Movie Review: Civil War (2024)

I’ve been waiting for this movie to move to streaming platforms (to watch it for free), but recently decided that given the current political environment we’re living in, it might be worth paying more to view it now. I’m very glad I did, because this is one of the most powerful, disturbing and relevant films I’ve seen recently.

As you might know, the basic story of this film is that the United States in the near future has descended into a series of secession attempts and civil war. A small group of veteran foreign war correspondents, led by a legendary war photographer (Kirsten Dunst), set out to travel from New York city to Washington, D.C. by car to try to interview the President of the United States (Nick Offerman), as the main secessionist army closes in on the capital.

 

My off-hand impression is that this movie hasn’t done very well with the critics, and isn’t that popular with audiences either. It’s easy to see why, too, because it is horrific, and hard to watch in many parts due to the violence and brutality it depicts. I don’t typically want to watch that kind of movie anymore either – I outgrew enjoying watching violent war movies a long time ago. But in this case, the things that would otherwise make this film repellent are totally the point. The point it seems to make is: be careful what you wish for.

 

The other night, I watched a segment on the TV news cataloging what MAGA world’s leaders are intending if Donald Trump wins the 2024 presidential election, less than five months from now. It can be summarized as this: violent revenge, vindictive prosecution, and murder and mayhem against leaders and well-known figures in every influential segment of our society, including the  legislative, judicial and administrative branches of government, law enforcement, entertainment, health care, the news media and academia.

 

Trump himself has made these kinds of threats of terror throughout this campaign. Both he and Steve Bannon unleashed a torrent of this fascistic vitriol at the Turning Point Action right-wing convention last weekend. It was clear, hateful, explicit, and terrifying, and we know by now that when they say things like this, they really mean them, and we must take them seriously.

 

I also heard last week that the same right-wing paramilitary groups that brought us the January 6^th uprising in 2021 are organizing for both 2024 election contingencies. If Trump wins, they will help the new administration unleash a reign of terror against their “enemies”, or if Trump loses, they plan to unleash an armed revolution to make sure he takes power anyway. They say they want a war, so they can “win”, and put down forever all the people they hate (meaning the other half of us). As Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito recently said, he and his far right allies believe that certain core issues can’t be compromised on; one side or the other must prevail. That is now apparently their goal, to win by whatever means are necessary and available, including violence.

 

That’s what this movie is really all about. Many critics and viewers have made the reasonable observation that the exact scenario – in which Texas and California (the ultimate red and blue states) combine forces against the U.S. government – doesn’t appear to make much sense, in terms of the political realities and allegiances of those two states as we know them today. But this criticism in my view misses the point entirely, which is that a civil war in the United States in the early 21^st century would not necessarily unfold along neat or predictable lines.

 

Indeed, war does make strange bedfellows, one of the obvious points of this film’s message. It might not be Texas and California leading the charge for insurrection, but it might be some other surprising combination of states or regions. Another important takeaway is the reminder that a plan of battle never survives first contact with the enemy. If you’re eager for civil war, you might think you know how it’s going to turn out, but you don’t. In fact, you don’t have a clue – we found that out the last time. This movie drives home that point, very clearly.

 

I saw a number of other similarly important points raised in this film that have not usually been considered in most of the journalistic and academic discussions of possible civil war that I’ve read over the past couple of years. I believe the people who made this film did a fantastic job of thinking outside the box in developing their plot, and also in comparing and contrasting the last American Civil War (1861-1865) with what one might look like now, in our heavily urbanized 21^st century society.

 

Most analyses I’ve seen of what a contemporary civil war might look like assume there would be localized civilian rebellions popping up, with the U.S. government and its professional military trying to suppress them. The idea of comparably equipped and trained federal forces and secessionist states' high-tech militaries fighting each other in the streets of our own cities, as is graphically portrayed in this movie, hasn’t appeared in any discussion of potential modern civil war I’ve read.

 

What the modern analysts seem to have forgotten is that when the Civil War erupted, a sizable portion of the U.S. Army and Navy essentially defected overnight, taking their leadership, troops, weapons and facilities to the Confederacy. As was true then, the domestic military infrastructure of our country is distributed across much of the continent, in red states and blue states (but now with nuclear arsenals too). It’s not inconceivable that governors might seize control of the forces and facilities of the U.S. military sited in their states, if they suddenly faced a hostile federal government they and most of their states’ people couldn’t abide.

 

It has happened before, here in the United States and elsewhere. When the Soviet Union fell apart in the 1990s, Ukraine ended up with a large portion of the Soviet Union’s military assets, including a nuclear arsenal which it foolishly gave back to Russia. States today might not make that same mistake, given what has happened to Ukraine more recently.

 

Potential MAGA rebels who dream of a 3% uprising by their militias, or maybe even the takeover of the U.S. military by their Dear Leader if he is re-elected, might want to consider the possibility that no matter which side shoots first, or claims dominance and control, it’s unlikely everyone across this country is going to go along quietly and passively with plans for an authoritarian regime. And there is plenty of knowledge, experience and access to the resources for war on both sides of our great political divide, as much as they might doubt that.

 

This movie captures that scenario – not just Texas and California, but other states too respond to the destabilization of the country by using their own local militaries (which in real life could be federal troops in their states, and/or national guard units), along with civilian paramilitaries, to set their own courses to independence. This inevitably leads to a general breakdown of civil order everywhere, and a free-for-all that visually resembles nothing so much as the many foreign hellscapes we’ve witnessed abroad in our lifetimes, in places like Lebanon, Kosovo, Chechnya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and Syria.

 

It's not just high-tech urban warfare between two modern hyper-equipped armies in this movie, either. The movie (and basic common sense) suggests it wouldn’t be anywhere near that simple here, because in the meantime, we have this other little national problem (or feature, as some might call it), a heavily-armed civilian population. This movie shows us how that aspect might play out, in all sorts of familiar yet defaced American landscapes: bucolic rural areas, burned-out suburban shopping malls and devastated major cities. 

 

I won’t spoil the impact of all the different situations our embattled journalists encounter by describing them here. Suffice it to say, I found them horrible to contemplate. Just imagine a “war of all against all” in America, a Hobbesian state where any idiot with an AR-15 and a box of ammunition can become godlike in their power to terrorize and kill anyone they don’t like.

 

Imagine what the polarization of our current toxic political environment might engender in a nation where all our trusted guardrails for ensuring civil order, decency to our fellow citizens, democratic self-government and stability have been removed, keeping also in mind the personal arsenals available to civilians and in play here.

 

I would guess many people who might see this movie would react by denying it could ever get this bad. And they are probably right – I certainly hope so. But I do have concerns about this common optimistic reaction to what lies ahead, for the following reason.

 

Since 2016 we’ve seen a continuously streaming news feed of shocking, unexpected and unprecedented  events in our country and our political life. Many of these events seem to lie far outside the mainstream of our history as a democracy, and our longstanding political norms. It happens so often now, many of us have become numb to it. I really want to scream every time I hear one more TV news host say “we’re in uncharted territory here”. Do ya think? So given this unstable state of affairs, what puts all-out civil war of the kind we’ve seen elsewhere around the world out of the realm of possibility?

 

I read a great book recently, The Demon of Unrest, Erik Larson’s new history of the lead-up to the first shots of the Civil War at Fort Sumter. One of the points he captured brilliantly in the book was the extent to which neither side – North or South – had very much insight into the mental state of their opponent. For that reason, both sides were dumbfounded when the shooting began. But the point is, these misunderstandings do happen sometimes in human history. And they could happen here and now too, even if we don’t want to believe that.

 

Anyone who has studied the history of the major wars in the last two centuries knows there is also a  consistent theme running through many of them. When these wars began, one or both sides looked forward to a fast, easy and total victory. One or both sides believed their forces would be overwhelmingly superior, and would cover themselves in glory, while quickly vanquishing the hated and obviously inferior foe. It happened in the American Civil War, in Europe at the start of World War I, in Germany in World War II, and most recently in Iraq, Afghanistan and Ukraine. It happens over and over throughout history, whenever the desire for glory, revenge and conquest leads to a mass delusion that a war will not exact a terrible price on all the participants, but only on the other side. 

 

The end result of each of those conflicts was disaster, mayhem, chaos and barbarism on a grand scale. Even where there were victors, the victories came at terrible costs in lost lives, destroyed societies, and ongoing political challenges, created by the unresolved hatreds and problems that continued to be passed down through succeeding generations. We know this is true, because in a very real way, we’re still paying as a society for the mistakes of the Civil War and the Reconstruction era, more than 150 years later. Indeed, some of the same issues and pathologies from that time are at the heart of our current crisis. 

 

So for those in the MAGA world who see opportunities for glory and revenge right ahead in the near future, through imagined martial feats, glorious revolution and acts of vengeance, they might want to watch this movie, and think once more about where all this might be headed. The rest of us should see the movie too, to challenge our complacent preconceptions about just how limited a modern civil war or insurrection might remain, and to consider some worst case scenarios for the months ahead.

 

Be careful what you wish for, and remember, the enemy always gets a vote. But in the end, everyone loses.

 

Civil War (the movie). Very highly recommended.

Movie Review: Hearts Beat Loud (2019). On Kanopy.

I stumbled on this intriguing little film recently while browsing Kanopy, one of the streaming services associated with many public libraries. It wasn’t until I got a little way into watching it that I realized not only that I had seen it before, but that in fact it had played a small but important contributory role in my decision to start trying to record music at home.

This is the simple, quiet tale of Frank, a working-class music fan, record-shop owner and former rock musician in Brooklyn. The role of Frank is played by the wonderful Nick Offerman (best known for his TV role as the lovable libertarian department manager in Parks and Recreation). 

 

Frank is also a widower, who had lost his wife years ago to a bike accident, leaving him the single parent to a talented young multiracial daughter (Sam), a high school senior who is now preparing to graduate, and leave for college to study pre-med.

 

As the story develops, it becomes obvious that Frank is under a lot of stress. In addition to trying to raise his daughter alone, his music store is failing financially, and he has no other prospects for work. His landlady, though a longtime friend, is pressuring him to close the store, and he dreads having Sam move away to California for college.

 

But despite all those pressures, the father and daughter still share a favorite ritual of getting together to write and play music together. We get to watch one such session, as the two of them haltingly try things out, putting together bits of music, words and melodies, as Frank plays the guitar, while Sam sings, plays a keyboard and creates loops with a modern sampling device. It’s a perfect little portrayal of the creative process of songwriting between two people.

 

At this particular session, though, Frank has acquired some new technology that allows him to record their music. He records the song they’ve written, and then (without telling Sam), he uploads it to a streaming service, where against all odds, it quickly goes viral. For the aging musician father, it’s a dream come true – they could form a band!  Get a record contract! Play live! Make music! And in the process, maybe he can rekindle his old band dreams, while keeping Sam with him in Brooklyn too. But is that what she wants?

 

I won’t spoil it by saying what happens next. It’s definitely a comedy-drama; it’s both fun and funny, while still dealing in serious topics of love, loss, growing up and letting go. If you like quirky, interesting character-based family stories, this is a great one to check out and enjoy.

 

But what I most remembered when I saw it again was the fact that when I had watched it the first time (early in the pandemic), it had been a total revelation for a completely different reason, beyond the emotional impact of the relationships and the story line. 

 

For me, the revelation was: really, you can fool around with some instruments and singing in the spare bedroom, record it and mix it, and upload it for other people to hear? With no formal recording studio or record company involved? And then you can just upload it for everyone to listen to it?   

 

Of course, I'm pretty sure I already knew all that abstractly, but it was so beautifully depicted – enough for me to suddenly believe the wild idea, “Maybe I could do that!”.

 

You just never know what people will take away from any given piece of art, or what unintended consequences may flow from it, do you?  This is why art is so dangerous! 

Highly recommended.

Movie Review: Good Night, Oppy (2022). Amazon Prime.

This enchanting documentary of space exploration in our own era tells an uplifting story of our intelligent machines, and the fascinating emotional relationships we humans can develop with them. It seems perfect for the current moment, with our rising excitement but also fears about A.I. and robotics, and how the development of these technologies may affect us.

Two Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity (or "Oppy", as it became known), were launched in 2003, and arrived six weeks apart on the surface of Mars in early 2004. Each was expected to last only a few months, but both ended up continuing to operate, and send back astonishing pictures, videos and data about Mars, for many years instead.  Spirit lasted for more than six years, until 2010; Opportunity lasted an astonishing 14 years before its final signal in 2018, surviving and continuing to explore and broadcast despite mechanical failures, unexpected harsh surface conditions and technical mishaps. 

This film is the delightful tale of these two extraordinary Mars rovers, and the marvelous discoveries they made and shared with humanity. But it is also a very human story of the individuals and teams at NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) who invented the rovers, designed, assembled and tested them, successfully sent them to Mars, and then controlled and monitored their explorations from Earth.   

We meet some of the dedicated space scientists at JPL, and get to share their experiences working on the project, their growing amazement and wonder at the longevity of their far-away mechanical team members on the Martian surface, and the affection and feelings they develop with the passing years for these intrepid machines, as they work together to overcome problems so the rovers can continue to send data and photos back to them.   

Using archival footage and recent interviews, the movie shows team members at various stages of their careers and the rover project, and how they increasingly anthropomorphized the remote robots, cheered them on, and coped with their ultimate demise and their grief about it, after nearly a human generation's worth of the rovers' service and communications from Mars.

This is an inspiring and hopeful story of humans, robots and true-life adventures in space, with amazing samples of the huge volume of photos and videos of Mars taken by the rovers, and an excellent Hollywood-quality sound track. Recommended.

Movie Review: Operation Mincemeat (2021). On Netflix.

This interesting recent movie on Netflix is a good docudrama about one of the more audacious Allied intelligence operations and victories of World War II.  It's about Operation Mincemeat, a real plan created by the British Naval Intelligence Division (NID), to confuse the Nazis with false information about the location of the planned 1943 Allied invasion of southern Europe (which ultimately was launched against Sicily).

The story begins with the development of proposals for the British military on how to create confusion and doubt among the German military authorities about the impending invasion. Ewen Montagu (played well by Colin Firth), a commanding officer within the NID, and his team members, are considering different ways they might feed credible-sounding fake intelligence to the Germans. They ultimately make the controversial decision to try to float a dead body ashore off the coast of Spain, disguised as a British military courier, with false plans for the invasion.

The group realizes they needed to create a completely fictional backstory for the body. But first, they need to find a fresh dead man’s body of the right age, sufficiently anonymous that it can be “repurposed” with a different identity, and well preserved enough to appear to have died recently. Once they overcome that challenge, they have to create a convincing history for this person who didn’t really exist, by forging public documentation and a discoverable history, and also figuring out how to put convincing corroborating evidence on the body itself.

Finally, they need to find a way to deliver the body, in the guise of a courier who apparently had been shot down over the ocean, so that it would float ashore and be found and accepted as real by the Spanish authorities, then passed along to a German agent, who they hope will send the information on to the always suspicious and sophisticated German intelligence apparatus, and ultimately to Hitler himself.

It's a far-fetched but well-crafted cinematic tale of this unlikely plan that not only happened, but even more amazingly appears to have succeeded in fooling the Germans about the location of the invasion. It also nicely depicts the lives and interactions of the team of seemingly ordinary men and women in an obscure London NID office, who worked together to assemble all the elements of this elaborate deception scheme, and see the whole fraud through to the end.

One of the movie’s noteworthy characters is Lt. Commander Ian Fleming (played by Johnny Flynn), Montagu’s personal assistant, who later became famous (in real life) as the creator and writer of the original James Bond spy novels. Fleming is believed to have played an important role in this secret operation.

It’s worth noting that this story has been told several times before in books and films, including in the book The Man Who Never Was (1953) by Ewen Montagu himself (which I remember reading and enjoying long ago); a popular movie of the same name, based on Montagu's book, from 1956; and the more recent book Operation Mincemeat (2010) by Ben McIntyre, which was the basis for this recent film.

However factually accurate and complete it may or may not be, it’s an enjoyable and dramatic portrayal of one of the high points of British spying and information warfare against the Germans in World War II. Recommended.

Movie Review: She Said (2022). In Theaters and on Peacock.

Last year I wrote a review of Catch and Kill, Ronan Farrow’s excellent non-fiction autobiographical thriller about his attempts to research and expose the stories of institutionalized sexual abuse by powerful men in major corporations, centered on NBC’s host Matt Lauer and the Miramax producer Harvey Weinstein. It’s a remarkable story, and an inspiring addition to the history of investigative journalism as an essential and difficult tool in the struggle for democracy and against abuses of power.

Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor were the two New York Times reporters also working the story of Harvey Weinstein, and his serial abuse of women employees and young actresses throughout his career as one of the most powerful figures in Hollywood, at the same time Farrow was trying to uncover the story for The New Yorker. 

After their sensational revelations in the pages of the New York Times, which ultimately led to Weinstein’s disgrace, his departure from Miramax and successful criminal prosecutions for rape, Twohey and Kantor also wrote a bestselling account of their work on the Weinstein story, She Said, which I haven’t read yet (but will).

In the meantime, though, I have seen the dramatic movie made from their book, which is an outstanding creative work in its own right, and a worthy entry on anyone’s “best investigative reporting stories” list of great films. 

As the story begins, we see how Weinstein first appeared on Kantor's radar, as a possible illustrative case of sexism in the workplace for an article she was researching on that topic. As she begins to follow leads, she hears harrowing accounts from several of Weinstein’s victims, but also runs into barriers, including the fact that most of the victims had received settlements, and had signed NDAs (non-disclosure agreements), which barred them from disclosing what had happened or talking to the media about their experiences.

We then see how Kantor (played by Zoe Kazan) recruits Twohey (Carey Mulligan) to work with her on the story, and how the two – with the careful and tough oversight of their editors and executives, and the everyday love and support of their husbands and young children, despite long hours at work and midnight phone calls – compile an exhaustive body of notes, anecdotes, sources, witnesses and documents, in order to write the story.

Much of the drama builds from watching the two of them arranging for and then conducting interviews with scared, reluctant sources in a variety of settings, as they try to understand the magnitude of Weinstein’s crimes, and the nature of the cover-up operations by the Miramax board of directors and Weinstein’s lawyers. It's also obvious that the fact that they are both career women and mothers of young daughters adds to the empathy and bond they are able to establish with many of the victims, as they try to gain their trust, learn their stories, and then ultimately try to get one or more of them to go on the record.

One of the most impressive features of the story (as in most investigative journalism tales) is the team’s high standards for the types of evidence they need in order to publish their findings. After all the recent years of constant attacks on the press for “fake news”, it is a revelation to watch what it takes to be able to publish a credible investigative report in the mainstream news media.

In the movie, it’s clear that the editors and writers automatically agree on the need for a high level of verifiability, because that’s their understanding of their jobs and the nature of their profession. There’s a reason that the New York Times is considered one of the most authoritative news sources in the world. But it’s also made clear that a story of this sort – about the crimes and misbehavior of a famous and powerful man – must be unimpeachable to withstand the sorts of attacks an influential man like Weinstein, and a wealthy company like Miramax, can unleash to protect themselves.

With all the social tumult of the last decade, it’s easy to see certain currents like the #METOO movement, which has had such an important role in uncovering institutionalized sexism and abuse in the workplace – as having arisen spontaneously. But it didn’t. The #METOO movement exploded as a direct result of the truths told by these few talented and dedicated writers and their editors, who were determined to get to the bottom of this ugly story, in order to shed light on institutional abuses of power, and by the brave women, some of them famous, who were ultimately convinced to make their own pain and victimization public in the hope of improving the lives of other women.

She Said is a gripping and intensely moving drama of two women investigative journalists working together on one of the most notorious and difficult real-life news stories of recent times. Highly recommended.

Movie Review: Somewhere You Feel Free: The Making of Wildflowers (2021). YouTube Documentary.

Hello again! It’s not even Christmas yet, and already I’m back from my reluctant but much-appreciated breather and short break from The Memory Cache. It was refreshing to take a break, and spend more than a week in Hawai’i with family and friends, with the trade winds blowing, warm weather every day, and gorgeous ocean views everywhere.  I took a helicopter tour of Maui, saw a sea turtle underwater at close range with my mask and snorkel on, went to the aquarium, and appreciated my life and my closest loved ones. It was wonderful.

This has been a surprisingly active bounce-back year for travel in our family, after the past two years of the COVID pandemic and lockdown. In October, my wife and I took a trip back east for a wedding in the Cleveland area, and then on to several family visits on the east coast. One fortuitous benefit of the Ohio visit, of particular interest here since it is once again Rock and Roll Friday on this blog (the fourth Friday of each month) was that we were able to visit the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, where we’d never been before.

It's a lovely museum, perfect for a lifelong popular music fan like me, with exhibits covering the entire history of rock since the late 1940s, including pictures, clothing, various rock stars’ guitars and other artifacts, and many explanatory articles and posters. 

The featured display at the time was one about the Beatles, tied to the recent Peter Jackson documentary about the making of the Let It Be album in 1969 (previously reviewed here), along with many other exhibits of interest, as well as mock-studio space where visitors can try playing instruments, and rocking out with a couple of on-site cover band musicians. It was a really fun museum, and if you’re ever in Cleveland, I highly recommend it. 

 

While I was there, I also saw a large poster for a new YouTube documentary I’d not heard about called Somewhere You Feel Free: The Making of Wildflowers. It’s a movie that was released more or less contemporaneously with last year’s release of the “missing” Wildflowers recordings made by Tom Petty and his collaborators, including members of the Heartbreakers, the noted music producer Rick Rubin, and other musical luminaries such as Ringo Starr (from the Beatles) and Carl Wilson (from the Beachboys).

The movie itself is not overly long at a run time of about an hour and a half. Most of it was pieced together from recently discovered 16-mm film shot during the period of the Wildflowers album recording sessions, with supplemental interviews (from both then and now) and candid conversations with some of the principals, especially Petty’s close friend, sometimes co-songwriter and lead guitarist Mike Campbell, Heartbreaker pianist Benmont Tench, Rick Rubin, Petty’s now-adult daughters, and a few other cameos.

Several people in the film claimed that Tom Petty believed that the Wildflowers solo album was his greatest work and accomplishment. That message was pushed throughout the movie, as it was in the promotions for the anniversary release in 2021 of all the supplemental recordings from that period. The film makes very clear that it was a time of major growth, change and transition for Petty, both as an artist and as a person, which had impacts on the sorts of sounds he created, and on the artists around him who contributed to the work from this period.

I’m not personally convinced that this album contained the greatest songs of Tom Petty’s long and prolific career as a songwriter and recording artist. I’ve always felt that the heavily acoustic guitar-based sound of these recordings, and the deeply personal, often somewhat somber and depressive lyrics, were not nearly as compelling or exciting as much of the other classic rock material of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

A perfect example of this is shown in the film, with the story of a short "side" recording session Petty did with the Heartbreakers while he was mostly focused on recording his own solo album. The session was needed to record two new songs for the band's last album for MCA (which was otherwise intended to be a greatest hits collection), before entering a new contract with Warner Brothers. 

One of the two new “filler songs” for this MCA-produced Greatest Hits album that Petty quickly wrote (and the full Heartbreakers band recorded) was “Last Dance with Mary Jane” – a monster hit and perennial crowd pleaser, which I believe will forever dwarf almost all of the songs on Wildflowers in popularity, except perhaps “You Wreck Me”.

Nevertheless, whatever you might think of the Wildflowers album and this stage of Tom Petty’s career and life, the movie is a fascinating, informal view into the personality, relationships, creative processes, and artistic development of one of the greatest rock stars ever, at this one particular point in the long arc of his career.  

If you are at all curious about how top musicians write and craft their songs, and how their emotional states, random events and collaborations with other musicians and recording engineers shape the outcomes of their efforts, this documentary is a fascinating and unvarnished view into the creative processes of one of the world’s favorite and most legendary popular musicians. It's also essential viewing for die-hard Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers fans. Recommended.

Movie Review: Pearl Jam Twenty (2011). Written and Directed by Cameron Crowe.

Happy After-Thanksgiving day (also known by some as Black Friday). Once again, though, it’s also Rock and Roll Friday here at The Memory Cache (which is the fourth Friday of each month).

For today’s post, I’m looking backwards again to a documentary film (and DVD) from Cameron Crowe, one-time youthful rock journalist and now grown-up filmmaker, whose earliest exploits as a teenage rock fan and talented young writer were so brilliantly and amusingly portrayed (in mildly fictionalized form) in Almost Famous (2000), which is still one of my all-time favorite movies.

I’ve always had a mixed reaction to Pearl Jam. They are certainly the most successful long-lasting band to come out of the heady times here in Seattle popularly known as “the Grunge era”. They survived the rush of sudden celebrity, massive wealth, drugs and the punk rock fear of “selling out” to corporate interests which crushed other rock stars of the times, notably their friend Kurt Cobain of Nirvana. And of course, there is the civic pride in having a world-famous band of rock musicians whose origins are here in my own city. 

At the same time, I was never a big fan of punk rock, and was too “mature” in age by the early 1990s to identify with the whole new youth music scene in town, and the new bands coming out of it. I sort of missed the whole thing due to adulthood, and never dove into the various bands, the local clubs and the epoch-defining new music that was being created right downtown by local kids.

Eventually, though, I did hear some of Pearl Jam’s early songs, and they were powerful. It was also impossible not to be drawn to Eddie Vedder’s unique voice and vocal style – a rich, expressive baritone with the ability to range from high-pitched, loud screams to the softest, gentlest soothing tones. The band had the same versatility, switching from driving, passionate powerhouse rock to soulful, quieter and more introspective slower songs. Eventually I became a believer in the band and their music, if never a truly committed or devoted fan.

This was the spirit in which I approached Pearl Jam Twenty. The “twenty” in the title is for the twentieth anniversary of the band’s formation, and in that sense, the documentary was very much about a story that was not complete, since the band continues to sing and record new songs to this day. But it does very much capture the most important story about them and their storied career, which is how did this group of talented musicians find each other at this particular time, and turn their shared drive to make music into one of the most successful rock acts of our era?

Crowe does an excellent job of piecing it all together for us, using a combination of interviews with the band members and others around them, archival footage of past performances, and new performance footage. He begins with a tour through the young rock community of the 1980s in Seattle, the lifestyles of the musicians, and how the eventual members of the band met each other and first played together in other groupings.

From there, we move to the formation of Pearl Jam’s predecessor band, Mother Love Bone, and the crushing drug overdose death of their lead singer Andrew Wood. We learn how that tragedy led to the chain of fortuitous events that brought Vedder to the band from southern California.

Crowe takes us on an in-depth tour of the personalities, the clashes, the alliances and the shifting power within the band, as Vedder’s charismatic live presence and his songwriting began to push him increasingly into the spotlight and to increase his influence within the band. We learn how he and other band members weathered the stress of their sudden success, the pressures of touring, and several cataclysmic events, including a concert in Denmark where a crowd rush caused the accidental deaths of nine fans.

It’s all there – the trip from obscurity to celebrity, from poverty to wealth, the competition, the cooperation, the drugs, relationships, screw-ups and wild successes. It’s a fascinating portrait of how a band which at one time was considered “the greatest rock band in the world” survived the perils of success, and became a band of brothers who could continue to come together regularly to create great music and put on fantastic live shows over a period that now spans more than 30 years.

If you’re a fan of Pearl Jam, and haven’t seen this documentary, it’s probably essential for you to track it down and watch it, just to gather all the inside stories and details you didn’t know before. And if you’re not necessarily a fan but want to know more about them, and the Grunge era of rock in Seattle, or about what sorts of challenges musicians in top bands must face and overcome to succeed in the music business, this is a compelling film history of one of the most successful and popular rock bands of the past three decades. Recommended.

Movie Review: Thirteen Lives (2022). Amazon Prime.

This new movie directed by Ron Howard is an amazing and inspiring story based on a real-life incident from 2018, which we all probably remember (it was only four years ago), where the boys on a Thai youth soccer team and their coach were accidentally trapped deep in a cave, and were rescued under harrowing conditions in by an international volunteer effort that combined with the Thai governmental response.

There was enough coverage of this near-tragedy that turned out so well that any of us who followed it in the news probably know the outlines of the story. What Ron Howard has done is to provide us with a brilliant “you were there” docudrama, showing us an inside view of the boys, their families, the Thai governmental officials and Navy SEAL special operators, and especially the small group of foreign rescue divers (led by two late middle-aged British divers portrayed perfectly by Viggo Mortenson and Colin Farrell) who provided the expertise to devise and carry out the dangerous and improbable rescue, which ultimately saved the lives of all 12 boys and their coach.

In an event that went on for about two weeks, and involved more than 5,000 volunteers as well as legions of international press, it’s hard to capture all the dimensions of what it took to save the trapped boys, and how they got so stuck in the cave in the first place, but this film does a thorough job of revealing added dimensions of the story which I didn’t recall from the news coverage at the time. I will discuss some of them below, so if you'd prefer not to know in advance, you can stop reading now, and just see the movie (i.e. spoiler alert!).

I didn’t realize (or maybe remember), for example, that it was the torrential downpours of the Thai rainy season that caused the boys to become trapped, as a massive storm flooded the cave behind them right after they headed into it. This rain continued to flood the cave throughout the incident, causing treacherous rivers of water to flow rapidly through the cave so that only divers could pass through narrow tunnels that are ordinarily accessible by walking and crawling.

I definitely didn’t recall that there was a massive team of volunteers on top of the mountain, led by a Thai-American hydrology expert, who worked on plugging and diverting the continuous flow of rain water away from the cave, and into the surrounding agricultural fields. This ruined the crop for the local farmers, who were later compensated by the government for their losses, but who agreed to the flooding in the moment, in order to help save the boys' lives.

Most thrilling, though, are the scenes of the divers, including the international volunteer divers and the Thai SEALs, who repeatedly fought their way into and out of the cave to a depth of more than 3 kilometers, through narrow, dark passages full of sharp rocks and fast-moving water, to bring the boys food, medical aid, batteries and hope.

The scenes of the rescue itself are absolutely astonishing and terrifying, since the divers believed the only way to bring the boys out was to sedate them, put them into full-face scuba masks, and tow them in a sleeping state, so they wouldn’t panic underwater and accidentally kill themselves. It was an incredibly risky approach, which they took because there was no other option open to them that seemed to have any chance of success. 

I love a good story about courage and heroism, and people banding together to accomplish something decent and worthwhile for others in the face of incredible adversity and danger, especially outside the context of war. With all the trauma and darkness of the past few years, it’s uplifting to see whole communities of individuals from around the globe come together, and in some cases risk their own lives, to help others in distress. This is one of the most miraculous such true stories told in film I’ve seen in a while. Highly recommended.

Movie Review: Elvis (2022). On Demand.

A few weeks ago, I had a chance to watch the Elvis movie which came out earlier this year. It was definitely worthwhile and very well done, and brought a fresh perspective and new light to the Elvis story.

I can still remember grown-ups talking about “Elvis the Pelvis” in scandalized voices when I was a child in the late 1950s, but my excitement about rock music and its stars didn’t really get going until the Beatles arrived in early 1964. Even though I remember listening to the pop hits of the late 1950s and early 1960s as a boy, on my first transistor radio in bed late at night, Elvis and his origins story were a few years before my time. 

By the time of his Vegas residency years in the 1970s, Elvis had also become somewhat passe’ compared to all the newer music and musicians of the 1960s – most of the young people I knew weren’t paying much attention to him anymore. Yet everyone knows that Elvis was the King of rock and roll, and a singing movie star too (I do remember watching his movies). So what did those of us who were too young to be his fans miss?

This very good biopic does a nice job filling in the historical gaps, and providing a convincing depiction of the power of Presley and his music, his grip on his audience and especially his magnetic effect on the adoring girls and young women of the 1950s. In a world where Elvis impersonators are a joke, or a hackneyed Vegas lounge act, and a dime a dozen as party entertainers, I’m sure many people feared that Austin Butler, who portrays Presley both on and off stage, and actually performs some of his songs, would just be the latest in a long series of forgettable copies of the master.

But I don’t think he is at all. Butler is a very good character actor, who looks the part, and who is as convincing as Elvis the poor young boy, just looking for recognition and a lucky break as a country singer, as Elvis the electrifying singer and on-stage performer, driving the girls mad with the suggestion of those forbidden desires that so offended the repressed and uptight sexual norms of the 1950s.

In an early scene of the unknown Presley first breaking through a sleepy Country and Western audience’s torpor, and nearly starting a riot among the young girls who were present, Butler (as Presley) looks as surprised and delighted as anyone by the effect his performance is having on the audience. It’s an exciting and very illuminating scene, beautifully acted, that sets the table for what is about to happen to Presley's career and his life.

There are also a number of interesting social and political aspects of the Presley phenomenon, and its ultimate effect on the growth of rock and roll as well as American culture, that I didn’t really know, and was very interested to learn more about. It’s well known, for example, that rock and roll, as a form of music primarily rooted in black music and performers, didn’t break out to wider acceptance until white artists and audiences began taking to it.

This was definitely true, for Presley as well as other early rock artists. As the movie shows, Presley personally knew, liked and played with black musicians, and was heavily influenced by their songs and style, but ultimately became vastly more successful than most of the black players ever did because he was white. So was this just cultural expropriation?

Perhaps it was, but I didn’t realize the extent to which the conservative resistance to Presley, his musical style and his sexually suggestive performance moves was rooted in racism, at the time that the civil rights movement was just getting started in the South. The movie highlights the extent to which the authorities controlling venues and the success of Presley’s career were afraid of and despised the growing popularity of black music, and its increasing traction with white kids. And they made Presley pay for it, by reviling him in the press and closing off venues to his shows.

The most shocking result of this racist backlash was Presley’s forced enlistment and two year stint in the U.S. Army just as his career was taking off, which his manager and promoter Colonel Parker (portrayed convincingly by Tom Hanks, very much against type) devised as a way to “cleanse” Presley of his reputation as an “un-American” friend of blacks (and thereby probably also a Communist, according to the twisted political logic of the early Cold War era).

The movie as a whole, in fact, focuses heavily on the cynical role Colonel Parker played in creating the Presley phenomenon and hysteria, while also corruptly benefiting from it, and manipulating and deceiving Presley throughout most of his career. It’s a sad tale, but one which is inseparable from the larger story of Presley’s own successes, artistic genius and setbacks.

As far as I know, there’s never been another cinematic treatment of the story of the King’s rise and fall, and his indispensable role at the dawn of the rock and roll era. This is a very entertaining and informative attempt, well-acted and nicely presented. There are too many years to cover, and too many events, to fully explore every detail of Presley’s decades-long life and career, but this film does a more than credible job of depicting and interpreting the man and the legend. Highly recommended.

Movie Review: Summerland (2020). Netflix.

This pleasing family drama was a historical period piece about England during the Blitz in World War II, exploring one more of the endless possibilities of circumstance, individuals and relationships that faced life-changing pressures under the savage bombing attacks of a brutal megalomaniac and his industrialized war machine.

I’ve often wondered of late whether the war in Ukraine will spawn a very similar literature over the course of the next hundred years. If it does, I hope they translate the best of it to English. There are few such similar historical analogies before or since World War II, of a modern peaceful urban population suddenly facing an unjust onslaught of death and destruction from a murderous dictator. The millions of Ukrainians who have had to flee with the non-combatant members of their families, or stay and fight and endure, will have countless compelling and dramatic stories to tell, or provide the scenarios for fictional versions of what they and their entire society are currently experiencing.

In Summerland, an irritable young female English writer (peevishly played by Gemma Arterton) in the rural seaside west of England is assigned a young boy evacuee (Lucas Bond) from wartime London during the worst of the bombing, to care for and harbor in her little house. The boy arrives with no warning, and is presented to her by a local civil defense volunteer, who offers no opportunity for the writer to decline the duty of hosting the uninvited pre-teen guest.

In the beginning, the young woman behaves predictably badly. She tries ignoring the boy, and leaves him more or less to fend for himself. But of course as any parent who has lived with a child underfoot knows, that’s not a very promising strategy in the face of a real and present young person with traumas, individual needs and a personality that require an adult hand, direction and wisdom to survive, develop and prosper.

With time and passing events in their daily lives, the writer and the child start to build a bond, a sense of family and caring for each other. And to her credit, she slowly manages to become the generous person and responsible adult the boy needs, even before she learns the surprising news about the real personal connection in her own life that had brought the boy to her.

It’s a charming and heartwarming story, with a happy ending and plot twists I can’t reveal (spoiler alert). It is definitely worth watching, especially if you’re feeling a need for stories of people under duress rising to the occasion, and being kind to each other in the face of unimaginable horrors and dangers. Recommended.

Movie Review: Taylor Swift’s Journey to Fearless (2011). Taylor Swift.

It’s Rock and Roll Friday again here at The Memory Cache, so today I’m highlighting a decade-old documentary and concert video of one of the greatest rock stars (if not the greatest) of the recent musical past and present. I hope you enjoy it!

I might be mistaken, but it seems to me that full-length concert videos of performances and tours by major musical stars are probably becoming a thing of the past. Instead, these days we tend to get mostly brief videos of single songs performed and recorded at shows. These short live song clips usually go straight to YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, and aren't usually all that well compiled or edited.

If it is the end of the era of full-length rock concert tour videos, that would be very unfortunate. A well-made concert video captures much of the excitement of a live performance, with better sound quality and viewer-adjustable sound levels, and crystal-clear images of the performers as good as or better than the view you would get from front-row seats, especially when seen on a large-screen HD TV with a decent sound system. And these videos often capture enough of the joy of hearing one well-loved song after another, played by our favorite musicians before a live audience of their devoted fans, to convey some of the special energy and excitement of the large rock concert experience.

I have a small library of DVDs (remember those?) of concert tours by some of my favorite rock stars. One of the best and more recent such videos in my collection is Taylor Swift’s Journey to Fearless, originally released as a three-part documentary.

It begins with a bit of a biography of Swift, from early childhood to the beginning of her now-legendary career as one of the top country, rock and pop stars of our lifetimes. It is then followed by a full-length film of her performing songs in her Fearless Tour, the first tour in which she was the featured attraction rather than the opening act for more established country stars.

Ms. Swift released a new album last week, Midnights, her tenth studio album. She is by now such a megastar and mature singer-songwriter, musician, entrepreneur, producer, director, social media influencer, and artist that it is hard to believe that someone with so many professional talents and accomplishments to her credit is still only 32 years old.

I “discovered” Taylor Swift's music well along in her career. I only started listening to her in 2020, with the release of her pandemic-era smash hit album Folklore, which immediately won her a Grammy. That was the first music of hers that I’d noticed, even though of course I knew she was a huge pop star, who everyone had been talking about for a long while.

Of course, it isn’t surprising that I hadn’t paid attention to her before. She and her storied career really belong to other more recent generations, the Millennials and maybe Gen Z particularly, and her fan base skews heavily female. But even as a male rock music fan from an earlier era, I was immediately taken with her evocative storytelling, her lyrics, her voice, the range of emotions she conveys, her sense of humor, the musical styles she has embraced and explored, and the sheer magnetism of her public personality. So as a newcomer to her and her music, I bought a DVD copy of Journey to Fearless online to get more of a sense of her as a musician and performer than I could get just by listening to her studio albums.

It turned out that this video provides not just concert footage, but considerable insight into many aspects of the rise of this truly remarkable artist. The documentary begins by tracing the path she followed in becoming a star, from her childhood obsession with writing and performing songs for her family and friends, her family’s move to Nashville when she was 14 to support her relentless adolescent drive to build a life and career as a musician, her first lucky breaks, her mistakes and opportunities getting a recording contract, and the release of her first album, the eponymously named Taylor Swift.

From there, we learn about her early touring experiences opening for other country music acts, and the explosive release of her second album Fearless, which was soon charting massive sales to her increasingly energized fan base. We then discover how the success of these first two albums led to her first headlining tour, the Fearless Tour, which played at arenas around the world for more than a year in 2009 and 2010.  

At the end of the pre-concert documentary sections, we learn how much Swift participated in creating many aspects of the show and the tour, in addition to the musical performances. She apparently provided direction and inspiration for the construction of the stunning stage design and lighting, which were based on her love of theatrics and fairy tales. She is credited in the video as a producer for sets and stage design, the music, the dancing, the costumes, the video production, and pretty much every other aspect of the tour and the film documentary made about it.

When I saw the credits at the end of the video, I was simply amazed that a new artist not yet even 21 years old was so thoroughly involved in creating every aspect of a complex, sophisticated tour and multi-media production, which ultimately grossed more than $66 million, put on 118 arena shows across the USA and abroad, and was seen by more than a million fans.  

When I watched the performance portion of the video, I was similarly astonished. In performing 13 of her by-now iconic songs from the tour, we see her singing, backed by a tight band of top-flight rock and country musicians, and accompanying herself beautifully on the piano, as well as playing a large variety of acoustic and electric guitars, a banjo, a ukulele, and probably a few other instruments I’ve forgotten. She also often danced, along with a small troupe of professional dancers and backup singers, and performed some short musical theatrical scenes in support of the stories of some of the songs. At one point she even flew high over the crowd in an elevated lift, singing her parts perfectly without missing a beat.

The lighting was spectacular, the special effects continuous. She reputedly did roughly eight costume changes per show, and she was the center of attention every moment at every single concert, surrounded by her rapt and adoring fans, many of them young girls her own age and younger, who  were there past bedtime with their happy parents. It was like Disney World on steroids, combined with a fantastic rock and roll extravaganza, all as envisioned and performed by a brilliant multi-dimensional talent and precocious megastar, who was only 20 years old at the time, and doing all this for the first time in her career.

We’ve all been hearing about Taylor Swift since she was 15 years old – it’s hard to believe it’s already been so many years since she first appeared. But this powerful documentary and concert video demonstrate clearly how and why the blockbuster career of this unique pop music and cultural icon came to be, and why she continues to fascinate and thrill her millions of loyal fans around the world. Highly recommended.