September 2017 - Page 6 of 7 - Ramblin' with Roger

MOVIE REVIEW: The Glass Castle

Woody Harrelson is Rex, who is forever promising to design and build the titular structure.

Three or four years ago, someone recommended to my wife that she read The Glass Castle, a memoir by Jeanette Walls about her unconventional growing up with her two sister and a brother. So she was anxious to see the movie in which “a young girl comes of age in a dysfunctional family of nonconformist nomads with a mother who’s an eccentric artist and an alcoholic father who would stir the children’s imagination with hope as a distraction to their poverty.”

The good news is that, in all the story jumping back and forth in time, I always knew when we were in the narrative, even with three sets of children. Movie magic at its best. For instance, Jeanette was played by Chandler Head as the youngest iteration, the one who suffers a defining accident in the movie. My wife says that in the book, the child was even younger, three or four.

Then the growing up Jeanette, who ends up in the deep end of the pool, was played by Ella Anderson, who, heaven help me, I recognize from the Daughter watching the annoying show Henry Danger. Both the younger iterations were quite good.

Jeanette as an adult was played by Brie Larson, who was so good in the movie Room that she won an Oscar. Here she plays one note for a long time, a fairly blank facial expression. I suppose she’s supposed to be showing how closed off she’s become by her upbringing. But it isn’t until an arm wrestling match between her fiance David (Max Greenfield) and her father (Woody Harrelson) that she shows much emotion at all.

Harrelson as Rex, who is forever promising to design and build the titular structure, is very good as an maddeningly intelligent dreamer, whose views on the economic system are not entirely wrong. (You see the REAL Rex at the end of the film.) Naomi Watts as the mom, Rose Mary, has less to do, but is fine.

I guess the problem is the disjointed storytelling made me feel that 127 minutes. Perhaps if with a different linear flow, and some judicious editing, it worked better for me and the critics.

But The Wife and The Daughter evidently enjoyed The Glass Castle more than I.

I is for I Was a Communist for the F.B.I.

It was a film so important to the Hollywood film collective that “it was nominated for the 1952 Academy Awards in the Best Documentary Feature category

The movie I Was A Communist for the F.B.I., it seems, was on television a LOT when I was a kid. And I’d usually watched it.

We only had two TV stations. One was the CBS affiliate, Channel 12, WNBF-TV at the time, which also carried some ABC shows. The other was the NBC affiliate, Channel 40, WINR-TV. And one or both of them would play this 1951 melodrama regularly, to fill their weekend afternoon programming.

From the Wikipedia:

“The story follows [Pittsburgh steelworker Matt] Cvetic, who infiltrated a local Communist Party cell for nine years and reported back to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on their activities.

“The film and [1952-1953] radio show are, in part, artifacts of the McCarthy era, as well as a time capsule of American society during the Second Red Scare. The purpose of both is partly to warn people about the threat of Communist subversion of American society. The tone of the show is ultra-patriotic…”

From Rotten Tomatoes:

“The real Matt Cvetic was a borderline alcoholic with a nasty disposition (he once allegedly beat his sister-in-law so badly she required hospitalization). But Cvetic was also a fervent anti-communist, and so, for a brief period in the early 1950s, he was a folk hero. I Was a Communist for the F.B.I. is the semi-true story of how Cvetic (played by Frank Lovejoy) renounced his friends and family and embraced the Red cause–on behalf of the F.B.I., for whom he was a volunteer undercover agent.”

It was a film so important to the Hollywood film collective that “it was nominated for the 1952 Academy Awards in the Best Documentary Feature category, though it’s about as much a documentary as On the Waterfront.” It rightly lost to Kon-Tiki.

Oddly, I think the movie had the opposite effect on me than it was supposed to. I haven’t watched it again. But YOU can here.

For ABC Wednesday.

We work hard for the money

What that effectively did was encourage CEOs to keep more money in their businesses — to invest in new technology — to pay their workers more — to hire new workers and expand their companies.

A friend of mine sent me the text of Whatever Happened to the Leisure Society? – by Thom Hartmann.

In a 1966 article, TIME Magazine looked ahead toward the future, and what the rise of automation would mean for average Americans. It concluded:

“By 2000, the machines will be producing so much that everyone in the U.S. will, in effect, be independently wealthy. With Government benefits, even nonworking families will have, by one estimate, an annual income of $30,000-$40,000.”

Now, that was in 1966 dollars, it would be over $120,000 a year now…

So by the year 2000, TIME predicted in 1966, we would enter what was referred to as “The Leisure Society.” The only problems facing America would be, just how the heck everyone would use all that extra leisure time! What kind of things would people get into when a nation has lots of money and lots of free time on their hands? And as we know today, we WISH that was our biggest problem.

Turns out, predictions about the leisure society were dead wrong. Productivity DID increase significantly during the 1960s. This actually starts from 1947 up to 2000, mostly thanks to automation and better technology.

Unfortunately, productivity increased, but wages didn’t. And neither did leisure time.

In 1966, when the TIME article was written, the top income tax rate was 70%.

And what that effectively did was encourage CEOs to keep more money in their businesses — to invest in new technology — to pay their workers more — to hire new workers and expand their companies.

After all, what’s the point of sucking millions and millions of dollars out of your business if it’s going to be taxed at 70%?

Thinking that way — if suddenly businesses became WAY more profitable and efficient thanks to automation — then that money would flow throughout the business, raising everyone’s standard of living, and increasing everyone’s leisure time.

But when Reagan dropped that top tax rate down to 28%, and everything changed…

Now, as businesses became more profitable, there was far more incentive for the CEOs and senior executives to pull those profits out of the company and pocket them, because suddenly they were paying an incredibly low tax rate. And that’s exactly what they did.

All those new profits thanks to automation that were SUPPOSED to go to everyone, giving us all higher paychecks and more time off, went just to the top 1%, to just about 345,000 millionaires.

Everyone else’s wealth has pretty much stagnated since the Reagan tax cuts, except for the top 1%.

HAPPY LABOR DAY.

Inventing America: Rockwell and Warhol

Warhol was a poor coal miner’s son from Pittsburgh

The notion that the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, MA was going to have an exhibition comparing Rockwell with pop art icon Andy Warhol may have sounded strange to many people. When I bought the catalog for the exhibition – and I almost NEVER do that! – even the saleswoman in the gift shop had thought it didn’t seem obvious. Yet we agreed that, somehow, it really worked.

Both artists were cultural icons who worked a great deal in commercial art. Some of their subject matter – Jackie Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Judy Garland, for example. Warhol owned at least a couple pieces of Rockwell art, including her Jackie piece and the Christmas piece Extra Good Girls and Boys.

They were both considered apolitical, yet there were partisan glimmers in some of their works. It was clear that Norman had some influence on Andy; see the Razor’s edge picture of Tyrone Power by Rockwell (left) compared with the male fashion model by Warhol (right).

They were both city kids. Rockwell grew up in Manhattan’s West Side, which he did not enjoy, preferring instead his summers on Long Island or upstate New York. Warhol was a poor coal miner’s son from Pittsburgh; his parents recognized that the youngest of three sons had talent and scraped to send him to art school. Eventually, he found his way TO New York City, where he thrived on the Upper East Side, living with his mother for the last two decades of her life.

Of course, they did have their differences. Rockwell was a generation older, e.g. But they were both misunderstood. Rockwell was supposedly doing treacle, Warhol simplistic items such as soup cans, when both their bodies of work were far more complex.
The third artist represented in the exhibit is James Warhola, Andy’s nephew, son of Andy’s brother Paul; the family kept the final A. He has done everything from paperback book covers for science fiction books of Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke to Garbage Pail Kids cards (asked to do so by Art Spiegelman of MAUS fame) to MAD magazine.

He was also a devotee of Rockwell, but of course was affected by Uncle Andy. In fact, Paul and his family would surprise Andy with their visits to New York, when James and his brother would end up stretching canvases.

The show continues through October 29. It is HIGHLY recommended!

Musical throwback: the Kingston Trio

Worried Man was a song in the repertoire of the late Les Green, and the Green Family Singers

Dustbury reported: “There’s a dispute now over which of two competing musical groups is the actual Kingston Trio.” This is not that unusual for a group of its vintage.

The group was formed in San Francisco in the late 1950s with Dave Guard (d. 1991), Bob Shane and Nick Reynolds (d. 2008). Guard left in 1961, and was replaced by John Stewart (d. 2008). They disbanded in 1968, but Shane started a New Kingston Trio, and after that it gets murky to me.

I had forgotten how massively successful the Kingston Trio was, especially early on. They had only #1 single, but six of their first seven albums went to #1, and the other went to #2.

The eponymous first album (1958), which contained the big hit Tom Dooley, as #1 for only a week. But it was in the Top 40 for 114 weeks, and the Top 200 for 195 weeks.

From the hungry i (1959) , which is a nightclub in San Francisco, “only” went to #2, but was Top 40 for 47 weeks, and Top 200 for 178 weeks

The Kingston Trio at Large (1959) was #1 for an amazing 15 weeks, in the Top 40 for 43 weeks, and in the Top 200 for 118 weeks. It won the Grammy for best folk album.

Here We Go Again (1959) was #1 for eight weeks, spent 40 weeks in the Top 40, and 126 weeks in the Top 200.

Sold Out (1960) hit #1 for 12 weeks, residing in the Top 40 for 42 weeks and in the Top 200 for 73 weeks.

String Along (1960) was their last #1 album, hanging there for 10 weeks, 27 weeks in the Top 40 and 60 weeks in the Top 200.

After two albums that reached the lower half of Top 20, the Kingston Trio had one album, Make Way! (1961) hit #2, three albums hit #3, one hit #4, and three albums, including The Best of the Kingston Trio (1962), hit #7 in the period 1961 to 1963.

The first six albums and the Best of all sold over a half million copies each.

Listen to:

Tom Dooley, #1 in 1958 HERE or HERE
The Tijuana Jail, #12 in 1959 HERE or HERE
M.T.A., #15 in 1959 HERE or HERE
Worried Man*, #20 in 1959 HERE or HERE

*This was a song in the repertoire of the late Les Green, and the Green Family Singers