Everyday People, 2: A Tale of Two Libraries (a start)

Two communities—easily reachable from my home—on either side of a state line are recognizable as deeply different, in their libraries (as just one measure)

Subsections below:

An innocent question brings an important desideratum to light

Computers in Library ABC (in New York)—including flukes

Library XYZ, in a locality with a more New Jersey tone

Computer features at XYZ—surprisingly state-of-the-art

[Edits 1/27/16. Edits 1/28/16.]

I knew I wanted to do a series headed “Everyday People,” which I started in December; and well before this, I had a notion to do a mini-series headed “A Tale of Two Libraries,” which originally wasn’t going to be under the “Everyday” rubric. But I decided to fold the earlier idea into the more recent one, in part just to get going on entries that are other than film reviews and reflective things having to do with career and local-economy issues.

This libraries mini-series will, in part, be a look at local community behavior. But it also will go a distance to describing the cultures of two different states, New York and New Jersey, which differences may tie in to some observations I can make that are relevant to the cultural and mood-related atmosphere surrounding the 2016 presidential race. (That probably sounds more ambitious than I’ll end up being.)

For instance, consider what some across the U.S. may have wondered, “Is Chris Christie’s allegedly brash style something that eventually will be germane to constructive work in the White House?”—whether he gets there as a member of the Cabinet if another Republican wins the White House (which would be my bet for him) or as president himself. Well, interestingly, the two libraries I am thinking about include one in New Jersey where there is enough of a difference in manners between the people you often encounter in that community and another in New York State (where the other library I’ll profile is) that I would not be stretching too far to say that the New Jersey “in your face,” sort-of “militant-mediocre” style is something that may reflect a more-at-large, brewing ferment that, though New Jersey by and large might not vote Christie into a White House slot, may (from throughout the U.S.) still be responsible for some unexpected way the electorate chooses its president this year.

From a far different angle (having little to do with the zeroing in on the cultures of the two libraries that I’m planning to focus on), I’ve thought with increasing cogency in recent times that one cannot understand the culture of New Jersey (especially northern), whether in the work world or in other publicly-exposed parts, without understanding the petty mentality. Pettiness is so much part of the interpersonal fabric here that, if one starts out trying to be as un-petty as possible, then if one were to get anywhere with one’s career here, one ends up (as a sort of “a fortiori” matter) adopting petty methods just to, so to speak, keep one’s head above water.

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I will look at the two libraries along a few general lines: (1) the infrastructure that characterizes each, especially the computers the public can use, as is suited to my professional work (and, sometimes, how others deal with them); (2) the manners and other nature of the people in each location (whether among likely patrons of the library or amid townspeople in the immediate area); and (3) such curious aspects of daily life as the occasional presence in the library of a group of “adult day-care” people (especially autistic people), shepherded by one or more social workers, ostensibly to get the disabled folk some salutary time out in the larger world.

For this first entry, let me look at one of the main reasons I come to these libraries, and then look a bit at the libraries as different cultures: particularly in the computers (and certain resources in the form of books). But I will make passing comments on the local social tones (and these will be covered in future entries, too).

An innocent question brings an important desideratum to light

One time at the New York State library that I go to, a young man—a higher schooler, it seemed, and by no means an AP Scholar type—asked me, why do I come here? Isn’t there a library in my own town (because somehow it came out that I am from New Jersey)? This struck me as a dumb question (for one thing, plenty of New Jerseyans come to this New York library; it’s a few minutes over the state border), and I forget what I answered him. But I knew I’d been coming here for a darned good set of reasons (which it was OK I didn’t have in the front of my mind to tell him).

It was sometime later that one of the key reasons (on whatever motivation I had it) occurred to me, for possible future use. Not that this is a practical concern the vast majority of the time, but the New York library has a good supply of legal reference books. And I realized that all of the public libraries I most often go to have good sets of legal books (in definite contrast to the libraries I opt confidently not to go to).

When I was mired in the Bauer lawsuit in 2008, I especially liked to go to the municipal library in the borough of Butler, N.J., which is in Morris County. I had been going to that library for my personal reasons for years, starting around 2002 or so, one reason being that it was on my way home from various locations of work down Route 23. But in 2008, its legal books were among the most helpful sets I could have located (and it contained editions [from the publisher Westlaw] of the New Jersey state court rules—an edition of which I eventually was allowed to take home for myself when the library replaced them with a new edition).

Somewhat sadly to me, I haven’t gone to the Butler library as much as I used to, in recent years. This is part of my new habits of daily life (going on for a few years now), which partly rely on driving as few miles as possible—and the Butler library is a longer drive from my home than either the New York library (call it, for this series, “Library ABC”) or the New Jersey one (call it “Library XYZ”) that I still often go to.

This other New Jersey library, XYZ, which I will talk about more, and which is also in Morris County, also has a decent set of law books, though (as a simple matter of walkabout fact) I haven’t had to rely on them as much as in Butler.

And interestingly, it is shocking to me that in Sussex County, my home county, the library in my town of Vernon is almost completely devoid of useful law books. Even the central county library in Frankford Township, which used to have a fairly decent legal section (though some of its features, like some crude online facility, weren’t too helpful), has been dismantling its legal section in the past several years (basically, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis).

And even the Sussex County courthouse (starting about a couple years ago) got rid of a large number of its volumes in the law library there. Meanwhile, helpfully, the county college, in Newton, N.J., has had a not-bad set of legal books (especially case-law “reporters”), which I also relied on (for case law information, in particular) during the Bauer suit of 2008.

But overall, Sussex County seems to have engaged in a campaign of “dumbing down” its libraries in terms of its legal-book holdings, to the point that I would almost never go to any of the county’s libraries (outside of the county college) for any law-book purposes. Morris County, in the Butler library and in the other one I’m to discuss (and of course Morris County has many municipal libraries), has far better infrastructure that treats patrons like adults in having legal books for public use (whether these are court-rule things, volumes of state statutes, or Nolo Press books for the layperson [as a pro se litigant]).

(I could explain my situation of how I use public libraries for legal purposes even further: for instance, in 2008, I found that different libraries were good for different resources, and in making best use of your time, you scheduled your stops there accordingly. Each has its own quirks as to what legally related holdings it has. For instance, Library ABC in New York doesn’t have court-rule books [for New York State], and I incidentally found in 2008 that for this sort of thing, you had to go to the county administrative building in Goshen, N.Y., where they have a legal library attached to the courthouse and related facilities there. I actually went there to do some research pertinent to the Bauer lawsuit in 2008, and got some info about a Google-related suit, though that info [and any other substantive info I got there] wasn’t really important to my work in the suit. But I was glad to make an acquaintance of that library—which in recent years has been harder to get access to, because the building was damaged by one [2011?] of the recent warm-weather storms we’ve had in the general area.)

I would go even further and say that one Sussex County library, in Wantage Township, seemed on its computers not even to allow ready access to Google. This plus the paucity of legal books means to me that Sussex County is not a place where—as I combine my practical reasons for going, into one bundle—I would go to use the library for almost any purpose. (I could make other generalizations about Sussex County that are based on my less-than-fully-satisfied experience of it since the early 1970s, including a sly characterization of it as “Excuses County,” but girlfriend, let’s not go there right now.)

To me, a library is (as a matter of principle) valuable because, IN PART, it has legal books that implicitly treat patrons like adults. This is like a public establishment that (if I may extrapolate from western-U.S. culture in the 1800s) has a gun on the wall so that, in case of invasion by horrible “evildoers,” you can grab the gun, lock and load, and be ready for flinty action. Same thing with legal books. Encounter some crooked legal shit intruding on your life? Have to hit the ground running with some legal response (when you have no money to pay an attorney)? No need to call an attorney, in my case. Get to the library and hit the legal books. For the pro se citizen defending his civil (or other essential) rights (in the world of “free-floating” litigation), it’s the “concealed-carry” option, as opposed to situations literally requiring guns (which I am not a fan of, anyway).

But the law books, fortunately, are not something I have lately had to value a library by in seeking to consult them in a pressing case. My main reasons for going to a library include such homely tools as the computers and the photocopiers. So let’s turn to these. (And this series won’t usually be as nerdy as the following may seem.)

Computers in Library ABC (in New York)—including flukes

First of all, Library ABC (in New York State) is only about seven miles away from my home, one way. Library XYZ in New Jersey is about 15 miles away, one way. They are, for better or worse, the two libraries I prefer to go to so often for my “work weeks.” (More can be said about the topography of the area, as helps shape my decisions on why I go to the libraries I do.)

It’s ironic that the New Jersey library is actually further from my home than the New York; meanwhile, going to the New York location means my driving up and down a steep hill on Barrett Road, which crosses the state border (and passes through what is now a state preserve) and which very-nearby locals are quite familiar with. The drop in elevation as you take this road is roughly 800 feet. No such drop occurs when I go to the New Jersey library.

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Library ABC, as apparently is the case with all libraries in the Ramapo/Catskills network of which it is a member, has public computers that you sign into by entering your library ID number (yes, I have a card for this library; it costs $75 a year, for an out-of-community person). You then are on a time limit, two hours per person per day (though the library staff can extend your time at your request, and per their discretion). It is something like being on a taxi meter. So, because of the time limit, I have a sense of working here of needing to be organized with my time, to get done what I need to (in the order appropriate for the day), to not be interrupted by my time running out….

Of course, I can always extend the time (the staff is good with me about that), but given the time-limit situation in general, I try to be compliant by not spending more than two hours at a time on the computer here, too often. (Sometimes, but not often, this can be a matter of other people waiting to use the computer.) (The main season in which my spending more than two hours on the computer would happen, fairly often, is the summer, when I have seasonal freelance work that can total more than two hours of solid—if not continuous—work a day.)

Another nice thing is that the computers in the Library ABC are arrayed so you have some level of personal space, if not complete privacy. You don’t seem to “sit on top of one another,” which actually is more the case at the Library XYZ (in New Jersey).

##

This (at Library ABC) is all when things are running well. In a period from about November 2014 to maybe midsummer 2015, there was a freakish situation at Library ABC of the possibility of a given computer suddenly dropping you from the electronic signup that you’ve duly already gone through—you would be suddenly closed out (without your two hours being up, often by a long shot), and in the process you lose new, unsaved content that you had already typed into whatever documents you had open at the time (while the versions saved on your Flash drive were OK). This—not instigated by anything fluky you did—could happen for some larger-systemic reason that no one on the library staff seemed able to figure out (more on such attempts at mitigation below).

This periodic problem started happening following when the library had changed to a new system of computers in November 2014. With the old computer system (which also had a signup mechanism), which I had used for at least three years, this problem hadn’t happened.

Over a period of at least eight months, the dropping from the signup happened to me about a dozen times, at least. Sometimes (in a several-day period) it happened more frequently than at other times (several-day periods). Early on, it was frustration-making, but I quickly learned to do things like save changes in documents more often, as not to lose content if I was suddenly bumped off the signup. (This problem, of course, happened to other people, too. And as many times as various of us patrons pointed out yet another occurrence of the problem, the library staff—when they did not sometimes, on a given day, seem in talking with you to overlook or deny the problem a bit, as happened early on—could only deal with it [I’ll be summary here] in an ad hoc, pragmatic, and never conclusive manner.)

An IT department outside of the library’s physical plant, meant more for the overall library network, was consulted on this issue now and then, but I don’t think they really pinpointed the source of the problem. There was be a situation with me, once, where an IT person would be (not in the library itself) “live” from his or her remote office, able to monitor the function of my computer while I worked on it, but this was a little like trying to stop by and watch when a mouse ambled into your kitchen at night, which you could never predict. Suffice it to say that, in the several months this problem was apt to happen, I would schedule when I appeared at Library ABC based on how much, for a given project, I wanted to deal that day with the drop-from-the-signup problem, versus dealing with the pause-giving characteristics at Library XYZ (and of course other reasons for going to one town versus the other would also be in play; I’m good at scheduling my locations for multiple purposes).

I had thought this problem had finally disappeared (sometime in later 2015, maybe by about September), but it reoccurred to me, once, this month (January 2016).

By the way, the computer system here at ABC is a sort of “client/server” system, as far as I understand; there are individual desktops with apparently a full desktop’s worth of hardware, but some aspects of the software (I don’t think all) seem to depend on (emanate from) some central server. The signup function does seem to be a central-server matter, but why the dropping-offs from the signup—which happened only one computer at a time—were happening, I’m not sure. (As you can tell, I’m not a programming person. I can feel out some aspects of the nature of a problem without knowing exactly what it is, similar to being able—with an automobile—to distinguish an ignition problem from a fuel-pump problem, without knowing how to fix it.)

Library ABC also uses Firefox for its browsers, which has its pluses and minuses (as far as their interaction with some products of Google I use). This choice of Firefox is a library-system policy.

Library XYZ, in a locality with a more New Jersey tone

Now let’s start to look at the Library XYZ, in New Jersey, which is located in an area close to a military research facility, as well as some state preserves (with the per-chance presence of various bears that wander through the area) and other charming semi-rural features. This is in a township that may seem to the casual eye a pretty rural area, but because (as one measure it might take too long to explain, to those who don’t get this) it is close to Route 23, a major artery leading from Sussex County and nearby townships in other counties (Passaic and Morris) to the more urban areas (and higher-paying jobs) to the southeast, there happen to be no small amount of people living here who have fairly decently paying jobs (white-collar, often).

I mean, Sussex County alone is famous for having about 60 percent of its workforce needing to commute out of the county to get to work (which is usually white-collar). This is fairly true, also, of the Morris County township at hand, which is one of that county’s townships closest to Sussex County (discussing this sort of economic stuff on a fine-grained level is something I hadn’t anticipated getting into; for one thing, I don’t have stats for this Morris County township the way I can for Sussex County). But there is, as a broad feature, a definite uptick in socioeconomic level among the people at this Morris County location (as is certainly suggested by the tone of behavior, which I can strongly attest to) compared to, say, Vernon Township, which (at several miles away) is among the neighboring townships in Sussex County to the north.

Now, not all people in this Morris County location are highfalutin’ white-collar types. There are definitely blue-collar types here. But these latter, I think it’s fair to say, are types who mainly work for service-economy type companies. This township does not contain a huge number of workers of the industrial, mining, construction, or similar segments. So, you could encounter people that might be a little rude because they’re blue-collar types, but they could also have a certain arrogance about them, because they are entrepreneurial types (or otherwise in demanded-on service jobs), and their income level isn’t bad.

And this phenomenon also coheres with the more at-large New Jersey manner of being “in your face,” along with posing (to you, the onlooker) the implicit question of “Where do you stand, O dubious one?”  That is, to the extent this town reflects New Jersey personal style, this manner is very much more evident in this particular New Jersey town, even within rambling-bear territory, than you see in the more placid New York State area (containing Library ABC) that I go to, to the north.

More exactly, the “in your face” stuff is more prevalent in the Morris County town among the blue-collar types, less so among the white-collar; the people here are generally nice, but it’s interesting how there is such a difference in tone between them and the people near Library ABC, along the lines of New Jersey style.

Computer features at XYZ—surprisingly state-of-the-art

Despite the New Jersey tone being present here—and sometimes when planning for a day’s outing, I do take into consideration how much I want to deal with the New Jersey tone versus the nicer upstate New York tone—Library XYZ’s computers in some ways are clearly superior to Library ABC’s.

For one thing, XYZ’s do better printouts (including of color), and the printouts are cheaper (by 33 percent, for both color and B&W [correction: 15 cents for B&W and 25 cents for color at ABC, 10 cents for everything at XYZ]). There is no electronic signup at XYZ, which sometimes can be a major determinant of whether I go there on a given day. XYZ also offers the option of using Explorer browsers versus Google Chrome browsers; for my purposes lately, the Chrome browsers can be better than anything else available at XYZ or ABC.

XYZ also has a better hookup—high-speed, maybe top-of-the-line fiber optics or some such thing—while ABC’s is a little more rickety (I won’t go into further details on this latter, because my phone service is through the local telecom entity that probably provides Internet access to Library ABC, and I generally am satisfied with this telecom company for what I usually seek from it regarding my home account).

Library XYZ also seems to have recently changed some (if not all) of its computers to using a Microsoft Office suite that is no longer on the individual computers but is in some outside, “cloud” configuration—which I have some reservations about (and I’ll leave discussion on this aside).

As you can see, there are some advantages with the XYZ computers over the ABC. The biggest drawback, by far, also parallels some aspects of how the community is there, in general. When you work at one of the dozen or more computers at XYZ, you seem to sit on top of one another, almost literally. Especially in the summer, when I have a high volume of freelance work—but when local kids are out of school and they gravitate to the library to play games on the computer, or such—this can be a grubby, somewhat distracting, privacy-eroding situation.

Also, when I work at Library XYZ away from the computers, I can use a “study carrel” I often sit at, and there is a certain amount of privacy. But here, there can be limitations.

The “in each other’s lap” flavor of working at Library XYZ can perhaps best be appreciated when I talk about how the “adult day-care” folks sometimes (led by one or two social workers) come in and “occupy themselves” for an hour or so. This will be covered in a future entry (and a version of this can happen at Library ABC, also).

Be patient with this series. It will take me time to get out.

Movie break: Connivers meet their inadvertent match in a churchgoing widow: The Ladykillers (2004)

A Coens also-ran has many charms that shouldn’t be overlooked

Tenth in a series: Post-9/11 Blues, Internet-infected Brave New World: A revisiting of 2001-10 pop (and political) culture

Also fits this series: America through a Coens’-eye lens

For a “directors’ dossier” on the Coens, see here.

Subsections below:

Background

A little cultural touchstone of sorts

The rogue’s gallery (and cast of nicer people)

A fascinating sequence: when the General tries to kill Ms. Munson

Miscellaneous other typical Coen features

Playful cross-references

The most conspicuous gospel songs

More-arcane allusions

Actors reappearing in Coens films

“Many done took the low parson.”

—Marva Munson (Irma P. Hall), the elderly widow in this film (and the only person with admirable character, if a bit naïve), in an early scene (in a police station) where she displays her religious beliefs; “the low parson” presumably means the devil, and “took” means “followed” (and if my quoting is off, it shows how the Southern accents can sometimes be a bit tough to get around, but generally make for fun, colorful talk in this film; when she says in the same scene, “How can it he’p [help] but do!,” she’s being more accessible, and shows the fun local color in this film)

[Edits 1/17/16.]

Gwump—gwump—gwump—gwump…. Heard outdoors (from inside a closed building) and at a distance, it’s the muffled, resonating bass from some charged-up folk-music performance, and we see a neat white building in a shot: is this a juke joint down South? No, it’s a modest church, a Baptist facility, it will turn out. The music inside? Lively gospel, and if you sample the two performances in extras on the DVD for this remake of The Ladykillers before watching the film, and if you don’t get a “Whoooop!!” excited charge out of the first, more rousing number (“Shine on Me”), then you might not especially like this film as a whole (while I don’t think anyone would hate it).

That’s because this film is a sort of broad-audience, pop-culture sampler from the Coens, in some ways on the atypical side for them; but for me, in particular, if you don’t like its best music (which might lend a gloss to the rest of the film), then you might not like the rest, which would go to show you simply don’t share the taste to value the Coens’ way of patching together bits of Americana, visions of less-than-noble episodes in man’s behavior, and flights of whimsy, in a stew that for many carefully-watching people would be often amusing, though maybe sometimes a bit off-putting.

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This film sometimes gets critically dismissed, as if it were decidedly lesser fare from the Coens—but I happen to like it, having seen it several times on DVD (and maybe the first time in the theater). Like a lot of Coens works, which may seem a bit disjointed (in story) on first viewing, the more you see this, the more the story comes together and the details add up amusingly. It may be a patchy film, and it came within a period (~2000-04), including their Intolerable Cruelty (2003), when the Coens were usually doing more mass-audience-aimed work (though in their case, “mass appeal” work is like vinegar and roughage with a little sweetening added).

(It’s interesting that, as they’ve aged, and perhaps as for many other fifty-somethings, family concerns [like tuition for college for their kids] have shaped their aging person’s thinking, they’ve bitten the bullet and, amid their more preferred work, done remakes—another is True Grit [2010]—and have worked with Steven Spielberg both on that 2010 film and on Bridge of Spies [2015].)

I think it’s useful to see The Ladykillers as a companion piece to O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), and not simply because both are set in Mississippi (this while Ladykillers is set in the modern day, with one of the criminals in a decidedly anachronistic style in his costume and speech, while for the earlier film the time is a parched 1937). Ladykillers features music produced and arranged by T Bone Burnett, as does the earlier film, except with more modern stuff mixed in (and some regular soundtrack “underscoring” by longtime Coens associate Carter Burwell).

Also, while O Brother dealt with archetypically Southern topics, it seemed strangely low in its representation of Black life. Ladykillers happens to make up for this, with Blacks occupying both bad and, most notably in Irma P. Hall, good characters. The gospel music on this film is a special treat, and I recommend you watch the two extras just mentioned that show a gospel choir (more on them later) singing a couple songs, to instrumental accompaniment, to whet your appetite for what localized culture this film acknowledges most heartily. As for the film’s story itself, it is more farcical than usual for a Coens work, though with their trademark black humor and occasional stark violence mixed in.

Background

This film is based on an old (1955) Ealing Studios farce, which featured the likes of Alec Guinness and Peter Sellers (and even Herbert Lom, who would later be a comic foil to Sellers in the Pink Panther films). I haven’t seen the older version, and thought I would try to locate it and check it out, after a friendly librarian at a New York State library where I often borrow DVDs said the older version was her father’s favorite film (and judging from her apparent age, he, if still alive, would be of a generation that would mean the older Ladykillers is definitely of older-times tastes, but still might be fine for me to check out).

The Coen brothers’ version updates things, of course—with colorful curse words, occasional rap music on the soundtrack, and their smart, tightly edited way of maximizing a sort of pinpoint satire. But it is amusing for taking a sort of droll story—featuring a Southern con man (Tom Hanks) with an elaborately loquacious, pretentious way of talking, and some henchmen he randomly gathered through an ad in a newspaper, who all pursue an almost Looney Tunes plot of tunneling from an elderly woman’s house toward the Mississippi River, to get into the land-based safe room, where money is kept, for a riverboat type of floating casino.

While this is another Southern-locale story, it is not a highly mimetic “slice of old-time life”; here there is not the careful visual styling (the sepia-photos look) or the thoroughgoing, fastidious attention to amusing Deep South accents, idioms, etc., as in O Brother. Hanks’ character seems a cross between a florid eccentric and an anachronism, but this is a modern-day story whose being “old-timey” lies largely in the impeccably old-values manners, decency, and illusions of the old widow, Marva Munson (Hall), whose house the criminals use (fooling her at first, of course) as a base for tunneling to their quarry. And while the soundtrack features a lot of tasty, old music (per T Bone Burnett), this story in good part gets its humor and some of its situational premises from the loser-on-the-street modern day.

A little cultural touchstone of sorts

Another aspect of this film’s take on certain Americana and tradition is to look at a culture—Black and Baptist in particular—while accepting it in its colorful style, and holding it as a sort of location for comic doings that are not inevitably the result of that culture. (Indeed, in their films including Fargo [1996] and O Brother, the evil that some people seem a bit too “simple” to comprehend at first seems something from “beyond” any particular local culture. Even their seemingly very personal A Serious Man [2009] depicts a local Jewish mensch grappling with Job-like travails, but this suffering seems an “evil” that was not inherently a part of his very particular culture. Anyway, this whole theme, seeming worthy of a chunky term paper, seems like it should be put aside here.)

Anyway, there was some old saying, or poem (which I first heard about in The American Scholar years ago), commenting on the socioeconomic differences between the different Protestant denominations in the U.S. It included, “A Methodist is a Baptist with shoes…. An Episcopalian is a Presbyterian living on dividends….” Or something like that (there was more to it, climbing the ladder of all the major Protestant denominations from poorest to richest). Well, the Baptist congregation where Marva Munson goes for rousing services (including music) has no problem about having shoes. Everyone is dressed nicely, and….

I will limit myself in this entry on this film, pending my locating (as may take a lot of time) the older Ladykillers and viewing it, and comparing the two. Some of the whimsical humor here seems to take off from the older, which would possibly have been overall a bit of dry, black-humorous British whimsy. But don’t consider this entry a Part 1, with a Part 2 taking a little too long to come; consider a later entry on the old and new Ladykillers a “spring robin” that shows up weeks from now, like a delightful surprise.

The rogue’s gallery (and cast of nicer people)

* Goldthwaite Higginson Dorr, Ph.D. (Hanks) is a wordy man who claims to be a professor of classical languages (Latin and Greek) who also has a fondness for Edgar Allan Poe; he is the leader of the crooked group, and Hanks seems to have a fun time trying to wind into Dorr’s loquacious talk displays of varying emotion and rhetorical (or devious-minded) angles. For instance, he has Dorr show his dubious side as he gets a bit strained when talking with Ms. Munson, showing his crooked intent through his pandering ways (while she doesn’t always catch him “tipping his hand”); other times, he just shows (in any number of settings, including his cohorts) eccentricities through his more “astute man’s” surface, such as a weird way of laughing.

The main problem viewers may have with Dorr is that some of his talk is so elaborate, it may be hard to follow at times (and some lines I still haven’t fully gotten, either). (Also, though he seems to have some level of education, in his ruse with Ms. Munson, he can’t be consistent with the details of his pretense of having his musical group play Renaissance-era music; at a few points there are references to his doing music from the “Rococo,” which was a different artistic period entirely—about [correction] 225 years later, perhaps.)

* Garth Pancake (J.K. Simmons) is the improbably-named handyman and factotum of the group, and is able to determine which tools to use, and will use them; he is able to access explosives (he says he has a “pyro” license), etc. (We wonder why he doesn’t get a legitimate job, with all his qualifications.) We first meet him working as a sort of prop manager for a filming company for TV commercials. At times he speaks somewhat ponderously, but in the way of a can-do sort who thinks aloud to solve a problem. He is a transplant to the South, originally from Scranton, Pennsylvania.

At one point Garth, addressing Gawain, is a bit pompous (even while trying to appeal to Gawain reasonably) in recalling his 1960s civil-rights work (having consorted with the Freedom Riders); but with Gawain (at numerous points, throughout the film) he ends up having a lot of heated quarrels. The sparks flying between the two characters are actually among the acting/comic highlights of the film (if you like salty, curse-laden comedy). Garth also consorts with a female companion, Mountain Girl (Diane Delano), who works with him so closely (he says she helps him with “ordnance, damned near everything”) that she is unexpectedly allowed (if with some resentment) to become a junior member of the group.

The Coens weave in some multiple uses of the topic of “IBS”—irritable bowel syndrome—which Garth suffers from. No surprise, a lot of low/midbrow jokes are mined based on this—Garth had met Mountain Girl at an “IBS singles weekend at Grossinger’s up in the Catskills”—but the script also weaves in, via Garth’s earnest explanations, some educational info on this chronic disorder.

Less academically, Gawain sums up the comic sides of the couple when he refers, in various arguments with Garth, to Mountain Girl as the “Swiss miss” and (later) as a “60-year-old with pigtails” with whom he derisively remarks Garth is consorting (to paraphrase nicely), with Garth thereupon heatedly retorting (in a physical fight) that she is only 53. “Professor” Dorr also, a couple times, mistakenly refers to Mountain Girl as “Mountain Water.”

* Gawain (Marlon Wayans) is the most comically heated and boisterous member of the group, and provides the “hippest” humor. He has gotten a housekeeping job at the casino whose office/counting house the criminal group is aiming to tunnel into, so he is the group’s “inside man.” A lot of his routines have to be seen to be appreciated. His effusive vocalizing after the group has had a mishap with explosives is funny but in a sort of manic-jabber way.

* “The General” (Tzi Ma) is a nearly-wordless man whose expertise brought to bear is tunneling, which he learned in Southeast Asia during guess which 1960s-70s war. Having come to the robbery project from running a small, no-name donut shop, he seems efficient but is dour, and one repeated comic bit has him repeatedly trying to sneak a cigarette in the root cellar in which the group is, with Marva Munson’s permission, camped out for their supposed instrument-playing practice. As a speedy spur-of-the-moment thing, the General has a way of tipping a lit cigarette in his mouth to hide it from Ms. Munson (which, in real life on the set, Ma must have had a safe way of doing, but how, I don’t know). His cigarette-“swallowing” trick will end up leading to his demise.

* “Lump” (Ryan Hurst) is an incompetent football player who is among the others because he answered an ad in a local-city newspaper that Dorr had run to get accomplices. He is on hand as, per Dorr’s appreciative characterization, a “hooligan,” a “goon,” a “brute,” a “battering ram” (some kind of qualifications for filling a job, right?)…and amusingly, though he often seems borderline “developmentally challenged,” he sometimes provides moments of unusual smarts to either help the group (coming up with the idea of bribing Gawain’s boss) or heroically hinder the professor (near the film’s end).

* Other characters include Sheriff Wyner (George Wallace), whom we meet at the beginning and end of the film, and appears briefly at Ms. Munson’s house midway through. The Wikipedia article on the film calls him lazy, but I don’t think that’s quite right. I think he and his white deputy, as can be seen in the opening scene and as can be seen near the end, are continually skeptical of her, not as if they feel she is mad or a crank, but just that she is an old, no-longer-streetwise widow, steeped in her religious life, who is subject to a lot of illusions and fantasy, so they are unapt to come to her help (except for getting her cat out of a tree, and the chore of advising a local youth on his use of a “[ghetto] blaster”) when she reports a problem.

The scene where Sheriff Wyner is at her house and Dorr hides under the bed is directed to make it seem almost as if Dorr was a fantasy of Munson’s, hence the sheriff’s “judicious” inclination not to want to meet Dorr. In fact, as we see near the end, it is the police’s continual skepticism (but not contempt) toward Ms. Munson that allows them to tell her to keep the money that was stolen from the casino.

But the charm of the film is that, however much the local lawmen don’t take her seriously, and though she was taken in by the crooks at first, she has enough character and common sense (and “influence” from her dead husband) to stand for the right and good in the film.

* Mr. Gudge (Stephen Root, who played Mr. Lunt, the funny/grotesque radio-station owner in O Brother) is Gawain’s low-key but colorful-enough, Southern-accented boss. Root seems like a resourceful character actor, from evidence in both the Coen films he’s in.

Among the film’s many amusing details, both Mr. Gudge and Garth, in separate situations, refer to Gawain (to his face) as “McSam,” though neither of the white men would have met each other. I don’t know whether “McSam” is a racist type of reference, or racially indifferent, but it is among the many slang and earthy instances of manners in this film.

A fascinating sequence: when the General tries to kill Ms. Munson

The Coens may be considered similar to Stanley Kubrick in that, while there is evident technical mastery in how the films are assembled, there can be a certain off-putting coolness about them. I was rather surprised at first to hear a famous actress on TCM one time saying that, as a measure of Kubrick’s later films, she found parts of The Shining (1980) interesting/pleasurable, but not the whole thing. I found this a bit odd—why not either like or dislike the whole thing?—but then I could see the point.

With the Coens, even if you like the overall comedy of a given film, there may be some parts that come off better than others—or the tone plus the execution can make a part stand out from the rest of the film (and sometimes the tone of such a case may depart from that of the whole film). With Ladykillers, a fascinating sequence comes near the end, in the last segment of the film where it seems to rush through the one-by-one demise of all the evildoers. When it is the General’s turn to try killing Ms. Munson—which the film’s overall evident premise allows us to assume won’t happen—he approaches her at night, as she sleeps in bed; he is holding taut a wire, as if he’s going to strangle her. The whole scene is quite well executed, and mixes a different batch of tones that might, in the abstract, seem incompatible. Many shots of Ms. Munson’s quaint home and her in bed, with cap on, seem charming and almost sentimental, even while the sinister General is sneaking up on her (shots of her husband’s painting are interspersed, with him seeming to register alarm [the playful details of the facial expressions in the portrait changing to reflect what is going on is apparently a detailed borrowed from Preston Sturges, an influence on the Coens). The whole scene is underlain by what is to me a haunting and delightful bit of a cappella gospel music, apparently courtesy of T Bone Burnett.

Just as the general is about to get her—after he has (as he usually does easily) enclosed his cigarette in his mouth as a precaution—a cuckoo clock sounds off, and he is startled. He accidentally gets the cigarette caught in his throat—he didn’t mean to swallow it—and starts to gag. He reaches for a glass of water, but it has Mr. Munson’s dentures in it. The dentures slide grotesquely through the glass, and the general is put off wildly. He hurries off, and the cat squeals by, disconcerting him even more. He falls down the stairs almost like a flimsy Halloween dummy. He ends up dead at the bottom, his face still and his body slid into the shot almost as if by a machine. The next shot is of Dorr, in the cellar, looking up suddenly as if wondering what the hell has just happened.

The whole sequence seems to mix charming sentiment, a bit of dim-light horror, improbable Looney Tunes action, and an overall sense of “moral comeuppance” that seems amazingly well combined and executed, from close-up to more distant shot. People might overlook this sequence as it comes in the rather-quick overall denouement of the film, but this sequence has always had a grip on me whenever I’ve seen it. It shows what fine technicians the Coens can be, even if the story is rather awful in minor respects (or other parts of the film seem also-ran-ish for the Coens).

Miscellaneous other typical Coen features

Playful cross-references. It’s amusing the way the Coens put cross-references between their films—a sort of thing Stanley Kubrick did, in his case with such bits as number sequences (e.g., something said in the script) and an allusion to his 2001 in A Clockwork Orange, etc.—which also is a way of “cross-marketing”—presumably trying to get people to see the other films, perhaps for them to catch the references in common between the films. As with other stuff about the Coens, fanboys would have a bigger knowledge of these than I do. But in Ladykillers, the heroine, Marva Munson, has the same name as the no-nonsense Black female judge in Intolerable Cruelty. Also, Gawain says to his boss Mr. Gudge that a female patron he was ogling in the casino had “an ass that could pull a bus”—an odd description, actually, and amusing as being something admirable; but a similar line is in Burn After Reading (2008), when a female says (to her doctor) that her ass is like this, without meaning it to be an admirable feature.

The most conspicuous gospel songs. The main, live gospel numbers—shown by a group in church scenes, but with full performances as DVD extras—are performed by the Abbot Kinney Lighthouse Choir, with Rose Stone and the Venice Four. (The instruments include acoustic guitar, and—less able to be seen—electric bass and clunky but just-right drums.) I don’t know anything about these singers beyond what the DVD provides, but they sound fine to me. The two songs they do (sampled in the film) are “Shine on Me” and “Troubles of This World.” (The extras versions have the sound strangely muted, but the sound is fine in the film.) Not only are the live choir’s performances used in the film, but instrumental or adapted voiced versions of the songs (in more film-soundtrack style or in a pop-music vein) are also used on the soundtrack (with these alternate versions presumably produced either by T Bone Burnett or Carter Burwell, or both).

More-arcane allusions also pop up. At one point, there is a riff between Professor Dorr and Ms. Munson on how a “Jew with a guitar” had once appeared at her church, as she is relating how her church accepts attendance by people of all denominations. This obviously is a playful allusion—more obvious to some in the audience than to others—to Bob Dylan, whom the Coens would much more extensively address (as a cultural touchstone) in Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), where even the look of the film was said to have been modeled after the cover of Dylan’s first album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963).

There is also a goofy exchange between Dorr and Munson, when they are seated in her charming living room, which seems to have little more purpose (as far as the larger story is concerned) than to allow a wordplay joke—the sort of thing that fiction writers like Joseph Heller, John Barth, and Thomas Pynchon used to engage in (especially in 1960s work). Munson wants to show Dorr the “kali” [sp?]—a sort of hand-carved wooden fife—that her husband Othar used to play. She remarks that, as a historical matter, its use went all the way back to the Biblical Hebrews. Then Dorr raises a question, which seems all but irrelevant (unlikely to have a positive answer): Had Othar ever played the shofar, the ceremonial ram’s horn (as he says) used by Jews (in certain religious proceedings)? Munson says no, seeming a bit vexed by the question. She gives a slight cross edge to her line that seems the whimsical punchline of this whole exchange: “Othar never blowed no shofar.”

Actors reappearing in Coens films. Again, Coens fanboys would have a better handle on this, but J.K. Simmons appears again in Burn After Reading, and Stephen Root, as I said above, also appears (memorably) in O Brother.

Movie break (Quick Vu): A power waif gets “strong with the Force”: Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015), Part 2 of 2

A blend of old and new, with a young viewer showing it’s best not to think too much with a film like this

Ninth in a series: The Dawning of the Age of the ACA: Looking askance at pop and political culture of 2011–now

[Edit 1/4/16. Edits 1/5/16.]

So I finally got to see this film, at the same theater complex where I saw Woody’s Irrational Man last August. This time, on a rather cold day (in the process of changing from too-warm December to weather that is more like early winter), I made my way in more easily than in the summer, parked in an easily locatable spot (for me) near the multiplex, bought my ticket, went to get refreshment at the food court in the nearby Rockaway mall—and glimpsed some men I saw again hours later, reminding me why this movie for “permanent 12-year-olds” may be just the thing right now: two homeslice-looking guys, at least one pretty overweight, were hanging around the entrance of the mall near the food court, chatting between themselves jovially. I wasn’t quite clued to what they were about, then.

Later, when I headed, post-movie, to get eats at the food court, I saw the same guys, one looking at me pointedly (and non-defensively or –menacingly), I knew: these were undercover cops, on the lookout for possible mayhem on a holiday night. You didn’t see this in the many old days of this mall’s history.

(That was me, the crabby old man, talking. Now, a little more lightened-spirit, a day after a dinner with extended family: For those [like Millennials] who grew up with Star Wars as an already-established furnishing of the culture they adopted wholeheartedly [the way some of us older folk accepted The Wizard of Oz (1939) as a cultural touchstone when we grew up], the new film might have caused some trepidation: did they do the new film right? One of my nephews said he approached the new film, when he saw it, thinking too much, as he put it; he was ready to criticize it as falling short, but apparently he was pleasantly surprised by how good it came out, with its entertaining quality and getting various details of the saga right. And for me, who is less of a fan [but still familiar with a number of its aspects], the fact that in one viewing of the film you can be bowled over by all the plentiful story elements and spectacle, allows you to overlook what may be lacking in it.)

As I said in Part 1, I am not a true-blue fan of the Star Wars series, but the story is such that (and if you’ve seen enough of the films) it’s pretty easy to have enough of a grip on this “world” that you can understand most of the new installment. There are details of this world I will never fully care to learn about (not necessarily a reflection on the franchise in its own right)—such as the premises of the joke about how Han Solo made a race with a ship in X parsecs; and the minutiae of this world are voluminous enough, and some of the concepts hokey enough, that you start to joke to yourself imaginatively, as I did when the film was nearly over, about the difference between (or the nature of) the “Jedi mind trick” (right term?) and the “Vulcan mind meld” (from Star Trek).  (As for Star Wars toy tie-ins, as I alluded to in Part 1: see End note 1.)

I think I will make notes in hefty-bullet-point fashion, since this film is probably understood enough, and respected enough, by fans that I needn’t try to sum the plot a lot, and if I try, I will be wrong on some details.

* The little robot that always can. The first hero we see is BB-8, the robot made from two main, round parts that seem physically as if they can’t possible move together the way they do. BB-8 will carry a piece of a map that leads to Luke Skywalker, who (hailing from the middle trilogy) has vanished, this plot bit being the big Macguffin of this film. Interestingly, in a film opener of a massacre of local villagers by bad guys (including stormtroopers), actor Max von Sydow is present as the representative of wizened nobility (somewhat as Alec Guinness functioned in the first one or two films [of the middle trilogy] and, with a different moral value, as did Christopher Lee in the prequel set: all elderly [and European-born] actors lending their veteran talents to these films in what now seems a traditional exercise for Star Wars of why-not?/side-part playing [vaguely similar to the likes of James Stewart turning up in the 1970s Airport series film]). Von Sydow gets summarily executed, showing he didn’t sign on for an extended dedication to working on this film through multiple and punishing locations.

(BB-8, who has a vocabulary of robot beeps and burps [which at least one of his human associates can understand], not unlike old R2-D2, can do various things in Swiss Army knife fashion, and has a sense of humor. Partway through the film, at a point where the gesture seems just right, he gives a “thumbs up” sign, but by means of some appendage suddenly sticking out, with a cigarette-lighter-like flame [I think], which detail got laughter out of the audience I was among.)

* White and black hats, so to speak. Two sets of people/creatures are trying to find Luke: (1) the Resistance (a sort of ragtag but earnest bunch), fighting for the good (and for this trilogy the disappearing world of these folk is the Republic, I think), and (2) the First Order, a bad bunch with numerous leaders, including the mystical, Oz-like Snoke, the “Supreme Leader,” who inhabits a murky throne room of sorts. Among the latter group, Kylo Ren, the most dynamic, on-scene baddie (played by Adam Driver), who we know is bad because he dresses all in black, speaks portentously through a distorting mask, kills almost at whim, and occasionally loses his temper in the ferocious way that we tell three-year-olds not to do, and which untrammeled temper distinguished Anakin Skywalker as he devolved darkly into the legendary Darth Vader in the prequels. Kylo also, at certain dramatic points, takes off his mask, and we see the Darth wannabe underneath, not terribly different in look from rocker Marilyn Manson (but without the creepy eye makeup).

Another baddie leader is some military sort who seems to direct things (in humorless, stiff tones) from a command center/ship-deck type setting.

* With pleasant music cueing her, a “Rey” of sunshine appears. The main hero—heroine—of the film is Rey (Daisy Ridley), a scavenger by trade and attractive female by genetics, the sort of “power waif” that I remarked on in Part 1; she has the Luke Skywalker role, the talented up-and-comer from a wasteland planet, for whom the Hand of Fate (not a franchise character) has exalted things in store, not the least of which is dexterous use of a light saber, complete with the humming sound effects that don’t physically seem to go with such a tool.

(How is it that numerous Star Wars characters, evidently not born on Earth, have British accents? Has the Commonwealth spread that far through the universe?)

Rey happens upon BB-8, and the two become an inadvertent team. The third member of the “good-guy” quest-ers is Finn, a stormtrooper formerly called FN-2187, played by John Boyega. Finn had started getting abruptly and potently disillusioned with his trained role when in the early village-massacre scene; his getting blood on his hands from a victim, which he accidentally has wiped on his helmet, effectively marks him for us as a faceless soldier whose conscience, nonetheless, is radiantly twanged big-time, who will, before long, become decisively disaffiliated from the First Order, for which he has worked.

* Who constitutes the united forces of evil for the trilogies. Another set of bearings I got more readily, which is the sort of foundational thing that anyone who dares approach these films with any sympathy should understand: As I jotted down at some point (possibly derived from some character’s remark), “Sith, Empire, [and] First Order—all darkness.” Which reflects the fact, I think, that for the three trilogies, the three respective foci of evil are: for the prequels, the Sith; for the middle trilogy (the 1977-83 films), the Empire; and for the new trilogy starting with the 2015 film, the First Order.

* Finn makes a run for it. Finn breaks out of the First Order’s established location (and command) with help from a pilot, Poe (Oscar Isaac), who helms a ship he manages to break free of a tether, with Finn manning the anti-whatever guns in some gun turret.

They crash-land on Jakka, the desert planet Rey lives on. The ship crashes in a sandy area that turns out to be, if we remember a reference made earlier, a quicksand sort of location. Finn is afraid Poe has sunken into the ground with the smashed ship. He moves stoically on, and eventually makes common cause with Rey. (An obligatory joke related to Boyega’s casting, when Finn explains he is with the Resistance, is made about his skin color; he remarks not all of the Resistance looks like him, which elicited laughs in the audience. Obviously, the main characters—young female, Black young male, Hispanic pilot [Poe]—are a pre-production nod to current demographic concerns, though the harmless self-referential joke about Finn’s race seems old-fashioned in movie terms, and after all, why should he have worried, when some of the other creatures [on both sides], some of whom speak English, look like they wouldn’t have been out of place [on Earth] in a swamp cavorting amid skunk cabbage, or in some reptile house in a zoo?)

Not to derogate Finn, but: We find relatively late in the film that Finn is a complex character who promises interesting plot developments in future installments. Though we can see Finn has come over to the side of light by leaving the First Order’s regime, and he consorts in good faith with Rey (in the effort to get BB-8 to his rightful owner, or such), he still is unsure of his loyalties, for whatever specific reason. At one point, appearing to backslide a bit, he says he is not of the Resistance (Rey’s set of allies), not a hero; he is a stormtrooper. Apparently the training for his old role has planted roots too deep, which in turn sprouts conflicts/doubts in him.

* A general note, on story density and nature of the plot. The stuff I’ve just described should suggest that this film is packed full of incident and plot, and most of the above happened in maybe the first 25-30 minutes of a 2:15-length movie. There’s rarely reason to get a bit bored or embarrassed—things keep moving, and the more deliberately sentimental moments happen rarely and get over with quick. The plot is a little tangled, and it struck me at times that a good amount of editing—not a surprise in a film this involved—was done, with results such as: (1) the way Poe disappears not long after he is on screen (early on), and he doesn’t reappear until toward the end of the film—and then largely in Top Gun–like shots of him embracing lively derring-do as a fighter pilot—suggests to me his part in the film might originally have been greater; (2) numerous coincidences abound, no surprise in a film of this genre type, but it seemed jarring when, toward the end, all of (1) Daisy by herself, and (2) Finn with Han Solo and Chewbacca as a separate group, are on either side of a huge crevasse in a large building or ship, with the latter group spying her excitedly across the divide. Look, there she is after all. The next shot, they are with her—which helps usher the story segment along, but how did the three males (if Chewy is a male) cross that huge divide?

(Chewy makes sounds like a friendly, grunting dog-cum-gorilla; but has anyone determined what gender he or she is? Chewy seems able to do things in copiloting a ship, and engage in earthy camaraderie with Han; and Chewy’s a “crack shot” with whatever gun-like thing he uses to fend off enemies—all of this as if he’s “one of the boys,” but you never know….)

* An old spaceship links up new heroes with old. Another coincidence concerns how Rey and Finn leave planet Jakku—in a spaceship that she refers to as a piece of junk or the like. The planet, which series experts might be able to explain in relation to the overall saga, is a junkyard of sorts, where scavengers ferret out pieces of junk to sell to an unseemly reclamation facility run by some reptilian sort, just to get portions of food. (The portions must have enough nutrition, because Rey looks health enough.) When Rey and Finn, on the run from First Order invaders, have to flee, they start up the old ship (without a jump or multiple unavailing crankings on a weak battery)—and Star Wars was always cool, in fact trademark-making in this way, in having seedy or junky elements around: ships that were blatantly worse for wear; dim saloons where shady sorts hung out amid funky music (reggae in this film [End note 2]). The old spaceship that, as rusted as it was, could still be started up resonated in the 1970s, when people pursued their livings with question-raising products on the supermarket shelves and clunkers of cars (with another kind of clunker in the White House).

Then, when the white-hat duo of Rey and Finn are in space, they are taken in by a larger spaceship—uh oh, what is this? And it turns out it is Han Solo (Harrison Ford) and old Chewy in what seems to be a sort of scavenging outer-space vehicle they are in. And Han marvels at finding—what Rey and Finn have driven—his old Millennium Falcon—the ship he flew in the 1970s films. And the Falcon becomes a sort of Love Bug that propels heroes for other lengths of the film. Han in being reunited with his old ship is (on different levels) like a wrinkled fan of old 1950s Chevys finding a ’57 Bel-Air in a Cuban backwater and musing appreciatively, “I haven’t seen one of these SOBs in 50 years!”

(In the world of Star Wars, Rey’s low-tech spaceship that, on Jakku, we initially see her flying around on, a dingy thing hovering quite close to the ground, seems like technology on the level of a foot-propelled scooter.)

##

Ford as Han Solo is one of the true pleasures of this film—not necessarily or simply because he brings back one of the well-known old characters, while Princess/General Leia (Carrie Fisher) and especially Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) seem more like cameo parts—but because Ford always brought a sort of insouciant, deal-with-the-shit charm to his part, as if he always felt the film was (most soberly assessed) a hokey thing, and he was slightly sneering at it, but sublimating this darker inclination to the streetwise side of Han while gamely going along with the story. (Ford famously said during making of the first film to original writer/director George Lucas [possible paraphrase], “You can write it, George, but I sure can’t say it!”)

Ford in reprising the role for the first time since Return of the Jedi (1983) looks a bit haggard (with his years), but with his muted-cynicism, warmhearted can-do attitude, he gives a lively example of older-years spirit for this series, to somehow match the timeworn familiarity of the old (and sometimes complicating) spaceships, while all of Ridley, Boyega, and Isaac, being all new to the whole shebang and young, provide the earnest-striver character traits.

Han (to Chewy, I think) delivers a pithy but resigned line that was one of the more tickling ones for adults: “Women always figure out the truth.” (So maybe Han had a fight with the Missus that morning?)

Anyway, a tiny quibble: aside from the coincidence of Han Solo happening to pick Daisy and Finn up in his old ship, how did the Millennium Falcon originally end up on Jakku? Does it matter?

Leia, we find, who now has the rank of general, inhabits a ship of her own that looks cruddy on the outside. Seems like the Republic/Resistance has had budget problems.

* All in the family. There were some family-related details that I didn’t quite get, or that I could not “check against well-organized prior knowledge of the saga” because I am less boned-up on Star Wars than many fans. For instance: (1) Kylo Ren refers to Darth Vader—the half-melted mask of Darth’s is shown in one shot—as his grandfather. Are we to take this literally?  (2) This may really make me seem “out of it”: are Han Solo and Leia the parents of Luke Skywalker? I thought I heard some allusion to this. (3) More weirdly: Did I hear some reference to Han Solo being the father to Kylo Ren?

* Challenging stops on Rey’s odyssey. In the sequence where Han, Rey, and Finn are in the saloon, and get help from a female sort with a kind of fish face, Rey ends up in the cellar, and happens on Luke’s light saber. In grabbing it, she has visions of being in another place and amid another tumult. Presumably this presages plot developments of the future.

The scene where Kylo Ren is trying to extract info from her head, via ESP or the like, about the piece of the puzzle concerning Luke, and where she is tied down in a dark room, is gripping in its way. Ridley’s acting chops are tested throughout this film, and she provides the most vivid and admirable new character to the franchise.

* Carrie Fisher getting some flak. I’ve heard there’s been (probably on social media) talk about how Carrie Fisher shows not to have aged well in this film. Actually, of the three actors from the middle trilogy who reprise their roles, she comes in second to Ford, and to me she doesn’t look quite as bad as others have said. Ford may look rather old, but he nevertheless acts on the youngish side. Fisher seems more old in manner.

Well, there’s a reason, in part not due to the character (which comes across sounding a little like a timeworn over-50 type running a small bagel shop in a Catskills hamlet). As is well enough known, Fisher has suffered from bipolar disorder (old name: manic-depression); and she has sworn by electroconvulsive therapy (ECT; a.k.a. “shock treatment”). ECT is controversial, for good reason; but if a patient embraces it because nothing else works as well, then that’s his or her prerogative. But a possible consequence of ECT (varying among patients) is hindered memory (especially short-term for events around the time of the treatment, which is given with frequency, not in a one-shot deal; and I’ve seen evidence of this in a friend with whom I associated closely not many years ago).

There was an interview with Fisher I saw in print (a newspaper) within the past two weeks, and darned if I didn’t have a bit of a hard time following her answers to the questions (and it had to be edited for clarity already, too); she seemed rather rusty, jaded, mottled in expression, and not giving a fig. Aside from this, the fact that she performs as well as she does in the film (and who knows how many takes she went through) shows that even an old bipolar patient can still provide a good piece of the puzzle for a film now earning close to $1 billion.

So, cut her some slack. Or, as ve say vrum alt gontry, “Shut it up, already!”

##

End note 1. When I had written Part 1, I had just assumed there would be some Star Wars goodies available for Christmas-gift use, and figured a BB-8 toy was out there. But I didn’t know for sure, and wondered. But I was “reassured” when, during the film previews, there was an ad for Petco (the pet shop) where, it turns out, you could see among the displayed Star Wars–themed toys available for your pet, there’s a BB-8 figure.

End note 2. The first film, now partly titled Episode IV, gathered steam in audience interest as 1977 went on. I distinctly recall some of the music (not the John Williams soaring-orchestra stuff usually associated with the franchise) plastering the airwaves of WABC, the AM pop station of the time in the NYC area. A recent review of the 2015 film said the 1977 film (which opened in May) was on marquees (with hit status) for umpty-ump weeks, I forget the number, but in accordance with this, the music I heard must have been in about September-October 1977, when we kids were back on the school bus (on which WABC was the ritually played station). The music was some funky stuff—which (per all reasonable inferences I made over the years) was the sort to have been in the film’s bar scene—that featured an instrument I later inferred was a clavichord, a 1970s-type keyboard instrument big on funk and other edgy pop music of the early-to-mid ’70s. Strangely, when I saw the 1977 film years later, perhaps on DVD, the music was changed (for that scene) to something else (more smoothed-over), I guess a victim to reediting the early installments of the franchise have been subject to over the years.