It started last night with a George Winston concert. Perhaps because he records on the Windham Hill label, Winston gets placed in the “New Age” category. (Question: [...]]]> There seems to be a cultural convergence happening here. Or maybe I’m just noticing because four of my favorite things are involved — music, books, film and hockey.

It started last night with a George Winston concert. Perhaps because he records on the Windham Hill label, Winston gets placed in the “New Age” category. (Question: Since “New Age” has been with us for decades, is it still “new”?) Or it could simply be that Winston invokes such a variety of styles in his solo piano work (plus a bit of solo slack key guitar and even solo harmonica) that he would otherwise fall into “unclassifiable.” I’ve been a fan for a number of years but seeing him live is another experience altogether. It is simply impossible for any recording to truly reproduce the overtones and harmonics he achieves with his sustains.

Thjis morning a moderated a session of the Festival of Books on Peter Orner’s Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives. Tomorrow I moderate sessions by Hampton Sides (Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin), NPR’s Deborah Amos (Eclipse of the Sunnis: Power, Exile, and Upheaval in the Middle East) and Kurt Kemper of Dakota State University on “College Football & World War II.” I’m also hoping to attend a few sessions in my down time.

I have hopes (slim but still there) of making it down to Sioux City to catch a couple games in the USHL Fall Classic. I’ve gone too long without live hockey and am in need of a fix. As if that weren’t enough to attract my attention, this is also the weekend of the first Reel Dakota Film Festival. Unfortunately, for both events their schedule and mine don’t coincide very well.

I’m not going to complain, though. Even though I may not be able to attend everything I’d like, it’s nice to see so much going on.

Steven Wright

Now My Cousin Vinny may not wow a [...]]]> It’s been too long since I’ve had a post in this admittedly infrequent series. So as kind of transition from the legal oddities that have been appearing each Friday, I thought it appropriate to talk about one of my favorite movies about lawyers — My Cousin Vinny.

Now My Cousin Vinny may not wow a lot of people. While Marisa Tomeia won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in the film and it gets an 86 percent rating at Rotten Tomatoes, it receives only a 75 percent rating from “top critics.” But when it comes to lawyers, the film is a hit. In fact, it finished third on the ABA Journal‘s 2008 list of the 25 Greatest Legal Movies.

Distilled to its essence, two college students are charged with murdering a clerk at a “Sac-O-Suds” convenience store in rural Alabama. Thinking the police are talking to them about shoplifting a can of tuna, they inadvertently confess. Bill (Ralph Macchio of Karate Kid fame) has a cousin, Vincent “Vinny” Gambini, who graduated from the Brooklyn Academy of Law, a correspondence school, six years earlier. Thing is, Vinny, played by Joe Pesci in inimitable Pesci style, just passed the New York bar six weeks ago after six tries. Still, he travels to Alabama with his girlfriend, Mona Lisa Vito (Tomei), to represent them. Their personalities and dress not only make them stand out, it puts Vinny at odds with the trial judge, the last role played by Fred Gwynne, best known as TV’s Herman Munster.

Why is the film such as hit with lawyers? Because the comedic farce lets Vinny do and say things any lawyer who’s been in the courtroom would love — or has wanted — to do or say. Hs response to the prosecution’s opening statement? “Everything that guy just said is bullshit. Thank you.” Clearly, the most concise and brilliant opening statement in legal history. Or there’s the following colloquy, the last line of which is sotto voce:

Judge: I don’t like your attitude.

Vinny: So what else is new?

Judge: I’m holding you in contempt of court.

Vinny [to Bill]: Now there’s a fucking surprise.

Vinny struggles throughout with procedure and finding attire that matches his style and the judge’s rules. The trial itself is a wonderful farce and Vinny’s cross-examination of the prosecution witnesses is excellent, including destroying one witness’ testimony by referring to “magic grits.” Yet there’s plenty of other humor outside the courtroom, much of which stems from Vinny’s Brooklyn tough guy tone.

For example, when he first meets Bill’s friend, Stan, in their prison cell, there is a deftly scripted misunderstanding about prison rape. Scenes with Vinny and J.T., a local yokel who loses $200 to Lisa in a game of pool, are classic. In their first encounter, a “negotiation” ensues when J.T. tells Vinny he will only get the money “over my dead body.” “You like to renegotiate as you go along, don’t you?, ” Vinny says. “Well here’s my counter-offer: do I have to kill you? What if I were just to kick the ever lovin’ shit out of you?”

Whether inside the courtroom or out, Vinny’s and Lisa’s take on the law and life give My Cousin Vinny a unique style and flavor. And perhaps because of how it satirizes the trial process, it is one of the few films I can watch over and over and laugh out loud each time.

My Cousin Vinny

Written, produced and directed by its star, Warren [...]]]> Love stories don’t rank well on my list of preferred movies. When you get right down to it, though, one of my favorite movies — Reds — is just that, a love story, albeit one played out on an epic background. It’s the background that gets me.

Written, produced and directed by its star, Warren Beatty, Reds tells the story of John “Jack” Reed, best known in the U.S. as the author of Ten Days That Shook the World, his firsthand account of the 1917 Russian Revolution. Clocking in at well over three hours, radical American politics and the Russian Revolution are the stage on which Beatty tells the story of Reed and his wife, Louise Bryant. Beatty infuses the film with history not just with the story and setting but by interspersing snippets of interviews with Reed’s and Bryant’s contemporaries. While I love the historic elements of the movie, it makes Reed and Bryant characters the audience can care about.

Released in 1981, the movie got 12 Academy Award nominationss, including best picture, best actor (Beatty), best actress (Keaton), best supporting actor (Jack Nicholson) and best supporting actress (Jean Stapleton). Of those five nominations, Stapleton was the only winner, deservedly earned for her portrayal of Emma Goldman. Beatty won the best director Oscar, though. Rotten Tomatoes gives the movie a 94 percent rating, saying that, “as it continues to age, the film only continues to grow in relevance, assuring its rightful place at the top of the Hollywood canon.”

As noted, I love the history aspect. Moreover, not only does Beatty portray that history in the epic cinema format many of the scenes dealing with the revolution and its aftermath invoke the larger than life approach Soviet filmmakers used in their own movies of Revolution. Beatty also does a fine job portraying the earnest idealism of Reed, a journalist who would actually end up being buried in the Kremlin Wall in recognition of his contributions to the Soviet state. But the real star of the film is Keaton.

Keaton certainly wasn’t a newcomer. After all, Annie Hall, several other Woody Allen movies and the first two Godfather movies (the only two worth watching) all preceded Reds. But Keaton rises to another level here. Her Bryant is mercurial and fiercely independent but also matures over the course of the movie, perhaps being even more of a realist than Reed. This could well be Keaton’s finest performance.

The movie, which was not released on DVD until 2006, does not glorify Reed or the Bolsheviks. In fact, the Bolsheviks come across as having more interest in the power of the state than the individual and straying from the dream of the workers’ collective. In fact, even Emma Goldman — whom the U.S. deported to Russia — wants to leave Russia because she sees this becoming another repressive government. As a NYT film critic wrote at the time the film was released, “‘Reds’ is not about Communism, but about a particular era, and a particularly moving kind of American optimism that had its roots in the 19th century.”

It is an optimism that now seems almost naive: the formation of Socialist and Communist parties in the American political system, expressing a desire to unite the working class and elevate perceived social good over capitalism. Yet another part rings all too true. Americans are great at talking about change. Actually working to bring it about is another thing altogether. Beatty’s Reed is willing to do that work and advocate that agenda internationally. Perhaps that’s why the Reed-Bryant relationship is the focus of the movie. After all, why would any red-blooded moviegoer fork over good money to see a story about an American who is, horror of horrors, a Communist?

Emma Goldman (Jean Stapleton), Reds

“Ratso” Rizzo, played by Dustin Hoffman, and Joe Buck (Jon Voight) are crossing a street in downtown New York City against [...]]]> For whatever reason, I don’t recall where or when I first saw Midnight Cowboy. But I do know that from that very first time, one scene and piece of dialogue has stuck with me.

“Ratso” Rizzo, played by Dustin Hoffman, and Joe Buck (Jon Voight) are crossing a street in downtown New York City against a “Don’t Walk” sign. When Ratso is almost hit by a cab, he glares at the driver, pounds on the hood and yells, “I’m walkin’ here! I’m walkin’ here!” The next line isn’t too bad either. He says to Buck, “Actually, that ain’t a bad way to pick up insurance, you know.”

I always think of that scene — over which there is disagreement whether it was scripted or ad libbed — when I hear or think of the movie. Released in 1969, the film is its own cultural icon. The core plot is fairly simple. Buck, a Texan who thinks he’s quite the love stud, comes to New York to seduce and live off rich women. As NYC is wont to do, his dreams are crushed. He ends up being taken in (using the phrase in more than one sense) by Rizzo, a streetwise and lame homeless person. With content dealing with sex and drugs, not to mention male prostitution, the movie was originally rated “X.” Yet Midnight Cowboy became the only X-rated movie to win the Oscar for Best Picture. (When it was re-released in 1971, the rating was changed to “R” without a single change in the movie.)

Both Hoffman and Voight were nominated for the Oscar for Best Actor — losing to John Wayne in True Grit. My favorite line ended up 27th on the American Film Institute’s list of the 100 best movie quotes. Hoffman ranked seventh on Premiere Magazine‘s list of 100 Greatest Performances of All Time for his portrayal of the “persevering, slumping, filthy, sweaty, rodent-like tubercular street hustler.” The appropriately named Ratso came in 33rd on the magazine’s list of the 100 Greatest Movie Characters of All Time. The film itself was named to the National Film Registry in 1994, was 36th on the AFI’s 1998 list of America’s 100 greatest movies (but dropped to 43rd ten years later) and gets a 90 percent rating at Rotten Tomatoes.

But it really is the characters who make this film. Roger Ebert summed it up quite well, saying “a 1994 viewing of the film confirms my original opinion, expressed in 1969, that the movie as a whole doesn’t live up to its parts. And that Joe and Ratso rise above the material, taking on a reality of their own while the screenplay detours into the fashionable New York demimonde.” It’s how Joe and Ratso rise above the material that is enthralling.

Hoffman’s Ratso is unquestionably one of the best performances of his career. We see and understand the relationship between him and Buck as it develops and what it grows to mean to each. Buck may be naive and Ratso a seedy street hustler but both have dreams. Despite — or perhaps because — those dreams and life turn more nightmarish, their relationship becomes stronger. Even though neither achieves his dream, both characters are unforgettable.

Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman), Midnight Cowboy

At first, you may not think this is [...]]]> There’s a couple reasons American History X makes my favorite movies list. One is simply that it’s a compelling look at a disturbing topic — neo-Nazism among young American men. Another is that it was a major step in Edward Norton becoming one of my favorite actors.

At first, you may not think this is Norton, especially if you recall him as Aaron in the 1996 film Primal Fear. Released just two years later, American History X presents a bulked up, heavily muscled Norton. It is an amazing transformation. Combined with Norton’s talents as an actor, it helps make his character, Derek Vinyard, more believable. Norton earned plenty of best actor nominations for his performance, including the Oscar (won that year by Roberto Benigni for Life is Beautiful, one of the worst Academy Award decisions in my memory).

Vinyard is a leading member of a skinhead group in Los Angeles. Despite being very intelligent, he makes no bones about his hatred. To him, every problem in America is due to “social parasites,” the “Blacks, Browns, Yellow whatever.” Vinyard ends up in prison after brutally murdering a black man. Although the story takes a road that is almost too pat when Vinyard realizes the error of his ways while in prison and then he is paroled on the condition he keep his younger brother from following the same path, the film is still powerful. The story is told from the timeframe following Vinyard’s release from prison and, while that is in color, all flashbacks were filmed in black and white, adding a unique approach to a film about race.

Rotten Tomatoes gives it an 83 percent rating, with a consensus that it is a “compelling and provocative story led by an excellent performance by Edward Norton.” It is in the range of “generally favorable reviews” at Metacritic, but users of the site give it a 9 out of a possible 10. I am clearly in the latter group, believing that while American History X has its flaws, it is an impressive and disturbing look at race and hatred in America.

“Danny Vinyard” (Edward Furlong), American History X