The Zeitgeist

Will the real Judy please sit down? That's Zellweger on the right.

Movies for Solitary Confinement

This appeared in print and online around April 1, 2020 during the Corona Virus Lockdown.

Since most of us have been forced into “solitary confinement” due to the onset of the viral apocalypse there are a lot of hours to fill when not trying to work or trying not to overeat (good luck with that!). Because most every professional and amateur sport has been cancelled, this leaves movies and TV to fill much of the gap.

The profusion of choices is practically paralyzing. When I was young (in the 60s and 70s when dinosaurs roamed the earth) we had just a handful of TV channels and networks and there always seemed to be something to watch, often as a communal experience with the whole family encircling a 19-inch black and white Zenith tube TV. Now we have a bazillion channels and web streaming services available on our big screens, desktops, laptops and phones and sometimes it can seem like less is worth watching. Where are the equivalent of Samantha and Jeanie?

To kill tons of time while staving off The Plague, I’ve compiled a list of on-demand and streaming movies that can soak up a whole lot of hours – So here we go. Rankings are between one and five stars.

MOVIES:

Judy (2019) ★★★★★

Renée Zellweger quite literally becomes Judy Garland, albeit Garland towards the end of her sadly too-short short life. Set in 1968 the film mostly focuses on her highly successful last series of concerts in London and all the accumulated challenges, setbacks, depressions, anxieties and neuroses that have all piled up to produce an artist at her breaking point.

Zellweger embodies Garland as did Gary Oldman in his portrayal of Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour (2017, also ★★★★★) to such an extent that she won the Academy Award for Best Actress along with the Golden Globe, BAFTA and Screen Actors Guild trophies for the same category. She swept all major and minor awards across the spectrum and when you see this movie, you’ll know why.

Zellweger’s portrayal of Garland encompasses not just drama but also song – she treats us to a bravura array of Garland hits (Zellweger proved she could sing back when she starred in Chicago (2002 ★★★★) but this level of song mastery goes straight to the ethereal. Her Judy Garland is affecting, touching and haunting and you will be left profoundly moved. There are flashbacks to Judy as a girl and adolescent (played competently by Darci Shaw) but the real action takes place in the late 60s present. The British supporting cast lends gravity and verisimilitude.

This is a must see if you like rock bio heartbreak and redemption stories like Ray (★★★★★), Bohemian Rhapsody (★★★★), Walk The Line (★★★★) and What’s Love Got To Do With It (★★★★★) all of which are highly worthwhile seeing as well.

One Upon A Time in Hollywood ★★★★

Staying in the world of the late 60s, Director Quentin Tarantino brilliantly recreates 1969 LA and Hollywood right down to the smallest paper clip. I’m in love equally with the performances of Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie as with DiCaprio’s cream-colored 1966 Cadillac Coupe de Ville. How do I know every detail of Tarantino’s 1969 is correct? Because I was alive and 11 years old at the time.

Brad Pitt, although not having top billing, really anchors the film. Pitt won Best Supporting Actor at the Academy Awards, Golden Globes, BAFTA and Screen Actors Guild. The film itself won Best Picture at the Golden Globes. Pitt made this movie as a 55-year-old and to say on him 55 looks 42 is an understatement. We should all look so good.

This is a bromance between a fast-fading TV star (DiCaprio) and his faithful sidekick and stunt double (Pitt) that echoes the relationship between John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson in Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994 ★★★★★) although with the violence spaced out and themed differently. In the Uma Thurman role is Margot Robbie (Wolf of Wall Street, 2013, also with DiCaprio, ★★★★) playing the late Sharon Tate. “Once Upon A Time” takes the Charles Manson-Sharon Tate Murders in a different direction and with an alternate story line full of twists, turns and surprises.

There are two versions of this film, the full-on version is 2 hours and 41 minutes – (that will chew-up time!) but there is an airplane cut that’s about a half hour shorter which benefits from tighter editing and a quicker pace. Try to rent that one if you can. The only reason this film gets four instead of five stars is because it’s about 20 minutes too long, but I sympathize with the director, what with all these great performances, where can you cut? Any Tarantino film is worth seeing and this latest one is no exception.

Ad Astra ★★★★

Perfect for the “end times” we’re living in, “Ad Astra,” (2019) has the fate of the whole universe in play – all life as we know it is in the balance. Brad Pitt (he had a busy 2019) rockets from 1969 to an unspecified future, perhaps 50 years from now, so about 2069. Pitt plays a heroic astronaut who is tasked with traveling out to Neptune to possibly confront his maybe alive or dead father (played with stoic derangement by Tommy Lee Jones) who headed a space station out at the edge of the solar system where Space Command thinks the cosmic threat is coming from.

The movie also retreads Donald Sutherland as a former friend and colleague of Jones in the quest to stop the threat. “Ad Astra,” Latin for “to the stars,” is evocative of Stanley Kubric’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968 ★★★★★) probably one of the most creative, original and innovative science fiction movies of all time. In “Ad Astra” as with “2001” we are presented with existential ponderings on the of meaning of life and of the nature of life itself. There are plenty of parallels including commercial flights to the moon (on Virgin Atlantic in “Astra” versus the defunct Pan Am in “2001”), vast stretches of uncooperative space and a lot to go over again and again in your mind after viewing the film. Pitt plays a retrained, sardonic space hero in a tight, mature performance. Excellent special effects and cinematography.

Another two lonely astronaut in crisis movies worth seeing are Gravity (2013 ★★★★) starring Sandra Bullock, George Clooney and Ed Harris which won seven Oscars including Best Director for Alfonso Cuarón and The Martian (2015 ★★★★) directed by Ridley Scott and starring Matt Damon, also a seven Academy Award-winner which is essentially “Castaway” in space with Damon and Tom Hanks tied for best latter day Robinson Crusoe.

Ford vs. Ferrari ★★★★★

Matt Damon and Christian Bale star as famed performance car guru Carroll Shelby and legendary race car driver Ken Miles respectively in this seemingly “gearhead” movie that women will actually like, believe it or not. As much a car movie as an “accomplish the impossible story against crazy odds and establishment guys in suits” who are always getting in the way of real vision and innovation. As the title suggests this is about Ford Motor Company taking on Ferrari at the Grand Prix of Le Mans back in the mid to late 60s and doing what no one thought was remotely possible, especially in the time they had to do it. The movie keeps you on the edge of your seat and you also feel like you’re a part of the action.

There’s great chemistry between Damon and Bale, two of the best actors of our time, giving highly charismatic performances. The race scenes are probably the best since the original Ben Hur back in the late 50s. “Ford/Ferrari” garnered two Academy Awards along with a bazillion nominations for best everything. 2019 was a highly competitive year and in another time this film would have seen more awards.

If you’d like to see Christian Bale in his first starring role (as good as anything since) rent Empire of The Sun (1987 ★★★★★) Steven Spielberg’s WWII coming-of-age epic set in Japanese-occupied China. John Malkovich and Joe Pantoliano are also great in the film.

Motherless Brooklyn ★★★★

Edward Norton directs, stars and co-wrote the screenplay for this modern Film Noir set in 1950s New York City. Norton plays a private detective with a highly visible case of Tourette's Syndrome, so to say he’s viewed as quirky and totally underestimated by all and sundry persons around him is an understatement. Norton’s character has Tourette’s, but he plays it with tremendous heart and pathos so that you never really feel sorry for him (and certainly don’t laugh at him) but on the contrary with each passing scene come to admire him more and more.

Norton gets all the visuals right about 50s New York, the clothes, cars, streets, dialog. He’s got a great cast backing him up featuring Bruce Willis, Alec Baldwin, Bobby Cannavale and the always terrific Willem Dafoe. It’s a real old-time gumshoe whodunnit and you’ll never guess the end until the end. While “Motherless” wasn’t nominated for any Academy Awards, this was a major omission as it deserves far more recognition.

For a “Bizarro World” Film Noir also featuring Bruce Willis, check out Sin City (2005 ★★★★) directed by Quentin Tarantino along with Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez. The film is based on a graphic novel by Miller and it actually looks like a charcoal or pencil drawing with amplified black and white cinematography with a 50s riff. “Sin” features Mickey Rourke, Clive Owen, Jessica Alba at her peak (MTV Movie Award Winner), Rosario Dawson, the late Powers Boothe (“Deadwood”), Michael Clarke Duncan and even Rutger Hauer. Winner at the Cannes Film Festival for Best Visuals. Not for the squeamish. Guys and teens will love it.

Finally, for those of you singles cooped-up solo, or those in need of a semi chick-flick, a real apocalyptic romcom would be Seeking a Friend for the End of the World (2012 ★★★ ½) where Steve Carell and Keira Knightley stumble into one another’s arms as an asteroid heads towards Earth. There’s no real sci-fi in here, but a lot of tenderness, empathy and heart. Carell often plays the emotionally down on his luck dude and this film is no different. Even though oblivion is neigh we’re not afraid because love burns eternal.

The Zeitgeist

Take the Paddles of Life to Your Daily Paper
(Good ideas for weeklies as well)

(This appeared online in December 2019)

With the constant and inexorable decline in print ad dollars and the persistent erosion of circulation and market share, perhaps it's time for daily newspaper publishers to start thinking out of the box and reach for a totally new print paradigm. Print publishing finds itself in a similar place to where radio was with the advent of television. For decades, radio ruled the broadcast roost but couldn’t compete just delivering to the ear what people wanted to see with their eyes. Radio had to reinvent itself, and it did. The reinvention was so good that radio has been and still is a thriving industry even today. Book publishing has survived the onslaught of the tablet and e-reader. We can learn from both experiences what print needs to do to remain competitive along with adapting some new ideas as well. For daily papers in particular, we need to develop a whole new model as opposed to just slashing costs left, right and sideways. Here are some ideas: People like print, they just don't want to pay for it. Give up on the downward sliding paid circulation model and like radio and most of the internet, provide the print edition for free. To maintain audited circulation, move to controlled/requested circulation where readers sign-up that they want it. Deliver via the US Postal Service and stop using the dwindling and often unreliable supply of carriers. Provide some additional free papers via news racks, boxes and at key locations in your market. The focus here is on reach and market share. If your share of the households in your market has declined to 10, 15 or 20 percent then you need to hit the 50 percent threshold to be viable as an advertising medium and relevant editorially. If you're not hovering at least at 50 percent, why should anyone advertise with you? Why would talented young people want to work for you if you're invisible? Even better if you can get to total market coverage of 90 to 100 percent. Reduce publishing frequency -- Unless you're in a seriously major market, stop thinking it's 1979. Reduce publishing frequency to 3X a week (Wednesdays for food, Fridays for the weekend and your Sunday paper). This will have the effect of saving you money on printing, delivery and every other assorted manufacturing cost. Additionally it will force consolidation of existing advertising on your busiest days. Newspapers need to recreate "The Thud Factor," thicker papers make a visual impact and create communal peer pressure to advertise (everyone goes where everyone goes!) and will also give you a more impressive editorial hole making you more of a must read (more about that below)."Thrice weekly, but never weakly." Local, Local, Local. Most folks get their breaking news online, on the radio or TV. Drop all the AP and national and world wire stuff. Put those pages and those resources to work on expanding local and state coverage. Put world and national as a summary or a briefs column if you must have it. Stop trying to compete with electronic media for breaking news. If you run national or world stories it should tie-in to your local market and be heavy on analysis. Add more lifestyles (especially food and restaurants), people, local business and sports coverage. Everyone likes to see themselves in the paper. News about Trump they can get anywhere. Promote evening reading -- Who has time in the morning to sit down with a paper for 20 to 40 minutes? Everyone is dashing off to work, school or other activities. Promote reading after work as a way to calm down and relax from the day, or after dinner or before bed (as a way to help sleep -- screens are known to inhibit sleep, reading things on paper helps it). Perhaps consider becoming and afternoon/evening paper even. But if you are keeping it local and heavy on features or sports, it won't matter when you deliver so long as it's before 5pm. The cable news networks all have higher ratings at night than in the morning or during the day. Newspapers should emulate this. Drop your ad rates -- See what Google and Facebook are charging locally. What are the rates for a local radio, cable or broadcast TV campaign? Make sure your rates are lower than everyone else so that it's a no-risk, no-brainier for people to include you in their media buys. Go for volume (think McDonald's) instead of a few ads a day. Offer even more discounts for multiple pages or inserts. Bonus web ads free for print contracts. Offer free (yes, I said that) classifieds for consumers to promote more readership and regain market share. Heavily discount business classifieds. Oh, and make sure your display ads LOOK GOOD and are written well (Design2Pro’s “Ad Factory” can help you in the looks department) so when the advertiser looks good, ads get more readership and more response. This leads to happier advertisers who'll spend more money with you. At the end of the day it's about image, exposure and results for the advertiser and more revenue for you.

This is no time for newspaper publishers to walk around sulking, complacent or resigned to defeat. People are still reading a lot of printed books -- because the books have content not available elsewhere (again, drop the national and world wire coverage, increase original content) and because people have screen fatigue. I work at a computer or smart phone screen all day. By 5 or 6pm my eyes have absolutely had it. It's comforting to read from paper after staring at screens all day. One final thought -- remember as kids your mother would warn you not to "sit on top of the TV because you'll go blind?” Well, that's what most of us are doing every day, sitting on top of the screen. Promote the idea of R&R for the eyes and peace of mind that comes from the printed word. If book publishers can do it, so can you.

The Zeitgeist

 Davening in The Hall of the Dead

This story appeared in many Jewish newspapers in the US in September, 2019

The lights are lit bracketing the bronze plaque bearing the name of Herbert Barbanel, Nechemia ben Avraham Moshe. It’s up front on the right, towards the bottom of one of the giant yahrtzeit frames that fill nearly all the wall space in this small old beit medrash.

When in New York (I spend most of the year in Miami) you can find me in the second row to the right, perpendicular to the plaques of my parents. By Long Island standards this is an old room, built in the early 1950s. It has all-original brass chandeliers and casement stained glass windows. The dedication plaque commemorates the donors’ parents who were nifter in the Shoah. By Brooklyn or Manhattan measure, it’s not that old of a room. Yet this space houses what seems like the names of thousands of the dearly departed spanning most of the 20^th and up through the first 20 percent of the 21^st Century. Vacancies are in short supply. If you want to be memorialized in this small sanctuary, you’d better reserve your spot pretty soon.

Before, during and after davening my eyes wander across the walls. I see the parents, grandparents and other relatives of most of the Five Towners I know along with other members of the shul who I knew back in the day.  If you ever want to feel relatively insignificant in the panoply of Jewish life, just spend time in this room. Life is finite and it’s molded in bronze. The plethora of yahrtzeit plaques makes tangible King Solomon’s words in Kohelet that if you want to understand the meaning of life, visit a house of mourning not a house of partying. Like on the Mount of Olives when all the wall space is gone they’ll have to start double and triple stacking.

There are also very sizable metal plaques recognizing those who built the shul in 1950-51 and then those who built the annex with the social hall in 1972. All of these leaders of the community from those days are long gone. It gives you a sense of how short the lease on life truly is. In 25 or 30 years, the names of those who paid for the recent renovation will also seem like ancient history to those milling about the lobbies.

Herbert Barbanel was my father and his second yahrtzeit is coming up fast. To everyone but his kids my father was variously known as Herb, Herbie, Chem or Chemki depending on who you were in the hierarchy of family and friends and when you met him; Mr. Barbanel if you please in business. I first met him in the Fall of 1962 when I had just turned four years old. He and my Mom met and started dating on Labor Day weekend of that year. To my mother it was imperative that whomever she dated would hit it off with her son and want to be my father. No evil or indifferent stepfathers need apply. Dad fell in love with my mother and with me. We came as a package. He committed to the two us at the same time and he lived up to that commitment in heart, word and deed from the very first day together to his very last.

A real Horatio Alger story, my Dad grew up dirt poor in Brownville, Brooklyn. His father died when he was seven. He went to work at an early age and attended high school and college at night. A member of “The Greatest Generation,” he served his country in the Navy (stationed in Norman, Oklahoma of all places) during the last year and a half of World War II. He scratched and fought his way up from nothing, ultimately to sit with princes of government and captains of industry and commerce.

In 2017 when Dad passed at 90, he had some famous company. Martin Landau (89), Fats Domino (89), Hugh Hefner (91), Harry Dean Stanton (91), Jerry Lewis (91), Adam West (88), Roger Moore (89), Don Rickles (90) and Chuck Barris (87). Fame can be fleeting indeed and soon forgotten. But love, values and Torah endure in the newsfeed of forever.

Like many in his cohort, Dad lived a life of quiet heroism – it’s no small matter to send kids to Jewish day school (as many know all too well today), to camp, to Israel, to college and grad school. Dad was not very Jewishly educated but it was a priority for him to send my brothers and I to get the education he missed out on. They say a mark of a successful Jewish life is if a person has Jewish grandchildren. Dad lived to see those grandchildren and a great-grandchild – all Jewishly committed. Dad, like Noach was “righteous in his time,” the 1950s-1980s was an era of rampant assimilation with most American Jews running as far away as fast as they could from Jewish life. In the face of this Dad wanted Shabbat dinner with kiddush and motzei; celebration of the holidays and a kosher home. If you grew-up on Long Island in that era these were not the prevailing winds in the Jewish world. But against the wind he walked, which ultimately bore fruit in his descendants. V’shinantam l’vanecha. He accomplished that.

He also made it a point to always be home for dinner and to be there. Family was his first priority. When in camp, I would get a short letter from him every day. Not that the letter said all that much, but he wanted you to know he was thinking about you. As I moved into adulthood, we would speak most days, often for just a minute or two and at the end of each call he would say in his Burgess Meredith-like voice, “I love ya, kid.” To say I miss that is a major understatement. He passed just before Rosh Hashanah two years ago and not seeing him there in shul with us for the High Holidays is like a dull ache that does not fade. Dad chose to love me and I him. Often the loves we choose are greater than the loves we have to have.

So, kaddish is coming and it will be said in that room where several generations of mourners have already rent their hearts if not their clothing. There is a comfort in the ongoing continuity of kaddish – a chain that stretches back to the dawn of Jewish time. No one is truly alone or forgotten in the House of Hashem.

I continue to go to shul each day and try to live a good life in the merit of my parents and in the hope that in Olam HaBa G-d will reward this by enabling us to be together again for all of eternity.