Roger Daltrey, the lead singer of The Who, opines that “the woke generation” is creating a “miserable world” for itself. He knows this hokey group is basically authoritarian, and by mentioning that “we’ve been through socialist governments” [which have flatly failed], Daltrey proves his awareness that the wokesters frequently smile on socialism.
Hooray for a great singer of great songs: “See Me Feel Me,” “Pinball Wizard,” “The Song Is Over.” And, of course, “Won’t Get Fooled Again” (apposite).
The family of 90-year-old Colette Marin-Catherine, including Colette herself, joined the French Resistance during the Nazi occupation. Her brother Jean-Pierre was sent to a German concentration camp where he died in 1945. In Anthony Giacchino‘s 24-minute documentary “Colette,” which I saw on YouTube, the haunted, usually unsmiling Colette, accompanied by a history student named Lucie Fouble, visits the defunct camp for the first time. Colette calls her brother “a man of steel,” and an intelligent one at that. The siblings’ mother averred that it was Colette, not Jean-Pierre, who should have died. The woman has never really gotten over this remark.
Colette and Lucie do not remain dry-eyed at the camp. Neither will the viewer. “Colette” is poignant. Not that it matters, but it won an Oscar for the best short doc of 2020. Here we see the sensitivity of two ordinary women in the face of malignant history.
(In French with English subtitles)
It is clear from his film, Dragged Across Concrete (2019), that writer-director S. Craig Zahler wants to bring urban realism back to cinema. A fictional city, Bulwark, is meant to be a typical significant American city with all its crime and tension. Bulwark might as well be today’s Minneapolis, and, in point of fact, a policeman played by Mel Gibson gets suspended from his job for doing something a bit similar to what Derek Chauvin did. He does it not to a black man but to a Mexican (there is no rioting), albeit black criminals are certainly here. White ones too.
All the while, the facts of life are conservative, not liberal. No one in the film is actually woke. The wife of Gibson’s Officer Ridgeman (Lauren Holden) fears she has become a racist. There is enough racist—and “racist”—language to make any liberal elite shed a pansy tear. And Jennifer Carpenter, as John Nolte describes, enacts “a professional woman desperate to be home with her baby, to be a full-time mother.”
Concrete is a fascinating movie, a disturbing caper tale. It is carefully shot with few closeups and contains cool, curious dialogue, even if Zahler’s writing seems slightly inauthentic in the film’s last fifteen minutes. Looking intimidating, Gibson is okay but in an easy part. Tory Kittles is in a harder one and succeeds memorably.
Cover of Barcelona
Staying temporarily in Barcelona, Spain are Fred (Chris Eigeman), an officer in the Navy, and his cousin Ted (Taylor Nichols), a committed salesman. Without intending to be, both are representatives of America, confronting myths about their home country floating around Barcelona at all times. Spaniards know nothing about the U.S., but Fred and Ted have youthful ignorance of their own; and, to be sure, their excursions in Whit Stillman’s 1994 film, Barcelona, are wonderfully engaging.
Fred drifts toward common hedonism (but is also capable of falling in love) before discovering what a bad deal hedonism is. Ted hankers for Protestant religious belief but fails to truly possess it. Neither phenomenon victimizes the player, however; it is violent anti-Americanism that victimizes Fred. He gets shot and no one knows if he will recover. There is some irony in the fact that the cousins ineluctably like the Barcelona women from the trade fair and pursue them. At last, as Stanley Kauffmann indicates, “almost everything is set to rights”: Fred and Ted find love, and they have survived anti-Americanism. Like Stillman’s other films, Barcelona focuses on implacable change, and although its plot is not always solid, it is a bright, incisive trip. And a tasteful and funny one.
A Henry King film, The Snows of Kilimanjiro (1952) serves up biographical content about Ernest Hemingway, here in the guise of a writer named Harry Street, and it’s pretty strong on the subject of loss. To be specific, there is the loss of an unborn baby and later of the woman (Ava Gardner) who carries the baby. Gardner’s Cynthia Green is Harry’s true love (their scenes together are usually pleasurable).
By and by, however, the film becomes perturbingly bad—tedious, in fact. To me, as played by Gregory Peck, Harry is not very interesting (just like Ava Gardner’s acting) or appealing. Kilimanjiro is serious, to be sure, but so is the Henry King-Gregory Peck production The Gunfighter, and it’s a gem.
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