descent, Chang speaks Chinese and also remembers hearing his grandfather telling about old China. He was struck by the irony of the situation and as a resulted decided to make his own farewell project.

"I think my grandfather and his sentiments are representative of many who have since left the Mainland. Like I say in my film: My grandfather no longer recognizes the China he once knew."

This wasn't Chang's first trip to China. Via email, he explained, "First time I traveled to the mainland was in 1997 to visit my grandfather in Beijing. He brought me to his old home which was in a hutong. In 2002, I went back to Beijing and also to take the cruise. Much had changed. The hutong was gone and in its place a giant skyscraper. I've also traveled extensively throughout China and lived in Hong Kong."

For those who are geographically-challenged, the Yangtze River is the third longest river in the world and the longest river in Asia. It has, at times, served as the dividing line between North and South China. The river has two dams, including the Three Gorges Dam, and many more are planned.

Yet the Yangtze is more than just a river according to Chang.

"To travel to the Three Gorges region is a very important trip for many Chinese people. It's almost like a pilgrimage. The Yangtze river or Chang Jiang (Long River) as it's known in Chinese is steeped in mythology and history. It's considered the lifeline of China. So you can imagine that for my grandfather it was an emotional trip."

The Three Gorges Dam project began in 1994 and isn't expected to be finished until 2011. The projected benefits will be the control of periodic flooding and a reduction of air pollution via the production of electricity from the water current thereby replacing the burning of coal. The rising waters will consume houses, villages and towns. For this project, over two million people will be displaced.

Not only were people displaced. Native animals were as well. The 2006 declaration of the baiji, the Yangze River freshwater dolphin, as functionally extinct was one of the environmental effects of this project and more animals are threatened. Yet the project moves on without environmental impact reports hindering the projected completion dates. This is China moving toward a greener future. Chang isn't concerned with this paradox, but the surreal human dramas on the farewell cruises.

The film really leaves it up to you decide the 'message'. It's not my job as a director to be heavy-handed. I want the audience to be provoked, to ask more questions. So there's been different opinions from all different perspectives, much like the different perspectives explored in the film. Westerners, Chinese Nationals, and the Chinese diaspora all have different sentiments. And just like a traveller who visits another culture in another country, one is always taking from a personal experience, a personal perspective, and I think that's important to note.

Going back in 2004 and 2005 and finally between May and December of 2006, Chang built up a story of opportunity and loss. This is part upstairs-downstairs story contrasting between the native servants who see they way of life vanishing and the foreign customers who are a bit disappointed that the old China has already disappeared. From the boat, both watch the last views of what has been the landscape of the Yangtze.

Of the many people he met, Chang chose two: Yu Shui who is re-christened as Cindy and Chen Bo Yu or Jerry. Both are given names that are easier for the foreigners to remember.

Chen Bo Yu is the spoiled only child of a middle-class family. As one of many "little emperors" created under the one-child-only policy, he has a hard time adjusting to being a servant among privileged Western clientele.

Yu Shui is the eldest of three children of an impoverished peasant family who live in a shack near the edge of the river. With no rent to pay and growing their own vegetables, they barely get by. In order to have a son, the family paid fines for having more than one child. Yu Shui wants to go to college, but where will the money come from? To pay the bills from her only brother's illness, Yu Shui must work on the boat as a dishwasher.

"Because Yu Shui is the eldest daughter she is responsible for taking care of her family," Chang explained. "Yu Shui cares deeply for her brother's well-being. I think it goes beyond the only son situation. Although I believe the family has a lot of expectations of the younger brother, Yu Deng Feng. "

Up the Yangtze is Chang's second documentary. His first documentary, Earth to Mouth, was about migrant farm labor and Canada's Chinese community.

Earth to Mouth was to me a romantic, poetic, meditative film. I wanted to depict the immigrant experience and to have found this Chinese-operated farm in Eastern Ontario was very unique. The film is entirely in Chinese and Spanish. I wanted to capture the beauty of living on a farm, and to me, in a way, this very naive, romantic perspective. And having found the character of the Chinese immigrant grandmother was fascinating, the fact that she ran this farm and worked with Mexican migrant workers.

There is something also, I think, melancholic about it. The fact that she was a recent immigrant from China, isolated on this farm. When I showed the film at a festival in Toronto, there’s been people who’ve seen the film who are immigrants of other countries, and when they see the movie it resonates very deeply with them because they can relate to this kind of displacement, uprootedness, loneliness that one feels when adjusting to a new culture. I think perhaps there was something that just seeped through the film when I was shooting the movie.

Canada and America are different countries with different though linked histories. When asked how he'd compare Canada's Chinese community to the US Chinese community, Chang said:

I think there's one essential difference between immigrants from Canada and from the US. In Canada there's this idea of a multi-cultural society. In the US, it's a melting-pot. In Canada, it's much more important to maintain your cultural identity and language. I think the US has a policy based on assimilation. It's a mass generalization, but I would say that the Chinese-Canadian community is much smaller than in the US and is not as connected. In the US, there's a community of filmmaking by Asian-Americans, that in my opinion, is very unified. But then again, there are great festivals in Canada, including Toronto's ReelAsian Film Festival, that bring together filmmakers from the Asian diaspora throughout Canada. But we have a deep history of Chinese-Canadians who helped to build the national railway, who have lived in Canada for many generations. There's a very good documentary by Karen Cho called In the Shadow of Gold Mountain which is about the last living survivors of the Chinese Head Tax and Exclusion Act. From 1885 until 1947, this racist act plunged the Chinese community in Canada into decades of debt and family separation.

Chang wants to continue looking at China in future documentaries.

I'm working on various projects. I'm working on a production about the opium trade from production to consumption. I'm helping to produce a film by my collaborator on Up The Yangtze. Fan Lixin's film about the Spring Festival in China when hundreds of millions of migrant workers try to leave the city for five days back to their homes in the countryside - it's absolute chaos. He's followed a migrant family for two years and it's a very dramatic documentary. I am helping him to finish this film. I also expect to make more documentaries
and fiction films in China.

If you can't see his first documentary and his second documentary isn't showing locally, Up the Yangtze will eventually be available on DVD and will include a more complete perspective of the people around the Yangtze.

Chang explained, "I shot over 200 hours of footage during the four years it took to make the film. Unfortunately, I could not make the 10 hour version. Additional storylines that are not in the film will be available on our DVD release. "

If you do see the Up the Yangtze and want to help the Yu family, Chang mentioned that you can do that with the click of a mouse.

EyeSteelFilm helped to pay for her tuition. I've since begun a fund through a great site called GiveMeaning to help the Yu family for the next 5 years to cover medical/health, food and supplies as well as to pay for the children's school education. Most importantly, I found out that Mr. Yu desperately requires an eye operation or he will not be able to find employment. We've managed to raise a bit of money through the site. Audiences can leave a movie feeling moved to action and this fund is a great way for people to channel the hardship chronicled in the film into something positive.

Yung Chang's documentary, Up the Yangtze is a slow boat to China, a China that doesn't exist, a China that will stop existing and a China that will exist in the future.

Chang replied to my questions before the 12 May earthquake. The 7.8-magnitude earthquake was centered 60 miles northwest of Chengdu and cause deaths in the city of Chongqing, one of the main cities on the Yangtze river.

MOVIE REVIEW: Of Mice and Men

2008-05-18T13:15:00.000-07:00

Since I first read this 1937 John Steinbeck piece in high school, much has happened. At the time, I had already witnessed the slow death of a loved one to a terminal illness. I didn't go to see the 1992 movie directed by Gary Sinise with a screenplay written by Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatist (The Young Man From Atlanta, 1995) and Oscar-winning screenwriter (To Kill a Mockingbird, 1962; Tender Mercies, 1983), Horton Foote, when it came out. What could this faithful production have to offer?

Since high school, I have seen many versions of Of Mice and Men. The reasons for Lennie and George's low economic status have differed from down-and-out white men during the Depression as per the original, to Lennie as a deaf person to both Lennie and George being braceros--men imported from Mexico to work on the farms when the able-bodied men were either forcibly removed into internment camps or gone to fight World War II in Europe or the Pacific. That each of these interpretation works sends a sadly universal message.

The first mention of death in the play refers to a dog and as a dog lover I thought I could understand the pain Candy felt. Previously, my pets (hamsters) had been short-lived as is their nature, my rabbits had died at home during the night and my dogs had been old with cancerous growths that defied the skills of most vets. I had not, until recently, been haunted by the decision of when to put a beloved dog down or wondered where would I be when I became old and unable to work.

In this way, with each year and each decade, this piece's meaning deepens and the pain becomes all too real and applicable to every day life.

For those unfamiliar with the story, it follows two drifters--poor, lonely men. They have been given a work assignment in Northern California. Lennie (John Malkovich) is a tall man of unusual strength, but with the mental capacity of a 3 year old. He has picked up a mouse, one already dead. He keeps it because he likes stroking soft things. We soon learn that he has killed other animals by petting them to death, crushing them without truly understanding the fragility of living things. George (Gary Sinise) makes him throw the mouse away. They sleep one night, under the stars. George makes Lenny promise to meet there again if something should go wrong. The next day, at the farm, they do find trouble. The foreman (Noble Willingham) has a son who dislikes Lennie instantly, perhaps, only because he is big and the son, Curley (Casey Siemaszko), is short. Curley is also picking fights with other men because his wife (Sherilyn Fenn) is lonely and often seeks out the company of the men when Curley isn't around. Steinbeck shows us the only future such men face. Candy (Ray Walston) is old and crippled. His only friend is his dog. Another worker, Carlson (Richard Riehle) badgers Candy about the dog. It is old, useless and smelly. In the end, Candy lets Carlson kill his beloved dog.

The pain is almost unbearable for Candy. Yet Lennie has a plan, one that will save Lennie and George from the lonely fate of Candy or the bitterness of some of the other men who have no future dreams. Lennie and George will save money for some land where they can work for themselves and George can tend the rabbits they will raise for food and money. After Lennie unintentionally revels the plan to Candy, George allows Candy to join their little plan and the future seems assured, until Curly and his wife ruin their plans.

The title was taken from a 1785 poem by Robert Burns. It expresses regret at turning up the winter nest of a mouse on a farm.

Thou saw the fields laid bare an' wast,
An' weary Winter comin fast,
An' cozie here, beneath the blast,
Thou thought to dwell,
Till crash! the cruel coulter past
Out thro' thy cell.

That wee-bit heap o' leaves an' stibble,
Has cost thee monie a weary nibble!
Now thou's turn'd out, for a' thy trouble,
But house or hald.
To thole the Winter's sleety dribble,
An' cranreuch cauld!

But Mousie, thou are no thy-lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men,
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!

Still, thou art blest, compar'd wi' me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But Och! I backward cast my e'e,
On prospects drear!
An' forward, tho' I canna see,
I guess an' fear

When I think of Lennie, I find regret for not having been braver and stronger and protecting the mentally disabled classmates I knew. I think of the afternoons I'd spent with one dog at a school for the developmentally disabled young teens who like Lennie had not more sense than a 3-year-old child around animals. I think of a lot of pain and grief I've given and felt.

Directer Sinise, allows these characters to be ordinary, very believable and flawed men. One can see that without Lennie, Sinise's George is doomed to bitterness. Without George, Malkovich's Lennie would have been beaten and murdered long ago. He has a child's flash of anger that isn't easily calmed down.

One feels that Sinise truly appreciates Steinbeck's words and the power of those words. He shows us the beauty of Northern Californian farmlands lit in golden light and in contrast, he also shows the ugliness of the oppressive and alienating worker system--every man for himself and, in the end, every man alone.

Sinise's Of Mice and Men is a movie worth renting, before or after you read the book and even, to remind oneself of where we as a country once were and thank God that we've become a kinder, gentler nation since.

MOVIE REVIEW: Don Juan in French

2008-05-07T23:15:00.000-07:00

If you aren't familiar with Moliere's play on Don Juan, and are more familiar with Don Juan de Marco, you might think the French would have more fun.

Yet that isn't Moliere's play "Dom Juan ou le festin de pierre." Jacques Weber, a French actor, has adapted Moliere's play and stars as the title character in the grim 1998 "Don Juan."

For those unfamiliar with the play, the play begins after Don Juan has seduced Elvire, a young woman in a nunnery. He has already lost interest and now pursues a couple who are happily in love, a love that Don Juan means to destroy by seducing the woman. Unfortunately for Don Juan, good fortune smiles on the couple and Don Juan's plans fail, leaving his boat to sink. He is saved by a poor peasant. The peasant has a lovely girlfriend who Don Juan proceeds to seduce and yet, one girl is not enough, and he flirts with another. In one scene, he cleverly plays each woman off the other, swearing undying love for both. He and his servant, Sganarelle, leave the women and attempt to return to their home. On the way, Don Juan is pursued by Elvire's brothers, determined to avenge her loss of honor and Don Juan chances upon the statue of a man he killed. He jests and invites the statue to dinner and the statue accepts.

Weber is gray-haired, with a large and imposing frame. He is husky in a way that suggests the aging of a once impressive physique into softness. His Don Juan is a humorless man blustering and trading mostly on his position for conquests in bed. He doesn't charm women as much as feed them their dreams, nourish their fantasy of conquering and reforming a bad boy. Or he plays on their greed and vanity--a peasant woman's dream of becoming a princess--or at least, a lady of aristocratic standing.

Michel Boujenah as Sganarelle is his dour servant and angry conscience. His position is thankless and his fate, to have his master die without paying him his wages, means poverty and destitution. Instead of a whine and a shrug, we have Sganarelle left destitute as a sidewalk beggar in a time before tell-all book deals on celebrities's scandalous lives. How times have changed.

Lacking the tease of a playboy or the humor of a bon vivant, this version of Moliere's play is a dark, merciless look at a harsh man who uses his money and position to lure women into bed, but almost immediately loses interest. His father disowns him. And he dies, very much alone. This is a fire-and-brimstone morality play with no sugar to make this medicine go down more easily.

As director Weber, scrapes away the charm of Moliere's play and despite the solemnity of this film, he doesn't move this into the range of horror. The statue is just a statue not a supernatural being come to fetch a man whose sins are too many and too great to leave to the normal devices.

Emmanuelle Béart is a fetching Elvire and Penelope Cruz and Ariadna Gil are the two beautiful peasant women who fight over him. All three have little on-screen chemistry with Weber and on a certain level, that works.

I recently saw a stage version of the very same play at Glendale's A Noise Within and that production sparkled with wit. Don Juan was dashing and quite a bit younger than Weber. Sganarelle was a comical worm of a man, trying to express his conscience yet crumpling into a groveling coward when his master's expression turned to a frown or raised his voice in anger. The story is essentially the same as this French movie, but the comedy is much more entertaining.

Mary Poppins was right: A spoonful of sugar in the way of laughter, make the medicine go down in the most delightful way. This movie isn't the most inspired version of Moliere's play and unless you like your lessons in life served with a dose of cod liver oil, pass on this one.

Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451

2008-04-26T01:59:00.000-07:00

A lot has happened in the world since Ray Bradbury wrote his 1953 "Fahrenheit 451." Bradbury has adapted his novel for the stage and it is the current guest production by Bradbury's Pandemonium Theatre Company at the Fremont Centre Theatre in South Pasadena. Bradbury's play starts slow, with some weak transitions, and yet there are some promisingly powerful moments.

For those that are more familiar with Michael Moore's documentary, "Fahrenheit 9/11," a title that Bradbury protested, this story is about book burning. The title refers to the temperature that books will ignite and yet the story is not meant to be about censorship.

There is, in this script adapted by Bradbury and directed by Alan Neal Hubbs, a slight speech about how minorities worked to condemn certain books, but according to Bradbury, this story was originally written to express his great love of books and his fear that the boob tube was making us mindless.

In the future, firemen do not put out fires, they burn books. Guy Montag (David Polcyn) is one such man, following in the footsteps of his father. During one such burning, he secretly takes a book and this brings him to the attention of his captain (Michael Prichard) and scares his wife (Meaghan Boeing). He also finds himself drawn to his young neighbor Clarisse (Jessica D. Stone). He eventually is forced to flee and joins other lovers of literature.

Yet the future Bradbury imagined in the 1950s doesn't reflect what we know now. Sure there are now huge televisions, but what about the Internet, GPS and books online? A few miles away, a rare book was on display at the local botanic garden--totally on a computer screen. Bradbury's script doesn't attempt to address issues that the audience would be familiar with. If you argue Bradbury is staying true to his original vision, he has already made some changes to the plot for the play.

Aside from the clash between the imagined future and our present, the play suffers from some awkward transitions, abrupt endings of scenes that do not flow into the next one and some scenes that seem extraneous. Some things remain unclear. At first I thought Clarisse was meant to be a child, or a girl not quite yet a woman and that gave Montag's attraction to her sort of a creepy undertone. The first scene is feeble yet the ending gives a different dimension than other interpretations I have seen, one that makes sense and resonates with the whole context of a play. You'll have to see this production to understand what I mean. No spoilers in this review.

Certainly this production shows promise, but could stand some editing and re-working.

"Fahrenheit 451" continues until June 8 at the Fremont Centre Theatre, 1000 Fremont Ave (at El Centro) in South Pasadena. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m. and Sundays,3 p.m.
(323) 960-4451 or Plays411.

A Noise Within's Don Juan

2008-04-26T00:42:00.000-07:00

Lord Byron portrayed Don Juan as a victim of Catholicism's sexual repression and of women's desires, but in Moliere's version, "Dom Juan ou le Festin de Pierre," Don Juan is an atheist condemned to hell. The current production of "Don Juan" at Glendale, California's classical repertory theater, A Noise Within, maintains the integrity of Moliere's script, managing to mesh a tragic moral tale with moments of brilliant comedy.

Moliere's genius is giving us Don Juan's put upon servant, Sganarelle, who acts as Don Juan's conscience and yet he is forced to retreat, bend his words into convoluted excuses as he is beaten down by his humble position and his master's complete selfishness. Don Juan's latest conquest is Elvira (Libby West), whom he has lured from a convent. To defend her honor, her brothers (Stephen Rockwell and Dale Sandlin) vow revenge. Yet justice will come from a statue.

As Don Juan, Elijah Alexander is handsome and virile and often bare chested. He has a manly command of the stage while JD Collum shifts between momentary heroics and shrinking into comedic cowardice. Yet, Alexander's Don Juan is a man without a sense of humor; he is a straight man driven by his own lusts. He has no morale compass. We see this as well as his modus operandi as he plays the two peasant girls (Abby Craden and Sarah Green) against each other.

Director Michael Michetti, working with Richard Nelson's translation, skillfully gives us elegance, dashing charm and yet over the top comedy in this serious moral tale. Having Rockwell and Sandlin dressed in black and white--the overall color scheme of this production--with flourishes of pink is inspired. Yet the two stray locks that Rockwell flips back every now and then (wigs and hair by Monica Lisa Sabedra) and his hilarious lisp gives this fop hysterical panache. Sandlin, a bit huskier than Rockwell, wears an ill-fitting costume--he can only button the top few buttons and his belly hangs out. One senses from Sandlin's portrayal that this nobleman is too vain to admit he needs a new outfit and assumes that no one notices. Rachel Myers costume design gives Alexander swashbuckling swagger to contrast these two aristocratic buffoons.

Still we do not admire Don Juan. We sympathize with Sganarelle and grow fond of the two brothers and admire Elvira when she comes to her senses and accepts responsiblity for her own mistakes, but we do not protest Don Juan's fate. We do not wink at the troubles and heartbreak he has caused for Michetti has shown us a man who can speak sweet words without seducing us into actually liking him, not an easy task, but both Michetti and Alexander are up to this task. This excellent production ends on May 24.

JAPAN FILM FESTIVAL: Atagoal Cat's Magic Forest

2008-04-26T00:06:00.000-07:00

This 2006 computer animated movie, Atagoal wa Neko no Mori directed by Mizuho Nishikubo is about a boisterous cat whose morality is suspect, but whose passion for life saves the day. Based on a popular manga by Hiroshi Masumura, this screen play by Hirotoshi Kobayashi condemns mindless conformity for the sake of peaceful existence. The title literally means Atagoal: The Cat Forest, but is translated as Atagoal's Cat Magical Forest.

Atagoal is a town of cats (with some humans) and Hideyoshi (Koichi Yamadera) is the biggest party animal there. His fun veers toward destructiveness and infuriates the other villagers, particularly since he snatches a few tuna fish. He escapes and his friends, humans Princess Tsukimi (Aya Hirayama) and Tempura (Asahi Uchida) run after him, finding him with a sealed chest. Thinking that there must be something to eat in it and warned by the slender cat with an eye patch and cape, Gilgars (Seiichi Tanabe) not to open it, Hideyoshi replies, "If you tell me not to do something I simply must," he mistakenly opens a magic seal that releases the beautiful Botanical Queen Pileah (Mari Natsuki). Pileah's voice hypnotizes the cats and the people of Atagoal, turning them into plants. As queen, Pileah wants to bring world order and peace by turning the cats into mindless, though happy zombies. Her only obstacle is the King of Plants, Kagayakihiko-no-Miya, or Hideko (Tesuko Kozakura).

Hideko has chosen Hideyoshi as his father and because of this, he never grows into a large, majestic plant, but remains a small, cute little seedling. Hideko has greater moral strength than Hideyoshi but gains strength from the big cat's strong life force.

The story is basically about how even children or the child-like beings can have great spiritual power and be severely underestimated by the bigger, more adult like beings. In that respect, it is not unlike the Chronicles of Narnia although less spiritual.

Sometimes the subtitles are not not spot on, but this movie is exuberant and family-friendly, especially for those that love cats. This DVD was not available on Amazon (26 April 2008)

JAPAN FILM FESTIVAL: Hula Girls

2008-04-25T23:08:00.000-07:00

What do you do when your small, poverty-stricken town where the major industry is coal mining, is headed for financial disaster as the coal mines slowly close down?

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, one town had the answer. They opened the Joban Hawaiian Center in January 1961. It was the first resort facility and theme park to open in Japan and it strove to bring the image of "The Dream Island, Hawaii" to the local people for an admission fee of 350 yen. Aloha shirts and muumuus were an additional 300 yen each.

Utilizing the hot springs from the mines, they were able to grow palm trees and banana trees in a 7,000 m giant dome, quite exotic for Japan, especially in the north. In the first year, they had 2,000-3,000 visitors on weekdays and 10,000 on Sundays. About 1.2 million visitors came during their first fiscal year.

Now called the Spa Resort Hawaiians, the center has a golf course, spas and a technical school for flamenco and Polynesian dance. Opening in 1965 by the governor of Fukushima, it cultivates dancers for the stage of the center.

According to the current director of Joban Kosan, Yukio Sakamoto,

Former President [Yutaka] Nakamura traveled to mining countries around the world--including Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States--looking for ideas about new businesses, but he found nothing promising. He made two tours, following almost the same route, but in the end his efforts were nearly in vain. As he made his way back to Japan with a sense of dejection, he stopped in Hawaii to take a rest, where he got a big hint. In an instant, the wonderful spaciousness and warmth of Hawaii and the rhythm of percussion instruments that reminded him of a village shrine festival gave him the idea of creating a Hawaii in Japan using Joban's geothermal heat and hot springs. This is what I was told.

Instead of outsourcing and hiring professional dancers, he had a professional dancer trained miners' daughters and eventually, whole families would work--at reception, in the restaurants and in the souvenir shops and on stage. This was part of the "One Mountain, One Family" creed of the Joban management because "if this project does not succeed, there will be no tomorrow for Joban."

Sang-il Lee's 2006 movie "Hula Girls" is a fictional story based on the inception of this resort. At the Japanese Academy Awards, the movie won for best film, best director, best screenplay and best supporting actress.

The movie centers on two friends, Sanae (Etsushi Toyokawa) and Kimiko (Yu Aoi) who persevere after the first disastrous meeting with the teacher, Madoko Hirayama (Yasuko Matsuyuki) whose career has been a string of failures. Sanae's mother has died, leaving her father to support four children. As the eldest, Sanae feels responsible for her family. Kimiko's mother, Chiyo (Junko Fuji), opposes the whole enterprise, thinking dancing is not respectable enough for her daughter.

This is, at its heart, about family. There are no samurai in disguise. There are no supernatural beings. Sanae and Kimiko both choose family in different ways and take on adult responsibilities. Sanae will leave to follow her father who has been laid off as he moves to another mine so that she can care for her siblings. Kimiko will lead through her dedication and quiet continued opposition to her mother, choosing her new family of hula dancers as well as the larger family--the whole village that can only survive through the success of this new enterprise.

An unabashed tear-jerker, this movie will perhaps be classified as a chick flick, but this is really a film for anyone who has been courageous enough to take up dance and stick with it past the awkward stages, had disastrous recital nights and been lucky enough to bond with others who have the same passion. And in a time when American and Japanese companies are outsourcing jobs to China, India, Southeast Asia, this movie is a comforting realization that business success can also save and build a healthy community.

JAPAN FILM FESTIVAL: Tokyo Cowboys

2008-04-18T10:29:00.001-07:00

There's moment in the rough cut version of "Tokyo Cowboys," supposedly a documentary of foreign men in Tokyo that startled me, causing all my built up understanding of the situation to come crashing down at the foundations carefully built up by director Daneeta Loretta Saft. Saft comes on the screen and we learn she was married to the guy, Mark Saft, whom I'd come to identify as the creepy guy, the lech, the tsukebei (Japanese for lecherous). The man who wanted an open marriage, but more likely wanted to sample the sexual side of his Oriental fantasies.

"Tokyo Cowboys" is not a labor of love, but one of discontent and perhaps even closure.

This is not a collection of random men, but men whom Daneeta Saft had known during her time in Japan and the kind of men who would hang out with the dog of a husband who was Mark Saft. This is, even from the perspective of foreign men in Japan limited, particularly since all the "gaijin" men are white and English-speaking in her movie presented at the 2008 Japan Film Festival.

Mark Saft isn't the only character in this movie. Ken is a recruiter who wants to become an actor and is willing to earn extra money by performing Christian marriages for Japanese despite being born Jewish. Dave rock star wanna-be and part of a band, Guyjin, white rappers hoping to make it in Japan. Patrick Of all the men, Cloudy, a man with dyed blond hair who drags around his vacuum cleaner "pet," would probably have been the most noticeable in his own country, Australia.

This is not to suggest that Saft doesn't know Japan well, or at least a part of Japan. . In an interview with Metropolis, we learn more about Daneeta Saft.

The 38-year-old director is more than just a visitor to Japan. Initially coming here with her boyfriend, she lived in the country from 1993 to 2000, first in Fukuoka on the JET Program and afterwards in the capital to work in the intense world of headhunting.

Mark Saft, now her ex-husband and still a close friend, is one of the characters in her documentary. “What the film is about is the point of view of the long-term foreign male resident in Tokyo,” she explains. “The only criteria are that they’re here for over ten years and they’re men. I didn’t want the female experience because I’ve experienced that already.”

Part of the experience was being fed up with the place. “I had such a bad time my last year in Japan. I started to blame Japan for all the problems I had in my life,” she says. But the US-born Saft didn’t decide to fly back home. Instead, she went to England and enrolled in the London Film School.

By making a film about white men finding success in the Asia, particularly with two of the main characters hooking up with Asian women, Saft is only adding to an old genre, the one where a white male goes into the so-called Orient, makes piles of money, has an affair with a local woman or local women and may even marry her and becomes more than he could ever been at home. Most famous or infamous of such romances was written by Louis Marie-Julien Viaud, under the pseudonym Pierre Loti: "Madame Chrysantheme" which later became the basis for "Madame Butterfly."

In the same respect, Saft's image of the wild west and cowboys and Westerns isn't totally accurate.

Instead, she looked at her own inability to describe her feelings on life in Tokyo as a woman for "Tokyo Cowboys." “There’s a reason Westerns are about men. It’s the frontier. It’s about reinventing yourself,” she says. “I can never have the same experience they have.”

Maybe Saft is thinking of westerns that mimicked samurai movies such as Clint Eastwood's character, a man with no name, in the Sergio Leone series or Eastwood's "Unforgiven." Yet there were women in the West who re-invented themselves, who became famous, who were more than good housewives, helpmates or prostitutes. Think Calamity Jane, the Unsinkable Margaret Tobin Brown, Annie Oakley, Willa Cather and Dale Evans. Debbie Reynolds starred in a 1964 movie musical about Brown "The Unsinkable Molly Brown," Doris Day starred in a 1953 musical called "Calamity Jane." Oakley became the subject of a 1946 musical on Broadway. What about Barbara Stanwyck in "The Big Valley," a western TV series. Stanwyck had starred as Oakley in a 1935 film. Gail Davis played her in a TV series from 1954 to 1956.

Yet what kind of woman is Saft and would she attract such gutsy pioneering women and get to know them?

This is not all that is Tokyo. We do not see the white women who become consorts to rich Asian men, white women who become nightclub singers or fashion models. We do not see the white men who are married and stay married to their white wives and we do not see the white women who are married to Asian men. We do not see the Americans, British or Australians who can pass as Japanese or other Asian.

These people do exist. I knew some of them the three times I was in Japan as an exchange student. For this reason, I cringed when one of the men was disgruntled and complained about being a gaijin and having a gaikokujin registration, to be registered as an alien. I, too, had an alien registration for Japan as well as the United Kingdom. My grandparents had alien registration in the U.S. as well. Yet Saft does nothing in her documentary to mitigate the mistaken bias of this comment.

Are the Japanese really so different from the U.S. or the U.K.? Ask any Asian ethnic, one born and raised in the US, UK or Australia if they haven't been complimented on his or her English and you'll know that you don't need a card to be identified as alien and that the marvel of someone speaking the local language with a different face isn't uniquely Japanese.

While learning the ins and outs of filmmaking, Saft says she started to long for Japan. “The school had some Japanese students and I gravitated towards them.” Then she caught up with one of her headhunting associates in London. Over a night of drinks, the former colleague mentioned he would give her $5,000 to shoot something in Japan. That was enough to get the ball rolling. The colleague eventually forgot his promise, and Saft was forced to raise the small budget of £60,000 herself.

At first, she thought she’d make a film about headhunters. “But their life is this Bermuda Triangle of their flat, Roppongi and their office because they work so hard. There’s no Tokyo. It’s not cinematic,” she says. “I didn’t want to make that movie.”

Instead, she looked at her own inability to describe her feelings on life in Tokyo as a woman for Tokyo Cowboys. “There’s a reason Westerns are about men. It’s the frontier. It’s about reinventing yourself,” she says. “I can never have the same experience they have.”

Reading Saft's blog entries is also informative. She writes,

"I'm thinking that BG is right. Maybe I should shoot something in Tokyo. Maybe something about the economic hostages. That's what we used to call ourselves--"economic hostages." How arrogant is that. But I don't know anything about documentary, really. And I have to work on my graduation film. I'll have to think about it.

The next morning, my flatmate asks me what I did in Tokyo. I tell her I was a writer.

"And, how was it...your writing," she asks.

It didn't suck. I could do what I wanted. I had fans. It was kind of rock and roll.

Please, God...if I go back there...please let it be rock and roll.

Is it fair to read her blogs? Why not when she so clearly ties it into the movie? We see how her documentary starts shaping up.

I've been watching my old tapes of Japan trying to get a feel for it again. There were so many strange experiences...so many things that I'd forgotten...things on the street. I even filmed myself having a nervous breakdown...5 hours of tapes of my crying pathetically.

I could even smell it...Tokyo It was such a strange place, and I swore that I would never go back. Now I'm seriously considering it. BG has put the seed in my head.

Five hours crying? And yet she finds herself drawn to the Japanese students at her film school in London where she is a registered alien as well.

At the screening, Saft seemed rather proud that she was the only non-Asian foreigner or gaijin to have her work included in the Japan Film Festival 2008. Yet she has produced a messy traditional view of the white males' experience in Japan, without the benefit of commentary from their Japanese colleagues or acquaintances as if these gaijin lived a compartmentalized life in a highly compartmentalized world.Her documentary is a small part of Japan, but we do not see the boarder view.

When I looked up gaijin on Amazon, the first page featured only books by men. Saft has given us more of the same. Is it really still a white man's world?

JAPAN FILM FESTIVAL: Los Angeles April 11-17

2008-04-16T21:19:00.000-07:00

The Japan Film Festival is historically five years old and suffers from some growing pains. Originally called the Chanoma Film Festival, it focused on films that focused on everyday life. Chanoma literally means living room.

After all, samurai and geisha movies come over to the US. More recently, anime has become popular here. Films about everyday people in every day Japan were and are less popular and this void creates a biased view of what Japan is and how the Japanese see themselves. Few Americans who have never been to Japan have seen "Otoko wa Tsurai Yo" ("It's Tough Being a Man"), a long-running series with the same lead actor (Kiyoshi Atsumi) and same director (Yoji Yamada) that only ended with the death of the actor (48 movies from 1969-1995). Yet Zatoichi has made it over. Americans seeing only this side of Japanese films can easily theorize that Japan's national character clings to the sensibilities of the samurai. Atsumi's character, Tora-san is the anti-samurai and there are many characters that would contradict the samurai morality.

Now that anime and J-horror have found fans in the US, the festival organizers decided to reflect the growing variety of genres represented by re-christening it the Japan Film Festival. Supported by the Japanese Consulate General, the Japan Foundation of Los Angeles, numerous Japanese-American corporations, and much of the Japanese media in the Los Angeles area, the festival this year screened independent films to indicate the depth and variety of Japanese filmmakers.

Some of the problems with the film festival include the brochures: The schedule didn't seem to be printed based in alphabetical order, order according to the Japanese syllabary or day. The panel discussion on the Saturday prior to the festival lacked focus. Reviewers were not given screeners and many of these movies were not readily available.

American moviegoers might be shocked that the movies actually start on time--without endless commercials or trailers. Of course, the festival features some Kurosawa classics: "The Hidden Fortress" and "Sanjuro."

"The Hidden Fortress" stars Toshiro Mifune was a general who is protecting the princess of the defeated royal family. With the family's gold, they travel to a safe territory. Along the way they pick up two cowardly peasants who provide comedic relief. George Lucas was inspired by this 1958 film when he was making the original "Star Wars" movie, particularly in terms of having two often bickering and absurd characters telling the story--in his case R2-D2 and C3PO. The actual Japanese title, "Kakushi Toride no San Akunin" is "The Three Villains of the Hidden Fortress."

The 1962 "Sanjuro" is the follow up to "Yojimbo." Its original name is "Tsubaki Sanjuro" which means "Camellia Thirty-Something Man." Based on the Shugoro Yamamoto novel "Peaceful Days," however with the success of the 1961 "Yojimbo" Kurosawa resurrected the anti-hero. In that movie, Mifune's character named himself "Mulberry Field Thirty-Something Man." This would later become Sergio Leone's "Man With No Name" who was embodied by Clint Eastwood. In "Sanjuro," nine young samurai plan to battle the corrupt leadership of their clan, but they are too innocent and rashly trust the wrong people. Luckily a rude and coarse ronin (Mifune) comes to their aid.

"Sanjuro" and "The Hidden Fortress" are available on DVD and at most of my local rental stores, but it is nice to see such classic on a big screen as they were meant to me.

Another film readily available on DVD, but nice to see on the silver screen is the more recent "One Piece: The Alabasta Adventure--The Desert Princess and the Pirates." Based on a Shonen Jump series (Shonen Jump is a weekly manga compilation that I've never really liked) by Eiichiro Oda, "One Piece" is both a TV series with 349 episodes as of the end of March and a movie series. This is the eighth in the series which now has nine episodes. The desert princess, Vivi, needs the help of Monkey D. Luffy, the captain of the Straw Hat Pirates. Luffy himself wears a straw hat. The duplicitous Crocodile has engineered a war between Vivi's father, King Cobra, and the rebels. The pirates all have special abilities or super powers as does Crocodile and his main henchman, the gay (his cape says "Okama") Bon Clay. There's a lot of blood-splashing violence, cute characters (usually animals) and odd-looking ones as well. If you're looking for the cute inventiveness and the environmental messages of Hayao Miyazaki, you won't find it here. To a certain extent, this movie, a retelling of the Alabasta arc of stories, is like a condensed form to quickly catch one up to the One Piece series that follows Luffy in his quest for the One Piece, the ultimate treasure that will make him the pirate king. The TV series began in 1999 and 349 episodes is a lot of catching up for anyone with a life.

MOVIE REVIEW: Debating Stereotypes of "The Great Debaters"

2008-04-13T01:03:00.000-07:00

Is it OK to promote a stereotype or false assumption if you are black?

That is the question that the movie, "The Great Debaters" indirectly asks. Two-time Academy Award winner Denzel Washington directed and led a cast that included Academy Award winner Forest Whitaker in what is a moving story about the kind of odds faced by a small black school, Wiley College, in the deep South when the Jim Crow laws were in effect.

In the Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Production movie, the team has their greatest moment when they travel North to debate with the Harvard team. Harvard is presented as the bastion of the establishment, the best and the brightest the nation has to offer and, with a very, very white student body. In reality, the Wiley team did not debate against Harvard because the ivory tower of the Ivy League had already fallen. The Wiley team traveled to Los Angeles, to debate with USC in 1935.

In essence, the movie asks the audience to step back into a time that existed, but not at the same time. One Harvard was a leading college in debate. Once Harvard was all white male. Yet that was not the Harvard of 1935. Wiley was founded in 1873 by the Freedman's Aid Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church near Marshal, Texas. In comparison, Harvard was founded in 1636 and is the oldest institution of higher education in the US.

The race barrier at Harvard had been broken by the time Wiley College was founded. According to Mass Moments, Richard Greener was the first African American graduate of Harvard in 1870. He went on to become a lawyer and a foreign service officer.

Compared to these two institutes, the University of Southern California was new. USC opened in 1880 with only 53 students and 10 teachers. It was, for its time, formed by a diverse group of men: a Protestant, an Irish Catholic and a German Jew. According to a 2001 article written for the "Daily Trojan" about black Trojan history, African Americans have been actively involved at USC since 1897. The first African American graduated from USC in 1909. The same article claims that during the Civil Rights era, Southern black families sent their children to USC.

Jim Crow laws didn't reach all corners of the US, as portrayed in another movie, also inspired by historical events and characters, the 2004 "Ray." The absence of different laws based on race in other areas didn't mean there wasn't racial prejudice or segregated neighborhoods and entertainment.

What Martin Luther King Jr. did during the civil rights movement was to bring the South in line with the rest of the nation. People outside of the South were shocked by the conditions and extent of racism yet this didn't answer the problems faced by people in New York--the reality that Malcolm X reacted against. Being able to legally sit at the front of the bus, attend the same college or eat at the same diner didn't mean racism didn't exist in Seattle, Los Angeles or Cambridge. Born in the Midwest (Omaha, Nebraska) and raised in Wisconsin and Michigan, Malcolm X's family experienced harsh treatment, threats and hate crimes perpetrated against them. Martin Luther King Jr's peaceful protests, just as Gandhi's, involved a majority population that was treated as a minority. Malcolm X addressed what it was like for a minority to gain attention and rights.

What kind of place of Los Angeles in 1935? In Los Angeles County, a Georgia-born African American athlete graduated from Muir Tech, now Muir High School, after playing shortstop and catcher on the baseball team, quarterback on the football team, guard on the basketball team and winning awards in the broad jump for the track and field team. That young man would go on to play on various teams at Pasadena Junior College, now Pasadena City College and even, for a short time, play at UCLA. He was the first athlete, black or white, to earn varsity letters in four sports: baseball, basketball, football and track. What he would become famous for would be baseball, when he, Jackie Robinson, became a Brooklyn Dodger in 1947.

That was after the Los Angeles Zoot Suit Riots of 1943 where some African Americans assisted the Mexican Americans, but before the Watts Riots of August 1965. In 1935, yellow perilism was building up on the West Coast. Racial prejudice was focused on other minorities in Los Angeles and African American were aware of this.

In this respect, the movie, "The Great Debaters" isn't so great in showing the shades of racism that existed outside of the Deep South and outside of the North. Even in 1935, the US was more than North and South and racism came in different shades and affected people of different skin colors.

The script went for the easy win with a plot of black versus white, of new versus old, of small versus big. A better film might have left us questioning the gray areas and seen beyond the landowners and the landless and the North versus the South. Such a simplistic theme harks back to the original Constitution which granted voting rights to landowning white men (landless white men gained the vote in 1856) and to the Mason-Dixon Line of the Missouri Compromise of 1820.

In February 2008, "The Great Debaters" won at the NAACP awards for motion picture, best actor in a motion picture (Washington) and actress in a motion picture (Jurnee Smollett). Yet did this movie really serve people of color well?

California was neither North nor South. At the time, legal racism in California didn't focus on the African Americans, yet that doesn't mean racism and racism against African Americans did not exist. It doesn't even mean that African Americans in California or anywhere else aren't racist themselves. Do we really need movies that promote a stereotypes, even if they favor African Americans from the Deep South?

Drip Dry - What is a Desert?

2008-03-23T18:37:00.000-07:00

Walking around Pasadena, most people probably don't think of the city as part of a desert - a place of vast sands, mouth-drying winds and devastating heat. But perhaps we would all be better off if they did.

With the so-called "perfect drought" of last summer and the autumn firestorms that followed, fears of global warming have hit Southern California hard, including Pasadena, which isn't yet a desert, but is well on its way to becoming one.

According to Tapio Schneider, an assistant professor of environmental science and engineering at Caltech, just what a desert actually is isn't easily defined.

"Desert has many different and quite vague meanings. The meaning you are probably thinking about is a very arid region [little rainfall, evaporation exceeds precipitation] with a barren landscape and sparse vegetation," Schneider explained recently via email. "Climatologically, deserts can be defined and sub-classified in several ways, but usually the term desert is applied if annual rainfall is less than about 10 inches," Schneider explained. "We receive about twice that amount on average, so according to that definition, Pasadena is not a desert. But in other classifications, the term ‘desert climate' refers to any climate in which evaporation exceeds precipitation, and this is the case in Pasadena."

If you look at a map drawn Sept 25 at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's Drought Monitor, you'll see that most of California was under a moderate to extreme drought, with almost all Southern California under extreme drought conditions. Yet, there were no statewide mandatory water conservation measures taken.

Nationwide, California wasn't the hardest hit area last year. A large portion of the Southeast United States suffered from extreme to exceptional drought conditions during that time.

Certainly things have improved this year and the current drought map shows Southern California as being abnormally dry to under severe drought conditions. Northern California also appears to be sitting pretty. But does this mean water usage is now only a Southern California issue?

Schneider explained in a phone interview that while many regions across the US are now suffering from drought and "we [scientists] see pretty clear changes," some people will argue that "the drought we are seeing here is a sign of climate change." But, he cautioned, it is too early to come to that conclusion.

After all, he continued, "A few years ago was one of the most humid years on record. And three years later, it was the driest year on record." He does still feel that "on average, it will get drier here," yet we must also consider that during a period of time there will be "variability" in weather patterns.

However, he was sure that "it is very likely it will get drier in the coming decades," but "whether that is due to human activity that is too early to tell. We'll know in a decade or two."

While scientists can wait that long to figure out whether last year's perfect drought was a sign of things to come or just a normal variation in the weather, he also acknowledged that, as a community, we can't wait much longer.

"We have to do two things: Find ways of producing energy with lower emission of greenhouse gases," he said. "At the same time, climate change will happen, part of it is inevitable, yet we do have a choice in it. We can adapt and conserve water as a resource by using energy technologies on an individual level and by being more aware in order to put pressure on our institutions to change on larger scale."

As the current drought monitor maps show, despite the rain, Southern California is still under drought conditions.

And "Water policies need to adapt now," Schneider said, "Climate will change in the next 50 years" and the reality is we will have to "use less water to adapt."

--Originally published in the Pasadena Weekly

Water Wars - Films for Thought

2008-03-23T18:12:00.000-07:00

If you are a green-conscious filmmaker but don't have the big bucks of Leonardo DiCaprio or the political clout of Al Gore to get your project green-lighted, why not enter the Intelligent Use of Water short film competition?

Last year's jury award winner, Sergio Cannella, was from Italy, but the competition's sponsor and the awards ceremony are both located in Southern California?

Following a special Oct. 11 screening at the Los Angeles County Arboretum & Botanic Garden in Arcadia, winners will be announced immediately and cash prizes of $6,000 for the Jury Award and $3,000 for the Audience Choice Award will be given by the event's sponsor, Rain Bird of Azusa.

Rain Bird, the leading manufacturer and provider of irrigation products and services for lawns, gardens, agriculture, golf courses and commercial developments, is giving amateur and experienced filmmakers a chance to showcase their talents and use the power of film to highlight the need for responsible water use with this contest, now in its second year.

Shalini Kantayya, director of the 2007 Audience Choice Award winner, "A Drop of Life," will serve as master of ceremonies. "I got the idea while in India making a documentary," Brooklyn-based Kantayya commented via email. "The more I researched and read about water, the more I became convinced of Vice President of the World Bank Ismail Serageldin's statement on the future of war: ‘If the wars of the 20th century were fought over oil, the wars of the next century will be fought over water.' I found the statistics alarming; between one-half and two-thirds of the world's population will not have access to drinking water by the year 2027.

"The water meter in ‘A Drop of Life' was originally created to illustrate a frightening future where water is the planet's most scarce natural resource. But then I learned that this frightening future, a world in which water is reserved for only those who can afford it, exists today. The science-fiction water meters I had imagined already exist in 10 countries including South Africa, Brazil and impoverished areas of the United States. This ‘coincidence' has affirmed my belief that this story has the power to move, inspire, and mobilize people to act on this vital issue," Kantayya said.

A filmmaker for her 7th Empire Media who has done commercial work for Sting, Mariah Carey, and Phil Collins, as well as interviewed and filmed people such as the Dalai Lama and Gloria Steinem, Kantayya also considers herself an activist and educator.

"My interest in conservation is about survival of every species on the planet," she explained. "Everyone should be aware that water is a precious limited resource and we must conserve, avoid bottled water, and convince our leaders to keep our water clean, safe and as our shared human right."

Kantayya's film, as well as Cannella's "Carpa Diem" - the tale of a fish and water, can be viewed on the Rain Bird IUOW Web site, www.IUOWFILM.com.

Entries may include narrative, documentary, animated, experimental and/or student-made short films that run one to 10 minutes in actual or excerpted run time and the subject matter should explore methods and ideas to responsibly manage and utilize earth's most precious resource.

The competition's 2008 judges are Robert Glennon, a professor at the University of Arizona's Rogers College of Law, Gary McVey of the American Cinema Foundation, and Amanda Pope, a professor at the USC School of Cinematic Arts.

All entries must be submitted electronically as an .mov, .wmv or .mpg file no later than 11:59 p.m. (PDT) Sept. 1.
For more information about the competition and entry requirements, visit www.IUOWFILM.com.

Wave of the Future: Go Grey to Go Green

2008-03-23T18:04:00.000-07:00

"Why in the world are we throwing away drinking water, using it to flush toilets and putting it into landscape?" John Koeller, technical advisor for the California Urban Water Conservation Council, asked recently.

Those functions "don't require chlorinated, filtered drinking water. What's closer to us than gray water? You can reduce your water use and water bill."

According to Koeller, Australia and Germany more commonly use gray water systems.

So what exactly is gray water?

It's water that was once drinkable (potable or whitewater), but was used for washing dishes, clothes or even for bathing. It is NOT water you let go down the drain while waiting for the shower or bath water to heat up, which is still clean "whitewater" and could easily be used for anything.

Nor is it water from the toilet bowl. Toilet water is considered "blackwater," with biological contaminants such as human and animal feces and urine. It also isn't rainwater.

Water in a semi-arid climate like Pasadena should be considered a precious resource and recycling water isn't a new way of conservation. Rather, it is really an old idea with a few new high-tech possibilities.

New buildings going up at Caltech, one of Pasadena's largest water consumers, will have pipes laid especially for gray water usage, according to Jim Cowell, associate vice president of facilities and planning.

"Water conservation is just one part of a larger initiative at Caltech to become a more sustainable campus. ... In these new buildings we are building, we are providing gray water piping," Cowell said.

These would provide gray water to the urinals and toilets, but Caltech is waiting for Pasadena as a city to provide gray water.

"The city does not have a gray-water supply, so we're ready if the city comes down with a gray-water main. We'll be ready to hook up our new buildings," Cowell said. "There would also be an opportunity to hook up our landscaping."

By waiting for the city, which has no immediate plans in the works, Caltech is avoiding what Koeller has called "a patchwork system of health codes" governing the usage of gray water, which boils down to "battling health codes."

The plumbing is not the biggest issue. Systems can be "approved in one jurisdiction and denied in other jurisdictions," or different inspectors might have "different interpretations of the same codes," and this is "a serious problem in this area" as opposed to Colorado and New Mexico, Koeller said.

Laura Allen, one of the members of the Greywater Guerrillas (www.greywaterguerrillas.com), a collaborative group of educators, designers, builders and artists encouraging the building of a sustainable water culture and infrastructure, agreed with Koeller.

"California needs to change the code and model the new code after Arizona's gray water code," Allen wrote in an email. "In Arizona, people are given basic health and safety guidelines, and if they follow them they fall under a general permit and don't need to do anything else to be ‘legal.' California needs a code like this, and to provide education and possibly incentives for homeowners to install gray-water systems."

Robert Mechielsen, founder of Studio RMA, which is designing the Pasadena EcoHouse, the first structural concrete-insulated panel LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) platinum home in the US, said the idea of using gray water is very valuable, especially in California, "yet there is a problem about run-over water. Who decides if that run-over water can be discharged in the street or the sewer? Rainwater and gray water can be discharged in the sewer so an engineered system would need a separate tank for your rain water which can be technically discharged into the street," and this multiple tank system would drive up the cost of the reclaimed water.

For the Pasadena EcoHouse, Mechielsen decided solar power would be a better use of money.

According to Allen, "Overall the vast majority of gray water systems are unpermitted because of the illogical gray water code California currently has. It's interesting to note that during drought times, the government had ignored its own code and told people to use their gray water!"

From a legal standpoint, Koeller explained there are currently two types of gray-water systems: engineered systems - bigger systems built to order and specially permitted - and packaged systems. The packaged systems are affordable for the average homeowner and rental property owner.

According to Mark G. Sanders, chairman of WaterSaver Technologies (www.watersavertech.com), a Kentucky-based company, for about $295 and the cost of a 90-minute installation by a licensed plumber, you can have an AQUS gray-water system installed.

The AQUS system is one of two packaged gray-water systems that has been chosen by the Metropolitan Water District as part of its Innovation Conservation Program. The system cleans up the gray water you used in your bathroom sink - taking out the large particulates with a coarse screen and killing the bacteria to make it "Fido-friendly" in case your dog uses the toilet bowl for a drink.

According to Sanders, WaterSaver Technologies will install AQUS in 17 buildings (single-family homes, apartments, hotels and maybe an office or two) and for three months the water and energy consumption will be monitored.

In a recent phone interview, Sanders estimated that the AQUS system uses about 50 cents worth of energy per year, but the study will give Californians an accurate picture of the total cost.

Sanders will be speaking at the upcoming Plumbing Manufacturer's Institute spring meeting on "Emerging Technologies in Indoor Greywater Reuse," which is a part of the Greywater and Rainwater Reuse Session on April 2 in Newport Beach.

Allen, co-author of the "Guerrilla Greywater Girls Guide to Water," said that "besides saving water and money, gray water systems also require people to look critically at what they're putting down the drain. It's a great time to rid the house of toxic cleaners, chemicals, etc. Biodegradable products are best. Also check to see they're low/free of sodium and boron, which can harm your plants. Oasis products are made especially for gray water. [Laundry detergent and all-purpose cleaner] For body products there is a great Web site [www.cosmeticdatabase.com] where you can enter your products and see how toxic (or not) the ingredients are."

Individuals who are passionate about water now currently practice gray-water usage, and yet it needs to go further than that. "The real question is: How far in a society are we?" Mechielsen asked. To have gray-water systems in place and for water conservation to work, we can't rely on just those people "who are very eco-conscious."

After all, the installation of engineered or packaged systems in one home "doesn't necessarily mean the next person who wants to buy this house isn't going to wash his paints in the sink," he said.

The bottom line, says Mechielsen, is you "really have to look at a group of people or a city or a green movement that have to come to a consensus: How as a group of people are we dealing with water that could be recycled in a safe, environmental and sane manner?"

Originally published in the Pasadena Weekly

Dry Green: Go Native

2008-03-23T17:58:00.000-07:00

Want to go green and still have green in your yard while conserving water?

Consider California native plants, which are more than just succulents and cactus. Many are flowering and many were used for food or medicinal purposes by Native Americans. Theresa Richau, the Herbs of the World garden curator at the LA Arboretum & Botanic Garden, feels people come to the Arboretum "to be healed" and gardens have that special power.

As a member of the Tongva tribe (who lived in the LA Basin), she feels that we should think of the "landscape of the universe" and that conserving water in a semi-arid area is part of the deal.

Currently, Richau is refurbishing and redeveloping a native California section of the herb garden with the help of her tribal elder, Mark F. Acuña, an ethnobotanist who has written his own personal guides to the Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden in Claremont as well as for the Bernard Biological Field Station at Claremont College and the Pitzer College campus.

Richau, Acuña and Marcela Singleton, the Grace Kallam Perennial Garden and Meadowbrook curator, are involved in the relatively new section of the Roots & Shoots Children's Discovery Node, the wildlife garden.

"A donor had an idea of creating a wildlife garden, and while studying wildlife-attracting plants, I found they are all native plants," Singleton explained. "They don't require soil amendments because they are designed to be here." Singleton also insisted that no irrigation system be installed, so plants are watered by the rains or by hand. Without irrigation, this garden is in bloom with orange, blue, purple and yellow flowers.

Acuña pointed at the silver-leaved Artemesia tridentate. The Tongva, who called it "wikwat," gathered the seeds and ground them into a mush. The leaves and branches were used in sweathouses. A medicinal tea for stomach-aches was made from the leaves, which were also used to make a green dye for tattooing. For the Tongva, this is a most sacred plant because it came from their original homeland, areas like Nevada before the climate changed. Like most silver foliage, this plant is great for a moonlight garden, reflecting light.

The seeds of the juncus, or wire grass (Tongva name soar, pronounced with two syllables) were used to make little edible cakes, the roots and leaves to make a diuretic tea, and the reeds for making baskets. The village women were responsible for maintenance - cutting, pruning and harvesting to keep the plant healthy.

According to Acuña, the local tribes had families who were responsible for different plants and even specific oak groves. The idea that the Native Americans "had no concept of ownership of the land was started by the Europeans," he explained.

In times of drought when the plants are stressed, families were responsible for oak groves and other useful plants, giving them extra water. This was true for Native Americans throughout California, he said.

The Tongva also used the state flower, the California poppy (Eschscholzia californica), for food - though it requires special preparation or it can be toxic, Acuña warned. The pollen from a field of poppies was collected by women and used as a cosmetic.

Similarly, the Tongva used the toxic blue-eye grass (Sisyrinchum bellum), a member of the iris family, called mantaka. The Tongva used it primarily for medicinal reasons, but it must be handled with care.

In the herb garden, volunteer Rafael Carrera Oliva, who is of Mayan descent, noted that his people used ruda, commonly known as goat's rue, to calm the stomach. Yerba mate is commonly used in Latin America as a tea.

The LA Arboretum plans to put up educational signs in the wildlife garden in the near future, but if you're lucky, you can also ask volunteers or the curators for information. Acuña will be giving lectures but his next one in May is already full. Both Richau and Acuña will be leading the refurbishment of Tongva dwellings on April 20, 25 and 27 at the Arboretum. Volunteers are welcome to help while learning more about Tongva culture and history.

Acuña is also working with the Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden and other Tongva elders to produce an ethnobotanic book, but until then, you'll have to catch him at one of the gardens to pick his brain.

Singleton recommended the Theodore Payne Web site to help identify plants in the meantime and for purchasing wildflowers and California natives.

The Theodore Payne Foundation, located in Sun Valley, has its fifth annual native garden tour on April 12 and 13. This self-guided tour of 39 Los Angeles-area homes costs $20 per person for both days and is described online at www.TheodorePayne.org.

The tour includes homes in Altadena, La Cañada Flintridge, Pasadena, South Pasadena, Monrovia and Glendale among other locations that have at least 50 percent native plants. On Saturday, April 12, at 6:30 p.m., there's also a free talk by Alrie Middlebrook, "Designing California Native Plant Gardens," at Barnsdall Gallery Theatre in Hollywood.

--originally published in the Pasadena Weekly

THEATER REVIEW: Egos Collide in "Orson's Shadow"

2008-02-01T21:04:00.000-08:00

The Pasadena Playhouse's production of "Orson's Shadow," is a provocative behind the scenes look at stage actors, in this case famous actors. Egos explode, but this production is a well-acted celebration of theatrical fireworks and wit with dead-on comedic timing.

For those who love movies, you might remember Orson Welles as a man whose early promise was killed by ego and studio politics. He had taken on Randolph Hearst in his 1941 movie, "Citizen Kane." Hearst's media empire boycotted the film that went on to be nominated for Best Picture, Best Actor (Welles) and Best Director (Welles) and won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay (Herman J. Mankiewicz and Welles).

Yet Orson as an icon has influenced popular culture, despite the desperation of his later years when he was often scrambling for financial support for his projects.

Based on true events, Austin Pendleton's play looks at the collision of narcissistic men and the death of a marriage in London 1960. A desperate Welles (Bruce McGill), trying to raise money for his next project ,agrees to direct an egotistical Laurence Olivier (Charles Shaughnessy) ,who wants to be relevant to a younger generation, and Olivier's young lover and future wife, Joan Plowright (Libby West). Olivier is still married to Vivien Leigh (Sharon Lawrence). Olivier and Plowright are founding the British National Theatre for which they will perform this new play, Eugene Ionesco's "Rhinoceros." Critic Kenneth Tynan (Scott Lowell), who wishes to leave something more than just words as part of his legacy to the theater world, is the one who suggests this meeting of creative artists of the stage. Tynan begins as our narrator, but Pendleton ends with Plowright, the only person still alive of the four, giving an epilogue.

Perhaps this is why "Orson's Shadow" is the kindest to Plowright and even, to a certain extent to Olivier.

In 1960, Olivier was still married to Vivien Leigh. They had become lovers while playing lovers in the 1937 movie "Fire Over England." Both were still married. Leigh was married to Herbert Leigh Holman, a barrister, in 1932 and had given birth to a daughter the next year. Olivier to actress Jill Esmond in 1930 whom he met on a film when she was more famous. Esmond and Olivier had just had a son in 1936. When Olivier and Leigh both divorced their respective spouses in 1940, they quickly married. Olivier seemed to want them to become a great theatrical couple, the Oliviers, often directing as well as starring opposite of Leigh--something he had not tried with Esmond.

Leigh had already attained film star success from her 1939 appearance as Scarlett O'Hara in "Gone with the Wind" for which she won a Best Actress Oscar. Olivier had starred in the 1939 "Wuthering Heights." Olivier would have to wait until 1948 to win an Oscar as Best Actor for "Hamlet." He also won for Best Director. The previous year, he had been given a special Oscar for his "Henry V."

She would later win another Oscar in 1951 playing Blanche Dubois in Tennessee Williams' "A Streetcar Named Desire." She had already played that role on stage under Olivier's direction in London, one that Olivier had interpreted differently than the film director Elia Kazan. Tynan had criticized Leigh's stage performances--including her Blanche, suggesting that Olivier was compromising his own talent for hers.

Leigh was a mercurial actress and was increasingly plagued by her bipolar disorder and Pendleton chiefly attributes this to the break up of the Oliviers marriage. There's little mention that Plowright was married when she met Olivier in 1957, during rehearsals of a play that John Osborne had written for Olivier, "The Entertainer." Plowright, who was 16 years younger than Leigh, did not divorce her husband until 1961, the same year she married Olivier to become his third wife.

According to IMDB.com, Plowright herself has even suggested that Olivier was somewhat difficult: "If a man is touched by genius, he is not an ordinary person. He doesn't lead an ordinary life. He has extremes of behaviour which you understand and you just find a way not to be swept overboard by his demons."

Although she was listed as the co-respondent in Leigh's divorce from Olivier, IMDB.com also quotes her as saying, "I have always resented the comments that it was I who was the homewrecker of Larry's marriage to Vivien Leigh. Danny Kaye was attached to Larry far earlier than I." Either way, both of the Oliviers were having affairs.

Pendleton sidesteps and streamlines all of this hubris. His Olivier is a charming, egotistical man, somewhat jealous of Welles' early success, constantly reliving his theatrical and cinematic successes with Leigh (e.g. "That Hamilton Woman"), still hurting from Tynan's harsh comments about Leigh's stage performances under his direction and Olivier attempts to control and mold the much younger (and less formal than Leigh) Plowright. Shaughnessy doesn't whine or weedle; he just makes helpful observations, hiding his own insecurities as he simply seeks better understanding while undermining Welles' direction. McGill's Welles is full of frustrated bluster. He can't finesse his way around Olivier's masterfully polite criticism and obsessive attention to detail. Yet he never becomes down right nasty. After all, Olivier and Welles had been friends. Welles has a tender spot for the troubled Leigh.

Lawrence's Leigh flutters in and out of control of her mania, we see lightening quick changes flash across her face as she struggles to maintain control of her emotions, particularly at a time that most women would find impossible--when facing your husband's much younger mistress. Lawrence's Leigh sparkles with tragic fragility and draws our attention from the much more down-to-earth West as Plowright.

Under the direction of Damaso Rodriguez, Welles, Olivier and Leigh are larger than life--fitting for the venue. Lowell's Tynan is a man with a vision that becomes a nightmare. The snappy pacing and witty exchanges without a razor sharp edge of hate or bitterness, prevent this production from being a poignant plunge into darkness. The real cypher is West's Plowright. The audience can't be sure why she loves Olivier, a man still very attached to his second wife.

"Orson's Shadow" debuted the Chicago Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago in early 2000 and was staged at the San Diego Old Globe Theatre later that same year. In 2005, there was an off-Broadway production at the Barrow Street Theatre. In 2001, I saw this play produced at the much smaller Black Dahlia Theatre. From what I recall, compared to this Pasadena Playhouse production with wonderfully solid backstage views by set designer Gary Wissmann, that production was much darker in both tone and general staging. In a small venue such intimacy allows for more subtle character nuances and the set design more minimalistic. Rodriguez's ensemble plays this mostly in the light although almost predictably, our first view of Welles' is of his shadow. This interpretation is less tragic, a bright and intelligent piece of entertainment.

In restrospect, perhaps there was a reason for Olivier to doubt himself. Leigh's Scarlett O'Hara and Blanche DuBois live on in popular culture. Welles' shadow looms larger still. Even if you haven't seen "Citizen Kane" or his "Chimes at Midnight" or "Touch of Evil," he voiced the original trailers for the 1977 "Star Wars" and 1979 "Star Trek: The Motion Picture." The character of the intelligent lab mouse, The Brain, in "Pinky and the Brain" is loosely based on him. He was, until his death, the voice of Robin Masters, on the "Magnum: P.I." television series. A genus of spiders was named after him.

This production will entertain those who know about Welles, Leigh and Olivier and even, to a lesser degree, Tynan and Plowright. For those who don't, it will still be an enjoyable romp backstage as egos clash and a marriage implodes and, perhaps, pique one's interest in the long legacy of all the characters involved. "Orson's Shadow" continues until February 17 at the Pasadena Playhouse.

Remembering Lucy: A Vicious Dog

2008-01-26T19:24:00.001-08:00

I suppose those in my neighborhood who remember Lucy think of her as a large vicious dog. I remember her as a dog who didn't take well to teasing. I also used to think of her as a victim, but now I feel that in some ways she was a hero.

I hadn't thought of her for a long time, and only recently, with the attention paid to the escaped tiger at the San Francisco Zoo, did I begin to think of her again. It took me a while to remember her name. It was the revelation that the young men teased the tiger, triggering an aggressive reaction that they surely now regret, that reminded me of Lucy.

Every day on my way home from school, I would make a point to pass her dog run. Her owners lived in the corner house, kitty corner across from my house. Along the dirt sidewalk at the side of the house bordering the street was Lucy's run.

As a puppy Lucy would run with the gamboling, clumsy gait of one whose feet and head were too big for the rest of the package. She was white and black, half German Shepherd and half Husky. At first, she ran with all the puppyish enthusiasm one would and should expect from a family pet.

That soon changed. Even though her owners put up plastic slats so that people couldn't directly see or touch Lucy, the damage had been done and continued to be done. People entertained themselves by kicking Lucy in the face when as a young pup she came with her sweet, excited bark up to the wire mesh fence. They waited until she was close enough, wanting to sniff their hands and meet these new people. They then kicked her in the face and laughed.

Lucy, of course, remembered these people. She grew up to be a big dog with an authoritative bark and a snarl. She didn't wait to bark when she came to the fence; you could hear her rushing up with an angry declaration. Yet when I lifted my voice above hers, greeting her, she quickly changed. She became docile, and instead of barking, she made that grunting sound dogs make when they want to be scratched in just the right place. My hand was small enough to squeeze through the wire mesh.

I always saved part of my lunch for her and she always remembered. On those rare occasions when she darted past her owners and got loose, I never had anything to fear. She would approach with a wide grin, wagging her tail. Even if I didn't have a treat, she would lean against me to be scratched in just the right place. My mother and sister were also not afraid of her even though we weren't particularly friendly with those neighbors.

One day when I was older and (I think) away at college, Lucy got out. There was a pedestrian, a man, and she attacked him. He was not badly hurt, but Lucy was put down. And that is the tragedy dogs and so many animals face: they often suffer for the misdeeds of humans. I do not know if the person she attacked had previously teased her, but it did seem to be a pastime of the boys and men who passed through our neighborhood. Lucy also seemed perfectly capable of differentiating between people. Maybe that scare stopped that pedestrian, and some others, from teasing dogs in the future. Fear will sometimes do that. I know one case in which a dog bite did stop two boys from teasing dogs thereafter. If so, then Lucy died an unfair and unfortunate death, but she died a hero if she prevented even one person from teasing a dog again. And one person certainly has the ability to tease more than one dog, cat or other animal.

I have seen neighbors teasing my own dogs, throwing things, imitating a bark. They do it to get the dogs' attention and make them bark, yet then they complain when the dogs do indeed bark. I used to live in a neighborhood where a man would walk his little Pomeranian and allow it to bark at larger dogs on the other side of the fence. Some dogs, like people, are braver when their opponent is behind bars. All of this teasing agitates the bigger dog, and who knows what might happen in the future? Sometimes the larger dog gets out at the wrong time and the smaller dog ends up dead. I know of one such encounter between a Pomeranian and a large white dog who happened to be off of his chain one day. One shake and the Pomeranian was dead.

In the case of the tiger, Tatiana, both a human and the big cat ended up dead.

If you check with any zoological garden, you'll see that they specifically request that visitors do not tease the animals. On the San Francisco Zoo's own website, there's a whole page devoted to zoo manners.

RESPECT THE ANIMALS! The magnificent animals in the Zoo are wild and possess all their natural instincts. You are a guest in their home. They are sensitive and have feelings. PLEASE don't tap on glass, cross barriers, throw anything into exhibits, make excessive noise, tease or call out to them.

Why should this be necessary?

Because bad things have happened and continue to happen. A baby wallaby was kicked to death at a British zoo. One American zoo records visitor problems that led to the death of animals:

About a dozen [deaths] were traced to moronic visitors.

Among the tricks of such visitors which killed some birds and badly injured some small mammals were the following: Throwing broken glass, poisoned or tainted food, indelible pencils, lighted cigar and cigarette stubs into cages or fenced enclosures, driving pointed sticks through the bars at animals tame enough to come within reach; breaking the bones of birds and mammals with stones, cutting wire fences, bending back the cut threads and frightening the animals so as to drive them into the projecting ends.

Several birds died with fish-hooks in their throats or stomachs. Two boys were caught trying to hook bear cubs with heavy fish-hooks. A gang of boys cut a hole into the wire fence of a grey wolf den, coaxed the parent wolves aside with sausages, and stole two cubs. The stolen cubs were recovered, the boys traced and punished.

And then there was the penguin baby penguin stolen a few years back, certain to die without the special diet and care it required.

I don't feel particularly sorry for the three young men in San Francisco. They were reportedly drunk on vodka in a public place. They were also high on a controlled substance (marijuana). They obviously didn't care too much about the legality of the matter, and they weren't particularly interested in animals. They didn't follow the appropriate behavior for the zoo as described by that particular zoo. One even climbed up on to the exhibit, going where visitors are quite obviously not supposed to roam. If the tiger hadn't attacked, these men would have returned to their car, probably had a few more drinks, and then driven home--endangering people who chose to responsibly spend that Christmas Day sober. If they had been sober, they might have realized a bit sooner the danger they were in and been able to communicate more quickly and effectively.

I am sure they thought themselves amusing. They didn't feel ashamed at their boorish behavior and how it infringed on the enjoyment of other people. They didn't think how being drunk and high might endanger other people. They were thoughtless, and I would guess this wasn't the first time they had behaved in such a manner. I would guess zoos weren't the only place they felt free to tease the animals. Would they have also thought it funny to tease a dog like Lucy? Why not? What was to stop them? Like Lucy, Tatiana was killed when she reacted as one would expect.

Yet perhaps Tatiana was not only a victim of her own instincts, but also the hero. She prevented these men from getting back in their car, getting drunker, driving drunk, and perhaps ruining the day and even the life of another person or animal.

Sometimes Love Isn't Enough - Animal Hoarding Horror in Southern California

2008-01-26T11:19:00.000-08:00

Love is a strange thing and so is the human mind. Sometimes a person with a tender heart never learns to say no and against all reason and financial considerations creates just the kind of disaster that person hoped to prevent. Yes, sometimes you need to be cruel to be kind because kindness by itself can kill.

Someone, perhaps in a kindhearted effort to save unwanted pets, collected about 400 animals. Who that someone is, news reports haven't revealed.

Of that number, there were about 200 dogs, 30 cats, 40 chickens and turkeys, 100 goats and sheep, a llama, an emu and a hog. They were left there with no water except for pools of mud. According to reports, dead animals were found in wheelbarrows, cages and in the mud.

Local non-profits, The Gentle Barn and A Wish for Animals, came forward and are leading this rescue mission, beginning on 14 January 2008. Before I heard anything on the news, the message was out on the Internet, in Yahoo! groups and on Craigslist.

The number of animals is almost too much for either of those non-kill animals shelters to handle--alone or together. So there is a call for help--people to foster, people to give money and goods. There is a request for people to save these animals who have suffered the fate of many animals--not intentional cruelty, but the cruelty of neglect.

These animals are victims of a person who is what is now called an animal hoarder. For years there have been jokes about the cat lady and now, there's even a doll. I have known some cat ladies and dog ladies. There even was a man with too many tigers.

Yet to animal welfare and protection groups, these people, known as collectors, have long been a concern. Sometimes, someone well-known and respected from their own ranks falls into the trap of taking on too many animals, not being able to say no and fully believing that they are the only ones who can give these animals the proper care. In small towns or even large urban centers with an understaffed and underfunded animal shelter, confiscating the animals and keeping them until the court case is over--perhaps for as long as a year--can be a financial disaster. It also means less room for the normal annual influx of animals.

At Tufts University, there is a web page that addresses this phenomena, the Hoarding of Animals Research Consortium. If you've never walked into a property of a hoarder, you might be shocked. I went to a former breed rescue, walking in after most of the dogs had been confiscated and what I noticed first was the smell. Not only did the kennels smell, but the office with the urine-soaked carpet, shiny with not quite cleaned off feces. There were open pits that smelled of urine in the kennels. One held a dead rat. Since then, HARC has photos similar to these on its website.

I have known of three other local non-profit animal rescue operations that had gone bad. HARC calls these the "rescue or shelter" type of hoarder.

I'm not counting the one with the four hundred, located in Lancaster nor the one with St. Bernards or the one with the tigers. It was easy to shrug off the infamous cat ladies, but this is a mental illness, compassion gone wrong. The financial cost to the community is enormous and the suffering of animals is impossible to measure.

Four hundred animals require a lot of love and require a lot of hard cash. If you have something to spare, help insure that the second time around, these animals will really be saved.

ADDENDUM: After I posted this on the blog magazine, Blogcritics.org, someone wrote in with the name of the alleged owner of the dogs, Ivan George Callais.

There are some dogs leftover from 2007 breed rescue cases in Houston and New York that have been divided between collie rescue non-profit organizations.

In Marshall, TX, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals rescued 200 animals, including dogs guinea pigs, bearded dragons and 26 hissing cockroaches.

Diamonds Are DeBeers' Best Friend

2008-01-21T19:44:00.000-08:00

Diamonds are according to Mohs scale the hardest mineral, ranking 10 with talc--that stuff you use as powder, at number one. Yet despite the price that diamonds command, they aren't that rare.

Diamonds as big and blue as the infamous 45.52-carat Hope Diamond are indeed rare, but even the odd red glow that results after it's exposed to ultraviolet light isn't rare. Rather, it's a characteristic of all natural blue diamonds.

There are far rarer stones, some coming from exotic locales like California, yet due to great public relations and marketing, we think of diamonds before color-changing alexandrite, emeralds or the California blue-colored gem benitoite. For that, we can thank DeBeers, a company based in South Africa.

This is not to say that diamonds weren't actually rare from an Occidental point of view at one time. There are no major diamond mines in Europe. For centuries, diamonds were found in India and then Brazil. That was up until the mid-19th century. Diamonds were discovered in South Africa in 1867. By 1880, Cecil Rhodes created the DeBeers Mining Company to oversee his large holdings of diamond claims in that country and by 1887, the company was the sole owner of the diamond mines in South Africa.

If you're not familiar with the history of South Africa, in the 17th and 18th centuries it was a Dutch possession. They imported slaves from their colonies in Indonesia, Madagascar and India. Great Britain took over the Cape of Good Hope in 1795 as a stop on the ship route to Australia and India. It was returned to the Dutch and then after the Dutch East India Company went into bankruptcy, the British annexed the Cape settlement in 1806 and encouraged British colonization. The Dutch colonists resisted British rule which resulted in the Boer Wars.

DeBeers is thus a remnant of European imperialism, specifically the expansion of British Imperialism. It was under the 1902 Treaty of Vereeniging that granted sovereignty to the UK with certain conditions, including agreeing not to press for native voting rights until self-government was achieved (granted in 1994) and the Boer republics would accept the British monarchy until they were eventually granted self-rule. South Africa would become a union in 1910, then complete independence (1926 and 1931) and finally became a republic in 1961.

Yet DeBeers has a presence in diamond mining in about 25 countries, including Botswana, Nambia and Tanzania. Mining in Botswana is via the company Debswana as a 50-50 joint venture with the government. Nambia and Botswana border South Africa. The British government placed Botswana under its protection after hostilities escalated between the native tribes and the Boers. Namibia was called South West Africa when it was under German control in the 19th century and later came under South African control during World War I. The East African country of Tanzania was a German colony in the 1880s and then became a British mandate in 1919.

Unlike pearls which dropped from being a precious gem to semi-precious when the Japanese (Kokichi Mikimoto and Tokichi Nishikawa) discovered a process to make cultured pearls, diamonds have maintained the image of being rare. DeBeers has been highly successful in convincing Americans that "diamonds are forever" and that after the engagement ring, you can follow that up with an eternity ring and a trilogy ring. Women who, for whatever reason, aren't married, can always buy a right-hand ring. Everyone needs a diamond.

The control that DeBeers maintains over the fine jewelry diamond distribution hasn't been a big secret. Gemologists and rock hounding hobbyists have known it for years. Only recently has legal action been taken against the company and its monopoly over the trade. This diamond cartel has been threatened by discoveries of diamonds in Angola, Canada, Australia and Russia and so far DeBeers has been able to form alliances over the years. It is calculated that DeBeers holds 70 percent of the diamond mines in Africa and 40 percent worldwide.

Yet in 1994, though, the US Department of Justice filed a charge against DeBeers, charging that DeBeers and General Electric had conspired to inflate the prices of industrial diamonds. As a result, DeBeers paid a $10 million fine in 2004.

Although DeBeers has not admitted to any wrongdoing, there's a class-action settlement in the works where people who bought diamond jewelry between 1994 and 2006 can benefit--notice how absolute their control is that it doesn't seem to matter from what store. The settlement will have DeBeers paying out an estimated $295 million. To file for payment, consumers should call 800-760-5431.

How much you can receive, apparently depends upon how much you spent and how many people file a complaint.

Marilyn Monroe sang,"Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend,"but in reality diamonds have been DeBeers' friend and DeBeers' hasn't been a particularly good friend to Africa and the miners. In the future, with Australia and Canada entering the diamond market and the sometimes economically-challenged Russia possibly repeating its 1980 and 1990 slip outside of its uneasy alliance with DeBeers, diamonds might not always be as valuable. People may finally realize how common they are and the world diamond market could potentially become more competitive.

Sondheim on Video - Beyond Burton and Depp

2008-01-15T23:05:00.000-08:00

Before Tim Burton and Johnny Depp took on Stephen Sondheim, most of the original Broadway cast of "Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street," was filmed during their 1982 national tour. George Hearn replaced Len Cariou, but Angela Lansbury is there in her Tony-winning turn as Mrs. Lovett. If I recall correctly from the PBS broadcast, Lansbury's Mrs. Lovett was a bit loopier, like a balmy aunt whom you hope is harmless as compared to Helena Bonham Carter's pensive and pining waif.

If you're intrigued by Sondheim, you might be interested in his other works on video. He wrote the lyrics for the 1957 musical "West Side Story" that went on to become a 1961 movie directed by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins. The movie went on to win Best Picture at the Oscars and featured Natalie Wood, Rita Moreno, George Chakiris and Russ Tamblyn. The book was written by Arthur Laurents and the music by Leonard Bernstein. Among its 10 Oscar wins were Best Supporting Actor for Chakiris and Best Supporting Actress for Moreno, as well as Best Original Film Score. This is available on DVD and VHS.

Sondheim again wrote the lyrics for the 1959 Broadway hit "Gypsy: A Musical Fable," based on the 1957 memoirs of Gypsy Rose Lee, a famous striptease artist who was pushed on stage as a back-up plan after her prettier and supposedly more talented sister ran away from their crass, controlling mother. With music by Jule Styne and book by Laurents, this became a 1962 film directed by Mervyn LeRoy and starring Rosalind Russell, Natalie Wood and Karl Malden. Russell plays down her own glamorous image to be crass and brassy, with a harsh, throaty voice while Wood's character slowly blooms with confidence.

Russell went on to win a best actress Golden Globe. This version is available on DVD. The 1993 made-for-TV version with Bette Midler and Ed Asner is available on VHS. The legendary Ethel Merman and the pre-TV sitcom Jack Klugman were in the original Broadway cast. CD recordings are available on Amazon. Angela Lansbury, the original Mrs. Lovett, was in the original London cast. Memorable songs include "Everything's Coming Up Roses," "Let Me Entertain You," and "You Gotta Get A Gimmick."

He wrote both the music and the lyrics (book by Burt Shevelove and Larry Gelbart) for the 1962 Broadway hit "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum," which became a 1966 movie with Zero Mostel and Jack Gilford recreating their Broadway roles. Buster Keaton and Phil Silvers were also featured. This is available on DVD. The plot revolves around three neighboring houses. One is a brothel. Another belongs to an elderly man whose children were stolen by pirates. The house in between these two is where Pseudolus, a slave, lives. He schemes to get his freedom while helping his master, Hero, son of the master of the house, find true love with a slave girl who has been promised to a war hero.

The movie changed the plot and cut some songs. Keaton was terminally ill with cancer at the time and this was his last movie role. This musical has been revived with Nathan Lane and Whoopi Goldberg as Pseudolus.

His 1973 Broadway hit, from which the song "Send in the Clowns" came, became the dreadful 1978 "A Little Night Music,", with Elizabeth Taylor, Lesley-Anne Down, and Diana Rigg. This received mixed reviews and was relatively unsuccessful. Taylor provides her own singing (unlike Russell or Wood), which isn't bad since is it more spoken, however the director Hal Prince doesn't elicit the fire that Taylor showed in "Taming of the Shrew" and seems content that this piece about passion and love be rather pastoral. The DVD was recently issued in the summer of 2007.

The original Broadway show won Tony Awards for Best Score, Best Musical, Best Book (Hugh Wheeler) and Best Actress (Glynis Johns). Inspired by the Ingmar Bergman film Smiles of a Summer Night, it involves the romantic lives of several couples, with the music set almost entirely in waltz time.

Sondheim's 1994 Passion (book by Lapine), is available as filmed for American Playhouse with the original Broadway cast. Based on the Ettore Scola film , this musical won Tony Awards for Best Musical, Best Book (Lapine), Best Score, Best Actor (Jere Shea), and Best Actress (Donna Murphy). The story takes place in 19th century Italy. A young soldier is in love with a married woman, and when transferred to a remote outpost, becomes the obsessive love object of the commanding officer's ugly niece.

Sondheim's 1984 Pulitzer Prize-winning musical Sunday in the Park with George" is on DVD as recorded before a live audience with Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters for TV (Showtime and American Playhouse). Patinkin portrays French Pointillist painter George Seurat. The first act revolves around the painting of his famous "Sunday Afternoon on the Isle of La Grande Jatte." Peters plays his mistress, Dot. Act II takes place 100 years later with Patinkin as Seurat's great grandson and Peters as his grandmother. From this play comes the song "Putting It Together," which later served as the title of a Sondheim musical review, starring Carol Burnett and George Hearn in the Los Angeles 1998 production (DVD).

In 1987, Peters was part of the original Broadway cast for Sondheim's "Into the Woods." With book by Lapine, this musical won several Tony awards including Best Score and Best Book. It basically looks at what happened after happily ever after in several fairy tales (Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, and Jack and the Beanstock). The original cast video is available on DVD, taped in 1989 and shown on public television in 1991.

Sondheim's musicals are alive and well on Broadway. If you can't afford pricey tickets, you can still see some great performances on video.

ACADEMY AWARD ARCHIVES 1930: All Quiet on the Western Front

2008-01-06T17:45:00.000-08:00

You might have read Erich Maria Remarque's book, "All Quiet on the Western Front" in high school. First published in German as "Im Westen Nichts Neues" in 1929, the best-selling book by this German World War I veteran was made into a movie of the same name. The movie went on to earn an Academy Award for Best Picture and Best Director.

Adapted by Maxwell Anderson with screenplay by George Abbott, this black and white movie is decidedly anti-war as it follows Paul (Lew Ayres), a young man who is persuaded to join the army by a schoolmaster (Arnold Lucy) only to return home on leave, disillusioned. He hears his old schoolmaster encouraging the young boys to go and fight for the glory of their country. Although he's encouraged to tell the boys the truth, he is reluctant, but finally relents, saying:

I heard you in here reciting that same old stuff, making more iron men, more young heroes. You still think it’s beautiful and sweet to die for your country, don’t you? We used to think you knew.The first bombardment taught us better. It’s dirty and painful to die for your country. When it comes to dying for your country, it’s better not to die at all.

The young boys boo him and don't listen to his words and yet he continues,"...it’s easier to say go out and die than it is to do it. And it’s easier to say it than than to watch it happen."

He hears older men telling him to push on to Paris. Instead of enjoying his leave, he can't wait to go back to his old friends who truly understand the nature of war. When he returns from leave early, he finds all his former comrades gone except the resourceful Kat Katczinksy (Louis Wolheim). The rest of the company are young recruits who have yet to understand what war really is. Paul confides to Kat:

The young men thought I was a coward because I told them we learned that death is stronger than duty to one’s country. The old men said, "Go on. Push on to Paris." It’s not home back there anymore....At least we know what it’s all about out here. There are no lies here.

Kat is injured and dies while Paul is carrying him back. Paul essentially becomes an old man of the company.

Under the direction of Lewis Milestone, this film is neither sentimental nor overly gory. The focus is on the men and their emotions, how watching a man die slowly strips him of the mask of enemy and makes him into just another man and how there is a madness in war and that can infect the men who survive. There are moments when the movie touches on shell shock: a man panics and runs wildly toward the enemy after he's been blinded or when on a quiet day, when Paul reaches out to touch a butterfly and is killed by a sniper.

In the end, Milestone shows us many men marching to war and rows of white crosses, just as other directors would later do to indicate the scope of sacrifice.

Yet by 1930, Adolf Hitler had already published "Mein Kamph" (My Struggle) in 1925 and 1926. The Great Depression had begun that year. In three more years, Hitler would be appointed chancellor.

With that in mind, there's an additional layer of poignancy in this film. Although the technology dates it, this movie still holds up well and, unfortunately, holds just as much meaning as it did in 1929, 11 years after World War I ended and just a decade before Europe would again be engulfed in war.

DVD REVIEW - The Devil's Backbone

2008-01-04T19:08:00.002-08:00

If you've seen Guillermo del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth," you might be interested in his 2001 movie, "El Espinazo del Diablo" or as we know it, "The Devil's Backbone," what he called it the spiritual sequel to "Pan's Labyrinth."

Like "Pan's Labyrinth," "The Devil's Backbone" is set during the Spanish Civil War. This war began in 1936 and ended in 1939, with the victory of the rebels against the Second Spanish Republic government, leading to the establishment of the dictatorship of Nationalist General Francisco Franco. The republicanos or Republicans were supported by the Soviet Union and Mexico. Because of the Soviet support, they were seen as communists and referred to as reds. The supporters of the rebellion, nacionales or Nationalists, had the support Italy and Germany, already united as the European Axis powers. Although Germany would later persecute Catholics, in Spain, the nacionales had the support of the Roman Catholic clergy.

As in "Pan's Labyrinth," the audience is asked to sympathize with the republicanos, war is seen through the eyes of children and a doctor plays a pivotal role. Yet while "Pan's Labyrinth" is an adult fairytale, "The Devil's Backbone" is a ghost story. This isn't a Hollywood fright tale, with screaming and stupid teens. This is a gentle, thoughtful tale, with a logic of its own, a story about impotence, war and revenge.

According to the DVD commentary, del Toro is uncomfortable with writing dialogue. He prefers images. It seems logical then, that the commentary is provided by del Toro and Guillermo Navarro. Del Toro talks about the repetition of images and that this movie is meant to be visual poetry. Navarro's camera operates as another witness, a restless witness, always moving. This affable pair give an entertaining and informative commentary.

The movie begins with images that we don't completely understand and words that set up a mystery.

What is a ghost? A tragedy condemned to repeat itself time and again? An instant of pain perhaps. Somthing dead which still seems to be alive. An emotion suspended in time. Like a blurred photograph. Like an insect taped in amber.

The palette is dominated by the steely blue and blue-black of the night contrast the golden fields and light and the friendly blue skies of the day. The colors are deeply saturated like an impressionistic painting and the shadows seem to swallow up faces although there are strikingly dramatic rim shots. The obscuring of faces makes one peer into the darkness, looking for whatever details might be given.

Set in 1939, a young boy, Carlos (Fernando Tielve), is brought by his tutor to an orphanage. Carlos doesn't yet know that his father, a republicano, has been killed. His tutor deserts him there, in the care of the strict but caring head mistress Carmen (Marisa Paredes) and Dr. Casares (Federico Luppi). Casares is in love with Carmen and refuses to return to Argentina although he player tango music on his gramophone. Carmen, widowed, has a physical relationship with one of the former orphans, Jacinto (Eduardo Noriega), who has returned to work as a handyman. Jacinto is also involved with Conchita (Irene Visedo) who is closer to his age and works in the kitchen. Carlos' main tormentor, the tallest of the orphans, Jaime (Iñigo Garcés), is infatuated with Conchita. Yet Jacinto has a secret. Deeply ashamed of his 15 years at the orphanage, he stays, searching for the gold ingots the republicanos left in the care of Carmen. Jaime was somehow involved in the disappearance of Santi (Junio Valverde), who may or may not be the ghostly figure that Carlos calls "the one who sighs."

The devil's backbone, according to Dr. Casares, is what superstitious villagers call fetuses with spina bifida. If you're not familiar with the developmental birth defect, it is the incomplete closure of embryonic neural tube. The spinal cord is incompletely formed and the vertebrae is not fully formed and remains unfused and open. The spinal cord protrudes through the opening in the bones. In order to provide some money for the orphanage, the doctor plays on the local superstitions; the preserved fetuses are embalmed in spices and rum and the rum is believed to cure various ailments, most importantly impotence.

These incompletely formed children are nobody's children, but according to the doctor, they are the result of poverty and ignorance. Likewise the war produces orphans who belong to no one. Their fathers won't be honored as heroes and they enter into a world of poverty and fear. Perhaps like Jacinto, they will be emotionally crippled, princes without a kingdom and young boys without a family. What could be a more mournful ghost story? Perhaps war and the resulting orphans are "a tragedy condemned to repeat itself time and again?"

OPINION - A Tale of Two Rapes

2007-12-30T17:45:00.000-08:00

A young woman, in the company of men other than her family members, is raped. She is treated like a criminal. Only by appealing to a higher paternal figure does she get help.

In the case of one woman from Qatif who was 18 at the time, she was attacked at knifepoint and raped by seven men. She had broken Saudi law which segregates the sexes. She was riding in a car with a man who was not a relative in conservative Muslim Saudi Arabia. Her rapists were sentenced for the incident that happened in 2006.

In the case of an American woman, who was married and abroad, working with other Americans at an American company in Iraq, she was drugged and gang raped. Now over two years after the incident, the men are unlikely to be punished by their employer or by the civil courts.

Jamie Leigh Jones, a young woman and employee of KBR, the biggest military contractor in Iraq was 19 in July 2005 when she arrived a Camp Hope in Baghdad's Green Zone. During her first week there, she reportedly accepted a drink from a group of company firefighters. What happened next, was inexcusable. She woke up the next day and because she was bruised and bleeding between her legs, she went to a military hospital. There a doctor took photographs and prepared a rape kit that would be passed to KBR security police.

A day before her rape, Jones had requested safer housing feeling that living on the second floor in a coed barracks where she was subjected to catcalls and the women's bathroom was on the first floor was a "sexually hostile living environment." Her supervisors were unconcerned. Jones at 19, had already suffered sexual harassment from a supervisor stateside, Eric Iler, according to her lawsuit against Halliburton and KBR filed on May 2007. Only 19 at the time, she had done the responsible thing: She had reported it with evidence and requested a transfer. That transfer took her to Iraq.

Jones reported being taken to a shipping container under guard, without food or water or medical treatment. She was later able to contact her father when a sympathetic guard allowed her to use a cell phone. She spoke with her father who then contacted his US Congressional representative, Ted Poe, who contacted the State Department.

Her rape had been so savage that her breast implants were ruptured and her pectoral muscles torn. She required reconstructive surgery.

Since she went public, her Congressman Poe, R-Houston, said three other women have contacted him. Ten others made similar reports because Jones has again done the right thing: She formed a foundation to help other women. Unfortunately, KBR made arbitration a part of its employee contract and the evidence collected in Jones' rape kit which resurfaced in May, show signs of being tampered: photos and the doctor's notes are missing.

According to accounts by the Houston Chronicle the arbitrator found in favor of KBR 82 percent of the time. That coupled with the tampered rape kit makes Jones and the other cases likely to be a battle fought in vain.

This means, although Jones can name one of her assailants and the rape kit might have used DNA analysis to indicated who the other men were, it is unlikely that these men will be punished at all.

There was a great international outcry against Saudi law because the rape victim, nameless and only referred to as the Qatif girl, rising from the predominately Shiite-populated area of Al-Qatif in the Eastern province where she's from, was sentenced to six months in jail and 200 lashes for being in the company of the unrelated man. On Dec. 17, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia pardoned her and the man who was with her.

The Qatif girl had appealed the initial decision in 2006, but the judge had only increased the severity of her sentence. The rapists themselves were at first sentenced to one to five years for assault but that was also increased in November to two to nine years. If there had been witnesses or if the men had confessed, these men who have received the death penalty.

The Qatif girl's husband has praised the King's decision.

While we as Americans or as women can rage at the thought of a victim being punished, although not for the rape--so it isn't a case of punishing the victim--we must also wonder what happened to the American system? In the case of Jones and the other women with KBR stationed in Iraq, they claim they were threatened with employment termination if they reported their assaults. More than two years after the incident, Jones hasn't seen justice. Poe told the House subcommittee: "Iraq is reminiscent of the Old Western days and no one seems to be in charge. The law must intervene and these outlaws need to be rounded up and order restored."

It was during that time, the time of the Old West when it was the victim's fault and the common wisdom was: She asked for it. In America, we like to think that Islam is backwards and unenlightened compared to Christianity, that modernization, justice for women and democracy are impossible under Islam. Yet the international community might see it differently when they see how Americans in an American company that isn't under Iraqi/Muslim civil law treats its female employees and how much these women must fight for justice.

Before we criticize another country, perhaps we should imagine how we look to the international community, and then we should consider how KBR and its men in Iraq are treating the Iraqi women.

This tale of two rapes makes it apparent that the world isn't safe for women in the company of men because some men still feel that they have a right to rape a woman for whatever reason--and this is despite the differences between Christianity and Islam and the nation states that are predominately guided by those respective religious principles.

REVIEW: Rich Boy Angst Ends in Alaska: Into the Wild

2007-12-29T09:00:00.000-08:00

In January 1991, I began working in Downtown Los Angeles, close to the Union Mission and near St. Vibiana. I walked through a kind of war zone, where the homeless (drunks and druggies and mentally deficit mostly I thought at the time), the parking lot attendants and even visiting businessmen thought women walking alone were fair game. I learned to put on a hard urban face and stride through town. In early February, the rainy season in Los Angeles, Christopher McCandless came to Los Angeles for an I.D.

Watching Emile Hirsch as McCandless walking those familiar streets in scenes from "Into the Wild" came as a bit of a shock. Had I passed this man on the street? Like McCandless, I had recently graduated and this was my first real job. Certainly, I had and have angst that still creates a wide gorge between my mother and I, but I had more mundane worries. I had worked myself through college; my parents didn't have the opportunity nor did they have the ability to extend financial support. I could hardly imagine, having, let alone giving away $24,000 to OxFam.

In this way, the movie about McCandless, based on Jon Krakauer's best-seller, is about a privileged young white man wanting to experience poverty and the so-called freedom it gives him. It is also the movie about a young man's dream.

As cool as "King of the Road" sounds or as people find Jack Kerouc's "On the Road," poverty and powerlessness can make it less fun. I think of Carlos Bulosan's 1946 "America is in the Heart" road tale. A minority and poor, his tale wasn't about the romance of the road, but about becoming American. He recalls a young girl and her even younger brother waiting until the railroad detectives are gone before, along with Bulosan and other men looking for work, they board a freight train in hopes of getting to California. During the night, the girl was gang raped.

I sat back in my corner and tried to sleep, brushing off the obscene conversations of the men around me. Then in the middle of the night, isolated in the corner of the box, I was awakened by the young girl's whimpering. She was desperately struggling with someone in the dark, breathing as though she were being choked to death. Then I heard her fall heavily on the floor, and she began to sob hopelessly. Her assailant dragged her to my corner. I could her the man fumbling at her. He was tearing hungrily at her clothes. ...After a while the girl did not struggle any more. She turned lifeless toward me, and in the dark I could hear her agony...With a sudden revulsion, I got up and felt for the man. But someone struck me on the head, and I rolled on the floor. There was silence for a long time; then as I returned to consciousness, I heard the stiffled sobbing of the girl again. Another man approached her...

Not everyone is so unlucky as that girl and her brother, and men don't have to worry so much as women. Perhaps what fueled McCandless' dreams was his good fortune and director Sean Penn emphasizes this. In his screenplay, Penn shows us at the very beginning how angry McCandless is with his parents and instead of being delighted at the offer of a car, he becomes angry. There are many people who would never and will never be able to afford a new car. Turning down a new car as a gift, would be unimaginable. Yet this was part of the privileged life McCandless led.

While Penn doesn't take us on McCandless' previous forays into the wild where he would return to be restored to health by the parents (William Hurt and Marcia Gay Harden) he would later distance himself from, he has the young man beginning his journey driving into a flash flood area and parking his car as he sleeps inside. The desert, as anyone native to the Southwest knows, is unforgiving. The flash flood doesn't kill him, but it encourages him to leave his car. He burns his money and begins walking and hitchhiking. Penn shows this because, in a sense, Candless thought it was important. According to Krakauer, McCandless took photographs to commemorate the occasion.

McCandless pushes his luck again, taking on white water with little experience and only a used kayak and life jacket. He survives and evades the officers patrolling the Colorado River to make it to Mexico in January 1991. At this point, he goes to Los Angeles. In the downtown area, he is also lucky. A year later, civil unrest would make the downtown so dangerous troops would be stationed down there.

In this respect, McCandless seems to share a kinship with Timothy Treadwell as documented by Werner Herzog in the 2005 "Grizzly Man." Treadwell, who was born in 1957 and therefore older than McCandless (born February 12, 1968), was born Timothy Dexter. Like Treadwell, McCandless took on the name Alexander Supertramp.

Treadwell didn't start filming until the last five years of his life. When he died in October 2003 he had spent 13 seasons in the Katmai National Park in Alaska. McCandless likewise had photographed himself and documented his big Alaskan adventure. In the Penn movie, there's also the intimation that McCandless wanted to go back and tell tales about his grand adventure and he did keep a journal.

Yet there is a downside to poverty, inside a city or out. Desperation for food is one and eating what you can and not what you really need is another. Moreover, experts will always tell you never hike in the desert, kayak or camp without telling someone where you're going and your schedule. And the list continues, including never go without a map or compass (or GPS). A cell phone could prove handy as well.

Penn also makes clear that although people tried to save him, from the hippy woman (Catherine Keener and Brian Dierker as her companion) whose own son was lost to her to the old man (Hal Holbrook) who wished to adopt him, McCandless in his singular determination and even arrogance could not be saved from himself. One thing you learn from skid row is that you can't save these people. Grace Lee Whitney is one such famous survivor of skid row.

You can give them food, but for whatever reason--drugs or confused ideas--you can't save them by giving them money. For most of them, their deaths will not make national news or become a major motion picture.

In my own family, my father's elder brother disappeared around a time when the life of a minority was cheap and Asian Americans were still the enemy and not the so-called model minority. More recently, my cousin disappeared and has not been heard of for years. How his mother, who died only a few years ago, must have grieved.

Keener and Dierker give sensitive portrayals of individuals who have dropped out of the urban path to follow their own lifestyles, forming a non-traditional functional family. Keener's motherly concerns are particularly touching since we know how McCandless' saga ends. Holbrook, as a fully functioning member of society who has dropped out of social relationships, stuck in mourning for the wife and son he tragically lost in the 1950s, is heartbreaking as he finally reaches out to to doomed young man. As McCandless, Hirsch gives us a sense of the vibrancy of this man and his arrogance is not boastful, but characterized by quiet determination.

They estimate that McCandless weighed less than 80 lbs. at the time of death. Penn suggests that after weeks of suffering from starvation, he passed away in a kind of euphoria, forgiving and even longing for his tortured parents. He was discovered two weeks later and you can view the actual bus on YouTube. Penn has faithfully recreated the bus.

McCandless made the news and became the subject of a book. He became famous for fatally playing a hobo or as he renamed himself, a super tramp. Penn shows the agony of the parents, perhaps unimaginable for most people unless you too have had a child die senselessly and needlessly. Penn's choice to use grainy color film, suggestive of old home movies, gives us a more intimate feeling about McCandless and his family.

Penn leaves no doubt that McCandless left a gapping hole in his family that will reverberate for generations. McCandless' story, his idealism and his foolhardiness have given him a place in modern pop history as a well-to-do white boy who wanted to play at what so many of us struggle against every day.

MOVIE REVIEW: Music, Gore and More: Tim Burton's "Sweeney Todd"

2007-12-26T18:12:00.001-08:00

The great surprise in "Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street" is not that Tim Burton can handle a darkly, gothic tale--we've seen that already in "Edward Scissorhands" and "Sleepy Hollow". Nor is it that Stephen Sondheim's musical is sublimely witty--he has garnered enough awards to prove it. The great surprise is that Johnny Depp can sing.

Who knew? Not only does he sing, but his voice harmonizes nicely with Helen Bonham Carter. As fellow muses to Burton, they bring a great gothic classic to film.

"Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street" isn't the first musical by Stephen Sondheim to be filmed but it certainly took a long time to get to the silver screen. "West Side Story" which made its Broadway debut in 1957 was the first of Sondheim's works to be made into a movie.

Sondheim worked as a lyricist to Leonard Bernstein's music (book by Arthur Laurents) on the Romeo and Juliet story that was eventually made into a 1961 movie starring Natalie Wood, Rita Moreno and George Chakiris. That movie went on to win best picture, with a supporting actor award for Chakiris and Moreno and a directing award for Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise. Sondheim himself would go on to be the winner of a 1990 Academy Award for "Sooner or Later (I Always Get My Man) from "Dick Tracy," a 1985 Pulitzer Prize in drama for "Sunday in the Park with George," six Tony awards for best score (1971, 1972, 1973, 1979, 1988 and 1994),

He would, as in the case of "Sweeney Todd" also write his own music. "Sweeney Todd" debuted on Broadway in 1979 with Angela Landsbury as Mrs. Lovett and Len Cariou as the murderous barber. Winning a Tony for Best Musical, Best Book of a Musical, Best Original Score, Best Actor in a Musical for Cariou, Best Actress in a Musical for Landsbury, Best Direction of a Musical, Best Scene Design and Best Costume Design.

With all those awards, it's a wonder it didn't hit the silver screen sooner. Yet perhaps people weren't ready to tackle the gory story itself. In long ago London, a young barber, Benjamin Barker (Depp) with a beautiful wife, Lucy (Laura Michelle Kelly), is framed by a Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman) and his toady, Beadle Bamford (Timothy Spall), and deported to Australia. He has now returned, under an assumed name, looking for his wife and daughter only to be informed by his former friend and neighbor, Mrs. Lovett (Bonham Carter), that the judge raped his wife who committed suicide. The judge then adopted the daughter, Johanna (Jayne Wisener), raising her as his ward and future wife. When a former associate (Sacha Baron Cohen) recognizes Todd and threatens him with blackmail, Todd murders the man. But what to do with the body? The resourceful and economical Mrs. Lovett suggests that it would be such a waste to not use fresh meat, when it is so expensive in Victorian England.

Bus'ness needs a lift,
Debts to be erased...
Think of it as thrift,
As a gift,
If you get my drift!

No?

Seems an awful waste...
I mean, with the price of meat
What it is,
When you get it,
If you get it..

Her pies become famous while Todd culls the local population, waiting for his chance to take care of the judge. Meanwhile, an acquaintance Todd made while sailing back to England, Anthony (Jamie Campbell Bower), catches sight of Johanna and falls fatally in love, but a crazy beggar woman tells him Turpin has imprisoned the girl.

While a stage musical offers immediacy, what a movie offers is a controlled framing of the picture and special effects. You can't easily have squirting blood saturating the stage and clean up in time for the next scene in a theatrical production. You also can't have cockroaches running around in time to the music--at least not in any production I have seen. Bodies falling with a thud, rats running around the basement and meat going through the grinder and coming out in a bloody mess isn't easy to show. And does one really want to go for realism and risk alienating the squeamish?

In the movie, from the opening shots, we have rain falling against a blue-black background of buildings, but some of the drops are suspiciously red, bright red. Blood does not stay bright red for long, nor does it have the kind of viscosity that would make it flow smoothly, slowly and stickily through the cogs of a wheel. Burton's usage of colors suggest animation or comic books or standard musical costuming.

Depp as Todd has a pale white face and darkened eyelids as does Bonham Carter. Unlike Tobias (Ed Sanders), the orphan boy Mrs. Lovett takes in or Rickman's Turpin or Spall's Bamford, the audience sees them behind this modern goth make-up. Their butchery becomes black comedy within an otherwise normal world. They are human cartoons, at times reminding one of both in Burton's previous effort, "The Corpse Bride."

Burton does, of course, give us blood. The victims of the barber bleed bright red blood, but mostly slump over in quiet death. Anyone who's beheaded a chicken knows that death doesn't come so easily, but perhaps the nervous twitching of a body would be too close to reality. Today's audiences have seen gorier, stomach-wrenching stuff on TV in medical soap operas and in recent realistic war movies. Burton elects to keep these killings simple and relatively calm--slit, spurt, dump down the shoot to the basement.

Nothing sexually lurid is visually depicted. That is left to our imagination. Lucy's rape is nothing more than Turpin with a great cape covering her, like a vampire engulfing his victim while shielding the audience from seeing something indelicate.

For all this, if you haven't seen many musicals on stage, you might wonder where the big chorus is or where the big song and dance numbers are. On stage musicals have come a long way since MGM churned out movie musicals in the early 1930s and 1940s. Smaller theaters often have to do with smaller casts due to cost and venue constraints and dark subject matter, while it may not reach a wide audience, are tackled. "Five Guys Name Moe," a 1992 Broadway musical featuring the music and lyrics of Louis Jordan had only six men on stage.

Not all musicals are bright and cheery. In Los Angeles, the 1982 cult classic movie "Eating Raoul" was staged as a musical a (1992 Off-Off Broadway). More famously, the 1996 Off-Broadway musical "Floyd Collins" looked at the struggle to save a man trapped in a cave in 1925. "Sweeney Todd" isn't the only musical about a mass murder; In 1997, "Jekyll & Hyde" opened on Broadway, based on the Robert Louis Stevenson novel.

With all the movies becoming musicals and musicals becoming movies in recent years and the popularity of horror flicks, it's been a long wait to see this Sondheim classic on the silver screen. Burton's vision perfectly suits "Sweeney Todd" and his ensemble are actors who sing well enough to make this a musical and visual delight.

ACADEMY AWARD ARCHIVES 1929 - The Broadway Melody

2007-12-18T19:46:00.000-08:00

This is how the musical began, not with a hummable songbook, but with ho-hum songs and already cliche-ridden story. What the 1929 "The Broadway Melody" did do when it won the best picture Oscar was begin an MGM tradition.

Not only was it Hollywood's first all talking musical, it also was Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer first musical with the story by Edmund Goulding, Norman Houston and James Gleason.

A vaudeville sister act of Harriet (Bessie Love) and Queenie (Anita Page) Mahoney goes to Broadway, but only the younger sister is chosen to be featured in the musical. There friend Eddie Kearns (Charles King) wants them in his number in a Francis Zanfield (Eddie Kane) show. Although initially in love with Harriet, he begins falling for Queenie. Queenie is courted by Jock Warriner (Kenneth Thomson), a member of the New York high society who is looking for a dalliance and not real love.
The original music was written by Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown and included the hit "You Were Meant for Me." Director Harry Beaumont was nominated for best director, however, his greatest successes were behind him, in the silent era. (e.g. "Beau Brummel" which starred John Barrymore)

As MGM won the box office battle with this top-grossing film of 1929, the studio quickly followed up with sequels. There weren't sequels in the traditional sense. Instead MGM decided to make movies with similar titles.

"Broadway Melody of 1936" featured Eleanor Powell in her first leading role. You can also see Buddy Ebsen, his sister Vilma Ebsen and Jack Benny. Nacio Herb Brown again provided the music while Moss Hart wrote the book. A young dancer (Powell) attempts to convince her old sweetheart (Robert Taylor) to give her a chance in a new Broadway production. He's taken up with a young widow (June Knight) who's financially backing his show.

"Broadway Melody of 1938" again featured Powell, Robert Taylor and Buddy Ebsen. Powell plays a girl who is concerned about a horse her family once owned that is currently being trained by Sonny (George Murphy) and Peter (Ebsen), a former vaudeville team. She follows the horse to New York City and is discovered on the train by Sonny and Peter and then the talent agent (Taylor) who is looking for talent for a new production backed by a former chorus girl and now rich wife of the horse's current owner. He secretly helps the girl buy the horse back. The girl brings him into contact with the tenants of a boarding house for performers, including the landlady (Sophie Tucker) and her daughter (Judy Garland).

The movie is perhaps most famous for Garland's sequence where she sings "Dear Mr. Gable," addressing her puppy love to Clark Gable in her room after her mother has torn up an autographed photo of him. This role made Garland a star and led to her role in "The Wizard of Oz."
Tucker, who played her mother, was already a Broadway star whose comedic style influenced comediennes such as Mae West and Bette Midler. She sings the finale in the "Broadway Melody of 1938.

"Broadway Melody of 1940"
brought back Powell and Murphy, but the highlight was Powell's partnering with Fred Astaire.

In this movie, Powell is a major Broadway star, looking for a partner. Astaire and Murphy are partners--Johnny Brett and King Shaw--who taxi dance and perform in night clubs. Trying to evade creditors, Johnny claims to be King. As a result, King gets the role on Broadway, but at the last minute, King isn't able to go on.

By this time, Astaire had already been paired with Ginger Rogers: "The Gay Divorcee" (1934), "Roberta" (1935), "Top Hat" (1935), "Follow the Fleet" (1936), "Swing Time" (1936), "Shall We Dance" (1937), and "Carefree" (1938).

Astaire and Powell were both major stars although this would be Powell's last great hit. Plans to pair her with Gene Kelly in another Broadway Melody was scrapped. The film features Astaire and Powell dancing to Cole Porter's "Begin the Beguine." Murphy's character might not have gotten the girl in either the 1940 nor the 1938 movie, but he did go on to be a US senator.

Directed by Norman Taurog with a screenplay by Leon Gordon and George Oppenheimer, this was the last of the Broadway Melody series and the best. Taurog had won a 1931 Oscar for "Skippy" and would later direct Elvis Presley in nine movies.

The first movie that started it all, "The Broadway Melody" may not have been the best and by today's standards, it isn't a good movie or a good musical, but it did help start a grand tradition and has its place in history.

ACADEMY AWARD ARCHIVES 1928: Wings

2007-12-14T19:04:00.000-08:00

In 1928, the first Academy Awards ceremony gave the best picture Oscar to the black and white silent movie "Wings."Produced by Paramount Pictures, it featured and was written to highlight Clara Bow.

Bow was known as the It girl--It being sex appeal. The film also won an Oscar for Engineering Effects.

While even now, WWI is considered a good war, "Wings" is jingoistic and even a sugar-coated version of the glory of war. This best picture captures motion pictures at the cusp of change.

The beginning subtitles clearly state the reasons for the name. According to them, on June 12, 1927 in Washington, Colonel
Charles Lindbergh declared that the "feats were performed and deeds accomplished which were far greater than any peace accomplishments of aviation."

The movie then states, that to those "young warriors of the sky, whose wings are folded about them forever, this picture is reverently dedicated."

This is a very straight-forward tale written by John Monk Saunders and directed by William A. Willman, and is about World War I pilots who begin as small-town rivals, Jack (Charles "Buddy" Rogers) and David (Richard Arlen) for one girl's affection, Sylvia (Jobyna Raulston). Jack is adored by his neighbor, Mary (Bow). Jack is misled into believing that Sylvia returns his affection although David knows this to be false. The men train together and become good friends. Jack meets Mary in Paris where she is an ambulance driver. Soon after, the men engage in a battle that ends with one's death.

Historically, the segments showing the training equipment for the pilots are intriguing and there's a quaintness in the innocence and purity of the pilots which contrasts starkly with the braggadocio of "Top Gun." The men's motives are pure. The sexual titillation is a brief glimpse of Bow's breasts. The rest of the movie is squeaky clean, even the death scene is devoid of dirt, grime or gore.

As for Clara Bow's It-ness, it escapes me and by today's standards, she'd be considered fat. Her career was at its peak. In October of 1927, Al Jolson's "The Jazz Singer"debuted, signaling the end of silent movies. Bow's Brooklyn accent didn't mesh well with the audience's image of It-ness.

Yet you can't fault the movie for a certain air of authenticity. Rogers would later serve in World War II as a Navy flight instructor. Arlen would be an Army flight instructor. He had served as a Royal Canadian Air Force pilot during World War I. Arlen and Raulston were married, divorcing in 1945. The talkies also ended Raulston's career as she had a lisp.

Yet there were actors who would move up and onward into talkies. "Wings" also features Gary Cooper in a small role.

In 1997, "Wings" was designated as culturally and historically significant and selected for preservation in the US National Film Registry of the Library of Congress.

MOVIE REVIEW: The Omega Man

2007-12-14T09:19:00.000-08:00

The 1971 "The Omega Man," starring Charlton Heston, is severely dated with its hokey music and fashion sensibilities but it provides a window into the psyche of the 1970s and gives startling ecological reminders that are hold true now with perhaps greater urgency.

Set in 1977, John William and Joyce Corrington's screenplay foresees a world that has been destroyed in 1975 by a biological plague during a war between the Soviet Union and People's Republic of China. Neville (Heston) was a military scientist working on an experimental vaccine which he uses on himself. Immune, he continues to live in Los Angeles alone while hunted by a group of plague victims, "The Family," led by Matthias (Anthony Zerbe).

Light-sensitive and transformed into albinos, the Family consider Neville a symbol of a sinful past as well as a murderer. He is, according to Matthias, "One creature caught in a place he cannot stir from in the dark...(with)...his cars, his guns, his gimmicks." He is "that creature of the wheel, the lord of the infernal engine, the machine." Although encouraged by another his lieutenant, Zachary, to use nitro or other weapons, Matthias explains "he will be destroyed not by guns, not by machines, not by the evil forbidden things that destroyed the world."

Finally captured by the Family, he is saved from the Family by a woman, Lisa (Rosalind Cash), a former member of the Family, who wants his help to save her younger brother, Richie (Eric Laneuville) and introduces him to a small group of people, mostly children, who have yet to "go over." Neville attempts to make a serum derived from his own blood as a romance forms between him and Lisa.

Although based on the Richard Matheson's 1954 novel, "I Am Legend," "The Omega Man" diverges in several respects. "I Am Legend" as a science fiction vampire novel set in Southern California in the late 1970s. The protagonist, Robert Neville, in the only survivor of a plague that has turned humanity into vampires and he theorizes that he became immune after because he was once bitten by a vampire bat.

That novel couldn't predict the socio-political landscape of the 1970s. China was clearly on the minds of major political figures. The People's Republic of China replaced the Republic of China in the United Nations in November of 1971. In June, the United States had just ended its trade embargo against mainland China. Of the three Chinas, mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan, the mainland (People's Republic of China) had now become more widely accepted despite fears of communism.

Earlier in the year, Charles Manson and his followers were found guilty in a Los Angeles court and later sentenced. In April, Manson was sentenced to death which was later commuted to life in prison.

Less sensational than those lurid murders, was the growing environmental movement. In 1970, the mayor of San Francisco, Joseph Alioto issued a proclamation for the first Earth Day on March 21 and by the next year, the United Nations was on board. In the same year, US Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, called for an environmental teach-in, or Earth Day, to be held on April 22 and the grassroots response was dramatic, involving thousands of schools and organizations nationwide.

One such public event included protests against the Vietnam War, although this was more of an aberration for the Earth Day celebrations than the rule. In 1970, a documentary film about the 1969 Woodstock Festival was released.

"The Omega Man" is very much a product of these times, with a social agenda rather than a pure slash and gore horror flick. There is no doubt the movie is meant to make a comment on the times.

"The Omega Man" uses some clips from the Woodstock film as Neville visits a movie theater, re-watching a film that he has seen so many times, he has memorized the words as a participant explains, we humans need "just to really realize what's really important...What's really important is that if we can't all live together and be happy, if you have to be afraid to walk out in the street, if you have to be afraid of...violence of somebody, what kind of way is that to go through this life?"

The leader of the mutants, Matthias, a former newscaster talks about something that very much concerns us in 2007. He sees the downfall of the world they knew as directly connected to modern machines and is portrayed as a cult leader, with black robes and talk about "The Family." Movie goers in 1971 could not avoid drawing parallels between Matthias and his family and Charles Manson and his family who had committed the 1969 Tate (Sharon Tate, Wojciech Frykowski, Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger and Steven Parent) and (Leno and Rosemary) LaBianca murders.

Manson had participated in the summer of love as an ex-con in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district where he began seducing his first followers. He had already served time for pimping an underage girl and most of his followers were women.

"The Omega Man" also has visual allusions to Neville as a Christ-like figure, a savior dying for the sins of man in order to save humanity. The prominence of African Americans in the movie such as Matthias' lieutenant (Lincoln Kilpatrick as Zachary), Lisa and her brother.

Although he had won an Academy Award for his role in the 1959 "Ben Hur," Heston wasn't new to the science fiction genre. He had already starred in the 1968 "Planet of the Apes" and the 1970 sequel "Beneath the Planet of the Apes."

As a result, "The Omega Man" isn't about fearing other men and even reconsidering what is the norm if the world is inhabited by vampires, but about the fear of communism, war and the summer of love turning into a summer of hate. It also reminds us that the concern about pollution, cars and industry were a hot topic in 1971, even as the environment is today, in 2007.