It's December . . .

 It's December finally in the year that wasn't.  The time for a summing up of the year past, a making of lists.

Except there aren't many or any noteworthy personal events in this year that never should have happened; it's like God stepped away for a moment and got distracted.  What would I list as something I did, because I never went anywhere hardly, or did anything practically, once the virus took hold, and what I think happened this year, my reality, is regarded by the Trumpite side of my family as my fantasy, induced by osmosis apparently by my location not only within the Northeast Bubble but actually inside the Beltway. 

Of course, they live in the real fantasy world, not me, because I operate on real information that I acquire from the Washington Post, the New York Times, MSNBC, CNN and my further reading in books and magazines as filtered through my education at boarding school, a state university and a top ten law school which taught me critical thinking skills to augment my life experiences acquired from being a ski bum for four years, a policeman for nine years and a lawyer for 25 years.  So what did I accomplish or do in this DOA year?

I went to one movie, on Valentine's Day, Parasite, because it won the Academy Award for being the best picture, where I got really sick by that night with a respiratory ailment that kept me down for two weeks and that I still don't believe I've fully recovered from. The movie was, well, awful and the illness was, well, I'll never know what I actually had because in Trump's America nothing is as it was before him and not for the better by a long shot.

2018 Movies

I saw six movies at the theatre in 2018, two of them very excellent films.

Three Billboards Outside Ebbings, Missouri.  Although this was a 2017 film, I saw it early this year and I thought it should have won the Best Picture Oscar for last year.  It's a very complicated film, and very violent, which has created a lot of controversy about it, but doesn't that describe the way life is?  Anything with Frances McDormand is bound to be a riveting film.

The Green Book.  This is my choice for Best Film this year.  It's also a complicated film with violence, injustice, suspense and subtle humor, and which involves loyalty to clan, duty and self, as well as growth and redemption.  Its depiction of an at-heart-a-good-man Italian bouncer, trying to support his family in 1960s New York City through dubious enterprises and low-level crime while remaining true to his tribal community, is fascinating and the film features jarring culture clashes from which compromises, accommodations and friendships emerge.  I am sad to say that until I saw this movie, I had no knowledge of the Green Book, although I was fully aware of Jim Crow America.  It features noteworthy performances by Viggo Mortensen as the Italian protagonist Tony Vallelonga, who drives and protects black classical and jazz pianist Don Shirley, portrayed by Mahershala Ali, on his musical tour of Southern American towns.

First Man.  This film features Ryan Gosling as Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the moon as he famously said, "A small step for a man, a giant leap for all mankind."  This is a film depicting a different America, a crew-cut time of greatness when America could and would accomplish astonishing things like landing a man on the moon within ten years of setting out to do so.  Included are the heart-breaking setbacks like the module fire that killed three astronauts to the soaring triumphs like the successful moon launch.  This is nothing like the current America.  A fun, quasi-suspenseful look back.

The Nutcracker Suite and the Fourth Realm.  A musical, live and animated action mashup that was entertaining for its 90 minute length.

Vice.  (Seen December 31st.)  A movie about a dark and truly evil man, Dick Chaney, basically a psychopath turned vigilante says one reviewer, who was instrumental in leading our country down the path towards ruination as Dubya's VP and the chief whisperer to that reckless fool.  I thought it might be funny because if you can't laugh at tragic events you are just left to cry.  But it's not funny, except for a few guffaw moments like watching Dubya try to shuck and jive his way through his handed-to-him-by-Scalia presidency.  This black biopic just gets grimmer and grimmer as we watch our nation get taken down a darker and darker inglorious path by power-drunk powerbrokers.  I might as well as have spent 132 minutes in a dentist's chair as looking backwards at this grim exposition of America's tragic missteps so far in this century.  

The Grinch Who Stole Christmas.  An animated tale of petty revenge and venality perpetrated by a crabbed, self-centered man living alone by circumstances and choice trumped by redemption engendered by love, devotion, civility and inclusion.  This obviously is a morality tale on how the current America might yet emerge back to greatness. 

And the best picture is . . . .

The Academy Awards for 2017 are upon us.  When they started nominating ten or more movies for Best Picture, I lost interest because I hadn't seen many or most of them.

It was too bad a winnowing process, with too many pictures vying for the top prize.  But I have seen Three Billboards in Missouri recently, a picture nominated for the Oscar, and I was stunned. 

It was wryly funny at first, but then it got real and horrifying, as the horrifying under-pining of the story would suggest.  (A raped and burned to death teenage girl, whose mother had cavalierly, unknowingly, invited her to walk to her destination instead of using the family car.)  There wasn't a sound in the theatre for the last hour as everyone watched, engrossed in the unfolding story as to the gruesome, oh-so-human consequences of each woman's choice.

And the ending is ambiguous, so it can finish (does anything ever finish, except school terms and life?) anyway a rapt, involved viewer thinks it should.  What a tightly constructed story, with excellent writing coupled with superior acting, and I think it should win the big prize.

Movies

Last year I saw ten movies.  One I can't remember, but the others were, in loose order of how I liked them, these, although I might have the exact titles wrong:

Dunkirk.  A rousing, well-told spectacle about the British evacuation by boat lift of their surrounded army from the French mainland in 1940 during the fall of France.  It might have saved the world from the scourge of Nazism, although as Churchill drily noted, wars are not won by evacuations.

Darkest Hour.  Another Dunkirk era tale, this time focusing on the lonely struggle of Winston Churchill to keep Britain in the fight during their darkest hour of World War II, and thereby maybe saving the world from the scourge of Nazism, once America finally got in the fight a year and a half later.

Beauty and the Beast.  Yeah, a musical.  I got dragged to it under false pretenses but I liked it.

Hidden Figures.  A stirring (and true) tale of black women's fight against not only sexism but racism.

The Batman Leggo Movie.  We sneaked into it after another show.  It was funny.

Despicable Me 3.  We sneaked into it after another show.  It was funny.

Thor.  It was deadpan funny, inspiring, well-paced and well done.

A Monster Calls.  It was about a tree in the cemetery, is what I remember.  And fatherhood, I think.

Fist Fight.  It was dreadful and unwatchable, something about a beleaguered schoolteacher in a tough school.  We walked out after 20 minutes and snuck into another show.

Reading, a little.

You might think that because I'm retired now, I would have a lot of time to read these days.  Somehow the days go by and although I'm busy around the house, I haven't made much time to read.  I blame it on two things this past year; my double hernia surgery last summer which took me longer to fully recover from, and the shock of November 9th when it became fully apparent that the Russians had pulled off a stunning coup and our world had changed for the rest of our lives.  I read fourteen books, however, and discarding the two short, sketched-in-outline-of-the-conflict on WWI and WWII by the same cruising historian, here are the best half dozen in ascending order, roughly.

Oswald's Tale by Norman Mailer.  Mailer was a great writer and this book was every bit as good as his Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Executioner's Song.  This book on Lee Harvey Oswald, a still-mysterious figure that, perhaps lone wolf style, changed US history forever with his assassination of President Kennedy.  (Think Vietnam, the Great Society, RMN, Watergate).  The book details Oswald's dreary and closely monitored (by the Russkies) time in the Soviet Union after he defected, and when he came back married to perhaps a KGB operative.  In short order this secretive, querulous lazy-bones drifter committed the most improbable crime of century.  It was an interesting book, Mailer came to no conclusion as to whether Oswald acted alone, he said--Maybe.  Mailer did, however, convince me in seven pages at the end of this tome that Jack Ruby probably acted on behalf of the mob to rub out Oswald.

Silas Mariner by George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans).  This short novel about a reclusive gold-hearted, gold-hoarding tailor is classic literature and tugs at your heart as all comes out right in the end.  It's depressing to think that in the nineteenth century women authors had to write under male names to get their books published, reviewed seriously and read.

Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller.  This classic play introduced Willie Lomax to American lexicon, a prototypical loser, destroyed at the end, and full of closely guarded secrets, as are several of his family members also.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte.  My reading of Victorian novels by female authors continues, they are all worthwhile and I wasn't exposed to them in my educational upbringing at an all-boys high school.  I read Dickens and my sisters read Bronte.  I loved Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte (published under the pseudonym Ellis Bell) , which I read in 2015, and this was a good book too, especially the first half.  The incredible, improbable plot-driven coincidences piled up too high by the end for me to think this book is superior to her sister's stunning novel but it did give us the notion of the crazy relative in the attic.  Watch the 1943 movie starring Orson Wells, and read the book, and you'll be richly rewarded.

True Grit by Charles Portis.  A little known western novel that is totally engrossing.  Most people are familiar with the two cinematic adaptations, starring John Wayne or Jeff Bridges, both interesting in their own right, but this book will absorb you and is full of homilies and life truisms.

Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte.  The least known of the Bronte sisters' novels, interesting and convoluted.  From hard beginnings, this governess persevered and prospered because of the wholeness of her staid and sturdy character.  Is there a common theme running through the Bronte novels, do you suppose?  I just wish Emily had lived past age 30 and written at least a second novel.

A couple of movies, and snow

The first snowfall of the season came today, with bitter cold accompanying it.  I went out for a run as the snow started, but only went a mile as my hands were freezing despite wearing gloves.

Yesterday I went to see a movie at the mall, following a lunch of pizza at noon at the Lost Dog Cafe.  I hadn't been to see a movie at a theatre in over a year.

A Monster Calls was the movie, dealing with a boy's struggles coping with his mother's death to illness, aided or perhaps goaded by the appearance of a spectre in the form of a massive walking tree.  A movie to bring a date to it was not, as it was oppressively overwrought.

But the trip to the cinema was salvaged by seeing a second movie on the same day, Hidden Figures, a film about the incipient American space program as it battled the Russians for celestial ascendency even as it massively handicapped itself by discriminating against brilliant talent readily at hand in the form of capable African-Americans who were denied the opportunity to prove their worth due to the prejudices, customs and laws of the times in the South.  The long-suffering underclass finally overcame the obstacles presented however, a triumph not of the American spirit but of the human spirit in the everlasting struggle against mendacity and evil.