Penny Dreadful: City of Angels

Penny Dreadful:  City of Angels is ten-episode series premiered on Showtime in April 2020.  The show is a spin-off of an Anglo-American program also named Penny Dreadful broadcast for three-years in 2014, 2015, and 2017.  (The British shows were set in Victorian London and involved werewolves, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, vampires, Frankenstein and, even, Dorian Grey.)  I haven't see the British series.  The plotting and character development is similar to Babylon Berlin -- a large cast of characters with regenerating sub-plots tacked onto an over-arching story.  These shows all rely upon an atmospheric and detailed recreation of a past era, focusing on a single metropolitan setting -- Berlin itself is a character in Babylon Berlin; similarly Los Angeles in 1938 is lovingly invoked in the American series.  Lavishly detailed and accurate historical reconstruction, rife with carefully researched period allusions, provide a backdrop for lurid and gruesome plots and subplots.  The filmmakers, it seem, try to borrow conviction from their meticulous scene-setting, importing that element of truthfulness into narratives that don't otherwise make much sense and that strain credulity in all sorts of ways.  I had thought that Babylon Berlin was the prototype for City of Angels.  But, based on chronology, it seems to me that the German show likely derived from the first series of Penny Dreadful involving foggy London and its monsters.  

By my count there are about six plots developing simultaneously in City of Angels:  an amoral and childish whiz-kid works out computations that might be used to develop deadly weapons of mass destruction (Nazi agents are trying to kidnap him); a Chicano man joins the LA police force as the first Mexican-American officer, encounters racism, and forms an alliance with his partner, an aging Jew to combat the Nazis that have infiltrated LA government; a spooky German immigrant woman with her vicious son seduces a German dentist, moves into his household, and clashes with the virtuous Mexican-American housekeeper (who happens to be the mother of the Chicano cop); a gang of Pachucos led by a ferocious female criminal plot riots intended to trigger a race war; a man who has engaged in a love affair with a prominent, psychologically troubled radio evangelist is mysteriously murdered along with his whole family; the troubled radio evangelist who is blonde and beautiful falls in love with the Mexican cop, despite opposition of their families; a corrupt City Councilman, who is having a homosexual affair with a Nazi "blonde beast" assassin, plots to route a freeway directly through the Latino barrio -- his machinations are aided by (you guessed it!) Nazis; the cops pin the murders of the family on a hapless Chicano kid who is lynched with a resulting race riot in which the German dentist's child is injured -- this inspires the dentist's sinister mistress to urge him to become a Nazi himself, but the dentist, who is an heir to the Krupp arms and ordinance fortune resists meanwhile the troubled evangelist commits suicide and the city burns down in riots and, the next morning, wrecking balls and bulldozers knock down the Barrio.  

All of this material is more or less derivative:  there is a minor subplot involving the horrible torture-murder of a little girl that is redolent of the Black Dahlia killing that drives the plot of LA Confidential; the troubled evangelist is based Aimee Semple Macpherson and invokes Elmer Gantry and other similar  films; the narrative involving the route of the freeway, involving the homosexual councilman and his vicious plutocrat father, is modeled on Chinatown.  Chinatown, of course, was based on The Big Sleep and, so, the show is ultimately rooted in crime dramas from the fifties, including JackWebb's Dragnet -- the Courthouse tower in central LA is a key feature in the landscape.  There are several lavish song-and-dance numbers involving dozens of jitter-bugging dancers -- these scenes are derived from the cabaret numbers in Babylon Berlin.  Episodes, often, end with music playing over simultaneous and intercut scenes of violence or poignant encounters, lovers meeting and parting.  Everything in this stew is rehashed and dished out with liberal servings of violence and gore.  The two most interesting features in the show are its casting and mythology.  Three female villains are played by one actress, Natalie Dormer -- she has odd bulging eyes and the show wants you to admire the performer's versatility in these parts (there's also some kind of supernatural explanation -- the three lady-villains are all manifestations of some kind of demon:  Dormer plays the witchy German homewrecker who demands that her lover become a Nazi; she also acts the part of the female Pachuco  gangleader who incites the climactic riot; finally, she plays the mousy but, nonetheless, domineering administrative assistant to the evil city councilman.  Overarching all the subplots is a symbolic figure, Sancta Muerta --"Saint Death" who looks like a deranged version of the Virgin of Guadalupe and shows up just before the mayhem begins.  Implausibly, the kindly housekeeper at the German dentist's house (the mother of the Mexican cop) is a devotee to Sancta Muerta although she is also, of course, supposed to be a good and pious Catholic.  

The show doesn't know whether it is supposed to be high-proof "camp" or some kind of serious crime drama.  The characters are all ambiguous -- in this respect, there's an adult aspect to the series.  The evil city councilman also is a pathetic fat man who just wants to be loved -- he practices dance routines alone in his office.  The German dentist turns out to be a pacifist, although he's also an Iron-Cross-decorated Krupp.  The Jewish cop, who traffics in cliches and is supposed to be the central source of wisdom in the show, also frames suspects and commits a cold-blooded murder.  The brassy radio evangelist is really a wounded, suicidal victim of her domineering mother who, in turn,  is suffering from some combination of religious mania and psychosis due to her four miscarriages before she gave birth to the little girl who was raised in revival tents.  Everyone is given a mix of motives, and, although this is shallow and, often, not too credible, the show wants its characters to be rife with indecision, flawed, and acting on ambiguous and, often, questionable motives.  A problem, of course, is that this complexity in characterization is entrapped in a series of narratives that involve very primitive conflicts that are worked out through a combination of violence, melodramatic speechifying, and torture.  Some of the speeches are bizarre -- the corpulent city councilman proclaims the future as belonging to fat men, notable Mussolini and Hitler (who I don't recall as being fat at all) and that the reign of the autocratic fat men will be a "thousand year Reich."  Shows that trot out Nazis as  villains are always suspect -- the presence of Nazis radically simplifies plots into pure good and pure evil and this, in turn, cuts against the grain of ambiguity in the characters.

City of Angels is handsomely produced with big riot scenes and elaborately choreographed dance numbers.   The last episode has been manipulated to provide commentary as to our state of affairs in the early summer of 2020 -- the immigrant barrio is destroyed, a series of George Floyd-style protests turn violent, and the Latino cop says that the government is using freeways as cordons, walling off ethnic groups -- "we're putting up walls everywhere," the hero says.  The show is a somewhat offensive but I bought into it enough to watch all ten episodes.

Monk, Straight, no Chaser

Monk, Straight No Chaser is a reverential documentary about the jazz legend, Thelonious Sphere Monk.  The movie was released in 1988 about six years after Monk's death.  Clint Eastwood, a jazz aficiondo, produced the film and it is directed Charlotte Zwerin.  Monk is a seminal figure in modern jazz, one of the founders (with Charley Parker) of BeBop and, in some quarters, he remains controversial. He composed an immense amount of music and his work is often atonal and dissonant.  As is standard in jazz, Monk often uses bland show-tunes or pop songs as a framework for his piano improvisation -- very quickly, he ventures so far afield from the source material that only a professional musician can detect the original melody concealed by the variations that he works on the tune.  His music is demanding and, often, rebarbative -- he stands in relation to earlier forms of jazz in the position that the Second Viennese School bears to predecessors like Wagner, Mahler and Brahms:  Monk builds on the earlier music and, indeed, seems to take some of its ideas to logical extremes, but this cerebral and abstract art may be difficult for many listeners to assimilate.  The Monk documentary was shown as part of TMC's survey of jazz movies and, no less of a luminary than Wynton Marsalis vouches for Monk's incandescent brilliance in his introduction to the film (appearing in his quarantine spider-hole with the nattily dressed Eddie Mueller somewhere on the other side of the country.). Marsalis reveres Monk so greatly that he, even, contests Mueller's remarks that the musician was mostly inarticulate and extremely difficult to understand when he spoke:  Marsalis says that Monk "used few words" but "what he said was very wise, if only you would listen closely."  

Two allusions come to mind:  on January 10, 1931,  the ailing Charles Ives attended a concert in which his work "Three Places in New England" was played along with avant-garde compositions by Carl Ruggles and Virgil Thompson.  Ives sat stoically through "Three Places" as members of the audience booed and  hissed his music.  But when "Sun Treader", a work by Ruggles, was similarly booed, Ives stood up and waved his cane in the air, shouting:  "You're a goddamned sissy -- when you hear strong masculine music of this kind, get up and use your ears like a man!"  Clive James, in one of his last poems, notes that he has never been able to appreciate the "Second Viennese School" -- composers like Webern, Berg, and Schoenberg.  "After all," he says, "there's a lot of competition -- I haven't even heard all of Bach's cantatas."  Monk's music, at least to me, inspires similar reactions.

Monk was born in 1917 and lived for most of his life near 64th and Amsterdam in Harlem.  He had a fierce-looking, obviously highly intelligent mother whom he replaced with an equally fierce and smart wife, Nelly.  Beginning in the late fifties, Monk's eccentricities developed into schizophrenia and he was often hospitalized.  Notwithstanding his shaky mental health, Monk was fantastically well-regarded, made many records, and, once, was on the cover of Time magazine.  The film is a good introduction to his work:  we see a number of pieces performed, without commentary, and in their entirety.  Most of the picture shows Monk at work playing piano.  The opening sequence is exemplary -- Monk is standing on stage, part of quintet that includes his most loyal side-man, the tenor sax Charlie Rouse.  Monk is shuffling in a tight circle, spinning around, not exactly like a dervish (he moves quite slowly) but, nonetheless, rotating on stage.  Suddenly, he stops turning in circles, skitters over to the piano, and starts playing at precisely the instant when the entry of the piano is necessary to the tune.  It's an odd exhibition of a seemingly distracted (and distracting) on-stage behavior that suddenly coalesces into a precise and completely musical performance that seems snatched out of apparent chaos.  (Monk had a tendency to pace when he was suffering from mental illness and he would often shuffle around in a circle, rotating it seems on his heel -- we see him doing this in an airport somewhere and interrupting his dance with sudden quick slashing movements, like karate chops.  (I can see how this would have been frightening to those around him -- Monk was a large man and looks very powerful.)   Monk wore eccentric hats, often pointed fezes or skull-caps, and he sometimes affected perfectly round granny glasses, even though he didn't have problems seeing.  The film documents a trip to Europe in which members of Monk's octet had to study their charts on the Transatlantic flight -- notwithstanding the last-minute preparations, the tour was a huge success.  In one scene, we observe Monk lying in a hotel bed wearing one of his fez-shaped hats and trying to order "chicken livers and rice" from a hapless and baffled German room service waiter.  Monk often mutters to himself but it's impossible to determine what he is saying -- there's an extended sequence in which fellow musician stand around Monk at his keyboard trying to figure out what his scribbled musical notations mean.  Usually, Monk responds to questions by saying "Just play what you want", although when pressed he will actually name a note, usually chromatic.  Late in his career, he seems to have abandoned the long-suffering Nelly and taken up with the redoubtable Countess Nica de Koenigswarter, the French woman in whose hotel room Charley Parker died.  She was very much alive when the movie was made and recounts some of her adventures with Monk.  Everywhere she lived was frequented by Black jazz musicians and, so, she got tossed out of various apartments and hotels.  In the end, she bought a condominium in Weehawken, New Jersey, and this is where Monk spent most of his time.  The Countess, who had been a Resistance fighter during the War (and actually flew bombing missions over Germany) ended up collecting battered, stray cats and one wonders if this impulse didn't color her relationship with Monk.  For most of the time that she knew him, he had renounced music and was no longer performing or composing.  The movie shows all sorts of odd details -- for instance, jazz clubs in Manhattan were, apparently, fire-hazards because big axes are always affixed to the walls in their backrooms and kitchens. The countess gives Monk a gold marker with which to sign autographs to which he responds enigmatically:  "Decipher that --" pointing to a scribble on a sheet of paper.  "Someone maybe will decipher that.  Then, they'll flip.  I mean flip for real."  The most interesting footage is old imagery of Monk at the piano -- he generally starts his improvisation by stating the melody, although spoofing it with what seem to be intentionally wrong notes and inept-sounding rhythms.  Then, he bends over the keyboard and really goes to work.  His right foot moves in perpetual motion, typically banging at the floor three times to the beat -- once with the sole of the foot, once on the ball, and, then, making a sliding or scooping motion withe his shoe.  Monk often plays in a way that seems to consciously eschew virtuosity -- you don't get any displays of flashy, if empty, virtuosity from this musician.  He slaps the piano, stabs at it with his fists and hammers the keyboard as if he's in a desperate fight to the death with instrument.  Sometimes, the notes seem to transmit shocks through his fingers and into his wrists and arms so that his shoulders twitch.  In one scene, he plays his signature tune "Blue Monk" with Count Basie sitting at the bottom of the piano looking up at him with a gaze of what seems to be unabashed love.  (Later, Monk was very angry and claimed that Basie was looking at him in an insulting way and says:  "Maybe, I will go to his show and look at him for awhile.")  For me, the highlight of the movie is Monk's performance of "Just a Gigolo" -- his variations on the melody were exciting to me, but just on the horizon of what I can interpret as intelligible.

Charlotte Zwerin, who directed the film, worked on it for a number of years.  (She was an associate of the Maysles' brothers and worked on Salesman as well as Gimme Shelter.)  The style of the film about Monk is studiously cinema verite.  The production of the picture was vexed by the fact that Monk died without a will and Nelly, his "common law wife", didn't own the rights to the music.  Some intricate legal proceedings were required to clear the music for the film -- this work was financed by Clint Eastwood.  The movie is musically of extreme importance -- Monk was self-taught on the piano and the picture shows his idiosyncratic fingerings and technique by focusing, often, on his hands as he plays.

The film is noteworthy in that acknowledges Monk's mental illness but doesn't dwell on it.  Like many other artists afflicted with sickness of the mind, Monk is not insane when he performs.  Indeed, he is absolutely, even mathematical rational, in his art -- it's his life that's a mess.   The film is clearly a labor of love -- I just wish that I were more educated as to how to enjoy this music.

Letter from an Unknown Woman

At least three times in Max Ophuls (credited as Max "Opuls") 1948 Hollywood "weeper", Letter from an Unknown Woman, the director's moving camera glides through walls, moving from outside to inside, not necessarily tracking a character's entrance into a building, but rather demonstrating the omniscience of the mechanism documenting (perhaps, even governing) the narrative.  Some hardworking graduate student should identify scenes in which camera's penetrate notional walls im American cinema and assess what these images are supposed to mean and how they affect viewers.  In Ophuls' film, the camera tracking through walls reminds me of the old-fashioned narrators who populate fiction in the 18th and 19th century, figures who invite you to sit down while they tamp tobacco into their pipes, assuring you that they are about to tell you a tale that is, not only, fascinating but also completely true, a story for which they can vouch as they spin the yarn, winking at you with an avuncular air from within wreathes of companionable smoke.  The notion, I think, is that I am going to transport you now, as if on seven-league boots, to some remarkable places.

At the beginning of Letter a caddish roue has been challenged to a duel.  The man's companions know that he will leave town before the fight:  "others can afford honor," the libertine says to his valet, as he orders  him to pack his things.  But the most imposing aspect of this introductory sequence, the frame to film's story, is the annex to the cad's Vienna apartment:  beyond the curb and front door, the space opens  into a high narrow stairwell in which an art nouveau stairway spirals up to a lofty landing at least forty feet above the entry.  At the landing, another flight of steps that looks chiseled out of granite ascends into dark shadows to some unseen garret above.  The camera re-positions and angles itself upward to show the anti-hero, a Lothario and concert pianist named Stefan Brand climbing those stairs -- it takes Brand a considerable time to trudge up to his apartment and the camera records his whole ascent.  We wonder why time is wasted in this way -- but, as it turns out, the steps, viewed from various angles, is one of the key locations where action will occur in the film.  Climbing and descending the steps doesn't necessarily have metaphoric or symbolic significance (Freud thought steps signified sexual arousal and Ophuls is Viennese but this would be a distinctly secondary meaning for the set -- the work of the brilliant Alexander Golitzen.)  Ophuls likes the stairwell because it imparts visual interest to sequences filmed there.

A little later, a character enters a cafe from a snowy street.  The door to the cafe is located at a streetcorner in Vienna (the Stefansdom is visible against the shadowy night sky on the horizon).  To reach the streetcorner, characters have to trudge up a steep ramp -- the sidewalks tilts upward to the intersection.  Once in the cafe, there is a landing but the tables are fifteen feet below the grade of the entrance, reached by another flight of stairs -- so you climb an exterior ramp to go into the cafe which turns out to be below you, down another set of stairs.  The elevation changes are wholly gratuitous but when traversed by characters, impart to us a sense of actual motion through a real, as opposed to, fictional space.  

Ophuls has the habit of complicating the location where important events occur.  A scene at an opera involves loggia, a box overlooking the stage, and a complicated marble stairway flanked by statues that leads like an opening fan down to the main entrance to the building.  (It's at the opera that the heroine sees her beloved, the man who has ruled her life, and been absent ten years.)  Outside the opera's lobby, there is an intricate portico of Doric columns, not just one group of them but several close to the door and, then, pushed out on the entrance porch to the edge of another set of stairs leading to the carriages waiting on the street.  The space between the Doric columns is further complicated by two large sphinxes mounted on the stone parapets adjacent to the exterior stair.  This is the place where the  heroine, Lisa Berndt, will meet her unfaithful and negligent lover and plan to escape from her marriage to be with him -- even though she seems to be happily married to a rich military officer.  Earlier, we have seen the heroine refusing to give up her baby son in the charity hospital in which she has just given birth -- the child is the cad, Stefan Brand's son, the result of the protagonist's one and only romantic encounter.  This location is particularly fraught -- the camera starts by peering into a long gloomy corridor in which a ghostly nun with an elaborate white wimple is approaching the camera, a bit like a vampire bat.  The camera tracks to the side passing through a wall into a strangely intimate and provisional space, a group of cells defined by hanging curtains, passing by one column of cells and, then, into a cubbyhole-like space at the head of a second group cells all veiled by curtain; in her niche,  the heroine is lying on a bed, confronted, now, it seems by the nun we saw in the corridor outside this odd cavern-like labyrinth of small chambers.  This interior space seems distinctly female, the location of parturition which, somehow, is associated with the cloth partitions in the ward.  Later, when Lisa's husband declares that he will take action to preserve his honor and keep her from going with the caddish pianist, he poses ominously in front of a display of swords and sabers.

Letter from an Unknown Woman is a prestige melodrama, marred, I think, by Joan Fontaine's casting as the doomed heroine, Lisa.  Fontaine has to show us Lisa as a fourteen-year old girl in the opening scenes establishing her infatuation with Stefan Brand, the dissipated concert pianist.  (She is the oldest-looking fourteen year old in cinema history.)  Fontaine isn't visually interesting although she's in the center of some of the most lavish decor in film history.  The cad, Stefan Brand is played by Louis Jordain in an impressive performance -- Jordain is ridiculously handsome in the scenes in which he seduces Lisa; later, when they meet ten years after he has made her pregnant, his eyes are dull and dead.  The movie traffics in one of the oldest and most noxious tropes in narrative -- a mother is punished for sexual infidelity by the death of her child.  The picture is predictable on all levels, although very well written.  About 20% of the film is taken up with the extended date scene in which the pianist and his prey, Lisa, wander around snowy Vienna, including a visually impressive sequence in which the characters sit across from one another in a simulated rail car while landscapes of Venice or the Alps are scrolled by them in the  car's simulated window in panorama form -- an old guy on fixed bicycle powers the moving panoramas.  The film is primarily interesting as an exploration of female obsession -- it's similar in some ways, although not as uncompromising, as Truffaut's The Story of Adele H--, about Victor Hugo's daughter and her fatal obsession with a man who has no interest in her.  Earlier I used the word "prey" to describe Joan Fontaine's character, Lisa.  The terms is inexact -- here the seducer turns out to be the prey.  Lisa gets exactly what she wants in this film -- including her own romantic and morbid death.  This is probably one of the most important melodramas from Hollywood's great decade --the film certainly transcends it's genre.  Yet it also feels compromised to me -- the imagery is too explicit in the final five minutes of the movie:  the hero even sees a ghostly Lisa, who has now died as well, superimposed upon the locations where they once met.   There's a hint, that I dislike, that the death of poor mad Lisa is a sacrifice that somehow redeems the caddish and careless Stefan, a sacrifice that restores some semblance of honor to him (presumably he will killed in the duel).  Ophuls later European films are more cynical and, I think, somewhat better than this Hollywood picture.  (Those films are Lola Montez, Le Plaisir, La Ronde,and The Earrings of Madame D--., all of them masterpieces.)  The romantically surging score is orchestrated from Franz Liszt's etude Un Sospiro ("A Sigh").  

Jazz on a Summer Day

If you're feeling a little down and out, I recommend that you watch Bert Stern's 1960 documentary Jazz on a Summer Day, a chronicle of the scene and some of the performances featured at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1958.  The picture is charming in a low-key way and guaranteed, I think, to cheer you up.  Jazz is a cool medium and the movie isn't grandiose, nor does it really strain for effects -- there's no narration:  the images and soundtrack speak for themselves.  Stern was a fashion photographer and the movie's cinematography is casually elegant; the editing is sharp and the soundtrack clear.  The sea-side location for the festival is beautiful and the weather was sunny and clear.  The audience is well-mannered and very upscale -- most of the men wear suit and tie and many of the women are adorned with spectacular pearls and there are many brilliant, feathered hats on display.    

Stern starts his film at dawn with carefully composed images og boats docked in the harbor.  Jimmy Giuffre and his combo are playing some kind of very chilly and cerebral music.  Stern's camera dips down to the water where the reflections of the boats and flags and masts in the rippling fluid create austere and beautiful abstract patterns.  Beyond the harbor, there are qualifying trials for the America's Cup, a sailboat race, and huge yachts are floating on the sea with people on deck watching gorgeous-looking sailboats surging forward on the wind.  (For the first half of the film, images of the sailboat races are intercut with Jazz performances -- some critics have complained that this distracts from the music, but I think the effect, rather highlights, in music video form, some of the jazz played in this part of the movie.  I know that admirers of Thelonius Monk feel that he is disrespected by the documentary -- his performance of a signature tune, "Blue Monk", is illustrated by the World Cup sailors and their pretty sailboats and, even, an announcer who talks over the tune to provide information about the sailboat race and wind  conditions at sea.)  Interpolated among the performances are clips of an open convertible full of musicians playing Dixieland numbers -- these performers are shown driving through town, playing at a carnival nearby, and, then, performing on s playground for small children at the sea-side.  Later, we see them driving away into the dawn as the film ends, music still ringing out as the convertible speeds away.  

In mid-afternoon, Anita O'Day performs.  She's dressed in a skirt so tight that she seems hobbled while climbing the steps to the stage.  She sings a heavily skat version of "Sweet Georgia Brown" and flashes her long horse-sized teeth at the audience.  When she's done with her set, she tries to bow but the dress is too tight.  There's an exuberant house party somewhere in town with kids drinking beer (Rheingold) and dancing on a roof-top.  Some musicians are rehearsing in a hot upper room -- they're sweaty and some of the men have taken off their shirts.  One of the musicians plays a Bach passacaglia on his cello, stopping for a moment to light up a cigarette.  The sailing ships come back into the harbor and the sun seems about to set.  In the early evening, the George Shearing quintet performs some sort of Afro-Cuban jazz with a conga player working very hard (his brown is sweaty) and someone playing a marimba.  Much of the jazz has a cool analytical, almost abstract, quality.  Dinah Washington performs "All of Me" -- she has a big pink bow at her waist and the camera broods on it.  The critic, Richard Brody claims that the camera's focus on this somewhat vaginal adornment is "obscene"-- I agree, but the emphasis is reasonable:  she's singing a raucous, sexually inflected song that concludes with the line:  "Come and get the rest of me!" -- an invitation that makes the pink bow wiggle in an enticing way.  (There's a moment when a trombone player intrudes on the song in a way that makes Washington look a little puzzled, even startled -- the performances are often filmed in very close shot using a telephoto lens and we can see the musicians sometimes signaling to one another.)  After dark, a woman named Big Maybelle, dressed in what looks like a white wedding dress, takes the stage and performs some blues -- she's a blues' shouter, not a style that I particularly admire, but her performance is intense.  Chuck Berry inexplicably appears, his gig rendered even more bizarre by the fact that he is working with a back-up band comprised of Duke Ellington side-men.  These musicians seem to be utterly baffled and look on with bemusement as Berry hops around the stage; he duck-walks at one point across the platform.  There's very little light in the audience at this stage.  People  are smoking cigarettes and some of the footage looks like the most glamorous cigarette ad ever filmed.  Some people dance in dramatic swaths of light.  The crowd looks like a bunch of well-heeled WASPS from an A.B. Gurney play with a few intellectual-looking Black people interspersed here and there.   Someone called Chico Hamilton appears as part of a quintet.  There's an elaborate drum riff repeated over and over -- it has a Caribbean flavor and is played on something like bongo drums.  This drummer looks like a scientist bending over a particularly difficult and dangerous experiment but the close-up is framed wrong -- we can't see whatever elaborate and complex motions he is making to keep the riff going.  Louis Armstrong follows after some stage patter with the impresario.  Armstong may have lost a couple steps on his cornet but his singing is rich and gorgeous -- we're reminded of what a consummate singer he was and here his gravelly voice sounds particularly resonant and beautiful.  By this time, the stage is bathed in blood-red light.  Armstrong performs a vocal duet with his old side-man, trombonist Jack Teagarden, and the music is  extraordinarily intimate and tender, perhaps, the best representation of friendship that I have ever seen portrayed in music -- the song, of course, is "Ole Rockin' Chair's got me" This is the highlight of the film and it is tremendously moving.  Armstrong ends with a version of "When the Saints go Marching In" -- as he plays his cornet, he rolls his eyes upward as if sighting the highnotes, aiming for them, somewhere in the constellations above.  The show ends with Mahalia Jackson singing a gospel tune and, then, ending with a reverent version of "The Lord's Prayer".  When she claps her hands on the uptempo numbers, it's like a drum rimshot or a rifle being fired.  Her throaty and sinuous phrasing of "Thy will be done" is spectacular, although I think the song is overly devotional for the setting.  A brief shot depicts the sun rising -- it's supposed to be dawn, although I would guess Mahalia Jackson finished her gig long before that time.  (It is after midnight when she takes the stage, "Sunday", the announcer notes and, thus, appropriately the time for the "world's greatest gospel singer" to perform.)  A couple of shots show the Dixieland band in the convertible, looking a little bedraggled but, nonetheless, still playing as the sun rises.

It's an elegant and charming picture, appealing in all respects.  The film's technique is pioneering andwas used in later concert movies, most notably the use of multiple cameras and close-ups in tight telephoto focus in Michael Wadleigh's Woodstock.

A Matter of Life and Death

Just before he dives, without parachute, from his crippled bomber, an RAF pilot speaks with a radio dispatcher.  The conversation is extravagant with doomed gallantry and the pilot says that he loves the young woman with whom he is speaking before plunging out of the flaming cockpit.  But, somehow, the pilot survives and, even, washes up under the cliffs of Dover.  There he meets the girl and confirms his love for her.  But it turns out that the pilot was supposed to have died and that a bureaucrat from the Agency of heaven failed to retrieve him from the deadly sea because of a "pea soup" fog.  The bureaucrat, a French man who lost his head in the revolution, descends to earth to seize the pilot.  The airman claims that his love for the girl merits an appeal to the heavenly tribunal -- since he wasn't plucked from the sea as a corpse, the pilot claims he's entitled to continue living.  On the earthly plane, the pilot suffers from headaches and interprets his visions of the After Life as hallucinations.  A neurologist diagnoses his condition as a kind of sub-arachnoid hemorrhage and surgery is scheduled.  This surgery coincides with the trial in the Court of Heaven in which the pilot argues that he be allowed to remain alive, primarily because of his love for the young woman.  This summarizes, in bare fashion, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's wholly remarkable A Matter of Life and Death (1946)  

I saw this film many years ago and was impressed by it.  There are several Hollywood variants on these themes including the Spencer Tracy vehicle A Guy named Joe and Steven Spielberg's Always in which the  doomed pilot flies missions putting out forest fires.  The Hollywood iterations of the theme, which are really about helpful ghosts, are interesting and, even, affecting, but they lack the utter grandiose strangeness and eccentricity of Powell and Pressburger's film.  Although I accurately remembered some of the elements of the English movie, my memory didn't serve me with respect to the strange splendor of the film.  First, the picture begins on an emotional pitch on which most movies would end -- the scenes of David Niven (as the pilot) in the flaming cockpit are imbued with wild pictorial intensity that is purely expressionistic.  Nothing is portrayed realistically -- it is all stylized:  the beautiful girl dispatcher is an ethereal pale wraith floating in a void that is filled with odd theatrical lighting.  The pilot's cockpit seems to sit athwart a fiery oven and billows with orange flame illumining the face of the dead co-pilot sprawled on the bomber's floor.  Everything is shot from inside fiery-looking sets.  The huge close-ups are lurid with flame-light (even in the undefined space where the girl is located.)  Then, the pilot's body is a tiny speck on a vast mud-flat.  When he hikes up from the sea, he first encounters a black dog and, then, a completely naked shepherd boy who is playing a flute to his goats.  (I have no idea what these visual frissons are supposed to mean, but they are startling and beautiful.)  The first woman that the pilot encounters is the dispatcher, an American girl (Kim Hunter) with a limpid cream complexion.  The pilot woos her in a bower of huge drooping flowers, again a vague location that seems more metaphysical than physical.  The scenes in heaven are filmed in icy, analytical black and white.  A woman who looks like Hera presides over a kind of celestial court -- the light makes halos around her and she looks fierce and terrifying, like an embodiment of Justice.  Heaven consists of a vast ceiling pierced by oval openings in which heavenly beings look down on enormous amphitheaters crowded with the dead.  The trial is conducted with the rock of Areopagus in the background lit like a fragment of a glacier with great illumined rays pouring up from the chilly white platforms.  The Judge is obviously Jewish with a great crooked nose and he looks about with placid, refined dignity, again another embodiment of the fearful nobility of the law.  (We later discover that this man is also the neurosurgeon who operates on the hero -- we discover this when he removes his surgical mask.)  The trial itself is almost Kafkaesque -- it deviates into strange channels:  for instance, much is made of the difference between England and its former colony America.  (The Judge is from Boston and supposedly prejudiced against Englishmen, for instance, the pilot, although we see nothing like this in his elegant and regal demeanor.)  The climax of the film involves an enormous white staircase that moves like an escalator past statues of former luminaries done in the flayed style of Giacometti -- this is surely one of the greatest sets in film history; reportedly it weighed 75 tons and its remarkable to think of all the money spent on what is a majestic and wholly surreal apparatus.  There are other curious, almost inexplicable, elements to the film -- the compassionate village doctor, who is a  sort of medical genius, has a camera obscura that projects a vivid image of the village in which he lives into a darkened chamber. This suggests that we are all prisoners in the dark room of our skulls or imagination.  (This motif is transmuted into an image of the pilot's point of view when he shuts his eyes under anesthesia -- we see a  kind of oval stage fringed by eyelashes which descend like a curtain when he falls asleep.)  These odd elements of the film, and its sense of being wholly interior, that is confined almost claustrophobically, to interior spaces suggests something like An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge  -- perhaps, everything is just a hallucination in the pilot's dying brain.  (This was suggested by Ben Mankiewicz on TCM when the movie was shown as one of the Essentials).  I don't think this theory is right, but it's suggestive.  The film is comprised of huge luminous close-ups that seem vaguely unreal -- no one's face looks as spectacular as these vast soft-focus portraits.  Even scenes outdoors feel as if they are inside -- the love scene in the bower takes place in a location deliriously full of huge, sexualized flowers:  it doesn't look like anyplace on earth.  Heaven is glacial with iis bureaucrats stationed at chunks of ice behind which we see acres of folded white wings -- conspicuously, although heaven is full of Brits and their allies, we don't see any Germans.  Roger Livesey, a regular with Powell and Pressburger plays the neurologist.  He careens around the countryside on a motorcycle and, at least, one of the shots of him on that vehicle is similar to scene of T. H. Lawrence on his motorbike in David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia -- if I am not mistaken Lean cites the shot directly and literally.  An example of the stylized, expressionistic manner in which Powell and Pressburger work is a sequence in which the neurologist crashes his motorcycle and burns to death.  We see an enormous ferocious close-up of the doctor's face covered in goggles and lit by lightning bolts -- it's a thunderstorm and his helmet gushes water.  Then, there's a shot of an oncoming lorry that passes through the frame.  We hear a crash.  The film cuts to a pillar of fire with the doctor's helmet spinning like a top at the bottom of the frame.  Then, there's a close-up of an onlooker's face who sees the doctor's body on fire (we don't) and turns away his head in horror.  This is sufficient to make the point and far more memorable than an account of the accident that showed us everything.  

The film isn't wholly successful -- the trial scene, although compelling is a bit windy with rhetoric:  Raymond Massey plays the prosecutor.  But even he is impressive, his profile like an eagle and his eyes flashing dramatically.  There are sequences that are charming but digressive -- for instance, we see American servicemen rehearsing as the "rude mechanicals" in A Midsummer Night's Dream.  (Some of these scenes are similar to Powell and Pressburger's ineffably strange A Canterbury Tale, also involving GI's in England.)  Nonetheless, the film is a major accomplishment and highly recommended.

The Swimmer

Time has not been kind to Frank Perry's The Swimmer (1968).  The film is based on a famous story by John Cheever, high-concept literature that is, in fact, simply a situation and not a narrative:  an aging womanizer in Connecticut devises the idea of swimming cross-country to his home -- the idea is that he will "portage" (hike) between expensive houses of neighbors and friends, swim across their pools, and continue in this way until he reaches his home.  Pretty quickly, it's established that the swimmer has lost his home and family -- his quest is quixotic because he has no home to which to return.  Along the way, the swimmer encounters various former mistresses and girlfriends.  He seems to have cut a wide swath through the rich wives in the suburbs where he once lived.  At first, his adventure seems benign and the film develops it's action as a sort of pastoral.  However, as the quest continues, people becomes increasingly hostile, the hero seems injured and hypothermic, and, after some severe humiliations, it's implied that he perishes on the front steps of the decrepit and locked house where he once lived.  At the time that the movie was released, the picture relied upon star-power (Burt Lancaster plays the swimmer) to engage our sympathy for the titular character.  But Lancaster, playing a man named Neddie Merrill, although beautiful, isn't admirable in any way -- in fact, he seems to be an inveterate sexual harasser:  we see him sneak up on women and grab them from behind, slap their asses, and, generally, although ineffectually try to seduce everyone that he encounters -- he even gropes a girl thirty years younger than him:  she was once his baby sitter when he was married to Lucinda (we never see her) and living with his wife and two daughters.  (The girl, after a cloying interlude of affection, finally figures out that Neddie is creepy and runs away from him in horror.)  In 1968, Neddie's boorish behavior would have been seen by many (although not all) as evidence of his manly vigor -- thus, there would have been a modicum of sympathy for his bad conduct.  Today, we don't give harassers like this the benefit of the doubt and, so, the fundamental emotional effect that the movie seeks to induce -- catharsis on the basis of the swimmer's tragedy won't be available to most viewers, notwithstanding Lancaster's physical and sexual appeal.  It's like Death of a Salesman if we were culturally attuned to deeply dislike Willie Loman -- the movie doesn't work emotionally because what happens to Lancaster seems mild in our less kindly, and more ideologically fraught, era:  no one is handcuffing Lancaster and hauling him, like Harvey Weinstein or Bill Cosby, off to jail.

The film seems intended as a sort of allegory of lost, or diminishing, masculine vigor.  Implicit is the contention that no one would have rejected Neddie's overtures when he was at the height of his power and influence.  The film is a weird combination of realistically intended (although often implausible) characters and situations and an allegorical schemata -- the picture begins in media res, with Lancaster emerging out of a sort of forest primeval, looking sharp in his little black bathing trunks but, otherwise, naked and barefoot.  (He does a lot of walking and running in the film and I winced many times for his poor bare feet.)  We are never told why this Natty Bumppo is wandering the wilds of Connecticut mostly naked -- this is the situation we are given.  Neddie happens upon a mansion with a pool where he knows the people in the house, rich White folks who are getting casually drunk poolside.  He swims the pool, flirts with the women, and, then, devises the idea to swim what he calls the "river of Lucinda" (named after his wife) to his home on the other side of the county.  He can accomplish this by traversing about a dozen pools that will lead to his home (where paradoxically there is no pool but instead tennis courts).  He describes his quest in poetic, and imaginary, terms -- "a river of sapphire pools" that will lead him home.  Alone among the rich people, Neddie seems to have a poetic sensibility.  Several times, he makes this toast:  "Here's to sugar on the strawberries!".  The women, of course, respond to the beautiful and athletic man with scarcely concealed lust -- the husbands, however, have disdain for whatever kind of failure has afflicted him.  For about ninety minutes, Neddie goes from pool to pool, crossing an idyllic landscape that seems to have no roads, no streets, no shopping districts or intersections or businesses of any kind -- just huge estates in lush green meadows with big swimming pools.  The most interesting part of the film is the first forty-five minutes in which Perry seems to be attempting some kind of variant on the most ancient, and diminished in modern times, artistic form -- the pastoral idyll.  He meets various women who seem interested in him, cavorts with a maiden thirty years younger than him, and, even, encouters a lonely boy playing a flute or some sort of wind instrument -- it's a version of Theocritus.  Toward the end of the film, the pastoral idyll drops away and we encounter with the Swimmer a crowded highway and, a public municipal poo filled with middle-class people who humiliate Neddie in a painful way.  At least, he climbs a weird cliff to his house on the hill, a place that seems long abandoned,.  As they say, "you can go home any more."  The nice weather (it seems to be a very hot day in late August) has turned ugly and there's a thunderstorm (not very effectively depicted).  Neddie, who has become increasingly disoriented, seems injured and feverish.  The ending is set up as the climax of an Antonioni film -- the camera dollies toward a broken window in the house and we expect a macabre tour of the ruined, empty structure (lots of empty frames like the end of L'Eclisse).  But Perry doesn't know how to manage this -- he's a very clumsy film-maker and the camera just shows us what we expected all along:  there's no one home at the Swimmer's house.  

The film is a virtual museum of late sixties cliches.  There's a sappy score by Marvin Hamlisch, amplified into all sorts of swooning orchestral interludes.  The camera shows innumerable sun-flares and, when Lancaster plunges into the water, drops are strewn all over the lens.  There are interminable slow-motion interludes that are supposed to be lyrical but are just idiotic and annoying.  When things get agitated, the camera trembles in hand -- that is, there are many hand-held sequences. Sometimes, flashbacks are signified by enormous close-ups of Lancaster's steely blue eye -- but the flashbacks are completely uncommunicative, just more lens-flare, slo-mo, and images of noble horses or flowers.  The film's appeal lies entirely in Lancaster's dogged performance which isn't bad in my view -- the actor is simply dealt an impossible hand.  Lancaster's athleticism here is precisely calibrated and he shows with this body how the character goes from proud and strong to weak, dejected, and ultimately doomed -- it's a tour de force of physical acting.  Despite Lancaster's tremendous beauty -- sometimes, with his hair slicked he resembles one of Donatello's warriors -- the enterprise is pretty much doomed.  

My Friend Totoro

Animation is labor-intensive and so, to avoid unnecessary expense, many cartoons employ generic backgrounds.  When the Roadrunner dashes cross-country, the buttes and cacti in the background just recycle in a loop of generic and abstract landscape.  In Hiyo Miyazaki's My Friend Totoro (1988), the teams of animators don't seem to imagine landscapes so much as they document, with photographic verisimilitude, real places.  In the 80 minute long film, characters sometimes amble or run along dirt paths and lanes.  Each of these thoroughfares is minutely particularized -- we see not just the yellowish dirt and gravel of the lane, but the incision of ruts in the dirt, the way that the rains have eroded the friable clay, constellations of gravel and pebbles as precise as the array of stars in the sky.  A tree is just not a green thing on a brown stick -- each of Miyazaki's trees is a exact replica of a living, breathing presence in the landscape.  I don't know any film so intensely committed to providing the experience of place:  landscapes, dwellings, weather, all of these aspects of the world are intensely imagined and expressed with intense quiddity --  there is an odd Heideggarian aspect to this film:  to dwell means to inhabit a place and exist in a particular relationship to it.  In My Friend Totoro displays to us artifacts of human existence in a lush, intensely green landscape:  the hills above the rice paddies which are painted in cells of luminous color like a canvas by Paul Klee, are full of ancient paths, strange weathered shrines, dense, mysterious thickets, and, breathing over the pastoral locus amoenus are winds just as precisely characterized as the sticks on the ground, the toad on the pebbled path, the enormous thunderheads billowing up over the humid hills and valleys.

These reflections on Miyazaki's film may obscure the fact that My Friend Totoro is a cartoon designed, it seems, for children with babbling pop tunes and titles showing dancing caterpillars and spiders among friezes of acorns.  The film's plot is like that of a bittersweet Ozu picture:  a young father with two daughters moves into an old farmhouse on a hillside overlooking a valley cultivated in rice paddies. The house has flocks of miniature goblins, furry black things called "soot sprites" -- these creatures are unsettling and scurry around like cockroaches but they are benign.  An elderly woman with the features of a witch (she's a neighbor) tells the two girls that she used to be able to see these spirits when she was a child -- apparently, adults can't perceive the presences that inhabit the landscape.  It is revealed that the family's mother is convalescing from some serious illness in a hospital about three-hours walk from the farmhouse.  The father is a professor and works in a nearby city (never shown in the film).  The pastoral landscape, as in Ozu, is contaminated by signs of urban civilization -- big powerlines on steel towers march across the countryside (and occasionally provide highways for spirits), buses stop at bus-stops, and there is a  little trolley-like train that we sometimes glimpse on ridges, profiled against the setting sun.  During the day, the father goes to work at the University and he, also, seems labor late into the night.  During the summer vacation, the two daughters, Sutsuki (who seems to be about ten) and the five-year-old Mai explore the landscape.  Near the house, there's a huge camphor tree immemorially old and towering, a world in itself with buttress roots, strange cavities and a  vast impenetrable crown of leaves looming over the landscape.  Mai keeps finding acorns strangely dropped to lead her into the thickets under the camphor tree.  In a glade, she sees a two peculiar and partially translucent spirits -- they are owl-shaped with tufted horns and walk on two legs.  Following the spirits, Mai falls (like Alice into Wonderland) down a sort of rabbit-hole that leads her to hidden alcove in the tree where a Totoro is sleeping.  A Totoro is an enlarged version of the little owl-shaped spirits, covered with yellowish fur and with a most featureless head -- the creature is big as an elephant, has slit eyes, a broad grin that emerges sometimes from beneath it's fur and no nose to speak of -- the Totoro is gentle and sluggish; Mai falls asleep pillowed on its belly.  The whole encounter seems like a dream and the next day when Mai tries to locate the creature to show it to Satsuki, she can't find the hidden alcove in the tree.  One evening, Mai and Satsuki go to wait for their father's return at a bus stop in the dark woods.  It rains and their father is not on the bus that appears in the storm.  (These sequence is a  virtuoso exercise in depicting how rain falls, trembles in droplets on trees overhead, and, then, falls again.)  The girls decide to wait for the next bus.  Suddenly, they discover that the big Totoro is standing beside them waiting for the bus.  But when the bus arrives it's a disturbing, surreal creature -- the Cheshire cat grafted to a monstrous caterpillar and hollowed out so that you can ride inside; the cat's eyes shine like headlights.  The Totoro gets on this grotesque bus and vanishes.  The next bus appearing in the rain holds their father to whom the girls excitedly describe their adventure.  He seems distracted -- the plan is that their ailing mother will return on the weekend.  A sinister telegram arrives suggesting that the mother has suffered a relapse.  Mai, then, sets off by herself to hike to the hospital but gets lost.  Oddly, she is carrying an ear of corn from the old woman's garden as a talisman and healing gift for her mother.  Mai gets lost and, even, is presumed drowned, but the Totoro and the bus-cat arrive to rescue her and take the two girls to a vantage where they can see their father and mother conversing in the hospital.  The adults can't see the girls or the supernatural critter but they do find the magical ear of corn inscribed as a gift for the mother on the windowsill of the room.  In the closing credits, we see the mother arriving in a taxi-cab and the family happily reunited and bathing together in the ancient bath-house next to the farm dwelling.  

The story is clear and reasonably compelling.  Much of it is mysterious to Western eyes.  The children are mostly happy although sometimes slightly concerned for their mother -- she is shown to be attractive but with an uncanny skull-shaped head.  In its mise-en-scene, the film resembles Ozu to some extent -- there are "empty frames" showing places that people have left or details in nature that don't advance the narrative.  (One image of a bicycle outside of a house in the rain seems a copy of pictures in Ozu's movies.)  The remarkable aspect of the film is the use of animated imagery to provide an intensely pantheistic vision of reality -- everything in the film is somehow alive and alert with spiritual energy.  Pools are full of dark tadpoles that look like soot sprites.  The humidity piles up cumulo-nimbus clouds on the horizon that thrust upward and glow from within with pinkish light.  Moths torch themselves around lights and we see snails on grass, toads on dirt pathways, a sinister-looking goat that tries to eat Mai's corn offering to her mother.  When it is thought that Mai has drowned, we see a tiny pink sandal in the pond, the water around it subtly disturbed by hovering dragonflies.  When the Totoro takes the children on an aerial ride over the nocturnal rice paddies, we see how the breeze created by the flying spirit shimmers in the moonlit water.  Miyazaki is capable of remarkable, expressionistic abstraction -- in an early scene, when a great wind blows, we see the vectors of energy as turbulent masses of shadowy black contending with green conical forms.  The film is extravagant with weather, fluxions in the air, and patterns of light and shadow. 

Miyazaki's later, and more ambitious films, are exhausting.  Spirited Away, a typhoon of monsters and ghosts, is very long and, although scene-by-scene fantastically brilliant, there's just too much of it -- the abundance of visual riches is more than what the audience can assimilate.  By contrast, My friend Totoro is perfectly proportioned.  The opening scenes in which the children explore the old farmhouse with its annexed bathing facility and encounter traces of supernatural presences is remarkably gripping and exquisitely designed.  (With its sense of wonder with ominous overtones, the opening scenes of this film are similar to the picnic at the abandoned amusement park that begins Spirited Away).  The impulse of Totoro is profoundly animistic -- the film is an animated exercise in Animism, as it turns out the film's Animist sensibility is perfectly wedded to the picture's design as a animated feature.  This is a very great movie, a fully realized masterpiece of animated film, and highly recommended.  

Da Five Bloods

Five African-American soldiers are helicoptered into the mountains of Vietnam.  Their mission is to recover a truck full of gold bars, payment, apparently, for Montagnard allies of United States.  The men find the gold but there is a savage firefight with the Viet Cong and the leader of the platoon, "Stormin' Norman, as he is nicknamed is killed.  Both the beloved platoon leader and the gold are left on the field of battle. Almost 50 years later, the surviving soldiers return to Vietnam, planning to recover both the gold and the remains of their comrade.  This is the premise of Spike Lee's Da Five Bloods (2020), now available streaming on Netflix.  

Da Five Bloods is a typical Spike Lee "joint" as he calls his films -- it's a combination of didactic material, much of it archival footage, intercut with a rabble-rousing genre film.  In this case, the movie combines plot elements from the Rambo pictures (the triumphant return of Americans to Vietnam) with elements of the heist movie.  There are echoes of many previous films in Da Five Bloods, including overt allusions to Apocalypse Now and  John Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.  The movie is long (about two hours and 35 minutes) and extremely ambitious -- it founders, unfortunately, on an implausible script.  Lee is caught between several genres -- elements of the film seem fantastic and, even, highly stylized:  the plot is driven by wild coincidences and fairy tale elements (for instance, the crate of gleaming gold bullion).  These genre elements clash with aspects of the movie that seem realistically conceived.  And Lee's attempt to fit the violent adventure story into a framework of mini-lectures about the Black contribution to American history is startling, but not wholly effective.  Lee seems embarrassed by the Rambo-style violence central to the story and wants to redeem the enterprise with "woke" political themes.  But preaching and murderous violence staged for thrills don't really cohere.  I assume the Lee believes most of the people who will watch this show need to be educated about African-American history -- the film i includes speeches by Malcolm X and Martin Luther King as well as references to notable figures in Black history (for instance Crispus Atticus).  Lee's influenced by Brechtian theater and doesn't attempt to conceal the teaching moments in the picture -- he just inserts this material into the story in the most overt and ham-handed manner possible.  You can admire his audacity but question whether there might not have been a better way to make the points without, in effect, lecturing the audience.  (Consider, for instance, Huston's The Man Who Would Be King, a film that makes powerful ideological points about the theory and practice of imperialist colonialism without ever making direct address to the audience.)  Lee's approach verges on insulting to the audience -- does he really think we're so dumb that we didn't know, as an example, that Black GI's formed a disproportionately large contingent of the combat forces in Vietnam?  The very weaknesses of the film though are what makes it interesting.  Lee isn't content with a violent heist movie and wants to make larger points about justice, history, and oppression.  Similarly, Lee isn't content with preaching to his audience -- he wants to entertain and will throw in everything but the kitchen sink to engage his viewers:  there are bloody shootouts, last minute heroics, a snake attack, as well as lots of very interesting quasi-documentary images of modern day Vietnam.  

Everything about the film's production is first-class:   the churning and, sometimes, soaring musical score by Terence Blanchard (jazz-inflected Aaron Copland) is wonderful, although as in many of Lee's best movies, the lush orchestral themes aren't correlated to what we see on screen and simply play on their own, providing a strange, disorienting flood of music under the images.  The photography is brilliant -- the picture is filled with burnished images of jungle, the luminous skyscrapers of Ho Chi Minh city and the vast, eerie mountains like something from a Chinese scroll where much of the action takes place.  (The cityscapes were shot in Ho Chi Minh City and the landscape scenes were filmed in Thailand).  The acting is brilliant and, indeed, the central protagonist in the film, Paul, as a MAGA-hat wearing, Trump-supporting, PTSD -tormented Black King Lear, provides an Oscar-worthy performance.  Raging against the Vietnamese, his buddies, and the racist establishment, Delroy Lindo, channels Humphrey Bogart, Marlon Brando, and Shaft as well -- viewers might be ashamed to admit it, but everyone has encountered a raging Black man, apparently high on something, storming down a city street, bare-chested and screaming in indignation at everyone he passes; Paul exemplifies this kind of rage and he's armed with an automatic weapon for half of the movie so he's genuinely scary yet also strangely pathetic.  This is a tremendous piece of acting which compensates for the fact that the other "bloods' are underwritten -- we really don't get much sense for any of them other than the soft-spoken Otis, a sad old man who has left a beautiful prostitute whom he loved, pregnant with his daughter, in Vietnam.  All the other figures in the movie are, more or less, either caricatures or ciphers -- Lee and his scriptwriters haven't bothered to develop much of a backstory for any of them and they really don't have much to say or do on-screen.  

The picture roars off to a start with Muhammad Ali famously declaring that no "Vietnamese ever called me nigger."  There's a montage of images characterizing the racial and political chaos in the sixties and Lee is careful to identify the pictures since he assumes (maybe correctly) that many members in his  youthful audience won't know or understand the references -- for instance, he explains in a superimposed title the Kent State shootings and calls out the names of the victims in the text projected with the pictures.  The film proper starts in Ho Chi Minh City where the Bloods meet in an expensive-looking hotel, have some drinks, and plot their hike through the jungle to retrieve Norman's bones and the gold.  We see them in the infamous nightclub Apocalypse Now where there is a tense scene between Paul and some ex-Viet Cong veterans -- Paul is not about to forgive and forget the enmity in the conflict.  Paul's estranged son, David, turns up, much to the chagrin of his father.  (David wears a Morehouse College tee-shirt through most of the film and exemplifies a younger generation of Black men who have grown up skittish about race, but less enraged and angry than their fathers, something that Paul chooses to see as weakness.)  David is too young to party with the older men and so he goes off to a saloon with a younger crowd where he meets the members of the aptly named LAMB, an international organization working in the hinterlands to clear landmines left over from the conflicts in the country -- these kids are White:  a French girl who flirts with David, a fat American kid, and a cynical, even nihilistic Finn.  They talk about the landmines littering the landscape and, of course, this is an ominous conversation as far as future plot developments will be concerned.  There's a long sequence, some of it scored to Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" (in homage to the film Apocalypse Now) in which our heroes tour the canals of former Saigon city on a pontoon boat -- this is the best episode in the picture, shot documentary style and ending when Paul again seems triggered by encounters with the Vietnamese, slips into some kind of rage, and nearly causes a  riot.  By this time, the Bloods have acquired a Vietnamese guide and fixer (his father fought with the Americans) and the kindly Otis has gone to see his former girlfriend and met his half-Black half-Asian daughter.  Otis' girlfriend introduces the Bloods to a sinister figure, an old Frenchman played by Jean Reno.  Reno's character promises the help our heroes get the gold bullion out of the country, albeit for a significant cut.  One look at Reno's decaying features, filmed in a big profile close-up, should have warned the Bloods not to trust this guy -- he is shot like Caligula crossed with Edward G. Robinson's Little Caesar -- obviously not a White man with whom you should do business.  But, of course, our heroes, like most treasure-hunters, are more than a little dim-witted and blinded by greed, make a deal with Reno's smuggler.  The bloods with David in tow then ride be jeep into the boondocks and set off on a long cross-country hike -- this is where the implausibilities in Lee's slipshod and carelessly designed script start piling up.  These men are well into their seventies and they don't seem fit enough to walk ten blocks, let along many miles in the stifling mountainous rain-forest.  And, if they find the bullion, the viewer wonders:  how in the world are they going to carry it out of the jungle?  Trekking through the rain forest things begin to go bad.  Otis has been given a gun by his former girlfriend but, of course, it ends up in the hands of the paranoid Paul, now acting a bit like a combination of Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny and Ahab in Moby Dick.  The bloods find both the gold and Norman's bones, but by this time they have wandered into a deadly minefield.  When the LAMB kids happen to show up, things go from bad to worse -- Paul beats them up (he thinks they are after his gold) and, then, ties them together with a rope.  Meantime the hapless expedition has been shadowed by sinister Vietnamese armed with machine guns.  There are several impressive fire-fights and lots of people get killed.  To provide further details might spoil the picture for some people and, so, I will simply say that the film is very violent, although there's an ending coded as happy -- although, it's more poignant, tragic and bitter-sweet.  Lee, then, does what no White film maker could get away with -- he ends the picture with Martin Luther King speaking about the promise of America.  This quotation doesn't really fit anything that we've seen, but it's intended to provide a moment of hopeful uplift to what has been a fairly grim last hour.  Throughout, the film, Lee shows us flashback images of combat in Vietnam that look something like the chaotic battle sequences in The Deer Hunter -- in these scenes, Lee doesn't "de-age" his protagonists:  the bloods interact with the preternaturally young and strong Norman as they appear in their seventies.  Lee's point is that these men have never grown beyond some of the savagery, fear and horror that they experienced in Vietnam -- they relive these scenes in a perpetual present.  This is a tricky conceit but it pays off brilliantly and makes a powerful point about memory and trauma.  Each one of us is still a child trembling before an angry father or a youth terrified on the battlefield or a hapless young lover -- you progress beyond these experiences but you don't really grow out of (or overcome) them.

The problems with the film are grounded in opportunism and plausibility.  Again, I am skeptical that a White director could get away with justifying the bloods blithe intent to steal millions of dollars from the United States government in the name of reparations.  Norman justifies the theft of the money, meant for U. S. allies, as "reparations" for slavery -- but I don't think the notion of "reparations" was really a matter of discussion in 1971 when the film is set.  Furthermore, Norman is presented as the pure, noble warrior -- stealing this money, which merely impoverishes another oppressed group, the Hmong and Laotian irregulars, seems to cut against everything that we are supposed to believe about this character and, so, diminishes the film and threatens to make it incoherent.  Reno's character is intended to keep the picture politically pristine -- Lee is unable to show Vietnamese criminals (this would undercut the themes of the film -- particularly the message of the unjust and immoral war) and so he needs a White ex-colonial fall-guy to blame for the carnage in the film's second half.  There are ludicrously stupid things in the movie, including a scene in which a rope is used to yank one of the protagonists off a landmine onto which he has stepped -- the sequence makes no sense and is risible, although no one will laugh because we've just seen in graphic imagery what one of these mines can do..  The entire climax filmed, in part, among the landmines is opportunistic in the sense that the bombs can be used to cull the cast and eliminate characters whose survival might be problematic in terms of the plot.  I remain a disbeliever in the notion that these old men could haul a thousand pounds of gold out of the wilderness on their backs.  The deep structure of the plot is actually Robert Stone's novel Dog Soldiers and the film version with Nick Nolte directed by Karel Reisz and called Who Will Stop the Raiin?  The final scenes in which Paul staggers through the deadly jungle ranting to the camera recall similar scenes (with less ranting) in which the wounded Nick Nolte hikes to his death on desert railroad deep in Mexico while a fire-fight is underway "back at the ranch" as they say.  (This sequence from Stone's novel in turn references the death of Neal Cassady, also in Mexico and Humphrey Bogart's solitary demise in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.)  Lee makes amusing use of a pro-Trump red MAGA hat that acquires considerable symbolic importance as the film progresses.  The film is simply too complex, ambitious, and poorly written, at least, in part to be wholly successful -- you have the sense that the movie would be better if it were a tightly focused heist drama (about ninety minutes long) or a full-blown epic three to four hours in length.  

 

Notwithstanding these cavils, which are not inconsiderable, the film is worth seeing and viewers will have to make up their own minds about whether Lee has succeeded in his twin goals -- that is, educating viewers about 'systemic' racism and creating an elaborate and gripping adventure film.  I'm skeptical but there are many, many things to admire in this film and everyone should see it.

(Most films end with a certification that no animals were harmed in the filming -- this is notably absent at the end of this picture.  If you have an affection for snakes, the film will be disturbing to you.  I will warrant that, at least, two snakes were harmed in the production of this movie.)

 

Destry Rides Again

Destry Rides Again, released in a beautifully restored Criteron version, is a product of 1939, the annus mirabilis of classic American cinema.  The film is a peculiar "urban" Western written as a vehicle for Marlene Dietrich -- this was her comeback film; the star had been in retirement in Europe for the preceding two years.  The script is by German and Viennese emigres, although writing under echt Americanized versions of their names, and the picture is ably directed by George Marshall. The film was James Stewart's first Western, although one can debate exactly how really "Western" the movie is -- it glances at genre conventions mostly to ignore and subvert them. In effect, the picture is a "problem Western" -- it's relationship to classics in the genre such as High Noon or Stagecoach is similar to the relationship of Measure by Measure in Shakespeare's canon to a tragedy like Othello.  The picture is designed to achieve certain effects inimical to the standard Western and, therefore, it's plot and structure are strangely deformed.  

The first odd element in Destry Rides Again is the picture's baffling setting.  Somewhere in the West, there is a town called Bottleneck (a term that is literal in that we see desperadoes shooting to pieces whiskey bottles in the first scene but, also, figurative in that the plot has to be run through the constricting structure of a genre, the Western, to which it isn't exactly suited.)  I have said that this is an "urban" Western -- the narrative revolves around an enormous saloon and gambling hall, a place consisting of two towering rooms rimmed by elevated walkways.  In one of the huge rooms, always filmed swarming with people, there is a stage on which Frenchy (Marlene Dietrich), the goddess fiercely presiding over this place, can sing and dance; on the opposite side of the room, there is a huge bar.  As is always the case in these places (cf. the gambling hall and saloon that Humphrey Bogart operates in Casablanca), management is ensconced in a suite of rooms up a long flight of steps above the hurly-burly of the casino and dance-hall floor -- so as to be able to better survey the action below.  What is particularly curious about the terrain of this vast saloon is the fact that there are two huge rooms, separated by a partition -- I have no idea why this is the case, but it signals an important thing about the movie:  Destry is characterized by a weird sense of the excessive;  there's too much on-screen, too many extras, too many cowboys, too many subplots for that matter.  The film insists upon its own excess:  the saloon set is introduced via two bravura tracking shots -- in one, at ground level, Frenchy tours the set, encounters various minor figures with whom she interacts (most of them try to embrace her and she knocks them down) -- the camera tracks with her and shows us the "lay of the land."  The other extraordinary tracking shot is aerial -- the camera glides along one of the upstairs balcony walkways and shows ud the two rooms full of revelers and the odd partition between them -- surely one huge saloon room would be enough.  Why are there two?  It's as if someone told the filmmaker to build an enormous set and make sure to get all the expense on-screen.  (The place resembles The Chuck-a-Luck saloon in Fritz Lang's 1952 equally bizarre urban Western, also featuring Dietrich, Rancho Notorious.)  Except for a few inserted shots, there's no Western scenery.  I counted only two shots of men riding horses through open terrain.  The saloon in this movie is a weird imaginary palace, plopped down in the middle of a town that seems to have no economy other than the huge dance-hall.

The plot and design of the film is equally strange.  James Stewart, the film's hero, doesn't appear until about fifteen minutes has lapsed setting up the situation.  He comes into town on a stagecoach with a blowhard tough-guy (his contribution to the plot makes no sense at all) and the tough-guy's comely sister.  When a rough patch on the roadway bounces Stewart (Destry) onto the young woman's lap, the film signals a "meet cute" and that there will be a romance between the girl and the hero.  But the film sketches this romance so briefly that if you blink you will miss it -- the movie is going to fish in deeper stranger waters.  In the first fifteen minutes of the film, we're introduced to the saloon and its owner, the aptly named Rank, a sinister gambler who cheats at cards.  Rank's squeeze is Frenchy, a  courtesan from New Orleans who comes complete with a sassy Black maid.  The action is driven by a bad act committed by Frenchy and shown at the start of the film.  After leading a rousing song-and-dance number Frenchy goes upstairs to the card room where Rank is pretending to lose to a sucker, Claggart.  (The name is odd -- Claggart, of course, is the villain in Melville's Billy Budd).  Claggart is dumb enough to bet his whole ranch on the outcome of the game.  Frenchy spills coffee on Claggart and in the ensuing confusion, switches cards on him so that he loses the game and everything he owns.  When Claggart complains to the sheriff, the law man confronts Rank and is murdered off-screen (we hear two shots).  The fact that the film contains a murder and later a macabre hunt for the dead man's corpse are elements in the picture that are hard to reconcile with its "comedy Western" genre elements.  After the death of the sheriff, the crooked Mayor and Rank appoint the town drunk as the new sheriff.  But the drunk (he's nicknamed Wash) miraculously gives up booze and recruits the son of a famous gunfighter to be his deputy.  For some reason, Destry agrees to serve in that role -- hence, the scene on the stagecoach.

Destry is a pacifist -- his gunfighter father was shot down in an ambush and he thinks gun-play is idiotic and immoral.  He doesn't wear guns and intends to tame the town without shooting anyone.  He's also law-abiding, and quite willing to enforce the gambling debts that Rank  holds on people in town, including the debt collateralized by the Claggart ranch.  When Rank and a posse of  his gangsters tries to seize the ranch, there's a gun-battle and Destry rides out to the "rescue" only to tell Claggart that he has to surrender the premises. (This is exceedingly peculiar). Destry's plan is to solve the murder of Sheriff Kehoe by finding the corpse and, then, making arrests of the perpetrators, chiefly Rank.  In this way, he thinks he can get the ranch back to Claggart.  At this point, the plot becomes strangely intricate.  The tough-guy on the stagecoach has 10,000 head of cattle (where did he get them?) and wants to drive them across the valley (why?).  Rank is collecting a toll of a quarter-dollar per head of cattle to cross the valley -- with Claggart's farm in his possession, he now owns the whole place.  The tough-guy cowboy pistol-whips one of Rank's gangsters and shoots dead another.  Destry is obliged to arrest him.  (But, for some reason, the cowboy who happens to be flush with money pays Rank 2500 dollars to allow his cattle to pass.)   By this time, Destry and Wash have found the dead sheriff's corpse and they arrest one of Rank's mobsters and put him in jail next to the tough-guy cowboy.  Destry has accomplished all of this without any gun-play, something that astonishes Wash.  Somehow or another, Rank's gunmen go to the jail and shoot down Wash -- he dies in Destry's arms.  This sets up the remarkable climax.  When Wash dies, Destry straps on his guns and leads an attack on the saloon in which Rank and his army are holed-up.  The attack includes dynamite thrown through the front window of the saloon and, then, a huge assault in which wagons are used as fortifications to attack the dance-hall.  The local good women (as is the case in most studio Westerns, females are divided into housewives/mothers opposed to saloon girls/prostitutes) take up hoes and rakes and march down the middle of the street.  They boldly parade between the two groups of men shooting at each other and, then, attack the saloon.  (It's a version of the Sabine women but immensely more elaborate that David's famous painting and the raison d'etre for the film.)  The gunmen in the saloon are unwilling to shoot the women although they are armed with clubs.  There's a huge battle in which the saloon is wrecked.  Frenchy, who has fallen in love with Destry, suffers the fate of all bad girls with hearts of gold in Western films -- just before Destry shoots him, Rank fires his gun aimed at the hero but misses and kills Frenchy.  In the last shot, peace is (sort of) restored in town and Destry seems to be romantically connected with the tough-guy cowboy's sister, one of the women who organized the assault on the Bar.  But this is so minimally suggested that the romance is basically invisible -- the real romantic magnetism is, of course, between Destry and Frenchy:  he has told her that if she scraped off most of her mask-like make-up, she would be a pretty woman.  We see her wiping off her lipstick as she gazes into a mirror after he has told her this and, later, as she dies, Frenchy again makes the gesture of wiping the rouge off her cheeks.  After showing a fearsome mob of women attacking the saloon, the movie makes a comical gesture toward restoring male dominance over the female sex.  A Russian cossack named Stavrogin is married to one of the woman-warriors, Lulu Belle.  Stavrogin literally loses his trousers in a card game at the saloon -- an event clearly figurative for the sexual influence of Frenchy and her dance-hall hostesses.  There is an huge knock-down drag-out cat fight between Lulu Belle and Frenchy over the affair of the pants.  This is also symbolic because Stavrogin "doesn't wear the pants" in the family -- Lulu Belle calls him "Callahan" after her beloved first husband who has died and whose picture she displays prominently in their home.  At the end of the film, Stavrogin smashes up the picture of the dear departed Callahan, asserts his rights as a husband, and demands that Lulu Belle call him by his proper name.  Thus, the film ends by back-pedaling away from its radical images of female empowerment -- images that were unexpected and, even, somewhat astonishing in a picture of this sort. (The Stavrogin-Callahan subplot, featuring Mischa Autry is like something that has wandered into the picture from a Lubitsch film. In fact, many scene in the film feature fast-talking dialogue that is similar to what one would expect in a "screwball comedy.") 

The film's extravagance is noteworthy.  Everything is bigger, louder, longer than we expect.  The catfight between Lulu Bell goes on and on and on and results in the destruction of much furniture and the two women half-naked, bruised, and soaking wet (Destry has poured a  jug of water on them to separate the combatants.)  In the next sequence, Frenchy assaults Destry aiming a gun at  him and, then, throwing bottles and crockery in his direction -- not just a few bottles and ceramics but dozens and dozens.  The image that seems to have inspired the film makers is the army of women intervening in the gunfight and, then, attacking the saloon.  Some of the shots in that battle are genuinely disturbing -- we see, for instance, the women backing minor villains up against the bar, beating them over the head into unconsciousness and, then, hauling their limp bodies up over the bar-rail to be hurled into the crowd of women, like enraged maenads tearing everything apart.  The savagery of the women's attack on the saloon is shocking.  It's fortunate that Frenchy is shot to death -- otherwise, it seems that the mob of enraged women would have torn her to pieces.  

The plot doesn't really work.  The subplot involving the tough-guy and his herd of 10,000 cattle that have miraculously materialized makes no sense and goes nowhere.  (I think the subplot is designed as a motivation for the tough cowboy's sister to join with Lulu Belle and form the monstrous regiment of women that destroy the bar, but this isn't clearly depicted.)  Destry's willingness to use the law to enforce Claggart's gambling debt to Rank is strange and not really resolved in the film -- we don't ever see Claggart back at his ranch.  Destry's pacifism, mirroring the sentiment of much of the country in 1939, turns out not to be real -- in the end, he straps on his guns and leads an attack on the saloon that is shockingly violent.  (American pacifism with respect to World War II also turned out to be fictional.)  The cynical lovelorn Frenchy dying in Destry's arms is the famous image that one takes away from this film, but their romance never really blossoms -- it remains a matter of glances and half-heard suggestions (Destry talks in a very soft voice for most of the picture.)   If  Destry were  really in love with Frenchy, the film's ending would be tragic and this won't work in a film advertised as a rock-em sock-em comedy Western.  The subject matter in the film is generally too dire for its own good and the implications of much of what we see have to be either ignored or avoided -- hence, the distractions of the intricate plot in the film's last half-hour.  Despite its utterly bizarre narrative and thematic features, the picture is a beautifully made example of studio classicism -- the movie withholds close-ups until its last scenes and, therefore, when the camera records Stewart or Dietrich in close shots, they have enormous impact.  The film restored Dietrich to fame and establishes Stewart as a competent, attractive Western hero.  And it contains Dietrich's signature number, See What the Boys in the Back Room will have, delivered in a throaty contralto as she prances back and forth across the stage in a cowboy hat and equestrian vest and trousers that are all tassels and glittering sequins scintillating in the luscious black and white.  The effect is that of a Berlin cabaret somehow transported to the wilds of Nevada.   

Strange Evidence

Sometimes, you need a TV show that you can berate, hurl insults at, and threaten.  Strange Evidence, a uniquely obtuse and dishonest reality TV show fits this bill for me.  Furthermore, I have to confess that the series, aired on Science TV (channel 61 on my Cable) is curiously addictive.  Although you despise yourself for watching this stuff, you keep coming back for more.

Strange Evidence features weird videos that purportedly depict uncanny and inexplicable events. Some of the video footage is pretty impressive and the images are relatively recent, generally depicting occurrences that haven't yet been flogged to death by the glut of shows featuring allegedly paranormal video.  Although broadcast on the Science Network, the show has nothing to do with science -- in fact, it's method of presentation is the precise opposite of anything that could be accounted "scientific".  The show is a variant on Ridiculousness, the wildly popular MTV show comprised of clips of idiots inflicting horrible injuries on themselves and others.  Ridiculousness features a Vanilla Ice-style White hoodlum with a panel consisting typically of a minor-league comedian, a Black rapper, and a blonde girl who sits with her bare knees together and giggles incessantly at the quips made by the other participants -- she is rarely allowed to say anything.  Ridiculousness consists of video clips strung together thematically -- the panel makes fun of the people being lit on fire or falling from great heights or suffering testicular rupture from being smashed in the groin.  (It seems that about every other clip involves potentially fatal injuries that are subject of hilarity by the thug-host and his panel.)  Strange Evidence involves clips that show weird things happening.  A group of talking heads comments on the images, although there is no panel assembled.  Rather, the model is that of a respectable documentary with pundits appointed to interpret the "strange evidence" on display.  The remarkable feature of this case is that the pundits are complete morons, many of them about 20 years old -- these supposed experts bear titles such as "Researcher", "Sociology Expert", "Archaeologist", "Military Consultant," "Pyrotechnics" and "Entomology".  The so-called entomologist is actually an exterminator -- he's a burly chap with sideburns and a fat face.  If he were opining on the NFL, I might listen to him, but he obviously knows nothing about bugs except how to swat them.  Even more curious is the fact that the so-called experts are called upon to comment on the video clips, more or less, at random --  in other words, the "entomologist" will be heard solemnly opining on images that show celestial events or hitherto-unknown beasts.  It's pretty clear that this group of people have been assembled from the producer's family and friends, more or less, at random -- they are no more qualified to comment than any other randomly assembled group of schlubs and dimwits might be.  In this respect, the show resembles some of the Slapped Ham videos on YouTube featuring ghosts and poltergeists -- Slapped Ham shows you something allegedly inexplicable and, then, invites you to "comment below".  But, of course, the viewer is never given enough information to make any sort of even partially intelligent comment.  Accordingly, the YouTube video simply invites idiots to speculate on footage that is often scarcely visible.  

Strange Evidence has pretty good videos, but the commentary on them is completely nonsensical.  Generally, a couple of the pundits will say something on the order of "wow!" or "I've never seen anything like that!" or "It's really strange" before venturing stray-seeming comments that often have nothing to do with what we've seen.  An example is a video taken in Siem Reap, a town in Cambodia.  The video shows a huge explosion that belches fire and debris onto a crowded roadway, knocking people to the ground.  We are given a date and place but no provenance for the video -- it seems to be a compilation from several surveillance cameras.  The "military expert" regales us with morbid tales about Pol Pot and we see images of corpses, stacked skeletons, and people being tortured -- it's all real documentary footage but it's only relationship to the explosion is that the blast and Pol Pot both were once in Cambodia.  Then, an "archaeologist" and a "science investigator" speculate that the explosion may have something to do with an alleged death ray hidden in the ruins Angor Watt -- we are shown some nice drone pictures of the impressive ruins which, of course, have nothing to do with the explosion.  Then, a "Social Historian" opines that the blast was probably terrorist.  The narrator notes that there is a thriving black market in gasoline in Cambodia.  Perhaps, the explosion involved gas.  The pyrotechnics expert, then, sets up an experiment in what looks like an abandoned car salvage yard.  He makes a hut of cellophane and skinny metal rods, puts a bucket of gasoline in the hut, and, then, triggers an explosion.  I think the purpose for the experiment is to discover whether gasoline fumes are flammable.  (They turn out to be.)  The narrator then suggests that "possibly" the blast occurred when someone illegally selling gasoline imprudently lit a match.  Then, we're off to the next oddity.  Featured on the show that I watched (a new series beginning on June 11, 2020) were the following:  a wiggly snake-shaped UFO, a man getting blown up in truck delivering packaging material in China, an alleged demon from a town near Leningrad (the Sosnovy Bor monster), strange aerial phenomena over Costa Rica, the explosion at Siem Reap, a odd-looking vertical beam of light seen over Edmonston (it looks like a star-gate about to open), poltergeists in an antique shop in Barnsley, England, a pygmy native threatening a Vespa rider somewhere in Sumatra, scarlet fog also filmed by a motor-biker in Sumatra (lots of strange events on that island), a disturbance in a river near a Chinese city, and most disturbingly, surveillance video showing a naked man who runs at top speed to hurl himself through the window of a van, falling back out in a spray of glass, and, then, hopping up to jump on the top of moving car, all of this mayhem occurring in a subterranean garage, then, flung from the top of the car, sliding across about forty feet of pavement, then, getting up again and sprinting out of the view of the camera.  This is genuinely scary footage because the frenzied naked man seems both incredibly deranged and oblivious to  pain.  The various "experts" speculate that he's possibly a time-traveler like the Terminator robot in the movie or, maybe, a zombie under the control of a sinister Master, or, perhaps, the victim of a "body hack" (a computer has seized control of him) or, even, maybe a "super soldier" created as a cyborg by the U.S. government who has run amok.  Most alarmingly, the show doesn't solve this riddle -- it just leaves us with the scary footage and a note that the young man, "under the influence" of drugs, was captured by the police.  This is useless information.  The show is beyond lurid.  When discussing the hostile "pygmy" on Sumatra, the pundits speculate that he is either an evil cannibal spirit (these  creatures eat infants), an member of an uncontacted tribe of Homo Florensiensis (the extinct hobbit hominids), or possibly a man-ape hybrid citing efforts by the Soviet Scientist "Ivanov" to create a chimp-human super soldier by inseminating pygmy women with chimpanzee semen.  (It's hard to figure out why an uncontacted tribe member would be hanging around a dirt-bike trail in Sumatra but who knows -- to me, the video looks doctored.)  Another good example of this show's amusing idiocy is the Sosnovy Bor demon -- this is a desiccated two-inch long relic that seems to be comprised of small turtle's head super-glued to a small snake's body that terminates in a rodent claw.  Is this the product of radiation dumped in the Russian river?  That is, some kind of mutant?  Or is it a hitherto unknown Russian animal or could we be looking at a chimera?  Of course, a chimera is a sort of hoax, something like P. T. Barnum's Fiji mermaid (a chimp's head on tuna body) or the so-called Jackalope (jack rabbit with antelope horns).  "Yes, it is a chimera" a zoologist declares, "but instead of citing taxidermy as a source for the creature, the expert launches into an illustrated lecture about Ligers (tiger-lions), mules, and the like.  Of course, the obvious explanation is never discussed, namely, that some warped taxidermist put this mess together with a few stitches and some glue.  "To date, the mystery of the demon has not been solved," the narrator solemnly tells us..  

The reason this show is maddening is that some of the footage is very interesting.  I certainly want to know what is behind the celestial light show (a huge cloud full of rainbow colors) in Costa Rica or the weird maelstrom in the river in China or the naked man hurling himself through windows in a grim-looking basement garage.  But we're never given any plausible explanation for these things. I find myself watching episode after episode of this show and the whole time cursing the TV with such vehemence that my gentle, old Labrador retriever slinks away and hides in hallway upstairs.

Post-script:  The naked man is Garrett Smith (21) a resident of Anaheim living at the El Mirador Apartments 3700 W. Mungal Drive.  The incident occurred on Saturday either March 10 or March 11, 2015.  Smith was apprehended one mile from the underground garage where this event took place.  He was seriously injured and treated at the U. S. Irvine Hospital in Orange County and, of course, charged with vandalism and other crimes.  Reports don't tell us what drugs were in this guy's system.