Thomas F. Cook

I’m curious if I will be right, that this show can only be resolved with the father dying either at Kendall’s hand or not, with Kendall in charge. At the end of the last season, Kendall had nearly completely broken down and was probably in the middle of a mental crisis. They went in to visit their father only to discover that he and his daughter’s husband had conspired, somehow — the machinations are mostly lost on me — to cut out the three kids forever.

But then this season started and all that seemed to be water under the bridge. The three kids are starting a new company called The 100 and as far as I could tell it was going to be a kind of Angie’s list or Yelp of the top 100 rated companies. But I’m not sure what it was or how they intended to make money from it. Shiv and her husband are in the middle of a divorce (they’re separated). The useless older one who was running for president and was afraid of the polls dropping him below 1% seems to think his future wife has left him.

Anyway, I’m only interested in seeing if I’m right. I’m not really interested in this family anymore. Power is power is power. It’s unrelenting. People who have it won’t give it up. People who lose it are forever trying to chase it and persuade it to return. I’ve never had power, that I know of. I’d like to think I’d never become as crazy as some of those Trump lunatics like Roger Stone or Steve Bannon or Rudy Guiliani.

Well I usually like to credit the authors but this is a board and video game adapted into real motion pictures. This seems to be happening everywhere — or the opposite. Avatar and Star Wars, for example, are now Disney rides. Disney is releasing soon, one of their most awful attractions, “The Haunted House.” I mean, maybe in 1960, people couldn’t feel the elevator lowering and “stretching” the house so it might have been impressive once, decades ago.

Anyway, this was a delightful adventure game and I got to play… oh wait a minute… I didn’t play anything. I watched. I ate some pizza. I kept looking at Chris Pine’s crotch to see if I could detect an outline of penis or balls. I couldn’t. Most of the less hairy men wear their shirts opened to just above their chest hairline, so as not to frighten sensitive women or jealous men.

But all in all, I kind of really liked it. I liked the characters. I liked their outsider status. None of them are particularly good at their respective jobs, including Chris Pine, whose job is to “come up with a plan,” and eventually comes up with 2 which he calls 4, because the first 2 have some stink on them.

But… I don’t know. I’m a little bit tired of the movies they keep giving us. It’s like getting a pair of sox for every birthday. Now that I’m 63. And 6’3″, I love sox. It just means I don’t have to go buy some. /but here’s a little secret.

My dad died at 67. and I’m 4 years from that. All men labor under the belief that they will not live as long as their fathers. My uncle died at 58. My grandfather (dad’s father) died at 62.

The Quiet Girl.

This one actually had me crying at the end. But unfortunately, almost nothing happens. It is a subtle movie — quiet, like its title. A young girl is sent to live with some foster parents because she is rebellious — I can’t even remember if they are related or not. The foster parents or Uncle and Aunt, had lost their only child a number of years earlier. But somehow, they are able to tame her rebelliousness and she is able to make them love again. It’s not in the theaters anymore, but it had it was like finding a cup of really great tea. A little boring. Not much action. But ultimately, deeply satisfying.

John Wick 4.

One thing that’s always puzzled me about Keaanu Reeves being such a kind human being and his Hawaiian name meaning “Cool Breeze” is that he also makes incredibly violent films. The Matrix scene where he and Trinity blast their way into an office tower, for example, shows thousands of spent ammo cartridges and almost complete devastation of the lobby when there were only, basically 4 or 5 guards. Granted, they were going up against a computer virus and in that make believe world, anything is possible, but in the end, they got on an elevator and pressed the floor they wanted (with absolutely no feelings.) In fact, I think that may have been what the movie was about: the lack of feelings of both the machines/computers/simulations and the people as well.

But in the John Wick series, the level of ultraviolence is off the chart. It’s, basically, the effect of video games on entertainment. In real life, if someone shoots you, you usually die. In video games, because each character is given a certain amount of “Life” or “HP” (health points), you might have to shoot them fifteen times to bring their health down to 20%.

This seems to be the m.o. of the John Wick series, until now. Supposedly each man is wearing a flexible kevlar fabric made suit, so they often pull their lapel over their heads, their most exposed points. I can’t even remember why John Wick became a movie character, except that it was probably based on a cartoon and Keanu, who seems to have a problem with speaking, preferred to shoot people in the heads rather than speak. My guesstimation, knowing that he likes to ride his motorcycle through Manhattan, is that he got into acting on a whim, figured out how to speak some lines with as little emotion as possible (My favorite is “free clean energy, for everyone,”) and because of The Matrix, kind of got caught. It’s been reported that he has only 384 words in this movie, but the entire story and camera is focused on him. My favorite moment, and probably Keanu’s best acting moment, was his last word: Helen.

The Conformist. (Bertolucci)

This was probably my favorite of the last several movies I’ve seen. I wanted to see it 40 years ago when it was showing at my local Saturday night art house but I was probably so young and stupid I would have gone drinking with friends instead. So I never saw it. But I knew there were some gay – related issues in it and, true enough, there were. But I was surprised because I don’t know my history as well as I think I do.

The story is about the rise and fall of fascism in Italy. We like our history neatly wrapped, like the day the world went to war, or Pearl Harbor was bombed, or 9/11. But Italy had already abandoned Hitler a couple of years before he was finally killed. So this movie takes place between the rise of fascism and its death, in Italy, where it was born in the first place. The main character, “Marcello” let’s say, is haunted by a homosexual encounter he had when he was 10 or 12. Somewhere thereabouts. I presumed, because of my prejudice about old movies, that this encounter was going to be traumatic. But actually, the young boy is incredibly turned on by the soldier or fascist who turns out to have women’s length hair and may also be a transsexual. It’s not clear and I think maybe this was on purpose. But whatever happens or happened to “the conformist,” it was something he enjoyed as a ten year old. This is pedophilia of course, but it’s portrayed much more innocently than when we think of groomers or others who have sex with children or are predators.

But the important part of the movie is that he becomes a conformist and in order to “pass,” must join the fascist party of Mussolini. In a harrowing scene that was later re-imagined in New Jersey in The Sopranos, one of his best friends is murdered in the woods, after seeing him and begging him for help. He doesn’t help and by the end of the movie has lost his mind. Reporting everyone for being a fascist. Pointing fingers in every direction, but not at himself.

Btw, the episode where Drea De Matteo playing Adrianna La Cerva, girlfriend to Christopher Moltisanti, is probably one of the most horrific and heartless scenes I’ve seen on TV. And it’s a direct homage to Bertolucci and The Conformist, which also deals with Italians and their Brutish mobs.

The Forger, by Maggie Peron, based on the memoir by Ciona Schaumhaus.

The Forger was also the name of a movie starring Lauren Bacall and Josh Hutcherson, two actors that I could never imagine had ever starred in a film together. It was one I missed. This one seemed really interesting to me, mainly because of one of the quotes: “celebrates the exuberant life force….” etc.

The only problem I could really see in the movie was, this time, some of the editing and, possibly, the fact that you have to know a little more about Nazi Germany and the Gestapo than what mainstream movies like Schindler’s List have given us.

I really enjoyed the movie, but I think I had to spend… possibly… 30 to 45 minutes trying to figure it out.

Apparently, during the Hitler/Nazi regime, there were quite a large group of Jews in Germany who decided to hide their religion from the Gestapo and practiced being a good German by responding Heil Hitler whenever necessary. But it’s even more complicated than that. And this movie is complicated to a level I haven’t experienced in a long time, which is why it took me so long to understand what was going on – especially what anyone wanted.

So Cioma (I think it’s probably Chris in English but I don’t know) is an exuberant and constantly happy young man. He’s blonde and probably doesn’t have the features that Nazi Germany thought were “Jewish.” But we learn at the very beginning of the movie that his parents and grandmother were “sent East,” and then shortly after, some government official comes to catalogue his mother and father’s room, and the dining room, and then seals it off with an official Nazi tape. He says that all the contents of that room belong to no one. (It’s kind of important that this happens because the theft of Jewish wealth was something that was rampant in the Nazi regime and aided by supposedly “neutral” Switzerland. Believe me: Switzerland was never neutral. They were money launderers and Germany knew it could steal the property and money of the wealthy Jews and hide it in Swiss banks. That’s a crime that is still ongoing in my opinion.

But back to the movie, it took me a long time to understand that being “sent east” was a euphemism for being sent to Auschwitz, or Poland, the eastern front of Germany’s war with Russia (and the rest of the world.) We also have to remember that Poland was invaded by both Russia and Germany. What the Russian’s (Ukrainian’s at the time) did to Polish officers and soldiers is documented in another movie called “Hate.” And it’s worth seeing. But basically, the death camps were mostly located in Poland because it was as far away as they could get. It would be like Americans sending Jews to a desert in Nevada or the hills of Montana. So anyway, I finally started to understand that this guy was Jewish, in 1942, in Berlin. And he even gets called a dirty Jew at one point. It becomes clear he’s not supposed to ride the trolley or take public transportation to his job, where he is making the tubes of rifles (sorry gun owners, I couldn’t name a single part of a gun if I tried, except maybe the trigger). Anyway, I finally come to understand that this job gives him an “exemption,” but even then I thought it meant an exemption from soldiering. I didn’t realize that these words were about the death camps. And yet, he’s relentlessly happy. Even after his parents and grandmother were carted off “east,” he doesn’t seem to give a shit. He has a friend named Det, who seems to work by doing tailoring for “market women.” A lot of this is just impossible to follow without an explanation, which is why it took me so long to realize that there were Jews living in Berlin in 1942.

The plot of the story is that he is an expert artist and can forge documents. True to Germanic culture, the photo of the person had to have grommets on two of the corners, exactly measured x number of millimeters from the the corner of the photos. The photos had to be exact. And most importantly — this is where his talent comes in — the Nazi mark of authenticity had to be exactly 3/4 on the photos and 1/4 on the paper behind it. Also they had a specific font which everyone would recognize today as the “Nazi font.”

He and his friend Det don’t actually have proper documentation of the kind that he is forging for others. What he has is basically a library card, in today’s parlance.

Anyway, I won’t spoil the rest of the movie, but what I wanted to say about it, is that if you don’t know about the world you’re writing about (in my case, the world of underground Jews living in Berlin during the later years of the war, with most of his family already sent to the death camps), the unprepared audience is going to spend most of its intellectual time trying to understand: A) Is this guy Jewish? B) Why do they act like he’s Jewish but don’t do anything about it? C) If he’s not Jewish, why do they treat him so badly? Etc. etc. Do you see what I mean? It’s called world building. The filmmaker’s made a lot of assumptions and possibly Cioma himself when he wrote his memoir. (He made it to Switzerland and ended up fathering four boys.) He understands his experience. I don’t and it took me about 45 minutes until I finally understood what the stakes were. It’s a badly written movie, but I did enjoy it.

And finally… a move. Tonight is my last night in the apartment I’ve lived in for 36 years. I was thinking that I might leave today and spend my first new night at Tom’s mom’s place, but my main goal was to move my plants. Supposedly, some junk people are coming tomorrow to haul my awful furniture away, including my bed and couch, and then the apartment will be absolutely empty except for the few bags of clothing and such that I have left. I’m hoping that I won’t cry when I leave. But 36 years is, I guess, and probably, the longest that I will live anywhere. I can’t say that I’ve really liked it. It was something my dad wanted to do for me. The apartment was always overheated. The building was mismanaged. One time I felt my chair moving and I realized we were having an earthquake and the bizarre north and south design of the building was exacerbating that movement. One time I brought home a guy that was so drunk he wouldn’t or couldn’t be made to leave and I finally dragged him into the hallway – probably one of my worst pick up experiences. People have been extraordinarily nice to me when they find out I’m leaving, and I always want to say, “why weren’t you this nice before.” But Debbie (the broker) said, “But you’re an institution. You’re part of what they see.”

And then I realized, yes, I’m like one of those solid fixtures that you kind of pass by on your way to work and are always happy to see. Mine was the clock on 5th Avenue between 42nd and 43rd or 43rd and 44th. For as long as I worked at Leavy Rosenweig & Hyman, I would look at that clock and judge my pace and situation by it. I took a really nice picture of it on a beautiful summer day. Maybe I’m not entirely human, but I’m humbled by the fact that I’m at least “there,” for people.

Tom Cook

A lot has been said about Brendan Fraser’s performance as a 600 pound man trapped in his apartment somewhere in Idaho. I don’t think more needs to be added by me, but after seeing it a second time, I realized what it was that bothered me the first time around, and it wasn’t the fact that he’s wearing a fat suit. In fact I thought the depiction of what enormously fat people have to do to get by in life was extremely sensitive. He needs a kind of claw to pick things up that have fallen on the ground (or in one case, the aid of someone else). He has an enormous brush on a kind of extension pole in order to bathe and also a ring to hold onto to prevent himself from falling.

He needs another ring to help him get into bed, and he has a very large walker which enables him to move about the apartment. His closest friend is enormously sympathetic as she brings him food that he knows he will need, even as she wishes he would get some help.

No what bothered me is that the movie is dated and I couldn’t see this the first time. But it’s especially true of the evangelical missionary that shows up at the beginning of the play and tries, over the course of it, to get Charlie to find Jesus so that he can be reborn when the end of the world comes. I know the hatred for gays, partly because there’s so much new talk about transgendered people, is on the rise. But this kid is woefully out of touch with contemporary awareness. It’s like he time traveled and didn’t get the message that gay men (Charlie is gay and has a daughter he fathered when he was married to a woman) are not apologetic anymore and are not shamed into thinking they must change. The missionary reveals that he is actually on the run from the law, having stolen several thousand dollars from his church, and he is also lying about their church sending people out on missions. The church, called “New Life,” now hands out pamphlets on the street corners and this is the extent of their missionary work. The reason the missionary is pretending to be on a mission is because he wants to do something — he doesn’t want to just pass out pamphlets. That’s an honest thing: most young people want to do things in their lives and many want to do good things. But to come into a gay man’s home, and preach, as he does at the end, that the reason he is fat is because he’s gay and has embraced sin, and that the reason Charlie’s lover killed himself is because he sinned — it’s just something that wouldn’t happen anymore.

The play was produced in 2012 so it means it was probably written in 2010 at the latest. But a lot has changed in a decade, and although I really admired the fact that at the base of Charlie’s unhappiness and his weight gain is the loss of his lover (who was also his friend Liz’s brother), and who, in some very subtle dialogue, it sounds as though he might have had the exact opposite of Charlie’s problem: anorexia, it all felt a little off somehow. They were ideas and situations that were probably very new at the time: teaching a class online without a camera in order to hide his obesity from his students; a gay man trying to reach out (and save) his daughter; the angry and possibly vicious daughter; the insecure missionary. But today it doesn’t quite add up, and if people weren’t so obsessed with body imagery and especially Brendan Fraser’s performance, which is, indeed, heartbreaking — they might have seen how this has not aged particularly well. It’s a bit of a time piece. And one of my own frustrations about writing, especially about gay men, is that what you write today, is obsolete almost as soon as you finish it.

The Whale refers to Moby Dick and the White Whale and in particular, an essay his daughter wrote which Charlie finds unbelievably beautiful. This is okay, but what really tugs at your heart and caused me to cry many times, was the desperation a man who is dying of congestive heart failure and has only a week to live is trying to save his daughter from a future she is hurtling into like the blind angry snot that she is.

I’m writing this review to purge my feelings. I don’t know why I thought a movie about a donkey on a journey was going to end on an upbeat note. Maybe it’s because we’re taught by Disney to expect upbeat endings when it comes to animals. Anyway, suffice to say, this does not have a happy ending and it left me in tears, which I think is the point.

EO has a loving caretaker and a good life as a performing donkey at a traveling circus in Poland. His caretaker might be a bit too loving, but since this movie is the donkey’s point of view, for the most part, it’s simply a lot of petting and stroking. It is possible to love a dog and a cat so it’s possible to love a donkey. Unfortunately, the circus has to file for bankruptcy and all the circus animals are sold.

There are also protestors at the circus — animal rights activists — who insist that the animals are suffering, though they are clearly not. The activists should have been a clue to me that this movie was going to be about animal welfare and the way we treat animals. EO often escapes whatever captivity he’s been forced into. In one horrible scene, he is pulling a cart at a fur factory where foxes in cages are screaming in fear as they are killed by some sort of electrical execution machine, and then thrown in the back of a cart. In one fairly nice environment, he lives in a donkey petting and riding farm. He finds work in a champion horse breeding stable. He accidentally watches a soccer game that seems to be played between some normal, though very enthusiastic, soccer fans and neo-nazis. Later the neo-nazis, who lost the game, come to where the winning team is celebrating — dragging EO into their revelries — and the nazis break in and beat everyone with bats. Then they see EO and decide to beat him as well. EO ends up in an animals rescue clinic.

Somehow he ends up on a truck that seems to be headed for a glue factory with other horses. But the driver of the truck inexplicably has his throat slit and the horses and EO are offloaded by the police. For no sensible reason, EO has been tied up to a pole and a vagrant, who turns out to be a gambler who has lost all his money, takes EO and says, (an ominous warning if I had been listening properly), “I wonder if I’ve just saved you or if I’m stealing you.”

Even while I still expected an upbeat ending — that he would find his way back to the loving caretaker he had at the beginning of the movie — I still feared the slaughterhouse that seemed to be looming in the background throughout the movie: the animal rights activists — most of whom are against meat — the nazis that nearly beat EO to death — the gambler who is riding in a horse trailer with EO on his way to Italy said something about having eaten sausage with donkey meat — when it finally got to the end and EO was at the slaughterhouse being herded along with thousands of cows and goats into the abattoir and clearly resisting (how they got those donkeys to act is just beyond me), I was surprised and upset. Even right up until the sound of the bolt going into the back of his head and the screen having gone dark, I kept hoping. That’s why I’m so upset and have been crying. Hope was shattered.

I don’t think people feel the same way, judging by the reviews I’ve read on IMDB. Most of those are about the technical aspects and one nut talked about the occult being the backbone of the movie, although I think that genius probably wanted to say mythology rather than the occult. The occult is a system of mystical beliefs and practice that exist outside of common religion. Communion is not an occult practice because it’s a common practice in the Catholic religion. Mythology are stories developed over time by a common group of people — usually spoken and passed down through re-telling. But in our era, there are quasi-myths being made – like Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader and Star Wars.

Anyway, IO (not EO), like many Greek myths, was a beautiful woman that Zeus decided to make love to rape by disguising himself as a cloud. Hera, found out about it and turned her into a cow. Several things happened and Hera decided to send a gadfly to sting IO and force her to wander the world. There may be something there to latch onto, but it’s no more convincing that he is called EO because that is the closest sound to a donkey’s bray. Anyway, I was deeply affected, upset and moved. It’ll probably take me a few days to get over this ending.

This movie could work easily as pure fiction, but it is based on the author’s real life experience in deciding to become a marine, given that his choices in life are bleak. In reality, Elegance Bratton has told people that he didn’t even realize he was homeless, though he lived, more or less, on the streets.

In the movie, he has a horrible mother who, because she is so disgusted by his homosexuality, puts newspaper on the couch so he doesn’t taint it with what I suppose she thinks are gay cooties. It is so weird to see homophobia in minority communities but it’s just as prevalent there as anywhere. This is why a term developed for gay black men called “the down low,” or “being on the down low.”

The surprising thing about this movie is the change that comes over the recruits as they go through boot camp. The year is 2005 and probably at the very start of what I would call the seismic change that led to gay marriage and its recent establishment in the law itself, due to the open threats by the Supreme Court and especially, Uncle Tom himself, Clarence Thomas, to overthrow the court opinion that made gay marriage legal in all 50 states. (The new law does not force states to marry gay people — it can’t do that — but it does require same sex marriages performed in other states to be recognized in every state.) So these recruits start out with their usual biases and hatreds on full display. On their first day they are all screamed at, “Are you a homosexual,” “Are you a communist,” etc. Ellis French, played by the amazing Jeremy Pope, does the usual denial, but, from what I could tell, he gets an erection in the shower and the others nearly beat him to death for getting it. At that point, they know he’s gay, but this being the era of “Don’t ask don’t tell,” they simply force him to sleep away from the others. But, maybe because of his kindness, and his strength, his ability to fight back, his death by drowning (he is revived and does not report the incident, which would have landed his Sargent some jail time,) his ability to comfort other recruits, and perhaps his humor, (although there’s not much of it), they become Marines whose motto is that they “fight to protect the Marine to my right and the Marine to my left.”

The real drama of the movie is actually at the end, when his homophobic mother decides to come to his graduation, and I won’t spoil it any further, suffice to say, he is a Marine among fellow Marines, and a changed man with a future. It speaks loads about the lack of opportunities for young black men, and especially young gay black men, most of whom, as he points out early in the film, are either dead or in jail.

I don’t think the reviews were more than “generally good,” but I thought for a man who has come that far — from not even knowing he was homeless to getting funding and writing and directing a movie based on his life — it was far more than generally good. It was deeply moving and that should be the judge of all artworks.

Back when I still had a writers group, or maybe it was in a class, we were talking about the absolute glut of books and movies about vampires. It began, probably, with Ann Rice, but really Bram Stoker and the movie Nosferatu. But by the time of Kristen Stewart and her run of movies, it was a joke, almost. As Stanley said in “The Office,” “How many damn Vampires am I supposed to care about?” With Ann Rice’s “Interview…” it was clear because of her skill with writing, that she was writing about gay men. Homo eroticism is basically the foundation of that novel and the subsequent sequels. Sexuality in general is important to those books because once they become a vampire, in Ann Rice’s rules of the world, the penis stops working and sexuality becomes more skin centered, and the focus is on the neck which is a fairly erogenous area. This allowed her to explore the history of Vampirism (but really, it was a look back at gay history and every gay man understood it).

Anyway somebody mentioned that the “new” theme of modern books, especially for young readers, was going to be cannibalism and I think I groaned out loud. I’m so tired of books and stories that a: make no sense and b: purport to shed light on an aspect of life in a new way. The Time Traveler’s Wife, for example, is just so difficult for me because although it’s shedding light on the “part time” marriage, people don’t just pop in and out of time. So it just doesn’t do anything for me.

Whatever cannibalism is supposed to represent is lost to me in this movie, which has won awards and appears to be well liked. What does it mean that they’re cannibals (which they call Eaters — they are able to find each other through a strong sense of smell that they possess). Is it trying to say that sex is a form of eating or ingestion? Is it trying to say that our deepest urge is to devour others? The title, Bones and All, refers to a line said by some particularly creepy cannibal they run into, played by Michael Stuhlbarg, who seems to have a lover played by David Gordon Green, who is not a cannibal but practices it anyway. He says that to eat a person, “bones and all” is the greatest feeling one can ever have. Given that it would be impossible to do this, it feels like a lie, but it sort of makes sense if you’re talking about cannibalism as a metaphor for sexuality. But I’m not really sure that’s what the author intended or what Guadigno is going for. And a quick look at the book it was based upon suggests to me that it’s simply a story about a young girl who is a cannibal. That’s all. Like a book about a girl who wanted to be a rugby player. Or a princess. When Jeffrey Dahmer ate his victims he said that the first time was simply to see what it was like, but later, he said he felt it was a way of keeping them with him. I don’t necessarily believe what Dahmer said about himself and his murders or even his feelings. For me, cannibalism is like murder. It is not explainable and it is no more a metaphor than murder is. Some people are just awful and can’t feel.