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letterboxd · 3 years

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The Package.

As the bonkers genre thrill-ride Shadow in the Cloud blasts into the new year, writer and director Roseanne Liang unpacks her love of Terminator 2, watching Chloë Grace Moretz’s face for hours, and the life lesson she learned from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’s Cheng Pei-Pei.

Roseanne Liang’s TIFF Midnight Madness winner Shadow in the Cloud landed with a blast of fresh genre energy on VOD platforms on New Year’s Day. It’s A-class action in a B-grade body, cramming plenty into its taut 83 minutes, including: a top-secret package, a freakish gremlin, a hostile bunch of Air Force dudes, outrageous stunts, dogfights and a fake wartime PSA that feels remarkably real.

Throughout, the camera is focused mostly on one face—Chloë Grace Moretz’s, playing British flight officer Maude Garrett—as she tackles all of the above from a claustrophobic ball turret hanging under a B-17 Flying Fortress, on a classified mission over the Pacific Ocean during World War II.

While the film’s tonal swings are confusing to some, schlock enthusiasts and genre lovers on Letterboxd have embraced the film’s intentionally outlandish sensibility, which “makes excellent use of its genre mash to create an unpredictable, guilty pleasure,” says Mirza. Fajar writes that “it felt like the people involved in this project knew how ridiculous it is and gave a hundred and ten percent to make it work. Someday, it will become a cult classic.” Mawbey agrees: “It really goes off the rails in all the best ways during the final third, and the last couple of shots are just perfect.”

Chloë Grace Moretz and her top-secret package in ‘Shadow in the Cloud’.

To most of the world, Liang is a so-called “emerging” director, when in fact, the mother-of-two, born in New Zealand to Chinese parents, has been at this game for the past two decades. She has helmed a documentary and a romantic drama, both based on her own marriage; a 2008 short called Take 3, which preceded Hollywood’s current conversation about representation and harassment; and Do No Harm, the splatter-tastic 2017 short in which her technical chops and fluid feel for action were on full display, and, as recorded in multiple Letterboxd reviews, established her as one to watch.

Do No Harm scored Liang valuable Hollywood representation, whereupon producer Brian Kavanaugh-Jones brought Shadow in the Cloud to her, thinking she might connect with the material. “It did connect with me on a level that is very personal,” Liang tells me. “As a woman of color, as a mother who juggles a lot.” She says Kavanaugh-Jones then went through the process of removing original writer Max Landis from the project. “He felt that Max was not a good fit for this project, or for how we like to run things. We like to be respectful and courteous and kind to each other…”

In several interviews, Liang has said she’s comfortable with film lovers choosing not to watch Shadow in the Cloud based on Landis’s early involvement. What she’s not comfortable with is her own contribution—and that of her cast and crew—being erased. While WGA rules have his name attached firmly to the project, the credit belies the reality: his thin script, reportedly stretched out to 70 pages by using a larger-than-usual font, was expanded and deepened by Liang and her collaborators.

Writer-director Roseanne Liang. / Photo by Dean O’Gorman

That team includes editor Tom Eagles, Oscar nominated for Jojo Rabbit, actor Nick Robinson (the titular Simon in Love, Simon) and Beulah Koale, a star of the Hawaii Five-Oh series. The opening newsreel was created by award-winning New Zealand animation studio Mukpuddy, after a small test audience got weirded out by the sight of a gremlin in a war film, despite well-documented WWI and WWII gremlin mythology. It’s an unnecessary but happy addition. The cartoon style was inspired by Private Snafu, a series of WWII educational cartoons scripted by none other than Dr. Seuss and directed by Looney Tunes legend Chuck Jones.

But the film ultimately hangs on Chloë Grace Moretz, who overcame cabin fever to drive home an adrenaline rush of screen craft, in which the very limits of what’s humanly possible in mid-air are tested (in ways, it must be said, that wouldn’t be questioned if it were Tom Cruise in the role). Liang would often send directions to Moretz’s ball turret via text, while her cast members delivered live dialogue from an off-set shipping container rigged with microphones. “I just never got sick of Chloë’s face and I’ve watched her hundreds, if not thousands of times. You feel her, you are her, she just engages you in a way that a huge fighting scene might not, if it’s not designed well. Giant empty spectacle is less interesting than one person in one spot, sometimes.”

Ambitious and nerdy about film in equal measure, it’s clear there’s much more to come from Liang, and I’m interested in what her most valuable lesson has been so far. Turns out, it’s a great story involving Chinese veteran Cheng Pei-Pei (Come Drink With Me’s Golden Swallow, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’s Jade Fox), whose film training includes a tradition of remaining on set throughout filming.

Roseanne Liang on the set of ‘Shadow in the Cloud’.

That meant that, during filming of Liang’s My Wedding and Other Secrets, Cheng would stay on set when she wasn’t required. “In New Zealand, trailers are a luxury,” Liang explains. “I said ‘Don’t you want to go to the trailer that we arranged for you?’ ‘No, I just want to sit and watch.’ ‘Why do you want to watch it, you’ve seen it hundreds of times!’ And she said ‘I learn something new every time’. To Pei-Pei, the secret of life is constant education and curiosity and learning. Movies are her work and her craft and her life, and she never gets bored. If I can be like her, that’s the life, right?”

Speaking of which, it’s time we put Liang through our Life in Film interrogation.

What’s the film that made you want to become a filmmaker? Terminator 2: Judgment Day is the movie that is at the top of the mountain that I’m climbing. To me it’s the perfect blend of spectacle, action design, smarts and heart. It poses the theory that if a robot can learn the value of humanity then maybe there’s hope for the ships that are us. That’s perennial, and possibly even more pertinent today. It holds a very special place in my heart, along with Aliens, Mad Max: Fury Road, Die Hard, La Femme Nikita and Léon: The Professional.

What’s your earliest memory of watching a film? I have a cassette tape that my dad made for my grandma in 1981 (he’d send tapes back to his mother in Hong Kong). I was three years old and he had just taken us to see The Empire Strikes Back in the cinema. And he can’t talk to my grandma because I’m just going on and on about R2-D2. I will not shut up about R2-D2 and he’s like, “Yes, yes I’m trying to talk to your grandmother,” and I’m like, “But Dad! Dad! R2-D2!” So it’s actually an archive, but it’s become my memory.

What’s the most romantic film you’ve ever seen? Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It’s not the sexiest, but it’s the most romantic. That last scene, those last words where she goes “But you’re gonna be like this forever and I’m gonna be like this forever…” and he just goes “okay”. That to me is one of the most romantic scenes I’ve ever seen. It is a perfect movie.

And the scariest? If it’s a horror movie, the most scared I’ve been is The Ring. I was watching it on a VHS and I was lying on a beanbag on the floor and I was paralyzed with fear. I couldn’t move, because I felt that if I moved she’d see me! Also, American Psycho just came to me this year. I caught the twentieth anniversary of that movie, which is a terrifying film, and again, possibly more relevant now than when it was made. The scariest film that’s not a horror is Joker. It scared me how much I liked it. When I came out of the movie, I was like, “I’m scared because I kind of love it, but it’s horrible. It’s so irresponsible. I don’t wanna like this movie but goddamn, I feel it.” Like, I wanted to go on the streets and rage. In a way we’re all the Joker, we’re all the Batman. That duality, that yin and yang, is inside everyone of us. It’s universal.

What is the film that slays you every time, leaving you in a heap of tears? This is a classic one, the opening sequence of Up. The first ten minutes of Up just destroy me every time. I also saw Soul a couple of days ago and I was with the whole family and I, just, if I wasn’t with the whole family I would have been ugly-sobbing. I had a real ache in my throat after the movie because I was trying to stop [myself] from sobbing.

Tell me your favorite coming-of-age film, the film that first gave you ‘teenage feelings’? Pump Up the Volume. Christian Slater! Off the back of Pump Up the Volume, I fancied myself as a prophet and wrote a theater piece called Lemmings. Obviously the main character was a person who could see through the façade, and everyone else was following norms. “No one understands me, I’m a prophet!” So clearly I have this shitty, Joker-style megalomaniac inside of me. It was the worst play, and I don’t know why my teachers agreed for us to do a staging of it!

Christian Slater and Samantha Mathis in ‘Pump Up the Volume’ (1990).

Is there a film that you and your family love to rewatch? We’ve tried to impose our taste on our children, but they’re too young. We showed them The Princess Bride—they didn’t get it. We literally showed our babies Star Wars in their cribs. That’s how obsessive Star Wars fans we were.

Name a director and/or writer that you deeply admire for their use of the artform. I have a slightly weird answer for this. Can I just give love to Every Frame a Painting by Tony Zhou and Taylor Ramos? They are my film school. I was thinking of my love of Edgar Wright, but then I thought of their video essay on Edgar Wright and how to film comedy, and his essay on Jackie Chan and the rhythm of action and then their essay on the Coen Brothers and Shot Reverse Shot. I must have watched that 30 times ahead of the TV show that I’m making now. I started out in editorial and Tony Zhou is an editor and he talks about when to make the cut: it’s an instinct, it’s a feeling, it’s a rhythm. I realized the one thing in common that I could mention about all the films I’ve loved is Every Frame a Painting. It’s their love of movies that comes bubbling out of every single essay that they made that I just wanna shout out at this part of my career.

Were there any crucial films that you turned to in your development for Shadow in the Cloud? Indiana Jones was something that Chloë brought up—she likes the spiffiness and the humor of Indiana Jones. Sarah Connor was our touchstone for the female character. For one-person-in-one-space type stories, I watched Locke quite a lot, to figure out how they shaped tension and story and [kept] us on the edge of our seats when it’s only one person in one space. In terms of superheroes, I came back to Aliens. Not Alien. Aliens. You know, there are two types of people in this world—people who prefer Alien over Aliens, and people who prefer Aliens over Alien. But actually I think I vacillate for different reasons.

Can there be a third type of person, who thinks they’re both great, but Alien³, just, no? Maybe that’s the best group to be in. We don’t need to fight about this, we can love both of them! I was having an argument with James Wan’s company about this, because there’s a rift inside the company of people who prefer Alien over Aliens.

Okay, program a triple feature with your film as one of the three. I don’t know. Ask Ant Timpson!

I’ll ask Ant Timpson. [We did, and he replied: “Well, one has to be the Twilight Zone episode with William Shatner: Nightmare at 20,000 Feet. And then either Life (2017) or Altitude (2010).”]

Thank you Ant! I used to go to his all-nighters as a university student. He is the king of programming things.

Jake Gyllenhaal in ‘Life’ (2017).

It’s strange that we never met at one of his events! Ant would make me dress up in strange outfits and do weird skits between films. (For those who don’t know, Timpson ran the Incredibly Strange Film Festival for many years—now part of the New Zealand International Film Festival—and still runs an annual 24-Hour Movie Marathon.) So what’s a film from those events that sticks in your head as the perfect genre experience with a crowd? It was a movie about a man protecting a woman who was the girlfriend of a mafia boss: A Bittersweet Life. Not only does it have one of the sexiest Korean actors, sorry, not to objectify, but also I actually screenshot a lot of that film for pitch documents. And, do you remember a crazy Japanese movie where someone’s sitting on the floor with a clear umbrella and a woman is lactating milk? Visitor Q by Takashi Miike. I remember just how fucking crazy that was.

Finally, what was the best film you saw in 2020? I haven’t seen Nomadland yet, so keep in mind that I haven’t seen all the films this year. I have three: The Invisible Man, which I thought was just amazing. I thought [writer-director] Leigh Whannell did such a great job. The Half of It by Alice Wu, a quiet movie that I simply just adored. And then the last movie I saw at the cinema was Promising Young Woman. The hype is real.

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‘Shadow in the Cloud’ is available in select theaters and on video on demand now.

#life in film #letterboxd life in film #female director #directed by women #52 films by women #action film #action genre #chloe grace moretz #wwii film #ww2 film #terminator 2 #chinese new zealander #cheng pei-pei #tom eagles #jojo rabbit #female action hero #letterboxd

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hchildren · 3 years

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HELMUT

The long awaited son, Helmut Christian, was born on October 2, 1935. “There the little chap lies: he looks like a Goebbels. I’m happier than I could imagine. I could go round smashing things out of sheer joy. A boy!” proud Joseph wrote into his diary.

On the day of Helmut's first birthday, Joseph bought his wife a costly ring.

In October 1937, when two-year-old Helmut answered him back, Goebbels paddled the lad, though reluctantly. "He doesn't give in", Joseph noted indulgently on his diary. "Not a bad sign!".

In the summer of 1938, Goebbels described his son as a "stubborn little ne'er do-well". However, the same day of Helmut's fifth birthday (1939), Joseph described him as a "nice, clever boy. He gives us all such a huge amount of fun.” In his diary, he called his son a "Clown".

Helmut studied a great deal of history and his father lectured him at length on the interrelation of historical events, although the boy was altogether too young to grasp its meaning. When his teacher at the Lanke primary school reported to his parents that his promotion to a higher form was doubtful, the atmosphere at home became very stormy, This for his father was unthinkable. He shouted angrily at the little boy and made him tremble, threatening him with dire punishment unless he did better. Magda intervened. She herself and the governess took the little dreamer in hand two, three, four, five hours a day. Both understood him and managed to shake him out of his dreamy ways into reality, with the remarkable result that he was not only promoted but gained astonishingly good marks. Käthe Hubner, Helmut’s 1943-1945 governess remembers “Helmut had once received from my lessons. It was only a few weeks, where I gave him private tuition”.

Once in 1942, the newsreel camera found him in the classroom of the village school. ‘Twelve birds sitting in a row, Helmut Goebbels!’ the teacher challenged. ‘A huntsman shoots one dead. How many are left?’ After much coaxing and flubbing while a forest of young hands waved around him, Helmut eventually arrived at a plausible answer: ‘Eleven?’ ‘Wrong!’ answered the teacher triumphantly. ‘None! The rest all fly away when the gun goes off!’ Helmut offered a goofy smile through his protruding upper teeth.

In this newsreel footage, Helmut appeared sitting on his school desk with his best friend, Georg Schertz. Georg, who was Helmut’s age, was also his neighbor in Schwanenwerder. They both attended the elementary school in Nikolassee in 1941 and then in Wannsee. The two boys were very good friends and used to play together after school. In fact, Georg was the only boy of the same age in Schwanenwerder. However, Georg’s mother was worried about her son’s close friendship with Helmut. Therefore, she once told Magda: “My husband was dismissed by your husband’s government from his civil servant job." Magda Goebbels smiled: "Yes, do you think we didn't know that? But the children have nothing to do with it.”

“Once,” says Georg, “I was with Helmut at an early evening film screening at the Goebbels estate. A propaganda strip was shown in which Russian soldiers were mowed down by German machine guns in Winter, and the snow was stained with Russian blood.” Georg believes it was a color film. And he can't forget that Magda Goebbels asked her husband if that was something suitable for children. To which he replied: "If you can't see it, you should close your eyes."

Georg invited his friend Helmut to his tenth birthday on April 24, 1945. For fear of hostilities, his parents had decided to hold the party earlier on April 20. But on this day, Hitler's last birthday, the Goebbels family moved out of Schwanenwerder, to the Fuhrerbunker. "We didn't believe they murdered their own children at first. My parents thought it was a ruse, Helmut and his sisters had been secretly taken away to South America...”. More than 70 years after Helmut’s death, Georg remembered him through tears: “Helmut was a highly introverted, a slightly shabby boy. He has been with me, inside me, all my life.”

Magda once described the temperaments of five of her children to her sister-in-law Eleanore (Ello) Quandt by describing how each would react to learning they had been deceived by their spouse. "Helmut would never believe that his wife would deceive him."

In 1940, Goebbels described his son as "still the plump, phlegmatic little chap". In fact, he seemed worried about his only son, who in comparison with his elder sisters was more distracted. However, it is curious that in October, 1941, Goebbels blamed her daughters for this: “Helmut has reached the age of 6 (…) It is essential for him to be in contact with other group of boys, because nothing good comes out from a boy that is always surrounded by girls”.

In July 1942, Joseph took advantage of an official trip to Bavaria, to visit a Nazi Party school close to Felfading and decided that he would “enroll Helmut when he is old enough”.

Käthe Hübner, said Helmut’s character "was especially dear to my heart. Perhaps because he was a little girlish and was not enough for the demands of his father to him". Helmut was considerate and sensitive, a dreamer. This did not suit his father. In fact, Auguste Behrend, Magda's mother, recorded on her memmoirs that Helmut had no greater ambition than to become a Berlin subway driver. Mrs. Behrend also remembered how once Joseph found Magda had dressed Helmut in a frilly silk blouse, and he snapped at her "That's not right for a boy," sending his son off to change. "We are not the Ribbentrops or Görings. People expect different of us!."

According to his autopsy, Helmut had blue-gray eyes, was 1'36 meters tall and had the wire brace around his upper teeth (they had always protruded just like his father's). Helmut was nine years old at the time of his death.

#helmut goebbels #goebbels children #hchildren #HELMUT

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weekendwarriorblog · 4 years

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The Weekend Warrior 10/16/20: SYNCHRONIC, FRENCH EXIT, TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7, LOVE AND MONSTERS, HONEST THIEF, THE KID DETECTIVE and More!

After the last couple weeks, I really need a break, which is why I’m writing most of this in transit to Columbus, Ohio to see my mother, sister and all (or some) of the friends that I made during my sabbatical to the city seven years ago for cancer treatment.

On, and look... Variety wrote about the movie theater chains and NATO lobbying Governor Cuomo to reopen movie theaters, showing that there’s been no proof of any cases leading back to movie theaters. (And more from The Hollywood Reporter…) New York leads and the world follows? More like ED leads and the world follows. Been saying this shit for months now and putting up with all sorts of needless abuse for it.

This week’s “Featured Flick” is actually a movie coming to theaters on October 23, but since I’m not sure I’m writing a column next week, I’m gonna review it this week! Cool? The movie is SYNCHRONIC (Well Go USA), and it’s the follow-up to Aaron Moorehead and Justin Benson’s amazing sci-fi film The Endless from a few years back. This ome stars Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan as parademics in New Orleans who have been coming across a series of bodies that have died in gruesome ways, all connected by a designer drug they were all taking.

I’ll just say right from the start that I loved almost everything about this movie from the amazing performances by Mackie and Dornan to the entire look and tone of the movie, which shows the duo taking huge steps forward as filmmakers, particularly Benson as a screenwriter. Unfortunately, I’m not sure what I can say about the movie and its plot without spoiling other’s enjoyment. I will say that it involves a designer drug and time travel and Mackie’s character has something odd about his brain that makes him better suited to figure out what is happening to the victims than others might be. Also, Dornan’s character Dennis has family issues, particularly with his daughter Brianna (Ally Ioannides), who disappears mysteriously, but it’s so nice seeing Katie Aselton as Dennis’ wife, as well as in another movie out this week.

I’ll also say that people who watch this movie will inevitably make comparisons to the work of Alex Garland and maybe even the more-versed ones might see a little of David Cronenberg’s Videodrome in the film’s trippy nature. The thing is that the movie is super-smart, and it’s obvious that Moorehead and Benson must have done a lot of research to make every aspect of it feel authentic. It’s just amazing what this duo can do with a small fraction of the money that Christopher Nolan had to make Tenet, and yet, they can create a complex and unique premise that’s actually easy to understand. Things like the camerawork, the music and sound design all add to the amazing tone and the mood that the duo have created.

I also think it’s Mackie’s best role and performance in many years, maybe even going back to The Hurt Locker, so as a long-time fan, I’m glad he connected with Moorehead/Benson to show that he’s more than capable of leading a movie like this.

Again, Synchronic will be in movie theaters and drive-ins NEXT Friday, October 23, but I want to give you an advance heads up, because Synchronic is likely to be the most original sci-fi or genre film you see this year. If you can’t get to the drive-in and don’t feel comfortable going to a movie theater, then I’m sure it will be on digital soon enough, but you definitely shouldn’t miss it!

Next up is Aaron Sorkin’s THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO SEVEN, streaming on Netflix starting Friday and the movie I was most looking forward to seeing this week. I was such a huge fan of Brett Morgen’s Chicago 10 documentary, which opened Sundance in 2007, especially with how he recreated the court trials using animation and a talented roster of voice actors including Hank Azaria, Mark Ruffalo and Geoffrey Wright. Sorkin has just as an impressive list of actors for his version, including Mark Rylance, Eddie Redmayne, Sacha Baron Cohen, Frank Langella, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and many more.

If you don’t know about the protests outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago – you see, back in those days, the Democrats were the bad guys… how times have changed!! Those protests led to a number of arrests but a few years later, the federal government charged a number of individuals with inciting the riot. The accused include Black Panther leader Bobby Seale, played by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II from Aquaman and Watchmen, Abbie Hoffman (Cohen), FBI agent Tom Hayden (Eddie Redmayne), Jerry Rubin (Jeremy Strong), David Dellinger (John Carroll Lynch) and two more. The six white guys are defended by Mark Rylance’s William Kunstler, who faces the tough Judge Hoffman (Langella) who is not putting up with any guff from these young revolutionaries.

All of the characters are quickly introduced with a quick-cut opening montage with actual newsreel footage, but then we’re quickly moved to a meeting to the Attorney General (Keaton) with the trial’s prosecutor (Gordon-Levitt). From there, we’re right into the trial about 16 minutes into the movie, although Sorkin frequently cuts back to the actual day of the Chicago protest to recreate what happened as testimony is given. Probably the part that will have the most impact and resonance is the way Seale was mistreated compared to the others, getting so riled up at the judge that the judge orders him chained and gagged. The trial would end up taking place for almost 7 months even though the results were eventually overturned.

This really is perfect material for Sorkin, and maybe if I hadn’t seen Chicago 10 first, I would have been a lot more fascinated by the trial sequences, though Morgen did an equally great job working from the transcripts. Basically, what happened happened. Where Sorkin’s screenplay and film excels is showing what’s going on outside the courtroom, whether it’s the recreations or just conversations taking place between the plaintiffs. As might be expected from Sorkin, the screenplay is great with lots of fast talking, making for a movie that moves at a kinetic pace for its two hours.

If I had to pick a few of the best performances, I’d probably focus on Cohen’s Abbie Hoffman, which is more than just an accent, he and Strong’s Rubin bantering back and forth like a seasoned Vaudeville act; Rylance’s Kunstler is spot-on, and Langella is just great as the crusty judge, the film’s only true antagonist. I also appreciated John Carroll Lynch and in fact, all the performances, although I felt that with so many characters, Sorkin wasn’t able to give Bobby Seale the time his story truly needed. Still, I would be shocked if this isn’t considered a SAG Ensemble frontrunner.

Ultimately, The Trial of the Chicago 7 is a fine recreation of a certain moment in history that still feels relevant and timely fifty years later, even if it’s so heavy at times you either need to focus or, like me, watch it on Netflix in two sittings. I still liked Steve McQueen’s movie Mangrove that takes place in a similar era and also culminates in a trial just a little bit better.

Before we get to the rest of this week’s new movies, I have one last review from the New York Film Festival, and it’s the closing night film, FRENCH EXIT, from director Azazel Jacobs and writer Patrick Dewitt, who has adapted his own book. The film stars Michelle Pfeiffer as Frances Price, a Manhattan widow from wealth who discovers she has no more money, just as her son Malcolm (Lucas Hedges with longer hair than usual) has decided to marry his girlfriend Susan (Imogen Poots) though he hasn’t told his mother that yet. With no other options, Francis takes her son on a ship to live in Paris for a while at the home of one Mme. Renard (Valarie Mahaffey), an elderly woman who is a genuine fan of Francis and welcomes them as her guests.

This is one of those ensemble character dramedies that I wouldn’t even be able to begin to tell you why you should see it unless you miss seeing Pfeiffer in a semi-decent performance, but one that doesn’t do much as the film itself is so boring and insufferably pretentious most of the time I’m not sure I can even recommend it for that.

Jacobs and Dewitt previous made the movie Teri maybe ten years ago, and I was never really a fan, so I’m not sure why I thought that Dewitt adapting his own book would bear better results. Once Frances and Malcolm get to Paris, there’s just an influx of odd characters who show up, some who have more impact than others. I liked seeing Danielle Macdonald as a psychic medium the duo meet on the ship across the Atlantic who Malcolm bonks. She’s brought back when Frances wants her to conduct a séance to communicate with her late husband who she thinks is now inhabiting an omni-present cat. Like everything else, the relationship between Malcolm and Susan and how that’s affected by her meeting a new guy just never goes anywhere.

For the most part, the whole thing is just dull and uninteresting, and so pretentious it never really leads to anything even remotely memorable. I have no idea why the New York Film Festival would decide to close with this one. (Although the 58th NYFF is over, some of the movies will hit its Virtual Cinema soon, so keep an eye out! For instance, this Friday, FilmLinc begins a Pietro Marcello retrospective as well as showing his latest film Martin Eden in FilmLInc’s Virtual Cinema.)

Liam Neeson stars in Mark Williams’ HONEST THIEF (Open Road), a crime-thriller in which he plays Tom Carter, the uncaught robber behind 12 bank robberies who decides to settle down with Kate (Grey’s Anatomy) Walsh’s Annie Wilkins, who he meets while renting a storage space to hide all the money he’s stolen. After a year of things getting serious with Annie, Tom decides to retire so he calls the FBI and says he’s ready to give back the 9 million, but two crooked FBI agents (one played by Jai Courtenay, the other by Anthony Ramos) decide they’re going to take the money instead. Their plan to steal the money Tom’s trying to return leads to a number of deaths, including putting Annie in the hospital. When that happens, Tom has had enough, and honestly, there’s no one better at getting revenge than Neeson. (Did we mention that Carter is ex-Marine? I mean, of course he is!)

Many will go into Honest Thief expecting the typical Neeson action revenge flick ala Taken or maybe one of his high-concept thrillers, but Honest Thief isn’t nearly that exciting. It starts out fairly slow and dry with no real crime or action elements, although Williams does throw them in from time to time. The whole thing is pretty dry, and it’s a good 54 minutes before we get to the revenge aspect of the story and that’s after a lot of bad decisions being made across the board. Anyone who is still wondering how Jai Courtney has a career won’t be changing that decision by his turn as the villain, and it’s a lot odd when the movie tries to make a sympathetic character out of his partner, played by Ramos.

Regardless, any elements that make Honest Thief unique from other Neeson action movies are quickly tossed aside for the same usual cliches, and the action scenes aren’t even that great. While Honest Thief may not be an awful or unwatchable movie, it’s probably not the action movie you might be expecting from Neeson – more like a bargain basement The Fugitive with one plot decision that almost kills the whole movie.

Delayed a number of times and now dumped to PVOD (with minimal theatrical) is Paramount’s LOVE AND MONSTERS, which is written by the prolific Bryan Duffield (The Babysitter, Spontaneous), directed by Michael Matthews and produced by Shawn Levy’s 21 Laps Entertainment. In the movie, Dylan O’Brien plays Joel Dawson, a young man surviving the apocalypse with a small community after the government’s plot to blast a couple asteroids heading to earth backfires. Instead, it creates giant, carnivorous monsters out of the earth’s animals who eliminate 95% of the earth’s human population. (We learn all of this through a Zombieland-like animated prequel getting us up to speed.) Before the earth fell into disarray, Joel was in love with Jessica Henwick’s Aimee, but they were separated by the fateful events. Seven years later, they’re reconnected via radio and Joel has sworn to travel the 85 miles across the creature-covered wasteland to reunite with her. Hence, the title “Love and Monsters.” Get it?

I actually didn’t hate this movie, although it’s not really a family film or one meant for young kids, because it’s PG-13 for a reason, including mild violence i.e. people being chomped by monsters, and some sexuality. Dylan O’Brien does a decent job carrying it, but it relies just as much on the other people he meets, particularly Michael Rooker’s Clyde and his young ward Minnow, played by Ariana Greenblatt, the latter who is such a scene-stealer that it’s disappointing they’re only in the movie for a small chunk. They’re probably the funniest part of the movie.

I like giant monsters and these ones are certainly … interesting. They seem to have been toned down a bit maybe to be more kid-friendly, more like the kid-friend Godzilla than the terror we’ve seen in recent incarnations. There are also a number of great action set-pieces, and some good post-Apocalyptic ideas we haven’t seen, especially when Duffield’s dark sense of humor is able to come out and keep things fun.

Still, Love and Monsters is not a kids’ movie, and there’s something about it that might make people wish the filmmaker just went full-on R, because going further towards PG would have made even the best parts quite painful to get through. As it is, Love and Monsters is a suitably fine boy and his dog adventure – oh, did I mention the dog? – that would make a perfectly fine streaming movie.

We’ll get back to some of the other theatrical releases in a bit, but I wanted to get to two movies that were pleasant surprises, maybe because I went into them with absolutely zero expectations.

I wasn’t really sure what to think about Cooper Raiff’s SH#!%HOUSE (IFC Films) at first, maybe because it’s title is a little off-putting and not really particularly representative of what the movie is. Raiff himself plays Alex Malmquist, a fairly new arrival at his college but already missing home and his mother (Amy Landecker) and not really adjusting to the crazy college lifestyle as exemplified by his roommate Sam (Logan Miller). After a party at a frat called “Shithouse” (hence the title), Alex meets and connects with his dorm’s R.A. Maggie (Dylan Gelula) and the two spend the night bonding and hanging out.

Obviously, someone at IFC Films loves these platonic indie two-handers about people meeting and hanging out over the course of a night, because Shithouse is the second such movie after Olympic Dreams earlier in the year. They also must know that I’m a sucker for these kinds of semi-rom-coms, because just like with that other movie, I totally ate up everything Raiff was trying to do and say with his movie. The chemistry between the two leads is undeniable, and maybe it won’t be a surprise that Gelula also appeared in Raiff’s previous movie.

As with any relationship, things do come to an end, and this one crashes and burns in a very sad way for Alex the very next day. Maggie starts to pretend she doesn’t even know him, and she ignores his incessant texts saying how much he enjoyed their night together. Boy, I have been there back in my reckless and romantic days of youth.

At first, I wasn’t that into Raiff as an actor – remember what I’ve said about filmmakers casting themselves? – but Alex definitely grew on me. Gelula is absolutely amazing, and frankly, I can see someone “discovering” her in ten years and becoming a new Parker Posey, Kate Lynn Sheil or other similar indie ingenue.

The combination of the two is what makes Shithouse such a special experience, since their situations are quite relatable and Raiff does a great job with the characterization in his writing to make this quite enjoyable to see how things will resolve themselves.

I also wasn’t quite prepared for how much I’d enjoy Steve Byrne’s THE OPENING ACT (RLJEfilms), maybe because I was unfamiliar with Byrne, and as usual, I didn’t read the description of the movie before sitting down to watch it. If I did, I would have known that Byrne is a stand-up comic and presumably this movie is somewhat based on situations that have happened to him. It stars Jimmy O. Yang from Crazy Rich Asians (a great comic in his own right) as Willy Chu, a young comic who has always dreamed of making it in stand-up but instead, has been stuck trying to get slots at an open mic night, while holding down a day job working at an insurance company. One day, his friend (Ken Jeong) sets him up for an MC gig in Pennsylvania at the Improv where his idol Billy G (Cedric the Entertainer) will be performing, so Willy quits his job to pursue his dream.

Much of Byrne’s movie deals with Billy’s “adventure” in Pennsylvania with the club’s womanizing featured act (played by SNL’s Alex Moffatt) and trying to face the struggles of stand-up in hopes of getting to the next level. There have been better movies about the subject, like Mike Birbiglia’s Sleepwalk with You, but Byrne’s film is a nice addition, particularly because Yang plays such a likeable, benevolent character you want to see him do well even after he crashes and bombs on a Saturday night and is at risk of losing the Improv gig.

It’s obvious that Byrne pulled in a lot of favors from friends to get such a great cast of comics – even getting Whitney Cumming to make a cameo – but the likes of Bill Burr actually take on key roles, like Willy’s boss in that case. Moffatt is particularly hilarious expanding on some of his outrageous SNL characters to play a stand-up who actually does help Willy, even as he puts him in pretty awful situations. Cedric also gives another fantastic performance as Willy’s idol who gives him the cold shoulder at first but eventually comes around and offers him the mentoring that Willy needs.

The Opening Act isn’t anything particularly revelatory, but it is thoroughly entertaining, and a nice little indie that I hope people will discover for themselves, especially those who like (or perform) stand-up.

Edward James Olmos directs THE DEVIL HAS A NAME (Momentum Releasing) starring the great Oscar-nominated David Strathairn as almond farmer Fred Stern, who has been running his orchard for three decades with trusty second Santiago, played by Olmos himself. Things are going well until they notice that some of the trees are rotting. It turns out they’re being poisoned by the water that’s been sullied by crude oil run-off from the nearby Shore Oil rigs. Around the same time, an opportunist named Alex Gardner, played by Haley Joel Osment, offers Fred a very low-ball offer to buy the farm, though Fred suspects something is up, and sure enough, Shore Oil is responsible.

Another movie I didn’t know what to expect other than a few cursory elements is this movie “based on a true story” movie about the little farmer taking on “The Man.” In this case, Shore Oil is represented by Kate Bosworth’s Gigi Cutler, a tough exec. at the corporation who thinks their lawyers (one of them played by Katie Aselton!) can crush this local troublemaker. When Stern’s lawyer (Martin Sheen) sues the oil company for 2 billion, they need to start taking things seriously, bringing in a tough “fixer” played by Pablo Schreiber.

I’m not sure where to begin with this movie that certainly has noble intentions in telling this story but suffers from quite a few issues, mostly coming from the script. I was a little concerned once I knew the premise, because I was not a huge fan of Todd Haynes’ Dark Water from last year, although I did enjoy the Krasinski-Damon-Van Sant ecological venture, Promised Land. This one falls somewhere in between, and probably its biggest issue is that it tries to create some humor out of the erratic behavior of the characters played by Bosworth and Schreiber; both performances are so off-the-rails at times it regularly takes you out of Fred’s story. (Osment is also pretty crazy but at least he fits better into his role.) Strathairn is great and well-cast, and Olmos is equally good, and I imagine that it’s partially because many of their scenes are together, allowing Olmos to direct with his acting. Aselton and Sheen are also decent, especially in the courtroom scenes.

Oh, and did I mention that Alfred Molina plays the Big Boss, who is interrogating Cutler as a needless framing device? Yeah, there’s a lot of characters, and when you hold this up against something like The Trial of Chicago 7, it’s just obvious that the film has too many elements for any filmmaker to be able to juggle at once.

Because of this, The Devil Has A Name is an erratic real-life dramedy that’s too all over the place in terms of tone, it ends up shooting itself in the foot by trying (and failing) to be funny despite the serious subject matter.

Next up is 2 HEARTS (Silver Lion Films/ Freestyle Releasing), another movie based on a true story from the Hool Brothers, who I really wasn’t very familiar with. I assumed this was going to be a faith-based movie, and maybe in some ways it is, but not really. It essentially tells two stories set in different time periods that you assume will somehow be connected. Ooh, boy.

First, there’s Jacob Elordi of Euphoria and The Kissing Booth – neither of which I’ve seen, mind you – who plays Chris Gregory, a college kid who connects in a meet-cute way with Tiera Skovbye’s Sam. Before we get too far into their story, we cut back to what looks like Cuba in the ‘50s and 60s, and meet Jorge Bolivar (Adan Canto), the son of an alcohol magnate, a soccer player who suffers a serious lung issue that puts him in the hospital. Years later, Jorge is travelling to Miami when he meets Radha Mitchell’s Leslie working as a flight attendant.

Both guys are pretty suave smooth-talking pick-up artists, and the movie spends almost an hour cutting between two very corny and cheesy romance stories that really don’t offer much in terms of story. Instead, it keeps following Chris and Sam’s life as they have kids, taking forever to get to the connection between the stories. I was getting pretty bored of the movie, but I felt like I had to stick it out to see what happens.

When you call a movie “2 Hearts,” you kind of expect it to be about a heart transplant of some kind, right? But no, it’s actually about a dual lung transplant that Jorge receives. Want to take a wild guess who the donor is? I certainly don’t want to spoil what happens, but for a movie that spends a good hour setting up the relationships between the two men and their pretty blondes with ups and downs that makes it seem like a Nicholas Sparks movie, it really throws a spanner into the fairy tale with all the melodrama that’s to come. It’s such a whiplash in terms of tone it pretty much destroys any chance of one enjoying the movie for what it is. It also loses a lot without Elordi, since the actors who play his family aren’t very good at all.

I had to actually look up the story to see how much if it was true, only to learn that Jorge was based on Jorge Bacardi who actually received a double lung transplant from one Christopher Gregory, inspiring him to create the Gabriel House of Care. The problem is that the time periods get so messed up by setting one story decades in the past. Using the same actors to play the people over that time with pretty shabby make-up just makes things that much more confusing. The big problem is that it spends so much time avoiding the actual plot and point of making the movie that by the time it gets to it, you just don’t care about the characters anymore.

The whole thing is very by the books and predictable, but ultimately, it’s hard to believe any of it, despite it being based on a true story. If you go into this movie expecting love and romance and all that kind of mushy stuff from the title, you’re likely to be disappointed when the movie finally gets to its point. (In other words, it could have used some giant monsters.)

Here’s another movie that I didn’t really know what to expect going in and that probably should have helped me enjoy it more… if it was anything resembling a good movie. Picked up at the Toronto Film Festival where it premiered last month, Evan Morgan’s THE KID DETECTIVE (Sony) stars Adam Brody as Abe Appelbaum, the “kid detective” of the titles, who as a child was one of those super-smart kids who have the deductive powers to help the people in his community, but as a 32-year-old, he just isn’t taken as seriously any more. When a high school girl named Caroline (Sophie Nélisse) comes to Abe to find out who murdered her boyfriend, Abe finally realizes that he has his first grown-up case, though he’s still obsessed with the disappearance of the mayor’s daughter (and his kid receptionist) Gracie many years earlier.

I’m sure there’s gonna be people out there who watch and appreciate The Kid Detective for what it is, a wry and slightly clever noir pastiche pseudo-comedy, but anyone who has seen Rian Johnson’s first film Brick or the underrated Mystery Team (starring Donald Glover very early in his career) might feel that this doesn’t live up to either. Besides the fact that Brody really hasn’t developed much personality as an actor, the film rolls along with a fairly flat, deadpan tone that just never gets remotely exciting. The humor is subdued and yet it feels like everyone is constantly trying too hard, particularly Morgan, while at the same time not really taking any chances. This is a movie that could have been edgier but instead, it milks its flimsy high-concept premise as long as possible before giving up.

Like Love and Monsters, Sony is releasing The Kid Detective into theaters on Friday, and hopefully parents will check that rating before assuming it’s a kid flick. Although there isn’t so much bad language or anything that wouldn’t warrant a PG… other than the fact that it’s not particularly funny or even entertaining and kids will be super-bored.

I can’t believe there’s still more! Amazon’s “Welcome to the Blumhouse” anthology series continues this week with two more movies in the series of eight, which you can now watch on Prime Video:

Easily my favorite of the four movies I’ve seen is Zu Quirke’s NOCTURNE (Amazon), which follows a pair of twins, Julie (Sidney Sweeney) and Vivian (Madison Iseman), who are both competitive concert pianists at the Lindberg Academy, although Vivian is clearly the better, as she’s heading off to Julliard while Julian is taking a gap year.

Before we meet them, we see a young violist jumping off the balcony to her death for some reason, and we learn that she was the finalist to play a concerto, so now that slot is open and both Julie and her sister desperately want it.

Nocturne is certainly more like the horror movies we expect from Blumhouse, which is both good and bad. The good is that it is indeed quite scary as Quirke’s team uses really eerie lighting effects and other things to create suspense. But there’s also an artiness to what Quirke does that elevates Nocturne above the normal high-concept horror-thriller.

Quirke, who also wrote the film, delivers all the characterization you expect from a good horror film so that you really care about the characters, and she’s put together such a fine cast, particularly Sweeney who has to run a gamut of emotions as Julie. I also like Rodney To as Julie’s tough instructor Wilkins

Again, I won’t say too much more about the actual plot, although if you can imagine a Faustian bargain and how that plays out for those around Julie, you can probably understand why a super-fan of The Omen might dig what Quirke did in this environment.

The fourth movie in the “Welcome to the Blumouse” series is EVIL EYE (Amazon), from Indo-American filmmakers Elan and Rajeev Dassani, a relatively innocuous thriller based around the relationship between Pallavi (Sunita Mani from last week’s Save Yourselves! and GLOW) and her mother Usha, played by Sarita Choudhury. Pallavi is in her late 20s and single and her mother keeps wanting to get her set-up with a nice man, as a good Indian mother is wont to do. When Pallavi meets Sandeep (Omar Maskati), things are going well since he has money and her mother thinks her daughter has hit the jackpot, until she realizes that Sandeep has a dark secret.

Here’s another thriller where it’s really tough to talk about the plot, because obviously the filmmakers want the story to unfold in the specific way it was written. Apparently, this one was once an Audible story, and the first thing I noticed was how amazing Sunita Mani looks from her fairly glammed down roles in other things. I think she’s just wearing make-up and has her styled different but I’m not sure I would have known it was the same actor in Save Yourselves! Because I had to do a double take.

The problem with Evil Eye, and it’s been a problem with some of the other “Welcome to the Blumhouse” movies, is that it isn’t necessarily what I’d consider horror. It really plays a lot more like a romantic drama, other than the fact that Pallavi’s mother has visions and believes in astrology enough to send her daughter trinkets to protect her from the “evil eye.” In fact, the movie just gets weirder and weirder, as it starts introducing supernatural elements, and without giving the big plot twist away, it does expect one to believe in reincarnation.

I wish I could have liked this more, but it really seems like it would be better suited for a show like “The Outer Limits” or “The Twilight Zone,” since the premise is stretched so think for about 30 minutes longer than necessary. I think the filmmakers did perfectly fine with what they had to work with – the two main actresses are just fab – but I think I’d need to see some of their other work to see if the issues I had were just cause the story isn’t that interesting or by their limitations in making it.

(And I promise that I do have a feature on all the filmmakers from the first four “Welcome to the Blumhouse” series coming over at Below the Line, but it’s been a pretty tough piece to write.)

I reviewed Alex Gibney’s new doc Totally Under Control (Neon/Participant), co-directed with Ophelia Harutyunyan and Suzanne Hillinger, in last week’s column but it’s now available to watch On Demand and then it will be on Hulu starting next Tuesday, October 20. Obviously, everyone wanted to get this out there and make sure people see it before they get too in-deep with the election.

I also reviewed David Byrne’s American Utopia (HBO), directed by Spike Lee, a few weeks back, but it will be on HBO and presumably HBO Max on Sunday night. Not as big an event as Disney+’s Hamilton but still worth watching, especially if you’re a fan of Byrne or his band the Talking Heads, because it actually acts as a nice counterpoint bookend to the late Jonathan Demme’s fantastic Stop Making Sense, one of the best concert documentaries ever made, or at least top 5. I’m bummed I missed Byrne’s show on Broadway, and it doesn’t sound like Broadway will be coming back anytime soon so I guess this HBO documentation is the best any of us can wish for.

Of the movies I didn’t have time to watch this week, the two that I’m hoping to still get to are two docs: Inna Blockhina’s SHE IS THE OCEAN (Blue Fox Entertainment) and Rick Korn’s HARRY CHAPIN: WHEN IN DOUBT, DO SOMETHING (Greenwich). She Is the Ocean explores the lives of nine women who all have a passion for the ocean. The Harry Chapin doc may be more self-explanatory, and I wish I was a bigger fan of Chapin, the famed singer/songwriter/activist, because maybe I would have watched this movie earlier. (But seriously, look at how many movies came out this week, when I was hoping it would be “slower”!) Also, I’m a little bit interested in the K-Pop doc #BlackPinkLightUpTheSky that will air on Netflix, just because, I dunno, I like adorable, young Asian women, so sue me?

Premiering on Disney+ this Friday is Justin Baldoni’s CLOUDS, starring Fin Argus as musician Zach Sobiech, who has only months to live when his cancer starts spreading, but he follows his dream to make an album and becomes a viral music phenomenon. I’m not sure if this is a true story but it certainly sounds a lot like a faith-based film called I Still Believe that hit theaters just before they all shut down due to the pandemic. Coincidence? I think not.

Also this week, the 32nd ANNUAL NEWFEST LGBTQ FILM FESTIVAL begins on Friday, running through October 27 with opening night being the well-regarded Ammonite, starring Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan, but it will be done as a drive-in, so I’m out. Over in Los Angeles, the AFI FEST starts on Thursday and runs through October 22, and that’s also showing a lot of cool festival/awards films that I haven’t had a chance to watch yet like The Father, I’m Your Woman and more. I missed my chance to get press accreditation, so yeah, I guess I’ll be waiting on that.

And then we get to all the movies that I didn’t have time to see or didn’t receive a screener, so here we go. This week’s unfortunate dumping ground:

Lupin III: The First (GKIDS) (This anime film is being released as a Fathom event on Oct. 18 – dubbed, and Oct. 21 – subtitled)

Belly of the Beast (I’ve actually heard good things about Erika Cohn’s doc about illegal sterilizations being conducted in a woman’s prison.)

Don’t Look Back (Gravitas Ventures)

Rom Boys: 40 Years of Rad (101 Films)

The Antidote (Cinetic/Brand New Story)

Monochrome: The Chromism (Tempest)

J.R “Bob” Dobbs and the Church of the Subgenius (Uncork’d)

Monster Force Zero (WildEye Releasing)

Ghabe (GVN Releasing)

The Accidental President (Intervention)

In Case of Emergency (Kino Lorber)

I’m not sure how much of a column I’m gonna write next week since I won’t have nearly as much time to watch movies or write about them in the coming week, while I’m in Colmbus. There are a couple high profile movies I hope to get to, so we’ll see what happens.

By the way, if you read this week’s column and have bothered to read this far down, feel free to drop me some thoughts at Edward dot Douglas at Gmail dot Com or drop me a note or tweet on Twitter. I love hearing from readers … honest!

#TheWeekendWarrior #Movies #Reviews #VOD #Streaming #Synchronic #TrialOfTheChicago7 #FrenchExit #LoveANdMonsters TheKidDetective #Nocturne #2Hearts #Shithout #THeDevilHasAName #TheOpeningAct

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There’s a desert valley in southern Jordan called Wadi Rum, or sometimes “the Valley of the Moon.” There are stone inscriptions in Wadi Rum that are more than 2,000 years old. Lawrence of Arabia passed through there during the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire. More recently, J. J. Abrams went there to film parts of the latest Star Wars movie, The Rise of Skywalker, because it’s largely uninhabited and starkly beautiful and looks plausibly alien, and one of the things that has always made the Star Wars movies feel so real—as if they had a real life of their own that continues on out beyond the edges of the screen—is the way they’re shot on location, with as few digital effects as possible. George Lucas shot the Tatooine scenes from A New Hope in southern Tunisia. For Skywalker, it’s Wadi Rum.

They don’t do it that way because it’s easy. Abrams and his crew had to build miles of road into the desert. They basically had to set up a small town out there, populated by the cast and extras and crew—the creature-effects department alone had 70 people. The Jordanian military got involved. The Jordanian royal family got involved. There was sand. There were sandstorms, when all you could do was take cover and huddle in your tent and—if you’re John Boyega, who plays the ex-Stormtrooper Finn—listen to reggae.

But in a way that’s the whole point: you’re out there so the world can get up in your grill and make its presence felt on film. “It’s the things that you can’t anticipate—the imperfections,” says Oscar Isaac, who plays the Resistance pilot Poe Dameron. “It’s very difficult to design imperfection, and the imperfections that you have in these environments immediately create a sense of authenticity. You just believe it more.” When Isaac arrived in Wadi Rum for his first week of shooting, Abrams had set up a massive greenscreen in the middle of the desert. “And I was like, ‘J. J., can I ask you a question? I notice we’re shooting on greenscreen.’ And he’s like, ‘So why the hell are we in the desert?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah!’ And he said, ‘Well, because look: the way that the sand interacts with the light, and the type of shots you would set up—if you were designing the shot on a computer you would never even think to do that.’ There’s something about the way that the light and the environment and everything plays together.” It’s that something, the presence and the details and the analog imperfections of a real nondigital place, that makes Star Wars so powerful.

It was powerful enough to bring 65,000 people to Chicago in April for Star Wars Celebration, a fan convention where you could see a giant Stormtrooper head made out of 36,440 tiny Lego Stormtrooper mini-figures, which is a world record of some kind, though I’m not sure exactly what, and where people were dressed up as Muppets who were themselves dressed up as Star Wars characters. But the main event was the launch of the trailer for The Rise of Skywalker, which was held in a 10,000-seat arena and was such a big deal that even though the trailer was going to be released on the Internet literally seconds after it was over, I—an at least theoretically respectable member of the media—was not only tagged, wristbanded, escorted, and metal-detected, but sniffed by a K-9 unit before I could go in.

J.J. Abrams, alongside Stunt Coordinator Eunice Huthart, directs the Knights of Ren; elite fearsome enforcers of Kylo Ren’s dark will.

I sat down with Abrams a couple of hours later. For the occasion, he was wearing a suit so black and sharp, he could have been doing Men in Black cosplay, but his most distinctive feature is his dark curly hair, which is upswept in a way that is only slightly suggestive of devil horns. Abrams talks rapidly, as if he can barely keep up with the things his racing brain is telling him to say. When I told him that not only was Star Wars the No. 1 trending topic on Twitter, but that all 10 of the Top 10 trending topics were Star Wars–related, and that he personally was No. 5, he was visibly stunned.

Then he recovered enough to say: “Well, I aspire to No. 4.” (For the record, No. 4 was the late Supreme Leader Snoke, who frankly did seem beatable. If you’re curious, No. 11 was pro golfer Zach Johnson, who had just accidentally hit his ball with a practice swing at the Masters. Life goes on.)

Disney executives talk about how important it is to “event-ize” Star Wars movies; i.e., to make them feel not just like movies but like seriously momentous occasions. They won’t have much trouble with this one: The Rise of Skywalker isn’t just the last movie in the Star Wars trilogy that began in 2015 with The Force Awakens; it’s the last movie in a literal, actual trilogy of trilogies that started with the very first Star Wars movie back in 1977, which began the saga of the Skywalker family. The Rise of Skywalker will finally, after 42 years, bring that saga to an end.

FIRST LOOK Vanity Fair reveals Keri Russell as the masked scoundrel Zorri Bliss, seen in the Thieves’ Quarter of the snow-dusted world Kijimi.

We all thought the story was over in 1983 with Return of the Jedi, and then we really thought it was over in 2005 with Revenge of the Sith. But Star Wars has always been an unruly beast, too big and powerful (and profitable) to be contained in one movie, or even in a trilogy, or even in two trilogies, let alone numberless novels, TV shows, comics, video games, Happy Meals, and so on. Now Abrams has to gather all those threads and bring closure to a story that was started by somebody else, in an America that feels a very long time ago indeed. “That’s the challenge of this movie,” Abrams says. “It wasn’t just to make one film that as a stand-alone experience would be thrilling, and scary, and emotional, and funny, but one that if you were to watch all nine of the films, you’d feel like, Well, of course—that!”

Like a lot of things that we now can’t imagine life without, Star Wars came really close to never happening in the first place. In 1971, Lucas was a serious young auteur just five years out of film school at U.S.C. He had only one full-length movie on his résumé, and that was THX 1138, which is the kind of visionary but grindingly earnest science-fiction epic that only the French could love. (They were pretty much the only ones who did.) Everybody expected Lucas to go on and make serious, gritty 1970s cinema like his peers, Brian De Palma and Francis Ford Coppola. At the time Lucas and Coppola were actively planning a radical epic set in Vietnam with the provocative title Apocalypse Now.

FORCE MAJEURE First Order leaders General Hux (Domhnall Gleeson) and Allegiant General Pryde (Richard E. Grant) on the bridge of Kylo Ren’s destroyer.

But Coppola would have to finish that one on his own, because Lucas went a different way. “I had decided there was no modern mythology,” he said in 1997. “I wanted to take old myths and put them into a new format that young people could relate to. Mythology always existed in unusual, unknown environments, so I chose space.” Lucas tried to acquire the rights to Flash Gordon (that would’ve been a dark timeline indeed), but when he couldn’t, he came up with his own original science-fictional epic instead. He called it The Star Wars. Like The Facebook, it would have to shed a direct article on its way to glory.

Even though American Graffiti had made Lucas a bankable director, Star Wars still came together slowly. In the first draft, Luke was an old man, Leia was 14, and Han Solo was “a huge green-skinned monster with no nose and large gills.” Fox executives were baffled by Star Wars, and they squeezed Lucas relentlessly for time and money. We forget now how jerry-rigged the first movie was: the cantina aliens weren’t finished, and the monumental Star Destroyer that dominates the opening shot is, in reality, about three feet long. The Death Star interior is basically one set re-arranged several different ways. To make Greedo’s mouth move, the woman in the Greedo suit had to hold a clothespin in her mouth. “What I remember about working on the first film,” says John Williams, the legendary soundtrack composer, “is the fact that I didn’t ever think there would be a second film.” (He also, like everybody else, thought Luke and Leia were going to get together, so he wrote them a love theme.)

But wherever real mythology comes from, Lucas had gone there and brought something back alive. People wanted movies that gave them something to believe in instead of relentlessly autopsying the beliefs that had failed them. We’d had enough of antiheroes. We needed some anti-antiheroes. “I realized after THX that people don’t care about how the country’s being ruined,” Lucas said. “We’ve got to regenerate optimism.” Like American Graffiti, Star Wars is a work of profound nostalgia, a post-Vietnam, post-Watergate anthem of longing for the restoration of a true and just power in the universe—the return of the king. And at the same time it’s a very personal hero’s journey, about a boy who must put right the sins of his father and master the strange power he finds within himself, and in doing so become a man.

Star Wars is also an incredibly enduring vision of what it’s like to live in a world of super-advanced technology. Science fiction often ages badly, turning into kitsch or camp—just look at Flash Gordon—but Star Wars hasn’t. More than any filmmaker before him, Lucas successfully imagined what a science-fictional world would feel like to somebody who was actually inside it—which is to say, it would look as ordinary and workaday as the present. He even shot it like it was real, working close-in and mostly eschewing wide establishing shots, more like a documentary or a newsreel than a space opera. “It feels very grounded,” says Naomi Ackie, who’s making her Star Wars debut in Skywalker playing a character named Jannah, about whom she is allowed to say literally nothing. “There’s the kind of spectacular-ness, and the supernatural move-things-with-your-mind magic stuff, but then there’s also this really grounded, rugged nature where everything is distressed and old and kind of worn out and lived-in. And I think playing with those two ideas means that you get this feeling that it could almost be real. Like, in a galaxy far away, it could almost be the case that you could have this.”

When Lucas made the first Star Wars sequel, The Empire Strikes Back, he cheekily labeled it Episode V, then went back and re-labeled the first movie as Episode IV, as if the movies were an old-fashioned serial that the rest of us were all just tuning in to. Around that time, he also started talking about Star Wars as a nine-part epic—so in 2012, when Lucas retired and sold Lucasfilm to Disney, it wasn’t exactly heresy that Disney announced more movies. At the time, Kathleen Kennedy had just been named co-chairperson of Lucasfilm, and she tapped Abrams to direct the first Disney-owned post-Lucas Star Wars movie. It was a bit like saying, Make the lightning strike again, please. Exactly here, if you could. Oh, and could you also earn back that $4 billion we just spent to buy Lucasfilm? (Narrator voice: He could.)

At first blush, Abrams’s debut Star Wars movie, The Force Awakens, looked like an elaborate homage to the original. Just like in A New Hope, there’s a young Force-sensitive person on a poor desert planet—that’s Rey, played by Daisy Ridley—who finds a droid with a secret message that’s vital to the Rebellion (or wait, sorry, it’s the Resistance now). There’s a villain in a black mask, just like Darth Vader, except that it’s his grandson Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), né Ben Solo, son of Han and Leia. Kylo has a planet-killing weapon, much like the Death Star but way bigger, which becomes the target of a desperate attack by Resistance X-wings. There’s even a bar full of aliens.

Abrams also insisted on keeping to the analog aesthetic of the original trilogy: those aliens had to be latex and yak hair, not bits and bytes, and everything possible was shot on location using film cameras, not digital ones. Even Lucas had abandoned that approach by the time he made the second Star Wars trilogy, but many fans consider those movies to be a cautionary tale. “Famously, the prequels were mostly greenscreen environments,” Abrams says. “And that was George himself doing that, and it ended up looking exactly how he wanted it to look—and I always preferred the look of the original movies, because I just remember when you’re in the snow on Hoth, when you’re in the desert on Tatooine, and when you’re in the forests of Endor—it’s amazing. If you put a vaporator here, there, all of a sudden almost any natural location suddenly becomes a Star Wars location.”

But the more interesting thing about The Force Awakens and its successor, The Last Jedi, written and directed by Rian Johnson, was how they subtly complicated Lucas’s vision. Thirty years have gone by since the ending of Return of the Jedi, during which time the newly reborn Republic became complacent and politically stagnant, allowing the rise of the reactionary neo-imperial First Order, whose origins we will learn more about in Skywalker. “It was almost like if the Argentine Nazis had sort of got together and actually started to bring that back in some real form,” Abrams says. Just like that, the rules of the Star Wars universe changed. It wasn’t all over when the Ewoks sang. Obi-Wan Kenobi and all those Bothans had died in vain. Even Han and Leia split up. It’s all a little less of a fairy tale now.

The feather-haired godling Luke suffered the trauma of having a Padawan go bad on his watch. It’s an echo of what happened to his old mentor, Obi-Wan, with Anakin Skywalker, who became Darth Vader. But where Obi-Wan made peace with it, waiting serenely in the desert of Tatooine for the next Chosen One to arrive, Luke’s guilt curdled into shame. He hid himself away, so that his Chosen One, Rey, had to spend most of The Force Awakens searching for him, and then another whole movie convincing him with the help of Yoda’s Force ghost to keep the Jedi Order going at all. Star Wars arrived as an antidote to the disillusionment of the 1970s—but now, in its middle age, Star Wars is grappling with disillusionment of its own.

DESERT POWER Joonas Suotamo (Chewbacca), Ridley, Anthony Daniels (C-3PO), and John Boyega (Finn) await the call to action for a chase scene.

By dint of advanced Sith interrogation techniques, I was able to obtain valuable advance information about The Rise of Skywalker. Here it is: common emblem.

Anthony Daniels, who plays C-3P0, is the only actor who has appeared in all nine movies of the Star Wars triple trilogy, so if anybody’s entitled to leak, it’s him. Daniels says he loved the script for The Rise of Skywalker, but he didn’t get it until the last minute, right before shooting started, and for some reason he just couldn’t memorize his part. “My first line would not go in my head!” he says. In person Daniels is like a C-3P0 whose preferences have been reset to charming and voluble. “The line that I couldn’t say was two words: ‘common emblem.’ Common emblem, common emblem—I would say them thousands of times. My wife would say it back. I just couldn’t say them!”

Fortunately C-3P0’s mouth doesn’t move, so he could add the line in postproduction. Anyway, there’s the big scoop: “common emblem.” I don’t know what it means either. (Also I 100 percent guarantee that they will change the line before the movie comes out so that this scoop will end up being fake news.) Daniels also told me that C-3P0 does something in this movie that surprises everybody—but he wouldn’t say what. “He keeps his clothes on. It’s not like he suddenly does this thing, but …”

The only other member of the old guard on the set this time was Billy Dee Williams, who plays the charismatic Lando Calrissian. At 82, Williams has lost none of his roguish charm, but now it comes wrapped in a kind of magisterial dignity. People tend to remember Lando for the deal he cut with Vader in The Empire Strikes Back, rather than for his redemptive comeback in Return of the Jedi, and Williams appears to have spent the last 45 years defending him. “He’s a survivor. It’s expediency for him,” Williams says. “You know, he was thrown into a situation which he didn’t look for and he had to try to figure out how to deal with an entity which is more than just a human.” And, he adds, with the weary air of somebody who has spent way too much time justifying the behavior of a fictional character, “nobody died!”

HOT TAKE Members of the crew shade and shine Daniels, the only cast member to appear in all nine of the Skywalker films, while BB-8 looks on.

Chewbacca is still here, too, but it’s not the same man in the suit. The original actor was Peter Mayhew, a seven-foot-three-inch gentle giant who was working as a hospital orderly in London when Lucas cast him in the first movie. Mayhew retired after The Force Awakens, and he died on April 30 at 74. His replacement is Joonas Suotamo, a fresh-faced former professional basketball player from Finland who always wanted to be an actor but was hard to cast because he’s six feet 11 inches tall. “When I first met [Mayhew] he told me I was a wee bit too skinny,” Suotamo says. “But we also had a Wookiee boot camp, which lasted for a week. He told me all kinds of things about the moves that Chewbacca does, how they came to be and his reasoning behind them.” Suotamo has now played Chewbacca in four movies and enjoys it about as much as I’ve ever seen anybody enjoy anything. “It’s very much like silent-era film, with Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin,” he says. “He’s a mime character and that’s what he does, and I guess in that minimalism comes the beauty of the character.”

Other things we know about Skywalker: We can safely assume that the Resistance and the First Order are headed toward a final smash, which will be a heavy lift for the good guys because, at the end of The Last Jedi, the Resistance was down, way down, to a double handful of survivors. They’ll face a First Order who suffered a stinging but largely symbolic loss at the Battle of Crait, and who, I feel confident, have learned something from the previous eight movies. The Empire built and lost two Death Stars. The First Order has already lost one super-weapon in The Force Awakens. Presumably it won’t make the same mistake twice, twice.

But the stakes go even higher than that, cosmically high. Sources close to the movie say that Skywalker will at long last bring to a climax the millennia-long conflict between the Jedi Order and its dark shadow, the Sith.

HORSING AROUND Finn and new ally Jannah (Naomi Ackie), atop hardy orbaks, lead the charge against the mechanized forces of the First Order. “It’s extremely surreal to be in it,” says Ackie, “and see how it works from the inside.”

STAR CROSSED Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) and Rey battle it out with lightsabers in a stormy confrontation. Their Force-connection—what Driver calls their “maybe-bond”—will turn out to run even deeper than previously revealed.

The hottest area for speculation, however, is the identity of the titular Skywalker, because at this point there aren’t many Skywalkers left to rise. One is General Organa, the former Princess Leia, Luke’s sister—but Carrie Fisher, who plays her, passed away in 2016. That was a deeply painful loss for Abrams personally, but it also presented him with an impossible choice as a filmmaker. He needed Leia to tell the story, but Abrams didn’t feel like a digital Carrie Fisher could do the job, and there was no way Lucasfilm was going to re-cast the role.

But then a strange thing happened. Abrams remembered that there was some footage of Fisher left over from The Force Awakens, scenes that had been changed or cut entirely, and he dug them up. “It’s hard to even talk about it without sounding like I’m being some kind of cosmic spiritual goofball,” Abrams says, “but it felt like we suddenly had found the impossible answer to the impossible question.” He started to write scenes around the old footage, fitting Leia’s dialogue into new contexts. He re-created the lighting to match the way Fisher had been lit. Bit by bit, she found her place in the new movie. “It was a bizarre kind of left side/right side of the brain sort of Venn diagram thing, of figuring out how to create the puzzle based on the pieces we had.” Fisher’s daughter, Billie Lourd, appears in the movies as a Resistance officer named Lieutenant Connix, and at first Abrams deliberately wrote her out of the scenes in case it was too painful—but Lourd said no, she wanted to be in them. “And so, there are moments where they’re talking; there are moments where they’re touching,” Abrams says. “There are moments in this movie where Carrie is there, and I really do feel there is an element of the uncanny, spiritual, you know, classic Carrie, that it would have happened this way, because somehow it worked. And I never thought it would.”

The only other member of the surviving Skywalker bloodline—that we know of!—is Leia’s son and Luke’s former Padawan, the fallen Jedi Kylo Ren. Kylo probably isn’t capable of actual happiness, but things are definitely looking up for him: by the end of The Last Jedi he has taken control of the First Order and killed or at least outlived his actual father and both of his symbolic fathers-in-art, Luke and Supreme Leader Snoke. Sources at Disney also confirm that his long-rumored Knights of Ren will finally arrive in Skywalker. “And then he had been forging this maybe-bond with Rey,” Driver says, “and it kind of ends with the question in the air: is he going to pursue that relationship, or when the door of her ship goes up, does that also close that camaraderie that they were maybe forming?”

SANDBLAST Camera operator Colin Anderson readies a take for a chase sequence spotlighting the heroics of Chewbacca, BB-8, and Rey.

Darkness in the Star Wars movies tends to come from fear: for Anakin Skywalker, Kylo’s grandfather, it was his fear of losing his mother and his wife. After two movies it’s still not so easy to say exactly what Kylo Ren himself fears, even though he’s as operatically emo as Vader was stoic. He’s fixated on the past—he made a shrine to his own grandfather—but at the same time the past torments him. “Let the past die,” he tells Rey in The Last Jedi. “Kill it, if you have to. That’s the only way to become what you are meant to be.”

Presumably whatever’s eating at Kylo started in his childhood: maybe being the kid of literally the two coolest people in the galaxy isn’t as fun as it sounds. Driver—who has obviously thought this through with a lot of rigor—points out that, as cool as they are, Han and Leia are both obsessively committed to lifestyles (smuggling, rebelling) that don’t leave much room for kids. He also points out that, unlike Luke and Rey, Kylo never got to go on a nifty voyage of self-discovery. Instead he grew up under the crushing pressure of massive expectations. “How do you form friendships out of that?” Driver says. “How do you understand the weight of that? And if there’s no one around you guiding you, or articulating things the right way … it can easily go awry.” By the emotional logic that governs the Star Wars universe—and also our own—Kylo Ren is going to have to confront the past, and his fears, whatever they are, or be destroyed by them.

Where Lucas’s trilogies tended to follow the roots and branches of the Skywalker family tree—their personal saga was the saga of the galaxy writ small—the new movies have a slightly wider aperture and take in a new generation of heroes. There’s Rey, of course, who sources say will have progressed in her training since the end of The Last Jedi to the point where it’s almost complete. With that taken care of, all she has to do is reconstitute the entire Jedi Order from scratch, because as far as we know she’s the Last One.

If Kylo Ren can’t be redeemed it will almost certainly fall to Rey to put him down, in spite of their maybe-bond. Their relationship is the closest thing the new trilogy has to a star-crossed love story on the order of Han and Leia: a source close to the movie says that their Force-connection will turn out to run even deeper than we thought. They’re uniquely suited to understand each other, but at the same time they are in every way each other’s inverse, down to Kylo’s perverse rejection of his family, which is the one thing Rey craves most. “I think there’s a part of Rey that’s like, dude, you fucking had it all, you had it all,” Ridley says. “That was always a big question during filming: you had it all and you let it go.”

PUNCH IT! In a historic reunion, Lando Calrissian (Billy Dee Williams) retakes the helm of the Millennium Falcon, joined by Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac), Chewbacca, D-O, and BB-8. “He’s a survivor,” Williams says of Lando.

Rey is also, according to totally unsubstantiated Internet theories, a leading candidate to be the Skywalker of the title, pending some kind of head-snapping reveal about her ancestry. (For the record, the other leading unsubstantiated Internet theory has the “Skywalker” of the title referring to an entirely new order of Force users who will rise up and replace the Jedi.)

Rey seems ready for it all, or as ready as anybody could be. “It’s nice having that shot at the beginning of the teaser,” Ridley says, over avocado toast at a fancy Chicago hotel, “because I think it’s quite a good visual representation of where she is now: confident, calm, less fearful.… It’s still sort of overwhelming, but in a different way. It feels more right—less like inevitable and more like there’s a focus to the journey.” Focus is a good word for Rey: on-screen Ridley’s dramatic eyebrows form a wickedly sharp arrow of concentration. I asked Ridley what she’s thinking about when Rey is using her Force powers, and it turns out Rey seems focused because Ridley is actually seriously focused. “I literally visualize it. When I was lifting rocks I was visualizing the rocks moving. And then I was like, Oh, my God, I made it happen! And obviously there’s loads of rocks on strings, so, no, I didn’t. But I visualize that it’s really going on.” (That scene, which comes at the end of The Last Jedi, is another example of classic nondigital Star Wars effects: those were real rocks. “It was actually really amazing,” Ridley says. “It was sort of like a baby mobile.”)

There’s also Finn, the apostate Stormtrooper, played by the irrepressible Boyega, who in person practically vibrates with energy and speaks with a South London accent very different from Finn’s American one. In some ways Finn has gone through a complete character arc already: he confronted his past—by beating down his old boss, Captain Phasma—and found his courage and his moral center. He has had a tendency to panic, if not actively desert, in clutch situations, but at the Battle of Crait he proved that he was past that. “I think he’s just an active member of the Resistance now,” Boyega says. “Episode Eight, he couldn’t decide what team he was fighting for. But since then he’s made a clear decision.” (Cast members tend to refer to the Star Wars movies by their episode numbers: four is the original movie, seven is The Force Awakens, and so on.)

Finn still has to make a clear decision about his romantic situation, though. As Boyega put it at Star Wars Celebration: “Finn is single and willing to mingle!” The movies have been teasing his emotional connections with both Rey and the Resistance mechanic Rose Tico, played by Kelly Marie Tran, with whom he shared a fleeting battlefield kiss in The Last Jedi. Rose seems like the more positive choice, given that she stops Finn from deserting early in the movie and saves his life at the Battle of Crait, and that the precedents for romantic involvements with Jedi are extremely bad. Tran is the first Asian-American woman to play a major role in a Star Wars movie, and she has been the target of both racist and sexist attacks online. But she has come through them as a fan favorite: when she appeared onstage in Chicago, she got a standing ovation.

Finally there’s Poe, who has mostly struggled with his own cocky impulsiveness, because he’s a loose-cannon-who-just-can’t-play-by-the-rules. Poe will have to step up and become a leader, because the Resistance is seriously short on officer material. In fact, some of that transformation will already have happened where The Rise of Skywalker picks up, which is about a year after the end of The Last Jedi. “There has been a bit of shared history that you haven’t seen,” Isaac says. “Whereas in the other films, Poe is this kind of lone wolf, now he’s really part of a group. They’re going out and going on missions and have a much more familiar dynamic now.” Star Wars has always been about friendship as much as it is about romance, and as of the end of The Last Jedi, Rey, Finn, and Poe are all finally in the same place for the first time since The Force Awakens.

The Rise of Skywalker introduces some new players, too. There’s a tiny one-wheeled droid called D-O and a large banana-slug alien named Klaud. Oh, and Naomi Ackie, Keri Russell, and Richard E. Grant have all joined the cast, though, again, we know practically nothing about who they’re playing. Going from being outside the Star Wars leviathan to being right in its belly can be a dizzying experience for a first-timer. “I actually tried to do this thing while we were filming,” Ackie says, “where I’d go one day, walking through London without seeing a Star Wars reference somewhere. And you can’t do it. You really can’t. So it’s extremely surreal to be in it and see how it works from the inside.

WELL MET Jordanian locals play the Aki-Aki, natives of the planet Pasaana.

If anything, Star Wars is only getting more omnipresent. The franchise under Lucas was a colossus, but he still ran it essentially as a private concern. He could make movies or not, as his muse dictated—he was beholden to no shareholders. But Star Wars under Disney makes the old Star Wars look positively quaint. Between 1977 and 2005, Lucasfilm released six Star Wars movies; when Skywalker premieres in December, Disney will have released five Star Wars movies in five years. “I think there is a larger expectation that Disney has,” Kennedy says. “On the other hand, though, I think that Disney is very respectful of what this is, and right from the beginning we talked about the fragility of this form of storytelling. Because it’s something that means so much to fans that you can’t turn this into some kind of factory approach. You can’t even do what Marvel does, necessarily, where you pick characters and build new franchises around those characters. This needs to evolve differently.”

A useful example of that fragility might be the relatively modest performance of Solo: A Star Wars Story in 2018. Solo was a perfectly good Star Wars movie that has made almost $400 million worldwide—but it’s also, according to industry estimates, the first one to actually lose money. In response Disney has gently but firmly pumped the brakes: the first movie in the next Star Wars trilogy, which will be helmed by David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, the duo behind Game of Thrones, won’t arrive till Christmas of 2022, with further installments every other year after that. There’s no official word as to what stories they’ll tell, or when a second trilogy being developed by Rian Johnson will appear.

But even as the movies pause, Star Wars continues to colonize any and all other media. In addition to video games, comics, novels, cartoons, container-loads of merch, etc., there are not one but two live-action TV series in the pipeline for Disney+, Disney’s new streaming service: The Mandalorian, created by Jon Favreau, and an as-yet-untitled show about Cassian Andor from Rogue One. I have personally tried a virtual-reality experience called Vader Immortal,written and produced by Dark Knight screenwriter David Goyer. At the end of May, Disneyland will open Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, a massive, 14-acre, $1 billion attraction where you can fly the Millennium Falcon, be captured by the First Order, and drink a blue milk cocktail (it’s actually nondairy) and Coca-Cola products out of exclusive BB-8-shaped bottles at the cantina. It’s the largest single-theme expansion in the park’s history: Take that, Toy Story Land. The Disney World version will open in August.

You realize now that, under Lucas, Star Wars always slightly had the brakes on—we were always kept a little starved for product. With Disney driving, we’ll really find out how big Star Wars can get.

ENCORE Composer John Williams conducting the Star Wars score, drawing on themes and motifs he has woven across four decades. “I didn’t think there would ever be a second film,” he says.

When people talk about the new Star Wars movies, they tend to talk about how faithful they are to the originals. What’s harder to say is how exactly the new films are different—how movies like Skywalker keep their connection to the past while at the same time finding a way to belong to the world of 2019. Because regardless of whether or not Star Wars has changed since 1977, the world around it has, profoundly. “There’s a loss of innocence, a sense of innocence that existed in the 70s that I don’t think to any extent exists today,” Kennedy says. “I think that has to permeate the storytelling and the reaction to the stories and how they’re set up. It has to feel differently because we’re different.”

We know things, as a people and as an audience, that we didn’t know back then. For example: back then it felt sort of O.K. to like Darth Vader, because even though he was evil he was also incredibly cool, and the kind of fascism he represented felt like a bogeyman from the distant past. But now fascism is rising again, which makes the whole First Order subplot look super-prescient, but it also reminds us that fascism is not even slightly cool in real life. “Evil needs to feel and look very real,” Kennedy says, “and what that means today may not be as black-and-white as it might have been in 1977, coming off a kind of World War II sensibility.” In the Star Wars–verse, Dark and Light are supposed to balance each other, but in the real world they just mix together into a hopelessly foggy, morally ambiguous gray.

But the changes are liberating too. Star Wars doesn’t have to stay frozen in time; if anything it’s the opposite, if it doesn’t change it’ll die. It will turn into Flash Gordon. For Abrams, that means he can’t go through this process so haunted by the ghost of George Lucas (who is of course still alive, but you get what I’m saying) that he winds up doing a cinematic Lucas impression. At some point Abrams has to let Abrams be Abrams.

The Rise of Skywalker might be that point. “Working on nine, I found myself approaching it slightly differently,” he says. “Which is to say that, on seven, I felt beholden to Star Wars in a way that was interesting—I was doing what to the best of my ability I felt Star Wars should be.” But this time something changed. Abrams found himself making different choices—for the camera angles, the lighting, the story. “It felt slightly more renegade; it felt slightly more like, you know, Fuck it, I’m going to do the thing that feels right because it does, not because it adheres to something.”

There are a lot of small subtle ways that Abrams’s Star Wars is different from Lucas’s, but if there’s a standout, it’s the way that the new movies look at history. Lucas’s Star Wars movies are bathed in the deep golden-sunset glow of the idyllic Old Republic, that more civilized age—but the new movies aren’t like that. They’re not nostalgic. They don’t long for the past; they’re more about the promise of the future. “This trilogy is about this young generation, this new generation, having to deal with all the debt that has come before,” Abrams says. “And it’s the sins of the father, and it’s the wisdom and the accomplishments of those who did great things, but it’s also those who committed atrocities, and the idea that this group is up against this unspeakable evil and are they prepared? Are they ready? What have they learned from before? It’s less about grandeur. It’s less about restoring an old age. It’s more about preserving a sense of freedom and not being one of the oppressed.”

FROM THE ASHES Mark Hamill, as Luke, with R2-D2. Speculation is rampant about who will “rise” as the Skywalker of the movie’s title—and how that choice will reflect the way the world has changed since Star Wars debuted in 1977.

The new generation doesn’t have that same connection to the old days that Luke and Leia did. It’s not like their parents destroyed the Old Republic. We don’t even know who their parents were! They’re too young to remember the Empire. They’re just here to clean up the mess they got left with, the disastrous consequences of bad decisions made by earlier generations, and try to survive long enough to see the future. Is any of this resonating with 2019? Might there possibly be a generation around here somewhere that’s worried about the consequences of its own decisions for the future? Star Wars has never been and probably never should be a vehicle for political arguments, but to paraphrase Ursula Le Guin, great science fiction is never really about the future. It’s about the present.

You could even—if you’re into that kind of thing—imagine the story of the new Star Wars trilogy as a metaphor for the making of the new Star Wars trilogy. In fact, I was totally prepared—because I am into that kind of thing!—to try to push this overthought metafictional hot take onto Abrams … but I didn’t have to. Abrams got there ahead of me. “The idea of the movie is kind of how I felt going into the movie as a filmmaker,” he says, “which is to say that I’ve inherited all this stuff, great stuff, and good wisdom, and the good and the bad, and it’s all coming to this end, and the question is, do we have what it takes to succeed?”

Kylo Ren has it all wrong: you can’t bring back the past and become your own grandfather, and you can’t kill the past, either. All you can do is make your peace with it and learn from it and move on. Abrams is doing that with Star Wars—and meanwhile the Resistance is going to have to do that, too, if they really are going to bring this saga to an end. Because we’ve been here before, watching a band of scrappy rebels take down a technofascist empire, and it seemed to work fine at the time—but it didn’t last. The same goes for the Jedi and their struggle with the Sith. To end this story, really end it, they’re going to have to figure out the conditions of a more permanent victory over the forces of darkness. Their past was imperfect at best, and the present is a complete disaster—but the future is all before them. This time, finally, they’re going to get it right.

#star wars tros #the rise of skywalker #vanity fair #long post

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paralleljulieverse · 5 years

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“Ding Dong the Bells are Gonna Chime...!”

This Day in Julie-history: Julie Andrews weds first husband, Tony Walton sixty years ago on 10 May 1959.

When Julie Andrews and longtime beau, Tony Walton finally decided to marry in the English spring of 1959, they had hoped to keep the wedding relatively low-key. Rather than plump for a big city venue, the couple chose to hold the ceremony at the small parish church of St. Mary’s Oatlands in Weybridge, close to their collective family home of Walton-on-Thames in Surrey. In her memoirs, Julie recalls that, even though she and Tony had both grown up in the very next village, she “had to prove residency in the parish of Oatlands” in order to get married at the picturesque mid-Victorian church (Andrews: 258). So for six weeks prior to the wedding, the star moved into the nearby Oatlands Park Hotel, making the daily commute into London for ongoing performances of My Fair Lady.

However, as profiled in our last post, the couple’s courtship had been a focus of such intense media attention that there was little serious hope they’d be able to keep the wedding out of the public eye. And, lo, come the big day, a sunny and unusually warm spring Sunday, a phalanx of over sixty reporters, press photographers and newsreel cameramen was on hand to cover the event. What’s more, a huge crowd of fans and public well-wishers –– ranging in estimates from two to three thousand––congregated around the church and surrounding lanes to get a glimpse of the star bride. It was a carnival-like atmosphere complete with “ice cream men and even a winkle stall” (Rolls: 2). “The pretty tree-shaded churchyard looked like Hampstead Heath on a Bank Holiday Monday,” noted one press report, “as fathers, mothers and children struggled on the lawns littered with ice lolly-sticks and sweet papers” (Marlborough and Court: 5).

More than two miles of cars clogged the roads leading up to the church, so not surprisingly the bridal party was a little late in arriving, pulling up to the front of the church ten minutes behind schedule. As Julie emerged from the bridal car, led by father Ted Wells, the crowds surged forward and news crews rushed to get shots. Some women reportedly fainted in the crush and “[t]eams of police had their hands full making way for Julie” (Rolls: 2). “This crowd makes me more nervous than playing Eliza on the first night,” exclaimed the star (ibid.). Ever the consummate professional, Julie took it in stride with reporters marvelling that “throughout the Hollywood-style hysteria, Miss Andrews remained calm, cool and apparently unperturbed” (Marlborough and Court: 5).

She also looked every inch the resplendent star bride in a stunning seventy-yard rose-budded white organza gown that had been designed specially for her by husband-to-be Tony Walton. Made from the designs by Julie’s longtime friend, theatrical costumier Madame de Rachelle, who had provided several earlier bespoke dresses for the star, the bridal gown had an estimated cost of £350, a substantial amount for the time. Rachelle also helped dress Julie the morning of the wedding, painstakingly fastening all 72 buttons at the rear of the gown with a small buttonhook (Hickey: 5).

Once inside the church, the wedding party was able to relax a little during the 35 minute service. As the officiating vicar quipped, “Forget your friends inside the church and the crowds outside. There’s nothing high-falutin’ about a marriage service” (Hickey: 1).* The 300-strong guest list was weighted heavily with local friends and family but there were a few famous faces dotted among the pews, mostly theatre folk who had been important to Julie during her career. Stanley Holloway, Robert Coote, and Noel Harrison, son of Rex, were on hand to represent the My Fair Lady crew. Rex was unable to attend as he was abroad visiting his ailing wife Kay Kendall in Paris. Sandy Wilson and Vida Hope flew The Boy Friend flag and others were there from Julie’s early radio and pantomime years such as Hattie Jacques and Vic Oliver. Further celebrity friends included Maggie Smith, Svetlana Beriosova, Anne Rogers and the official wedding photographer was none other than Tony Armstrong-Jones (Cottrell: 118).

Following the ceremony, the bridal party and guests made their way to the reception at the Mitre Hotel in Kingston-on-Thames directly opposite historic Hampton Court. Thousands more lined the roads to cheer them on and some even hired rowboats in an effort to get a closer peek at proceedings from the riverfront (Rolls: 2). Inside, the three hundred invited guests were treated to a lavish champagne supper with dance music provided by Johnnie Howard and his Orchestra who played inevitable selections from My Fair Lady but also from Sandy Wilson’s Valmouth with which Tony had been successfully associated (“Denmark Street”: 7). Maintaining the dual theatrical theme, the three tiered wedding cake was topped with two miniature figures, one in Eliza Dolittle flower girl costume and the other in an artist’s smock (Cottrell: 121).

After it was all over, the newlyweds were driven straight to London airport to catch a late night flight to Los Angeles. It was billed as a two-week “honeymoon”, though it was in fact more of a working holiday with Julie taping a TV special with Jack Benny and Tony working on designs for a new musical (Cottrell: 122). Julie recalls that she and Tony slept most of the long flight to California, both exhausted from their big day. As the flight prepared to land, Julie writes that as she slowly roused, she saw Tony smiling at her in the next seat:

“’Help!’ I said to him in a very small voice. He nodded, knowing what I meant. The festivities were over; we were married and heading into the unknown” (Andrews: 262)

Notes:

* In her memoirs, Julie gives the name of the officiating vicar at the wedding as Rev. Keeping, “a charming man, kind and gentle in our meetings with him” (Andrews: 259). Press reports from the time, however, list him as Rev. John McKitterick (Hickey: 1; “Marriages”: 12; Rolls: 2). Far be it from us to suggest that she-who-is-practically-perfect-in-every-way got it wrong, which is why, in one of the photos accompanying our previous post, we followed Dame Julie’s lead and identified the kindly vicar as Rev. Keeping.

Sources:

“2000 at Julie Andrews’s Wedding.” Belfast Telegraph. 11 May 1959: 8.

Andrews, Julie. Home: A Memoir of My Early Years. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2008.

Cottrell, John. Julie Andrews: The Story of a Star. London: Arthur Barker, 1968.

“Denmark Street Doodles.” The Stage. 21 May 1959: 7.

Hickey, William. “Phew! What a Scramble for the Bride and the Motorist: My Fair Lady Marries Boy Next Door.” Daily Express. 11 May 1959: 1, 5.

Marlborough, Douglas and Court, Monty. “PictureMail Goes to the Stage Wedding of the Year: Shouting Women Delay Julie.” Daily Mail. 11 May 1959: 5.

“Marriages: Mr. T. Walton and Miss J. Andrews.” The Times. 11 May 1959: 12.

Nathan, David. “C-r-a-w-l-i-n-g Home But What a Loverly Day it was for a Wedding.” Daily Herald. 11 May 1959: 1, 3.

Rolls, John. “Cor! Wot a turn ant for Eliza...” Daily Mirror. 11 May 1959: 2.

Photographs by Tony Armstrong-Jones, Ron Burton, Kenneth Denyer, and Terry Fincher.

#julie andrews #tony walton #wedding #1959 #st mary's church #oatlands #weybridge #My Fair Lady #united kingdom #england #celebrity #stars

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seeselfblack · 6 years

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Do you know the contributions and importance of Robert F. Williams to Black History—the Civil Rights and the Black Power Movements...

NEGROES WITH GUNS: Robert F. Williams and Black Power Documentary...

The first African American civil rights leader to advocate armed resistance to racial oppression and violence, Robert F. Williams was born on February 26, 1925 in Monroe, North Carolina. The fourth of five children born to Emma Carter Williams and John Williams, Williams quickly learned to navigate the dangers of being black in the Deep South. The Ku Klux Klan was a powerful and feared force in Monroe, and the community where Williams grew up experienced regular brutalization at the hands of whites.

Williams’ grandmother, a well-read and proud woman who was born a slave in Union County in 1858, taught Williams to cherish his heritage and to stand up for himself. Before she died, she presented her young grandson with his first gun, a rifle that had belonged to his grandfather, as a symbol of their family’s resistance against racial oppression.

After high school Williams joined the Marines in hopes of being assigned to information services, where he could pursue journalism. Instead, he received a typical assignment given to African American Marines at that time: supply sergeant. Williams’ resistance to the Marine Corps’ racial discrimination earned him an “undesirable” discharge and he returned to Monroe.

A blurry nighttime photo of a Ku Klux Klan gathering; 100 or more people stand together in white cloaks and pointed hoods. A huge cross is on fire, burning brightly as it towers behind them.

“It is time for Negro men to stand up and be men and if it is necessary for us to die we must be willing to die. If it is necessary for us to kill we must be willing to kill.” Becoming a Leader

In 1956, Williams took over leadership of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which was close to disbanding due to a relentless backlash by the Ku Klux Klan. Williams canvassed for new members and eventually expanded the branch from only six to more than 200 members.

Williams also filed for a charter from the National Rifle Association (NRA) and formed the Black Guard, an armed group committed to the protection of Monroe’s black population. Members received weapons and physical training from Williams to prepare them to keep the peace and come to the aid of black citizens, whose calls to law enforcement often went unanswered.

With his fellow NAACP members, Williams waged local civil rights campaigns and brought the conditions of the Jim Crow South to the attention of the national and international media. Williams led an ongoing fight to integrate the local public swimming pool and opposed the condemnation of two young African American boys for the “crime” of kissing a white girl during a harmless child’s game—a cause that had been deemed too controversial for the national NAACP.

Meeting Violence with Violence

In 1959, after a jury in Monroe acquitted a white man for the attempted rape of a black woman, Williams made a historic statement on the courthouse steps.

He said of his courthouse proclamation at a later press conference: “I made a statement that if the law, if the United States Constitution cannot be enforced in this social jungle called Dixie, it is time that Negroes must defend themselves even if it is necessary to resort to violence.

“That there is no law here, there is no need to take the white attackers to the courts because they will go free and that the federal government is not coming to the aid of people who are oppressed, and it is time for Negro men to stand up and be men and if it is necessary for us to die we must be willing to die. If it is necessary for us to kill we must be willing to kill.”

At Odds with the Mainstream Civil Rights Movement

The NAACP suspended Williams for advocating violence. In 1961, the Freedom Riders came to Monroe to demonstrate the efficacy of passive resistance—the hallmark of the mainstream Civil Rights Movement led by Martin Luther King, Jr. An angry mob of Klansmen and Klan supporters overwhelmed the Riders, who called upon Williams and his Black Guard for help. Amid the chaos, Williams sheltered a white couple from an African American mob, only to be accused later of kidnapping them.

With state and local authorities pursuing Williams for “kidnapping,” and frenzied Klansmen calling for his death, Robert and Mabel Williams and their two small children fled Monroe. Fidel Castro granted Williams political asylum in Cuba, and the family spent the next five years in Havana. Robert and Mabel Williams continued to fight for human rights from Havana through their news and music radio program, “Radio Free Dixie,” and the publication of Williams’ pamphlet, The Crusader, which reached an influential underground audience. In 1962, he wrote the book Negroes With Guns.

In 1966, Williams moved his family to China during the height of the Cultural Revolution. There, as in Cuba, he enjoyed celebrity status and fraternized with Mao Zedong and Chou En Lai.

Homecoming

In 1969, Williams returned to the U.S. aboard a TWA flight chartered by the federal government. All charges against Williams were dropped, and he went on to advise the State Department on normalizing relations with China. Williams did not, however, assume leadership of what had become a divided and beleaguered Black Power Movement. Instead, Williams accepted a position as a research associate at the Institute for Chinese Studies at University of Michigan, and he and Mabel moved to Baldwin, near the university. Williams died of cancer in 1996 and was buried in Monroe.

See also:

- PBS Independent Lens: NEGROES WITH GUNS: Rob Williams and Black Power doc - Backed by a jazz score by Terence Blanchard (Barbershop and the films of Spike Lee), NEGROES WITH GUNS uses interviews, rare archival footage and searing photographs to chronicle Williams’ rise to notoriety, his eight-year exile in Cuba and Mao Zedong’s China and his much-publicized return home in 1969. Voices include historians, members of Williams’ Black Guard—armed men committed to the protection of Monroe’s black community—and Williams’ widow, Mabel.

For eight years, Williams and his family lived in exile, first in Cuba and then in China. In Havana, Williams began to broadcast a 50,000-watt radio program called "Radio Free Dixie." Selected recordings are featured in NEGROES WITH GUNS. The radio show fused cutting-edge music with news of the black freedom movement and Williams’ editorials, which, among other things, urged blacks not to fight in Vietnam.

In exile from 1961 to 1969, at the height of the American Civil Rights Movement, Rob Williams and his accomplishments have been largely erased from the public consciousness. According to the filmmakers, NEGROES WITH GUNS helps to “restore Rob and Mabel Williams to their rightful place as important civil rights figures who defied the white power structure without the protection of large numbers or the attention of television cameras.”

- Negroes With Guns: The Untold History of Black NRA Gun Clubs and the Civil Rights Movement

- The Harvard Crimsom - Negros With Guns

- Mabel and Robert Williams: Monroe to Beijing

- You can rent and/or own Negroes With Gunjs from California Newsreel or Vimeo.com

#robert f. williams

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impressivepress · 3 years

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We Should Be Grateful Charlie Chaplin Made 'The Great Dictator' When He Did

Charlie Chaplin is understood to have confided to his friends that, had he known about the full horrors of the Nazi regime, he would probably not have got around to making The Great Dictator.

“There are things in our century that wipe away even the most poisonous smile from the face of the most passionate satirist,” wrote one of the 20th century’s foremost historians. He was referring to Karl Kraus, the great Austrian journalist-polemicist-satirist, whose book The Last Days of Mankind, written in the inter-war years, is a 20th-century classic. When it came to lampooning National Socialism and Adolf Hitler, Kraus says, “nothing occurs to me”. A little later, he adds: “The word fell asleep when that world awoke.”

When the Holocaust became common knowledge, Chaplin must have also felt that his craft was inadequate to render Hitler’s world in any known cinematic genre – political satire or vaudeville, burlesque or tragedy. The Great Dictator was conceptualised and filmed when it was still possible to make fun of the Fuehrer.

Chaplin started shooting for the film in September 1939, just days after Germany invaded Poland. But he had been planning a movie on Hitler for years before that, and worked on his script through 1938-39. From Nazi newsreels, he had carefully studied Hitler’s mannerisms and the way he harangued large crowds. Chaplin also watched Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda documentary Triumph of the Will (1935) several times over to make sure that he knew Nazi rituals well enough; his incredible talent for mimicry did the rest.

The film shoot took a little over six months. By the time Chaplin sat down to edit and add the music tracks, Hitler was overrunning Belgium and Holland while France was gently nudging itself into surrender. When The Great Dictator released in the US in October 1940, London was being carpet-bombed by the Luftwaffe, Neville Chamberlain had already made way for Churchill as the British prime minister and Warsaw’s Jews were being herded into the first ghettos run by the Nazis. However, the tone of the film had already been set before the active hostilities began. A tragedy loomed clearly enough then, but few thought yet that it was the Armageddon.

This perspective is important for understanding the satirical and political scope of Chaplin’s film. The ‘final solution of the Jewish problem’ was not only in the future, it had perhaps not begun to take shape as yet in even the most malevolent Nazi sensibility. Chaplin had set out to spoof the pompous bully who was absurd and arrogant, but not yet quite the hideous hangman history was to know him as. Hitler still regarded Mussolini with something of the awe that the disciple reserves for his mentor – this gave Chaplin the opportunity to flesh out a memorable love-hate-love relationship – and Mussolini’s precipitous invasion of Greece, which annoyed Hitler no end, was not to happen before end-October 1940.

The Great Dictator can very well look a tad too light-hearted today; the fact that an uproariously funny story is being told around what can only be described as unmitigated evil can surprise its modern-day viewers. But it is undoubtedly a film true to its time.

And The Great Dictator is much more than a parody. It is a stirring denunciation of fascism’s core principles – xenophobia, intolerance, bigoted nationalism and anti-Semitism. It is funny, but its world is intrinsically violent. Hynkel is often nervous, even shy, but in the presence of his pretty secretary, his predatory instincts are aroused in a trice. Holding her in a tight embrace, he digs his teeth into her neck with sudden vehemence, the whole act looking more like the tearing of flesh than love-making. The utter casualness with which he gives up his prey when the telephone buzzes suddenly makes the scene even more chilling.

Writing in Criterion, Michael Wood notes the effortlessness with which Chaplin shows us “how lethal the ludicrous can be”:

Nothing in the film is quite as frightening as the sight and sound of the ludicrous Hynkel casually ordering the execution of three thousand striking workers.

Chaplin plays around marvellously with this crossover between rollicking humour and unmixed horror. Wood has pointed out how the harmless barber waving a razor over the bare throat of a customer looks more murderous than Hynkel ever does in the film. But the masterly mixing of the strains of Johannes Brahms’ ‘Hungarian Dance no 5’ into this edge-of-the-seat scene adds that piquancy which is signature Chaplin.

Again, as the barber sets out on his first date with Hannah, the storm-troopers arrive to get him. A long shot shows the SS men approaching the couple from one end of the street. The barber stops dead, turns around and heads in the other direction nonchalantly, as though nothing was the matter. Another long shot captures another SS column closing in on him from the other direction. Now in panic, the barber scrambles for safety, running first this way and then that, and the camera pans back a long distance before an aerial shot shows him being swept up by an avalanche of burly SS men.

As masterful as the casual mixing of horror and humour is the blending of the ridiculous and the sublime in The Great Dictator. Gracefully, even tenderly, Hynkel performs the unforgettable balloon-ballet with Wagner’s ‘Lohengrin’ playing softly on the soundtrack. But then he slips on to a tabletop, and goes on bouncing the globe-balloon off his behind, with loving care, a dreamy, enchanted look frozen on his face. When finally he tries to get both his arms around the balloon, it bursts with a scream in his face.

Again, as the fugitive Schultz plots Hynkel’s assassination while sheltering in the ghetto, a serio-comic drama plays out around a noble enterprise. Each of the ‘volunteers’ (Schultz smartly rules himself out right at the beginning) pledges himself to the great project, but is aghast when he finds the fateful coin in his pie. The scene soon turns into a boisterous farce.

The Nazis hated Chaplin, because they found his humour irreverent, subversive – hardly the kind that promoted the ‘wholesome family values’ so beloved of Hitler. In his 1931 trip to Berlin, Chaplin proved hugely popular in Germany and, though the Nazis did not like his spectacular success in all his public engagements, there was not much they could do at that point.

After Hitler rose to power, however, things changed dramatically for Chaplin, as they did for many other popular artists, German and non-German. In 1935, Goebbels banned The Gold Rush in Germany, presumably because the film ran counter to wholesome family entertainment. Even before that, in 1934, Goebbels had authorised the publication of a slanderous little book titled The Jews are Looking at You which, among other choice epithets, described Chaplin as “a disgusting Jewish acrobat” (Chaplin was not Jewish, though). Chaplin had seen the book, and it is safe to assume that his resolve to make a film around Nazism hardened because of it.

Given this background, he could hardly have chosen to play a part in the film that was non-Jewish. And Chaplin being Chaplin, he decided to deliver the coup de grace by playing Hitler as well. It must have been with grim satisfaction that he wrote into one of the opening credits of The Great Dictator words that dripped with irony: “Any resemblance between Hynkel the dictator and the Jewish barber is purely coincidental”. Of course, Chaplin wanted his audience to not look at the dictator and the barber through the same eyes. He expected the audience to laugh right through the film, but he hoped that while the viewers would laugh with the barber for the most part, they would laugh at Hynkel with derision, loathing and worse.

The Great Dictator represented another momentous event: it was Chaplin’s first ‘talkie’. (Modern Times in 1936 had a character screaming at people from a giant TV screen for a few moments, besides the inspired nonsense of the tramp’s song at the cabaret. But it remained a silent movie otherwise.) Chaplin seems to be exploring the enormous potential of his new ‘device’ with great relish here. Hynkel’s public speeches are pure genius. He speaks a mock German that bristles with coughs, sibilants, gutturals and splutters, with occasional identifiable words like sauerkraut (pickled cabbage) and schnitzel (fried meat slice) thrown in with gusto. It is pure gibberish delivered at an extremely, feverishly high pitch – so much so that the microphone itself cringes on its stem.

In another scene, Hynkel dictates an official note to a typist in a matter-of-fact manner. He is speaking aloud while she is taking it down on her typewriter. When Hynkel spouts a long, solemn sentence, she knocks out just a couple of letters. But when he offers only a monosyllable, she types furiously for several lines, clanging the machine as she works it intently. Hynkel looks on, amazed, but she remains completely unruffled, business-like. This playing-off of sound against meaning is an idea that could only have occurred to someone who was transitioning from silent to talking films, but it is hard to imagine anyone else picturising it as brilliantly as Chaplin.

The film’s last sequence, of the barber speaking as Hynkel to his victorious troops, is an audacious piece of cinematic thinking. The speech’s content is perched on the edge of mawkishness, and as it begins to crescendo, it sounds very nearly shrill. And yet, in the end, Chaplin pulls it off magnificently. The barber hesitates, approaches the microphone apprehensively, and begins speaking haltingly. As he does that, the frame slowly sheds its sharp focus, becomes somewhat bleary, over-exposed, fuzzy. As his speech gains in passion and force, the speaker himself is no longer very real himself, and as Hannah looks up to the sky, the screen is bathed in a soft, other-worldly light. This is neither Hynkel nor even the barber speaking here, but Chaplin himself stepping in to deliver his own message as the creator of the movie. Come to think of it, this could have been the only way The Great Dictator could have concluded.

For years before the film was made, cartoonists had exploited the quite remarkable resemblance of Chaplin’s moustache with Hitler’s. Chaplin was, of course, all too aware of it himself (which is why he thought of casting himself as the dictator). He knew that, with the minimum of effort, his face could be touched up to look like Hitler’s. And he also knew that the similarities stretched beyond their physiognomy: they were born within four days of each other – Chaplin on April 16, Hitler on 20, both in 1889; and both rose from poverty and neglect to power and prominence.

Did these similarities trouble Chaplin? Many believe they did, Chaplin’s own son telling us they actually haunted his father:

Dad could never think of Hitler except with a shudder, half of horror, half of fascination. “Just think,”’ he would say uneasily, “he’s the madman, I’m the comic. But it could have been the other way around.”

Of course Hitler was not only a madman. Nor was Chaplin merely a comic. But in The Great Dictator, the intersection of insanity and laughter produced a memorable movie. Chaplin says he couldn’t have made the film except in 1938-39. We are grateful that he made it when he did.

Anjan Basu · 16. Apr 2019.

#film #Charlie Chaplin #adolf hitler #the great dictator #Film Review #the wire

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hendrikwaehner-blog · 5 years

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Jess, aged 15, writes: We have just returned from a break in Toronto, Canada, where we spent four days discovering the city. We did everything from bus tours to cycling, and really loved our time in the city. There was a lot to see and do, the people were friendly, it was unusually clean for such a big city, and the attractions were very well done. Here are our highlights of the trip and what we’d recommend:

What to do

Jess writes: My favourite part of our trip to Toronto had to be the island cycling tour. We met our friendly and knowledgeable guide Mina early in the morning and were quickly armed with bikes and helmets. Soon, we found ourselves cycling downtown to the port, where we took a ferry to the Toronto Islands. We spent the morning cycling around the islands, and learning about their history. I particularly enjoyed visiting the beach, listening to ghost stories, and seeing the lighthouse. This was especially interesting as it was only built six metres away from the seafront, but sediment deposition means that it is now inland. We all had an excellent time – the islands were gorgeous, the stories were fascinating, and the cycling wasn’t too strenuous. Despite not being used to cycling on roads, we all felt very safe. It was a wonderfully tranquil morning.

Casa Loma was spectacular

Brian says: One of the highlights of our trip was visiting Casa Loma, a huge medieval looking mansion surrounded by beautiful gardens and a fountain. The gothic exterior with its two towers in completely different styles makes it look a bit like a fairy tale castle. We began our visit with the very interesting 20 minute newsreel type film about the life of Sir Henry Pellatt, the financier who spent millions building Casa Loma then was forced to leave in 1923 after going bankrupt. We really enjoyed looking at the film posters on the walls downstairs showing the many movies shot there, and there was also a TV screen showing some clips (e.g. X-men, Chicago, Cocktail etc) with captions letting you know which room had been used for that scene. We then took an excellent audio guide of the nearly hundred rooms, the most beautiful ones for me being the Round Room and the Conservatory. We then climbed up the narrow steps to the Norman tower, which gave stunning views of the city in the distance. We were there for about two and a half hours, and hadn’t seen everything we would have liked to (especially the secret tunnels) as we just ran out of time. It might be a tourist trap, but Casa Loma is definitely a must-see when you come to Toronto.

Read more about Casa Loma here, in a full blog post by Sarah.

Ripleys Aquarium was a must-visit!

Robert, aged 12, writes: Ripley’s Aquarium is one of the most popular, if not the most popular, tourist attraction in Toronto with so much to see and do for both kids and adults. There are loads of different creatures to look at including jellyfish, sharks, turtles and an octopus. Throughout the aquarium were loads of interactive things to play or touch. There was a section when you could feel how cold the water is for the fish, customise your own jellyfish or even feel some baby sharks. Some of the creatures were incredible to look at especially the ones in the tunnel – I loved watching the sharks swim over my head. Over all I had a really fun time and there was really something for everyone. There’s even a play area for younger kids.

If you like shopping, you need to visit the Eaton Centre!

Jess says: The Eaton Centre is the busiest shopping centre in North America, so we knew we had to give it a try. The Centre contains a range of shops (varying from high end to ones you may see on the high street) and we enjoyed walking around and finding chains which we don’t have in the UK. We exited the complex with books, t-shirts, and trousers, and generally had a nice, relaxing time traipsing the stores.

Robert writes: One of the tallest, most symbolic buildings in Canada is the CN tower which can be seen from nearly all the city and even further away.

View from the CN Tower

Classified as one of the modern wonders of the world, the tower stands at 1,815 feet so the views are amazing. We went up the first viewing point which was great, you could see the whole city. You could pay extra to go up a few extra floors but it seemed pointless to me as it is the same view. One floor down were two glass walkways on which you could sit, jump or even lie on while looking down at the roads directly under your feet.

Robert on the glass floor at the CN Tower

I found the whole experience very enjoyable, but it was just another view which I’ve seen a lot of – and there were so many great things to do in Toronto that it wasn’t my favourite.

The spectacular Horseshoe Falls

Sarah writes: It’s hard to tell you how wonderful our visit to Niagara Falls was without referring you to our full post on it (which you can see here!). It was, honestly, the most fantastic day and we cannot recommend it enough – it’s unlike anything else we’ve ever done.

The Falls are majestic and beautiful, a real wonder of the world. And it doesn’t mater that Niagara is really busy, because all the people who are there simply want to enjoy what you do – extraordinary waterfalls! I have never seen The Falls from the US side, but my husband assures me that the Canadian side, with the Horseshoe Falls, is far better. I can believe it. We experienced our trip from different angles – a helicopter above, a boat riding on and going down to see the Falls at the level at which they gush past. All were well worth doing. We hired a car to get to Niagara and it took around two hours. We left early in the morning and would recommend that. It really was a wonderful day.

What to see

The views from the islands were amazing!

Jess writes: Aside from Niagara, the best views on this holiday had to be on the ferry from Downtown Toronto to the Toronto Islands. During our cycling tour, we took a ferry from the port to Hanlan’s Point, and the view was simply stunning. We had a clear, close up view of the Toronto skyline, the water shone in the sun, and there was a small breeze in our hair. It was truly lovely; very serene and tranquil. It made our visit to the islands even more special.

The City Sightseeing Toronto bus tour is another way to see the sights. The two hour journey takes you all around the sights of Toronto, giving lots of information. There was also a real guide, as opposed to listening through headphones and hearing the same annoying music again and again! The only negative of this was it could be difficult to hear the guide due to the microphone static. The trip was very pleasant, though traffic meant we moved quite slowly.

Where to eat

The food at Eva’s was so delicious!

Brian says: We ate some delicious food on our Canadian holiday, but Eva’s Original was one of the standouts. My sweet toothed daughter had found out about this before our visit, and it took us about 20 minutes to get there from our hotel downtown, but it was really worth it. Eva’s bake traditional Hungarian chimney cakes fresh on the premises. They look delicious enough all by themselves, but we added some extra calories by each having chimney cones which are filled with delicious vanilla soft serve ice-cream. I chose a cone that had been baked with coconut flakes, and a chocolate sauce topping. It was huge, but delicious, so I managed to finish it. We then saw that a couple at the table next to us were sharing one. Eva’s Original was a real treat, and I would love to go back again one day.

Jess writes: Kensington Market is very different to the rest of Toronto, as it is filled with vintage clothes stores and hipster places to eat. I would have loved to explore had we had more time, as there was lots to see and do. We had lunch at a waffle shop which was a bit of a let down, but I know that there were many other places to go to which looked nicer.

The Beavers Tails were so delicious!

Sarah says: We found the BeaverTails stall down by the waterfront in Toronto. Quite honestly they were utterly delicious and it is lucky they don’t seem possible to get in London, as I would galumph my way through them and become far too vast! Put it this way, we got one each and the couple sitting opposite us, shared theirs… They are basically pastries with toppings on, but that doesn’t sell them well enough! They are huge, the pastry (fried!) is delicious and the toppings – whether chocolate hazelnut or nutella are utterly decadent. A real holiday food!

Jess writes: In conclusion, we all had a lovely time in Toronto. Paired with an excursion to Niagara, it was a holiday with something for all the family. The atmosphere was friendly, it was easy to navigate, and there was lots to do. I definitely recommend a visit.

Disclosure: We were fortunate enough to be given a CityPass to try out when we were in Toronto. This meant we got free entry into a number of attractions and, as importantly, that we skipped the queue – particularly brilliant for the CN Tower and Aquarium! We genuinely thought the CityPass was fantastic as it gave you freedom to do what you wanted, when you wanted – but the company had no input into our decisions of what to do, or what we wrote in this post. The CityPASS costs around £55 per adult and £37 per child. We were also very fortunate that Toronto Bicycle Tours provided us with the bicycle tour of the Islands, including bike hire and ferry crossing, on a complimentary basis. This usually costs around CAD 90 per person (around £54). However, they also had no input into this post and all our thoughts, as usual, are our own.

The post Four days in Toronto with kids appeared first on Family Travel Times.

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back-and-totheleft · 4 years

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What Matters

Stone’s experiences fighting in the Vietnam War, a conflict in which he spent 360 days serving with distinction in the United States Army, have unsurprisingly formed a huge part of his outlook as a filmmaker. From his critique of American foreign policy in South America in Salvador, his condemnation of the American government’s treatment of veterans in Born On The Fourth Of July, and his portrayal of the true horrors of the Vietnam War in Platoon, Stone’s anti-establishment streak is clear to see. It’s something he has always worn with a badge of honor and made no attempts to water down. Bringing what he sees as the harsh realities of American foreign policy into the conscious of mainstream cinema audiences is a recurring theme throughout his work.

Platoon is understandably seen as Stone’s most personal work, given its direct link to his own tour of duty. However, I’d argue that JFK is a very close second. The assassination of John F. Kennedy was a pivotal moment in the life of the young director. According to Stone it marked the start of what he saw as a fall from grace for America and their embarking on a dark road that began with Kennedy’ successor Lyndon Johnson escalating the war in Vietnam. In the production notes for JFK Stone stated:

“Kennedy to me was like the Godfather of my generation. He was a very important figure, a leader, a prince in a sense. And his murder marked the end of a dream. The end of a concept of idealism I associated with my youth.”

These strong feelings flow right the way through the movie and it’s clearly a passion project which Stone made with an intense verve. However critics could arguably point out that it was this passion which blinded Stone to certain realities and led to him to take some fairly strong liberties with the truth. [...]

Treated purely as a piece of drama, JFK is a mesmerizing blend of styles and formats. It has elements of documentary, historical recreation, family drama, criminal investigation, political thriller, and courtroom drama coursing through it. At its center sits District Attorney Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner) and the story of how he and his team successfully brought about the first trial relating to the assassination of President Kennedy. The dramatic thrust of the movie is deliberately simple, underneath all the layers of intrigue, it’s a group of dedicated and tireless public servants seeking to uncover the truth and expose the shady goings on of those in power. It’s compelling and passionate cinema that whips you up and demands your attention.

From the very outset it’s easy to see why JFK won Academy Awards for both Cinematography and Editing. The opening montage which begins the movie is a bravura introduction that condenses down a wealth of crucial information into a very short space of time. We see historical archive footage of Kennedy’s speeches, his family life, his meetings with other politicians, as well as footage of other key players and events from the era.

As the footage begins, a key theme is immediately articulated via Dwight D. Eisenhower’s ominous warning against the rise to prominence of the military-industrial complex. We are then shown newsreels documenting Kennedy’s narrow election victory over Richard Nixon as the ground is set for his arrival in power.

The tempo then begins to pick up, the editing quickens and the tone becomes more serious, as the Cold War and its milieu unfolds. The Bay of Pigs fiasco, the annexation of Cuba, Kennedy’s deal with Krushchev and his apparent desire to withdraw from Vietnam are all explained in brief via archive footage and calming narration by none other than Martin Sheen. Key concepts and themes are now lodged in our minds. These include Kennedy’s willingness to work with Russia, his supposed weakness on Communism, and the threat he posted to those with a vested interest in war.

Suddenly, in amongst the newsreel footage comes our first fictional scene involving a call girl being ditched by the roadside. It marks a sudden shift that sees the montage’s pace and intensity increase once more. The music shifts from a brisk military drum roll to a far more menacing and tense piece. From here the momentum ramps up towards that fateful day in Dallas as footage of Kennedy’s arrival in the city is blended with recreations of his route to Dealey Plaza. Eventually it cuts to footage from the Zapruder film and as his car makes that final turn, we hear a gunshot ring out and it all fades to black.

Thanks to Stone and his editors Joe Hutshing and Pietro Scalia, the movie’s entire tone and raison d’etre is perfectly laid out before us. This whole sequence runs just shy of seven minutes. In those seven minutes a huge amount of information is relayed to us. You are thus launched into proceedings imbued with a sense of both historical context and atmosphere, as well as a range of questions already primed and ready to go.

Hutshing and Scalia utilized a range of sources for their visual jigsaw including newsreels, stock photos, home movies, and Stone’s own new footage. The blending of historical fact and fiction begins here, with real-life footage and dramatic re-creations mixed together through a series of quick cuts in order to develop Stone’s story. The issue with this perhaps being that it’s sometimes hard to tell when the archive footage ends and the new footage begins. This process of merging together fresh footage and archive pieces comes not only in the introduction, but several times throughout the movie.

When the mysterious 'X' (Donald Sutherland) lays out his version of events for Jim Garrison, we again witness an onslaught of visual information which seemingly backs up his claim. Likewise, when Garrison is in the courtroom laying out his own version of events, we again view it via a gripping montage of moments which reinforce his argument. In all three cases, the fast paced editing drives the story along and gives each sequence a sense of urgency and vitality.

The film’s cinematography is also a joy to watch and more than worthy of its Oscar win. Robert Richardson and Stone delivered a film that could go from brooding and sombre, to vibrant and urgent in the blink of an eye. Moments such as Garrison interviewing Clay Shaw (Tommy Lee Jones) on a rain-soaked Easter weekend or Garrison’s solitary viewing of Robert Kennedy’s shooting are shrouded in gloom and despondency, reflective of the sense of despair Stone himself felt over these moments. Meanwhile, the dizzying courtroom sequence delivers many little gems, from the camera stalking Garrison as he prowls the debate floor, to the way it cuts away to capture the shocked looks of the sweat-laden fan-holding courtroom audience. [...]

It’s seeing how the pieces fit together that makes the film so fascinating. Pieces which are hinted at in the opening montage, characters referenced in or even merely glimpsed in flashbacks, come back in to proceedings later on as the puzzle takes shape. For example, one of the 'Nazi-type' mercenaries shown early on in the background at one of David Ferrie’s (Joe Pesci) training camps, shows up later on as an apparent contact on the ground giving a signal to the 'hobos' on the day of the assassination. This man never utters a line, yet he offers a subtle through line linking earlier moments with the broader story.

While Stone himself deserves great credit for producing this huge piece of work, he was helped majorly by a brilliant all-star cast. To name but a few we saw Kevin Costner, Tommy Lee Jones, Gary Oldman, Joe Pesci, Kevin Bacon, Jack Lemmon, Donald Sutherland, Ed Asner, and Sissy Spacek all throwing themselves into their roles. Even John Candy and Walter Matthau, who both only have very brief cameos, are scintillating to watch. Candy’s perspiring jazz-talking dodgy attorney oozes screen presence, while Matthau’s good ol’ Senator is the cynical doubter who reignites Garrison’s interest in the assassination. [...]

From the Zapruder film onwards we sense Garrison is truly hitting his stride, his dismantling of the so called 'single bullet' theory is so erudite and persuasive you’ll almost want to just believe he is right and completely avoid the fairly important factors Stone failed to include. The fact that Garrison does not go on to win his case and the jury instead finds in favor of Shaw, is utterly immaterial. It’s the seeds of doubt he planted and the broader idea he put forward that matters. As he walks off with his family, head held high, what matters is that he tried.

-Robert Keeling, “Oliver Stone's JFK: A Masterful Blend of Fact and Fiction,” Den of Geek, Apr 19 2017 [x]

#oliver stone #jfk #robert richardson #John F. Kennedy #den of geek #cinematography #editing

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hollywoodjuliorivas · 6 years

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JOURNAL REPORTS: RETIREMENT Why You Should Write a Memoir—Even if Nobody Will Read It Among the psychological benefits: It helps people make sense of their lives When a person sits down to write the story of his or her life, there can be unexpected benefits. Pencie Huneke, above, refers to writing her memoir as “an exercise of self-affirmation.” PHOTO: ZACK WITTMAN FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL By Lisa Ward Nov. 10, 2017 10:08 a.m. ET 4 COMMENTS Is it worth writing a memoir if no one will ever read it? Millions dream about spinning their life story into a best-seller. Most never get past the dreaming part, much less the first chapter. But there are potential rewards other than riches and fame for those who try. According to psychologists and researchers, writing a memoir—even just for personal consumption—can help the author review and make sense of his or her life, come to terms with traumatic events and foster personal growth. In fact, some of the therapeutic benefits may be lost if the writer thinks about too large an audience—or even a readership greater than one. The story can become less authentic. And there are other potential pitfalls to writing your life story. Writers can be thrown into despair if they have trouble reconciling past failures or placing traumatic events into a larger context. “It really depends on the type of stories people tell to make sense of their lives,” says Dan McAdams, a psychology professor at Northwestern University. People who can construct cohesive life narratives—where there are common threads and one event leads to the next—are likely to benefit from writing a memoir, he says, while those who view their lives as a series of random, unrelated events are not. His research has found that life narratives are especially beneficial if they focus on redemption and overcoming adversity. The Mental Mistakes We Make With Retirement Spending The mind-set and habits that work so well when people are building their nest egg can damage their quality of life—and investments—in retirement. CLICK TO READ STORY Love at First Sight: Retiring in Italy The bureaucracy and four-hour lunch break can be maddening. But the kindnesses, beauty, food—and price—can’t be beat. CLICK TO READ STORY When ‘Enough’ Doesn’t Have to Mean ‘More’ Essayist Robbie Shell writes about giving up the relentless pursuit for more and finding contentment in retirement. CLICK TO READ STORY New Procedure Looks Promising for Men With Enlarged Prostates The minimally invasive treatment uses steam to kill cells and shrink the prostate. CLICK TO READ STORY Is There Really a Retirement-Savings Crisis? Two experts look at the same data—and come to very different conclusions. CLICK TO READ STORY Recommended New Books for Those Who Are Grieving Sheryl Sandberg and other authors offer strategies on how to move forward after suffering a loss. CLICK TO READ STORY MORE IN ENCORE Positive light In a memoir by Pencie Huneke, two key themes are resilience and gratitude. Now 84 years old and living on a barrier island near Venice, Fla., Ms. Huneke raised her five daughters alone after her husband left. Her memoir describes the “blur of misery” she felt in the early days of their rupture. But her story, Ms. Huneke now says, ultimately puts the experience in a positive light: She made close friends, enrolled in a financial-management course and met the “love of her life.” She also forgave her ex. “He and I have actually become friends. How lucky for all of us,” she wrote, in one of the few extracts she shared with a reporter. The act of writing about traumatic or difficult events can reduce stress, lessen depression and improve cognitive functioning, according to researchers. Several studies have even shown such writing to improve the function of the immune system. Psychologists believe that by converting emotions and images into words, the author starts to organize and structure memories, particularly memories that may be difficult to comprehend and accept. “You can’t simply dump an entire experience on a piece of paper,” says Joshua Smyth, distinguished professor of biobehavioral health and medicine at Pennsylvania State University. Through writing, he says, the memory of the experience can be broken down into small parts, allowing the event to be more easily processed and then laid to rest. A hidden death Susan Mayall, now 84 and living in Livermore, Calif., says she tried for years to write about her childhood in Britain during World War II, years that included frequent German bombing raids on her neighborhood. Much of her struggle, she says, involved coming to terms with her mother’s behavior. Early in the war, in 1941, Ms. Mayall’s father, an interpreter in the Royal Navy, died at sea, but her mother never spoke of his death to the children or otherwise acknowledged it until the war ended. Ms. Mayall shared early drafts of her memoir with her brothers, who objected to her harsh evaluation of her mother. “I struggled all my life to understand my mother’s reactions,” Ms. Mayall says. What finally put things in perspective, she says, was writing about a particular memory: the moment her mother read the letter from the Royal Navy about her husband’s death. Ms. Mayall in her memoir describes seeing the letter, without explicitly knowing at the time what it said, and witnessing her mother’s reaction: “She tears [the letter] open, and starts to read. Then she leans forwards and her hands go up over her face. She’s shaking—I can feel her.” Ms. Mayall says she developed more empathy for her mother as she continued to work on the memoir over the years. In the final version, she acknowledges her mother’s bravery and describes in detail what it was like to raise four children on a meager income in wartime conditions. When writing about past traumas, the people who gain the most from the experience are those who tend to acknowledge their own problems but can also see other people’s points of view. Over the course of writing, their general perspectives about their topics evolve, says James W. Pennebaker, a psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Making new connections between events in the writer’s life is key, he says. There are risks. Writing to uncover a deeper meaning in one’s life often requires brutal honesty or authenticity, a sort of self-disclosure that could either be hurtful to other people or cast the author in a negative light. If a writer starts repeating the same topic incessantly or becomes increasingly angry and bitter, it is best to stop, Dr. Pennebaker says. Some such feelings can’t be helped. “Writing about upsetting experiences can provoke negative emotions,” says Dr. Pennebaker. “It’s much like going to a sad movie. Most people report getting back to normal in an hour or so. If a person is living with a negative experience, they are probably feeling bad much of the time. The writing helps to get them out of that cycle.” Writing a memoir can also help authors re-evaluate how they want to live for their remaining years, says Susan Krauss Whitbourne, professor emerita of psychological and brain sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The exercise will sometimes reveal to the writer patterns of behavior that were—or are—harmful. Past battles When Paul Wortman, professor emeritus of psychology at Stony Brook University in New York, started analyzing and writing about his life and career, he says he discovered that he had a problem with authority figures. His short temper and past battles with department chairs, he says, were the product of his relationship with his father. Dr. Wortman swore to change his ways. He ended up revising his memoir at his wife’s request, after she read it and became uncomfortable with his idea of sharing it with an extended group of friends. Through careful editing, Dr. Wortman says, the message stayed the same, but some of the details were left out. Making changes based on who will read the finished product reveals another truth about memoirs: There is a huge difference between writing a memoir for yourself and writing it for an audience. By writing for others, the author may be tempted to omit details or even change the story, compromising the process for the final product. Also, it may be disappointing if very few people take the time to read the memoir. Still, sharing a memoir in limited circles can be therapeutic, especially if there is a receptive audience. Sharing can strengthen social ties and help friends and family members understand who the writer is and how he or she came to be that way. The process can also help validate the writer’s experiences and even break ageist stereotypes, says Susan Bluck, a psychology professor at the University of Florida. A child or grandchildren may be surprised to learn their grandparent hitchhiked across the country, Dr. Bluck says, adding, “It feels good when someone is excited about your story.” Ms. Huneke, in the introduction to her memoir, discusses why she chose to leave a written legacy for her immediate family. Her memoir, beyond a few excerpts, hasn’t been shared with anyone else: “Perhaps this is an exercise of self-affirmation, that one’s existence has been worthwhile and possibly even memorable,” she wrote. “Or does it have a higher purpose, to fill in gaps for future generations who, one hopes, might care and even enjoy it? Then again, maybe it is only a desire to explain to one’s children just why one is the way one is. It might even be interesting for them to identify characteristics in themselves they may have inherited!” Ms. Ward is a writer in Mendham, N.J. She can be reached at [email protected]

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londontheatre · 7 years

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This production of Sir Terence Rattigan’s Love in Idleness, originally called Less Than Kind, comes across as a straight revival, and in many ways it is, but there’s an interesting story about the various revisions of the play, in the show’s programme (worth a read, even if £5 is a tad too steep for some). The two versions were substantially different enough to warrant Rattigan having to apply to the Lord Chamberlain’s Office for a new licence before the play could be staged as Love in Idleness. In this production, Sir Trevor Nunn has used “a conflation of the two versions”.

To a modern audience, this has now become a period play, what with talk of ‘a fiver’ being sufficient funds per head for dinner at the Dorchester, and cohabitation still seen by many in the general population at the time the play is set as immoral, described in the play as “living in sin”. Old newsreels from the 1940s were played during scene changes, but ultimately these came across as fillers rather than adding anything to the evening’s proceedings. This was quite a personal story that just so happened to be set in Second World War London, and there was enough in the script about rationing, for example, without the need for pitiful meat portions to be displayed on stage during a set change.

Sir John Fletcher (Anthony Head), Minister for Tank Production (don’t ask) and his partner Olivia Brown (Eve Best) are in a relationship but Sir John is still married to Diana (Charlotte Spencer). Olivia’s son Michael (a broody Edward Bluemel) is largely unaware of the current situation, having been stationed overseas for most of the war, only returning as victory for the Allied Forces is becoming increasingly imminent. There’s some humour in the audience knowing more than certain characters at certain times, and then more humour when the penny drops. It became a tad formulaic.

Opposites attract, in the old adage. The establishment figure of Sir John clashes with the more radical and borderline idealistic Michael, and predictably they eventually end up accepting one another. Mind you, if they hadn’t, it would have made for a very dreary and repetitively argumentative evening indeed. But is it believable that Michael, such a left-wing (but absolutely not communist) and headstrong character, would be so easily led, or debatably misled, by both Fletchers, separately?

I could go on with more examples: suffice to say the play isn’t all that. But goodness me, the acting is superb throughout. The script is far from a flop, however. For instance, Edward Bluemel’s Michael attempts an antic disposition as though this were Hamlet. He even offers Sir John and his mother tickets to a play, apparently called Murder in the Family, as though this were Act III Scene II of Shakespeare’s masterpiece. I’d even go so far as to say I could see Bluemel in a production of Hamlet, playing the title role, at some point in the relatively near future.

LOVE IN IDLENESS REVIEW

Rattigan would not have foreseen the inadvertent relevance to the off-stage character called Bojo Sprott-Williams, an aristocrat. It is well within living memory that a certain Mayor of London was nicknamed ‘Bo-Jo’, and Sprott-Williams’ conduct as described by both Sir John and Michael meant that Bojo, like his politician namesake, might as well have been in the Bullingdon Club himself. And I couldn’t help feeling sympathetic towards Olivia, torn between love for her partner and love for her son, chastising and then almost immediately being apologetic and caring. It’s not easy to achieve affection towards such an indecisive character, but Eve Best is utterly sublime.

My fellow theatregoer found this show a ‘good English classic’. For my part, it’s a hilarious, heartrending and hopeful production.

Review by Chris Omaweng

This brand new production marks Trevor Nunn’s exciting return to Rattigan’s work, following the huge success of Flare Path. Returning from Canada after a four-year absence during the war, eighteen-year-old Michael is full of youthful ideology and leftist leanings. But he is shocked to find his widowed mother Olivia is now the mistress of cabinet minister Sir John Fletcher, enjoying a comfortable society life. When Michael and John clash, sparks fly and relationships are tested as everyone learns some difficult lessons in love.

Love in Idleness stars the Olivier Award winning Eve Best (A Moon for the Misbegotten, Hedda Gabler and Nurse Jackie), Anthony Head (Six Degrees of Separation, Merlin and Buffy The Vampire Slayer) and Edward Bluemel (The Halcyon)

LOVE IN IDLENESS

Apollo Theatre London Booking Period: 11 May – 1 July 2017 Running time: 2 Hours 45 Minutes including one interval

http://ift.tt/2pYKiqP LondonTheatre1.com

#IFTTT #LondonTheatre1.com

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clubofinfo · 7 years

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Expert: A century ago, a Southern academic and racist emerged in Europe and the United States as a crusader to “make the world safe for democracy”.1 Wilson had been elected president in 1913, the year before Europe’s imperialists plunged the world into four years of mass murder. That war alone caused some four million direct battle casualties and untold millions of non-combatant deaths in the aftermath. Woodrow Wilson, despite the policies he actually pursued, would be turned into an icon of the 20th century’s most enduring myth—the benevolence and humanitarian virtue of the great slaveholder republic founded in 1776. Wilson could arguably be called the nation’s first celebrity politician and international celebrity export. This remarkable marketing accomplishment predated television. The successful promotion of Wilson on both sides of the Atlantic as the archangel of peace and the United States as virtual heaven on Earth was certainly made easier by the cinema (especially the newsreel) and mass literacy (although an overwhelming number of the soldiers slaughtered in the European theatre were illiterate). It was the organisational and manipulative skills honed during the campaign to bring the US into this initially European war that would empower the men who came to dominate the mass media—whose descendants dominate it today. In 2017, a real estate mogul from New York City, the original headquarters of the propaganda machine that created Woodrow Wilson, became the 45th president of the United States. The country has been waging war almost continuously since 1945, most recently its proclaimed “Global War on Terror”. From all indications the US war efforts have not been all that successful, at least by any literal interpretation of the war’s stated objectives. The “terror” that is the “enemy” does not appear anywhere near defeated. Despite the efforts of US Forces (both overt and covert), the third president has now arrived in the White House with what might best be called a stalemate: as Remarque titled his book Im Westen nichts neues (misleadingly translated into English as “All Quiet on the Western Front”).2 So 2017 begins not unlike 1917. There has been no progress in the war—just a continuous flow of corpses and body parts, albeit mainly those of civilians in the alleged combat zones. In 1917 Wilson’s handlers needed to create the conditions by which the US population could be persuaded to surrender its men and boys as cannon fodder in Flanders and at the same time convince the belligerents in Europe that the US was not shipping soldiers and materiel to Europe to expand its own empire. These were no mean tasks. Aside from a significant faction among the ruling elite that was unwilling to spend money defending Britain (a competitor), there was the generally held attitude of a largely immigrant population that Europe was the place they had gladly left behind. Either they wanted nothing to do with Europe or they were sufficiently connected by family ties that they saw no reason to return to shoot relatives who happened to remain in Europe. As for the Black population of the US, they had nothing to say in the matter. The number of Blacks allowed to vote for Wilson was insignificant. Furthermore they did not need to go to Europe to be killed. It was dangerous enough being Black in the US. The US regime had neutralised the indigenous population and its ex-slaves were largely under control. Hence one could say that domestic peace (for whites at least) prevailed. However, in 1913 Wilson had signed the Federal Reserve Act.3 Explained as a law to establish economic and monetary stability after what had been one of the longest depressions in history, it actually transferred the nation’s finances to a para-state corporation dominated by the country’s most powerful banks—who after 1914 had also become the principal creditors of Britain and France in their war against Germany. In other words, the US regime had created a structure by which its fiscal and monetary policy would be made not by the legislature (as foreseen in the Constitution) but by committees of men for whom the outcome in Europe was far from a matter of indifference. In the first months of the war—in fact until late 1915—the Allies seemed a sure bet. Their creditors were convinced the war would be won quickly. By 1916 faith in a quick end to the slaughter had disappeared. Much worse were the serious fears of an adverse decision, either a victory for Germany or an end to hostilities with conditions disadvantageous to Britain and France (and hence their US bankers). Anything short of an Allied victory heightened the risk that the Allies would default on their debts. Hence pressure mounted for Wilson to mobilise on the side of Morgan’s debtors. Needless to say the DuPont family was just as thrilled to increase its supply of explosives and munitions to the War Department.4 Provocations had been fabricated in the past to justify US military intervention against weak or defenceless countries like Spain and Mexico (and the much hated Black republic of Haiti) whose inhabitants also were considered racially inferior. But a war in Europe would be a war against white people with comparable or even superior weaponry and military aptitude. The last war the US had fought against whites was half a century ago. The Civil War had traumatized the country for decades thereafter. Hence Wilson’s government was faced with a huge challenge: to create an image of the war in Europe, which could be sold to the white citizenry. Moreover it had to create the illusion of a threat to the country which could make the US intervention appear as self-defence. To do this it was necessary to create a new image of the USA. This image had to be compatible with the various narrative levels of the sales campaign. To accomplish this complex task, the Committee on Public Information was established. Since the British Empire had been the traditional enemy of the US since 1776, a story had to be concocted in which the US and the UK were now friends bound—as opposed to enemies separated—by history. Then a story had to be invented as to why the German Empire, only constituted in 1871, was an enemy of the US although there had never been a war between the two countries. A story also had to be told that there was something common between Britain and France (historical enemies and constant competitors) and the US, which made them the natural allies of the United States. Then there were some tricky details. A lot of immigrants actually came from Germany and or had family ties to different parts of the German Empire. Until recently there had been no reason to give this much attention. Now it was entirely possible that such German immigrants would be asked to fight against Germany. Could they be trusted? What about the Irish who had no reason to love Britain as the colonial master of their ancestral homeland?5 Complicating this was the known activism of Germans in the emerging labour movement. Then there was the large number of rural and semi-rural inhabitants far from the centres of power. Leaving aside the notorious ignorance of world geography and affairs of those farm boys and ranch hands, who could be recruited to take land from Indians and Mexicans: Would they volunteer to get their guns and sail far away to Europe, where there was no land to grab? Thus the Committee on Public Information had to rewrite US history—almost from the beginning. This was the origin of the US mission in World War I to “make the world safe for democracy”. The polemics of the British settler elite; e.g., Thomas Jefferson, notwithstanding, the foundation of the United States was a unilateral declaration of independence from an imperial regime in London that threatened to extinguish the sources of oligarchical wealth in thirteen of its North America colonies in favour of industrialisation and power-sharing with creole elites emerging in the Caribbean: in short, an end to chattel slavery and the expense of suppressing slave rebellions.6 Democracy, a system of government whose spurious origins are attributed to the slave-holding society of ancient Greece, was redesigned as the perennial flower of a state whose landowners and financiers had consistently resisted every attempt to deliver it to the vast majority of the country’s population. At the same time the “melting pot” fantasy was invented to explain why previously separate immigrant communities, successively imported to exploit whatever group had landed in the previous generation, were now mysteriously all Americans. These ethnic and language groups were inoculated with the holy spirit of Manifest Destiny, the political equivalent of the “gift of tongues”—in reality the sediment of America’s acidic political system. Germany was then reduced to a mere rapine horde of cannibals, ruled by a fanatical dictator (an image to return throughout the 20th century in the depiction of the regime’s enemies). The German emperor, a cousin of the then-reigning British king-emperor, was turned into the enemy of Democracy and humanity.7 In essence, the Hohenzollern king-emperor was simply turned into the logical opposite of the emerging fiction. The diplomatic manoeuvres by which France had assured that Germany went to war remained concealed so that even today charitable historians insist that Germany was the sole cause of the war.8 The vicious image of Germany then had to be turned into a real threat to the innocence of Europe. The sinking of the Lusitania (the Latin name for Portugal), a British merchantman plying the Atlantic with munitions, but loaded simultaneously with American passengers, became the Maine or the World Trade Center for US propagandists. The German imperial government had published ample warning in the United States that the ship was transporting munitions to Britain and as such could not enjoy the benefits of neutral shipping. Despite public knowledge that the British ship was deemed a legitimate target for German submarines, the ostensibly neutral US government did nothing to discourage its citizens from taking passage. When it was duly sunk, outrage followed. The incident was converted into a casus belli for the United States regime to abandon its previously declared neutrality and to openly side with the British and French in the European imperialists’ war. The bankers’ president reacted according to a script that is followed to this day. Then the war atrocities propaganda, which the British had used so successfully to incite their own subjects, was reworked for domestic consumption in North America. Meanwhile an entire industry had been created to fabricate the American Dream (still a central element in school curriculum in the subordinated Federal Republic of Germany).9 Needless to say the treatment of non-whites in the US could not and was not heralded as a virtue. Yet since white supremacy was a major part of all European imperial ideology, this omission went unnoticed. British and US propagandists were eventually to elaborate the myth of American independence into the absurd—because truncated—fable of national self-determination as an excuse for fragmenting the Austro-Hungarian and German empires after the war.10 The history of how these central myths were propagated in the US is too extensive to treat here but Creel, who was the leading light of the Committee on Public Information, gave a detailed account in his book about the Committee.11 However, it is crucial to understand that the “Dream” is a 20th century fabrication, designed to sell the war at home and persuade European allies that the US was not entering a war of conquest in Europe. In 1917, the empire that still cannot say its name, was shaping the consciousness of subsequent generations for whom the US is merely the purveyor of “freedom”, Coca Cola and Levi’s jeans (later the Internet, a computer system designed for surviving its own plans for global atomic war against the Soviet Union).12 This is the non-empire with over 800 military bases worldwide and whose ambassadors have the power of pro-consuls in most of the world’s 187 United Nations member-states.13 It is necessary to understand the public relations (as Edward Bernays felt compelled to rename “propaganda”) and corporate advertising machine that was created to invent the strange belief that the United States of America is truly exceptional—not only for its citizens, but for the rest of – at least the white part—world. It is this carefully crafted and maintained image of the US—found in every cinema, on almost all televisions, and in the music and consumer goods proliferated even more virally than the weapons supposedly limited by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). It is the base for the consciousness of millions who have been taught to abhor every particular quality of their own cultures and countries not consonant with the taste promulgated by the boards of US corporations, especially among those who think of themselves as “white”. As Bukharin has been cited, Anglo-Saxon ‘love of liberty’ was only “a less vulgar but no less untenable attempt to advance a territorial-psychological theory. The place of “race” is here taken by its substitute, the “middle European”, “American” or some other humanity”.14 Only then is it possible to grasp the peculiar reaction to Donald Trump’s election in 2016 to the highest elected office of that invisible empire, with its ubiquitous invisible army. George W. Bush was mocked. Barack Obama was canonised. But Trump—who is in every way as much a creature of the real US as his predecessors and competitors—is reviled and treated as a threat to world peace. Ronald Reagan—who actually joked on camera about nuking the Soviet Union—has been forgotten, like the Alzheimer’s he no doubt brought into office. Not even a month has passed since the inauguration of Mr Donald Trump of Trump Towers as the 45th person authorised by the US Constitution to occupy the slave-built mansion at 1600 Pennsylvania most appropriately named the White House—which with the notable exception of one Kenyan-American and his family, has also been occupied solely by men who consider themselves to be “white” and their domestic servants often enough of the “coloured persuasion”—and the Washington correspondent of the liberal Lisbon daily Publico reported that the world economic system is threatened with destruction by one of the most notorious (though certainly not the richest) New York real estate magnates.15 No irony was intended. Portugal, a country whose cultural significance, were it not for Brazil, would probably compete with that of Belgium or Finland, is about as far as one can get in what North Americans call “Old Europe” from the centres of power. Its last great moment was 1755 when the destruction of Lisbon by an earthquake precipitated a European financial panic.16 Since then—as the 2008 casino collapse amply showed—it has been sufficiently far from power to have become a very realistic place—a showcase for the fraud that drives that world economic system and how a people accustomed to poverty and neglect by their rulers still manages to maintain a kind of quiet dignity and decency noticeably lacking in the Western hemisphere. The absurdity of the report from Washington ought to be apparent in a country whose 11 million inhabitants—making it slightly larger than Mr Trump’s home town—have been reduced from imperial citizens to inhabitants and customer service employees in a relatively cheap theme park for the rest of Europe’s still employed tourists. They could be forgiven for asking what the new US President could possibly do to more seriously diminish their standard of living than has already been done by the 44 previous. However, its political class continues to pursue the ideals enshrined in the Treaty of Methuen, probably the first subprime mortgage of an entire country to be consummated in modern European history.17 This reader had to ask which world economic system was threatened with demise by the new tenant in Washington’s most exclusive rental property? By what logic or stretch of the imagination is one to believe that a man made wealthy by real estate speculation in one of the most manipulated property markets in the world could even conceive anything that would destroy the basis of his family’s wealth? Did we all miss something? Is or did Donald Trump become a communist—even after the collapse of the Soviet Union ostensibly proved to us all that there is no alternative to capitalism? Another bizarre headline heralded the “end of political correctness”.18 For those who follow this line of thought it may be helpful to remind them that “political correctness” originally meant the hypocritical and deliberately divisive appropriation of the language of political liberation to undermine the very liberating goals of ending various forms of exploitation and oppression based on race, class, or gender. It is a testimony to the effectiveness of reactionary propaganda that the language of liberation has been converted into an instrument for defending its opposite. It is also proof that language is not isomorphic with the real world—an insight only appreciated when the managers of language—the mass media in all its permutations—attack those who hold views with which they cannot agree. Nazis and the now largely defunct communist parties of what was once called the Soviet bloc are the only ones whose use of language was supposedly deceptive or simply dishonest. In what was once called “the West” or the “free world” the unrestricted expression of ideas was claimed as an exclusive property. Per corollary everything said or written in the West was per se free (and putatively true) whereas everything said in the “East” was putatively false and composed of lies. No matter how many lies were exposed in the West, the West was still “free” and “true”, while no matter how accurate or intelligible the communication in the East was, it was composed prima facie of lies. One of the most astounding examples of this hypocrisy was the claim that official economic reporting in the East was always doctored, if not outright false. This claim was reasserted when the GDR collapsed as the basis for deliberate undervaluing of state-owned assets awarded for next to nothing to Western bidders (to the extent competitive bidding even applied.) Yet it was not only standard practice of Western governments to falsify cost of living figures by changing the composition of the basket of goods used to measure it or to fake unemployment figures by changing the definition of unemployed, whole batteries of accounting firms specialised in producing deceptive balance sheets to undervalue companies for tax purposes. This practice was especially common for US corporations operating in Latin America; e.g., Cuba and Guatemala.19 The fraud was only exposed when nationalist governments in those countries tried to enforce compensation for eminent domain actions based on tax returns that had been filed under previous regimes. John Blair, in two studies produced while he was an economist for the defunct US Congressional Committee on Transnational Corporations, wrote quite clearly that the US Government has no reliable economic statistics because it is almost impossible to get accurate disclosure from the principal economic actors—business corporations.20 In other words, the world economic system that Mr Trump supposedly endangers is so opaque that not even those employed by the government to routinely record and analyse its activity are able to attest to the reliability, let alone veracity of the data disclosed. How this condition can be reconciled with the dogma of free information in the West defies comprehension. So let us leave aside the “nuclear threat” Mr Trump supposedly poses to the world economy, as we know it. The fact is we know very little about it by those criteria we have been told we are to trust; e.g., the Press owned by those very corporations whose secrecy is all but inviolate. We have no reliable or honest information about the status of the world economy from anyone claiming the right to tell us its condition. In political terms we are not even entitled to this information since it is per se private property—free only for those who own it. Ultimately this means the only claims sane people can make on their governments is that they do or do not do certain things, which have a real economic impact—e.g., secure incomes or the basic needs for everyday life for real human beings. Of course, that is where the central conflict begins. That “world economic system” to which not only the Portuguese journalist refers is not designed to satisfy real economic (basic needs of everyday life) problems. It is designed to satisfy the needs of legal entities called corporations and other subordinate fictions for those people who “own” them. So to return to plain language—the author for Publico is saying that Mr Trump poses a threat to the system by which existing corporations and their owners satisfy their needs. But these needs must not be too clearly specified since the more specifically they are described the more obvious it must become that they have nothing to do with what most of the world’s population expects from an economic system. The jargon of the world economic system is so pervasive that few people even realise that their own descriptions of the economy make it impossible to draw a direct connection between what corporations and their owners do and what effects those actions or omissions have on the struggle to satisfy the basic needs of everyday life. Here it is important to mention the ideological function of the so-called “priority of needs” pyramid which everyone taught economics and business administration in school or university learns. This pyramid claims that humans prioritise their needs beginning with food and shelter and in the last stage—when everything else is done—consider the acquisition of knowledge or wisdom or human rights. This “priority of needs” is really an argument for depriving humans of their humanity—which for better or worse means the necessity of determining themselves what best satisfies their basic needs. Like B.F. Skinner’s primitive behaviourism theories, the hierarchy of needs is really a trick to justify slavery, both physical and intellectual.21 The language is deceptively simple. The illusion of simplicity is intended to mirror a supposedly simple reality. But reality for humans has never been simple. Ungoverned by “instinct” and wholly at the mercy of language, it is impossible for humans to satisfy their own basic needs without cognition—essentially overt and covert verbal behaviour. Of course, without cognition they can satisfy the needs of others—and that is why this clever metaphor is a standard “social science” explanation in a discipline that prides itself on pretensions to numeral-mathematical objectivity. The exaggerated fear of Donald Trump—not confined to the Portuguese middle class—can only be understood in terms of what the image of Donald Trump means to those fed on the American Dream—a neurosis cultivated in the advertising laboratories of Woodrow Wilson’s Creel Committee. This is not to say that people have no reason to fear the future exercise of US imperial and corporate power. Rather it means that Donald Trump—properly speaking the spectacle of Donald Trump, President of the United States—has infected the educated white population with a massive dose of cognitive dissonance. After the phenomenal “Blackwash” of the US “Global War on Terror” purged popular memory of the embarrassing George W Bush era, a garden-variety white billionaire threatens to undermine a century of brainwashing. This raises an even more important strategic question. Do the invisible people who rule the US not recognise the risk that Donald Trump poses for the carefully nurtured infatuation of Europeans and the white middle classes everywhere with the American Dream? Or do they feel this is an endgame? Are they convinced that they have sufficiently isolated Putin’s Russia and the Chinese tiger so that no matter what the US does it will retain the support Wilson’s Committee on Public Information so carefully engineered—if only because the US remains the lesser of all evils, makes the more popular films and controls the Internet? We cannot forget that the machinery, which maintains consent, ignorance and ideological conformity with the Business ideology of the United States, is still in place. It is entirely possible that Donald Trump is an accident or evidence of dissent in the US ruling elite—which is still overwhelmingly “white”. Given what we know—or could know—about this machine, the hysteria about Donald Trump may also be a crafted fabrication. Despite all the formal outrage over President Trump’s policies, not a single European government has threatened retaliatory measures against the US. Although Mr Trump declared NATO obsolete neither Greece—which cannot even afford to be in NATO—nor any other member has announced its withdrawal. Nor have there been any calls for such action in the mainstream or compatible media. So is this a lot of “wolf-crying”? What about the so-called real economy? Donald Trump has trumpeted that his administration will bring Chinese jobs back to the US. One might conclude that he is promising US corporations to reduce workers to the status of “coolies”. No government in Europe—and certainly not the European Commission—has any plans for restoring full-wage employment to its own citizens. Angela Merkel has successfully suppressed any debate about German military deployment in the US combat theatres where refugees are the second major crop—after opium. The past half year, the Portuguese government, led nominally by a Socialist, spent most of its time concocting a budget to please Germany’s George Wallace, the finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble—little mention of the Portuguese themselves whose wage and consumption taxes have increased every year while salaries have been frozen at 2006 levels. If crypto-socialist Hollande has now decided not to seek re-election it is probably because he did his real job—dividing the French Socialist Party (PSF) beyond the capacity to govern.22 A minister under the last French president declared in an interview that the Americans had bought the Socialist Party years ago—only confirming what Philip Agee wrote in his CIA Diary.23 The Guardian, part of the compatible Press in the UK, published an article by a “colour revolutionary” from the Gene Sharp cottage industry that brought us the spectacle of Yugoslavia’s explosion and the fascist coup in the Ukraine.24 The author asserts that no more than 3.5% of the population is needed to bring down a tyrannical regime. Apparently there was never 3.5% capable of forcing the release of thousands of Black Americans rotting in US prisons, including such political prisoners as Mumia Jamal or Leonard Peltier—although their “trials” have long been proven to have been rigged by the State. Nor can one avoid the question whether the “special relationship” between Britain and the US allows a major British daily to advocate an unconstitutional challenge to the elected POTUS (never mind for a moment that the US has one of the most archaic and least democratic electoral systems on the planet)? The sincerity of the 3.5% is apparently as selective as the interest of the infamous 1%. One hundred years after fabrication of the Good America myth, the nightmare of the “American Dream” seems about to end. The comedian George Carlin once said they call it the “American Dream” because you have to be asleep to believe it. Maybe it would be a good thing if Donald Trump’s election made people wake up. * Thomas Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924, US President 1913-1921) was born in Virginia and educated in Georgia and South Carolina before taking degrees at Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore) and ultimately becoming president of Princeton University before launching his political career. Among his contributions upon becoming US President was to introduce the post-slavery Jim Crow regime into the federal civil service. (For the reader unfamiliar with US military institutions: the twisting citation in the title is from the US Marine Corps hymn. The Corps was a major foreign policy instrument for US Presidents already in Wilson’s day. It serves a function as presidential lifeguard not unlike the role of the Household Cavalry in service to the British monarch). * Erich Maria Remarque, Im Westen nichts neues, was a best-selling novel (1929) describing the conditions on the Western front during World War I from the German side at least. In German “nichts neues” means “nothing new”, a more ambiguous title than the harmless sounding “all quiet”. * The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 is often included in the catalogue of Wilson’s “progressive” legislation. In November 1910, the secret “council” was held at the Jekyll Island Club on the eponymous Georgia sea island where much of the US ruling class had been accustomed to spending vacations. It was attended by representatives of the US banking elite and its political officials in the Treasury and the Congress: Nelson Aldrich, A. Platt Andrew (members of the National Monetary Commission), Paul Warburg of Kuhn, Loeb & Co.; Frank Vanderlip, National City Bank of New York; Henry P. Davison, J P Morgan & Co.; and Charles Norton of the First National Bank of New York. Together they drafted what was called the Aldrich Plan. The Aldrich Plan in turn formed the basis for the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. * For details see Gerald Colby Zieg, Beyond the Nylon Curtain (1974), reviewed elsewhere by this author. World War I was “a great banquet of gold” for the Du Ponts who grossed over one billion dollars during the war (p. 131). * Any doubt about the British attitude toward Irish independence was removed when Roger Casement, who had played a leading role in exposing the slavery and mass murder in the Congo Free State under its owner, Belgium’s Leopold II, was hanged by the British for treason because he took his Irish nationality seriously and was convicted of accepting German promises of aid to the Irish nationalist struggle. It has been suggested that the British were killing two birds with one stone since Casement had earned the enmity of the Belgian empire too. * See Gerald Horne, The Counter-Revolution of 1776 (2014), reviewed by this author elsewhere. * Wilhelm II was a welcome guest in the United States before the war. This author’s grandfather was a witness to one of the yachting enthusiast’s visits to Newport, RI on the occasion of regattas in Narragansett Bay. * In 2013, Christopher Clark, an Australian historian “sympathetic” to Germany omits entirely Britain’s interest in provoking war in 1914. See The Sleepwalkers by the current Regis Professor of History at Cambridge University, also reviewed by this author. In contrast Carroll Quigley (1981) provides a more circumspect analysis in The Anglo-American Establishment, a book largely disregarded although Quigley was a Georgetown professor and Bill Clinton mentor. * English books in German schools still teach the long-discredited “Thanksgiving feast” story although it is a matter of historical record that Thanksgiving in the US was celebrated as a military victory—like Blood River in Afrikaner history’s Day of the Covenant—until Abraham Lincoln turned it into a national holiday of reconciliation between the North and South in the US Civil War. The American Dream is composed of little lies, exaggerations and outright falsehoods written into textbooks, film scripts and consumer-based celebrations exported wherever a buck is to be made. * This became part of the Wilsonian “14 Points”. See Markus Osterrieder, Welt im Umbruch (2014) for a detailed discussion of the intricacies and contradictions of this covert project—which somehow only applied to peoples who were deemed “white”. * George Creel, How we advertised America (1921). Creel was a journalist chairing a group comprising Madison Avenue advertising executives et al. See also Stuart Ewen, PR! A Social History of Spin, (1996). * Fittingly the dean of armed propaganda (counter-terrorism) in the US, Edward G. Lansdale (1908-1987), began his career as the advertising executive who made Levi’s jeans into the famous clothing brand it is today. For some odd reason the worshippers of the Internet forget to mention that it is the successor to the ARPANET, invented by the US military to assure that its computer systems would survive the expected retaliatory strike following the first atomic strike against the Soviet Union—the core of US strategic planning until the end of the so-called Cold War, as can be seen in the official history film produced by the Sandia National Laboratories, the R&D department of the US atomic war establishment. See U.S. Strategic Nuclear Policy. The fact that almost all crucial servers for the Internet are located in the US—such that the EU felt compelled to adopt consent rules for the storage of data from European users on US servers—is never seen as a risk to “Internet freedom”. Never mind that virtually all Internet software, and much of the hardware, originates from US corporations. * There is an old joke on the Left about the US regime: “Why has there never been a coup in Washington D.C.?” The answer: “Because there is no U.S. Embassy in Washington D.C.” In a conversation the son of a Honduran tobacco plantation owner told this author that in the nation’s capital, Tegucigalpa, the three most important buildings in the country were the Catholic Cathedral, the headquarters of the Honduran armed forces and the US embassy, whereby the latter was paramount. * N. Bukharin, Imperialism and World Economy, London 1972 (1918), p. 112. cited in Kees Van Der Pijl, The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class (1984). * Rita Siza, “Trump começou a desmantelar a ordem comercial global” Publico, 24 January 2017, pp. 22-23. * This event also played a central role in Voltaire’s satirical novella Candide, a work later adapted by Lillian Hellman and Leonard Bernstein to dramatize the political atmosphere of the United States during the post-WWII purges. * Treaty of Methuen named after the British diplomat, John Methuen, who negotiated this treaty with Portugal in 1703. Ostensibly a commercial treaty, the British Empire essentially guaranteed Portugal’s sovereignty (against any challenges by Spain) in return for what would now be called “most favoured nation status”. In the course of Anglo-Portuguese relations, Portugal would sacrifice its textile industry to Manchester in return for privileged access of its wine to British markets (e.g. Port and Madeira) and open its Brazilian ports to British merchants. Arguably the Treaty of Methuen made Portugal a permanent extension of the British Empire on the Continent. * Ligia Amancio „Trump e o pós-politicamente correcto“, Publico, 27 January 2017, p. 47 * This was the real source of conflict between United Fruit and the Arbenz government that led the CIA to overthrow the Guatemalan president in 1954. It was also the reason why Fidel Castro nationalised assets of major US corporations—they had refused compensation based on their fraudulent tax returns filed under the defunct Batista regime. * See John Blair, The Control of Oil (1976) and Economic Concentration (1972). * B.F. Skinner, About Behaviorism (1974) Skinner’s research coincides with a whole range of programs funded by the CIA to investigate manipulation of human behavior. Skinner’s most famous books were Walden Two (1948) and Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971). It is entirely possible that his work was wittingly or unwittingly promoted by those sources of academic largesse. For a stark contrast to Skinner’s “biological determinism” see Morse Peckham, Explanation and Power: The Control of Human Behavior (xxxx). * João Ruela Ribeiro, “A alternativa à austeridade vem desmoralizada e sem poder”, Publico, 28 January 2017, p. 3. “O resultado: a direita não passou a apoiá-lo e a esquerda que o elegeu abandonou-o. Hollande, o mais impopular Presidente da Quinta República, chega a Lisboa com um pé for a do poder, o Partido Socialista totalmente dividido e com a ameaça da Frente Nacional.” * Philip Agee, CIA Diary (1975). * Gene Sharp (*1928) is a retired political science professor from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and researcher at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs, who founded the Albert Einstein Institution in 1983. The institution’s funding has come from the entire host of US political warfare foundations—NED, IRI, Rand, Ford. His cottage think tank (amusingly also located in Cottage Street, East Boston, Massachusetts and its role in the manufacture of synthetic “revolutionary” movements is the subject of a documentary The Revolution Business. OTPOR—meanwhile renamed—played a central role in orchestrating the media campaigns that made Milosovic’s Serbia the tyrannical cause of the war which with the power of the US—exercised by counter-terror expert Richard Holbrooke—forced the destruction of the Yugoslav Federation in the early 1990s. The process was described in detail in the documentary The Weight of Chains (2010). http://clubof.info/

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