The Socratic Method

I have been waiting eleven years for a follow-up to Walkin' the Dog, the second of Walter Mosley's profound and moving Socrates Fortlow short story collections. I devoured Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned in 1997 and voraciously consumed Dog in 1999. I am such a fan of Mosley's Fortlow novels that I find it incomprehensible that I missed the publication of The Right Mistake: the Further Philosophical Investigations of Socrates Fortlow (2008). And, yet, somehow I did. In a remarkably serendipitous "recommendations" e-mail from Amazon.com (received in the summer of 2010) I was advised of a hardcover edition of Mistake at a bargain price ($8.74) - less than both the paperback and e-book editions.

Some things are meant to be. Two years ago I may not have been in the proper frame of mind to fully appreciate the delicious irony and profound wisdom of something, anything, being the "right mistake." Today finds me not only in the right frame of mind but primed and ready to receive Fortlow's sad, savvy and always deeply human further investigations.

It is also somewhat fitting that I come into possession of the third book of the Fortlow trilogy in the fiftieth anniversary year of the publication of Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird. Atticus Finch (played in the movie of the same name by Gregory Peck) is To Kill a Mockingbird's most upright character, representing the moral ideal of both a lawyer and a human being: he is brutally honest, highly moral, extremely opinionated, a tireless crusader for good causes (even hopeless ones), a virtual pacifist and, for the most part, devoid of any of the racial or class prejudices afflicting the other citizens of fictional Maycomb, Alabama.

Finch goes to great pains to instruct his children on the importance of being open-minded, judicious, generous neighbors and citizens. He is eventually revealed to be an expert marksman, but he had chosen to keep this fact hidden from his children so that they would not in any way think of him as a man of violence. He was once the best shot in Maycomb County, but quit shooting because he felt he had an unfair advantage.

Now, Socrates Fortlow is everything Atticus Finch is - brutally honest, highly moral, extremely opinionated, a tireless crusader for good causes - and he is everything Finch is not. While Finch is better than his peers, a lawyer, a state representative, a loving father, Fortlow is the worst of us - a double murderer and a rapist. While Finch has been re-elected to the state legislature many times, often without opposition, Fortlow has spent twenty-seven years doing hard time for the crimes he committed. Finch is our highest ideal; Fortlow is nothing nice.

This is what makes Fortlow the greater literary creation.

When we first meet Fortlow in Outnumbered he is living in negative space, in a hallway between two burnt out furniture stores. His kitchen is "only big enough for a man and a half" and the second room, where he sat and slept, was no bigger. He has a card table for dining and a fold-up plastic chair for a seat. He cooked all his meals on a single hotplate and drank his beverages, mostly water, out of mayonnaise jars.

Fortlow is a man living off the grid. He is literally a man who has nothing and no one. But, from the opening pages of Outnumbered to the last pages of Mistake Fortlow does what he do - teaching life lessons, doing favors small and large, and gaining grace from his noble, selfless actions.

From the depths of depravity, Fortlow becomes the eminence grise of his South Central Los Angeles neighborhood - a journey movingly and memorably examined in The Right Mistake.

~rave!

El Sargento Negro

I know this is a day late and a dollar short but TMC had a Woody Strode marathon on yesterday.

Strode, an All-American athlete at UCLA (he played football with Jackie Robinson) was one of the first blacks to play in the NFL. He is probably best remembered for his brief Golden Globe-nominated role in Spartacus (1960) as the Ethiopian gladiator Draba, in which he fights Kirk Douglas to the death.

Strode played memorable villains opposite three screen Tarzans. In 1958, he appeared as Ramo opposite Gordon Scott in Tarzan's Fight for Life. In 1963, he was cast opposite Jock Mahoney's Tarzan as both the dying leader of an unnamed Asian country and that leader's unsavory brother, Khan, in Tarzan's Three Challenges. In the late 1960s, he appeared in several episodes of the Ron Ely Tarzan television series.

He became a close friend of director John Ford, who gave him the title role in Sergeant Rutledge (1960) as a member of the Ninth Cavalry falsely accused of rape and murder; he appeared in smaller roles in Ford's later films Two Rode Together (1961), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) and Seven Women (1966).

I watched Sergeant Rutledge, which contains some of the best and worst black characterizations I have ever seen on film juxtaposed against Ford's iconic Monument Valley tableaus, and Once Upon A Time in the West, a truly great spaghetti western directed by Sergio Leone and starring Henry Fonda, Jason Robards, Charles Bronson, Jack Elam, Strode and Claudia Cardinale.

The opening shot of 6 foot four inch Strode from his boots to the top of his cowboy hat is worth the cost of admission.

Henry Fonda, as a truly evil man; Bronson, as a zen-like drifter, and Cardinale as a strong-willed frontier heroine, are all revelations.

~rave!

Dream Weaver

Viewing a movie in a darkened theater has long been called a shared dream experience. Christopher Nolan's Inception gives a whole new meaning to this idea; a notion he twists into pulse-quickening knots before turning the whole enterprise on its head - not once, not twice but three times - and then once again for good measure.

It is hard to quantify how good Inception is. It is a two and one half hour roller coaster ride with enough thrills and chills to keep you glued to your seat - when you are not perched on the edge of it. Inception is full of good actors doing good work, including Leonardo DiCaprio, Ellen Page, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

DiCaprio gives another fine performance confirming himself as "the actor" of his generation and, for anybody who hasn't already seen his indie work in films like The Lookout (2007), Levitt is surprisingly good. He gives a steely performance that is lean, sinewy and remarkably balletic. Add to this heady stew Oscar winner Marion Cotillard. She is chillingly affective as DiCaprio's dead wife and dream nemesis.

To the aforementioned trio, Nolan brings his favorite players from the Dark Knight franchise for which he is most famous. There is Michael Caine as DiCaprio's father-in-law and mentor, Cillian Murphy as the rich industrialist/mark, and Ken Watanabe as the murky client who sets the whole enterprise in motion.

Full of action and fantastic but seamlessly integrated and organically woven-in landscapes and dream-scapes, Inception is a cinematic recitation on artistic inspiration, the nature of dreams and questions about what is and is not real. We explore dreams, yours and mine, their necessity, their siren call and the dark, murky depths hidden just beneath.

It is mind-boggling and mind blowing and yet, at its core, it is a Hitchcockian story about love, lost and redemption that is both harrowing and heartwarming. Through it all, Nolan is our Morpheus, our dream-weaver, a benevolent and malevolent conductor who takes us on a mystical, magical tour of the dream world and all its environs.

~rave!

Fifty Years Old and 30 Million Strong

June 11, 2010 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird. A staple of English classes nationwide, the book has sold well in excess of 30 million copies and been translated into three dozen languages. The book continues to sell one million copies in the U.S. every year. I have yet to read To Kill A Mockingbird, a glaring gap in my cultural literacy, but I have seen the excellent movie directed by Robert Mulligan often and it pisses me off each and every time.

In acknowledgement of the golden anniversary of Harper Lee's magnum opus, I re-watched the movie this weekend and, once again, it irks me mightily that Tom Robinson, an innocent, upstanding black family man gets railroaded for a rape he did not commit - a rape that, in fact, did not even occur - and is subsequently shot dead "trying to escape" while Arthur "Boo" Radley, the white town idiot, commits murder, albeit altruistically, and walks away scott free. This, I am lead to believe, is a happy ending.

I think Harper Lee's only published novel continues to endure and prosper because most readers want to believe they are Atticus Finch, the principled lawyer who is the moral center of the novel. That, in fact, they are probably closer in thought and action to the drunken redneck Robert E. Lee "Bob" Ewell (who actually commits the crime for which Tom Robinson is tried and convicted) or, more charitably, to Walter Cunningham (the dirt poor farmer who begrudgingly pays off his legal debt to Finch with bags of nuts and other forms of barter) who allows himself to be coerced into the mob that converges on the courthouse to lynch Tom, notwithstanding.

They want to believe in a man as good and kind and decent as Atticus Finch, a man who refuses to judge any man less he has walked a mile in that man's shoes. They want to believe America, at its core, is as good as Atticus Finch. They want to believe that they, at their core, are as good as Atticus Finch. But while the road to Rome may have once been lined with hundreds of martyred men nailed to crosses and each proclaiming "I am Spartacus!" - there isn't, and never has been any profusion of men like Atticus Finch.

Fifty years out and thirty million copies sold and there remains precious few of us who would stand up in the face of withering opposition and do the right thing.

~(no)rave!

Natalie Could

TCM is running a Natalie Wood film festival this month. Back
in my sane and sober youth I loved me some Natalie Wood. For
little boys of color she was the ethnic "it" girl. Russian descended
Natasha Zacharenko played white-girl-turned-Native-American
(The Searchers), Hispanic (West Side Story), Jewish (Marjorie
Morningstar) and Italian (Love With the Proper Stranger).

Wood had this ineluctable quality of being able to play both the
tomboy (Gyspy and Inside Daisy Clover) and the vixen (Gypsy
and Bob&Carol&Ted&Alice); the ingenue (West Side Story) and
the full-fledged woman (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof). She was Annette
Funicello and Marilyn Monroe rolled into one. And, for this child
of the sixties and seventies, that was a heady combination.

I felt as if I had suffered a personal loss when Wood accidentally
drowned while filming Brainstorm in 1983.

~rave!

Slanty-eyed White People Playing Asians Marathon

There is a slany-eyed white people playing Asians marathon on TCM today.

Thus far this morning I have seen that great Asian actress Katharine Hepburn starring as Jade Tan in the great Chinese resistance movie Dragon Seed (1944). This movie also stars notable "Asian" actors John Huston (as patriarch Ling Tan) and Agnes Moorehead (as third cousin's wife). There is a scene where Hepburn is holding an actual asian infant that looks eerily like Kim Hunter holding a real chimpanzee in Escape from the Planet of the Apes.

Dragon Seed was followed by that great Asian actor Anthony Quinn playing Chen Ta in "China Sky" (1945).

I am currently watching those great Asian actors Paul Muni (Wang Lung) and Luise Rainer (O-lan) in The Good Earth (1937). Is Luis Rainer the only Asian to win an Academy Award for Best Actress?

The Good Earth will be followed by:

The Bitter Tea of General Yen, (1933) starring that great "Asian" actor Nils Asther."

7 Women, (1966) starring Ann Bancroft (which I may skip because all the Asians are played by Asians)

55 Days at Peking (1963)starring that great "Asian" actress Flora Robson as Empress Tzu-Hsi and notable "Asian" actor Leo Genn as Gen. Jung-Lu.

~(no)rave!

The Not-So-Great Unknown

I watched the premiere episode of Persons Unknown. It achieved what I would have thought would be an impossible combination: it is giddily ridiculous and maddeningly engaging.

Instead of an island, this Lost-esque knockoff takes place in a hotel that is straight out of The Shining. You half expect Jack Nicholson to hack through a wall - "Heeere's Johnny!" - at any moment - or, at the very least to be found typing "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" ad nauseum on a manual typewriter.

Like a malevolent trickster, Persons Unknown baits and tricks you. The opening scene plays like scores of others we have seen before on countless episodes and incarnations of L&O, a single mother is distracted at a playground while her daughter wanders off and disappears. The mother lurches and screeches her daughter's name in a frantic and futile effort to find her when the authors insert a cruel twist - it is mommy who is about to show up on a milk carton. Which doesn't ratchet down your fear for the missing girl; it only acerbates it.

Then there is the bland band of abductees. These people have obviously been assembled for their particular skill sets - like the matronly white woman who conveniently knows all about biometric implants and slow-release tranquilizers - but stereotypes still abound. For instance, the black character, a trained soldier, should be the one in change but it is the generic "mysterious" white guy who consistently steps up to the mantle.

The black guy is, instead, used as sort of a mine canary. When a band of cliche-R-us refugees from a Chinese restaurant arrive to cook and serve copious amounts of Chinese food and everyone looks at it like little Mikey's siblings looked askance when first served Life cereal - "I'm NOT going to eat it!" And they don't eat it until "Little Mikey," the black guy, digs in and chows down.

"How is it?" a middle-aged white woman asks tentatively.

"Best damn Chinese food I ever had. I could eat it every day!" the black guy says as he shovels food into his mouth.

Later, when everybody reads their fortune cookies, the black guy says, "Mine is in Chinese."

Oh, yeah, the key that will unlock each of the hotel rooms where each member of the "lost" group initially and mysteriously finds him or herself is found inside each room's hotel bible.

I never would have found mine.

~rave? (I dunno. I will watch again, though)