review Archives - Page 48 of 60 - Ramblin' with Roger

Movie Review: He Named Me Malala

In 2014, Malala Yousafzai and Kailash Satyarthi were awarded as Nobel Peace Prize laureates for “their struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education” At the age of 17, Malala became the youngest person to ever win a Nobel Prize.

Malala is therefore an appropriate choice for a documentary movie. The Daughter has been reading her autobiography, I Am Malala, upon which the film was based. The family plus The Daughter’s friend N went to the Spectrum in Albany to see He Named Me Malala.

It is a very nonlinear film, with some of the history, including the source of the protagonist’s first name, depicted in a very engaging animation style. We find that Malala is human, struggling with her studies in England, picking on her little brother, fascinated with Roger Federer’s hair. Yet she’s such an impressive person, feeling no antipathy for the Taliban man who shot, and nearly killed her.

The “he” in the title is Malala’s father, Ziauddin Yousafzai, who was a bit of a rabble-rouser in favor of education for girls himself. He describes his relationship with his daughter as them being two parts of the same persona.

The movie was produced and directed by Davis Guggenheim, who put out An Inconvenient Truth(2006) and Waiting for ‘Superman’ (2010). The Malala movie was less well-received, by both audiences and critics, perhaps because, I’ve read, the family tried to keep some privacy for a very public figure. And, since she’s still known to be alive, and a Nobel winner, there was not as much suspense as to the outcome.

I’d agree with the criticism that the film is more educational than engrossing. But it’s mighty educational, though I wish it were more so. This is an especially useful film for those less familiar with her story and is worthy on that level.

MOVIE REVIEW: She’s Funny That Way

The working title of the film She’s Funny That Way was Squirrels to the Nuts.

The imperative for going to the movies was that The Daughter’s favorite ~~babysitter~~child watcher would soon be going away to college, in Ohio. The Wife suggested that we see She’s Funny That Way. I had never heard of it, knew nothing about it.

We’re sitting in a none-too-crowded room at the Spectrum Theatre waiting for the story to develop, involving this guy Arnold (Owen Wilson) arranging for a call girl, Isabella (a UK actress named Imogen Poots), but then makes her a different type of proposition that can get out of “the life,” and onto the path of what she wants to be, which is an actress.

At some point, these two women in the theater start laughing hysterically, and we’re not “getting” it. It turns out that an actor one of them knows, Austin Pendleton, is playing Judge Pendergast, who had previously had been with Isabella, and is distraught when her former madame (Debi Mazar as Vickie) tells him that Isabella has retired. Apparently, Pendleton is playing against type.

Soon enough, though, The Wife and I start laughing, occasionally vigorously. I’ve seen the film described as a screwball comedy, which I suppose it is, but it also reminded me of one of those Shakespeare comedies of coincidence, where Arnold is producing a play, which features his wife, Delta (Kathryn Hahn), and an aging Lothario who may have slept with Delta (Seth, Rhys Ifans), and the playwright (Joshua, Wil Forte) falls for the auditioning actress playing a hooker, the aforementioned Isabella.

The working title of the film was Squirrels to the Nuts, a line referenced a few times in the movie, which came from a 1946 comedy Cluny Brown, starring Charles Boyer and Jennifer Jones.

I kept thinking this felt like a Woody Allen pic, in part because of Wilson, who I last saw in Woody’s Midnight in Paris. But in fact, the story was directed and co-written by Peter Bogdanovich. The movie even had small roles for Bogdanovich alums Cybill Shepherd as Isabella’s mom, and Tatum O’Neal as a waitress.

Jennifer Aniston was particularly strong as Jane, who seems to be the shrink for many of them, and quite terrible at it. Someone pointed out a possible goof: “When Jane lets the German Shepherd, Shep, into a taxi, she says, ‘Good girl.’ Later she refers to him as a male: ‘Come on, boy.'” But Jane’s character was so self-absorbed that I wouldn’t doubt she didn’t KNOW the gender of her own canine.

The weakest link, unfortunately, was Poots, as the lead. Among other things, her Noo Yawk, or more specifically, Brooklyn accent was terrible. But the cast surrounding her, which also included Richard Lewis as her father, and Illeana Douglas as the bored reporter, were fine.

I had a debate with my wife whether Rhys Ifans could be a convincing sex symbol, to which I said, “Mick Jagger.” That was a convincing point, she acknowledged.

It’s not a great film, but there are hilarious moments. So I give it a mild thumbs up.

Thoughts on the book Marriage: Voices from a Forty-Year Labor of Love by Matt Baume

“On February 27, 2004, Mayor Jason West married 25 same-sex couples before a cheering crowd in front of the New Paltz Village Hall.”

Arthur introduced me, electronically speaking, to Matt Baume, whose regular Marriage News Watch video he often linked to. Now Baume has written a “book based on his experiences in the fight for marriage equality in the USA.”

I should note that I was able to download it for free during the promotional week. Also, I HATE reading on my Android device, or on the computer; it’s just not my thing. That said, the book does have the “easy-to-read, breezy style” Arthur promised, and I learned a lot.

What I really wanted to write about, though, was my own evolution about same-sex couples getting married, based on the confirmation Baume provided, and, to a lesser extent, Arthur’s observations about a question I asked him.

If someone had asked me in 1990 whether gay people should be able to get married, my answer would have been, “Wha?” While there had been couples who had attempted matrimony even 15 years earlier, as explained by Baume, none of the gay people I knew had ever mentioned it.

Then I started hearing about a case out in Hawaii, where, in 1993, “the court ruled that while the right to privacy in the Hawaii state constitution does not include a fundamental right to same-sex marriage, denying marriage to same-sex couples constituted discrimination based on sex in violation of the right to equal protection guaranteed by the state’s constitution.” And that got me to start thinking about the issue seriously for the first time.

By then, though, some, probably most, of my gay friends noted that they OPPOSED the idea of marriage, much in the same way Baume describes the attitudes of some of his friends and allies. They believed marriage was a heterosexist hegemony that was not consistent with their lives.

And though they didn’t say so at the time, it would have required them to be “out” as a gay couple. And not just out to their friends and family, but OUT out to the whole society when that was considered risky in terms of employment, child custody, and even personal safety. Since there seemed to be no consensus on the issue, either in my circle or, as far as I could tell, nationally, I let the issue go.

Then Bill Clinton was elected, and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell in December 1993, which, while prohibiting “military personnel from discriminating against or harassing closeted homosexual or bisexual service members or applicants,” barred “openly gay, lesbian, or bisexual persons from military service.” For me, it was the worst of both worlds, DIRECTING people to live a lie, and I did not like it at all. It was finally repealed in 2011.

Worse, the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) (Pub.L. 104–199) was passed in September 1996, “defining marriage for federal purposes as the union of one man and one woman.” Even though no one I knew was clamoring for same-sex unions, this seemed preemptively bigoted and more than vaguely unconstitutional.

Around this time, or somewhat thereafter, there were laws passed around the country allowing for “domestic partnerships” or “civil unions.” There was a certain logic to this. Marriage, or this marriage-lite variation, as some derisively put it, may deal with issues of who’s covered under someone else’s insurance, who could visit someone in the ICU of a hospital, inheritance taxes, and the like.

There was a strategy in terms of letting other people see gay couples as “marriageish” pairs, something Baume touched on. Still, I didn’t much take to it, though I surely understood it. If I had been in that situation, I might well have opted to use the provision, which tended to vary by jurisdiction, but it seemed to be weak tea.

(It also likely generated my disdain for the term “partner” for romantic relations, a term this business librarian usually used for entrepreneurial relations.)

The year 2004 proved to be pivotal in my thinking. Baume mentions Gavin Newsom, who was mayor of San Francisco, who “gained national attention when he directed the San Francisco city–county clerk to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, in violation of the state law passed in 2000…The…weddings took place between February 12 and March 11, 2004.”

Much closer to home, I was surprised, and impressed, and delighted, and thought that he was crazy when the mayor of New Paltz, NY, my college town, did essentially the same thing.

On February 27, 2004, Mayor Jason West married 25 same-sex couples before a cheering crowd in front of the New Paltz Village Hall. Not long thereafter, the Ulster County District Attorney charged West with nineteen misdemeanors in connection with these marriages. A court later dismissed the charges against West, a ruling which the state appealed. [A judge reinstated] the charges against West, arguing that this criminal case did not concern whether the state constitution mandates same-sex marriage, but rather whether West violated his oath of office in performing illegal marriages… These were dropped by the prosecutor on July 12…A state court judge issued a permanent injunction barring West from solemnizing same-sex marriages.

Then “same-sex marriages began in Massachusetts on May 17, 2004, as a result of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) ruling in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health that it was unconstitutional under the Massachusetts constitution to allow only opposite-sex couples to marry.” This convergence of events moved the needle for me in terms of my support for marriage equality, not that it SHOULD happen, which I guess I had decided pretty much as a direct result of seeing the effect of DOMA, but that it COULD.

A bill supporting same-sex marriage in the New York State legislature failed in 2009, as reported by Baume, I felt a tad sad, but unsurprised by the Republican state senate. But I was watching the state legislative proceedings, on live television, when marriage equality was approved by the NYS legislature in June 2011, and I engaged in an unusual bit of fist-pumping, which I hadn’t done since Super Bowl XLII, when the New York Giants beat the previously unbeaten New England Patriots back in February 2008.

When Section 3 of DOMA was declared unconstitutional, it seemed correct, based less on the rightness of the broader same-sex marriage issue than on the unequal protection of the law that Edith Windsor was experiencing. She was slammed with hundreds of thousands of dollars in estate tax, whereas, if she had been married to a man who had died, she would have owed NOTHING.

The complete death of DOMA in 2015 seemed to me to be the only reasonable conclusion, lest the nation suffer a patchwork quilt of competing laws, where someone could visit their hospitalized spouse in state A but not in state B. I thought that was becoming a totally unworkable system. Maybe I was less excited by that ruling than other milestones because it just made sense, and the converse did not.

Anyway, there you have some musings based on Matt Baume’s useful book.

DVD review: I Am Big Bird

Caroll Spinney’s first performance before legendary Muppets master Jim Henson was disastrous.

There was a Kickstarter campaign to make a movie about a guy named Caroll Spinney back in July of 2012, which successfully raised $124,115 USD from 1,976 backers.

Who’s Caroll Spinney? Why, he’s the guy who, for over 40 years, has played the iconic character on the children’s television show Sesame Street named… Oscar the Grouch. Well, yes, he does, but he also occupies the costume of an internationally-known, eight-foot-tall, yellow avian creature.

The movie I Am Big Bird garnered some success at film festivals, so it wasn’t until a couple of months ago that I had a chance to see it digitally (and, because I was too busy, I didn’t). Finally, this yellow envelope arrived in the mail in early August, and I got to watch the film.

I’m oddly fascinated by negative reviews of movies I like. Though it got 84% positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes (53 out of 63), those who were less enthusiastic suggested that it was a puff piece with “little sour to temper the sweetness of this portrait.” One critic thought the tension between Spinney and a Sesame Street director was contrived, even though Emilio Delgado (Luis on Sesame Street) and Bob McGrath (Bob) confirmed the conflict onscreen.

Those critics must have missed the part about his painful growing up with his father’s hair-trigger temper that he seemed to find ways of bringing out. This was mitigated by his mother’s introduction of puppet shows, but his “dolls” became a source of bullying by some of his classmates. His first performance before legendary Muppets master Jim Henson was disastrous. His early days on Sesame Street, aggravated by his failing marriage, were so bad he considered quitting the job, or worse.

When I was in college, I used to watch Sesame Street (the show didn’t start until I was in high school), and few things on television have made me more verklempt than when the human cast explained to Big Bird that Mr. Hooper, the shopkeeper on Sesame Street, had died, a programming decision based on the death of his portrayer, Will Lee. Seeing it again brought back that sentiment.

There were other less upbeat aspects, including Spinney’s loner status, Jim Henson’s funeral, and the Challenger disaster. There’s this story. And the movie told of the physical wear of being Big Bird, as well as the Bird being supplanted on Sesame Street by the Muppet Elmo.

Yet maybe the critics didn’t find enough drama because Caroll Spinney is a great guy. The story of how he met his second wife, Deb, is absolutely charming. His now-adult kids adore him, his coworkers are touched by his continued sense of wonder.

You should check out I Am Big Bird: The Caroll Spinney Story. If it lacks a sufficiently dramatic narrative arc, it is nevertheless a loving portrait of an interesting man.

MOVIE REVIEW: Trainwreck

I wonder what Amy Schumer’s cousin, U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) thought about the movie Trainwreck?

There’s a TV show on Comedy Central called Inside Amy Schumer. I’ve never seen it, but it is described as “straight from [her] provocative and hilariously wicked mind,” exploring sex and relationships.

So the language and sexuality was not a shock to my system when The Wife and I saw Trainwreck, written by and starring Schumer as a thirtysomething named Amy, who learned early on, from her father Gordon (Colin Quinn), to eschew romantic commitment; so she is either sex-positive or slutty, depending how one views these things.

She can be snarky about the marriage of her younger sister Kim (Brie Larson) to Tom (Mike Birbiglia), which meant instant family, with Tom’s son Allister (Evan Brinkman).

Amy is a magazine writer for a publication trying too hard to be cutting edge. She is assigned by her editor Brianna (Tilda Swinton, ever the chameleon) to write about a successful sports doctor named Aaron (Bill Hader), who hangs out with his patients, such as basketball player LeBron James (well played by LeBron James). Aaron has the audacity to ask her for a second date, and the tensions ensue.

Despite its explicit nature early on, at the heart of this film is a rom com, though, in the traditional roles, Amy’s the guy. That is not a putdown, only a description, as many of the mostly positive reviews suggested. Plus there are some interesting family dynamics; Amy’s dad was the original trainwreck. The movie’s a tad long, for which I blame director Judd Apatow, and it’s more than a bit sappy at the end.

I liked it when The Wife and I saw it at The Spectrum Theatre a couple of weeks ago. She was unsure early on whether she’d like it, but it turned out to be a winner for her too.

Amy and her father’s cousin, U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY), have teamed up to fight for gun control following a mass shooting at a screening of the movie in Louisiana.