Documentary, Netflix

Chaos: The Manson Murders Documentary

Chaos: Manons Murders movie image

This documentary is based on the book by Tom O’Neil, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties. With such a provocative title, we’re led to expect mind-blowing revelations. Unfortunately, it’s mostly speculation, though it’s still fascinating.

O’Neil reveals an anti-climactic spoiler right at the beginning:

“I still don’t know what happened but I know that what we were told isn’t what happened.”

This is an honest, if deflating, admission that could probably be applied to many popular conspiracy theories of the last half century or so. We can just sense that something is off with the official narrative, but it’s less easy to pinpoint what really occurred. As a case in point, Chaos director Errol Morris says in an interview with Slate:

“I believe there was a conspiracy to kill JFK, although if you ask me, I would be hard-pressed to tell you exactly the nature of that conspiracy.”

The Official Narrative

The most thorough and widely believed version of the case are found in Bugliosi’s 1974 book Helter Skelter, named after the Beatle’s song that allegedly inspired Manson.

O’Neil’s book presents some compelling reasons to doubt Bugliosi’s account. It’s not the horrific events themselves that are disputed but Manson’s motives. While the Helter Skelter theory looks mainly at Manson’s apocalyptic vision of starting a race war, O’Neil examines some interesting connections between Manson and the CIA MK-ULTRA program, which involved mind control and LSD.

There’s also a possible connection between a CIA-linked scientist named Louis Jolyon “Jolly” West and Manson. Both West and Manson have links to the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic. Manson often brought his followers to the clinic for medical treatments (largely treating venereal diseases). West apparently went to the same clinic to recruit subjects for his dubious experiments.

Unfortunately, this critical link between West and Manson is speculation, as there’s no evidence that they ever met.

O’Neil suggests that Manson may not have been taking direct orders from West or the CIA. Rather, he may have simply been given the freedom to “do whatever he wanted.” In this view, Manson himself may have been part of a wider experiment -let all these crazy hippies take lots of drugs and see what happens. This could explain why law enforcement was so slow at apprehending Manson and his followers.

Linking Manson with the CIA overlaps with many other popular conspiracy theories regarding the 1960s counterculture. Many of these theories are related to the Laurel Canyon music scene as well as the Beatles. If you want a taste, just look up O’Neil’s book on Amazon and check out the related books. It’s an endless rabbit hole.

Manson’s connection to the music industry is well established, of course. It was possibly a key factor in the murders. Manson supposedly thought the house where Sharon Tate and others were killed was occupied by music producer Terry Melcher, who declined to produce Manson’s record.

The Manson murders are an American true crime saga that never seems to stop fascinating people. Quentin Tarantino revived it with Once Upon a Time in America, which postulates an alternative outcome.

The Chaos documentary only skims the surface and you really need to read O’Neil’s book for more details. Director Morris takes a skeptical view but doesn’t present O’Neil as a total crank. It would be hard to do this as O’Neil himself admits he doesn’t know the real truth. The very fact that he made this film at all suggests he considers the case far from closed. Unfortunately, there’s not much hope that we’ll get any closure. Many of the key players surrounding the Manson murders, including Manson himself and prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi are now dead, making it unlikely we’ll ever know the complete truth.

Amazon Prime, dark comedy, Film Festivals

Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person Review

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Humanist Vampire movie poster

In the last couple of months, my search for entertaining low budget films on streaming sites hasn’t been very rewarding. I couldn’t even make it through a few of them (I won’t even bother to mention the names). Fortunately, Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person was a pleasant surprise.

This 2023 French language Canadian film, directed by Ariane Louis-Seize, is set in Montreal. While it hasn’t been widely seen in theaters, it has an impressive share of film festival wins and nominations in multiple countries. Like many contemporary independent films, it will most likely reach its widest audience via streaming.

The title lets you know right away that it’s firmly in the horror-comedy genre, though not exactly how I expected. While there’s ample dark humor here, it’s not a laugh-out-loud kind of funny. Nor is there that much horror, at least for a vampire movie. It’s actually more of a dramedy, exploring a platonic relationship between two misfits, one human, the other a vampire.

Sasha (Sara Montpetit) is a young vampire with a problem; she doesn’t like to kill. Her fangs aren’t even properly developed, to the chagrin of her respectable vampire family. Paul (Félix-Antoine Bénard) is a suicidal teen who’s bullied both at school and work. Sasha and Paul meet at a group for depressed and suicidal people. The idea is that Paul wants to die and Sasha is seeking willing victims.

The plot is in some ways reminiscent of Let the Right One In (both the Swedish and American versions), but Humanist Vampire has a style of its own. It delves more into areas such as mental health and family dynamics.

One of the main reasons this film works so well is that it doesn’t go overboard trying to be funny. The characters play it straight and avoid the pitfall of becoming parodies, as lesser actors might have done in this kind of movie. Sasha is appropriately morose as a vampire with a conscience, just as her sister Denise (Noémie O’Farrell) is a more typically feral and ruthless example of the species. Paul comes across as a genuinely troubled misfit teen. Despite the absurdity of the premise, we empathize with these characters.

Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person is currently streaming on Amazon Prime and AMC.

 

 

 

Amazon Prime, independent film directors, indie films

Kwik Stop: Low Key, Overlooked Indie Film Now on Amazon Prime

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Kwik Stop movie poster

Kwik Stop was released in 2001 but, despite winning several film festival awards, didn’t get much attention or distribution. It’s recently been added to Amazon Prime, so hopefully it will get a wider audience, which it truly deserves. A Slate article  by Charles Taylor argues that the lack of fanfare around Kwik Stop reveals everything that’s wrong with the movie industry. This article is from almost 10 years ago; if anything, things are worse today.

Michael Gilio wrote, directed, and is one of the stars of Kwik Stop, a hard to label micro-budget film that doesn’t often do what we expect. Set in a dismal, generic American landscape that appears to be somewhere in the Midwest.

It starts as a young guy who calls himself Lucky (Gilio) drives up to a convenience store in a classic car. Between his car and haircut, he looks like a James Dean character. After doing some petty shoplifting, he’s confronted by Didik (Lara Phillips), a teen who’s anxious to leave town. She threatens to tell a nearby cop about Lucky’s crimes if he doesn’t give her a ride. He plans to drive to Hollywood to become an actor. Didi wants to tag along.

With this start, Kwik Stop looks at first to be a road movie, possibly the violent kind along the lines of Bonnie and Clyde or Badlands. However, neither of these characters is quite capable of acting out such extreme actions. They are limited by a kind of circumstantial and existentialist quicksand that prevents them from getting too far.

What follows are some mild spoilers, though Kwik Stop is not a plot-driven movie, so there’s not really much to spoil.

Lucky and Didi have a series of fairly absurd misadventures involving burglaries that result in Didi getting sent to a juvenile detention center. Lucky then concocts an absurd scheme to break her out, recruiting his ex-girlfriend to assist. This sequence of events is part of what’s refreshing about the movie. Your first instinct may to think, “this is too ridiculous; no one would do anything like that.  But when you think about it, it’s so ridiculous that it seems like it could be true. It’s actually too ridiculous to fit into a formula novel or screenplay.

Along with Lucky and Didi, a depressed alcoholic named Emil (Rich Komenich) gets sucked into Didi’s chaotic life. He’s a sad sack character who proves to be more complicated than he first appears.

To appreciate Kwik Stop, you need to take a step back from the characters and understand that no one really knows what they’re doing. They are oddly believable as people who are making everything up from one moment to the next.

As the aforementioned Slate article  points out, some of Kwik Stop‘s absurdity is reminiscent of early Jim Jarmusch films such as Stranger than Paradise and Down By Law. Later mumblecore movies of the early 2000s also have some similarities. However, Gilio has a distinct style of his own. Jarmusch’s characters, often seem like they are in a perpetual existentialist fog. By contrast, Lucky and Didi actually seem to believe they are headed somewhere; it’s just that their plans and actions are so confused and self-defeating that they have no chance of achieving their goals.

Kwik Stop is the kind of low key, unpredictable indie movie that’s all too rare these days. It’s currently streaming on Amazon Prime, FreeVee, Apple TV, and other services.

 

 

 

 

 

dark comedy, Netflix, Standup comedy

Adrienne Iapalucci on Netflix: What Does Dark Comedy Tell Us About Society?

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Adrienne Iapalucci
Adrienne Iapalucci The Dark Queen

In her Netflix special The Dark Queen, Adrienne Iapalucci lives up to her moniker. She begins by saying, “I’m not a good person,” and nothing that follows gives us any reason to doubt this. I have no idea if her misanthropic persona is her true self. But if not, she does a great job of making us believe.

Standup comedy is one of the hardest forms of entertainment to pull off. More so now, for a couple of reasons. First, it’s gotten so mainstream that the competition is fierce, and being original is nearly impossible. Even the best of them start to sound like they’re regurgitating the same stuff after you’ve seen them a few times. The other reason is that it’s hard to know what you can joke about nowadays. The amount of backlash comics like Dave Chapelle and Ricky Gervais get for their un-PC jokes probably discourages others from stepping out of line. That is not remotely the case with Adrienne Iapalucci.

Nothing is off limits it seems, as she jokes about 9/11, Muslims, disliking Puerto Ricans, and victims of school shootings, for starters. Nor does she do it playfully, like Russell Peters who specializes in roasting every ethnic group. She unleashes one inappropriate line after another without any backpedaling.

Unlike left-leaning bluish comics like Sarah Silverman or right-leaning ones like Gervais, Iapalucci seems like an equal opportunity misanthrope. I can appreciate this about her, as she doesn’t push any particular agenda, apart from pure nihilism.

I find her more entertaining than your usual standup routine, but then I’ve never been the genre’s biggest fan. At least you never know what kind of unhinged, inappropriate thing she’ll say next. Her deadpan delivery adds to the effect.

Maybe cancel culture is already moving into the rearview mirror. People are finally realizing the futility of trying to quell opinions (and jokes) that offend them. After all, the controversy attached to Chapelle and Gervais has profited more than harmed them. They’ve turned their most objectionable jokes, regarding trans people, into branding tools. I’m not sure if that makes them funnier -I’d put them both into the large category of comics whose material has gotten overly predictable. But attempts to “cancel” them have surely failed.

I searched for reviews of the Dark Queen show and didn’t see much in the way of outrage or demands to silence her. I’m talking about “professional” reviews now as I didn’t scour the web for every Rotten Tomatoes review. It seems to be sinking in that calling attention to a message you don’t like is only fueling it.

What Does the Dark Queen Say About Us?

I’m a little torn when contemplating the societal implications of someone like Iapalucci, along with Anthony Jeselnik and others whose style of comedy is pure darkness. On the one hand, I wonder if such blatant misanthropy isn’t part of an overall desensitizing, contributing to a world where empathy is an anachronism and utter self-centeredness is the norm.

On the other hand, her utter disregard for limits serves to undermine the overly sensitive tendencies of cancel culture. As Kat Timpf points out in You Can’t Joke About That, society has become unsettlingly humorless in recent years.

In a better, saner world, comics like Adrienne Iapalucci wouldn’t exist, at least in their current form. The conditions and atrocities they chuckle at shouldn’t be part of reality. But given that they are, we have a choice. We can approach them with grim seriousness, allowing only pundits, experts, and leaders to address them. Or we can let the dark comics do their thing, for better and for worse.

Broadly speaking, Adrienne Iapalucci is part of a lineage that includes Lenny Bruce, Bill Hicks, and George Carlin (to name a few). They often cross the boundary into the offensive and tasteless. But they also hold a mirror to society, revealing uncomfortable truths that are present whether we look at them or not.

 

 

Indie film directors, movie reviews, Netflix

The Killer on Netflix: A Hitman’s Vendetta

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The Killer on Netflix movie poster

It seems like Netflix is specializing in made for streaming movies with extremely limited theater runs about contract killers. At least if we consider two recent offerings: Richard Linklater’s Hitman and David Fincher’s The Killer (2023).

Actually, the two films aren’t very similar. I’ve already discussed Hitman, where the protagonist isn’t even a real contract killer but an undercover quasi-cop pretending to be one. The killer in The Killer is a bona fide killer. In fact, as played by Michael Fassbender, he’s one of cinema’s most ruthless hitmen, at least for a protagonist (when it comes to villains, it would be hard to list the endless variety of psychopaths portrayed over the years).

The killer, whose real name we never learn, uses a long list of pseudonyms, one of the movie’s few borderline amusing aspects. Although we see him in action, we mostly hear his inner dialogue, accompanied by a Smiths soundtrack.

It could be tedious to hear someone repeating various Nietzschean and Machiavellian quotes (along with one by Aleister Crowley), but here it’s actually compelling. Many of the words are repetitive, but we’re interested to see how (and if) the killer acts them out in each scenario.

As the killer meticulously prepares to do a job in Paris, he makes a mistake and shoots a bystander instead of the target. This sets off a messy sequence of events that throws off his equilibrium. As you might imagine, people who hire contract killers aren’t likely to forgive mistakes. They attack his home in the Dominican Republic and maim his girlfriend. The assassins, however, make their own mistake and leave her alive and able to identify them.

The killer, it turns out, isn’t too cold and calculating to resist the lure of revenge. So most of the film follows him as he tracks down each and every culpable party. He continues to repeat his mantra: “Stick to your plan. Anticipate, don’t improvise. Trust no one. Never yield an advantage. Fight only the battle you’re paid to fight.”

As his actions clearly don’t fit this stoic ideal, he almost seems like a malfunctioning android or Terminator, functioning at a high and deadly level, but not quite the way he was programmed to work. Tilda Swinton has a nice role as a charismatic fellow assassin who is on the killer’s list. They play a life-and-death game of cat and mouse over drinks at a restaurant.

We get no backstory for the killer. Did he watch his family get murdered as a child? Was he mentored by a fellow sociopath? We have no idea as we only see him as a finished product.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen the 1967 French classic Le Samouraï, but that film similarly portrays a lone wolf, hard-to-kill hitman on the run.

The Killer brings an intense energy to a familiar genre. It alternates between action and slower-paced brooding scenes. While not exactly groundbreaking -a hitman seeking revenge is a familiar trope-, for fans of arty-Euro style suspense, it’s worth a watch.

Documentary

Kedi: The Cats of an Ancient City

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A cat on a stool in a restaurant.

Istanbul is known for many things: it’s the site of the old Byzantine city of Constantinople and, later, the Ottoman empire. It’s home to many famous sites and buildings such as the Hagia Sophia. It’s a popular destination for tourists, ex-pats and digital nomads. On top of all this, it’s famous for its  huge cat population.

Though it’s high on my list of places to visit, I haven’t yet gotten to Istanbul, so my knowledge is unfortunately all secondhand. I’ve come across many random videos of cats in the city: on streets, in the metro (often parked on the turnstiles where people enter the  system).

Cat in Istanbul Metro

Kedi: Cats of an Ancient City is a documentary that explores the ancient relationships between cats and humans in Istanbul. What’s refreshing is that it’s not the usual nature documentary with a narrator bombarding us with hundreds of factoids. To be sure, there’s a place for this kind of programming. However, it’s hard not to feel like you’re back in school being forced to sit through an educational video. Kedi focuses on the actual lives of cats and the people who love and care for them. We do get facts, but they are interwoven into the fabric of daily life.

There’s no complicated narrative here. We  see what a big part cats play in the everyday lives of many Istanbul residents. They naturally tend to congregate around markets and restaurants where food is plentiful.

One man describes how taking care of cats helped to cure him of long-term depression. A woman ponders how relating to cats feels like communing with an alien species. Several people emphasize how each cat has its own unique personality.

As heartwarming as it is to see people bonding with animals, it’s not all upbeat. Istanbul, like almost every developed area, is suffering from the common ills of gentrification and over-development, which impacts animals as well as humans. In a city that already has an overpopulation of cats, there are now fewer places for them to live. Towards the end, someone laments how the fast-paced way of life is making everyone less human. Some things are apparently universal.

Kedi: Cats of an Ancient City is must-see viewing for cat lovers. It’s also a less common view of a great city. Unlike the usual travel doc, which focuses on history and tourist attractions, this one takes you into actual neighborhoods and the everyday life of its residents, both human and feline.

I found this documentary on Kanopy, which you can access for free via public libraries and universities. I’m not sure if it’s streaming anywhere else at this time.

Film Festivals, indie comedies, Netflix

Hit Man: Fun Noirish Comedy But Not Vintage Linklater

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Hit Man movie poster

Richard Linklater, one of my favorite indie directors, is known for his episodic and conversation-heavy films such as Slacker, Dazed and Confused, Waking Life,  Boyhood, and the Sunrise-Sunset trilogy. Hit Man, on the other hand, is more like a Coen Brothers movie: twisty and plot-driven.

Hit Man went directly from a premier at the 80th Venice International Film Festival to Netflix. It did open at a small number of “select” theaters, but the vast majority of viewers will stream it.

Based loosely on a true story, it stars Glen Powell as Gary Johnson, a college professor who also works undercover for the New Orleans police. His superiors persuade him to pose as a hit man to set up people desperate or unhinged enough to hire a contract killer. Things get complicated when he’s “hired” by a woman named Madison (Adria Arjona) who wants to kill her abusive husband. Unlike prior setups, Madison seems like an actual victim with a just cause. It also doesn’t hurt that Gary is instantly attracted to her.

The story is a fairly typical modern noirish-comic tale with quirky characters and twists. Is Madison really a victim or more of a femme fatale with a hidden agenda? Will she discover Johnson’s true identity? To make matters more complicated, Johnson has a rival on the police force, a real cop named Jasper (Austin Amelio), who wanted the fake hit man gig himself. As Johnson gets involved with Madison, Jasper is watching.

One problem I had with Hit Man is how it starts. Gary Johnson narrates and just announces that he’s a philosophy professor with a mostly boring life who just happens to work undercover for the police, as if this is a normal thing. We see how he’s reluctant to take on the hit man role. But, really, that’s a relatively small step compared to the initial stage, which we never see, of getting recruited by the police in the first place. Maybe they didn’t want to lengthen the film by adding exposition, but to me it seems like a big omission.

I don’t tend to watch movies multiple times, but I get so much enjoyment from the verbal exchanges in many Linklater films that I often enjoy revisiting them. Sadly, I can only think of one scene in Hit Man that has this quality: a brief conversation between Gary and his ex-wife Alicia (Molly Bernard), who fall into the kind of profound and completely-inessential-to-the- plot type of conversation found in Waking Life, Before Sunrise, and others. Otherwise, the narration and dialog in Hit Man is either functional or typical flippant movie dialogue.

As played by Powell, Johnson is an enigmatic character who fluctuates between nerdy, charismatic, and unpredictable. From my research, I see he’s been in some popular movies I haven’t seen (I’m basically an all-indie guy). He mostly comes across like a movie star confident that the script has him covered. The role reminds me a bit of Tom Hanks in Catch Me If You Can.

I put Hit Man in the category of an A- or B+ semi-indie/semi-mainstream fils that I enjoy but wouldn’t go out of my way to see again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

dark comedy, Netflix

When You Finish Saving the World: Gen Z vs Boomer

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Movie poster: When You Finish Saving the World

When You Finish Saving the World, Jesse Eisenberg’s directorial debut and based on his own novel, stars Julianne Moore and Finn Wolfhard as a mother and son with serious social and communication issues, both with each other and the rest of the world. This is an insightful, sometimes funny, sometimes cringeworthy depiction of a conflict between two generational stereotypes: self-satisfied, affluent liberal Boomers and self-absorbed Gen-Zers who are more comfortable interacting online than in person. To its credit, the film doesn’t really take a side as both generations are lampooned.

Julianne Moore plays Evelyn, the director of a woman’s shelter in Indiana. Her teenage son, Ziggy, spends all his free time live streaming a music program that is broadcast globally to, he can’t stop announcing to everyone, 20,000 fans. Jay O. Sanders takes a back seat as Ziggy’s father, whose low key presence mainly consists of drinking wine, retreating with a book to his bedroom, and avoiding conflict as much as possible.

Ziggy is the kind of part Eisenberg himself would have played 20 or so years ago. In fact, this film vaguely evokes a 90s film in which he appeared, The Squid and the Whale, as both depict highly dysfunctional upper middle class families. Wolfhard is very effective in this role as a character who is often less than sympathetic. He’s both awkward and self-centered, oblivious of how off-putting his behavior often is.

Despite his apparent popularity online, Ziggy is socially awkward with his peers. He becomes infatuated with Lila (Alisha Boe), a politically active classmate who reads poetry at a local radical community center. Ziggy makes some ill-planned attempts to impress her. He turns one of her poems about oppressed people into a song and then brags how much money he made online with it. Ziggy suffers from the delusion that social media posturing is the equivalent of making a real difference in the world.

Evelyn is equally uncomfortable to watch. One of Julianne Moore’s strengths is playing characters who try to put on a brave front while barely hanging on emotionally. We saw this recently in May December, where she plays a woman living in the aftermath of a scandal. Here, she is equally off balance at home with Ziggy and her uncommunicative husband and at work, where she awkwardly tries to balance her role as supervisor with her egalitarian values. In one scene, her efforts to get friendly with a receptionist results in the other woman asking if Evelyn is planning to fire her.

Evelyn becomes obsessed with Kyle (Billy Bryk), a teen who goes to school with Ziggy (though the two are not acquainted) who is staying at the shelter with his mother. At first, she appears to take a maternal interest in Kyle, who seems more grounded and easier to communicate with than her own son. However, it starts to go in a queasier direction when she takes him out to dinner and gets giggly and flirty with him.

We need to look beyond Ziggy and his parents to find characters who are relatively normal and well adjusted. We see their foibles through the eyes of Lila and Kyle. The film’s major weakness is probably that the nearly perfect symmetry between Ziggy and Evelyn’s awkward interactions stretches credibility.

What I liked best about the film were some of the casual and offhanded observations. For example, we see Evelyn and Ziggy squeezing into an ostentatiously tiny Smart car, which is parked in one of the neighborhood’s larger and more ornate homes. This perfectly captures Evelyn’s need to be seen as a socially conscious activist while living a comfortable life in an upscale suburb. Then there’s the everyday hostility between Ziggy and his parents, who casually hurl obscenities at one another. This might be shocking to anyone not familiar with the norms of many liberal middle class families. Ziggy is especially territorial about no one disturbing him while he’s vlogging.

When You Finish Saving the World reveals how difficult communication can be in the modern world. . But overall, Eisenberg and the actors do an admirable job of sending up people whose self-importance and grandiosity can overshadow good intentions.

 

indie films

My Dinner With Andre 40 Years Later

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My Dinner With Andre, directed by Louis Malle, is a cult classic from 1981 that is still widely discussed today. It’s been called a prophetic look at a society that is increasingly alienated and dominated by technology. I hadn’t seen it for many years, so I thought it would be a good time to rewatch it and share my thoughts.

Just a Conversation

If you’ve never seen it, My Dinner With Andre is simply about two men, actor and playwright Wallace Shawn and theater director Andre Gregory, playing themselves, having dinner at a restaurant. Yes, it’s all talk. The only thing that prevents it from seeming like a stage play are the scenes before and after the dinner, where we are treated to some vintage scenes of New York City in the early 80s.

There aren’t very many movies, especially popular ones, that are 99% dialogue. Some of Richard Linklater’s films, such as the Sunrise-Sunset trilogy are dialogue-heavy, but in that case there’s a romantic mood as well as a variety of scenes (e.g. European cities). Waking Life is a closer comparison, as it’s full of philosophical inquiries, but that film diverts us with animated special effects. My Dinner With Andre is just two guys sitting in a restaurant for almost 2 hours. Yet, the movie continues to captivate viewers more than 40 years after its premier.

Does My Dinner With Andre Have a Theme?

Fortunately, Wally and Andre aren’t just uttering random, meandering thoughts. Although their conversation veers in many directions, there are some central themes. Andre introduces a fairly radical criticism of modern society, describing how people are almost entirely inauthentic and sleepwalking through life. His point is reminiscent of the mystic George Gurdjieff, who spoke of people being unconscious. I don’t believe Andre mentions Gurdjieff, but he does refer to Zen, which emphasizes living in the moment. Wally, meanwhile, argues for a more conventional and less confrontational attitude.

I suspect the disagreements between Wally and Andre are a bit exaggerated for dramatic effect. Most of the discussions revolve around Andre’s outlook while Wally takes on more of a Devil’s Advocate role as he upholds the virtues of bourgeois comforts over adventure and radical discontent.

One could say Andre’s point of view reveals a certain bourgeois privilege, as he has the freedom to travel the world in his quest for self-actualization. Of course, he understands this fully and expresses the requisite self-loathing that is, ironically, also characteristic of bourgeois intellectuals.

A Prophetic Movie?

It’s popular in some circles to look back at all the dystopian prophets, such as Orwell and Huxley, and discuss who came closer to the truth. My Dinner With Andre is sometimes mentioned as a prophetic work.

Many of the topics do take a grim view of modern civilization and the direction it’s headed. It’s especially disturbing to hear about alienation and self-preoccupation in 1981, about 15 years before internet culture, much less smartphones and social media.

I don’t think Andre is a prophet as much as an astute observer of what was already happening. He says at one point that the 1960s were the  “the last burst of the human being before he was extinguished.” To understand this point of view, it’s helpful to consider the era when these comments were made.

While it’s easy to be nostalgic about the 80s now, it was actually a rather pessimistic time, especially in big cities. The economy was in a recession, it was the middle of the Cold War, and the AIDS epidemic was peaking. This was also the beginning of the decline of New York’s (and America’s) middle class due to soaring housing costs. We get a glimpse of this mood early at the beginning of My Dinner With Andre, as Wally mentions his struggle paying bills and boards a graffiti-ridden subway.

It’s not entirely coincidental that Escape From New York, the post-apocalyptic thriller starring Kurt Russell as the vigilante anti-hero who rescues a US president who is trapped in a New York that has been turned into a prison, also came out in 1981. As different as these two films are, they share some of the dystopian angst that was in the air during that time.

Andre’s Vision of a New Underground

Andre’s vision is not wholly pessimistic. He advocates for a type of underground to keep civilization going during these new dark ages, using the model of communities such as Findhorn in Scotland, which is famous for its innovative agricultural methods and neo-pagan outlook.

This notion is similar to the  concept of temporary autonomous zones, an anarchist ideal that advocates the formation of spontaneous pockets of resistance and culture. Sadly, such idealistic visions have not fared well when people make a serious attempt to implement them.  This was brought to light in 2020, when an actual “autonomous zone”  called CHAZ (Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone) sprung up in Seattle, where the initial euphoria soon degenerated into violence.

Similar problems have  plagued other utopian communities, including many that sprung up in the 1960s. I am digressing, but the point is that the kind of idealism Andre expresses is more easily experienced by financially independent individuals than by groups of people from disparate backgrounds who must contend with everyday survival and  conflicting social forces around them.

Was the Movie Scripted or an Improvised Conversation?

As Wally and Andre talk, it would be easy to believe that the movie is a documentary, capturing a spontaneous conversation. It turns out that this was not the case. As you can read in the review by Roger Ebert, the film was actually carefully scripted and was taped over a period of several months. So the conversation reflects the two men’s actual personalities but we can assume many of the events discussed (especially in Andre’s life) were invented or exaggerated for dramatic effect.

My Dinner With Andre: A Timeless Classic

My Dinner With Andre is a movie worth watching every so often. Surprisingly, it doesn’t seem dated today (aside from the shots of 1981 New York of course). Most of the topics they discuss are timeless. On the one hand, intellectuals have long bemoaned the decline of civilization. On the other hand, the modern world does seem to be getting ever more chaotic, alienated, and fragmented. My Dinner With Andre may not provide any solutions, but it can help to clarify some of the questions.

Watch My Dinner With Andre on Amazon Prime

Documentary, Netflix

Radical Wolfe -Tom Wolfe Documentary

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I watched Radical Wolfe  right after reading Tom Wolfe’s very first book, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. Considering I lived through all the decades in which he wrote, I’ve had surprisingly little contact with his work. This documentary is a good introduction into a journalist and writer who was often controversial and who helped people to understand many of the most important cultural movements of the 1960s and beyond.

Radical Wolfe, directed by Richard Dewey, written by Michael Lewis, is 75 minutes, relatively short for a piece covering someone with such a long  career. I actually prefer this condensed approach, though someone could easily have made a 2 or 3 hour documentary on such a character.

Although it shows Wolfe in a mostly favorable light, it doesn’t ignore the fact that he was controversial and often provoked censure, as when he published a piece in New York Magazine in 1970 called Radical Chic ( which obviously inspired the doc’s title), targeting Leonard Bernstein and other liberal intellectuals who defended the Black Panthers. This helped to set the stage for Wolfe as a provocateur who would later offend people with The Bonfire of the Vanities among other works.

Towards the end, someone observes that no one in the future could ever replicate a career like Wolfe’s. The reason for this, sadly, is that someone as outspoken and controversial as Wolfe simply wouldn’t be tolerated today. I suppose this is debatable in the social media age, but it raises some interesting questions. People far more extreme than Wolfe have platforms on Twitter and YouTube for example. However, it’s not likely that anyone very controversial or extreme would be able to attain the mainstream popularity of Wolfe.

Radical Wolfe is a good introduction to a writer who captured some essential scenes and cultures of mid-20th century America. It’s currently streaming on Netflix.

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