Authoritarians, Thieves, Letter Writers and Street Fighters
I read three children's books. I read a nonfiction book about international affairs and start reading another. I watch four pictures.
Having been a longtime admirer of her commentary and journalism, I’ve been meaning for a while to read a book by the expert on Eastern European affairs and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Anne Applebaum. This interest took on renewed urgency this past week, so I checked out a library copy of her most recent and timely book Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism.
The first fifteen pages of this 2020 missive, in which Applebaum cautions that “given the right conditions, any society can turn against democracy” and that “if history is anything to go by, all of our societies eventually will,” makes for harrowing but pertinent and urgent analysis. Hopefully the rest of the book will be even more useful in making sense of the societal and ideological breakdowns and realignments through which we are all trying our muddled best to chart a responsible path and will help me keep a cool head in trying to make sense of the conflagration that has recently ignited on the European continent. Applebaum’s invaluably insightful voice can be followed in real time right now on various podcasts and in television interviews, social media accounts and print journalism.
Before starting the Applebaum book I read three children’s books. The first was a board book edition of a classic children’s book from 1940 called Caps for Sale by one Esphyr Slobodkina. I found it in a Little Free Library and read it because it had a “Reading Rainbow Book” sticker on the cover, which I guess means it was read on Reading Rainbow at one time, and I have loved Reading Rainbow all of my life. When I was in first grade the teacher would wheel in a television and make us watch Reading Rainbow every day; the theme song still stirs deep feelings of nostalgia and bibliophilia in my breast more than thirty years later.
From the library I got the competently-made, uninventive, pleasantly anodyne new children’s book Justice Is... A guide for young truth seekers, written by the podcaster and distinguished former federal prosecutor Preet Bharara with illustrations by Sue Cornelison, and the brilliant, heartfelt, morally sophisticated and dramatically nuanced children’s novelette The Real Thief, written and illustrated in 1973 by the genre titan William Steig. The Real Thief is a short read but contains more complexity and insight than some of the over-cooked stuff that often passes for Serious Literary Fiction these days and closes on a bittersweet but clear-eyed comment about the “troubles that come up every so often even in the best of circumstances, since nothing is perfect.”
And speaking of that selfsame sentiment, while reading these children’s books I read a concise, eloquent, sad, hopeful non-fiction book from 2018 called Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor by a writer named Yossi Klein Halevi, an American-born immigrant to Israel of whom I had never heard until he was recently interviewed on Andrew Sullivan’s podcast. (They had some stark but productive disagreements, which also describes Applebaum’s exchange with Sullivan on a subsequent episode of the same podcast.) Halevi wrote this piece while looking over the wall that separates his East Jerusalem neighborhood from people whose homes he can see in the West Bank territories; the book takes the form of ten letters written to an imagined “neighbor” on the other side of the wall to whom Halevi wishes to express, on a human-to-human level that cuts through noise and narratives, his reasons for emigrating to his adopted homeland and what the ancient society and modern state of Israel mean to him as an individual, hoping to fuel an ongoing dialogue in which he can offer the same opportunities to Palestinian people who want him to more fully understand their point of view. To this end he has made an Arabic translation of Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor available for free online to anyone who wants it. (My mother and I read this book at the same time as a conversation piece and the edition she read included at the back a number of letters from Palestinian readers in response to Halevi, which my edition of the book didn’t contain.)
Readers will recall that becoming less poorly-informed about Israel has been an interest of mine for a while now and this is the fourth book I’ve read related to the topic since late 2019. All four have been remarkably cogent and well-written in interestingly disparate ways and any of the four would make an appropriate jumping-off point for someone new to the topic. Halevi’s is the shortest and most earnest and ties for most personal with Noa Tishby’s Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth, though Tishby is an accomplished entertainer and television producer who can’t help but try to be witty and inviting whereas Halevi’s stated goals of trying to build bridges and seek paths toward productive compromise compel him to take a more serious and introspective tone.
I watched four very different movies. One was great and one lousy.
Holiday, directed by George Cukor, 1938. Apparently this is a remake of a film with the same title from 1930; stumbling upon the 1938 version at the library was my first time hearing of either. It’s a sweet-natured, efficient, straight-ahead romantic comedy with the same marquee pairing of Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn as another, screwballier rom-com from the same year called Bringing Up Baby, directed by Howard Hawks. Holiday is a far less zany complement to Bringing Up Baby with both actors playing more reasonable and realistic characters than the near-caricatures they played in the other film.
The story in Holiday has to do with Grant’s character Johnny wishing to marry the sister of Hepburn’s character and being surprised to learn of the vast wealth and aristocratic social standing of the family he plans to join and of the expectations for a productive and conventional life that his fiancee and her father have in mind for him which conflict with his free-wheeling and adventurous spirit. He ultimately chooses integrity over love and ends up with both when circumstances co-conspire with the fiancee’s charming sister Linda and brother Ned, played by Hepburn and Lew Ayres respectively, to help him realize that Hepburn’s character loves him for who he is and that it’s her and not her sister with whom he’s meant to spend eternity.
There’s subtle but abundant suggestion, in the quiet and stereotypical way such things had to be presented when homosexuality couldn’t be openly discussed on screen, that the single, acerbic, alcoholic, creatively-inclined Ned is as attracted to Johnny as is Linda. But once Johnny and Linda acknowledge their feelings for one another in the surprisingly short third act, the Grant/Hepburn chemistry can’t be uncatalyzed.
The two leads are outstanding and the rest of the acting, particularly that of Ayres, is solid and unshowy. There’s also some remarkably sophisticated old-school camera work exemplified by an amazing tracking shot early in the picture that follows two characters out of a room and down a hallway to hit their marks perfectly at the top of a staircase. Like everything in Holiday it’s done so gracefully and unobtrusively as to bring almost no undue attention to itself and is only in service of an entertaining ninety-five minutes at the movies. Grant and Hepburn are outstanding individually and their chemistry here is modulated with more restraint and earnestness than in the whacky Hawks picture.
Dirty Harry, directed by Don Siegel, 1971. This was my first time since my teenage years watching this loose-cannon no-nonsense tough-guy police detective classic. It’s also one of the all-time great San Francisco movies; the picture includes some cool shots of beautiful locations from around the city and makes convincing use of San Francisco geography and culture for its setting and milieu. I know part of the reason the creators set the movie there is because their story makes fictionalized but direct reference to the real-life case of the Bay Area-operating Zodiac Killer. However they also seem to have been borrowing and/or stealing liberally from the 1968 film Bullitt, also an on-location renegade detective story set in San Francisco, also featuring a score by Lalo Schifrin and also starring a very, very good-looking male movie star in the lead. (Though to my eye the fortyish and in-his-prime Clint Eastwood of Dirty Harry is even more of a piece of ass than Steve McQueen in Bullitt.)
Dirty Harry is an absolutely great movie all around. Most of the compositions and lighting look as terrific as Eastwood who embodies the stoic, aggressive, manly, laconic, wise-cracking and world-weary plainclothes policeman as no one else could, has or will. The right-wing premise about circumventing due process to restore order to a city being lost to the hippies, druggies and murderers is a fascinating glimpse into where American culture was in 1971 and the many strange directions into which Hollywood studios were branching at the outset of that decade. That simmering, funky Schifrin score gives the brisk picture an additional kick in the rear as it hums along — until the music harrowingly drops out at certain critical action points, especially in the enthralling climax where Harry stalks the psychopathic sniper Scorpio through a mill north of the Golden Gate. This scene has an outcome that isn’t in any serious doubt even if the viewer doesn’t know that there are four Dirty Harry sequels but it’s still a fitting closing sequence for a great movie. I’ve only ever seen the first two Dirty Harry pictures and I recall the second one actually being pretty good, so maybe I’ll end up getting caught up on all of them.
Street Fighter, directed by Steven E. de Souza, 1994. Still with the Van Damme pictures, oy.
The last time I saw Street Fighter was when it was out in theaters. I remembered it being a lot of fun and hoped I would find the same to be the case as an adult, albeit probably for different reasons. But it’s not! This movie is terrible and not in any way that makes it enjoyable or worthwhile.
It’s based on the classic video game Street Fighter II and its expanded version Super Street Fighter II, both of which I’m still pretty good at, but the movie is loose enough in its adaptation to disappoint loyal fans of the original games and constricted enough in its fealty to the source material to prevent it from functioning on any level as a good motion picture. The premise of the games involves world-class fighters from all different styles, each representing their respective home countries, squaring off against one another in a no-holds-barred international street-fighting competition; the movie tries and fails to map this onto a more conventional heroes/villains action story.
This movie looks and feels cartoonishly garish and depressingly cheap in every way. Several important roles from the games are badly miscast. For the nerds, I’m thinking primarily of the characters Ken, Ryu, Chun-Li and Cammy here. And even Van Damme’s version of the Guile character feels off. To make things worse, the story in the Street Fighter film involves an authoritarian gangster asshole waging a tactical and propaganda war against a vulnerable country, so this wasn’t precisely the right week for me to watch something with such a goofy and fanciful take on subjects which are unfolding with such grimy, flesh-and-blood importance and seriousness in the real world.
Actually when I was watching the great Van Damme movie Double Impact a while back, it occurred to me that maybe the original Guile character from the Street Fighter games was in part inspired by Van Damme himself, since Van Damme side-kicks a flying oil drum in Double Impact in precisely the way the Guile character does in Street Fighter II, which was released in the arcade in the same year that Double Impact came out. Or maybe it’s the other way around and Van Damme was ripping off an idea from the Capcom game company for his movie. In either case the additional depth that this connection might lend to Van Damme’s casting in the Street Fighter film adaptation does nothing to diminish the shittiness of this profoundly stupid movie which neither stands on its own merits nor pleases this fan of the original games.
Deadwood: The Movie, directed by Daniel Minahan, 2019. If you don’t count the first eight seasons of The Simpsons as a television show unto itself, the HBO series Deadwood is my favorite program ever. After the show’s premature conclusion the Deadwood fan community waited years and suffered numerous conflicting rumors, reports and promises in anticipation of two straight-to-HBO movies that were meant to expand on the meaning of what we had loved in the show and tie up the narrative threads more neatly. What we finally ended up getting, more than a decade after the series had wrapped production, was one movie, and it turned out to be pretty good. I already watched Deadwood: The Movie not long after it was first released, but a close friend just finished his first assay of the show and I wanted to give the movie a closer look anyway.
For those who don’t know, the show is a historically-based but liberally-fictionalized Shakespearean/Jacobean version of what life might have been like in the Black Hills before South Dakota was an American state, when the town of Deadwood had no protection from hostile natives who weren’t pleased that settlers were squatting on their land to mine gold and when the absence of law forced Deadwood’s dangerous, desperate and eccentric inhabitants to make up their own rules as they went along. The movie isn’t, and doesn’t try to be, as brilliant or amazing as the show, but it gives fans the last dance we wanted with these characters (who have been aged by the creator and writer David Milch almost as much as the actors playing them have been aged by the passage of real time) without harming or diminishing the greatness of the entire project. Anything other than a cringe, series-tarnishing misfire, which Deadwood: The Movie is decidedly not, counts as a success here.
Every character who didn’t die on the show (and whose performer didn’t die in real life) gets a chance to do or say something interesting or meaningful, and the two opposing-but-complementary moral poles and most significant characters, Timothy Olyphant’s portrayal of Seth Bullock and Ian McShane’s of Al Swearengen, get permission from the characters they need to hear it from the most to let go, forgive themselves and face whatever is coming with open hearts and minds.