TV Review - Holiday Heist

You could be forgiven if you forget that Lifetime’s excellent film Holiday Heist (produced by Mar Vista Entertainment) is a Christmas movie. There is sibling love, parental love, friends in love, “cute meet” love, middle age love, black love. If there were not already a film called “Love, Actually” this would be it.

Oh, and then there’s the heist. Most films of this scope get it wrong by having an overly big crime plot. This one is well set up and goes down like a perfectly sized and spiced gingerbread cookie.

While the cast is up to the task of this film, the writing and cinematography are the stars. There is a pleasingly tempered tension in the story. Rather than the being set in the usual Anyplace, USA, this film feels situated with generous references to Chicago - which it gets right. ( While hot dogs may be picnic fare everywhere else, they are year round there. ) It hits all of the Christmas romance notes - woman falls into man’s arms, current lover is a red herring and the second lover is maddeningly irresistible and the main character has suffered a personal loss.)

But, this is not the typical pretty snow globe  of a movie where a slight upset raises flurries that settle as softly and quickly as they arose. In this movie, Christmas is what happens while you’re living in December. Decorations are put up, parties are danced and sh*t happens. Which is how most of us experience it.
Well worth the watch.

(Lifetime December 14)

The Waves - film review

The Waves
A very real family drama that deals with grief as it exists both before and after a tragic event. Very well written with fresh characters, strong acting and a wonderful music track. It’s a movie that’s deeply about all the characters - the way a family is.
Highly recommended.

JoJo Rabbit - Film Review

“JoJo Rabbit”
A wonderfully inventive film. It made me think about the choices that young children make every day in their natural search for morality- and how that search becomes bewilderingly difficult in a time of war.  

The Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon- Book Review

“The Wonder Boys” by Michael Chabon
This is a wild ride of a story about what ambition looks like in the bloom of youth and at the opening of old age. Set in academia, where promise shines and dulls with the advent of star students and waning of star professors, it tells a story as old as time. It’s a story about the abuse of time itself. While this shares a subgenre with “Goodbye, Mr Chips” and “The Paper Chase” it is about so much more than  an old teacher and his unruly modern students. Chabon reaches well past the classroom to tell this story, fitting in 3/4 of a dead snake, Marilyn Monroe’s  wedding jacket and old jazz clubs in Pittsburgh. And then there is the writing.  In a very good novel you are lucky to get five fabulous sentences that motor the plot forward with lyricism and are invisibly dipped in meaning. Here the mic is dropped on about every third page. To wit, “...he likes to caution and amuse his young companions with case histories of the incurable disease that leads all good writers to suffer, inevitably, the quintessential fate of their characters.”
People say I am a harsh critic on literature. But that is only to remind everyone what stellar looks like.

“Parasite” Review

SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT
“Parasite” is a wonderful Russian doll of a film. Its message is precisely, yet differently carved, everywhere you look. Even the house tells the story. It’s a magnificent house that’s not just behind gates, but behind a faceless, tall, stone wall - a wall that gives nothing to the community but protectively wraps a lush private park and spacious, high end, indulgent living quarters. Outside, a grey unscalable mountain/ inside, “what wall”? And within that house is another that tells the story again. The existence within is  both serene and grim. Calm and agitated. Opulent and threadbare. Compliant and rebellious. A modern re- telling of the best of times/  worst of times. I could write a similar paragraph about the weather, the clothes, the twist, the climactic scene, the spousal relationships. Tremendous performances all around with a script that is tightly sewn together with the tiniest of necessary scenes that make the story sail. This is a film that uses all the paints in the box to set the picture. Highly recommended and a good kick off to Oscar season.

)sub) Audible

(sub)AUDIBLE

I hear that the era of dog whistle politics is over

Good

Now everyone can hear the ear splitting quiet I hear everyday

The refusal to say thank you 

Or good morning

The near silent command to step aside 

As pets walk by and the screaming crush of grass under my shoe 

The silken sound of help being slid into a pocket out of reach

The gentle lap of the waves of resentment 

(that also tickle my toes while I reach high)

That yet rises above the thunderous uplift of the sky

The cold slapping sound of forgotten invitations

The distant babbling brook of the public, yet private, prattle of peers

The humming of doubt

The surprising whoosh of waiting

That low and slow thudding backbeat

Of uncertain hearts

The Sound of Murder: a Night Out at a Vintage, Broadway Failure

I discovered Theatre40 yesterday, tucked inside Beverly Hills High School.  The play was The Sound of Murder. It played Broadway in 1959. It was not a hit. That is why I went to see it.

I wanted to learn what was thought to be Broadway worthy  60 years ago. What themes resonated with an audience that had yet to see a hippie, the march on Washington, the moonshot or The Brady Brunch? What the heck were people thinking about in the year before I was born?

The play is a whodunnit- a tasty bit of cat and mouse between a wife who wants to leave a marriage and a boorish, author husband who knows she is having an affair but refuses to grant a divorce. He also refuses to have children. The lovers’ plan to kill the husband is overheard by his devoted secretary. Trouble ensues.

In the theatre dark, I tried my best to be a 1959  version of myself. I appreciated the long skirts, tiny watches, and a two story home with a single first floor phone. The murder planning is accidentally recorded on a reel to reel tape machine that the man uses to dictate his novels. On the day when we learned that Amazon’s Alexis is listening in on  homes this was my first link back to 1959: the unintended consequences of convenient tech. On a cultural level, it was easy to recognize the trope and trials of the unmarried,  professional woman so typically illustrated as an unattractive secretary. But it was much harder to determine the impact of these things: the affair, the husband’s  hatred of children, the need for your spouse to grant you a divorce,  domestic abuse, limited opportunities for women, and the heartbreaking schism between commerciality and artistry. (The husband writes children’s books but cheerfully despises children.)

Eventually, the lovers have to make a second, more determined and angry attempt to kill the husband. In the last scene we see them on the way to do the deed, climbing the stairs, hand in hand, with heroic purpose and lighting.

So what to conclude? By 1959, Tennessee Williams had written Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Ibsen had written A Doll’s House and Tolstoy had written Anna Karenina. We can add Tess Derby and Emma Bovary to a long parade of desperate wives and near- wives. It seems that in 1959 society was still wrestling with the known problems resulting from the repressed lives of women.

This play champions the concept that modern people should take the situation in their own hands, to do a wrong to make a right. In that way it whispered the decade to come, where civil, and if necessary, not so civil, disobedience was righteousness.

I’ve always sensed 1960, my birth year, was an incendiary crux in time, where what came before was entirely different than what came after. The Sound of Murder was not a popular play. But to be popular you have to be not only accepted but broadly understood. My 1959 self probably would not have seen what was coming. But now I think I know what I may have been thinking about.