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The Trump supporter profile on film

21 Nov

Angry white men on film: Seven times cinema got to the Trump vote before us

By Tom Meek

 

Most of us in the proudly liberal-leaning Hub are still in shock from Donald Trump’s historic and controversial “win” last week, making the demagogue the 45th president-elect. Throughout the presidential campaign there were near-riotous breakouts at Trump rallies and the candidate famously offended minorities, immigrants and, most resoundingly, women. “The Art of the Deal” Don looked primed to go up in flames at any turn and got away with language and behavior that would get any wage-earning wonk fired without a second consideration, but come Nov. 8 there was pushback from a certain populace in mid- and and Southern states who had been suffering quietly through the long, slow manufacturing ebb and were left out of the high-tech, life sciences and servicing surges – the non-college-educated white male, known as hard-working union members in more prosperous times, who had previously delivered swing states such as Pennsylvania and Michigan blue. We on the coasts scratch our head why, slow to realize the cold sting of disenfranchisement as a powerful motivator. Below are seven films that delve into the psyche of the dislocated white male, usually outcast, antisocial and operating outside the law:

 

“Hell or High Water” (2016)
Boston-born Ben Foster and Chris Pine (the new Captain Kirk) play brothers desperate to keep the family farm by heisting banks. Foster’s Tanner, just out of the slammer, has been there before, but Pine’s Toby is divorced and struggling to stay afloat financially and maintain a relationship with his progeny. The bureaucratic bank holding the homestead’s deed plays the heavy, and Jeff Bridges checks in as the sympathetic, but dutiful sheriff caught in the mix on the eve of his retirement. Pine and Foster make the frustration of hopeless conclusions, and the flight against them, deeply palpable. David Mackenzie, the British-born director who turned in the saucy “Young Adam” (2003), renders the Texas setting like a sequel to “No Country for Old Men” and registers one of the best films of the year so far. See also: “Out of the Furnace” (2013).

 

“All the Right Moves” (1983)
A young Tom Cruise plays a high school football star in dying steel-mill Pennsylvania who values his gridiron prowess as a way out of the economic dead-end, but his strict coach (Craig T. Nelson) may have other ideas. The death of the working-class American Dream and the despair as big biz going overseas for cheaper labor remains pointedly relevant. See also: “Hoosiers” (1986)  Continue reading →

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26 Oct

‘Ghost bike’ memorial ceremony honors bicyclist killed by truck in Porter Square

By Tom Meek
Wednesday, October 12, 2016
A “ghost bike” memorial is set up Tuesday in Porter Square in memory of bicyclist Bernard “Joe” Lavins. (Photo: Andrew Huang)
A “ghost bike” memorial is set up Tuesday in Porter Square in memory of bicyclist Bernard “Joe” Lavins. (Photo: Andrew Huang)

More than 200 cyclists, co-workers and friends gathered in Porter Square on Tuesday to hold a candlelight vigil for Dr. Bernard “Joe” Lavins, who was struck and killed Oct. 5 by an 18-wheeler while bicycling through the tangled intersection in front of Christopher’s restaurant.

Details of the accident have yet to be released, but his death marks the second cyclist in Cambridge killed in a little over three months after Amanda Phillips was doored and struck by a lawn service vehicle June 23 in Inman Square.

The ceremony, led by the Rev. Laura Everett, head of the Massachusetts Council of Churches and a cycle advocate, dedicated a “ghost bike” memorial in Lavins’ memory, and mourners recalled Lavins, a 60 year-old research scientist at Ironwood Pharmaceuticals in Cambridge.

The Rev. Laura Everett leads the Tuesday memorial ceremony in Porter Square. (Photo: Tom Meek)
The Rev. Laura Everett leads the Tuesday memorial ceremony in Porter Square. (Photo: Tom Meek)

He was a cautious man, mourners said, who took a bike safety class put on by the company before he began commuting from his home in Lexington two years ago. (To get away from the frustrations of driving and to get more exercise, because he loved junk food too much, one friend pointed out.)

Ken Carlson, a colleague of Lavins’ at Ironwood who also chairs the Somerville Bike Committee, and Chris O’Dea, another co-worker who cycles, called for “something positive to come from the terrible tragedy” – namely to make Porter Square and all hazardous hotspots throughout the city safe for cycling.

Five city councillors attended the event – Craig Kelley, Leland Cheung, Jan Devereux, Nadeem Mazen and vice mayor Marc McGovern – and John Adams, proprietor of the Kendall Square pool hall Flat Top Johnny’s, gave a history of the ghost bike, a symbol of remembrance and a reminder to motorists to share the road. Peter Cheung, a video editor and cycling enthusiast from Jamaica Plain, painted Lavins’ ghost bike after it was found in the basement of Flat Top Johnny’s. Admiration of his work brought a sweeping response from Cheung: “No more ghost bikes.”

Lavins leaves behind a wife and a 13-year-old daughter – and a heartbroken cycling community that wants change now.

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A Sidewalk Picasso — Artist Eric Kluin Makes Newbury Street His Studio

3 Oct

Published in the WBUR ARTery

October 03, 2016
By Tom Meek

Artist Eric Kluin outside the Newbury Street restaurant Sonsie. (Tom Meek for WBUR)

If you’ve ever been by Sonsie on Newbury Street on a bright sunny day in the past 20-plus years (since the restaurant’s opening back in 1993), you’ve probably seen Eric Kluin — the surfer-esque painter with six-pack abs — busily at work on his easel perched just outside the establishment’s welcoming French windows that open out onto the sidewalk.

A shirtless fixture that’s hard to miss, Kluin’s something of a curio. Does he have a license to secure that spot? Is this some entitled ploy to pick up women? These are questions you might ask yourself as you pass by. Reasonable questions for the intrigued, but the answers might surprise you.

Kluin, a pretty laid back individual, moved to Boston in the late ’80s after working at a halfway house in Arizona where he had formerly been a resident. He’s been a recovering alcoholic for 22 years, and ironically, it was a bar that gave him his shot at a sustained recovery.

He began consuming alcohol abusively at the University of Michigan where he studied art, and didn’t stop until he was scraped off the floor of his flat in Boston by a concerned friend and tossed into rehab — twice. He admittedly describes himself as a “classic alcoholic who would drink himself to death if given the opportunity.”  Continue reading →

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Almost up a creek while paddling the waters of Disney

15 Sep

Published in the Boston Globe

 

Signs warn of alligators and snakes near Seven Seas Lagoon.

Signs warn of alligators and snakes near Seven Seas Lagoon.

By Tom Meek GLOBE CORRESPONDENT SEPTEMBER 09, 2016
Vacation resorts — those destinations you leverage your life savings for so the family can relax and have fun without sweating the pressures of daily life — include safety and security as part of the package, right? Such was the likely expectation of the family from Nebraska whose 2-year-old son was killed by an alligator at Walt Disney World’s Grand Floridian Resort earlier this summer. The attack, which took place on an idyllic swath of beach on the manmade Seven Seas Lagoon, occurred as the family took in one of the resort’s family movie night offerings. For me the news was extra chilling, as just weeks earlier, my wife and 6-year-old daughter sat on that very beach watching “The Force Awakens.” Eerier still was the realization that a misadventure of mine two years earlier had given me a glimmer into the dangers that lurked in Walt’s waters.

I’ll be the first to testify to the structural beauty of the stately Grand Floridian and its limitless amenities, but those foreboding “no swimming” signs along the beaches gave me pause the very first time I passed them by. There was no footnote or qualification, just a red slash through a silhouetted swimmer. I assumed the water was polluted. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Continue reading →

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Bad Cycle

5 Jun

Bike Month alone, without follow-though, doesn’t get our cities where they need to go

By Tom Meek
Saturday, June 4, 2016
bike lane with trash can blockage
Installing bike lanes isn’t a cure-all for bicycling infrastructure, and they have problems of their own. (Photo: Marino Pascal)

May was Bike Month, the month we celebrate all who crank through the urban landscape reducing traffic, helping save the environment and promoting a healthy lifestyle. But besides some flag waving, what do Bike Months really accomplish? Do more people saddle up the steel steed, do motorists become more sympathetic and aware of cyclists, are the roads somehow suddenly safer? Unfortunately no – it merely underscores the lip service municipalities and agencies put forth when they could better serve the biking community and public safety by putting real dollars into infrastructure, policy and traffic law changes.

Opinion boxFor me, the month began with great optimism. I sent letters to transportation heads in Boston and Cambridge outlining 10 unnecessary hazards to bikers in each city where immediate improvement could be had. I ride a 15-mile round trip every day from Porter Square to the very end of the Seaport, and had hoped that, given the month, documenting these persistent areas of peril (unclassifiable on the wonderful, but limitedSeeClickFix app) might garner some attention and thought from those with the power to enact change.

What happened was fairly emblematic of bureaucracy, and embosses the truth that we don’t value cycling as much as we say we do. From Boston I got a cricket concerto (though the canyons of potholes I flagged by South Station did get filled within days). Separately, a call toBoston Bikes – a municipal department opened in 2007 – to ask about bike rack policies and safe passage around or through Boston Common turned out to be a frustrating do-nothing back-and-forth. At no time during the conversation did the young rep mention Boston Bikes doing something, anything; she just directed me to take up issues elsewhere at City Hall, or to use an app. It was disappointingly clear that she cared little about cycling and wasn’t in touch with the state of the roads or traffic conditions, let alone the community she served.  Continue reading →

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Election Flicks

23 May

Hypocrisy And Hubris: 10 Films That Reflect The 2016 Election

A still from the film "Weiner." (Courtesy of IFC Film)

A still from the film “Weiner.” (Courtesy of IFC Film)

The political season is well upon us, more vehemently and contentiously so than past presidential primaries, especially given the surprising number of upstarts, lack of usual faces and an arguably unpopular field. If either of the Democratic candidates win, history will be made with the first female commander in chief or the oldest citizen to assume the Oval Office. If Republican front-runner Donald Trump wins, his victory will cap a campaign of shock and awe, bluster and division, the likes of which seemed only possible in a movie.

That said, hitting the campaign trail has not been a particularly vast topic explored on film, but when it has, it’s been done with biting satire or a telling inward look at ourselves, our society and how we value democracy.

Most often those films stoke our fear of big corporations and power brokers seeking to influence control, as well as our fascination with scandal, the politician’s sudden fall and the tabloid train wreck that ultimately becomes a reflection of our impossible expectations, our own hypocrisies and an illumination of the intoxicating stupor of power that leads to self-destructive hubris.

Below is a list of 10 movies that bear particular relevance to the campaign as it is currently unfolding. (The last film in the list, “Weiner,” opens this weekend in select locations.)

“The Best Man” (1964)

Gore Vidal’s seminal skewering of big egos clashing for the White House pit a fictionalized version of Adlai Stevenson (played by Henry Fonda) against a JFK-like incarnation (Cliff Robertson), both vying for a former president’s approval. The shards of political courtship carry the tang of Obama having to mitigate his allegiances with Sanders and his former secretary of state Clinton. Vidal adapted his stage play, Franklin J. Schaffner (who helmed “Planet of the Apes” and “Patton”) directs and Lee Tracy was nominated for an Academy Award for best supporting actor for his turn as the ailing former president, casting an ostensible nod to Harry Truman.   Continue reading →

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A Small Good Thing

15 Apr

‘A Small Good Thing’ has simple answers for better living; free screening is Monday

By Tom Meek

 

What makes a good life? Health, love, money, career success? Turns out it’s happiness, which encapsulates elements of those others, and the balance of which that equates to equanimity – or so that’s the basis for Pamela Tanner Boll’s documentary “A Small Good Thing,” which gets a screening Monday at the Cambridge Friends School.

Boll, who lived in Winchester for most of her adult life and collected an Academy Award as executive producer on the 2004 documentary “Born into Brothels: Calcutta’s Red Light Kids,” came up with the concept to explore the meaning of a life well lived after looking inward at her own existence. “I felt like I had so many great things in my life,” she said in interview. “I had a good family, great sons, a nice home and I had been able to find work that was meaningful, but I also felt I was, however, getting too stressed out and busy. I felt like I was becoming one of those people who says, ‘I’m so busy with work, I don’t have time’” to socialize.

Surely championing documentary voices for more than a decade has contributed. “I come across so many amazing stories and I help them get to the screen,” she says. But it’s a tough business to make a go at. “Born into Brothels” cost less than $500,000 to make and made $8 million at the box office – most eaten up in distribution and marketing. Her own film cost a bit more than “Brothel” to make and is clearly a labor of passion, as is true with most documentaries.  Continue reading →

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Karen Aqua’s Films at the HFA

6 Apr

Local Animator Karen Aqua Remembered In Retrospective At Harvard Film Archive

An image from Karen Aqua's animated film "Kakania." (Courtesy Harvard Film Archive)

An image from Karen Aqua’s animated film “Kakania.” (Courtesy Harvard Film Archive)

 

In the broad sense, an archive is a place to preserve and retain history. In the case of art, it becomes a means to ensure the ongoing resonance of an artist’s vision.

To that end, the Harvard Film Archive has recently acquired the films of animator Karen Aqua, who died after a prolonged battle with ovarian cancer in 2011. Some of the newly collected works will be presented on April 9 with the retrospective program “Sacred Ground & Perpetual Motion — The Animated Cosmos of Karen Aqua.” Karen’s husband, musician Ken Field, will be on hand to introduce her work.

The late Karen Aqua. (Courtesy Ken Field)

If Aqua’s name doesn’t trigger any immediate bells, she had lived in and around Cambridge since the 1970s after graduating from Rhode Island School of Design, where she and her husband were intimately ingrained in the artistic community. She produced a multitude of short, ethereal works that deal more in emotional experience than traditional narrative. What’s truly most impressive is how Aqua painstakingly created her works by hand, illustrating the action at 24 frames per second.

Of the 15 films on the slate for the April 9 program — each of which runs between two and 12 minutes — Aqua’s most defining work may be “Vis-á-Vis.” An evocative contemplation of the life of the artist, the film depicts an animator diligently working while the outer world — the source of inspiration — beckons teasingly. The pull between the commitment to create and to experience life is rendered poignantly as the artist begins to split into two halves that tug on the each other, each trying to move in its own direction. Continue reading →

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Stonewalled

27 Feb

Mural due to be painted over at Starbucks; revised design wasn’t brought to landlord

March 1 could see return to blank wall at Massachusetts Avenue shop

By Tom Meek
Friday, February 26, 2016
Lesley University artists Gary Chen, Ellie Lukova and Percy Fortini-Wright paint a mural on the Starbucks at Shepard Street and Massachusetts Avenue last fall.
Lesley University artists Gary Chen, Ellie Lukova and Percy Fortini-Wright paint a mural on the Starbucks at Shepard Street and Massachusetts Avenue last fall. (Photo: Timothy Dungan-Levant)

The colorful mural at Massachusetts Avenue and Shepard Street depicting ethnically diverse students and nearby academic landmarks will be painted over early in March. The alfresco painting, done by Lesley arts students through a collaboration by Starbucks and the Committee for Art on the Avenue, had become a point of contention between Starbucks and Stone Investment Holdings, which owns the building that houses the coffee franchise, the trending eatery Shepard and other retail and food fronts.

The reason for the impending eradication comes because of a “miscommunication” with the landlord, for which Starbucks takes responsibility. The coffee giant initially reached out to the community with an in-house mural idea, but was engaged by the neighborhood to do something more “local.” Starbucks spokeswoman Holly Hart Shafer admitted that its lease requires approval from the city and landlord for changes to the exterior of the building, and the company didn’t follow through with the landlord on the second proposal after the first had been approved. Continue reading →

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In Jackson Heights

17 Nov

Frederick Wiseman On His Latest Documentary, ‘In Jackson Heights’

Still from Frederick Wiseman's "In Jackson Heights" (Courtesy Zipporah Films)Still from Frederick Wiseman’s “In Jackson Heights” (Courtesy Zipporah Films)

Cambridge has quietly become an incubator to more than just hi-tech, intellectualized liberalism and life sciences. Slowly but surely over the past few decades the left bank has become a nurturing rook for documentary filmmakers.

It’s home to such notables as Academy Award-winners Errol Morris (“Fog of War”) and Margaret Lazarus (“Defending Our Lives”). Oscar-nominated Joshua Oppenheimer (“The Act of Killing” and “The Look of Silence“) attended Harvard and longtime resident Ross McElwee made an indelible mark in 1985 with his critically acclaimed autobiographical sojourn, “Sherman’s March,” too, but predating all that undeniable talent and vision, and most prolific, looms Frederick Wiseman.

The embodiment of the cinéma vérité, Wiseman, at the spry age of 85 (call it 86) is now churning out his 40th cinematic essay, “In Jackson Heights,” which begins a special engagement at the Museum of Fine Arts starting Wednesday, Nov. 18, and runs through the end of the month.

Documentarian Frederick Wiseman, director of "In Jackson Heights" (Courtesy Zipporah Films)

Continue reading →

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