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The Last Black Man in San Francisco<\/strong><\/em> \u2013 It\u2019s been a long time since I\u2019ve seen a movie three times in the same year, much less have it grow inside my head with each viewing. The first time I saw it, I came away thinking of it as a lyrical, idiosyncratic meditation on the cumulative impact on gentrification and the ways it has, over generations, shattered whatever meaning to be found in the words, \u201chome\u201d and \u201croots.\u201d The second time I saw it, I listened closer to its dialogue, its depiction of families vulnerable to fault lines of denial, delusion and not-so-benign neglect. For whatever reason, the third viewing brought out in sharp relief the speech by budding playwright Montgomery Allen (Jonathan Majors) about the violent death of a friend and how whole lives, especially those belonging to young black men, are so often put in boxes by others and how it\u2019s left to those young men to break out of those boxes by themselves. It made me think of boxes I\u2019d been forced to occupy and bust open on my own throughout my life and, in the context of Joe Talbot\u2019s debut feature, I started to wonder, with some distress, whether home, or even the desire for home, made up a kind of box that constrains one\u2019s best aspirations. I bet if I watched it for a fourth, fifth and seventh time I\u2019d start thinking of other, different things to unsettle me. No matter how many times I see it, the one line that\u2019ll stay with me belongs, appropriately, to Jimmie Falls, the movie\u2019s star and co-screenwriter, who gently chides a bus-riding sourpuss for bad-mouthing the home town that\u2019s picked him up and slammed him down: \u201cYou don\u2019t get to hate it, unless you love it.\u201d Some movies are too small for the thoughts that contain them. But this movie has a soul big enough to set free hundreds of dreams, whether renovated or built from scratch.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Watchmen<\/strong> <\/em>\u2013 \u201cI\u2019m not a Republic serial villain,\u201d Adrian Veidt\/Ozymandias insists in the original 1986-87 Alan Moore-Dave Gibbons graphic novel just before he makes millions of heads explode in New York City. Damon Lindelof\u2019s sequel\/reinvention for HBO made America\u2019s heads explode by fashioning a harrowing version of a 1940s Republic movie serial spiked with sex, drugs and sociopolitical science. Among the many miracles of this brash and daring venture, the most noteworthy may be how it shares with its source material the way it weaves pulp mythology of costumed vigilantes into an oddly plausible version of 20th century history, leaving us all in pretty much the same sorry, disheartening mess we\u2019re in at the precipice of true-life 2020. On a far less cosmic level, I have along with many others in the Twitter-verse found among many new reasons to love Regina King the way her character says \u201cmotherfuck<\/em>er\u201d with the sweep and precision of a nothing-but-net three-pointer.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n On The Media<\/strong><\/em> \u2013 I\u2019ve long stopped watching nightly newscasts and would just as soon skip whatever the 24-hour news cycle has to offer at any given interval. But for the sake of whatever sanity I can maintain when dealing with the awfulness of the present, I never miss WNYC\u2019s inquiry into all things media. Week after week, co-hosts Brooke Gladstone and Bob Garfield, along with their doughty support team of editors and producers, manage, with probing intelligence and gimlet-eyed scrutiny, to get at whatever\u2019s been bothering me about the way things are and \u2013 mostly \u2013 aren\u2019t covered by what we used to call \u201cthe press.\u201d They are the go-to source for slicing and dicing though the smoggy mendacity of the Trump administration and its enablers. They secure your trust by chasing down truth, lies and, most of all, context. It isn\u2019t enough, for instance, to say<\/em> that the justice system is dysfunctional. So they will give you the historical factors \u2013 cultural, political and racial \u2013 behind mass incarceration. And not just that issue, but also poverty, climate change, education, foreign policy and housing. The program\u2019s signature achievement in this especially estimable year was its series on \u201cThe Scarlet E,\u201d as in \u201ceviction,\u201d one of many stories festering in post-Millennial America that doesn\u2019t get as much attention in the media biosphere as, say, whatever Bill Gates is or isn\u2019t doing with his money \u2013 even though they\u2019ve got that<\/em> covered like a blanket too. More than most of the media it holds accountable, this series fulfills the basic requirement for delivering the news by telling you things you didn\u2019t already know and reminding you of things too important to forget.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Once Upon a Time\u2026in Hollywood & Dolemite is My Name<\/strong><\/em> \u2013 If I owned a repertory house or a drive-in, I would make these a double feature that I made sure to exhibit every year (late summer, I think). Though they\u2019re set a few years apart from each other near the hinge of the 1960s and 1970s, both movies appear to be conversing from opposite ends of the culture about a transformative era for American movies. Traditions that were either falling apart or recombining in Quentin Tarantino\u2019s iridescent alternate history of 1969 were pulled from back alley trash compactors by the working-class L.A. schemers and dreamers brought to merry life by director Craig Brewer and screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski. The reinvention of Rudy Ray Moore (Eddie Murphy in what some keep insisting is a \u201ccomeback\u201d even though he\u2019s never really gone away) gives off a giddy vibe of a rags-to-raggedy-ass-riches saga, a kind of\u00a0 lounge-lizard’s version of\u00a0Up From Slavery<\/em> with an upraised middle finger goading you to eat its dust. Once Upon a Time\u2026<\/em>is in a starkly different manner a Pilgrim\u2019s Progress<\/em> saga, though you\u2019re left wondering at the end whether it\u2019s Leonardo DiCaprio\u2019s has-been TV western hero or Brad Pitt\u2019s deceptively blithe stuntman-handyman who\u2019s made the most progress. Such questions matter more than whatever conclusions some have extracted from Tarantino\u2019s vision \u2013 and it is more than anything a vision, whatever you want to make of its depictions of both imaginary and real-life characters.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n The Old Drift<\/strong> <\/em>\u2013 My favorite novel of the year is best described by its author Namwali Serpell as \u201cthe great Zambian novel you didn\u2019t know you were waiting for.\u201d It begins with an implausible accident at the start of the 20th century involving three individuals in a hotel along the Zambezi River in what was then known as the Northwestern Rhodesia territory. The lives of their families \u2013 one African, one British, one Italian \u2013 are intertwined for what\u2019s left of that century and for several years into the 21st. In between, there are sagas within sagas; some dealing with a woman\u2019s hair that cannot stop growing and whose fallen strands make things grow out of the ground. Another story arc is based on the true-life effort by Zambia\u2019s \u201cMinister of Space Research\u201d to train his newly independent nation\u2019s best and brightest science students to beat both the Russians and Americans to the moon before the end of the 1960s. Eventually the tangled destinies of these and other characters are swept up by a public health calamity referred to here as \u201cThe Virus.\u201d Serpell\u2019s novel dares to imagine her native country into a technologically advanced near-future that is at once exhilarating and frightening in its prospects. Add to all this the constant presence of mosquitoes as both a kind of Greek chorus and vigilant corporate godhead and you have a willfully imaginative and (I almost forgot to add) gorgeously written contribution to the shelf of such novels as The Tin Drum, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Midnight\u2019s Children<\/em> and (wothehell) Adventures of Huckleberry Finn<\/em> that realize a whole country\u2019s heritage and destiny in a rich, capacious fictional narrative. I also forgot to mention that this is Serpell\u2019s first novel.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Kristen Scott Thomas on Fleabag<\/em><\/strong> — There was a lot to love about the second season of Phoebe Waller-Bridge\u2019s universally-acclaimed series, beginning (of course) with Waller-Bridge herself and her bemused, stressed-out and agreeably horny alter-ego stumbling and grappling through her fraught early thirties. I was all in on her Fleabag persona throughout her search for love, even if the approach-avoidance thing with The Priest (Andrew Scott) began to grate for reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with its presumptive \u201cimpropriety.\u201d For all its humane and bittersweet wit, the series, for me, glowed brightest in the approximately five minutes Fleabag spends in a bar with Belinda (Thomas), a corporate mogul fleeing a cocktail party in her honor<\/a>. Over martinis, Belinda gives Fleabag \u2013 and us \u2013 the gift of her wisdom about things like menopause, why women are better able to deal with pain than men and the categorical imperative to flirt. Never before have I (and, I\u2019m betting, anybody else I know) seen Kristin Scott Thomas so juicy, so fired-up-funny and lit-from-within as she is here. No wonder Fleabag makes a pass at her. We all would. But instead of a tumble, Belinda bestows to Fleabag something more precious by declaring, \u201cPeople are all we\u2019ve got.\u201d And in case you didn\u2019t hear her, she repeats, \u201cPeople. Are. All. We\u2019ve. Got.\u201d Much as you don\u2019t want to agree (and almost everything else about the series encourages you not to), you know, deep down, that she\u2019s right about this, along with everything else she\u2019s laying down.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story<\/strong><\/em> \u2013 A word to those who insist on believing that Martin Scorsese\u2019s meta-mixing of imaginary sidebars to the actual Rolling Thunder tour conducted by Dylan during the Gerald Ford administration is somehow contiguous to the \u201cfake news\u201d ethos abetted by the Right. That word is, to be polite as possible about it, no. The movie states its business at the outset: what else would an old magic trick be doing there? If you can\u2019t tell from jump street that it\u2019s playing fair with its variations on a theme, that\u2019s on you, not on Scorsese and not on Dylan. I may disagree with the latter\u2019s typically gnomic pronouncement that wearing a mask is a means of telling the truth. (As with much else with Dylan, he borrowed that observation from someone else; Oscar Wilde. I believe, in this case.) But the movie\u2019s mischief is nonetheless consistent with a rock music tour whose whole concept was steeped in shadows, disguise and craftiness. Those whoppers with Sharon Stone and Jimmy Carter may rankle the literal-minded. For me, the movie\u2019s willingness to tease at and toy with the parameters of literal and figurative storytelling is far less a concession to the present-day political madness than a provocative means of climbing out of the smog. To elaborate: I remember going to a November 1975 Rolling Thunder gig at the Hartford Civic Center deep in the doldrums of economic blight, especially in down-and-depressed New England, and coming away from the show feeling buoyed and even cross-eyed hopeful about the immediate future. Which is sort of how I felt when this movie was over. I can\u2019t tell you why any more than I could explain my reaction back in the day. It may have something to do with being more open to possibility and risk than to cloistered indignation and fear. Or maybe it has something to do with whatever Allen Ginsberg is telling us all to do at the end of this film: \u201cYou who saw it all or who saw flashes and fragments, take from us some example, try and get yourselves together, clean up your act, find your community, pick up on some kind of redemption of your own consciousness, become mindful of your own friends, your own work, your own proper meditation, your own art, your own beauty, go out and make it for your own Eternity.\u201d<\/em> Now you tell me: what does any of this have to do with whether something is fake-fucking-news or not?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n In the Dream House<\/strong><\/em> \u2013 Imagine a warm-hearted Patricia Highsmith who retains enough delicacy and detachment to train upon herself as well as those around her. But Carmen Maria Machado\u2019s not writing a thriller \u2013 or more to the point, she\u2019s not writing just<\/em> a thriller. Her memoir of a psychologically abusive relationship with another woman inhabits multiple genres and motifs. Its chapter headings conceive segments of this story, by turns, as a \u201croad trip to everywhere,\u201d or \u201cbildungsroman,\u201d \u201clesbian pulp novel,\u201d \u201ccreature feature,\u201d \u201ccomedy of errors,\u201d \u201csci-fi thriller,\u201d \u201csoap opera,\u201d \u201cAmerican gothic\u201d and \u201cstoner comedy.\u201d There are also categories such as \u201chypochondria,\u201d \u201cdirty laundry,\u201d \u201cword problem,\u201d \u201cqueer villainy,\u201d \u201cChekhov\u2019s gun,\u201d \u201chouse in Iowa,\u201d \u201capartment in Philadelphia,\u201d \u201csecond chances\u201d and so on. Maybe you can figure out a narrative of sorts from these clues. But Machado is not only engaging openly and honestly with personal pain, but probing for different ways to articulate it. In the process, she reinvents \u201cmemoir\u201d itself as an arena for scholarly speculation, cultural inquiry, links to folklore, fairy tales and even an especially grisly episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.<\/em> She is using all her imaginative resources to get to the kind of truth promised, but intermittently achieved in more conventional memoirs. Besides Highsmith, you think of W.G. Sebald and Raymond Queneau and their experiments with narrative and reminiscence. The real thrill one feels in reading In the Dream House<\/em> is in encountering a means of personal storytelling that is original and, in more ways than one, transformative.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/Watchmen-Manhattan-300x200.jpg\")
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