Movie Review: "Free State Of Jones"

"Free State Of Jones": B.  Free Sate Of Jones is a film that bites off a little more than it can chew, but eventually overcomes an odd structure and questionable editing to deliver an entertaining, educational Civil War story.  The movie opens with an 1862 battle scene reminiscent of the D-Day landing depicted in 1998's Saving Private Ryan.  Confederate soldiers, making no attempt to defend themselves, are easy targets for the Union soldiers as the gray-jacketed infantrymen march over the rise.  Director Gary Ross zooms in for the gory bloodletting.  Battlefield nurse Newton Knight (Matthew McConaughey), dressed in a plain white long-sleeve shirt and therefore distinguishable from the combatants, drags the mortally wounded southerners on a makeshift stretcher to nearby hospital tents.  Aware of the fact that the medical personnel's triage protocol is not based on the severity of injury but rather on the military rank of the patient, Newt drapes a perished officer's jacket over the barely breathing body on the stretcher before bringing him into the tent.  The ruse works; the man is immediately tended to.  Newt is a wily one, a fact which will be confirmed, time and again.

Although born and raised in Mississippi, Newt does not see the War Between The States as his war.  Rather, it is a war fought by the poor Dixie uneducated low class for the benefit of the land owners, particularly those who depend on slave labor to run their cotton operations.  He has no sense of defending the South's honor when the people he despises most are not the northerners but the powerful entitled gentry right in his own locale, Jones County.  When a teenage neighbor is conscripted into action by a Rebel officer and within minutes dies in Newt's arms, Newt's decision to desert is confirmed.  He is now a man without a country, a rebel (small "r") with an impossible cause.

 

After a brief visit to his Mississippi farm and family, fugitive Newt makes his way to a hideout near a swamp where most of the other temporary residents are runaway slaves.  Later they're joined by other deserters like himself.  The relationship between Newt and his new friends is mutually beneficial, teaching each other tricks of survival.  The group is mostly self-sufficient, although periodically supplies are brought to the hideout by Rachel (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), a trusted slave who seems to be able to bamboozle whoever her master is into thinking she's doing something other than visiting the swamp.  With every visit, Rachel and Newt get more snuggly, but the blacks in the camp don't seem to mind her taking up with a white man.  As a matter of fact, neither does Newt's white farm wife, Serena (Keri Russell).  This romantic arrangement may or may not have been illegal in the Utah Territory, but most certainly was in Mississippi.  It's an issue which director Ross glosses over.

 

As the number of castaways and fugitives increases, Newt assumes a leadership position, with Moses (Mahershala Ali), a slave, as his right hand man.  In an ironic action, the group declares they have seceded from Mississippi, which of course has already seceded from the US.  This new entity, the Free State Of Jones, takes on the Confederate army, and as a result becomes strange bedfellows with the Yanks.  Guns and ammo never seem to be in short supply for Newt, Moses and the boys.  They have valuable connections with armament dealers.  The Rebs know where Newt's swamp foxes are hiding out, but their officers recognize the folly of initiating battle against the Free State on the latter's home turf, i.e., the swamp.  It is a home field advantage which surely would result in lethal ambush.

 

The Civil War ended in 1865, two years after President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation.  The movie continues through the subsequent post-war Reconstruction.  Carpetbaggers descend from the north, joined by their southern brethren, the Scalawags.  The plight of the newly freed blacks does not improve much, if at all.  They may be free, but they remain poor, uneducated and still at the mercy of the whites in many ways.  The Ku Klux Klan runs unchecked, inflicting lawlessness targeted at blacks and their churches.  Newt is steadfast by his friends' side through the many hard times, as much a mentor and leader as a warrior.

 

About a quarter of the way through the movie, the story suddenly flash-forwards eighty-five years to a 1940's Mississippi courtroom in which a descendant of Newt is being tried for the state crime of interracial marriage to a white woman.  The heritage of the defendant hinges on whether he is part of the family tree that Newt produced with Serena or the family tree from the Newt-Rachel affair.  Every so often director Ross revisits and updates the trial.  I found these interruptions to be extraneous distractions which only tack on more minutes to a film which could stand to clip a few.

 

McConaughey turns in an excellent performance.  I was never a fan until I saw him in the movie Mud (reviewed here on June 20, 2013; B+).  I later (in my Movie Ratings Recap of February 8, 2014) rated it the third best movie I attended in 2013.  His characters in Mud and Free State display many similarities which play to the actor's strengths.  Both those men, Newt and Mud, are outsiders, rough and ragged around the edges, but characters you pull for while they are on the run.  McConaughey has come a long way since his performance in 2009's Ghosts Of Girlfriends Past, to which I gave a pre-blog rating of D-.  In fact, the following is an excerpt from an e-mailed review I sent to my three kids on May 19, 2009:  "Matthew McConaughey may be the only Hollywood film star who would lose to Keanu Reeves in an acting contest."  Yep, MM has come a long way.  I wonder if there's hope for Reeves.                  

Sports Yucks 'n' Nuggs - Volume II

If the Minnesota Twins are your favorite Major League Baseball team, right about now you are probably ready for the NFL season to get going.  The Vikings open mini-camp next week, so you won't have to wait too long.  The Twins, sporting a record of 34-59, are the second worst team in baseball -- thank you, Atlanta -- and the worst in the American League.  The rookies we've been led to believe were going to take us to new heights have under-performed.  Some are clearly not ready to play at the Major League level.  Most of our batters don't know the strike zone, and have something against protecting the plate with a two strike count.  We do not have a single pitcher who would be even the number 2 starter in any other team's rotation.  Our primary closer, Glen Perkins, has been on the shelf all year, and we just waived the guy we were counting on to replace him, Kevin Jepsen.  The coaches have finally given up on our big off-season acquisition, Byung-ho Park, who is now in the minors.  Things came to a head this week with the announced firing of Twins General Manager, Terry Ryan, who held the job for eighteen of the last twenty-three years.

To help get your mind off this predicament, it's time for another Sports Yucks 'n' Nuggs.  Volume I of SYnN was posted here on May 15, 2012.  Then I explained that the entries I chose were "either funny or [were] worthy of at least a nod or a salute because they [were] interesting."  The same formula applies to the present post, Volume II, except these are all baseball related.

*****

Marney Gellner, a fellow Bishop Ryan High School alum, is one of the field reporters for Fox Sports North telecasts of Twins games.  Last May she was in the Target Field bleachers interviewing a couple from Fertile, Minnesota and bestowing on them $100 worth of Minnesota State Lottery scratch-off tickets.  One of them had a "Circle Me Bert" sign.  As television analyst Bert Blyleven was circling them with his telestrator, Marney asked the excited folks what the population of Fertile is.  "Eight hundred thirty-eight," the man and wife proudly proclaimed.

Bert quickly chimed in, "I thought it would be more."

*****

Bartolo Colon is a forty-three year old pitcher for the New York Mets.  The veteran Dominican has been a Major League pitcher for nineteen years, is a Cy Young Award winner and a four-time All Star, including this season.  Before he came to the Mets three years ago, he pitched for seven other teams, only one of which (the Montreal Expos in 2002) was/is a National League franchise, i.e.,the league in which pitchers bat instead of being replaced in the lineup by a designated hitter.  The Mets list Colon as 5' 11" and weighing 285 pounds.  If he weighs less than three bills I would be very surprised.

In May Colon became the oldest pitcher in MLB history to hit his first career home run when he belted a curve ball over the wall at Petco Park against the San Diego Padres.  The pitcher was James Shields, one of the better hurlers in MLB.  The lapse of time for the hefty Colon's home run trot around the bases could have been measured with an hour glass.  His trickster teammates, aware that this was his first career home run, all left the dugout and hid in the runway leading to the clubhouse.  A few moments after Colon returned from his trot to an empty dugout, his teammates reappeared, laughing it up as they heartily congratulated the old guy.

*****

I have witnessed the high school fans at several Champlin Park basketball games.  They sit in a large group right behind one of the baskets, and when the opponents are shooting free throws at that end the fans' antics intended to distract the shooter are hysterical.

Last month I attended the Class 4A State Championship baseball game at Target Field between the CP Rebels and the Wayzata Trojans.  The Rebel baseball fans proved just as free-spirited as the basketball crowd.  (Yes, I realize there's a good chance they are the same kids comprising both groups.)  Whenever a Wayzata player struck out, the CP crowd yelled out in cadence, "Left, right, left, right, left, right..." until the dejected batter returned to his dugout and descended its stairs.  You have probably heard the same type of chant at basketball games when an opposing player fouls out.  Okay, maybe it's poor sportsmanship, but I could not suppress my laugh whenever it happened.

I got another chuckle in the fourth inning when the Wayzata catcher smashed a leadoff triple for the Trojans' first extra base hit of the game.  He slid into third base a second or two before the Rebel's third baseman could apply the tag.  The Wayzata player was so excited that he pumped his fist and yelled words of encouragement to his teammates in the nearby third base dugout.  Only problem was, in his cheerleading gesticulations he jumped in the air above the bag, and that enabled the very alert CP third sacker to tag him out.  From the penthouse to the outhouse, to coin a phrase.

Immediately, the Rebels' fans started repeatedly yelling in unison: "You let the WHOLE TEAM DOWN!"  I'm sure this was audible all over the box seat area, where almost the entire crowd was seated.  Wayzata's catcher got the last laugh, however, as the Trojans took the title, 9-1.

*****

The night before the Major League Baseball All Star Game every year, there is a Home Run Derby Contest featuring four sluggers from each league.  The rules for the Derby change every once in awhile, but the contestants have always been able to select their own pitcher.  Some guys pick their brother, or their former high school coach or a teammate.

Brad Radke was a pitcher for twelve years with the Minnesota Twins.  It is traditional in baseball that the rookies get picked on by the veterans, kind of a rite of initiation.  Brad's rookie season was 1995, and the Twins played an interleague series in LA against the Dodgers about a week before the All Star Game.  Radke gave up a couple of home runs to Dodgers slugger Raul Mondesi.

One of Radke's teammates was friends with a couple of Dodgers who somehow had stolen some official Dodger team stationery.  They gave a sheet or two to Radke's teammate who wrote a fake letter from Mondesi to Radke, complete with Mondesi's forged signature.  In this letter, "Mondesi" asked Radke if he would be willing to be Mondesi's pitcher for the upcoming Home Run Derby.  At first rookie Radke fell for the scam but eventually figured things out.

*****

A funny sight at the St. Paul Saints games...  The infield is dragged in the fifth and seventh innings by a half dozen guys dressed in... wait for it... drag.  Leave it to a Mike Veeck operation to think of that!  There is something goofy going on in between almost every half-inning, e.g., a live pig delivering new baseballs to the home plate umpire, stretcher races, and a human version of bumper cars.

One gimmick at the Saints game I recently attended maybe wasn't such a good idea.  The public address announcer stated several times that before a certain upcoming inning, all the fans would be asked to do a short series of squats by their seats in an attempt to break the Guinness world record.  For those fans who did not feel up to the task, they were invited to retreat to the concourse so that they "wouldn't be counted as a 'no'" and thereby subtracted from the total.  I happened to be sitting in an aisle seat and got a close-up look at the obese and infirm as they very slowly trudged up the stairs to the concourse before the calisthenics began.  They did not look happy.  In a way, it was a Walk Of Shame which put an unintended damper on the otherwise fun activity.

*****

The next little story requires an intro.  When pitchers are about to be activated off the Disabled List, the team usually has them throw what's called a "simulated game" in the bullpen.  Then, if there are no physical setbacks, the pitcher is activated a day or two later.  There is no live hitting in a simulated game, but a batter does stand in the batter's box with a bat on his shoulder.  Thus, the exercise is slightly more real than simply having the pitcher throw to a bullpen catcher without a batter standing in.  The average simulated game has the pitcher throw about three innings of fifteen pitches each.

On the evening of Thursday, May 19, the Twins hosted Star Wars Night at Target Field.  The fans were given Trevor Plouffe Star Wars bobble heads.  The opponent was the Toronto Blue Jays.  An hour before the Twins-Jays game started, Twins pitcher Kyle Gibson, who was on the DL but nearly recovered from his injury, tossed a simulated game in the bullpen.

The Force that evening was not with the Twins.  They managed only four hits -- Plouffe went 0 for 4 -- and lost 3-2, dropping their record to an MLB-worst 10-20.  Afterwards, Twins fan Ryan Glanzer tweeted the quip of the day:  "The Twins also lost Kyle Gibson's simulated game earlier tonight."

*****

More from Bert Blyleven, and his TV partner, Dick Bremer.  Blyleven is a member of the Baseball Hall Of Fame, and ranks fifth on the list of MLB all-time strikeout leaders with 3,701 Ks.  (Note: The four ahead of him are Nolan Ryan, Randy Johnson, Roger Clemens and Steve Carlton.)  During a recent game, Dick asked Bert if he kept the ball from his last career strikeout in 1992.  Bert replied, "No, because at the time I didn't think that would be my last strikeout!"

Dick then recalled a similar conversation he had with former Twin and Hall Of Famer Harmon Killebrew.  The Killer, who died in 2011, ranks twelfth on the list of MLB career home runs with 573 dingers.  Dick asked The Killer if he kept the ball from his last career home run in 1975.  Harmon gave an answer similar to Bert's.  He did not keep, or even seek, that ball because he thought more round trippers were in his future.

*****

Last Saturday, July 16, was the biggest game of the year for both the Chicago Cubs and the Texas Rangers.  The Cubs and Rangers were each comfortably in first place in their divisions, the NL Central and the AL West, respectively.  It was a beautiful sunny day in the Friendly Confines, which was overflowing with more than 42,000 fans.  The Cubbies were clinging to a slim 3-1 lead going into the top of the ninth, three outs away from flying the big "W" over Waveland & Sheffield Avenues.  Despite confidence in Cubs closer Hector Rondon, the fans were quite aware that the Rangers' lineup was a potential powder keg.

Leadoff hitter Rougned Odor lifted a lazy fly to right fielder Jason Heyward, who had just switched to that position from center field.  Heyward was obviously blinded by the sun's light, putting his mitt up more as a shield than anything else.  The Chicago faithful gasped a sigh of relief when the ball found its way into Heyward's glove as he almost tumbled to the ground.  It's always good to get the leadoff guy, especially in the ninth.

The second man up, Ian Desmond, meekly tapped out, pitcher to first.  One more out to go, but the Rangers' most dangerous batter, future Hall Of Famer Adrian Beltre, was up.  On the fourth pitch of the at bat, Beltre hit a towering fly toward right field.  "Here we go again" was undoubtedly the universal thought in the stadium.  Would Heyward struggle again?  No!  Three seconds before the ball found leather. Heyward stuck up the thumb on his throwing hand to assure his teammates, the fans and the millions of TV viewers that he had this one measured.  Plunk!  He was right.  Cubs win!  Cubs win!!

Quarterly Cinema Scan - Volume XXIV

In 1998 the American Film Institute announced a series of celebrations planned to commemorate the one hundred year anniversary of commercial cinema.  The main component of each celebration would be a "greatest list" of different categories to be announced via nationally televised specials.  As you might expect, the first AFI list was that of the one hundred greatest movies released during that one hundred year span, in the opinion of the esteemed AFI panel of experts.  In the following year, AFI released its list of the fifty greatest screen legends, split evenly between actors and actresses.  Katharine Hepburn was selected by AFI as the top actress, while Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart placed and showed in the actor category behind Humphrey Bogart.

Grant and Stewart have always been two of my favorite actors.  It's a shame that The Philadelphia Story from 1940 is the only movie in which the two of them appeared together.  I had never been a big Kate fan, but her performance in The Philadelphia Story won me over.  By the way, it was the last and most acclaimed of the four films in which Cary and the redhead co-starred, although 1938's Bringing Up Baby was critically acclaimed too, notwithstanding lagging ticket sales. 

The Philadelphia Story was the only film in which Kate and Jimmy acted together.  Their only other pairing of sorts was That's Entertainment, Part II from 1976, a documentary containing snippets of older films, mostly musicals, in which they separately starred.

The background for the production of The Philadelphia Story could, itself, be grist for another movie.  In 1938 the Manhattan Independent Theater Owners took out an ad in the Hollywood Reporter which, among other things, disparaged Hepburn and labeled her as "box office poison." This was on the heels of Bringing Up Baby.  Considering that she had, by this point in time, already won a Best Actress Oscar just five years beforehand for Morning Glory, and had also been nominated two years later for Alice Adams, this was strange criticism indeed.  Kate could have let her resume speak for itself, but the spirited actress chose a different course of action.  Shortly after the ad appeared she took to the stage to perform the lead role in The Philadelphia Story, which started with a national tour and eventually ended up on Broadway.  She bought the rights to the script for $30,000, and flipped it by selling the movie rights to MGM for $175,000, with a provision that she would maintain control of the movie production.  She then demanded and received another seventy-five grand from MGM to play the leading lady, Tracy Lord.  (Note the inside joke, i.e., Hepburn's character bearing the first name "Tracy," a reference to Hepburn's long-time lover, Spencer Tracy.)

As Turner Classic Movies host Ben Mankiewicz described her, "Box office poison, perhaps, but front office brains."

*****

Here are the movies I watched at the Quentin Estates during the second quarter of 2016:
        

1.  All The Right Moves (1983 drama; Tom Cruise is a feisty high school football star whose dream of escaping a life in the local Pennsylvania steel mill town coincides with that of his vindictive coach, Craig T. Nelson.)  B+

2.  Because They're Young (1960 drama; Dick Clark is a high school history teacher who, when he isn't hitting on school secretary Victoria Shaw, is getting very involved in the personal problems of his students Michael Callan and Warren Berlinger.)  C

3.  Breaking Away (1979 comedy; Dennis Christopher, a  bicycle racer, and Dennis Quade are two of four "stoners," recent high school grads in Bloomington, Indiana, who have cultural clashes with the more affluent college guys.)  C+

4.  The Cardinal (1963 drama; Tom Tryon is a priest who, on the way to becoming a cardinal, encounters challenges involving a poor rural Massachusetts parish under the direction of Burgess Meredith, a black Georgia parish targeted by the Ku Klux Clan, a sabbatical in Vienna where he meets the fetching student, Romy Schneider, and the Nazis who have just annexed Austria.) C+

5.  The French Connection (1971 detective drama; Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider are NYC detectives who follow leads pertaining to the prospect of a huge illegal narcotics shipment being smuggled into the city.)  B+

6.  The French Line (1954 musical; Texas oil baroness Jane Russell switches identities with model Joyce Mackenzie while on board a trans-Atlantic ocean liner, and suitor Gilbert Roland, a French playboy who appears to be interested in Jane, is kept in the dark.)  C+

7.  The Graduate (1967 comedy; an older family friend, Anne Bancroft, seduces recent college grad Dustin Hoffman, but their affair turns sideways when he meets her daughter, Katherine Ross.)  B+

8.  Jeremiah Johnson (1972 western; Robert Redford decides frontier town life isn't for him, so he lives high up in the Rockies among the elk, the hawks, the rabbits, the wolves, the bears, the Crow, the Flatheads and the Blackfoot.) B+

9.  Kings Row (1942 drama; Robert Cummings studies medicine under the tutelage of girlfriend Betty Field's father, Claude Raines, then goes off to Vienna while his best buddy, Ronald Reagan, gets serious with a girl from the poor side of town, Ann Sheridan.)  C

10.  La Ronde (1950 comedy; narrator Anton Walbrook introduces and observes ten different sexual liaisons in a sequence in which one of the two parties from a given story is also involved in the next.) C+

11.  Life Itself (2014 documentary; a biographical detailed overview of film critic Roger Ebert, including his days as a young aspiring journalist, his affiliation with rival and partner Gene Siskel, his commingling with the rich and famous in places like Cannes, and his terminal illness which he fought with the unflagging support of his wife, Chaz.)  A-

12.  The Philadelphia Story (1940 comedy; Katherine Hepburn, a wealthy high society divorcee, is about to marry John Howard, but she gets sidetracked by her ex, Cary Grant, and by a tabloid writer, Jimmy Stewart.) A

13.  This Is Spinal Tap  (1984 mockumentary;  Rob Reiner is a documentarian who memorializes the final days of a fictional English band comprised of members Michael McKean, Christopher Guest and Harry Schearer.)  A-