Road improvements are still hastened by deaths but slowed by resentments

16 Jun

A sticker posted at the scene of a June 7 traffic death in Cambridge’s Harvard Square.

Nearly 10 years ago, after cyclists Bernard Lavins and Amanda Phillips died within three months of each other, I wrote about the vulnerability of cyclists as road users and hoped to see lowered speed limits, fewer trucks in areas where cyclists and pedestrians were common and a shift from car-centric urban planning to equitable, safer-for-all streets. Much has changed. Cambridge’s Cycling Safety Ordinance went through, then-governor Charlie Baker enacted a “safe passing” law, Bluebike stations have blossomed around Greater Boston and e-bikes have made two wheels a more accessible alternative form of commuting for more people. Yet in that time, three more cyclists have been killed by trucks on Cambridge streets, including a 55-year-old woman June 7 at Mount Auburn and DeWolfe streets in Harvard Square; and lawsuits for a time sought to halt and reverse the CSO by returning the slim slivers of safe haven to trucks and other carbon-emitting vehicles – all as unchecked temperatures continue to rise globally. We are allegedly making progress, but trending backward and people are dying.

As a cyclist who’s been riding the streets of Cambridge and Boston some 4,000 miles a year for nearly 40 years, the need to bike defensively hasn’t changed much: There’s still a lack of deference to the safety of vulnerable street users by motor vehicles who don’t look for them, zipping past before making a hard right or blasting their horn because they don’t think they belong on the road.

Nearly all cyclists are multimodal – they also walk and drive – but most will tell you that when on a bike, they have to have their senses engaged more keenly. “Head on a swivel,” as many say. To put it another way, as a pedestrian you don’t regularly assume a car is going to come up on the sidewalk; in a car, if you have a green, you don’t yield for fear that another car will blast through a red and hit you, since you have the right of way. And in both scenarios you have a designated safe place in a sidewalk or a 2-ton encasement should any of that happen, unlikely as it is. On a bike, one ding and you’re out in the road and at the mercy of a six-seat SUV going twice your speed, with nothing to protect you.

This is documented easily by crash data from the state Department of Transportation and Cambridge police open portals. Over a 10-year period, six cyclists have died on our streets and 11 pedestrians; as a percent of population (approximately 105,000 and 9,000), bike riders are six times more likely to die via a motor vehicle strike than a pedestrian. More telling is that at least five of the six fatal crashes involved a truck.

Friday’s tragedy occurred shortly after the CSO took a blow in a recent City Council vote, with deadlines potentially extended in places unless the city laws are adjusted to find more car parking. But a bike-lane backlash has been going on for years – “They run red lights”; “They don’t wear helmets”; “Their bikes don’t have lights” – in addition to resentment over the loss of parking, with spaces for people with disabilities being the emotional ante often laid down. Reckless behavior is never acceptable, and cyclists can be their own best ambassadors by showing courtesy and respect to other road users; that said, motor vehicles pose the far bigger public risk and are the sole agent of road deaths. Meanwhile, in the recent makeover of Porter Square, when separated bike lanes were installed, the number of accessible parking spaces available more than doubled as part of the project.

An important aspect about that June 7 crash is that it happened where there were separated bike lanes. Whether the box truck made an illegal right (rights are allowed only on a green arrow) or the cyclist proceeded through a red light or some other factor was at play has yet to be determined. It may be some time before we know the results of an investigation, but one thing that should be considered in the interim is street design. This section of Mount Auburn is an opening-up point, which adds to its complexity. For traffic heading east on Mount Auburn, there are five traffic lights and three signs. That’s a lot to take in; if you sit at the intersection and observe for a few signal cycles, you will see confusion from users. And, of course, there are those who push through illegally. We try out traffic pattern designs to hopefully improve road safety, but must balance the needs of businesses and those who need to get around. It’s a challenge, and one with impacts.

The long and short is, traffic flows need to be simple and intuitive. Are cyclists from other states familiar with Boston bike signals, are the signals and signs at Mount Auburn and DeWolfe in the best location for each type of road user? These are nagging questions that should have been answered by post-installation use and review by those who came up with them, as well as those who enforce traffic. We’re a world-class city with revered universities that draw people from all corners of the globe; there are going to be new-to-Boston people in the streets every day. Our rotaries are infamous for their WTF factor to those newly entering Massachusetts; intersections in Harvard Square don’t need to be.

The victim, who hailed from Florida, was on a Bluebike, eliciting on social media boards sentiments that those who ride the rentals “don’t know what they’re doing.” Bluebikes are designed to be a simple walk-up-and-use transportation; it’s the violence of the streets that’s the real factor here, and we should acknowledge that. If we applied this same logic of “needing to know how to navigate the streets of Boston before getting on a bike” and extend it to cars, would anyone deplaning from Italy, the U.K. or Japan be able to rent a car at Logan?

The intersection will change. The city will act. The sad reality is that it took a life to do it. We’re one of three area cities with Boston and Somerville that have adopted Vision Zero goals – to eliminate traffic fatalities through engineering – but we’ve struggled to meet checkpoints. Potentially extending CSO deadlines only addles those efforts.

There is a sprig of hope, however, as on Monday the council gets a policy order asking the city to undertake a review of intersections where crashes have resulted in a serious injury. It’s a decade late, but something that could have real results. And getting measurable results is the only way to evaluate downstream efforts: ink is cheap, blood is not. Furthermore, as we become a denser city, we need to rethink how we use our streetscapes and who uses them. It’s not just about safety. It’s also about equity.

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‘Hold,’ an installation suggesting enslavers’ ship, offers place for reflection in idyllic Radcliffe Yard

7 Jun

“Hold,” by Curry J. Hackett and Gabriel Jean-Paul Soomar, is installed in Radcliffe Yard near Harvard Square.

Idyllic Radcliffe Yard on Brattle Street in Harvard Square hosts rotating art exhibits in the cozy, verdant nook known as the Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Garden. You know, those perfectly formed mounds of sand and gravel, the stately, tiered wooden walkway or perhaps the picturesque, grassy green knolls with wispy reeds reaching skyward. The Harvard Radcliffe Institute has held a biennial competition within the Harvard community since 2012 to produce and deliver these public installations.

This year’s winner, “Hold,” by Graduate School of Design students Curry J. Hackett and Gabriel Jean-Paul Soomar debuted before commencement ceremonies: an abstract rendering of a slave ship’s cargo hold. It may just be the institute’s most provocative installation to date, as it stirs the painful legacy of slavery in America and, more pointedly, at Harvard.

The 30-foot, U-shaped structure of wood and translucent plexiglass represents the nave or “hold” of a ship where those forcefully abducted from their native land, put in chains and separated from their families existed for long stretches under inhumane conditions – relative darkness and little food or water – as they were harried across the ocean and into the shackles of plantation enslavement. The rising wall on the Garden Street side of the installation is an evocation of the ship’s sail that caught the wind and drove the vessel.

The open, interactive design invites visitors to step inside the “Hold” and interact with history and the ripples of injustice across decades and centuries. “Sometimes when I go there I see a ruin. Other times I go there and I see a common,” Hackett said over coffee, reflecting on his own interactions with the piece.

Curry J. Hackett, left, and Gabriel Jean-Paul Soomar at the May 15 opening event for “Hold.”  

Hackett and Soomar didn’t come together so much because of a Harvard connection, but because Soomar’s mentor at the University of Miami knew of Hackett, who had taught design at Howard University and the University of Tennessee. The inspiration for “Hold,” Soomar said, came as the two sought to create “an inviting safe place for Black and brown people and others marginalized who might not otherwise have such a space at Harvard.”

“We wanted to bring forth narratives and histories and create a conversation,” Soomar said.

A key conceptual bonding point for the two and the design were the writings of professor Katherine McKittrick, a prominent feminist and activist at Canada’s Queen’s University. Most specifically, her essay on “Plantation Futures” and the notion of enclosure and the walling off of Black peoples. The walls that enclose here go beyond the hull of the ship, as there are other barriers that sequester and separate, be they redlining, disproportionate incarceration or inequity in educational opportunity – the list is long. Additionally, the Radcliffe Institute, an interdisciplinary academic research center with a focus on issues of race and gender, invited applicants to propose topics and themes that might be related to “Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery” report released in 2022 during the tenure of president Lawrence Bacow.

“Hold” is a multimedia experience. An audio component that enriches the sense of immersion is slated to change over the exhibit’s two-year tenure but now plays “A Baptism Story” – a bit of “personal oral history” as Hackett describes it. If you plug in your earbuds and scan the barcode on the plaque, you hear a soundscape Hackett recorded around Boston and the banks of the Charles River – the repetitive clanging of a pile driver at a construction site, the rustle of reeds and pronounced splashing of water – mixed with a looped phone conversation between Hackett and his mother recalling her baptism in rural Virginia and singing a few bars of a hymn.

The recording is meant to evoke spirituality and sensation, Hackett said, though much of the conversation is obfuscated by other sounds to protect the privacy between mother and son while conveying the essence of their relationship and bond. If you go at sunset, there are weatherproof speakers embedded in the ground around “Hold” that play the nearly 15-minute track. “It’s like you’re in the middle of a conversation,” Hackett said. The site-projected audio is far more affecting and immersive than the streamable alternative. Like a good Dolby system, you hear sounds in the aural fore and some that are faraway; from the splashes, you can practically feel your feet in the water. There’s also a track of chimes that play at 11 a.m. Sunday, the time many Black churches schedule services.

The soundscape for “Hold” will play on holidays such as Juneteenth, Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Independence Day.

A new soundscape is expected every three months. Next up, Soomar, who was born in Miami and raised in Trinidad and Florida, will bring a collage of celebratory sounds from diasporic carnivals in Trinidad, London, Boston and Nigeria. “It’ll be like going from one room to another with different music,” Soomar said. From there, Hackett and Soomar, graduates from the School of Design as of May, will curate additional soundscapes, working with Radcliffe staff to draw from the Harvard community.

The ongoing process also provides an opportunity for Hackett and Soomar to reconnect with their creation. The hope is to have other events – community gatherings and perhaps panel talks, Hackett said.

Hackett, who has a design consultancy, is looking to return to the classroom, though where is still to be decided. Soomar will teach this summer at the Arts for Learning program in Miami and will likely launch his own consultancy.

The Radcliffe selection process was something of a sojourn of endurance. Hackett and Soomar submitted their initial design sketches and concept overview early in 2023 and were told that March they were one of five shortlisted entries. They submitted a prototype of their design and in June 2023 found they’d won. It was “fulfilling and humbling,” Soomar said.

As a result of the “Legacy of Slavery” report, the Bacow administration pledged $100 million to redress the stain of slavery in the university’s past, including a public memorial acknowledging the use of enslaved people to build and operate the school. Last week the memorial committee heads, English professor Tracy K. Smith and Carpenter Center director Dan I. Byers, resigned, citing pressures to rush the project. The timeline for the memorial is still unknown, though 2027 was an early goal. In the interim there is “Hold.”

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Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

25 May

Series put in reverse to fill in the gaps on a map of dangerous ground

Hard to believe it’s been nearly 10 years since George Miller punched us all in the face with “Fury Road,” his amped-up reenvisioning of the post-apocalyptic “Mad Max” universe. A phenomenal cast and action scenes that arguably topped the original trilogy’s signature episode, “The Road Warrior” (1981), made that spectacle of a lawless world taken over by marauding tribal factions a reboot like no other. “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga,” the new nitro-injected prequel to that 2015 desert storm, is a high-energy affair, to be certain. It doesn’t move the needle, but it is game to try to keep pace.

One of the perverse pleasures of those late 1970 and 1980s films (“Mad Max” and “Beyond Thunderdome” bookending “Road Warrior”) was Miller’s minimal backstory or world building. In voiceover we’re told only that fuel become scarce, nations went to war over it and nukes happened – leaning in on catastrophic climate change before COP 21 was even a glimmer in the U.N.’s eye. Then again, global nuclear warfare pretty much leapfrogs an environmental crisis. 

As always, scarce resources are the crux of conflict in “Furiosa” and the reason for the rise of ’roid-rage tyrants such as the Morlock-ish Immortan Joe or our new dispenser of wasteland sadism, Dr. Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), whose MO is drawing and quartering by motorcycle after a bit of “Squid Game” fun. (This younger Immortan Joe is played by Lachy Hulme, replacing Hugh Keays-Byrne from the 2015 film. Keays-Byrne, also indelible as Toecutter in the original “Mad Max” in 1979, died in 2020.) As we know from “Fury Road,” young, fertile women are worth warring over as well, or more so to be hoarded away in chastity belts with the intent to propagate legacies Genghis Kahn style. 

Miller and his longtime co-scribe Nick Lathouris, had a small part in the 1979 film, do a yeoman’s job of fleshing out the chaotic, dust-choked universe conjured up in “Fury Road.” In this chapter we actually get to go to the Bullet Farm and Gas Town, fortified encampments that loomed across the desert but were never visited or sieged by Immortan Joe’s pasty white phalanx of War Boys. “Furiosa” also becomes the first “Max” flick to play significantly off plot developments from another chapter (though to belie the title, while there is a Max stand-in, there is no one named Max). The film’s five segments begin in the Green Place of Many Mothers where “Fury” essentially ends, as a young Furiosa (Alyla Browne) is kidnapped by the minions of Dementus. Her mother (Charlee Fraser), a hell of a shot with a rifle, follows along in a pursuit. It’s long-simmering scene with the potent poetry of the grueling desert march from “Lawrence of Arabia” (1962). Jumping forward in time, an older Furiosa played by Anya Taylor-Joy (“The Queen’s Gambit,” “The Witch”) has been traded from Dementus to Joe to stave off a war and later, through near-death happenstance, goes incognito in Joe’s mountain cliff complex known as the Citadel. 

Given that what much of what goes down in wasteland has to do with dick waving (I mean, we have characters called Rictus Erectus, Scrotus and Pissboy) and prison-yard, alpha-male domination, the uneasy peace and trade accords with Gas Town and the Bullet Farm begin to fray, with Furiosa and her own agenda in play as war looms. This is also the first “Mad Max” to have hordes of equally matched factions go at it, not the haplessly underarmed and helplessly outnumbered stranded and beset in their own personal “Rio Bravo” (1959). And despite the outwardly mean, masculine veneer, like “Fury Road,” “Furiosa” is decidedly female in its humanist gaze and nurturing of hope for a better tomorrow. 

Taylor-Joy is seamless as the can-do, younger version of what Charlize Theron brought to the screen nine years ago. Equally superb is Browne as the adolescent Furiosa, and not enough can be said about Fraser’s mad mom, who may be the most formidable wasteland warrior of all. Hemsworth tries, but he’s no Lord Humungous, and his bawdy bad-ass retorts have a bit too much “Thor” jokiness to them. The other near miss is Tom Burke (Orson Welles in “Mank”) as Praetorian Jack, a weak-tea distillation of Mel Gibson’s morally ambiguous roamer from the initial films who lacks the harrowed, frying-pan-into-the-fire immediacy of Tom Hardy in the last go-round; a relationship dynamic between Jack and Furiosa that Miller aims for as they ride out into the wasteland in the requisite fortified tanker never really takes hold, because Taylor-Joy’s grease-smeared avenger is so much more fully baked and fire-breathing. 

“Furiosa,” as gorgeous as it is to take in, is long, and Miller and Lathouris unwisely rehash moments from past films (Gyro Captain ultra-lights, a botched Molotov catching fire on the legs of a hapless combatant and the whole “You want to get out of here, you talk to me” swagger line, among the many) as homage, which just weakens them. You can’t fault the film’s furious pacing, jaw-dropping action sequences and dutiful connecting of dots, but is it needed? “Fury Road” was a mic drop; “Furiosa” is a victory lap, the “Silmarillion” of the series. 

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The bike bus rolls on each Friday in Cambridge, but a recent kids’ ride was more like a parade

23 May

By Tom Meek

Saturday, May 18, 2024

Darren Buck leads a bike bus in Cambridge on Friday.

The Peabody/Rindge Avenue Upper School bike bus is about to notch its second anniversary. It launched at the end of June 2022, just as Cambridge was emerging from pandemic lockdowns and shut-ins, and has operated nearly every Friday of the academic calendar since.

A bike bus is a parent-chaperoned group of children who ride to school together. There’s safety in numbers that provide visibility and street presence, and participants get a low-stress, fresh-air outing. The Peabody/RAUS group led by parents Katherine Beaty and Darren Buck is one of nine bike bus initiatives in Greater Boston and the only one in Cambridge. There are three in Somerville.

Beaty started the bike bus because being a bike advocate in the more traditional, political sense had become taxing, she said, noting its meetings, campaigns, emails and follow-ups yielding little immediate result or much joy. “I wanted to do something that would bring me joy and get my kids to school,” she said, speaking before a bike bus presentation she and Buck gave Wednesday as part of the Streetwise lecture series at the Aeronaut Brewery. Buck, who works in transportation policy, was in the midst of scouting cities to relocate his family to and happened to encounter Beaty leading a group of kids on bike. He knew immediately Cambridge was the place to land, he said.

One of the leading proponents for the bike bus movement is “Coach” Sam Balto, a Portland, Oregon, physical education educator who taught at the David A. Ellis School in Roxbury. He’s also a self-described tactical urbanist – activists such as those in Critical Mass or the Boston Bike Party who take a physical approach and might spray paint bike lanes on a street in the middle of the night. When in Boston, Balto used to place cardboard cutouts of Tom Brady around the Ellis school to get cars to slow down. Beaty referred to him as her “guru.”

A May 8 ride in recognition of National Walk, Bike and Roll to School Day included performers from the School of Honk.

In their Streetwise presentation, Beaty and Buck outlined the three steps necessary for a successful bike bus. First is finding a calm, safe route to the destination, probably less-trafficked side streets; there’s an engagement component of reaching out to the community, other parents and the school administration; the most critical part is to have fun. For a May 8 recognition of the National Walk, Bike and Roll to School Day, the Peabody/RAUC bike bus was accompanied by members of School of Honk, who performed while rolling along. Vice mayor Marc McGovern spoke and rode with the group. Beaty said the caravan had more than 130 riders.

For this past Friday’s regular ride, which I attended, revered Boston institution Keytar Bear was supposed to join but was unable to make it because off traffic issues, promising to accompany a future date instead. This time there was approximately 40 riders, which Beaty said was typical; drop-off in the winter is not significant, she said, though some rides have to be canceled when there’s ice or heavy snow or rain.

The route that Beaty and Buck lead begins at Russell Field near the Alewife T station, with organizers first gathering riders from the Fresh Pond Apartments on Rindge Avenue. Beside parents who serve as ride marshals, there are volunteers from the Cambridge Bike Safety Group who help make sure intersections are safe to proceed through and block traffic as necessary. The right, safer route in this case includes Dudley and Reed streets, some of it parallel to the busier avenue where the school is. Students of all ages participate, with some riding with parents in e-assisted cargo bikes, some kicking along on balance bikes and others doing their own two-wheel propulsion. The communal joy of the activity is palpable, and an apt flourish to the end the week. Most people the bike bus passes cheer and wave, Beaty and another Bike Safety volunteer said. You can often see on the faces of onlookers the effect of a parade of second-graders gliding by.

The Peabody bike bus works only for the commute to school, not from, because of varying after-school schedules and one-way streets that prevent a calm and safe path back to Russell Field. Many parents bike their kids home on the sidewalk, or load their bicycles into their car or the hold of a cargo bike. Organizers are asking the city to designate certain streets as a Neighborway, as they are doing in Somerville.

Beaty said she would love to see more bike buses, but cannot be in two places at once – and she and Buck live close to Russell Field. Their children won’t be at Peabody forever, either, and Beaty, a Harvard library employee, will be on a research sabbatical in Rome next year. The hope is that others will step up. Given the group’s energy and levels of participation, that might not be a problem.

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Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

11 May

Reboot hails Caesar

And so we enter into our next “Planet of the Apes” trilogy. Back in the ’60s and ’70s, theaters were packed for people in ape suits chasing after hunky Hollywood sorts such as Charlton Heston (the 1968 original with a script by “Twilight Zone” creator Rod Serling) and James Franciscus (“Beneath the Planet of the Apes”) playing men caught out of time and in the wrong place – a world ruled by talking apes where humans were largely mute also-rans. They were the kindlings of the blockbuster before there was “Jaws” (1975) or “Star Wars” (1977) Those films, all starring Roddy McDowall, were a five-pack with the actor playing the demure, science-minded chimp Cornelius in the first three and then his son, Caesar in the last two, “Conquest for the Planet of the Apes” (1972) and “Battle for the Planet of the Apes” (1973).

Skipping over Tim Burton’s 2001 stinker, the 2011-2017 trilogy (“Rise,” “Dawn,” “War for …”) wasn’t so much a reboot as a retooling that leveraged CGI and the talents of motion-capture actor extraordinaire Andy Serkis playing the series centerpiece, Caesar, who leads the apes out of human tyranny and along the path to a peaceful sovereign existence. In that series, apes achieved higher intelligence and the ability to speak because of humankind’s meddling and experimentation, while humans turned aphasic and dimwitted due to a virus that pretty much shut down the planet – this being pre-Covid, mind you. 

“Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” is a new grab at a franchise (“From the beginning we thought about this as a trilogy,” director Wes Ball told Empire) that serves up a warm embrace of Caesar and his legacy. Since “War for the Planet of the Apes” the solidarity of ape-dom has fragmented and gone feudal. We’re a few generations out as the eagle clan of apes, a peaceful treehouse encampment-aviary, raise eagles to help them fish, scout and defend themselves. Humans are rare and believed to be near extinction. 

Our protagonist is Noa (Owen Teague), a coming-of-age chimp whose father (Neil Sandilands) is leader of the clan and harsh to his own. On an excursion to find coveted eagle eggs and rise in rank and stature, Noa and his posse see signs of a lone human in the woods and other forces moving through the valley as well. The latter turns out to be a column of soldier apes sent forth by a bonobo known as Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand), who, like any good Roman leader seeking to expand the empire, does so by sacking and enslaving – which is exactly what happens to the eagle clan. In the aftermath Noa links up with Raka (a beautifully baritoned Peter Macon), a hermit orangutan well versed in the teachings of Caesar (“Ape not kill ape,” which Proximus Caesar, who trades on the name for effect and de facto authority, violates regularly) and keeper of books, which Noa has never seen. Noa’s also never seen a human, but sure enough, the waif in the woods, (Freya Allen, “The Witcher”), now trailing them for food scraps, comes out of the dark and joins them on their quest to infiltrate Proximus Caesar’s seaside fortress – an enormous, rusted-out aircraft carrier or cargo ship beached up against the rocky cliffside – and free the eagle clan survivors, Noa’s mother and a budding love interest among those imprisoned. It’s no spoiler to say that Allen’s Mae (the apes call all human women “Nova” by default) can speak, which blows even Raka’s mind.

The film’s gorgeously shot and boasts some imaginative world building, but there’s a lot going on, perhaps too much: Proximus Caesar’s larger agenda is to gain access to an old military silo for the ostensible humanmade war machine relics inside; to date, their big tactical weapon is an electric cattle prod; other than that, it’s knives, spears and fists. Several plot threads never get tied up, and Noa and Mae are thinly drawn – twice as much so if you hold them up against Serkis’ Caesar. Part of that is the uneven pacing by Ball, who cut his teeth on the “Maze Runner” series, another dystopian sci-fi concept. That said, there are some nice homages to the 1968 original, including a dark horse ambling regally down a deserted beach, those eerie scarecrow totems from the forbidden zone and the ominous trumpeting of a ram’s horn before a siege.

The film is less steeped in the metaphorical references to slavery and racism layered into the 1963 “Apes” novel by Pierre Boulle (who also wrote the novel that “The Bridge of the River Kwai” was based on) and more front and center in the earlier franchise. What we do get is some megalomaniacal clinging to power that feels Trumpian and plenty of fair digs about human hubris and the past due to repeat itself, as well as the perils of game-changing war technology falling into the wrong hands. Not much of it’s fresh, but it is dutiful and likely do well enough to ensure the next two chapters before another pause and a reboot. It’s how it goes, damn them all to hell.

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Film Clips

27 Apr

Of Beavers and Boys, reviewed: ‘Hundreds of Beavers’ and ‘Boy Kills World’

Cult camp is an odd genre bucket that collects a vast variety of films dumped there for varying reasons. Some (“El Topo,” “Barbarella” and even the recently released “Sasquatch Sunset”) end up there by design; others (“Showgirls,” “Mommy Dearest”) wind up there because they’re unintended, rubbernecking-worthy spectacles. Two films from this week’s roundup land there with mixed results: “Hundreds of Beavers,” which had a held-over-by-popular-demand extended run at the Somerville Theatre this year and is now available on streaming platforms, and “Boy Kills World,” which played as part of the Boston Underground Film Festival at The Brattle Theatre and opens at Apple Cinemas Fresh Pond on Friday. Two different films with distinctly different outcomes.

‘Hundreds of Beavers’ (2022)

“Beavers,” co-written by director Mike Cheslik and star Ryland Brickson Cole Tews, shoots for something new and markedly left of center. What the pair has concocted is slapstick, silent-era comedy mixed with loopy Looney Tunes animation and modern-day special effects. Made for a mere $150,000, the film has a premise that feels affectionately borrowed from Chaplin or Keaton: A 19th-century applejack seller named Jean Kayak (Tews), perpetually hopped up on his own hooch, gets into a skirmish with an army of beavers in the frozen wilds of the northern Midwest – think “Jeremiah Johnson” (1972) by way of “The Gold Rush” (1925). The beavers aren’t cute CGI creations, but dudes in suits with ginormous buckteeth. There’s something to do with a fur trader (Doug Mancheski) and his winsome daughter (Olivia Graves) whom Jean fancies, but it’s mostly Jean versus the bevy of beavers with cartoonish boinks and bams and some fairly taxing physical comedy performed by Tews as he hops from one log to another in a sawmill and slip-slides his way across the ice as a legion of angry beavers chases after him. No dialogue is spoken, and it’s shot in black and white. The experience (did I mention the daughter is pretty good at disemboweling beavers with a knife?) gets a bit repetitious, but Cheslik and Tews, all in on the hijinks, save some zaniness for the last go-round.

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‘Boy Kills World’ (2023)

“Boy Kills World” jumps out of the gate with promise; in the near dystopian future the aristocracy keep the masses in check with an annual lottery/purge called the “Culling.” What the film is, however, is a fairly pat, years-in-waiting revenge drama centered on a warrior known just as Boy (Bill Skarsgård, “Barbarian”) under the tutelage of a sensei (Yayan Ruhian, from the “Raid” films and “John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum”) to beef up and exact revenge on Hilda Van Der Koy (Famke Janssen), the elitist who sanctioned the execution of his parents when he was an adolescent. The gimmick is that Boy can’t talk, yet the whole movie is narrated by him in voiceover. That’s done by H. Jon Benjamin (the voice of “Archer”), who makes Boy sound something like a cross between the gruff growl of Christian Bale’s caped crusader in Christopher Nolan’s “Batman” trilogy with the wily witticisms of Bruce Campbell in any of the Sam Raimi “Evil Dead” flicks. That is somewhat fitting, as Raimi serves as executive producer here, and though directed by Moritz Mohr, “Boy Kills World” has plenty of Raimi influences. The plot of rebel forces fighting an aristocratic tyranny means comparisons to films such as “V for Vendetta” (2005) are sure to drop, but the lesser, forgotten 1992 Mick Jagger vehicle “Freejack” is the more apt comparison, as the fun of watching Skarsgård the avenger’s parkour-propelled takedown of legions of baddies ultimately palls. Skarsgård, almost as jacked as older bro Alexander was in “The Northman” (2022), makes for an impressive onscreen presence, as does Jessica Rothe as the skilled assassin known as June27 equipped with a neat combat helmet that’s a cerebral message board of sorts. It’s too bad the narrative arc they ride isn’t as sleek and mean

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Businesses can bring in the bicycling crowd, one $5 lifetime helmet sticker at a time

27 Apr

Bicycle Benefits founder Ian Klepetar takes advantage of a discount at Cambridge’s Area Four eatery unlocked with the sticker on his helmet.

Remember those $5 Bicycle Benefits stickers? They gave you deals such as 5 percent off at Petsi Pies if you showed a bike helmet at the cash register with the right sticker affixed to it.

They’re still around (so is Petsi Pies, now under new ownership and crushing it on Beacon Street in Somerville) but undergoing a relaunch of sorts in preparation for Bike Month in May.

Bicycle Benefits launched in 2007 in Saratoga Springs, New York – the hometown of sometime Somervillian Ian Klepetar – but a Greater Boston campaign arrived in 2008 to give people an exclusive financial incentive to get on bikes and out of cars. “We live in a culture which prioritizes an auto-focused existence despite the destructive nature of automobile travel,” Klepetar said. “Most people have access to a bicycle, yet often need a little extra nudge to ride it.”

There are approximately 40 cities in the United States with a Bicycle Benefits program. Part of the reason the program is being rebooted by Klepetar and his all-volunteer crew is the damage done by the Covid pandemic to the restaurant industry, which is a large sector of the businesses participating in Bicycle Benefits.

Before Covid, the program had about 40 partners in the Cambridge-Somerville area, Klepetar said. It is currently at 60, and he hopes to have that number at 100 by the end of the summer. Many of the businesses that participate in the program sell the stickers.

The program has a online map that makes it easy to look up partners in a city or by postal code and filter choices by business type – hardware store, bike shop, cafe, bar, restaurant, and so on. Some current deals Klepetar highlighted are a free coffee with the purchase of a pastry at the Area Four eatery (a discount he took advantage of while we met) and 10 percent off purchases at American Flatbreads in Somerville’s Davis Square.

Most participating businesses are local and independent, but there are nationwide chains – Ace Hardware and Whole Foods, for instance, which offers a $5 gift card for every $50 purchase at its grocery store on Beacon Street in Somerville.

Klepetar, who makes his living through maintenance and gardener gigs – and during the winters works at a ski resort in Utah – remains committed to the cause. When he went from Boston to Madison, Wisconsin, to launch a program there, he rode his bike the whole way.

“A lot of how we get around is within our control,” he said.

The website and other operating expenses for the program are paid out of income from people buying the $5 stickers – pretty much a one-time, lifetime purchase. When I told Klepetar I had three helmets and laid down my fiver, he gave me three stickers.

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Chemicals from Rite-Way’s on-site dry cleaning have contaminated the ground and potential sale

27 Apr

The empty former Rite-Way Dry Cleaners on Hudson Street in Cambridge’s Neighborhood 9 on Saturday.

Levels of contamination at the empty former Rite-Way Dry Cleaners are “high” and nearly unprecedented in their complexity in the experience of a 28-year environmental expert who talked with neighbors at a Thursday meeting.

A best-case scenario for remediation would be to demolish or do significant reconstruction of the structure, which would allow direct access for removal of contaminated soil under the building at 4 Hudson St. in the North Commons neighborhood of Neighborhood 9, said Daniel G. Jaffe of Environmental Properties, a firm in Newton.

The meeting was held as part of a state Department Environmental Protection public involvement plan required by the petition of concerned residents, mostly those living on lower Bowdoin Street and the abutting property of 3-5 Shepard St. At the meeting held at the Cambridge Main Library, illustrations from Jaffe showed a potential plume of impact ranging from Hudson Street down Massachusetts Avenue to south of Marathon Sports.

The Rite-Way structure was built in 1925 and has hosted a dry cleaning business from the 1960s until Rite-Way shuttered in the first half of 2018, according to documents prepared for the site’s owner, Nathaniel Swartz of Tennessee, and filed with the state. The building is technically part of a 1670-1672 Massachusetts Ave. parcel that also houses Floyd’s Barbershop and Wrapro Falafel & Grill, all owned by Irving Swartz until his death in 2006 and now handled by trustees, according to documents filed at the Middlesex Registry of Deeds.

When Rite-Way was in business, it was a point of pride for owner Babu Patel that his was “the only dry cleaner in the area who cleans clothes on-premises,” he told the publication American Drycleaner in 2014. “That means I can control quality as well as garment flow.” But it’s turned into a headache for Swartz’ trust, because suspected contamination makes a sale or leasing complicated. Under law, the owners of the property do not have to remediate contamination to sell, but they do have to disclose the contamination to a buyer, and it’s harder to finance purchase of a contaminated site and to insure it.

The property is represented by realtor Roy Papalia of Belmont, who said he’s had 4 Hudson St. on and off the market several times over the past half-dozen years. In a recent go-around, the trust decided to have the site tested, he said. (Nathaniel Swartz was reached by phone Friday evening  but deferred questions to an attorney.)

Venting contaminants

Documents filed with the state in 2022 by Jaffe referred back to testing as early as 2017, before Rite-Way closed. Contamination reports on the Massachusetts Office of Energy & Environmental Affairs website show significant quantities of tetrachloroethylene and trichloroethylene, chemicals used in dry cleaning that have been linked to liver, cervix and lymphatic system cancer.

Jaffe has tested air and soil in eight potentially affected buildings and installed in Floyd’s, Wrapro and the former Rite-Way what are called sub-slab depressurization systems – airtight PVC pipe systems that pump toxic vapors from under the building and vent them into the outside air. They are not final remediation solutions, but make human living areas safer and habitable until such measures can be accomplished.

It was the installations of these systems last year that upset neighbors in the two- and three-story structures around the single-story former Rite-Way, because the pipes’ mouths were not equipped with filters. Jaffe assured attendees at the Thursday meeting that the air being released is tested regularly and not a public health threat, with toxins below hazardous levels. Residents of 3-5 Shepard St. pushed back, citing their experience during a 2016 dispute with the owner of a restaurant called Shepard (in the space that now houses Moëca) when smoke from the restaurant’s wood-grill oven blew into their homes because of wind coming off Massachusetts Avenue and over one-story structures such as the restaurant and Rite-Way.

The systems essentially provide clean healthy environments for the trust’s tenants while releasing unhealthy air into the larger community, resident Bhupesh Patel said after the meeting.

Remediation planning

The best way to remediate is to remove the contaminated soil, but the multiple buildings involved in a dense urban area present logistical issues. Jaffe said microbes could be injected into the soil to break down the toxins, but that process takes longer and can also expand the borders of the contamination. Similar if lesser contamination once found at 1615 Massachusetts Ave., a site owned by Harvard, was remediated easily because a building was razed and the contaminated soil removed, Jaffe said.

The final version of the PIP is due June 7 with a public feedback period.

Deb Zucker, a resident at 3 Shepard St., said she was unaware of the contamination until her building got a request to have testing done on the property. It was the residents who then filed Dec. 23 with the state to get Rite-Way designated as public involvement plan site, which compelled the public informational meeting and interviews with the residents and state and local officials.

No representative from the state DEP attended the Thursday meeting; the office was contacted for comment Friday by email but did not immediately reply. State Rep. Marjorie Decker’s office sent a representative Thursday to better understand the situation.

“Nobody knows what’s going on,” said one Shepard Street resident. “There is no trust.”

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Challengers

20 Apr

Triples tennis, lacking in rules

Luca Guadagnino knows how to stoke the erotic and push the boundaries of moral comfort (and then some) while delving into complex, fully formed souls living preternatural existences on the fringe of society. Take “I Am Love” (2009), in which Tilda Swinton played a well-to-do wife having an affair with her cook, or Timothée Chalamet as a fine young cannibal in “Bones and All” (2022) or even Guadagnino’s Oscar winner “Call Me by Your Name” (it won Best Screenplay and Chalamet and the film were nominated) that made him an international talent. They’re all rooted in viscerally deep carnal connections.

His latest, a fierce, fast passion play, hops into the ranks of pro tennis at the level just below Serena and Federer superstardom. You’re immediately wowed by bristling chemistry between its three wholesome leads, the raffish Josh O’Connor, also now on the screen in Alice Rohrwacher’s “La Chimera,” Mike Faist, who broke through as Riff in Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story” (2021) and Zendaya, currently ruling the desert in “Dune: Part Two.” O’Connor and Faist play Patrick Zweig and Art Donaldson, besties since the age of 12 and more than pretty good with a racket. The flashbacks to their teenage doubles matches are showcases in cocky bravado that spill over into the after-parties that are all about netting members of the opposite sex. Now, however, the two are not so close. Art’s looking to play in the U.S. Open. He’s got a slam within his reach, but a recent slide has his confidence shaken and his game off, so his wife-coach Tashi (Zendaya) decides to have him play in a warmup tournament in nearby New Rochelle. It’s B-league, sponsored by a local tire outlet, but also draws Patrick, who lives pretty much hand to mouth sleeping in his car at tourneys. They haven’t seen each other in nearly 13 years, since Art won the hand of Tashi – who had been dating Patrick.

In rewinds (there’s a bevy of ’em, but with the help of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ electric score and some slick, attentive costuming, it’s done pretty seamlessly) we learn that Tashi – then Tashi Duncan – was the next big thing in tennis, a Naomi or Coco heading to Stanford before owning the world. A knee injury changes all that. The three initially meet at a tourney where Tashi is the big draw. At the trophy awards ceremony, both lads jockey for her favor and invite her back to their stylish hotel room for a beer. Ultimately the evening turns into a three-way makeout session, with Tashi subtly sliding out of the triple tongue tickle, which proves to be an eye-popping realization for Art and Patrick and emblematic of Tashi being perpetually one step ahead and pulling the strings.

As energetic and comely as our gamers are in the reignited love triangle, there are reasons for pause. Namely their stoic, unbridled sense of self interest and lack of emotional connection or fealty; Art and Tashi have a young daughter in a hotel room she scoots out on to have illicit meetups with Patrick. It’s like a 150 mph ace serve, awesome to behold but hollow, if that’s all the match is: Pretty but cold, not the intoxicating grit of a hard-fought Connors-McEnroe marathon hanging on every stroke, antic and bead of sweat. That happens in the on-court sequences, which are viscerally and kinetically staged, but not off-court. The fault is not on the performers so much as on the script by Justin Kuritzkes, which has zing and zip but not depth. In execution it’s not far from Zendaya’s 2021 outing “Malcolm and Marie,” in which Sam Levinson’s framing of a marriage pushed to the edge is more cool conceit than credible lived experience. How “Challengers” ends, there’s no true match point. That may sit well with those smitten by the film’s postured aesthetics, but others searching for something more reflective will likely be left at the midcourt line, tennis’ version of no man’s land.

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Short Takes: “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” and “Sasquatch Sunset”

20 Apr

‘Sasquatch Sunset’

David and Nathan Zellner churned out quirky, experimental indie works such as “Plastic Utopia” (1997) and “Goliath” (2008) and later veered into slightly more digestible alternative fare with “Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter” (2014), about a depressed Japanese office worker obsessed with the movie “Fargo” (1996) who searches for that film’s lost suitcase of cash. They opt for something more fantastic and scatological here as they embed us in a group of Sasquatch over the course of a calendar year. The film’s not far off from “The Dawn of Man” sequence in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968); no human words are uttered, though there are plenty of human gestures. Amid the lush greenery of the Pacific Northwest we get to know our clan of cryptids; the brusque alpha male (co-director Nathan Zellner), the lone female (Riley Keough), the more demure junior male (Jesse Eisenberg) and an ostensibly adolescent ’squatch (Christophe Zajac-Denek). Early on we get a fairly gratuitous sex scene right out of “Clan of the Cave Bear” (1986), then there are bouts of masturbation and self-exploration of genitalia (yup, you get full-frontal bigfoot). As base as that may sound, the film unfurls more like a stock nature documentary until things move toward the comic and absurd: Employing a turtle withdrawn into its shell as something of a cellphone; or the alpha munching on what can best can be described as herbal hallucinogens and laying his desire for sex on a mountain lion, which does not go so well. It feels like “The Three Stooges” by way of Nat Geo, and near going over the top. There’s plenty of pissing and shitting too, especially when the clan discover a logging road running through their territory (it’s up to this point that it’s unclear if we’re in the Paleolithic or the present) and experience the need to mark it. As much as you could say it’s a “Beavis and Butt-Head” spin on the Pakuni from the 1970s Saturday morning TV staple “Land of the Lost,” there is vulnerability, fear, compassion, grief and a sense of community that registers onscreen. Well crafted (the costume, makeup and cinematography impress), “Sasquatch Sunset” is at turns weirdly touching and, as the title suggests, there is the heartbreak of witnessing what may be the last of a rare breed.

‘The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare‘

The title might tie you up with thoughts of “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,” and isn’t too far off – both are about teams assembled by the British government to stave off evil forces with world domination in mind, and both have links to James Bond (more on that later). Beyond that, one is based on a comic book and the other on the real-life derring-do by a ragtag team of World War II commandos trying to cripple the Nazi naval war machine as Britain remains the lone European holdout against Hitler and prays for the entry of the United States into the war. 

Based on Damien Lewis’ 2016 nonfiction book spun up from Winston Churchill’s declassified papers, the Guy Ritchie-helmed film homes in on Operation Postmaster, one of Churchill’s unauthorized and unsanctioned covert ops that proved instrumental in swaying the balance of power in the war.

The rich potpourri of strapping can-dos is led by Maj. Gus March-Phillips (Henry Cavill, aka Superman, rocking a killer handlebar mustache), sprung from the brig for the suicide mission. With him are explosives expert Freddy Alvarez (Henry Golding, “Crazy Rich Asian”), Henry Hayes (Hero Fiennes Tiffin), captain of the modest fishing vessel used for the operation, and gleeful Scandinavian killing machine Anders Lassen (Alan Ritchson), who would give Alexander Skarsgård’s berserker in “The Northman” (2022) a run for his money in bloodletting and wear a broad beaming smile while doing it. The target is a critical Nazi supply ship (of CO2 filters for U-boats) and ammo depot on the West African island of Fernando Po, then a Spanish colony. Along the way the raffish rascals sink a Nazi patrol boat, liberate tactical strategist and ladies man Geoffrey Appleyard (Alex Pettyfer) and tangle with a British destroyer. They have operatives on the island as well with Richard Heron (Babs Olusanmokun) who, a la Rick in “Casablanca” (1942), runs a casino, and club chanteuse Marjorie Stewart (Eiza González), who’s deadly with a pistol but oft dangled as bait to ply Nazi command.

Ritchie, known for his cheeky, stylistic verve (“Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels” and “The Gentlemen”), which the director set aside for his other “truly happened” effort “Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant” (2023), reverts pleasingly back to his roots. It’s “The Guns of Navarone”(1961) if reenvisioned through an “Inglourious Basterds” (2009) lens. The cast is all in, even if the narrative, long for its two-hour running time, ebbs when it should be cresting.

Back to that Bond thing: Under hushed asides from Churchill (played by Rory Kinnear, so electric in “Men” but no Gary Oldman here) there’s a Brigadier Gubbins code-named “M” (Cary Elwes) and his aide, a young Ian Fleming, the guy who would go on to pen the secret-agent novels–allegedly inspired by Cavill’s suave Major. The original 007, Sean Connery, played Allan Quatermain in that other “Gentlemen” movie. 

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