Friday, December 11, 2015

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl & We Could Be King (Movie Reviews by Bob Racine)



                  Me and Earl etc: 1 hr & 45 min, color, 2015
                  We Could Be King: 1 hr & 20 min, color, 2015
                            
How many of us remember our senior year in high school?  I am not referring to how it ended – Prom night, commencement & diploma and such like – I am speaking of the months and weeks that made up that year, the struggle to finish one course after another, the debate over which college to try for, or perhaps for some of us who were not Magna Cum Laude material, a nagging worry about whether we would graduate at all.  I know Math caused me a lot of that worry.  That last semester I took a College Algebra course that did not come easily for me. 

The entire class consisted of seniors, and on the morning of the final exam the professor walked in with his mimeographed copies of the test and as he started to pass them out, he commented, in reference to them, that “we’ll see now how many of you are going to hand in your caps and gowns”.  Can you imagine a more daggered morale booster than that?  (Of course, as it turned out, the exam was a breeze for me, and yes I said a well-earned goodbye to the twelfth grade just a few days afterward.)
                            
Seniors do have a fine line to tow, between the last inch of their childhoods and the wide open, awesome cavity of an uncertain adult future.  Excitement, jitters, high expectations, anxiety, confidence, fear of failure, all intermixed!  If you have any memory of it at all, you will have little trouble understanding or identifying with the major players in these two splendid films.  One, “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl”, a fictional drama/comedy, and the other, “We Could Be King”, a first rate factual documentary!  
                            
What I love the most about “Me and Earl” is the choice of the writer Jan Andrews (adapting from her novel) to create a type of teen character that rarely ever gets major consideration in a motion picture.  Greg (Thomas Mann) is the kind of kid who has no chance of ever being voted The Most Handsome, The Wittiest, The Most Popular or The Most Likely to Succeed.  He has a narrow hound dog face, a sad expression much of the time, a jaundiced opinion of himself, and does not mix all that much.  He dresses rather shabbily and is not a dater.  He has a friend (RJ Cyler), the Earl of the title, who lives in a low rent district that happens to be located just a few blocks from Greg’s residence.  The two boys, friends since early childhood, are many light years removed from anything Ivy League.  There are no clean cut, athletic heart throbs to clutter up this very personal coming of age story.  It belongs completely to the two of them and to a petite girl who has been stricken with Leukemia.
                            
Her name is Rachel (Olivia Cooke).   When Greg first goes to visit her, going most reluctantly upon the arm twisting of his own mother, the girl is about to start chemotherapy and is no more enthused about “hanging out” with him than he is with her.  It seems the two mothers are allied around the notion that a “nice boy” like Greg would be just the balm Rachel needs.  But remarkable things happen between them over the six months of their strange, at times awkward and embattled friendship.  Little does he know that he has things to learn from her and that his life under her influence will undergo a seismic sea change, however resistant to it he is, while his friend Earl, a rough and tumble sort, becomes paradoxically a strangely steadying force.
                            
Greg and Earl have for years been creating home movies designed as parodies of old movie classics.  The intercutting of images from their amateur work creates a lot of visual amusement.  The entire movie is narrated by Greg, his narration mixed with titling that designates specific phases and sub-chapters in what he calls his “doomed relationship” with the dying girl.  What really challenges his wits is the pressure brought upon him to make a film for Rachel to be completed during the time she has left.  In fact, the entire production has the aura of a home movie.  But it is anything but amateur stuff. 

The human drama/comedy picks up more and more strength as it proceeds.  The dialogue for the kids is quite authentic, insightful and forceful.  It all seems to be a maiden voyage for the whole cast and crew; there is not a face that I ever remember seeing before nor name I ever recall hearing about before, including its director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon.  But it proves quite seaworthy, and I think most intelligent viewers will feel grateful for having climbed aboard.  It won multiple awards and a standing ovation at the Sundance Film Festival.

A callow youth is forced somewhat prematurely to confront the titanic and very tangible subjects of mortality and personal grief, and it pays suitable respect to them without turning into a tear jerker.
 

A personal brag (sort of) is in order before I do a little expounding on the virtues of a terrific documentary feature, “We Could Be King”, about some high school-ers who recently had an enormous barrier to penetrate, not only for the purpose of excelling at football but for that of graduating with an academic record that keeps them in their uniforms.  Because I am not a great football fan, I probably would never have taken a second look at it, but my wife Ruby had a student in elementary school named Ruchi Mital, who has remained throughout the intervening years not only a grateful high-achieving learner giving high marks to her teacher but also a close friend of Ruby’s and, by acquisition, mine as well. 

Ruchi is the Production Coordinator on “We Could Be King”, working with Producer Caitlin Mae Burke and the film’s Director Judd Ehrlich.  I am so glad that she put us in touch with this fine piece of work.  It is an example of excellent pacing and editing and photographic ingenuity and of empathetic reporting and visualization.  There is not a tedious moment or an overbearing sequence.  Images of life on the field and those off the field are well in balance. 
                            
The scene is northeast Philadelphia, where educational budgets are being slashed all over the area, schools closed and teachers losing their jobs.  One of the schools biting the dust was Germantown High whose student body merged with that of Martin Luther King High, up to that point a fierce, bitter rival on the gridiron. 
                            
What you watch in the footage of this film is a miracle in the making.  It might pertain to football but it is not really about football.  It is about some of the most fascinating adolescents I have ever had the experience of watching – jumping over all kinds of hurdles that only boys from a poverty background would ever be likely to face, some of the hurdles in the classroom, some in the dangerous street environment where they are growing up, some inside themselves.  Most of the kids we see are seniors struggling to obtain an athletic scholarship, a goal that requires a scholastic record of excellence.  The fact is that both teams had been doing quite poorly, losing more games than they won. How then could two such outfits with such a sorry record form one combined ball club that would have any chance of achieving anything like excellence? 
                            
That question can be answered in two words: Ed Dunn.  This man is the coach who made it all happen.  We have probably all seen or heard of high school sports coaches who are anything but ethical or even-tempered, who swear in front of the students, who bully and belittle to get the results they want and engage in all kinds of counterproductive tricks and maneuvers, more to serve their own egos than to do anything constructive for the young people they are supposed to serve.  But Mr. Dunn is a marvel to behold and to hear. 

He is a supreme role model for every aspiring man or woman preparing to take on the job of putting kids through competitive paces.  He knows when to push and when to ease up, when to raise the bar, when to slack off, when to criticize and when to build self-confidence.  As far as I am concerned this man is the true star of this documentary.  When one of his boys starts maligning another, he steps right in with a favorite byword of his, “Pick him up; don’t push him down.”  His byword reflects a passionate belief that when one kid is shut out or allowed to fail or feel small, the whole team suffers.  I just loved watching this man. Such tremendous commitment guiding those disadvantaged youth to victory!
                            
I close with an example of how he talked to his students:
                            
“We come from humility. This is not a private school. We ain’t got Nike practice jerseys, pants, and the whole nine. We got mismatched cleats. We go to different schools, difficult situations, but that’s not what makes us weak. That’s what makes us stronger than everybody else. This should be your motivation. This is not an excuse. Humility. That’s why we get in this dirt. That’s why we get on this hill. So we remain humble.”
                            
Both films can be obtained from Netflix.  Whether you choose to send for the disc or to stream, I earnestly suggest you consider making use of the subtitles.  The dialogue is rapid fire and contains much of the argot of the streets and school grounds that may not come to rest clearly on every ear.  


To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com. To learn about me consult on the website the blog entry for August 9, 2013.

Friday, November 27, 2015

The Slippery Issue of Safety (Essay by Bob Racine)



The night was quite wet, the roads tending toward slick, and the shoulders on many stretches had turned to mud.  The year was 1954, and we were making some haste northward on Route 1, a two lane artery in those days (a few decades before limited access highways emerged) weaving its way through the countryside ten miles or so out of Raleigh, North Carolina.  It was somewhere, as I recall, around 10:00 pm.  I was one of four Wake Forest ministerial students returning to the campus on a Sunday night from a weekend extension trip, a passenger in the front seat, all of us eager to get back to our campus rooms and out of the rain. 
                            
We came around a curve and to our shock another car that had been headed southward, the opposite direction from ours, had crossed the road and hit a muddy embankment on our side and turned completely over.   The head and tail lights were still on, and the emergency lights flashing.  Obviously someone was still in the car, had not yet gotten out.
                            
Instinctively we pulled to a stop a few feet beyond the wreck and went on foot to render whatever assistance we could.  By the time we reached it, two persons, the driver and one passenger had started to crawl from it.  And to our amazement three or four other cars immediately also stopped.  It took a few moments for it to sink into our four minds - that the incident had just occurred seconds before, else how could we have been the first to come by on a main highway that busy?  Construct the picture in your minds: they had been going one way, and we the other; they had crossed the highway, right in our path, seconds before we reached the spot.  If we had arrived those few seconds earlier, a head-on collision would have most certainly occurred and the likelihood of severe injury, possibly death, would have been our fate.  We had been having lively conversation in the car up until that moment.  But from there on back to our college, over the next half hour or so, none of us spoke.  We were sobered; we all had done the calculation, and we were stunned and terrified over what was so apparent to us.
                            
That is probably the closest I have ever come in my eighty-two years to a tragic, senseless death.  It still gives me shivers reliving it in my memory.
                            
Danger we perceive as the opposite of safety, and safety is much on the minds of inhabitants of nations these days, following the terrorist attack in Paris.  What was perceived as safe surroundings has now been transformed into a perilous frontier seemingly under the partial control of savage marauders.  The citizens of the world have internalized the horror and suddenly the event is not thousands of miles away from our nests; we experience it as if it has happened right outside our doors and windows, on the very street where we live.  We have become nervous and fearful, even inside our front doors.  And when people become nervous and fearful, they tend to become desperate, and desperation can make them irrational – irrational enough to think that to prevent victimized migrants from entering our borders they have significantly reduced the chance of terrorists creeping in.  Overlooked in the near hysterical political rhetoric we have been subjected to is the fact that terrorism has become professionally organized, and professionals, despite our vetting processes, can find ways to get a foothold on our shores.  They have far more sophisticated devices than bedding down with a bunch of bedraggled migrants running from oppression.  Welcoming the migrants, on the other hand, is one way to hold the line against that very tyranny with which they have become innocently associated in the minds of governors and members of Congress. 
                            
(The desperation can also call forth latent bigotry, both in thought and action, which it is now doing up and down the country, but that is another subject for another essay.)
                            
We humans seek protection – by those with powers greater than our own, while we from time to time must remind ourselves that that protection is not foolproof.  We create environments in which we feel protected, while it remains true that we are not ultimately so.  We design homes and sanctuaries and we go to great lengths making those places cozy and comfortable and warm – all this to insulate ourselves against the raw outside, against danger and the boisterous and unpredictable elements that surround us.  Inside those places we seem to cancel out whatever the risk to which we would be otherwise exposed.  We go to great trouble to convince ourselves that we are protected and beyond the reach of capricious chance.
                            
Perhaps we all from time to time wish we had the myopia of Mr. Magoo.  He can walk nonchalantly through a mine field or across a rickety bridge or through one calamity-about-to-happen after another, and what he knows nothing about does not hurt him.  He proceeds on his breezy, cheerful way.  We do our level best to emulate him; we decide not to know about certain things, because what we do not know will not hurt us or even depress us, or so we assume.  But in the struggle to do this, we forget something that we may never have thought we knew.  In our homes we can create privacy, comfort, and to some extent protection.  But what we cannot create even there is safety, because. . .
                            
SAFETY IS AN ILLUSION!  Like it or not, the possibility of safety is an illusion!  
                            
Even in the most burglar resistant domicile the inhabitants are still subject to the dangers of food poisoning or deadly infections (either carried in from the outside or acquired from one another).  No manufactured comfort zone can provide us any guaranteed immunity from disease or heart attack or domestic accident.  So the best we can do is play the odds.  What are the odds against having our protective shield penetrated?  We calculate odds with mathematical precision, sometimes forgetting that odds are nothing more than estimates, guesswork.  We suffer shocks when things happen that we think could have been prevented.  Yet they happen, despite all our vigilance.
                            
And then there are the dangers we bring onto ourselves when we entrust our lives and our safety into the hands of airline pilots and far more when we take to the wheel of a car.  Those who have a fear of flying need only consult the statistics.  The chance of our meeting injury and/or death on the road is at least five hundred times greater than on a commercial air flight.  That fact has been driven home to me countless times when I have had a close call with another driver or when necessity has forced me to drive in inclement weather, and especially when I relive that chilling moment on the highway with my student friends in 1954.  Probably also the chance of death from ISIS is greatly exceeded by motoring in a car. 
                            
As we drive further and further into the twenty-first century, we hear with increasing frequency reports about the polar ice caps in a state of meltdown and the prospect, and some experts say the certainty, of massive rises in the ocean levels.  Nature continues to pull colossal tricks on the earth’s inhabitants.  The tsunamis that have battered Pacific islands and brought forth merciless tidal waves wreak unspeakable destruction upon thousands who thought their places of dwelling were secure.  They make all of us living in coastal areas feel qualms of uneasiness over the possibility that the Atlantic could deliver tsunamis as well, since no scientist has offered any assurance to the contrary.  The illusory ideal of safety gets to feel further and further from our grasps. 
                            
Tornados have descended with little if any advanced notice, and floods from unprecedented quantities of rainfall are living proof that battery from nature is not the sole fate of coastal dwellers.  And let us not forget that earthquakes give little if any warning.
                            
Where is Safety?  She is as mythical and make believe as a Greek goddess.
                            
How do we live meaningful, peaceful lives in such a world?  Are we to conclude that life is just a crapshoot?  Many, including myself, resort to faith and faith communities.  We know that life is precarious but with the quality of love, redeeming love shared, we prayerfully empower each other to what we call a life of simple abundance.  Though we never know when our lives will be required of us, we learn to be at peace within the world that surrounds us, a communal peace that so many on the planet do not know.  I have not done a study of Walt Whitman’s private life or of the religious life he might have espoused, but in penning these following words he had the right idea:
                            
Quicksand years that whirl me I know not whither,
your schemes, politics fail, lines give way,
substances mock and elude me,
only the theme I sing, the great and strong
possessed soul, eludes not. 
One’s-self must never give way; that is the final
substance, that out of all is sure ,
out of politics, triumphs, battles, life – what at last
finally remains.


To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com. To learn about me consult on the website the blog entry for August 9, 2013.

Sunday, November 8, 2015

Prohibition Is Still With Us -- After a Fashion (Essay by Bob Racine)



Thus far in the course of running this blog I have avoided making controversial or subversive statements.  I do not normally fancy myself an iconoclast.  What I am about to say in this posting may look at first like just that, but I prefer to think of it as an invitation to debate, the opening up of a new domain for serious exploration.  It would be subversive if I spoke with dogmatic authority; I will speak instead more as a devil’s advocate, but one who is about 90% on the way toward believing what is being proposed.  I am not playing a game; I am not in a gaming mood.  !
                                     
First of all let me lay a foundation!
                                     
What chance would a member of the legislature have today, if that law maker tried to push a bill through Congress bringing back the likeness of the Volstead Act of a century ago?  A law totally abolishing the consumption of alcoholic beverages was in effect in the U.S. for a decade and a half from coast to coast, finally rescinded by the states in 1934.  Even the most occasional imbiber was turned into a criminal if and when the imbibing took place.  Today a repeal of a Constitutional amendment would stand a better chance of passage and ratification than such a bill. 
                                     
And rightly so!  Who wants to try that again? 
                                     
As most of us know, Prohibition did not wipe out booze; it sent the stuff underground.  Much of respectable society was forced to pretend it was dry, even if they were nipping on the side in the privacy of their own homes.  Temperance leaders thought they had purified the country, little knowing that they had given all kinds of sordid elements a power they had never had before.  But now we have another form of Prohibition afflicting our country, one that has been with us for quite some time.  Only now it is not fermented grape juice that has elicited laws of abstinence.  Now a different type of substance user is being targeted.  Our nation is thick from coast to coast with drug laws.  Jail time and prison sentences are imposed upon anyone caught in the possession of the more deadly variety of narcotics.  So let me lay it on the line, and maybe make some readers mad.
                                     
As I see it, the best solution to the drug wars, the best way to put an end to them is to LEGALIZE THE DRUGS.  Legalize all drugs, just as we legalized booze in 1934 after a long and fruitless experiment.
                                     
Now, let me make it clear that I am not proposing that doing this would keep people from getting hooked , but legally forbidding their possession and use is not doing that either.  Read the papers, watch the news, soak up the facts about the pandemic that is now engulfing hundreds and thousands of our youth and probably even more of our middle-aged adults, turned on by more than marijuana and prescription pain killers, but also by heroin and cocaine.  The drug laws are not preventing lives from getting ruined.  Recently on 60 Minutes the audience was informed that heroin is no longer classified in peoples’ minds as a product used only in the slums or the ghetto.  It has penetrated and proliferated even in suburbia, among the affluent.  It was heartbreaking to hear and watch parents of these addicted kids agonizing over what has happened to them. 
                                     
The drug laws are archaic and ineffective.  They are not a deterrent.
                                     
What would we gain by such legalization?  I maintain that while it would not save anyone from shipwreck, it would have two very desirable effects.
                                     
For one thing, it would contribute considerably to thinning out the population in our jails and prisons, something that is much under consideration among law makers and law enforcement officials and heads of government and much of the general public at present.  Thousands of Americans are currently in our prisons who have never committed a crime of violence.  They are only there on so-called “drug charges”.  And nobody has computed the number of such so-called offenders in the local jails of our country, awaiting trial for possession. They have simply used a drug that our government has declared unlawful.  Would someone explain to me (and here’s my challenge) how this differs from Prohibition?   The quantity of alcohol consumed back in the twenties and early thirties did not let up; all we accomplished was turning partakers into criminals.  And that is what we are doing right now, as if our nation has learned nothing from its history.    
                                     
I remember years ago seeing a documentary short film that consisted of nothing more than young people who had been through addiction, how they got started and what it took to get them presumably clean.  One girl I remember said that when she was in her mid teens she “thought that breaking every law on the books was the most glamorous thing in the world.  Now, I see that drug addiction is about as glamorous as cancer.” 
                                     
These misguided youth are not criminals; they are not enemies of society.  They are sick people, and sick people do not belong behind bars; they belong in hospitals and treatment centers.  Addiction is a disease, one that demands treatment, and when we send the addicts to prison, where do they get that treatment?  What are the chances of a cure inside a penal institution?  There they learn what criminality really looks like and stand a sizeable chance of being shaped by it.  Their sickness is compounded.  And let me ask a very pertinent question: how many alcoholics do we send to prison?  How many victims of strong drink are ever prosecuted just for being enslaved to “the devil’s brew”?  Why is one form of addiction criminalized and another one is not?  Statistics tell us tons of truth about how alcohol wrecks families.  Its destructive history equals in every respect that of heroin.
                                     
The second thing to be derived from legalizing drugs is its likely impact upon those who direct the covert traffic.  Under our present legal system those who experiment have to sneak around, have to hide their habit, have to be clever and surreptitious, have to make evil covenants with traffickers.  The cartels and their pushers thrive off the illegality.  They build empires out of supplying those who have to sneak, and they charge exorbitant amounts and become millionaires off the exploited flesh of the weak.  They all would probably be out of business overnight, if drugs were legalized, just as Al Capone and Bugs Moran and Frank Nitti and all the other beer barons were after 1934.  They were bust.  Bust, that is, until they went into the narcotics business and the legal lunacy started all over again in another form!
                                     
Now, I am trying not to be naïve.  If someone under the influence of one drug or the other (and let us not forget that alcohol is a drug) tries driving a car while intoxicated or commits a violent act or damages property and certainly if that person takes the life of another, either accidentally or maliciously, or causes injury to another, that individual should definitely be prosecuted, but prosecuted for that crime of violence or destructiveness or endangerment.  I do not for a moment mean to suggest that drug-induced sickness excuses anyone from the consequences of felonious behavior.  In such a circumstance the law most certainly should be enforced.

In reference again to the parallel between narcotics and alcohol, I must remind us all that we have had, ever since Prohibition, laws regulating the distribution of alcoholic beverages.  It has been against the law (technically) to sell it to minors or to mentally challenged people.  The same should apply to drugs.  Of course, this is where parents come into it.  The way to fight addiction and wanton indulgence is through education and value training, and the parents and the schools must be observant and diligent in this teaching process.  This discipline is not easy; it requires commitment and loving care, sometimes tough loving care.  My suggestion is not a panacea; it would just shift the focus away from law enforcement to health provision. 
                                     
New legislation with bi-partisan support and backing is currently being considered that is supposed to thin out the prison population by the release of those incarcerated for non-violent small crimes.  That sounds like a good start in the direction of making us all more honest about the problem.  But it is my prayer that beyond such a move, the bold step will be taken to decriminalize all drugs completely.
                                     
This one time I not only welcome feedback; I crave it.  Please let me hear from you readers.  Is there something I have overlooked in my reasoning?  Is my notion misguided or does it make sense or what. . .?  I am still working it out!


To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com. To learn about me consult on the website the blog entry for August 9, 2013.