Author: allen0997

Gospel Hour ~ A Capsule Book Review

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Gospel Hour ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp

Southern writer T. R. Pearson (born 1956 in Winston-Salem, North Carolina) has a writing style all his own, as you will know if you’ve ever read any of his books. It’s a style that might discourage a lot of readers, but if you persevere and don’t give up after a few pages, you get into the rhythm of the writing and find that it’s fun and not all that difficult to read. Some writers, such as William Faulkner, write such long, esoteric, cerebral sentences that it’s sometimes hard to understand what the man is saying; you might have to go back and break the sentence down into its separate clauses before you know what’s going on. While T. R. Pearson writes some very long sentences, he’s not as challenging to read as William Faulkner and you should be able to extract the meaning of his sentences at the first reading, as long as you are paying attention and don’t have too many distractions. Here is an example of one of T. R. Pearson’s sentences, from his novel Gospel Hour:

But she failed unaccountably to disclose to him just what precisely had transpired there in the sanctuary between the doxology and the bi-weekly prayer for the shut-ins which left Donnie Huff quite unable to anticipate the visit he received come Tuesday evening from a Laurel Fork delegation, the call he entertained from Mrs. Troy Haven and Mrs. Norma Baines and the Reverend Mr. Worrell’s wife Louise in addition to Miss Cindy Womble who’d seen fit herself to tote with her her sizeable hooters that Donnie Huff commenced straightaway to appreciate and know in his heart such gladness about that he left the ladies to stand for a time on the front slab while he simple gazed enchantedly through the screenwire until Opal Criner prevailed upon him to admit please the pack of them into the house.

And this is just one sentence!

Gospel Hour is a comic Southern novel about good-old-boy Donnie Huff who lives in a small house with his wife, Marie; his mother-in-law, Opal Criner; and his small son, Delmon. Donnie Huff is not very smart or ambitious. He swills beer and spends his evenings in front of the TV. He works as a lumberjack with a crew of other men just like him. One day when these men are poaching lumber (stealing lumber that doesn’t belong to them), Donnie Huff has an accident with a skidder (whatever that is) and ends up in the river upside down underneath the skidder. When his co-workers pull him out of the river, they believe he’s dead. After a couple of minutes, though, he revives. He has had, they believe, the rare experience of dying and being brought back to life.

Donnie goes on about his business and doesn’t think much about what happened to him in the river. All he saw, he says, were green spots. Nothing much to rave about. When his devoutly religious mother-in-law Opal Criner and other ladies of the church find out that he has had a dying-and-brought-back-to-life episode, they make it into a transformative religious experience. Egged on principally by his religious mother-in-law, Opal Criner, Donnie becomes convinced that he saw Jesus at the portal of heaven and that Jesus touched a “downy patch” on his arm. Suddenly Donnie, who never attracted much positive attention before in his life, becomes a celebrity. People begin donating money to his “ministry.” Donnie knows a good thing when he sees it. He’s tired of scratching out a living as a lumberjack. There’s real dough to be made as a minister. People want to be healed of their afflictions and they believe that touching the “downy spot” on Donnie’s arm that Jesus touched will do it for them. Donnie’s biggest sceptic is his droll wife, Marie. She’s mainly interested in decoupage and she’s not buying into Donnie’s sudden religious conversion.

Religion, as we see in Gospel Hour, is, in some (but not all) instances, a “business” whose main goal is reaping profits. When Donnie sees people in a tent revival who are sincerely crushed by grief, disappointment, and the general nastiness of life, his true conversion begins. He can’t really help these people by letting them touch the “downy spot” on his arm, he realizes, and he can’t fool them into believing he’s something he’s not. Even though he’s not very smart, he sees the phoniness in what he’s doing, and this, at the end of the novel, is his real moment of triumph.

Copyright © 2017 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

I Want My Money Back

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I Want My Money Back ~ By Allen Kopp

What has been seen cannot be unseen. Time lost cannot be recovered. Money wasted cannot be regained. The nominees for recent movies that, to me, were a complete waste of time, money, and effort:

Birdman ~ If the first thing you see in a movie is Michael Keaton in his underpants, you know it’s not a good sign. And, if Michael Keaton in his underpants one time isn’t enough, you will see Michael Keaton in his underpants again later in the movie. Birdman is a boring, pretentious, incomprehensible, talky-talky-talky-blab-blab-blabfest. All the characters do is stand around and talk. The most honored movie of the year, grabbing every award in sight. Everybody wet their pants over this one. Except me.

Gone Girl ~ Based on a novel I have no intention of ever reading, Gone Girl is about a married couple who don’t have such a good marriage. She’s a children’s author (ho-hum, I’m bored already), and he co-owns a bar in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, with his sister. She wants to spice things up in her marriage, so she tries to make it appear that he killed her and, after she has done that, she goes into hiding. She’s a devious, unlikeable, psychopathic, black-hearted bitch. Wait a minute! She is exactly the kind of despicable wife he deserves. This movie is like an episode of Dr. Phil. Excuse me while I locate my vomit bag.

Noah ~ Not much at all is known about Noah from the Bible, so the screenwriters here concocted a completely fictitious story with movie star Russell Crowe as Noah, complete with computer-generated animals. They’ve tried to make the story relevant and trendy by inserting references to the environment. They can’t bring themselves to refer to God for fear of offending anybody, even though God is an important, though unseen, element in the story. Noah is a religion-based movie seemingly made by people who don’t believe in anything other than their potential for box office profits.  A bizarre, fabricated, disappointing story that bears no resemblance to anything in the Bible. What a load of horse hockey!

The Martian ~ A pedestrian sci-fi fantasy starring my least favorite movie actor in the universe, the smirking Matt Damon. He’s stranded alone on Mars after his astronaut colleagues think he’s dead. Well—guess what?—he’s not dead. He’ll have to figure out a way to survive alone in the hostile Martian environment for over a year; that’s how long it’ll be before anybody is scheduled to return. He uses his own excrement to grow potatoes as a food source. Classy, isn’t it?  The Martian is a derivative, implausible, completely predictable exercise in tedium.

Still Alice ~ She’s a classy lady, a professor at a prestigious university, married to a renowned doctor. She lives in a beautiful house and is mother to several handsome, accomplished, successful children. When she’s only about fifty, she develops early-onset Alzheimer’s. We watch her as she forgets where the bathroom is in her own house and wets her pants. We watch her as she completely falls apart, not even being able to remember how to kill herself. Still Alice is like a story line to a soap opera or a TV disease-of-the-week movie. Manipulative and distasteful.

Life of Pi ~ A boy/man is traveling across the ocean from India to Canada on a small ship. His family owns a zoo in India and, because of financial difficulties, they are moving the zoo, which means all its animals, to Canada. A terrible storm wrecks the ship carrying the zoo and kills everybody on the ship except the boy/man and a few of the animals. The boy/man is lost at sea on a lifeboat with the surviving animals. He develops a special relationship with a tiger. Years later, the boy/man (now a middle-aged man and no longer a boy) tells a friend with whom he is having dinner that maybe none of it ever happened. A pointless, slow, uninvolving, dull, over-produced (in 3D no less), tedious story of survival at sea. If you enjoy seeing animals die (even if they are computer-generated), then, by all means, don’t miss Life of Pi.

The Counselor ~ At the end of The Counselor, my first thought was: I wouldn’t want to have to sit through that again. It’s about a lawyer who lives in Texas close to the Mexican border who discovers a way to make a lot of money to satisfy his appetites: get involved in drug smuggling. Of course, he must deal with unsavory types, and things don’t go as he hoped they would. He discovers the truth to the adage: If you lie down with dogs, you get fleas. Don’t waste your time on this tawdry dud. It’s two hours of your life you’ll never get back.

World War Z ~ The world is experiencing a zombie influx. No one is safe. Movie star Brad Pitt might be just the hero to save humanity. He has a wife in blue jeans and two shrieking daughters in deadly peril. World War Z is a lame, silly, bloodless, predictable, big-budget horror film. The scariest thing about World War Z is Brad Pitt’s hairdo.

Copyright © 2017 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

The Gap of Time ~ A Capsule Book Review

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The Gap of Time ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp

The Winter’s Tale is one of Shakespeare’s later plays and is less well-known than many of his other plays. It’s about King Leontes, King of a country known as Sicilia, who has a wife, Hermione, and a best friend, Polixenes. Hermione is about to give birth to a baby. With no proof at all, Leontes gets the idea into his head that Hermione and Polixenes have been having an affair and that Polixenes is the father of the baby that Hermione is about to have. When the baby is born, it’s a girl and Hermione names her Perdita. Leontes can’t stand to look upon the baby and threatens to dash its brains out. Rather than killing it, however, he agrees to let a character known as Antigonus take the baby away and “cast it to fortune.”

Antigonus takes the baby to the country of New Bohemia. A terrible storm at sea kills Antigonus, but Perdita is delivered safely to land. A poor shepherd and his dimwitted son named Clown, played by Jerry Lewis (just kidding), find Perdita and raise her as their own. Fast-forward sixteen years. Perdita is now about seventeen years old and has fallen in love with Florizel, the son of Polixenes, the one-time best friend of King Leontes of Sicilia. (Coincidence plays a very large part in this narrative, as you can see.) Polixenes apparently knows who Perdita is and is violently opposed to the match. Florizel and Perdita escape from New Bohemia and end up in good old Sicilia.

When Leontes meets Perdita, he is attracted to her, not knowing she is really his own daughter. (Yuck!) The shepherd who raised her and his son, Clown, show up (just when needed) with proof of who Perdita is (apparently articles that were left with her when they found her as an infant). Everybody is reconciled and Leontes admits that he wronged his wife Hemione and treated her unfairly. When he sees a statue of Hermione in a friend’s home, it is so lifelike that he wants to kiss it.

The Gap of Time is a novel by the English writer Jeanette Winterson. It is a “re-imagining” of Shakespeare’s play The Winter’s Tale. All of Shakespeare’s characters are now hip contemporary characters. Leontes is now an unlikable jerk with a foul mouth known as Leo, head of a big company known as Sicilia. Hermione is a singer (wouldn’t you just know she’d be something like that?) named MiMi. Polixenes is now Xeno and he’s gay. Just to keep things contemporarily politically correct, the shepherd is now black and is known as Shep. His son Clown is now Clo and he and Perdita consider themselves brother and sister, even though he’s white and she’s black.

So, The Gap of Time is a Shakespeare play with the Shakespeare part removed. I’m not sure what the point is here. Did the world really need to have The Winter’s Tale by William Shakespeare “re-imagined” by a contemporary writer?  Does Jeanette Winterson add something that Shakespeare left out? Do Shakespeare’s characters need to be updated and made to sound groovy and hip like characters in a Sylvester Stallone movie? Do we really need to have any of Shakespeare’s plays “dumbed down” for a contemporary reading public? (The vast majority of the public never reads a book.)

The Gap of Time is engaging at times with some good dialogue, especially in the first half. There’s a lot of claptrap interspersed throughout the novel about time, about how time affects its players, and about how time…I’m not sure what time is supposed to do here, and I’m not sure exactly the point that Jeanette Winterson is trying to make about time, but I do know that time is of immense importance to this story.  Am I to conclude that time heals all wounds and wounds all heels? If you think you want to read The Gap of Time, don’t. Instead get a copy of Shakespeare’s play, The Winter’s Tale, and read it. You’ll feel a lot smarter for it.

Copyright © 2017 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

Lion ~ A Capsule Movie Review

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Lion ~ A Capsule Movie Review by Allen Kopp

Five-year-old Saroo lives with his mother, his older bother, Guddu, and his younger sister, Shekila, in a small village in India. The family is poor but loving and close-knit. Saroo’s mother can’t read or write. Saroo and his brother scavenge coal and exchange the coal for food. When Guddu goes out at night to look for work, Saroo insists that Guddu takes him along. When Saroo becomes sleepy, Guddu leaves him on a bench at the railroad station. Many hours later when Saroo wakes up, Guddu hasn’t returned. There is nobody around at all, so we assume it’s the middle of the night.

In looking for Guddu, Saroo boards an abandoned train that is just sitting there. He falls asleep on a bench on the train and when he wakes up the train is in motion. He’s locked in and can’t get out and can’t get anybody to hear his cries for help. Two days later the train is 1600 kilometers away in Calcutta. Saroo is alone in the big, frightening city. He, of course, doesn’t know where he is, nor does he understand how he got there. He is just alone on the streets with hundreds of other children in similar circumstances.

Saroo experiences kindness from strangers, but he also knows that he must be wary of them. A seemingly kind woman takes him in and feeds him and gives him a place to sleep, but Saroo overhears that she is going to give him to a man, for what purpose Saroo doesn’t know. Another kind man spots Saroo on the street outside a restaurant and takes him to the police. The police question him about where he comes from, but they speak a different language, so Saroo isn’t able to tell them anything. When he says the name of his village, they don’t know what he’s talking about.

After months on the streets of Calcutta, Saroo ends up in an orphanage. The orphanage people try to reconnect him with his family by running ads in Calcutta newspapers, but nobody comes forward to claim Saroo. A kind welfare woman informs Saroo that a couple in Australia wants to adopt him.

Saroo travels to Australia and is taken into the home of John and Sue (David Wenham and Nicole Kidman), an almost-too-good-to-be true, middle-class Australian couple. (David Wenham played a pumped-up Greek warrior in the movie 300.) Twenty years go by and Saroo grows into a man. He is smart, decent and respectful, everything John and Sue hoped he would be. Sue tells Saroo after he is grown that she and John opted not to have any children of their own. “There are already enough people in the world,” she says. When she was twelve years old, she says, she had a “vision”  that one day she would take a “brown-skinned” child into her home and give him a better chance at life.

As happy and well-adjusted as Saroo is as an adult, he can’t forget his family back in India. He becomes obsessed with finding them again and letting them know what happened to him. When somebody tells him about Google maps on the Internet, he spends many hours looking for clues to where he came from. Even if he finds the place, he has no guarantee that his family will still be there, or that they are still alive.

Finally, his searching pays off. He recognizes features on Google maps that he recognizes from childhood. When he learns the name of the place, he knows it’s what he was trying to say, but he was saying it wrong. He travels to the place in India that he has located by way of Google maps. More than twenty-five years have gone by since he disappeared. What will he find when he returns to his childhood home?

We never know where Lion is taking us. Where we end up is not where we expected to be. It’s an engaging and emotional (real emotion as opposed to melodrama) movie with many fine touches. If you are capable of being moved by the plight of a homeless five-year-old boy in the slums of Calcutta, India, you will be moved by Saroo. He’s like a little animal with a haunting voice and enormous brown eyes. He loves his mother, his sister, and his brother, and he wants desperately to find them.

Copyright © 2017 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

Split ~ A Capsule Movie Review

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Split ~ A Capsule Movie Review by Allen Kopp

Split is an odd little horror film written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan. It’s about a seriously disturbed man (James McAvoy) with twenty-three personalities. He abducts three teenage girls (not for the usual reasons) by spraying them in the face with something that knocks them out and driving off with them. When they wake up, they find themselves locked in a place with no means of escape. They believe they will die, but that doesn’t keep them from hoping they will find a way out.

The odd thing about this man, the three girls soon discover, is that he is different people at different times. At one time, he’s Dennis, an authoritative man dressed in black; at other times, he’s Patricia, a lady who speaks in carefully modulated tones; and then he’s Hedwig, a boy of nine whom the girls try to finesse into letting them go before Dennis comes back. Hedwig talks like one of the Bowery Boys.

The disturbed man is being treated by a fashionable (and apparently very expensive, considering the surroundings) psychiatrist named Dr. Fletcher (Betty Buckley). He appears to Dr. Fletcher mostly as Barry, the fey fashion designer. When she tries to call forth any of the other personalities lurking behind Barry, he resists. When Dr. Fletcher is alone with him in her home/office, he seems menacing in an understated way. The music score adds to the feeling of menace we feel when Dr. Fletcher is alone with Barry. She, however, doesn’t seem to be the least bit afraid of him. She’s an expert on multiple-personality disorders, but even she seems to underestimate his capacity for evil. She doesn’t know, for example, that he has abducted those teenage girls and is holding them prisoner in his lair. (Just exactly what is his lair? We don’t know until the end of the movie.)

With all the man’s personalities, he talks about unleashing yet another one, the twenty-fourth, that will be worse than all the others. He calls this one the Beast. Dr. Fletcher takes a familial interest in her patients and truly wants to help. She goes to the man’s lair (she knows what and where it is before we do) and discovers the Beast in a most disadvantageous way (to her). She also discovers the abducted girls, or at least the one that remains. We are left wondering at this point what happened to the other two girls. One of them crawled through a hole in the ceiling, after which the man tells the other two girls they will never see their friend again. We assume, without knowing, that he caught her trying to get away and killed her.

Split is not overly violent or gory in the way that this kind of movie usually is. The bad man in this movie isn’t nearly as creepy or as twisted as, say, the killer in The Silence of the Lambs. He is more given to psychological terror than physical violence. The movie is engaging enough without being what we would call “entertaining” in the traditional sense. There’s a sense of suspense and unease, but it could have been a lot more effective if some of the missing gaps had been filled in. For example, how does the disturbed man come to be in the place where he hides the three teenage girls? Does he live there? How can he do what he does and not be seen or detected? Exactly what is his motivation for abducting the girls? We see right away that it’s not about sex, so what is it? He wants somebody to dance with him? That isn’t enough. The abduction of the girls just seems like a plot device that doesn’t play out.

Copyright © 2017 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

Barton Fink ~ A Capsule Movie Review

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Barton Fink ~ A Capsule Movie Review by Allen Kopp

Things are all balled up at the head office. Can it really be twenty-six years since the Coen brothers’ brilliant dark comedy Barton Fink first came out? I watched it again this week and liked it just as much as the first time I saw it on the movie screen.

Barton Fink (played by John Turturro) is a fuzzy-haired, bespectacled, New York, Jewish writer. He is a serious playwright who wants to create a “new, living theatre” extolling the common man. He has a hit play on Broadway. With his success comes new opportunities; his agent persuades him to go to Hollywood to write for the movies where he can make the big money he needs to continue writing his plays.

Hollywood for Barton is a vision of hell. He is installed in a seedy, seemingly empty hotel where everything is a little “off.” The fawning desk clerk named Chet appears to be the only employee at the hotel, except for the comatose elevator operator named Pete. “Have you read the Bible?” Barton asks Pete at one point in the story. “The Holy Bible?” Pete asks. “Yeah, I’ve read it. I’ve heard about it anyway.”

The wallpaper in Barton’s room on the sixth floor is peeling off from the Los Angeles heat. There’s a mosquito that buzzes around Barton’s head while he’s sleeping and it bites him on the face. (“We don’t have mosquitoes here,” someone tells him. “This is the desert. Mosquitoes live in swamps.”) The room is so quiet that he hears sounds coming from the room next door. It sounds like a man alternately laughing and crying in a distressed way. Barton calls down to Chet and politely complains. When the man next door finds out that Barton has complained about his noise, he confronts Barton. This is where Barton meets “Charlie Meadows” (John Goodman), the folksy and friendly insurance salesman (he says) who, we learn, is not really who or what he appears to be.

Barton’s problems with his hotel accommodations are nothing compared to the problems he has with the studio, Capitol Pictures, that employs him as a writer. His first assignment is to write a “wrestling picture for Wallace Beery.” He is completely out of his element here. He doesn’t go the movies, he says, and knows nothing about wrestling pictures. He doesn’t even know how to begin.

When Barton is visiting the studio one day, he runs into a writer named Bill Mayhew, vomiting his guts out in the men’s room. Barton discovers right away that this man is none other than the great writer W. P. Mayhew. “You are the greatest novelist of our time,” Barton gushes. “Why, thank you, son!” Mayhew drawls. He’s from Mississippi, don’t you know, and his character is obviously a take-off on the great American writer William Faulkner, who did, for a time, bastardize his great gift to write for the movies. Bill Mayhew is a terrible lush, but charming, and invites Barton to drop by his bungalow at the studio later in the day, where he will give Barton some pointers about writing a wrestling picture. When Barton arrives to meet with Mayhew, he (Mayhew) is in a drunken rage and can’t come to the door. Barton speaks instead to Audrey, Mayhew’s secretary. She is a Blanche Dubois-type character with a Southern accent. When Barton, who is lonely and knows nobody in Hollywood, asks Audrey to go out with him, she confides that she and W. P. Mayhew are “in love.”

Barton remains stymied with his script. He is “blocked,” he says. He must present an outline to the studio head. He doesn’t know what to do because he has written nothing. On the night before his meeting to present his outline, he is frantic and has no one to turn to, so he calls Bill Mayhew for some emergency advice. Mayhew is indisposed, Audrey says, and cannot come to the phone. When Barton tells her the predicament he is in, she agrees to come to his hotel room and try to help him with his script. “There’s nothing to writing a wrestling picture,” she says. Barton is appalled to learn that Audrey has done most of Mayhew’s writing in recent years, including his novels, because Mayhew has been too out of it with drink to do productive work. Audrey gives Barton a few suggestions for his script and then they kiss and end up together in bed. Fade out.

When Barton wakes up in the morning, Audrey is dead in the bed beside him, apparently stabbed many times in the chest. Barton is terrified. He knows he didn’t kill her, but he doesn’t know who did. Not knowing who else to turn to, he goes to the room next door and enlists the aid of Charlie Meadows. Charlie is sympathetic and, after helping to calm Barton down, disposes of Audrey’s body. All right, the body is gone, but the mattress is soaked with blood. What will Barton do about that?

Charlie has to leave town for a few days but will be back. He tells Barton to stay in his room and not talk to anybody. He asks Barton to take care of a box for him until he comes back. We don’t know what’s in the box—we never know—but Barton agrees to grant this little favor. The box is just about big enough to hold a human head.

When two police officers show up at Barton’s hotel, they are looking for Charlie Meadows. In a rapid-fire exchange of dialogue, they tell Barton that Charlie Meadows’ real name is Karl “Madman” Mundt. He’s a serial killer with a whole string of killings in his wake. Barton knows then who really killed Audrey.

In the last scene, Barton is seen sitting on a California beach, having escaped an inferno (part of the hell that he’s been in since he came to Hollywood?) at his hotel that Charlie Meadows/Karl Mundt set. He is carrying the box that Mundt asked him to safeguard. A girl comes along wearing a modest bathing suit. He tells her she is very beautiful and she blushes. He asks her if she is in pictures and she says, “Don’t be silly!” She sits down several feet away from Barton, facing the ocean, and raises her right hand to shade her eyes as she looks out to sea. The image that Barton sees of the girl is the picture he has been looking at the whole time on the wall above his writing desk in his hotel room. We know then how unhinged Barton has become. Does the girl really exist, except in his mind?

Few movies come along that are as memorable, inventive, and as much fun to watch as Barton Fink. The dialogue is a pleasure to hear (especially the exchange that Barton has in the lobby of his hotel with two hardboiled L.A. police officers), the photography and period sets are perfect, and the music score by Carter Burwell is beautiful and mysterious. One of my all-time favorite movies.

Everything is all balled up at the head office. By the end of the movie, we understand the significance of this statement.

Copyright © 2017 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

Oscar is Hiding Behind the Couch

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An industry congratulates itself by handing out trophies for the “best.”

The same annoying, unfunny host.

The same jiggly girls in their tired prom dresses.

The same faux-handsome men with their capped teeth and artful hairpieces.

The same whiny liberal elites spouting the same boring leftist propaganda.

How about if we just skip it this year?

by allen0997

Hidden Figures ~ A Capsule Movie Review

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Hidden Figures ~ A Capsule Movie Review by Allen Kopp

Hidden Figures is a story about breaking barriers that is, at least in part, based on fact. It’s 1961 and the “space race” between the United States and Russia is underway. Russia has put a spy satellite into orbit around the earth, giving Americans a feeling of unease, and Russia is the first to put a man (Yuri Gagarin) into space. As Al Harrison (played by Kevin Costner), the big boss at NASA says, “we (meaning the United States) have come in second in a two-man race.” This state of affairs puts a lot of pressure on the American space program and forces NASA to work its employees mercilessly.

Three black woman named Katherine Goble, Mary Jackson and Dorothy Vaughan are new employees at NASA. Each of them is accomplished in her own way. Katherine Goble (played by Taraji P. Henson) has been a math prodigy since she was a small child. It takes a lot of calculating to launch a rocket into space and bring it safely down again. Katherine is more adept at the calculations than most of her male counterparts. She is, of course, underestimated because of her gender and her race. This is 1961, remember, so black people can’t use the same coffee pot as the white people, not to mention toilets and drinking fountains. Al Harrison seems a cold and forbidding boss, but as he sees how capable Katherine is, he develops a grudging admiration for her and becomes, in a way, her mentor. When Katherine wants to attend all-male briefings to better understand what is going on with swiftly implemented changes, she is told there is no protocol for a woman to attend briefings. “There is no protocol to put a man into orbit around the earth, either,” she says.

Dorothy Vaughan (played by Octavia Spencer, who won an Oscar playing a maid in The Help) is mechanically inclined. As a new employee at NASA, she heads up a group of black female employees, but she is stonewalled when she tries to get the pay and title of supervisor. (This slight is probably more about her race than her anything else.) When NASA installs a mainframe computer that takes up an entire room, Dorothy is the only person who seems to know how to get it going.

Mary Jackson (played by Janelle Monáe) is only an adjunct to her male counterparts, but she longs to be NASA’s first black female engineer. She lacks a few classes, though, to even qualify. She can pick up the classes she needs at a school near her home, but she’s not allowed to attend because it’s an all-white school and she’s black. Having no intention of being thwarted, she petitions the court to bend the rules a little bit to allow her to get the classes she needs. She finesses a white judge and he rules in her favor.

After being out-classed by the Russians at the beginning of the space race, the American space program finally finds its legs and does some amazing things, including putting a man, Alan Shepard, into space and putting another man, John Glenn, into orbit around the earth. At the end of Hidden Figures, when Katherine Goble is asked if the seemingly impossible goal of putting a man on the moon can be achieved by the end of the 1960s, she says with confidence, “We’re already there.” To her it’s the next barrier to be broken in a long line of them to come.

Copyright © 2017 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

Perfidia ~ A Capsule Book Review

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Perfidia ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp

Writer James Ellroy is unapologetically politically un-correct. If you are offended by racial slurs and blunt sex talk, he is not the writer you should be reading. He manages to insult almost every ethnic and niche group. He gets away with it, it is assumed, because all his novels are set in the not-too-distant American past, where racial prejudice and racial slurs were much more a part of everyday discourse than they are now. “If you’re looking for political correctness,” Mr. Ellroy says, “go someplace else.”

His big (almost 700 pages) novel Perfidia (a Spanish word meaning betrayal or treachery) is set in Los Angeles in the days following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. With all those Americans dead in Hawaii and with the country now at war, fear and unease—and in some cases, hysteria—are the order of the day. The west coast of California seems the logical place that the frighteningly aggressive “Japs” will attack next. And those mandatory blackouts don’t do anything to ease peoples’ fears, either. (Imagine moving through a big city at night with all the lights turned off.)

The Japanese people in the Los Angeles area are being rounded up, no matter how innocent or blameless they are. Their property is being confiscated and they are being housed in “internment” camps. Americans are so anti-Japanese because of Pearl Harbor that they want to kill or at least defile almost every Asian they see. (Most people can’t tell the Japanese from other Asians). It’s in this atmosphere of fear and distrust that Perfidia is set.

Dr. Hideo Ashida is an Americanized Japanese. He is a brilliant forensic chemist employed by the Los Angeles Police Department. When all the Japanese people on the city payroll are canned just because of their ethnic background, Dr. Ashida manages to hold onto his job because he is so good at solving crimes. (He is, of course, called Charlie Chan and Mr. Moto, but he seems impervious to insult.) When he is out in public in the days following the attack on Pearl Harbor, people call him names, spit on him and, in some cases, threaten him. The police department assigns bodyguards to keep him safe.

Dr. Ashida has what he believes is a “shameful” secret. In the world that he inhabits of hyper-masculine, crime-fighting alpha-males, he is secretly gay. The lone object of his desire is one Bucky Bleichert, a boxer with whom he has been friends since high school. He sets up a hidden movie camera in the shower room to capture footage of Bucky naked. The one femme fatale in Perfidia, one Katherine “Kay” Lake, offers Dr. Ashida a roll in the hay but he, of course, isn’t interested.

On the day before the Pearl Harbor attack, a Japanese family of four, the Watanabes, are brutally murdered in their home. It appears to be a sort of ritualized killing, maybe a suicide, but the police just can’t figure it out. There’s an apparent suicide note written in Japanese that speaks of the “coming apocalypse,” but it’s too ambiguous. On examining the background of the Watanabes, the police discover they are “Fifth Column,” meaning they are part of the non-fighting branch of the Japanese military whose job it is to create disorder on the civilian front. The Los Angeles police are hoping to find a Japanese suspect to pin the Watanabe murders on, to somehow mitigate the internment of the Japanese people. If it turns out that a white person committed the murders, it will be a public relations nightmare.

If you read Perfidia and some of the other novels of James Ellroy (L.A. Confidential, American Tabloid, among others) you know that the Los Angeles Police Department of the past was unspeakably corrupt, or at least it is that way in the Ellroy universe. Most of the upper tier of the police department are on the “make” in some way or other. They have no allegiance to anything other than themselves. They take drugs, cheat on their wives, kill without compunction whenever it suits them, cover up evidence, and involve themselves with gangsters and shady characters that will advance their own interests. They don’t account to anybody but themselves. These crime fighters are in some ways worse than the criminals they pursue.

Some real-life people (Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, J. Edgar Hoover) appear as minor characters in Perfidia, and James Ellroy paints a very unflattering portrait of them. It’s probably a good thing they’re all dead or they might be initiating some legal action. Bette Davis having a torrid affair with police sergeant Dudley Smith? It somehow doesn’t fit in with the idea we have of Bette Davis. (Bette’s husband, we are told, is a “chains-and-leather queen.”) Joan Crawford seducing a young police officer half her age? Maybe so, but it’s an odious thought. J. Edgar Hoover with pomaded hair and buffed fingernails developing “crushes” on handsome L.A. police officers? I somehow doubt it. It’s all part of the badly damaged world of James Ellroy.

However you look at it, Perfidia is fun to read for its portrayal of a time and place. Very few of us alive now were alive seventy-five years ago at the start of World War II; this is a vivid “re-imagining” of those days. As long as the novel is, the chapters are short, the paragraphs are short, the sentences are short and punchy, and we never get bored. Keep turning those pages and eventually you’ll come to the end and want more.

Copyright © 2017 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997