Oppenheimer (2023)

Somewhere along the line I developed a bad attitude about director and writer hail the auteur Christopher Nolan. I didn’t like Inception, I didn’t like Dunkirk, and I really didn’t like The Dark Knight Rises (is there consensus it’s his worst?). On the other hand, to be fair, there are as many that I do like, at least by parts (the first two Batmans, The Prestige, Interstellar, and especially Memento). But when last summer’s “Barbenheimer” phenom went down, famously restoring movies to commercial oomph, I was dubious, especially when I ventured out to see Barbie first. But I finally got around to Nolan’s A-bomb and frankly have to file it with things that make me shrug. It’s long, to start with, it’s packed full of strutting stars (Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Kenneth Branagh), the sound design is pretentious, and so is the gaudy overall visual strategy, alternating color with black and white because what? Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer is a stout enough moral being, heart in the right place, all that, much like oh, say, Kevin Costner in Hidden Figures. Murphy mumbles too much but I understand that’s part of the sound design. Points for being reminiscent of David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth. Still, by my lights the only certifiably great turn in this one, perhaps not surprisingly, is from Robert Downey Jr., who continues to bank the fires on being the best movie actor alive. The picture is arguably worth seeing for his performance alone. But I’ve heard enough disputes now about the historical veracity of Oppenheimer that I felt obliged to not believe any of it. I suspect the things I liked most and didn’t know already were the things that were made up. For a three-hour movie about A-bombs there was only one mushroom cloud. That’s probably for the best, at this point. Even nuclear anxiety isn’t what it used to be. Much too much was clonkingly obvious, like the quote attributed to “Oppie” out of the Bhagavad Gita, “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” It came to remind me of Samuel L. Jackson’s faux Bible quote in Pulp Fiction. I won’t go so far as to call the fatally self-serious Oppenheimer out and out bad. But I’m willing to say it’s 85% mediocre.

“The Battler” (1925)

Here’s another good one by Ernest Hemingway from the In Our Time collection(s)—actually a late-breaking substitute for “Up in Michigan” when a publisher got squeamish. It seems to be set in Michigan, but the scene is different. Nick Adams has just been tossed from a freight train he jumped on. He’s been riding the rails. It’s too early for the Great Depression as such, but it has much of that violence—just as the 1920s had much of the same financial woes for many agricultural and other workers. It’s striking how much this feels like a Depression story now. Nick makes his way to a campfire he sees going in the woods by the railroad track. He meets a man who notices Nick’s black eye and torn clothes and seems to like the fighting spirit they suggest. He turns out to be a boxer whose name Nick knows. Now down on his luck, obviously, and we learn why later in the story. Another man shows up who is more or less the boxer’s minder. The third man is African-American, and the story is not without its problems regarding him. I hold Hemingway responsible for turning the slave Jim in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn into “N-word Jim,” which has stuck even though Twain himself never used that term. It’s possible it would be useful to look at each use in this story of “negro” and the N-word to see if Hemingway intended any kind of useful distinction. But I suspect not. There is some unpleasant racism in his first novel as well, The Sun Also Rises (1926). My sense is more that Hemingway was a hostile racist. But that said, his portrayal of the unfortunately named Bugs is not insensitive. Bugs is interesting, complex, fully formed, and the most competent person here. It’s a little surprising to see Nick so loose in the world, riding the rails and brawling. I like the dynamics between these characters. We already know Nick but the other two are impressively vivid. The boxer is closer to cliché maybe with the mental problems that make him alarmingly violent and alarmingly quick to turn on someone. The story remains problematic because of the race issues but it’s still also very good.

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

18. Todd Rundgren, A Wizard, a True Star (1973)

[2007 review here.]

You could probably argue that my favorite album by Todd Rundgren is psychedelic only because the production purposefully jams many of these songs and fragments seamlessly together, each one blurring into the next across a range of styles. Among other things that makes it hard to listen to it on CDs or via streaming, which routinely insert a couple of annoying seconds between all tracks. The album reminds me structurally of the Beatles’ Abbey Road, stringing together a series of songs (or fragments) under 2:00 at one point, or their White Album, with its wide and seemingly senseless assortments of rock or pop song style. Yes, Wizard has annoying throwaways—I could do without the 1:08 “Dogfight Giggle,” for sure. And it is now unfortunately dated with the crypto-homophobic ditties “Rock & Roll Pussy” (1:11) and “You Don’t Have to Camp Around” (1:06 and still lovely). Fair enough. It also has songs in Rundgren’s achingly beautiful and friendly (if slightly tinged with ‘70s self-help vibes) pop song mode (“Sometimes I Don’t Know What to Feel.” “I Don’t Want to Tie You Down,” “Does Anybody Love You?”). It has more songs that are intended to be inspirational in a heroic juveniles-against-the-world mode (“Zen Archer,” “Just One Victory,” “When the Shit Hits the Fan / Sunset Blvd.”). Perhaps most surprising—though also looking forward to the mistakes of his overly faithful Faithful covers LP a few years later—is an 11-minute soul medley featuring the Impressions’ “I’m So Proud,” Smokey Robinson’s “Ooh Baby Baby,” the Delfonics’ “La-La Means I Love You,” and the Capitols’ “Cool Jerk.” The last is the only clinker in that bunch. The first three are gorgeous and moving versions. Thus, much like the cover art suggests, we are set adrift here inside Todd Rundgren’s tender octagonal die-cut elfin musical world, which moves through its 55 minutes of material with masterful ease. I’m not sure Todd Rundgren ever had an imperial phase but, if he did, this album was part of it. He was producing one substantial album after another in the early ‘70s, with Runt; Runt: The Ballad of Todd Rundgren; Something / Anything?; A Wizard, a True Star; Todd; and Initiation (plus his Utopia project). He stayed close to his pop instincts bleeding into prog and/or thrashing heavy rock on all of them. A Wizard, a True Star is his psychedelic phase.

Strangers on a Train (1951)

USA, 101 minutes

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Writers: Raymond Chandler, Czenzi Ormonde, Whitfield Cook, Patricia Highsmith, Ben Hecht

Photography: Robert Burks

Music: Dimitri Tiomkin

Editor: William H. Ziegler

Cast: Robert Walker, Farley Granger, Patricia Hitchcock, Kasey Rogers, Marion Lorne, Ruth Roman, Leo G. Carroll, Howard St. John, Jonathan Hale

In director Alfred Hitchcock’s rogue’s gallery pantheon of woman-hating psychopaths—which includes at least Joseph Cotten as Charlie Oakley in Shadow of a Doubt, Robert Walker as Bruno Antony here in Strangers on a Train, and Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates in Psycho—Walker is not to be underestimated or taken for granted. I would not put him last in any stack-ranking and might put him first. Everyone knows the story in Strangers on a Train from the Sonic Youth song “Shadow of a Doubt”: “Met a stranger on a train / ... He said / ‘You take me and I’ll be you’ / ‘You kill him and I’ll kill her.’” Tennis player Guy Haines (Farley Granger) becomes the target of convenience in Antony’s plot for the perfect murder(s). Antony wants to rid himself of his judgmental tycoon father and save his inheritance too. He offers to kill Haines’s troublesome wife Miriam (Kasey Rogers, billed as Laura Elliott), who won’t give him a divorce now that she knows he’s involved with a senator’s daughter. Miriam is also pregnant by another man. Antony says his plan is perfect because no one can connect the murderers to their victims. Haines, who has indeed just met Antony on a train, takes it as an unpleasant joke and thinks no more of it. Then Miriam turns up dead, strangled to death in a lover’s lane near an amusement park. And now Haines begins hearing from Antony about what he needs to know to murder Antony’s father.

Miriam is killed surprisingly quickly, almost as soon as the idea comes up—barely 20 minutes into the movie. It’s practically a shock to the system. Miriam and the amusement park and the two men she is on a date with are lurid and wanton and the whole scene seems made to order for murder if not orgies of violence. Once the deed is done the boom increasingly lowers on Haines, who doesn’t know how to get out of the mess and instinctively tries to hide that he knows Antony at all—which of course does not work. Antony has ways, as a D.C. party scene shows, of insinuating himself into the life of Haines and the senator’s family. Granger plays Haines like a cornered rat, sweating and licking his lips in anxiety and trying to square the various points of guilt that are hemming him in. Inevitably the movie ends up back at the amusement park, whose ambience has not improved any.

“The Machine Demands a Sacrifice” (1972)

This story by the ever-restless Dennis Etchison might be more science fiction than horror, though it’s certainly horrific. In the future, in Los Angeles, freelancers cruise for deaths among the auto accidents of heavy traffic, hunting body organs to sell. Policemen, called COPters, patrol from above in jetpacks somehow built into their nightsticks. The “COPter” neologism reminds me of Philip K. Dick and the story does too. As usual, Etchison’s setting is a strong part of the story. Here it is Los Angeles traffic—freeways full of cars that wait minutes to travel feet, and the web of arterials that feed them. We see one freelance team commit a heinous murder to get to the product, and Etchison even notices that the victims are Black, using racism to jack up the horror a little more. It’s good stuff, although, ever since the urban legend (waking in a strange hotel bathtub with a terrible wound in your side), criminal organ harvesting has been somewhat overplayed as an idea (even if your story was written before that market opened up). And it’s arguable that the Phildickian aspects ultimately work against the story. On paper, it shouldn’t be as good as it is. Maybe I like it more than some other Etchison stories because it’s direct rather than allusive or suggestive. I wouldn’t call it restrained and, in a way—perhaps paradoxically, and perhaps I’ll change my mind—I’m saying that’s a virtue. The crime it depicts is horrible. It makes clear what a horrible world this is. Maybe that’s too black and white? I couldn’t find much about it on the internet, which suggests it’s not considered among his best. And that’s fair enough. The science fiction trappings are probably a net negative. On aesthetic grounds “restrained” probably still wins the day. But I liked Etchison’s effortless turn to the soul-eating traffic jam. Even in 1972 he obviously knew that scene well. I also like Etchison’s Southern California roots, this seems like a good time to say. He’s like the Beach Boys—maybe he didn’t surf and all that, but he knows the landscape intimately—psychic, cultural, and otherwise. Now that I think about it, the title is also Phildickian, which does make sense for 1972 California. Etchison remains an intriguing problem in horror for me. I don’t always know why his stories work, but they often do.

Dennis Etchison, Talking in the Dark
Story not available online.

The Green Ripper (1979)

I was sure I could randomly pick up any Travis McGee novel by John D. MacDonald and find unpleasant scenes of diabolical sexual assault and murder, because that was my experience when I was reading them in the ‘80s. But this was my second in recent times where it didn’t happen. Maybe I’m remembering it wrong or maybe I’m tougher or maybe this is related somehow to my “best travis mcgee novels” google search? I might try a couple more and see how it goes. I’m not unhappy with this result. MacDonald and his McGee novels are very popular among fans of mystery and detective fiction and with good reason. MacDonald is good at doing this. But the rapey qualities drove me away so I’m enjoying what I have while I’ve got it. This one starts with a girlfriend dying suddenly. It’s another of MacDonald’s glowing Man and Woman relationships. One shtick in the series is that McGee is a bit of a white knight for the ladies. It’s typically heroic heterosexual sex out of the Hugh Hefner mold. I have no idea whether Gretel appears in previous novels. McGee gets around. In his defense, he may feel a little smarmy, but he always seems to deliver the noble sex of dignity and gentle care. I’ve heard these affairs described as the “sexual healing” part of the story. No raping for McGee though he lives in a world full of it. But revenge—that’s another story. Revenge he will do. Once he finds out Gretel was murdered by poison, not done in by disease, he is on the case. It leads down byzantine corridors until he finds himself in a training camp for Christian terrorists. “The Green Ripper” is a private joke with Gretel, a mangling of “the Grim Reaper.” It is here solely to get the color word into the title for the series’ ridiculous titling scheme. This is the 18th McGee novel of 21, so it’s near the end, which came with MacDonald’s death in 1986. The Green Ripper is a bit rote but pulls us right along, with few slow patches and little to distract by way of plausibility, although that’s more a personal call. I didn’t miss the various plot conveniences, but I didn’t mind them either. YMMV. A lot depends on what you think of MacDonald. I know he’s got nasty stuff out there, it just wasn’t in the two I looked at. He’s good enough I may read on. But I don’t trust him yet either.

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

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.