Archive | October, 2021

Dune

23 Oct

Do Villeneuve and Chalamet finally get it right?

The hotly anticipated second cinematic take on Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi classic rolls into theaters this week. Billed as an adaptation and “not a remake” of the now infamous 1984 misfire by David Lynch, the new “Dune” arrives in two, two-hour plus chapters. “Part I” is a marked upgrade from that butchered Lynch release (he lost creative control and the film was edited down to just over two hours). It’s sharper, more conformable in its saga duds, and as you can imagine, the use of modern computer effects go a long way to offset those cheesy sets and clunky models.

Set some 8,000 years in the future in a galaxy far, far away, “Dune” much like “Star Wars” (or is it “Star Wars,” much like “Dune”?) is driven by lore, the assent of a man-boy to the mantle of hero and some nasty interstellar parlor games. We hone in on House Atreides, a noble lot tasked by the intergalactic emperor to housesit a barren desert planet called Arrakis. The why is maguffin of sorts, the planet’s main resource is its spice-melange, a radiant cinnamon-like powder that makes spaceships travel at warp speed and also gives those that can consume it and not die, super human awareness. Arrakis also has monstrous sand worms who like to munch on mining equipment and hovercraft for fun and then there’s the indigenous Fremen, who live in caves below the Saharan seas of sand and have a long his history of oppression by foreigners, most notably the violent regime of the Harkonnens, the previous imperial group to occupy the planet.

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Wheel Good People, Part Deux

23 Oct

More wheel good people: Bicyclist help goes on, including an Oct. 24 Halloween party in The Port

By Tom MeekThursday, October 14, 2021

Lonnell Wells in his CambridgeSide mall Bike Give Back space with an organization intern. (Photo: Tom Meek )

A year ago we cast the spotlight on efforts by bicyclists to help those at risk from Covid-19 and to confront racism. Those ills persist, but so does the work by the Bike Delivery Program and the tight-knit team behind the Cambridge Bike Give Back initiative. Each mission has been sustained by the toil and generosity of volunteers, but now could use a lending hand.

The Cambridge Bike Give Back initiative, which takes old and unwanted bikes and retools them for those in need, was launched in August 2020 by Lonnell Wells and friends in reaction to the murder of George Floyd. It gives bicycles to kids who might not otherwise have one to ride with friends, or a person just out of prison needing an inexpensive way to get around in their reentry to society, Wells said. The program now has a storefront in the Cambridgeside mall parking garage. Vice mayor Alanna Mallon and former mayor Anthony Galluccio helped broker the arrangement, Wells said, and his sources for steel steeds has grown too. He’s reached out to municipal and collegiate police forces for unclaimed bikes and forged a partnership with Bikes Not Bombs, the original bike-driven social activist group down in Jamaica Plain. 

The Give Back program has provided more than 350 bikes since its founding last year, Wells said, in addition to hosting community barbecues and sponsoring a Black Lives Matter ride around Cambridge.

The program plans a family-themed Halloween party from 1 to 4 p.m. Oct. 24 at the Greene-Rose Heritage Park in The Port neighborhood. There will be a costume contest, games and candy for kids, free food for all and a raffle; bikes will be given away, and bike tuneups offered. (Organizers are looking for able bike mechanics to help on Sunday. If you have a bike you want to unload, they could use that, too. Email cambridgikegiveback@gmail.com.)

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The French Dispatch

23 Oct

‘The French Dispatch’: Bienvenue to the latest precious pages from the desk of Wes Anderson

By Tom Meek Friday, October 22, 2021

Fans of Wes Anderson, cinema’s official maestro of all things quirky and twee, may be in for a bit of a letdown with this loving smooch to “The New Yorker” and other intellectually curious magazines of the latter half of the 20th century – i.e., “The Paris Review.” Sure, it has a tremendous cast: Anderson regulars Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Jason Schwartzman, Edward Norton, Tilda Swinton, Saoirse Ronan, Adrien Brody, Frances McDormand and Léa Seydoux, as well as new players Timothée Chalamet, Benicio del Toro, Elisabeth Moss and Jeffrey Wright are invited to the party. But in the league of “Moonrise Kingdom” (2012), “The Royal Tenenbaums” (2001) and “The Grand Budapest Hotel” (2014) it is not.

True to the object of its affection, “The French Dispatch” has the assemblage of a glossy flip-through, laid out in sections with a different story told by a different writer. Holding it all together is Murray’s George Plimpton-esque publisher Arthur Howitzer Jr. as he talks with various staffers in the book-lined confines of the Dispatch, the European desk of the Liberty, Kansas, Evening Sun located in the fictional French village of Ennui-sur-Blasé (yes, there’s that twee). Of the four chapters, the least interesting is the opener with Wilson as a bike-riding journalist who pretty much gives us a guided tour of of Ennui, which proves to be true to its name – oui, oui, yawn. The best segment has Swinton’s art critic presenting a long lecture about a criminally insane prison artist (Del Toro) who becomes a modern abstract expressionist sensation inspired by his guard, lover and model (Seydoux). The two actors have outstanding chemistry. Then there’s the political bit in which McDormand’s on-the-scene reporter jumps into the 1968 French student revolt (de Gaulle be gone) and embeds with (and beds) the movement’s young leader (Chalamet, whom you can also catch on screen in the next theater over in “Dune”). Lastly, we get the food critic (Wright, Billy Dee smooth) on a Dick Cavett-like talk show recalling a massive kidnapping plot (lots of bodies) for which culinary skills prove essential and lethal. 

The snazzy scenes that take place between the segments, either amid the halls of the Dispatch or in Howitzer’s office with most of the ensemble huddled to together, are gift bonbons that cleanse the palate between the plats principaux. Overall, “The French Dispatch” never rises to Anderson’s high bar. It’s a savory, indulgent mess, something of a fallen soufflé. 

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Of Bike Lanes and Politics

4 Oct

With the installation of protected bike lanes comes a fast-moving issue for council race

By Tom Meek Friday, October 1, 2021

A bicyclist travels in a quick-build protected bike lane in Central Square. (Photo: MassAve4 Impacts Analysis)

A springtime study about bike lanes replacing on-street parking continues to send out shock waves, and is now playing a role in November’s elections.

Citizens groups have been formed, petitions are circulating and candidates are getting endorsements around the MassAve4 Impact Analysis report and other issues relating to the city’s Cycling Safety Ordinance. Passed by the City Council in 2019 and updated in October 2020, it calls for around 25 miles of protected bike lanes to be installed throughout Cambridge within five to seven years.

When released in April, the MassAve4 report triggered panic among business owners and residents who feared that nearly all on-street parking spaces would be removed in favor of quick-build protected bike lanes along Massachusetts Avenue from Harvard Square to Dudley Street, including Porter Square. The city quickly assured that it was only studying the effects of achieving the ordinance’s goals with quick-build options such as flex posts, signs and road markings rather than curb cuts, sidewalk and road surface alterations that would demand more planning, cost and resources and be less likely to meet the law’s timeline.

The city has not released a plan, but by May the city manager expects to identify where quick-build bike lanes will work and get City Council approval for a timeline on installing other kinds of bike infrastructure, according to the MassAve4 project page. Outreach and community engagement will be part of the process. If the city fails to have a plan approved in 2023, quick-build lanes along the corridor will be mandated by the ordinance.

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No Time to Die

1 Oct

‘No Time to Die’: Daniel Craig’s final film as Bond is big but not great, mopey but not meaningful

By Tom Meek Thursday, September 30, 2021

There’s so much you want to love in “No Time to Die,” the fifth and final Bond for Daniel Craig, but at 2 hours, 43 minutes, it’s a slog. Scenes go on too long, and the Craig films have over time gotten more and more into the melodrama of being Bond and his emotional attachments and far-reaching backstories. It’s counterintuitive to the Bonds that defined the franchise (see Connery and Moore) through caricatured male machismo and kitschy, cruel tropes – square-jawed derring-do, lethal techie gadgets hidden in a shoe and a litany of cheesy one-liners that sound brilliant when served up as straight as a martini garnish.

In the latest and 25th Bond, that’s all long gone. Everything is about an agent’s inner turmoil, with some deft action sequences stirred in. Craig, who’s physicality helped define the Bond of the 21st century, also notched an emotional awareness that has largely been absent since the one-and-done George Lazenby’s 00 took up the mantle of monogamy and got hitched in “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” (1969). Here Bond is retired and living off the grid on a West Indian island until the arrival of old CIA pal Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright) and a yuppie attache (Billy Magnussen), who’s got a bit of a Jared Kushner thing going on. Leiter wants James to help locate a package in Cuba kidnapped by Spectre with the intent of mass producing nanobot assassins – basically a DNA-targeted virus that gets passed from person to person until it finds its mark. The bigger fear is that someone could leverage the technology to wipe out whole ethnicities or geographic areas.

Yes, as with any Bond, the world hangs in the balance. Some of the installments are joys, some are wobbly curios or campy time capsules and others are just misfires, but it’s really about the world-hopping journey and execution of spectacle. “No Time to Die” is a humorless Bond in which the past gurgles up continually. In the opener, Bond is about to go off-grid with “Spectre” (2015) love interest Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux), but that’s all changed in an intercept by a piranha pool of baddies while on a holiday – and quest to exorcise some of those past ghosts – in the high mountains of Italy. The sequence of turns makes Bond question his trust in Swann. Trust becomes something of a theme that runs throughout the film; later Bond finds out that the newish M (Ralph Fiennes) may be in on the nanobot mess too. Old friend Blofeld (Christoph Waltz) pushes his way into the party as well, seeming more like Hannibal Lecter than Donald Pleasance (the most memorable of all Blofelds, the arch villain who’s made an appearance in a total of nine Bond films) in his restraints. But the madman du jour is a gent with the devilish name of Lyutsifer Safin (Rami Malek) and a disfigured face. It seems these days the only way to cast a viable Bond villain is to gun for an Academy Award-winner (Malek and Waltz have won, and Javier Bardem from “Skyfall”) and shoehorn them into an effete persona with a twisted soul. The best Craig baddie to date came in the form of a man’s man, a guy who did his dirty work with his own two hands. That film was not only the best Craig entry but one of the best Bonds ever. The 00 chapter I speak so highly of, “Casino Royale” (2006) was also Craig’s first, and the demented demon of demise behind the maniacal doings was played by Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen, a capable performer who has even played Hannibal Lecter (TV’s “Hannibal”) with enough nuance and panache to earn Anthony Hopkins’ thumbs-up.

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