DAVIDSON'S ISLAND

Streaming this weekend:

The King of Staten Island—Although undeniably funny in the right dosage, the Saturday Night Live comedian Pete Davidson never struck me as a having a broad range. But playing the semi-autobiographical title character in this, his first star vehicle, he shows the ease and emotional accessibility of, well, a star.

Working from a script he co-wrote with director Judd Apatow and Dave Sirus, Davidson plays Scott, a twenty-four-year old stoner and aspiring, though not very promising, tattoo artist, living with his weary but doggedly upbeat widowed Mom (Marisa Tomei) in New York's persistently unglamorous Fifth Borough. The son of a firefighter who died in the line of duty—Davidson’s real-life dad died in the 9/11 attacks—Scott is funny, intelligent, likable, even charismatic, but also traumatized, stuck in adolescence, and quietly, almost unconsciously desperate.

Even for Scott, though, change is of course inevitable. His younger, better-adjusted sister (Maude Apatow) heads off to college, and soon his Mom has started a relationship with another firefighter (Bill Burr). Scott responds to it all with bursts of edgy anger—something like Adam Sandler without the mannered eccentricity—offset by a peculiar gentleness that suggests self-awareness and the potential for growth.

Like many of Apatow’s works, the film meanders around at a dawdling clip, exploring subplots and secondary characters, setting up gags that will pay off far down the road, if at all. Not everything works, but it’s a natural approach for a movie about an aimless hero, and we keep rooting for him.

BLM

Except for a comment or two on posts by other people, over the last week and a half I haven’t said a word in any public forum about the murder of George Floyd, or any of the events that have followed. There are a couple of reasons for this.

First, I’m unable to find words to express my horror and fury and disgust at this atrocity, nor at the fact that it’s very far from an isolated case. Any combination of outraged adjectives seems feeble, both for this individual incident and for the monolithic, deadly reality of deep-seated racism in our justice system.

Second, even if I could find adequate eloquence, I always feel presumptuous in railing against an injustice of which I’m unlikely to be the direct victim. Who cares what some random 58-year-old white dude thinks about racist police brutality?

But I realize that this won’t do. Nobody cares or needs to care what I think on this issue, but it’s nonetheless incumbent right now for all of us—maybe especially us 58-year-old white guys—to say what we think anyway. Modesty and sheepishness and circumspection are not virtues at a time like this. So, lest anyone suppose that my silence has implied either indifference or sympathy with the perpetrators, let me keep it simple:

Black Lives Matter.

I use this now-stock phrase because there is nothing whatsoever about it that a reasonable person should find offensive. Nobody, as far as I know, has suggested in using it that Only Black Lives Matter, or that Black Lives Matter More. Yet many white people, including plenty of people I knew back in high school, seem to find this plaintive phrase infuriating.

Many of these same folks, who seemed to feel no pressing need to denounce Floyd’s killing, were swift in their finger-wagging indignation over looting and other violence connected to some of the past week’s protests. Wrong as this violence (at least some of it probably the work of agents-provocateur) unquestionably is, the hand-wringing response to it by many white people who didn’t seem overly upset by the killing itself suggests the need of a reminder like the phrase Black Lives Matter.

Here's what I hope isn’t true: I hope the elaborate revulsion that some of my fellow white folks evince when they hear “Black Lives Matter” isn’t a reaction to the reflexive internal response “No They Don’t.” Or, “Yeah, But Not That Much.” Not as much as broken store windows or stolen jewelry or re-thinking our own sense of self-justification. But I have to wonder.

In any case, here’s what I think, in the broadest possible terms, about how we should proceed. Black people and other disadvantaged minorities in our country have been trying to engage white society about their plights since at least the end of the Civil War. The vast majority of this engagement, ranging in approach from advocacy to being "a credit to one’s race” to nonviolent resistance to militancy to taking a knee, has been peaceful and dignified on the nonwhite side; white folks have often responded, however, with near-psychotic violence or, on a good day, with patronizing condescension or angry evasion.

Every civil right that white Americans take utterly for granted, down to the most basic, had to be won by black folks, virtually inch by inch in some parts of the country, school by school, drinking fountain by drinking fountain, lunch counter by lunch counter, public swimming pool by public swimming pool, in slow, stubbornly entrenched battle. Black folks have had white allies along the way in this struggle, of course, some of them important, but overall, their victories, which benefit all of us, are their own.

But now it’s time for us white folks to step up. We love things being All About Us; here’s our chance. Black activism can lead the way on changing laws and policies and what sort of language or practices aren’t socially acceptable. But sooner or later this work, essential though it is, runs into the wall of hardwired, often not fully conscious racism. Racist police violence can and should be combatted by protests and changes in policy and training; it can’t be truly eliminated until white folks will no longer tolerate it. And that’s not likely to happen until we are willing to admit that, whether we approved of it or not, we have tolerated it.

I wish I had suggestions more specific than “step up,” but I really don’t. I need guidance on this myself. Ideally, I think, the change would begin within law enforcement culture, with a shift in aspiration from being a thuggish enforcer of an archaic social order to a proud public servant of all people equally. Plenty of cops already see themselves this way; it’s time we asked them to assert themselves as leaders in their profession.

But we can’t wait for this optimistic scenario. The rest of us need to learn to speak up, challenging casual racism on the part of family members, friends, co-workers. And if we witness one of these mortifying incidents of public bullying of black folks by a fellow white person, we need to try to summon the courage to stick up for the black person. It isn’t right that our voices will carry more weight with the bully than the black person’s, but it’s often the case.

Much more often, though, I think that we need to work on mastering the fine and noble art of Shutting the Fuck Up. When we hear or read a racial opinion or observation that we perceive as critical of our own position, we should take a few minutes to think it over before we leap to our own defense or reflexively self-justify. And when I say we should take a few minutes to think it over, I mean we should take a few years.

Also, we should take the earliest opportunity to run the toxic garbage currently polluting the White House, the Senate and many other governing bodies around the nation out of power on a rail. This won’t get rid of racism, obviously, but it can strike a gratifying blow against overt, unapologetic racism.

Black activism can change policy; it can’t cure racism. We can only do that for ourselves, and only if we want to. We should want to.

Anyway, in light of all this, this past weekend I went to a march in downtown Phoenix—wearing a mask and keeping a discreet distance from my fellow marchers, of course—as well as to a smaller neighborhood demonstration near my house, at the Cactus Park Police Station. I’m proud to say The Kid went too, of her own volition, both downtown and right here in the neighborhood (at different days and times than I did). Everything that we witnessed was entirely peaceful. Here are a few images from the weekend:

PUNCHING BACK

Opening virtually this weekend...

Judy and Punch--The Australian writer and director Mirrah Foulkes had the inspired idea to do a Punch and Judy show with real people. But the reversed order of the names isn't accidental. Foulkes not only flips the title; she flips the script.

Mia Wasikowska (Tim Burton's Alice) is Judy, stuck in a provincial town in an indistinct Renaissance-ish past, married to the great but down on his luck puppeteer Mr. Punch, played by Damon Herriman. He's a drunken, short-fused brute, and while she tries to be supportive she's long since become the real behind-the-scenes talent in their performances. Eventually we get a grim, gory equivalent to most of the traditional show's classic episodes: The Baby, Toby and the sausages, Pretty Polly, The Constable, The Crocodile, the gibbet, even, in a sense, the Ghost and the Devil. But this time Judy doesn't settle for being a mere victim.

These puppet shows, which when well-performed can be entertaining in their grotesque energy, are part of a long tradition in Western entertainment making light of tyrannical domestic violence. You can trace a line from Punch beating Judy to Ralph Kramden threatening to send Alice to the moon; Ralph never followed through, of course, but his sense that he was entitled to do it was understood. Foulkes makes the inversion of this dynamic exhilarating, and her actors are terrific, especially Herriman's intelligent, self-pitying, reflexively self-justifying Punch.

Those especially sensitive to depictions of violence toward the helpless should be forewarned: there are real horrors and outrages here. There are also moments of Ren Faire-ish corniness, and toward the end there's a big didactic speech that lands with a thud, even if, like me, you agree with every word of its sentiments. But even with these sour notes, the movie is rousing and generous in spirit, and its point is taken: The joke behind the Punch and Judy tradition is no joke.

BODY SWAP

Available on demand, from Dark Star Pictures...

Pulse--Ollie (Daniel Monks), a gay teenager in Perth, Australia, has long been in love with his straight best friend Luke (Scott Lee). He undergoes a rather vaguely-explained experimental surgery that turns him, physically, into a gorgeous young woman, Olivia (Jaimee Peasley). Then he gets to learn about how much fun it is when guys desire you: Fumbling drunken sex; the walk of shame; half-intentional Machiavellian agendas among your friends; clashes with his single Mom (Caroline Brazier).

Stevie Cruz-Martin directed this intriguing, nominally sci-fi drama, from a script by Monks. The technique is unfussy naturalism. Most of the time we see Ollie as his own self-image, a frizzy-haired, toothy kid in a t-shirt; only when we see Olivia from an external point of view do we see the glamorous young woman.

What we get heavy doses of here, and what the movie is really about, is the terror and agony of negotiating sexual adolescence. There are sustained scenes of teens giggling nervously as they maneuver through awkward interactions, and sustained scenes of teens dancing and partying in blaring clubs. They're all completely believable, and your tolerance for them is likely to be roughly analogous to your tolerance for such scenes in real life.

Monks and his costars are vibrant, skillful actors, and the movie is quite fearless in exploiting the dramatic possibilities of the idea, from the heartbreaking to the lurid. If the movie has a message, it would seem to be that putting a teenage boy, regardless of orientation, in charge of a beautiful body is something like giving a toddler a machine gun.

VAST TIMES AND ROSS NOTES, HIGH

Opening virtually this weekend:

The Vast of Night--In a small New Mexico town one night in the mid-'50s, a teenage switchboard operator and the cocky young radio DJ with whom she's infatuated hear the same weird, unearthly sound coming through both of their boards. When they're contacted by a couple of listeners who claim to remember the sound, and narrate their backstory with it, things get weirder still.

This sci-fi flick, directed by Andrew Patterson from a script by James Montague and Craig W. Sanger, begins with the conceit that we're seeing an episode of Paradox Theatre, an earnest anthology series in the Twilight Zone manner. The filmmakers wisely don't try to maintain this throughout, but now and then they shift back to a grainy TV image for a few minutes, as if to remind us of the tradition they're working in.

The script is so talky, really, that it could probably be an effective radio play, yet the film is visually wondrous as well, with flashy editing and dazzling long tracking shots (accomplished by drones, I guess) that evoke an otherworldly flavor. Best of all is the acting; Sierra McCormick is extremely adorable as the sweet, bespectacled young heroine, loping through the streets of the town at the slightest, always decent, impulse. Jake Horowitz seems for all the world like he's doing his best junior-league Matthew McConaughey as the DJ, and it works well. Bruce Davis, in a voice-over performance, and the excellent Gail Cronauer cast a cumulative chill as the witnesses.

The film isn't quite a home-run; the resolution is somehow both a little too vague and a little too literal. But The Vast of Night is so rich and inventive that I feel ungrateful pointing this out. It's as if Robert Altman and Stephen Spielberg collaborated on a Twilight Zone, and it almost worked.

The High Note--Tracee Ellis Ross plays a superstar pop singer. She'd like to work on new material; her handlers, led by Ice Cube, want her play to it safe with a Vegas residency. Dakota Johnson plays her put-upon personal assistant, who of course is an aspiring music producer. Kelvin Harrison, Jr. is the inexplicably obscure young musical prodigy the assistant falls for, and would also like to produce.

Although I don't know if audiences will (or should) share my reasons, I liked this movie, one of the higher-profile releases so far to get exiled to streaming by the pandemic, precisely because it was an undemanding big-budget indulgence; a pop-music story without a lot of drug use or other torturous, tiresome self-destructive behavior on parade. Although Johnson is attractive and agreeable enough as the reckless heroine, the star performance is the charming, funny Tracee Ellis Ross; defiantly batty, mercurial and high-maintenance, but not a villain. Mostly thanks to Ross, The High Note stays on-key.

AIN'T LIFE GRANDMA

Another selection in the Steve Weiss "No Festival Required" virtual cinema...

Lucky Grandma--Grandma Wong's fortune teller pronounces that her luck looks uncommonly auspicious, and at first the prophecy seems true: She returns from a bus trip to a casino to her little apartment in New York's Chinatown with a bagful of cash. The trouble is, a local gang thinks the money belongs to them and sends goons to intimidate her. Grandma Wong hires a bodyguard, Big Pong, from a rival gang, but she's still in danger.

The title character here is played by Tsai Chin, best known to American audiences as a "Bond girl" in You Only Live Twice, though I tend to remember her as Lin Tang, daughter of Christopher Lee's Fu Manchu. Stripped of glamour in her mid-eighties, she has an exhilarating furiousness as the crabby, disappointed yet still determined Grandma, trudging the streets with a cigarette constantly dangling from her lips. It's one of those marvelous near-minimalist performances that elderly actors sometimes give, at the stage of their careers when they've finally internalized the idea that less is more: Tsai Chin gets more punch with a slight widening of her eyes or tightening of her frown than a younger actor would with ten times the emoting.

Aside from her formidable performance, and that of the mountainous Corey Ha as sweet, slow-moving Big Pong--he's amusingly contrasted with the tiny Tsai Chin as he follows her down the street--Lucky Grandma is a taut, snappily-edited noir, directed by Sasie Sealy from a script she wrote with Angela Cheng. It's funny but never quite farcical, with a sense of genuine peril and some touching, reflective moments toward the end. Also, Andrew Orkin's menacingly percussive, unhurried music is the best film score I've heard so far this year.

THIS MOVIE IS THE BOMB

On this date in 1989, Steve De Jarnatt’s film Miracle Mile opened. I saw it the following afternoon, at a shopping mall multiplex in Greenbelt, Maryland. I loved it, but because it potently dramatized certain morbid scenarios that have long haunted my imagination, I could never bring myself to see it again. Yet scenes and details from the film stayed in my memory through the decades, more vividly than many films I’ve seen multiple times.

Recently I was urged, by the director himself, that it was time to revisit the film, so I acquired the fine Kino Lorber Blu-ray. I hadn’t misremembered; it was at least as spellbinding this time as it was three decades ago.

For the uninitiated, Miracle Mile starts as a wistful meet-cute romance. Harry (Anthony Edwards), a trombone player passing through L.A. on a gig, meets Julie (Mare Winningham), a waitress who lives in Park La Brea, while they’re touring the Page Museum and gazing at the tarpits.

Whimsical circumstances make Harry oversleep for his big date with Julie; he shows up after three in the morning at the diner where she works, in the title neighborhood, but of course she’s long since gone home. He answers a ringing phone in the booth outside the diner, and on the other end of the line hears a frantic young soldier (voiced by Raphael Sbarge) in a missile silo, who claims he’s misdialed trying to reach his father to tell him: World War III is on, and the U.S. has a little over an hour before the missiles hit.

From there on, Miracle Mile is a headlong real-time nightmare, as poor Harry tries, first, to convince a bunch of strangers in the diner to take his story seriously, and then to find Julie and get her out of town. Even without the threat of nuclear devastation, things do not go smoothly.

Not only by bringing to woozily plausible-seeming life a threat that many of us spent the Reagan years fretting about, but also from Theo Van Sande’s queasy-yet-beautiful pastel/neon L.A.-hangover cinematography and the brooding score by Tangerine Dream, Miracle Mile seems very much an ‘80s movie. But it doesn’t seem dated; especially in our current weird times, the feeling of plausibility very distressingly remains.

I should also note that, while the movie is scary, it isn’t a downer. Edwards and Winningham are almost achingly lovable, and the supporting ensemble is tough to beat: Mykelti Williamson, Denise Crosby, Lou Hancock, John Agar, Robert DoQui, O-Lan Jones, Kurt Fuller, Alan Rosenberg, Danny de la Paz, Earl Boen, Brian Thompson, Claude Earl Jones, Howard Swain, Diane Delano and Edward Bunker, among others.

There’s a surprising amount of grim but hectic and effective comedy, and while De Jarnatt shows us horrifying rioting in the streets near the end, he persistently balances this jaundiced view of humanity with touches of human tenderness and integrity. Indeed, the overall sensibility with which De Jarnatt—who hasn't made another feature since, though he’s written and directed copious TV—imbues the film is warm and generous-hearted, and gallantly romantic.

One specimen of this romance may be found in the extensive and entertaining special features that come on the Kino Lorber disc: De Jarnatt’s alternate “happy” ending—two sweet extra seconds.