La Llorona (2019)

La Llorona is a ghost out of Mexican folklore that hangs out, by reputation, near bodies of water, howling and mourning for her drowned children. There are lots of versions of the story and how the children came to be drowned and actually there are even lots of movies too, going all the way back at least to a 1933 La Llorona, a Mexican picture. Lately there has been a spate of them, perhaps connected to an appearance in Pixar’s Coco of the Mexican folk song about the business, “La Llorona.” Wikipedia details a specifically Guatemalan version of the La Llorona story so it shouldn’t be a surprise that a Guatemalan, director and cowriter Jayro Bustamante, stepped up with his own take. It made the rounds of film festivals a few years ago and remains worth a look. This version of the tale takes an interesting political bent, with a former dictator who has been forced from office, brought to trial for genocide and convicted, and then his sentence commuted by the country’s supreme court. No doubt they were more interested in looking forward, not backward. This dictator figure, played by Julio Diaz, is called Enrique Monteverde here, but he is based on the real-life Guatemalan dictator in 1982 and 1983, Efraín Ríos Montt, who faced his own charges of war crimes and genocide. The movie takes place soon after his conviction has been set aside, when Montaverde and his family (wife, daughter, granddaughter, servants, and security) repair to their home where they are virtual prisoners. The action is mostly interior but constantly punctuated by chants and calls from the crowds that gather daily to protest him. Sometimes they throw stones and break windows. The swimming pool is strewn with wanted posters for him, tossed over the fence. Even most of the servants have given up and taken off. But the need for servants is still there and one day a woman shows up ready to work, and with experience—Alma, played by an otherworldly Maria Mercedes Coroy. Later her credentials turn out to be falsified but she’s in the household by then. This La Llorona skillfully blends the horrors and depredations of Latin American death squads and repressive right-wing regimes with the La Llorona legend. Julio Diaz is nearly perfect as Monteverde, still a monster after all these years, with a little bristly mustache, an omnipresent sidearm, and bottomless horndog notions. I admit this La Llorona feels a bit like a film festival usual suspect, but don’t hold that against it.

Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game (1978)

The second novel by William Kennedy in his Albany cycle turns on a plot point I also noticed in Legs: kidnapping. I just didn’t realize it was so common. I thought the whole Lindbergh baby thing was kind of a one-off. In fact, this novel is based on an actual case, per Wikipedia an “attempted 1933 kidnapping of John O’Connell Jr., the nephew of Albany Democratic boss Daniel P. O’Connell.” The Wikipedia article also notes, “The kidnapping is the central point of the story, but Kennedy also details the everyday lives of the characters inhabiting Albany’s working class and poor neighborhoods.” Just so, Billy Phelan and Martin Daugherty, an Albany reporter, feel more like side characters, as does the kidnapping story. Albany itself is beginning to emerge as the main player. Kennedy must have already had a trilogy in mind when he wrote this. He says as much in an introduction to An Albany Trio, relating that he needed to tell the Legs Diamond story before this one, and this one before the next, Ironweed, which by itself you may recall won a lot of prizes and such. Legs felt like a self-contained fictionalized biography—and a highly entertaining one—but this felt more like setup and transition, made out of the Albany color in 1938. Which worked fine as such but also very much like a second part in many series, so busy laying groundwork and developing backstory that it practically forgets to include a main narrative arc. Billy Phelan’s career as a low-level gambling hustler bore some interest. Martin Daugherty’s story seemed more cliché as a slightly ignorant, slightly idealist columnist for a daily paper. I have no idea why Martin’s father’s story is here, nor for that matter Billy’s father’s story, which is also here but not at such length. For reasons, no doubt. More will be revealed. The usual things with series. None of it had much of anything to do with the kidnapping story either. Quibble, quibble. Legs, Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, and Ironweed are short enough they can be contained in a single trade paperback of 600 pages. They are eminently readable and enjoyable even when they are confusing. Kennedy is just that good of a writer. This second one in the Albany series is probably informative for the bigger picture but not truly a stand-alone, the ways Legs is and Ironweed might be. But I’m happy to read on. I even have the fourth and fifth installments on hand (Quinn’s Book and Very Old Bones).

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.
William Kennedy, An Albany Trio

19. Isaac Hayes, Hot Buttered Soul (1969) – “Walk On By”

Isaac Hayes came up originally in the ‘60s as an influential songwriter at the Memphis-based Stax label, cowriting “Soul Man” which became a hit for Sam & Dave in 1967. Later he struck big with the score for the 1971 blaxploitation picture Shaft. In between his soul was psychedelicized and he delivered up a stone classic in Hot Buttered Soul, which he followed with two more albums similar in intent and strategy (The Isaac Hayes Movement and ... To Be Continued)—that is, approximately two songs per albums side, covers of well-known pop songs, and running times that approached and often sailed by the double-digit minutes mark. “Walk On By” is the place to start—it's conveniently first on the LP too. For the most part it’s the place I’ve stayed. This mighty 12-minute cover of the Bacharach-David standard, originally recorded by Dionne Warwick. takes your heart away and explodes with delicious noise. From the opening it’s easy to see the plan—the notes are longer, the tempo slower, there appears to be a sawing orchestra on hand swelling up at the big moments. Guesting Funkadelic alum Harold Beane and his vicious fuzz-toned guitar lead a march to the glorious entry of Hayes’s vocal, a rumbling mumble sorely beset by the vicissitudes and pompatus of love. It goes way down deep as he opens up every bit of the agony. It’s your beloved one and all you can do is hope they will just pretend they don’t know you. “You put the hurt on me,” he moans, getting to the point. (“when you said it,” the chick singers sing) “You socked it to me, mama. When you said goodbye.” (wail wail) Warwick made it work dramatically, even though the production on her more upbeat version is buoyed by gently puffing horns and sweet strings. Hayes takes it another direction and I have never heard the song again in the same way, however indelible Warwick’s version is (and it is—it is Hayes’s genius to recognize that it is). On the flip side of Hot Buttered Soul Hayes tries repeating the trick: Jimmy Webb’s beautiful “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” here clocking in at 18 minutes. I swear Hayes holds down a single uninterrupted organ chord for the first half of it, and the subsequent release and finally getting into something like a song is liberating and revelatory, a brilliant moment. But 18 minutes is a little long for that payoff. The rest of Hot Buttered Soul— a tender ballad, “One Woman,” and the playful "Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic" riffing on Mary Poppins syllables—can be taken or dispensed with at will.

Songs From the Second Floor (2000)

Sånger från andra våningen, Sweden / Norway / Denmark / France / Germany, 98 minutes

Director/writer/editor: Roy Andersson

Photography: Istvan Borbas, Jesper Klevenas

Music: Benny Andersson

Cast: Lars Nordh, Sten Andersson, Stefan Larsson, Torbjorn Fahlstrom, Lucio Vucina, Hanna Eriksson, Peter Roth, Tommy Johansson, Sture Olsson

As I get deeper into the aggregated critical roundup list of best 21st-century movies over at They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? I find more and more movies and filmmakers that are new to me. A lot of them are generally more difficult than my perhaps entertainment-oriented values would like (hi Holy Motors, hi Tabu, hi Colossal Youth). I know now that Ari Aster, for one (and his mother too), has very high regard for Swedish director, writer, and editor Roy Andersson. But I had never really heard of Andersson in any meaningful way until the last year or two, when Songs From the Second Floor made a chart leap, up from several years in the range of #57 to #73 to its present position of #41. A friend (Steven Rubio aka Mon-Sewer Paul Regret) posted a review last fall that allowed Songs might be for others, but it wasn’t for him. Based on that, I put off looking at it for a first time last year, hoping it would fall again out of my reach. But no.

Thus I came to Songs with rock-bottom expectations (and this won’t be the last time this year!). Terms like “absurdist” and “existential” associated with Songs and Andersson did not help. But low expectations can sometimes be your friend if you can still bring yourself to look at something. Songs From the Second Floor is a loosely connected series of vignettes made out of single shots of long scenes that are indeed absurd. A stage magician starts to saw a volunteer from the audience in half—wounds him, actually. A parade of performative self-flagellants playing in the background of scenes creates a traffic jam that lasts for eight hours and more. A passenger choir on the subway erupts in song, like flash mobs can do now. A man has a son he says was driven insane by writing poetry. At least these scenes often have the virtue of being funny.

“Reflections” (1974)

Angela Carter is a dense prose stylist. This story, formally a kind of M.C. Escher exercise, gets to strange places. The first-person narrator is taking a walk in the woods—his voice feels to me more like a woman, but he is a young man. He hears the singing of a bird, then the singing of a woman. His reverie is interrupted when he trips on something, which turns out to be a seashell. “A shell so far from the sea!” It’s very big and also the pattern of whorls on it goes the wrong way, our first clue that we are inside some mirror world. The singing young woman has a gun and shoots at him. She sics her “enormous black dog” on him. She forces him at gunpoint to an ”ancient brick house” surrounded by a magnificent walled garden. Wikipedia, via ISFDB, summarizes: “A boy goes on a Through the Looking-Glass-like adventure into a bizarre, reversed world. He encounters an elderly woman who is actually a hermaphrodite, and is raped by a girl in a forest before ultimately escaping.” That’s about it all right. The girl’s name is Anna, a palindrome. Everything in this world is reversed or reversible. Perhaps the androgyne represents a kind of balance between the two worlds. Here’s a typical Carter sentence, during the rape of the narrator: “I shouted and swore but the shell grotto in which she ravished me did not reverberate and I only emitted gobs of light.” What would the reverse look like, one wonders. By this time our guy is aware he is in a mirror world. He takes Anna’s gun and shoots her. He knows where the mirror portal is and intends to escape. The androgyne, I should mention because I’m sure it means something, if not everything, seems to spend all their time knitting prodigiously. Attempting to put it all together, the story has much the feel of dreams in the retelling (and rereading by fragments). Carter is one to read almost like poetry, slowly and carefully, savoring and pondering its raw ways. It’s at least as weird as, and maybe even better than, the Lewis Carroll tale. I know that’s saying something but also I have always found the classic Carroll tales slightly oversold.

Angela Carter, Burning Your Boats
Story not available online.

If Morning Ever Comes (1964)

Anne Tyler’s first novel was published when she was 22, which is impressive in itself. She had not yet discovered Baltimore—this is set in North Caroliina, where she was raised. Many of the elements we associate with Tyler are here, but not yet quite in focus. It’s about a big family of misfits and emotionally wounded. Some tend toward the isolated eccentric brooders she would later sharpen to a fine edge. Others are the natural healers and binding elements of families, dysfunctional by nature but, again, not quite as sharply drawn. In fact, many of her characters here tend toward more undifferentiated blends of these two favored Tyler types. The Hawkes family is big—six girls and one boy, Ben Joe. Ben Joe (not to be confused with banjo) is 25 and has just started law school at Columbia, but he worries about his family living in the small town of Sandhill, North Carolina. It’s November and he skips a week of school to take the train down to visit them. Various antics ensue. His older sister left her husband in Kansas and has shown up in Sandhill with her baby. Their father was a doctor who kept a mistress and died of a heart attack at her place. Their mother is bitter and depressed. Their grandmother is kooky. Tyler would get much better with kooky characters. The other five sisters have some distinguishing traits—two are twins, Jenny is on the road to becoming isolated and eccentric—but they’re more like a blob of sisters. It’s a very short novel, which is part of the problem. Tyler has a good reason for the family to be big but there’s little time to detail them all. I read this in my first flush of infatuation with Tyler (ca. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant and The Accidental Tourist) and was disappointed. I was better prepared for it this time and enjoyed it for what it is, a pretty good novel by a young writer with lots of potential and limited life experience. Tyler got better with seasoning but she was always a natural at novels, learning the craft early. If Morning Ever Comes is strictly for Tyler completists. It’s not her best by a fair shot but it’s not her worst either. Don’t ask me what her worst is. I like them all even if just a little.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

Women Talking (2022)

Star-studded Women Talking has a kind of twist on the familiar “based on a true story” cliche of a lot of topical movies. It is based on a novel, Women Talking by Miriam Toews, which in turn is based on real events—or, as Toews puts it, is “an imagined response to real events.” Those real events took place in a conservative Bolivian Mennonite community and have been dubbed the “Bolivian Mennonite gas-facilitated rapes.” These rapes took place between 2005 and 2009 and involved a group of men who sprayed a sedative intended for animals into the windows of houses, later taking advantage of the passed-out women, girls, and children. Their confirmed victims numbered 151. The movie is pretty much as the title advertises. These women or their loved ones have been assaulted. Lately a man has been caught at it, which has finally explained all the incidents of women waking to clear physical evidence of an assault (including pregnancies) but no memory of it. Now they are meeting clandestinely—Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, Frances McDormand, Judith Ivey, Emily Mitchell, and more—to decide what to do next. They formally vote on their three choices: do nothing, stay and fight, or leave. The first is eliminated and the debate circles around the latter two. It’s mostly talking, but there are many uncomfortable flashbacks. Sarah Polley directs and cowrites (I realized later I had confused her with Sarah Paulson). It’s Polley’s fourth feature and her first in 10 years. While it is easy to make conservative religious groups like Mennonites out to be rife with such problems, blaming it on sexual repression, that’s partly because these things predictably happen over and over. Does anyone still think celibacy is a good idea for Catholic priests? Has anyone noticed that Southern Baptists are presently laboring under a major such crisis? Look it up. The strength of this movie is its focus literally on women talking—talking out the issues, the violence of men, their attachments to men, the difficulty of starting a new community, the line to draw for bringing their sons. They finally settle on under age 15—me, I’d go a little lower. The picture is somewhat plodding and talky, but that’s also the intention. I have a hard time sympathizing with people who can’t quit the religion that is actively harming them—Stockholm syndrome, anyone?—but I also believe everyone is entitled to their own beliefs. Groups like those in this movie challenge me on the latter point, but I think the picture is worth seeing for its distinctly feminist and/or even feminine approach to conflict resolution.

“Indian Camp” (1924)

This story brings us to the somewhat confusing welter of the In Our Time collection featuring Nick Adams, with its multiple versions and quasi-sense of being more than just a collection of short stories, on the order of some kind of interconnected cycle. My version (from the Finca Vigia Complete edition) is prefaced by a single paragraph labeled “Chapter 1” with a war scene. One of these vignettes shows up between every story. I’m more prone to take the stories as standalones and the vignettes as unrelated prose poetry flourishes. “Indian Camp” is very short and very good. It’s the first appearance of Nick Adams, seen here in Michigan as a kid. He is accompanying his father, a doctor, on a late-night call. The occasion is a problem childbirth for a Native American woman. The baby is coming out feet first and ultimately the doctor has to perform a caesarean using a jackknife and no anesthetic. The husband, meanwhile, in the upper bunk, has killed himself by slashing his own throat. He’s not discovered until after the birth. There’s blood everywhere. The brutality here surprised me, but what is perhaps more surprising is that little about it feels overdone. It comes close, and some might disagree. The suicide was particularly gruesome. The doctor hurries Nick out of the cabin, sorry now that he brought him. In general, the story is racist toward Native Americans, but more by way of ignorance than hate. Certainly Nick is getting a life lesson out of this—about life and death, about men and women, about whites and minorities and the realities of poverty. It’s Nick’s point of view through the story. Much of the focus is on the father and son relationship as the father provides a stream of soothing explanations about the situation, at least until the point when it becomes clear what he has to do. We learn about the jackknife in a conversational aside later. Hemingway’s self-serious tone works well here. The best Hemingway—even including some of the vignettes—bears a sense of dismay and devastation, as if captured at the moment innocence is shattered. He often seems to prize stoicism above all else in the face of calamity, but it’s apparent he’s trying to protect the side of himself that believes in the goodness of humanity and life. As must we all. At the same time, a more cynical side of him appears to believe everything is worth nothing, and thus the basic internal conflict of Hemingway. He is just starting to discover it in these Nick Adams stories from In Our Time, which can be gripping, vital, and immediate. The suicide here may be a slightly false note, reaching too far to make an impact, but it’s not hard for me to believe these events could have all happened just this way. The story is shocking but poignant and altogether done well.

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
Read story online.
Listen to story online.

20. Jefferson Airplane, Surrealistic Pillow (1967) – “Somebody to Love,” “White Rabbit”

[2010 review of “White Rabbit” here.]

In high school daze we all seemed to have Jefferson Airplane albums and among us we had close to a complete collection. I owned After Bathing at Baxter’s and Crown of Creation—also Volunteers, which I never cared much for. Someone even had Bless Its Pointed Little Head, and a few had Surrealistic Pillow, which even then seemed to be considered best by the general consensus. I admit I spent most of my life doubting that until I arrived at this project and put in some time listening systematically. I loved Creation and Baxter’s, and I still swear by them, but what they don’t have are the songs “Somebody to Love” and “White Rabbit.” They are a certain ne plus ultra of psychedelic pop chart artistry. Yes, the turn to Ravel’s Bolero in “White Rabbit” is arch but the drama is carried off well. It burns and scratches and builds like a drug trip. Grace Slick never sounded better; she wrote it and she sings the hell out of it. Both are under three minutes. “White Rabbit” is closer to two and a half. It was the only song that could have worked in the bathtub scene in Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (the book, not the movie). It’s a sensible way to die, if you have to die—at the climax of “White Rabbit.” I would even listen to arguments that everything you want to hear in psychedelic music is captured in “White Rabbit” and “Somebody to Love.” But in other news, Surrealistic Pillow otherwise has merely the quixotic and typical virtues and problems associated with a band with multiple songwriters with multiple agendas. Grace Slick wrote “White Rabbit.” Her former brother-in-law Darby Slick wrote “Somebody to Love” when they were both in the Great Society, a forerunner to Jefferson Airplane. Marty Balin is involved in five songs on Surrealistic Pillow, Paul Kantner in two, Jorma Kaukonen two, and Skip Spence chips in one. They’re not bad, sincere ballads mixed up with various folky strains and goofs, but the songs on Crown of Creation are better. There is also, on a 2003 reissue of Surrealistic Pillow, a very nice six-minute blues workup written by Kaukonen, “In the Morning,” which is not to be missed and would have been a good album closer on the original release.

The Terminator (1984)

UK / USA, 107 minutes

Director: James Cameron

Writers: James Cameron, Gale Anne Hurd, William Wisher

Photography: Adam Greenberg

Music: Brad Fiedel, Tryanglz

Editor: Mark Goldblatt

Cast: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Biehn, Linda Hamilton, Paul Winfield, Lance Henriksen, Bill Paxton, Earl Boen, Bess Motta

It had been a long time since I’d seen a Terminator movie—and, full disclosure, I’ve only seen the first two (of six, not counting TV, video games, action figures, and other treatments)—so I wasn’t entirely sure what I would be getting into these 40 years later. As I recall, the first sequel, from 1991, was the better picture. And sure enough, this 1984 original puts an impossibly young Arnold Schwarzenegger into a thriller milieu that is at least 80% 1980s cheese. Even the projected dystopian future of 2029, a wrecked war zone with deadly purple rays and other high-tech war gadgetry going pew-pew-pew, seemed faintly rinky-dink. Meanwhile, in 1984, Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) and her big-hair best friend Ginger (Bess Motta) are grooving to walkmans and the relatively newfound portability of music. Can’t stop, won’t stop—which means they don’t always hear the dangers coming down. Let’s not even get into the rockin’ soundtrack by Tryanglz, whoever that is. Was 1984 the most ‘80s year of all? I know there’s a theory it was the best year all-time in pop music. Tryanglz is not evidence for it.

In spite of the many dated aspects, The Terminator remains relatively good entertainment (even if the sequel might be better). It has an intriguing science fiction / time travel premise, based on the oldest chestnut in the books, about going back in time to kill your grandfather. But that means—I couldn’t be alive—to kill him—he never died—so I was born, but— Don’t think about it too much because the paradoxes will make your brain hurt. Oh, wait, it’s a whole franchise later now, and the many zigs have profoundly zagged. The fact of the matter is that The Terminator is closer to Beverly Hills Cop and The French Connection, in terms of what it is, than to heady science fiction like Blade Runner or 2001. What it is is lots of gunplay, lots of car chases, and a light dusting of sci-fi. Action, baby. As a movie, The Terminator notably loves guns to the point of fetish. Everyone has different models of automatic weapons and shotguns, sawed-off and otherwise, with fancy laser attachments and such. Later there will be pipe bombs. Let the ordnance fly!