We’ll always wonder about ‘To the Wonder’

Viewing “To the Wonder” with a polite crowd at the Pasadena Laemmle Playhouse 7, I heard snorts of derisions. Don’t let negative comments dissuade you from seeing “To the Wonder,” but you’ll have to take a different mindset with you.  Think visual and abstract over concrete.

One common comment made by more than one person was that Terrence Malick’s latest film is nothing more than a string perfume commercials without product placement.

Would a photographer say that? It’s doubtful. As a once aspiring product photographer and a great admirer of Horst P. Horst, I wouldn’t laugh at someone who has reached the top of the profession. I don’t know how much those cinematographers for perfume commercials are paid, but they are the movie heirs to Horst at their best. Perfume houses would hardly continue to put out such short pieces if they weren’t successful and just what is the point of those commercials? By creating a feeling or image that is attractive to the consumer, the cinematographers are selling a product.

And just what is Malick selling here? The movie reminded me of a couple of things:

1. I’ve always wanted to visit Mont St. Michel.
2. An old fellow grad student at UCLA had a Persian girlfriend once.
3. A recent conversation at Ebertfest.

The movie begins at Mont St. Michel with a couple–an American man, Neil,  played by Ben Affleck and a French woman, Marina, played by Olga Kurylenko. What a curiousity! Who would have thought to build such a strategic fort on a sometimes island. The image is both romantic and mysterious, and instantly gives us a location.   Marina has a young teenaged daughter, Tatiana (Tatiana Chiline).

Marina narrates in French. Get ready because this is an American movie with plenty of subtitles. She is in love and ponders about this unity of two separate entities and rejoices “to the wonder.” This is the honeymoon phase of any romance.

At that stage, it’s easy to get along with someone you can’t communicate well with, even in your own language. Feelings are at times like one’s breath on a cold day, you can see it and almost feel it but not really touch it and hold it in your hand. Feelings and thoughts, though are an important part of love, to my mind. Yet my friend, who was fluent in many languages, but spoke no Farsi told me that his Parisian romance with a Iranian Persian woman was wonderful, the absolute best because they never argued. Or rather, they couldn’t argue.

That kind of romance seems to be Stepford wife-ish or like that old song “Robot Man” where “we’d never fight because it would be impossible for him to speak.”

Both Neil and Marina are two attractive people attracted to each other. Marina elicits smiles from the reticent Neil by dancing in the streets. It’s both charming and childish. Neither Neil nor Marina could probably conjure up enough of the other’s language into a string of magically witty sentences to produce such smiles linguistically.

Neil brings Marina and Tatiana back to his house in Oklahoma. There’s something not right with his house. We don’t know how long he’s lived there, but there’s a sense that he hasn’t really moved in. There’s something missing, even Marina’s daughter later senses it.

Marina and Anna only see the beautiful side of the U.S. Neil, in his work, trudges around land and water ruined by industrialization. The images here forces us to recall the romantic beauty of Marina and Neil in the mud just as the tide slowly comes back in at Mount St. Michel. Here, Neil is alone in the mud and the scene is far from pretty. Neil also accompanies a priest, Father Quintana (Javier Bardem) on his rounds.

The father might prowl below gorgeous stained glass windows amongst the shiny clean wood pews, but he is troubled and has lost faith. We hear his thoughts in Spanish. Inside the sparsely attended church services we see Neil and Marina. The father is not judgmental.

On his rounds with Neil, we see the people of this small town in Oklahoma living in houses that are weatherworn and nearly as broken down as the people. The inhabitants, both white and black, suffer from a number of ailments and it’s suggests, well, everything in this movie is suggested rather than clearly stated, that many of the inhabitants problems are related to environmental pollution.

Neil won’t or can’t marry Marina and eventually her visa expires and she and Tatiana must return. My research shows that for stays of 90-days or less, holders of French passports do not need a visa.  The maximum stay for a B-2 Tourist Visa is six months and the holder has the right to request an extension. Neil doesn’t give Marina a reason to stay although in voiceover, she would have stayed if she had asked.

When she returns to Paris, things don’t go well for Marina. She’s jobless and she sends Tatiana to live with her father. Although Neil has become re-acquainted with the lovely blonde Jane (Rachel McAdams), he resolves to save Marina by marrying her.

Yet even after they marry, their house doesn’t acquire a homey feel. We’ve seen the rich and lived in house of Jane where everything suggests settling in and nesting. Neil and Marina are still in boxes and otherwise minimalist furniture. Too neat in the public area and too bare in the privacy of their bedrooms.

Neil and Marina understand each other well enough to argue now, but not to understand and their frustration becomes destructive. Yet the breaking of things never rises to the level of physical threat. Marina feels the touch of temptation. Her friend, the Italian-speaking (yes, more subtitles) Anna (Romina Mondello) urges to be free. Throw away your purse…you can come back for it later. Apparently Neil goes off on walk-abouts, disappearing. For how long and how often, Marina doesn’t explain. Then Marina decides to take an afternoon off from her marriage at a seedy hotel room. You don’t get the sense of carnal passion, but passivity. Marina wants change; she wants to end her marriage, but how other than adultery?

According to IMDb, cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, who worked on both this and the earlier 2011 “The Tree of Life,”  explained that for Malick, “Photography is not used to illustrate dialogue or a performance” but instead, the images we see are “to capture emotion so that the movie is very experiential” and each image is ”meant to trigger tons of memories, like a scent or a perfume.”

Reading various reviews and viewer reactions, the story is very open to interpretation, but so was the ending of the more easily accessible “Titanic.” Do Neil and Marina get back together in a bigger, better house and have kids or is that just a dream or an illusion. Is Marina sadly plagued with some character defect or mental disease that makes her dance and wander through life? Does she end up a homeless woman with only a small dog as a friend as she sleeps rough under the stars in clothes that are dirty and stained? Does she revisit Mont St-Michel attempting to re-capture that moment when she had her daughter and a handsome lover and she was lost “to the wonder”? Or perhaps, the most cynical interpretation was that the whole movie was a dream of a tortured mind and the only reality is a woman sleeping on a field followed by a dog and tragedy.

Does the uncertainty bother us? Does that make the film less than perfect? Why can’t we have a movie that inspires a Rashomon experience for the audience?

So often we hear someone say of a movie adaptation that the book was better. The book can describe in detail what would be too tedious and deadly lengthy in a movie. What a movie does better is present images and Malick doesn’t succumb to the temptation of CGI.

During Ebertfest, after the screening of Malick’s “Days of Heaven,” I overheard some audience members complaining about the lack of concrete facts for “I Remember” and, almost in the same breath, the inability to hear all parts of the conversation in Malick’s 1978 “Days of Heaven.”  That movie’s cinematography was by Néstor Almendros (1930-1992) with additional photography by Haskell Wexler.

Yet perhaps those viewers missed the point. Just as we never hear the argument that ends with Bill (Richard Gere) accidentally killing his boss in Chicago and sends Bill, his girl Abby (Brooke Adams) and Linda (Linda Manz) on the run, we never hear the argument between Neil and Marina. The words aren’t important. If Malick the writer had given us dialogue, we might have obsessed on the words, but so often the words we spew out when anger boils our brains aren’t really worth noting.

Like the perfume commercials, these scenes by their angle, lighting and composition are meant to convey feelings and emotions, to conjure up memories of our past, real or imagined. The best approach is an open-mind that absorbs visual cues, as if you were watching a foreign drama despite this being a production by an American director.

L.A. Asian Pacific Film Festival: See ‘Four Strings’

I was lucky to get some preview screeners for the L.A. Asian Pacific Film Festival and if you can’t get into the festival gala “Linsanity,” then be sure not to miss “Jack Shimabukuro: Life on Four Strings.”

By his name, you know Shimabukuro is part Japanese. Born and raised in Hawaii, he became familiar with the ukelele and these are the four strings that he makes his living on. This 2012 documentary was already shown on PBS in Hawaii, but has yet to broadcast here. Shimabukuro was like many teens–he formed a garage band, but he resisted the call of the guitar. Instead, he took the ukelele and brought fused it with new styles and sensibilities.

While Shimabukuro, who has also given a TED talk, took tradition and moved it forward, two documentaries look at people looking back to go forward. The 2013 “Tongues of Heaven” is about members of indigenous people who want to learn the language of their ethnic culture in Taiwan and Hawaii. With educational systems that use the majority language, and a history of governmental intervention that attempted to destroy the language and customs of the minority, this is an uphill battle. If you’re monolingual, you might wonder what’s the problem?

That question is answered in “To Weave a Name.” Directed by Christen Marquez, this documentary follows Marquez’s personal journey to re-connect with her mother and the native Hawaiian half of her ancestry. Language and culture are intertwined and especially for Marquez’s mother, language, culture and the culture of hula. There aren’t many places that teach Hawaiian. Likewise, Mandarin Chinese is the language taught in Taiwanese schools (for a time it was Japanese) but that’s not the language of the indigenous peoples.

As a nation where the majority of citizens come from somewhere else, we should encourage language skills and learning beyond English.  For Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, this month is a time to renew interest in the culture and language of our ancestors. For some, their plight is that they were indigenous peoples and learning the official language of their country also means losing some of their own culture. Once a language is lost, so is a great deal of the beauty of the culture. Can today’s generations preserve culture and perhaps, like Shimabukuro, move it forward as well?

“Jake Shimabukuro: Life on Four Strings” screens on 4 May 2013 (Saturday) at 7 p.m. at the Directors Guild  of America #1, 7920 Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles.

“To Weave a Name (E Haku Inao)” screens on 7 May 2013 (Tuesday) at 6:45 at CGV Cinemas #2, 621 S. Western Ave (between 6th and Wilshire), Los Angeles, CA 90005. Then again on 11 May 2013 (Saturday) at 3:00 p.m. at the Art Theatre of Long Beach, 2025 E. 4th Street, Long Beach, CA 90814.

“Tongues of Heaven” screens on 4 May 2013 (Saturday) at 2:30 p.m. at the CGV Cinemas #2, 621 S. Western Ave (between 6th and Wilshire), Los Angeles, CA 90005. Then again on 11 May 2011 at 12:30 p.m. at the Art Theatre of Long Beach, 2025 E. 4th Street, Long Beach, CA 90814.

For more info, visit the film festival’s website.

 

 

‘The Other Shore’ doesn’t get where it should go

I desperately wanted to like “The Other Shore” because I greatly admire the gutsy Diana Nyad, but this documentary doesn’t get where it seems to be going. If you’re already familiar with Nyad and her most recent attempt to swim from Cuba to Florida, you’ll already know how this documentary ends and director Timothy Wheeler doesn’t make the journey there worthwhile.

For those who aren’t familiar with Nyad, she’s a more reticent female Jack LaLanne. LaLanne, who died on 23 January 2011, used to celebrate his birthday by performing some fantastic physical feat. I admired his pep and perseverance.

Nyad, now 63, was inducted into the U.S. National Women’s Sports Hall of Fame in 1986 and into the International Swimming Hall of Fame in 2003. What has she done? She doesn’t swim fast, she swims long. In 1974, she swam a 22-mile Bay of Napes race for a women’s record time of 8 hours, 11 minutes. The next year, ate 26, she then swam the 28 miles around the island of Manhattan. That wasn’t enough. Three years later, she made her first attempt to swim from Havana to Key West. She failed and this would be her unfulfilled dream.

What she did do was swim 102 miles for her 30th birthday from North Bimini Island (Bahamas) to Juno Beach in Florida. She then retired to become a journalist for NPR (a weekly five-minute piece on sports for “All Things Considered” and formerly the host of “The Savvy Traveler” on public radio.

Nyad has written for the New York Times, Newsweek and other publications and wrote three books, including the 1978 “Other Shores.” Openly gay, she has been a role model for the GLBT community.

Then, she came out of retirement, attempting again and again to swim from Cuba to Florida. beginning in 2010 when she was 60. Yes, she wanted to swim for days and miles at age 60. At 60, she trained for a year and then made attempt number two in August 2011.

I’ve never been to Florida or Cuba, but I’ve been on a California beach when the warning cry goes out for jellyfish. I’ve seen jellyfish washed ashore. I don’t know how it feels to be stung, but I know it is much, much worse than a bee sting and I already know all about those. Nyad knows about jellyfish. In August 2011, she was stung twice by a box jellyfish before quitting. Only a month later, in September, She made another attempt but met with box jellyfish and a Portuguese Man-of-War.

SPOILER ALERT!

Her most recent attempt was in August 2012, but those darned jellyfish along with a storm at sea, ended that attempt. Along the way to this last attempt, we learn what makes Nyad swim. At first it was a means of anger management. Nyad had been sexually abused as a child, first by her stepfather and later by a swim coach.

That was obviously long ago and far away since Nyad is now past 60. What she will do now and where she will go beyond Cuba is the question that this documentary doesn’t answer. Without that, the journey seems to not have a goal. For that reason, I’d like to see more of Nyad with her life partner and the world beyond those failed marathon Cuba-Florida swimming attempts.

You can follow “The Other Shore” on its official website or its Facebook page. The movie is not yet available on Amazon (you can watch “The Channel” with Diana Nyad) nor on Netflix (DVD availability date unknown).  For women (and men) over 30, Diana Nyad should serve as an inspiration and this documentary can help to that end.

Hues of black and blues in ‘Sapphires’

The question of just what is black is inescapable in the Australian movie, “The Sapphires,” as well as who can pass. By pass, I mean who can pass for black or white or, more basically, something that you are not. Don’t worry, this movie is a sugar-coated, feel-good tale of a black girl group that finds opportunity and maturity entertaining American troops during the Vietnam War.

Passing, has its advantages. I can pass for Chinese in Hong Kong or Taiwan at a disadvantage because my Mandarin is poor. I can pass as Chinese in Korea where some have prejudices against the Japanese. I can’t pass for white and it’s not easy to pass as American or Japanese. You soon learn that some people look at your face and not your body language.

The movie, “The Sapphires” takes on passing for white as well as four women passing as black Americans on stage. We first see them in  1958 as a group of Aboriginal girls–two sisters and two cousins–who are singing for their relatives on a makeshift stage. We already know that not all is well because we’ve been told by subtitles that there was a Stolen Generation of children. In the crowd, we see some light-skinned faces and know something bad will and has already happened.

History

The Australian government stole away light-skinned children of the indigenous Australians, taking them from their families and putting them in institutions run by religious or charitable organizations. Sometimes they were fostered out. The practice began in 1909 and continued until 1970.

What the movie doesn’t say is that most of the women were trained to be domestics and the men to be agricultural labor. The 2002 Australian movie “Rabbit-Proof Fence” looks at this practice, following three girls who escape and walk nine weeks to return to their Aboriginal families.

To put this practice in perspective, consider that there is also a generation of White Stolen children who were part of a forced adoption policy practiced in Australia between 1930 until 1982. The babies of unmarried women were taken in this case.

The practice of sending off poor or orphaned children began with the British. Vagrant children were gathered and sent to the Virginia Colony in 1618.  Large numbers of children were forcibly sent to the colonies to help with labor shortages, only ending in 1757. The Children’s Friend Society (founded in London in 1830) sent children to South Africa, Australia and Canada.

In the United States, post-Revolutionary War, there were similar attempts to force cultural assimilation on Native Americans. While students weren’t kidnapped, there was evidence that some parents were coerced into signing up their children. At the schools and on the reservations, there were efforts to convert the Native Americans to Christianity (until the 1978 American Indian Religious Freedom Act.

The U.S. military had only been desegregated in 1948 (Executive Order 9981).  The Korean War (1950-1953) was the first war with desegregated troops. The Vietnam War (1955-1975) was the second military action with desegregated troops.

Black versus black

The question of just who is black in the Pacific Ocean was asked in “South Pacific” and raised again more recently with the casting in “Cloud Atlas.”

“The Sapphires” are black in the Australian and British sense of the word and that covers a lot of ground outside of Africa. In this case, they begin as an innocent foursome singing for their relatives on a makeshift stage but as adults, they have been whittled down to a trio.  These three sisters  enter a singing contest. Leading the sisters is the bossy eldest, Gail (Deborah Mailman who appeared in “Rabbit-Proof Fence”), who wants to sing lead but doesn’t have the voice. Julie (Jessica Mauboy) is the youngest, but she has the voice. Cynthia (Miranda Tapsell) unwisely loves the attention of men too much. They are the only Aboriginal entrants and though their performance of a Merle Haggard country classic is better than the other white entrants, they lose.

The only two people at this rinky-dink contest who see their talent is one of the white entrants, a boy who has yet to learn the logic of racism, and the drunken white host, Dave,  who has been living in his car.

Seeing their raw talent, Dave (Chris O’Dowd) helps them sing “blacker” by exposing them to the Motown sound, educating them on the blues. After a lot of practice and a sudden addition of a cousin, Kay (Shari Sebbens), who has been passing as white in the big city, they audition and win a spot on the entertainment roster for U.S. troops in Vietnam. In Vietnam, they become more confident and learn a bit about show business, American racism and the war.

The movie is as upbeat as the songs so there will be a happy ending and you get to learn more about the actual women this film is based on.

Authenticity

The movie began as a play by the same name written by Tony Briggs. The play debuted in 2004. Briggs based the play on the experiences of his mother, Laurel Robinson, and his aunt, Lois Peeler, who did tour Vietnam as singers in 1968.

Briggs created the fictional character of Dave Lovelace and Irish actor O’Dowd plays him as a charming, drunk. You’ll have to take this as an adult fairy tale to see a happy ending and believe in the happy, lovable alcoholic. Briggs wrote the movie’s screenplay with Keith Thompson.

Director Wayne Blair is an Indigenous Australian writer and actor and was in the original cast of the play. Blair captures the fun and development and keeps the socio-political aspects from getting too serious or grim.

The cast is authentically Indigenous Australian and none of the women is model-emaciated thin. Mailman is both Indigenous Australian and Māori and had the lead role in a 2010 musical movie called “Bran Nue Dae.” In the original play, she played Cindy.

Shari Sebbens is part English descent (father) and Indigenous Australian from her mother’s side.

Mauboy is part Indonesia (father) and part Indigenous Australian. Her talents was recognized when she finished fourth on season four of “Australian Idol.”  She auditioned by singing Whitney Houston’s “I Have Nothing.” That should tell yo what kind of power she has in her voice.

Tapsell was born in Darwin, but raised in Kakadu, a national park which is both under the management of the Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities and the Aboriginal traditional land owners.

Like Native Americans, Indigenous Australians have different groups that are identified based on the regional indigenous languages. So while the women are all Indigenous Australians, they are not all from the same region. That might be an issue for someone somewhere. And for the black versus black, we’ll take our cue from science.

Genetically, Indigenous Australians are closer to East Asians and Europeans than they are to Africans according to a DNA sequencing performed in 2012. The study concluded that their sample indicated the “Aborigine genome was found in one analysis to be genetically closer to East Asians than Europeans” there were also indications that suggested “the Aboriginal Australians split from the ancestral population of Eurasians, rather than from modern East Asian populations.”

Beyond genetics and history, ”The Sapphires” is a feel-good movie with a cast that you can feel good about–no blackface or passing here.

Ebertfest 2013 Day 2: Thoughts of family

Introducing the first film of day two of Ebertfest (18 April 2013), Chaz Ebert noted that even the skies were grieving Roger Ebert’s passing. Indeed, what had been dark clouds and a bit of rain the day before had become a thunderstorm. I know the Midwest is famous for them, but they are sort of exotic to us from the West Coast. All the rain didn’t deter fans of Roger Ebert and Ebertfest, but the weather and some airline problems prevented Jack Black from joining Ebertfest.

Did I mention how much I was looking forward to dancing tango with the man who gave voice to a panda and played a Pip to Gladys Knight’s performance on “American Idol”?  Black was present via phone for the Q&A session in the evening.

I don’t exactly melt in the rain like the Wicked Witch of the West but walking for an hour under a downpour isn’t fun so I skipped the panels so my husband and I could get some much needed rest and we’re still on a different time zone.

My haiku for the morning was:

Grey days are great days

To curl up with a hot mug:

Coffee? Or lover?

We did hop on a bus for a 5-minute ride to the Virginia and the afternoon program. In Sophie Kohn’s short piece, “To Music” we had a priest (Paul Cox) attempting to engage an emotionally distraught man, but what eventually brings him out is music. Kohn benefited from having maestro Tamas Vasary to play the piano and his dancer wife Henriett Tunyogi to be, what else, a dancer. Vasary, Tunyogi, Cox and Sophie Kohn along with Feike Santbergen were having a bit of post-Cannes Film Festival “madness.” Sophie is the daughter of the festival director Nate Kohn and she read her first email to Roger Ebert, written after she had known him for quite a while, as an introduction to her piece.

“To Music” helped introduce the next movie, the Paul Cox documentary “Vincent: The Life and Death of Vincent van Gogh.” I say introduce because the program seemed to set up a layering of images not unlike poetry and the program has a pull-quote from Roger Ebert’s review of the film “poetic, thoughtful man portrayed in documentary.” Usually one might think of Vincent van Gogh as an angst-ridden crazy man who painted. Then there’s that incident with the ear–his cut off as an offering.

Let’s remember that flash forward a few hundred years and artists get paid for Self-mutilation didn’t become fashionable for artists until last century and it wasn’t painters but performance artists who took that ploy. Perhaps not exactly sacrificing an ear but there was that woman who had someone carve a star on her stomach with a razor blade  or otherwise burned and cut (Marina Abramovic), or the man who had his assistant shoot him and in a different performance was nailed to a VW bug in Venice, California (Chris Burden) or the literal pins and needles performances that drew HIV-positive blood (Ron Athey). Before extreme sports became a way of annihilating oneself, came extreme performance art of the 1960s and 1970s. There are no reports of actual ear-cutting but there was one performance artist who, in 2006 had an extra ear implanted into his arm. The legend of Van Gogh’s ear-cutting is less straight forward and art historians don’t actually agree on how it happened.

Cox’s movie tends to downplay the possibility of madness and the whole ear-cutting incident. The poetic Ebertfest program goes from Cox portraying a priest to Cox’s film about a man who initially wanted to be a pastor but failed and became a painter instead. In Cox’s film, we see the lush fields of wheat and his paintings of the wheat fields and the workers gathering up the crop. Yet in those days (Van Gogh lived from 1853 and died at 37 in 1890), the labor while still hard was not vast fields partially cultivated by machines. The industrial revolution had not begun. Van Gogh painted the poor and lived and died in poverty. Terence Malick’s film “Days of Heaven” which the audience had only seen the day before is about how the industrial age exploited the poor and the migrant workers hired to harvest the wheat do not share in the prosperity of the land-owning farmer.

Watching the Cox documentary, in my mind I saw the lush acres of golden wheat waves from Terrence Malick’s “Days of Heaven.” Malick’s film has the brother of the narrator who becomes a victim of circumstances and is shot.  The Cox documentary is also about a man who was shot and most believe he committed suicide although Wikipedia notes no gun was found.

With narration by John Hurt, we listen to the actual words that Vincent van Gogh wrote to his younger brother Theo, but we never hear from Theo. This is a bit one-sided, but it does create a vision of a man who is obsessed with his own concerns and perhaps doesn’t always see people as they are. Recreating scenes, many inspired by Van Gogh’s paintings, Cox helps us imagine the world that Vincent van Gogh saw. Cox employs some shaky cam as well as fast-motion blurring to convey Van Gogh’s state of mind.

In the end, we do understand how important Vincent’s family was to his work. Without Theo, who died six months after Vincent at age 33, Vincent would not have been able to afford to live and paint. The younger Van Gogh was an art dealer. Vincent only sold one painting during his lifetime (“The Red Vineyard”). Where in “Days of Heaven” we have a family driven apart by poverty, greed and jealousy, here were have a family in two brothers–one supporting the other and giving a great gift to the world of art. Now I wonder if Roger Ebert’s program doesn’t also suggest that we, the attendees at Ebertfest, need to support young artists such as Grace Wang and Sophie Kohn.

Since we, now meaning my husband and myself,  like to pace ourselves, we skipped director Patrick Wang’s “In the Family” which showed at 4 p.m.  Last year we skipped all of the second afternoon screenings. Yet you can understand from the title that this film is also about family. According to Roger Ebert’s review, the movie looks at how the world family can have different meanings that reach beyond bloodlines.

As I began this essay with a reference to Jack Black, you know that I had to attend the festival’s screening of “Bernie.”  Even without Jack Black, seeing the movie on a big screen (I saw it on Netflix) and listening to what both Black via phone and the director Richard Linklater had to saw made me want to watch the movie yet again.

After to many thoughtful movies, the program definitely needed a little laughter and “Bernie” provided so much laughter, even though the movie is about a murder, that you’ll have to watch it again so you can hear all the lines.

“Bernie” is a fictionalized account of the nicest man in the small town of Carthage, Texas, who became friends with the meanest person in town, a lonely widow, and the result was murder. The murder divided the small community and there’s now a “Free Bernie” website devoted to getting justice for Bernie Tiede.  Roger Ebert thought that Black should have been nominated for an Oscar. You will, too. Black studied many videos of Tiede performing and went to visit him in prison as well. Tiede has, unfortunately, yet to see the movie. Linklater revealed how he cast the locals, many of whom were actors or actor-wannabes and added some comments of their own. He also mentioned that Tiede claimed that he was only an escort (not the widow’s lover) and has lost his mother at the tender age of two and then his father at about 15. Although his father had remarried, Tiede then went to be raised by his grandmother. There was some speculation in the audience that Tiede was the victim of an emotionally abusive relationship and that his life sentence was extreme.

Tiede might be an unmarried man but he managed to build up a family in the small town of Carthage, genuinely loved and appreciated by the residents. Now that’s a special skill–bringing joy to so many.

As a fan of murder mysteries and police procedurals, “Bernie” is now my favorite murder movie, but Jack Black, I feel you still owe me a dance!

This blog entry comes out late due to technical issues.

Ebertfest 2013 review: ‘Days of Heaven’

There are films that you won’t feel the full impact of unless you see it on a big screen and I don’t mean a big screen TV. That’s what Ebertfest is all about and if you didn’t see it in a theater when it came out in 1978 (some of you might not have even been born then) or didn’t make it to Ebertfest last night, then your big screen will have to do. “Days of Heaven” can be streamed on Netflix.

• Read Roger Ebert’s Great Movie review of “Days of Heaven”

The movie is about the past and the narrator is neither of the main characters. From the clothes, we can assume this is sometime before World War II, and even the 1920s–before the advent of the flapper and shorter skirts. When men still wore suspenders and long sleeved shirts for hard labor and not t-shirts or a tank top and jeans. This is a time of greater formality and greater exploitation. These good old days weren’t good for everybody.

The movie stars Richard Gere as a Chicago man named Bill who gets in an argument with the boss at the steel mill. We don’t really know what it was about, but push really comes to shove and Bill accidentally kills the man. You’ll rarely see a death scene that is filmed with such beauty. In the red heat of a steel mill and the sweat and grim of the men working there, cinematographer Nestor Almendros, finds poetry and won an Oscar for it.

In a time before OSHA and workers comp there was much to complain about and when Bill, his girl Abby (Brooke Adams) and our narrator Bill’s sister (Linda Manz) flee, they find work that’s even harder in the wheat fields of some large farm. Under the cloud of a murder charge, Bill learns to take the unfairness. These are not, he thinks the days of heaven. All three work from dawn to dusk and even beyond, longing to hear the horn that will signal the work day’s send. Bill is passing Abby off as his sister, but more than a few men are suspicious. Remember that this is in a time before sex and the single girl would be the topic without scandal. You were either a good girl or a slut.

The farm is so large that even for as flat as the terrain is you can’t see another house. In this isolation there is both beauty and despair. The farmer (Sam Shepard) has a lovely two-story Victorian house that rises above the waving sea of wheat like a great castle. And so it must seem to the workers who sleep outside in tents and wash up in a nearby pond.

The farmer falls in love with Abby despite warnings from his trusted confidante, a man with a face more weathered than the barn and house. Bill has an idea after hearing a snippet of conversation that the farmer doesn’t have long to life. And doesn’t this farmer who’s getting rich off of the sweat of these men owe them something more? That thought isn’t expressed but it must have been there. None of the workers love this farmer and he is a lonely man. Bill’s plan is to offer his love Abby as a wife to this man and to later return and claim a widow and her wealth. If Bill is guilty of anything it is wanting something more than “nosing around like a pig in the gutter” and being poor. We don’t hate him nor do we hate the farmer. He’s not portrayed as particularly cruel or callous. His courtship and marriage to Abby is courteous and cautious. He’s almost shy but he isn’t blind and he grows uneasy watching her relationship with Bill.

You’ve seen this story before, perhaps even in real-life with the various housewives of Hollywood or perhaps your own local version. What makes this movie rich is the devotion to the light. Reportedly, filming was only done when the light was right–that means in the diffuse cold light of the morning or the golden light of the dusk before evening. Time was taken to consider the lyrical qualities of nature from the wildlife such as rabbits and pheasants who find food and sanctuary in the wheat fields, to the joy of the dogs running in the fields to the green shoots of grain rising from seed to green grass above the dark soil and even the blazing controlled heat in the steel mills contrasting the mesmerizing elegance of a fire on the wheat fields, replacing the placid waves of gold with raging high waves of red.

Director Terrence Malick and his team of cinematographers (Almendros who left the film early as it ran over schedule, going on to another project, and the man who was credited with “additional photography” at the end of the movie, Haskell Wexler, who attended Ebertfest) emphasized visual beauty over the words spoken by the three adults caught in this lovers triangle and found the right person in 16-year-old Manz as the narrator to set the tone. Neither Bill nor the farmer are the villains of this story. We see the yearning and jealousy in the faces of both men. When they both lose their little heaven it isn’t an act of nature, it is through an unwise choice they each make.

“Days of Heaven” is a movie that reminds us in the making that what’s worth doing is worth doing well and if that takes time, take the time. The movie made me look around and wonder if today and tomorrow aren’t my own “Days of Heaven” and if I don’t take time to appreciate it, those days will have been wasted. “Days of Heaven” is not a waste of time and it’s a film that required an extraordinary team who were willing to work together for a singular vision. And in his comments Wexler noted that his attitude toward that curious credit had changed (Almendros set the tone) and sometimes great special effects require no more than a little creative thinking and something as mundane as coffee beans.

Ebertfest 2013 review: ‘I Remember’

If you have the opportunity to watch this short subject film by Grace Wang, please give it a chance. It’s not long, and the set up seems to have no particular direction. However, after watching it I did remember.

I remembered lost opportunities. I remembered how often I wrote to be critical and forgot to write in praise. I remembered how often I forgot to write about a perfect moment and appreciate the joys of life.

Roger Ebert in his 11th Hour lecture commented he considered reading the art that counted most–not writing, but reading. With the telephone, with Skype and with every day life, we don’t always take the time to write. You don’t have to write a full blog entry or a novel to have impact. Maybe Wang’s little film, taken seriously could help bring back snail mail. For the price of a stamp, you can brighten someone’s day. Why don’t we do it more often?

We spend much too much time complaining. Now take time to record good memories or make them.

Wang is one of Roger Ebert’s Far Flung Correspondents and is based in Canada.

Ebertfest 2013: Day one is about possibilities

Clearly Roger Ebert knew that this 15th edition of Roger Ebert’s Film Festival would be special. He planned it that way and even without him, it was special–filled the possibilities of the future and his legacy to Champaign, Illinois as a city, as the home of his university and as the home where he had given his heart to the people of the world. Being a part of Ebertfest, as it is affectionately known, means being a part of his extended family and that’s both an honor and a responsibility.

The party got started even before the official 17 April 2013 opening movie. On 9 April 2013, Roger Ebert launched his new website. It’s exciting; it’s clean and it’s highly visual. Just what you’d want for people interesting in watching the flickering images across a screen to produce tales of people who are literally larger than life. Roger is wearing a white suit, smiling and sweeping open his arms. That weekend, the Virginia Theatre held an open house. Built in the 1920s, at one point this theater was threatened with demolition. It could have become a parking lot. The Virginia has been home to the Ebertfest from the very beginning. Roger couldn’t have known the hidden beauties of this old theater.

The Champaign Park District bought the theater in 2000 and then began the task of fundraising. During that 13 years the Park District was  twisting arms and singing the theater’s praise, the Virginia was still home to the festival. Then last fall, the restoration team discovered just what a treasure the theater really was when they uncovered stencils and intricately painted canvasses. That changed the assessment from “blah” to surprised excitement from even one of its boosters, CPD marketing director Laura Auteberry. The Virginia had been closed for almost a year, but the grand reveal was breath-taking. I’d only been in the Virginia during last year’s Ebertfest, but this year, I could really appreciate what the original builders had in mind.

At the President and Mrs. Robert A. Easter’s reception just prior to the official opening of the festival, Roger’s widow, the warm Chaz Ebert, revealed that the Ebertfest would become a part of a richer and larger legacy. Roger and Chaz are endowing the university for an Ebert film studies program. When she again announced it at the festival, Chaz Ebert also noted “I’m excited because I don’t even know how it’s going to turn out…Roger scripted this for you.”

Chaz was obviously moved by the first movie, a short by one of Roger’s Far Flung Correspondents, Grace Wang. The short involved an ordinary day, one filled with sadness and memories. The mood is suddenly changed by a note. And Chaz had many notes from Roger, after he couldn’t speak any more. I envy my fellow FFC who had hand-written notes from Roger.

For opening night at the newly opened Virginia Theatre, Roger wanted to have a sing-along to his own lyrics for the tune “Those Were the Days,” after Wang’s short. We got up and had a sing-along.

Once upon a time there was a theater,

Where we used to see a film or two

Remember how we laughed way the hours

And dreamed of all the great things we would do?

Those were the days my friend

We thought they’d never end

We’d sing and dance forever and a day

We’d life the life we choose

We’d fight and never lose

For we were young and sure to have our way

The next film was also sad but oddly moving. If you haven’t seen “Days of Heaven,” read Roger Ebert’s review of this 1978 Terrence Malick film. Starring a young Richard Gere and Brooke Adams, the days of heaven are those idyllic days of love and comfort, before or after disaster. Haskell Wexler, who as given the credit a credit on the movie that once rankled him was on had to field questions from the audience.

The festival this year is dedicated to Wexler. He’s come to find peace in the credit now. Times has changed him.

This Malick film fits in neatly and may even become the stuff of legends or make you believe in God. You’ll also want to remember that the very last review Roger wrote was for another Malick film, “To the Wonder.“

That’s like a little pre-ordained note from heaven. Looking through my own few years of correspondence with Roger, I see opportunities missed and notes about what he wanted me to do in the future. I’m sure he left such notes for many, many people and I hope they will each consider those comments. If Roger didn’t know he was dying so soon–before the launch of EbertDigital and his new website, before this 15th Ebertfest, then he did know that he wanted to leave and legacy and he’s been building it. How can you help? Don’t expect notes from heaven, but look at the notes, words and actions of this one man who once did it all and slowly released duties, functions and responsibilities to a trusted few and also spoke out publicly about his concerns for the future. He seemed unsure that one person could change the course of the world, but in the celebration of Ebertfest’s 15th anniversary, we have proof that one many can move many to achieve much.

‘Léonie’ lost in Migration to the U.S.

“Léonie” is a mild-mannered autobiography of the mother of Isamu Noguchi and apparently something was lost during its migration from Japan, where it first screened in 2010.

The website says that this is “the true life story of Léonie Gilmour” and director Hisako Matsui was inspired by Masayo Duus’ “The Life of Isamu Noguchi.” Matsui read the book seven years before the movie came out and that was 14 drafts later (co-written with David Wiener). The movie was shot on location in the J.S. and Japan, but not specifically on the locations that might have since changed. The Pasadena scenes were filmed in the Santa Ynex Valley in 2009.

Emily Mortimer plays the title character.  Léonie is old and she is telling her story to her son, Isamu Noguchi. Noguchi is already a sculptor of renown. Léonie remembers when she was a student at Bryn Mawr and we see her disputing what a male professor has to tell the all-female class in 1892. This scene is meant to introduce the woman who will become her best friend, Catherine (Christina Hendricks) and establish that Léonie is strong-willed and doesn’t want to be disappointed by boring people. What isn’t explained is why she was self-destructive.  At Bryn Mawr, she also meets Umeko Tsuda (Mieko Harada), a woman determined to change the status of women in Japan.

From the Pennsylvania-based Bryn Mawr, Léonie ends up in New York where she applies for a job and meets the charming and forward Yone Noguchi (Shido Nakamura). She is hired to help him write and eventually together they publish a novel “The American Diary of a Japanese Girl” and become lovers. The chemistry between Mortimer and Shido Nakamura isn’t particularly convincing. Oddly, he and the other Japanese men are always well-coiffed–not a hair out of place, but Mortimer’s Léonie seems to have an eternal bad-hair day.Their affair is carried out in a well-furnished clean apartment. No rats. No cockroaches. If I could find an apartment like that in New York now, I’d be happy.

Yone has supposedly in his heart married Léonie. Now, you’ve probably raised your eyebrow at this thought. A simple scribble on a piece of paper isn’t enough to make it legal. It’s enough for our Léonie. Soon Léonie finds herself pregnant and alone. To avoid being much too interesting, she flees to her mother (Mary Kay Place) who lives alone in a tent Pasadena. This is 1904. The whole of Pasadena seems to be just dirt, wood wagons and tents. That might be the image of the wild west, but looking online, Pasadena seems to have been a little bit more civilized than that.

According to the book, “The Life of Isamu Noguchi,” Noguchi was actually born in a charity hospital for the poor (Los Angeles County Hospital) on 17 November 1904. Because Leonie registered herself as “Mrs. Yone Noguchi” the Los Angeles Herald ran a story on the child with the title “Yone Noguchi’s Babe Pride of Hospital: White Wife of Author Presents Husband with Son.”

By 1905 the 1872 California state law forbidding marriages between “negroes” and “mulattoes” with whites added “Mongolians.” Léonie and her mother moved to Pasadena after Leonie left the hospital. Pasadena had ten thousand residents.

Léonie is offended by the racism that her son faces and in 1907 goes to Japan where she again meets her “husband” but finds he has already taken a Japanese wife. Isamu who has been nameless because Léonie wanted Yone to name the child, gets the name Isamu, meaning courage.

Léonie gets on by teaching English to students her husband has found for her. She will leave the house Yone has found her and move on to and in 1912, she’ll have her own house built in Chigasaki (Kanagawa prefecture). She allows her son to plan the house. He’s ten. From the workers, he learns how to Japanese carpentry which is good because his mother doesn’t require that her wild boy to attend school. Mothers everywhere are cringing here.

As if Léonie hasn’t learned her lesson yet, she is again pregnant to a father whom she won’t name (but we do get a suggestion here) . This time she has a daughter, Ailes Gilmour.

Here is where the problem lies. According to Wikipedia, the original movie was concerned with both Isamu and Ailes. Isamu became a famous artist and in his adopted home of New York City, there’s a museum dedicated to him. Ailes Gilmour became a major figure in the American Modern Dance movement. Léonie somehow raised her two children to become special people, but the focus in this movie as it has been substantially re-edited according to Wikipedia is Isamu Noguchi.

There’s much, much more to this story. The movie takes us to Noguchi’s move back to the United States for education in 1981 and see his decision to leave pre-med studies for art in 1920 when his mother and half-sister had joined him in New York. Where the movie doesn’t go is into the psychological realm and examine Léonie’s emotional canvas or the way events sculpted Noguchi’s creativity and chipped away at his place in either culture.

The book notes that Noguchi was disappointed that his New York friends “spoke up against the relocation of the Japanese-Americans.” Noguchi knew of eight Japanese artist in New York City and urged them to work in relocation camps, but only Noguchi was willing to do so. entered a Japanese American internment camp, notably Poston where many San Diego and Southern California Japanese American’s were interned. Yet he didn’t feel these were his people and the experience “knocked out my sense of social responsibility” he wrote to a friend. He left and never returned and this left some bitterness on the side of the internees.

By 1942, when the internment began, Léonie has died. She died in New York of a pneumonia in 1933.

What’s disappointing is this movie doesn’t tell us more about Léonie and almost completely ignores Ailes. For a movie about a woman who forged a sometimes foolhardy independent life as a single mother, this re-edit focuses on the woman behind the man who would become Isamu Noguchi and not the woman who encouraged both her daughter and son into creative fields where they both made noteworthy contributions. Yet even with Isamu, the movie doesn’t venture to chip away at the stone to develop a personal interpretation of one of America’s great artists. “Léonie” is currently playing at Laemmle’s Playhouse 7.

PBS airs doc on ‘Wonder Women’

Heroic myths abound from the distant past to the more recent graphic novels, but while there are a slew of super heroes that have become a part of American pop culture, there are few women and most of them were with pale sidekicks and little more sexual scenery for a teenage boy’s fantasy. The documentary “Wonder Women! The Untold Story of American Superheroines” gives a closer look at Wonder Woman and how she opened the doors for more superheroines and still was able to excite imagination of both feminist  and sexually frustrated fanboys.  The documentary will air on PBS, Monday, 15 April 2013 at 10 p.m. as part of the Independent Lens series.

Superman, had Superwoman. Batman had Batgirl or Batwoman. In the late 1930s, coming out of the Great Depression, a lot of super heroes were born such as Superman and  Wonder Woman. She was born and raised on a island of Amazons and there was no Wonder Man. She wasn’t part of a team and no male counterpart was rescuing her. She had a romantic interest, but she was usually seen saving him.

Without Wonder Woman, could there have been a Bionic Woman? At Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Xena? Or the determined Ripley who led kicked butt against the toothy, salivating aliens.

Snippets of old archival clips, snaps of old comic book pages and interviews with pop culture specialists, actors and Ms. Magazine founder Gloria Steinem are combined to give us an idea of just how Wonder Woman was created and transformed through the decades and why the feminist movement both embraced her and resurrected her image.

Yet why did the DC Comics superheroine Wonder Woman, a character that was created  by American psychologist William Moulton Marston, survive when others like Sheena and Miss Fury, faded into geekdom trivia?

A couple of things helped: Gloria Steinem and Ms. Magazine found her irresistible (cover of July 1972 issue, the first monthly issue) and salvaged her from post-World War II bondage with male ideas of femininity and TV embraces a series with Lynda Carter as eponymous character (1975-1979).  Wonder Woman wasn’t someone a hero could rescue, she rescued herself.

The studio executives were worried that a woman, even one as fetching as Carter, could carry a TV series by herself.

Carter says, “It was my job to show women…this guy’s knocking your around…knock him back…They did not think that a woman could carry a show.” You think that bustier that featured missile like breasts and high go-go boots helped attract boys as well as girls?

When she did, then the documentary, states that opened the way for other series with attractive white female leads such as “The Bionic Woman” with Lindsay Wagner as Jaimie Sommers (1976-1978). “The Bionic Woman” was a spin off of the series “The Six Million Dollar Man” (1974-1978). In both series, the lead character had been secretly saved through biomechanics implanted into them, replacing some of their original body parts and giving them superhuman powers which they used to help the government.

Women working undercover was the same theme as the TV series “Charlie’s Angels” which aired from 1976-1981. The series featured not one woman leading the cast, but three former fashion models portraying former police women who had been frustrated by sexism that relegated them to mundane police work. Instead, as private investigators, they get to wear glamorous clothes and have exciting adventures with no male backup, just the disembodied voice of Charlie giving them assignments and their minder and Charlie liaison, Bosley.

“Charlie’s Angels” hasn’t exactly been embraced by feminists, being criticized as too much giggle and jiggle. “Bay Watch” had yet to become the number TV program in the world and enlarge the role of slow-mo and hard bodies over actual dialogue. There’s no mention of that beach based series, but this documentary does consider how women were hypersexualized in comic books. It suggests that the hyper-masculinity of the 1980s was a reaction against women’s gains. Who would have put our former governator as the Terminator, Rambo and Reagan together as a defense against Wonder Woman?

Still from there TV and the movies went on and gave us Sarah Connors, Buffy, Captain Janeway and Xena. There’s some trepidation that the slogan “Girl Power” has become no more than pink wallpaper. On the other side, the anti-Wonder Woman forces, there were worries that Wonder Woman’s pro-female message promoted lesbianism (and how did they explain Steve Trevor–threesome?).

When we see the real faces of girls, grrrls or women who are inspired to be daring and brave because of Wonder Woman, we don’t have to wonder if a sexy package for feminism is a bad thing. There are limits though as seen at Wonder-Con last month. Liberated or chained by her need to appeal and cause salivating and hard-ons in complete strangers? Fame-whore or fantastically free spirited and self-assured? Perhaps not even Wonder Woman’s golden lariat reveal the reality without in depth psychoanalysis and a review of her public indecency arrest record.

Would Wonder Woman and her sisters attend such an event to barely clothed.  Doubtful. There are limits. Wonder Woman may have been created by men, but she was rescued by Ms. Magazine and she points to a fine line where a woman can be sexy, but powerful and self-assured. Her costume is modest compared to what you’d see on the beach.

The documentary “Wonder Women! The Untold Story of American Superheroines”  will air on PBS, Monday, 15 April 2013 at 10 p.m. as part of the Independent Lens series.