Movietime

The best of `07 in `08 (or `09)

This time of year many media outlets rank the top movies of 2008. But since I watch most movies on DVD most of the movies I saw this past year came out in 2007 which was an outstanding year for movies. So to be different, here's my list of the top films of 2007.

10 Tie (ties for 10th are always good). Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. Outrageous and vulgar this movie with the double entendre title was laugh-out-loud funny. The poor guy almost got hit in the face with a penis.
Persepolis. I didn't think I'd ever watch a cartoon about a girl (autobiographical cartoonist Marjane Serepi) growing up in the Middle East. But this engrossing film will teach you more about Iran than you'll ever learn on a TV newscast.

9. In The Valley Of Elah. There have been several movies about the Iraqi war (all of which have bombed at the box office) but this was the best thanks to a standout performance by Tommy Lee Jones. Tommy Lee's character lectures a school janitor early on about how the American flag is only supposed to fly upside down if the country's in a lot of trouble. When you see him walking towards the flag at the end of the film it's pretty powerful.

8. The Waitress. A small, independant movie about the trials and tribulations of some small-town waitresses. The movie's also about pies: The I Don't Want To Have A Baby Pie - quiche, egg, brie and smoked salmon; or the I Hate My Husband Pie - bittersweet chocolate and caramel.

7. Sicko. American health care sucks; Europe's is better, and this Michael Moore offering (his best movie) sends Sean Hannity into apoplexy. The DVD interview with Che Guevara's daughter is a must for socialists.

6. Before The Devil Knows You're Dead. The bungling partner movie of the year. Philip Seymour Hoffman cons his brother (Ethan Hawke) into doing all the work. Said brother always screws up. Movie begins with a full-screen shot of Hoffman's bare butt.

5. Juno. During a trip to the video store last summer I realized that everyone knew Juno. Even people who hadn't seen the movie. Some of it was the poster but Juno was a unique character and none of the movies characters made predictable decisions. Washington state's Kimya Dawson provided the funky music.

4. Gone Baby Gone. One of the things about living in different parts of the country is that you realize how pronounced regional accents are. Even if Gone Baby Gone (adapted from a Dennis Lehane novel) wasn't a good story these are the best Boston accents in the history of movies. That's because director Ben Affleck cast actual Bostonions who really did ``drive their caas to Dorchestuh.''

3. Across The Universe. A musical comprised solely of Beatle songs was probably inevitable and this movie will also get higher points from (some) Beatles' aficionado's. Also kudos to the movie's producers for using some lesser known (at least to me) Beatles' songs such as Across The Universe, Dear Prudence, and Happiness Is A Warm Gun. However, the male lead is still named Jude.

2. Michael Clayton. An underrated movie that focuses on three characters played by George Clooney, Tom Wilkinson and Tilda Swinton. The message here is that corruption is there but sometimes we just don't want to see it. And if we do see it, Michael Clayton (Clooney) will ask if we've stopped taking our meds.

1. No Country For Old Men. Speaking of interesting characters this Coen brothers' epic stars Javier Bardem as the stoic killer with the Moe Howard haircut. Despite criticisms of being too violent, No Country is reminiscent of the quirky, unpredictable movies of the `90's (some made by the Coen brothers). The only movie made in the last few years that may be considered a classic.

A trip to one video store showed that only Gone Baby Gone and Sicko aren't in the new movies section. I went to one movie in theaters this past year - Burn After Reading - and spent $17 on the movie, popcorn and soda. No doubt, I'll be watching most movies at home again this year.

Where's Denny Crane when we need him

The Boston Legal TV show began winding up last week just as a pre-trial hearing took place at Seattle Municipal Court for 23 citizens who were arrested at Nickelsville back in October. Those folks opted not to leave the West Marginal Way site as a sign of civil disobedience when the police told people living there (residentially challenged, a new term I just found) that they couldn't campout.
You can read the jist of the homeless problem on some of my previous posts and on some of other blogs that I hope to link too sometime this century. Anyway, I showed up at the court to lend moral support to Andrea Bauer and Steve Hoffman, two of the people arrested at Nicklesville that day. Andrea and Steve represent the Freedom Socialist Party, one of many organizations that's stepping up big time for people who sometimes have trouble fighting for themselves.
Andrea, Steve and the other Nickelsville defendants went out in the corrider to plan their next move as the rest of us sat watching the other court cases. Some of it was tedious, and we almost wished that BL's outrageous Denny Crane would make an appearance to liven things up.
But there was one case that stood out. A young woman was brought into court, wearing orange prison garb, and her hands tied behind her back. I wondered if she had just killed 15 people. It turns out the women, who looked about 21, was involved in a hit-and-run accident (apparently no one was hurt); she has a drinking problem and no way to pay damages on the other car.
The judge, Judith Hightower, said that the court would work with the girl if she gets a job (I assume that's after she got released) and she started with restitution for the car. I had two thoughts: 1) this poor girl probably ain't going to find a job and 2) if she had a rich daddy, she sure as hell wouldn't be getting dragged into court tied up like Bobby Seale at the Chicago 7 trials. It is indeed a classist society.
When the Nickelsville people returned it was decided that they'd be heading to court on March 10 at 9 AM. It sounds like they're ready to fight the system and Andrea says, that why'll many of these people were strangers, they're starting to bond, kinda like a sports team.
Hightower, the judge hearing the case, is the same judge who told the city a couple of years ago that she wasn't going to prosecute anymore people who were brought in for sleeping on the street if the shelters are full. The judge, a small black woman, with short hair, probably in her late `50's, seemed pretty lay back as well. She said if anyone wanted to film the trial just let the lawyers know. Apparently, there's at least one Nickelsville documentary being made.
Let the games begin.

The above YouTube has some really cool stuff that was mostly filmed by Revel and Alex from Real Change unless otherwise noted. There's stuff from all over the country if you click on to the little boxes underneath.

A Personal History

On December 1 2008, my father would have been 95 years old. Even though he’s now been dead more than half of my life he’s still the best person I've ever met. I’ve been thinking about how much 20^th century history my dad actually lived through.

My dad was an altar boy growing up. He never would have said anything if a priest touched him inappropriately but he remembered being on the altar a few times when the priest was too drunk to serve Mass. He remember leaning on one priest so he didn’t tip over.

He quit high school during the Depression to go to work in the mills to help support his family. These were changing times in Rhode Island where he grew up. The unions were becoming a force in the mills and Irish, Italian and Polish immigrants were literally taking control of the state, voting straight Democratic tickets of course and going to Catholic Church every Sunday. The Republican White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (called WASPs) who owned the mills, the media and the banks were losing power.

My dad probably thought at one point that he’d never leave Rhode Island. But most able-bodied males went into the service when World War II started. My father traveled to places like Guam, New Guinea and even briefly Hawaii. I guess I’m my father’s son, the thing that most impressed my dad about New Guinea was that women didn’t wear tops on the beach. Looking back, I would have liked to have asked more about his travels. But when you’re a teenager you know everything, and then when you get older there’s so much you want to learn.

My dad was stationed in Washington D.C. for much of the War and said he looked liked Radar from MASH then- he was a clerk also, relatively short, wearing green fatigues and glasses. Sundays were the soldiers’ day off. My dad never forgot riding on the bus; there were no problems when the bus was in Washington, but as soon as it reached the Virginia state line; the blacks (most of them soldiers in uniform) had to go to the back of the bus.

When my dad grew up in RI there weren’t many blacks living there and he didn’t think much about black people. But he thought it was the damndest thing that black soldiers, who were defending their country, had to move to the back of the bus. I’m sure my dad had more empathy for black people when he saw signs in front of stores in Virginia saying, ``no dogs, Yankees or (insert `n’) word allowed. And that was the pecking order. My dad was below a dog but above a black. The greatest irony is that the part of Virginia just outside of DC is a fairly wealthy area now; what some commentators call the most ``liberal or Democratic’’ part of the state. My dad went back to school on the GI Bill and got a college degree in accounting. That’s something W wanted to cut out, even though HIS father and a lot of influential Americans went to college on the GI Bill.

I’ve been reading Tom Brokaw’s book about the 1960’s where Bill Clinton said you can tell a lot about people by how they felt about the `60’s. My dad liked the `60’s. He liked the military also because it had been a good experience for him, but at parties he liked to hang out with my younger cousins. He said that the younger generation coming up was less hypocritical than his generation. It particularly bothered him that his generation considered it so terrible if a man and woman lived together without being married.

Even when my dad died it was an historic time. He died walking outside in the blizzard of 1978, the worst snow storm to hit the Northeast in 100 years. My mom and I had to go to the hospital to identify his body and got stranded there. It was over a week before we had a funeral.

Of course, my memories of my father are more personal. He told me to never use the `n' word, the `f' word, and go to church every Sunday. Well I never use the `n' word. And he taught me how to drink while we watched Johnny Carson monologues on television. ``Hey son, I'll open another can of Narragansett if you share it with me.'' I won't get a better offer all day.

What A Difference Four Years Make

The night of the election I saw something I thought I'd never see. I was chilling out at the Showbox in downtown Seattle when CNN flashed across the screen that they were projecting Barack Obama as the next President of the United States.
The room literally exploded. I saw one girl jump two feet in the air from a standing position. A woman I'd been talking with came back from the bar where she'd been ordering some food. ``I just made out with about 12 people, four of them girls.'' Later on I discovered that hundreds of people were partying on Capitol Hill, an area filled with young people, liberals and gays. It wasn't that a black man had been elected that surprised me so much; it was the massive celebration for a politician. Aren't politicians somewhere between ax murderers and child rapists on the food chain. Usually people celebrate like this when a team in the city wins the World Series. Yes, I know this is Seattle but as more than one person pointed out to me, Seattle sports fans don't have this passion.
As revelers continued their reveling, I couldn't help but think back to Election Night four years earlier. I'd been writing a lot for the Real Change newspaper in Seattle and received two passes from the editor to go to the Democratic Party shindig at another hotel. Stacey, one of the RC interns was voting for the first time and was really into the election. She was driving everyone in the office crazy talking about it. ``Gee, why don't you take Stacey with you to the political party.''
So off I headed, with my intern to Democratic headquarters (insert Bill Clinton joke hear). It was no joke to see Stacey (who people thought was my daughter) crying at the end of the night when George W. was re-elected.
Stacey's mood was even worse in the next couple of days. She attended Antioch College, a progressive school in Ohio. If students came from a state where John Kerry was expected to win - like Stacey who came from upstate New York - they were being encouraged by their teachers to vote in Ohio where a close race was expected. Stacey had been on the phone with friends and Antioch students were assigned to a polling place that had only a couple of old voting booths. The Ohio secretary of state WAS head of the Bush campaign. Some students waited eight hours or didn't vote at all. I was tempted to say to Stacey, ``welcome to the real world." But she felt bad enough without me being a smart-ass.
I got to thinking about Jimmy Breslin's book that week - How The Good Guys Finally Won about Richard Nixon's resignation. And how Bush's re-election showed good guys don't win anymore. It turned out that there were a lot of voter discrepencies in Ohio but Kerry didn't have the fight in him. Too bad for Stacey and her friends.
Maybe that's what people were celebrating that Tuesday night. I have a lot of cynicism about Obama - Nixon got us out of Viet Nam and into Cambodia, Obama will get us out of Iraq and into Afghanistan - but I like how he gives people hope. And as the title of the book says, for one night at least, it felt like the good guys finally won.

Baseball and Porn

Two of the three major league baseball players from Rhode Island - Tampa Bay Rays' outfielder Rocco Baldelli (bottom) and pitcher Danny Wheeler (top) - played in this year's World Series. The third - catcher Chris Iannetta - played in last year's WS for the Colorado Rockies. More importantly, he took one of my cousins to her ninth grade prom. As the comedian Steve Wright once said, ``it's a small world but I wouldn't want to paint it."

Wheeler was coming up thru the Warwick, Rhode Island Little League and Babe Ruth programs when I left that city in the early `90's. I don't think anyone expected him to be a big-leaguer when he was 14. He was one of those guys who just kept getting better.

Rocco on the other hand was one of the greatest athletes to come out of the state. Besides baseball he ran track and was offered a college volleyball scholarship almost unheard of for a player from New England.

I interviewed Rocco once along with his cousin Jonathan Smith when they were about to face off in the state high school championship series. I remember two things - 1) Rocco was quieter and Jonathan did most of the talking and 2) a couple of nights later Baldelli hit a home run off his cousin that left McCoy Stadium - the home of the Boston Red Sox's Triple A team.

Baldelli came from the northern part of the state and played high school ball at the Catholic school down in Warwick so my old paper and new paper at the time showed an interest in him. I was working for my new paper when I talked to Deb my partner from the old paper on the phone. Deb thought Rocco was a great kid but was surprised when she heard that Rocco's family ran a porn shop.

I was surprised also. Rocco's uncle, Charlie Baldelli had once been Mayor of Woonsocket, R.I. But then again Rhode Island had bishop's who went to mobsters funerals. Fortunately, I was talking to my friend Rich a few days later. Rich was working in Central Mass. at the time; the best editor I ever had and a guy who knew everything about Northern RI sports not to mention the name of every bad baseball player and rock song that came out of the `60's and `70's. He was the guy to ask about Baldelli.

After nearly passing a kidney stone from laughing so hard, Rich exclaimed, ``I love how Rhode Islanders pronounce the word p-o-r-n and p-a-w-n the same way. '' In fact, Rocco's dad ran Woonsocket's biggest pawn (not porn) shop for several years.

If you've read this far, that's the only connection I know between baseball and porn (although some would argue that both were better in the 1970's than they are today).

Rocco Baldelli battled a mitochondrial disorder to hit home runs in last month's American League Championship Series and the World Series. Rich Pedroli, a former writer and editor for the Woonsocket Call, Miford News and MetroWest News, died suddenly of a heart attack last year. He touched the hearts of many in the newspaper and sports world.

Let's All Go To Nickelsville

In the movie Burn After Reading, a couple of CIA agents wrap up all the storylines in the final scene. At one point, one of the CIA guys looks into the camera and says, ``have we learned anything from this? I don’t think we’ve learned a fucking thing.’’

For a second I thought I was watching Seattle mayor Greg Nickels and his staff discussing Nickelsville the homeless encampment that the mayor’s office has been chasing around the city for the last month.

Seattle’s shantytown, built by and for the homeless, has had four homes since it came to fruition last month. First it was in Southwest Seattle, but police chased Nickelodeons off the West Marginal Way site although 22 campers and friends stayed to be arrested as a sign of civil disobedience.

Nickelodeons camped in the parking lot briefly (that’s owned by the state, the vacant field they were originally squatting is owned by the city) and then moved to Discovery Park in the northern part of the city. Nickelodeons thought they were okay on tribal land but the city claimed their presence violated the city lease with the United Indians of All Tribes. The tribe also asked the Nickelodeons to leave presumably to avoid further hassle from their landlord. Fortunately, Nickelsville now has a lawyer, from the Northwest Justice Project, who kept getting the date moved back before the Nickelodeons left Discovery Park.

I recently talked to one of the guys who got arrested in Southwest Seattle and he was in a grumpy mood. ``The city said they own the West Marginal Way property but that’s only in white man’s law. The Duwamish (Indian Tribe) owned it first. Then the city says that Nickelsville being on Indian land violates the Indian’s lease with the city. What does the lease say? You’re not allowed to be humane towards the homeless?

His mood didn’t improve any when I told him that if Nickelsville hadn't left Discovery Park the city was planning to fine homeless groups for every day that they stayed. Groups such as Share/Wheel, Veterans for Peace, ROOTS a.k.a. Rising Out of the Shadows and the Interfaith Task Faith on Homelessness.

``The UN ruled that you can’t do that (fine third parties),” my friend Steve bellowed. The United Nations! Holy crap. Perhaps someone like feisty Anita Freeman, a Nickelsville spokesperson, could go and speak before the UN. All kidding aside, people who can’t get food and shelter must feel like they’re in a war zone sometimes.

Things have been quiet lately as Nickelsville has been at its new home- the United Christian Church in the University section of the city across from the Church Council of Greater Seattle. Members of Nickelsville met with their new neighbors last week and explained what they were all about.

Some members of Nickelsville would like to the mayor as well. The day before they left West Marginal Way a group from Nickelsville went down to City Hall. The mayor refused to meet with them (surprise) and one Nickelodeon told me they even locked the elevators. If you’re healthy enough to walk the long staircase it doesn’t matter because you won’t get any farther than the reception area, all the offices are behind locked glass doors.

Like the campouts in front of City Hall, Nickelsville has been successful in putting the plight of the homeless into the mainstream media. A couple of web sites – nickelsvilleseattle.org and the realchangeorganizingproject.blogspot.com provide information and links to past media coverage.

As someone noted on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer web site, ``I’ve complained in the past about the homeless in Belltown who panhandle and defecate in alleys. But Nickelsville is an example of homeless people doing something to help themselves.’’ Here’s hoping the city will see it that way someday.