Movie Review: "Whiplash"

"Whiplash": B+.  If you have heard of the legal tort of intentional infliction of emotional distress but are not sure what it is, Whiplash could serve as a case study.  It is the story of life in a highly competitive, elite music academy located in New York City, where extremely talented young musicians attempt to endure what amounts to a battle for survival.  Several are forced to throw in the towel before graduating because they are unable to cope with the headmaster or meet his demanding requisites.  The film examines how high a price promising performers are willing to pay for a diploma that likely paves the way for a career in music.

Miles Teller plays Andrew Neiman, a drummer who dreams of making his living in the rhythm section of a jazz orchestra.  Buddy Rich is his idol.  Andrew is no slouch on the skins, immediately drawing the attention of Terence Fletcher (J.K. Simmons), the imposing, muscle-bound headmaster of Shaffer Conservatory.  Year after year, Shaffer turns out some of the world's finest star musicians of the future.  A lot of Shaffer's reputation is a result of Fletcher's exacting standards.  But at what price are those standards tolerated?

Fletcher is into mind games, many bordering on mental cruelty.  Fletcher is keen on embarrassing students in front of the entire studio band, which is the ensemble at Shaffer in which the best musicians play.   When he dismisses a plump trombone player, the ensuing verbal attack includes harsh criticism of the young man's musicianship as well as his weight.  He derisively calls a demoted drummer "Mr. Gay Pride of the West Side."  When Andrew confides in Fletcher regarding Andrew's rough childhood, Fletcher uses that against Andrew publicly minutes later.  The musicians are treated like pawns, some brought by Fletcher into the studio band for the sole purpose of making incumbent players think they are about to be demoted.  He relegates some students to the job of being merely page turners for the musicians deemed superior.  The ultimate insult is to be labeled a permanent page turner.

Writer-director Damien Chazelle is quite good at setting tension-packed moods throughout the story.  The viewer never knows when Fletcher is about to explode in a tantrum.  Chazelle's script is not as successful in its attempt to paint Andrew as a likable normal college-age kid.  His relationship with his girlfriend, Nicole (Melissa Benoist), never seems on track, and his dinner table conversation with his male cousins is totally out of character.  Of course, you can't have a movie about a jazz academy without a terrific score; I have no complaints there.  (By the way, the film is named after the title of a tune heard frequently both in rehearsals and on the performance stage.)

The last act of the movie is triggered by a sad piece of news announced earlier by Fletcher to the studio band regarding a former Shaffer student.  We don't think much of it at first, but everything is not as it seems.

Unlike the fake singing, piano playing or horn blowing we might see in a lot of films, it's pretty difficult for an actor to convincingly pretend to be drumming.  Therefore, a huge tip of the hat to Teller, who obviously is a skilled kit man in real life.  But the scene stealer in Whiplash is clearly Simmons.  With his sculpted torso and bulging biceps, he commands attention whether by intimidation or credentials.  I would not be surprised to see Simmons nominated for an Oscar as a supporting actor.

We often hear about college and professional athletes who decide voluntarily to quit their sport while still in their prime and in relatively good health. The reason most often given is that the game is no longer fun for them.  After having seen Whiplash, one similarly wonders what musicians have to bear to achieve a career in music.  Is burnout a strong possibility because the fun is missing?  Whiplash raises another question too: How many musicians had the talent to be successful performers and entertainers, but were left at the wayside because of personal discouragement suffered at the hands of an instructor?      

Dillon Hall Diaries: Angst About Angers

I have never set anyone's cleats on fire, put peanut butter or Ben Gay in anyone's jock strap, or shaving cream inside anyone's cap.  Therefore, as a prankster I am not in the same league as someone like Bert Blyleven.  For the most part my shenanigans were more juvenile, like short-sheeting a bed, hiding a text book or leaving a fake phone message.  However, in all humility I must further state that I was the mastermind behind one of the best pranks ever executed in the fabled history of Dillon Hall.

 

You might recall from my September 9, 2014 post (Kiwi Can Contests) that during my junior year at ND, my roommate, Wayne Cuchna, and I occupied one of seven "doubles" in an isolated wing on Dillon's first floor.  The band of fourteen guys living there was comprised mostly of juniors and sophomores, with a sprinkling of freshmen, also known as "freddies."  I wouldn't go so far as to say the fourteen of us were like brothers, but because of the proximity of our quarters, we ate many meals together, often studied together, borrowed each other's records -- I am still waiting to get my Paul Revere & The Raiders album back from my next door neighbor, Rich "Rinny" Reinthaler -- knew each other's families and friends, engaged in dozens of bull sessions together, and generally supported one another through the highs and lows of the long and arduous school year.  And of course, as you already know, there were always the Kiwi Can Contests.

 

One of those "freddies" was Ed Beck, who lived at the far "dead" end of our wing.  The other three or four freddies, including Ed's roomie, Bill "The Bird" Powers, were low key, rather humble guys, who more or less recognized the unwritten pecking order amongst the fourteen.  No one actually thought that the upperclassmen among us were any smarter or wiser than the underclassmen, but still, there was some deference shown by the younger guys to the oldsters.  There were no big fish in our little pond, but if, indeed, there had to be small fish, that role was fulfilled by the frosh.  There were certain things, particularly those relating directly to Notre Dame the institution, for which the juniors would have a better feel or a deeper understanding, if only for the fact that they had more experience as a university student than did the underclassmen.

 

Good ol' Ed did not see it that way.  Perhaps he couldn't help himself, being a native New Yorker and all (tip o' the cap to Salinger for my usage of those last two words), but any outsider with an overview of the entire scene would easily observe that Ed was the proverbial know-it-all.  His most distinguishing characteristic was rubbing folks the wrong way.  Regardless of the topic, be it current events, football, girls, politics, professors, music, what have you, Ed knew best and was not bashful about sharing the wealth of his knowledge with the remaining underprivileged thirteen.  He gave me a pain where I sat down, and I was not alone with that sentiment.  Ridicule, confrontation and avoidance did not work; he'd dig in even more.  Avoidance, by the way, was hard to accomplish, given the logistics of our wing.  But what really gored our collective ox was Ed's incessant referral to his acceptance into Notre Dame's Angers Program for the following school year.

 

Angers (pronounced "ahn-ZHAY") is a mid-sized city in western France and the home of a handful of colleges and universities.  During the years I attended ND, the University of Notre Dame had a program affiliated with Universite Catholique de I' Oust  located in Angers.  Participants in that program were usually sophomores who desired to spend one or two semesters across the pond.   In those days, studying abroad was not nearly as common as it has become during the last few decades.  Almost every one of my contemporaries dreamed throughout high school of some day attending Notre Dame, so why would we want to leave?  Even if we had that inclination, most of our families could not afford to send us overseas for even a semester, let alone a year.  The thought of applying for the Angers Program never crossed our minds.

 

Ed, on the other hand, did not think along those lines; just the opposite.  From the moment (probably around February) that he was accepted into the Angers Program, that is all he talked about or cared about.  We could be talking about dining hall food, Major League Baseball, South Bend crime or an upcoming kegger, and without fail Ed would manage to get Angers into the conversation.  He had a knack for slanting the discussion into a comparison between how much better off he would be in France versus us slugs stuck in The Bend.  At first it was funny, as Ed was turning into a caricature of himself right before our eyes.  But after enduring his patronization for weeks on end, retaliation was in order.  Luckily, two separate ingredients fell perfectly into place, enabling me to pull off my caper, which I prefer to refer to simply as "The Letter."

 

The first ingredient was the fragile social status and simmering mood of the US, and elsewhere, in 1968.  That year has been called by many historians and political scientists the most tumultuous year in US history.  The Cold War was in full swing, the civil rights movement was surging, Viet Nam War protesters dialed up their demonstrations several notches, especially following the Tet Offensive, and the US presidential election, including the intra-party nomination campaigns, was no holds barred.  The Reverend Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis on April 4 of that year, and race riots ensued.  Democratic candidate Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles nine weeks later.

 

But the US was not the only place of social unrest.  In May, 1968, France was the scene of violent protests and strikes carried on predominantly by students and laborers.  That country almost came to a standstill, as students occupied campus buildings and workers shut down industry.  The police were outnumbered.  Demonstrations turned into riots which got out of hand.  It would take several weeks, and an actual dissolution of the French Parliament, before order was restored.

 

The second ingredient, strange as it may seem, was what we found in the practice space used by my band, Lemon Oil Mahogany.  LOM had "inherited" from my first band, the Dark Ages, a postage stamp size storage room located at the bottom of an extremely narrow stairway near the front of Dillon.  Apparently the room had not been used, or even visited, in many years.  Dust, mold and cobwebs were everywhere.  It could have functioned as a chamber of horrors from a Stephen King novel.  The guys in the Dark Ages made a deal with our rector, Father James "Flash" Flanigan, that in return for our cleaning the place up, he would let us practice down there.  Now, a year later, LOM was the beneficiary of that arrangement.

 

Originally we just cleaned out enough space to squeeze in our equipment and ourselves.  Subsequently one late spring day after practice we had a little more time, so we started clearing shelf space.  The books on those shelves were so old that the bindings gave way when we opened them.  But then, pay dirt!  Tucked away in a corner was a box of official Notre Dame stationery, with letterhead designating "Administrative Offices" and a beautiful etching of the Administration Building (aka the "Gold Dome Building") above it.  This was like finding gold.  My scheme to prank Ed Beck was hatched!

 

Father James Riehle (pronounced "really") was the no-nonsense Dean Of Students in those days.  The main responsibilities of the person holding that position were to oversee the conduct of the student body, and to enforce the multitude of rules and regulations which ND men were expected to follow.  If you're inclined to think that the incumbent in that office would, necessarily, be tough as nails, you would be correct.  Father Riehle, although only in his mid-forties, was one of those guys who appeared to be many years older than his actual age.  A cigar-chomping, gruff ex-hockey player, he was surely cut out to be the Dean Of Students.  No news from Father Riehle was good news for all Domers under his figurative thumb.  An aside:  My first sophomore year roommate,  Mike "The Ripper" Rippey, was called on the carpet by Father Riehle on many sad occasions before finally getting the heave-ho after the first semester.  The Ripper's downfall was mostly alcohol related; he was a well-known fixture in after-hours South Bend.  Every time he got called in to the Dean's office he'd say to me, "John, this time I'm Riehle in trouble!"

 

It took me a few days to compose The Letter to Ed.  I went through several drafts on notebook paper before I was finally satisfied.  Once I had crafted my masterpiece, I borrowed The Bird's typewriter under the pretext of having to submit a research paper, and hunted and pecked my way through.  Of course, I typed The Letter on my newly found Administrative Offices stationery.  It has been over forty-six years since I composed The Letter, but to the best of my recollection, it read something like this: 

 

Dear Mr. Beck,

 

I regret to inform you that, due to the civil unrest in France, including Angers, the University of Notre Dame has decided to cancel the Angers Program for the coming school year.  Please know that this was a very difficult decision to make, as the administration is well aware of the eagerness with which many of our students, including yourself, looked forward to the opportunity to study in Angers.  We will revisit the situation toward the end of the current calendar year, and if circumstances merit doing so, we will consider reinstating the Angers Program for the 1969-1970 school year.

 

The safety of our students is always our foremost responsibility.  Thank you for your understanding.

 

Sincerely yours,

 

James L. Riehle, C.S.C.

Dean of Students 

 

I did my best forgery job of Father Riehle's signature, stuck the letter in a regular ND envelope which was available in the bookstore, and mailed it to Ed on a Thursday, using an intra-campus postal box.  I knew it would reach his Dillon mail slot the next day, Friday, the hardest day of the work week to get ahold of anybody in the Ad Building.

 

The rest is history.  Ed did, indeed, receive the letter on that Friday.  I can still hear his wail, like something out of The Hound Of The Baskervilles.  His whole reason for being was gone.  There was no one else nearby in the dorm heading for Angers with whom he could commiserate, so he tried to get ahold of Father Riehle by phone.  I knew that would be next to impossible, especially on a Friday afternoon.  Ed was beside himself as he ran over to the Ad Building, letter in hand.  I did not see him for several hours.  My guess is that it took that long for many phone calls to go back and forth to ascertain whether the Angers Program was in jeopardy and if Father Riehle had actually sent that letter.

 

When Ed finally entered the South Dining Hall, barely in time for the swill they called "dinner," he was totally exhausted, yet evidently relieved that he had merely been the victim of a hoax.  We didn't hear much from Ed about Angers for the rest of the school year.  The Angers Program was not cancelled, and as far as I know, Ed was there as planned for the '68-'69 school year while I made the best of things on campus my senior year.  I have not seen nor heard from Ed since the spring of '68.

 

Other than my roomie, whom I swore to secrecy, I have never admitted my prank to anyone -- until now.  As much as I wanted to take credit for the caper, the price of being found out was too much to risk.  Of course, the guys in our wing figured the culprit was one of our group, and their level of enjoyment was almost equal to mine.

 

The Statute Of Limitations has long since expired, and Father Riehle passed away in 2008.  I think I am safe. If you ever watch the movie Rudy, keep an eye out for the man playing the role of the Notre Dame football team chaplain.  That guy is no Hollywood actor; it's Father Riehle who, in addition to his day job as Dean Of Students, was the football team's chaplain in real life.  I wonder if he will read this post from that great cigar lounge in the sky.   

Movie Review: "John Wick"

"John Wick": B-. My favorite professor at Notre Dame was Easy Joe Ryan, a former Chicago newspaper man who taught freshman composition.  His nickname came about not from his grading methods -- heavens no!  It had to do with his cool demeanor, his patience and his kindness.  I am not sure what his family history was, but he lived by himself in Lyons Hall.  No matter how well a student thought he had written, Easy Joe could find several places for improvement.  I corresponded with Professor Ryan via Christmas cards for a number of years after I graduated, until his brother notified me of Joe's passing some time around 1978.

I was thinking of my old prof Wednesday afternoon when, by default, I sat through John Wick at the West End theater.  If I had written the script for that movie and submitted it to Easy Joe, it's likely he would have returned it to me replete with dozens of not-quite-acerbic comments, all written with the fire engine red ink he favored, admonishing me to try harder.  Viewing John Wick drove home the fact to me that, when putting together a film to appeal to the targeted demographic, presumably males under 40, you don't have to strive for greatness.  What you strive for are fast cars, non-stop action, and a high body count.  Evaluated under that premise, John Wick hits the mark.

The story-telling structure is one we've seen before.  In the opening sequence, Wick (Keanu Reeves) drives his car at a relatively slow speed, head-on into a barricade in front of a loading dock.  He slowly opens the door and half-falls into the street.  The blood all over his clothing and upon his face clearly could not have resulted from the impact.  He must have been in a fight.  We wonder if the lead eponymous character is going to croak ninety seconds into the film.  But, no, 'tis not to be.  As Wick takes out his cell phone to take one last look at his deceased wife on video, the story flashes back so we can see how he got into this predicament.

Wick is a "retired" hit man who used to work for the Russian mafia in New York City.  The mafia's kingpin is Viggo (Michael Nyqvist), who has a real dolt for a son.  The son, Iosef (Alfie Allen), makes the stupid decision to steal Wick's 1969 Mustang, and exacerbates the stupidity level by intentionally killing Wick's dog in the process.  Among other things, Iosef is unaware of two important facts.  First, because the dog was given to Wick posthumously by Wick's wife, Wick considers it the main link between him and her memory.  Second, Iosef is clueless that his chosen victim is a former hit man once employed by Viggo.  Even when the owner of Iosef's chop shop, Aureilo (John Leguizamo), gives him a heads up on the Mustang's owner, Iosef shrugs it off as a minor inconvenience.  When Aurelio then gives Viggo a call to tell him what Iosef has done, that's when the story kicks into another gear. 

John Wick is to guns what Bruce Lee movies were to martial arts.  Whenever Wick gets into a fight, which is often, he is always outnumbered by the bad guys.  But just like in the martial arts movies, the villains line up one at a time to do battle with the hero.  The thought apparently never occurs to them to rush Wick en mass.  Also, they conveniently come out from behind their hiding places and fire a few wayward shots before Wick easily plugs them.  It makes no difference how far away Wick's target may be.  He is deadly with a hand gun from any distance; no need for a rifle.  On occasion, the mafia baddies bring knives to a gun fight.  One interesting, albeit physically impossible, technique employed by Wick is that whenever he flips a guy over his shoulder, he manages to keep one hand free so that he is able to fire his hand gun point blank before the fallen warrior can rise.

This movie has other "touches" which are noteworthy.  John holes up for a couple of nights at The Continental, a hotel which caters to assassins.  The one house rule is that no "business" can be conducted on hotel premises.  By the way, don't make the mistake of assuming that all the paid killers are of the male persuasion!  Willem Dafoe plays Marcus, an older mentor who shows up at the funeral of Wick's wife, but then accepts a $2 million contact to bump off his protege.  Marcus' calling card is that, no matter whom he's paid to shoot or in what location, he always gains access to a perfect rooftop perch with an absolutely clear view of his prey.  How lucky can a killer be?  I also liked Charlie (David Patrick Kelly).  Need a dozen dead bodies removed, no questions asked?  Just call Charlie and make dinner reservations for twelve.

There is a scene about a third of the way through the movie which struck my funny bone.  It involves a conversation in Wick's doorway between Wick and a cop named Jimmy (Thomas Sadoski).  Jimmy peers in and sees a corpse in the hallway, but because Wick is a friend, they simply bid each other good night.  It wasn't until then that I realized that the movie is practically devoid of humor; I decided to keep count of how many times the writers and director gave us a break from the tense action by using a funny line.  The final tally was three (in a ninety-six minute movie).

I wrote above that I ended up seeing John Wick "by default."  My original plan was to see Fury, but the ticket seller at the West End told me that it would not be shown that day due to a special, unadvertised event for a private audience.  At that point my only options were to view St. Vincent, Bill Murray's latest which had already started ten minutes earlier, or JW.  I would have preferred Murray, but since I didn't want to start watching after it had already started, I opted for the latter.  At least I got to see if Keanu Reeves had improved his acting ability since I first saw him in 1994's Speed.  Not so much.

Movie Review: "Gone Girl"

"Gone Girl": C+.  Major clues are discovered, almost in plain sight, inside a suspect's house days after the police supposedly combed the place with high tech tools looking for evidence.  (Maybe they were in a hurry to get to the doughnut shop.)  A character enters the hospital with dried blood on the skin, and emerges days later with the blood still visible.  (Maybe there was a shortage of soap and wash cloths inside the medical facility.)  No one orders a paternity test for a fetus playing a key (invisible, of course) role in the story, even though the purported father has already willingly submitted his DNA to the authorities.  (Why didn't he or his lawyer think of ordering the test, even if the police didn't?)  A missing woman's former boyfriend is identified early-on to the cops, but they don't bother to set up a stake out or put him under any kind of surveillance. (Maybe the script writers ran out of time, but this film does run two and a-half hours.)  One of the greatest mysteries surrounding Gone Girl is how a movie with so many holes can be a major hit at the box office. (The film, which was released in October, has a very good chance of becoming one of the top ten grossing movies of all time for that month.  As of November 5, ticket sales had exceeded $137 million; it must reach $164 million to crack that top ten.)  The only explanation I can come up with is that the film's success is mainly attributable to the mega-hit 2012 book by Gillian Flynn bearing the same title.  Flynn also penned the movie's screenplay.  Her adoring reading public must have flocked to the theater for multiple viewings.

Many studies have shown that three of the most common elements in troubled marriages are money, fidelity and children.  Nick and Amy Dunne (Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike) have hit that trifecta, and then some.  When the story opens, Amy is already missing.  Ben, alerted by a phone call from his neighbor that the front door to his house is wide open, rushes home from the bar he owns to discover the living room ransacked.  There is no sign of his wife, the police are called in and the usual questions are asked. From that point, the storytelling goes back and forth, with intermittent flashbacks revealing that the "perfect" couple had their behind-the-scenes problems.

The police, led by Detective Rhonda Boney (Kim Dickens), do not initially look upon Nick as a suspect, but little by little both the police and we, the viewers, start to catch on that Nick might not be the all-American guy he outwardly seems.  Why was Amy's life insurance policy recently upgraded?  (Isn't that true in all such TV shows and movies?  The missing person or the deceased always carries an enhanced life insurance policy, naming the prime suspect as the beneficiary.)  Why did Amy secretly buy a hand gun?  And what about all those accusatory entries in her diary?

Less than half way through the film, we learn that Nick has had a little nookie nookie going on the side with Andie (Emily Ratajkowski), one of his former college students who looks more like a high school sophomore.  How dumb can Nick be?  He even invites Andie over to spend the night with him at the house of his twin sister, Margo (Carrie Coon). The scads of media members who have been camping outside Margo's house inexplicably are nowhere to be seen when Andie enters and exits; how convenient!

My two favorite aspects of Gone Girl are the performances by Tyler Perry and Missi Pyle.  Perry plays Tanner Bolt, a Johnnie Cochran type of attorney, the camera-loving kind that celebrities hire when their backs are against the wall and public opinion has already found them guilty.  Pyle is absolutely dead-on as a cable TV pseudo-journalist in the style of Nancy Grace, who immediately presumes all suspects to be guilty, especially if the alleged victim is an attractive woman.  Speaking of which…

Rosamund Pike, a former "Bond Girl" (2002's Die Another Day), is outstanding as Amy, a difficult and taxing role.  Not having read the book, I was surprised at the number of scenes in which she appears.  Not that I'm complaining.

Quarterly Cinema Scan - Volume XVII

It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done;

It is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.

Those words, among the most famous in all of English literature, are spoken by Sydney Carton in Charles Dickens' A Tale Of Two Cities, my favorite novel of all time.  The story depicts life in Paris at the beginning of the French Revolution in the late eighteenth century.  The national motto of France, "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," is said to have its origins from the Revolution.

In the mid-1990's Polish film maker Krzysztof Kieslowski decided to create a trilogy of stories loosely based on the three words comprising the aforementioned French motto.  Appropriately enough, the film titles, in their shortened form, are simply called Blue, White and Red.  (The on-screen titles are each preceded by the word "Tri-color.")  It is no accident that the three colors precisely correspond to the vertical bars of the French flag, seen left-to-right as blue, white and red.

When these movies came out in the United States, I intended to see them, mostly out of a combination of my admiration of the Dickens book and a curiosity over how the famous Kieslowski worked the colors into his themes.  Alas, I never made it to the theater in 1993 in time to see Blue before it disappeared from the Twin Cities, and I was reluctant to view the remaining two films when they were released a year later because I thought -- it turns out mistakenly -- that I needed the background of the first.  (PSA: Although you do not need to see the three films in order, the ending of Red makes more sense if you watch that movie last.)  About ten years ago I almost bought the boxed set of the trilogy, but due to my basic nature of being frugal -- okay, cheap -- I decided against it.  I finally had an opportunity to watch all three films four months ago when they were featured on Turner Classic Movies television.  It was worth the wait.

I also remember that after Red was released in 1994, the local critics declared it to be the best of the trilogy.  On the other hand, national film critic Leonard Maltin, who published his forty-fifth and final annual film guide this year, bestows that distinction on White. Initially, my personal preference was to give the nod to Blue.  Of course, I must confess that I could watch a two hour movie of Juliette Binoche picking flowers in a garden or shopping for floor tile in Menard's, and I would still be inclined to give it two enthusiastic thumbs up (to borrow a phrase from the late Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel).  But after a few doses of honest deliberation, I am forced to declare White the superior film, with Blue coming in second.

In Blue, Binoche stars as Julie, the widow of a world famous music composer who had been commissioned by the European Council to write a major concerto titled Concert For The Unification Of Europe.  The piece was to be played only once, simultaneously by orchestras in twelve European cities.  As the story develops we learn more about the influence Julie had on the composition, working behind the scenes while her husband was hailed as the master.

When she loses her family in a tragic accident, Julie decides to rid herself of almost all of her possessions, including the unfinished concerto score.  She instructs her attorney to sell her villa, and heads for the city with only a small box.  Her ambition is to start a new life by living anonymously and alone.

Will she be able to find liberty from the life she has left behind?  It may not be as easy to do so as one might originally believe.

In White, Zbigniew Zamachowski plays Karol, a Polish hair dresser who marries Dominique (Julie Delpy of the Before Sunrise trilogy), a Parisian who owns a small shop.  The story opens with a short courtroom scene, in which Dominique is telling a French judge that she wants a divorce because Karol can't perform in the boudoir.  Karol still loves Dominique, but due to the language barrier caused by his inability to converse in French, he has little grasp of what the testimony is, and is unable to assert his own position coherently to the judge.  He asks the judge if he is not entitled to a fair trial because he speaks only Polish.  In his mind, the principle of equality of legal rights should not be compromised just because one of the parties does not speak the language of the court, viz., French.

When Karol gets back to Poland, he concocts an ingenious scheme to get back at his ex.  Will it work, or should he have left well enough alone?  By far, this film has the most humor in the trilogy, and has the most "going on" as the story takes place.  Add to the mix that Zamachowski is a brilliant actor, and that explains why I place White as the signature piece of the trio.

In Red, Valentine (Irene Jacob) is a young Swiss fashion model whose picture is splashed on billboards all over Geneva.  She accidentally injures a dog with her car, and meets the mysterious retired judge Joseph Kern (Jean-Louis Trintignant), who is identified on the dog's collar as its owner.  Inside Kern's house, Valentine discovers that he has set up an intricate eavesdropping apparatus which enables him to listen in on his neighbors' telephone conversations.  Despite Kern's position, explained at length, that his practice has merit, Valentine shows her disgust and leaves to take the dog to the veterinarian.  Kern seems disinterested.

Their paths cross again when the dog runs away from Valentine and ends up back at Kern's house.  The two lead characters, who originally could not seem any more disparate, have more conversations.  In a strange way, a fraternity is established, and despite their age differences, what they have to say to each other has an impact on their lives.

Kieslowski co-wrote all three of the scripts.  As a result there are certain common threads throughout, the most obvious being the use of the respective film titles' colors in each picture.  For example, in Blue Julie keeps a blue chandelier after getting rid of all the other items in her villa.  That chandelier appears in several subsequent scenes.  Many of the filmed scenes appear to be shot through a blue filter.  In White, Karol hangs on to a white porcelain bust of a woman's head, which he repairs (and even kisses!).  That bust stays with him, whether in France or Poland.  There are several outdoor scenes with snow, and a few flashbacks to Karol and Dominique's wedding day, obviously having white as the predominant color.  In Red, that color is pervasive throughout; even the dog, Rita, is red.

Each of the three movies contains a "throwaway shot" involving a very old, hunched-over person attempting to insert a bottle into a tall recycling bin.  There are varying degrees to which the main character in each story interacts with the senior citizen.  There is also one scene in each movie where one or more characters from the other two movies make an extremely brief appearance.  Watching the three films in a short span of time will assist you in spotting those moments.

***

I am approximately a month late in posting this Cinema Scan of the movies I've seen on the tube during the third quarter of 2014.  Hopefully my editor won't fire me.

1. And God Created Woman (1956 drama; Bridgette Bardot is a sexy teen foster child, who marries Jean-Louis Trintignant to avoid being sent back to the orphanage, even though she is more smitten with his older brother Christian Marquand.)  B

2. Blue (1993 drama; see the above mini-review.) B+

3. Breakfast Club (1985 dramedy; Emilio Estevez and Molly Ringwald are among five high school students from five different cliques who serve a Saturday morning detention in their school's library.) B+

4. Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid (1969 western; Paul Newman and Robert Redford are humorous train and bank robbers who, with occasional assistance from Katharine Ross, stay on the run to evade capture by the lawmen.) A

5. A Farewell To Arms (1932 war romance; Gary Cooper is an American army lieutenant who secretly marries nurse Helen Hayes in Italy, but World War I doesn't make things easy on them.) C

6. The Fault In Our Stars (2014 romance; Shailene Woodley and Ansel Elgort are teenage cancer patients who meet in a support group, fall in love and travel to Amsterdam to meet a favorite author.) B+

7. Gallipoli (1981 war drama; Mel Gibson and Mark Lee are young track stars who volunteer to fight for Australia against the Ottoman Turks in World War I.) B+

8. Harper (1966 detective drama; Paul Newman is a slick LA private dick, hired by super rich Lauren Bacall to track down her alcoholic philandering husband.) C

9. Her (2013 drama; Joaquin Phoenix is a nerdy loner who develops a relationship with the woman "inside" his future (?) word operating system.) B-

10. The Lovers (1958 romance; Jeanne Moreau is married to French business owner Alain Cuny, and dallies with handsome polo player Jose Luis de Vilallonga, but when her car breaks down she turns her attention to the motorist who gave her a ride, Jean-Marc Bory.) C

11. Our Man In Havana (1959 comedy; Alec Guiness is a British vacuum cleaner salesman who gets talked into becoming a spy in Havana, where cigar chomping Ernie Kovacs is the chief of police.)  B+

12. Random Harvest (1942 romance; show girl Greer Garson helps Ronald Coleman avoid the authorities as he escapes from an asylum where he was an amnesia patient, but their budding romance is cut short when he's struck by a car and suddenly is able to recall his former life.) B+

13. Red (1994 drama; see the above mini-review.) B

14. Shine A Light (2008 documentary; Martin Scorsese filmed the Rolling Stones performance at New York City's Beacon Theater in the fall of 2006, with Mick Jagger doing almost all the singing, while Keith Richards, Ronnie Wood and Charlie Watts let the great backup singers fill in the accompanying vocals.)  B+

15. Spencer's Mountain (1963 drama; Henry Fonda and Maureen O'Hara raise nine kids on the Grand Tetons, and don't mind being poor until their oldest, James MacArthur, needs money for college.) C

16. Three Days Of The Condor (1975 drama; Robert Redford is an analyst for the CIA who unwittingly uncovers a top secret scheme, then relies on photographer Faye Dunaway to assist him in keeping alive while he gets to the bottom of it.) A-

17. White (1994 dramedy; see the above mini-review.) A-

The MHT 8, Part IV: The Aisle Cloggers

The Ugly stands alone.

We first spotted them in the Tel Aviv terminal late Sunday night, about an hour before we weary travelers were to board our 12:30 a.m. Delta flight to JFK in New York.  Groups of boys, obviously Hasidic Jews, running all over the place, like kids being turned loose at Disneyland.  The main attraction was sprinting the wrong way on the people movers, with occasional spurts into and out of the stores.  They ranged in age from young teens to college age.  Their apparel consisted of knee length bottoned black coats, black top hats, and braids coming way down from their ears where sideburns ought to be.  "I'll bet they are bound for Russia," said Tom Hart, one of the MHT 8.  If only he were right.

Our final day had started early, of course, with the walk down the Via Dolorosa and the visit to the Church Of The Holy Sepulchre, as described in my September 30th second installment of The MHT 8.  We concluded the morning with a thirty minute stop at the Western (aka Wailing) Wall inside the Jewish Quarter of The Old City.  Then, that Sunday afternoon was free, the first mid-day period we had without an organized activity since arriving in the Holy Lands nine days before.  Between our return to the Inbal Hotel and our final group dinner at 6:30, we had a leisurely outdoor lunch at a nearby cafe, visited the famous King David Hotel -- I enjoyed the celebrity signatures on the floor tiles of the main hallway -- packed our bags, and (in Momma Cuan's case) swam in the Inbal pool.

Following dinner, we bade farewell to the ten Magi group members (including Father Joe) who were "extending" to Istanbul the next day, and then boarded the bus for one final ride.   Tel Aviv was a little over an hour away, and by the time we arrived at the airport, all we wanted to do was fall asleep on the plane and wake up twelve hours later at JFK.  To put it mildly, however, things did not go without a hitch.  First there was the fatiguing wait to pass through not only the regular security check point, but also the energy-sapping formality of customs.  Following that ordeal, we still had plenty of time, so most of us gathered near our gate to drain an Israeli beer or two -- Goldstar amber was quite tasty -- and hang out, waiting for the midnight boarding.

It wasn't long after we were seated on the jumbo jet that we realized the Hasidic Jews we'd seen running around the terminal were not going to Russia after all; they were getting on our plane.  A simultaneous surprise was that they were in the company of dozens of male adults of all ages, including sixties and seventies, whom we hadn't spotted in the terminal.  Where were these older folks when the teens were frolicking in the terminal?  On a plane which held close to four hundred passengers, the Hasidic delegation comprised at least two-thirds of it.

What followed was one of the strangest, most surrealistic sights I have ever experienced.  The ultra-orthodox Jews refused to take their seats, and were blocking the aisles.  Small groups would proceed toward the rear of the plane, only to return back up the aisle, against the flow.  Then they would stand there aimlessly.  They placed very large suitcases in the overhead compartments, some of which were too big to allow the shutting of the compartment door.  Then they'd return to the overhead compartment, and open it for purposes of retrieving articles from their carry-ons, or re-adjusting the contents of the compartment.  Whenever they did this, which was often, they would have to lean into whoever the poor soul was sitting in the aisle seat underneath the overhead.  One of them was our fellow pilgrim, Chuck Neerland, who I thought was going to clobber the guy who went to the overhead above Chuck for the fifth or sixth time.  Luckily Chuck thought the better of it, or he may have been escorted off the plane, but I would not have blamed him if he had acted on his impulses.

This mockery of decorum, civility, safety and airline protocol went uninterrupted for over an hour.  There were more people standing than sitting.  The Delta flight attendants were ineffective, flabbergasted and incompetent.  About forty-five minutes into this ridiculousness, the pilot (or copilot) got on the intercom, and asked people to take their assigned seat.  This announcement, which sounded more like a plea than a command, fell on deaf ears.  A few minutes later, two of the officers came out of the cockpit and convened with a small group of Jews halfway down the starboard aisle.  Again, this conference had no effect.  The aisles remained clogged.  Several minutes after that, someone (a flight attendant?) asked over the P.A. if there were people who were willing to trade their seats to accommodate the passengers who did not like the seat to which they were assigned.  (At this point, we had no idea what their beef was.)  I only saw one passenger, who did not appear to be Hasidic, get up to trade seats, and as he was doing so, there was an unfriendly verbal exchange between him and another passenger whom I could not see.

What I could see were many Hasidic "elders" who did absolutely nothing to help resolve the situation, but chose instead to bury their collective noses in their prayer books, oblivious to what was obviously going on all around them and refusing to take any responsibility.  I momentarily thought back to my teaching days, when my eighth graders simply would not have dared to misbehave on any of our several public outings.  They might not have been angels on school premises, but never failed to toe the mark in public.  Yes, it is a different culture now, and we live in a much different era.

Along with the total ineptitude of the Delta flight crew, the biggest surprise to me was that this airplane insubordination would be occurring in Israel, of all places.  If there is one country on the globe known for its tight travel security and enforcement of the rules, it is Israel.  Yet, if the same thing happened on a domestic flight in almost any other country, the perpetrators would have been taken off the plane by a marshall and charged with a crime.  On Flight 469, no police or security officer ever came on the plane.  We did not push off from the gate until 1:10 a.m., an hour and ten minutes after we boarded, and forty minutes after we were scheduled to take off.

So, what was the cause for the ruckus? The MHT 8 found out later that disruption caused by Hasidic Jews failing to take their seats is not an uncommon occurrence.  Their unhappiness stems from their refusal to sit next to a woman, and of course there were many women on the plane.  When I first heard this I was incredulous, but after some research I've learned it's true.  It's hard to believe that a religion teaches that awful practice, but apparently that was one reason why the elders did not admonish their young proteges.  I still wonder why Delta puts up with such foolishness, or if it's even within the rules of accepted international travel regulations.  I still find it hard to believe that airport security never made an appearance.

When all the commotion was going on, I wanted so badly to take a picture to memorialize the sad event.  I did not for two reasons.  First, I was in a window seat, so I would have had to raise my camera quite high to capture a picture over fellow passengers' heads.  Second, the last thing I wanted was to start another brouhaha in the event someone saw me taking pictures and wanted to "make something of it."  In any event, if you care to see pictures of a similar happening which occurred on an El Al flight going from New York to Isreal, check out the following article which appeared last month in the Gothamist: http://gothamist.com/2014/09/26/ultra-orthodox_jews_flight.php.  Finally, I am happy to report that the Hasidics did not accompany us on the final leg to the Twin Cities.  Once they deplaned at JFK, we never saw them again.        

The MHT 8, Part III: Beleaguered In Bethlehem

In the final paragraph of my September 30th second installment of The MHT 8, I promised to share a small sampling of "the bad" and "the ugly" regarding our recent pilgrimage to the Holy Lands.  The good far outnumbered the bad, and accordingly, I have chosen merely three items to describe in that category.  The first two can be classified as annoying; the third was disheartening.  I've decided to save "the ugly" for a subsequent, fourth post.

The Layover. The first irritant of our adventure was the layover in Charles De Gaulle Airport outside of Paris.  After taking off on Friday from MSP at 5:28 p.m. CDT, we had arrived at De Gaulle at 8:06 Saturday morning, Paris time, which was 1:06 a.m. body (Minneapolis) time.  We had been in the air seven hours and thirty-eight minutes.  How would we kill the six hour interval until taking off for Amman later that afternoon?  If the layover was, say, eight or ten hours, we could have taken a train into the city for a couple of hours before returning to the airport.  But six hours?  Too short a time to take a chance on leaving the confines of De Gaulle.  Then, to our collective dismay, the layover was extended from six hours, which was bad enough, to seven and a-half hours.  Sigh.

The pre-trip buzz was that De Gaulle was a good airport for travelers with long layovers, similar to MSP.  I'm not sure who gave us that false hope, but they were dead wrong.  We were stuck in terminal 2E, which seemed to be isolated from the rest of the airport.  This being Saturday morning, the place was almost deserted.  If what you were looking for was perfume, cosmetics or cigarettes, no problem.  There must have been eight stores and kiosks selling those products.  But what we really craved was a comfortable place to sit, preferably inside a bar or restaurant.  We eventually found an area, hidden behind an almost unmarked wall, which functioned as a makeshift bar, selling wrapped day-old sandwiches and bottles of Heineken out of a deli case.  As we sat on hard plastic chairs sipping our brew around tiny tables, we were too tired to go exploring on foot in an effort to discover a passageway to a different, more welcoming section of De Gaulle (if, indeed, there was one to be found).  We also wondered why Magi Travel routed us this way.  Did we save a few bucks by putting up with this interminable layover?  Those were dollars we gladly would have paid for better routing.  We were not happy campers when we eventually boarded the Air France flight to Amman.

The Inbal.  Magi Travel has a reputation for booking its clients in first class hotels. The Crowne Plaza in Amman, during our short single overnight stay, seemed nice enough, and as I wrote in my September 30th post, the Scots Hotel in Tiberius was phenomenal.  Then we spent the final four nights -- five if you count our getaway night -- at the Inbal Hotel in Jerusalem.  While not as posh as the Scots, the Inbal  upheld Magi's reputation, but with one major exception.  The service in and near the bar and commons areas was, for all intents and purposes, non-existent.

Picture a group of twenty-nine people who have been up since dawn and have spent most of their day either on a bus or on foot visiting designated points of interest.  It is now the hour before (or after) dinner, and their fondest desire is to sit down, relax, enjoy each other's company and recount the splendid things they've witnessed while they quaff an adult beverage.  It all sounds good, but soon after the large group congregates a few feet from the hotel bar, they realize that no one is going to take drink orders.  So a few unlucky ones go up to the bar, where they are ignored by the staff.  Finally, when it dawns on the staff that their guests would like to order drinks, they act as if they have never taken a drink order before.  And these are the hotel bartenders!  Then they can't find the correct bottle or a clean glass.  Finally when they attempt to "ring up the order," they can't find the right button on their register's keypad, so they wait for their colleague to finish what she's doing and then ask that person for instruction.  They rarely have change in the cash drawer.  If you didn't really need a drink before you arrived, you certainly did by the time you were eventually handed your glass.

This routine repeated itself every night we were there.  When we congregated in the lounge or on the nearby patio, moving chairs and heavy tables around so we could sit together, no staff member ever came to assist or to serve us.  We were invisible to them, notwithstanding our numbers.  Almost every time we wanted to order something, we had to belly up to the bar and go through the aggravating routine all over again.

When I returned home I did some research regarding the Inbal, and was shocked to find that, on some sites, it is rated a five star hotel.  Apparently those reviewers are teetotalers!

Astonishing Poverty.  I remember reading a Twin Cities Reader (predecessor to City Pages) review of the former restaurant, Aquavit, located years ago on the ground floor of the IDS Building in downtown Minneapolis.  The critic's comment that stayed with me was something like this:  "It is very hard to enjoy your nine dollar dessert at Aquavit when you happen to glance out the window next to your table and see someone shivering in the cold begging for bus money."  More than once on our trip, that recollection came to me.

Our first tour guide was Sammy, a very personable fellow who greeted us at the Amman airport Saturday night, got us to our hotel in time for a late dinner, and then accompanied us on the bus the next morning and afternoon while we visited Mount Nebo and Bethany Beyond The Jordan, where John The Baptist baptized Jesus.  Sammy, a Jordanian, was very proud of his country, and emphasized to us that it's not just Israel (which he often referred to as "the other side") which comprises the Holy Lands.  This was important information, and the more he talked about Jordan's connection to the Bible, the better we could understand why we didn't start the tour in Israel.

Sammy talked almost non-stop, from the time we boarded the bus at the Amman hotel until we re-boarded following the baptism sight.  But then, during the seventy-five minutes or so it took us to drive north to the heavily secured border crossing, he barely said a word.  The reason was evident by observing the crumbling towns we passed through.  What was there to say?  Buildings falling apart, people sitting idly on the edge of the curbless roads, broken and boarded-up windows, stray dogs and cats meandering across the rubble.  The thought occurred to me that Jordan is one of our most important allies in the Middle East, and yet it is clearly a third world country.  One explanation offered by Sammy for the depressing conditions is that, unfortunately, there are no oil deposits under the sands of his country.

Although things did immediately change for the better once we crossed from Jordan into Israel, scenes of abject poverty once again were before us three days later when we entered the occupied West Bank.  I am tempted to use the word "god-forsaken" to describe a large portion of that area.  Miles and miles of endless arid desert, distopian towns where it was hard to find a smiling face, barbed wire fences, guard towers at the corners of long impenetrable walls, garbage in the streets and in the yards, crumbling buildings, falling roofs.  I have been on a number of American Indian reservations, but this was far worse.  Most of all I felt sorry for the kids.  Kicking a soccer ball around on a dirt pitch was the closest thing I saw to happiness.

It is one thing to witness the gloom of the occupied territories through the tour bus window.  It is quite another to encounter it on a personal basis.  This happened a handful of times throughout the week.  We pilgrims would be led into a shop or a restaurant which would be run by Christian friends of our Israeli tour guide, Wally, where we were encouraged to spend our money.  Although there was no real pressure to buy, the atmosphere was such that one felt almost compelled to purchase something, anything, even if for the mere sake of helping the proprietors out.

The most disappointing experience of the entire pilgrimage was witnessing what has become of Bethlehem.  Before our trip, my image of that place conformed to the lyrics of the well-known Christmas carol, O Little Town Of Bethlehem.  The present day city of Bethlehem could not be more opposite.

Forget about pictures of a young couple entering a small village with their donkey, and hoping to find lodging where their child might be born.  Bethlehem today is a large, grimy, bustling city, almost adjacent to Jerusalem.  There is no countryside separating the two cities, no sense of pastoral cleanliness, quaintness or enchanting stargazing.  Those concepts are quickly dispelled when you must pass by a security checkpoint to enter; unlike Jerusalem, Bethlehem is in the West Bank.

Of course the only reason to come to Bethlehem is to visit the Church Of The Blessed Nativity, built over the stable where it's believed Jesus was born.  But our first stop in Bethlehem, once we got past the security gates, was a large gift shop owned and operated by Wally's friends.  All of the men in our group collectively moaned when Wally told us he'd give us an hour -- an hour -- in the store.  That was about fifty minutes longer than any of us needed or wanted.  Upon entering the store, we were immediately handed a medium size basket into which we were supposed to place our selections of statues, crucifixes, jewelry, scarfs, paintings, trinkets, toys, clothing and other assorted items which, had we been in a US shopping mall, we would have ignored without giving it a second thought.  There seemed to be a sales clerk on hand for each one of the twenty-nine of us.  I commented to a friend that it reminded me of my one trip to Nate's Clothing Store in the Minneapolis Warehouse District back in the '80's.  In both instances, the clerks descended upon you as soon as you set foot in the shop, and would not let go of you until you were out the door.  In the Bethlehem store, I ditched my basket as quickly as practically possible, and waited near the door with my other three male counterparts from the MHT 8 while our wives explored the aisles.

Momma Cuandito did end up buying a few items, but the worst was yet to come.  A pack of Palestinian men had gathered outside the store's door, blocking the path to our bus.  They were shoving beads, wood carvings and other religious artifacts in our faces, beseeching us to buy with stories about their families' desperate circumstances.  Our three-word reply, "No thank you," did not work.  A couple of them became belligerent, and I had to wrap my arm around Momma Cuan and get her into the bus.  I used to think the panhandlers on the streets of San Francisco were the most aggressive I'd encountered.  The Palestinians in Bethlehem made those beggars by the bay look meek.  Accosting us on the sidewalk was bad enough.  I don't know what would have happened if they'd climbed aboard the bus.