I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

I don’t suppose anyone needs me to tell them that this, Maya Angelou’s coming-of-age autobiography, is an exquisite book.  It’s gorgeously written, unflinchingly honest (I think that’s what boggles my mind most about the idea of writing about one’s own life – that nerve it takes to allow oneself to be so naked,) and at time sharply painful to read.  I couldn’t tell you why I never read it before now, but I also don’t think I’ve ever been in a better place in my life to recognize it for the masterpiece it is (some spoilers.)

The book paints Angelou’s life between the ages of three and seventeen, following young Maya from her early childhood in Arkansas to the North and West and back again.  The everpresent ugliness of racism permeates her experiences, as do the struggles of this young girl to discover who she is being forged to become in the crucible of extreme, cruel circumstances.  By degrees, she starts to understand what the world is, the place that people tell her she has in it, and the place she tries to carve out for herself.

Different elements are at play here, all employed tremendously well.  There’s stranger-than-fiction slices of life, like the story of a particularly charismatic worshipper whaling on the preacher in the middle of his sermon.  There’s beautiful character work, like the exploration of Maya’s brother Bailey and how deeply affected he is by the existence of their “Mother Dear.”  There are searing, horrendous passages, like the description of Maya’s rape as an 8-year-old.  There are intellectual ruminations, social commentary, poetic beauty, heartbreaking truths, and fierce individualism.  It’s at once a story containing fathoms and the story of one specific child.

I particularly love the deft exploration of race, including the influence of colorism and the intersectionality of being both Black and a girl.  Angelou covers the terrifying (Momma embodying the caregiver of every Black boy who’s ever had to agonize over his safety in an unkind world when he doesn’t come home at night,) the dehumanizing (the white dentist telling Momma there’s no way he’ll put his hands in Maya’s mouth,) the unifying (everyone crowded into the store to listen to a Joe Louis fight on the radio, needing him to win as a reflection of their own legitimacy as a people,) and the soul-crushing (the speaker at Maya’s graduation talking about the top-of-the-line equipment and new teachers brought in to improve the white school, while the Black school is getting money devoted only to its athletic facilities.)  In both large and small moments, threats of violence and microagressions alike, American race relations work their way into Maya’s life, and it is in that tempest of hatred, fear, and ignorance that she must come of age.

Just superb.  There’s nothing more for me to say, except that I feel fortunate to have read it.

Warnings

Sexual content (including abuse of a child,) violence, language (including racial slurs,) drinking, and strong thematic elements.

The Cook (1918)

The Cook isn’t in The Best Arbuckle-Keaton Collection because, when that DVD came out in 2001, the short was still believed to be lost.  Fortunately, the majority of the film has since been rediscovered and released on the DVD The Cook and Other Treasures (the missing final scene is described in the intertitles.)  This one is just so much fun.

Almost entirely plotless.  Fatty works as the cook at the Bull Pup Café, where Buster is the waiter, Alice Lake is the cashier, and Fatty’s dog Luke is the bouncer.  The assorted restaurant gags are broken up on occasion by Al St. John, playing a literal tough customer who’s taken an unsavory shine to Alice.

I don’t care that the storyline is basically “Storyline – what’s that?”  This short is delightful, up to its ears in fabulous gags and fantastic comic sequences.  I love the juggling sensibilities Fatty brings to cooking (flipping pancakes between two different pans and off his shoe is especially fun,) as well as his fancy knifework.  I love that he has one enormous vat from which he gets everything from sliced ham to ice cream to coffee.  I love absolutely everything about the spaghetti scene, which is a comic master class in dreaming up numerous gags from a single prop.  Fatty wrapping individual strands of spaghetti around his finger before eating them is fun, as is the sight gag of him trying to knit his spaghetti.

Buster is no slouch in that scene, either.  Completely flummoxed by his spaghetti, he variously uses a straight edge razor, a teacup, and a pair of scissors to try to eat it.  Really, Buster is great throughout the short.  The running gag of him catching every dish Fatty tosses through the air to him – including, among other things, a bowl of soup and a glass of milk – is terrific.  He helps kick off this amazing dance sequence that comes out of nowhere and has nothing to do with anything, but it’s just wonderful.  I don’t even know where some of his dance moves come from; they do notlook like 1918, I know that much.  The man was a class unto himself.

He feels really Busterish here, closer to his persona in his own films.  Something about the combination between supremely athletic/suave and hopeless clumsy.  He has all sorts of funny little bits of business, and he also takes his patented Buster Keaton Soulful Eyes out for a test drive with Alice Lake and another woman in the short.

The stuff with Al St. John isn’t as good, except when he’s being chased by Luke.  Watching that dog climb ladders never gets old for me, and I get a kick out the scene where Al is spinning around in circles with Luke’s teeth clamped on the seat of his pants.

And in the “there’s cartoon gags, and then there’s just crazy” category, we have Fatty accidentally bringing a meat cleaver down on Buster’s neck.  Yes, there’s the amusing bit afterwards in which he verifies that Buster’s head is still attached, but that is absolutely ridiculous.

Warnings

Slapstick violence, drinking, and an attempted abduction.

Character Highlight: Wilfred Mott (Doctor Who)

There’s just something about Wilf.  With Sylvia around, Donna clearly needed some goodness in her life before she joined the Doctor, and Wilf is just the ticket.  The character adds to the humor, warmth, and sense of wonder in series 4, and although my feelings about “The End of Time” are mixed at best, I am glad that Wilf got a shot in an adventure of his own (a few Wilf-related spoilers.)

We don’t meet Wilf for the first time in “Partners in Crime.”  He makes his initial appearance before that in the Christmas special, in which he sells newspapers and shakes his fist at the sky, warning all “them aliens” not to attack London a third Christmas in a row.  There’s nothing in that episode to indicate he has any connection with Donna, but when “Partners in Crime” rolls around and Donna goes “up the hill” to see her grandpa and his telescope, there’s that little news vendor again.  That first scene with him and Donna is enough to make me love him, because I want all the best for Donna and it’s clear that they have a lovely relationship.  As Sylvia pessimistically critiques her daughter and father in equal measure, Donna and Wilf are both dreamers in their own way, and Donna is even able to speak to him – albeit obliquely – about her previous encounter with the Doctor.  When Donna does find the Doctor again, I love that she has him fly the TARDIS by Wilf’s star-gazing spot before taking off, letting him in on the fact that she’s leaving as well as giving him a sight for the ages.

Like the best “companion’s family” characters, Wilf worries for Donna’s safety, but he ultimately knows that she shouldn’t trade the incredible adventure she’s having for a more secure life.  He stands up for Donna when Sylvia finds out about the Doctor, and even as he frets over her when things hit the fan, alien-wise, in London, he encourages her to get out there and do what she can to help.  And Wilf doesn’t just talk the talk:  during the “stolen Earth” incident at the end of series 4, he takes to the streets with a paintball gun, planning to shoot the Daleks in the eyestalks and blind them (that is such a Doctor Who thing to do – I love it.)

Like I said, my overall feelings about “The End of Time” aside, I love that Wilf gets to be an actual companion.  Like any other companion, his reactions to the big alien goings-on range from flabbergasted (calling the Vinvocci “cactus” people) to horrified (watching the Master subsume the human race) to awed (looking down on the Earth from his vantage point on the Vinvocci ship.)  Unfortunately, he doesn’t get too many big moments as a companion.  His most hands-on scene is probably the one where he uses the Vinvocci’s asteroid lasers to shoot the missiles the Master launches at them, and before the actual companioning starts, he does an impressive bit of sleuthing to track down the Doctor with the aid of the “Silver Cloak,” his pensioner friends with their ears to the ground.  Aside from that, his larger purpose as a companion is to be someone the Doctor can have weighty conversations with.  Not that this is always a good thing, since Ten is rapidly approaching critical angst mass within the first fifteen minutes of this story and throwing in a teary Wilf isn’t playing fair, so some of this can be a bit much.  Other scenes between them, however, are really lovely.  It’s to see the Doctor relating to an old man asan old man, and because Wilf has been connected to the Doctor through Donna but has never traveled with the Doctor himself, he’s as just about the right level of familiarity:  close enough to be able to get what’s going on with the Doctor, but still removed enough that he can get real when he needs to.

A Few Thoughts on Alice Through the Looking Glass

I saw this film with a friend the other night, and while I certainly wouldn’t call it a good movie, it’s also a somewhat frustrating one, because it contains a handful of strong points – elements that, if pursued more deftly, might have resulted in a much better film.  That’s what I want to look at today, things that I feel went both right and wrong.  (Note:  I’m sticking strictly with the movie here.  The current allegations against Johnny Depp are another matter.)  A few spoilers.

General complaints first.  It feels disjointed to me that the movie’s look is one of wonder and whimsy while the overall storyline is bogged down by family drama.  Season 1 of Once Upon a Timesold the Mad Hatter as a tragic (yet dark) figure, but try as Alice Through the Looking Glass might, it really can’t pull off the same.  All the sad eyes feel forced, the familial fallings-out feel too tritely-written, and the prevailing tone of the whole thing just feels out of place.  (Also, speaking of Once Upon a Time, the Queen of Hearts’s childhood origin story makes Regina’s villainous motivation seem almost rational.)  To couple the father-son, sister-sister angst with the technical visuals and bonkers silliness of Wonderland doesn’t work for me.

As with the first film, the less you know about the book, the more sense the story makes, but I don’t begrudge it that.  After all, it was sold from the beginning as a revisionist version of Alice’s adventures.  Besides, I’m not so attached to the book that I mind all the changes, and it’s not like the book would give too much of a cohesive story arc for a film to work with, anyway.  While some of the newly-imagined plot, like Hatter angst, doesn’t interest me, others, like Hero!Alice, are pretty neat.  On the latter front, Alice’s transformation into a BAMF is written a little too obviously at time, but I like the general idea of it, and some of it comes off really well.  The opening scene, wherein Alice (now traveling the world in a ship left to her by her late father) escapes a band of pirates due to her knowledge of the sea, creative thinking, and sheer nerve, makes me very happy, and that combination of smarts and bravery serves her well when she gets back to Wonderland.

It’s interesting to me that every scene set in our world is basically, “Boo, Victorian misogyny!  Go feminism!”  It’s not surprising that Alice would receive pushback from her way of life there, and that it would be hard for her to combat something she can’t solve like a riddle or fight with a sword; I was definitely a little impressed when, mid-film, a Victorian doctor declares her to suffering from “female hysteria.”  That said, this storyline is also written too on-the-nose at times, and I don’t think the threads between Alice’s struggle for independence in England and her heroic journey in Wonderland are drawn quite clearly enough.  Again, I feel a real disconnect between the different parts of the film.  There are good pieces that don’t seem to blend organically into the whole.

My last check in the plus column is some of the stuff surrounding the personification of Time.  All the time jokes (a la “Why is it you wait for no man?”) feel very Lewis Carroll, and while it doesn’t quite make sense for Time to have a clock in his chest, since the use of timepieces to mark its passage is a box that we humans stuff time into, I do love the rooms filled with hanging pocket watches in his castle, each one representing a different person making their gradual way toward ticking their last – a cool idea, and a really gorgeous image.  I also enjoy the general theme of the time-travel plot, the ultimate idea of learning from the past rather than changing it.

Trevor Noah: Pay Back the Funny (2015)

It was a no Last Week Tonight, no Daily Show week, so have a review of another Trevor Noah standup special (thanks, YouTube.)

Filmed in Johannesburg, this special starts out reallysimilar to Noah’s Lost in Translationshow from Comedy Central.  He opens with the same riff on “woohoo,” touches on the same idea of Black people’s fractious history with the police, and tells the same story about his mother and grandmother’s reactions to him getting the Daily Show gig.  At first, I thought it was going to be the same basic show, albeit in slightly different packaging; I like his comment that white people don’t have the problem of going to jail “by mistake,” and I think it’s interesting that, in the anecdote about his mom, his mentions his younger brother being named “head prefect” at school, while in the American-made Lost in Translation, he says his brother’s made “student council.”

After the first 10-15 minutes, though, it’s entirely different, mostly fantastic material.  He has an amusing riff on smartphones, complete with a dramatic reenactment of a woman taking a “candid” selfie.  He discusses South African president Jacob Zuma’s latest scandal and how he’s rebounded from it – I love Noah’s delight at Zuma making fun of the way someone else talks, and his speculation about how Zuma learned to eyeroll is great.  I pretty much always enjoy Noah’s observations about interactions between different cultures, and he has some nice material on accents here, doing a terrific routine on the origins of the South African Indian accent as well as drawing clear distinctions between someone’s accent and their level of intelligence.

Speaking of accents, it turns out Noah’s chief edict from his countrymen before joining The Daily Show was not to lose his.  My favorite part of the special is an extended sequence about The Daily Show’s effect on his life at home and in the States.  He describes himself as “well-known” rather than “famous” and tells the crowd about his experiences being invited to celebrity events.  From the chaotic nightmare of the red carpet, to “rubbing shoulders with” people who have no idea who he is, to desperately trying not to fanboy in front of everyone he’s ever idolized, it’s an excellent picture of what it’s like to have just gotten his first seat at the table.

The other long routine I love is a story about South Africa’s frequent load-shedding (rolling blackouts.)  Returning to South Africa from New York, Noah can’t get past the electric gate for his own house due to a power out, and he muses on the perils of trying to jump his fence before getting swallowed by the soul-crushing exercise of ringing up a government department.  The references here are South-Africa-specific, but trying to call a bureaucracy isn’t.  Between the automated voice, the endless hold music, and the completely-unhelpful live operator who picks up just when Noah has lost all hope of ever speaking to another human again, the anecdote is both totally South African and absolutely universal.

Overall, I think Lost in Translation is still the best I’ve seen so far, but this special is super funny, really personable, and a lot of fun.

Warnings

Language, alcohol references, and thematic elements.

Relationship Spotlight: Strika & Agu (Beasts of No Nation)

This is maybe an odd relationship to write about from this movie, since the totally frakked-up, bizarre father-son Stolkholm Syndrome relationship between the Commandant and Agu is clearly the center of the film.  However, as understated as the bond between Agu and Strika is by comparison, for me, it’s the film’s heart (some spoilers.)

In a way, Strika is just one more piece of the paradoxical honey trap that is the Commandant’s forces.  While the Commandant steps forward as a twisted father figure to fill the void of Agu’s recently-murdered father, Strika is offered up as a sort of surrogate brother.  Many of the other soldiers are older than Agu and intimidate him, but with Strika, there’s a chance that he might prove a friend to Agu.  And so, this boy becomes another element luring Agu into a false sense of belong, kinship, even normalcy.  Playing with Strika, fighting alongside him, and seeing how he cares for Agu, the hooks of the rebel army sink deeper into Agu’s skin, making it that much harder to run away.

Despite Strika’s youth, he’s a more “seasoned” soldier than Agu is and is therefore a good choice to further indoctrinate him into the army.  Strika has already been pulled under the Commandant’s riptide, and he’s hardened himself to the blood that’s stained his hands.  He can show Agu the ropes and watch his back when they’re in a hot spot.  It would be hard for Agu to compare himself to the older, bigger soldiers, but looking at Strika, you can see how Agu might think, “I could be like him.”  It’s certainly in the Commandant’s best interests that Agu and Strika become friends.

But it’s more than that, because no matter how advantageous it is for the Commandant’s machinations, the friendship that forms between Agu and Strika is true, and the Commandant can’t touch that.  In some stories, Agu and Strika might have given one another the will they needed to break free and escape the army, but here, they’re instead one another’s means of clinging on.  They talk – or rather, Agu talks, while the mute Strika communicates in other ways – skirting around the enormity of the issues that have upended their lives.  They doplay, finding flashes of moments in which they can feel like children and, maybe just for a minute or two, forget the horror of their existence.  They protect each other, both physically and emotionally.  After the abuse Agu suffers, you know that he needs more than the quiet, non-judging companionship Strika gives him, but it’s all either of them have, and so they figure out how to sustain Agu with it.

Beasts of No Nation is a heavy film with many hard-hitting scenes, but the one that gets to me the most is easily the last scene shared between Agu and Strika.  In a cruel, violent, unjust world in which people exploit them and risk their lives in the name of someone else’s agenda, in which no one cares whether they live or die, they care about each other.  In the midst of all the darkness, brief points of light.

Favorite Characters: Bucky Barnes a.k.a. The Winter Soldier (The Avengers)

(Bucky-related spoilers, including Captain America:  Civil War.)  When I first saw Captain America, Bucky was just so-so character, mainly coasting on Sebastian Stan’s performance.  It wasn’t until The Winter Soldier that he came alive for me, both in that film and retroactively in the first movie.  By the time Civil War finally came out, he was one of my favorites.

At first blush, Bucky in Captain Americafeels like little more than a plot device, Steve’s best friend who becomes a tragic casualty of WWII, and it’s true that he has a lot more going on as a character in the later movies, but there’s still some good value here.  I like that Bucky appears so out of Steve’s “league,” friendship-wise, before the super-soldier serum turns Steve into Cap, but he doesn’t treat Steve that way.  Right from the first, it’s clear that their friendship goes deep.  It’s also important to establish him as a brave all-American boy who likes to have fun, because when he comes back in the later films, we need to see how thoroughly he’s been changed.

‘Cause Bucky has it rough.  Loses his arm and nearly dies after a fall from an elevated train.  Taken by the enemy and experimented on, giving him a bionic arm and powers similar to Cap’s.  Brainwashed and sent on wetwork missions, committing acts that would horrify him in his right mind.  Held in cryogenic stasis between missions to keep him a viable asset for almost 70 years, routinely wiping his mind and subjecting him to further brainwashing.  Because of all this, formidable as he is in The Winter Soldier, he’s always more of a weapon than a villain.  I love the way he fights like an absolute animal when he’s activated, because it demonstrates how much he’s not his own person at that point.  He does insane stuff, even for a powered person, and he just keeps coming relentlessly.  There’s no sense of self-preservation or falling back to regroup, because the fascists who’ve been playing with his brain don’t leave any room for that.

Naturally, the whole thing wrecks Steve, and it’s through his sheer belief in Bucky’s buried humanity that he’s able to break through Bucky’s programming and help him start down the path of returning to himself.  By the time we catch up with Bucky in Civil War, he’s done a lot of work to regain a sense of who he is.  However, now that he’s out from under Hydra’s thumb, some want him to answer for the crimes he committed as the Winter Soldier, as well as other crimes attributed to him.  On the run, fighting those who try to take him in, trying to keep his past from creating any further damage in the world – the prevailing impression I get from Bucky in this film is that he’s just tired.  Running, fighting, being used, over and over, and even as he keeps on going, it’s clear he’s running on empty.  In addition to the physical demands and threats, he’s also dealing with the weight of his past, exacerbated by seeing Steve again.  As much as Steve wants to believe in Bucky and will never give up on him, he’s also wary, untrusting of Bucky, and Bucky more than once has to prove he’s in his right mind before Steve starts to let his guard down.  No judgment on Steve – given what’s been done to Bucky, it would be irresponsible to do otherwise – but it’s still a harsh reminder of what Bucky has been made into.  And even Steve’s unconditional support is hard for Bucky to take, seeing Steve and others endanger themselves for his sake when Bucky doesn’t feel he deserves it.  Despite literally having had his free will taken away in an invasive, torturous manner, Bucky still holds himself accountable for his actions and carries the guilt of them.  Incredible character drama, and I’m loving every second of it, but I hope that, at some point, we can see Bucky getting at least a minute of relatively uncomplicated peace and/or happiness.  He’s long overdue.