Throughout his career, Steven Spielberg has created some of the most popular films of all time, garnering him an enormous amount of respect on both a critical and financial scale. He is considered by many to be the most famous director of all time, given his track record as both director and producer of some of the most recognizable films of the past 50 years. Movie Daddy is a series by Story Screen Editor-in-chief, Mike Burdge, which aims to cover the Beard's directorial filmography in an attempt to present just why Steven Spielberg is very much that hot fire when it comes to being an American filmmaker. In this installment, we're talking the big one, the movie that jettisoned Spielberg’s career into the powerhouse that it continues to be today: Jaws . ==================== Jaws is one of those rare movies that TRULY gets better every time you watch it. During my rewatch for this article, I found myself inevitably getting lost in the story and characters, yet again, even after having viewed this movie dozens of times, if not more. There is a brisk pace and sleek style to how the film reveals itself, whether it’s through individual character arcs, genre bending or basic act structure. Much like Hitchcock’s Psycho , Jaws is such a behemoth of movie fandom that a critical analysis starts to feel unjustified. “What can I say about this movie that hasn’t already been said, or even worse, is brutally apparent at this point in time to anyone watching it?” So, instead of discussing what about this movie is so good, I thought I’d focus on the whys and hows that made it so great. Jaws was the first true blockbuster of Hollywood, at least in the sense we have come to define the term today. It was the first movie to break $100,000,000 at the box office, catapulting it into the consciousness of the entire world. When a movie becomes as popular as Jaws did, it moves beyond entertainment, and cements itself into popular culture forever. To this day, the film, and its massive success, affect the way movies are made, and even more so, how they are marketed. While the arrival of Star Wars in 1977 - just two years after Jaws’ release - solidified the new model of marketing and spectacle-style of releasing films, it is Spielberg’s movie that unintentionally paved the way to how modern Hollywood big budget films are handled at almost every turn, from concept to release. So how did this thing all come together? By now, I’m sure most of you know some of the troubled production myths that plague stories of the shoot to this day. What Spielberg described as a “hellish shoot,” (mainly due to the increased stress and troubles of shooting on open water) was ultimately completed, mainly due to a good amount of luck and A LOT of talent. Or how Spielberg himself put it, with: “courage and stupidity.” Hey, it's not called magic because it's easy to understand and believe. We’ve all heard the horrors of the shark, (lovingly referred to as “Bruce” by the crew) not working on set, leading to massive delays initially, and ultimately, requiring a need to work around showing the beast too often and too early. This reworking created the motif of not showing the shark to build fear and tension with the audience. It’s a similar tactic used by John Carpenter in Halloween , where the less you see (or know) the scarier, which really is where most of Jaws’ legendary horror status comes from. Hell, the opening credits are also very indicative of the same style used only a few years later in Halloween’s opening moments (which Robby Anderson and myself discuss in this video ). I will say, however, that I’ve come to consider that this “shark no work” reasoning for many of the film’s most brilliant moments might be a bit of an exaggeration due to the mythology built around the production. Spielberg himself called the film: “ Duel in the sea,” referring to his first feature film (which I covered here ) where the truck-driving antagonist is intentionally never shown to create dread and mystery. The climactic defeat of the truck driver is even visually the EXACT SAME SHOT as the demise of the shark in Jaws falling in slow motion to the bottom of the ocean. So how much were the failings of the original shark device to blame for the movies truly masterful successes? We’ll never know, because at this point, the myth is so much sweeter than any reality. Based on Peter Benchley’s wildly successful book of the same name, the project was shopped around quickly to get it going. To give a very basic understanding, meetings with Spielberg first began in February of 1974, the shooting started in April, and the film needed to be completed by June, mostly due to specifics involving the Screen Actors Guild, as well as the need to get the film out into theaters while positive reception to the book was style hot. Because of these time constraints and Spielberg’s persistence on changing the script to fit his style and vision, the film became a massive collaborative project: Spielberg worked with Benchley, along with other credited and uncredited writers, to tighten the script up all throughout production, sometimes delivering new pages of scenes on the day of shooting. This allowed for a pretty elastic experience on set, where the actors began to work new dialogue and moments into the scenes, leading to a very naturalistic feel to the finished product. This process is why we get these amazing characters, who you really CARE about, making the developing conflict between them and their environment an absolute delight to behold throughout the first half of the film. In fact, the first half of the movie just might be even better than the second half, but I dunno! Depends on the day, I guess. But once these anchors of character and plot were put into place, Spielberg’s true superpower of combining and heightening genres could be unleashed. The film’s screenwriter, Carl Gottlieb, said: “When you do a straight line adventure film like Jaws , anything that doesn't contribute to the suspense or the humanity or the horror has to go.” With this idea in mind, the creative minds behind Jaws sought to not leave out any genre elements that didn’t live up to the high standards they had placed. Instead, they made them reach those standards. Comedy, drama, horror, action - everything was upped to the highest level conceivable in order to maintain the adventure genre aesthetics, and the result was one of the most joyously watchable films ever created. This is something Spielberg has carried over to most of his adventure oriented projects, which ultimately, (to oversimplify) is why his movies work so well. It’s the reason why you (and I should include myself in this) wouldn't be to blame for getting so lost in some of the best stories Spielberg has presented, that we forget to notice all of his amazing directing choices - both audio and visual - purposefully generating a mood, theme, idea or some other reason. Getting lost is the point. THAT’S pure movie escapism, and you need a master of that weapon to truly get the results ya boi Steve constantly receives. Spielberg’s contributions as a director cannot be understated when really breaking down just what makes his movies tick - from his color choices: reserving red only for blood, (and a couple glasses of wine) to his archetypal nature of subverting typical “Monster Moments” in order to create something primal - he allows our familiarity with swimming to set the mood, and our imagination to fill in the rest. His direction of the entire project is masterful. Spielberg constantly flips expectations on a technical level throughout Jaws . As a true cinephile, he knows how movies HAVE been made, so he uses all of this knowledge to build tension and execute terror in ways that feel fresh and unexpected. In her review, film critic and absolute beast, Pauline Kael, wrote: "In 'Jaws,' which may be the most cheerfully perverse scare movie ever made, the disasters don’t come on schedule the way they do in most disaster pictures, and your guts never settle down to a timetable. Even while you’re convulsed with laughter, you’re still apprehensive, because the editing rhythms are very tricky, and the shock images loom up huge, right on top of you." This is a fantastic observation (obviously), and in a cheekily charming anecdote, the director explains his love of manipulating the audience’s mood, transitioning the laugh of Brody's “Shit” line into the scream of the first appearance of the shark as an example. Spielberg says he would sit at the back of movie theaters waiting for that moment's reaction: where the joyful experience of the adventure thus far suddenly has the rug pulled out from under it, in what has now become arguably the film’s most famous moment. The director’s use of camera tricks, both in filming and editing, are also in high gear. His infamous subtle blocking and camera placement are used to present differing alignments with various characters, as well as differences between characters themselves (character design and costumes communicate these same things). You can just look at the shots used during the USS Indianapolis story for a perfect example of how all of these elements can be used to create the separation between Hooper/Quint and Brody. We even have the brilliant dolly zoom shot (perfected by Hitchcock in Vertigo ). Always really fucking cool in any movie, the dolly zoom is peppered in at the end of a fantastic series of shots, that are cut together using passing people to direct position and the eyeline of the audience. It’s all fantastic stuff that you just love to watch. We’ll get into this much more as we continue down the director’s filmography, but John Williams’ score is the stuff of miracles in Jaws , and it’s no surprise that he took home that little gold statue for his work on the film, his second win at the time. While I must take a brief moment to say that the movie itself is a masterpiece, and one of the best movies ever made, I’d be lying if I didn’t find the why and how of it all so much more fascinating throughout this analysis. On every level, Jaws is a movie that probably shouldn’t work, and most definitely shouldn’t work AS WELL as it does. A lot of the film requires a certain suspension of disbelief, which isn’t always a negative thing to say about a movie. That’s the very nature of movies: they aren’t real. Spielberg and his crew are able to manipulate the flow of information and the display of the images into a feeling of passive adventure; it is extremely impressive, and unbelievably risky. On the believability of some of the film’s events, Peter Benchly quotes William Goldman by saying: “Reality may be great and truth may be wonderful, but none of it holds a candle to believability, and if a filmmaker has done his job and brought you into believability he can do anything.” To that effect, Spielberg himself believes, “If I've got them for two hours they will believe whatever I do for the next three minutes, because I've got them in my hands.” This seems to specifically point to the tank blowing up the shark at the end of the movie, which is (understandably) a little unrealistic. The decision came from the need to change the story’s original ending, where the shark ultimately just dies from its wounds, which is definitely not as COOL. Both versions of the story still help to tie off Brody’s arc; the shark represents his realization of his own mortality and weakness. But blowing the thing up is way cooler, and a much better ending to this crowd-pleaser. I’ll end with a great summarized quote from film critic, Roger Ebert, who looked back on Jaws in retrospect in relation to Spielberg’s continued career afterwards. I think it perfectly encapsulates exactly what this movie did for the director, as well as the moviemaking world at large: "Spielberg's first big hit contained elements he repeated in many of his movies... The movie was the launching pad for the most extraordinary directorial career in modern movie history. Before 'Jaws,' he was known as the gifted young director. After 'Jaws,' he was the king." On the next Movie Daddy , we’ll be jumping ahead (that’s right, it’s time to start hopping around!) to the modern animated epic: The Adventures of Tintin. Mike Burdge Editor-in-chief Founder of and programmer for Story Screen. Lover of stories and pizza in the dark. When he isn't watching movies, you can find him reading things about people watching movies. He currently resides in Poughkeepsie, NY and most assuredly is going through a French Connection phase.

Diana DiMuro and Mike Burdge take a trip to King Land with director Mike Flanagan's two feature film Stephen King adaptations: Gerald's Game and Doctor Sleep . And they both rip hard. Listen on....

Last week we announced over social media that founder, editor-in-chief, and all-around man-behind-the-curtain, Mike Burdge, is leaving the theater located at 445 Main Street in Beacon, NY, and Story Screen is going with him. We received an outpouring of love from the community, plenty of questions, and even some potential misinformation (No, Mike is not dead or leaving Story Screen. Yes, the theater will remain a movie theater, now called The Beacon). Mike started Story Screen in 2014, showing movies publicly as pop-up events around Beacon, NY while partnering with local businesses. He gathered friends who created fun engaging content for pop-up events and Story Screen's website , everything from one-of-a-kind film posters to podcasts, videos, articles, and reviews - all while building a community of movie lovers where everyone is treated like family. Mike, along with Robert Anderson, Bernadette Gorman-White, and Diana DiMuro, later became Story Screen’s managing team behind the scenes. Story Screen built up a fanbase that helped lead to our involvement in the opening and management of Wonderbar and the Story Screen Beacon Theater. At Story Screen Beacon Theater, Mike was the programmer, booker, and projectionist, while also working with the staff of both the theater and Wonderbar. Just when it seemed like the business had finally hit its stride, the pandemic hit. Story Screen reached out to its fans with digital movie screenings and fun live-streaming events to help keep the community engaged while they stayed safe at home. Eventually, we worked with the City of Beacon to build and operate the Story Screen Drive-In at the Beacon Settlement Camp. It was important to find ways during the pandemic to support other Beacon businesses and engage with the community. We were all in this together. The Story Screen Drive-In was a huge success. We even continued operating it for a while after the theater reopened. Once the theater reopened, Story Screen continued to bring quality film programming (whether new or old, mainstream, independent, or local) to the big screen, while also hosting special events at the theater like the Beacon HorrorShow, Trivia nights, an annual Oscars celebration, and our monthly VHS Pasta Night. These special events and themed film series built up a large and supportive audience. We have had a terrific response to events and tremendous community support from everyone in Beacon. We love engaging with you. We are always excited when someone says they recognize one of us from a podcast episode of “Story Screen Presents” or when they want to discuss a movie they enjoyed watching at the theater. We are definitely sad to leave the Beacon location behind, but we are also extremely excited about what’s next. On behalf of everyone behind Story Screen, we want to thank all of the staff (past and present) of Wonderbar and the Beacon theater, all of the artists, creatives, and writers who contributed over the years to special events and our website, businesses who donated, and to everyone who showed up for screenings, from the early days of pop-up events around Beacon to shows on the big screen at the Story Screen Beacon Theater. Thank you to the entire community of Beacon for all of its love and support. We could not have done it without you. PLEASE STAY TUNED, FRIENDS. This is not the end. While Mike Burdge and Story Screen are leaving the theater located at 445 Main Street, Beacon, NY, we still have so much more in store. We appreciate your continued support while we plan what’s next for Story Screen in the coming months. We are excited about new locations, themed pop-up events, movie trivia, games, and much more! To stay up to date on the latest and greatest, follow us on social media ( Facebook , Instagram & Twitter ) and visit our website www.storyscreenbeacon.com where you can sign up for our newsletter and find all of our fresh film content (articles, reviews, podcasts, and videos), as well as information on upcoming special events. Keep an eye out for the launch of our new membership platform where you can support us while gaining access to exclusive content, special merchandise, and admission to our upcoming events. We can’t wait to see you at the movies. Love, The Story Screen Family

This past week I revisited Gus van Sant’s 2008 film Milk , a film about the life and career of gay rights activist and politician Harvey Milk; I was struck by how timely – once again – the movie felt. Milk’s original release was at the Castro Theater in San Francisco, two weeks before Election Day. Proposition 8 – an odious, homophobic voter referendum to amend the California state constitution to declare that only marriage between a man and a woman was recognized as valid in the state – was on the ballot and a huge topic of controversy at the time. Milk felt like an urgent story, not just about the history of the gay rights movement, but as a reminder of where we as a society should not return to again. Seven years later, when gay marriage was effectively legalized in the United States via the Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, (after being declared legal on the state level in a number of places), Milk began to seem almost quaint to me – a story about an unfortunate time period, a relic of a harmful culture from long ago. Now, given who is in charge of our country’s administration, the story has regained a sense of urgency. The film opens with the real-life footage of Dianne Feinstein – then the President of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, now the Senior Senator from California – announcing to the press that Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone had both been shot and killed by former Supervisor Dan White. The film then flashes back eight years, to Milk meeting his boyfriend, Scott Smith, for the first time in New York City on the eve of his 40th birthday, where he makes the decision to stop living inside the closet and actually live a life that he can be proud of. When I watch this film, I am struck not only by the way the film’s flashback structure allows us to get viscerally involved in the act of Harvey’s recollection of events, but also by the layers of memory and nostalgia it elicits from me. In the current political climate this meta-remembrance resonates with me far more deeply than ever before. I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. In high school I used to wander down to the Castro neighborhood at the end of the day, and get a snack at Hot Cookie and people watch. I’ve wandered by the memorial plaque for Harvey Milk at the former site of his Castro Camera storefront hundreds of times. I’ve seen movies at the Castro Theater. I used to go bowling with friends at the alley next door to the Moscone Center. The story of Harvey Milk was taught to us in 4th grade as part of our unit on the history of California. The footage of Feinstein making the announcement of the deaths of Milk and Moscone is gut-wrenchingly familiar to me. This history is embedded in my heart. It’s in my bones. When I was in 4th grade learning about Californian history and Harvey Milk’s role in it, my teacher was a young man, likely no older than 25 years old at the time. I’ll call him Mr. Barnes. He was a funny guy, able to keep us entertained during the driest of lessons. One day, fairly late in the school year, we were talking about the concept of culture in class. Being that we were in San Francisco, we began talking about the specifics of what is considered gay culture. At this time we were also being taught Sex Ed: egg, sperm, how the sperm gets deposited in the vagina, all the things that make 10-year-olds giggle awkwardly. One of my classmates, trying to figure out how to map gay culture and gay relationships upon the paradigm of sex we were being taught in biology class, expressed curiosity as to how sex works for homosexual men. Mr. Barnes answered my classmate’s question honestly, explaining that typically when gay men have intercourse, the penis goes into the anus. He didn’t elaborate beyond that, he used the correct anatomical terms for all body parts involved, and then the culture conversation continued on. What followed can only be described as a shit-storm. Another of my classmates, apparently extremely uncomfortable by the topic of gay sex, (even within the context of school sexual education), went home and told their parents about the question and how Mr. Barnes had answered. The parents then called the principal. The principal panicked. A letter was sent home informing all of the families what had happened. Mr. Barnes was suspended. A town-hall meeting was organized for all of the parents from my class. My father attended the meeting, and was shocked by the level of vitriol being expressed by the other parents. The fairly innocuous answer Mr. Barnes had given in the classroom had been exaggerated wildly – parents were furious, convinced that what Mr. Barnes had done was extremely gratuitous, lascivious, and unacceptable. One parent declared that he might as well have shown us a gay pornography film for how inappropriate this was for a classroom full of 4th graders. They all called for Mr. Barnes’ head, and the school folded. Two weeks before the end of the school year, Mr. Barnes was fired. You might be thinking that this story must have happened long ago in the 1970’s, the Harvey Milk era. You would be wrong. This happened in 1995. When I look back on this incident, I remember how confused and saddened I was by the way it was handled. Don’t we live in San Francisco? Aren’t gay and lesbian people a huge part of what makes San Francisco’s culture the way it is? Everyone knows that, so what was the problem? My teacher was fired, not for honestly answering a student’s question, but because the answer had to do with homosexuality. It was a scathing indictment of the supposed liberal values of my San Francisco Bay Area private elementary school. 22 years later, I think of this as the moment when I stopped feeling so confident that the city in which I lived – the most famously gay-friendly city in the world – was actually a truly progressive place. While re-watching Milk this past week I couldn’t stop thinking about what happened to Mr. Barnes. Milk and Smith moved from New York to San Francisco, hoping to live in a place where their relationship would be more accepted. They end up in the Eureka Valley, in the Castro neighborhood, a place slowly being taken over by gay and lesbian people, but historically home to a large community of Irish Catholic families. Milk and Smith are dismayed, when they quickly realize that the local police were more willing to arrest and brutalize the gay population, as opposed to protecting them from hate crimes. This realization – that San Francisco was not as progressive as it was known to be – is what formed the genesis of Harvey Milk’s political career. Milk’s intention, as an activist and a politician, was to be a representative for the interests of the sizable and growing gay population in San Francisco. By running for the Board of Supervisors, debating his opponents, and giving speeches to his potential heterosexual constituents, he brings issues of gay rights to the forefront of San Franciscans’ minds. He normalizes conversations about the gay community in the public eye, which eventually helped to decrease their perception in the city as other, and humanize them for those who did not understand them and thus feared them. Milk’s political strategy makes me remember the nonchalance with which Mr. Barnes answered my classmate’s question. What a bold act of courage that was, to answer in a way that put the idea of gay sex within the overall framework of the human sexual education curriculum we were being taught. It was an answer that sought to normalize the idea of gay relationships – asking us, as 10-year-olds, to not think of gay people as other. Similarly, later in the film, after Milk is finally elected to public office after three previously unsuccessful campaigns, he introduces legislation to enact a citywide gay rights ordinance, as well as spearheads an effort to defeat Proposition 6. Sponsored by State Senator John Briggs, Prop 6 is an effort to ban gays, lesbians, and anyone who supported them from working in California’s public school system. Prop 6 is also a part of a larger nationwide conservative movement that began with a campaign by Anita Bryant (the brand ambassador for the Florida Citrus Commission) to repeal a gay rights ordinance in Dade County, Florida. Milk realizes that the best way to make sure Californians as a whole vote against Prop 6 would be to help them understand how many gay people they actually know. By forcing heterosexual Californians to realize that gay people were their friends, neighbors, and family members, it allowed them to respect their humanity and not see them as bogeymen out to molest young children. Milk instructs his inner circle of assistants, aides, and activists, to come out to their families if they haven’t already – to lead by example and spread the word for others to do the same. Prop 6 was eventually defeated – one of the first significant gay rights victories in California. In February of 2004, nine years after my elementary school fired Mr. Barnes for answering a student’s question, Mayor Gavin Newsom legalized gay marriage in the city of San Francisco. It was another watershed moment in gay rights history. Back then I was taking time off from the second semester of my freshman year in college to seek treatment for major depressive disorder. I spent most of my days back home by myself, lonely and frightened about my future. When I couldn’t bear to be in my dad’s house any longer I would get in my car and drive around aimlessly. I remember driving through downtown San Francisco on the first day gays and lesbians were allowed to obtain marriage licenses, seeing the line of couples, thousands long, snaking around and around the block leading to City Hall. People were so happy. There were balloons and signs and music everywhere, journalists and photographers swarming the area to document the moment. It was one of the most pure expressions of love and joy I have ever witnessed in my life, and the sight of all of those people, finally being allowed to marry their partners, lifted my dark spirits. Over the next month I went out of my way to drive by City Hall as frequently as possible to see the celebrations. Four weeks and 4,000 gay marriage licenses later, the California Supreme Court shut Mayor Newsom down, declaring that what he had done was illegal. In August of that same year, all of the licenses that were issued during that time period were voided. Four years later, in 2008, just as Barack Obama was elected the 44th President of the United States, Proposition 8 passed in California, banning gay marriage. It was around this time when I began to realize that gay rights – just like any civil rights movement – comes in fits and starts. Two steps forward, one step back. Milk and Smith ran away to a city where they felt they would be accepted for who they were, and instead, they see police violence towards the gay population. Milk becomes the first openly gay politician to be elected to public office in California (and the third openly gay politician to be elected in the United States), and months later is gunned down by Dan White, a homophobic colleague whose lawyers claimed spuriously that his diet of junk food caused a chemical imbalance that made him commit double homicide. Mr. Barnes tries to get us not to think of gay sex as weird, and promptly gets fired. Gavin Newsom legalizes gay marriage in California, and four years later California conservatives push for anti-gay legislation and succeed. President Obama repeals Don’t Ask Don’t Tell in 2011. Obergefell v. Hodges legalizes gay marriage in 2015. One year later, Mike Pence, Governor of Indiana who has gone on record saying that he wants to roll back protections for LGBT citizens, and who believes in conversion therapy, becomes the Vice President. While we’re at it: Barack Obama was the first African American man elected to the office of the President of the United States of America. Eight years later, Americans responded by electing a failed real estate mogul, a shamelessly racist demagogue with no political experience who openly questioned Obama’s citizenship, as the next President. Two steps forward. One step back. One of the most remarkable moments in Milk , involves a young man living in Minnesota who calls Harvey Milk in despair after seeing him on the news speaking out against Anita Bryant and John Briggs. The young man tells Milk that he is going to kill himself. His parents are going to send him to conversion therapy and he sees no way out. Milk begs the young man to escape, get on a bus, come to San Francisco, and go to any major big city away from his parents. But he can’t escape. He’s in a wheelchair. He hangs up the phone and Milk is devastated. Later, when Prop 6 is defeated and the San Francisco gay rights ordinance is about to pass, the young man calls him again. He did escape. He made it to Los Angeles. He’s living openly and he thinks he is going to be okay. I look at this scene and I wonder about all of the young gay people who grew up in Mike Pence’s Indiana who were also contemplating suicide. I think about what the future holds for us in a country where Mike Pence could likely become the President of the United States. Hollywood films about gay characters have an unfortunate and notorious reputation – they almost always feature a tragic death, either by disease or by violence, as a major plot point. The most successful gay movies in the past 20 years all hold to this pattern: Philadelphia , Boys Don’t Cry , Brokeback Mountain , A Single Man , Dallas Buyers Club . At first glance, Milk is easy to categorize as another gay martyr film – though based on a true story, it is yet another mainstream media depiction of a gay character who has to die for the story to resonate. But I would strongly argue that Milk , like the story of Harvey Milk himself, is not just a story about a martyr for a cause. It is a story about what it takes to be an effective activist. When Anita Bryant’s anti-gay rights campaign in Dade County succeeded, the Castro exploded with angry and fearful citizens. Riots are suddenly a risk, and the local police are more than ready to begin arresting people. Milk instructs his protégé Cleve Jones, to turn the community’s anger into a protest, and to march them all down to City Hall, where Milk would speak to them as a city Supervisor and let them know that they were being heard, and that Milk would be their voice. As Cleve leads thousands of people down Market Street improvising chants along the way, I was reminded of the unorganized protests that occurred at airports across the country when Donald Trump issued his Muslim travel ban. How those completely spontaneous demonstrations conveyed loudly the strong disapproval of the American people against Trump’s cruel, unnecessary, and poorly thought out policies. How an immediate call to action helped support the ACLU’s lawsuit against the Executive Order and struck it down. I wonder how many times in the next four to eight years we will have to do this. I wonder if the next time it happens we will be marching for the LGBT community again. Milk , in depicting the life of one remarkable man, becomes a story that shows the multiple arenas in which activism can occur. Harvey Milk ran for political office to make his community’s platform heard, but he also encouraged his followers to live openly as homosexuals, to be brave and proud, rather than afraid for their lives, because simply by existing in the world they would change the hearts and minds of those around them. To lean on a cliché, Milk is a symbol of how ordinary people can achieve extraordinary things. Memory and nostalgia – through Milk’s flashbacks, through America’s painful civil rights history and the cultural moment we are living through right now where we are at risk of repeating many of our most shameful moments – intertwine heavily within this story as well as adjacent to it. When I watch the story of Harvey Milk now, thinking about Gavin Newsom and Barack Obama and my 4th grade teacher Mr. Barnes, I realize that the most important lesson we can all take from this film now is the idea that just by showing up and being who we are, and being unafraid to do so, we display an act of resistance against those who wish to oppress us. And from a place of resistance, it is possible to achieve transcendence. Reeya Banerjee Reeya is a food & beverage cost accountant in the hospitality industry with a film degree from Vassar College that she does not use. She can usually be seen playing the bass guitar at various Beacon Music Factory shows, or drinking IPA's at Dogwood in Beacon, NY. #Newsletter #Articles #Milk #HarveyMilk #April #DayofSilence #ReeyaBanerjee

Home Alone – written by John Hughes, directed by Chris Columbus, and starring erstwhile wunderkind Macaulay Culkin – was released in theaters in 1990. I am 32 years old. In the subsequent 27 years since its release, I have seen this movie at least 100 times. I made my parents, my friends’ parents (along with my friends), and even a couple of babysitters take me to see it in theaters at least seven times. After it came out on VHS in 1991, I watched it at least once a month for the next six years. Sometimes I would watch it, rewind it, and watch it again immediately. I brought it with me on play dates to watch with more friends. I brought it with me to various relatives’ houses to watch while my parents were catching up with said various relatives. It didn’t matter what time of year it was: as far as I was concerned it was Home Alone time. I watched it so many times that I memorized the dialogue. Hell, I watched it so many times that inadvertently my parents memorized the dialogue. To this day, all it takes for my dad and me to crack each other up is to quote Angela Goethals as Kevin’s older sister, “You’re what the French call ‘les incompetents.’” Or John Heard as Kevin’s father on the phone with the French police: “Est-ce IL Y A un perSON qui parle anglais LA?” Or to do a mangled countdown, a la Johnny in the fake gangster movie ‘Angels with Filthy Souls’ that Kevin keeps watching­: “One, two, TEN!” Or to impersonate Joe Pesci as Harry the Wet Bandit, realizing that Kevin was home alone: “Looks like we’re being scammed by a kindy-gardener.” I could go on. But I won’t. Around the time I turned twelve I got a grip, and reduced my Home Alone consumption to once a year, a few days before Xmas. I have continued the tradition to this day. In the past couple of years I’ve started ordering a cheese pizza for dinner, (even though I prefer toppings) and I drink Pepsi (even though I prefer Coke), just as Culkin’s Kevin McCallister prefers. Do I really need to summarize the plot? It seems unlikely that there are people in the world who have not seen this movie. It’s a part of the Xmas movie canon at this point along with It’s A Wonderful Life , Miracle on 34th Street, A Charlie Brown Christmas, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, A Christmas Story, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, The Muppet Christmas Carol , (and I think now we have to include Love Actually in this mix as well). But in case you have been living under a rock for the past three decades: the McCallister extended family leaves for a Christmas trip to Paris to visit an uncle. A snowstorm the night before the flight causes both a power outage and several downed telephone wires, resulting in a chaotic frenzy the morning of their flight, along with a terribly botched headcount of the kids; Kevin is left behind. Once the family realizes what has happened it’s too late. Kate, Kevin’s mother, then spends the rest of the film trying to get back home to Kevin. In the meanwhile, Kevin figures out how to become somewhat self-sufficient in a way he has never had the opportunity to do so before as the youngest in the family: he learns how to do laundry, goes grocery shopping, decorates the house for the holidays, and gets over both his irrational fear of the scary unfinished basement of their house, and of his neighbor, Old Man Marley, a stoic elderly man who is rumored (falsely) to be a serial killer. Also in the meanwhile, Marv and Harry, a notorious burglar duo known as the Wet Bandits, have been casing houses in Kevin’s neighborhood to rob while everyone is out of town for the holidays. They have identified Kevin’s house as the jackpot, and even after they learn that Kevin is home alone, decide to rob the house anyway, assuming that the child will be too scared to do anything except let them get away with it. But of course, they seriously underestimate the kid’s moxie, as he rigs up a number of booby traps inside the house to thwart the thieves, and outsmarts them enough to call the cops and get them taken to prison. Kate arrives home the next day, and the rest of the family shows up shortly thereafter. Christmas has been saved, and no one needs to know what went down between Kevin and the Wet Bandits. This movie made a huge impact on me when it first came out because I too, am the youngest in my family. There’s something extremely satisfying about seeing this little kid who is picked on by the rest of his cousins for being helpless, finding the wherewithal to be resourceful enough to protect his home from two burglars. A couple of years after the movie was released – when I still used to binge watch it with abandon – my family moved to the Chicago suburbs, not far from where Home Alone was filmed, and it was fun to be able to identify the locations in every scene. And the scene between Kevin and Old Man Marley in the church affected me deeply back then as well, as a meditation on the power of kindness and understanding. Old Man Marley doesn’t condescend to Kevin in their conversation, and as a result they are able to really see each other and help each other. Kevin learns a lesson about not being influenced by stupid rumors spread by his older siblings and how to be his own person, and Old Man Marley, moved by Kevin’s advice, reconnects with his estranged son. There really is a lot of heavy stuff going on in this lighthearted children’s movie. * As much as I loved Home Alone as a child, revisiting it as an adult is a trip. Every year I watch it now I feel like I learn something new about the story. Here’s are ten things I have only realized about Home Alone in the past five years: 1) Kevin is only alone in the house for like three days. Somehow when I was little, it seemed like he was home alone for much longer. Maybe 10-15 days. I think now this misperception is because when I was little (the way Kevin is little) and alone with hours of unstructured time, the days just stretch. Especially when you have no idea what is going on. 2) Kevin legitimately thinks that he is to blame for his family vanishing, simply because he got mad at them the night before and wished they’d all go away. This is something I figured out only last year. I have no idea how this completely blew past me the first 99 times I watched this movie, but there you have it. It makes his determination to protect himself and his family home from Marv and Harry all the more heartbreaking. He believes that he is the only McCallister left. 3) A word for Old Man Marley: dude, I get that it sucks that all of the neighborhood kids are afraid of you, but you aren’t helping things by storming up to Kevin at the pharmacy and slamming your withered bandaged hand on the counter in front of him wordlessly. Seriously, you don’t see how that might be scary to a little kid? No wonder the little guy ran away without paying for his toothbrush. 4) Kevin doesn’t call the police to inform them that he knows Marv and Harry are coming to rob his house because he is afraid they are after him for shoplifting the toothbrush. See, Old Man Marley? You ruin everything, and you’re not even really a murderer! 5) Kevin is apparently a tactical military genius. He comes up with the plan to protect the house in ONE HOUR, including setting up all of the traps and microwaving his mac and cheese. Again, this is something I thought took much longer when I saw the movie as a kid. I thought I remembered that he had a couple of days to work this out. Nope, he does it in an hour. The kid is eight years old! What the hell?! 6) Marv and Harry are dumb AF. Like, unfathomably dumb. Dumb for being outsmarted by a child, but also dumb for trying to burgle a house with anyone home, kid or no kid. Also, kind of hilarious that they survived nails in their feet, a blowtorched head and a burned hand, paint cans in the face, smashing into a brick wall after Kevin cuts the rope attached to the tree house, and they are finally only done in by Old Man Marley, a frail, elderly man, showing up and smacking them with a 10 ounce metal shovel from Home Depot. 7) Also, one last word for Old Man Marley: dude, once you rescue Kevin from those idiots, why do you drop him off back at his house even though at this point it’s evident that no one else is home? You are such an irresponsible adult. I’m starting to wonder if this is why your son kept his family away from you for so long. 8) This movie could never happen today between the airport security theatrics we are all subjected to while flying post 9/11, and also smartphones. 9) The McCallisters are RICH. Holy cow. Giant house in Winnetka, Illinois? International travel for a family that big? Kate can just drop everything and start buying tickets back to the States without even thinking about the cost? Must be nice. 10) Kevin’s brother Buzz is a piece of shit. (Actually, I knew that back when I was a kid.) * I have maintained for years that this is the best Christmas movie ever made. I know, I know, It’s A Wonderful Life is the benchmark for this genre, and Gen X-ers are always happy to shout at me that A Christmas Story is far superior. (They are wrong. Shut up, Gen X-ers.) Home Alone has a brilliant soundtrack by John Williams, (and if you don’t believe me, take a listen and tell me that it’s not as good as Star Wars, Jurassic Park , and E.T. ). It also has a killer cast: in addition to the aforementioned late, great, criminally underrated John Heard, there’s Joe Pesci, Daniel Stern, and of course little Macaulay. We also have Kieran Culkin, (who might be the most successful Culkin at this point) as Fuller, the brilliant Catherine O’Hara as Kate McCallister, oh and also a random cameo by force of comedy nature (and also late great) John Candy, as a polka musician who drives Kate back to Chicago. And I think despite the extreme violence against the burglars being played for laughs, (which I remember the film being criticized for), it also achieves the right balance of Christmas schmaltz by showing the parallel story of Kevin growing up and connecting with the (evidently oblivious) Old Man Marley while his awful family realizes how hard they always are on him as they panic about his well-being. It’s heartwarming, it’s empowering, and also Kevin wrecks Buzz’ room, which he completely deserves because he’s a piece of shit. I am grateful that this movie exists for those reasons, and also because to be frank, nostalgia can be overwhelming. To lean on a favorite Mad Men quote, nostalgia literally means, “the pain from an old wound, a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone.” All I have to do is hear the opening credits theme to Home Alone and I get goose bumps. I remember what it was like to be little, to feel the freedom to binge watch a Christmas movie in the middle of July and not care how weird people thought I was, to figure out which Dominick’s grocery store in my old neighborhood Kevin shops at because then I could talk my parents into going there too and buying me some frozen mac and cheese. I remember watching this movie with my parents, before I lost my mother to cancer when I turned twelve. I remember wishing I could be Kevin: smart enough and cool enough to outsmart a couple of adults who didn’t have my best interests at heart. While also full of enough grace to be able to forgive his family for this honestly unforgivable thing: being forgotten. I only realized that John Hughes wrote this film when I was in college in film school, and once I did, it made complete sense to me that the man responsible for the Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller , and Sixteen Candles created this story. As Judd Nelson said during a tribute to Hughes after his 2010 death, Hughes “had a gift for treating young people not as children, but as developing adults.” While Kevin is decidedly younger than the teenage protagonists of most of Hughes’ work, this quintessentially Hughes-ian sensibility still comes through, and it’s what makes Kevin a compelling character for me to watch as an adult. Kevin begins to understand who he really is in this film, beyond just being the helpless youngest child everyone picks on, even though he’s a work in progress and has fits and starts along the way. I think more than anything, this is why the movie still holds up for me as I more definitively move away from being a young person. I am grateful for this film because it reminds me year after year in new ways that we are all works in progress, we are all sorting through who we can be in the world, and we are all figuring out just what we are capable of. And there will always come a day when it is time for us to rise to the occasion. We can only hope that when that happens we won’t have to rig up a bunch of paint cans in the stairwell. Reeya Banerjee Reeya is a food & beverage cost accountant in the hospitality industry with a film degree from Vassar College that she does not use. She can usually be seen playing the bass guitar at various Beacon Music Factory shows, or drinking IPA's at Dogwood in Beacon, NY. #Newsletter #Reviews #January2018 #Xmas #Christmas #HomeAlone #ReeyaBanerjee

I am a clumsy person. I am in fact so clumsy, that last month as I was walking up to the stage at Quinn’s here in Beacon while performing, I tripped and sprained my knee, bruising the bone badly in the process. It was the second time I had fallen last year, and busted this same knee (the earlier culprit had been a patch of black ice in the train station parking lot on the morning of my 32nd birthday). A lot of people saw what happened. It was embarrassing. But I had friends there who helped me up off of the floor and got me home. And then, even though I couldn’t put any weight on the leg in question, I hauled myself up two flights of stairs to my apartment, using only my other leg, my arms and the bannister. When I reached the top, I was quietly pleased with myself for how physically strong I was for doing that. But nobody saw it. They just saw me fall an hour earlier. It’s hard to be a woman who isn’t naturally graceful. It’s hard to be known as someone who doesn’t perform femininity in a way that makes people comfortable. I have strength, but I’ve been clumsy my whole life, and people often find that off-putting. For a while I worked in an office alongside a woman who couldn’t lift a box of samples that weighed more than ten pounds, but she was willowy, wore designer clothes, and moved in a delicate manner about the room. She spoke in a near whisper while I was criticized for talking too loudly on the phone with our vendors, (most of whom I had relationships with prior to joining this company). She was perceived as the perfect representative of our department, while I was relegated to carrying heavy boxes to the back storage room, and told by my awful boss that no one wanted to see a fat girl in a skirt. As I watched I, Tonya , directed by Craig Gillespie, starring Margot Robbie as fallen skating star Tonya Harding, at the AMC 25 in Manhattan last month, while wearing a knee brace (so I could actually walk around somewhat normally), I found myself remembering three skating performances from Tonya Harding in the 90’s. I was a figure skating superfan back in the day, and in retrospect, I realize that what I loved about figure skating when I was a child was how aspirational it was. I knew I would never be as fluid with my physicality as Kristi Yamaguchi, Katerina Witt, Midori Ito, or Oksana Baiul, but I was captivated by their performances and admired their ability to do what had always eluded me. The first performance I recall of Harding’s of course, was the famous 1991 routine at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships (see here ), where she became the first American woman to land a triple axle in competition, qualifying for the Olympic team going to Albertville the next year and making history, a moment that was recreated for the film. I remember her as a tiny figure in a baby blue dress, light on her feet, and the joy on her face when she did it, the confidence it brought to the rest of the performance, and I remember the way the commentator, Dick Button, was so happy for her. I remember the way he remarked on her physical strength and power as a skater, and also I remember the way the other commentator – whose name I sadly can’t recall – remarked upon how Harding’s artistic sensibility and musicality had improved over the years. This is the paradox of figure skating as a sport – and especially women’s figure skating: it’s a sport, so it demands a level of elite athleticism and strength. But the culture of figure skating also demands that you be naturally graceful, with artful movements that convey an air of refinement on and off the ice. This fundamental tension is the crux of what I thought the trajectory of I, Tonya would be. Tonya Harding was an exceptional athlete. Tonya Harding was criticized by the figure skating world for not performing femininity correctly. She scored high points for technical merit for her ability to execute complicated jumps well, and she was docked points for artistic merit because she was deemed trashy, with her big 90’s hair, her hand-sewn skating costumes, her lacquered-on makeup, her desire to skate routines to ZZ Top and Tone-Loc songs as opposed to more traditional, classical music choices, and her propensity towards cursing. She outskated most of her competitors when it came to strength, but could never seem to catch a break from the judges for the way she presented herself. Power vs. pretty. It’s a delicate balance in figure skating, and the way it often plays out is immensely frustrating. There are two other skating performances I remember from Harding back in my die-hard skating fanatic days. The first was prior to the debacle of the assault on Nancy Kerrigan orchestrated by Harding’s husband, Jeff Gillooly; the 1993 Skate America competition, where she skated a routine to the theme from Jurassic Park . Two minutes into the program, she stopped and approached the judges. She claimed one of her skate blades was coming loose, and she was concerned that she would hurt herself attempting jumps with a wobbly blade. According to the rules of the sport, she could either: take two minutes to rectify the situation and then resume her routine from the point at which she stopped, or she could wait to skate until the very end and have to do the entire routine again from the beginning. She selected the former, and went backstage to have at her skate with a screwdriver. Then she resumed the routine. She had lost her rhythm. She fell during one jump. She doubled another jump that was supposed to be a triple. She had performed well enough earlier in the competition to qualify for the Olympics at Lillehammer, but she was obviously upset after that performance. The last performance I recall was her 1994 Olympics performance, which occurred after the attack on Kerrigan. It was the same Jurassic Park routine. There was high drama before she got out on the ice: the audience was getting impatient. Her skate lace had broken during the warm-up, and her team was struggling to get a considerably shorter replacement lace tight enough to support her ankle. She barely made it onto the ice in time before being disqualified, and then again, shortly after beginning the program, she approached the judges to ask that she stop and replace her lace so as not to hurt herself. At this point, commentator Scott Hamilton couldn’t contain his snark, saying that equipment malfunctions are every skater’s worst nightmare, and it also almost never happens… but it keeps happening to her. This time, Harding elected to fix her lace and skate the full program again after all of the other skaters, and the next competitor, Josee Choinard, was called to the ice, again causing Hamilton to comment on how unfair this was for Choinard, whose prep time was cut short. When Harding finally skated at the end of the night, she was met by several boos from the audience and she performed inconsistently, not falling but again doubling some intended triple jumps. She came in 8th. Kerrigan won a silver medal. At the time, as I was watching this play out, I felt Harding deserved it, like it was karmic retribution. I don’t know if I feel the same way now after having seen I, Tonya . The film tells the story in mockumentary style, with lots of fourth-wall breaking, and talking head type interviews. We see clearly that Harding grew up in a poor family, with an abusive mother (Allison Janney in a scene-stealing performance) and an absent father, who, like many women from abusive homes, ended up married to an abusive man – Gillooly, who was the first and maybe only person to tell her that he thought she was pretty. He beat her, and she tried to leave, and he apologized, and she came back and he beat her again, over and over and over. These scenes of cyclic domestic violence are very hard to watch, and yet the overall tone of the film skews wacky, (how else to explain the crew of bumbling idiots Gillooly hired to take Harding’s competitor Kerrigan down?), which I think downplays the heartbreaking reality that Harding was somehow able to be the exceptional athlete she was in spite of a chaotic and frightening home life. I found myself wishing that the film had spent more time exploring this issue – how someone who was forced to work several pink collar jobs at a time to support herself, someone who had to spend hours hand-making her own skating costumes because she couldn’t afford or didn’t have the cash to commission designer ones the way her competitors did, someone who was always living in constant fear of her life due to the abuse from her husband – was still able to train long and hard enough to qualify for the Olympics. Twice. That takes some major gumption, and I was disappointed that the film only slightly grazed that topic, instead spending more time portraying her as the unwitting victim of her husband’s stupid idea to mess with Kerrigan. Yes, I think the movie goes too easy on Harding when it comes to the Kerrigan issue. It’s clear that Gillespie and Robbie (who also produced the film) are very sympathetic to Harding, and only barely suggest that she knew more about the attack on Kerrigan than she claimed. Harding herself in real life loves the movie. That’s fine; I don’t need to agree with all movies, and I also have no way of knowing how involved Harding was in the planning of the attack. But I think by spending so much time reveling in the stupidity of Gillooly and his accomplices, trying to downplay whatever involvement Harding had in this plan, the movie elides the more interesting aspects of the Harding vs. Kerrigan conflict. Kerrigan herself was working class, like Harding, but she came from a more stable home life and was able to carry herself in the way that the figure skating association wanted to see. She was not as strong a skater as Harding, but she performed femininity correctly. When you pull that apart, you see why Kerrigan was obviously seen as an easy target by Gillooly, but also why she may have loomed large in Harding’s mind as a threat. Harding and Kerrigan came from similar backgrounds (and were in fact friends for a time), but Kerrigan was getting the artistic points that were always out of Harding’s grasp. Kerrigan had figured out how to do it right. Kerrigan has found the perfect balance of power vs. pretty. This, of course, is all my own hypothesis. The movie doesn’t delve into this at all. But I wish it did, because the end of the story, in the film and in real life, is Harding’s eventual ban from figure skating competition forever by the United States Figure Skating Association, for her perceived involvement in the Kerrigan attack. She was ousted from the very sport she had sacrificed her education for and devoted her life to, the sport that gave her painful existence meaning, the sport she loved. But the real tragedy in this is that the sport itself did not love her back, never did, and never would, unless she somehow magically turned herself into a different person. She was shunned by a culture that was constantly rejecting her anyway for being who she was. There is an excellent episode of Radiolab about the French figure skater Surya Bonaly, who received similar criticism in her skating career as Harding, (in fact, Harding is asked for commentary on the story). Bonaly was an anomaly in the figure skating world, not just because of her athleticism, but also because of her race. Black figure skaters were few and far between, especially when she was still competing. Her manager leaked a number of completely untrue and totally whack stories about Bonaly’s childhood, basically because he thought “all publicity was good publicity,” even if it perpetuated some seriously fucked up stereotypes of black people in the process. In listening to this episode, you get a sense of how racist figure skating culture is, but it also even further throws into relief the emphasis on femininity that the sport demands, and the almost homophobic sensibility underneath that. I listened to this episode again after watching I, Tonya and was reminded of the scene when Harding’s mother tells her after a performance that she “skated like a graceless bull dyke.” Bonaly is an immensely powerful skater who was always docked for artistic merit. Time and time again she would outskate her competitors technically, only to be punished for not being graceful. Commentators would declare that she couldn’t actually skate; she only could jump. This culminated in two hugely controversial moments in her career: the first being her refusal to accept a silver medal during a competition, due to her belief that she had performed better than the gold medalist, and the second, being her choice during another routine, after the medal incident, to execute – flawlessly – a backflip (while doing a split mid-air) and landing on one foot. Backflips are banned in figure skating competition due to their being deemed too dangerous. If you ask Bonaly, she did the flip because she was experiencing a flare up from an ankle injury that was causing her not to execute jumps properly during the routine, and she wanted to make up some technical marks. But there is also a hint in the reporting that she did the flip as a solid fuck you to the figure skating judging establishment, who did not find her athleticism worthy of praise because they felt it came at the expense of artistry. Again, we see that tension, that elusive balance of power vs. pretty, and I keep wondering what the point of a sport is if you can be penalized for being too sporty. Tonya Harding’s life is a parable of the way patriarchy damages women. Prior to I, Tonya , I am certain that almost nobody remembered that Harding was once thought of as the best skater in the country due to landing that triple axel. People instead, remembered the messy separation and reconciliation between her and Gillooly, and the attack on Kerrigan, and how her performances started to slip later in her career. People assumed that Harding likely requested the attack on Kerrigan because she herself wasn’t performing well; whereas I think Harding’s performances slipped because she was married to an abuser, and she spent so much time managing that dynamic that she had less time to train. The Kerrigan attack was the regrettable outcome of being married to an abuser. I wish the movie dealt with this more; I wish they shaded Harding a bit differently, I wish the filmmakers weren’t so devoted to portraying Harding as a sympathetic figure when it came to what was done to Kerrigan. Having been a figure skating fan during these years, I was always so certain that Harding was a villain, full stop. But I, Tonya , swung the pendulum a bit too far in the opposite direction. She wasn’t a hero, either. I think a more interesting film would force us to be comfortable living in ambivalence about Harding, to be able to simultaneously accept that she might have purposefully injured a competitor whom she called a friend, and that she had a tremendous gift as a skater when she was in her prime. The movie doesn’t allow us to spend enough time reveling in her strength, before it gets bogged down in the distastefully comic portrayal of her abusive marriage. We just see her fall. And then we are asked to forgive her. I don’t want to forgive her. But during the moment in the film when Harding is criticized harshly for her trashy hand-sewn costumes and her unwholesome image by a judge, I experienced a full body cringe, remembering my awful boss who told me that no one wanted to see a fat girl in a skirt. When the movie ended, I limped my way out of the theater with my knee brace, and hauled myself down four flights of stairs because the elevator was broken. No one in the theater helped me get down those stairs, but they all could clearly see that I was hurt. Maybe if I had feigned difficulty in walking down, someone would have jumped in to help poor little fragile me, but I don’t want to be rewarded for fragility. I think I deserve credit for being strong. I’m no Tonya Harding, but I think she deserved credit for being strong too – not just physically strong, but strong enough to power through a childhood in poverty and a lifetime of abuse to get to the Olympics, twice. I think that’s admirable, and not really as funny as I, Tonya wanted me to find it. I think Robbie deserves the acclaim she has received for her portrayal of Harding, (and I certainly hope Janney cleans up in this awards season), but in a weird way, I think I want to accord Robbie that acclaim for the movie that I, Tonya wasn’t. I firmly believe that I, Tonya would have been more powerful as an indictment of the way our culture defines femininity, as opposed to a comedic hagiography of a complicated woman. I’m happy this film was made. But I also fear that it missed the point. Reeya Banerjee A program manager / Girl Friday / jack-of-all-trades at Beacon Music Factory and a hospitality food & beverage cost accountant with a film degree from Vassar College that she does not use. She can usually be seen singing and playing the bass guitar at various BMF shows, or drinking IPAs at Dogwood in Beacon, NY. #Newsletter #ReeyaBanerjee #Reviews #ITonya #FigureSkating #Power #Pretty #Abuse #February2018

Recently I was telling a friend of mine about how I had switched concentrations in college. I had arrived at Vassar as an intended theater major. I had already studied acting fairly seriously beforehand, in the very strong theater program at my hippie-ass artsy high school, and via two summer theater intensive programs in 2001 and 2002 at Boston University and Northwestern University, respectively. However, after being thoroughly disheartened by the first class session of the Vassar Drama department’s prerequisite for the major, I dropped the class. This was also after realizing that although I was a theater kid, I was not a “theater kid,” and I could not stomach the idea of four years amongst “theater kids” (#sorrynotsorry). I attempted to audition for plays produced by the student production company that was external from the Drama department, but after a while I stopped; I had been a big fish in a small pond in high school, and that was no longer the case. I also always knew that being a visible minority with an obviously South Asian name would make pursuing theater as a career an uphill battle – being a big fish in a small pond had shielded me from this reality thus far, but the lesson I took away from my experiences attempting to do theater in college was that acting was not going to be in the cards for me. “Of course,” I told my friend, “I was totally not expecting that ten years later we’d end up with Kal Penn, Mindy Kaling, Aziz Ansari, Kumail Nanjiani, Hasan Minhaj, Priyanka Chopra etc. etc. etc. all over movies and television… when I was growing up, the only brown person on TV was Apu. Maybe I gave up too soon?” Maybe I gave up too soon. Hold that thought. * Saturday morning, I woke up at 7:00 AM so that I could watch the New York Times’ livestream of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s wedding in real time. My feelings about the Royal Family are complicated; as a person of Indian descent, I am inclined to dislike them on principle because of the long legacy of colonialism and oppression brought forth by the United Kingdom upon my people (300 years! They ruled India for 300 fucking years!!!). I suspect that anyone who has roots in any of the former British colonies probably shares this sentiment. That said, I’ve always been fond of Harry for a roundabout reason: my mother passed away less than a week after Princess Diana was killed. Experiencing the world’s very public mourning of Diana alongside my own private mourning was surreal, and given that Harry and I are the same age, I’ve always felt connected to him through our shared membership in the awful Young Dead Mothers Club. Harry’s openness about his struggles with depression is also something that greatly endears him to me; he is someone who I always make a point of “checking in with,” (via media coverage – don’t worry I’m not hiding in the bushes outside Kensington Palace), periodically to see how he is doing, because in a weird way, it reminds me to evaluate how I’m doing. All that said, I do have to admit that the fact that Harry has chosen to marry Meghan Markle has raised him even more considerably in my esteem. It’s a big deal for someone in that family to marry someone like her – a biracial, once-divorced, American woman, who already had a successful career as an actress on the USA Network’s show Suits . And okay, let me be very, very clear here: as far as I am concerned, the operative word in that previous statement is “biracial.” It is a big, big fucking deal that Prince Harry has married someone who is half-black, precisely because of the long legacy of colonialism and oppression brought forth by the United Kingdom upon many, many nations populated by people of color. While I don’t love the egregious abuse Meghan received from the British media shortly after their relationship went public, I do love that Harry issued a statement explicitly calling out its sexism and racism, in those words. This kind of resolute forcefulness is not what we have come to expect from this family. The Windsors may be slow to change, but right now, we are seeing a huge seismic shift. Look, I don’t even like weddings. I am a curmudgeon. I hate earnest performative displays of romantic love (I hate ironic performative displays of romantic love too). Watching people cry at weddings in particular, makes me irritable and eye-rolly. Super religious weddings (of any religion) make me uncomfortable, because I was raised in a Marxist family. But let me tell you, I was pretty damn invested in the Royal Wedding. And there were a few moments – like when Reverend Michael Curry gave his sermon on the redemptive power of love and quoted Martin Luther King Jr. in the process, or when the gospel choir sang that stirring rendition of "Stand By Me" while Harry and Meghan stared at each other like a couple of heart-eyed emojis, or when Prince Charles very kindly offered his arm to Meghan’s mother Doria Ragland, who had her twists pulled back under a fabulous hat, as they went to witness the signing of the marriage registry – where I caught myself getting a bit teary. Meghan Markle is the best thing that has happened to this family in a long time. Having her, as a woman of color, now within their ranks is one of the few things that may give the royals a shred of hope at remaining relevant in any way. The Windsors’ relationship with relevance has always been tenuous, and even more so during the years since Queen Elizabeth ascended the throne in 1952 in the diminished post-colonial version of Britain that emerged after World War II. The monarchy doesn’t have political power any longer; at this point, the only real value to anything the monarchy does is only symbolic. But there’s power in symbolism. When I look at the official photographs from the wedding day released by the now-Duke and Duchess of Sussex, I can’t not notice that destabilizing shot of brown, from Meghan and her mother Doria, in a Royal Family picture. It’s amazing. I’m getting all weepy again. It’s not the grand Hazza-and-Megs romance that’s making me cry, though I will admit they are nauseatingly adorable. I’m crying because I think it’s pretty damn cool to be able to look at Meghan Markle, now a representative of an institution that is arguably Britain’s biggest non-musical cultural export – and an institution that, not that long ago, was gleefully exploiting the natural resources and the people and the dignity of a country that I am directly descended from (my grandparents grew up under British rule, that’s how recent we’re talking) – and see someone whose skin looks like mine. Representation matters. Hold that thought. * The Simpsons has been on television nearly as long as Prince Harry and I have been alive. I think you probably know where I am going with this but in case you have been living under a rock since the 1980’s, here’s the deal: there is a character on The Simpsons named Apu. He’s a broad Indian stereotype in the worst way: a guy who owns a convenience store, speaks in a heavy accent, and is largely a buffoon. He is voiced by Hank Azaria – an immensely talented actor… who is white. I have always felt fond of Apu – he was the only Indian guy on TV when I was growing up – but also disgusted by my fondness – he’s a cartoon voiced by a white guy. I grew up in predominantly white neighborhoods, attending predominantly white schools, where I was often the only brown kid anyone knew, and it’s pretty astounding how many of my white friends thought it was funny to do that Apu voice at me, or were surprised that my mother was an attorney and my father has a PhD in English literature and now works in finance (I guess all Indian kids are supposed to come from Quik-E-Mart families?). The comedian Hari Kondabolu dissected exactly how problematic and hurtful this was in his 2017 documentary, The Problem with Apu , discussing his experiences being bullied growing up by white kids doing Apu impersonations at him, being insulted on behalf of his Indian immigrant parents – neither of whom behave like Apu – and speaking with many of the South Asian actors I mentioned earlier in this piece about how difficult it is trying to succeed in acting careers when everyone just wants them to behave like Apu. Kal Penn went so far as to say that he has never liked The Simpsons solely because Apu exists as a character. Watching The Problem with Apu was both heartening and heartbreaking for me simultaneously. It was really powerful to see my feelings about Apu – right down to the experiences of being bullied as a kid by other kids using Apu against me – be echoed by so many others. But during the film, Kondabolu tries repeatedly to get in touch with Azaria through his agent to talk about Apu and, in the end, devastatingly gets turned down. Azaria felt that he would not get to have any control of how Kondabolu portrayed him in the documentary after their conversation. He apparently did not see the irony in that he was being asked to discuss how Kondabolu felt about not having any control over how people see him, because of the prevalence of the Apu stereotype. Kondabolu was gutted by this, and so was I. It’s just so fucking disappointing. The production team behind The Simpsons has not handled this criticism well. Only a few weeks ago, they released a fairly tone-deaf episode that straight-up implied that any offense over Apu was just humorless, overly-PC hand wringing. This awful episode was absolutely dragged, and rightly so, by pretty much every media critic out there. Showrunner Al Jean doubled down on the episode’s message, depressingly tweeting articles from the extreme-right wing publication “National Review” defending the show. When you consider that The Simpsons was once seen as subversive and counter-cultural, this development is baffling. But I really do believe that when a show has been on television for 29 years – The Simpsons recently broke Gunsmoke’s record to become the longest running scripted series in history – no matter how much they once challenged "The Establishment," at some point they became "The Establishment." The Simpsons is an institution, and because of that, the production team thinks they deserve a free pass to keep putting a racist caricature on screen, no matter how many people it hurts. If there is one encouraging thing to come of this recent Simpsons brouhaha, it’s this: Hank Azaria appeared on Late Night with Stephen Colbert and said that he is listening. He understands that the way Apu is characterized is problematic. He is willing to step down from voicing Apu, and let a South Asian actor take his place, if that’s what it takes to start making things right. Progress. Hold that thought. * During the three days prior to being overtaken by Royal Wedding fervor, I was watching one movie teaser trailer over and over and over again: Bohemian Rhapsody , the upcoming Queen biopic. I am so excited for this movie. Man oh man oh man, did they nail the look and sound of the band and the time period. And, of course, there is the brilliant Rami Malek playing Freddie Mercury. Malek is probably best known for his Emmy Award-winning performance as Elliot Alderson on the USA Network’s (huh) Mr. Robot . I strongly suspect, though, that after this movie comes out on November 2nd, Freddie Mercury will be Malek’s career-defining role. I mean, just look at this trailer . He has his physicality and his attitude down perfectly. It’s uncanny. There is a contingent of internet grumblers who are mad that Sacha Baron Cohen is not in this movie. Cohen originally signed to play Mercury, and left the film while it was still in development due to creative differences with the living members of Queen, who are all heavily involved in the production. People think that Cohen is a more accurate physical match for Mercury. I also suspect that people are assuming that the film will not be edgy, and will shy away from the darker aspects of Mercury’s life now that Cohen is no longer involved – though I really see no evidence that supports this theory based on a 2-minute teaser. But to all that I say, bollocks. Bullshit. I am done, done, fucking DONE with watching white actors portray people of color in mainstream media. Done. The conversation about Apu and Azaria is extremely relevant here. See, that’s the thing: I think many people don’t know, or often forget, (or conveniently forget) that Mercury was a person of color. He was born Farrokh Bulsara in 1946, in the British protectorate of the Sultanate of Zanzibar (now part of Tanzania). His parents were Parsis from the Gujarat region of the then-province of Bombay Presidency in British India. He spent most of his childhood in India and Zanzibar, and moved to England at the age of 17, where in college he met the other members of what became Queen. He was a British citizen by birth (a perk of being born during British colonial times), and he remained so for the rest of his life. He was British, yes, but he was also Indian. He was brown. As a musician myself, Mercury is someone I deeply admire for his songwriting talent, his charisma and his staggering four-octave vocal range. But he is also someone I hold close to my heart as a fellow brown person. He is the only famous-in-the-mainstream rock and roll star of Indian origin that I know of. I love him, and I maybe want to be him; his overwhelming success during his tragically short life gives me the hope that maybe someday I can achieve some small fraction of that success myself. He makes me not want to give up on music the same way I gave up my theatrical ambitions in college. And that’s why it is hugely important that he be portrayed, in what is likely to be the definitive movie chronicle of Queen’s history, by an actor of color from a similar ethnic background. No, Rami Malek isn’t a perfect fit – he is of Egyptian descent, not Indian, and he was raised Christian Orthodox, not Zoroastrian. But casting him is a damn sight better than Sacha Baron Cohen. The story of Hank Azaria’s characterization of Apu on The Simpsons is that he was inspired by the 1968 Peter Sellers film The Party , in which Sellers, a white British actor, wore brown makeup to play an Indian man. You’ve heard of blackface, presumably, and why it’s bad? Well, this is brownface. And Cohen as Mercury would also have been brownface. This is not okay. It’s not okay at all. It’s 2018. We can do better. If Prince Harry can marry a woman with a black mother, surely we can avoid casting another white British actor and putting him in brownface, right? When I watch the teaser trailer for Bohemian Rhapsody I get weepy, for the same reason why the Royal Wedding made me weepy. Seeing Malek in costume as Mercury – he looks so much like him, he’s got the mannerisms down, he’s got the accent, and in just a short 2 minutes I feel him inhabiting Mercury in a whole-bodied, hard-hitting way – I am struck by how powerful it is to see an actor on screen whose skin looks like mine, portraying a staggeringly brilliant musician who became world famous in spite of the fact that his skin looked like mine. Progress. Representation matters. I’m not going to give up. Reeya Banerjee Reeya is the Operations Manager at Beacon Music Factory, an out-of-the-box music school in Beacon, NY. She has a tuxedo cat named Eliot, the Stig of Berkelac, and a film degree from Vassar College that she does not use. She usually can be seen singing and playing bass at BMF shows or drinking IPAs at Dogwood while reading pop culture news on her phone. #Newsletter #Article #ThinkPiece #Representation #BohemianRhapsody #TheSimpsons #RamiMalek #Apu #MeghanMarkle #ReeyaBanerjee #Queen

Here’s the thing: Crazy Rich Asians , directed by Jon M. Chu and based on the novel by Kevin Kwan, is a straight-up traditional romantic comedy. Boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, boy introduces girl to his family, boy’s family is not very fond of the girl, wacky hijinks ensue, and love prevails in the end. The formula for any romantic comedy is essentially: love + obstacle + angst = all’s well that ends well. This movie fits that to a T. Here’s where Crazy Rich Asians is different: the entire cast is Asian or Asian American, and the film takes place in Singapore. But the Rom-Com beats are still there, perfectly intact, and because of that familiar framework, the film doesn’t get bogged down in belaboring its supposed “foreignness” to white American audiences. That in a nutshell, is what is so fantastic about this film. Let’s get more specific: Rachel Chu (Constance Wu) is an economics professor at NYU, raised by a single mother. Her boyfriend is Nick Young (Henry Golding), also a professor, who grew up in Singapore. Nick invites Rachel to Singapore for his best friend, Colin’s wedding; when she arrives in Singapore, Rachel is shocked to realize that Nick’s family is gobsmackingly wealthy, having amassed their fortune in real estate and hotels. Rachel is completely overwhelmed and desperate to make a good impression, but Nick’s mother Eleanor, (the resplendent Michelle Yeoh) finds Rachel to be too American and too working class to be good enough for her son. She makes it clear that she does not approve of their relationship – to the point where it seems that Nick will have to choose between his family and Rachel. Many of Nick’s family and friends also do not believe Rachel belongs in their world, and they behave in ways varying from dismissive to outright hostile. Rachel, with the encouragement and help of her college best friend, Peik Lin (Awkwafina), is determined to win Nick’s family over – but she is also determined to be treated with respect, and is willing to walk away from the relationship if need be. With a number of hiccups along the way, including: a dead fish left in a bed, the breakup of Nick’s cousin Astrid’s (Gemma Chan) marriage, a confrontation during Colin’s insanely opulent over-the-top wedding ceremony, (during which, I kid you not the bride walks down an aisle filled with water and flowers), and an epic showdown during a game of mahjong, Eleanor comes around and Rachel and Nick finally get engaged. In my last article for Story Screen, I tried to unpack how powerful representation in media is for people of color. Crazy Rich Asians is a huge achievement in that realm, just by virtue of the cast and the film’s setting. It’s empowering and heartening to see the familiar romantic comedy format, executed perfectly, featuring people from the general area of the world that my family is from. I love that it deals with the emotional side, as opposed to the political side, of being an immigrant family. I love that the story is about Rachel being brilliant, strong, and fierce to protect her dignity amongst Nick’s judgmental family. I love the feminist undertones – the strong relationships between Rachel and her mother, Rachel and Peik Lin, and the friendship Rachel cultivates with Astrid, (who is the only one in Nick’s family who likes her). And on the flip side, I love that the movie features a cast full of Asian men who take off their shirts – and I don’t mean that in a lascivious way! Asian men have historically been portrayed in Western media as feminine or asexual, just as Asian women have historically been portrayed in Western media as hypersexual and submissive. Crazy Rich Asians consciously avoids those two pitfalls and it is glorious to behold. But not everyone I know is a fan. A lot of people from Singapore have criticized the demographics represented in the film: the story is entirely about the wealthy upper class Chinese population in Singapore. The film completely overlooks the fact that a sizable chunk of Singapore’s citizens are Malay (the indigenous community in the country) and Indian. There aren’t any Malay characters in the story, and there are only two Indian characters – if we can even call them that, as they don’t have any lines. We meet them only when Peik Lin and Rachel are driving up to the Young family estate, and their entire purpose in the story seems to be that they are huge, turbaned, carrying bayonets, and scare the crap out of the two women. Basically, they are there to be brutish and frightening. Singapore has a long history of poor treatment of its minority populations – the Chinese majority, experience significant economic and social privilege, and the state has an unfortunate track record of legislating discriminatory policies against its Indian and Malay citizens – so having the only two non-Chinese characters in the film essentially be portrayed as “thugs” is problematic, to say the least. There has also been some grumbling over the casting of Golding as Nick; he is half English and half Malaysian Iban, and some feel that having him in the role is tantamount to white-washing. I myself, while watching this film, privately made note of the fact that all of the Singaporean characters spoke English with British accents. I was relieved at first, because British accents tend to signify worldliness and sophistication, and would help white audiences access the story without getting bogged down in biases towards Singaporean Chinese dialects. But then, the more I thought about it, it made me a bit sad. Why do we need to hear British accents in order to believe the story? Why do we live in a world where a film full of Asian characters needs to consciously avoid using Asian accents in order to keep people from tuning out – or mocking? I don’t know the answers to these questions. And I don’t love that my love of this movie is complicated by these questions – can’t I just enjoy a beautiful movie about people of color in peace without having to think about how fucked up racial politics in Singapore is? Maybe the larger question to ask here is: can one movie be all things to all people? In 2001, Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding was released in theaters – a sprawling, Richard Altman-esque exploration of one family in New Delhi as it prepares for a wedding. That year, my father and I famously went and watched it in theaters over and over and over again – for a total of 13 times. But it turns out we were watching the film for different reasons. My dad loved the Delhi-ness of the movie –it reminded him of when he was young and had just met my mother, and of exploring the city – its sights, smells, and sounds, the ebullient Delhi dialect of English, which was always punctuated by Hindi and Punjabi. I loved the movie, because before then I had literally never seen a mainstream film featuring people who looked like me. That movie made me feel seen. My dad for a while was a bit confused by this. “ Monsoon Wedding is a great movie, but… Reeya. That movie isn’t about us. The family in that film is Punjabi. We are Bengali.” But what my dad didn’t understand is, for those of us like me, who were born and raised in America, those regional cultural differences don’t mean as much as they would to someone born and raised in India. For those of us like me, just seeing Indian people depicted on the big screen was a watershed moment. Can one movie be all things to all people? No. The answer is no. The answer will always be no. Is Crazy Rich Asians flawed? Yes. Absolutely. The lack of portrayal of non-Chinese Singaporean people in the film is pretty damn egregious given the political situation in Singapore, and I completely understand why some viewers aren’t able to forgive the film for that. But Crazy Rich Asians is also a breakthrough. It’s the first time a film has featured an all-Asian cast in a modern setting since The Joy Luck Club in 1993. It’s a romantic comedy filtered through a specific second-generational immigrant lens that doesn’t condescend to white audiences. It’s two hours of pure joy and gorgeous art direction and fabulous costuming and wonderful performances by phenomenal actors who we never get to see otherwise. And it’s breaking box office records. I saw Crazy Rich Asians in Fishkill, NY on opening day. The theater was packed, and maybe two-thirds of the audience was white. When the film ended, everyone in the theater clapped and cheered, and my heart soared. Filmmaking – and art in general – is at its best when it creates and cultivates human connection and empathy. Crazy Rich Asians is able to do so because it so nonchalantly inserts people of color into a storytelling formula that everyone is universally familiar with. Progress comes in fits and starts – the film doesn’t get all aspects of representation right, but given that it took 25 years after The Joy Luck Club for this movie to come about, I’d say we were due for a bit of a shake-up even if it isn’t perfect. And if Crazy Rich Asians sets the stage for future mainstream films with completely non-white casts, then we will have more and more opportunities to do better going forward. There is no downside to that. Reeya Banerjee Reeya is the Operations Manager at Beacon Music Factory, an out-of-the-box music school in Beacon, NY. She has a tuxedo cat named Eliot, the Stig of Berkelac, and a film degree from Vassar College that she does not use. She usually can be seen singing and playing bass at BMF shows or drinking IPAs at Dogwood while reading pop culture news on her phone. #Newsletter #Review #ReeyaBanerjee #CrazyRichAsians #Representation #September2018

Warning: this article contains major spoilers for the entirety of A Star is Born . “Maybe she’s a way out. You know, it’s like… I don’t know. You float out, float out to sea and one day you find a port. Say, 'I’m gonna stay here for a few days.' A few days becomes a few years. And then you forgot where you was going in the first place. And you realize you don’t really give a shit about where you was going, because you like where you’re at.” -George “Noodles” Stone (Dave Chapelle), A Star is Born (2018) A Star is Born is Hollywood canon. The original film, starring Janet Gaynor and Fredric March, was released in 1937. It has subsequently been remade three times – once in 1954, starring Judy Garland and James Mason, once in 1976, starring Barbara Streisand and Kris Kristofferson, and now this year, starring Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper (his directorial debut). It is such an established story in the Hollywood canon that I almost feel foolish providing a plot summary, but here goes, briefly: Ally (Gaga) is a waitress and a formerly aspiring singer-songwriter who has all but given up her show business dreams after being told repeatedly that she is not attractive enough to succeed as a musician. She scratches her musical itch by performing covers weekly at a drag bar, where one night Jackson “Jack” Maine (Cooper), a famous country singer who is privately battling alcoholism, blunders in looking for a nightcap and catches her act. After spending a magical evening together talking about music and life (she is drawn to him and his charm and his depth, and he is likewise completely captivated by her, and her immense talent) he takes her under his wing – and on tour – giving her an audience for her original music, and the mentorship that only a music business veteran like him could provide. And, of course, they fall in love. She begins to gain recognition as a musician and attain a measure of success. He falls further into his addiction, and his career begins to falter. His erratic behavior begins to reflect poorly on her, and realizing that he’s going to destroy her, he takes his own life. Ally, in her grief, finds strength in the memory of the deep love she shared with Jack and the influence he had on her, and we assume that she will continue to thrive in the industry despite this horrible tragedy. That’s a summary of the most recent remake, but the three previous iterations of this story cover the exact same ground. The first two versions (where the lead characters are named Norman and Esther) set the story in the world of Hollywood movies, whereas the 1976 version (where the lead characters are named John and Esther) along with this current version, move the story from film to the music industry. Either way, when you go into the theater to watch Gaga and Cooper, if you have even a passing familiarity with the earlier versions, you know what is going to happen, beat by beat. The meet-cute. The mentorship. Her success. His addiction. His failure. His humiliation of her in a moment where she is about to receive an award for her work. Her willingness to put her career on hold to devote herself to his recovery. His epiphany that he’s holding her back. His suicide. Her triumph, in spite of losing the love of her life. Going into a film knowing exactly how it is going to unfold and end makes for a peculiar watching experience, or at least it did for me. Was I going to watch it and mentally compare it to the three earlier versions? Or was I going to watch it with the intention of interpreting it as its own independent entity? I ended up doing a little bit of both. This newest version of the story succeeds immensely, first and foremost, because of the strong acting performances by its two leads. Cooper, subsuming his normal golden-haired endearingly intense (and to be frank, often goofy) screen presence into the role of a leathery, weathered, raspy-voiced, sexy-but-troubled bad boy with a heart of gold, is tremendous, and tremendously believable. Cooper inhabits the persona of a seen-it-all, knows-how-it-all-goes musician – and he does all of his own singing (and sounds amazing, by the way). And Gaga, incorporating her normal over-the-top theatricality and bigger-than-life stage persona into the role of a small-time, struggling, somewhat "Plain Jane" musician, is nothing short of astonishing. She has such a natural, down-to-earth presence on screen, and such an ease with holding her own against other, more established actors, that I found myself forgetting that in spite of her very successful turn as The Countess in 2015’s American Horror Story: Hotel – a performance that won her a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Limited Series or TV movie against some very stiff competition – Ally is her first major role in a feature film. Hell, I found myself forgetting the time I saw her in concert at Madison Square Garden in 2011 wearing bondage gear, putting her paws up, and screaming that “[she’s] a free bitch, baby!” Cooper also has a deft hand for a first-time director. His use of close-ups and lens flares (the latter of which usually irritate me) contribute to the intimate, heart-piercing nature of the intense love story between Jack and Ally. He also does a terrific job capturing all of the music sequences throughout the film in ways that further the emotional undercurrents of the story whether it’s the large wide shots showing the overwhelming surge and sound of the crowd in the arena rock sequences or the small quieter moments of Ally and Jack playing and singing music together at home. The way Jack sits next to her in the recording studio, as Ally records her first solo song, captures how we feel that the world around them has faded into just the two of them, even though behind a glass wall are all of the studio technicians and the record producer. He also shows us the weird, otherworldly quality (as compared to the indie-alt-country vibe of Jack’s concert tour) of Ally’s flashy-costumed, airbrushed-and-dyed, and hyper-choreographed synth-pop solo-artist musical phase. It is this emotional aspect of the film’s plot that gets super interesting, and provides some welcome updates to some of the more dated aspects of the earlier versions of this story. The first three films show that the fading aging star character (Norman/John) descends further into his addiction because he is jealous of the success that his protégé/lover (Esther) begins to achieve independent of him. This leads him to act out in various dysfunctional ways: insulting her, and humiliating her on a national stage. In this most recent adaptation, Cooper complicates this conflict a bit; Jack struggles with Ally’s newfound fame, but not because he is jealous of her success (though he is certainly cognizant of his star fading). No, Jack struggles with Ally’s fame because he feels that she has sold out; after a particularly successful show during Jack’s tour, Ally is approached by a record producer named Rez, who signs her and then refocuses her away from country music and towards pop. She suddenly is headlining her own shows armed with a litany of backup dancers. Her lyrics move away from the poignant (“I’m falling / in all the good times I find myself longing / for change / and in the bad times I fear myself,”) to the insipid (“Why do you look so good in those jeans? / Why’d you come around me with an ass like that?”). After a by-all-accounts successful appearance on Saturday Night Live , Jack drunkenly confronts her while she is in the bathtub, saying that he doesn’t understand why she would make what he considers trash music when she’s capable of better. In the process, they have an excruciatingly uncomfortable fight, in which she calls him out for his alcoholism, and he tells her that she’s ugly – a very low blow, given that before Ally met Jack she had been told by industry professionals that her nose was too big for her to be successful and during their first night together Jack insisted that he thought she was beautiful, including her nose. But that’s not the insult that cuts the deepest in this scene – what’s worse is that Jack tells her that this new pop music direction her career is taking makes her embarrassing. Jack, in spite of the tremendous fame he had achieved earlier in his life, sees himself as a pure artist, a modern, high-desert bard, and he thought that that was what Ally was too. Jack never cared about the economic value of music; he only cared about the emotional value. Now, seeing how easily Rez was able to transform Ally into a pop princess, all in the interest of the bottom line – increased records sales, flashy tours, television appearances – he feels betrayed. Who is this woman he loves? And Ally too is betrayed – who is this man she loves, who was once singularly supportive of her and now tells her she’s ugly and embarrassing? The casting of Lady Gaga in the role of Ally provides some interesting meta-commentary on this idea of fame and the different types of fame one can achieve. Fame is a topic that Gaga has very obviously spent her whole music career grappling with. Recall that Gaga’s first album, a glittery electro-pop dance party ode to love, sex, money, and drugs, was entitled, The Fame (and was subsequently followed up by a deluxe edition entitled, The Fame Monster ). Recall that her most recent album, Joanne , has her embracing a more stripped-down, soft rock, and country-flavored style. Gaga went from, “Beautiful, Dirty, Rich” to “Million Reasons.” She’s basically Ally in reverse. It’s easy to see how Gaga is able to portray this character so indelibly – she has a rich array of life experience to mine in order to do so. Cooper knew what he was doing when he cast her. All I’ve wanted is for someone to believe in me and mentor me, but my fear is that the general perception of who I am is that I am mediocre and not worth the effort. I want to learn but no one wants to teach me. I’m sick of having to mentor myself. I’m sick of feeling like none of the authority figures in my life, or none of the people I admire in my life, think I have anything worth cultivating. It makes me believe that I really am truly mediocre, truly unnoteworthy, truly nothing. Just a blank space in the world. With blue hair. That’s an excerpt from an email I sent my best friend Sarah earlier this year, concerning my own feelings of stagnation with regards to my musical creativity. But looking through my email archives, I see that I’ve sent her variations of this rant many times over the past decade, relating to my writing, my former corporate career ambitions, and my academic interests. This either means that I am indeed truly mediocre, or that I am indeed truly spectacular at self-pity. Regardless, I spent several months last year grumbling that I hadn’t written Lady Gaga’s song, “You and I.” That song is exactly the kind of arena rock-flavored big-voiced belty power ballad (which is my wheelhouse in a nutshell – and in my go-to key!) that I would have written if I knew how to write a song (which I don’t), and Gaga did it seven years ago. Life is hard. But this kind of irrational yet deep-seated imposter syndrome is what has me convinced that I am inherently a low-rent small-town musician, fated to be the "Cover Band Queen" of Beacon, NY for the rest of my life. This is also what Ally fears in A Star is Born – when Jack encounters her at the drag club, she’s there to perform a cover of Edith Piaf’s “La Vie en Rose,” and in their ensuing conversation, she explains that she takes the opportunity to sing covers because she has been told the industry will have no interest in her original music because she’s not attractive enough to be successful. She is the much-feted "Cover Band Queen" of the neighborhood. And thus, the moment when Jack reveals that he has created an arrangement of a song that Ally wrote, and brings her on stage during one of his gigs to sing it with him, made my heart soar and sink at the same time. Soar because the song, “Shallow,” is a terrific song, featuring powerhouse vocals by both Cooper and Gaga (and truthfully, the whole soundtrack album to this film is full of legitimately good music, music that deserves – and is getting – radio play). But also sink because goddammit, I don’t have a Jack who’s going to believe in me and give me a platform like this. How many of us get to have a Jack? A mentor, a friend, a love, who literally makes us go viral, and skyrockets us to fame? It’s worth considering: how does fame ever happen? This is a central question in the 2013 documentary, 20 Feet from Stardom , which tracks the stories of several women who have worked as session background singers for their entire careers and, in the process, have contributed to some of the greatest hits in rock music. How is it that it took until this film for anyone to really take any notice of Darlene Love, who is most famous for her ubiquitous (seriously, wait till Thanksgiving is over and you’ll start hearing it everywhere) song, “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home”)? How is it that Merry Clayton, who provides the searing, guttural, heart-stopping vocals during the choruses of “Gimme Shelter” by the Rolling Stones, never became a humongous star? How is it that Lisa Fischer’s debut album didn’t explode all over the radio? Sting, who appears in 20 Feet from Stardom, is the only one who gives a clear answer to this question, an answer that is still maddening: no one really knows what it takes to become famous. There’s no formula. Sometimes the most talented performers in the world never make it, and to try to find some sort of logical rhyme or reason as to why it is a fool’s errand. It just happens. Or it doesn’t. A Star is Born tackles this topic, albeit in a more oblique way, and with equally inconclusive answers. Did Ally become famous because Jack mentored her? Did she become famous because the video of her singing “Shallow” with him had hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube? Did she become famous because she really is a prodigious songwriter with a gorgeous voice? Or did she become famous because when Rez came into her life and told her what she had to do to achieve world domination, she complied? Would she have been happy with a life singing duets with Jack at his concerts as a member of his touring band? Would she have won a Grammy as Jack’s girlfriend/duet partner? Or was that only possible because of Rez’s influence on her career? I like that A Star is Born doesn’t try to answer these questions concretely. We’re slightly manipulated to sympathize with Jack’s befuddlement at the synthetic nature of Ally’s solo career, but we are never asked to judge Ally too harshly for it, as she herself remains the same down-to-earth earnest young woman we met at the beginning of the film. And unlike the first three versions of this film, in the end, Ally is not willing to sacrifice her career entirely to devote herself to Jack’s recovery from addiction. She has the agency to decide for herself how best to honor, and take care of, her partner. And this strength of character is why, out of all four versions of this story that have been made, I actually truly believe that Ally (versus the three prior Esthers) will continue to succeed after this story is over, even having lost Jack to his addiction. I’m capable of wallowing for days at a time, sometimes weeks. I look at videos of my own past performances and cringe at the sound of my voice and the sloppiness of my bass playing technique. I relive, over and over again, mistakes I’ve made on stage and difficulties I’ve had in rehearsals. I question everything I’ve ever done, every dollar I’ve spent on my instrument, and every dumb facial expression I’ve made while playing. I think about every time I have expressed enthusiasm for a song I have covered – no matter how much I love the song – because who’s going to respect me, ever, if all I can do is just retread what other, more talented people, have done before me? I get frustrated and embarrassed asking for help from anyone I think might be able to mentor me, because it feels purposeless and empty. I roll my eyes at anyone who tells me I’m being too hard on myself. I internally snarl at people around me who seem capable of being musical without a hefty dose of self-flagellation. And then, I feel ashamed for doing so. All that to say that as much as I relate to Ally, it didn’t take much for me to be able to relate to Jack as well. It’s easy to wallow when all you want to do is be an authentic creative and it’s not working. Blundering into fame like Ally does is next to impossible, but losing your way artistically like Jack does, is sadly far easier, and far more common. This adaptation of A Star is Born , more than any of the previous ones, captures in a really accurate and visceral way, the extreme pain that can accompany creative pursuits. None of the earlier versions made me cry the way this one did. And I’m not a crier. “I’m off the deep end Watch as I dive in I’ll never meet the ground Crash through the surface Where they can’t hurt us We’re far from the shallow now.” -Ally (Lady Gaga), A Star is Born (2018) It has always aggravated me that baked into the premise of the A Star is Born canon is that in order for the young up-and-coming star to succeed, the aging star that loves her has to fail. Her rise is mirrored by his fall. It’s a zero-sum game. There’s no room for grey. And to me, it feels so passé at this point. Life is not a zero-sum game. Love is not a zero-sum game. People are human and complicated, and the idea that Jack flounders because Ally becomes a pop star is kind of stupid. The real masterpiece of Cooper’s adaptation is the first hour of the film, comprising the meet-cute between Ally and Jack. Over the course of one crazy impromptu night – which includes an excursion from the drag bar to a cop bar where Ally picks a fight with a jerk who tries to accost Jack, a pit stop at a grocery store for frozen peas to ice her hand, and a long, long conversation sitting in the grocery store parking lot, bonding over music, over songwriting, over the more wretched aspects of their life stories. She is young, talented, cool, and full of potential. He is tragic, soulful, and full of a deep well of pain. The power of this sequence is in witnessing how intoxicating it is to feel seen. The way Ally, who has been told all of her life that she’s funny looking, suddenly realizes that someone thinks she’s beautiful. Sexy. The way Jack, who’s been told all of his life that he’s a fuck-up, suddenly realizes that someone understands his sadness and doesn’t recoil. The way the woman who’s been convinced that she is only destined to sing other people’s songs finds someone who thinks she has something of her own to say. The way the man who’s been convinced that he knows all there is to know about being a musician finds someone to bring him new inspiration. They see each other. And so, they fall. Love is scary. Look at the rhetoric we use to describe it – they “fall” in love. No matter the height, falling can go very, very, wrong. And falling fast can be even more treacherous. Ally and Jack fall in love in this scene. They fall fast – maybe too fast? But who cares? Cooper and Gaga have great chemistry with each other, and so this scene is beautiful to watch. They capture that heady feeling of falling so well – the romance of sitting outside, the absurdity of the frozen peas bandaged to her hand, the way her singing the song she’s been writing to him starts to feel like a confession of love. You get the idea that this is fate. That maybe people come into each other’s lives for a reason. Maybe there’s a reason they found each other. Maybe there’s a reason why they never felt seen till now. Can we ever really see ourselves clearly? Or do we need someone else’s eyes? I began this piece with a quote from Jack’s friend Noodles (a wonderfully warm cameo by Dave Chapelle) that I believe hints at this: maybe some people come into your lives to show you that you don’t have to keep running, or being mired in the dark. And when you find someone who makes you feel like you don’t have to keep trying to escape, would it really be so bad to allow yourself to be happy? Cooper’s adaptation of A Star is Born does such a good job of modernizing the more dated aspects of its famous story that I find myself wishing that he’d gone totally rogue. I wish this had been a total upending of the canon. I wish I could have seen the version of this story where the question of Ally and Jack’s success – as a couple, as partners, as musicians – is not a zero-sum game. The one where he recovers, not because of some tired old notion that it’s her job to be his salvation, but because he cares about music and he cares about her and so he tries a little harder to be better. Because would it really be so bad to allow himself to be happy? And maybe she goes back to her alt-country roots and they go on tour together again and thrive. Or maybe she finds a way to work his songs into her pop queen persona, all earnest and ironic at the same time (this is something Lady Gaga is masterful at in her real life), and they go on tour together again and thrive. Because sometimes people come into your life for a reason. Because maybe your soulmate is the person who forces your soul to grow the most. And yes, some growth is painful. But as Noodles says, with growth you can finally see that maybe you can accept, and even like, where you are. Because, and I don’t know when I stopped being pragmatic and scornful of romance, maybe Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s wedding rewired my brain or maybe I’m just getting soft in my old age or, more likely, it’s because this past summer has completely upended my life in an overwhelming way – because I want to believe, I need to believe, that sometimes love, no matter how scary, is transcendent. Yes, we’d complicate the A Star is Born canon this way. But in 2018, the canon is problematic, reductive, and tired. Cooper, along with Gaga, has refreshed the story so much with this adaptation. Maybe in 2038, or whenever Hollywood tries this again, they can let us see a version of this oft-told tale that isn’t a zero sum game. In the meantime, we’re pretty far from the shallow now with this film, so maybe I shouldn’t complain too much. Reeya Banerjee Reeya is the Operations Manager at Beacon Music Factory, an out-of-the-box music school in Beacon, NY. She has a tuxedo cat named Eliot, the Stig of Berkelac, and a film degree from Vassar College that she does not use. She usually can be seen singing and playing bass at BMF shows or drinking IPAs at Dogwood while reading pop culture news on her phone. #Newsletter #Articles #ReeyaBanerjee #AStarisBorn #Musical #Spoilers #BradleyCooper #Oscars #LadyGaga

Warning: this review contains plot spoilers for Little Women. I rewatched Gillian Armstrong’s 1994 film adaptation of Little Women on Netflix over the course of three train rides home from work about a month ago and at the end, I busted out laughing (in the quiet car – forgive me, fellow commuters) because I had this vivid memory of having watched the movie in the theater with my mother when it was first released. It’s the last scene of the movie, where our plucky heroine, Jo March, goes running after Professor Friedrich Bhaer in the rain to confess her feelings to him, and to beg him to stay in Concord with her and teach at the school she is starting in her late aunt’s mansion. “Ugh, nooooooo,” my mom said. “Let him go! Let him go! Tell him to keep walking! Nooooo!” And I joined her: “Go away! Go away Professor! LEAVE! JUST LEAVE!!!” I’m sure everyone in the movie theater hated us that day. But my mom had read the book by Louisa May Alcott as a young girl, and had given me the book to read as well, and so, we both knew that Jo was going to end up with Friedrich, no matter how rudely we heckled the movie screen and irritated everyone around us. The thing is, though, almost everyone I know who has read Alcott’s book feels the same way about this coupling. Professor Bhaer is old, dull, and a bit of a mansplainer. He judges Jo’s writing for being too lurid and fantastic, despite the fact that she is able to sell such stories and use the money to support her family. He’s like a proto-hipster who eschews popular culture and shames Jo for her pride in being able to publish her work. And yet in the end, she still runs to him in the rain and begs him to stay, because somehow along the way she has fallen in love with him, even though they have basically no chemistry and almost nothing in common besides a knack for teaching…? He sucks. I mean, really. He sucks. * I am 34 years old, which puts me squarely in the “Old Millennial” territory, and as such, I think it’s safe to say that Armstrong’s adaptation of Little Women is the definitive one for women my age. The 1994 adaptation is entirely charming with a staggeringly deep bench of a cast: Winona Ryder (just as she was becoming a huge star) as Jo, Claire Danes (in her debut film) as Beth, Kirsten Dunst (baby-faced and coming straight from Interview with a Vampire ) as Amy, Eric Stoltz as John Brooke, Trini Alvarado as Meg, and Susan Sarandon as the girls’ mother, whom they call Marmee, with Gabriel Byrne as Friedrich Bhaer. Byrne is admittedly much more handsome than Friedrich’s description in the book, and he tries his damndest to do his best with such a thankless role, but ultimately he still fails to help us comprehend how or why Winona Ryder’s Jo would go chasing after him in the rain. Oh, and there’s also, Christian Bale – Batman himself (but impossibly young and floppy-haired) as Laurie, Jo’s best friend, the boy next door who loves her, but for some reason in the end ends up married to Amy, and we’re just supposed to accept that that’s a plausible thing that happens. I think you can tell that I have some major issues with the source material here. And so, therein lies the trouble with Armstrong’s film: it is a faithful chronological depiction of the plot of Alcott’s book. Meticulously faithful. Extremely meticulously faithful. Which means that, much like the book, we have more than a couple of straight-up baffling moments. Not only does Armstrong fail to show us why Jo would fall in love with the Professor, she also fails to show us why Jo turns Laurie down, and she fails to convince us that somehow years later, Laurie would fall in love with an older Amy (played by Samantha Mathis) and Amy would somehow be okay with this, knowing that he loved her older sister. And while we’re on the subject of Laurie and Amy – there is a super creepy moment in the 1994 film when young Amy (Dunst) is being taken to Aunt March’s house with Laurie accompanying her on the ride. Amy is all of 13 or 14 years old in this scene, while Laurie is in college. She wistfully tells Laurie that one of her fears is that she will never be kissed before she dies, and Laurie promises that he will make sure to kiss her at least once before she dies. She leans against his shoulder happily, and I shudder, because why is college-aged Batman making such promises to baby Kirsten Dunst?! It’s not ok! It’s not ok at all! And it makes their future marriage even creepier. But it is a remarkably effective film all the same, with lush scenery, a beautiful soundtrack, and a heart-rending death scene from Claire Danes, and people went to see it in droves because the book, for all of its plot flaws, is still a beloved classic, read by many young girls – many little women – over the years. Nostalgia is a powerful tool. So when I heard that Greta Gerwig was directing a new adaptation, I was curious to see how she might try to distinguish her film from my generation’s “definitive” adaptation. Once again, a stacked cast: Saoirse Ronan as Jo, Emma Watson as Meg, Eliza Scanlen as Beth, and Florence Pugh as Amy (although I do wonder why Gerwig didn’t end up casting any American actresses as the titular Little Women in this quintessentially American Civil War-era story). Laura Dern plays Marmee. Meryl Streep is Aunt March. Bob Odenkirk as the girls' father (sounding a bit too much like Saul Goodman, but endearing nonetheless). And Timothee Chalamet – also young and floppy-haired – as Laurie. And all I can say, really, is bravo, Greta Gerwig. Because she somehow found a way to tell this story, fairly (if not meticulously) faithfully, and she corrects the flaws that have always bothered me, both about Armstrong’s film and the source material. Gerwig accomplishes this primarily by not showing the story in chronological order – we begin with the four girls as grown women, and are shown via flashbacks all of the events that lead them to where they end up as adults. We first meet Jo as she tries to get a story published in New York, and we first meet Amy in Paris with Aunt March, running into Laurie. And it might even be this simple – the fact that when we first see Laurie, he’s with Amy and not Jo (which is what a chronological tale would do) – that made me more open to the idea that these two could somehow fall in love, despite the spectre of Jo’s earlier refusal of Laurie hanging over them. Meeting Amy as a fully formed adult with her clear-headed understanding of the world, her place in it, and how she intends to fulfil the destiny she has always wished for – to marry a wealthy man, and thus save her indigent family of teachers, artists, and writers – makes it easier to not totally despise her in flashbacks when she famously burns Jo’s manuscript out of spite. For the first time, I could see Amy as a real character – an actual person, not a concept (bratty little sister, vain young woman), and as a counterpoint to Jo, as opposed to a thorn in her side. Gerwig also ensures that we see that Amy has always had a crush on Laurie since she was young, which gives the scene where he begs her not to marry her boring boyfriend Fred Vaughn some real stakes. Instead of being flattered, Amy gets upset, because she has always felt like she was second to Jo, and she can’t fathom being so in marriage as well. This moment in particular took my breath away, because it allows Amy to vocalize that truth: that she can’t take a proposal from Laurie seriously, even though she has loved him for forever, because she knows how deeply he loved Jo, and how Jo’s refusal destroyed him. And because this then sets up Laurie’s transformation from debauched playboy to a somewhat serious businessman in a plausible way (whereas the same transformation is borderline comical in Armstrong’s film) – Laurie wants to prove to Amy that he doesn’t see her as a second choice, and that he will be worthy of her. * I’m talking a lot about Amy here, when it’s fairly accepted that the heroine of Little Women has always been Jo. Saoirse Ronan imbues Jo with a lively mix of tomboy energy, intellectual fortitude, and a sense of world-weariness (even as a young girl). She is the Jo I envisioned in my head when I first read this book when I was little. It might be controversial to say this, but I will: Winona Ryder is not a strong actress, and her version of Jo always reads as cartoony to me (which matches Christian Bale’s cartoony depiction of Laurie – he never seemed comfortable playing a romantic hero, so…). The scene where Jo refuses Laurie is a melodramatic mess no matter how you look at it or who are playing the characters, but Chalamet does well with his quiet devastation when it occurs, which was a welcome difference in interpretation for me. Where Bale whined and wept and rended his garments during this scene, Chalamet turns his anger inwards and imbues Laurie with a level of gravitas that I never saw in him before. This in turn also helps support the storyline that Laurie eventually outgrows his heartbreak and falls in love with Amy. And it doesn’t involve a creepy carriage kissing promise between an adult and a young teen. (Shudder.) * But I’d like to close this out by highlighting my favorite changes that Gerwig has made with her interpretation. It’s a two-part correction: the first, being that she casts Louis Garrel as Professor Bhaer, essentially changing the character from a fusty old mansplainer to a bonafide young foreign intellectual hottie, charging the few scenes he shares with Ronan with enough chemistry that I could actually, finally, see what might have attracted her to him. When he criticizes her writing, it reads more like a peer trying to challenge her to do better, rather than an old man telling a young woman, WRITING: UR DOIN IT RONG. I can understand why between his words and Beth’s request that Jo “write something for her” that she would be inspired to write the book that turns into the text of Little Women – she’s doing it out of a desire to fulfill her own ambition, rather than to please some old dude who has irrational fears that her page-turner pulp stories will somehow morally corrupt her readers. (I mean, really, dude? What a prig. Ugh.) But even better is the suggestion, at the end, that Jo does not actually end up married to Friedrich, even though she does chase after him in the rain and beg him to stay. Jo is back in the publisher’s office – a publisher who told her that books about women only do well if the heroine gets married by the end. So it is implied that Jo writes the happy rainy ending for herself and the Professor to get her story published, but she remains fiercely independent and unmarried in the end, the way she always declared she would be. “Book” Jo gets Hottie Foreign Professor, and “Real” Jo gets to see her book being printed, bound, sewn, pressed, and published. I had no desire to heckle the end of this movie the way my mother and I did 25 years ago watching Armstrong’s adaptation. I clapped. In fact, everyone in the theater clapped. It may seem blasphemous for me to be so critical of the source material, and so dismissive of the film adaptation that reminds me the most of my childhood because of its overzealous faithfulness to said material, (I mean, who am I? I’ve never published a book and I’ve barely used my expensive film degree) but Little Women is a book that so many young people are given to read because it is an early example of a story about women’s lives that treats the characters as important people with substantial inner thoughts and feelings and desires aside from the men in their lives. And yet, I’ve always found the ultimate fates of Jo, Friedrich, Laurie and Amy in the book, so completely implausible that they made me angry. This 2019 adaptation has effectively corrected these plot flaws and as a result, we end up with a beautiful film about women finding their way in the world, rather than a contrivance of marriages for the sake of making sure everyone ends up married. “Writing things is what makes them important,” Amy tells Jo at one point in the film. Gerwig has rewritten this version Little Women in a way that makes me appreciate the importance of the story on its own merit. I may be an Old Millennial, but this most recent adaptation is now my definitive one. It will clean up like mad during awards season, and it is not to be missed. Reeya Banerjee Reeya is the Communications Director for Song-Smith, Inc, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that produces song•smith, a bi-monthly web series that spotlights songwriters in the Hudson Valley. In her other life, she works as a hospitality finance associate, sings and plays bass guitar, and has a film degree from Vassar College that she does not use. She can frequently be found in various coffee shops and bars drinking IPAs while reading pop culture news on her phone. #Newsletter #Reviews #ReeyaBanerjee #LittleWomen #GretaGerwig

From his Oldest Youngest Fan. I have this battered old VHS tape (VHS? What’s that?) in my office. On the label, in bright orange marker in my awkward seven-year-old handwriting it says: “Presidential Bash 1992.” Saturday Night Live does a “Presidential Bash” compilation of their best political sketches over its now 45-year history during every election year during the lead-up to Election Day. It’s safe to assume we’ll be getting one in late fall this year. I’ve seen them all since I was old enough to stay up to watch them, but that very first one for me from 1992, is the only one that I own, because for some odd, fateful reason, my parents decided to tape the broadcast when it aired that November while we were living in Chicago. I have watched this tape easily over a hundred times in the past 28 years. Part of what draws me back to it is the nostalgia of the time period – all of these 1992-era commercials (McDonald’s was doing “Have you had your break today?” back then), and even more fascinating, the 1992-era political ads. There’s a comically over-the-top Republican attack ad against Carol Moseley Braun, who was the Illinois Democratic candidate for Senate at the time – spoiler alert: she won, and served as Senator until 1999. But mostly I go back to it because even though, as per usual, the “Presidential Bash” serves up old political sketches dating back to the show’s beginnings in 1975, in 1992, this special is absolutely dominated by Dana Carvey. Carvey was SNL’s biggest breakout star at the moment, and he was the go-to impressionist, not only for incumbent George Herbert Walker Bush, but also for Ross Perot, the Texan crackpot billionaire philanthropist who was running as an Independent candidate against Bush and Bill Clinton. I no longer have a VCR (VCR? What’s that?) so I haven’t watched this tape in a while, but I can hear Carvey-as-Perot squawking: “Can I finish? Can I finish? Can I finish?” And Carvey-as-Bush bleating: “Wouldn’t be prudent at this juncture.” “Stay the course, a thousand points of light.” “As Commander-in-Chief, I am ever cognizant of my authority to launch a full-scale orgy of death there in the desert sands… probably won’t, but then again, I might!” “…and this will not be another Viet-nam. For we have long learned the lesson of Viet-nam… stay out of Viet-nam.” “I’m not afraid to say recession. Recession! Recession!” "I will never ever ever never ever never never ever ever never never ever ever never ever never never ever ever never raise taxes again! And I mean never ever ever never never ever…" I can hear Carvey as clearly in my head as if I were watching it all unfold in front of me. At some point in my mid-twenties, I realized that every single fact I knew about George H.W. Bush’s presidency most likely came from watching this extended montage of Carvey-as-Bush sketches from the 1992 SNL “Presidential Bash.” Jury’s still out on whether that’s something I should be proud of, but regardless, it is something that still elicits warm fuzzy feelings in me when I think of Dana Carvey. And George H.W. Bush, for that matter. (Why yes, that is weird. Weird, wild stuff.) Carvey is turning 65 on June 2, 2020, which is yet another celebrity birthday that just makes me feel old. When my family moved to the Bay Area in 1994, a friend tipped me off that he lived in the same San Francisco suburb that I did. Never one to shy away from quasi-celebrity stalking, I actually looked the guy up in the Yellow Pages (Yellow Pages? What’s that?) and found his listing. No phone number, but an address a few blocks away from my local library. This thrilled me to no end. Alongside the 1992 SNL “Presidential Bash,” there’s another bit of Carvey’s work that has stuck with me for years: in 1995, two years after he left SNL , he did an HBO “Critics’ Choice” stand up comedy special filmed in San Francisco. I didn’t watch it when it was first broadcast because we didn’t subscribe to HBO , but Comedy Central got the rights to it a year later and inexplicably, for what seemed like months, it would air constantly. Like, almost every night. And, given that there wasn’t anything else on TV I found compelling to watch in 6th and 7th grade, I ended up watching this stand up special… ...more times than I can even count. There are bits of this comedy special that are literally burned into my brain as a result. I remember an introduction that seemed to consist solely of him yelling: “FUCKING 49’ERS!!!” for five whole minutes and the San Francisco audience howling and cheering endlessly (to be fair, the Autumn of 1995 was a fantastic time to be a football fan in San Francisco). I remember a long tangent about how his two sons – barely toddlers at the time – needed to have a scheduled one hour of “Naked Time” in the house, lest the whole place devolve into the anarchy of constantly naked little children. (I really wonder how his kids feel about this bit now that they are in their 20’s.) I remember a long, long, long riff on the O.J. Simpson trial (yes, it was that time, too). And I remember his impression of Neil Young writing a new song – right down to the made-up lyrics, which I would sing loudly with my friend Jacob in class, annoying our homeroom teacher: Dead dog lying in a ditch Cigarette smoker has an itch Secret whores with ancient vices Lucky’s has the lowest prices I’m getting higher… I’m getting higher… in the world. Aside from this ubiquitous stand up special, when I think of Carvey, I remember him primarily for his famous characters and impressions on SNL . He was “discovered” by SNL executive producer Lorne Michaels in the stand up comedy circuit (where early in his career he had played a show at one point with a little-known Robin Williams, who blew the room away so profoundly that Carvey was almost too afraid to go on stage afterwards). But it’s clear watching his stand up that the material is mostly him playing characters (such as his toddler sons) or doing impressions (such as Neil Young), which is what I believe Michaels found so compelling about him. On SNL, I remember him doing impersonations of: Johnny Carson, Jimmy Stewart, John McLaughlin, along with Ross Perot and H.W. Bush. And I can clearly remember the Church Lady, Massive Headwound Harry, Lyle the Effeminite Heterosexual (a character that has not aged very well, alas), Hans from Hans & Franz, (played by Kevin Nealon) two Schwarzenegger-idolizing Eastern European body builders who hosted a show so they could “PUMP [clap] YOU UP!” and flex their copious muscles, the "Choppin' Broccoli" songwriter (please just Google this now if you don't know it; it's nearly impossible to explain and absolutely sublime)… and of course, Garth Algar, sidekick to Mike Myers’ Wayne Campbell of Wayne’s World . I rewatched SNL’s “Best of Dana Carvey” compilation recently, and I was just filled with so many of my old warm fuzzies revisiting all of his old material. But when I go over this extensive body of work from his seven years on SNL, (an all-time record length stint at the time of his departure in 1993) what sticks out to me most is the fact that aside from the Wayne’s World spin-off movies, (in which he was a supporting character) none of these characters or impressions led Carvey toward any sort of lucrative movie career after his departure from the show. This is something that many SNL alums have aspired to and succeeded to various degrees: Chevy Chase, Eddie Murphy, the aforementioned Mike Myers, and Will Ferrell. Carvey also never really achieved true greatness as a stand up comic – he’s no Robin Williams or Steve Martin or Garry Shandling or Jerry Seinfeld. His stand up is indeed primarily a platform for his impressions and characters. I actually found the 1995 HBO “Critics’ Choice” comedy special on YouTube a few days ago, and settled in to watch it, hoping for a happy trip down memory lane. After about 15 minutes, I had to turn it off. I just couldn’t keep going for the full hour. I didn’t even make it to the Neil Young bit that has stuck in my mind for over 20 years. It was a lot of intense, repetitive impression and character work, extremely frenetic and loud, and very low on… actual content. It almost stressed me out. I was bummed to close the browser tab, but close it I did, to spare my sanity. The truth, I firmly believe, is that Dana Carvey’s real strength, (where his talent can be most broadly explored and showcased) is in being a sketch comedy actor. And so this, I’m sorry to say, brings me to The Dana Carvey Show , which debuted on ABC in primetime in 1996, after a tremendous lead-in audience from the #1 show on television at the time… Home Improvement. What can I even say about this? I was 11 years old in 1996, and Dana Carvey’s return to television was a hugely anticipated event - not just in pop culture at large but in the microcosm of the Banerjee household. We cued up our VCR to tape the first episode. Dana Carvey! In prime time! I just knew it was going to be groundbreaking and tremendous! Maybe Monty Python 2.0, even? Who knew? I was so excited. My parents were so excited. We were all SO EXCITED. This was the literal definition of appointment television. Okay. So. The very first sketch of The Dana Carvey Show that ever aired featured Carvey as Bill Clinton, talking about how he couldn’t wait to face the clown-show of ridiculous Republican candidates challenging him for the presidency that fall. It was funny. We were laughing. And then… it just all went off-the-rails from there. Carvey-as-Clinton rips off his shirt to reveal that he has genetically modified himself to be able to breastfeed so he can feed babies, and then further reveals that he has a full set of six teats (not just two nipples), so he can also feed puppies and kittens and any other creature who needs feeding. All the while, Carvey demonstrates with a (fake) baby and actual real live puppies and kittens being handed to him by his aides, and milk is visibly squirting from the teats. Then, he stands up to reveal that he has had a hen’s ass grafted onto his body where his real ass was – And this is where my mother turned off the TV. “What the hell kind of nonsense was that?! I didn’t want to see that! No one wants to see that!” She was right. No one wanted to see that. Literally no one. The Dana Carvey Show lasted only 8 episodes. In retrospect, it is painfully clear that choosing to start the very first episode of this highly-anticipated program with the Clinton-teats sketch was an unmitigated, disastrous mistake. My household was not the only household in 1996 who turned off the TV or changed the channel before that sketch was over. Far from it. Carvey lost almost 90% of their lead-in audience from Home Improvement because of that sketch. And the show never quite recovered after that. There’s a documentary from 2017 on Hulu called: Too Funny to Fail: The Life & Death of the Dana Carvey Show that shows exactly how things went so horribly wrong. I watched it the other day, and it was absolutely fascinating. I should clarify: the entire 8-episode run of The Dana Carvey Show is also on Hulu, and for the heck of it, I tossed Episode One onto my queue to revisit it before delving into the documentary. Yes. I went back, on purpose, to watch Sketch One, Episode One, the beginning of the end of The Dana Carvey Show . Readers, it is awful. I turned it off, again. 24 years later and I still couldn’t watch the Clinton-teats sketch all the way through. But then I went to the documentary, and it’s really very well done. The general consensus is that the show tanked miserably because prime time was not the right venue for the kind of comedy Carvey excels at. Plus they had no real understanding of their lead-in audience. Executive producer Robert Smigel – probably most famous in the mainstream as the creator of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog – admits that he had never watched a single episode of Home Improvement until about four or five episodes into production of The Dana Carvey Show , and when he finally did, his heart sank. On top of that, ABC had recently been purchased by squeaky-clean Disney , and network executives, especially after the debacle of the Clinton-teats, began to micromanage the show more and more, to keep it from alienating more people and losing more sponsors. But what is truly, truly incredible about The Dana Carvey Show is that it had a hugely stacked cast and crew aside from Carvey. Smigel was executive producer. Louis C.K. (oh yes) was the head writer. Charlie Kaufman (yes, that Charlie Kaufman, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Charlie Kaufman) and Bob Odenkirk (yes, the Saul Goodman) were on the writing staff. And then, on top of that, there were two completely-unknown actors plucked from the famous Second City improvisational comedy troupe in Chicago to round out the cast. Those men were Steve Carell and Stephen Colbert. Yes. Really. Steve Carell and Stephen Colbert’s television debut consisted of eight episodes of the nearly universally critically panned Dana Carvey Show. The show was finally cancelled after consistently disastrous ratings and being absolutely eviscerated by TV critics. In the documentary, Carvey describes going back home to his family, who were living in Greenwich, CT, and realizing that he had hardly seen his kids in months, and that he was exhausted. Carvey has since been reluctant to appear in movies or more television shows, and has devoted most of his time since then to being a father to his kids. He returned to stand up – more of the same stuff that I remember from that HBO “Critics’ Choice” special – but otherwise he has remained fairly low-profile ever since. I’ve been bagging on poor Dana Carvey for a while in this piece and honestly, it hurts my heart that this is where my train of thought is going because still, to this day, when I think of him, I think of that old VHS tape of the 1992 SNL “Presidential Bash” in my office with my seven-year-old handwriting on it, and how honestly, that 90-minute special was the genesis of a genuine admiration and fanhood of Carvey’s talent for me at a very young age (probably too young to be watching him, honestly). He demonstrated and defined what was funny to me for a long time. (I mean, holy crap, I have held on to that tape for nearly three decades!) He was like electricity in a bottle when he was on SNL . And it seems that the failure of his attempt to conquer prime time with The Dana Carvey Show has dimmed some of that electricity, and it makes me sad. Carvey did a comedy special for Netflix back in 2016 called: Dana Carvey: Straight White Male, 60. My boyfriend and I watched it the other day and it was actually pretty good – still fairly impression-heavy, but with some great observational humor. Although he did spend a good ten minutes making fun of Millennials, which irritated me. (Anger at Boomers mocking Millennials for struggling in an economy and society that the Boomers ruined is one of my favorite drums to pound as an “old” Millennial and I hope his younger Millennial sons gave him some crap for that later). He also recounted some really great, hilarious, and endearing backstory about how he based the character of Garth on his older brother Brad, an engineer who pioneered early movie and television video production and editing techniques. Carvey has mellowed considerably since the HBO “Critics’ Choice” stand up special that I used to know by heart, and recently abandoned to save my sanity – the electricity and manic energy that used to suffuse his very being has been tamped down quite a bit. But, such is what happens as we age. I’m no whippersnapper myself anymore. And you know what? It doesn’t matter, because he was still pretty damn funny. We were laughing a lot. He’s not lost his sense of humor in the slightest, and he’s still one of the most spontaneous and versatile impressionists I’ve ever seen (he does a really good Obama voice - no joke - and yes, he has a Trump impression now, and yes, it’s just terrific, fabulous, wonderful, the best ever). As I think about how to wrap this up – how to somehow encompass the legacy of Dana Carvey (as if it’s even appropriate to consider the “legacy” of a performer who is still alive) – I keep coming back to one thing. And that is the tragedy of The Dana Carvey Show : a program developed solely to showcase Carvey as a sketch comedy star, doing more diverse material than he was allowed to as a player on SNL – which bombed so spectacularly… but also introduced two of the funniest comedians working on the planet today: Steve Carell and Stephen Colbert. Both men openly admit that the producers of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart hired them based off of one sketch they did on Dana Carvey called: “Waiters Who Are Nauseated by Food.” Basically Colbert and Carell spend the sketch trying and barely succeeding to read the specials on a menu to restaurant patrons without vomiting everywhere. That was the premise of the entire sketch, and that’s why Jon Stewart hired them. For real. And the rest is history. Think about that. If there hadn’t been a Dana Carvey Show , we wouldn’t have gotten much of what made The Daily Show so good in its heyday. (Remember the Carell/Colbert point-counterpoint "Even Stevphen"?), The Colbert Report, The 40 Year Old Virgin, Stephen Colbert’s famous (and infamous) roast of George W. Bush at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2006 , The Office, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert , and all of these Oscar-nominated movies Carell seems to be doing these days. Imagine a pop culture world without Carell and Colbert in it, right now. Just try. I’ll bet you can’t. So, thank you, Dana Carvey. Thank you for giving us the uncanny impressions, the indelible characters, the laughs, the electricity, the joy, this old Millennial's entire political education of Bush the First's single term as President, and also for giving us Steve Carell and Stephen Colbert. Happy birthday. I will never forgive you for the Clinton-teats sketch, but it’s a small crime within an uneven, but still unambiguously vast and hilarious career. I was going to buy a VCR this weekend so I could watch you as George H.W. Bush on my 1992 SNL “Presidential Bash” VHS tape again, but given the COVID-19 economic downturn, spending money probably wouldn’t be prudent at this juncture… Reeya Banerjee Reeya is the Communications Director for Song-Smith, Inc, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that produces song•smith, a bi-monthly web series that spotlights songwriters in the Hudson Valley. In her other life, she works as a hospitality finance associate, sings and plays bass guitar, and has a film degree from Vassar College that she does not use. She can frequently be found in various coffee shops and bars drinking IPAs while reading pop culture news on her phone.

I remember when I first watched Back to the Future . I think I was 7 years old, and my mind was completely blown: by the premise, by the acting, by the sheer wildness of Marty McFly’s (Michael J. Fox) adventure back in time. And then I remember finding out that the movie had been made and took place in 1985, and I felt so extremely disappointed. I was born in 1985. I wished, desperately, that I had been born a decade earlier, so that I could have been around to see Back to the Future when it had first come out, so I could have been a part of the original hoopla around the film, and really joined in on the fandom as it was happening in real time. Alas, I had no DeLorean time machine to make this happen. I could only watch this movie from a remove, a step behind everyone else who had seen it in theaters originally, and speculate on what my life might have been like if my parents had married a couple of years earlier and decided to have me soon after. In the meantime, all I could really marvel at was that Back to the Future was my age. That was kind of cool in its own way. Less cool than if I’d been there to see it in real time, but not too shabby. I have seen this movie many, many times since then, and I rewatched it yet again a couple of days ago to refresh my 35-year-old COVID-19-lockdown-addled-brain memory. (Coronabrain, folks. It’s a real thing.) It’s always a really fun trip to get into this story again, but the first thing that always makes me chuckle is Huey Lewis & the News singing, "The Power of Love," written specifically for the film, right in the beginning. See, I know Huey Lewis. Or rather, I know his son – he was in my class in high school in San Francisco (hi Austin, if you’re reading!). And I did meet Mr. Lewis once, late in my senior year, when he came to some sort of random cabaret performance that the school was putting on, and me and my friend Meghan sang a duet: “Nobody’s Got No Class” from the musical Chicago. Mr. Lewis pulled me aside after the show. “Hey, that was really great! You’ve got a killer voice!” he said. Any sense of articulate thought vanished from my brain. “OHMYGODTHANKYOUSOMUCHTHAT’SSONICEOFYOUOHMYGOD THANK YOU MR. LEWIS!!!” He grinned. “You can call me Hugh. Awesome job, seriously.” And then he vanished into the crowd, and I did the Snoopy dance in my head. Huey Lewis himself makes a cameo early on in the film, as one of the teachers evaluating whether Marty’s band can play at the next school dance. “Hold it fellas,” he says, stopping their audition, “I’m afraid you’re just too darn loud.” And when I watch this now, I feel myself grinning, knowing that I know Huey Lewis, and just how darn nice he is, remembering him paying me that amazing compliment back when I was 18 years old, not even knowing that 13 years later I was going to start trying to be a musician myself. Nostalgia, man. Nostalgia for the past and nostalgia for the future that you don’t even know. Isn’t that what Back to the Future is all about, at its core? I write a lot about nostalgia when I write about films – much like my Story Screen colleague Mike Burdge, who often looks at filmmaking through the lens of it being a tool for building empathy (which I certainly agree with), I tend to look at it as a lens through which storytellers can create a path toward nostalgia. To lean on a quote from Mad Men that I maybe lean on too often, “…in Greek nostalgia literally means ‘the pain from an old wound.’ It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone.” I’m not going to sit here and recap the plot of this film for you – you wouldn’t be reading a 35-year retrospective on Back to the Future if you hadn’t already seen it. And I’m not going to unpack a Freudian reading of 1955-era Lorraine (Lea Thompson) being attracted to the boy she doesn’t know is her son, Marty, accidentally transported back from 1985 after a mishap with Doc Emmett Brown’s (Christopher Lloyd) time machine. Tons and tons of film scholars have done that already, way better than I could here (I graduated from film school in 2007 and became an accountant). You can find lots of essays on that topic easily with a quick Google search. I’m here to talk about the multiple layers of nostalgia that exist within this film. Marty’s nostalgia for Doc Brown while he’s hanging out with him in 1955, knowing that 30 years later, his friend and mentor will be killed by Libyan terrorists. (Yeah, some of this movie has not aged well...). In that moment, it’s simultaneously nostalgia for Marty’s past and nostalgia for Doc Brown’s future. There’s Marty’s parents’ nostalgia for the high school dance where they met and fell in love – both the original version of the story from the beginning of the movie, when this memory is bittersweet for George (Crispin Glover) and Lorraine because of how disappointing their lives turned out, and the new version, once Marty accidentally changes the trajectory of George and Lorraine’s meet-cute while he’s stuck in 1955, when the memory is just plain sweet, because their lives have been so happy and successful ever since. There’s Marty’s future nostalgia for his timid father George when he meets him in 1955 and realizes that George has been timid all his life, and he thinks maybe he can help him with that, not realizing how profoundly it would change his family’s life. There’s Marty’s future nostalgia for his mother Lorraine, who he knows as a depressed, overweight alcoholic in his 1985 life, but who he sees anew in 1955 as a young, gorgeous girl, and he wonders what happened to her to make her so sad. And then of course there’s Doc Brown’s nostalgia – we learn that at the end of the film, he actually survives the terrorist attack. At some point between meeting Marty in 1955, and seeing him again in that parking lot late at night while testing the time machine in 1985, he thought back fondly to that weird kid from the future and decided to read the note Marty wrote him warning him about his death (despite his protestations about interfering with future events back in 1955), and he put on a bullet-proof vest, just in case. Pains from old wounds, all of it. This movie is a nostalgia machine. It runs and functions entirely on nostalgia. Nostalgia is the petrol in its pump, it’s the blood in its veins, it’s the phenomenon that propels Marty to fix the mistakes he accidentally makes in preventing his parents from meeting properly in 1955 when he crash lands into it, and it’s the phenomenon that causes him to be completely bowled over by how much his 1985 life changes when he finally comes back. Because he’s inadvertently fixed all of his family’s problems. Fixing his family, in 1955, was solely to ensure that he and his siblings wouldn’t vanish into the ether in 1985, as 1955 Doc Brown warns him could be possible. But when he returns to 1985, what he sees gives him that twinge in his heart more powerful than memory alone. He realizes he has made everything better for everyone in his life. Doc is alive, his family is thriving, and along the way he invented rock and roll… …yeah. Let’s talk about that. There are a few details about Back to the Future that I’d forgotten: the first of which is that Biff Tannen (Thomas F. Wilson) isn’t just a bully to George McFly (and everyone else), he’s a straight-up rapey bastard. First he feels up Lorraine repeatedly in school in 1955, and then attempts what looks like an actual rape in the car before the school dance, causing the confrontation between him and George that leads to George and Lorraine later falling in love. I remembered Biff as being a douchebag, but I did not remember that he was a rapist. So, that was unsettling. Second, I’d forgotten the whole Libyan terrorists plotline: Doc Brown stole the plutonium he needed to power his time machine in 1985 from a group of Libyans who asked him to help them build a bomb. This leads to a shootout in the parking lot of the mall featuring a van full of straight-up Middle Eastern terrorist stereotypes yelling in faux Arabic. Um. Kind of icky. (But it was 1985! But… yeah.) And then of course, the icing on the cake: in 1955, after George saves Lorraine from being raped by Biff, Marty is asked to sit in on guitar with Marvin Berry & the Starlighters, the band playing at the dance, because in the process of dealing with Biff’s idiot friends in the parking lot, Marvin hurts his hand. Marty starts playing and singing “Johnny B. Goode,” and the rest of the band joins in. “All right guys,” Marty tells them, “this is a blues riff in B, watch me for the changes and try to keep up.” As I watched this the other day I thought: Oh my god, I’ve played this song in a band. I’ve played it in that key. 12 bar blues, don’t pass through the four on your way back down; keep it moving because it’s a fast, fast song. I didn’t know, when I was 7 years old, watching this movie for the first time, that 26 years later I’d be playing this exact same song on stage at a real music venue, and I felt that pang, that twinge in my heart for 7 year old me, watching this movie, knowing nothing about this song, knowing nothing about who I was going to grow up to be. “Johnny B. Goode” is a style of music the kids at this high school have never heard before in 1955, and they love it, dancing along enthusiastically. Partway through this sequence, we see Marvin Berry calling his cousin Chuck (yes, Chuck Berry), and telling him basically that he’s gotta listen to what this white boy is doing because it’s that “cool new sound” Chuck has been looking for for his own music. Yeah, no. No. NO. Whitey white Marty McFly did not invent rock & roll. Marty McFly did not give Chuck Berry “Johnny B. Goode.” That is not a thing that happened, and this is straight-up offensive, especially given the current political climate. I just can’t with this, I can’t. I never said this was a perfect movie. I ended my rewatch of the movie awash with more nostalgia: look at how young Michael J. Fox was, how fresh-faced, how healthy. He was a baby. This was before we knew about his Parkinson’s Disease, and way before we could see the effects it had on his body. God, how time flies. Look at how Christopher Lloyd somehow looks exactly the same as he did as Reverend Jim Ignatowski on the TV show Taxi – a show I used to watch on “Nick at Nite” as a child because it, too, was well before my time. Does this man age? Has he always looked old? Has he always looked crazy? He’s certainly always been hysterically funny. Whatever happened to Lea Thompson? Didn’t she have a sitcom for a while? Where did Crispin Glover go? I think Glover’s performance in this film is a stroke of pure genius; he’s so affecting in his timidness in 1955. He’s so determined to do his best at Marty’s behest; he’s so sweet underneath his awkwardness. Where did he go?! I know he was in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape but why can’t I see him now? Why didn’t he have a huge career as a character actor? Why wasn’t he everywhere? Why wasn’t he the eccentric weirdo in every movie ever since Back to the Future? And then, my buddy Huey Lewis, ends the film with "The Power of Love" again. I actually think he has a killer singing voice too, even if Huey Lewis & the News as a band was a little on the dorky side (sorry Hugh (sorry Austin)). But the poor guy now has Ménière's Disease, and is suffering major hearing loss. He hasn’t performed live since 2018. This absolutely breaks my heart, especially remembering how kind he was to me that day I sang in the cabaret at my high school in 2003. God, how time flies. The Future sequels exist too; they are flawed, and nowhere near as worthwhile as the original. Back to the Future Part II did promise us flying cars by 2015, and I have yet to see that materialize (um, I’ve been waiting, why haven’t you invented the Flying Prius yet, Toyota Motor Company?!) And the filmmakers also screwed Crispin Glover over. They could not agree on the terms and money for him to appear in the sequels, so they reduced the role of George McFly and recast him. However, they also reused footage from Glover that had been filmed for the first movie, and the older footage was combined with new footage of the recast actor, who wore prosthetics and other obscuring garments (sunglasses, etc) to play down the fact that Glover wasn’t actually in the film. Glover subsequently sued the producers, claiming that they had used his likeness without his permission, and hadn’t paid him for reusing the old footage from the original film. As a result, there are now clauses in the Screen Actors Guild agreements which state that producers and actors are not allowed to use such methods to reproduce the likeness of other actors. So, good on Glover for making that happen for his fellow actors’ union members. Back to the Future Part III is just awful. Skip it. Let’s pretend it didn’t happen, please. (Sorry, Mary Steenburgen.) Back to the Future is 35 years old. I am 35 years old. This is a weird thing to think about on some level: being the same age as one of my favorite films. It’s even weirder to think that there was a time when I wished that by 2020, I would be 45 years old, so I could have experienced the Back to the Future phenomenon in real time. That’s definitely some 7 year old nonsense logic right there. Now, from where I sit… I’m good. 35 is good. I’m fine with it. This movie is as old as me, and like I said, that’s kinda cool. It’s become like a favorite sibling* or something. This film will always capture my imagination, no matter how old I am, no matter who I become. No matter how much time flies, Back to the Future will always be there, flooding Marty, George, Lorraine, Doc Brown, me – us – with the pain from those old but wonderful wounds, those twinges in the heart that only nostalgia can provide. * NB: I’m an only child, please don’t @ me because I know this metaphor is a bit wonky. Reeya Banerjee Reeya is the Communications Director for Song-Smith, Inc, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that produces song•smith, a bi-monthly web series that spotlights songwriters in the Hudson Valley. In her other life, she works as a hospitality finance associate, sings and plays bass guitar, and has a film degree from Vassar College that she does not use. She can frequently be found in various coffee shops and bars drinking IPAs while reading pop culture news on her phone.