Reviewing the situation

Ron Moody as Fagin

Ron Moody sang the retrospective, "Reviewing the Situation" in the movie of the Broadway show, "Oliver." He played Fagin, a British Charles Dickens character, a master thief, and mentor to the Artful Dodger and young Oliver Twist. There is no mention in the movie that Fagin is a Jew. That's a positive for us.

Last week the universities of Louisiana State (LSU) and Kentucky played a basketball game. For most of the world, it was irrelevant, but the two teams were both on a roll, and the clash lived up to all high expectations.

LSU, up by two points, fouled Kentucky’s Keldon Johnson with six seconds left in the game. Johnson, who was 3-of-7 from the foul line up to that point, calmly sank both free throws to tie the score.
LSU had the ball and one final chance. Junior Skylar Mays drove to the basket and missed a layup, but teammate Kavell Bigby-Williams was there for the tip-in. End of game.

Except that there was controversy. Seems that the tip-in should have been disallowed due to the rule that a ball cannot be touched if any part of the ball is 'in the cylinder' formed above the rim. The call or non-call is not reviewable according to the rules of basketball. The 'non-call' made Kentucky fans irate, as you can imagine. None of the Kentucky fans seemed to notice when seconds before one of their players had his hand up through the ring, which also should have been called as a goal-tending penalty and thus awarding the LSU team with the goal. But selective crowd refereeing is not limited to basketball.

A couple weeks ago, the New Orleans Saints were playing a football game (NFC Championship Game) in their home field, the SuperDome. They played against the eventual winner, the Los Angeles Rams. In the last two minutes, on a 3rd and 10 play, New Orleans quarterback Drew Brees threw a sideline pass which fell incomplete. The Saints kicked a field goal to go ahead by 3 points on the next play. The problem? Robey-Coleman, defenseman of the Rams clearly interfered with that pass and committed two offenses. Neither of those was called by the referees standing within meters of the play. It was a shocking non-call. Again it was also not reviewable by the referees up in the booth.  The whole description of the situation is here.

Due to the rules of each game, certain plays are able to be reviewed by the officials who are not on the court or the field. Certain other plays are not able to be reviewed. That's how rules work. Whether hawkeye on the tennis court or the VAR of the soccer World Cup, some things can be reviewed.

Speaking personally and not via a sports image, I like to review situations. I like to think back over my life, and over interactions with others. I go back over many in my mind, even now. I'm remembering mistakes I've made and moments where I've done things correctly.  Making an inventory of personal moments, defects of character, positive responses to situations... it's about reviewing the situations. Thanks Ron Moody.

When you review the situations of your life, do you see images and people? Do you feel emotions? Do you wish to go back and repair mistakes? I certainly do. But those are irretrievable. Those moments are part of your own history that made you into the you you became. For better or worse, you are you now, and those lessons of the dark past helped make you act better today. Or so I hope.

The Bible uses the term 'sin' to call out mistakes we made and offers us repair via 'repentance.' That's way better than regret or dismissal. Look back. Ponder. Consider the hurts you caused others to experience. Set and keep high standards. Then repent, admit you were wrong, ask God to forgive you, and when it won't harm others more, ask them to forgive you for the wrongs you committed.

That's the point of reviewing the situation. Let's do better next time. Fagin's song is all about NOT amending his life. That's not useful to society. The NFL is reviewing their entire refereeing regimen, and I expect some significant amendments to their review process.

What will you do as you review the situations of your life? 

Howard Hughes, Rules Don't Apply: A review

I'm not an expert on Howard Hughes. I didn't see the 2006 movie about Clifford Irving, the fake Hughes biographer, starring Richard Gere in Irving's role in "The Hoax." Leonardo de Caprio's performance as Hughes in "The Aviator" (2004) featured his earlier life in Hollywood and in the airline industry from the 1920s and 1930s. Warren Beatty's 'biography' of Hughes picks up and ends in 1964, so there is no overlap with Aviator. Beatty's super-involvement included producing, directing, writing the screenplay, and acting as the lead character. Let me highlight a few moments of the film.

Four main characters feature: Beatty as Hughes, Lily Collins as Marla Mabrey, Matthew Broderick as Levar Mathis, and Alden Ehrenreich as Frank. (For those who follow this blog about many Jewish concerns, the last three of these listed have Jewish ancestry). Other characters are played by the likes of Annette Bening, Martin Sheen, Candice Bergen in more than cameo roles.

The ambling story concerns Hughes in conflict with the world: New York bankers (led by Oliver Platt), his own staff, and just about everyone. He makes Marla wait for her one-off appointment with him after her screen test. He makes us wait ... and wait. It seems interminable. Hughes doesn't appear as luminous as most would make of themselves if they were billionaires (or was he 'only' a millionaire?) In fact, he stays in the shadows most of the movie. The choice of lighting reminded me of "Citizen Kane" and even the mystery of Rosebud seemed to flashback on me in "Rules."

Beatty uses the ingenue Mabrey as a foil, and in the movie this Baptist woman is the daughter of Bening (Beatty's real wife). Too weird. Collins as Marla makes perfect sense. The real-life daughter of singer Phil Collins, has been in a few things, but this is her first major role. Her IMDB listing is here . And she's playing a starlet-wannabe coming to Los Angeles/ Hollywood for the chance of a lifetime. She comes from Front Royal, Virginia, still a rural town near Washington, DC. Her Baptist preacher has inspired her to know about virtues including sexual behavior and about abortion and such. Some surprises ensue as you might expect.

I will not spoil the ending, but will tell you that this is not an Irish tale. It's pure Hollywood. At least in its endings.

There was a momentous scene which seemed to turn the movie, but Beatty didn't stay black-to-white as I expected. In that scene he 'came out' and turned on a lamp near his darkened self. If I remember right, the background music of Mahler's 5th even changed its feeling. He caught a serious glimpse of his DNA-in-the-future, and that seemed to give him spark and lift. But Beatty didn't keep it going to my disappointment. By the way, for Donald Mitchell, perhaps the most important Mahler scholar writing today, the Fifth Symphony “initiates a new concept of an interior drama.” The idea of a programmatic symphony has not vanished, “it has gone underground, rather, or inside.” I wonder if that influenced the choice of the 5th throughout.

Perhaps Beatty saw in Hughes a great American enigma. A life of massive financial success and yet a life of wishing to be in relationship with his departed father. A desire to keep his father's legacy, or at least his name, in perpetuity. And utter dissatisfaction with those who disagreed with him, on any level, even about ice cream availability.

He lived as a recluse, see these facts about the real Hughes in this article from History.com I'm sure some of the real story influenced Beatty. And then there is the Hollywood add-on as per usual.

Hughes was a megalomaniac, but I'm not a psychologist, so probably shouldn't evaluate him as such with such little information. Still, Beatty made us think this in the very slow opening (at leat 45 minutes of the 2 hours) and Hughes' obsession with his own reputation and possible identification as crazy.

Someone asked me "Did you like the movie?" And honestly I never quite know if I liked some movies until I sit down to write the review of it. This one is certainly in that category. What I liked was clear...the parts by Sheen, Bergen, Platt, Ed Harris, Alec Baldwin... they all were subjugated to the great one. Beatty made it clear, in their deference, and their compliance, their opposition and their diminution, that Hughes was the greater. I liked the ingenue and her life choices she was continually forced to make. I liked the Radaresque Broderick in his subjugation to Hughes, until that one moment of confrontation. I liked the forward-thinking Frank, the chauffeur. I suppose there was enough in the movie to give it another look, down the road, on an airplane at 35,000 feet in a few months.

ABC News in the US gave it a moderate score, and finished with "When "Rules Don’t Apply" is good, it’s a delight. When it’s not, you just wish you were somewhere else." Oy, did I agree with that one!

And maybe then I will think of what I have to do to live in subjugation to my Greater One, the Almighty. No matter how I see myself in this movie, as I identify with one or more characters (at a time), I know that in the end, no matter how much I gain or lose, there is a Greater One. A God who gives of Himself that we might have life. I had a good relationship at times with my dad, but when I met the Eternal Father, the Lord God Almighty, I found my own darkness-to-light moment and the music changed from Mahler's 5th to Mahler's Resurrection!

No enigma now. Life comes and life lives on, because of the One who said of Himself (and which is a sign on one of the churches in the early part of the movie), "I am the Way, the Truth and the Life." (Yeshua, the messiah quoted by his friend and biographer John) Thanks be to God.

Hunt for the Wilderpeople: The movie, a review, and some thoughts

Ricky Baker (Julian Dennison) is a defiant 12-year-old city kid who finds himself on the run with his cantankerous foster uncle Hec (Sam Neill) in the million-hectare New Zealand bush outside Hec's place. A national Kiwi manhunt follows, and the two are forced to put aside their differences and work together to survive in this very funny and heartfelt adventure.

I laughed out loud more times than I can remember in recent years in a movie theatre. Apologies to the folks at the Randwick Ritz on Sunday arvo. This buddy movie was at times "Thelma and Louise" and "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" and at other times it was Bing Crosby and Bob Hope on the road to Singapore. The one-liners were precious; the timing was impeccable; the scenery stunning. I liked it all. No wonder Rotten Tomatoes gave this a 100 rating.

Murray from Flight of the Concords (Rhys Darby), who has been in much more since 2009 when that Kiwi series finished, plays a wild bushman flawlessly. He is not alone in flawless role-playing. In fact the entire cast is so full of caricatures it's super-predictable. But that doesn't diminish the effect any more than our knowing Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner are going to have different results at the painted cave. In fact, perhaps it's the predictability of the uncle and kid in their mis-adventures, the trio of bounty hunters, the mad Child Services Worker, Paula (Rachel House) and her offsider, each person in the cast is cartoon-like, and yet believable, that makes this such a good movie.

My favourite of course, was Aunty (Rima Te Wiata) whose lines to Ricky, and her birthday song to him (apparently written on the spot as required) endear her to everyone in the cinema.

Odd things. The credits include sections headed "Wildercrew" and "Wildercast", with the latter including the subheading "Wilderdogs". I have no idea what that all means. A very fun trivia note: The Toyota that Hec and Ricky use to escape from Psycho Sam's hideout is called Crumpy, in reference to Barry Crump, the author of the book on which the screenplay was based. An identical vehicle was driven by Crump in a long-running series of Toyota commercials in New Zealand, where Barry played a bushman taking a city slicker named Scotty for a drive through the bush. Scotty was played by Lloyd Scott, who appears in this film as "Tourist". Some fun connections with Kiwi tv-cinema history.

No spoiler, no spoiler alert. It's a classic buddy movie with great lines, fantastic scenery, and painful ties between the two protagonists. You will enjoy this no matter who you are, or from what country you come. A good laugh, even at predictable pacing, will be worth your while. Let me know what you think after you see it.