A Man Without A Country: A Memoir Of Life In George W Bush's America (2005) by Kurt Vonnegut

A Man Without A Country: A Memoir Of Life In George W Bush's America (2005) by Kurt Vonnegut: This is the great American humourist and satirist's last 'new' book, a collection of essays that appeared in the magazine In Our Times during the George W. Bush presidency.

At this late date (Vonnegut would die in 2007, still stuck in the Bush 2 Years), Vonnegut still had the power to amuse and instruct, though no desire to attempt another novel. At least one of the pieces did get reworked into his final 'half-novel' Timequake, half a novel because Vonnegut published it unfinished but filled out with observations about life in America.

Here in The Trump Years, A Man Without A Country reminds one of how lousy the Bush years were -- how criminal, how unsupportably undemocratic, how moronic and ridiculous. Trump is not an anomaly. Trump is a logical extrapolation. Have we forgotten so soon that the 2000 Presidential Election was stolen by disenfranchising minority voters and not just through all the more public post-election shenanigans?

Vonnegut notes at one point that a real horror story would be called 'C-Students from Yale.' Like Bush 2 and so many of his cronies.

If Vonnegut were around today, maybe he'd note that Bush 2 normalized all the crap that Trump has now expanded. Or that Trump is also dangerous because he makes seemingly rational left-wingers nostalgic for the days of Bush and Reagan and Nixon. Hidey-ho! So it goes! Recommended.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018): written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, segment "All Gold Canyon" based on a story by Jack London, segment "The Girl Who Got Rattled" based on a story by Stewart Edward White; starring Tim Blake Nelson (Buster Scruggs), James Franco (Cowboy), Stephen Root (Bank Teller), Liam Neeson (Impresario), Harry Melling (Artist), Tom Waits (Prospector), Zoe Kazan (Alice Longabaugh), Brendan Gleeson (Irishman), Chelcie Ross (Trapper), Tyne Daly (Lady), Saul Rubinek (Frenchman), and Jonjo O'Neill (Englishman):

On Netflix appears this early holiday gift from the Coen Brothers, an anthology movie set in the Old West. It's one Hell of an assembly. Beautifully shot and acted, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs plays with assorted tropes of the Old West, from singing cowboys to grizzled prospectors, from stagecoach rides to wagon trains, from bank robberies to traveling shows. 

The stories move from satire to bleak comedy to ironic tragedy and back again. Tom Waits stands out in a field of fine performances as that grizzled, tenacious prospector; so, too, Tim Blake Nelson as the eponymous singing cowboy and Harry Melling as a traveling performer. Highly recommended.

The Divided States of Hysteria (2017): written and illustrated by Howard Chaykin

The Divided States of Hysteria (2017): written and illustrated by Howard Chaykin: Legendary comic writer-artist Howard Chaykin stirred up controversy when The Divided States of Hysteria came out in single-issue form in 2017. 

Much of the flack came from the Left, an odd turn of events because Chaykin is vocally left-wing and has been for decades. But he's also been an expert at making readers uncomfortable for decades now. 

For example, he caused the late Harlan Ellison to have a world-class freak-out with his revisionist Shadow miniseries in the mid-1980's, a book which logically pointed out that the Shadow was a fascist sociopath and then ran with it all the way to awesomeness.

The Divided States of Hysteria is a near-future dystopia in which much of the executive and legislative branches of the U.S. government died in a terrorist attack before the book's narrative begins. Rather than offer a bipartisan fantasy of a perfect President within this scenario, as Designated Survivor does, Chaykin instead offers more chaos, horror, incompetence, and a group of "heroes" who make the Dirty Dozen look about as scary as the goddam Goonies.

At the heart of a lot of complaints, I think, is Chaykin's ability to make violence and fascist tendencies look attractive. It's sort of the point -- as some wag once pointed out, a lot of comic-book superheroes are fascistic, anti-government sociopaths. Or would be, if they were real. But isn't fun to watch them solve things with punches and explosions?

At the heart, though, of those complaints is also the inability of many people, left or right, to separate the representation of something from advocacy of that same thing, along with a a pronounced and escalating ability to take offense at anything that isn't pablum. Bland, inoffensive pablum. You're mean, Early! How dare you draw the aftermath of a completely plausible 21st-century American lynching AND PUT IT ON YOUR COVER! 

Identity politics also requires that one of the two people closest to being a hero in The Divided States of Hysteria, as a trans woman, SHOULD NOT BE REPRESENTED BY A HETEROSEXUAL WHITE MALE CARTOONIST!!!

But she is a great character. And dead sexy.

At one point, female terrorists detonate dirty bombs they've had implanted in their wombs. This is not a pretty scenario. I imagine Tom Clancy vomiting with rage somewhere. So too someone on the Left. Chaykin has decided to find ways to horrify the reader, and the same old beheadings and IED attacks and marathon bombings have lost the power to shock. They're becoming background noise.

In order to stop America's enemies -- and redeem his own devastated reputation, and avenge the deaths of his mistress and wife and family in a terrorist attack  -- a disgraced CIA operative puts together a team of four convicted murderers. They're up against a cadre of terrorist leaders and a Russian operative and the incompetence of their own country's government. The President they're working for, a replacement from the Cabinet's lowest levels, is a compromised hack. 

So five misfits.... well, 'misfit' is a bit of a misnomer. Besides our CIA protagonist, our heroes are a trans man who killed three clients in self-defence, a mob hitman with a serial-killing hobby, a criminal accountant who murdered a couple of dozen rich people with poison, and an African-American serial-killing sniper who's a really good shot and loves shooting white civilians in the head.

The Challengers of the Unknown these are not. Challengers of the Unthinkable, maybe.

The violence is horrifying. The art is slick and gorgeous and horrifyingly clinical at atimes. The 'sound-design' from letterer Ken Bruzenak is fascinating enough that it gets its own 4-page explanatory essay at the back of the volume. Over it all hangs a question Chaykin has been asking and answering for a long time in his work -- are these the heroes you want? Because this is what they would really look like.

I mean, there are other questions. And the whole thing, complete with the cynical 'voice' of an omniscient narrator running along with the narrative, is a compelling action narrative, blood-soaked and morally dubious. But it's also a compelling examination of the heroism people love when it's sanitized in everything from James Bond movies to daily news reports of Seal Team 6 and Our Brave Black Ops Boys in Afghanistan. 

And I haven't even delved into the sexual and racial politics explored throughout! The Divided States of America delves into an America besotted with sex and violence, sometimes at the same time, sometimes as the same thing. 

Along with the narration comes a recurring series of images of death and horror from various American sites. The terrorist groups themselves are a mixed bag too -- an All-Star, Dream Team-up of White Supremacy and Black Power and Islamicism, coordinated by a Russian operative who's also a Hollywood movie producer. It's doom alone that counts, all moving towards a final attack on a telethon for a wounded America, complete with the President, to be destroyed by the same groups who are also the event's public donors.

It's not so much that the satire and the violence both blister. It's that the entire book seems entirely plausible. Chaykin's been examining the puritanical, pornographic nature of American culture for decades. The American love of violence as a solution, and the attendant separation of the world into Good and Evil, Us and Them. Now all accompanied by the eternal chatter of social media.

Bang bang, screw screw, shoot shoot. Highly recommended.

The Infinite Wait and Other Stories

The Infinite Wait and Other Stories (2012) by Julia Wertz: Three pieces make up this comics collection from Julia Wertz. 

The first, entitled "Industry," chronicles the jobs she's had over two decades and two coasts, from a lot of waitressing and bartending jobs to her later days as a professional cartoonist who doesn't have to hold down another job.

The second, the eponymous "The Infinite Wait," covers Wertz's move to San Francisco from Napa in 2002 and her subsequent diagnosis of having the auto-immune disease Lupus. The third, "A Strange and Curious Place," is, in Wertz's own words, "basically just a love letter to my hometown library and everything it taught me."

"Industry" probably has the most laughs per panel, even as Wertz starts to lose jobs because of her incessant drinking. The publishing success of her first two books, Fart Party I and II, moves "Industry" to an often hilarious evaluation of how Hollywood tries to adapt work, and specifically autobiographical work. 

"The Infinite Wait," Wertz informs the reader, was a title chosen for its pretension and "seriousness" as a joke related to the decidedly unpretentious tale of Wertz vs. Lupus. This is certainly one of the funniest comics stories ever created about an incurable auto-immune disease. Well, any disease, any sickness. It may catch at the heart, but the story never stops presenting situations of high wit and low comedy.

Then there's "A Strange and Curious Place," the shortest piece in the book. It is indeed a paean to Wertz's hometown library, and to the joys of reading for a child. The depiction of Julia and her brother's excitement at the annual library book sale is a gem of humourous, pithily observed sentiment. The book, too, is a gem of autobiographical self-evaluation and often raunchy, sometimes obscene brilliance. Highly recommended.

Marked by 9/11

Can't Get No (2006) written and illustrated by Rick Veitch: Manhattan CEO Chad Roe has a bad day when complainants launch lawsuits against his company and its signature product -- a truly indelible marker. Stock prices drop into the Zero range. Angry victims of the truly permanent marker want Roe's head. It's September 9, 2001 in New York.

Can't Get No is a surreal, often grotesque piece of left-wing agit-prop from writer-artist Rick Veitch. It's also brilliant and, in my comic-reading experience, unique. I've never encountered a comic before in which the odd, often vague blocks of text (no word balloons or, for that matter, directly attributed quotations here) interact with the occasionally grotesque but also splendidly, comically rendered art so as to induce a sort of trance state in the reader.

Pages go by, and the text seems to vanish from one's memory before it can be stored. Veitch has conjured up a graphic novel that reflects the mass-culture wasteland of America and its cancerous hold on individuals and on the planet. I'd hate to see what this book would do to someone truly stoned.

This is a quest narrative in which images carry the weight while the text noodles away in the background, strange and elusive. There's a Theme Park one probably won't forget. And there's Chad Roe, whose body is turned into a canvas early on for a couple of artists interested in those permanent markers. 

Don't look for epiphanies or life-changing revelations at the end, though. It seems to me that the point of Can't Get No is that some people simply cannot permanently change. They've already drowned in the toxic, memoryless, money-obsessed melting pot that is America, melting. Highly recommended.

Penis Jokes

The Brothers Grimsby (2016): written by Sacha Baron Cohen, Phil Johnston, and Peter Baynham; directed by Louis Leterrier; starring Sacha Baron Cohen (Nobby), Rebel Wilson (Dawn), Mark Strong (Sebastian), and Isla Fisher (Jodie): A barbaric yawp of a comedy had me laughing at points and cringing at others. Though the cringing was mostly done during the scenes of mawkish sentimentality that occur periodically, parodies I assume of the mawkish sentimentality of many action movies. 

Sacha Baron Cohen takes aim at the British class system and action movies, roughly in that order. He's a welfare yob from infamously depressed Grimsby (a real city); Mark Strong is his long-vanished brother, a James Bond-type superspy. They team up to save the world from a nefarious scheme that will reach fruition at the (never-named because of copyright reasons) World Cup final. You know this is an unrealistic movie because England is playing in that final!

The grotesque comes hard and fast (that's what she said!) and without modulation or regret. Director Louis Leterrier (The Incredible Hulk, Now You See Me) doesn't have the chops to accentuate the comedy at all times, which means that stretches of the movie play like the action movies it is parodying. Cohen manages a weird, almost Rabelaisian sweetness at times -- Nobby is a knob and a yob, but he loves his family and he's capable of self-sacrifice. Mark Strong plays off Cohen well as a straight man; more importantly, he's cinematically plausible as a superspy action hero. He's like a more self-aware Jason Statham. 

I laughed a lot, so I guess I liked it. The elephant scene alone should really have nabbed this movie a Make-up Oscar nomination. Recommended.

Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping (2016): written by Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer, and Jorma Taccone; directed by Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone; starring Andy Samberg (Conner), Jorma Taccone (Owen), Akiva Schaffer (Lawrence), Sarah Silverman (Paula), and Tim Meadows (Harry): The Lonely Island boys make a pop mockumentary (mock popumentary?) about a gormless pop-rap group and its even more gormless frontman (Andy Samberg). 

As with Lonely Island's song and video parodies, it's too sweet to be blistering satire. In the Classics game, they'd probably call this Horatian. Nonetheless, while certain things wear out their welcome, there are a lot of laughs here, many of them riffing on real-world occurrences that include U2 releasing an album on all the iPhones in the world and a lot of real-world songs and videos by people that include Macklemore and One Direction. 

It's no This is Spinal Tap -- what is? -- but it's a mostly fun 90 minutes with a lot of laugh-out loud moments in the songs and the scenes. There's also something refreshingly weird in a scene involving Samberg reluctantly signing a fan's penis. Recommended.

Girls!

Or Clark Kent when Lester wears glasses

The Trouble with Girls Volume 1 (1987-1988/Collected 2006): written by Will Jacobs and Gerard Jones; illustrated by Tim Hamilton:

The Trouble with Girls Volume 2 (1988/Collected 2006): written by Will Jacobs and Gerard Jones; illustrated by Tim Hamilton:

Apparently, one of my local dollar stores just got a crate of 10-year-old comic-book collections from Checker Publishing. And lo, the two collections of late 1980's/early 1990's superhero satire The Trouble with Girls  were among them!

The two volumes collect most of the initial B&W run of The Trouble with Girls from Malibu/Eternity. Only an annual is missing, which is a shame. But what's left, while occasionally a work of reprinting ineptitude (somebody dropped a slip of paper on more than one page...), is also a lost work of comedic comic genius from writers Will Jacobs and Gerard Jones and artist Tim Hamilton.

The Trouble with Girls (the name riffs on an early Elvis Presley movie) features the adventures of globe-trotting superspy/superguy Lester Girls, who is hyper-capable in everything he does, from sex to combat to protecting the world from a wide variety of super-villains and secret cabals.

But Lester doesn't want any of this. He just wants to settle down with a nice woman in suburbia, have kids, and maybe finally get the last page of John Steinbeck's The Red Pony read. But this is never to be. Whether it's a high-school reunion or a trip to the store, Lester's life will always erupt into high-action pandemonium.

Tim Hamilton really was a pleasing cartoonist, capable of comic moments with just enough superhero sheen to keep the satire running. And Will Jacobs and Gerard Jones are very funny writers, especially once they expand the satire from spy movies to pretty much Anything Goes. 

You'll almost certainly wince at some of the jokes, at least a few of which may seem somewhat sexist, though I'd argue that the sources they're satirizing are sexist and the commentary in The Trouble with Girls attacks the sexism of superheroes, Hollywood blockbusters, and the James Bond universe by foregrounding the absolute horror certain action-loving fans (and writers, and creators) have of the female body when it's de-objectified. I'd have loved to see the comic's take on the recent Ghostbusters kerfuffle that ignited fandom's terrible constituency of the He-Man Woman-Hater's Club.

There's more than a whiff of Seth Macfarlane's much-later American Dad! in the DNA of Lester Girls. But Lester is funnier, more charming, and weirdly sympathetic in his endless quest to save the world, discover his secret origins, and read the last page of The Red Pony. 

There's also a special guest appearance by James Joyce's Stephen Daedalus at Lester's high-school reunion, among other literary characters that also include The Great Gatsby's Daisy Buchanan. But then we're right back to the nefarious, miasmic depredations of the super-villain known only as The Wind-breaker. It's that kind of humour. Highly recommended.

When the Sun Rose Black Over the Last City

Zenith: Phase Three (1989/Collected 2014): written by Grant Morrison; illustrated by Steve Yeowell and others; character design by Brendan McCarthy: And now the 1989 show, in which Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell take the piss out of every Crisis and Secret War and Company-wide Crossover Event ever seen in the mainstream superhero comics of DC and Marvel. 

Phase Three is at once almost howlingly funny in its take on crossovers -- for the most part, all the heroes from different realities spend most of their time confused about what they're doing, who they're fighting, and who they're fighting with. And artist Steve Yeowell abets the foggy satire of super-hero armageddons with his sketchiest, sparsest, most evocative and suggestive artwork yet.

The Many-Angled Ones, the Great Old Ones, the Lloigor, have launched a major assault on all the alternative realities of Earth. Only a mighty army of superheroes can stop them! Super-jerk Zenith and super-conservative Peter St. John get drafted for the battle because of course they do. But nothing is really as it seems, and by the end of things, the true enemies of the universe will stand revealed. Or will they? Yes, they will. Maybe.

Morrison and Yeowell do a tremendous job here of juggling meta-commentary, satire, and abject horror. The Lloigor are truly horrible, and they're depicted in ways that almost certainly intentionally recall Kid Miracleman's devastation of London in Alan Moore's Miracleman. But they're also horribly comical and, frankly, not that bright. It all holds together as a satiric epic of horror right up to the bombastic climax, the terrible revelation, and the sudden reversal.

Throughout, Zenith remains his familiar unpleasant self, contrasting the various heroes who take this sort of thing seriously, or who've experienced actual tragedy. A certain number of minor characters are either old British comics characters or homages to same, but knowing who they are isn't integral to enjoying the book. Highly recommended.

Zenith: Phase Four (1990, 1992, 2000/Collected 2014): written by Grant Morrison; illustrated by Steve Yeowell and others; character design by Brendan McCarthy: And so, after the revelations in Zenith: Phase Three about the origins of the Many-Angled Ones and their plans for Earth, we come to the end. 

Can telepathic Conservative super-knob Peter St. John and self-absorbed super-pop-star Zenith save the world from a host of nigh-omnipotent alien gods? Or will the Sun turn black and all of creation fall?

Narrated for large stretches by the aging British creator of the British superhero program, Zenith: Phase Four alternates between dystopian horror and flashes of satire as embodied in the eponymous Zenith. Peter St. John has his own plans for humanity, but they apparently don't involve killing everybody. Not so the Many-Angled Ones, Lovecraft's Great Old Ones. Neither so the rest of Earth's super-heroes, who have a plan of their own that doesn't involve the survival of non-super-heroic humanity.

The result is a superhero comic book that trades in cosmic horror and bits of absurd humour on the way to its denouement. There's still enough mystery left at the end to fuel a Phase Five, but that doesn't seem to be in the offing. A coda from the year 2000, eight years after Phase Four ended, is a rare mis-step from writer Grant Morrison, a sour piece that can be ignored given its meta-commentary on the series as a whole. 

But otherwise, Phase Four is a triumph of revisionist superheroics and weird visionary horror. There's a damned city at the end of things that's quite a triumph of horrific imaginings. And there's Zenith, too self-absorbed to rule the world, and Peter St. John, whose plans remain mysterious right up to the end. And as the creator of the superheroes muses, superheroes in the real world -- or any idealized concept -- becomes horrors almost beyond imagining. Most of the time. Highly recommended.

Satire is a State of Mind

Being There: adapted by Jerzy Kosinski and Robert C. Jones from the 1971 novel by Kosinski; directed by Hal Ashby; starring Peter Sellers (Chance), Shirley MacLaine (Eve Rand), Melvyn Douglas (Ben Rand), Jack Warden (President 'Bobby'), Richard Dysart (Dr. Robert Allenby), and Ruth Attaway (Louise) (1979): 

The last great performance of the inestimably great Peter Sellers should have nabbed him a Best Actor Oscar. But the Academy hates comedy. Hal Ashby's film, adapted from Jerzy Kosinski's partially plagiarized 1971 novel, was a pet project of Sellers for years. Only the success of the later Pink Panther films secured him the clout to get it made. And boy, is it dandy.

Sellers plays Chance, the live-in gardener for a Washington recluse known only as the Old Man. Chance is... well, simple. Very simple. Amiable and harmless and simple. And boy, does he love TV! And having apparently never left the Old Man's house, no record of Chance's existence seems to exist. When the Old Man dies, no provisions for Chance exist in the will. So he's cast out to walk the streets of Washington, DC.  

Almost everything Chance knows about the world comes from the mediated world of television: he wants to watch TV all the time, if possible. And as he watches, he'll sometimes imitate what he sees. He imitates the gestures of people around him.  He parrots back what people say to him (along with the occasional 'I understand,' which for Chance really means 'I don't know what you're talking about, I'm just being polite'). And when pressed, he'll talk about gardening. There's almost no there there. So of course some people view him as wise and insightful.

Sellers modeled some of his performance on the screen persona of Stan Laurel. It's absolutely winning in any event, ranging from subtle bits that modulate Chance's affably blank stare depending on the situation to moments of absurd slapstick. Chance reflects back to people what they want to see in him. None of his utterances are cryptic or wise, but people -- and especially the rich people he falls in with -- take his comments on proper gardening as wise thoughts on the U.S. economy.

Being There is a surprisingly bleak satire of American politics, sweetened by Chance's utter simplicity and sweetness. He's a holy fool who has fallen in with the Illuminati. And the Illuminati just aren't all that bright. Indeed, the rulers of the world pretty much all seem to be idiots made idiotic by their own narcissistic self-involvement. Chance's former housekeeper knows what he really is; as she observes when she sees him on a talk show, just being white in America can get a person almost anything.

Being There is in many ways the mirror-image of another great satire of the 1970's, Network. But here, the sinister Cabal that really runs things is made up of people who've willed themselves into perfect blindness. What the last scene of the movie, made up on the set by director Ashby and Sellers, means to the overall movie is something for the individual viewer to decide. Me, I'm still not sure. Highly recommended.

Best in Show: written by Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy; directed by Christopher Guest; starring Parker Posey (Meg Swan), Michael Hitchcock (Hamilton Swan), Catherine O'Hara (Cookie Fleck), Eugene Levy (Gerry Fleck), Bob Balaban (Dr. Theodore W. Millbank, III), Christopher Guest (Harlan Pepper), Michael McKean (Stefan Vanderhoof), John Michael Higgins (Scott Donlan), Jennifer Coolidge (Sherri Ann Cabot), Jane Lynch (Christy Cummings), and Ed Begley Jr. (Hotel Manager) (2000):

Maybe the high point of movies made by Christopher Guest and his merry band of co-writers and performers, though some prefer Waiting for Guffman. I don't include This is Spinal Tap because it has Rob Reiner directing. This one, focused on several people whose dogs are competing in a dog show based on the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, is a comic gem. 

While the characters all verge on being comic grotesques, they're invested with enough warmth and sympathy to make Best in Show a rarity -- a gentle satire. The performances are superb, the direction smoothly negotiates the faux-documentary approach, and the writing absolutely sparkles with wit and goofiness. Best in Show is an all-timer. Highly recommended.

Heat

Cottage Country: written by Jeremy Boxen; directed by Peter Wellington; starring Malin Akerman (Cammie Ryan), Tyler Labine (Todd Chipowski), Lucy Punch (Masha), Dan Petronijevic (Salinger Chipowski), Benjamin Ayres (Dov Rosenberg), and Kenneth Welsh (Earl Chipowski) (2013): Ontario's cottage country mostly plays itself in an amiable, occasionally blackly comic bit of horror-satire. Cast against type as a buttoned-down office drone, Tyler Labine is appealing. Malin Akerman, while about 1000 times too attractive for her role as Labine's obsessive girlfriend, also does solid work as an increasingly demented Bridezilla wannabe.

More gore and more laughs would be nice, but I've certainly spent 90 minutes with far worse movies with far bigger budgets. And there's a bit involving the extrication of an ax from someone killed with said ax that's both funny and weirdly authentic. Lightly recommended.

King Solomon's Mines: adapted by Helen Deutsch from the novel by H. Rider Haggard; directed by Compton Bennett and Andrew Marton; starring Stewart Granger (Allan Quatermain), Deborah Kerr (Elizabeth Curtis), Richard Carlson (John Goode), Kimursi (Khiva), and Siriaque (Umbopa) (1950): A surprisingly nuanced approach to both race and nature makes this 1950 adventure hold up better than most similar films of the time. Set in 1897, even though the novel was published in 1885, the film involves that prototype of Indiana Jones, Allan Quatermain, a British hunter and guide in Africa, played here by the stolid, likeable Stewart Granger in his first Hollywood role. 

The studio added Deborah Kerr's character to the film as a love interest while also taking significant liberties with the plot, though mostly to fit events into a 100-minute film. Location filming at times gives the movie the feel of a National Geographic special, as we're treated to lengthy shots of natives dancing, various animals up to shenanigans, and an assortment of beautiful landscapes. Our heroes trek towards a possibly mythic diamond mine somewhere in south-central Africa in search of Kerr's lost husband, picking up mysterious warrior Umbopa along the way. 

Aside from one of the world's most ridiculous-looking fake spiders, the menaces the group faces are drawn from life. A stampede on the grasslands impresses (and, obviously, hasn't been conjured up by CGI). And some of Quatermain's interactions with the natives must have shocked racists in 1950. I wonder if some scenes were edited in the American South. Recommended.

Lone Star: written and directed by John Sayles; starring Chris Cooper (Sam Deeds), Elizabeth Pena (Pilar), Kris Kristofferson (Charlie Wade), Matthew McConaughey (Buddy Deeds), Ron Canada (Otis), Joe Morton (Del), and Miriam Colon (Mercedes Cruz) (1995): Perhaps the most satisfying of all the films of writer-director John Sayles. While the backbone of its plot is a fairly traditional mystery, that mystery allows Sayles to move back and forth across a gulf of 40 years as Chris Cooper's Sheriff of a small Texas border town investigates a murder linked to his late father, the much beloved former sheriff of the town.

Sayles assembles a fine cast and gives them lots to work with. As in most of Sayles's films, there are very few villains -- in this case, exactly one, Kris Kristofferson's odious sheriff, seen in flashbacks to the late 1950's, when Chris Cooper's father was a young deputy played by Matthew McConaughey. 

Several plots intertwine over the course of the movie, all of them tied into the murder plot because in this small town, everything is connected. And while Cooper tries to figure out this particular bit of the past, the larger history of Texas, particularly Texas in regards to race relations, also gets argued over in local politics and in a meeting of parents with the school over its "controversial" attempt to offer something other than a valedictory to white people during history classes. In all, it's a fine piece of writing, directing, and acting, true to its genre antecedents but also grasping at something larger than just the solution to a mystery. Highly recommended.

Grotesque

Stardust Memories, written and directed by Woody Allen; starring Woody Allen (Sandy Bates), Charlotte Rampling (Dorrie), Jessica Harper (Daisy) and Marie-Christine Barrault (Isobel) (1980): "Tell funnier jokes!", the aliens tell filmmaker Sandy Bates during this movie. Bates is plagued by the feeling that he needs to move beyond comedy into more meaningful drama. Of course, Allen himself was plagued by the same feelings in the late 1970's, which led to the depressing, Bergmanesque Interiors (1978), which Allen did after his biggest commercial and critical success, Annie Hall.

And pretty much everybody hated Interiors.

Stardust Memories uses Bates's attendance of a weekend celebration of his movies at the Jersey Shore Hotel Stardust as the loose frame for a tour through Bates's memories, dreams, nightmares, and creative problems. It's a riff on Fellini's 8 1/2, and Allen and his casting director fill the movie with grotesques. This is one of the ugliest, weirdest looking crowd of extras and minor roles ever assembled. Is this how Bates and, by extension Allen, views his fans and critics? Good question.

But the movie also pokes and prods the pretensions of Bates, who is not, the film also seems to suggest, the deep thinker he wants to be. There are some very funny setpieces throughout this film. There are also some tedious sections. The whole thing seems fascinating but somewhat inorganic, though the ending clarifies a lot of the prior murkiness. Recommended for Woody Allen fans.