Confession/Obsession and a Voice

 

Conclave is a lushly produced, nicely directed motion picture about one of the world’s more publicized events, the election of a new Pope. It stars such fine actors as Ralph Fiennes, John Lithgow and Stanley Tucci and does not skimp on sets, costumes, or any other important production value.

All that being accounted for, candor forces me to admit that I fell asleep at least twice… or maybe three times…while the movie droned on. Here is my confession: I am not Catholic and unless you are, do not bet a lot of money that you can keep your eyelids open for the entire two-hour running time of this movie.

Admittedly the story is one with which anyone in the western world can identify, there is conflict aplenty, and there are enough contemporary references to make the movie relevant. That leaves me to guess that you may have to be Catholic (or, alternatively, not recovering from surgery) to really give a damn. But then, maybe it’s just me. Peacock has this motion picture for streaming, or you can purchase through Amazon.

While I believe myself to be very pro LBGTQ (at least as much as this 87-year-old can keep up with the alphabet soup of identity politics) I am also a heterosexual, which might account for some of the lack of empathy while watching Queer, starring Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey. My general disinterest in the film went beyond an inability to identify or empathize. I just thought the movie was more weird than queer and I have trouble imagining what drew any of the principals to this piece of material in the first place. That said, for what it is worth, all the performances are excellent, and the photography is… for the most part… quite lush, as are the Latin American settings of the 1950s. Still, the movie, which will eventually stream on MAX, is not worth your time unless you are one of those who have a yen to experience what it was like to go to an art house flick at midnight in the middle of the last century. If only Queer was shot in black and white it would be a pretty fair imitation of one of those entrees.

Wallace & Gromit have been perennial Oscar winners in their category, but mostly that is when entered only as animated short films. This one (Vengeance Most Fowl) is feature length and it simply does not have the wit nor the wisdom of its shorter predecessors. This one can soon be streamed on Netflix.

Among favorites in the Oscar sweepstakes, is Nicole Kidman in Babygirl.  The actress holds nothing back in this tale of desire, infidelity, and lust. It is hard to imagine Antonio Banderas as a cuckold, but the actor is spot on in his lesser role as husband to Kidman. That leaves the third part of the triangle… an actor, new to me, by the name of Harris Dickinson… who I found less impressive but, in fairness, I feel it only right to qualify my judgment due to the very real possibility of my simply being jealous of his on-screen domination of Ms. Kidman.

This is a very sexy movie and one that is well made, although it wraps up a bit quickly and overly tidy for my taste. It will eventually stream on MAX.

They do not give Oscars for performances in television series… even those streaming on HBO via MAX… but if they did you would be wise not to bet against Colin Farrell in The Penguin. He is simply brilliant in this self-effacing role as… well as… thanks to a major make-up job… being totally unrecognizable. The supporting cast are all uniformly excellent and the cinematography and sets are gorgeous.

Finally, there is Maria, starring Angelina Jolie who is, without a doubt, the front runner and the one to try to overtake in this year’s Oscar sweepstakes. It is as if the actress has been waiting her entire career to play this part of prima donna, Maria Callas, and she does so with total confidence in her own ability and physicality. The picture is beautiful to look at and a joy to hear… although, I am betting one does not have to be an Opera aficionado to appreciate this standout motion picture, which can currently be streamed on Netflix.

One more word for Ms. Jolie as Maria Callas: Brava!

 

Barney Rosenzweig

December Song

It would appear that any recovery from surgery impacts heavily on the aging process. Imagine not one, but two surgeries in less than half a year. My beard is shaggy, but it is not so much that unkemptness that distresses as I look into my bathroom’s mirror.

Four score and seven years ago, Myrtle Rosenzweig brought forth, upon this continent her first son and right now, I am looking every hour of that epoch.

“It all begins to turn to shit at 85” might well be true for most folks, but add a couple of years to that, plus those two hernia operations, and the doctor one might most want to seek out has a PHD after his name rather than the more ubiquitous MD. I mean, c’mon, old folks have egos too.

So far it seems that surgery number two went much better than number one. Of course, it is early yet, and I reserve the right to further recovery and more follow-up exams in four or five weeks.

The Doc says I may drive now, but I am inhibited from doing so by the huge car cover I placed over my car just before my operation10 days ago. Lifting, bending, employing a “core muscle” are all on the not-to-be-done list. Hard to remove a car cover without doing quite a bit on that list of the verboten.

My granddaughter’s holiday open house to show off her new LA apartment beckons. The 11 steps that lead up to the front door give me yet another item on my list of why I don’t like Christmas (as if I needed one).

Friends threaten to drop by for a visit. I discourage them. My kids and grandkids are different. I figure I always looked old to them.

Given the weeks of discomfort and pain prior to surgery number one, then weeks of minimal recovery, followed by my month-long cross-country drive before discovering I needed to go under the knife all over again, we are talking months of non-activity and being totally sedentary. This has led to a disquieting time for my accountant due to the higher than usual volume of queries he receives from my “sick bed” as well as a prolonged period of unemployment for the physical therapist whose mission seven months ago was to get me back onto the grass tennis courts of Fisher Island. Take it from the source, that ain’t happening. Just a return to my Island Paradise is at least a month away.

When not bingeing on the Academy channel for the latest “for your consideration” movies… and, honest, the attendant reviews of those flicks are coming, but as a helper for your holiday list, here are some recommendations: Do see Maria, Babygirl, A Complete Unknown, The Count of Monte Cristo, Saturday Night, and My Old Ass. Do not see: A Real Pain, Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, Queer, or Here.

Besides the movies, I am doing some correspondence, reading the very clever Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution by Elie Mystal, and… for me, the really good news: I am spending at least a couple of hours a day on my latest tome, Life Without Cagney & Lacey. Unlike its author… that never gets old.

 

Barney Rosenzweig

 

COUPLES THERAPY

Season two of the Netflix series The Diplomat is a wonderful addition to season one and the writing of the show’s very interesting marriage of its lead characters is a true highlight. The addition of Allison Janney as the American Vice President is a very real plus as well. I recommend this series highly along with Nobody Wants This, a new romantic comedy series, starring Kristen Bell, the wonderful female lead from multiple seasons of The Good Place. Her co-star, Adam Brody, also does a fine job along with a delightful supporting cast, including the always marvelous Tovah Feldshuh. Like The Diplomat, Nobody Wants This is on Netflix.

Having now finished season two of The Old Man on Hulu I can commend that as well. The show features some terrific action sequences, convoluted spy plotting, and sharp dialogue, but it is the relationships that make the series soar. Jeff Bridges and Amy Brenneman as lovers, with Bridges and John Lithgow as life-long allies, fellow spies, and adoptive parents of Alia Shawkat. Jessica Harper and Janet McTeer move things along as current and former spouses to Lithgow, while Navid Negahban reunites as Shawkat’s “real” dad. I could reveal who Joel Grey is coupled up with but that would require a major spoiler alert, or, in the parlance of the CIA, if I told you, I would have to kill you.

I was disappointed with the new Ted Danson comedy, A Man on the Inside. The idea is strong enough, but the writing is lame, the pace is laborious, and just perhaps the absence of a strong co-star contributes to the demise of this well-intentioned Netflix series. Danson does his best, which should be plenty good enough, but I had to turn this off after two episodes. It really made my teeth hurt. Oh yes, Sally Struthers (Archie Bunker’s daughter in that famed series of yesteryear) has a nice, albeit small part and does well by it.

A Real Pain is a motion picture starring Kieran Culkin, the Emmy winner for Succession, and Jesse Eisenberg, who also directs. I got into a fair amount of trouble the last time I reviewed one of these third generation Holocaust movies and so I re-enter this arena with some trepidation.

I am sorry… I just do not have much of an idea what this movie is supposed to be or why anyone would take the time/trouble to make it. And Culkin? I had grown weary of his scatological speech patterns in Succession long before his “triumph” of the final season. Now I discover… this is what he does. He is playing that same “I don’t finish my sentences” character in this movie that paved his way to an Emmy in the HBO series… only this time in Bermuda shorts. Forgive me while I pass.

Black Doves on Netflix is an action spy series all about relationships with some terrific acting made all the more necessary by the really over the top plotting… even for an international spy thriller. The weird thing is that despite the extreme stretching of any kind of credulity at all, the thing works… really well… and it owes it all to this very solid cast who take their roles seriously and never once look at the camera to ask if any of us are following this thing. To the Producer’s credit, every so often, the show bounces backward in time to a partial flashback to sort of explain what the heck it was we had viewed twenty or thirty minutes before.

Keira Knightley is the principal lead (and one of the Executive Producers) in this series, and she is very credible in what really is a not very credible role. Her naïve husband (Andrew Buchan) gets my award for TV’s most sound sleeper, a quality which enables him to remain oblivious to all of his wife’s various shenanigans. Ben Whishaw is wonderful in supplying support as well as humor and a little romance.

I could not understand one word said by Sarah Lancashire as the very British boss of the spy team but, in the end, it really did not matter that I could not get my subtitles to work. Somehow, I managed to understand enough of her part in the plot to get by without her help. The remainder of the show’s ensemble is particularly good. I highly recommend this and, if I am wrong and you hate it, the good news is you will figure that out in the first hour of the series and you can turn it off with little time lost.

For something totally different, let me also recommend a tiny motion picture just released in theatres and on Amazon Prime, unhappily titled, My Old Ass.

It is a small, coming of age movie that deserves a better title. Maisy Stella, who is new on the scene to me, is particularly good. No pyrotechnics, nothing earth shattering. Just a sweet story, nicely told. Percy Hynes White is about as cute a leading man as his name might indicate. I think you will thank me for the recommendation.

That’s it from me for a while, I am off for the redux of last summer’s hernia surgery. Should give me lots of time for more TV bingeing.

 

Barney Rosenzweig

 

 

 

 

PARADISE LOST

The thing about referring to the place you live as “paradise,” is that everyplace else you find yourself… isn’t.

My current locale… far from my joy-filled home on Florida’s Fisher Island… is Southern California. My place of birth, home of the once mighty Trojan football team, the self-proclaimed entertainment capital of the world. Well, anyway, whatever else, it still remains the place of my birth.

I have been here in Los Angeles much longer than I intended or desired because that pain in my abdomen is not just the healing process of my hernia operation of three months ago; it is that self-same surgery gone bad and needing a do-over.

All that poking and prodding because of my complaints of continuing pain, and all those various physicians’ explanations that I would soon be fine, are now in the past. I must have the surgery again. Can you visualize my palms to face? My frustration with the medical establishment?

Of course it is different this time. Now there is scar tissue to deal with, plus the fact of failure the first time. This second surgery is going to take longer… and more fact findings will be required such as CT scans and cardiology clearances. This is not like before with 30 minutes of “twilight.” This is going to be three to four hours of anesthesia on an 87-year-old guy with a pacemaker.

I am easy about all of it. What upsets me is that I am in California and this procedure requires six weeks of inactivity post op; meaning that instead of returning to Miami and my Island Paradise before mid-December, I very likely will not be home until February.

I could go back to Miami and have the same team as before have another whack at my torso, but Fisher Island is under repair… and my building is going through major (read noisy and dirty) work with a resultant loss of privacy on my wrap-around deck and environs until the end of January. That unhappy fact, plus a plethora of funerals, is what brought me to California in the first place.

Is it any wonder that suicide comes to mind? Even as a fleeting thought? My body is betraying me, and at 87, there are naught but prospects drear. Do I really want to spend months of however much time is left on this planet in recuperation? The damp, grey clouds of California in the middle of winter, the all-that-is-left B-list lunches, the traffic, and the fact of everything out here being far away from everything else… including a parking place. It is a lot with which to cope.

Until it isn’t. I do not have a lot of skill sets, but among those I do possess is resiliency. A built-in tendency to bounce back.

It does not mean I don’t hate being out here on the west coast so much longer than I planned … especially at Christmas time. I am a Jewish kid, born in 1937 on December 23. That is 87 years of competing with Baby Jesus for attention at birthday time… something that is particularly tough in this part of the country where half my family are ardent Catholics.

My complexion is not the only thing around here that is green. Everywhere there are wreaths and decorated trees. The only thing that isn’t verdant is garishly crimson. This does not happen as much in The Sunshine State. Probably because the red and green combo clashes with the aqua and orange décor that dominates the neighborhoods of South Florida and my Island Paradise.

All that said, my mood is better. Markedly better. 24 hours of sulking and now my spirits have been revived. You may well ask how that is accomplished. By coming to view this catastrophe as opportunity, that’s how.

It came to me out of the darkness that there is the fact of my latest tome… an autobiography… languishing in my “to-do” file for months. Not a single word written since Spring, not one comma altered. The surgery, the cross-country trip, my general lack of motivation, let alone ambition, have conspired to have the book lie dormant.

My life story without the stuff already written in Cagney & Lacey… and Me (as ever, still available via Amazon or iTunes). It is appropriately enough entitled Life Without Cagney & Lacey and its conceit is that the reader has already devoured the aforementioned memoir and now wants to know what happened before and after that singular success.

It would all be so much easier if I were Steven Spielberg… or even George Lucas. Then, at least, I would figure there was an audience for such a book. I remain just enough of a producer to be concerned about box office receipts and just who this work is for.

What got me started on this opus was realizing that my life has been long enough to be of some interest. The pertinent question is to whom?

I have come to realize the trick is not to give a damn. 87 years later, it is my turn and a terrific way to fill days of recuperation (six weeks of them, to be specific) in a reclining chair with nothing better to do than complete those pages that I have spent a lifetime creating.

A nine-year-old washing dishes at a downtown restaurant, Yell King at the University of Southern California, three marriages, Frank Sinatra, Fess Parker, Daniel Boone, Paul Newman, Lolita, Steve McQueen, Paddy Chayefsky, Marlon Brando, Doris Day, David Wolper, Charlie’s Angels, Farrah Fawcett, Spelling/Goldberg, Ned Beatty, Marty Ritt, Jane Seymour, Tony Richardson, East of Eden, Christie, The American Dream, The Trials of Rosie O’Neill…

Just a few hundred pages between me and my Island Paradise.

 

Barney Rosenzweig