What to Watch on VOD: "The League"
Plus: "Johnny Mnemonic: In Black and White," Happy birthday Ingmar Bergman, and more.
As of yesterday, Hollywood is facing a double strike â writer and actors â for the first time in 63 years. If you donât know why that matters or you think theyâre just being whiny media crybabies, please read this backgrounder by Voxâs Alissa Wilkinson, or the new New Yorker article about the âOrange Is The New Blackâ actors who were still bartending or contemplating going on food stamps while starring in a hit Netflix show, or anything that explains why the economics of streaming TV represent a form of digital peonage that in no way resembles making a living and at worst is a form of identity theft. What do I mean by âdigital peonageâ and âidentity theftâ? Per Wilkinson, âAccording to SAG-AFTRA national executive director Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, the AMPTP's proposal on AI included allowing background actors to be scanned, paid for one day's work, and then be used however they want in perpetuity for the rest of the universe forever.â
âThe Leagueâ (â â â, in theaters and for rental at Amazon, Apple TV, YouTube, and elsewhere) is a documentary about baseballâs Negro Leagues thatâs been fashioned by director Sam Pollard (âMLK/FBIâ) in the Ken Burns mode: Lots of archival deep dives, stirring music, and the voices of the people who were there. But itâs a story that most Americans (especially white Americans) know only in outline, through names like Satchel Paige (above), and the thoroughness of âThe Leagueâ â the way Pollard embeds it in a century of Black social history, struggle, and advancement â makes for an experience thatâs both illuminating and remarkably entertaining. As much as Pollard can only skim the surface of his subject in 103 minutes, a viewer still comes away with a richness of event and personality and a sorrow that the Negro Leagues had to exist at all â and also that they were unceremoniously dumped after Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseballâs color line in 1947.
Pollard points out that there were Black players on white teams during the 19th century, and only in 1887 did team owners, under pressure from racist star players like âCapâ Anson, vote to segregate. The Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance saw the rise of the Negro National League and the Eastern Colored League, with teams like the Kansas City Monarchs and the Philadelphia Giants, powerhouse talents like Josh Gibson, and visionary entrepreneur-owners like Rube Foster. âThe Leagueâ celebrates individual players â and has an amazing well of film footage and archival reminiscences from dozens of Negro League alumni, including Willie Mays and Hank Aaron â but its eye is constantly on the prize of Black baseballâs larger place within mid-20th century America, when the sport was the third largest economic engine in Black communities and a source of immense social pride even as baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis steadfastly refused to consider integrating the sport.
âThe Leagueâ is mournfully alive, too, to the irony that Robinsonâs signing to the Brooklyn Dodgers spelled the end of this vibrant culture. Pollard points out that any player who wasnât on the level of Robinson or Buck OâNeil or the aging Paige â which was most of them â ended up dropping out of the game, and any rosy feelings we may have toward Dodgers owner Branch Rickey for signing Robinson get a sharp corrective when we learn that Rickey didnât compensate the Negro Leagueâs Monarchs for their star first baseman â he just took him, as other white owners did with their first Black players. (âTheyâre not even a real league,â Rickey is reported to have snorted derisively.) Pollard ties the betrayal to the larger crisis in post-WWII Black communities â âAfter the integration of the major leagues, you just see the deterioration,â one historian comments here â and whether thatâs a reach or not, âThe Leagueâ still commemorates a cultural moment of hope and accomplishment, a place where Black Americans could âbe free to just be us, without the white gaze.â Itâs a solid and stirring documentary â you should see it.
Curio of the week: âJohnny Mnemonic: In Black and Whiteâ (1995, â â 1/2, streaming on the Criterion Channel) â Can desaturating its color turn a bomb into a classic? Not really, but it can still put a movie through interesting changes, especially if it wasnât really a bomb to begin with. Artist Robert Longo got a dent in his reputation by directing his only feature film, a day-after-tomorrow thriller starring a young Keanu Reeves, hot off âSpeed,â as a black-market courier who uploads information into a hard drive in his brain. The setting is a futuristic New York City of, um, today, which only sounds hilarious until you read the opening titles: âSecond decade of the 21st Century: Corporations rule. The world is threatened by a new plague.â Maybe a little too on the nose, but the screenplay was written by William Gibson, who coined the term âcyberspaceâ and who turns out to have been right about everything.
Critics drubbed âJohnny Mnemonicâ mercilessly on its release in 1995, but Longo claims he always wanted to shoot the film in black and white, the better to ape subversive art-house sci-fi like Jean-luc Godardâs âAlphavilleâ and cult objects like âTetsuo: The Iron Man.â In 2021, the director got his chance to restore and color-time the film into a lustrous bichrome version that doesnât smooth out the movieâs rough edges but rather makes a dreamlike virtue of them. In the process, Gibsonâs vision of a hellish modern world where megacorporations control everything and people live out entire existences on the Internet doesnât feel prescient so much as dead-on prophetic. Factor in a supporting cast of Ice-T, Henry Rollins, Dolph Lundgren, cult actor-director Takeshi Kitano, and German acting Valkyrie Barbara Sukowa (a.k.a. Mrs. Robert Longo), and âJohnny Mnemonicâ is a time capsule that looks simultaneously backwards and forwards. Plus, Keanu is so endearingly wooden that his performance has a found-object charm of its own, one that black-and-white enshrines in a kind of kitsch nobility. Is it a better movie for the change? Iâm not convinced. But itâs certainly worth a look, and I wouldnât have said that before.
In other news: Happy 105th birthday, Ingmar Bergman! Those who celebrate the legendary Swedish directorâs psychological acuity and downer filmmaking brilliance can pick from any or all chapters of his career: The early breakthroughs âThe Seventh Sealâ and âWild Strawberriesâ (both 1957); the âGodâs silenceâ trilogy of âThrough a Glass Darklyâ (1961), âWinter Lightâ (1962), and âThe Silenceâ (1963); the late run of masterpieces from âCries and Whispersâ (1972) and âScenes From a Marriageâ (1974) through âFanny and Alexanderâ (1982). All are streaming on the Criterion Channel, and many can be found on Max and/or Kanopy or for rent on a number of platforms; see Justwatch.com for specifics. That also goes for the late-1960s work that, to my mind, shows Bergman at the peak of his powers: âPersonaâ (1966), âShameâ (1968), and âThe Passion of Annaâ (1969). These are movies that burrow beneath the skin of human relationships and existence itself with a reckless confidence thatâs by turns dreamlike (âPersonaâ), savage (âShameâ), and heartbroken (âThe Passion of Annaâ), and itâs hardly coincidental that Liv Ullmann (below, with Bergman) is in all three of them.
Re: Ullmann â itâs always discombobulating to realize that a deathless screen icon is not only life-sized but lives in your town. Ullmann married Boston real estate developer and hotelier Donald Saunders in 1985 and resided for many years with him in Gloucester, Mass., from where she would occasionally descend into Boston for events like a 2016 50th-anniversary screening of âPersonaâ at which I was lucky to serve as moderator.
Ullmann and Saunders now live in Boston, and she returned to the Coolidge Corner Theatre again this week for a private screening of âLiv Ullmann â A Road Less Traveled,â a glowing documentary that had its premiere at Cannes in May and will be theatrically released later this year. Again, I was lucky to share the stage with her for a post-film Q&A (unavailable on video, unfortunately). The actress is 85 now and frailer than she was seven years ago â honestly, we all are â but her memories are, if anything, more pellucid than ever, and the way she spoke with depth of feeling to the historical moment and the moment in the theater itself was intensely moving. We are blessed to still have her with us, and blessed, too, that the films are there to be seen.
Classic of the Week: âThird Finger, Left Handâ (â â â, 1940, Turner Classics on Sunday July 16 at 6:00 AM, so set your DVR). We tend to remember Myrna Loy in tandem with the âThin Manâ movies and her co-star William Powell; as Nick and Nora Charles, they made marriage seem a never-ending field of play. But Loy could hold down a comedy on her own, and sheâs delightful as a fashion editor who invents a fictitious husband to keep the office wolves away but is backed into a corner of pretending that painter Melvyn Douglas is that husband. We all know where this is going, but itâs the getting there that matters, and even if MGM was too swank to really do screwball well (âLibeled Ladyâ notwithstanding), Loy had by now patented a winsome, practical unflappability that made her both adorable and one of the more sneakily sexy stars of classic-era Hollywood. The movieâs on DVD but not available for streaming anywhere, so grab this while you can and enjoy the late-inning scene where this cat-faced actress from Helena, Montana, pretends to be a loud-mouthed bawd from Brooklyn.
Enjoy your weekend and donât hesitate to weigh in with any thoughts, stray or otherwise.
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I really hope to find The League....that looks great. I have seen many of those Bergman films...I found Cries and Whispers to be one of the most disturbing films I've ever seen...and I will set my DVR for TCM Sunday morning....(I have the largest Tivo that was available, and I am embarrassed by HOW MANY FILMS I have stored on it. I will never be able to watch them all).
Yes, âdowner filmmaking brillianceâ captures Bergmanâs genius perfectly. Iâve viewed and experienced many of the tougher films, exiting the theater (often the Thalia!) in some kind of sad but profound daze. I'd like to raise up two that left me a bit more upbeat, âWild Strawberriesâ, yes - a grim portrait of an old man during most of it but with a lovely closing sequence of reconciliation and peaceful closure. The second is âSmiles of a Summer Night,â a brilliant comedy that was the basis for Sondheim's "A Little Night Music," my favorite musical.