The Call To Diarize

With Islamic militants causing havoc in the Middle East and elsewhere, there is an ongoing furor about what should happen to the thousands and thousands of refugees fleeing Syria for, well, anyplace that's not Syria. Europe, mostly, since it's the mostly-functional place that's in the neighborhood.

I fear I lack expertise and certainly firsthand knowledge of the situation, but the ongoing flood of stories related to the breakdown of civilization compels one to take a stand. The situation is further complicated (for me) by who is espousing what view. Conservatives think that the problem is Islam (or, if they're honest, brown-skinned people generally) and that refugees--any refugees, from anywhere--should be refused asylum. And worse. My company of fellow liberals tends to believe in tolerance and moderation and to argue that most Muslims, like most Christians, are good and non-violent people.

My views align much more with liberals than conservatives (with whom I share seemingly not a single gene of my intellectual DNA), but on this topic I'm uneasy--something I'm reminded of constantly by my inability to bestow my pathetic "like" to most of my friends' pro-refugee FaceBook posts, or at least not without some ambivalence.

But a couple thoughts recur as I go over these news items. One is Sam Harris's reminder that Muslim "extremists" are extreme only in their belief in the literal truth of their texts. They act as they do not because it's fun to blow people up but rather because they feel it is their duty to do so--and because of their conviction that they will be rewarded for doing this duty. This is why so many are willing--even eager--to die carrying out their missions; they are sure their reward is waiting just on the other side (a reward which, curiously, seems to closely resemble what they're rejecting with such dispatch here on Earth). So the hard truth is that the problem to a large degree IS Islam itself. (Certainly magical thinking is the more general problem here, but the biggest fire to put out in this case involves this religion and these specific bits of magical thinking.)

The other thought, of which we are often reminded by people like Pat Condell, is that the "moderate" Muslims who flee the violence of their home lands often seek to impose their will in their new homes when they reach sufficient numbers. This is not in and of itself problematic: it's what all of us do, generally finding others with our beliefs and convictions and banding together to change the world in ways that seem congenial or appropriate to us. But what I can't shake is the sense that--to some extent (and maybe the "extent" involved invalidates my argument entirely)--the refugees are bringing the very disease with them that they're fleeing in the first place. I fear their broken societies might stem in large part from the incompatibility of the modern world with the pre-scientific views held by many of their citizens. The Muslim fundies argue that the modern world itself is evil and retrograde and must be resisted and destroyed. ("Well there's your problem," as Adam Savage liked to say.)

Obviously an overwhelming majority of the general population rejects this view, yet we're the ones being blown up and slaughtered (admittedly, in small numbers as yet here in the US). Places like Sweden, which for some time now have encouraged displaced Muslims to come and make a life there are now grappling with those newcomers trying to reshape the landscape in unwelcome ways. This might, I think, have been anticipated. (There's a subchapter here about meddling American foreign policy and fundamentalist religion swelling to fill a void we've unwittingly created. But I'm even less able to talk coherently about that.)

So though I hesitate to say it--not least because it sounds perilously like something heard at a Republican debate--it's not completely irrational to worry that the problems of religious violence will come with the refugees, if not immediately then almost certainly in time as numbers and concentrations grow. It has nothing to do with the quality of the people involved; our problems stem from magical thinking in general, and from the specific magic believed in this case.

I don't know the numbers, but I'd venture this: those committing violence against humanity are probably a vanishing small number as a percentage of the faithful. If we widen our view to look at those who do not commit violence but who condone it or think it justifiable, the number grows a good bit. And if we look at the people who disagree with the violent acts but cannot bring themselves to condemn them--who, perhaps, realize they have no grounding to condemn them--then our number grows further; until I suspect we're looking at a substantial figure. This is how moderate religion is part of the problem and not of the solution; not because most people commit the violence, but because clinging to their own magical thinking deprives them of any leverage against the fundamentalist. "Moderate religion" fails as an antidote both because moderates almost by definition lack vigor and zeal, and because the "holy" book they claim to follow does not allow them to disregard the passages they find distasteful. Thinking there such a thing as a "holy" book in the first place is the problem, not any part of its solution.

The situation is further complicated by a Maslow's Hierarchy kind of scenario wherein the refugees are initially looking at much bigger problems than whether society is amenable their religious practices. Asylum countries are faced first with the reality of people needing the most basic needs--food and water and medical care and housing--followed by things like social services and schools for children. By the time these things are settled, the problems of religion seem small compared to the crisis phase just overcome. Our natural and laudable tendency is to help those in need; and the refugees (like the hitchhiker who wants only to ride in nice cars) are not in a position to make demands when their very lives and their most basic needs are at risk. But it's naive not to expect those demands to come.

The elephant in the room is religion itself. It's the tendency toward magical thinking, toward accepting and believing things that manifestly aren't true. We're reluctant / unwilling to face this plainly, clearly because the obvious dysfunction of one group's magical thinking inevitably puts the untenability of our own magical thinking under the microscope. When American conservatives say "Islam is the problem" what they're really saying is "those people are following the wrong religion." But if the moderate is helpless against fundamentalist zeal, then fighting fundamentalist fire with a different fundamentalist fire is stupidity itself. As history amply demonstrates: our story is full of the brutal sectarian slaughter that follows sure as gravity from this line of thinking.

But be that as it may, I fear that whatever our good intentions Islam is not a force to be reasoned with. There is no compromise solution waiting for us to grasp. The fundamentalists who drive the religion care nothing for our good intentions and accommodation except as it paves the way forward for them. We can only combat the clearly dysfunctional magical thinking of one group by jettisoning our own--and hoping that refugees connect the good lives available to them with the secularity of the societies in which they settle. (This might be a new idea to some of them.) This purging of magical thinking seems to be happening, at least in the developed world. Big social change takes time to effect. But in a world of instant and almost unlimited information, sectarian violence based on magic--and the transparent mingling of religious zeal with the desire for power--is clearly playing a role in chasing young people from the church in droves. That's a hugely positive development, but it's naive to think that this kind of power structure will fade away quietly.

You Hear Me, Baby? Hold Together!

How does one review a movie like this? (Is there even such thing as "a movie like this?")

The difficulty with Star Wars: The Force Awakens is not in the film itself, which is just fine, but in the galaxy of anticipation and expectation and baggage that many of us bring to the experience. We almost need two reviews: one for those with the baggage and one for those without.

And they'd be different reviews, if only slightly.

I was 14, soon to be 15, when the original Star Wars came out. This is right in the butter zone of the audience target, and I was duly smitten, seeing the film something like 15 times over the next several months. Sometime earlier I remember seeing a trailer for Stanley Kubrick's 1969 epic 2001: A Space Odyssey and being giddy to FINALLY see a great space movie, only to feel... underwhelmed when there were no starships or booming space battles or laser blasts or aliens or anything I expected. Apes. There were apes. I remember thinking "What the fuck IS this? Did somebody screw up the edit?"

In retrospect, there's no contest as to which is the better film. But at 14 I wanted Star Wars, and A New Hope was a thrilling experience for me. (As an aside, it's interesting to watch the film now and see how much has changed--when I was SURE my opinion of it could NEVER change!)

But this all raises the question of for whom the subsequent Star Wars movies were aimed. The original sequels (V and VI) were easy enough to swallow as continuations of the original story (well, yes, there were the Ewoks). But the prequels of the early 2000s missed their marks on a number of fronts, leaving us to wonder what approach any further films might take--or should take.

Well, wait no more. The Disney juggernaut purchased the rights to the Star Wars universe in 2012, and J.J. Abrams (a couple of Star Treks, a couple of Mission Impossibles, a bunch of other stuff) is the first director invited to continue the franchise and his effort, The Force Awakens, is here.

I decided there's little point in avoiding spoilers, since everyone will have seen it soon enough. So you are forewarned--SPOILER ALERT!--I just wade all over the story here.

It's 30 years after the close of Episode VI, Return of the Jedi. A few things are presumed (details scavenged from the otherwise-discarded Known Universe): Han and Leia became a couple and had children. Luke formed a Jedi school to rebuild the shattered order. All this has come and gone in the intervening years. The hated Empire has reorganized into the First Order, an entity indistinguishable (for our purposes) from the Empire.

The film opens with our being introduced to a couple new faces, junk scavenger and ace-pilot Rey (Daisy Ridley) and ambivalent Storm Trooper Finn (John Boyega). Oscar Isaac plays Poe Dameron, the Republic's best pilot, who with his feisty sidekick droid BB-8 has taken possession of a secret map that shows the location of the disappeared Luke Skywalker. The plot will bring these three into contact and collaboration. With Darth Vader and the Emperor gone, the First Order is overseen by a new Supreme Leader, Snoke, and the day-to-day operations are run by the very Vader-like Kylo Ren. Luke's disappearance appears to have something to do with the current malaise. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

First, the good stuff--and it's mostly good stuff all around. The film is beautiful to look at, and it has (in updated fashion) just the stuff to fire the young kids' imagination. Planets and starships and strange creatures and epic battles. Rey lives inside the hulk of a piece of Imperial war junk, and spends her days scavenging the immense ruins of starships crashed in the great battles of the previous films. Abrams keeps everything boiling along at a brisk, but not too-brisk, pace. The primary trio of new cast members could not be better-chosen. Daisy Ridley especially as the film's primary character is fantastic. She is young and has the naivety of her inexperience, but she is in no way helpless or weak. Indeed, she discovers her skills virtually without tutoring--something not Anakin nor Luke nor Leia ever achieved. As an actor, she has the innate ability to show the contents of her mind effortlessly on her face, which lets us follow her closely on her adventures. John Boyega's role is ambivalent by design, but he proves the perfect companion: chivalrous, capable, and essentially good. But he's in need of motivation and direction. Oscar Isaac plays a smaller and more archetypal role in this film--hotshot pilot--but the stage is primed for more substantial things to come, I suspect.

And the old characters make their appearances as well. Han Solo and Chewbacca are prominent characters, and Princess (now General) Leia Organa has a bit of screen time. We're treated to brief appearances from R2-D2 and C-3PO, and Luke does show himself at the end--for two wordless minutes. But it's really the young folks' film, and their franchise moving forward.

(I hesitate to mention it, but I found Carrie Fisher's appearance utterly distracting. I fear a double standard at work here where I can celebrate Han Solo's aging and grizzled appearance but not Leia's. But I insist it's not MY refusal to let her age gracefully; somebody--either her or the studio or whomever--clearly wanted her to look younger than her 59 years. She has been so extensively Botoxed that her face is virtually immobile throughout the film. Almost shockingly so--only a wired-shut jaw would have completed the job. Her upper lip is especially troublesome, looking like some kind of plastic surgery reconstruction in its refusal to move. At all. It's like she's had a clear plastic mask fused to her own face. Personally, I'd be very happy to celebrate the REAL 59-year-old Carrie Fisher, but perhaps that person doesn't exist anymore. Maybe in a twist of reality they could use CGI to restore mobility to her face?)

The John Williams score has its moments, but I'll typically need to spend more time around it before I can decide if I like it or not. A part of me wonders if they don't need to head in a completely different direction here.

And what of the not-so-good? I was kind of struck as the story went along how closely this film follows A New Hope. It's almost a remake. A relative nobody (Luke originally, Rey here) is faced with epic decisions and the trials help her (him) to find herself. The Old Guard seeks new kids to carry the torch. A feisty droid sidekick provides comedy relief. "Business" meetings happen in seedy bars with "hip" music and a menagerie of aliens. The bad guy is really a fallen good guy, and our heroes alone know it and make it their mission to turn him back to the light. These elements still work, but there's a slight lack of freshness to the story. And because of the tie-ins to the previous films, the story is necessarily more complicated and multi-stranded than the almost comic-book simplicity of the original. I understand that it has to be so, and that there's no way to write a story that hits everyone's bases; but THIS story doesn't improve for this complication.

But no matter. I was thrilled to go and am already plotting my next viewing (in Sydney, if it's open there.)

We know that the next two sequels are already in the works--the filming is already underway for the next film--and I'm already eager to see how Rey and Finn's story progresses, and what role Luke will play going forward.

And the grade? For those of us yearning, perhaps irrationally, for anything Star Wars I'd give it an A-. It's a very worthy fix, and a great start to a new franchise. Without this prime for the pump, it seems a B film.

Yearning To Breathe Free

Last night's film, John Crowley's Brooklyn (screenplay by Nick Hornby, based on the novel Brooklyn by Colm Tóibin).

Saoirse Ronan plays Eilis Lacey, a young girl who leaves her sister and mother in Ireland to seek a better life in America. Her older sister Rose (Fiona Glascott) sees that Eilis is smart and has potential, and that life in 1950s Ireland will be a dead end for Eilis. She arranges with an Irish priest living in Brooklyn (played by Jim Broadbent) to find a department store job and a place at a boarding house for Eilis. Along the way she is introduced to a whole menagerie of characters, and we see her finding her feet in this new life and in life in general.

There's nothing like loss to help us focus on what is important. For a young person, the loss of family must rank among the most traumatic. Eilis and Rose have recently lost their father in Ireland, and now Eilis's departure puts her entire being at sea (literally and figuratively). I wonder how many of us would thrive in that setting?

I could not help thinking--as surely we are meant to think--about the millions of people in the last two + centuries who abandoned their homes for the limitless possibilities of America. How often we have been told of the magic of Ellis Island and of the very moving sight of the Statue of Liberty--I've see these places in New York Harbor a hundred times--but Brooklyn puts us in the shoes of a young woman who has left everything she knows for the chance that there's something better elsewhere.

It's a big nugget for a story to digest, a momentous happening on a personal scale, and an exciting one.

The real nub of the film--as the trailers make clear--is not Eilis's departure initially, but her return to Ireland a year or so later and the forces that seek to keep her there. This difficult decision here is her coming-of-age moment.

Brooklyn is a quiet film, made more so by Eilis's essentially quiet, taciturn nature. Ms. Ronan has to pack a whole range of emotional experiences into a pretty limited range of expression, and the whole movie rides on her performance. Saoirse Ronan has always struck me as a bit of a chameleon. Even watching her closely it's hard for me to get any kind of a read on her--indeed, I can't even quite picture what she looks like. It's not that she's generic or forgettable, exactly--she seems very normal and reasonably attractive--but hers seems the countenance of possibility. It also means that she seems able to play almost any character--from Eilis to teen assassin Hannah to Agatha in The Grand Budapest Hotel--with conviction. She is in every scene and the film sinks or swims with her.

I confess I'd never even heard of Irish director John Crowley. It seems he has worked primarily in theatre, and has done a few films and a bit of television. Brooklyn should certainly raise his profile another notch. Mirroring my comments on Spotlight (though a very different kind of film than Brooklyn), I love that Brooklyn underplays most of its elements. There's a cartoon villain or two, but most everyone is subtly played and the dilemmas which Eilis must navigate are not contrived. There's a quiet and contained realism about the story that played very well for me.

A lovely story well-told. It only misses the highest possible marks for its limited scope.  Grade: A-

...For I Have Sinned

Yesterday's film: Thomas McCarthy's Spotlight.

Very much in the vein of Alan Pakula's 1974 political thriller All The President's Men, Spotlight tells the essentially-true story of the Boston Globe's early 2000s exposé of the Catholic Church's systematic and widespread sexual abuse of children. The term Spotlight refers to the five-person investigative team from the Globe that researched and broke the story (which along with subsequent coverage earned the paper a Pulitzer Prize in 2003).

Thomas McCarthy is unfamiliar to me, but I found I was an instant fan. I see he has worked primarily as an actor in both film and television, and has a dozen directing credits on his resume. However he got his experience I cheered every one of his choices here, especially what he chose NOT to do. The drama is baked into the bones of the story itself, and no resort to film cliche or easy tension-ratcheting gimmickry were used--this must be hard to resist as this kind of restraint is very rare.

The paper received a tip-off in 2001 that priests were sexually molesting children. The story had been around before and had even gotten some minimal coverage. But a new editor-in-chief at the Globe, Marty Baron, felt there was more to the story than the paper was pursuing and he persuaded the Spotlight team to take a look. As it turned out, Spotlight's investigation was like turning over a log to find a whole ecosystem of rot and depravity throughout the church. The abuse was bad enough, of course, but the real story was the church's knowledge of the abuse and its complicity and cover-up. A number of private investigators and lawyers had been working for years on bits and pieces of the scandal, but those smaller efforts had been successfully fended off by the church through payouts and intimidation and the public labeling of accusers as quacks and liars.

But Boston is a very Catholic place, and the church is deeply entwined in the very fabric of Boston life. This meant that the sources needed to uncover the story and even the staff of the paper itself were at times reluctant to cooperate. It was only when the team amassed such a weight of evidence that it could not be ignored that the dominoes fell. (We see he chain of emotions from "How dare you say these things about the beloved church?!" to "Is it as bad as all that?" to "Oh god, what have we done / allowed to happen?" over and over again.)

Spotlight is what The DaVinci Code dreamed of being. Spotlight is everything that film is not, measured and methodical and grinding. The investigation has the ups and downs one would expect--the 9/11 attacks occur right in the middle of the investigation--but these are not dangled in front of us as The! Next! End! Of! The! World! They are things that must be ground through and overcome as the work plods on. McCarthy manages to keep this plodding from seeming at all, well, plodding, and I found I was at the edge of my seat for the whole two hours.

I especially love that Marty Baron, who would have been easy to portray as the outsider come to upset the order of things, was greeted with some natural skepticism but quickly proves his mettle; I love that Rachel McAdams is not sexualized and there are no muddling romantic subplots among the close-working reporters. Everyone is portrayed as incredibly hard working and good (but not infallible) at their jobs.

And of course Spotlight has the considerable advantage of being true in all its salient parts. The evil in the story is the actual, demonstrated evil of the organized church and of some of the men of that church. Marty Baron was savvy enough to recognize that the real story is not the individual abusers or even the victims but the institution itself. When it was discovered that Archbishop Bernard Law had known of the abuse and had helped engineer the cover-up, the Spotlight team was eager to post the story immediately--it was seemingly exactly what they had been looking for. But Baron alone insisted that the Spotlight team keep digging because the story was bigger than Law. (The team risked being scooped by another paper by these delays, but the risk got them a much bigger story.)

Bernard Law, of course, was simply moved to another jurisdiction. This time to a plum post within the Vatican itself. That says about everything we need to know.

This hasn't been a big movie year for me, but now at year's end this film rises to the top. Very highly recommended.

Grade: A