The soloist

Good performances by Foxx and Downey as the principals in the story of an LA reporter who stumbles upon a homeless man playing Beethoven on a two-string violin, befriends him, and writes about him in his newspaper column. He, STeve Lopez, wrote a book. I remember reading about him years back.

Vantage point

Vantage point


Interesting idea. US television (GNN, a fictional network) is carrying the US president (played aloofly by William Hurt, who sort of looks presidential) appearance in a plaza in Salamanca, Spain, at a summit of Western and Arab nations. As he is introduced and starts to speak, he is shot, twice. He is rushed off in an ambulance. Moments later a bomb explodes. A few more moments later a Secret Service agents bursts into the television truck and demands to see its tapes, and spots suspicious activity.

The film backs up to seconds before 12, and tells the same story from a different person's perspective 7 other times.

At first, the movie is gripping, the story well told. An interesting idea: how do different people see the same sequence of events? However, by the fourth or fifth, the cumulative effect becomes tiresome rather than illuminating.

After the teevee's perspective come others: Dennis Quaid's Secret Service agent, Thomas Barnes, just-returned to the job after a medical leave (having taken two bullets in protection of the president some unspecified time back); Forest Whitaker's tourist with a hand-held camera, who catches action and befriends a little girl who bumps into him and loses her ice cream; the President, who actually than actually having been shot is ensconced in a hotel room, his double having taken the bullets; one of the terrorists; and so on.

A big car chase scene follows Barnes spotting one of his fellow agents in a Spanish police uniform (he calls Washington on his cellphone, and describes the "rogue agent"). Meantime, one of the bad guys has infiltrated the hotel where the President is staying, and works his way up to POTUS's floor. A co-conspirator detonates a vest-bomb to create a diversion, and that first bad guy guns down all remaining agents, both outside and inside POTUS's room. POTUS is kidnapped, there is much shooting, more car chasing, and in the end the good guys win.

As far-fetched as it might seem, events of the last eight years have shown that wild schemes are planned, and can be executed. Technology is featured in a way that is intriguing: cellphones to call around the world; smart phones used to remotely shoot the president and detonate bombs. Alas, technology could not rescue this film. The Times review didn't mince words.

Demanding Rights, Courting Controversy

Black Maverick. By David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito. University of Illinois Press, 304 pages, $35


In the 15 or so years of the civil-rights movement, no incident evoked more outrage than the torture and killing of Emmett Till, the spirited 14-year-old who left Chicago in August 1955 to visit relatives in Mississippi.

15 years? Wonder how he defines the Movement. 1955 to 1970? The fight for the giving of full civil rights to all Americans, blacks included, began long before 1955.

Read an excerpt from ‘Black Maverick’

The murder brought national disgust upon Mississippi, especially after thousands of mourners viewed Till’s open casket and noted the barbarities wrought upon the boy. State authorities felt pressured enough to put two suspects on trial, and civil-rights leaders believed that this time, just once, maybe, justice might be done.

Howard in 1955 holding the arm of the mother of murdered youth Emmett Till. Also pictured, Rep. Charles Diggs and witness Amanda Bradley.





One of them was T.R.M. Howard—physician, landowner, activist, orator and the subject of “Black Maverick,” a compelling biography by David T. Beito and his wife, Linda Royster Beito. “Black Maverick” is a necessary biography, too: Howard played an important part in the Emmett Till story, and in the entire civil-rights era. He deserves to be better known.

I am not familiar with the name.

Famed civil-rights leader Medgar Evers was Howard’s protégé, as was (later) Jesse Jackson. In the most public period of his career (Howard died in 1976, at age 68), Jet magazine tracked him every month and Ebony highlighted him in a story on “The New Fighting South.”

As the Till trial date approached, Howard was poised to take action. He made his home a command center, welcoming Till’s mother, hosting journalists and providing safety for witnesses he’d rounded up with promises of safe passage to Chicago after the trial. Guards roamed the premises, and Howard slept with a .45 at his pillow, a submachine gun at his feet. The “not guilty” verdict returned by the jury dismayed many but inspired Howard to take the case to the public. He delivered speeches in Baltimore, Los Angeles and New York decrying lawlessness in the South and berating J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, whom he accused of foot-dragging whenever a black victim was involved. Hoover replied with a public letter rejecting Howard’s “intemperate and baseless charges.” Liberal white journalist Hodding Carter (the father of Jimmy Carter’s White House adviser) had once called Howard a “one-man uplift movement.” Now he wrote: “I wouldn’t want to gamble on Howard’s life expectancy in the Delta.” In the end, Till’s murderers were never convicted.

What a sorry chapter in US history.Awful. Tragic. Horrible.

With Howard so prominent back then, people might wonder why he has virtually no place in the popular memory of the civil-rights movement. The Beitos have an explanation. Other aspects of Howard’s life, they argue, tainted his legacy: sexual profligacy; becoming an abortionist, his penchant for big cars and fancy clothes, his anti-communism.

A flamboyant Second Amendment, ­anti-communist capitalist doesn’t please journalists and historians searching for civil-rights martyrs.

Quite a value judgment to make.
T.R.M. Howard at his desk at the Friendship Medical Center in Chicago (1975).

Israeli Writer and Iconoclast

Amos Kenan




Mr. Kenan, who fought in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war but also belonged to the anti-Zionist and anti-religious Canaanite movement, consistently roiled Israel’s political and cultural waters as a columnist, novelist, playwright, painter, sculptor, screenwriter and filmmaker. Somehow he maintained a career as a restaurant critic as well.

Quite a Renaissance man.

He was a scathing critic of Israeli religious leaders, and when the mood suited, extended his range beyond Judaism. His play “Friends Talk About Jesus” was banned from the stage by the Israeli Supreme Court in 1972 for being unacceptably contemptuous of religion.

As the struggle for Israeli statehood gathered momentum, he joined the Lehi, referred to by the British as the Stern Gang, the most extreme of the underground paramilitary organizations in Palestine.

At the same time, influenced by the poet Yonatan Ratosh, he joined the Canaanites, a small but influential group of artists and writers who hoped to build a Hebrew rather than a Jewish state in the biblical land of Canaan that would embrace both Arabs and Jews. It regarded Judaism and Islam as retrograde, and dissociated itself from the Jewish Diaspora. He was a founder of the group’s magazine, Alef.

History Boys

" Centers around eight boisterous-yet-talented schoolboys hoping to gain admittance to England's most prestigious universities. They are aided on their quest by two teachers, a shrewd young upstart and an inspiring old eccentric, whose opposing philosophies challenge the boys to confront the true meaning of education and the relative values of happiness and success."

Even without understanding all of the dialogue (my pesky American ears could not understand all the spoken English), I thoroughly enjoyed this film.

The students are studying for the entrance exams to Oxford University colleges, and are tutored by Hector, an old fuddy duddy teacher of long standing (who likes to fondle his students's genitalia as he gives them rides on his motorcycle - something they all accept), and a teacher brought specifically to tutor them.

Checking Out

"On the eve of his 90th birthday, a celebrated thespian summons his three grown children to his Manhattan apartment for a celebration they will never forget. When the party's over, he plans to make his 'final exit.'"


Fun movie. The cast works well together.