Men in Hats

The Adjustment Bureau may be the best "men in hats" movie since Rusty Cundieff's Fear of a Black Hat. And this is not my left-handed attempt to praise the movie with faint damns. There is real appeal in first time director George Nolfi's grim fairy-tale about the path of true love. The two leads, Matt Damon and Emily Blunt have a lot to do with this. Improbably there is real chemistry between them. I say "improbably" because this is a role that should be essayed by a young John Edwards and would have better suited Damon's brother-from-another-mother, Ben Affleck, or Blunt's real-life husband, John Krasinski (The Office), to name two. Matt Damon is miscast as David Norris, the charismatic political wunderkind at the core of the Bureau in much the same way he was miscast as Jason Bourne and the talented Mr. Ripley. Which is to say, he is terrific.

When The Adjustment Bureau was released three short months ago, it seemed a little improbable that the political freight train that was the senate campaign of Congressman Norris could be derailed by the inopportune release of college pictures showing him mooning his frat brothers but, of course, this was before Weinergate and the circus of the absurd that dominated the news cycle for nearly two weeks. Norris goes down in inglorious defeat but all is not lost as he and Blunt meet "cute."

Then boy-loses-girl and they meet cute again when angel-cum-organization-man Anthony Mackie literally misses the bus. This is noteworthy because it quickly becomes apparent that it is imperative to the Men-in-Hats aggregation that is the Adjustment Bureau to keep Damon and Blunt separated at all costs. Why? Who knows. Suffice it to say that the Big Boss Man has a plan and it is verboten to deviate from that plan. When you do veer off course, as Damon repeatedly does, the Men-in-Hats must make adjustments to get you back on the straight and narrow. Damon is such a tough nut to crack that the Men-in-Hats must do something they have only done once before - they tell Damon everything and then attempt to coerce him into compliant complicity.

When senior Man-in-Hat John Slattery, who wears his fedora as nattily as he does on Mad Men, fails to talk sense to Damon, the even more senior Terence Stamp is brought in to "hammer" Damon into commission.

On the whole, The Adjustment Bureau is a little pokey and the business with the hats is a little hokey (as a unrepentant hat wearer I cannot condone the profiling - "never trust a man in a hat") but, as mentioned before, the chemistry between Damon and Blunt is appealing and the last act all-or-nothing flight from downtown Manhattan to Liberty Island in New York Harbor is quite rousing.

~rave!

First We Pray

Nate Dogg is dead. It don't even seem right to be writing that shit. How the fuck Nate Dogg gone be dead? I'm about to hit a double-nickle and Nate couldn't have been no more than - dayum - 41 years old. Fourteen years my junior - but Nate Dogg weren't never no junior. He was always a grown ass man. And maybe that was the fuckin' problem. Nate always seem too grown for this silly ass rap game - which has always been a province of little boy posers. But as I said, Nate was always a grown ass man with a grown ass man's voice and a grown ass man's soul.

I stumbled across his great album, G-Funk Classics, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, by accident. It literally fell off the roof of a moving car. Possession being nine-tenths of the law, I loaded it into my CD player and there it stayed for the better parts of the next six months as I played the hell out of it.

The two disk G-Funk Classics, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 is a ghetto elegy delivered in Nate Dogg's inimitable buffed-up baritone - which could have been described as silky-smooth if it hadn't been so rough-edged. Nate Dogg's voice told you he had been places and seen things - hell, done things - and that he had had a few drinks and a lot of smokes while he did so. If Luther Vandross and Tone Loc had had a bastard child, Nate Dogg is what he would have sounded like.

That voice infuses and informs everything on G-Funk Classics, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2. I call Classics an elegy but while it is melancholic and plaintive, it is a lament for the living, not the dead.

Black people dont have no, no where to go
you know, all we got to do is kick it
we gonna kick it in our hood, you know
what we gonna do, we might
we might go kill a couple of niggaz mane
you know, go in they hood and do a drive-by
then come back in the hood and laugh about that stuff
you know, its just a thing
("First We Pray," G-Funk Classics, Vol.1&2)

Now the above lyrics are (or were) standard ghetto poetry. What elevates the song to greatness is the chorus:

First we pray, then we ride

First we pray, then we ride

The first time you hear Nate Dogg croon those first three plaintive words: First we pray, you'll never get them out of your head. The way he stretches and caresses the word "pray" and makes it soar will borrow into your consciousness like some insidious viral worm and your brain will never be the same again.

Rest in peace, Nathaniel Dwayne Hale.

~rave!

Cuts Like a Machete

Grindhouse was the ode to 70's era exploitation movies Robert Rodriguez co-directed with Quentin Tarantino. Machete is the grindhouse movie Rodriquez promised but failed to deliver in his half of the twin-bill extravaganza. Machete which appeared in Grindhouse as a cheeky one-off trailer for a movie never made, is everything Rodriques' bloody but aimless Planet Terror is not. It is forward-paced kinetic thriller and classic 70's grindhouse actioner with plenty of bad(ass) dialogue and gratuitous nudity glommed on like so much icing on a cake.

Hatchet-faced Danny Trejo was born for this role as "one mad Mexican" who has a literal axe to grind with evil political operative Michael Booth (Jeff Fahey) who double-crosses him while in the employ of evil Senator John McLaughlin (a thinly veiled John McCain), played with giddy, greasy slipperiness by Robert DeNiro, and under the thumb of the even more evil Steven Segal, who essays the paunchy but serenely venal power broker, Torrez.

Add to this savory stew a estrogen heavy dose of Michele Rodriguez as a tough mama amalgram of Cesar Chavez and Che Guevara and Jessica Alba as a sweet-faced Federal Agent who plays "beauty" to Trejo's machete wielding "beast."

The gratuitous nudity is delivered in a small but bracing dose by actress Mayra Leal as a naked chica who gives new meaning to "reaching out to touch someone" in the opening sequence. It is delivered in large, loopy, (hopefully) drug-induced gallops by former A-list actress Lindsay Lohan, who plays Jeff Fahey's wild-child daughter, and Alicia Rachel Marek, who plays Lohan's alcoholic mother. Lohan looks great naked but you can't help but wonder "WHAT WAS SHE THINKING?" when she agreed to take this role.

In one great set-piece, a character explains how the human body has twenty feet of small intestines right before Machete puts the knowledge to bloody and effective use. You'll never think of seven yards of guts in the same way again.

Machete the movie holds together better than most Robert Rodriquez movies, which often come off as half-baked despite great cinematic ingredients. One wonders whether to ascribe this Rodriguez or his credited co-director, Ethan Maniquis or, perhaps, even his co-writer, Alvaro Rodriguez. In any event, rarely has ten million dollars been better employed on the big screen.

~rave!

Wi-fi and other revelations

I have been busy as a one-legged man in a butt-kicking contest.
Just completed a major move and moving is always been an
ordeal for me because I always try to drag fifty-four years of my
life with me. In fact, for eight years I lived in an undesirable sit-

uation (two break-ins in the last three years; horrible landlord;
worse neighbors) because I absolutely abhor moving.

This time I did a major purge, throwing away stuff I had been
toting around for thirty years. Still, there were hundreds of books
to move and scores of boxes to lug them in.

I threw away hundreds of video tapes. Turns out my late brother
and I were delusional, self-appointed archivists: we recorded
every episode of The Cosby Show and A Different World and
every movie we loved because we could not foresee a world where
Netflix would put anything we could possibly want to see at our
fingertips with a wi-fi connection.

I had boxes of old Jet magazines - all of which are available on-
line in their entirety.

Ditto for boxes of skin slick magazines collected during my sane
and sober youth - all content available on-line for a monthly fee
(although, there's nothing like the real thing, baby).

I did tote my hundreds of vinyl records and my thousands of CDs.
I did not tote my hundreds of cassette tapes and scores of 8-tracks
(although I did preserve a few).

It was a blast rediscovering books, magazines and photographs
that I had forgot I had (even though trips down memory lane
slowed down the moving process quite a bit - it took me three
weeks to move a three-story townhouse - if I ever ask you to help
me move - RUN!)

Lastly, I have been without a home wi-fi connection from
November 17th until yesterday (worse than Chinese water torture).

~(no)rave!

Bloom Day

Undercovers, J.J. Abrams new I Spy/He Spy/She Spy high concept espionage series is as improbable as it is watchable. Steven and Samanta Bloom (who despite being played by actors whose birth names are Boris Federic Cecil Tay-Natey Ofuatey-Kudjoe and Gugulethu Mbatha-Raw have character names that sound like they came straight out of James Joyce's Ulysses), are upscale caterers who used to be highly competent spies. They are called back into the game because an undercover operative has disappeared and in all the world these retired former spies, five years removed from their last assignment, are the only ones capable of handling this particular assignment.

I am willing to suspend belief and believe that five years ago the Blooms were elite covert operatives (despite the fact that actress Mbatha-Raw is only 27, which means she would have retired at the top of her spy game at 22) which makes it easy for me to appreciate the pure J.J. Abrams-ishness of Undercovers. Given carte blanche by the covert agency that covets their particular skill sets, the Blooms are able to globe trot while wearing great looking clothes.

With a single phone call to their star-struck, overly obsequious factotum (Ben Schwartz) the Blooms are able to parachute into Spain, France and Russia at the drop of a hat where their sudden appearance goes unnoticed because they also speak Spanish, French and Russian fluently.

As pure escapism, Undercovers is kind of a kick. For one, for once, although the leads are not of the Caucasian persuasion, no expense has been spared in making Undercovers look rich. Martha Stewart would die for the Blooms catering kitchen and I would die for the office/loft that overlooks said kitchen.

And the action, while occasionally derivative, steals from the best. When little bitty Mbatha-Raw has to hoist a big rocket launcher to stop a bad guy, it is reminiscent of Rae Dawn Chong doing the same thing in Commando and the couple stopping mid-caper to tango is right out of True Lies.

The married Blooms are probably improbably fond of each other but I rather liked that, too.

~rave!

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!