'Gripping' Ugandan documentary makes Oscar cut

Uganda has its first ever Oscar-nominated film, a documentary about political persecution and daring resistance to the Museveni regime.

Bobi Wine: The People's President tells the story of musician Bobi Wine's transition from pop culture to political activist running for the presidency of Uganda against entrenched incumbent Yoweri Museveni. En route, Wine is arrested many times, brutally beaten, and effectively exiled from his homeland.

Here is the trailer.

For On the Media, Brooke Gladstone has a compelling interview with Wine himself and director Moses Bwayo.

In following Bobi Wine for the film, the film crew was itself in peril. If behind the scenes was as breathtaking as Bwayo described, I can't imagine how unnerving the end product must be. Wine briefly spoke on OTM of his torture by Ugandan authorities, and it's not easy to hear, before he himself stopped and said he could not talk it about it more.

It happens that my all-time favorite documentary to date is Call Me Kuchu (2012), which deals with the detestable persecution of the LGBTQ community in Uganda. Call Me Kuchu is hard to watch, but I come away from it every time thinking it should be required viewing for humanity: a lesson in immorality, the horror that results when the great commandment of Matthew 22:39 is disregarded. 

I note that it's not clear Wine himself, for all his persecution, quite gets the takeaway on the LGBTQ question. But he might have come around, and he's probably right that the Museveni regime leverages past transgressions against him.

Anyway, I am keen to see Bobi Wine, which is streaming in the United States on Hulu and Disney+, where the film is touted as "gripping." Fortunately, the film can be seen in Africa and even has been screened in Uganda. Wine told OTM that National Geographic has made the film available for streaming throughout the continent.

Shockingly, Wine told OTM that he is intent on returning to Uganda. Much as I would like to see change for Uganda—I've traveled there, and it's a magnificent country—I hope Wine takes to heart the lesson of Alexei Navalny and well considers his timing.

UPDATE, Mar. 4: I've since seen the film. Two thumbs up, and prayer for Uganda.

Liske translates Yeats poem with link to dystopian sci-fi

© Cyprian Liske; used by permission.

My friend and scholar-translator Cyprian Liske has prepared a Polish translation (image) of W.B. Yeats's "Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven" (1899).

Here is the Yeats original:

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Liske is a doctoral student in sustainable development and international trade law. We worked together in the American Law Program of the Columbus School of Law of The Catholic University of America and the law school of Jagiellonian University in Poland.

I don't speak Polish beyond a few words, so can't well appreciate Liske's skill as a translator. But I was intrigued by this project because, Liske informed me, the poem was inspiration for a 2002 science fiction film starring Christian Bale, Equilibrium.

The film didn't do very well. In the patriotic wake of 9/11, a dystopian parable might have been just a bit ahead of its time. I might now revisit it.  Ostensibly a romantic poem, "Cloths of Heaven" gets a lot of play in popular culture; its use in this context is compelling.  Equilibrium is set in a world in which emotion is outlawed: a response to the violence and hatred that rent the world in a third great war.  As the United States and Turkey condemn the burning of the Koran in Sweden, igniting, if you will, a perennial free speech debate, Equilibrium seems not as terribly far fetched as its précis suggests.

I just finished watching HBO's Succession (s4), and it struck me that its Sorkin-esque dialog, timing, and staging marks it as a dystopian antithesis of my beloved West Wing: respective representations of our times, now and then.  Our dystopian restatements of contemporary society, perhaps like the corporatocracy itself, seem as yet not to have found rock bottom.

Wide-ranging social commentary in Peele's 'Wendell & Wild' pillories privatization, school-to-prison pipeline

Released by Netflix in October 2022, Wendell & Wild is a delightful stop-motion horror animation and none-too-subtle commentary on the school-to-prison pipeline.

Jordan Peele and Henry Selick co-produced and co-authored Wendell & Wild, which is based on an unpublished book by Selick and Clay McLeod Chapman. Comedic genius Peele was fresh off Nope (2022), which I thought was much better than the confused Get Out (2017), though the newer film won zero Academy nods to the earlier's screenplay win and three noms in 2018. Selick is a Hollywood legend, but doesn't perennially produce new work for our pleasure. He co-masterminded The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) and James and the Giant Peach (1996) in the animation vein, and he did the visual effects for a favorite film of mine, the quirky and underrated Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004).

Wendell & Wild follows teenager Kat (Lyric Ross, Déjà on This Is Us) as she battles demonic forces, including an eponymous demon pair (voiced by Peele and comedy partner Keegan-Michael Key), intent on evil works, including construction of a prison, in the down-on-its-luck earthly town of Rust Bank. Critics harshed on the film for jamming too much social commentary into one vehicle, and, admittedly, Wendell & Wild fires head-spinningly at innumerable targets.

To me, that's the fun of it. Race, education, employment, the institutional church, and the criminal justice system only outline the low-hanging fruit. Through subtleties such as plot device, semantics, and imagery, the film digs deep into nuances, even the socioeconomic layers of natural hair.

Whatever your pet peeve of social dysfunction, you can find it in Wendell & Wild, which is why I first saw the film as a commentary on transparency and accountability in urban development. The demons and their mortal allies are in the privatization-of-state-services game. They plan to build a prison that will do nothing in the way of rehabilitation alongside schools that will do little in the way of education, as building each institution to serve its purpose would be bad business for the other.

What I was inclined to see as a problem in freedom-of-information law, informed as I was by a former student's recent publication on private-prison abuse in Arizona for The Journal of Civil Information, to be fair, is just one angle on the broader problem of the school-to-prison pipeline. In this vein, I shared a scene from Wendell & Wild with my law students.

It happened that Jose Vazquez, communications director for the ACLU of Alabama, keyed in on the same scene and posted it to Twitter (embed below). In the scene, mean-girl ringleader Siobhan (Tamara Smart) starts to put together the evil plot of her parents, urban development power couple Lane and Irmgard Klaxon (David Harewood and Maxine Peake), owners and directors of Klax Corp. How sweet is that multiplicitous naming?

This clip is a spoiler but I really hope it can be used in classrooms and just generally shared because we all need to learn how prisons ruins people's lives, families, and entire towns! We can all imagine better futures and this film does a great job illustrating that. pic.twitter.com/Y2TS31lkAd

— jose bouquet (@josebouquets) October 29, 2022

Wendell & Wild is worth the watch. As Vazquez wrote of the above clip on Twitter, "I really hope it can be used in classrooms."

With Keaton as Ken Feinberg for 9/11 20th, 'Worth' challenges tort norms with study of victim comp

Worth, a dramatization of Kenneth Feinberg's special mastership of the September 11 Victim Compensation Fund, dropped on Netflix today in select markets.

I frame my 1L Torts class with exploration of tort alternatives, and I periodically infuse our study with comparative law.  Typically, I begin Torts I in August with a study of the New Zealand accident compensation system.

I ask the class whether Americans might similarly embrace social compensation.  Notwithstanding their personal predilections, students readily identify objections based in deterrence dynamics, the American ethos of personal responsibility, and our cultural priority of "day in court" entitlement.

In the spring semester, I round out Torts II with a return to tort alternatives in America's exceptions to the rule, easing our study from worker compensation to compensation funds, such as 9/11 and BP.  Students are then challenged to consider: if Americans find the notion of New Zealand-style social compensation system so repellent, why do we embrace it when the stakes are especially high?

For two years now, I have used the German-made Playing God (2017), a documentary about Brockton, Mass.-native Feinberg, as a springboard for class discussion of the necessary parameters of social compensation systems, including valuations.  Previously, I used recorded lectures by Feinberg.  A good, recent, and more-concise-than-usual item is his talk at Chicago Ideas Week on the theme of his 2005 book, What is Life Worth?—the original title of the movie, Worth, according to IMDb.

Even if a torts professor does not wish to cover alternative compensation systems, these are useful audiovisual catalysts for discussion of the valuation of life and loss, as part of the study of damages.  Other worthy tools, in the podcast vein, include "Worth" on Radiolab (2014) and Feinberg's appearance on Freakonomics Radio (2018).

Starring Michael Keaton as Feinberg, Worth is necessarily a Hollywood conflation of events and issues, focusing on 9/11 upon its upcoming 20th anniversary.  Still, plenty of effort is exerted to remain faithful to history.  Feinberg is pictured enduring the heat of an angry and frustrated assembly of families, after which he has informative if discordant exchanges with individuals.  There are also discrete scenes of victim testimonies that might seem interruptive of flow in an ordinary drama, but can't help but captivate in the haunting context of 9/11.

These interactions and the orbiting characters who emerge in the story are clearly modeled on, or amalgams of, real events and persons, many of whom were recorded in videos from the time, and clips of which can be seen in Playing God.  Exemplifying his skills as a character actor, refined in landmark roles from Beetlejuice to Birdman to Ray Kroc, Keaton offers a compelling portrayal of Feinberg as the peculiar human protagonist whose likeness has become inextricable from American mass compensation systems, for better and for worse.

Worth is a superb ride and offers endless starting points for serious academic discourse on the subject of compensation models, not to mention the role of the legal profession and the complex sociology of death.  The film is a welcome addition to the audiovisual arsenal for classroom teaching to stimulate deep thinking on the wisdom of tort law.

Arts school awards BFA to creative talent in film, TV; 'Schitt's Creek' creator Levy says, 'follow through'

Last week, my daughter was awarded a well earned bachelor of fine arts degree by the film and television program at the Savannah College of Art and Design.  Look forward to shameless promotion of her future projects on this blog.

Dan Levy
(Vogue Taiwan CC BY 3.0)

The commencement speaker was Schitt's Creek creator Dan Levy.  He told graduates:

[F]ollow through. That’s the greatest advice I could give because so few people actually do it....  If you’re a writer and you want to write a book, or a book of poetry, or a television show, or a movie and it gets a bit daunting and intimidating and you get that writer’s block, don’t give up on it. Because at the end of that experience, you will have something....  Ninety-nine percent of the people out there have all the ideas in the world but never follow through on it. So if you are that person, that can walk into a room with something, some expression of your creativity that you have completed, you are so far ahead of a lot of people.

I always wanted to have a blog.

Child labor still plagues chocolate supply chain in West Africa, despite decade of distressing documentaries

From our dining room table, a chocolate bunny left over from the weekend is staring me down.  Two things are keeping me from biting off its smug head.  First, I just got back from a run of only a couple miles, and I feel like I'm breathing through a straw.

Second, earlier today, I watched Chocolate's Heart of Darkness, a study of child labor in the chocolate supply chain.  The 42-minute piece is free on YouTube, posted September 2020.

This English version is credited to German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle (DW), though the film originated with French independent documentary firm Premieres Lignes in 2019.  French journalist and filmmaker Paul Moreira directed.  On YouTube, Chocolate's Heart of Darkness appears as "Bitter Chocolate," which risks confusion, because that is the title of an equally disturbing but different project on the same subject: s2e05 of the Netflix documentary series, Rotten, directed by Abigail Harper and also released in 2019.

Both of these Bitter works update, with precious little progress to report, the sorry state of affairs captured in the 2010 documentary The Dark Side of Chocolate, which was co-directed by Danish journalist Miki Mistrati and American U. Roberto Romano, a photojournalist and human rights activist who passed away in 2013.

Cocoa I photographed in Ghana in 2020.
The DW film depicts industry reliance with some success
in certification tracking in Ghana, but not in Côte d'Ivoire.
(RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

In the last decade, I've refrained from recommending the 2010 docko to students or colleagues, because it's one of those films in which the makers' agenda so powerfully muscles in on the narrative that the viewer is left with reservations over objectivity.  But now, with two more projects in the same vein and all compasses pointing in the same direction, I think it's fair to discount nuanced indications of bias and say that Big Chocolate has a real mess on its hands.

Litigation against American agri-giant Cargill, a key broker in the global chocolate trade, and against Swiss-based multinational Nestlé, over child labor—practically, slavery—sits presently in the U.S. Supreme Court (Cargill, Nestlé at SCOTUSblog).  A decision, due any day, seems likely to kick the claims out for lack of U.S. jurisdiction under the alien tort statute, however much some Justices might have been troubled by what they heard in oral argument in December.

Even if the suits were to proceed in U.S. courts, or in any courts, Chocolate's Heart of Darkness gives a flavor of how hard the claims would be to prosecute.  Abusive child labor is so entrenched in West African forests, and nations such as Côte d'Ivoire so utterly incapable of establishing rule of law in these remote places, that it is scarcely imaginable that cocoa could be harvested any other way.  This is to say nothing of rampant deforestation to meet demand.

The film shows that the certification and tracking mechanisms set up with, let's give the benefit of the doubt, the best of intentions by the corporations to make good on sustainability pledges are so riddled with corruption as to be farcical.  It strains credulity to suppose that transnational companies do not know the reality.  But knowledge is not necessarily culpability.  And this is hardly the only supply chain that leads from Western fancy to catastrophic human toll in the developing world.

I don't think that my chocolate bunny is going to last the week.  But it's going to make me sick in more ways than one.

'For the first time, we're seen as we should be seen,' Martin Luther King Jr. told Star Trek's 'Uhura'

Prepping the spring semester when classes start the day after an involuntary furlough is prone to put a particular professor perpetually a week behind.  So forgive me for belatedly marking Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, which fell this year on Monday, January 18. Or we can say this is a more timely commemoration of yesterday's World Day for African and Afrodescendant Culture.

Of all the things one could relate about the legendary Dr. King, Nichelle Nichols (IMDb, PBS), Star Trek's original Lt. Uhura, has the very best story.

That's from the 2011 documentary, Trek Nation (IMDb, Amazon).  She told the story also to the Television Academy Foundation in 2019.

Shop Shatner and don't ask too many questions

William Shatner, 2016 (Gage Skidmore CC BY-SA 2.0)

I'm a pretty big William Shatner fan.  James T. Kirk was my favorite TV captain in the 1970s.  TJ Hooker was my favorite TV cop in the 1980s.  And Denny Crane might have been one of my favorite TV lawyers in the 20aughts, except that Alan Shore already was, and you can't have two from the same show.

The occasional troubling this or that surfaced about Shatner's personal life.  There were stories about how nobody liked him.  But I persevered.  A lot of people don't like me, either.  And I'm perfectly delightful.

It's especially disconcerting, then, to have come across the bizarre bazaar called "the William Shatner Store."  An odd array of items is on offer, from Shatner's science fiction books, naturally, to a Star Trek The Original Series Mood Rock Light, reduced to half off at $40, to "Mr. Shatner's Broadcasting and Cable Hall of Fame Award," only $1,899.00.  

Items are nicely cross-referenced by various variables, including show, so I eagerly looked up Boston Legal.  There are only four items there, all props from the show, wall-hanging-like awards and certificates, such as "Judge Leslie Bishop Judicial Performance Review Certificate": framed and now marked down from $169.95 to a tantalizing $99.95.

I couldn't abolish from my mind the image of Denny Crane relieving a Hollywood law-office set of its miscellaneous detritus on the last day of filming, much like my kindergarten teacher let us take home the leftover Play-Doh at the end of the school year.

It would make me more comfortable to think that Shatner has no involvement in the management of the Shatner Store.  Maybe it's run by his grandkids, to make a buck, a contemporary Hollywood equivalent of a lemonade stand.  Or maybe it's a distressed plea, in the manner of a GoFundMe page, to raise money for the eldercare of an aging legend.  

Alas, those scenarios seem not to be the case.  The odd Sky headline that led me to the Shatner Store evidenced hands-on management by none other than the main man.

You would think we would learn to separate our favorite fictional characters from the people who play them.

My first-ever favorite TV lawyer, and maybe still my overall no. 1, was Samuel T. Cogley, who represented James T. Kirk and was played by the prolific Elisha Cook Jr. (1903-1995).  If you know anything about him that I would not want to know, please keep it to yourself.

Multi-ethnic kid crew fights bloodsucking gentrification

Are you in need of a Stranger Things fix? Season 4 resumed filming a couple of weeks ago.

In the meantime, Netflix's Vampires vs. the Bronx offers delightful diversion.

There have been black vampires and black horror films, but not so much vampire films with human protagonists of color.  Or many colors.  Enter Vampires vs. the Bronx, a welcome addition in the open vein of comedy-horror.

In Vampires, a quartet of talented youthful stars (Jaden Michael, Gerald Jones III, Gregory Diaz IV, and Coco Jones) are residents of a Bronx neighborhood resisting a clandestine vampire invasion.  The characters casually comprise kids of African-American, Haitian, Puerto Rican, and Dominican descent.  Their cultures are not conflated as we get glimpses of their home lives.

The film collects stars and boasts a few subtle send-ups to classic comedy and horror.  An opening cameo by Zoe Saldana is especially apt, as her heritage includes all of Dominican, Haitian, and Puerto Rican roots.  Cliff "Method Man" Smith plays the local priest, who doles out the Eucharist with a steely glare to his troublesome young congregants.  Bronx-native, Dominican-American comedian, Joel "The Kid Mero" Martinez drives the narrative as beloved bodega owner-operator Tony.   

Saturday Night Live actor-comedian Chris Redd and another Bronx-native, Dominican-American comedian, Vladimir Caamaño, get a few of the film's top comic lines as observers of the action in the tradition of Statler and Waldorf, or Jay and Silent Bob. Director Oz Rodriguez also directs Saturday Night Live and is a native of the Dominican Republic.

Vampires vs. The Bronx is built not so subtly on a storyline of urban gentrification.  The Scandinavian-blonde vampire brood seeks to seize local businesses and convert the likes of Tony's bodega to high-end retail and craft coffee.  The vampires are aided by their human familiar, Frank Polidori (Shea Wigham), who brings Italian-mob-style tough tactics to persuade property owners to sell.  Acquiring a building has the spooky side effect of allowing the vampires to enter without asking permission.  

The theme carries through as vampire leader Vivian (Sarah Gadon) stops by the bodega to peruse Tony's growing inventory of new-age super-foods and settles on a purchase of hummus.  If you can't have a sense of humor about cultural stereotypes, this isn't the film for you.

At the same time, don't expect pedantic messaging on race and gentrification to run too deep.  PG-13 Vampires vs. The Bronx means mainly to make fun.  At that, it succeeds.

Here is the trailer.

Texas indictment surfaces problem of elected prosecutors; First Amendment protects Netflix film

Actor, model, and District Attorney Lucas Babin
(Steve Stewart CC BY 4.0)

A Tyler County, Texas, grand jury has indicted Netflix for lewd depiction of TV girls in the French film, Cuties (2020).  Sadly, the indictment says more about Texas and American criminal justice dysfunction than about Netflix or contemporary media.  

The film plainly is protected by the First Amendment, rendering the indictment more political stunt than serious legal maneuver.  I wasn't going to watch Cuties, but now I feel like I should, so score one for Netflix, nil for District Attorney Lucas Babin.  Or, I should acknowledge, this might be good campaign fodder for an elected D.A. in East Texas, so it's win-win, minus transaction costs.  

Using the criminal justice system as a means to political ends is a deeply disturbing phenomenon; John Oliver featured the issue in 2018 commentary on Last Week.

Besides being an attorney, Babin is himself, or was, an actor and a model.  His father is dentist and U.S. Rep. Brian Babin (R-Tex.).

The September 23 indictment (image from Reason) relies on Texas Penal Code § 43.262, Possession or Promotion of Lewd Visual Material Depicting Child.  The statute reads:

(b) A person commits an offense if the person knowingly possesses, accesses with intent to view, or promotes visual material that:

     (1) depicts the lewd exhibition of the genitals or pubic area of an unclothed, partially clothed, or clothed child who is younger than 18 years of age at the time the visual material was created;

     (2) appeals to the prurient interest in sex;  and

     (3) has no serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

The latter conjunctive element (3), lacking in serious value, is a typical savings provision meant to bring the law into conformity with the First Amendment, which certainly protects the film.

Promotional image of Cuties French release

Cuties, or Mignonnes in the French original, is a 96-minute drama about a Senegalese-French girl coming of age in contemporary Paris.  She struggles to reconcile her conservative Muslim upbringing with the popular culture of her schoolyard peers in the social-media era.

A Sundance 2020 award winner in dramatic world cinema, the film was written and directed by Parisian born Maïmouna Doucouré, herself of Senegalese heritage.  In a September 15 op-ed in The Washington Post (now behind pay wall), Doucouré wrote:

This film is my own story. All my life, I have juggled two cultures: Senegalese and French. As a result, people often ask me about the oppression of women in more traditional societies. And I always ask: But isn't the objectification of women's bodies in Western Europe and the United States another kind of oppression? When girls feel so judged at such a young age, how much freedom will they ever truly have in life?

The sexualization of the girls in the film is already familiar in the life experience of an 11- or 12-year-old, Doucouré further wrote. Still, a counselor was on set, and French child protection authorities signed off on the film.

Some of the flap over Cuties, and probably precipitating the Texas indictment, was Netflix's initial promotion of the film with an image of the child stars in sexually suggestive outfits and pose (see Bustle).  Netflix apologized publicly and to Doucouré and withdrew the portrayal.

Here is the trailer for Cuties.

The case is State v. Netflix, Inc., No. 13,731 (filed Tex. Dist. Ct. Tyler County Sept. 23, 2020).

'Miss Juneteenth' speaks both to problems of our times and to timeless problems

Thanks to the Duke (University) Screen/Society, yesterday, I virtually attended a screening and discussion of the 2020 film from Vertical Entertainment, Miss Juneteenth.  It is an insightful and gratifying film, so I want to make this note of it.  In our covid era, it's easy to miss new releases.

Written and directed by Channing Godfrey Peoples, Miss Juneteenth is the story of Fort Worth, Texas, teen Kai (Alexis Chikaeze) and her mom, Turquoise Jones (Nicole Beharie), as Kai prepares to participate in the Miss Juneteenth beauty pageant, a pageant that her mother happens to have won, back in the day.

Yet that description unfairly oversimplifies the film, as would any description that confined the story by race or class.  The film richly portrays Turquoise and Kai's lives.  It explores mother-daughter conflict, romantic entanglements, and socioeconomic struggles. Simultaneously, the film comments softly, not heavy-handedly, on pageant culture, civil rights, the American dream, and, of course, never trumpeted yet omnipresent, the glorious but unfulfilled promise of freedom marked by Juneteenth.

In a striking scene set in a Juneteenth museum, the young contestants are being oriented on Juneteenth history by a passionate docent when the schoolmarmish pageant wrangler directs the kids' attention to framed pictures of past Juneteenth queens.  The docent was speaking to the legacy of slavery, driven out of the American South, while the pageant director educates the girls on such etiquette nuances as table manners imported with the Pilgrims.  The girls' gazes drift to the latter display, which, I contend, speaks subtly but powerfully to how African-American communities have long wrestled with the fine line between cultural subjugation and assimilation that courses through American history from Reconstruction to Civil Rights to present day.  I'm reminded at once of Mike Pence's oddly third-person reference from Fort McHenry in August to "American people ... standing with ... our African-American neighbors" and Dulce Sloan's missive this week on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, "The Messed Up History of Black Hair in America."

A character in the film once comments, "Ain’t no American dream for black folks.”  As we wondered at the latest news of government ineptitude yesterday morning, contemplating how our salaries are going down while our workloads are going up, my wife speculated that the anger and resentment that people both black and white feel toward the lack of opportunity for upward mobility in this country is really much the same.  The difference, she suggested, is that black people have always known that meritocracy is an American myth, while white people are just figuring it out.  (She cited Michael Sandel on WBUR talking about his Tyranny of Merit.)

Miss Juneteenth has given me a lot to chew over.  I haven't even mentioned my own daughter's foray into the pageant world when she was a teen: Miss Rhode Island High School 2016!  In Miss Juneteenth, as Turquoise is working herself to death to scrape together the money to support Kai's pageant bid, Kai's father, Ronnie (Kendrick Sampson), shakes his head: "An $800 dress just don’t make no sense to me."

Word for word, I swear, Peoples stole that line from me.

Here is the trailer from Vertical Entertainment.

Happy Constitution Day.

'Our Side': Short film on immigration crisis in Italy earns Academy nomination in narrative

Last year, my daughter, Morgan Steele, worked as a script supervisor on a short film in Sicily.  Our Side (2020), directed by Nicola Rinciari, is an intriguing and timely snapshot of fictionalized human drama amid the very real immigration crisis in Europe.  The film has been nominated for the Student Academy Award in narrative.  Here is the trailer:

 

"Our Side" Trailer from Nicola Rinciari on Vimeo.

Report from a Social Distance Week 7: For lockdown horror, 'Dr. Rick' prescribes hibachi, водка, and tulips

My new doorbell cam
spies a ne'er-do-well.

Quote of the Week:  "Murder hornets, but with the right lawyer, manslaughter bees. 🐝"  —attorney Jennifer T. Langley

Our stay-at-home order is formally lifted in Rhode Island as of today, May 9, though in this phase one, most restrictions remain in place as either mandates or recommendations.  I’m not eager to go out much myself until we have effective antibody testing, and then we'll see.  And we’ll have to hope and pray that our economic reopening doesn’t drive up the infection numbers.  Three days ago, with stay-at-home still in place, I saw dozens of kids playing basketball at Burr's Hill Park.  Parents were there, too.  “Knock it off,” Governor Gina Raimondo would have said.

Oh, I almost forgot the week's most exciting news.  Hitting the grocery store first thing in the morning, we scored a whole package of toilet paper!

Knock it off.  This is week 7.

What I’m Watching

Knives Out (2019).  This movie is a rollicking good time, an Oscar-nominated screenplay in the hands of a classic cast.  Daniel Craig, with a credible Mississippi drawl, proves why he’s so much better than Bond, and Jamie Lee Curtis, well, enough said.

Ozark s3 (2020).  I finally caught up, and there’s a reason why this show was viewers’ number one new binge in lockdown.  The show remains intense, not for the faint of heart.  I didn’t see coming that Helen would play such a pivotal role in season 3.  Now I have to make room on my top TV lawyers list, category: drama, for Janet McTeer’s Helen Pierce (link to spoilers).  This is not Newcastle UK-born McTeer’s first turn as a TV lawyer; she played Patty Hewes’s vengeful secret sister Kate Franklin in the final season (2012) of Damages.  In the Marvel universe, she’s Jessica Jones’s mom, Alisa Jones.

American Horror Story: 1984 (s9) (2019).  For me, AHS has never been able to top season 5’s super-creepy Hotel (2015-16), with Lady Gaga, but season 9 was enjoyable.  It’s AHS’s answer to Stranger Things, and I can’t get enough of these tongue-in-cheek ’80s tributes.  As usual, the anthology series assembles an all-star squad of regular and guest stars.  Carrie Fisher daughter and “Scream Queen” Billie Lourd well anchors the cast.

Locke & Key s1 (2020).  I was pleasantly surprised by the first couple episodes.  The show may fairly be described as YA, employing the convenient contrivance that the adults can’t see the evil spirits.  Nevertheless, it’s creative and cleverly executed.  Our teenage heroes occupy a haunted house, of sorts, in coastal Massachusetts.  Really the series is filmed mostly on finely crafted sets in Toronto with gorgeous outdoor scenes in UNESCO World Heritage Site Lunenberg, a port town on Nova Scotia’s southeastern coast.  I’m fast becoming a fan of lead actor Connor Jessup, who played Ben Mason in Falling Skies (2011).  The Locke & Key story is based on a 2008-13 graphic novel series (Amazon) of the same name and in a style that pays homage to H.P. Lovecraft (a Providence, Rhode Island, native, see also Atlas Obscura) and Richard Matheson (obituary).  A Fox pilot that wasn’t picked up, Locke & Key also was a 2011 TV movie by director Mark Romanek, who directed the recent s1e01 of Tales from the Loop.

Outer Banks s1 (2020).  I'm not going to pretend this is more than it is.  Another YA offering, sometimes I like to immerse myself in the equivalent of what my grandmother called her "stories," pretty people in the throes of impossible melodrama. Bonus, Outer Banks actually has a thrilling story from writer Shannon Burke and the filmmaker Pate Brothers. It's Treasure Island meets 90210, and I thought that before I learned that Burke's most recent and successful novel, Into the Savage Country (2016), was, he said, inspired by books including TI, Kidnapped, and White Fang.  The show totally confirmed my suspicion that my niece and nephews growing up on the OBX lead frenetic lives filled with intrigue, murder, and buried treasure, all interlaced with vertiginous adolescent lust.  The cast, the usual twenty-somethings pretending to be ten years younger, are mostly relative newcomers, well handpicked from the minor character ranks of such other recent features as Stranger Things, Black Lightning, and The Hate U Give.  On the adults-as-adults side, American Horror Story alumna Adina Porter, also a veteran of True Blood and Newsroom, turns in another spellbinding performance as Sheriff Peterkin.

Basic Versus Baller: Travel at Any Cost s1 (2018-19).  The perfect virtual escape from lockdown, I'm torn between loving these guys and burning with envy that I didn't think of this first.  Brothers Marko and Alex Ayling, "the Vagabrothers," went to university in southern California and were teaching English in Spain when they started vlogging in 2012.  They became a YouTube sensation and were invited to make 10 episodes of this show for Tastemade, an eight-year-old, Santa Monica-based, food-and-travel media company that has carved out a lucrative niche on the digital frontier.  The show is available on various platforms; I'm watching on Hulu.  The conceit is that in each episode, one brother gets to live the high life and the other has to hostel it, as they explore destination cities and their food worldwide.  Sponsorships figure in unobtrusively.  The competition angle is light-hearted, as the brothers succeed in sharing the delights of different price points and put local culture on center stage.

Progressive ads.  Progressive Insurance—which has never had a worthwhile deal for me—has a hilarious new ad character, "Dr. Rick."  “Progressive can’t protect you from becoming your parents” is the theme; Dr. Rick's intervention was forecast by two also funny "parentamorphosis" ads seven months ago.  Two new 30-second bits are “Group Outing” and “Pillows.”  There’s also a 74-second mockumentary on YouTube.  Progressive’s faux Zoom lockdown ad, with Flo, is pretty funny, too.  Progressive uses the Boston-based ad agency Arnold, and Martin Granger directed.

What I’m Eating

Miku Japanese Cuisine.  To #Save­Our­Restaurants, we ordered curbside this week from nearby Miku: wonton soup, crispy calamari, pork gyoza, sesame chicken, and a ridiculous portion of hibachi chicken.

What I’m Drinking

Community House Blend.  A new order arrived from Community, and we started with the solid house blend, a medium-dark roast.

Водка Окно в Европу.  We took a short interlude from our gin habit.  The name of this Russian vodka by St. Petersburg-founded Ladoga Group translates to “Window on Europe.”  I brought it back from Russia, mostly for the pretty design on the bottle.  Inside, what can I say, it’s vodka.

Dry Line Cape Cod Gin.  A Christmas gift from my wife, this briefly barrel-aged, organic-cane-sugar double distillation from South Hollow Spirits in North Truro, Massachusetts, leads with juniper berries harvested locally from eastern red cedars, and follows up with angelica root grown in a compost of Truro Vineyard grape skins.  My bottle is from small batch #10.  The Boston Globe aptly said it “has a soft bite,” and Drink Hacker likewise reported a “palate … extremely soft for a gin of this alcohol level,” 47% ABV, with a “sweet and lengthy” finish.

What I’m Doing to Stay Sane

Google Nest Thermostat and Hello.  We gained some distraction through home improvement and a socially distancing visit from our masked local technician.  Google’s thermostat gets a 👍 thumbs up; its doorbell gets a 👎 thumbs down.  The thermostat we bought to replace our broken one.  It’s pricey, but we expect to recoup savings from all those times we both leave home and forget to turn the heat off.

The Hello doorbell/security cam was a gift.  It makes a quality image and shares a futuristic look with the thermostat.  But it comes with a lot of shortcomings.  First, the Hello is almost useless without a paid subscription.  The device itself has no processing ability; it’s dumber than a mere motion sensor.  The Hello must constantly stream image to and from Google just to check for motion.  Hence, the subscription is necessary if you want the device to be anything more than a doorbell.  Second, the data stream eats bandwidth and will ruin you if your service is capped.  Third, the cloud-based detection algorithms have a long way yet to go.  The motion sensor is oversensitive, set off by trees and shadows.  The sound sensor is a non-starter on our busy street.  These shortcomings are all understandable for a work-in-progress product, but not for one that demands a monthly fee.  I have a Blink camera already, and I’m much happier with that.

Watching spring spring.  The tulips are opening, despite a continuing cold that diverges daily more from seasonal highs.  The birds are fighting it out for access to the feeder.  Sometimes #QuarantineLife is just about watching the grass grow.

Happy Mother's Day!

🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷

Photos and video, except in "What I'm Watching," RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-SA 4.0

Report from a Social Distance Week 5: A Birthday, a Flood, and a Fire

April snow (RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-SA 4.0)

My plan-B return to Africa in June was just canceled.  I kind of expected that.  Here in New England, it remains unseasonably chilly, lows this week at the freezing point, and highs usually in the low 50sºF, 12ºC give or take, and a mean wind chill.  One morning even brought a light snow.  The long-range forecast shows no warming for the remainder of the month.  We’re getting deeply anxious for the transition to spring, even as the names of the days have become arbitrary.  At least in this week 5 of isolation, we had occasion to celebrate a calendared milestone, my wife’s birthday.

What I’m Celebrating…

It was a Quarantine Birthday!

For my wife, I made a birthday cake!: a classic pound cake with hazelnut buttercream frosting.  I won no points on aesthetics, but the sweet taste was spot on.  I also made our dinner of vegetable pasta with mozzarella garlic bread, heavy on the garlic.  We had my wife’s favorite wine, Gazela vinho verde (she’s a cheap date).  And from her Amazon WishList, she received some admittedly non-essential but long desired Yuxier BBQ gloves (Spider-Man-style, but not really, because a Chinese maker wouldn’t dare test trademark).  Our daughter sent our favorite flavored honeys from the Savannah Bee Company, and there were lots of lovely cards: thanks, family and friends.

What I’m Reading

The Atlantic (May 2020).  The latest issue of my favorite magazine, The Atlantic, hit my doorstep this week, and I’ve never been happier to see it.  This month has the usual plenty of enthralling content, from an assessment of the fractured right in American politics (Robert P. Saldin and Steven M. Telles), to a photo study of social distance (Amy Weiss-Meyer), to an exploration of the everlasting allure of Scooby Doo (Christopher Orr)—this year’s May movie Scoob! will skip theaters.  Most-interesting-item honors go to MacDowell Colony fellow Francesca Mari’s “The Shark and the Shrimpers” for breaking down the legal system’s obscene exploitation of the BP disaster with faked compensation claimants.  The conduct of key plaintiff’s lawyer Mikal Watts, acquitted, I found frighteningly reminiscent of Ecuador v. Chevron's fallen star, Steven Donziger.  According to Mari, Watts even commissioned a documentary about himself; cf. Donziger’s PR panache.  Somehow, despite the well reasoned fury of U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan, Donziger last week wrangled the validation of 30 Nobel laureates.  That’s more Bizarro than the “liberate” tweets.

🙏 Our ongoing Bible reading has proceeded from First to Second Kings, and we’ve begun a Sunday Zoom study of my favorite book, James.  If you feel in need, or wish to support others, in these strange times, you are welcome to visit our church’s new virtual prayer wall, as well as Sunday service at 0930 US EDT.

What I’m Listening To

Floodlines (2020).  This eight-part audio series by Vann R. Newkirk II represents a first foray into podcasting for The Atlantic.  It’s a fascinating deep dive into the Hurricane Katrina disaster, exploring all angles, especially race and socioeconomic implications.  Newkirk skillfully weaves a narrative that traces New Orleans history from its roots in slavery to its contemporary demography.  A lot of what’s here wasn’t new to me, because, for work, I’ve done a more-than-normal amount of reading about Katrina, and I'm personally familiar with NOLA.  (The audio pacing is slow, and you can nudge up the speed if you use an intermediary such as Google rather than streaming from the home page.)  There’s still plenty here, though, for anyone, and maybe a lot for some: Katrina was 15 years ago, so young adults might not even remember it.  For my part, I had never heard of the case of Ivor van Heerden, who lost his academic post at LSU Baton Rouge in suspicious subsequence to his criticism of the Army Corps levees.  That one nugget from Floodlines part 3 sent me down a depressing rabbit-hole-reading of van Heerden’s ultimately unsuccessful litigation.  Academics, even with tenure, almost always lose to judges’ sycophantic deference to university bureaucrats, while a 2011 AAUP report had no trouble seeing through LSU’s pretext.  FIRE wrote about the importance of the van Heerden case just this week.

What I’m Watching

Code 8 (2019).  Eh.  It killed a couple of hours.  Did you know that Stephen Amell (Arrow) and Robbie Amell (The Tomorrow People) are first cousins?

For All Mankind s1 (2019).  A pandemic gift on free Apple TV+, I’m loving this series.  It’s not what I expected, and I don’t want to give away too much.  The premise of the show is an alternate history in which the Soviets won the moon race; that much was in the trailers.  Unexpected was the clever imagining of an alternatively unfolding history of American civil rights as a consequence of that pivotal national shame.  The title of the show turns out to have much greater significance than a fleeting reference to the Lunar Plaque or an innocent homage to Neil Armstrong’s famed phrase.  Joel Kinnaman returns to earth from Altered Carbon s1 to deliver a credible old-school astronaut struggling to find his place in a changing NASA, while Sonya Walger, as America’s top female astronaut, shines among an extraordinary cast of leading women.

KN Aloysh (Apr. 19).  My friend Komlan Aloysh launched his YouTube channel of interviews with African changemakers by sitting down to Zoom with Rhode Island-residing, Liberian tech entrepreneur Jacob Roland, founder and CEO of West Africa-serving Pygmy Technologies.  Their wide-ranging conversation reached from the transnational tech sector to Liberian food and culture.  Roland well observed, in whatever area one might wish to create, the Liberian market is ripe and ready.  And he tipped viewers off to top unspoilt beaches in Liberia, though I suggest you get there before Chinese developers do.  The show made me conscious of how much I am missing West Africa just now.

What I’m Eating

Bluewater Bar + Grill. This week's self-sacrifice (sarcasm) to #Save­Our­Restaurants went to a local institution and its generous and hard-working staff.  Our bounty included R.I. calamari, battered cauliflower, chili broccoli, burgers and truffle fries, and the pièce de résistance, cinnamon beignets worthy of their Louisiana heritage.

Bread machine.  “While you're watching Ozark and baking bread ... ,” Trevor Noah began a bit this week.  He had my number.  Ozark s3 is on the to-do list, and already I had dragged the bread machine up from the basement.  My aim was to save from waste the remaining brine from a finished jar of pickles.  For reasons unknown, my pickle-juice bread didn’t rise properly.  I got over the initial disappointment.  Though it was dense and a touch chewy, my undersized loaf was delicious, and I ate it up in the course of the week.

What I’m Drinking

New Orleans Blend.  My wife doesn’t usually care for dark roasts, but even she fell for this offering from Community Coffee.  Its rich texture kicks off your day with a Bourbon Street party in your mouth.  Maybe that’s the cabin fever talking, but laissez le bon temps rouler.

Bombay Sapphire East.  This geo-themed gin in classic Bombay blue boasts of Thai lemongrass and Vietnamese peppercorns.  I’m not sure I could distinguish it from straight Sapphire in a taste test, but I’m willing to pay for a foreign feel while stuck in the States.

Veiner Nössliqueur von Pitz-Schweitzer.  A yummy sample of hazelnut liqueur I picked up in Luxembourg: I used it in the icing for the birthday cake.  And maybe I sampled some according to the one-for-the-cup-one-for-the-cook rule.  The drinking policy at my work-from-home-place is super chill.

What I’m Doing to Stay Sane

Burn this.  Our town has suspended yard-waste pickup, so I collected from the yard and burned in the fireplace the winter season’s accumulated kindling.  We had a nice, hot fire for the birthday celebration.  Though I always worry whether the trees outside are alarmed by the smell of smoke from their fallen limbs.

This is the matrix.  Ramadan Mubarak to our Muslim friends, and blessed weekend to all.

Photos in Celebrating, Eating, Drinking, and Staying Sane are mine, CC BY-SA 4.0.