Unca Darrell

MAY 14 / Go see "Rock 'n' Roll"

TOM STOPPARD's "Rock 'n' Roll," like most Stoppard plays, is worth your time. It's running at the Alley through May 24.

MARCH 24 / What is it with Hollywood and the editorial board?

MONDAY the Chronicle came out in support of unspecified incentives to attract filmmakers to Texas.

What incentives means, in this case (and in plain English), is taxpayer money. In the language of bureaucrats, taxpayer money is called grants. Either way, the Chronicle wants to write checks to out-of-state hotshots who probably dislike Texas as it is about as much as the Chronicle editorial board does.

MARCH 13 / Lovely movie

  GOLDEN DOOR is a slow-paced, elegaic account of a poor Sicilian family's migration to America in the early 1900s. Worth seeing for the story, the characters, and the scenes of rural Sicily, steerage, and Ellis Island. 

It's a reminder of the millions of similar deeply human stories that have gone into (and are still going into) the making of America.

MARCH 9 / Lew Wasserman was right

 

IN 1971 Esquire published the screenplay for Two-Lane Blacktop and preemtively declared it the best movie of the year. I kept an eye out, but the film never appeared at a theater near me. Now, thanks to Netflix, I have repaired this tiny gap in my cultural memory.

A very young James Taylor (the singer) and Brian Wilson (the Beach Boy) play drifters with an ugly muscle car. Their occupation: hustling small-town hotrodders.

The movie also delivers one airheaded and promiscuous hippie girl, one deranged nemesis in a GTO, and one delicious dose of '70s paranoia about the physical dangers associated with Driving Through Middle America While Under the Influence of Long Hair. 

Sort of like Easy Rider, but with a '55 Chevy.

MARCH 3 / Ideas for an R&B film festival

START WITH Ray, the Ray Charles biopic.

FEBRUARY 23 / Must-see movie

HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS -- or is it millions? -- of children are sleeping tonight in the cold dormitories of orphanages across the old Soviet Union. Some of these children are true orphans. Many others were abandoned or taken from abusive or alcoholic parents. Still others are economic orphans, left behind by parents seeking work in the West. To get a sobering sense of what life is like for these children, rent "The Italian." It's a good movie and, like "Bella," will make you a better person.

"The Italian" is about a six-year-old boy, Vanya, at a remote Russian orphanage run by an alcoholic director. There's much about the place that is outside my experience, but the look and feel of the orphanage were exactly right. I say this based on visits to several dozen similar institutions in Romania, Moldova, and Transniestria. 

Some things about the movie that rang true:

Teenaged girls taking care of younger children. Again and again I saw older girls fitting coats and caps on their charges, taking them by the hand, leading them where they needed to go.  

The looks on the faces of the children as they follow Western visitors around the grounds. In part it's curiosity, but these children also perfectly understand that the visitors may carry the keys to their liberation. Adoption!

The awful fates of many of the older girls as they age out of the system. These orphanages are recruiting grounds for international sex traders.

The ever-present rumor that the true motive for adopting these children is to take their organs for transplants. Adoption in Moldova was once shut down for several months while the government investigated the transplant rumor. Why do people believe it? Because the black-market sale of organs is all-too-common in parts of the old Soviet Union.  

The pain of parents who have left their children behind. Our group saw a distraught mother deliver two children to an orphanage. She could no longer care for them. The movie shows the heartbreak of a mother who returns for her son, only to find that he has been adopted.  

Some orphanages I saw were far better than others, probably based on the quality of the directors, but even the best had low budgets and poor facilities.

"The Italian" -- see the movie to understand the title --treats Western adoptive parents with some sympathy, but is merciless about Russian mothers who too-freely give up their children, about the pervasive financial corruption of the Russian culture and economy, and, most of all, about the corrosive national humiliation of giving up Russian children to outsiders. 

FEBRUARY 23 / Best conservative movies?

National Review/Digital has produced this list of the twenty-five best conservative movies of the past twenty-years.

No. 1 is certainly right on.

What about the rest?

JULY 14 / No heroes for a generation?

James Bowman:

American movies have forgotten how to portray heroism, while a large part of their disappearing audience wants to see celluloid heroes. I mean real heroes, unqualified heroes, not those who have dominated American cinema over the past 30 years and who can be classified as one of three types: the whistle-blower hero, the victim hero, and the cartoon or superhero.