I saw Star Wars, now called Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope, at exactly the right time in my life. I was twelve-years-old. As an adult I would come to see its flaws. It was elitist, racist, and simple-minded. It raised the issues of imperialism and nuclear annihilation only to dismiss them without really addressing them. If Richard Nixon, the man who almost used nuclear weapons on Vietnam, came from Yorba Linda, California, Grand Moff Tarkin, the man who actually did order the destruction of Alderaan, came from Old Europe. The heroes, by contrast, Luke, Leia, and Han Solo, were as American as apple pie.

For a twelve-year-old from suburban, New Jersey, Star Wars was thrilling entertainment. Luke Skywalker was no ordinary nineteen-year-old farm boy. He was a hero with a special destiny. Who wouldn’t want to have a father like Obi Won Kenobi or a big brother like Han Solo? In the real world, nineteen-year-old American farm boys raped and murdered Vietnamese peasant girls. In that “galaxy a long time ago and far far away” they rolled into the heart of the evil empire, rescued the princess, and got to fly jet fighters without even passing the Air Force Academy entrance exams. What Star Wars taught us – and by “us” I mean late Boomers and Early Gen Xers – was that perhaps America still had a future. Forget Vietnam. Forget stagflation. Forget the gas lines. Ordinary Americans from out of the way places like Stanley Rogouski from Elizabeth, New Jersey or Luke Skywalker from the desert planet Tatooine could still go onto do great things.

What a cruel hoax it all turned out to be. Star Wars was not only rotten, Cold War Propaganda – it was no accident that Ronald Reagan referred to the Soviet Union as “the evil empire” – it was the end of American cinema. Star Wars was not the first “blockbuster” – that honor belongs to Jaws – but it was a key moment in the process whereby storytelling became marketing. After Star Wars, Hollywood began to concentrate, not on selling movie tickets, but on selling brands. The great American films of the 1930s and 1940s were surrounded by hype and publicity, but they were one off events. The screenwriter had to say what he wanted to say in ninety minutes. After Star Wars, moviegoers had to assume that any new “blockbuster” was probably the first movie in a long series of movies, little better than a teaser. The Hunger Games is a good movie. It’s not three good movies. I’ve long since lost count of how many times they’ve remade Batman. The Matrix should have ended with Neo’s monologue about the continuing struggle. Shailene Woodley wisely gave up acting in the ongoing Divergent series to combat the real evil American empire at Standing Rock. Worst of all is Star Wars. It just goes on, and on, and on. What seemed so fresh and innocent in 1977 was already stale in the late 1990s when George Lucas brought out the insipid Phantom Menace. Astonishingly, in 2017, thirty-year-olds are paying to see Star Wars reboots, to watch films based on a simple-minded screenplay written for children over a decade before they were even born. Indeed, more than anything else, the release of The Force Awakens, Rogue One, and the coming Last Jedi indicate that we are living in a dead culture.

Sadly, it turns out, “these kids today,” the millennial generation born in the 1980s and 1990s, don’t want anything new. They simply want a more inclusive version of what the Boomers had. The Force Awakens, which was a bad movie, gave us a female Luke Skywalker. Rogue One, which is actually a pretty good movie, gives us a Latino Han Solo. I suppose it represents some progress that Gareth Edwards cast Diego Luna instead of say Ryan Gosling, a Mexican white guy instead of an Anglo Saxon white guy, as Rogue One’s ruggedly handsome, morally ambiguous hero Cassian, but it’s not that much progress. What saves Rogue One from becoming a tedious bore like The Force Awakens is not only Felicity Jones, who with her pert British face, girl next door athleticism, and wounded, angry demeanor, is utterly believable as an action heroine, it’s the film’s doom laden dramatization of a world, and of a culture, with no future. Whether or not Gareth Edwards intended it – and I strongly suspect he did not – Rogue One is the negation of the Star Wars franchise, a good slap to the back of the head for the millennial generation, an exhortation to forget about the past and create something new.

In my review of La La Land, I remarked that Damien Chazelle’s musical would have been a much better film if it had been about zombies, if Ryan Gosling twirled Emma Stone around the dance floor only to rip her arm off, and, in turn, get beheaded. Rogue One comes a lot closer. While its hero and heroine are not zombies, Grand Moff Tarkin, one of its most important villains, is not only depicted as a zombie, but actually played by a zombie, a digitally created zombie to be sure, but still a zombie. In the original Star Wars, Tarkin, played by the gaunt, almost cadaverous British actor Peter Cushing, annihilates Alderaan, Prince Leia’s home planet, right in front her eyes. Aside from Obi Won Kenobi feeling a “great disturbance in the force,” we forget about it thirty seconds later. Not only does Leia not go through any kind of ritualized mourning process, she immediately falls into a meet cute “I’m only fighting with you because I really want to fuck you” relationship with Han Solo, who never once says “God Leia, it must really suck that your entire species got wiped out by the Death Star. Can I run to the store and get you a pint of Häagen-Dazs or something?” In Rogue One, by contrast, we vividly experience the effect of Tarkin’s serial genocide spree from the point of view of the races of people being destroyed by what Darth Vader once referred to as “this technological terror,” twice.

It’s probably not worth thinking too much about whether or not “the holy city of Jehda” is Baghdad or Mecca. Yes, Forrest Whitaker’s extremist rebel Saw Gerrera is more Al Qaeda in Iraq than George Washington crossing the Delaware, and yes, kyber crystals are probably supposed to represent oil, but Rogue One’s script is too underwritten to make any real political point about American involvement in the Middle East. The real point that the film makes, whether it intends to or not, is the sense of there being no future. Felicity Jones’ Jyn Erso and Diego Luna’s Cassian will not live to see the Death Star destroyed. Whether it’s a fear of global warming, nuclear war, or economic disintegration, the millennials feel, deep inside their bones, that they will never see old age, that they are part of the human race’s last generation. The current obsession with reboots of Boomer franchises like Star Wars, the lack of any real new youth culture, the millennial generation have a problem with “the horizon.” In the memorable words of the reprogrammed imperial droid K-2SO “there is no horizon.” In the original Star Wars franchise, Luke Skywalker not only had a father. He had two, the choice between Christ, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Satan, Darth Vader. He also had Yoda. He had mentors, teachers, older men who either would help him grow up to be a Jedi Knight, or seduce him into serving the dark side of the force. Jyn, in turn, has two fathers, her biological father, from whom she’s separated as a little girl, and Saw Gerrera, who teaches her how to kill a whole platoon of Storm Troopers with a baton. Nevertheless, she has no future, neither with Cassian or anybody else. Jyn, like Luke Skywalker, watches both her fathers die, but she only outlives them by a few days.

Jyn Urso and Cassian die a heroic death, vaporized in each other’s arms, but they save, not the future, but the past. After they die in the holocaust created by the digitally recreated dead actor, the cgi zombie Peter Cushing, the story picks up at the beginning of the original Star Wars. We have come full circle back to 1977. The plans for the Death Star, bought so dearly at the cost of two planets, are handed off to none other than Princess Leia, played by none other than a dead Carrie Fisher, her digital likeness superimposed on the young Norwegian actress Ingvild Deila. Take this to heart millennials. Take this to heart. Not only will your elders make you work at unpaid internships, they will replace you with digitally recreated versions of themselves. I wasted my future. If you kids don’t rebel now, you won’t even get that opportunity.

Between 1880 and 1924, approximately twenty-five million immigrants settled in the United States, mostly from Eastern and Southern Europe. If their story has figured prominently in American cinema, as I have argued previously, it is not well-understood. From the original Scarface to 1970s classics like The Godfather to 1990s TV miniseries like The Sopranos, the cinematic history of non-Anglo-Saxon white immigrants has followed what I will, for lack of a better term, call “The Italian Narrative.” Tony Soprano, in a session with his psychiatrist Dr. Melfi, sums it up best. The white ethnic gangster is nothing more than an American capitalist with a vowel at the end of his name.

Superficially, The Italian Narrative sounds radical, even socialist. To quote Balzac, “le secret des grandes fortunes sans cause apparente est un crime oublié, parce qu’il a été proprement fait.” Behind every great fortune is a great crime. Nevertheless, The Italian Narrative has always obscured the history of the Italian immigrant working class to focus on the corrupt, even criminal Italian immigrant bourgeoisie. Tony Soprano’s great grandfather was almost certainly not a “worker bee,” but a small time enforcer who imported Southern Italian labor for those “other fucks,” the Rockefellers and the Carnegies, and broke strikes when those “worker bees” got uppity and demanded too much money.

Like Jerzy Skolimowski’s terrifically cynical black comedy Moonlighting, James Grey’s unjustly overlooked film The Immigrant focuses, not on the petty-bourgeois immigrant exploiter, but on the exploited immigrant proletarian. It is a story, not of upward, but of downward mobility. The American dream is not a moral dilemma where you, almost inevitably, trade your morals for a McMansion in North Caldwell or a Summer house on Lake Tahoe. It’s an illusion. In fact, you don’t even see many “real” Americans, if “real” Americans are defined as old stock, white Anglo Saxon Protestants. Your life in the United States is a lot like what your life would have been like in Poland or Southern Italy. It’s a brutal Darwinian struggle where those immigrants who, in Tony Soprano’s words, want a “piece of the action,” introduce their fellow immigrants to American capitalism the hard way.

The Immigrant opens on Ellis Island – where James Gray was allowed to film on location – with Ewa and Magda Cybulska, two Polish women who have escaped the war ravaged hellscape of Eastern Europe. Ewa, played by the French actress Marion Cotillard, and Magda, played by the Armenian American actress Angela Sarafyan, are not from the very bottom of Polish society. On the contrary, Ewa, who speaks fluent, if heavily French trying very hard to be Polish accented English, has worked as a nurse for an English diplomat. She and her sister are not proletarians, but downwardly mobile petty-bourgeois. Nevertheless, it’s 1921. The American ruling class no longer needs Eastern and Southern Europeans as worker bees. Three years later Congress would pass the Johnson–Reed Act of 1924, a law heavily influenced by the eugenicist and white supremacist pseudo-science then in vogue, and the authorities at Ellis Island are looking for any excuse to send immigrants back to their home countries. After the doctors examine Magda, who has a persistent cough, they send her to the infirmary to be examined for lung disease. Ewa, who’s perfectly healthy, but who was raped on board ship during the transatlantic crossing, is declared a “woman of low morals” and set to be deported.

Note: The plot of The Immigrant heavily depends on Ewa’s plans to get Magda out of the infirmary at Ellis Island and I think this is a major weak point. Not only do we never find out whether or not Magda really has tuberculosis, she pretty much disappears from the film after the doctors at Ellis Island pull her out of the line. I’m not an expert on the history of Ellis Island but I can’t imagine that Magda would be better off in a Lower-East Side slum than she would be at Ellis Island Immigrant Hospital, racist though its administration may have been.

Ewa’s detention as “a woman of low morals,” as it turns out, is no accident. Throughout the film’s opening, the two sisters have been shadowed by a man named Bruno Weiss, a first generation German Jewish American – we’re never explicitly told his religion but he does speak Yiddish – played by longtime James Gray collaborator Joaquin Phoenix. Weiss, who’s one of those ethnic whites who “wanted a piece of the action,” is a pimp and a theater impresario who regularly observes the newly arrived immigrants at Ellis Island looking for attractive women. Not only did Ewa fit the bill, he had become so obsessed with her appearance that he had bribed the immigration authorities to mark her off as a “possible public charge,” insuring that she would not be able to enter the country legally. Something about the collusion between Weiss and the authorities at Ellis Island rings true in our currently climate of nativism and white supremacism. The American ruling class wants new immigrants, but it doesn’t want them to have any political rights. Weiss takes advantage of the darkening mood of early 1920s America to make Ewa his virtual slave.

The Immigrant is a classic melodrama but it’s a very good one. It’s main strength is Marion Cotillard, who manages to project the right combination of damsel in distress and determined, independent woman. Joaquin Phoenix is also very good, as is the set design and cinematography. There are one or two missteps. Gray’s budget did not allow him to recreate the Manhattan skyline of the 1920s and there are several very clearly modern buildings visible upon Ewa’s arrival in lower-Manhattan, but whether or not the period décor is authentic, it works. It’s rich, almost overly ornate quality manages to reflect Gray’s restrained approach to Bruno Weiss, who’s about as genuinely evil a movie villain as I’ve seen in a long time, but who’s outwardly normal, if not exactly “charming.” Somewhere underneath the richly designed sets is the rotten heart of American capitalism. Weiss doesn’t so much seduce Ewa into a life of prostitution but bully her into it. The “American Dream” for Ewa is clearly a Darwinian nightmare, a gaudy, outwardly wealthy spectacle she sees through without much trouble, but which has captured her and won’t let her escape. All she really wants to do is hold onto to her family and her religion. Events beyond her control has made that impossible.

The main weakness of The Immigrant is Jeremy Renner, as Bruno’s cousin “Emil”, or “Orlando the Magician.” We’re never quite sure what we’re supposed to think about Emil, and that’s a problem. Is a genuinely good side of the American dream, or is he the seductive illusion of the American Dream. Renner sadly can’t quite project either. Ewa seems to like him, and he tries to encourage her with the admonition that “she deserves to be happy.” Maybe if Gray had cast a younger actor in the role – an actor in his twenties might have been able to convey a sense of the innocence and idealism of “American Dream” – but Renner, with his pencil thin mustache actually looks more like a villain than a potential rescuer, and in the end we don’t really care much when he comes to his violent, tragic end.

Whether or not Gray intended it, the effect is to strengthen The Immigrant as a feminist movie. Not only does Ewa have to stand on her own, the only thing she really cares about is getting her sister out of the infirmary. In spite of the overall lack of solidarity between the women exploited by Bruno Weiss, and a rather vicious female character played by Dagmara Domińczyk, sisterhood in The Immigrant is indeed powerful. James Gray has made a film that steals the immigrant narrative away from the Tony Sopranos of the world and gives it back to the women who scrub the floor at your local hospital, or wait for the bus ever morning on the corner to go to their jobs as domestic servants. That his exploited heroine is played by a fair skinned European actress only calls our attention to the universality of the story that he tells. Those Syrian refugees and Mexican migrant laborers currently in the cross hairs of racists like Donald Trump were once Irish, Polish, or Italian immigrant being persecuted by a previous generation of nativist bigots and exploited by a previous generation of soulless, petty bourgeois hustlers. Some things sadly never change. That Mexican woman Donald Trump and Steve King are trying to persuade me to hate could have been my great grandmother.

As most historians know, from 1934 to 1968 American cinema was more heavily censored than any other film industry in the western world. The Motion Picture Production Code, the fruit of a partnership between the major Hollywood studios and the Catholic Church, had strict rules about what we could, and could not see in movie theaters. There was to be no miscegenation, “licentious nudity” or profanity. You couldn’t “ridicule the clergy.” You couldn’t depict “scenes of actual childbirth” or “the illegal traffic in drugs.” Above all you couldn’t portray criminals in a sympathetic light or make a movie where “crime pays.”

(I don’t give away the ending, but there are spoilers.)

Hell or High Water is a great “pre-code” movie, maybe the first one I’ve seen in the modern era. Between 1930 and 1934, American cinema reflected the angry, almost revolutionary mood of the American people during Great Depression. Hell or High Water does the same thing for the “white working class” in 2016, for people still angry about the financial crisis of 2008 and the Bush/Obama bailout of Wall Street. Don’t get me wrong, Moonlight is a fine movie, but there’s a reason that Hell or High Water never stood a chance to win Best Picture. The pampered liberal elite that runs Hollywood was not about to put its stamp of approval on a movie that all but calls for guillotines, pitchforks and torches.

Hell or High Water begins at a Texas Midlands Bank in one of those desolate little towns made famous by Peter Bogdanovich in The Last Picture Show. A teller arriving early in the morning to open up the doors, Dale Dickey from Winter’s Bone and Breaking Bad, is shoved inside by two men in ski masks. To her surprise, they don’t want the money in the vault, but only the loose bills collected from depositors the day before, a few thousand dollars, a fairly modest sum that hardly seems worth the risk of a long prison sentence. When the bank robbers, Toby and Tanner Howard, two brothers played by Chris Pine and Ben Foster, take off their masks in their getaway car, we immediately begin to identify with the two men. They seem likable. They knock over another bank, then head home to their ranch out in the wastelands, where they bury the cars underneath a pile of dirt, and talk about their recently deceased mother. We learn that Tanner Howard, the elder of the two and the family black sheep, has spent time in jail for shooting their abusive father.

Hollywood being Hollywood, I suppose you can’t make a movie about a pair of sympathetic bank robbers without also including a pair of sympathetic police officers. Hell or High Water gives us two Texas Rangers, Marcus Hamilton, an old Anglo nearing retirement played by Jeff Bridges as a combination of Deputy Dog and The Dude from the Big Lebowski, and Alberto Parker, who’s a half Mexican, half Comanche evangelical Christian who likes to watch TV preachers in between interrogating witnesses. Hamilton’s a half-hearted bigot but no fool. Parker’s convinced that the two men who knocked over the pair of Texas Midland Banks are simply methheads looking for their next fix. Hamilton’s not so sure. There’s a method in their madness, he insists, a reason they’ve declined to take the more easily traceable rolls of money from the vaults, and only targeted banks in small, out of the way towns with low foot traffic and poor security. In between genial ethnic slurs, Hamilton suggests that they stay the night in the local area, and stake out a few more Texas Midland Banks in small, decaying out of the way little towns. Parker, reluctantly, agrees.

After Toby and Tanner Howard stop off at a local Indian casino, exchange their stolen money for a stack of chips, play a few token hands of cards, then cash in the chips for two checks made out to the Texas Midlands Bank, we realize that Ranger Marcus Hamilton is onto something. There is a method to their amateurish methods, which we learn about in detail after they stop off at their lawyers. Years ago their mother had taken out a reverse mortgage on the family ranch. Later, her bank, not coincidentally Texas Midlands, started foreclosure proceedings on the land they had once believed next to worthless, but have subsequently realized contains enough oil to make Toby’s ex-wife, who he still owes child support, and two sons rich. They’ve just about stolen and laundered enough money to pay off their mother’s debt, and set their kids up for life. That they’re stealing money from the same bank that’s threatening to take property that’s been in the family for generations is not only class war. It’s poetic justice. One more robbery should put them over the top.

We all know what’s coming, a final showdown between the Howard brothers and Rangers Hamilton and Parker, but it’s the way the film executes the familiar plot that makes Hell or High Water one of the best films of 2016. Neither Hamilton nor Parker is exactly what you would call a “pig” or an enthusiastic enforcer for the American ruling class. They’re just doing their jobs. Similarly, neither Toby nor Tanner Howard has personal grievances against the police. They’re just doing what they have to do to keep the banks from getting hold of their family’s property. It’s the character of Tanner Howard, however, that makes Hell or High Water such a dangerous, explosive film. Tanner, who we’ve already learned has killed his abusive father, is the troubled, violent family black sheep. Toby Howard, in turn, is a cool headed, cerebral criminal mastermind. For the past few years, we’ve all been reading about violent, disgruntled white men who go on shooting sprees, and many of us, at least me, have always lamented how the typical mass shooter targets innocent people. If only we could direct that violent rage, not against people who just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, but against the banks, the courts, the ruling class, their lawyers, and the police officers who defend their “privileges.”

That not only happens in Hell and High Water, Taylor Sheridan, the same writer who wrote the screenplay for Dennis Villeneuve’s film Sicario, grounds his conception of class war in the history of the white man’s genocide against native Americans. Tanner Howard, to be sure, is an Anglo, not an Indian or a Mexican, and perhaps Sheridan is engaging in a certain kind of “cultural appropriation,” but the underlying theme of Hell or High Water is that the European genocide against the Plains Indians has now taken on a new form, the corporate elite’s economic genocide of the white working class. “This town has lost its reason for existence,” the half Indian, half Mexican Parker tells Hamilton as they look out on a desolate, half populated row of abandoned factories and foreclosed houses. “One hundred and fifty years we owned all of this land,” he continues. “The white man came and took it away from us, and now the banks are taking it away from them.” Suddenly, an earlier scene, where Tanner had almost come to blows with a native American man in the Indian casino makes sense. “I’m a Comanche,” the man had said, glowering at Tanner. “That means I’m the enemy.” Tanner takes it all in stride. “Of what?” he asks. “Of everything,” the man responds. “That makes me a Comanche too,” Tanner nods, recognizing a brother in arms.

I began this review by labeling Hell or High Water “a great pre-code movie,” but I think the final shootout and the film’s ultimate resolution go beyond anything Hollywood tried in the early 1930s. It’s straight up class war, the suicidal rebel against the banks, the police, and a gang of enthusiastic Texas gun nuts who finally see an opportunity to “shoot a bad guy,” and wind up getting much more than they bargained for. Chris Pine’s final scene with Jeff Bridges spoke to me in a way few mainstream films do. “We’ve always been poor,” he said, revealing the true history of the “white working class” in American. “We’ve never had anything. That’s going to change for my boys.” Bridges, who hates Howard for what his brother did to his partner, but knows he’s been upstaged, can only seem to agree. He’s spent his life doing a job that no longer has any real meaning.

Final Note: If you’re a good looking bank robber and a chunky waitress flirts with you in the diner, always, always leave her a big tip. The life you save may be your own.

In Spike Lee’s 1989 film Do the Right Thing, Mookie, a delivery man played by Lee himself, has a brief argument with Pino, the racist older son of his employer, the owner of Sal’s Pizza. Unlike his father, Pino has no hesitation about voicing his contempt for black people, but Mookie has already noticed a contradiction in the way he thinks. “Who’s your favorite basketball player?” he asks. “Magic Johnson,” Pino quickly responds. “Who’s your favorite movie star?” Mookie says. “Eddie Murphy,” Pino answers without hesitation. “And who’s your favorite rock star?” Mookie adds. By this time Pino is beginning to catch on. “Bruce,” he says. ”It’s Bruce,” but Mookie knows he’s lying. “It’s Prince,” he sighs impatiently. “It’s Prince. Pino all you ever talk about is nigger this and nigger that, but all your favorite people are so-called niggers.” Few things are more revealing about the culture of the 1980s than Pino’s clumsy attempt to explain away Mookie’s argument. “It’s different,” he says. “Magic, Eddie, Prince, they’re not niggers. I mean they’re not black. “Let me explain myself,” he continues. “They’re not really black. I mean they’re black but they’re not really black. They’re more than black. It’s different.”

Orenthal James, O.J. Simpson, who was born in public housing projects in pre-gentrified San Francisco in 1947, is one of the greatest running backs ever to play football. The 1968 winner of the Heisman Trophy, he led the University of Southern California to the National Championship. After a rocky start in the NFL under Buffalo Bills head coach John Rauch, who tried to fit him into a system that wasted his talents, he thrived under Rauch’s replacement Lou Saban, rushing for 2003 thousand yards in 1973, and breaking the all time record set by Jim Brown the decade before. Watching old highlight films of Simpon playing for USC or the Buffalo Bills is a bit like opening the pages of an ancient Greek epic and reading about a demi-god. Simpson is 6’2” and 210 pounds, which is already big for a running back, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, but when he finds a hole in the opposing teams defense he becomes almost superhuman, impossible to catch, let alone tackle. Many great athletes struggle after they retire from professional sports. Simpson seemed to be an exception, getting out of the NFL only a little after his prime, and begining his career as a successful actor, corporate pitchman and man about town in star studded Hollywood. You can still see traces of his charisma in the commericals he did for Hertz Rent a Car in the 1970s. He’s anthing about a dumb jock. On the contrary, he comes off like any other graduate of the elite University of Southern California, smooth talking, quick thinking, urbane, intellectual.

If you had met O.J. Simpson in the early 1980s, you probably would have decided he would become more like Bill Bradley, the basketball star who became a United States Senator, then Lawrence Taylor, the New York Giants Linebacker who fell into alcholism, drug addiction and despair. If you had been Mookie from Do the Right Thing, however, you might have noticed something different, that O.J. Simpson had spent his life trying to win the approval of people like Sal’s racist son Pino. Back in the late 1960s, when African American athletes were beginning to assert themselves politically, Simpson refused to make even a token gesture of support. Unlike Muhammad Ali, who joined the Nation of Islam and resisted the draft, or John Carlos and Tommie Smith, who gave their iconic black power salute at the Mexico City Olympics, Orenthal James Simpson did not consider himself part of the new generation of race conscious African Americans, but rather, to quote Pino, “more than black.” In a sense, he was the Michael Jordan or the 1960s and 1970s, the superstar athlete who cares more about his TV commercials and his stock portfolio than about the people back home in the projects. Jordan, however, who was born in the 1960s, did not carry around the same emotional baggage as Simpson, who was born in the 1940s. Michael Jordan had the luxury of remaining apolitical because of the radical black athletes who came before him. Simpson did not have that privilege.

O.J.: Made in America is more than just a biography of a great athlete who fell from grace. It’s a broad, wide ranging history of race relations in the city of Los Angeles. When as USC’s star running back, O.J. Simpson declared that “I’m not black. I’m O.J.,” he probably couldn’t have done it anywhere else in the United States. Los Angeles was more than just a northern city, a Chicago or a New York, where black people from the south moved n the 1940s and 1950s to escape the Jim Crow South. It was the epicenter of the American Dream, the great metropolis where you could not only escape Jim Crow but escape from American history altogether. Simpson was hardly the first man in Hollywood to dream about becoming more than the sum of his parts. The film industry, after all, was founded by Eastern European Jews. They not only dreamed of being real Americans, but reinvented what it means to be a “real American.” Simpson was squarely in their tradition, and by 1985 he seemed to have achieved his goal. He had discarded his first wife for Nicole Brown, a tall blond Aryan out of central casting. He had turned his Brentwood Estate “Rockingham” into a social center for the Hollywood elite. He was friends with the Kardashians before the Kardashians were the Kardashians. He imagined himself as the President of a major film studio.

From the very beginning, however, something was clearly wrong. In the Fall of 1985, only a few months after he formally married Nicole Brown – they had been dating years before that – the LAPD responded to a domestic violence call at his Rockingham estate. He was already beating her. In some ways, O.J.: Made in America is about seven hours too long. Orenthal James Simpson is really just another wife beater, an egotistical control freak who makes himself the king of his castle and the lord and master over his wife. “O.J. thought he owned Nicole,” one of his friends says in a revealing and provocative moment. “It was kind of like a reverse slavery.” White domestic abusers act pretty much the way O.J. Simpson did. They get away with what they can, which, if the husband is rich or well-connected, is usually quite a bit. The violence escalates until the wife either leaves for good, or she ends up either a broken shell of a woman, or dead. Yet it’s impossible to ignore the racial undercurrent in the marriage of O.J. Simpson and Nicole Brown. For O.J., possessing Nicole had finally let him convince himself that he was “more than black,” that white America had not only accepted him as a man, but as a white man. As Simpson declined into middle-age, however, and as relations between the LAPD and black Los Angeles reached their breaking point during the Rodney King affair, it became more and more difficult to maintain the illusion that he was “not black but O.J.” Mark Fuhrman, the police officer who responded to the domestic violence call in 1985, a racist who had fantasies of killing black men, would soon play an out-sized role in O.J. Simpson’s life.

O.J.: Made in America pulls no punches when it comes to the photos taken of the murdered Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, a friend who was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. We see them again and again. We examine the gruesome images more and more closely each time until we finally linger on the large, gaping holes in Goldman’s and Brown’s neck. It’s impossible not to try to imagine what the murder itself looked like. Ron Goldman was a young man, twenty five years old, over six feet tall. He was fit and went to the gym, but O.J. Simpson had reverted back to a demonic version of the superman he had been when he played for the Buffalo Bills and the University of Southern California. No longer able to deny that he was black, and middle-aged, forty six years of repressed, murderous anger burst through the carefully constructed walls of repression and denial like the water breaching the New Orleans dykes after Hurricane Katrina. If Simpson had spent his life trying to be “more than black” in order to win the approval of white America, he had at long last become white America’s deepest fear, the black brute who kills a white woman. After a lifetime pretending he was Jackie Robinson or Sydney Poitier, he had become Bigger Thomas.

Or did he?

Did O.J. Simpson really kill his wife on the night of June 17, 1994? To be perfectly honest, I don’t know, and if I had been on the jury for the O.J. Simpson murder trial, I would have certainly voted “not guilty.” I don’t even think he should be in jail today. The civil trial was a kind of “double jeopardy” and the thirty-three-year sentence for robbery and kidnapping in 2007 that’s effectively sent him to jail for the rest of the his life was absurd. Anybody else would have gotten a year or two, if that. I never really followed the O.J. Simpson trial in the 1990s, but it’s breathtaking to watch O.J.: Made in America and to see the prosecution’s case fall apart. The documentary contends that the evidence was overwhelming, that Marcia Clark, Chris Darden, and Judge Lance Ito simply mishandled the case, but there’s no question that F. Lee Bailey and Johnny Cochran succeeded in raising “reasonable doubt” about Simpson’s guilt. The black people who cheered his acquittal weren’t cheering on a man who got away with murder so much as they were cheering on a black man who had finally gotten a fair trial. The white people crying over Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman weren’t crying for two people they had never met, but over the way the criminal justice system had finally begun to work the way it was supposed to work. To quote that tedious social media cliché, “when you’re used to privilege, equality begins to feel like oppression.” O.J. Simpson may or may not be a murderer, but there’s no question that he was “not guilty.”

Perhaps the most fascinating moment in O.J.: Made in America comes halfway through the third segment. The incompetent judge Lance Ito has allowed the mostly black jury – O.J. Simpson got a jury of his peers, but Nicole Brown Simpson didn’t – to tour Simpson’s Rockingham estate. Simpson’s lawyers – who had based their defense partly on the idea that Simpson was now a hero to the black community in Los Angeles – had redecorated the house with whatever photos they could find showing him with other black people. One of the pictures they remove is a portrait of Simpson with Donald Trump. Trump and Simpson were never friends. The photo had been taken at a press conference at the opening of the Harley Davidson Cafe in New York City, but there’s a deep cultural affinity between the two men. Along with Bill Clinton’s Telecommunications Act of 1996, the O.J. Simpson murder trial represents the decisive break with the media landscape of the 1970s and 1980s, the moment when the cable news networks dropped all pretense of acting like journalists and started acting like entertainers. If O.J. Simpson was, in a sense, the beginning of “Reality TV,” then the election of Donald Trump is President is its logical outcome. O.J.: Made in America, which got a well-deserved academy award for Best Documentary, shows us how it all happened.

I haven’t seen Manchester by the Sea, Arrival or Hell or High Water and for all I know one of those might have deserved Best Picture. I also think La La Land and Moonlight are such different films it’s impossible to judge honestly which one was better. Both were very good. Neither was great. So I had no rooting interest in either. This Vox article, however, reminds me of something I hadn’t previously considered. Moonlight is the lowest-budgeted film ever to have won Best Picture.

Moonlight’s budget was $1.6 million, which is very low by most standards. (By contrast, fellow Best Picture nominees La La Land shot for $30 million, Hacksaw Ridge for $40 million, Arrival for $47 million, and Hell or High Water for $12 million.) And while its $22 million gross is terrific for such a low budget, it’s still the lowest-grossing of the Best Picture nominees.

http://www.vox.com/culture/2017/2/27/14748332/moonlight-best-picture-why-it-won

Out of curiosity I looked up the budgets of a few well-known independent and alternative films.

Whit Stillman’s debut film Metropolitan cost $225,000.

Reservoir Dogs cost $1.3 Million.

Pulp Fiction, which certainly was the Best Picture of 1994, cost $8.5 million.

Before Sunrise cost $2.5 million.

Jennifer Lawrence’s debut (and still best) film Winter’s Bone came in at $2 million.

And the all time low budget champion Clerks cost $27,000 dollars.

As I said, I had no great rooting interest between Moonlight and La La Land. The best movie of the year rarely wins the Best Picture Oscar anyway. But in the age of $100 million dollar superhero films and $144 million dollar reboots, a film with a budget of $1.6 million dollars being named Best Picture is surely an encouraging sign. Even last year’s comparatively modest Best Picture Winner Spotlight cost over $20 million.

Moonlight’s budget is even more impressive when you take into account how Mahershala Ali won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. I hope prospective filmmakers learn all the right lessons. You can make a film about a demographic (black, working class gay men) most Hollywood studios like to ignore on a budget you might be able to raise off a Kickstarter campaign, and not only gain critical acclaim, but make money. Let’s hope that going forward we see more real people and fewer superheroes, more good camera work and less CGI, more first time actors and fewer big stars. Maybe Hollywood can finally get off the disastrous track its been on since the 1970s, when blockbusters, branding and advertising replaced imagination and creativity.

Early in Damien Chazelle’s romantic musical La La Land, Mia Dolan, an aspiring actress played by Emma Stone, is working as a barista near the Warner Bros. Studio in Burbank, California. After a tall, elegant looking woman who we only see from behind walks up to the counter and orders a latte, the employees at the coffee shop are transfixed. “Oh I wouldn’t think of it. It’s on the house,” the manager says, and we quickly realize that the woman, who insists on paying anyway, is a famous movie star who has already “made it.” That we never learn her name is no accident. “Movie stars are disposable,” Chazelle is telling us early on in his film. “So why exactly is Mia Dolan aspiring to fame and fortune in Hollywood?”

While Mia’s acting career is going poorly – she’s regularly dismissed from auditions with little or no comment – her romantic life is more promising. She begins a relationship with Sebastian Wilder, an aspiring jazz musician played by Ryan Gosling. It would be hard to imagine Mia or Sebastian lacking for the company of the opposite sex. Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling are both good looking in that all important “conventional” sense. Nevertheless, Gosling is no Fred Astaire and Stone is no Ginger Rogers. Where Astaire and Rogers seemed to enjoy every moment they were on screen, an infectious mood that gave both of them a natural charisma, neither Gosling nor Stone seems to be having much fun. “What exactly does Mia Dolan hope to express with her acting?” we wonder. Sebastian Wilder turns down a well-paid “gig” as a jazz pianist in a band led by real life jazz musician John Legend because he insists on playing his music his way, but he never seems to be able to express, either in words or on his keyboard, what he really wants. In fact, Legend, who’s a pretty good actor, says more about the future of jazz in thirty seconds than Wilder says in the whole movie.

After Mia’s self-written, one woman play goes badly, she decides to quite acting, and go back home to her parents house in Nevada. It honestly seems like a good decision. Sebastian and Mia come off like a happily married middle-class couple waiting to happen. So why are they wasting time pursuing careers as artists when neither really seems to have very much to say. Perhaps Mia should go back to school. Perhaps Sebastian, who wants to open up his own Jazz club, should considering selling real estate, or stock options, something that would allow him to save up the capital he needs to start a business. Even though Gosling utterly redeems himself as a good boyfriend when he drives all the way out to Nevada to bring Mia the news of a casting director wanting her for an audition the lead in a new movie set in Paris, by this point in a fairly long, over two hours, movie, we’re beginning to get bored. La La Land, which is well crafted and beautifully shot, still needs something to make it more than simply an exercise in style and nostalgia for old Hollywood. After Sebastian drives Mia back to the Warner Bros. Studio in Burbank, and she nails the audition, all Mia can really do is sit back and wait for a call from the studio that will determine whether she decides to continue her acting career, or look for something else. Does she get to go to Paris and become a “real” actor or not? If waiting is boring, then watching someone passively wait for a call from a casting agent is even more boring.

It was during Mia’s wait for that call from the casting agent that I realized what La La Land had lacked all along: Zombies.

The first half of La La Land, as beautifully filmed as it is, radiates a sad truth about American music and film. It’s dead. Sebastian Wilder and Mia Dolan are a very nice young man and woman with little or nothing to say pursuing artistic dreams that were over before either of them was even born. They are essentially zombies, dead souls going through the motions of acting and playing the piano for ninety year olds. La La Land’s wonderfully shot landscape, full of images from classic American cinema and landmarks of old Hollywood might as well be a morgue. Nobody cares about Casablanca anymore. Nobody cares about James Dean. Charlie Parker was great for his time, but the goal of opening up a jazz club called “Chicken on a Stick” – Charlie Park was called “Bird” because he loved chicken – is more like cultural grave robbing than artistic innovation. The musical and dance numbers are competently done – Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling can both sing and dance – but where Astaire and Rogers not only seemed to float through the air, they also had an authority and an authenticity to their art. They were dancing for a reason. The classic musicals of the 1930s had a purpose. For the price of a movie ticket you could escape the Great Depression.

Stone’s and Gosling’s performances, by contrast, are not only heavy and workmanlike, you can never quite forget that they’re “acting.” It constantly reminds you that their characters are both unsuccessful performers, and more importantly, as of yet unfulfilled careerists. In the movie Swing Time, Fred Astaire hopped a freight train to New York with less than fifty cents in his pocket, but you still got the sense that even if he never made the big time it wouldn’t bother him. All he wanted to do was dance. With Stone and Gosling, the goal seems more important than getting there, success more important that having fun. They don’t really enjoy those musical numbers for themselves, but only as a means to that mansion in West LA and that spot on the Hollywood A List. How much more enjoyable Stone and Gosling would have been, therefore, if they had sung and danced as zombies, if Gosling had twirled Stone around the dance floor only to rip her nose off her face before losing an arm trying to pick her up, if Damien Chazelle made it explicit that if you pursue a dead art, your soul will eventually die, that if you go through dance moves that no longer matter you basically end up dancing like corpse. Ah, if only the moral dilemma in La La Land had been “should I behead my true love” rather than “should I break up with my true love so I can make it in the film business.” Just a few thousand dollars of zombie makeup could have turned a very good film into a great one.

Damien Chazelle should have given us zombies, but I can certainly understand why he didn’t. He was making a “serious” film that will eventually be re-released by Criterion, and zombie movies never win “Best Picture” at the Academy Awards. So instead of zombies, he gives us an alternative timeline, constructs two parallel narratives that represent “what was” and “what might have been.”

We never find out for certain whether or not Mia gets the part in the film set in Paris, but we do know that she becomes a successful actress. “Winter Five Years in the Future,” the title card tells us as we see an elegant looking woman, filmed from behind, walk into the coffee shop that used to employ Mia. After the manager offers her her latte for free, and she insists on paying anyway, we realize that the elegant looking woman is in fact Mia Dolan, that she’s finally made it in Hollywood. We also assume that she and Sebastian, who like Mia is shown to have found success are both happily married. He’s found a way to open up his jazz club after all. OK, we think, it’s a rather forced happy ending, but at least it’s a happy ending. But then we notice something strange. What the fuck!! Mia is married to another guy, and not someone whose character had been previously established earlier in the film, but literally just “some guy.” We never even find out his name. Husbands, like famous actress shot from behind in coffee shops, are disposable and interchangeable. Even though Sebastian and Mia very credibly swore to each other that they’d always love each other, their marriage and their finding success, were mutually exclusive. So Mia gave up Sebastian for her acting career and Sebastian gave up Mia for his jazz club. La La Land, we conclude, is a romantic movie with a very unromantic ending.

But Damien Chazelle has a surprise up his sleeve. La La Land doesn’t have one ending. Similar to the way Tom Tykwer uses multiple timelines Run Lola Run, it has two. The final twenty minutes of La la Land, I have to admit, are terrific, and will probably get Chazelle a Best Picture Oscar. Mia and “that guy she’s married to” – did I mention he doesn’t have a name, that he’s just “some guy?” – get stuck in a traffic jam on a freeway. So they take the most convenient exit and duck into a nightclub for dinner. You can almost feel Mia’s heart leap when she notices that the club is called “Seb’s” for “Sebastian” and that it is indeed her ex lover playing the piano. She imagines the marriage with Sebastian that never happened. Let’s call it “A Wonderful Life that Never Happened.” It’s not only beautiful and heart rending, it also makes you realize what Mia and Sebastian had been lacking all along. If you can give up your true love for your career, even it’s a career in music or film, then you’re not an artist. You’re a yuppie. You’re a hard headed business man, or woman, who should be selling real estate or stock options, not starring in movies or playing the piano. That Damien Chazelle couldn’t dramatize how Mia and Sebastian went from miserable failures to the A List Hollywood elite, that he simply jumps five years into the future, and presents their triumph as a fait accompli probably says even more than he intended to say. In 2016, in the dying capitalist empire of America, art is all form, no substance. You can make nice looking films or music that people can dance too, but it has little or no relevance to how people actually live, and if it does, you probably won’t be able to sell it.

In other words, we live in a dead culture. That’s why La La Land, as a good a film as it is, would have been so much better had it been about zombies. Damien Chazelle should have used zombies.

After watching a series of grim, minimalist “art movies” by the Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín, and having a sudden craving, not for the social realism of the “Pre-Code” Hollywood of the early 1930s, but for a classic Hollywood costume drama of the 1940s or 1950s, I stumbled upon a film called “Prince of Foxes.” It’s on YouTube in full. Based on a historical novel by a long-forgotten writer named Samuel Shellabarger, it was directed by the American director Henry King, filmed entirely on location in Italy, and stars Tyrone Power as a Renaissance mercenary, or “condottieri,” in the service of the infamous Caesar Borgia. Consuming Prince of Foxes after Tony Manero and Post Mortem was a bit like going to a Greek diner an ordering a “cheeseburger deluxe” after living on brown rice and vegetables for a month. As delicious as the romanticized view of Italian history, which reflects New Deal America at its height, and the straightforward plot were, like greasy french fries covered in ketchup, I’m beginning to find that my tastes are getting a little too good for classic “Code” Hollywood. Something was missing. I wanted a tragic view of history and a tough-minded education in power politics. I got a happy ending that felt a little too much like a cop out. Nevertheless, Prince of Foxes is one one of the most illuminating American costume dramas I’ve ever seen, partly because of the on location shots in the tiny Italian city state of San Marino, and the polished cinematography, but mainly because of one man, Orson Welles.

I don’t know if I’ve ever seen such a perfect mixture of good filmmaking and bad filmmaking as Prince of Foxes. Welles, who plays Caesar Borgia – if you’ve read Machiavelli’s Prince you know him as a kind of Renaissance Otto von Bismarck, as one of the first practitioners of “realpolitik” – gives Henry King’s movie a depth it probably shouldn’t have. It’s more than just the fact that Welles was a charismatic actor, although he’s certainly that and more. Its that his tragic biography as one of the great artists of American civilization who was stymied, not only by powerful enemies like William Randolph Hearst, but by Hollywood’s shallow commercialism, gives him an aura that contrasts with the shallow commercial and insipid optimism of the film as a whole. The plot revolves around Borgia’s attempt to united Italy and the diplomatic mission of Andrea Orsini, Tyrone Power, a soldier of humble birth who dabbles in painting passing himself off as a member of an old aristocratic family, to the Castel del Monte in Abruzza. Citta del Monte, as it’s called in the film, is a paragon of republican, republican with a small r, virtue. While Borgia believes that might makes right, and the ends justify the means, the elderly Count Marc Antonio Verano, the ruler of Citta del Monte, believes in liberty, freedom, and self-governance, wants no part of Caesar Borgia’s united Italy. Borgia, therefore, has assigned Orsini, a clever and unscrupulous mercenary, to get into Citta del Monte on a mission of good will, assassinate Verano, and make it look like an accident.

Verano, who’s played by the sixty year old British actor Felix Aylmer, also has a much younger wife, Camilla Verano, who’s played by the twenty-one-year-old Wanda Hendrix. Would you believe that Andrea Orsini and Camilla Verano “meet cute” on the way to Citta del Monte? That Orsini initially has no idea that she’s anything more than a fan of his painting? That she’s deeply respectful of her elderly husband’s democratic ideals? That once inside Citta del Monte, Orsini falls so in love with “Madonna” Camilla that he can’t go through with the plot to assassinate her husband? That he becomes a turncoat, organizes the resistance to Borgia’s invasion and that Count Verano is conveniently killed outside the city walls to get him out of the way so that the young couple can get married? That Camilla is a feisty presence herself who wants to resist the Borgias? That Orsini leads a valiant resistance that inevitably fails because the brave citizens of Citta del Monte are outnumbered? That Orsini nobly surrenders himself to an almost certain death by slow torture in order to save “Madonna” Camilla and Citta del Monte? That things look really bad for awhile until Mario Belli, Orsini’s wily comic sidekick played by Everett Sloane, manages to bluff Caesar Borgia, who turns conveniently stupid, into letting him have custody of the prisoner, and it’s a clever ruse which lets Orsini escape? That Borgia, as wicked as he is, has an even more brutal henchman who locks Camilla up in a dungeon when she tries to follow her now lover out of the city and is rescued by a daring sneak attack by Orsini, Belli, and the now aroused citizens of Citta del Monte?

Of course you would. Prince of Foxes is the one hundredth remake of the kind of romance Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland perfected a decade earlier in Michael Curtiz’s great film Robin Hood, but which by 1949 had become stale and formulaic. You can guess every plot twist twenty minutes before it happens, and yet it doesn’t detract from the entertainment, mainly, once again, because of the presence of Orson Welles. In the climatic scene where Caesar Borgia tries to turn Camilla Verano against Andrea Orsini by revealing his humble background, Welles, who was all of thirty four years old in 1949,  talks to Power — who was a year older at thirty five — and Wanda Hendrix like a sadistic, but amused father toying his naughty children. The fact that the naughty children get the upper-hand and that you know they will is what makes the film so illuminating. Hendrix, who’s by far the worst, and yet best, thing about Prince of Foxes is ludicrously miscast as a Renaissance Italian. It’s not just the American accent, but her whole presence. It all comes off a bit like Gidget Gets all Serious and Goes to the Renaissance, and yet her vapid performance is what gives scene so much weight. Somehow Welles, a guy from the Midwest, really seems to believe that an all American girl like Hendrix will reject a “cute boy” – and one who’s already a war hero – just because his parents were working class. It’s even funnier when you realize that Wanda Hendrix was briefly married to the real life American war hero Audie Murphy, and yet somehow Welles pulls it off, establishes himself as “Old Europe” to Power’s and Hendrix’s Southern California, as Mussolini or Francisco Franco to their New Deal America, and relishes every minute of it. All it takes to conquer fascism, the film seems to be telling us, is an American boy and an American girl willing to defend truth, justice, and the American way.

Yet the irony is that in real life it was Welles who was the idealist, the great artist put in chains by a cynical American commercialism, and Powers who was a conventional movie star. Prince of Fox’s happy ending, the kind of formulaic resolution forced on American cinema by the Production Code and adopted by Hollywood studio bosses as an easy moneymaker, embodied the true cynicism at the heart of the American empire. Welles, on the other hand, as we know from watching Citizen Kane or the Magnificent Ambersons, had a tragic, not an facile and optimistic view of American history. This is the way power works, his portrayal of Caesar Borgia seems to say, and we can’t just ignore it. It’s too bad we still do.