ESCHER THING

This week "No Festival Required" offers, along with the 1976 Texas music documentary Heartworn Highways...

M. C. Escher: Journey to Infinity--Robin Lutz directed this deft and speedy documentary portrait of the Dutch woodcut and print artist famed for repeated symmetrical patterns; birds and lizards taking shape in the spaces between other birds and lizards; gravity-defying, dimension-bending stairways; hands drawing the hands that are drawing them and the like. It traces his life, from art school in Delft and Haarlem to artistic awakening in Italy until Mussolini drove him to Switzerland and then Belgium, where the Nazis made him uncomfortable and ultimately drove him back to the Netherlands.

There are a few talking heads: Escher's own (now elderly) kids, and Graham Nash, who's a big fan. But the focus is less on his life than on the evolution of his art, although Escher claimed he was less an artist than a mathematician. Many of us would be inclined to disagree; his style is impeccably lovely, and his visions are playful and beguiling at the same time they carry unsettling perceptual resonances. He is perhaps vulnerable to the charge of gimmickry; this may be why serious critical appraisal was slow to come, despite (or because of) his work's worldwide popularity.

But it would be hard to suppose, based on Escher's diaries and other writings from which the narration of this film is taken, that he was a crass huckster. Indeed, he seems perplexed and a bit pained by the enthusiasm of hippies and rock stars for his pictures. This narration, spoken with Cleese-worthy buoyancy and a touch of comic pomposity by Stephen Fry, is one of the movie's best assets; it's the perfect seasoning to the feast of Escher's images.

LAST FRIGHTS

Another spooky one, available today on Prime:

The Funeral Home (La Funeraria)--This Argentine chiller takes place entirely in and around the cheerless title establishment. It unfolds through long tracking shots that prowl the rooms and grounds to the accompaniment of screeching, groaning music, and I can't deny that it worked my nerves and creeped me out.

But the movie is more than cheap scares. It's a well-constructed, very well acted supernatural analogy for how a family can carry on in a home despite the presence of extreme dysfunction. Bernardo (Luis Machin), the funeral director, lives in the back of the home with his wife Estela (Celeste Gerez) and her teenage daughter Irina (Camila Vaccarini) from an earlier, abusive marriage. There's plenty of domestic tension in the house anyway, but it's compounded by the fact that the family is well aware of the ghostly, even demonic presences in the house, and the adults have chosen to simply tolerate them. Irina isn't OK with this, understandably; she wants to move in with the abusive father's mother. Just as understandably, Estela isn't OK with this.

The acting is top-notch. Better yet, though the tale has a psychological subtext, writer-director Mauro Ivan Ojeda keeps the film fun-scary instead of depressing-scary by playing rigorously by the hokey rules of the ghost story; Ojeda even manages a touching flourish in the final minutes without lapsing into sentimentality, or losing the sinister atmosphere. This movie is literal-minded in the best way.

MAUD FORSAKEN

In Valley theaters this weekend; on Epix starting February 12:

Saint Maud--The title character is a young in-home nurse assigned to care for Amanda, a terminally ill choreographer and dancer, in a mansion overlooking a bleak British seaside town. Maud is a devout Catholic, recently converted after a tragedy. She's pretty sure that God has plans for her bigger than nursing drudgery, and finally it hits her: she's meant to save the soul of the worldly, terrified Amanda.

What ensues in this devotional shocker written and directed by Rose Glass, along with clashes between Maud and Amanda and her circle, are unbidden, overwhelming and apparently orgasmic spiritual ecstasies, terrifying and exalted visions, and self-harm and mortification of the flesh. It's like a Hammer film directed by Bergman or Dreyer, with more than a dash of Ken Russell. How much of what we see is Maud's tortured psychology and how much is truly supernatural is left ambiguous. The overall effect is potently horrific and sad, yet also startlingly, joltingly erotic at times.

Much of the movie's power derives from the Welsh actress Morfydd Clark, who plays Maud. She avoids an obvious pitfall--playing her as a wide-eyed, rapturous innocent--and gives Maud a businesslike edge, but with touches of gnawing uncertainty at her mission, and a heartbreaking underlying sense of despair. She's superb, and Jennifer Ehle, as Amanda, monstrously inconvenienced by her illness but keen-eyed for any diversion, is no slouch. These performances are heavenly.

HANK AND LARRY

While visiting my sister in Atlanta in the summer of 1973, I got to see Hank Aaron play, before he broke the record.

He didn't hit a homer that day, but he did get two hits, and the Braves beat the Cards. It was “bat day” at Fulton County Stadium, and the bat I got that day was my baseball bat thereafter; the Hank Aaron pennant I got that day was on the wall of my room for many years thereafter. More than a decade later my father met Aaron on an airplane and got his autograph for me. Except for Muhammad Ali, who I loved for his humor rather than any interest in boxing, Aaron was the first of my few sports heroes. RIP Hammerin’ Hank.

Another legend has departed us this weekend: RIP to radio and TV titan Larry King, at 87.

In 1984 and '85, I ran the overnight board at WSEG, Ron Seggi's long-since-departed station in Erie; I hosted and played oldies for the first hour, then babysat the feed of Larry King's talk show from the Mutual Network for the rest of the night. In those days, King had regular eccentric callers, like Norman the Numbers Man from Paramus, New Jersey, who insisted that sports scores showed his divinity via his obsessive numbers-crunching and would invariably end by exploding with anger at King's attempts to reason with him (Norman probably needed professional help), or the Portland Laugher, who never said anything but would simply cackle maniacally at anything King would ask him. For all King's accomplishments on TV, nothing he ever did there was as marvelous as this radio work.

Anyway, one night, at the height of the Reagan-era Cold War, I called in to the show.

As many of you know, I've always been a dinosaur geek (it's only one of my many geekdoms, but it's the earliest). Earlier that day I had been discussing with my friend Ron which dinosaur was more well-known, the T-Rex or the Brontosaurus. So that night, bored and restless at the studio, I called into King's show, got on the air, and asked "Larry, what do you think is the most famous dinosaur?"

And without missing a beat, Larry King said "The brontosaurus, or the Defense Department."

WHY YOU ALWAYS LION?

Hope everybody had a great Inauguration Day.

On Inauguration Eve, Donald Trump, Jr. posted this comparison between incoming President Joe Biden and Scar, the villain of Disney's The Lion King, on Instagram:

I'd like to set aside the obvious silliness--that Biden "cheated to win"--and ask Junior a different question: Who, in this "analogy," are the hyenas?

Back in 1994, when I reviewed The Lion King for Phoenix New Times, the 32-year-old pedantic ass I was spent interminable paragraphs trying to show off my supposed great Shakespearean acumen by tediously noting all the allusions to the Bard in this and other Disney animated flicks of the period. I didn't get to what should have been the point of the review until the last couple of graphs, and even there I let the movie off too lightly for it.

Specifically, I should have given more emphasis to how hard it is to escape the interpretation of The Lion King as an allegory (probably unintentional) in support of racial--or, at the very least, nationalistic and aristocratic--purity. Much was made at the time that this was the first truly original Disney film; that it wasn't based on some fairy tale or novel or other such source. Yet what they came up with was, as in the Star Wars flicks, one more tired-ass tale of a prince destined to rule as a birthright.

Even back then, though, what I found still more disturbing was the matter of the hyenas.

The usurper Scar invites the hyenas to integrate the lion pride, a sure sign of his wickedness. Two of them have overtly "ethnic" characterizations, voiced by Whoopi Goldberg and Cheech Marin. A third, performed by veteran voice actor Jim Cummings, appears to have some sort of disability. It's this diversity that wrecks the integrity of the pride under Scar. The filmmakers seemed to be uncomfortable with this implication themselves, since toward the end there's a heavy-handed shot of the hyenas goose-stepping. This touch now seems like a classic reflexive right-wing projection, a meme tactic, like putting a Hitler mustache on a picture of Obama.

I closed my review back in '94 with the observation that "...if The Lion King weren't so obviously good-hearted...it might have seemed like the jackboots had been placed on the wrong paws." I can remember people I knew back then rolling their eyes at this mild suggestion as being overthought and tiresomely "politically correct" of me. But the 58-year-old pedantic ass I've grown into now wonders if I didn't take this insanely popular movie too little to task.

So, again, I'd like to ask Don Jr., who would have been about 16 years old when The Lion King came out: Who, in your view, are the hyenas?

Also, does this mean you see yourself as Simba, destined to rule after throwing Biden off a cliff?

AW, NUTS

Word has reached Your Humble Narrator, from across the continent in my beloved home town of Erie, Pennsylvania, that The Peanut Shoppe, longtime fixture on the southeast corner of 10th and State Street, closed last week. A day or two later came the news that proprietress Anna Linebach, known throughout town simply as "The Peanut Lady," had passed on, at 89.

This one hurts. I've loved that magical place since I was a small child, and my Mom bought me a green plastic Mr. Peanut bank there, which lived for many years in my room and forever in my heart...

It was the street-level corner store of the 14-story G. Daniel Baldwin Building...

...Erie's tallest skyscraper (it's now called "Renaissance Centre"). Ms. Linebach was a crusty Austrian, given to griping about the weather, an ongoing challenge for her since her best marketing tool was leaving her door open and letting the smell of roasting nuts waft out onto the sidewalk and lure in hapless passersby. I was often one of them. My friend also used to buy raw peanuts there for his parrot.

In my college years I would walk over to buy tubs of cashew butter, which Ms. Linebach would grind herself, nodding at me approvingly and saying, in her German accent, "Dot meggs a noise zaandwich [that makes a nice sandwich]."

A few years ago my brother, knowing my fondness for the place, sent me this t-shirt...

I'm wearing it today, in Ms. Linebach's memory. RIP Peanut Lady.

EAT ADVISORY

The January/February issue of Phoenix Magazine...

...now on the stands around the Valley, is dubbed "The Food Love Issue," and the cover story promises "101 Reasons to Get Psyched About Valley Dining." Your Humble Narrator had the honor to be one of the seven authors of the story; thirteen of those reasons were written by me. See if you can guess which ones!