The final countdown … just 10 more days of The Distancer.
Love this for him — Dr. Fauci’s COVID-19 ball model is going to be housed in the Smithsonian!
Maybe it’s just because I’ve just finished an apartment search of my own, but I really got a kick out of this New Yorker humor piece “Zillow Listings for Earth.”
For those who still have access to cable, it might be worth tuning into TCM on Thursdays this month and beyond. Host Jacquelyn Stewart is hosting a new series on “problematic” classic films and how we can simultaneously appreciate and critique works of art rather than relegating them to the cultural dustbin.
On that note, if you’ve got a few minutes tonight, it’s worth hearing a measured, nuanced debate on the manufactured Dr. Seuss hubbub from Seth Meyers:
Now, what you came for…
DAY 357: Kes (available on Amazon Prime)
The classic European coming-of-age movie for film students to watch is always François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, a heavily stylized forerunner of the French New Wave. (It’s quite good and available on HBO Max, should you be a subscriber!) But for some, childhood isn’t a fantastical playground — it’s a jungle gym that can eat you alive. Rather than shy away from that isolation and self-doubt, the great director Ken Loach leans into it in Kes.
This film from 1969 follows the woebegone Billy (David Bradley), a tender-hearted young boy who already feels trapped growing up in a working-class English coal town. He can’t catch much of a break from being tormented at home or at school. Loach doesn’t sensationalize his struggles, and he doesn’t have to. The staunch realism through which he views the bleakness of both Billy’s present and future drives home the overall atmosphere in which he lives with brutal efficacy. (I must add, despite how grim this sounds, there are actually some quite funny scenes to liven it up!)
That’s not to say Kes is all gloom and doom, however. The title refers to the kestrel (think like a falcon) that Billy takes … er, steals … and makes his own. Kes is more than just an escape mechanism the stand-in for a friend he cannot find among his peers. His new pet becomes something to give him purpose and direction, a joy Loach relishes in capturing. The joy of Billy taking up falconry is all the sweeter because we know the cultural context in which it’s occurring — and in which it can be squelched. Loach’s film demonstrates the tragedy of how those in dead-end working-class towns must bump up against the limitations of their circumstances far faster than they should have to. As a filmmaker, he conveys this with both compassion and indignation alike.
Be good to yourselves and to each other,
Marshall