history

BLACKBERRY: woulda, coulda, shoulda

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Photo caption: Jay Baruchal in BLACKBERRY. Courtesy of IFC Films.

BlackBerry is the funny true story of Canadian geeks who find themselves suddenly dominating the nascent smartphone market…but not for long. The improbable rise of BlackBerry’s parent company is a tale of the Odd Couple partnership co-CEOs, Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchal), who ran the engineering side, and Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton), who managed finance and sales.

Mike Lazaridis solved the technical challenge that had kept cell phones from becoming the email machines that they have been since. As played by Baruchal, Lazaridis is reserved, even shy, supremely confident in all things tech and not all confidant with other humans.

Lazaridis needed a pitchman, and that was the hard charging Balsillie, who, as played by Howerton ranged between hard-charging and abusive. A tech exec I knew in Silicon Valley was described to me as having “too much testosterone” and that’s Howerton’s Balsillie.

Lazaridis’ engineering brilliance, combined with Balsillie’s sheer will and audacity, allowed the company to nimbly pivot through various product cycles. Balsillie’s hubris even began to leak into Lazaridis. But then came an advance in product design that Lazaridis hadn’t anticipated, and Balsillie had cut one too many corners in finance.

I’ve mostly seen Baruchal in much more broadly funny roles (Tropic Thunder, This Is the End). Here, Baruchal successfully carries the leading role with a much more subtle and textured performance. One nice (and slyly underplayed) touch is that when Baruchal’s character transitions from the CEO of a start-up to the CEO of a company with a massive market cap, his haircut transitions, too.

For much of the movie, we see Howerton playing Balsillie as a one-note, hard charger. He refuses to acknowledge any obstacle, until, in a wonderful moment of performance, his face shows when knows he’s finally been had.

BlackBerry was directed by Matt Johnson, who also co-adapted the screenplay and plays one of company co-founders.

Make sure you watch the end credits to see what happened to the real guys.

I screened BlackBerry for the San Luis Obispo Film Festival, where it won the audience award for Best of Fest. BlackBerry opens in theaters tomorrow, and it’s a surefire audience-pleaser.

JEWS OF THE WILD WEST: desperadoes, cowpunchers…and Jews

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Okay, so this is one of those rare movies that had me at the title. One doesn’t automatically think of Jews among the wagon trains, desperadoes and cowpunchers of the Wild West. But, in Jews of the Wild West, documentarian Amanda Kinsey brings us an anthology of impressively well-researched Jewish experiences on the Western frontier.

Kinsey starts off with a saloon girl who married an iconic gunslinger (and buried him in Colma’s Jewish cemetery) and the marketer of the clothing item most identified with the American West (hint – not Wranglers). As a Western history buff, I was familiar with those first two stories, but then I started learning a lot:

  • Why many of the first mayors of frontier towns were Jewish;
  • How Eastern European occupational restrictions on Jews prepared them for a pivotal role in the development of the great Denver and Greeley, Colorado, cattle stockyards;
  • That most Jews found markedly less antisemitism in the West than in the East;
  • That teenage Golda Meir ran away to high school in Denver.

My jaw dropped at the shocking story of the Hebrew Emigrant Aid Society, which in 1881-84, until taken over by the reputable United Hebrew Charities, was helping new Jewish emigrants resettle in the remote West. The seeming benevolence, it turns out, was motivated by an earlier wave of now prosperous Jews who didn’t want the impoverished Orthodox arrivals from Eastern Europe to challenge capitalism and make them look bad.

Interestingly, filmmaker Kinsey, a longtime NBC News producer and five-time Emmy winner, is NOT herself Jewish.

I attended a screening of Jews of the Wild West at the San Luis Obispo Jewish Film Festival that included a Q&A with Kinsey and local historians. Jews of the Wild West is streaming on Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu and YouTube.

SPEER GOES TO HOLLYWOOD: immune from shame

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SPEER GOES TO HOLLYWOOD. Courtesy of Vanessa Lapa.

In her absorbing documentary Speer Goes to Hollywood, filmmaker Vanessa Lapa takes us inside a Nazi war criminal’s brazen attempt to rehabilitate his image into “the Good Nazi”. Previously unheard private audio recordings of Albert Speer himself reveal him to be one of history’s most audacious spin doctors.

Speer, the highest ranking Nazi to escape execution at the Nuremberg Trials, was the master of the Nazis’ wartime production efforts. A trained architect, any ability Speer had to design structures was surpassed by his genius in logistics. In Speer Goes to Hollywood, Speer displays an ever greater gift for dissembling.

After being released from prison in the mid 1960’s, Speer published a bestselling (and self-serving) memoir, Inside the Third Reich, to perpetuate what is known as The Speer Myth. Speer would have us believe that the worst crimes in history occurred – right under his nose and to his benefit – without any participation on his part. Speer’s defense was essentially, “Hey, it was the OTHER Nazis“.

(Note: not even a liar as bald-faced as Speer denied that the Holocaust happened.)

To supply the German war machine, Speer exploited the nearly limitless pool of those conquered, persecuted and to be exterminated by the Nazis. Powering his production with forced labor, Speer enslaved 12.5 million victims and worked many of them to death, all to perpetrate a war of aggression.

In the tapes, we hear Speer collaborating with Andrew Birkin, a Stanley Kubrick protege, on the script for a film to further Speer’s version of history. In the face of damning evidence, Speer never wavered in his deflections, dodges and denials. Speer Goes to Hollywood reveals Albert Speer to stay on message with unmatched relentlessness, discipline and audacity.

Andrew Birkin was trying to cash in on the popularity of Inside the Thrd Reich. The tapes show Birkin to be stunningly enabling in the attempted whitewash. Once Birkin slips and blames a kerfuffle on “the Jewish machine”.

Another Birkin mentor, Carol Reed is the truth teller. Reed, the director of The Third Man, gives Birkin a reality check – this IS a whitewash, pure and simple.

A prime example of the banality of evil, Speer doesn’t seem to be a fanatic hater, but an amoral grasper/climber, willing to swallow even genocide as an acceptable price for getting ahead. He does display an ingrained antisemitism, once tossing off “Of course, we resented the Jews“, as if, who wouldn’t?

Here’s a tantalizing nugget from Speer Goes to Hollywood. We hear Speer claim to have written the top Nuremberg prosecutor, American Robert Jackson, to claim important knowledge of Germany’s neurological warfare research, using it as leverage to avoid being turned over to the Soviets. Speer hints at an implied quid pro quo, but given Speer’s credibility, who knows if any of it is true.

The ever-watchable Speer Going to Hollywood chronicles unashamedness on a mass scale.

A SONG FOR CESAR: the arts embedded in activism

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Photo caption: A SONG FOR CESAR. Courtesy of Juno Films.

A Song for Cesar is a rich documentary on the role of music and the arts in the critical years of Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Worker movement – so rich that it’s much more than that. There’s a time capsule of the turbulent 1960s, the story of emerging Chicano identity and a meditation on the role of arts in political activism – all embedded in a compelling history lesson.

A Song for Cesar shows us how music and the UFW uplifted each other. Anthems were used in mobilizing, and benefit concerts were a major pillar of UFW fundraising. In the other direction, Cesar Chavez and the movement inspired a generation of Chicano musical artists. We hear directly from a veritable Who’s Who of Chicano musicians from Malo, El Chicano, Tower of Power, War, Santana and Los Lobos through Ozomotli. The memories of UFW allies like Taj Mahal and Joan Baez are also central to A Song for Cesar.

It’s not just only about music, either – the importance of murals and theater are highlighted. We hear from Luis Valdez, founder of Teatro Campesino, about the beginnings of Teatro and its place in the movement.

A Song for Cesar captures the zeitgeist of the time. The UFW’s organizing campaign coincided with (as well as inspiring) new Chicano identity and pride. As Tower of Power’s Emilio Castillo says, “People were ready to protest for social change.They weren’t going for the old okey-doke no more.” 

A Song for Cesar reminds us of the mass casualty tragedies that galvanized the Farm Worker movement, along with the low pay, wage theft, horrid working conditions and exploitation. (A personal reflection: when I think of the cruelty, disrespect and social control embodied in the short handled hoe, I still get pissed off.) Exceptionally well-sourced, A Song for Cesar presents first-hand recollections of Chavez family members, UFW leader Dolores Huerta and other participants. The UFW history is deep enough to acknowledge the overlooked role of Filipinos in the UFW, with Larry Itliong as a co-founder of the union.

The Farm Workers had to face goon violence from the growers and infiltration by racist law enforcement. It becomes all the more relatable when Luis Valdez describes facing the violence with non-violence in very personal terms. A Song for Cesar is solid history and an important document of the times.

A Song for Cesar is filled with cool tidbits, like how Cesar Chavez was himself a big jazz fan, who would comb record store bins whenever he had the chance. Who knew?

A Song for Cesar opens this weekend, and will have March 18-24 runs at the Opera Plaza and the Smith San Rafael.

more thoughts about THE NEUTRAL GROUND and the Lost Cause lie

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Dedication of the Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville, Virginia

C.J. Hunt, in his insightful and thought-provoking documentary The Neutral Ground, explores the lie of the Lost Cause, which is still embraced by many White Southerners and is the rationale for preserving Confederate monuments. That myth is that that the Civil War was about a principle of “States Rights” somehow divorced from slavery, and that the Southern cause in the Civil War was romantically heroic.

At one point, Hunt observes,

“The founding documents of the Confederacy talk so obsessively about slavery, the real mystery is how so many people came to believe that Confederate symbols have nothing to do with it.”

Not only is Hunt dead right, but you can read the actual declarations of the causes of secession yourselves. The truth is inescapable – the South fought the Civil War PRIMARILY to continue slavery.

The SECOND SENTENCE of Mississippi’s declaration is “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery”.

Texas identified this grievance against the Northern States:

“based upon an unnatural feeling of hostility to these Southern States and their beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery, proclaiming the debasing doctrine of equality of all men, irrespective of race or color– a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of Divine Law. They demand the abolition of negro slavery throughout the confederacy, the recognition of political equality between the white and negro races, and avow their determination to press on their crusade against us, so long as a negro slave remains in these States.”

One of South Carolina’s grievances against the northern states was, without irony, “They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes.”

It is clear from reading the official actions of the Southern states AT THE TIME that the only relevance of “States Rights” was to continue and expand slavery. Baby Boomers recall that “States Rights” was code for “racial segregation” in the 1950s and 1960s. Same thing.

The Neutral Ground also documents that, after the subversion of Reconstruction in the last quarter of the 19th Century, Confederate statues were intentionally placed to impose terror and demonstrate White supremacist power. See the photo (above) of the dedication of the Charlottesville, Virginia, statue of Robert E. Lee during this period. The dedication is ringed by robed and hooded Ku Klux Klan members. Everybody AT THE TIME knew what was going on,

Unfortunately, Southern Whites have lived in a Lost Cause echo chamber for a century. It has become more offensive to tell them that the Civil War was about slavery than to suggest that Jesus was not the son of God.

The German people embraced a “stab in the back” lie to explain their defeat in WWI. That, of course, led to the Nazi regime, a second world war, mass genocide and the destruction of Germany itself. Today’s Germans know that they can be proud of their contributions to world culture, industry and science and still accept that following Hitler was a grievous mistake. Good luck finding a contemporary German who will say, “Hey, none of us actually believed all that stuff about a Master Race”.

THE NEUTRAL GROUND: the supremacist legacy of old statues

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Photo caption: C.J. Hunt in NEUTRAL GROUND. Photo courtesy of PBS POV.

In the pointed documentary The Neutral Ground, C.J. Hunt explores the continuing legacy of Confederate monuments in America. Finding the backlash against removing New Orleans’ Confederate monuments so absurd, Hunt, a producer for The Daily Show, started out to make a snarky YouTube video. But he found himself drawn more deeply into the history of Confederate monuments, so intentionally braided with white supremacy.

In my view (and C.J. Hunt’s), it’s a no-brainer to remove monuments that should never have been erected in the first place. After all, these monuments celebrate men who led a traitorous insurrection against their own country, who sought to keep other human beings enslaved and who lost a disastrous war. Traitors. Slavers. Losers.

But Hunt is fascinated by the chorus of White Southerners advocating for the preservation of Confederate monuments to maintain pride in (White) Southern heritage. All of them claim that the Civil War was not about slavery. And none of them would say that they are White supremacists or that slavery was acceptable. Hunt notes a disconnect with historical fact:

“The founding documents of the Confederacy talk so obsessively about slavery, the real mystery is how so many people came to believe that Confederate symbols have nothing to do with it.”

I am a student of American history, and this is one of my pet peeves. If you’re interested, you can read more thoughts about THE NEUTRAL GROUND and the Lost Cause lie.

Now back to the movie, The Neutral Ground.

Hunt is very funny. To a woman who wants to keep all the statues in their prominent places with plaques for context, he suggests this wording: “Hi, I’m Robert E. Lee. A long time ago, I turned on my country and led over 200,000 Southern sons to their graves, so we could keep our basic right to own human beings as property. #SorryI’mNotSorry“.

After meeting a round of genteel “as long as you stay in your place” racists, Hunt is unnerved by encounters with the “I want to kill you” variety of racists.

For me, the highlights of The Neutral Ground were Hunt’s sparring with his own African-American father. His dad, moving about his kitchen in an Aunt Jemima apron, critically recounts the evolution of C.J.’s own racial awareness and imparts his own unblinking view of institutional racism in America. This repartee sets the stage for The Neutral Ground to become even more personally-focused for C.J. Hunt.

I watched The Neutral Ground on PBS’ POV; it’s now streaming on PBS.

ATOMIC COVER-UP: the truth will out

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ATOMIC COVER-UP

The understated but brilliant documentary Atomic Cover-up reveals the story of the long-hidden eyewitness film record of the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Japanese film crews immediately filmed the carnage and destruction, which was quickly suppressed by the Japanese military. Within a month, the US occupation forces were in charge, and American filmmakers took over the filming of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, often with Japanese crews. Censorship continued under the US military.

The films have now escaped the censors and are seen in Atomic Cover-up with the testimonies of the original Japanese and American cameramen. As told matter-of-factly by the men who captured these images, it’s a great story.

I screened Atomic Cover-up for its world premiere at Cinequest, and it made my Best of Cinequest 2021. You can stream it during the festival for only $3.99 at Cinequest’s online Cinejoy.

MLK/FBI: about America then and about America today

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MLK/FBI. Photo courtesy of IFC Films.

In MLK/FBI, Sam Pollard, the master of the civil rights documentary (Eyes on the Prize), takes on the FBI’s quest to discredit and even destroy Martin Luther King, Jr. Over many years, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI targeted King with wiretaps, bugs, surveillance and informers. The FBI built a trove of audio tapes of King having extramarital sex; these tapes are now in the National Archives and will be released publicly in 2027. The tapes themselves are not included in MLK/FBI, but the film reveals the many secret FBI memos that discuss them.

Pollard bookends MLK/FBI with historians considering the questions of how we should process the behavior on the tapes and how we should face the actual tapes when they are released six years from now.

MLK/FBI documents the moment that Hoover and his top lieutenant William Sullivan became obsessed with King – and the moment they tried to force him into suicide. From their perspective, if King’s movement wanted to upend the racial inequities that included legal segregation, then of COURSE he must be an anti-American subversives. They started by red-baiting King for associating with communists, and then moved to focus on sexual behavior.

MLK/FBI reminds us who we were back in the 1960s. King had not yet been martyred and many in the mainstream shared Hoover’s discomfort with racial progress and his driving fear of communism. When MLK and Hoover had a public spat, the polling documented 50% of the American public siding with Hoover and under 20% with King.

While today, a male public figure would likely not be ruined by consensual heterosexual sex outside of marriage, that was not the case in the 1960s. Then it was still controversial about whether a divorced person – or even someone married to a previously divorced person – should be elected to high office.

And MLK/FBI says a lot about our society today. Although this salacious material was leaked to many journalists in the 1960s, none actually made it public. I find this particularly sobering, because today there is no way that the temptation to generate clicks, likes retweets and ratings would have been resisted – it would have gone viral, as we now say, probably with history-changing consequences.

MLK/FBI can be streamed from Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7: an earlier bizarre moment in our political history

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John Carrol Lynch, Jeremy Strong and Sacha Baron Cohen in THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7

In The Trial of the Chicago Seven, writer Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing, Oscar winner for The Social Network) brings history alive. The trial of anti-Vietnam war activists in 1969 was a bizarre moment in our political history (but not any more bizarre than the past four years).

Now in 2020, it’s time for this movie. Back in 1969, there were authoritative statements about criminality on both sides. But it’s more clear today – and indisputable – that the violence outside the 1968 Democratic Party convention in Chicago was a series of police riots, pure and simple, and that the trial was Nixon’s nakedly illegitimate legal assault against all activism.

The overriding absurdity of this political trial was that it alleged a conspiracy – and some of the alleged conspirators barely knew each other and some despised the others. These were rivals within the anti-war movement and only together in Nixon’s mind.

The movie makes this most clear in the conflict between Tom Hayden (Eddie Redmayne) and Abby Hoffman (Sacha Baron Cohen). Hayden of Students for a Democratic Society wanted to end the Vietnam politically. Hoffman of the Youth International Party (Yippies) was against the war, but sought a wider cultural revolution; the Yippies’ clownish political theater alienated the American Middle and made Hayden’s job harder. Hoffman was hilariously witty and Hayden was as funny as a heart attack. The two men couldn’t have conspired together to order lunch.

Hayden does not benefit from the Sorkin treatment. One is reminded that another activist said, “Tom Hayden gives opportunism a bad name.” THat almost tops Abby Hoffman’s own cutting appraisal of Hayden: “He’s our Nixon”.

The disparity between the defendants was emphasized by the prosecution of David Dellinger (John Carroll Lynch), the non-hippie, a pacifist leader from another generation. Dellinger was a suburban dad and boy scout leader, No one could see him as some punk kid, so when his outrage finally boils over, it’s one of the most powerful moments in the film.

John Carrol Lynch and Sacha Baron Cohen in THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7

Cohen and Lynch are superb in The Trial of the Chicago 7, along with Kelvin Harrison, Jr., who plays Black Panther leader and martyr Fred Hampton, and Mark Rylance as defense lawyer William Kunstler. It’s a star-studded cast with Michael Keaton, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Jeremy Strong (so good as Lee Harvey Oswald in Parkland).

Frank Langella is also brilliant as the villain, Judge Julius Hoffman. Langella’s Hoffman is imperious and intemperate, and utterly blind to his own racism and generational bias.

Frank Langella in THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7

The facts are compressed and – for the most part – kept in context. The role of former Attorney General Ramsey Clark (Keaton) happened a little differently but is portrayed with basic truth. Fred Hampton didn’t actually attend the trial and sit behind Bobby Seale; but the facts and impact of his assassination are fundamentally correct.

The one thing that annoys me about The Trial of the Chicago 7 is the spunky character of the defendants’ office manager Bernardine – because it’s clearly inspired by radical Bernardine Dohrn. Dohrn, who was not part of the trial, was NOT some chick answering the phone, but had already graduated from law school and was about to co-found the Weather Underground terrorist cell. I’m guessing that Sorkin wrote her in the story in a well-intentioned attempt to make the story NOT all-male. But the truth is that even the counter culture was sexist, and even male hippies saw women as adornments in 1969. The 1963 publication of The Feminine Mystique did not immediately wash away millennia of patriarchy.

This, however, is a sound retelling of a salient moment in our political and cultural history. Cohen, Lynch, Rylance, Langella, Harrison Jr, are all exceptional, and The Trial of the Chicago 7 is pretty entertaining.

Remembering John Lewis

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John Lewis (on far right) in JOHN LEWIS: GOOD TROUBLE. Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

John Lewis, that most profoundly American of American heroes, has died at age 80. Released just nine days ago, the documentary John Lewis: Good Trouble traces the life of the civil rights icon.  I usually don’t buy reverential biodocs, but when the subject is a freaking saint, I guess you have to go with it.  The rest of the title comes from Lewis’ mantra – if you see injustice, make good trouble, necessary trouble. 

US Representative John Lewis, of course, was a real hero.  As a very young man in 1965, he had been leading efforts to register Blacks to vote in Selma, Alabama, including a peaceful march to the State Capitol in Montgomery.  On March 7, 1965, the march got as far as the Edmund Pettus Bridge on the outskirts of Selma when they were attached by local law enforcement and Ku Klux Klan members under the command of Sheriff Jim Clark.  Lewis was in the very first rank and was beaten, shedding his own blood on “Bloody Sunday”.  Two subsequent marches on the bridge and the LBJ speech that followed led directly to the Voting Rights Act of 1964, the most important civil rights legislation since 1867. 

In John Lewis: Good Trouble, we see footage from the Edmund Pettus Bridge.  We see a young John Lewis being beaten in 1965, and we see an elderly Lewis in an anniversary march with President Barack Obama and former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

John Lewis: Good Trouble is well-sourced by director Dawn Porter, even though only a few of Lewis’ contemporaries survive.  When the first Black president was elected, Lewis says he wept for JFK, RFK, Dr. King and the others who hadn’t lived to see it.  Fortunately, Lewis had sisters still alive who participated in the documentary.

We get an inside glimpse at Lewis’ childhood.  We get to see Lewis watching footage of himself at a pivotal Nashville sit-in that he had “never seen”.  And, this intimate portrait shows us some dry Lewis humor and some impressive octogenarian dance moves.

How did Lewis get to Congress?  John Lewis: Good Trouble shows us the race against his longtime friend and fellow Civil Rights icon Julian Bond. My day job is in politics, and I understand that, to win, you have to do what you have to do to win; others may find this episode bracing and unsettling. 

 John Lewis: Good Trouble is an insightful view of a man and of a critical point in American history.  You can stream it on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.