Movie Review: "Testament Of Youth"

"Testament Of Youth": B.  This British film is, essentially, a war movie with no shots fired but plenty of bloodshed.  The story follows four years in the life of Vera Brittain (Swedish actress Alicia Vikander), starting with Armistice Day in London, 1918, and quickly flashing back to the beginning of World War I.  The film is an adaptation of Brittain's memoirs, and thus is non-fiction.

Most of the people in England did not feel threatened by the outbreak of war precipitated by the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand over a thousand miles away in Sarajevo.  Even when England decided to send its young men into battle, the public under-appreciated the magnitude of the risks.  This was merely going to be a short-term skirmish, more an adventure than a life-and-death confrontation.  The boys would return as heroes within a year.  No need to disrupt long-term plans.  Joining the fray was the honorable thing to do.  How could a bloke look his mates in the eye if he was the only one in the group not to enlist?

Vera's dream is to become a professional writer, and the coveted credential to achieve that is a degree from Oxford.  Her old-fashioned father thinks spending tuition money to put a daughter through college is a waste; she should concentrate instead on finding a suitable husband.  Vera's brother Edward (Teron Egerton), to whom she is extremely close, goes to bat for her by helping to persuade dear old dad that the new piano he purchased to appease Vera is trivial compared to her prospective education.  Months later, Vera returns her brother's favor by convincing pops to allow Edward to go to war.  It isn't long before Vera wishes she could retract her sales pitch.

One of Edward's friends is Roland Leighton (Kit Harington).  He and Vera become engaged right before he boards a train to take him to his first military assignment.  What is it about train scenes in war movies?  Those settings, especially the plaintive engine whistles and the white steam wafting from the locomotive over the station platform, provide a great background for lingering goodbyes.  And of course all this is accompanied by a score of French horns and violins.

Vera is sure she failed the Oxford entrance exam, a section of which asked her to translate English passages into Latin.  Vera does not know Latin, so she does the next best thing; she makes the translation into a foreign language she does know, German.  The film has several scenes in which characters are receiving mail and reading other people's mail, sometimes at the addressee's request, sometimes not.  Vera is stunned when Edward opens the envelope and informs her that she passed the test.  But as the war gets closer to home and the Germans prove to be a much more stubborn and formidable adversary than originally predicted, Vera makes the tough decision to put her education on hold and volunteer as a nurse.

Vera is almost overwhelmed by the hospital wards where she toils.  Things get worse when she chooses to cross the channel to offer her services in "dangerous France," as her disapproving mother describes it.  The carnage is repulsive, but at least her long hours working tirelessly gets her mind off her brother and fiancé, who are near the front lines.  Seeing the effects of war from this vantage point informs the memoirs she would write almost twenty years later.

Like many other films which I've graded a B, Testament Of Youth is more interesting than entertaining.  The story arch is slow paced, and perhaps not surprisingly since we're dealing with early twentieth century England, the affection between Vera and Roland seems almost platonic.  For at least the first half of the movie, I was not sure if Vera had one, two or three brothers, as three similarly aged male characters (including Edward and Roland) often appeared together on screen and seemed fungible.  The muddled Brit accents did not help matters either.  Roland uses poetry, instead of conversation, to express his feelings for Vera.  That's great, I guess, if you're into poetry, but it is not all that effective for purposes of making a feature film. 

Watching Testament made me think of two other movies for divergent reasons.  Regarding the famous Hitchcock thriller Psycho (scanned here on January 7, 2015; A-), critics felt that the explanatory lecture by the psychiatrist at the movie's end was extraneous.  Some went so far as to call it an insult to the collective intelligence of the audience, which should have been able to draw their own conclusions and interpretations about main character Norman Bates.  Near the end of Testament, Vera delivers a sermon to a small but angry crowd which had gathered in London after the war to discuss reparations.  I felt the same way about that scene as the critics felt about the lecture in Psycho.  We already know, after almost two hours of viewing, that Vera views war as a senseless waste of humanity.  That outlook is firmly established once she is asked to treat mortally wounded "Huns" (as her colleague calls the enemy), and realizes if she hadn't before that those soldiers are pawns just like the British combatants.  If the film goers had been paying attention, Vera's unspoken message would have sufficed.   Therefore, Testament would have been better without the lecture, even though it gives actress Vikander a chance to showcase more of her talents. 

Testament also brought to mind Tangerines (reviewed May 15, 2015; B+), for the simple reason that both carry "stupidity and futility of war" messages.  The latter is a much more effective film, and comes without any closing sermon on the mount.

The Candy Stripers

Around here at the Quentin Estates, we call each June 25 the anniversary of Mary's Second Big Mistake.  (We celebrate her First Big Mistake on February 14.)  We got married thirty-nine years ago on a Friday evening at Most Holy Trinity Church.  Our reception was held in the church "parlours," which is a euphemism for "basement."  To commemorate the occasion there are many stories surrounding the wedding which could be related, and which someday may yet be told, but due to time constraints I am limiting myself to one shortie.

In the spring of 1976 I was just completing my seventh year of teaching at MHT School, and my fourth as assistant principal.  My salary was in the neighborhood of $9,500.  In addition to that whopping sum, one of my perks -- actually, my only perk --  was being allowed to live, free of charge, in a small two bedroom house adjacent to the school's parking lot.  The house, which was owned by the parish, used to provide lodging for one or two associate pastors, but by the mid-seventies the days of small parishes having the luxury of more than just a pastor were long gone.

Given the relatively late hour (5:00) of the nuptial Mass, and not really believing the old adage about the groom not seeing the bride on her wedding day before the ceremony for fear of bad luck, Momma Cuan and I decided to have our professional photographer take pictures at 4:00.  Mary and her bridesmaids used some rooms in the school to get ready, while my four groomsmen and I used my house.  Two of the guys used my living room and a small front room to get dressed, and two others used my second bedroom while I was in my own bedroom.  As I was standing there in my tightie whities, a half-hour before picture time, I heard one of the guys, high school bud Denny McMahon, call out from the living room, "Hey John, aren't all of us supposed to be wearing solid white tuxes?"  As a matter of fact, we were!

"What!?" I exclaimed as I raced out from my room.  There they were, Denny and my brother-in-law Mike, fully dressed wearing white tuxes with red candy stripes on the jackets.  They must have guessed, thankfully correctly, that I did not have a heart condition, because if I were ever going to go into cardiac arrest, this was it.  I immediately went into panic mode, and as I scrambled to unearth my yellow pages from beneath one of the several piles of papers strewn throughout my abode, four thoughts danced simultaneously through my noggin.  First, how could the formalwear people screw up so badly?  Second, even if the formalwear place has two solid white jackets available, how are we going to get them in time?  The store was twenty minutes away in Southdale, and 4:00 was quickly approaching.  Third, why did we wait till the eleventh hour to check inside the clothing bags?  And fourth -- really first -- Mary is going to kill me!

I finally found my yellow pages and was literally dialing up the store's number when all four groomsmen (including best man Tom and my cousin Louie) burst out laughing so hard they were getting stomach aches.  The joke was on me.  They had conned the guy at the formal wear store to let them borrow two candy stripe jackets, in addition to the rented solid whites, for the sole purpose of pulling off that pre-wedding prank.  I'm sure the clerk didn't mind, as the demand for candy striped jackets was most likely nonexistent.  My friends knew a gullible sucker (me) when they saw one, and correctly predicted my over-the-top frenzied reaction.

None of that foursome ever confessed to who came up with the idea for those shenanigans.  Thirty-nine years later, that crime remains unsolved.  (So does the mystery of who trashed my getaway car which I had locked up in my garage, a discovery I did not make until 1:00 in the morning.)  If CBS ever resurrects their show Cold Case, maybe the culprit will be revealed.     

Movie Review: "Love & Mercy"

"Love & Mercy": B.  As a public service announcement, let me caution you against a misconception and offer a piece of advise.  If you enjoyed the play or the movie Jersey Boys, the story of the 4 Seasons, don't think that Love & Mercy follows suit by being a film about the Beach Boys.  It would be logical to expect that, because in the pre-Beatles era, and even during and after the British Invasion, the 4 Seasons and the Beach Boys were by far the two most commercially successful American vocal groups.  (You already knew that, if not from your own experience then from reading my March 10, 2014 and June 25, 2014 (among others) posts on this blog.)  Thus, they are often linked together.  The 4 Seasons were a quartet featuring lead singer Frankie Valli, but Jersey Boys is not Valli's biopic.  Rather, it is the story of the foursome, and as I pointed out in that June 25 review (A-), the story's treatment of all four members almost equally is one of its important strengths.  On the other hand, Love & Mercy is the story not of the Beach Boys but of their mastermind, Brian Wilson.  There has not, as yet, been a feature film about the Beach Boys; only a couple of made-for-TV attempts.

Paul Dano plays Wilson as a twenty-something, and John Cusack portrays Wilson as a middle-aged man.  Throughout the film, director Bill Pohlad, a Minnesotan, switches from '60's scenes to the '90's.  Here is the nugget of advice:  If you are distracted by the facts that Dano does not resemble Cusack and Cusack does not resemble Wilson, you need to pay more attention to the other facets of the film in order to "get the most out of it."  At least there is a similitude between Dano and the young Wilson.

Brian Wilson was and remains one of the most fascinating characters in the history of the music industry.  If ever there were a genius in the pop music realm, it was he, a thesis driven home by the documentary The Wrecking Crew (reviewed here on April 28, 2015; A-).  Brian and his two brothers, along with a cousin and a close friend, formed the Beach Boys in Hawthorne, California.  Almost every single they released from 1962 to 1966 became a smash.  The most frequent themes were those of surfing, sports cars, high school and, of course, girls.  Their harmonies were rich, the beat was usually uptempo, and their lyrics resonated with teens nationwide, even those in the landlocked Midwest.  Many young fans, including me back in the day, figured these guys grew up on the beach and were natural-born surfers.  The truth, as we later found out, was that Hawthorne is landlocked too, separated by a few busy highways and LA suburbs from the ocean, several miles away.  And of the five bandmates, only drummer Dennis Wilson surfed.

Although Brian is a genius, he was psychologically tormented.  His struggle with mental illness is the focus of this movie.  The film does not purport to explain the cause of his problems, but the presence of two misguided, if not evil, superior males were exacerbating factors.  As children the Wilson brothers were beaten by their father Murry (Bill Camp), a tyrant both in terms of their upbringing and their fledgling careers.  A blow administered by Murry to Brian's ear left him partially deaf.  Of even deeper concern and more illustrated in the film is the presence of a court-appointed psychotherapist, Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti).  Landy is determined to control every aspect of Brian's life, including his diet, his medications, his residence and his social life.  Landy is a one dimensional character who clearly sees Brian as his meal ticket.  Landy uses round the clock surveillance to keep his "patient" under his dominion.  By exerting a ridiculous level of control over him, particularly with respect to his regimen of overmedicating, Landy easily has the vulnerable Brian at his mercy.  Every scene Landy is in is difficult to watch.

Elizabeth Banks plays Melinda Ledbetter, a former model turned Cadillac salesperson, who first encounters Brian in a dealer's showroom.  She does not know that the male customer examining the innards of a Caddy is the music legend.  She is fascinated by Brian's quirkiness and simple honesty.  The more she is around him, the more suspicious she becomes over his relationship with Landy and the latter's motives.  While in the presence of Melinda, Landy attempts to disguise his domination over Brian, but she is an astute observer whose hunches about the unnaturalness of the Landy-Wilson relationship are accurate.

The Beach Boys' music became much more experimental in the mid-sixties.  Wilson was fascinated with the Beatles' Rubber Soul album, released in December 1965.  The Beatles had decided to take their music in a different direction than the pure pop style which had lifted them to fame.  Rubber Soul was their vehicle to do so.  Brian wanted his band to follow a similar path, and 1966's Pet Sounds was the result.  Those two albums are universally considered masterpieces by music historians.  Another parallel one can draw about the two bands is that the Beatles stopped touring within nine months of releasing Rubber Soul, and Wilson abandoned touring to devote more time to writing and producing near the Pet Sounds chapter of the Beach Boys' reign.  One important difference between the new paths charted by the Beatles and the Beach Boys was that all four Mop Tops were on board with the transcendence, whereas Brian's change of direction caused internal dissension among the group.

I was hoping for a little more Beach Boys music on the sound track, but given Pohlad's narrower focus of concentrating much more on Brian than the band itself, the smaller sample size of tunes is understandable.  Dano displays acting chops I never knew he possessed, while Banks and Giamatti strike the right notes in their performances.  Cusack was a good call to fill the role of the older Brian.  His characters always seem to be at least a touch off dead center; in this film, way off.

One has to wonder how Landy's emotional abuse of the mentally ill music man could go unnoticed by others who were close to him, such as Brian's bandmates, other family members, his professional colleagues and court personnel.  It took a car salesperson to discover what was going on.

Fly Ball Pecking Order

The Twins got swept by the Royals in this week's battle for first place in the American League Central.  The three game series had been hyped ahead of time as the most important June series the Twins would have played in the last half dozen years.  The series proved at least one thing: The Royals clearly have better personnel from top to bottom than the Twins.  The Royals have better starting pitching, and the best bullpen in the Major Leagues.  As for the eight "position" regular starters (nine if you count designated hitter), there are only two places where the Minnesota player is superior to his KC counterpart:  Brian Dozier over Omar Infante at second base, and Torii Hunter over Alex Rios in right field.  (Yes, I would rather have Eric Hosmer than St. Joe at first base.)

I took Momma Cuan to the game last night, a 7-2 loss, and our home town heroes committed three errors.  They are officially in a June swoon, having lost five of their last six, all at home.  The Twins' record for June so far is 3-7, and in two of those wins (the two against Boston last week) the Twins' victories came in spite of their sloppy play.  Thankfully, the Red Sox played worse.

A play occurred in last Friday's humiliation at the hands of Milwaukee which is emblematic of the Twins' fielding woes.  It was the first game of a three game series between the (then) first place Twins and last place Brewers at Target Field.  With two out and the Twins trailing by just a single run, the Twins let an eighth inning popup in front of the plate fall unattended to the ground while an insurance run scored.  The Twins never recovered, and the Brew Crew cruised from that point forward to a five run victory.

How could this incompetence occur?  The combined salaries of the pitcher, the catcher and the first and third basemen (i.e., the four fielders closest to the ball) is approximately $35 million per year.  Isn't Terry Ryan paying them enough dough to catch an easy popup?  Isn't this stuff covered in spring training, if not Little League?

The next day I was strolling down Nicollet Mall when several people, who had obviously watched the Twinks' Bad News Bears performance the previous night, came up to me and asked what the protocol was for fielding fly balls.  I was wearing a big hat with "Self-Proclaimed Baseball Guru" across the front, so maybe that's why they singled me out.  I referred them to my blog, and promised to address this weighty matter within a few days.  Those few days are up, so here goes.  What follows are the almost universally held rules for catching a fly ball before it hits the ground.

Think of a baseball diamond as separated into four distinct zones.  The rules for catching a fly ball change, depending on which of those zones is the landing area of the ball.  There are, however, at least two rules that are static regardless of the relevant zone.  First, no one should call for a ball until it has reached its apex in flight.  (Exception: line drives.) Second, don't call for a ball which clearly should be fielded by a teammate.  For example, if the third baseman is camped under the descending ball, the shortstop should not call him off.

ZONE A - Medium To Deep Outfield

1. There is only one player who always has first dibs, and that is the center fielder.  If a corner outfielder is called off by the center fielder, the former must give way to the latter.  The center fielder is the boss, even if the right fielder is an eighteen year veteran like Torii Hunter and the center fielder is someone like Aaron Hicks who has spent much of the last few years in the minors. 

ZONE B - Beyond The Infield Skin

2. What if there is a shallow outfield fly which could be caught by an infielder, most likely the shortstop or the second baseman?  Here is the rule: If an outfielder calls off an infielder, the infielder must get out of the way and let the outfielder do his job.  The two main reasons are (i) it is generally easier to catch a ball while running in than to catch a ball running out, and (ii) if a throw is required, such as on a potential sacrifice fly, a fielder running in can get more on his throw than a fielder who is back-peddling.

3. If a ball is hit behind first or third base either in foul territory or close to the foul line, it is preferable to have the middle infielder call off the corner infielder.  The middle infielder usually will have a better angle on the ball, even though he has to run farther to get to it.  Also, middle infielders generally are more athletic, faster, and better fielders than corner infielders.  Here is a rule of thumb: If the corner infielder has to turn his back to the plate in order to reach the ball, he should give way to the middle infielder who calls for it.

ZONE C - Beyond The Mound

4. Zone C is the part of the diamond, fair or foul, which is past the pitcher's mound but not past the infield skin.  This situation calls for the shortstop to take charge.  He should either call for the ball or yell for one of the other infielders -- not the pitcher -- to take it.  The pitcher is the least desirable player to field a popup because he has to deal with getting off the mound -- a sometimes difficult task given his follow-through -- and, honestly, does not practice that part of his game.  He is being paid to pitch, not catch popups.  Just like the center fielder is the boss of the outfield, the shortstop is the boss of the infield, unless Rule # 5 applies.

ZONE D - In Front Of The Mound

5. Ideally, the pitcher should take charge if the ball is in front of him.  That means he should designate one of his teammates, not himself, to catch the popup.  This identification process entails keeping a couple of things in mind.  First, the catcher should only catch a popup if he is clearly able to do so much more easily than his teammates.  A catcher has to come out of his crouch, locate the ball, ditch his mask in the opposite direction, run with all sorts of equipment attached to his body, and use a mitt with a smaller pocket than his teammates.  Also, high fouls near the plate tend to backspin more than other popups.  No, the catcher should not be the preferred option if a teammate is close at hand.  So that leaves the choice between the third baseman and the first baseman.  The latter is using what is creatively referred to a "first baseman's glove."  (It used to be called a "trapper's mitt.")  All other things, such as distance to reach the ball, being equal, the first baseman should be the first option in Zone D.

That's it, five easy rules.  You will note that no one player has to know all five, and for most fielders only two of the rules pertain to their positions.  C'mon guys, don't give away outs!  By the way, the fifth paragraph of this post might be pure poppycock, but the rest is nothin' but the truth.